Milton and Toleration

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MILTON AND TOLERATION

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Milton and Toleration Edited by

SHARON ACHINSTEIN and

ELIZABETH SAUER

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Great Clarendon Street, Oxford ox2 6dp Oxford University Press is a department of the University of Oxford. It furthers the University’s objective of excellence in research, scholarship, and education by publishing worldwide in Oxford New York Auckland Cape Town Dar es Salaam Hong Kong Karachi Kuala Lumpur Madrid Melbourne Mexico City Nairobi New Delhi Shanghai Taipei Toronto With offices in Argentina Austria Brazil Chile Czech Republic France Greece Guatemala Hungary Italy Japan Poland Portugal Singapore South Korea Switzerland Thailand Turkey Ukraine Vietnam Oxford is a registered trade mark of Oxford University Press in the UK and in certain other countries Published in the United States by Oxford University Press Inc., New York  the several contributors 2007 The moral rights of the authors have been asserted Database right Oxford University Press (maker) First published 2007 All rights reserved. No part of this publication may be reproduced, stored in a retrieval system, or transmitted, in any form or by any means, without the prior permission in writing of Oxford University Press, or as expressly permitted by law, or under terms agreed with the appropriate reprographics rights organization. Enquiries concerning reproduction outside the scope of the above should be sent to the Rights Department, Oxford University Press, at the address above You must not circulate this book in any other binding or cover and you must impose the same condition on any acquirer British Library Cataloguing in Publication Data Data available Library of Congress Cataloging in Publication Data Data available Typeset by Laserwords Private Limited, Chennai, India Printed in Great Britain on acid-free paper by Biddles Ltd., King’s Lynn, Norfolk ISBN 978–0–19–929593–7 1 3 5 7 9 10 8 6 4 2

Contents Notes on Contributors List of Abbreviations

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1. Introduction Sharon Achinstein and Elizabeth Sauer

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I . R EV I S I N G W H I G AC C O U N T S 2. Milton and the European Contexts of Toleration Nigel Smith 3. Toleration and the Specter of Heresy in Milton’s England David Loewenstein 4. John Milton, Roger Williams, and the Limits of Toleration Thomas N. Corns 5. Milton, Marvell and Toleration Nicholas von Maltzahn

23 45 72 86

I I . PH I LO S O PH I C A L A N D R E L I G I O U S E N G AG E M E N T S 6. Libertinism and Toleration: Milton, Bruno and Aretino James Grantham Turner 7. Milton, Natural Law, and Toleration Jason P. Rosenblatt 8. ‘A Taken Scandal not a Given’: Milton’s Equitable Grounds of Toleration Victoria Silver 9. Milton and Antitrinitarianism Martin Dzelzainis 10. Milton and Catholicism Andrew Hadfield

107 126

144 171 186

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Contents I I I . P O E T RY A N D R H E TO R I C

11. Toleration and Nationhood in the 1650s: ‘Sonnet XV’ and the Case of Ireland Elizabeth Sauer 12. Toleration in Milton’s Epics: A Chimera? Sharon Achinstein 13. Intolerance and the Virtues of Sacred Vehemence Paul Stevens 14. Secularizing Conscience in Milton’s Republican Community Lana Cable 15. Milton, Islam and the Ottomans Gerald MacLean Afterword Ann Hughes Index

203 224 243 268 284 299

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Notes on Contributors Sharon Achinstein is Reader in Renaissance Literature at Oxford University, and author of Literature and Dissent in Milton’s England (Cambridge, 2003). Her Milton and the Revolutionary Reader (Princeton, 1994) won the Milton Society of America’s James Holly Hanford Prize, and she has edited a special issue of Women’s Studies on Literature and Gender in the English Revolution (1994), and published numerous essays on Milton, Dryden, women’s writing, and politics in the seventeenth century. She is a consulting editor for the forthcoming Milton Encyclopedia (Yale University Press) and is editor for Volume 5 of The Complete Works of John Milton (under preparation for Oxford University Press), the Divorce Tracts. Lana Cable is Associate Professor of English and Master of Arts programme director at The University at Albany, State University of New York. Her book Carnal Rhetoric: Milton’s Iconoclasm and the Poetics of Desire (Duke, 1995) received the James Holly Hanford Award. In addition to Milton, her essays and book chapters treat the politics of metaphor, orientalist drama, and the anatomical epic of Spenserian Phineas Fletcher. She also contributed the introduction to Milton in the Age of Fish: Essays on Authorship, Text, and Terrorism, ed. Michael Lieb and Albert C. Labriola (Duquesne, 2006). She is currently writing a book on the early modern free conscience debate. Thomas N. Corns, MA, D.Phil, F.R.Hist.S., FEA, is Professor of English and a provice chancellor at University of Wales, Bangor. His work on Milton includes The Development of Milton’s Prose Style (Clarendon, 1982), Milton’s Language (Blackwell, 1990), Uncloistered Virtue (Oxford, 1992), Regaining ‘Paradise Lost’ (Longman, 1994), and John Milton: The Prose Works (Twayne, 1998). His most recent publication is A History of Seventeenth-Century English Literature (Blackwell, 2006). He is editor of the prize-winning A Companion to Milton (Blackwell, 2001) and the forthcoming Milton Encyclopedia (under preparation for Yale University Press). He is also General Editor, with Gordon Campbell, of The Complete Works of John Milton (under preparation for Oxford University Press). Martin Dzelzainis, Professor of English, Royal Holloway, University of London, has co-edited Marvell and Liberty (Macmillan, 1999) and is editor of Volume 1 of The Complete Prose Works of Andrew Marvell (Yale, 2004). He has edited John Milton, Political Writings, Cambridge Texts in the History of Political Thought (Cambridge, 1991). Author of essays and chapters in books on such topics as republicanism, Milton, Roman law, political ideology, Bacon, Charles I, Shakespeare, Hobbes, and Marvell, he is currently working on a monograph, provisionally entitled The Flower in the Panther: Truth-telling, Print, and Censorship in England, 1662–1669. He is also general editor of The Works of Edward Hyde, Earl of Clarendon, forthcoming from Oxford. Andrew Hadfield is Professor of English at the University of Sussex, and has published widely on Renaissance topics, with books including Literature, Politics and National

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Notes on Contributors

Identity: Reformation to Renaissance (Cambridge, 1994), Edmund Spenser’s Irish Experience: Wilde Fruit and Salvage Soyl (Oxford, 1997), Literature, Travel and Colonial Writing in the English Renaissance (Oxford, 1998), and Shakespeare and Republicanism (Cambridge, 2005), awarded the Ronald H. Bainford Prize for sixteenth-century literature (2006). He is also the editor (with Raymond Gillespie) of The Oxford History of the Irish Book, vol. iii: The Irish Book in English, 1550–1800 (Oxford, 2006). Ann Hughes, Professor of Early Modern History at the University of Keele, is the author of numerous studies on politics and religion under the Stuarts. Her publications include Gangraena and the Struggle for the English Revolution (Oxford, 2004), Politics, Society, and Civil War in Warwickshire, 1620–1660 (Cambridge, 1987), The Causes of the English Civil War (St Martin’s, 1991, 2nd edn., 1998), and the co-edited volumes Conflict in Early Stuart England (Longman, 1989) and The English Civil War (Arnold, 1997). David Loewenstein is Marjorie and Lorin Tiefenthaler Professor of English at the University of Wisconsin, Madison. He is twice winner of the Milton Society of America’s James Holly Hanford Award for distinguished book, 1991, 2002 and is author of Milton and the Drama of History: Historical Vision, Iconoclasm, and the Literary Imagination (Cambridge, 1990) and Representing Revolution in Milton and His Contemporaries: Religion, Politics, and Polemics in Radical Puritanism (Cambridge, 2001). He has co-edited Politics, Poetics, and Hermeneutics in Milton’s Prose (Cambridge, 1990), The Cambridge History of Early Modern English Literature (Cambridge, 2002; paperback edn., 2006), Paradise Regained in Context: Genre, Politics, Religion, Milton Studies 42 (University of Pittsburgh Press, 2003); and Heresy, Literature, and Politics in Early Modern English Culture (Cambridge, 2006). He is currently editing the Collected Works of Gerrard Winstanley and is the editor for Paradise Lost in The Complete Works of John Milton, in preparation for Oxford University Press. Gerald MacLean, FRAS, F.R.Hist.S., Anniversary Professor of English and Related Literature at the University of York, has authored Looking East: English Writing and the Ottoman Empire before 1800 (Palgrave, 2007), The Rise of Oriental Travel: English Visitors to the Ottoman Empire, 1580–1720 (Palgrave, 2004) and Time’s Witness: Historical Representation in English Poetry, 1603–1660 (Cambridge, 1990). In addition, he is editor of Writing Turkey: Explorations in Turkish History, Politics and Cultural Identity (Middlesex, 2006), Culture and Society in the Stuart Restoration: Literature, Drama, History (Cambridge, 1995) and co-editor of The Country and the City Revisited: England and the Politics of Culture, 1550–1850 (Cambridge, 1999) and The Spivak Reader: Selected Works of Gayatri Chakravorty Spivak (Routledge, 1996). With Nabil Matar, he is currently writing Britain and the Muslim World, 1558–1728 for Oxford University Press. Jason P. Rosenblatt, Professor of English at Georgetown University, is the co-editor of Not in Heaven: Coherence and Complexity in Biblical Narrative (Indiana, 1991) and author of Torah and Law in ‘Paradise Lost’ (Princeton, 1994), Renaissance England’s Chief Rabbi: John Selden (Oxford, 2006), and two dozen essays in journals and books. He is under contract to produce a Norton Critical Edition of Milton’s Selected Poetry and Prose. Awards include Fellowships from the John Simon Guggenheim Foundation,


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the Folger Shakespeare Library, and the National Endowment for the Humanities. Professor Rosenblatt is a past president of the Milton Society of America (1999) and recipient of its Hanford Award (1989). Elizabeth Sauer is Professor of English at Brock University, Canada, where she was awarded a Chancellor’s Chair for Research Excellence. Her books include ‘Papercontestations’ and Textual Communities in England 1640–1675 (Toronto, 2005), Barbarous Dissonance and Images of Voice in Milton’s Epics (McGill-Queen’s, 1996) and nine editions/co-editions, among which are Reading the Nation (Routledge, forthcoming), Milton and the Climates of Reading: Essays by Balachandra Rajan (Toronto, 2006), Reading Early Modern Women (Routledge, 2004), winner of the Society for the Study of Early Modern Women Best Collaborative Work; Imperialisms: Historical and Literary Investigations 1500–1900 (Palgrave-Macmillan, 2004), Books and Readers in Early Modern England (Pennsylvania, 2002), and Milton and the Imperial Vision (Duquesne, 1999), winner of the Milton Society of America Irene Samuel Memorial Award. Her book Toleration and Milton’s ‘Peculiar’ Nation is in progress. Victoria Silver, Associate Professor, English and Comparative Literature, University of California, Irvine, is author of Imperfect Sense: The Predicament of Milton’s Irony (Princeton, 2001), and she has published major articles on Milton, Marvell, Jonson, Browne, and Hobbes. Silver was Recipient of The Chancellor’s Award for Excellence in Fostering Undergraduate Research at the University of California, Irvine. Nigel Smith is Professor of English at Princeton University. He is the author of Literature and Revolution in England, 1640–1660 (Yale, 1994) and Perfection Proclaimed: Language and Literature in English Radical Religion, 1640–1660 (Oxford, 1989), as well as articles on Shakespeare, Donne, Herbert, Milton, and Bunyan, and on such topics as atheism, vegetarianism, and Socinianism. He has edited the Ranter Tracts and the Journal of George Fox, and is editor of The Poems of Andrew Marvell (2003) in the Longman Annotated English Poets Series. Paul Stevens is Professor and Canada Research Chair in English Literature at the University of Toronto. His publications include Milton’s America, America’s Milton (co-editor, special issue of University of Toronto Quarterly, in progress), Early Modern Nationalism and Milton’s England (co-editor, forthcoming 2007), When is a Public Sphere? (co-editor, special issue of Criticism, 2004), Discontinuities: New Essays on Renaissance Literature and Criticism (co-editor, Toronto, 1998), and Imagination and the Presence of Shakespeare in ‘Paradise Lost’ (Wisconsin, 1985). He has twice won the Milton Society of America’s Hanford Award for most distinguished article. James Grantham Turner is Professor of English Literature, University of California, Berkeley, and is the author of Politics of Landscape (Oxford, 1979); One Flesh: Paradisal Marriage and Sexual Relations in the Age of Milton (Oxford, 1987), winner of the Milton Society of America’s James Holly Hanford Award for distinguished book; Libertines and Radicals in Early Modern London: Sexuality, Politics and Literary Culture, 1630–1685 (Cambridge, 2001) and Schooling Sex: Libertine Literature and Erotic Education in Italy, France and England, 1534–1685 (Oxford, 2003). Turner has also written chapters

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for historical surveys on Renaissance literature, on the change from Revolution to Restoration in English culture, and on the eighteenth-century novel. Nicholas von Maltzahn, Professor of English at the University of Ottawa, is author of An Andrew Marvell Chronology (Palgrave, 2005) and Milton’s History of Britain: Republican Historiography in the English Revolution (Oxford, 1991). His work on Milton and Marvell includes a number of articles on their literary and political afterlives. He has edited Marvell’s An Account of the Growth of Popery and Arbitrary Government for the Yale Prose Works of Andrew Marvell (2003) and is now editing Milton’s tracts on church government and toleration for The Complete Works of John Milton, in preparation for Oxford University Press. His current research explores questions of toleration and multiculturalism.

List of Abbreviations AP

Apology against a Pamphlet

Areop.

Areopagitica

CJ

Journals of the House of Commons

CM

The Works of John Milton, gen. ed. Frank Allen Patterson, 18 vols. in 21 (New York: Columbia University Press, 1931–8)

CSP

Milton, Complete Shorter Poems, ed. John Carey, 2nd edn. (London: Longman, 1997)

DDC

De Doctrina Christiana

DDD

The Doctrine and Discipline of Divorce

Eikon.

Eikonoklastes

LP

Declaration, or Letters Patent

ODNB

Oxford Dictionary of National Biography

Of Ed.

Of Education

Of Ref.

Of Reformation

PC

Private Correspondence

PL

Milton, Paradise Lost, ed. Alastair Fowler, 2nd edn. (London: Longman, 1988)

PR

Paradise Regained

PWAM

The Prose Works of Andrew Marvell

RCG

The Reason of Church-Government

REW

The Readie and Easie Way to Establish A Free Commonwealth

SA

Samson Agonistes

SP

State Papers

TCP

A Treatise of Civil Power

TR

Of True Religion

YP

Complete Prose Works of John Milton, gen. ed. Don M. Wolfe, 8 vols. in 10 (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1953–82)


1 Introduction Sharon Achinstein and Elizabeth Sauer

I ‘What is toleration?’ asked Voltaire, opening his article on that subject in his Philosophical Dictionary. There, the philosophe offers, not an answer, but a characterization: ‘it is the prerogative of humanity’.¹ Tolerance is the major question of Enlightenment, one that has come back to haunt our modernity that is resurgent with religious activism. This book’s central claim is that a study of the writings of John Milton can contribute to broadening our understanding not only of the history of toleration but also of the links between literature and history. A standard history of ideas approach has long hailed Milton as a hero of toleration, and it is true that Milton defended different kinds of tolerance throughout his writing life. Early writings proposing tolerance include the divorce tracts (1643–5) and Areopagitica (1644), where Milton advanced theological arguments with biblical examples, but also came to espouse radically heterodox views of community and personhood. Milton’s Tenure of Kings and Magistrates (1649) attacked the Presbyterians’ intolerance, while the Defences of the People of England (1651, 1654) promoted civil liberties. Serving as an official in the Cromwellian government, Milton allegedly licensed the religiously incendiary Racovian Catechism (1652) and other heretical We gratefully acknowledge our indebtedness to the following: Kathryn Murphy for her superb editorial assistance; the English Faculty of Oxford University and the Social Sciences and Humanities Research Council of Canada for generous financial support; David Loewenstein, Martin Dzelzainis, and David Norbrook for their astute remarks on our Introduction; and all our contributors for sharing their valuable insights into the richly rewarding subject of Milton and toleration. Contributors’ individual styles of spelling and punctuation are retained throughout. ¹ Voltaire, ‘C’est l’apanage de l’humanité’, in Dictionnaire Philosophique (Paris: GarnierFlammarion, 1964), 362; tr. Philosophical Dictionary, T. Besterman (Harmondsworth: Penguin, 2004), 387.

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Sharon Achinstein and Elizabeth Sauer

works.² Like many thinkers of his day, he promoted a philo-Hebraic cultural and literary program.³ His shorter poetry expressed outrage at the persecution of religious minorities and his Psalm translations spoke in the voice of the oppressed. Even on the eve of Restoration and facing a re-established national church, his pamphlets Of Civil Power and The Likeliest Means (1659) urged church disestablishment as a means for achieving a more inclusive political culture. The Preface to his unpublished theological treatise, De Doctrina Christiana, is a plea for toleration of unorthodox Christian sects and positions. In defiance of the anti-sectarian climate of the Restoration era, Milton explored and defended individual liberty of conscience in his 1673 edition of his Poems as well as in his major poems, Paradise Lost (1667, 1674), Paradise Regained (1671), and Samson Agonistes (1671) and in his final tract, Of True Religion (1673), espoused a broad definition of a Protestant church. There was also an intolerant Milton. This Milton restricted his appeal to civil liberties and freedoms of the press to Protestants, with the Roman church ever vilified for its tyrannies; this Milton was largely silent on the proposed readmission of the Jews in 1655; this Milton championed Cromwell’s campaign against the Roman Catholic Irish in the 1649 Observations; and this Milton spattered his writings across his career with anti-Catholic satire and invective.⁴ His last pamphlet, Of True Religion, protested against the toleration of Roman Catholics when English political leaders were considering a Catholic Indulgence. While the liberal tradition of toleration writing tends to play down this intolerant Milton, it was indeed as a Protestant that the Whig tradition hailed him as a hero. With anti-Popery and anti-priestcraft as its main pillars, Whigs saw Milton’s defenses of freedom of conscience and attacks on persecution as vital to their contribution to the history of liberties of the individual, culminating in John Locke.⁵ The essays which follow, however, resist unearthing an ‘intolerant’ Milton at the expense of the formerly tolerant liberal one. In the early modern period, as Alexandra Walsham and others have shown, ‘tolerance and intolerance are ² Stephen B. Dobranski, ‘Licensing Milton’s Heresy’, in Stephen B. Dobranski and John P. Rumrich, eds., Milton and Heresy (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1998), 143–4; and see Dzelzainis below. ³ See Douglas Brooks, ed., Milton and the Jews (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, forthcoming). ⁴ See Don M. Wolfe, ‘Limits of Miltonic Toleration’, Journal of English and Germanic Philology 60 (1961), 834–46; and John Illo, ‘Areopagiticas Mythic and Real’, Prose Studies 11.1 (1998), 3–23. ⁵ See, for example, Justin Champion, Republican Learning: John Toland and the Crisis of Christian Culture, 1696–1722 (Manchester: Manchester University Press, 2003), 100–5; and on the construction of the ‘Whig’ Milton, see Nicholas von Maltzahn, ‘The Whig Milton, 1667–1700’, in David Armitage, Armand Himy and Quentin Skinner, eds., Milton and Republicanism (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1995), 229–53.

Introduction

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better seen as dialectically and symbiotically linked’.⁶ And yet, history does not run backwards: without falling into an easy determinism, one may at least say that once the printing press was in regular, widespread use, the control or dissemination of information had to take on new forms. Perhaps, even more controversially, we might say the same about concepts: once a concept like freedom of thought was espoused and made public, any subsequent battle would have to take that into account. Some readers may be frustrated at the lack of precision about what is that ‘toleration’ our contributors have found in Milton. Recent historians have been helpfully clarifying about the important distinctions between toleration, tolerance, freedom of inquiry, and matters to do with ecclesiology: ‘comprehension,’ rather than toleration, for example.⁷ They have also explored how toleration was a tactical strategy at times rather than a point of principle.⁸ We have hoped to keep the notion of toleration sufficiently broad so as to investigate how one spectacularly sensitive and engaged author constructed visions of community, its spaces, boundaries and textures: ours is a project in the history of the imagination, not simply the reconstruction of legal, ecclesiological and social practices. Milton was a great upholder of boundaries (‘fit … though few’) but he was also deeply interested, as our contributors show, in the malleability of boundaries, in the dynamics of mixed communities, and ‘brotherly dissimilitudes’. We seek to show how Milton’s visions of tolerance intersected with contemporary political discourse and also how they reveal deeper movements in the history of the imagination. Through this study we hope, moreover, to find how modernity’s new discourses—liberty of ⁶ Alexandra Walsham, Charitable Hatred: Tolerance and Intolerance in England, 1500–1700 (Manchester: Manchester University Press, 2006), 5; and John Coffey, Persecution and Toleration in Protestant England, 1558–1689 (Harlow: Longman, 2000). ⁷ In addition to Walsham, Charitable, 234, see also Mark Goldie, ‘The Theory of Religious Intolerance in Restoration England’, 331–68; and John Dunn, ‘The Claim to Freedom of Conscience: Freedom of Speech, Freedom of Thought, Freedom of Worship?’ 171–93, both in Ole Peter Grell, Jonathan I. Israel and Nicholas Tyacke, eds., From Persecution to Toleration: The Glorious Revolution and Religion in England (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1991); Tim Harris, ‘Tories and the Rule of Law in The Reign of Charles II’, The Seventeenth Century 8.1 (1993), 9–27; John Spurr, ‘England 1649–1750: Differences Contained?’ in Steven N. Zwicker, ed., English Literature 1650–1740 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1998), 3–32; John Marshall, John Locke, Toleration and Early Enlightenment Culture (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2006). ⁸ Tom Webster, Godly Clergy: The Caroline Puritan Movement, 1620–1643 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1997), passim, and esp. 333–8; Walsham, Charitable, 236–7; Gary S. De Krey, London and the Restoration, 1659–1683 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2005), passim, and esp. 116–40. On the Netherlands, see Andrew Pettegree, ‘The Politics of Toleration in the Free Netherlands’, in Ole Peter Grell and Robert Scribner, eds., Tolerance and Intolerance in the European Reformation (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1996), 198.

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conscience, natural law, equity, materialism, libertinism, rhetoric, secularism, even literature itself—created spaces for toleration. The traditional liberal account of toleration that hails 1688 as the landmark (because through it a toleration was legalized by government) is not the only way of telling the story of toleration. In so doing, we insist on breaking down the opposition between ‘theory’ and ‘practice’ that has shaped revisionist approaches to post-Reformation theology and politics. A number of recent scholars have sought to determine the actual shape of tolerance and intolerance within particular communities in early modern Europe, and their work has been invaluable to the reconstruction of the lives of people who were, at once, removed from the centres of polemic, but at the same time, those most affected by sectarian strife or concord.⁹ At times, this is an invaluable corrective to an idealizing approach; but at others, this seems to restrict understanding by setting ‘practice’ against ‘beliefs,’ actions rather than words, reality against rhetoric. Missed by those who favor functionalist accounts of social change is an explanation of choice, of intention. Throughout the historian David Cressy’s important new study, England on Edge, there is however an agency-less narrative: what happened was, variously: a ‘collapse’ (6, 9 and passim), a ‘breakdown’, ‘confusions and changes of the times’ (21), a ‘distemper’, a ‘splintering’ (9), and last, an ‘earthquake of cosmic proportions’ (424), without a clear sense of how ideas played a role in relation to these great changes.¹⁰ This rejection of principle or the obscuring of the meaning of beliefs, words, or rhetoric leaves us wondering why sectarian radicalism spread in the first place; and how the people experiencing change felt about it. Walsham points to the ‘distorting’ effects of the persecuting rhetorics: ‘speech, script and print may even have been responsible for creating mirages of dissident movements which did not in fact exist’.¹¹ We question this approach that seeks an underlying ‘reality’ beneath the ‘representations’. Along with our view, rather than rejecting these idealizing representations, the historian Ann Hughes has recently broadened our understanding of the importance of them. Persecutors like Thomas Edwards, she has shown, may have been the fabricator of nightmares, but they were also recording something real: an ⁹ For example, Ann Hughes, Gangraena and the Struggle for the English Revolution (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2004); Benjamin J. Kaplan, Calvinists and Libertines: Confession and Community in Utrecht, 1578–1620 (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1995); Walsham, Charitable. ¹⁰ David Cressy, England on Edge: Crisis and Revolution, 1640–1642 (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2006), 6, 9, 21, 9, 424. ¹¹ Walsham, Charitable, 28, 27; see also J. C. Davis, Fear, Myth and History: The Ranters and the Historians (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1986). Hughes takes a subtle approach in Gangraena.

Introduction

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awareness of pluralism and its threats to a particular, ideologically charged, vision of commonality.¹² We think literature has something to offer. In exploring works of literature, we can gain further insight into why these fantasies mattered in particular; and in the works of John Milton, we hope to show, we are given a detailed and multi-layered account of the religious, political and literary landscape of the mid-seventeenth century, and a convincing case that we should care about literature and the evidence it has to offer. If some historians all too often seem to want to get behind the ‘representations’ to reach a realm of the ‘real’, our contributors demonstrate that the truth of representations is a valuable truth in itself. The images of literature, rhetoric and poetry present a kind of ‘truth’ of the past that we in the discipline of literature are uniquely skilled to explore. While in some areas of literary study, the topic of toleration seems rather old-fashioned, perhaps supplanted by an interest in ethics, ‘identity’ and ‘difference’, we consider the claims of a liberal political tradition to offer a meaningful engagement with vital—and still unresolved—aspects of human social life.¹³ Our volume resists a distinction between ‘theory’ and ‘practice’ of toleration without reducing one to the other. Literary evidence is somewhere between these two poles. As the writer’s engagements with ideas form a kind of practice, as Milton insisted, reading was a kind of action in the world; indeed, discernment was one of the most fundamental actions necessary to a life of virtue and faith. In Milton’s own literary methods, furthermore, practice is indeed the only way you can know theory (or know that you don’t really know it).¹⁴ Milton’s accounts of toleration offer up a more complex picture of the practical and the theoretical, the passions, interests, reasons, than can be found in a traditional history of ideas approach or in the newer anti-intellectual revisionist approach. Milton’s vehement rhetorical style, for instance, does not simply convey ideas, but is itself a particular expressive mode. As Paul Stevens tags it below, Milton’s ‘expressive’ significance is a kind of action that, on the one hand, exceeds the pragmatic aims and, on the other, is also a mode of self-fashioning. We are led to ask about the relation between the literal ¹² Hughes’s Gangraena is open to the complex but important ways that representations, including literary representations, need not be set against ‘realities’, but indeed help to constitute the known. ¹³ See the important challenges to the concept of ‘tolerance’ in Giovanna Borradori, Philosophy in a Time of Terror: Dialogues with Jurgen Habermas and Jacques Derrida (Chicago and London: University of Chicago Press, 2003), 129. ¹⁴ Though he might not put it that way, this is a claim that might follow upon Stanley Fish’s insights; see, in particular, Is There a Text in this Class? The Authority of Interpretive Communities (Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 1980), 13, 168; and How Milton Works (Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 2001), 4.

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violence and the rhetorical violences: to ask what are the differences between ‘speech’ and ‘action’. We find in literature very compelling evidence for historians to use in seeking to understand how people experienced new, or painful, or liberating, ideas. Milton defends the lived experience in the real world, always measured and recalibrated to the wider purpose of serving God. With Milton we can see how closely ethics, epistemology, and personal experience are lodged; and how toleration came about as Milton ‘felt the saving power of interpretive freedom’, as Jason Rosenblatt puts it below. In this volume, we will see Milton as a reader fully engaged with the deep questions of his day, working with natural law theorists Grotius and Selden (Rosenblatt), for example, or libertine writers ( Turner), to rethink his own theological commitments in light of his personal experience. With Milton’s habits of reading we can unearth a de facto or practical toleration of unorthodox ideas (Achinstein). Through the history of reading, we can see how Milton’s humanist training—in the methods of Hebrew philology, legal history, classical philosophy, and, most of all, disputation and rhetoric—could lead to new modes of selfunderstanding and action in the world, what James Turner here provocatively calls ‘libertine reading’, the practice of willingly confronting the scandalous or the contrary. Thomas Hobbes had it right to worry that classical learning had bred a generation of rebels; but that is only part of the story of the legacy of humanism and its penchant for disputation in England. While Milton’s engagements with classical history and rhetoric were always mediated through Reformed concerns, his practical application of humanist principles could lead in strikingly original directions.¹⁵ A deeply religious thinker, Milton saw the aims of his reading as repairing the work of the Fall, as combining liberal knowledge the better to serve God’s purpose, a processual approach to knowledge as open-ended in the human realm. But if Milton is the conveyor of Reformed humanist thought, with its communitarian and republican traditions, he is also the one to defend singularity, the non-controvertibility of individual experience. His poetry is both defense and exemplum. What tension between equity and the discrepant instance is found by Victoria Silver here to characterize the Satanic, Milton absorbs in the name of faith: faith despite the invisibility, the unseen qualities of the creator. Silver’s subtle and complex case below for Milton’s particularity gives us a reason for attending to the writings of this astonishing author. That ¹⁵ For humanist engagements with toleration, see Ingrid Creppell, Toleration and Identity: Foundations in Early Modern Thought (London: Routledge, 2003), 39–64, on Bodin, and 65–90, on Montaigne; Gary Remer, Humanism and the Rhetoric of Toleration (University Park, Pa.: Pennsylvania State University Press, 1996).

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emphasis on individual experience was the starting point, but also the field of action, for a whole new way of conceiving persons, their rights, their political and civic liberties. Milton’s admissions of uncertainty in human and divine relations need not be seen as the scepticism that inevitably leads to toleration but rather as a means to reformulate the nature of human obligations.¹⁶ An attention to Milton helps us broaden our view outwards from the English focus of the micropolitical framework of British historians of ecclesiology and controversy.¹⁷ Although Milton’s title pages insisted on his Englishness, this was because he sought a European audience, and our contributors situate Milton in that wider context. His reading of the Piedmont crisis in light of English national concerns depends upon a dialogic relation with continental developments, as Elizabeth Sauer here shows; and this international vista is not confined to the spectre of Counter-Reformation Roman Catholicism. Indeed, the lived experience of tolerance, or of multi-confessional coexistence on the continent, had led to refinements in theology, with, as Blair Worden and John Coffey have argued, believers seeking for a new ground upon which to offer the fundamentals of religion.¹⁸ Of course, it was in relation to his own domestic radical contexts—such as those presented by Thomas Corns and David Loewenstein in this volume—that Milton created his vision; but there were wider influences and a wider audience imagined for his work (Martin Dzelzainis’s analysis of Milton’s grappling with avant-garde Continental thought sheds light on this below). A writer at work, Milton reveals a capacity for ‘rapidly synthesizing fresh positions’, as Nicholas von Maltzahn states it here, and Dzelzainis shows the political processes by which his ideas emerged. While Milton at times surrendered to a knee-jerk anti-popery fear, he saw in popery not simply Roman Catholicism, but all forms of servitude, dependence, and alienation of reason, as Andrew Hadfield explains in his essay; in this, he sharply and surprisingly differed from his contemporary tolerationists, such as Vane and Williams, who had both ¹⁶ For the importance of distinguishing tolerance from scepticism, see Richard Tuck, ‘Scepticism and Toleration in the Seventeenth Century’, in Susan Mendus, ed., Justifying Toleration: Conceptual and Historical Perspectives (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1988), 21–35. ¹⁷ As Jonathan Scott, England’s Troubles: Seventeenth-Century English Political Instability in European Context (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2000), requires that we do. See also Sharon Achinstein, ‘Milton and King Charles’, in Thomas Corns, ed., The Royal Image: Representations of Charles I (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1999), 141–61. ¹⁸ Blair Worden, ‘The Question of Secularization’, in Alan Houston and Steve Pincus, eds., A Nation Transformed (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2001), 20–40. The radically tolerationist Baptist Thomas Helwys is exemplary; see John Coffey, ‘Puritanism and Liberty Revisited: The Case for Toleration in the English Revolution’, Historical Journal 41.4 (1998), 961–85.

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argued for toleration of idolators.¹⁹ His multiple commitments, along with his rhetorical and philosophical experimentation, provide a sharp corrective to those who would prefer to take Milton as a hero or anti-hero of tolerant thinking. In Milton, we shall see the contours of early modern ambivalence regarding the very nature of human society and its capacity for tolerance. His calls for tolerance are all the more engaging at a time when we see the resurgence of various fundamentalisms around the globe. Above all, our contributors insist on a connection between toleration and heterodoxy. There is no necessary correlation, to be sure, and historians of tolerance differ in their assessments about whether the fight against persecution for religion in England was also a fight for freedom of inquiry. In his study of the origins of Enlightenment thinking, Jonathan Israel, for example, has contrasted the continental defenses with those of Britain: on the continent, arguments for tolerance moved towards freedom of thought; in Britain, he claims, they were restricted to attacks on priestcraft.²⁰ However, Margaret Jacob, with her vision of a radical enlightenment in the history of science, and more recently, Justin Champion, in his studies of later seventeenth-century heterodoxy, have sought to reconstruct the underground free-thinking traditions in Britain. Champion charts the English tradition of anti-priestcraft writing, whereby religious leaders can become true legislators with the right approach. Henry Stubbe’s and Charles Blount’s investigations into comparative religion offered anthropological or proto-secularist frameworks for a civil religion, rather than arguments for atheism. Champion insists that the English attacks on priestcraft preceded the French libertine tradition of freedom of thought, and should be seen as a political engagement with institutional authority.²¹ Nigel Smith’s contribution below helps to situate Milton in relation to these avantgarde movements in Continental thought; and Achinstein’s essay explores the presence of these international intellectual concerns in Milton’s poetry. ¹⁹ Coffey, ‘Puritanism and Liberty’, 969. ²⁰ Jonathan I. Israel, Radical Enlightenment: Philosophy and the Making of Modernity, 1650–1750 (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2002). See also Michael Hunter, ‘The Problem of ‘‘Atheism’’ in Early Modern England’, Transactions of the Royal Historical Society, 5th ser. (1985), 135–57. ²¹ Justin Champion, The Pillars of Priestcraft Shaken: The Church of England and its Enemies, 1660–1730 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1992); and Republican Learning: John Toland and the Crisis of Christian Culture, 1696–1722 (Manchester: Manchester University Press, 2003). See also Margaret C. Jacob, The Radical Enlightenment: Pantheists, Freemasons and Republicans (London: Allen & Unwin, 1981). To this must be added studies of English Revolutionary radicalism, particularly Nigel Smith, Literature and Revolution in England, 1640–1660 (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1994); James Holstun, Ehud’s Dagger: Class Struggle in the English Revolution (London: Verso, 2000); and David Wootton, ‘Leveller Democracy and the Puritan Revolution’, in J. H. Burns and Mark Goldie, eds., The Cambridge History of Political Thought, 1450–1700 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1991), ch. 14.

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Did Milton’s unorthodox views contribute to a theory of toleration? James Turner has powerfully argued that Milton’s questioning of prelapsarian sexuality was unorthodox, and as William Poole has recently shown, Milton parted ways with the conservative Puritans of the Westminster Assembly over how much was lost at the Fall.²² According to Poole, in Milton’s vision of the Fall, sin has not utterly depraved man; John Rogers has developed the picture of Milton’s unorthodox theological commitments for an account of political radicalism. While the implications for the political theory or practice of tolerance are at present unclear, it is sure that Milton’s dabbling with or full immersion in radical ideas depended upon his commitment to absolute freedom of inquiry.²³ Although scholars disagree over the extent or presence of these elements in his theology, Milton’s engagement with anti-Trinitarianism or Arianism may likewise be seen in a tolerationist context, where even fundamentals of faith might surrender to inquiry.²⁴ In Areopagitica, Milton recalls the omnivorous reading of Moses, Daniel and Paul, biblical exemplars, who were ‘skilfull in all the learning of the Ægyptians, Caldeans, and Greeks’ (YP 2.507–8), giving real value to unchristian sources of learning. To this account, we must add Milton’s contribution to the history of freedom of thought, particularly his Areopagitica, which invites the consideration of ‘all kinde of knowledge whether of good or evill; the knowledge cannot defile, nor consequently the books, if the will and conscience be not defil’d’ (YP 2.512). ²² James Grantham Turner, One Flesh: Paradisal Marriage and Sexual Relations in the Age of Milton (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1987); William Poole, Milton and the Idea of the Fall (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2005); Norman Burns, Christian Mortalism from Tyndale to Milton (Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 1972); and see also Stephen Fallon, Milton among the Philosophers: Poetry and Materialism in Seventeenth-Century England (Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 1991); Rachel J. Trubowitz on Milton’s alleged ‘monism’ in ‘Body Politics in Paradise Lost’, PMLA 21.2 (2006), 388–404. ²³ For the political consequences of the radical vitalism in contemporary scientific discourse, see John Rogers, Matter of Revolution: Science, Poetry, and Politics in the Age of Milton (Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 1996); John Rogers, ‘Milton and the Heretical Priesthood of Christ’, in David Loewenstein and John Marshall, eds., Heresy, Literature and Politics in Early Modern English Culture (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2006); on Henry Stubbe, see James R. Jacob and Margaret C. Jacob, ‘The Anglican Origins of Modern Science: The Metaphysical Foundations of the Whig Constitution’, Isis 71 (1980), 251–67, esp. pp. 260–1. ²⁴ On this subject, see for example the scholarship on the theological controversies in Milton’s De Doctrina Christiana: Maurice Kelley, This Great Argument: A Study of Milton’s ‘De Doctrina Christiana’ as a Gloss upon ‘Paradise Lost’ [1941], Princeton Studies in English, 22 (Gloucester, Mass.: Peter Smith, 1962); Stephen F. Fallon, ‘Milton’s Arminianism and the Authorship of De doctrina Christiana’, Texas Studies in Literature and Language 41 (1999), 103–27; John P. Rumrich, ‘Milton’s Arianism and Why It Matters’, in Stephen B. Dobranski and John P. Rumrich, eds., Milton and Heresy (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1998), 75–92; Balachandra Rajan, ‘The Poetics of Heresy’ and ‘The Two Creations: Paradise Lost and the Treatise on Christian Doctrine’, in Elizabeth Sauer, ed., Milton and the Climates of Reading: Essays by Balachandra Rajan ( Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 2006), ch. 2, ch. 7.

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With his defense of freedom of inquiry, Milton comes to arrive at a radical ethical position regarding the innocence of the conscience and the will. For God, Milton writes, ‘left arbitrary the dyeting and repasting of our minds; as wherein every mature man might have to exercise his owne leading capacity’ (YP 2.513). The questions so explosive to Milton—of human sexuality; of regulating marriage; of desires; of social and spiritual hierarchy—warrant a broadening of our notions of toleration. If sexual discontent can be the grounds for a struggle for freedom, as James Turner argues, then, how can the polity, marriage, and even the self be understood? In the essays to come, we shall see whether, and in what ways the narrower question of liberty of conscience or religious liberty broadens out into a wider defense of personal freedoms.

II As the subsequent essays will also show, Milton’s imaginative writings evolved in conjunction with developments in the political and religious spheres. A brief overview of the early modern history of toleration in England is in order. In the early modern era, toleration was not synonymous with religious freedom, but rather with the concepts of ‘permission’ and ‘endurance’, a more passive version of the classical term tolerantia.²⁵ England’s history of toleration offers no evolutionary narrative toward enlightenment and liberty. The English nation of the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries was less advanced in its tolerationist policies and practices than France and Poland, where, as Milton himself would later acknowledge, ‘Protestants injoy … liberty among Papists’ of public speaking, writing, and printing more than do English Protestants in their own land (YP 8.426–7). In England, repression of dissident religious beliefs and practices was continuous both before and after the Protestant Reformation. As Supreme ²⁵ In addition to Walsham, Charitable, and Coffey, Persecution and Toleration, see: Joseph Lecler, Preface, in Toleration and the Reformation, trans. T. L. Westow, 2 vols. (New York: Association Press, 1960), vol. i, p. x; Cary J. Nederman and John Christian Laursen, ‘Difference and Dissent: Introduction’, in Cary J. Nederman and John Christian Laursen, eds., Difference and Dissent: Theories of Tolerance in Medieval and Early Modern Europe (Lanham, Md.: Rowman & Littlefield, 1997), 9–10; Cary J. Nederman and John Christian Laursen, eds., Beyond the Persecuting Society: Religious Toleration Before the Enlightenment (Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 1998); Ole Peter Grell and Roy Porter, eds., Toleration in Enlightenment Europe (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1999); G. R. Elton, ‘Persecution and Toleration in the English Reformation’, in W. J. Sheils, ed., Persecution and Toleration, Studies in Church History, 21 (Oxford: Basil Blackwell, 1984), 163–77.

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Head of the Church of England, Henry authorized the persecution of Catholics and Anabaptists; Edward VI, ascending to the throne in 1547, brought a new campaign of zeal against Catholics, with persecution overseen by Protector Somerset; Mary’s brief reign followed with persecution against Protestants, a Counter-Reformation program in line with her international alliances. The Elizabethan settlement re-established Protestantism as the state religion and, following Elizabeth’s Act of Supremacy which legislated against Roman primacy, the 1559 Act of Uniformity saw the revival of the liturgy of the Edwardian Prayer Book and the establishment of a national Reformed Church; fines of one shilling were the punishment for failing to attend Protestant services; the 1581 recusancy law raised this to the extortionate sum of £20 per month. Elizabeth promoted Erastianism on the basis that, in William Cecil’s words, ‘the State could never be in Safety, where there was a Tolleration of two religions’,²⁶ or, in her own words, ‘There cannot be two religions in one State.’²⁷ The 1563 Thirty-nine Articles served as the English Church’s constitution, and despite efforts to accommodate a wide range of Christian beliefs within one church, the number of people succumbing to religious persecution in her day totalled that of Protestant deaths under Mary, with prominent Catholic and Calvinist martyrs among Elizabeth’s victims (Edmund Campion, Robert Parson, and Henry Barrow). Recusants and Anabaptists, for example, faced interrogations, fines, seizure of goods, imprisonment, deportation, or banishment.²⁸ While the advancement of tolerance was rarely an aim of governments in England, early political and religious history also reveals that the English people themselves frequently resented the concept and frustrated state-sponsored efforts to grant toleration. The succession of James VI of Scotland ( James I) to the throne installed what many believed would be a relatively peaceful, but for Parliament distinctly uncomfortable, period of tolerance. James was favourably disposed to the Roman church and laity; and was in general known for his ‘confessional bridge-building’.²⁹ At the same time, politics and public pressure conspired to force the king to take the offensive against Catholicism: in 1605 Parliament demanded the revision and enforcement of penal laws against recusants, and the Gunpowder Plot fueled the nation’s outrage against popery. The following year, 1606, saw the passing of bills demanding conformity to the Established Church and outlawing adherence to Catholicism. The main threat to the English Church, however, came not from Catholics but rather ²⁶ Quoted in W. K. Jordan, The Development of Religious Toleration in England, 4 vols. (1932–40), 1.88. ²⁷ Lecler, Toleration and the Reformation, 2.355, 378. ²⁸ For a good guide to this history, see Walsham, Charitable, ch. 2. ²⁹ Scott, England’s Troubles, 98–9.

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from Protestant separatists, who would challenge monarchical jurisdiction, demand disestablishment, and sow the seeds of revolution.³⁰ The discontent with state power over religion intensified with the rise of Laud under Charles I, and with the imposition of the new Prayer Book in Scotland. Puritans and separatists attacked the instruments of royal and ecclesiastical power, leading to the Root and Branch Petition of 1640 and ultimately to execution of the archbishop of Canterbury and the dismantling of episcopacy. The toleration controversies of the 1640s involved Presbyterians and Erastians, who argued for unity through the establishment of a Presbyterian national church, and dissenters who opposed a state church and pressed for liberty of conscience. The outbreak of the first civil war intensified these religious disputes, challenged episcopacy, and curtailed the king’s infringement on the liberties and liberty of conscience of his subjects. By the end of the civil wars, Parliament banned the Book of Common Prayer, the office of bishop was abolished, and the stage was prepared for the execution of the king. Emerging in the 1640s and 1650s into organized groups, Levellers, Fifth Monarchists, Quakers, Diggers, and Ranters were among the radicals who professed fervent beliefs in the universality of grace and human rights that underwrote their defences of political liberty and of popular representation. For these dissenters, the time was ripe for revolutionary ecclesiastical and political programs that challenged not only the authority of the church from which it developed but also that of the state that established the church.³¹ Replacing the monarchy, the republican government frustrated rather than advanced the sectaries’ causes.³² Indeed, significant legislative changes were made under the Commonwealth: the 1650 Act for the relief of religious and peaceable people was passed and statutes enforcing church attendance repealed. But the Rump’s insistence on maintaining the state church through civil power undermined toleration efforts. The Protector himself assumed a range of different positions on toleration: he supported religious toleration and encouraged learning; he stimulated foreign trade; he promoted the Protestant League in 1654–5 and appealed in 1655 for warring Protestant parties ‘by ³⁰ See Peter Lake, Anglicans and Puritans? Presbyterianism and English Conformist Thought from Whitgift to Hooker (London: Allen & Unwin, 1988); Kenneth Fincham, ‘Clerical Conformity from Whitgift to Laud’, in Peter Lake and Michael Questier, eds., Conformity and Orthodoxy in the English Church c. 1560–1660 (Woodbridge: Boydell, 2000), 125–58, and Fincham, ed., The Early Stuart Church: 1603–1642 (Basingstoke: Macmillan, 1993). ³¹ See Christopher Hill, The World Turned Upside Down: Radical Ideas during the English Revolution (London: Temple Smith, 1972) and John Coffey, ‘ Puritanism and Liberty Revisited’, The Historical Journal 41.4 (1998), 961–85. ³² Blair Worden, ‘Toleration and the Cromwellian Protectorate’, in W. J. Sheils, ed., Persecution and Toleration, Studies in Church History, 21 (Oxford: Basil Blackwell, 1984), 199–233; J. C. Davis, ‘Religion and the Struggle for Liberty’, Historical Journal 35 (1992), 507–30.

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brotherly consent and harmony [to] unite into one’ (YP 5.2.680); under his authority Irish Catholics were slaughtered or transplanted; he strongly condemned the atrocities committed against the Waldensians in Piedmont; he defended in theory—and occasionally in practice—a culture of dissent; he actively suppressed Catholicism in the European theater; he proposed the readmission of the Jews in the 1655 Whitehall conference; and he declared war against the Spanish. But the Cromwellian period also saw the introduction of the 1650 Blasphemy Act calculated to repress antinomians and Quakers. If the civil war and interregnum gave rise to debates and proposals on toleration, the Restoration saw the return of forms of religious persecution, victimizing Catholics but especially Protestant sectarians.³³ The era also witnessed an eruption of controversies over conscience, extending from Parliament’s imposition of the Westminster Confession on the nation in 1660, to the failures of the Dutch War and Clarendon’s fall in 1667, to the disputes over the question of comprehension of dissenters. Confronted by ‘a rumour abroad of some Motions or Act to be offered for Comprehension or Indulgence’, the Cavalier Parliament voted on 10 February 1668 to enforce laws against nonconformists. A comprehension bill was, however, ‘much desired by the greater part of the nation’, reported Samuel Pepys.³⁴ Later that year, Charles was again approached about this matter, but the Commons seized the opportunity to legislate, outside of monarchic jurisdiction, adherence to the Act of Uniformity. Persecution in the Restoration became ideology and practice.³⁵ In the early years of the following decade, the crisis over toleration reached other climaxes: Charles’s Declaration of Indulgence (1672) and the Popish Plots (1679–81). Shortly before the outbreak of the Second Anglo-Dutch War, in which he allied himself with France, Charles issued the 15 March 1672 Declaration of Indulgence, the first such declaration having failed a decade beforehand. Citing the futility of the twelve-year-long suppression of religious dissent, the 1672 Declaration called for the suspension of ‘Penal ³³ Gary S. De Krey, ‘Rethinking the Restoration: Dissenting Cases for Conscience, 1667–72’, Historical Journal 38 (1995), 53–83; N. H. Keeble, The Literature of Nonconformity in Later Seventeenth-Century England (Leicester: Leicester University Press, 1987); Douglas Lacey, Dissent and Parliamentary Politics in England, 1661–1689: A Study in the Perpetuation and Tempering of Parliamentarianism (New Brunswick, N.J.: Rutgers University Press, 1969). ³⁴ Samuel Pepys, 10 February 1668, in Robert Latham and William Matthews, eds., The Diary of Samuel Pepys, 11 vols. (London and Berkeley: University of California Press, 1970–83), 9.60, quoted in Elizabeth Sauer, ‘Milton’s Of True Religion, Protestant Nationhood, and the Negotiation of Liberty’, Milton Quarterly 40.1 (2006), 5. ³⁵ On the ideology of persecution, see Goldie, ‘Theory of Religious’; and Gordon Schochet, ‘Samuel Parker, Religious Diversity, and the Ideology of Persecution’, in Roger D. Lund, ed., The Margins of Orthodoxy: Heterodox Writing and Cultural Response, 1660–1750 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1995), 119–48.

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Laws in matters Ecclesiastical, against whatsoever sort of Non-Conformists or Recusants’.³⁶ In the charged politico-religious climate that seethed with anti-Catholic sentiment, Charles’s proposed indulgence failed. In his final original prose work, Of True Religion, Hæresie, Schism, Toleration—the product both of a turbulent era and of a particular moment marking a conjunction between fierce anti-Catholic agitation and a proposed indulgence for various nonconformist sects—Milton numbered among the majority in fully supporting in March 1673 the Commons’ withdrawal of the Declaration. The Toleration Act of 1689 freed Protestant dissenters from penalty, though still legislated political and social exclusion; toleration of those outside the Protestant church would have to wait until the nineteenth century.

III The study of the writings of John Milton can help us to see how these dramatic changes concerning persecution and the ideal of uniformity that were in place in Tudor and early Stuart England came about. During Milton’s writing life, and in part because of his contribution, religious toleration emerged out of radical Puritanism. Milton scholars have, however, figured toleration only secondarily, instead dwelling on the intellectual contexts of Puritan radicalism, liberalism, nationalism, colonialism, (anti-)imperialism, and republicanism. The foregrounding of toleration in this book is designed to complement, supplement, but also establish a methodological departure from related studies on the subject by offering alternative ways of understanding these movements and Milton’s relationship to them.³⁷ Milton has enjoyed a reputation during much of the twentieth century as a champion of liberalism, a reputation bolstered by the ‘great Whig tradition’, as Nicholas Tyacke characterizes it.³⁸ In histories of Puritanism, Milton ‘was to enjoy easily the greatest ³⁶ His Majesties Declaration to all his Loving Subjects, March 15th 1671/2 (London, 1671/2), 6. See also Mark Knights, Representation and Misrepresentation in Later Stuart Britain: Partisanship and Political Culture (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2005). ³⁷ Classic ‘progressive’ analyses include William Haller’s The Rise of Puritanism … from Thomas Cartwright to John Lilburne and John Milton (New York: Columbia University Press, 1938), Haller’s Liberty and Reformation in the Puritan Revolution (New York: Columbia University Press, 1955), A. S. P. Woodhouse’s Puritanism and Liberty (London: J. M. Dent & Sons, 1938, 1951, 1965), and Arthur Barker’s Milton and the Puritan Dilemma ( Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 1942). ³⁸ Nicholas Tyacke, ‘The ‘‘Rise of Puritanism’’ and the Legalizing of Dissent, 1571–1719’, in Grell, Israel, and Tyacke, eds., From Persecution to Toleration, 17; and see Annabel Patterson, Early Modern Liberalism (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1997).

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posthumous reputation among later liberals’ and become ‘the only radical Puritan tolerationist to exercise great influence in the eighteenth century’.³⁹ Recent excellent studies have offered nuanced historical recontextualizations of Milton’s political and religious emphases to correct an overdetermined Whig or marxisant approach.⁴⁰ Concentrating on Milton’s relationship to radical ideologies, scholars, including Nicholas von Maltzahn, David Norbrook, Nigel Smith and David Loewenstein, have recently explored the political and ecclesiological content of that shared culture, developing a formidable portrait of Milton’s republicanism and liberalism but leaving the story of Milton’s theories and ethics of toleration and their relation to the radical tradition yet largely untold. ⁴¹ Otherwise valuable political and literary histories of Milton’s republicanism tend in general to address toleration (and civic rather than religious toleration) only insofar as it functions as a subcategory of republican virtues. The vision of republican toleration, moreover, does not fit well with Milton’s own views. Simone Zurbuchen has argued that early modern republican theorists were more committed to a nationally established church, in line with their emphasis on communal virtue and civic responsibility.⁴² James Harrington is illustrative here. Harrington in his System of Politics (1661?) supported liberty of conscience, with conscience only capable of ³⁹ Coffey, ‘Puritanism and Liberty’, 969, 984. ⁴⁰ Among the fine investigations situating Milton’s life and work in a culture of dissent during the English revolutionary and Restoration periods are Keeble, Literature of Nonconformity; Nigel Smith, Perfection Proclaimed: Language and Literature in English Radical Religion (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1989); and Nicholas McDowell, The English Radical Imagination: Culture, Religion, and Revolution, 1630–1660 (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 2003). For investigations of the interrelationship of literature, polemics, and religious politics, see David Loewenstein, Representing Revolution in Milton and his Contemporaries: Religion, Politics and Polemics in Radical Puritanism (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2001), for the Revolutionary period; and Sharon Achinstein, Literature and Dissent in Milton’s England (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2003) for the Restoration. See also John N. King, Milton and Religious Controversy: Satire and Polemic in ‘Paradise Lost’ (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2000); Achsah Guibbory, Ceremony and Community from Herbert to Milton (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1998); Kristen Poole, Radical Religion from Shakespeare to Milton: Figures of Nonconformity in Early Modern England (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2000); and Dobranski and Rumrich, eds., Milton and Heresy. ⁴¹ See David Norbrook, Writing the English Republic: Poetry, Rhetoric and Politics, 1627–1660 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1999); Nicholas von Maltzahn, Milton’s ‘History of Britain’: Republican Historiography in the English Revolution (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1991); Quentin Skinner, David Armitage and Armand Himy, eds., Milton and Republicanism (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1995); Janel Mueller, ‘Contextualizing Milton’s Nascent Republicanism’, in P. G. Stanwood, ed., Of Poetry and Politics: New Essays on Milton and His World (Binghamton, NY: Medieval and Renaissance Texts and Studies, 1995); and Graham Parry and Joad Raymond, eds., Milton and the Terms of Liberty (Cambridge: D. S. Brewer, 2002). ⁴² Simone Zurbuchen, ‘Republicanism and Toleration’, in Quentin Skinner and Martin van Gelderen, eds., Republicanism: A Shared European Heritage, 2 vols. (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2002), 2.47–72, at 53.

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being protected in a democracy. However, he saw the necessity of a national religion, and excluded from public office in the state those who, for reasons of conscience, dissented from that national religion.⁴³ Tolerance is also a relatively neglected subject of studies on Milton’s relationship to empire or anti-imperialism. The exploration of Milton’s engagements with imperialism establishes some of the parameters of the conversation in which this book hopes to participate.⁴⁴ To the argument made by David Quint that Paradise Lost and Paradise Regained are epics reinforcing and interrogating imperialism we might add an analysis of the negotiations of toleration in Milton’s poetics and poetry.⁴⁵ As J. Martin Evans sees Paradise Lost as a register of the multiple, contesting attitudes to the colonization of the New World, we can find a model for analysing the equally controversial subject and discourses of toleration.⁴⁶ None of the scholarship on this subject, however, centres on and treats the question of toleration in a robust, thoroughgoing manner. We do not propose here to offer a unified overview of Milton and toleration but hope to open up new possibilities for present and future investigations which reassess the strengths, limits, and contradictions of Milton’s position.

IV The organization of our volume reflects the multi-dimensional approach to the question of Milton and toleration. The contributors in Part I, ‘Revising Whig Accounts’, resist the liberal paradigms of a chronological progression from a persecuting past to modern-day tolerationism, while reassessing Whig histories of England’s leading role in developing and even exporting tolerationist principles. The contributors establish international and national religious and cultural contexts for addressing the key questions on Milton and toleration. ⁴³ James Harrington, A System of Politics, in J. G. A. Pocock, ed., The Commonwealth of Oceana and A System of Politics (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1992), 282. For theoretical analyses, see also Zurbuchen, ‘Republicanism and Toleration’; and Charles Larmore, ‘Liberal and Republican Conceptions of Freedom’, in Daniel Weinstock and Christian Nadeau, eds., Republicanism: History, Theory and Practice (London: Frank Cass, 2004), 96–119. ⁴⁴ David Armitage, ‘John Milton: Poet against Empire’, in Armitage, Himy, and Skinner, eds., Milton and Republicanism, 206–25; Paul Stevens, ‘Paradise Lost and the Colonial Imperative’, Milton Studies 34 (1996), 3–21, and Balachandra Rajan and Elizabeth Sauer, eds., Milton and the Imperial Vision (Pittsburgh: Duquesne University Press, 1999). ⁴⁵ David Quint, Epic and Empire: Politics and Generic Form from Virgil to Milton (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1993). ⁴⁶ J. Martin Evans, Milton’s Imperial Epic: ‘Paradise Lost’ and the Discourse of Colonization (Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 1996).

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At the same time, they identify some of the polemical stakes and widen the understanding of the ideologies of toleration. The approaches taken here are comparative without collapsing into polarities or binaries. At issue are Milton’s engagements with elite groups, dissenting communities, and with key ideas and proponents of toleration whose arguments informed his own thinking on the subject. Nigel Smith productively locates Milton in a broad tradition of intellectual freedom of belief associated with elite groups in Europe, from which are derived Milton’s understanding of religious toleration and persecution, of free will and anti-Trinitarian theology. The following three essays locate Milton in the embattled religious cultures of the day: David Loewenstein’s ‘Toleration and the Specter of Heresy in Milton’s England’ studies the scare-mongering of the pamphlet wars over religious toleration. While Loewenstein situates Milton in relation to John Goodwin and William Walwyn—two major polemical writers in the English history of toleration—Thomas Corns, in ‘John Milton and Roger Williams, and the Limits of Toleration’, positions Milton in relation to Williams and in the context of both the new world and the theological aims of civic reform. Advancing the argument of Milton’s limited and Williams’s absolute toleration which critics have generally maintained, Corns, however, explores the issue more fully, complicating the positions of these two writers on the scale of toleration in terms of their views on church polity, on the relationship between congregational independents and Presbyterianism, on millenarianism, and on questions of civic and spiritual regeneration. Milton’s difference from the Whig perspective on tolerance is at the center of Nicholas von Maltzahn’s piece, ‘Milton, Marvell and Toleration’. This contribution scrutinizes historical accounts of liberalism in analysing questions of religious tolerance in early modern England and the importance of the subject not only for Milton but also for Marvell, whose contributions to the religious origins of the Enlightenment are situated in proximity to Milton’s. Part II, ‘Philosophical and Religious Engagements’, explores Milton’s participation in philosophical debates about questions of toleration. In each case, contributors to Part II analyse a complex of discourses and representations underlying Milton’s concept of heterodoxy, brotherly dissimilitudes, and the poetics of toleration. In turn they take toleration to its outer limits—libertinism, natural law, equity, Anti-trinitarianism—and explore the main intolerance, anti-Catholicism. Extending the narrower concerns of ‘religious toleration’ and the abstract language of toleration to consider the wider ramifications of defenses of freedom of thought and experience, passions, and the ethics of confrontation, James Grantham Turner’s ‘Libertinism and Toleration: Milton, Bruno and Aretino’ applies the question of toleration to a range of erotic classics, as well as to the varied ‘tractates’ and ‘reasons’ of

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religious controversy. In doing so, he advances the concept of a pan-European movement towards freedom of thought, with a provocative investigation of sexuality as the core of libertine philosophy. Jason Rosenblatt’s ‘Milton, Natural Law, and Toleration’ enhances our understanding of the natural law tradition as well as explaining the significance of Milton’s engagement with theorists from Grotius to Selden, Pufendorf, Locke, and Barbeyrac to account for the transformation that occurs between Milton’s antiprelatical tracts that ‘apotheosize the spiritual aristocrats of the reformation’ and the treatises on divorce which emphasize commonality and toleration. Victoria Silver develops the links between epistemology and theology in her essay, ‘ ‘‘A Taken Scandal not a Given’’: Milton’s Equitable Grounds of Toleration’. Legal theory, Montaigne, and the extensive treatment of Milton’s Of Civil Power combine to make a powerful and original case for assessing Milton on questions of equity and toleration, and offer a philosophically nuanced account that challenges as well as complements some of the volume’s historicist offerings. Martin Dzelzainis’s ‘Milton and Antitrinitarianism’ explores the outer limit of religious tolerance Milton embraces within reformed Christianity, exploring the political conditions that expose the dimensions of his intellectual engagement with antitrinitarianism. The chapter posits an earlier (mid-1640s) date for Milton’s heretical antitrinitarianism, on the basis of his knowledge of religious controversies in Geneva and Poland. Andrew Hadfield’s essay on Milton and Catholicism offers an overview of the central intolerance in Milton’s writing life: popery, seen less as a political threat than a threat to philosophical freedom. Milton and Toleration seeks to understand the literary means by which tolerance was questioned, observed, and became an object of meditation. Part III in particular addresses the vital role of literary evidence in a study of toleration. How do the poet, the polemicist, the rhetorician intervene in the debate on the subject? The essays here examine how representations and discourses of toleration figure in the field of the literary, which includes Milton’s prose as well as poetry, and how imaginative literature can help enrich our understanding of the engagement with cultural, religious, and ethnic difference. Elizabeth Sauer uses ‘Sonnet XV’ and the literature on the Irish crisis to investigate the ways that toleration and imperialism operated side by side in Cromwellian England and were integral to the Interregnum government’s mission to advance a nationalist agenda. Sharon Achinstein looks for evidence of toleration thinking in the great epics, exploring the contrast between Milton’s philosophical commitment to free inquiry and his literary methods of forcing confrontation of different faiths. Paul Stevens’s ‘Intolerance and the Virtues of Sacred Vehemence’ develops these contentbased approaches to offer a different vantage point: his historically particular

Introduction

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analysis of Milton’s language depends on a distinction between the expressive and the pragmatic functions of the rhetoric of violence, and the defense of emotional, affective rhetoric. This wide-ranging study asks how the bloody nature of Milton’s anti-persecution rhetoric is ultimately modulated into a less vehement, more moderate anti-persecution discourse. Our final two essays explore the impact of Milton for later readers as they stretched the outer bounds of tolerance. Lana Cable examines the republican tradition, arguing that a rising secularism led to new concepts of individual agency and virtue, mediated through the poetry of John Milton for later readers. Gerald MacLean, in assessing Arab-Islamic responses to Milton that have focused on the character of Satan in Paradise Lost, shows that Milton’s unorthodox treatment of ancient sources made him attractive to a variety of Muslim thinkers who recognized in Milton’s poetry an attitude toward religious toleration remarkably in line with their own traditions. The viewpoint of the other, which is so crucial in addressing questions of toleration, offers intriguing insights into self constructions generally and the literature—and silences—of Milton and Muslims in particular. The history of Arab-Islamic critical response to Milton is the history of attempts by academics, writers, critics and poets, to make Milton their own. The final section explores, then, a poetics of tolerance, seeing in Milton’s work not simply a preoccupation with religious difference, but a literary means of representing and, in many ways, participating in the acceptance of difference.


Part I Revising Whig Accounts


2 Milton and the European Contexts of Toleration Nigel Smith ‘the largely tolerationist Arian Arminian John Milton’¹

Milton is customarily presented as an apologist for religious and political liberty. He defended liberty of the press in the mid-1640s, advanced some extremely heretical views on divorce and some more obscure theological positions, oversaw the publication of some theology (the Racovian Catechism—the federal document of the Socinians) that was outlawed by the Commonwealth authorities, maintained that these freedoms were best realized in a Christian republic, and defended a wide measure of religious toleration late in his life. If there were limits to the religious toleration offered by the Interregnum governments, these were for the time comparatively broad, and as Secretary for Foreign Tongues, Milton was responsible for the communication of these views to foreign governments. He was a friend of some of the most influential tolerationist thinkers of his time, especially Roger Williams, the founder of Rhode Island. These views are embedded, more or less obviously, in his poetry, and his three most important poems were published during the period when likeminded Protestant nonconformists suffered the greatest degree of legal persecution between 1660 and 1688.² Milton, then, is presented as a guiding light toward liberty: what came before him was largely blind persecution (with some exceptions in the ancient world), and what followed was a slow and growing awareness that religious toleration was constitutive of ¹ John Marshall, John Locke, Toleration and Early Enlightenment Culture (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2006), 8. ² Arthur E. Barker, Milton and the Puritan Dilemma, 1641–1660 ( Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 1942), 18–20, 74–97; repeated in Barbara K. Lewalski, The Life of John Milton (Oxford: Blackwell, 2000), 201–6, 283–7, 382–6.

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and beneficial for a free society. He was in this sense a precursor of Locke’s influential pro-toleration writings, but in a general sense more influential, since many more people have read his poetry than have read Locke’s political theory. Both authors have been judged significant influences on the writing of the constitution of the Unites States of America.³ This interpretation of Milton’s career and works is very Whig and Protestant; one formed in the light of the religious strife that followed the Reformation, and one born out of a typically Protestant and northern European view of the attempt of the Roman Church, through the Council of Trent and the Inquisition, to maintain its integrity against the rise of Protestantism. Pre1640 England was no light to Europe on the issues Milton cared about: both his writing, and the extent of the persecution of unorthodox religious views under Elizabeth, James and Charles, are testimony to that. Milton also knew that religious toleration did exist to a greater extent in several other European states than in England. There was the impressive or at least very complicated example of the United Provinces, and further afield, the Commonwealth of Poland-Lithuania, which had toleration inscribed into its constitution, which was home of the original Socinian church as well as communities of exiled Anabaptists and Mennonites. It did not serve Milton’s purpose to show that the medieval church could be seen to harbour either tolerationist ideas or practice, and in any case, he probably did not know about them, although of course he stressed the protoReformation strand in the medieval church. Neither does he seem to know about the other places in or adjacent to medieval Europe where toleration was practised. Medieval Spain was ruled by Muslims who made religious toleration compulsory. Muslims, Jews and Christians cohabited the Iberian peninsular. Only after the rise of the Aragonese kings did toleration cease to exist now within the extent of a Christian monarchy.⁴ Milton’s thought might indeed more readily be seen to fit within the context of the rise of the three Atlantic monarchies—Spain, France, England—and their quest for interior religious unity as a concomitant to the rise of centralized monarchical power. Persistently articulated Miltonic themes address the rise of the nation state, and therefore the kinds of liberty that make the modern Christian nation state so strong.⁵ ³ Annabel Patterson, Early Modern Liberalism (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1997), chs. 1, 8. ⁴ Cary J. Nederman, Worlds of Difference: European Discourses of Toleration, C. 1100–C. 1550 (Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 2000), 30. ⁵ See for instance Paul Stevens, ‘Milton’s Nationalism and the Rights of Memory’, in Imagining Death in Spenser and Milton, ed. E. Bellamy (Basingstoke: Palgrave Macmillan, 2003), 171–84.

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Ideas of tolerance were in circulation long before the seventeenth century, and emerged from a variety of intellectual frameworks, some of them opposed to each other. Medieval reformers like John Wyclif thought that it was the duty of a monarch to guarantee the security of all subjects even though the theological views of some of those subjects will be wrong and so will not lead to salvation.⁶ In the earlier sixteenth century, radical reformers like Hans Denck and Sebastian Franck thought that true Christians should be inherently tolerant since it was a corollary of inward faith and love. Religious truth is in their view a deeply inward matter and cannot therefore be compelled from outside. It was the force of this spiritualism that had a huge influence on later Enlightenment views of religion.⁷ New world exploration also produced new perspectives. The dispute at Valladolid in the mid-1500s resulted in Bartolomé de Las Casas and Francisco Vitoria arguing that indigenous Americans had a right to religious toleration (even if it included human sacrifice and cannibalism) as well as cultural autonomy: they had dominium and a degree of sovereignty so that neither forcible conversion nor conquest was justified. Within the Catholic Church these experiences produced the view by the later sixteenth century that ‘concordance’—unity within the Christian realm—was neither possible nor worthwhile.⁸ Thus Bodin’s Colloquium heptaplomeres (1588), which was not published until nearly two hundred years after its composition, argued in favour of the toleration of different creeds and sects within creeds so that representatives of each position could learn more about their beliefs through debate with their opponents. Bodin himself, famous as an apologist for absolutism, reversed his previous position of enforced conformity. In eastern Europe, there was an experiment in multi-confessional coexistence: the Polish-Lithuanian Commonwealth began in 1579, with Henry of Valois as its first elected king.⁹ Fausto Sozzino was compelled to leave Siena and head for Poland where anti-trinitarians were tolerated and where there was an anti-trinitarian church. The Polish context helps to explain why Socinianism and Catholicism seemingly met in certain respects, and coexisted. For instance, in the realm of theology, the Socinian idea of the priesthood of ⁶ John Christian Laursen and Cary J. Nederman, eds., Beyond the Persecuting Society: Religious Toleration Before the Enlightenment (Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 1998), 1–16. ⁷ Burkhard Dohm, Poetische Alchimie: o¨ ffnung zur Sinnlichkeit in der Hohelied- und Bibeldichtung von der protestantischen Barockmystik bis zum Pietismus ( Tübingen: Max Niemeyer, 2000). ⁸ Anthony Pagden, The Fall of Natural Man: The American Indian and the Origins of Comparative Ethnology (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1982). ⁹ See Richard Butterwick, ed., The Polish-Lithuanian Monarchy in European Context c. 1500–1795 (Basingstoke: Palgrave, 2001).

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Christ resembles the Catholic position, despite their fundamentally different view of the Trinity. This connection in turn relates to the degree to which Protestantism is circumvented in some points of Socinian theology, and therefore why it might appeal to ‘high’ Protestants who were in fact looking more to Rome than to Geneva.¹⁰ In England, this meant the Laudians: Milton’s enemies in respect of church government, but a group with whom he shared much in respect of the theology of free will.¹¹ The constitution of the Polish-Lithuanian Commonwealth, dedicated as we have seen to toleration, attempted to enshrine diversity in its constitution and its structure of political and administrative appointments. Thus, while the elected king of Poland was often a former Jesuit, his secretary was a prominent Protestant; indeed, in the case of the appointment in 1649 of Martin Ruar, a Socinian.¹² Holland involves a different scenario to Poland, and one where Socinian students and emissaries began to arrive from the second decade of the seventeenth century onwards. By the end of the sixteenth century and therefore after the revolt from Spanish rule, the dominant feeling in Holland was that the imposers of religious unity, wherever they arose, were responsible for more damage than the heretics themselves. Local privileges were a strong bulwark here against the threat of interference by the national government. The Reformed religion was strong in its control of buildings, church revenues, the dispensing of charity and education, but it was not a state church, and its access to the total available communion of worshippers was therefore limited. There was no compulsion to church attendance and baptism; civil marriage was a possibility. The discipline offered by the Dutch Reformed Church was not attractive to everyone, and while the government had retreated from the absolute religievrede of the later 1570s (with its attendant turmoil), it respected the freedom of individual conscience above confessional unity. Catholics and Mennonites worshipped in numbers but privately at home or later in ‘purpose-built private churches’. In Holland, families were thus sometimes markedly divided between three or more confessions. This is a much more extreme case than in England ¹⁰ G. H. Williams, ed., The Polish Brethren: Documentation of the History and Thought of Unitarianism in the Polish-Lithuanian Commonwealth and in the Diaspora, 1601–1685, 2 vols. (Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Press, 1980); Richard Tuck, Philosophy and Government, 1572–1651 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1993), 186, 189, 338–9. ¹¹ H. J. McLachlan, Socinianism in Seventeenth-Century England (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1951); Nigel Smith, ‘ ‘‘And if God was one of us’’: Paul Best, John Biddle and AntiTrinitarian Heresy in Seventeenth-Century England’, in David Loewenstein and John Marshall, eds., Heresy in Early Modern England (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2007), 160–84. See now Micheal Lieb, The Theological Milton: Deity, Discourse and Heresy in the Miltonic Canon (Pittsburgh: Duquesne University Press, 2006). See also the forthcoming work of Sarah Mortimer of Gonville and Caius College, Cambridge. ¹² Williams, The Polish Brethren, 2.476. Ruar’s predecessor in this post was also a Socinian.


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where confessional conformity was still required by law. Many Dutch people chose—perhaps as much as 50 per cent of the population—to be affiliated to no particular church. Being in a church was therefore a more consciously voluntary act than in other societies.¹³ It took a while for the theoretical implications of the Dutch situation to be fully realized. After all, despite there being strong early advocates for toleration, foremost among them Dirck Volkerstzoon Coornhert in the 1570s, the States of Holland had not officially adopted liberty of conscience. A moral vision detached from religion had been propounded by Justus Lipsius in Politicorum libri sex (1589), based in fact on Roman stoicism. It was attacked by Coonhert in Defensio Processus de non Occidendis Haereticis (Gouda, 1591; banned by the State of Holland; Hanover, 1593), precisely because it appeared to reduce ethics to an ‘art’, rather like the ‘art’ of being a courtier, as opposed to something connected implicitly to belief. Others who disagreed with Lipsius on a philosophical level nonetheless thought that outward conformity was necessary for the sake of an ordered society. Civil governors were worried by the emergence of Arminianism and by the apparent progress of Lutheranism within Dutch territories. Anabaptists (i.e. Mennonites) were frequently banned in many towns until after 1625, and attempts by the small community of (mostly Portuguese) Jews in Amsterdam to establish synagogues in Haarlem and Rotterdam failed, not least because of the resistance of the Reformed Church and local government. Coornhert’s arguments for religious peace extended to a proposed ban on the interpretation, as opposed to the reading, of scripture, which he argued was no attack on religious freedom, but which readily looked to his Calvinist opponents like intolerance by the back door. Arminians, when they had influence, were no less intolerant of separatists than the Calvinists.¹⁴ Intense pamphlet wars in which the Counter-Remonstrants (Calvinists) attacked their Arminian rivals continued: it was particularly fierce in the later 1620s. Eventually attitudes loosened, as Milton himself acknowledged in his The Readie and Easie Way to Establish A Free Commonwealth (1660).¹⁵ Although he was exceptional in his views at this time, the influential Arminian scholar Simon Episcopius revived Coornhert’s call for a fully fledged toleration, including that of Catholics.¹⁶ Episcopius argued that most Christians agreed on the fundamentals of their ¹³ See Judith Pollmann, Religious Choice in the Dutch Republic: The Reformation of Arnoldus Buchelius, 1565–1641 (Manchester: Manchester University Press, 1999). ¹⁴ Now recounted in John Marshall, John Locke, Toleration and Early Enlightenment Culture (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2006), ch. 11. ¹⁵ YP 7.381. ¹⁶ Of Episcopius’s many works, Vrye Godes-dienst (1627) stands out in respect of toleration. His collected works were published at Gouda in 1650–5.

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faith. A wide spectrum of views may be derived from the Bible. Debating different interpretations of the Bible was a positive good, he maintained, each belonging to different individual believers, and was a bringing together of the different parts of the whole truth. These views were repeated and extended in later decades by Philippus van Limborch and Jean Le Clerc.¹⁷ In the 1650s and 1660s defenders of the republic like Pieter de la Court, a textile manufacturer from Leiden, contested the Orangists and the Calvinists, and wrote in support of religious toleration as part of the freedom which was best served in a totally non-monarchical state: that is, without a stadholder.¹⁸ This was the best way to preserve a peaceful and prosperous state. Nonetheless, Socinianism was often greeted in the United Provinces with horror, and subject to measures of suppression in the late 1640s and early 1650s; only in the 1660s did such treatment relax. By the time of Milton’s death some foreign observers, such as Sir William Temple and Gregorio Leti, were viewing Dutch toleration with approval, in contrast with the universally negative views of earlier commentators. Across Europe, but with a focus in the Dutch Republic, Arminians and more especially Socinians developed coherent statements in favor of toleration during the course of the period. These authors stressed morality over doctrinal requirements, which were limited in respect of being requirements for salvation. Being attentive to the text of the Bible, but allowing a large degree of difference in individual interpretation, as Milton states in Of True Religion (1673), is such a minimalist statement, although Milton himself pointedly excludes the Roman Catholics because their idolatry and the authority of the Pope is intrinsically bound up with not accepting the Bible as the primary religious guide. In this respect Catholics embody the ‘implicit faith’ that Milton attacked throughout his career, as opposed to the explicit faith grounded in diligent study and understanding. The full title of the tract is Of True Religion, Hæresy, Schism, Toleration; and what best means may be used against the Growth of Popery, so tolerance of all faiths was not his goal. Those who stressed the necessity of the separation of the godly in the true church from the rest of the world also argued that the secular ruler had no right to interfere with that church. But many radical reformers had no developed sense of toleration, and often no distinct toleration theory. ¹⁷ See Philippus van Limborch, Theologia Christiana (1686); Hugo Grotius, The truth of the Christian religion, with notes by mr. Le Clerc. To which is added a seventh book by mr. Le Clerc. Done into Engl. by J. Clarke (1711). ¹⁸ Pieter de la Court, Het Interest van Holland (1662); idem, Aanwysing der heilsame politike gronden en maximen van de Republike van Holland en West-Vriesland (Rotterdam, 1669), translated as The true interest and political maxims of the Republick of Holland and West-Friesland (1702).


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They wanted toleration by the secular ruler of their beliefs, which, they believed, once exposed, would become the one true religion of the state, and eventually of Europe and beyond. In other words, they did not have a notion of the separation of church and state, or a division between civil and ecclesial spheres of authority. There are many instances of intolerant theological differences and struggles for authority within many separatist churches and groups, including Anabaptists and Baptists in the sixteenth century, and among English Quakers in the following century. There are instances of cruelty exercised within the Baptist and anti-trinitarian churches in western and eastern Europe.¹⁹ Fundamental attitudes of prejudice against whatever was judged to be idolatrous remained in these theologies. They functioned as a chief motor of the disciplinary zeal that characterized much post-Reformation religion. In 1640, Milton presented himself aligned with a general Puritanism, or perhaps in the precise context of the publication of Of Reformation in 1640, he stood with a more narrowly defined anti-episcopal front. Whatever the case Milton’s energetic imagery of reformation in his early 1640s tracts participates in this zeal. In 1642 Milton argued on these grounds that the Book of Common Prayer, the English liturgy as it then stood, should not be tolerated.²⁰ However, in the later sixteenth century, statements of unconditional toleration did emerge, significantly coupled with attacks on predestination theology. These were Sebastian Castellio’s De haereticis (1554) and Jacob Acontius’s Satanae Strategema (1565). Both authors were resident in Basel at the time. While Castellio condemned atheists, he also maintained, along with Acontius, that heresy hunting created more sedition than heterodoxy itself. Many of these tenets are to be found in the Racovian Catechism (first edition, 1605) the federal document of the Polish Socinian church that was widely distributed across Europe. Milton controversially licensed a Latin edition of this work in 1651. And such views were repeated and even extended by the tolerationist thinkers of mid-seventeenth-century England (such as Roger Williams, the follower of Montaigne, the Leveller William Walwyn, the Baptist and Leveller Richard Overton, and, in another political camp, the neo-Arminians and proto-Latitudinarians John Hales and William Chillingworth) to include all Christians, Jews, Muslims and pagans. For most of these thinkers, punishment should not be corporal but simply involve excommunication. In the sixteenth century, there was still a preference for banishment or fines, but these penal components dwindled in the following ¹⁹ John Marshall, John Locke: Resistance, Religion, and Responsibility (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1994), 318–19. ²⁰ YP 1.938.

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period in pro-toleration writing. The civil magistrate was to keep order in the civil sphere.²¹ The chiliast notion that it was time in the last days to gather the faithful and that no truth should be excluded in a debate that would finally establish the true church, a view that Milton famously propounds in Areopagitica, has been seen as exclusive and therefore ‘intolerationist’ in that it included only Christians (properly Protestants) and Jews, who, it was thought, would convert to Christianity in the process leading up to the Second Coming of Christ.²² But it would be wrong to suggest that this view substantially outweighed another, skeptical view that since no one could possibly judge God’s ways with man, no one had the right to condemn anyone for their opinion.²³ Such skepticism, enforced by familiarity with thinkers like Montaigne and Charron, was shared by episcopalians and radicals alike, but not by Milton. While it has been shown that skepticism could lead to intolerant attitudes, it could also be allied with other outlooks (such as the experience of religious pluralism in stable states, or an awareness of the detrimental effects of intolerance on trade) to support toleration. Spinoza claimed in 1670, towards the end of Milton’s life, that anyone could believe as they wished, and say so too, a statement that has been seen as descriptive rather than prescriptive.²⁴ His theory of toleration rested on two planks: an appeal to the secular ruler to protect minorities from the violence of the mob or the persecuting clergy and an appeal to the secular ruler to tolerate secular religion. He denied that there was support for persecution in the Bible and that the Mosaic Law applied only to the Hebrews, while at the same time elevating philosophy over theology. But it seems doubtful that Spinoza tolerated atheists or those who did not believe in a forgiving God. He also clearly thought that those who spoke seditiously should be suppressed, and this meant of course the religious too. Spinoza certainly believed in the right of the individual to freedom, arguing (quite differently from Milton) that although power might be given through the social contract to the sovereign by the necessity that governed the universe, there could be no compromise of the individual’s freedom in the exercise of the contract. The extent of the individual’s rights was full, and Spinoza embraced Muslims, Jews and ²¹ John Coffey, ‘Puritanism and Liberty Revisited: The Radical Protestant Case for the Toleration of All Religions in the English Revolution’, Historical Journal 41.4 (1998), 961–85. ²² YP 2.561–8. ²³ Here I respectfully disagree with Alexandra Walsham, Charitable Hatred: Tolerance and Intolerance in England, 1500–1700 (Manchester: Manchester University Press, 2006), 235. ²⁴ Baruch Spinoza, Tractatus Theologico-Politicus (1670), esp. ch. 20; John Christian Laursen, ‘Spinoza on Toleration: Arming the State and reining in the Magistrate’, in Cary J. Nederman and John Christian Laursen, eds., Difference and Dissent: Theories of Tolerance in Medieval and Early Modern Europe (Lanham, Md.: Rowman & Littlefield, 1997), 185–204.


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Catholics as well as Protestants within his boundaries of toleration. Spinoza’s notion of liberty is broader than Locke’s, since Locke found symbolic but non-violent religious protest a compromise of the civil magistrate, and he left it to those very justices to decide in context what was seditious or not (although he modified these views later in his life perhaps under Spinoza’s influence). Certainly a relatively severe strict belief in God was necessary in Locke’s view for toleration.²⁵ Milton and Locke both believed that liberty was connected to creating a fit life for the souls of men; Spinoza did not believe in a notion of the soul in this sense. It was for a deist like Charles Blount, who appropriated sentences and phrases from Areopagitica in his Just Vindication of Learning (1679), to go the full measure in the English language and argue for complete freedom of thought and expression in a free-thinking rather than a theistic sense; his position is therefore not the same as Milton’s. It was indeed in the literature of the deist critique of ‘priestcraft’ that we can find a call for a purging of the prophetic element in Milton. In the eyes of the deists prophecy remained a limitation in Milton’s vision of political and religious liberty, however important it was as a poetic component.²⁶ Behind all of this lies the tradition of intellectual freedom of belief that belonged to elite groups in Europe, and that we most readily associate with the Italian city states of the later Middle Ages and the sixteenth century. Milton himself is a very pure descendant from this tradition, where speculation belonging to an educated elite might be left alone by ecclesiastical authorities. Even after the rise of the inquisitions in the sixteenth century, those needing books on the Index (e.g. medical doctors) were usually allowed them. This speculative freedom Milton wanted extending to a broader range of people, although it is never quite clear in his writing, such as in Areopagitica, where the limit ends: ‘For this is not the liberty which wee can hope, that no grievance ever should arise in the Commonwealth, that let no man in this World expect; but when complaints are freely heard, deeply consider’d and speedily reform’d, then is the utmost bound of civill liberty attain’d, that wise men looke for.’²⁷ It should also be remembered that Milton is addressing the precise issue of press freedom and the matter of how books were to be licensed in 1640s England. He saw the matter of book licensing as distinct from the growth of religious sects, and hence the issue of toleration. Suppressing books would not prevent the growth of sects: ‘If to prevent sects and schisms, who is so unread or so uncatechis’d in story, that hath not heard of many sects refusing books ²⁵ See below, 40–1. ²⁶ Nigel Smith, ‘The English Revolution and the End of Rhetoric: John Toland’s Clito (1700) and the Republican Daemon’, Essays and Studies (1996), ed. K. Flint, Poetry and Politics, 1–20. ²⁷ YP 2.487.

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as a hindrance, and preserving their doctrine unmixt for many ages, only by unwritt’n traditions.’²⁸ Certainly, any Italian intellectual whose heterodoxy led him to fall foul of the church, such as the unfortunate Giordano Bruno, or Galileo Galilei, was likely to become a hero for a Protestant tolerationist of Milton’s ilk. And Milton would benefit from the notable insights of the Venetian critic of the Inquisition, Paolo Sarpi, the author of the History of the Council of Trent (1618), which was never available in print in Italy in Milton’s lifetime. Sarpi has even been argued to have held atheist views although he celebrated Mass as a Servite friar until his death in 1624. He also believed, unlike almost anyone else at the time, that information concerning matters of state should not be kept from the people, but should be freely circulated. This he argued would make for a more peaceful society.²⁹ Matters were different elsewhere in the Italian peninsula. In 1601, for instance, Pope Clement VII had the Talmud burned in Rome. For all this, there was a great deal of intolerance, in theory and in practice. Confessional states in Europe tried to enforce policies of singular obedience, and arguments supporting the rightness of such views and practices reached back into the Middles Ages and beyond.³⁰ As we have seen, Milton always maintained Catholics should not be tolerated since they were themselves not merely idolatrous and superstitious but also seditious: all Roman Catholics were enjoined by the Pope to undermine the Protestant regime in England.³¹ Back in the late sixteenth century Coornhert had noted that most of the extant and emergent confessions of his time would become intolerant if they were given political power, not least because they grounded religious authority outside of a recourse to unmediated scripture. Many different kinds of Protestant were tolerated in Civil War and Interregnum England: Presbyterians, Independents and Baptists. But Quakers and Socinians fell outside of these boundaries, and while there were Friends in Cromwell’s household, this did not mean that the machinery of justice could not and should not be leveled at those who strayed from unorthodox views into blasphemy and the theologically unacceptable.³² The trials of the Quaker ²⁸ YP 2.529. ²⁹ Filippo De Vivo, ‘Paolo Sarpi and the Uses of Information in Seventeenth-Century Venice’, Media History 11 (2005), 37–51; Nigel Smith, ‘Milton and the Index’, in Holly Nelson and Donald R. Dickson, eds., Of Paradise and Light: Essays for Alan Rudrum (London: Associated University Presses, 2004), 101–22. ³⁰ However, even here, within the German Protestant states and the Holy Roman Empire, there were exceptions and exceptional circumstances. ³¹ See Pope Sixtus V’s Bull against Elizabeth I: ‘A Declaration of the Sentence and Deposition of Elizabeth, the usurper and pretensed Queen of England’ (Antwerp, 1588). ³² In W. J. Sheils, ed., Persecution and Toleration, Studies in Church History, 21 (Oxford: Basil Blackwell, 1984), 199–233.


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James Nayler and the Socinian John Biddle were the public show trials of the Commonwealth years, the public testing of what was bearable in the Puritan Revolution. If 1642–60 proved for an advanced intellectual Protestant pamphleteer and poet a relative liberation from a decade of persecution under Archbishop Laud, and harsh terms for Puritans before that, 1660 saw a tough clampdown on religious nonconformity. Under the bishops of the restored Church of England and the majority in the Cavalier Parliament of 1660–7, rigorous conformity was seen as the only antidote to the disarray of the previous period. The years of the Restoration were marked by a series of measures designed to suppress nonconformist worship, or to license it under the terms of financial exactions. That the Cavaliers and the bishops did not get their way all the time was in part due to other persuasions in the court that kept Charles II interested in the prospect of religious toleration, which he had after all promised at the start of his reign in the Declaration of Breda.³³ He was interested in a measure of toleration not least because he wanted to further the interest of the English Roman Catholics (and he had made promises to this effect to Louis XIV who wanted to see the toleration of English Catholics as the beginning of their rise of to supremacy, and the rapid re-establishment of Catholicism as the state religion in England). James II wanted this even more, and it was his pursuit of toleration (really for the sake of the Catholics), even to the extent of interfering with local government and other institutions like the universities, that resulted in his demise. If a relatively wide degree of toleration for Protestants was achieved in the Glorious Revolution of 1688–9, Louis finally achieved his goal of a single-faith kingdom. Eleven years after the death of Milton the revocation of the Edict of Nantes in 1685 resulted in the forced migration from France of 200,000 Huguenots, and the coercion of 700,000 more on pain of incarceration, torture, slavery, execution. In the same period, the attempt by Charles II to resettle the Church of Scotland resulted in the persecution of many Protestants resistant to episcopal government (the Covenanters), and a series of armed revolts by them. Violence marked Scottish religion down to 1700. In Ireland, Protestant intolerance towards Roman Catholics prevailed except for brief periods during revolts by Irish Catholic nobility (latterly supported by the French) and during the reign of James II. After assuming the English crown, William III led an international Protestant army to reimpose a Protestant hegemony in Ireland. King Billy’s War is the stuff of many legends from which myths crucial to the ³³ N. H. Keeble, The Restoration: England in the 1660s (Oxford: Blackwell, 2002), 68–84; S. Achinstein, Literature and Dissent in Milton’s England (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2003), chs. 1–4.

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modern Irish sense of nationhood, in all its fraught complexity, begin. As has often been noticed, Milton’s Irish writings, rooted in the arguments of the Elizabethan settlers of Ireland, line up with these prejudices.³⁴ Within Christian Europe, different kinds of minority fitted in generally awkwardly. First, there were the behavioral minorities: ‘libertines’ and ‘sodomites’. Protestant nonconformists were quick to condemn the moral shortcomings of the court libertines of their own day, and to juxtapose them with their own moral purity.³⁵ Milton’s treatment of sexuality has been placed in a subtle and interactive relationship with the native and European discourses of libertinism.³⁶ Where practising homosexuality among men can be seen in the early modern period, it was almost always treated by religious authorities as evil. Homosexuals in western Europe faced punishment and even execution.³⁷ The second category is of the ethnic and cultural minorities. The practice of toleration in parts of the Islamic world was not reciprocated in nearly all of Christian Europe and the old prejudices against the Jews remained commonplace through to the eighteenth century. Where communities of Jews were tolerated in Europe, they were often circumscribed, and were elsewhere present in tiny numbers, as in England from the later 1650s onwards. Toleration arguments here were mixed up with conversion designs; the former being seen in the case of Jews, Muslims and ‘pagans’ as a means to achieving the latter. To be a heretic Jew must have been the worst of all minority positions in early modern Europe. Having been unveiled by the Portuguese Inquisition as a reverted ‘conversos’ Uriel Da Costa traveled across Europe in the earlier seventeenth century: Amsterdam, Hamburg, Venice, Vienna. He denied the validity of rabbinic teaching, maintaining that all a Jew needed was the Hebrew Bible. He has not unfittingly been described as a ‘Jewish Anabaptist’. Sadly, but perhaps not incomprehensibly, he committed suicide in 1640, an outsider to all belonging in race and religion.³⁸ It was only in the 1670s that the Elector of Brandenburg, Friedrich Wilhelm, against the wishes of some of his subjects, invited different productive minorities to Berlin, including Huguenots and ³⁴ See below, Elizabeth Sauer’s essay in this volume, Ch. 11. ³⁵ George Fox, Journal, ed. N. Smith (Harmondsworth: Penguin, 1998), 162. ³⁶ See James Grantham Turner, One Flesh: Paradisal Marriage and Sexual Relations in the Age of Milton (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1987); idem, Libertines and Radicals in Early Modern London: Sexuality, Politics, and Literary Culture, 1630–1685 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2002), 57–8, 64, 75–99; idem, Schooling Sex: Libertine Literature and Erotic Education in Italy, France, and England 1534–1685 (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2003), 16 n. 35, 47–51. ³⁷ Randolph Trumbach, Sex and the Gender Revolution (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1998). ³⁸ Uriel Da Costa, Três escritos, ed. A. Moreira de Sá (Lisbon, 1963); idem, Examination of Pharisaic Traditions, ed. H. P. Salomon and I. S. D. Sassoon (Leiden: Brill, 1993); Miriam Bodian, ‘In the Cross-Currents of the Reformation: Crypto-Jewish Martyrs of the Inquisition 1570–1670’, Past and Present 177 (2002), 66–104.


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Jews, thereby beginning that city’s rise to later cosmopolitan fame.³⁹ But for the most part, Muslims were widely regarded as a Satanic evil, the plain contrary of Christianity, and purveyors of a monstrous religion that led only to immorality; especially, it was held, sodomy. It was in the elite world of oriental scholarship, especially on Arabic texts, that these attitudes began to change, that some comparative understanding of Islam arose. While the threat of the Ottoman armies in south-eastern Europe remained very real in the period, mid- and later seventeenth-century intellectuals were aware of the extent of toleration of Christianity of all kinds within the Ottoman territories, even to the extent of holding it up as a model for England. As a monotheistic religion, Islam was an ally of Christianity against atheism, and as a strictly monotheistic religion was an ally of the anti-trinitarian Christians against the orthodox, who themselves could and often did argue that Socinians and Unitarians were close to Islam and that their claim for the toleration of Muslims was unacceptable.⁴⁰ This largely later-seventeenth-century perspective is absent from Milton’s writings. It is undoubtedly true that the treatment of the experience of Adam and Eve in Paradise Lost in some places begins to lessen the difference between Jews and Christians, but Satan remains the stereotype of an oriental tyrant at the beginning of Book 2: High on a Throne of Royal State, which far Outshon the wealth of Ormus and of Ind, Or where the gorgeous East with richest hand Showrs on her Kings Barbaric Pearl and Gold, Satan exalted sat. (2.1–5)

The history of Islam and the Islamic peoples, like the Jews after the coming of Christ, is outside of the poem’s ambit in any detailed sense. Within Christian tradition, anti-tolerationists, be they Catholics or Protestants, could always turn to patristic and medieval authorities for views of those who were not to be tolerated because they were heretics. Heretics and schismatics tended to be regarded as inherently seditious or in some circumstances treasonous; people whose views would destroy the social order that God had ordained. It was a world of black and white: truth and its diabolical opposite, a structure exemplified in the allegory of Book I of Spenser’s The Faerie Queene. To take an indifferent view of heresy was to risk being bracketed by the orthodox as a heretic oneself. In this context, it would have been startling to read ³⁹ See Derek McKay, The Great Elector (Harlow: Longman, 2001), 186–7. ⁴⁰ See also N. I. Matar, Islam in Britain, 1558–1685 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1998).

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Milton’s redefinition of heresy in Of Education and Areopagitica as ‘choice’ (Greek ‘haeresis’; Latin ‘electio’)—a return to the original Aristotelian roots of the words in Greek ‘prohaeresis’—reason.⁴¹ A similar statement is made in A Treatise of Civil Power (1659), where the Presbyterians and Independents are defined as heretics in the sense of ‘the choise or following of any opinion good or bad in religion or any other learning’.⁴² We may be in error, but as long as we follow the scripture, we are heretics in the truth. In the King James Bible, Acts 26:5, ‘after the exactest heresie of our religion I lived a Pharise’ as Milton translates it, has ‘sect’ instead of ‘heresy’. Patristic authorities like Tertullian had moved the definition the other way from this ‘pagan’ sense in their commentaries on St Paul, even though Tertullian himself had defended the toleration of Christians within the pagan Roman empire.⁴³ There is nonetheless some inconsistency of usage on Milton’s part: a page later we learn that not he who follows his conscience in a matter of scriptural interpretation but he who follows the church against his conscience is a heretic: in this instance Milton lets the pejorative meaning stand.⁴⁴ We also encounter Milton’s restructuring of the contemporary definition of enquiry as the discerning of truth from its contrary, falsehood. Enquiry he understood as the creative and simultaneous engagement with both truth and falsehood as a contrary experience itself. Yet faith and obedience to the church, church authority and what was defined as orthodox therein was privileged over personal reasoning by the majority of Christians and Christian authorities. During the 1640s and 1650s, several bodies, notably the Westminster Assembly of Divines, maintained that it was up to church synods and councils to determine controversies of faith and matters of conscience. Although in places the Savoy Declaration of October 1658 appeared to uphold the consciences of believers, it also gave the civil magistrate power in religious matters, a contradiction that Milton identified. In this respect Milton has a very different position; he even goes as far as to suggest that a true church is quite distinct from any national grouping, such as a nation state.⁴⁵ He therefore avoids reference to forms of Protestantism that did involve support from secular force: the established Church of England and Presbyterianism. But in places he keeps the word ‘doctrine’, which seems to suggest an agreed formulation of faith over and above the finding any individual might make in a reading of scripture.⁴⁶ ⁴¹ YP 2.396, 527. ⁴² YP 7.247. ⁴³ Milton noted two instances of this kind of thinking in De Doctrina Christiana, one from Tertullian, the other from Lactantius: they are noted as injunctions to choose good from evil within a Christian context: YP 6.362–3. ⁴⁴ YP 7.248–9. ⁴⁵ Westminster Confession of Faith, III.669; Savoy Declaration, ch. 35; YP 7.258. ⁴⁶ YP 7.262.


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To Augustine belonged the most influential statement in support of the state coercion of heretics and schismatics. He argued that coercion in the name of faith could be regarded as voluntarist precisely because it was in the name of faith. Intolerance was a necessary magisterial compensation for the consequences of original sin.⁴⁷ Yet the execution of heretics in significant numbers as a way of protecting the church from error dates from much later: the late eleventh and twelfth centuries. After all, heresy caused the damnation of souls, and was often portrayed as sexual perversity. Sometimes, sexual libertinism appeared to be practised by the heretics: this is how Anabaptist polygamy appeared to the orthodox, even if it was a condition of purity to the Anabaptists themselves. The world needed to be cleansed of heretics: a view that was widely held by both Catholics and magisterial Protestant reformers. The way to cleanse it was to burn them. Anti-trinitarianism represented a particularly grievous heresy. In the eyes of its opponents, to deny that Christ was God was to open the way to atheism. To heresy could also be added another deeply troubling category: witchcraft. The two went hand in hand. From this viewpoint, persecution and the suppression of heresy was a painful but entirely necessary and justified cure.⁴⁸ Defenders of the need to suppress heresy or error could always point to the resistance arguments of Protestants or indeed (and especially in England and among the Protestant French) Catholics as evidence of both sedition and treason, not least since such arguments were grounded in traditions of natural law, rather than religious duty. Those who either refused to make oaths of loyalty (e.g. Anabaptists, Quakers), or who could be seen to equivocate (Catholics, especially Jesuits) were also regarded as subversive and disobedient. Added eschatological urgency was given to this view by the widespread belief from the early days of the Reformation onwards that the Last Days were at hand. In practical terms, toleration arguments were used as a strategy to achieve unity, the issue of freedom of conscience not being in this case a final or genuine aim. The post-1559 Church of England was founded on what was deemed to be an acceptable consensus, with many issues left undecided and open to individual interpretation—adiaphora, or ‘things indifferent’; Milton himself was in some senses more restrictive, since he claimed that anything ‘indifferent’ not in scripture should be utterly disregarded.⁴⁹ In a ⁴⁷ Marshall, John Locke, chs. 5–6; Walsham, Charitable Hatred, 40–9. ⁴⁸ See Stuart Clark, Thinking with Demons: The Idea of Witchcraft in Early Modern Europe (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1997). ⁴⁹ YP 8.427–8.

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related way Locke thought that indifferent matters were not a real part of religion’s concern. The everyday experience of the treatment of religious heterodoxy, or of religious minorities, is now deemed to be far less flamboyant than the literature of toleration and anti-toleration might suggest. Minorities with a long history in particular localities might well be tolerated over long periods of time: Roman Catholics in the north-west of England, dissimulating Familists in parts of Essex, Cambridgeshire and Surrey. Specific pressure points might emerge at certain junctures, but the system produced general coexistence. This was true of much of Europe as well as of England. Harmony, conflict, consensus and repression coexisted all at once, notably after the initial periods of reform and anti-reform, with their violent consequences, in the 1530s, 1540s and 1550s. It might be more accurate to describe this state as one of continual potential tension, as is evident in the lively parish politics of late sixteenth- and early seventeenth-century London, or, in more unusual circumstances, the debates between Presbyterians, Independents and Baptists on the one hand, and Quakers on the other, in various parts of the country during the 1650s.⁵⁰ As has been pointed out, the state toleration of Roman Catholics remained a possibility through the seventeenth century. So also, Puritan nonconformity remained at the heart of the established religion and in greater numbers than those who had absolutely separated. The hope that the ejected ministers might be comprehended within the national church remained a goal for many throughout the Restoration. Such various attitudes permeated the ecclesiastical establishment at all ranks, as well as the laity. With such possibilities for the future of worship, accommodation made more sense from a local point of view. It also explains extraordinary conversions: why the key General Baptist and Leveller Robert Everard should eventually become a Roman Catholic, his faith in a scripture-based faith finally exhausted.⁵¹ Or to look at a case moving the other way, the scriptural commentator Charles Marie De Veil (1630–1685) was born the son of a rabbi in Metz, but was converted by Bossuet and became a Roman Catholic and an Augustinian priest, then via a brush with Jansenism joined the Church of England upon arrival in London in 1677. He was then finally persuaded there was no scriptural justification for infant baptism, and so became a Baptist in 1684. But these details do not explain away the brutal treatment of Quakers during this period: old attitudes ⁵⁰ Peter Lake with Michael Questier, The Anti-Christ’s Lewd Hat: Protestants, Papists and Players in Post-Reformation England (New Haven and London: Yale University Press, 2002); Ann Hughes, ‘The Pulpit Guarded: Confrontations between Orthodox and Radicals in Revolutionary England’, in Ann Laurence et al., John Bunyan and His England (London: Hambledon, 1990), 31–50. ⁵¹ ODNB.


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towards religious alterity and the transgression of customary religious behavior died hard. Milton grew up in a world in which martyrdom was part of living memory: the martyrdom of radical Protestants and Roman Catholics, and before that, the memory of the Protestant martyrings during the reign of Queen Mary. The last men to be burned for heresy in England, the anti-trinitarians Edward Wightman and Bartholomew Legate, went to the flames in 1612 when Milton was three. There was also the memory and the continuing practice of imprisoning Puritan clergyman who would neither wear the required vestments nor use the Book of Common Prayer, or, later on, the Book of Sports. The poet Andrew Marvell’s father, the Revd Andrew Marvell (c.1585–1641) was investigated by the archbishop of York for not wearing the surplice and for not using the Prayer Book properly.⁵² Lay people were also interrogated for reading unapproved material; in the Interregnum the boot was on the other foot, with Anglicans daring sometimes to use their liturgy. In France martyrdom was harsher—the tongues of heretics were slotted with a knife or removed. Everywhere authorities were concerned that the theatre of martyrdom would create converts rather than induce conformity. In the sixteenth century even some Protestants made relics of martyrs’ bones. Persecution of Protestants remained the object of popular kudos to the seventeenth century. Printed records, in writing and in pictures, of martyrological suffering and persecution for the sake of faith were legion in the period, for Protestants, Catholics and radicals.⁵³ If martyrdom was passive resistance, others were prepared to resort to violence, from sophisticated plots to local riots, all of which were part of the texture of a world in which there was no single religion but where a solution to the issue of toleration had not been found. Where banishment was a punishment for heresy, especially on the continent, others chose voluntary exile, typically in the Netherlands, or in the English Americas. Recent historical investigation has foregrounded the phenomena of dissimulation and partial conformity, exploiting a porous boundary between conformity and nonconformity, especially within families, and as the public regulation of worship intensified or de-intensified. Down to the end of the seventeenth century, the recognizable behavior of the ‘church papist’ was recorded: appearing in church once a month to avoid local harassment and fines, although the success of such a strategy would require the quiescence of local officials. Evasion of ⁵² Nicholas von Maltzahn, An Andrew Marvell Chronology (Basingstoke: Palgrave, 2005), 25–6. ⁵³ Brad S. Gregory, Salvation at Stake: Christian Martyrdom in Early Modern Europe (Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 1999).

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sacrament and oath-taking, involving in the latter case all sorts of casuistry, was both practised and reviled by all parties across the central Reformation divide.⁵⁴ In Europe, the consequence of extended religious war, from the later sixteenth century until the middle of the seventeenth, was a final agreement in some areas to permit more than one confession. This was so in the German Protestant states and the Holy Roman Empire after the Peace of Westphalia of 1648 that ended the Thirty Years War (and that amplified the more limited framework of the Peace of Augsburg of 1555). There then emerged the phenomenon of ‘confessionalization’, where tolerated religions grew insulated from each other through time, so that society became divided. The same, it is argued, is true of France after the Edict of Nantes of 1598. Continued peace exaggerated the differences. But the experiment in supraconfessional coexistence in Poland-Lithuania came to an end in the late seventeenth century, in part because the boundaries between confessions had become too strong, there being by then a conflict over the practice of popular religiosity. The Polish Brethren were ultimately forced into exile. In France, Louis XIV’s final assertion of absolutist will led to one of the last great population shifts of the early modern period: the expulsion and further brutalization of the Huguenots. Before then, in the 1650s, Milton had reacted with horror to the massacre of Protestants in the Waldensian region of northern Italy. Milton’s career was drawing to a close as John Locke’s was on the rise. To Locke falls the distinction of being the most influential philosopher of the late seventeenth and early eighteenth centuries. Locke’s A Letter concerning Toleration (1689), translated from Latin to English by Andrew Marvell’s nephew William Popple, is the most influential statement of advanced religious toleration in the English-speaking world at this time. Locke’s position is that Christianity is peaceful and charitable: there can be no such thing as persecution in the name of Jesus for any reason. There is a boundary between faith and not faith, and between immorality and morality, but the former is a matter to be dealt with peacefully within the ambit of religion and the latter within the ambit of civil law. All this is stated even given the fact that the immoral may well appeal to religion and the religious persecutors will appeal to the need for public order. Locke’s position is characteristically and beautifully clear-cut. Milton belongs to a different stage of awareness, in which the emphasis is upon the felicity of searching for truth in a free state. The separation of church and state is important to Milton, and he argues strongly for it in 1659, but ⁵⁴ Alexandra Walsham, Church Papists: Catholicism, Conformity, and Confessional Polemic in Early Modern England (Woodbridge: Boydell Press, 1993).


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he is only a relative tolerationist. ‘Liberty’ is consistent with Protestantism, and Catholics, idolators and the immoral are not free precisely because they do not have liberty. On grounds of morality and civil security, they should not be tolerated. To persecute and to be a Protestant, says Milton, are mutually exclusive. But Locke regards an ‘idolatrous’ church as permissible, since what is deemed idolatrous is, so to speak, in the eye of the beholder, not the secular ruler. Yet Locke regards the safety of the commonwealth as the ultimate criterion: all religious practice must be consistent with the laws of a given state, and no allegiance by any religion in a given state can be made to a foreign prince. Locke is also adamant that the only cause of sedition in religious conventicles is oppression: the making of their existence illegal. Elsewhere, Locke is interesting in assuming that church membership is voluntary rather than inherited, and it looks like a separatist argument itself (or as if secular concepts of association were influencing this conception), whereas with Milton voluntary church membership is not so important and was apparently not practised by the poet himself. Like Milton, Locke is sure that the reading of scripture is crucial and foundational, but where Milton celebrates the diversity (the ‘heresies’) that will occur through various readings of scripture, Locke (with perhaps his interest in an individual’s cognition playing on his mind) is more concerned with singularity: each man is an orthodoxy unto himself, each church is an orthodoxy unto itself. In the light of these comparisons, the argument that education and licensing rather than toleration is the primary guiding principle in Areopagitica comes to mind.⁵⁵ Milton is quite clear that there is distinction between matters purely religious and those that belong to the civil law, and which are therefore the concern of the magistrate. In this respect, he is again close to Locke. And he thinks it is a greater crime to Protestants to persecute, even to the extent of bloodshed, when they have a scripture-based religion as a foundation.⁵⁶ He calls for a ‘repressing of thir contraries determinable by the common light of nature’, a formulation that belongs with Milton’s sharp and distinctive treatment of contrariness at the heart of his vision.⁵⁷ But he is as much, or even more interested in what it means to be a free Christian, in what that positive experience consists, than in the conditions that make it possible. A word that is more frequent in Milton’s prose and poetry than ‘toleration’ ⁵⁵ Nigel Smith, ‘Areopagitica: Voicing Contexts 1643–45’, in David Loewenstein and James Grantham Turner, eds., Politics, Poetics and Hermeneutics in Milton’s Prose (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1990), 103–22. ⁵⁶ YP 7.253. ⁵⁷ YP 7.258.

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is ‘tolerable’: what is tolerable in a marriage, or hell, for instance. Hence he devoted an entire tract to the abolition of ‘hirelings’ (a paid ministry, perhaps maintained by tithes) as opposed to a ministry of people called personally irrespective of education and support to preach the Word of God. To this extent, and unlike the Presbyterians, Milton considered that the entire Mosaic law, with its list of civil prohibitions, was abrogated with the birth of Christ. Any pattern of civil magistracy as exercised originally by the Israelite priests does not apply to Christians. Equally, churches must not seek to influence political assemblies, as instanced with the Fifth Monarchists in the 1650s: turbulence was the result.⁵⁸ Yet, as commentators have argued, if introduced, it would have been all too easy for Milton’s republic to become divided between an empowered and tolerated radical Christian elite, who would surely be those enjoying the ‘civil rights and advanc’ments of every person according to his merit’ and those excluded from that category who would not enjoy full citizenship: hardly what we would think of as a tolerant society.⁵⁹ In a difficult moment for the English republic, in respect of Ireland, Milton defended denial of toleration to anything ‘absolutely contrary to sound Doctrin or the power of godliness’. Mere conscience would have to wait.⁶⁰ It is the purpose of this volume of essays to discuss in detail Milton’s response to toleration issues, in his writings, and in the political predicaments we know he found himself in his career. It has not been the purpose of this article to go into these matters and texts in such detail. However, it is worth making two points by way of conclusion with regard to Milton and toleration. First of all, and this is a point seldom understood, not least because Christopher Hill characterized Milton’s theology as ‘left wing Arminianism’, thereby obscuring the way in which Milton discovered his Arminianism. Through the 1630s, Milton was broadly connected with some of the most advanced political and religious English thinkers of the day. He sought the patronage of Sir Henry Wotton and he knew John Hales. Those of this group that survived into the 1640s were indubitably supporters of the king, but they had the greatest degree of access to the challenging ideas of men like Sarpi, and were best placed to understand the debates of theology that were preoccupying the Dutch republic and the rest of Protestant Europe. They were often more intellectually advanced than their Calvinist compatriots. Milton’s mature knowledge of religious toleration and persecution, of free will theology and of anti-trinitarian theology, begins at this juncture and in this context, whatever he did with it later on, and however Puritanism itself also produced its own heretical wing. ⁵⁸ YP 7.380.

⁵⁹ YP 7.383.

⁶⁰ YP 3.325.


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Second is the argument that the mature poems, especially Paradise Lost, are exemplary tolerationist works of literature. They confess no particular party line yet invite the reader to contemplate a series of theological positions that have to be understood as a debate, with trains of reasoning involved, even as God lays down the law on free will, or the Son appears distinct from the Father (or does he?). On the level of poetry and poetic tradition, this means inviting the learned reader to debate the worth of earlier models of creation epic, stretching back even to Lucretius and Epicurus before him. It is consistent with the idea of scripture reading (as opposed to sermon listening) that the most advanced tolerationist thinkers of Milton’s time urged. Here one thinks of Coornhert. But Coornhert remained a Roman Catholic in some senses, and his own poetry tends towards the deeply introspective and mystical. In Milton’s England, we would have to look at some of the more educated early Quakers, and their fellow-travelers, to find similar views. Milton was quite sure that there was a human state called bondage or slavery, that it had been perpetuated by ancient or modern tyrannies, and that one of the greatest of these was the Roman church. His writing, fusing classical republicanism and advanced Protestantism, is dedicated toward inculcating freedom and belief as vigorously anti-idolatrous and hence anti-enslaved activities; a perpetual source of renewal for a free state. But liberty is not toleration, however closely related, and probably this is a good thing too. Milton’s liberty must mean some things are not to be tolerated; that message is everywhere evident in his poetry and prose. However, with regard to Milton’s writings, the model of early modern society as a dialogue of tolerance versus intolerance is insufficient as an analytic paradigm. This is because every theory of toleration appears to contain a measure of intolerance; this is so even in Coornhert’s writing. The metaphor of a Moebius strip, with two pieces of different metal fused together, back to back, will not do either. A model of a molecule, in which one part of the structure was intolerance in ratio to a larger collection of toleration atoms is more fitting. It may be that the kind of toleration vision deducible from a writer like Andrew Marvell, governed by pragmatic considerations, open to charges of some conceptual incoherence, or at least considerable obliqueness, but generating an ethos of sympathy, if not also an ardor, for the other, and certainly acceptable to some Roman Catholics, is less open to charges of inconsistency on the grounds of toleration than is the case with Milton.⁶¹ But Milton’s writings draw in the reader to think hard about what being free means, and where we might begin to be aware of toleration. In the early modern world, no less than today, there appears to be no possibility of ⁶¹ See below, Nicholas von Maltzahn’s essay in this volume, Ch. 5.

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a toleration utopia—where anyone and everyone can believe what they like and practise it. In his terms, Milton makes one confront this reality where others imagine toleration but at the price of the active mind or imagine toleration as it could never actually be, as was the case with the balance of power in Restoration England. In this case, we have manifest the betrayal of the active mind.

3 Toleration and the Specter of Heresy in Milton’s England David Loewenstein

1. Monstrous Toleration and the Growth of Heresies Fearing the dramatic growth and spread of heresies during the 1640s, the mainstream godly considered the very idea of religious toleration almost unthinkable—or, indeed, intolerable. The notion of toleration threatened their vision of an ordered, unified, and godly national community, and it generated powerful fears of religious chaos and moral confusion. It provoked in their writings visceral responses and shocking images, including images of monstrosity and disease. When the Presbyterian divine and zealous heretic hunter Thomas Edwards published his massive Gangraena in three parts during 1646, he employed images of monstrous generation to convey the alarming consequences of toleration in an age of religious sectarianism and anarchy; this new age of religious turmoil, he believed, had produced vast and endless new errors and heresies which he feared his own work could never fully represent or possibly contain.¹ The splintering of Protestantism, ¹ Indeed, in his third part, published in December 1646, Edwards warned that the swelling of sectaries and heresies was so great that he might need to produce a fourth part: The Third Part of Gangraena. Or, a New and Higher Discovery of the Errors, Heresies, Blasphemies, and Insolent Proceedings of the Sectaries of These Times (London, 1646), 218, 271. He also concludes this work by promising to produce ‘a Treatise against Toleration and pretended Liberty of Conscience’ (295). For an excellent comprehensive treatment of Edwards in the context of the religious ferment and culture of revolutionary London and in relation to contemporary heresiographers, see Ann Hughes, Gangraena and the Struggle for the English Revolution (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2004); my discussion here addresses more specifically the ways Edwards and other Presbyterian ministers figured the monstrosity of toleration and generated acute fears about it.

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followed by fractious religious diversity and the explosion of heresies, was transforming England itself into an alien land—a world of ‘strange errors’ and ‘mishapen children’. Edwards envisioned that toleration itself was both ‘the midwife and nursing mother’ of this monstrous offspring and would ‘cause growth of Heresies fast enough, and the ruine of Religion and godlinesse’ (Gangraena, 1.3; 3.233). Likewise, Edwards depicted toleration itself in terms of a monstrous conception and deformed offspring produced by swelling numbers of sectaries in England: ‘the monster of Toleration conceived in the wombe of the Sectaries long ago, they having grown big with it ever since’ (Gangraena, 1.64–5; cf. 2.5). In Gangraena he would render the analogy between toleration and monstrosity even more grotesque and shocking as he conjured up the image of a monstrous body of heresy created out of an amalgam of different errors and sects, found especially in the New Model Army, where ‘liberty of conscience’ flourishes as ‘the great Religion’: England was now a land breeding ‘strange monsters, having their heads of Enthusiasme, their bodies of Antinomianisme, their thighs of Familisme, their leggs and feet of Anabaptisme, their hands of Arminianisme’ (Gangraena, 1.16–17).² Besides expressing deep religious anxieties, this language of monstrosity dehumanized heretics, making the violent assault on heresy, schisms, and religious toleration appear more justified and natural. We tend to think of revolutionary England, with its massive outpouring of books and pamphlets, as a crucial period in the history of debate about the nature and limits of religious toleration. In many ways it was, as this volume of essays on the struggle for toleration in Milton’s England confirms. Yet it is also important to emphasize (as the passages from Edwards above suggest) the depth of visceral and irrational feelings, as well as feelings of rage and hatred, that the idea of toleration could arouse during these years when the heated religious imagination was easily inflamed. As the Independent minister John Goodwin put it in responding to Thomas Edwards, this was a fiercely contested subject that stirred up arguments that were ‘onely or chiefly, firebrands of Reproaches and Defamations, throwne in the faces of the

² On monstrous bodies in the early modern period, see Laura Lunger Knoppers and Joan B. Landes, eds., Monstrous Bodies/Political Monstrosities in Early Modern Europe (Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 2004). This valuable book, however, does not specifically address the monstrosity of toleration or heresy in Milton’s England, although David Cressy’s account of the trope of monstrosity in the 1640s has implications for the subject: ‘Lamentable, Strange, and Wonderful: Headless Monsters in the English Revolution’ (40–63). On heresy, monstrosity, and gender in anti-heretical writing of the English Revolution, see also John Marshall, John Locke, Toleration, and Early Enlightenment Culture (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2006), 297–302.

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one side by the other’.³ For the orthodox godly, especially Presbyterians who advocated a compulsory national church and abhorred radical sectarianism, the notion of toleration was so frightening that there were limits to the degree in which they were able—or indeed wished—to engage in reasoned debate and careful argument about an issue that aroused deep fears of moral chaos and confusion; and which also pitted them against threatening religious opponents they considered such ‘a rash, heady People’.⁴ Radical religious writers, as we shall see below, might appeal to ‘the efficacy and convincing power of sound reason and argument’ in order to challenge the fury of anti-tolerationist writers ‘fiery hot against errours and heresies so called’. But, as William Walwyn observed, godly writers and preachers bitterly opposed to toleration tended to ‘use other weapons’,⁵ especially reviling language and alarming images that in turn contributed to this new climate of anxiety, fear, and dread. Toleration, in the minds of the orthodox godly, threatened to tear apart religious unity, thereby generating political and religious anarchy and a frightening world overrun with errors, schisms, and heresies. If the growth of menacing heresy evoked images of contagious disease and gangrene from mainstream godly writers, toleration evoked images of chaos, inundation, violent dismemberment, and deformity. Its dangers were denounced by enraged preachers and writers employing a rhetoric of fear, hysteria, and savagery that had, in some ways, as tenuous a connection with reality as the fear-mongering rhetoric of Senator Joseph McCarthy and the House of Un-American Activities Committee did in the 1950s.⁶ ³ John Goodwin, Cretensis (London, 1646), 34. Edwards, in turn, complained about the sectaries’ ‘violent and fierce pleading by word and writing a free Liberty and Toleration of all kind of Religions’ (Gangraena, 3.185). ⁴ A Letter of the Ministers of the City of London … Against Toleration (London, 1645), 3: regarding the Independents and toleration, these ministers claimed, ‘Their desires and endeavours are unreasonable.’ Anti-tolerationist writers, as William Walwyn noted, tended to see separatists as ‘a rash, heady People, and not so much concluded by their Reason, as their Fancie’: The Writings of William Walwyn, ed. Jack R. McMichael and Barbara Taft (Athens, Ga., and London: University of Georgia Press, 1989), 103. Further references to Walwyn’s writings are taken from this edition; page numbers are given parenthetically in my text. ⁵ Tolleration Justified, and Persecution Condemned, in Writings, 164; see also 159, 167, 170, and The Compassionate Samaritane, in Writings, 117 (‘Separatists … feare your Club more then your Reason’). Also see John Goodwin, Sion-Colledg Visited (London, 1648), 7–8; and the title page of Goodwin’s M.S. to A.S. with A Plea for Libertie of Conscience (London, 1644), where Goodwin appeals ‘to the judgements of all rationall, and moderate men’. On heresy hunters ‘fiery hot against errours’, see Walwyn, Writings, 208. On Walwyn and rational discussion, see also William Haller, ed., Tracts on Liberty in the Puritan Revolution, 1638–1647, 3 vols. (New York: Columbia University Press, 1934), 1.63. ⁶ Cf. Diarmaid MacCulloch writing of the hysteria against heresy in sermon writers of the fifteenth century in central Europe: The Reformation (New York: Viking Press, 2003), 37.

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Thus a large number of London Presbyterian ministers in 1648, anxiously warning against bringing in ‘an universall, boundless, lawless, abominable and intolerable Toleration’, evoked images of savage dismemberment and uncontrolled profusion: they observed that ‘we swarm with noisome Errours, Heresies and Blasphemies: Instead of unity and uniformity in matters of Religion, we are torn in pieces with destructive schisms, Separations, Divisions and subdivisions’; and they concluded that ‘instead of a Reformation’, ‘we have a Deformation in Religion’.⁷ To make their case for increased alarm, these godly ministers cited a wide range of ‘abominable Errours’ and ‘damnable Heresies’ maintained under ‘the notion’ of ‘New Truths’, including anti-Trinitarianism, mortalism, the belief in general redemption and the role of human free will in matters of salvation, the denial of the sacrament of baptism, the belief that hell is a ‘non-entity’, errors concerning marriage and divorce (with Milton as the main proponent), among numerous others. Like Thomas Edwards, they envisioned a new religious world of nightmarish, unnatural generation out of control and they employed the trope of monstrosity, agreeing that England had ‘now brought forth an hideous Monster of Toleration’ (A Testimony, 4, 33). The specter of heresy and its ability to spread rapidly contributed greatly to these intense fears of England ‘swallowed up with Sects, Schismes, Divisions, disorders, contentions and confusions’ (A Testimony, 32),⁸ thereby severely testing the degree to which the mainstream godly could ever imagine, with any kind of sympathy, a world of religious diversity. Heresy was regularly compared to a terrible gangrene, disease or infection spreading quickly throughout the body politic; a threat to thousands of souls, it was potentially incurable, while devouring faith, peace, and godliness.⁹ Metaphors of ravaging disease suggested that if heresy was profoundly unnatural, so was toleration. It was as though hell itself had ‘broke loose’, to echo the title of one hostile tract warning about the specter of spreading errors and heresies.¹⁰ It was generating not only ‘Ecclesiasticall Anarchy and confusion’ but endangering the whole nation and the entire social order: ‘If errours arise in the Church’, one fearful commentator on its alarming spread noted, ‘the Common-wealth will not want confusion’ (Cranford, Haereseo-Machia, 5, 10).¹¹ Whether or not toleration was a remedy ⁷ A Testimony to the Truth of Jesus Christ (London, 1648), 29–31; this text was signed by John Downame, James Cranford (mentioned later in this essay), Christopher Love, and Edmund Calamy, among other London divines. ⁸ See also Edwards, Gangraena, 3.277. ⁹ See e.g. Edwards, Gangraena, passim; James Cranford, Haereseo-Machia: Or, The Mischiefe which Heresies doe (London, 1645), 5–7, 34. ¹⁰ Hell Broke Loose: or, A Catalogue of Many of the Spreading Errors, Heresies, and Blasphemies of These Times (London, 1646). ¹¹ See also David Cressy, England on Edge: Crisis and Revolution, 1640–42 (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2006), ch. 10, esp. 217, 219.


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or cure for a diseased nation weakened by bitter religious warfare and fears of division was itself a matter of intense controversy; as this skeptical observer went on to note: ‘It is commonly replyed in Pulpits, in Presses, That a toleration of all consciences, even Antichristian, would be a sovereign remedy to cure all dissentions, and an effectual means to compose the warres of Christendome’ (Cranford, Haereseo-Machia, 11). But as this writer, who warned about ‘the mischiefe which Heresies doe’, also observed, toleration might have precisely the opposite effect: ‘the toleration of errour is not a way to peace, as some men pretend, but to disorder’ and ‘the unrestrained inundation of our errours’ (Cranford, Haereseo-Machia, title-page, 14, 15). Accusatory terms such as ‘error’ and ‘heresy’, however indiscriminately employed and conflated, thus had the power to arouse enormous fears during the mid-century crisis, fueling ferocious opposition to religious toleration; consequently, those godly writers opposed to toleration could also be calculating in their manipulation of fear: Thomas Edwards, Goodwin noted, simply had to ‘pronounce the formidable sentence of Error and Heresie, against all opinions and judgements of men whatsoever, which will not comport with his understanding (or fancie rather) as the standard of all Truth’ (Cretensis, 10).¹² Because fears of toleration and religious anarchy were so closely related to the specter of a flood of heresies and errors unleashed, radical religious writers in Milton’s England attempting to justify religious toleration were faced with a particularly difficult challenge. In this new poisoned climate of religious controversy, toleration was represented in godly propaganda as the great enemy of religious unity—and indeed of any kind of religious stability—and radical religious writers had to muster all their polemical and imaginative resources to justify it. In the following sections, I examine some of the more striking ways three of the most original radical religious writers—John Goodwin, William Walwyn, and Milton himself—responded to the specter of heresy and the language used to demonize ‘heretics’ in the context of the bitterly contested issue of religious toleration.¹³ One purpose of this essay, especially in its final section, is to reassess the freshness of Milton’s reformulations of ‘heresy’ and ‘heretic’ in Areopagitica by situating Milton in the context of other leading radical religious writers struggling to respond to the crisis over toleration during these years of religious division, ¹² To stifle toleration, Goodwin writes elsewhere, ministers simply had to ‘stigmatize the Truths of God, with the odious and hatefull names of infamous & pernicious Errors & Heresies’ (Sion-Colledg, 19). ¹³ Roger Williams is also among the leading radical religious writers who engaged, in exceptionally original and independent-minded ways, with the notion of religious toleration and fears of heresy. On Williams and Milton on toleration, see the essay in this volume by Thomas N. Corns., Ch. 4.

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fear, and varying degrees of intolerance. By situating Areopagitica in relation to tolerationist writings of Goodwin and Walwyn, as well as the specter of heresy generated by Edwards and mainstream godly writers, I hope to illuminate Milton’s highly distinctive responses to contemporary fears of toleration and the spread of heresy.

2. John Goodwin: Heresy, Independency, and the Struggle for Toleration Repeatedly vilified by Thomas Edwards and other religious enemies as a ‘Grand Heretic’ and ‘a monstrous Sectary’ (‘a compound of Socinianisme, Arminianisme, Libertinisme, Antinomianism, Independency’, among other so-called heresies (Gangraena, 3.114)),¹⁴ the radical Independent London minister and religious polemicist John Goodwin addressed the specter of increasing heresies in his many writings promoting religious liberty and toleration and interrogating the role of coercive power in matters of religion. As early as 1642, Goodwin, who rejected predestinarian orthodoxy and embraced the doctrine of general redemption, found himself caught up in violent controversy and charged with heresy by George Walker (soon to become a member of the Westminster Assembly). In response Goodwin articulated a remarkable openness to the possibility of new religious truths and a striking independent-mindedness about a diversity of religious beliefs. Informing the London clergy in Imputatio Fidei, or, A Treatise of Justification that he was not afraid ‘to cast away long-endeered and professed opinions, when once the light hath shone upon them, and discovered them to be but darknesse’ (indeed, it was ‘a marveilous bewtie’ and ‘blessing’ to do so), Goodwin suggested that the exegesis of scriptural matters and texts needed to remain free and open to new interpretations because there were ‘thousands of Scriptures that have not yet opened, or delivered out their treasures’.¹⁵ Goodwin expressed his provocative point of view, with its implications for thinking about religious toleration, by employing the analogy of the New World and its relatively recent discovery: having remained unknown for so ¹⁴ See also Sion-Colledg Visited, where Goodwin complains that godly ministers have represented him ‘as a man of monstrous and prodigious errours’ (13). On Goodwin vilified by Presbyterians as ‘The Grand Heretic of England’, see the Leveller Humphrey Brooke, The Charity of Church-Men (1649), in William Haller and Godfrey Davies, eds., The Leveller Tracts, 1647–1653 (New York: Columbia University Press, 1944), 342; on Goodwin viciously satirized as the ‘monstrous Metropolitan’, see John Vicars, Coleman-Street Conclave Visited (London, 1648), 27. ¹⁵ John Goodwin, Imputatio Fidei (London, 1642), ‘The Epistle Dedicatory’ (to the London clergy), (a2)v ; sigs. (b4v )–(Cr ).


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long, its discovery, after all, had deeply unsettled received ideas about the world. Similarly, Goodwin suggested, there was much yet to explore about scripture and its wealth of undiscovered spiritual truths: If so great and considerable part of the world as America is, being as large as all the other three [i.e. Asia, Africa, Europe] so long knowne … was yet so unknowne to all the world besides, for so many generations … well may it be conceived, not only that some, but many truths, yea and those of maine concernement and importance, may be yet unborne. (Imputatio Fidei, sig. (b4r ))

As the last part of this passage suggests, Goodwin is a writer receptive to new conceptions of religious truth since many may indeed ‘be yet unborne’. The process of searching for religious truths, as Milton likewise suggests in Areopagitica, remains ongoing and open-ended; Goodwin’s religious outlook and language already differed from that of godly heresy hunters who would employ the language of monstrous generation to represent the birth of new heresies and the frightening consequences of religious toleration. Goodwin would soon emerge as one of the most formidable and combative proponents of toleration in a period of religious crisis when it was under massive assault. The religious tensions and ferment of the Civil War years radicalized Goodwin’s religious positions so that by 1643 he founded a gathered church within the London parish of St Stephen, Coleman Street.¹⁶ As the Presbyterian clerical faction grew in power, Goodwin became increasingly embroiled in bitter pamphlet controversy over toleration and the fear that Independency had opened ‘a doore to all errors, heresies, and unsound opinions’ which were quickly spreading and endangering both the stability of mainstream religious institutions and the nation itself.¹⁷ Goodwin’s religious outlook during the 1640s, like Milton’s in Areopagitica, was increasingly dominated ¹⁶ Tension between Goodwin’s gathered church and the parish meant that Goodwin’s church met at his house in Coleman Street from 1645 to about 1648: Murray Tolmie, The Triumph of the Saints (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1977), 11–16. On Goodwin’s career as a minister, see also the ODNB article by Tai Liu, 22.819–22. Helpful studies of Goodwin’s career and religious beliefs include E. S. More, ‘Congregationalism and the Origins of the New Arminianism’, Journal of British Studies 22.1 (1982), 50–70; More, ‘Congregationalism and the Social Order: John Goodwin’s Gathered Church, 1640–60’, Journal of Ecclesiastical History 37 (1987), 210–35; Perez Zagorin, How the Idea of Religious Toleration Came to the West (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 2003), 208–13; and especially John Coffey, John Goodwin and the Puritan Revolution: Religion and Intellectual Change in Seventeenth-Century England (Woodbridge: Boydell & Brewer, 2006), which the author kindly allowed me to read in page proofs. Coffey persuasively shows that Goodwin had created a gathered church by late 1642 (pp. 98–101). ¹⁷ John Goodwin, Theomachia, or, The grand imprudence of men running the hazard of fighting against God in suppressing any … practice concerning which they know not … whether it be from God or no … (London, 1644), 33.

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by a vision of England as a terrain of religious as well as ideological warfare. In Theomachia; or The Grand Imprudence of Men Running the Hazard of Fighting against God, he argued that there were ways of fighting against God as well as fighting for Him. Elaborating upon two of his sermons based upon Acts 5:27–39, Goodwin engaged in intense scriptural exegesis, giving a fresh contemporary interpretation to the story of Gamaliel’s speech admonishing the Jerusalem authorities not to suppress Peter and the other apostles and ‘their erroneous and dangerous Doctrine’ since, according to the authorities, ‘they were not meet to be tolerated in the State, nor yet to live’. Gamaliel warns them not to persecute the apostles when they are put on trial, especially if their work ‘be of God’; for then these authorities, by exercising ‘the bloudy rage and violence of men’ (as Goodwin puts it) (Theomachia, 5, 10), would ‘be found even to fight against God’ (Acts 5:34–9), since the apostles take their orders from a higher authority and are not bound by any human assembly or power. In the context of the mid-seventeenth-century struggle for toleration, anxieties about increasing religious divisions, and the rise of Presbyterian power and the forceful assertion of its authority against religious deviants, this scriptural story took on new potency in Goodwin’s exegesis.¹⁸ Chief among ways of fighting against God was the use of the weapons of secular power to suppress religious freedom, separate congregations, and rival beliefs, and to punish ‘heretics’ by force or even with death. Here Goodwin’s fierce anti-authoritarianism, when it comes to restraining matters of conscience, began to manifest itself: if the only means of slaying ‘these enemies of Christ’ was by ‘the sword of the Spirit’, then, Goodwin concluded, our ‘Prisons and Swords are no Church-officers, nor any appurtenances to any Ecclesiastique authority in what form of Government soever’ (Theomachia, 34). In contrast, the so-called ‘congregationall way’—the Independent way encouraging gathered churches of true believers or saints—was now, Goodwin suggested, the most promising ‘method of … warfare … against those enemies of God, and Religion, errors and heresies’ (Theomachia, 33). The recent explosion of errors and heresies had resulted in the godly objection that ‘if an heretique be suffered to live, he is in danger of infecting others, and destroying them eternally’; yet Goodwin perceived that violent suppression and restraint—as if one could put ‘fetters … upon the feet of errors and heresies to secure and keep them under’—would have precisely the opposite effect, comparable to the attempt to censor authors and books, as Milton argued in Areopagitica: it ¹⁸ Goodwin would later recall the scriptural story of Gamaliel and the issue of fighting against God: see Goodwin’s bitter attack on Thomas Edwards in Cretensis, 7–8.


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would stimulate the multiplication of heretics and sects by casting ‘a spirit of Authoritie upon them’, turning them into martyrs, and making ‘their reputation glowe’ (Theomachia, 37).¹⁹ The apparent ‘intolerablenesse of a Toleration’ for begetting new schisms and religious factions was a major focus of Goodwin’s lengthy assault on the Presbyterian heretic hunter Adam Steuart in M.S. to A.S. with A Plea for Libertie of Conscience (1644), Goodwin’s first Independent book and a striking assault on the traditional Reformed view of the magistrate’s power in religion. Interrogating the anti-tolerationist positions of ‘A.S.’—one of the heretic hunters Milton would lash out at two years later in his ‘On the New Forcers of Conscience under the Long Parliament’²⁰—Goodwin argues that the reason why sects, schisms, and ‘wild opinions … lately started amongst us’ spread so rapidly is that we resort to coercive human authorities and power, especially ‘the iron rod of the Civill Magistrate’, to try to crush them: we ‘have recourse to our own arm, hoping by disgracing, displacing, way-laying, impoverishing, suspending, imprisoning, and other weapons and wayes of the flesh, to ease our selves of the burthensomenesse and trouble of them’ (M.S. to A.S., 54, 59).²¹ Goodwin’s catalogue of gerunds conveys the futility of violent compulsion by human authorities, acts which inflame greater religious hatred and fears rather than ‘quenching … those flames of divisions and dissentions that are amongst us in matters of Religion’ (55). This new climate of fear and defamation by coercive powers, Goodwin suggested, discouraged individuals of ‘good conscience’ from exercising freedom of intellectual inquiry and independent religious judgment, particularly ‘from searching and inquiring into the Scriptures, after a more exact knowledge of the … perfect will of God in things’ (59). Fear was not merely an impulsive, visceral response among the orthodox godly shocked by the idea of toleration; it was also being manipulated by them in an increasingly vicious war of religion: ‘whereas feare indeed ordinarily makes men cruell, it is much to be feared, A.S. only pretends feare, that so he may have a colour [i.e. an outward appearance or show] to be cruell’ (104–5). Like Milton and Walwyn, Goodwin revealed an increasingly strong anti-authoritarian strain in his writing as he stressed the fallible judgments of civic and religious authorities, including ¹⁹ Cf. Areopagitica: ‘instead of suppressing sects and schisms, it raises them and invests them with a reputation’, YP 2.542. ²⁰ CSP 298–300. See my discussion of this sonnet in ‘The War against Heresy in Milton’s England’, forthcoming in Milton Studies 47 (2007). ²¹ Steuart had responded with hostility to An Apologeticall Narration by five Independent ministers arguing for a wider latitude of governance for individual congregations, an argument that stimulated further the debate over toleration.

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godly ministers who invoke the specter of heresy and religious anarchy to scare away support for toleration and underscore the urgent need for a state church.²² It was perhaps inevitable that Goodwin, soon savagely demonized by Thomas Edwards (as well as by other Presbyterians, including Robert Baillie) for his heretical positions and for becoming one of ‘the grand Patrons of Toleration’,²³ would strike back hard. In Cretensis: or a Briefe Answer to An Ulcerous Treatise (1646) Goodwin devotes his polemical energies to answering at length the first part of Edwards’s Gangraena and reconceiving (as Walwyn likewise does; see below) two widely used tropes: heresy as a rapidly spreading disease and the heresy hunter as physician who cures, by means of his bitter writings, his readers, as well as the church and state, of a terrible infestation and poison.²⁴ There Goodwin, attempting to expose the sickness of the virulent and feverish heretic hunter, points out ‘spots which appeare here and there in the body of the Gangrene, which plainly shew the very vitals & inward parts to be pestilently infected’; written with Edwards’s ‘gangred pen’, it is a book ‘swelling with poison, and the gall of aspes’ (Cretensis, 47, 3, 27). As the defender of toleration and Independency, Goodwin presents himself as an alternative kind of physician in these poisonous religious times, producing ‘the cure of the said dangerous ulcer, called Gangraena, and to prevent the spreading of it to the danger of the precious soules of men’ (Cretensis, title page). Goodwin mocks Edwards for generating a kind of uncontrolled, extravagant fantasy of increasing heresies that might be multiplied in print ad infinitum as his overheated religious imagination invents more and more of them: I marvaile how Mr Edw. having (it seemes) an authorized power to make errors and heresies at what rate, and of what materials he pleaseth, and hopes to live upon the trade, could stay his pen at so small a number as 180; and did not advance to that Angelicall quotient in the Apocalyps, which is ten thousand times ten thousand, and thousand thousands. (Cretensis, 9)

Edwards’s ‘Catalogue, or black Bill’ has, more than any other contemporary text, fabricated a frightening image of heresy by means of ‘lying tales and ²² Coffey, Goodwin and the Puritan Revolution, 111–12, notes Goodwin’s partial retreat from his radical tolerationist positions in revisions made in the second edition of this tract; however, Goodwin’s willingness to compromise with conservative Independents seems to have been temporary. ²³ Thomas Edwards, The Casting Down of the Last and Strongest Hold of Satan (London, 1647), 46. Edwards would soon devote more than 100 pages of Gangraena to mounting an undisciplined, ferocious attack on Cretensis and its author as ‘the profound Oracle of the Sectaries’: Gangraena, 2.30–140 (phrase from 90). For hostile Presbyterian responses to the tolerationist positions of M.S. to A.S. and Theomachia, see Coffey, Goodwin and the Puritan Revolution, 111, 115–16. Coffey reviews other contemporary satirical portraits of Goodwin in ch. 5. ²⁴ See, e.g., Edwards, Gangraena, 2.131.


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reports’, yet Goodwin, by picking apart passages from Edwards, tries to expose the savagery of his dogmatic religious judgments and intolerant assertions, fueled by a ‘Dragon-likenesse of spirit’, as arbitrary, subjective, and therefore unfounded: ‘For I professe ingenuously, that I know not by what other rule or measure, besides his own humour and will, he judgeth of error or heresie’ (Cretensis, 8, 29, 19, 10). Cretensis, the title of Goodwin’s diatribe, echoes Paul’s epistle to Titus where Cretans, in Paul’s satirical characterization, ‘are alwayes liers’ and therefore should be rebuked ‘sharply’ and (to use Goodwin’s word) ‘cuttingly’.²⁵ But whether Goodwin’s own harsh verbal responses might help to restore Edwards and his pestilent book to a measure of health remains uncertain;²⁶ like Paul concerning the Cretans and their church (see Titus 1:16), Goodwin seems not to expect much success. Goodwin also responded in Sion-Colledg Visited to the specter of heresy and monstrous toleration generated by London Presbyterian ministers in A Testimonie to the Truth of Jesus Christ (1648), a text touched on in the first section of this essay and one in which Goodwin found his own writings tarnished ‘with the blacke brand of Infamous and pernicious Errors’ (SionColledg, title page). In Sion-Colledg Goodwin challenges godly ministers who refuse to engage rationally with authors they anathematize as ‘heretical’, and who prefer instead ‘to poure out flouds of such reproachfull and foule language … upon mens sayings or opinions … without answering so much as any one reason or ground, upon which they build such assertions’. Such ministers are impetuous, frenetic, and indiscriminate in their use of inflammatory terms—they ‘insult and stamp with the foot, and cry out, Errors, Heresie, Blasphemy, anti-Scripturisme, Arminianisme, and I know not what’, and such strident rhetoric only fuels sharper religious divisions. Furthermore, in the heat of religious controversy, the ministers offer crude and rash interpretations of contemporary religious texts they disagree with, making ‘errours and heresies of similitudes’ and dismembering the texts by ‘mangling, maiming, and deforming the sayings of [their] Brethren, [and] when [they] cite them, by leaving out very emphaticall and materiall words, and clauses’. In this climate of violent controversy and textual warfare there exists a witch hunt against so-called heretics so that the ministers who ‘make errors and heresies of similitudes’ are indeed ‘seeking errors and heresies in other men, untill [they] finde them’ (Sion-Colledg, 7, 8, 14). The crisis over religious toleration had consequently become so inflamed by visceral passions and the ²⁵ Titus 1:12–13; see Cretensis, title page and 50. ²⁶ ‘I make no question but ere long you will see the whole body of [the Gangrene] full of such spots all over’ (Cretensis, 47). For additional discussion of Goodwin’s critical responses to Edwards, see Hughes, Gangraena and the Struggle for the English Revolution, esp. 266–9.

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strident war of words that vocal proponents of toleration found themselves regularly demonized as monstrous ‘heretics’ or ‘sectaries’, while engaged in a highly precarious struggle whose outcome in favor of their cause was far from assured. Goodwin, then, was surely one of the English Revolution’s most daring proponents of religious toleration, and in some ways he embodied what Bernard Williams has identified as a main tension of toleration: the ‘tension between commitment to one’s own outlook and acceptance of the other’s’.²⁷ In Goodwin’s terms that meant his strong commitment to a congregational or Independent way, along with his acceptance of other religious truths, including those many that were yet to be discovered and that were ‘yet unborne’. Nonetheless, there were also limits to Goodwin’s creative thinking about religious toleration in relation to the alarming specter of growing errors and heresies evoked and exploited by godly ministers and heresy-hunting writers. As the war against heresy, separatism, and toleration escalated during the 1640s, Goodwin, unlike Walwyn and Milton, did not interrogate skeptically the emotionally charged analogy between the spread of heresy and contagious disease; nor did he repudiate altogether the potential danger of heresy within Protestantism. Moreover, he did not question or revise the concept of heresy itself as a crime, although he often deplored the polarizing language associated with it and remained deeply suspicious about human authorities, including any kind of state church, determining what is heresy, error, and schism:²⁸ ‘if a person, one, two, or more, being members of a particular Church, shall be infected with any hereticall or dangerous opinion, and after two or three admonitions … shall continue obstinate, he ought to be cast out from amongst them by that Church’ (Goodwin, M.S. to A.S., 53). There is no mistaking the Pauline echo here, although Goodwin is more generous than Paul when it comes to the problem of what to do about obstinate heretics fomenting divisions and sects by propagating dangerous opinions within a particular religious community: ‘A man that is an heretick [hairetikon anthropon] after the first and second admonition reject; Knowing that he that is such is subverted, and sinneth, being condemned of himself’ ( Titus 3:10–11). Yet in Goodwin’s age of religious fear and anxiety, when the fight for toleration was exceptionally heated, coercive power—‘power … very dangerous for a Magistrate to owne’—would never, he always insisted, suppress the explosion of errors, schisms, and heresies; rather ministers truly agitated about the ²⁷ See Bernard Williams, ‘Tolerating the Intolerable’, in Philosophy as a Humanistic Discipline (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 2006), 127, 130. ²⁸ See Goodwin’s response to William Prynne in Innocency and Truth Triumphing Together (London, 1645), 34.


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specter of spreading heresies, he suggested, should preach ‘soundly from the Scriptures to evince the folly, vanitie and falsehood of all such wayes’ (Goodwin, M.S. to A.S., 57, 53). In the mid-seventeenth-century crisis over toleration, Goodwin stands out as a formidable polemical opponent of zealous heretic hunters and as a vigorous, independent-minded defender of free inquiry into religious truths who, if necessary, would resist, as he himself did during the Interregnum, excessive compliance with any religious faction or group.²⁹ Walwyn and Milton, however, would show greater linguistic suppleness and conceptual imagination as they interrogated orthodox visions of the terrifying growth of heresy in the midst of the English Revolution’s deepening crisis over religious toleration.

3. William Walwyn: Toleration and ‘The Power of Persecuting’ Considered by Thomas Edwards ‘a desperate dangerous man … a man for all Religions, pleading for all’ (Edwards, Gangraena, 2.26),³⁰ William Walwyn was one of the most gifted polemicists promoting religious toleration in Milton’s England, especially in response to the alarming specter of heresy generated by godly writers; he was already formulating his views well before the Levellers emerged as a threatening radical political force at the end of 1646. Wary about religious dogmatism in a period when the orthodox godly were so inimical to the idea of toleration, Walwyn observed that the concept of heresy was itself a remarkably volatile and slippery one, so that what was considered heresy in one age might well be considered religious truth in another; hence the relation between ‘heresy’ and ‘orthodoxy’, he suggested, remained an unstable one: ‘those tenets which are now accounted heresies, may be the countenanced truthes of the next age; as what formerly was accounted errour, is now esteemed truth’ (Writings, 242).³¹ Walwyn made this observation in A Demurre to the Bill for Preventing the Growth and Spreading of Heresie (October 1646), a text in which he vigorously challenges a proposed ordinance for punishing heresy by means of death and blasphemy by means of branding ²⁹ Goodwin in the 1650s could write against the gathered churches, such as when they supported the Fifth Monarchists or when Baptist doctrine caused schism within his own church or when Independent divines supported the system of Triers under the Protectorate: see Liu in oDNB, 22.822; and especially Coffey, Goodwin and the Puritan Revolution, ch. 8. ³⁰ Cf. Walwyn, Writings, 182–3 (where Walwyn notes that he has been called ‘a great Anabaptist’ and ‘a great Antinomian’, as well as ‘a dangerous man’). ³¹ Cf. liberty-of-conscience, in Richard Overton’s Araignement of Mr. Persecution (London, 1645): ‘is it not frequent amongst us, that the thing that we judged heresie, wee now believe is Orthodox [?]’ (24).

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with a hot iron. There Walwyn warns Parliament that inflammatory antiheretical language, and the disturbing specter of heresy that such polarizing rhetoric was encouraging, was also the weapon of the clergy, an instrument of intimidation used to stifle debate about toleration, ‘to establish a very inquisition’, and ‘to terrifie men from a free and necessary search into the grounds and originall of things, and to dispose all men’ to believe ‘whatsoever the Synod and learned Church-men shall hold forth’ (237, 243). Urging religious toleration for separatists who were being ‘hunted into corners’ (95), Walwyn perceived, like Goodwin, that the outburst of violent anti-heretical discourse in his age was both fueled by and fueling a new climate of fear and repression.³² Thus two years earlier, in The Compassionate Samaritane (1644), Walwyn had examined the liberty of conscience for separatists persecuted by Presbyterian ministers in a more Socratic fashion, employing a series of reasons and objections. There he presents the argument, in terms of an ‘Objection’, that toleration would contribute to the shattering of religious unity and political stability, thereby turning the nation itself into a loathsome monster of separatist religion: ‘we shall become a very monster in matters of Religion, one part being Presbyter, another Anabaptists, Brownist another, and a fourth an Independent, and so divers according to the diversity of opinions that are already, or may be broached hereafter’ (104–5). Walwyn’s passage anticipates Thomas Edwards’s analogy of the grotesque monstrous body—representing hostile fears about the uncontrollable growth of heresy—and reminds readers of the alarming consequences of toleration which creates deformity where there was once apparently religious unity. Yet for Walwyn, as for Milton in 1644, the most troubling prospect facing his age was not the recent explosion of sects and heresies; it was the newly acquired ‘power of persecuting’ possessed by zealous Presbyterian clergy in their highly ambiguous role as judges over the consciences of others. The victims of persecution and repression during the Laudian years, these godly ministers were seizing the power to enforce compulsion and servility—yet ‘they will be more violent’, Walwyn warns, ‘as slaves usually are when they become masters’ (158, 106).³³ In order to destroy the prospects of toleration and heighten fears of social and political dissolution, they employ stigmatizing labels or evoke the specter of Anabaptist anarchy: ‘They brand men with the name of Hereticks, and fasten what errours they thinke are most hatefull to the people, upon those men they purpose to make odious’ (112; cf. 120–1). Walwyn’s analysis in 1644 ³² Edwards consequently noted Walwyn’s text among the ‘scores of Books written wholly for Toleration, and pretended Liberty’: Gangraena, 3.186. ³³ See also Tolleration Justified, in Writings, 156.


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anticipates Gerrard Winstanley’s analysis of a sinister ‘clergy power’ during the early Interregnum; like Winstanley, he depicts a menacing professional clergy using learning, language, and ‘cunning contrivances’ (111), including sophisticated hermeneutics, in order to keep the Bible a mystery so that godly ministers may retain their hold on power, especially over vulnerable lay parishioners.³⁴ Irrational fears, as well as their desire for power, likewise prompt the institutional clergy to project in preaching and print a specter of monstrous religious confusion and heresy. Most likely Walwyn’s religious skepticism—including his sense of ‘the uncertainty of knowledg in this life’ influenced by reading Montaigne³⁵—made him increasingly doubt the authority of institutions, including ‘Generall Councells, Nationall Assemblies, Synods, and Parliaments’ (104), to judge separatist congregations for their religious beliefs, compelling them to accept one religious truth over another. Montaigne’s skepticism, especially his wariness about dogmatism in matters of religion, had been deepened by his experience of the sixteenth-century French Wars of Religion; Walwyn’s was deepened by England’s own war of religion, inflamed by the specter of separatism and radical sectarianism that seemed increasingly out of control during the 1640s.³⁶ Paradoxically, it was from ‘a Romish Catholique’ French author and an ‘honest Papist’ (400), as Walwyn puts it, that the English Independent churches themselves might learn much about the spirit of toleration in this new age of religious crisis. Sharing a deeply anti-authoritarian religious perspective with the Milton of Areopagitica, Walwyn was no less concerned about Presbyterian control of the press because, as he stresses, that will give the clergy a distinct advantage in the war of words fought over toleration and the definition of heresy. As ‘Masters of the Presse, of which they are lately become by an Ordinance for licensing of Bookes’ (i.e. the Ordinance of June 1643), the Presbyterians now possess greater power to control public opinion and stifle debate when it comes to controversial religious matters and thus they may ‘write what ³⁴ See Writings, 109, 110–11, and cf. 231–4, where Walwyn imagines a contrite Edwards confessing he felt the need for the learned clergy to keep their power over ‘plaine unlearned men’ and to create ‘a mere Clergy religion’; on Winstanley’s analysis of ‘clergy power’, especially during the Interregnum, see my Representing Revolution in Milton and His Contemporaries: Religion, Politics, and Polemics in Radical Puritanism (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2001), ch. 2. ³⁵ Writings, 399–401, where he observes that he has ‘been long accustomed to read Montaigns Essais’. See also Olivier Lutaud, ‘Montaigne chez les niveleurs anglais: Walwyn et Les ‘‘Essais’’ ’, Rivista di letterature moderne e comparate 12 (1959), 53–8. ³⁶ On England’s War or Wars of Religion, see Anthony Fletcher, The Outbreak of the English Civil War (London: Arnold, 1981), 417–18; and especially John Morrill, The Nature of the English Revolution (London: Longman, 1993), 33–175.

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they wil, they may abuse whom they will, and nothing can be said against them’ (112–13).³⁷ One of the most prominent of these Presbyterian licensers (mentioned by name by Walwyn in 1649) was James Cranford, a leader in the campaign against toleration of heterodox opinion and the divine who would soon license Edwards’s Gangraena (and write prefaces to its three large parts); his own Haereseo-Machia would soon contribute to the imaginary terror of schism and heresy by invoking the specter of the bloody Irish Rebellion and its ‘unnaturall’ consequences, including the killing of thousands of Protestants, in order to warn against the menacing consequences of encouraging toleration.³⁸ The struggle to justify toleration in the midst of an age disturbed by such bitter religious differences prompted Walwyn to recall Christ’s engagement with the politico-religious sect of the Sadducees (see Matthew 22:23–33). His Good Counsell to All, originally published as part of The Compassionate Samaritan, offers a highly distinctive interpretation of the confrontation between Jesus and the Jewish sect. The Sadducees, after all, rejected the belief in the existence of angels and spirits and in the resurrection of the dead (it was foreign to the Pentateuch); in debate with them Jesus displays his skill in interpretation (he uses ‘argument and perswasion to alter or controle their judgements’, Walwyn observes) as he meets them on their own ground by citing Exodus 3:6. Yet rather than emphasize that the Sadducees ‘do err’ (Matthew 22:29), like factious heretics or religious deviants, Walwyn presents a Jesus who refrains from becoming defensive or dogmatic and then zealously demonizing the sect despite their ‘dangerous opinions’, including their rejection of the idea of the resurrection: ‘He, nevertheless both heard and answered them gently; he did not revile them with reproachfull language, telling them that they were not worthy to live in a Commonwealth; nor did he warne others to discourse with them’ (128–9).³⁹ Christ ‘answered them gently’ is clearly Walwyn’s irenic formulation—it is not especially supported by the biblical account—since Walwyn wants to believe in the role of gentle persuasion in a world of religious warfare inflamed by ‘reviling accusations’.⁴⁰ Walwyn thus transforms this confrontation between Jesus and an opposing sect into a model of how to respond to ‘heretics’ in an age when the specter of heresy and fears of religious faction were generating fierce hatred for differing beliefs. Yet this polemical warfare aggravated by fiery, polarizing ³⁷ See also Writings, 184. ³⁸ Cranford, Haereseo-Machia, 13: ‘Will a toleration satisifie hereticks, if they have power in their hands? It did not content the Irish Papists, witnesse the bloud of 150000 Protestants shed upon the first advantage, and these unnaturall warres so long continued.’ For Walwyn’s reference to Cranford, see Writings, 396. ³⁹ For Walwyn on Christ and the Sadducees, see also Writings, 136, 240. ⁴⁰ See Walwyn’s A Whisper in the Eare of Mr. Thomas Edwards Minister, in Writings, 175, 183.


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language seemed to leave little hope for Walwyn’s appealing belief that sound argument and ‘perswasion’ could eventually create a world where ‘men might live peaceably and lovingly together, though they differ in judgement one from another’ (129). In 1645 a letter written by anxious orthodox ministers of the city of London also invoked the specter of increasing heresy in order to undermine any sympathy for toleration. Addressing their concerns to the Assembly of Divines, they complained that Reformation would never be completed until ‘Schisme and Heresie is extirpated’, that ‘Sects and Heresies’ would ‘shelter themselves under the wings of Independency’, and that a ‘lawlesse Toleration’, ‘utterly Repugnant’ to the 1643 Presbyterian Solemn League and Covenant (which pledged to eradicate heresy and schism, while protecting ‘the power of godliness’), would only unleash more strange and horrid opinions.⁴¹ Walwyn answered with Tolleration Justified, and Persecution Condemned, a tract published anonymously warning that the Presbyterian ministers, possessing ‘in their hands the power of persecuting’, were attempting to enforce their severe judgments upon Independents and other separatists, thereby blowing ‘the coales of dissention’ (158, 169). Walwyn depicts their spirit of fury and bitterness against sectaries as a latter-day form of Old Testament vengeance—they resemble Jews crying out ‘an eye for an eye, and a tooth for a tooth’ (161) rather than the Jesus who urges his followers, in the Sermon on the Mount, to love their enemies and ‘blesse them that curse you’ (Matthew 5:44). Walwyn’s tract presents the London ministers as cynical, restless, and power-hungry with ‘their private juncto’s and councels’ (156). What drives their violent spirit of persecution and their aggressive assault on toleration is fear: not only fear as a calculated means of enforcing religious conformity and mental servility, Walwyn suggests, but fear in the sense of their underlying insecurity about their own ambiguous authority. Only godly ministers deeply insecure about their tenuous and precarious hold on power would so violently oppose toleration, insisting that their interpretation of religious truth was right and everyone else’s wrong: ‘Upon how slight foundation is their reputation supported, that fear being despised unlesse Authority forces all to Church to them?’ (166). During 1645/6 Walwyn responded to Thomas Edwards—‘a Master and Comptrouler to other mens judgements and practises in the worship of God’ (206)—in no less than five tracts in which Walwyn reversed (like Goodwin) the trope of poisonous heresy and accused Edwards himself of spreading, by ⁴¹ A Letter of the Ministers of the City of London … Against Toleration (London, 1645), 4, 5–6; The Solemn League and Covenant, in S. R. Gardiner, ed., The Constitutional Documents of the Puritan Revolution, 1625–1660 (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1905), 26.

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means of his books and his ‘infectious braine’, poison that had ‘envenomed the hearts and understandings of thousands … easily deluded by the least pretence of zeal and godlinesse’ (213, 210).⁴² Appalled by the ‘extream fury’ with which Edwards expressed his hatred of separatists and conducted his unbridled campaign against so-called ‘heretics’, Walwyn employed vivid animalistic images to convey the elemental savagery of this leading heretic hunter whose vicious enmity has dehumanized him. Indeed, any attempt to restrain him had only backfired, as Walwyn suggests in a passage that gives the scriptural comparison of ‘false prophets’ to ‘ravening wolves’ (see Matthew 7:15) a contemporary immediacy that also exploits a note of ethnic stereotyping atypical of Walwyn: ‘instead of qualifying his spirit … [it] hath set him all on fire, that he rageth like an Irish ravenous and hungry woolfe, deprived of his prey by generous and true English Mastives, that watch both night and day to save his harmlesse and benefitiall sheep (the Independents and Separatists)’ (174, 207). Walwyn’s responses to Edwards resulted in some of his most inventive writing, and I want to conclude this section by briefly examining one of Walwyn’s most ingenious and ironic texts: his Prediction of Mr. Edwards His Conversion and Recantation ( July 1646). Walwyn possessed a remarkably agile literary imagination that could express itself in inventive ways that deserve more attention from literary scholars and, for that matter, from historians who have focused on Walwyn’s religious beliefs and his contributions to Leveller political thought and polemics. In his Prediction, Walwyn allows his imagination free rein as he envisions Edwards, finally tormented by guilt over ‘the violence of his spirit’ against ‘conscientious people’ who ‘differ with him in judgement’ (228),⁴³ producing a lengthy dramatic monologue in prose recanting his McCarthyite campaign of heresy hunting. Edwards, like Paul (before his conversion) viciously ‘persecuted the church of God’ (1 Corinthians 15:9; Galatians 1:13), although Edwards’s violent spirit of persecution, expressed by means of ‘his embittered pen’ (229), has exceeded Paul’s. Lashed by his own stinging conscience (‘O vile man, what have I done?’), the anguished heresy hunter confesses that he has committed evils, of a new and unparalelled nature, such as the Protestant Religion in all after-ages will be shamed of. … I most presumptuously and arrogantly, assumed to my selfe, a power of judging, and censuring all judgements, opinions, and wayes of worship (except my owne) to bee either damnable, hereticall, schismaticall, or dangerous. ⁴² I discuss one of the most ingenious of these texts, A Parable, or Consultation of Physitians upon Master Edwards, in ‘The War against Heresy in Milton’s England’. ⁴³ Perhaps with irony Walwyn comes close here to echoing Edwards’s own complaint about ‘the violent Spirit of Sectaries against all persons and things that pleases not them’ (Gangraena, 1.109).


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Moreover, the anathematizing ‘nick-names’ he has so stridently and indiscriminately employed in print—‘Brownists, Independents, Anabaptists, Antinomians, Seekers, and the like’—have served as his verbal weapons in rendering separatists and sectarians and their gathered churches (however small or close to the practices of the apostles) ‘odious to Authority, and all sorts of men’ (230–1). The result, Edwards admits, is that his own inflammatory writings, rather than those advocating toleration, have helped to dissolve ‘all civill and naturall relations’, turning England into a frightening, chaotic ‘Nation of quarrels, distractions, and divisions’ (231). Furthermore, Walwyn’s contrite Edwards can now see that he, who once assumed ‘a power of judging’ other religious opinions heretical, in fact has ‘no infallible spirit to discern between truth and errors’ (230–1, 234)—much as John Goodwin himself had been arguing. Close to a state of despair resembling Milton’s inwardly tormented and theatrical Satan (‘what shall I doe? whither shall I fly?’),⁴⁴ the anguished heretic hunter finally grasps a key lesson from Christ’s sermon on the mount: ‘But I say unto you, Love your enemies’ (Matthew 5:44; 235). In Walwyn’s text, however, the lesson reinforces the point that, rather than separatists loving their persecutors, religious persecutors should love those whom they have so savagely demonized. Of course, one could hardly imagine a more implausible depiction of this most implacable of seventeenth-century heresy hunters. Walwyn clearly relishes his ‘prediction’, his satirical fantasy of an inwardly tormented heresy hunter who, seeking to redeem himself, finally manages ‘to breake forth and publish to the world’ an anguished recantation of his behavior and writings (230); beneath the irony and ingenuity of this imaginative work, however, there lies a more urgent message about the specter of heresy created by godly propaganda as well as the struggle to promote toleration in such a bitterly contentious religious world. Yet rather than relinquish his vocation as a godly warrior leading a ferocious campaign to eradicate heresy and toleration, Edwards would make the specter of heresy appear even more frightening and monstrous by publishing his third massive part of Gangraena in December 1646—an unrelenting assault on the anarchic dangers of sectarian writing and political revolution.

4. John Milton: Toleration and ‘Fantastic Terrors of Sect and Schism’ Like Goodwin and Walwyn, Milton felt the need to respond, as he does in Areopagitica, to ‘these fantastic terrors of sect and schism’ (YP 2.554) which ⁴⁴ Walwyn, Writings, 235; cf. PL 4.73: ‘Me miserable! Which way shall I fly[?]’.

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were making the struggle over toleration increasingly divisive and difficult. Positioning Milton in relation to contemporary writers like Goodwin and Walwyn does indeed remind us that Areopagitica is no ‘isolated document, nor Milton a cloistered and bookish academic’;⁴⁵ however, it also enables us to see more sharply what was so distinctive and original about Milton’s own revaluation of the specter of terrifying heresy and schism, as well as the polarizing language used in the escalating war against toleration. As early as The Reason of Church-Government (February 1642), where Milton shows little interest in the structures and rituals of the visible church, we see him responding increasingly skeptically to deepening anxieties in his culture about the new specter of heresy, as well as to the slipperiness of religious labeling, created by the disintegration of Protestant unity. To be sure, his text addresses fears expressed by defenders of the Church of England, yet it does so in a way that anticipates his responses to the worries of the mainstream godly about the splintering of Protestantism producing a terrible and potentially irreversible ‘deluge of innumerable sects’ and popular heresies. In Church-Government, Milton is beginning to deflate these fears and to question warnings about unstable religious divisions developing that threaten to dissolve more traditional religious identities. Consequently, Milton challenges the notion that if prelacy were destroyed ‘we shall be all Brownists, Familists, Anabaptists’: ‘If we go downe, say you, as if Adrians wall were broke, a flood of sects will rush in. What sects? What are their opinions? give us the Inventory’ (RCG, YP 1.783–4, 786–7). Although the Presbyterians themselves would soon supply plenty of these sprawling inventories, Milton is dismissing the fears of spreading heresy and schism in a way that would hardly assuage the growing concerns of godly brethren: ‘Noise it till ye be hoarse; that a rabble of Sects will come in, it will be answer’d ye, no rabble sir Priest, but a unanimous multitude of good Protestants will then joyne to the Church, which now because of you stand separated’ (RCG, YP 1.787–8). Milton’s phrase ‘unanimous multitude’ anticipates the subtle double negatives of Areopagitica (see below) where religious truth may be both one and many, and where—on a linguistic level—Milton challenges the rigid dualisms encouraged by anti-tolerationist Presbyterian discourse. Like Walwyn and Goodwin, Milton also sees how ‘vile and hateful terms’ have been increasingly used as verbal weapons (more than reasoned argument) in the ongoing war against heresy, whether conducted by ⁴⁵ Christopher Hill in the ‘Foreword’ to Writings of William Walwyn, xiii. See also Nigel Smith, ‘Areopagitica: Voicing Contexts, 1643–5’, in Loewenstein and James Grantham Turner, eds., Politics, Poetics, and Hermeneutics in Milton’s Prose (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1990), 103–22, and esp. 112–13 for a brief comparison of Walwyn and Milton in 1644.


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prelates or Presbyterians: ‘those terrible names of Sectaries and Schismaticks’ are now essential to their ‘manner of fight’, especially when ‘the quiver of … arguments … is ever thin, and weakly stor’d, [and] after the first brunt is quite empty’; for then heresy hunters will resort to that ‘other quiver of slander’ (RCG, YP 1.788). Such ‘hateful’ labels are manipulated as protean rhetorical devices by those heresy hunters—prelates and soon the Presbyterians themselves—who revile sects and the growth of heresies: ‘For the word Puritan seems to be quasht, and all that heretofore were counted such, are now Brownists’ (784), a reference to the leading Elizabethan separatist Robert Browne whose name and the names of his followers—‘Brownists’—were indiscriminately invoked during the 1640s to evoke the specter of increasing heresy.⁴⁶ Not only does Church-Government, with its vigorous assault on the ‘scandalous misnaming’ (RCG, YP 1.788) of sects and separatists, anticipate Milton’s spirited defense of radical sectarianism in Areopagitica and his searching critique there of anathematizing names (including ‘heretic’); it also begins to reveal his deepening differences with the Presbyterians on this crucial matter. It anticipates his fresh responses in Areopagitica to the escalating war against heresy and toleration aimed at casting ‘panick terrors into the hearts of weaker Christians’ (RCG, YP 1.794). A text saturated with metaphors of ideological warfare as it participates in the revolutionary world of religious ferment and expanding political debate, Milton’s Areopagitica (November 1644) provocatively engages with the explosive language of heresy hunting—both contesting received ideas and labels and reinterpreting them in strikingly new ways. In Areopagitica Milton envisions London, the nation’s most vital center of print culture in his revolutionary age, as a shop of war with both readers and writers actively engaged in controversy and dispute—‘sitting by their studious lamps, musing, searching, revolving new notions and idea’s’ (Areop., YP 2.554). Milton is acutely aware of the power of print not only for ‘revolving new notions’ of political and religious liberty, as well as of a free press,⁴⁷ but also for ‘revolving new notions’ of ‘heresy’ and ‘heretic’ at a time when their pejorative implications were increasingly dominating bitter religious controversy. Rethinking the meaning of such terms and the powerful fears they were provoking was crucial, in Milton’s view, to ‘the reforming of ⁴⁶ See e.g. The Brownist Haeresies Confuted ([London], 1641). David Cressy notes that between 1640 and 1642 there were some forty-five publications which had the derisive name ‘Brownist’ in their title: England on Edge, 214. ⁴⁷ On Areopagitica and revolutionary print and pamphlet culture, see esp. Sharon Achinstein, Milton and the Revolutionary Reader (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1994), 58–67; Joad Raymond, Pamphlets and Pamphleteering in Early Modern Britain (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2003), 262–75.

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Reformation it self’ (Areop., YP 2.553). The Licensing Ordinance of June 1643, to which Areopagitica directly responds, registers Parliament’s fears that the recent uncontrolled outpouring of print—the publishing of ‘books, pamphlets and papers, in such multitudes’—was not only threatening the authority of Parliament but endangering godly religion itself by encouraging radical sectarianism and shattering religious unity: thus the ordinance recognizes the urgency of ‘suppressing the great late abuses and frequent disorders in Printing many false, forged, scandalous, seditious, libelous Papers, Pamphlets, and Books to the great defamation of Religion and Government’.⁴⁸ Indeed, by the time he published the first installment of his Gangraena in early 1646, Thomas Edwards was urgently warning Parliament that its 1643 Ordinance was not only ineffective, but that there were ‘never more dangerous unlicensed Books printed, then since the Ordinance against unlicensed printing’ (Edwards, Gangraena, sig. a2r ; see also 58–9). In Areopagitica, a text printed unregistered and unlicensed, Milton provocatively exploits the medium of print to intervene in the escalating war against heresy and toleration and to ‘revolve’ his own distinctive notion of heresy.⁴⁹ Thus in the midst of proclaiming England ‘a place of Philosophic freedom’ (rather than a place of intellectual, religious, or political servility) and observing that the new Presbyterians are but old priests writ large (‘that Bishops and Presbyters are the same to us both name and thing’, Areop., YP 2.537, 539), Milton inserts his most striking reformulation of what it means to be a heretic: ‘A man may be a heretick in the truth; and if he beleeve things only because his Pastor sayes so, or the Assembly so determins, without knowing other reason, though his belief be true, yet the very truth he holds, becomes his heresie’ (Areop., YP 2.543). No one in Milton’s England—including such notable defenders of toleration as Goodwin and Walwyn—had reinterpreted heresy in quite this way before, nor presented it to Parliament as an alternative to currently received notions of heretics and the frightening dangers they were supposedly posing to the health of the body politic and religious unity.⁵⁰ Milton’s fresh redefinition includes nothing of the pejorative New Testament or Pauline implications associated with heresy as the fomenting of divisions and sects among Christians by means of false teachers or false prophets propagating dangerous or deviant beliefs: hence Paul warns the Corinthians that ‘there be ⁴⁸ Acts and Ordinances of the Interregnum (London: HMSO, 1911), 1.184. ⁴⁹ ‘Revolve’ is meant to recall Milton’s ‘revolving new notions and ideas’ and can mean ‘To consider, think over, ponder or meditate upon (something)’ (OED 4b). ⁵⁰ Walwyn resembles Milton when he urges his readers to ‘abhor that most superstitious maxime to believe as the Church believes’ (A Demurre to the Bill for preventing … Heresie, in Writings, 243), but he does not align this servile belief, as Milton does in Areopagitica (see below), with heresy itself.


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divisions [schismata] among you’ and ‘there must also be heresies [haireseis] among you’ (1 Corinthians 11:18–19), while in his second epistle, Peter the apostle warns that ‘there shall be false teachers among you, who privily shall bring in damnable heresies [haireseis], even denying the Lord that brought them’ (2 Peter 2:1).⁵¹ Even John Goodwin, as we saw earlier, did not altogether reject the Pauline implications of heresy as the fomenting of divisions and sects among Christians by means of the propagation of dangerous opinions. In the war against heresy and toleration, the orthodox godly especially exploited these negative implications—Milton refers to their fears that ‘these divisions and subdivisions will undoe us’ (Areop., YP 2.556)—in their campaign to make the specter of heresy and schism seem more terrifying and threatening to the health of the body politic. Milton responds to such escalating fears about heresy by conceiving Truth dynamically—he likens Truth to a ‘streaming fountain’ with ‘her waters’ flowing in a ‘perpetuall progression’ rather than stagnating ‘into a muddy pool of conformity and tradition’ (Areop., YP 2.543)—so that the greatest heresy is not religious division but the static possession of religious truths: it is a blind, unquestioning, and servile acceptance of theological beliefs determined by any ecclesiastical or political authority, whether that be the Westminster Assembly of Divines or even, for that matter, a minister who leads a gathered church. Godly writers anxious about the recent appearance of ‘so many horrid opinions and blasphemous heresies’ were urging orthodox ministers as well as magistrates to determine once and for all what is dangerous heretical belief and what is not, as if the definition of religious truth could and should be firmly fixed: ‘The declaration of what is hereticall, what orthodox; what is lawfull, what scandalous, belongs to you’ (Cranford, Haereseo-Machia, 42). Yet when it comes to judging inflammatory or alarmist statements about heresy and heretics, Milton’s text challenges its readers not to assume a passive or timorous role, but to exercise their own acute, independent, vigilant judgments. And this skeptical, anti-authoritarian perspective Milton exemplifies himself by interpreting against the grain—by freshly and vividly reformulating contemporary conceptions of the war between heresy and truth, while calling into question hostile godly attitudes towards growing heresies, including the fear that ‘the infection … may spread’ to the common reader (YP 2.517) exposed to provocative or seductive heretical and unlicensed books. Moreover, Milton’s Areopagitica offers its contemporary readers a vision of a ‘pliant’, ‘puissant’, vigorous body politic (Areop., YP 2.554, 558) stimulated ⁵¹ See also, for discussion of Pauline texts and heresy, Zagorin, How the Idea of Religious Toleration Came to the West, 18–19.

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by religious ferment and flux and the massive outpouring of print. This is one way, indeed, that Milton answers godly writers who were beginning to employ graphic images of contagious disease, monstrous bodies, and swarming sectaries in order to convey the sickness, deformation, and increasing vulnerability of the body politic and the church to spreading heresies, thereby creating (in Milton’s words) ‘these fantastic terrors of sect and schism’. Milton’s metaphor of the organic body politic—with its blood ‘fresh’, its ‘spirits pure and vigorous’ (Areop., YP 2.557)—conveys a vision of a vibrant nation and its rapidly changing religious culture that are in the process of being reinvigorated and recreated by ‘much arguing, much writing, many opinions’ and many schisms (Areop., YP 2.554). Contrary to the frightening specter of religious and political chaos offered by anxious heresy hunters fearful of monstrous toleration, a profusion of errors, and ‘that infection which is from books of controversie in Religion’ (Areop., YP 2.519), this pliant Protestant nation full of growing sects and schisms—now a terrain of religious warfare as well as political experimentation—is ‘not degenerated, nor drooping to a fatall decay, but casting off the old wrincl’d skin of corruption to outlive these pangs and wax young again’ (Areop., YP 2.557). Milton is indeed scornful about the specter of ‘all these supposed sects and schisms’ (Areop., YP 2.556), as if their dangers to the new Protestant nation in the process of being forged are nothing more than a frightening fantasy and an imaginary terror projected by the orthodox godly. Yet as his elaborate passage about building the Temple of the Lord suggests, his response is more complex than this, enabled by his figurative writing in this densely imagistic text. Taking a common enough trope—temple building or work—for the construction of godly reformation in the turbulent 1640s (it was regularly employed by Presbyterian preachers),⁵² Milton refashions it in a strikingly fresh way as he responds to the growing crisis over religious toleration and the menacing specter of heresy and schism: Yet these are the men cry’d out against for schimaticks and sectaries; as if, while the Temple of the Lord was building, some cutting, some squaring the marble, others hewing the cedars, there should be a sort of irrationall men who could not consider there must be many schisms and many dissections made in the quarry and in the ⁵² See e.g. Thomas Hill, The Season for Englands Selfe-Reflection, and Advancing TempleWork (London, 1644), 25 ff.; Stephen Marshall, A Sacred Panegyrick (London, 1644), 21; John Marshall, The Right Understanding of the Times (London, 1647), 38. For political and religious uses of temple work in sermons of the period, see Achsah Guibbory, ‘Israel and the ‘‘Fast Sermons’’ during the English Revolution’, in David Loewenstein and Paul Stevens, eds., Early Modern Nationalism and Milton’s England ( Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 2007).


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timber, ere the house of God can be built. And when every stone is laid artfully together, it cannot be united into a continuity, it can but be contiguous in this world; neither can every peece of the building be of one form; nay rather the perfection consists in this, that out of many moderat varieties and brotherly dissimilitudes that are not vastly disproportionall arises the goodly and the graceful symmetry that commends the whole pile and structure. Let us therefore be more considerat builders, more wise in spirituall architecture, when great reformation is expected. (Areop., YP 2.555)

Milton’s emphasis is on the process of building; like Goodwin (who uses the trope of discovering the new world, as we saw earlier), his focus in Areopagitica is on the process of searching for religious truths, just as the Temple of God is under constant construction. Yet Milton’s figurative writing and conceptualization also convey a level of subtlety and nuance missing in Goodwin’s works about toleration and the specter of heresy. Milton’s dense metaphor of the Temple of the Lord, combined with his linguistic formulations (e.g. his double negative ‘not vastly disproportionall’), allow him to escape from rigid dualisms when it comes to thinking about religious differences—to offer an image that contains proportion and disproportion, schism as well as unity. In the new religious world of this pliant godly nation, opposites are not unopposed. It is possible to achieve ‘perfection’ and ‘graceful symmetry’ even when every piece of ‘spirituall architecture’ is not ‘of one form’. Religious truth may thus be both one and disparate, various yet homogeneous; or to invoke another Miltonic double negative, it is ‘not impossible that she may have more shapes then one’ (Areop., YP 2.563), so that Milton’s fresh conception revises the late medieval and early modern emphasis on truth as essentially single and indivisible.⁵³ Milton’s vision of the Temple of the Lord is consequently a distinctive and subtle conceptual and imaginative response to godly writers and preachers who were increasingly prognosticating only religious deformity, division, and chaos in a new world of growing sects and destructive schisms. When the godly were expressing such acute fears that religious unity might be shattered forever in a world of fractious diversity and proliferating errors encouraged by toleration, Milton in Areopagitica offers a striking revision of what ‘the unity of Spirit’ (Areop., YP 2.565) might indeed be like. It is notable that in Areopagitica and elsewhere in his controversial writings Milton never associates any particular Protestant sect or radical religious group with dangerous heresy or heretics; indeed, it is also notable that, during periods of acute religious and political crisis, he almost never invokes ⁵³ On the concept of truth as single and indivisible, see Alexandra Walsham, Charitable Hatred: Tolerance and Intolerance in England, 1500–1700 (Manchester: Manchester University Press, 2006), 1.

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specific sects or radical religious groups or their leaders by name, as if coming to their defense or invoking their authority might somehow compromise his own authority as a controversial writer and defender of radical religious views.⁵⁴ Nevertheless, in his subsequent controversial writings Milton would continue to confront and redefine, in original and striking ways, the concepts of ‘heresy’ and, as I argue elsewhere, the equally feared specter of ‘horrid blasphemy’ likewise used ‘to terrifie … the people’ (TCP, YP 7.246).⁵⁵ The seeds for Milton’s conceptual rethinking and verbal ingenuity, however, were already well developed in Areopagitica, as the crisis over religious toleration in his age was deepening and becoming increasingly embittered.

5. Conclusion Early modern fears of heresy and anxieties about religious toleration have taken on fresh implications in our own time when the specter of terrorism and religious extremism have fueled intolerance, misunderstanding, and divisions, thereby making our world more unstable and threatening its ideals of religious ‘diversity’. As we have seen, the perceived dangers of heresy in Milton’s England and the heated religious imagination converged, resulting in pathological and visceral responses by fearful godly writers who attempted to combat heresy’s insidious spread and monstrous generation, and who were terrified about increasing religious divisiveness and chaos unleashed by toleration. During the war of religion in the mid-seventeenth century it had become ‘common’, as one leading Quaker controversialist would put it, ‘for all different sorts of men to cry out one upon another, and against each other, Heresie, Hereticks, Erronious Persons, and the like’, thereby filling the world ‘with Enmity about difference in Religious matters’.⁵⁶ While that ‘Enmity about difference in Religious matters’ during the mid-seventeenth-century crisis should be understood in its own culturally and historically specific contexts, such vicious ‘Enmity’ also reminds us that the challenges created ⁵⁴ On this matter, see my essay, ‘Milton among the Religious Radicals and Sects: Polemical Engagements and Silences’, Milton Studies 40 (2001), 222–47. ⁵⁵ For discussion of these matters in A Treatise of Civil Power and Of True Religion, see my essay, ‘The War against Heresy in Milton’s England’. On contemporary responses to ‘horrid blasphemy’, see also my ‘Treason against God and State: Blasphemy in Milton’s Culture and Paradise Lost’, in Stephen B. Dobranski and John Rumrich, eds., Milton and Heresy (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1998), 176–98; and Janel Mueller’s acute philological analysis in ‘Milton and Heresy’ in the same volume (21–38). ⁵⁶ Edward Burrough, Memorable Works of a Son of Thunder and Consolation (London, 1672), 866, 867.


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by religious difference and the struggle for toleration remain as pressing and as precarious as ever. To be sure, the bitter religious divisions and polarizing language fueled by the frightening specter of heresy and toleration in Milton’s England remain distant from us; yet in other ways they eerily resonate today in our own world of discord and ‘difference in Religious matters’.

4 John Milton, Roger Williams, and the Limits of Toleration Thomas N. Corns

1 Since approximately the mid-twentieth century Milton’s Areopagitica has seemed less like an iconic proclamation of core values of western liberalism and more like a series of problems to be explained away. The large arguments of the tract substantiate the case for the exclusion of civil power from matters of conscience and belief and seemingly defend unlimited toleration of doctrine and perhaps discipline. They exclude the role of censorship and assert the right to freedom of speech: in Milton’s ringing sentence, ‘Give me the liberty to know, to utter, and to argue freely according to conscience, above all liberties’ (Areop., YP 2.560). Yet the toleration the tract actually demands from the Long Parliament is much more limited. The tract accepts that some texts should be suppressed for reasons of state and that, after they have published, all authors should be open to prosecution and their texts to confiscation and destruction; for some ‘the fire and the executioner will be the timeliest and the most effectuall remedy’ (Areop., YP 2.569). Milton proclaims that ‘a fugitive and cloister’d vertue’ is unmeritorious and ‘that which purifies us is triall, and triall is by what is contrary’ (Areop., YP 2.515). He argues that, when Truth and Falsehood ‘grapple’, ‘who ever knew Truth put to the wors, in a free and open encounter[?]’ (Areop., YP 2.561). Given such confidence, why then should Milton exclude from toleration ‘Popery, and open superstition’ and, even more mysteriously, ‘that also which is impious or evil absolutely either against faith or maners’ (Areop., YP 2.565). The first phrase has attracted most discussion, since it makes explicit the exclusion of Catholicism from toleration. Perhaps we should

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read it simply as a hendiadys. But it may have a wider significance. Milton previously had linked English episcopacy with Catholicism in its decline into ‘irrecoverable superstition’ manifest in its ‘empty conformities, and gay shewes’ (RCG, YP 1.766), and the violent fantasy which ends Of Reformation certainly envisages ‘a shamefull end in this Life (which God grant them)’ for English bishops (RCG, YP 1.616); we may recall that William Laud’s trial was drawing to its vindictive conclusion as Areopagitica appeared. The second phrase is enigmatic. Ernest Sirluck simply interpreted it as a further part of the case against tolerating Catholicism (YP 2.180–1). Yet ‘impiety’ against faith implies, instead, some kind of blasphemous deviation from within the Protestant community. ‘Maners’ hints rather at acts of outrageous behaviour against accepted standards of propriety, a phenomenon which does not really suggest Catholic practices. The term surely suits better the sorts of transgressive conduct extremer sectaries were likely to get up to, the kinds of actions which culminated in Ranter and early Quaker enthusiasm for disrupting church services and which were already noted in some accounts of radical groups. So how may the evident inconsistencies in the argument—the soaring generalizations and the significant exceptions—be addressed? Typically, Miltonists suggest Milton has adopted some subtle stratagem to achieve a defensible polemical objective. Reviewing the interpretations of Ernest Sirluck, Joseph Wittreich, John Illo, Annabel Patterson, and Christopher Kendrick, Abbe Blum summarizes the state of the argument thus: current scholarship offers contradictory explanations for what appears to be contradictory in the tract. Milton is variously seen as a canny tactician who moderates his stance on toleration in order to convey the appearance of solidarity with those who could repeal the 1643 Licensing Act (especially Parliamentary groups and members of the Westminster Assembly—the latter then meeting to decide religious matters); a brilliant moral instructor who employs irony to move ethically upright, intellectually superior readers (who as kindred liberal Christians will affirm his rhetorical prowess); a conservative party-line Protestant spokesman for intolerance who constructs a conditional restricted freedom of expression tailored only for the elect. Most recently Areopagitica’s seeming contradictions have been interpreted as Milton’s ‘manifesto for indeterminacy,’ a conversion of various factions’ disagreements into a nonoppositional celebration of intellectual energy, and finally and quite differently, as the product of a self-validating, monistic ethos which registers the tensions deriving from a bourgeois problematic.¹

I would contend that several of the most illuminating of recent accounts succeed by actually subordinating the ostensible argument of the tract to the ¹ Abbe Blum, ‘The Author’s Authority: Areopagitica and the Labour of Licensing’, in Remembering Milton: Essays on the Texts and Traditions, edited by Mary Nyquist and Margaret W. Ferguson (New York and London: Methuen, 1988), 77. First published in 1987.

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identification of some larger ideological appeal. Thus, in a radical celebration of workers by hand and brain, Michael Wilding sees, ‘running throughout the Areopagitica’, a ‘structural contrast between the dignity of labour, manual and intellectual, and its opposite, the lazy, loitering easy life readily imaged in the beneficed clergy or Roman church’.² For Stanley Fish, in classic Fishean mode, ‘the tract becomes at once an emblem and a casualty of the lesson it teaches, the lesson that truth is not the property of any external form, even of a form that proclaims this very truth’, and ‘a (self-consuming) emblem’ at that.³ Sharon Achinstein’s Habermasian reading sees the tract as advocacy for a redefinition of the appropriate arena for debate and a new engagement of the private reader in the processes of civic decision-making and discussion; it constitutes ‘a significant moment in the conceptualization of the public sphere’.⁴ For David Norbrook, as he works to establish the early history of secular republicanism in England, this is ‘Milton’s major contribution towards the celebration of the public sphere’, imperfectly simulating a classical Athenian form, and calling for ‘a recovery of the political potential of Greek democracy’.⁵ Rather against the trend, my intention is to return to the narrow, surface argument, and to come at its apparent inconsistencies somewhat differently. I shall not defend its polemical ingenuities, as once I did, because, frankly, they are not that ingenious;⁶ most modern readers, I suspect, see through them readily enough. But I am reluctant to attribute simple incompetence to a tract that contains some of Milton’s most brilliantly figurative prose, and which, quoted selectively, anticipates with a resounding magniloquence the principles of western liberalism articulated by John Locke and inscribed in the American constitution. What, then, is going on inside Areopagitica?

2 Answering the question is helped by a careful consideration of the case of Roger Williams, whose Bloudy Tenent, of Persecution, for cause of Conscience (1644) caused him both in his own age and in ours to be associated ² Michael Wilding, ‘Milton’s Areopagitica: Liberty for the Sects’, Prose Studies 9.2 (1987), 7–38, p. 17. ³ Stanley Fish, ‘Driving from the Letter: Truth and Indeterminacy in Milton’s Areopagitica’, in Nyquist and Ferguson, Re-membering Milton, 243, 248. ⁴ Sharon Achinstein, Milton and the Revolutionary Reader (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1994), 58. ⁵ David Norbrook, Writing the English Republic: Poetry, Rhetoric and Politics, 1627–1660 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1999), 118–19, 129. ⁶ Thomas N. Corns, Uncloistered Virtue: English Political Literature 1640–1660 (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1992), 55–60.


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with Milton. Milton criticism almost habitually contrasts the limitations on toleration proposed by Milton with the perfect toleration advocated by Williams. Most recently, for example, Barbara Lewalski draws attention to his exclusion of Roman Catholicism, ‘[u]nlike Roger Williams who proposed complete religious toleration’, a constraint she, no doubt correctly, links to English anxieties about the assault on Protestantism launched in the Thirty Years War.⁷ Among contemporaries, Williams and Milton shared a brief notoriety, in which the latter’s Doctrine and Discipline of Divorce (1643, 1644) was linked with The Bloudy Tenent. Thus, for example, Ephraim Pagitt declared that extremists ‘preach, print, and practise their hereticall opinions openly: for books, vide the bloody Tenet, witness a tractate of divorce in which the bonds are let loose to inordinate lust’.⁸ Of course, both tracts are subject to tendentious and hostile representation. Ann Hughes has made a meticulous study of the work of another heresiographer, Thomas Edwards, who also attacks both Williams and Milton. She identifies in the middle years of the 1640s the formation of what she terms ‘the Presbyterian mobilization’ against extremer Puritans, inspired by the belief that ‘the main danger to orthodox Presbyterian reform came from religious radicals—often described as the ‘‘white devils’’ promulgating errors on the ‘‘right hand’’—who campaigned for toleration, rather than the ‘‘black devils’’, the profane people who resented godly discipline and Calvinist preaching’.⁹ Milton and Williams both served unwillingly and perhaps inadvertently the ends of that mobilization, since they could be represented as characterizing in extreme form white devilry as pursued by dangerously misguided intellectuals, in Milton’s case leading to libertinism and promiscuity, in Williams’s to the prising open of a Pandora’s box of heretical dangers. Williams and Milton may well have met already outside the proxy connections in the pages of heresiographies. They were Cambridge contemporaries, overlapping from 1625 to 1628, though at different colleges. Lewalski and Francis Bremer both postulate an acquaintance during Williams’s time in London in 1643–4.¹⁰ Certainly they were in each other’s company during Williams’s second return to England in 1651–4. Williams taught Milton ⁷ Barbara K. Lewalski, The Life of John Milton: A Critical Biography (Oxford: Blackwell, 2000), 191. ⁸ Ephraim Pagitt, Heresiography: or, A description of the Heretickes and Sectaries of these latter times (London, 1645), quoted in The Life Records of John Milton, ed. J. Milton French (New Brunswick, NJ: Rutgers University Press, 1949–58), 2.127; see also 122, 143, 171. ⁹ Ann Hughes, Gangraena and the Struggle for the English Revolution (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2004), 211. ¹⁰ Lewalski, Life, 180; Francis J. Bremer, ‘Williams, Roger (c.1606–1683)’, DNB.

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Dutch, useful to a diplomatic civil servant (or possibly German, useful for a controversial theologian¹¹) in return for other language instruction.¹² Milton’s own positions on the issues of toleration and on the total separation of the church and state certainly moved close to Williams’s own in the late 1650s. In 1644, however, Williams had three clear advantages over Milton as he approached these topics. He had actually founded and run a civic society, albeit the puny new colony of Rhode Island, whereas Milton had, perhaps, run a very small private school. He also knew far better than Milton the authoritarian aspirations of those Puritans who wished to remain members of the Church of England and to reform it to their own agenda. The New England non-separating congregationalists (we shall turn to issues of church government shortly) dominated the Massachusetts Bay colony, from which he had been forced to flee ‘through winter snows, taking refuge with a tribe of native Americans’ (Bremer). Milton was still writing to defend Smectymnuus, the presbyterian anti-prelatical propagandists, in 1642, and may well have been surprised by the vehemence with which presbyterians and those broadly aligned with them attacked his divorce publications. Williams knew his enemies; Milton probably did not. The political poems he penned but did not publish in the mid-1640s suggest a bewilderment that ‘Men whose life, learning, faith and pure intent / Would have been held in high esteem with Paul’ (among whom he surely numbers himself) were pilloried in print as heretics; moreover, as the line ‘When straight a barbarous noise environs me’ suggests, the suddenness of the presbyterian mobilization had caught him off guard (‘On the New Forcers of Conscience’, ll. 9–10, CSP 299; ‘Sonnet XII’, l. 3, CSP 297, my italics). Finally, Williams had a defined and coherent soteriology which accorded well with his arguments on toleration. Carrying his strict Calvinism to its relentless conclusion, he observed no general advantage in proselytizing in print: the Holy Spirit would select those who were to be saved, and would select the human agency by which conversion would occur, irrespective of human choice, planning or understanding. Other strict Calvinists, in America, Scotland, England, and continental Europe, believed there was an obligation to restrain and govern the reprobate through an alliance of ministers and magistrates. Williams preferred wholly to resign the spiritual life of citizens to the secret working of God’s determination. Mark Goldie has traced the debt of Whig tolerationism to the civil war period when ‘A substantial segment of Protestancy came to believe that priestly usurpation [of civil power] took ¹¹ Gordon Campbell, private communication. ¹² Gordon Campbell, A Milton Chronology (Houndmills and New York: Macmillan and St Martin’s Press, 1997), 155.


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not one but three forms: prelatical and presbyterial as well as popish.’¹³ Williams anticipated that trend, and perhaps was the first to extend suspicion of priestcraft to congregational Independency. The issue emerged clearly in his Christenings make not Christians, published in 1645, in which he explains why he did not convert native Americans, among whom he had lived and whose language he had learnt. His explanation, in a way characteristic of Williams’s dialectic in The Bloudy Tenent, is both practical and spiritual. Indeed, he has written the first guide to a native American language, his Key into the Language of America (London, 1643), but that level of knowledge scarcely permits one to discourse ‘in matters of Heaven’.¹⁴ His assessment is fair enough. A Key broadly anticipates the form of a Berlitz phrase book, with chapters on greetings, numbers, securing accommodation, the parts of the body, and so on, though with additional meditational material, often in verse, in which native American conduct is compared to that of white settlers, usually to the detriment of the latter. But the spiritual argument, stated clearly too in A Key, is that the task of determining when and how true conversion may extend to the elect among the indigenous people is one which belongs to God alone: the Father of Spirits … will in his holy season (I hope approaching) perswade, these Gentiles of America to partake of the mercies of Europe, and then shall be fulfilled what is written, by the Prophet Malachi, from the rising of the Sunne in (Europe) to the going down of the same (in America) my Name shall be great among the Gentiles. (Williams, A Key, sig. A6v )

The millenarian edge implied by the first parenthesis is pertinent as we turn to The Bloudy Tenent. Williams plainly knew that diverse religious groups could peacefully coexist in a state in which the civil magistrate is not empowered to enforce orthodoxy. They did so in Rhode Island, which had already admitted to live among Williams’s followers a radical Arminian group, expelled from Massachusetts Bay. It would continue to do so, and in due course provided shelter for other groups persecuted elsewhere in New England. Williams had worked out that crimes—‘Treasons, Rebellions, Massacres’, and so on—could be treated simply as civil offences even if their motivation were religious and based on the free exercise of conscience. He contended that the civil law need interest itself in religious belief and practice (as opposed to civil disorder motivated by religious belief) in order to ensure ‘that no persons, Papists, Jewes, Turkes, or ¹³ Mark Goldie, ‘Priestcraft and the Birth of Whiggism’, in Nicholas Phillipson and Quentin Skinner, eds., Political Discourse in Early Modern Britain (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1993), 216. ¹⁴ Roger Williams, Christenings make not Christians (London, 1645), 18.

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Indians be disturbed at their worship, (a thing which the very Indians abhor to practice toward any)’ (Bloudy Tenent, 139). With the confidence of an experienced political leader, he could advance the argument that toleration secures peace and stability, while persecution for cause of conscience breeds discord: Yea and for the generall good of the whole world, the field it selfe, which for want of this obedience to that command of Christ, hath beene and is laid waste and desolate, with the fury and rage of civill War, professedly raised and maintained (as all States professe for the maintenance of one true Religion (after the patterne of that typicall land of Canaan) and to suppresse and pluck up these Tares of false Prophets and false Professors, Antichristians, Heretickes, & c. out of the world. Hence illae lachrymae: hence Germanies, Irelands, and now Englands teares and dreadfull desolations, which ought to have beene, and may bee for the future (by obedience to the command of the Lord Iesus, concerning the permission of Tares to live in the world, though not in the Church) I say ought to have beene, and may bee mercifully prevented. (Williams, Bloudy Tenent, 85–6)

Williams briskly anticipates John Morrill’s influential contention that ‘The English civil war was not the first European revolution: it was the last of the Wars of Religion.’¹⁵ Williams looks at the recently started conflict and places it in succession to the Irish rebellion of 1641 and the horrors of the Thirty Years War. The passage also shows his scepticism about the state-founding optimism of John Winthrop’s Massachusetts colony. He denies the claim that the Israel of the Old Testament provides the type on which a modern Puritan commonwealth can model itself, along with the contingent assertion that the religion of the state should be pervasive and supported by the action of the civil magistrate. Typology is at the heart of the protracted debate between John Cotton, the leading theologian of Winthrop’s Massachusetts, and Williams, which reached its climax in The Bloudy Tenent. As Emory Elliot notes, Williams maintains a conservative position on the use of types, arguing ‘that the only valid reading of Old Testament types is as foreshadowings of New Testament antitypes’.¹⁶ In so doing, Williams seeks to turn off the energy feeding Winthrop’s Puritan experiment, which it drew from its own sense of founding a new Jerusalem on American shores. Instead, Williams offers a different kind of millenarianism, of a more sombre kind. Most early modern tolerationist arguments at some point draw ¹⁵ John Morrill, The Nature of the English Revolution (London and New York: Longman, 1993), 68. ¹⁶ Emory Eliot, ‘New England Puritan Literature’, in The Cambridge History of American Literature, vol. i: 1590–1820, edited by Sacvan Bercovitch (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1994), 198.


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on Christ’s parable of the wheat and the tares (Matthew 13), which suggests that deviant elements should be left without state intervention till the two groups are separated at the great reaping when Christ returns in judgement. Williams alludes to it frequently, as in the passage cited above, and he opens The Bloudy Tenent by reprinting a statement from an earlier persecuted tolerationist, the first sentence of which cites the parable. Winthrop and his associates saw themselves as establishing, in his frequently quoted phrase, a city on the hill, a millenarian state in which the saints could live in holiness together. Williams does not allow this. For him, the book of Revelation clearly indicates that the millennium is to be ushered in by pandemic devastation, when the ‘glorious white Troopers (Rev. 19) shall in time be mounted’ (Bloudy Tenent, 117). God’s decisions about who may be saved cannot be understood or influenced, and any supposedly godly state is temporary, subject in due course to the general destruction awaiting the world, and of unknowable spiritual status. Just possibly, a pious society may providentially be reserved till the end of all things. He offers that as an uncertain prospect to revolutionary England, ‘if this Nation shall turne … from that violent persecuting or hunting each of other for Religion sake’ (Bloudy Tenent, 243). Were such benevolence developed, it would in civil terms avoid the brutality of persecution for the cause of conscience, but it would not secure salvation for the individual nor offer an abiding and collective solution under the view of eternity.

3 In 1643–4 American colonial politics appeared on the London scene, though it mapped imperfectly on the new ideological formations of England at war. The Massachusetts Bay colony from which Williams had been expelled had developed a uniformity of religious practice in which non-separating congregationalism was confirmed by civil authority and by the structure of government. As it happened, those Puritans who had settled there in numbers since the very early 1630s were not, for the most part, advocates of a presbyterian church government, and they saw no reason for the development of its complex hierarchies to reform religion and protect its doctrine and discipline. Instead, without seceding from the Church of England, congregations formed and observed their own particular discipline. Some were more radical than others, ‘but as time went on the leaders of the church gradually moved in the direction of greater and greater uniformity’. Civil government closely mirrored ecclesiastical development: ‘As early as 1631 … the franchise was limited to the members of the churches. In 1635 church attendance was made compulsory for all, whether members of the church or not. From 1636 onward

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the organization of new churches had to be approved by the magistrates and the church elders.’¹⁷ In effect the New England non-separating congregationalists had achieved the sort of status as a puritanical and national church to which English presbyterians, seconded by their Scottish allies, aspired in the early 1640s. Williams knew exactly where he stood with respect to this American establishment: he knew with absolute clarity that they were his enemies. His disagreement with them had both religious and civil components. His Calvinist soteriology and his own notion of separating congregationalism made him critical of retaining a communion with the unregenerate majority of the Church of England and of forcing into New England congregations unregenerate elements that were unfit to mix with the saints who had chosen to worship together. At the same time, he disputed the facile assumption that a combination of a gift by James I to the Massachusetts Bay Company and intervention of a divine providence had presented the Puritan settlers with the lands of the native Americans on which to establish their new Israel. Williams saw settlement as part of a transfer of property from the indigenous peoples to the newcomers which should be governed by law, by contract and by appropriate compensation. The view was at once secularizing and subversive; ‘when the Massachusetts Bay colony banished him in 1635, the first of the four charges Governor John Winthrop listed against Williams was that he denied the colonists’ territorial rights’.¹⁸ Just as Scottish presbyterians descended on London to give their advice on the Puritan reformation of England, so, too, did an influential cluster of influential divines who looked to the American model of non-separating congregationalism. In London, theirs was an uphill battle, though some secured membership of the Westminster Assembly of Divines. Late in 1643 Philip Nye, a promoter of the New England initiatives in church government though not himself an e´ migré, together with four other ministers, published in London An Apologeticall Narration, Humbly Submitted to the Honourable Houses of Parliament. At this point, English Puritanism started to crack open. The ministers were of a devout respectability that left them individually beyond reproach, and their argument was simply for a certain latitude in the new reformation ‘to some lesser differences with peaceableness’ (Apologeticall Narration, sig. A1v ). They are suggesting a limit to toleration, though one which permits their variations in practice, while excluding others. David Masson, who writes vividly of these years, suggests that, were it not for their growing unease about sectaries, the presbyterians ‘would have patted the ¹⁷ Max Sevelle, A History of Colonial America, 3rd edn. (Hinsdale, Ill.: Dryden Press, 1973), 161. ¹⁸ Myra Jehlen, ‘The Literature of Colonization’, in Bercovitch, ed., Cambridge History of American Literature, 76.


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Five Dissenting Brethren [that is, the authors of the Apologeticall Narration] on the back, and said, ‘‘It shall be made easy for you; we will yield all the accommodation you can possibly need; only don’t call it Toleration.’’ ’¹⁹ Possibly, such a compromise could have been achieved, other things being equal, though the five brethren, and Milton with them, were in the event overwhelmed by the presbyterian mobilization, designed both to reform the church on their chosen model and to get the kind of stranglehold on extremer dissent that the New England congregationalists had achieved in Boston and its environs.

4 Milton in 1644 was left with all the confusions and ambivalences that characterized incipient radical Independency. Like Nye, he had assumed he could be in dialogue with men such as Thomas Young and the other Smectymnuans, whose efforts they had so recently seconded. But he had developed, too, an awareness of his own differences from presbyterians, both in the heterodoxy of his doctrinal position, specifically and explicitly about divorce reform, and in his perspective on the extent to which sectaries should be tolerated. Yet he still retained a shared vision of national regeneration once prelacy was expelled. Areopagitica perfectly embodies those complexities and ideological fissures. Unlike Williams, but like Winthrop, Milton apparently envisaged a new civic foundation on the basis of spiritual regeneration. The vision of Areopagitica is of a new Jerusalem for the saints to dwell in; for both men, that vision is as much utopian as millenarian. Winthrop’s foundation sermon, preached before his settler party reached land, dwelt on Matthew 5:14, ‘Ye are the light of the world. A city that is set on an hill cannot be hid’, an image which ‘reflected the core of his thinking about the society he and his fellows intended to establish’.²⁰ For Milton, too, cities of biblical vision are to be equated with a real and familiar city–not Boston, of course, but London: Behold now this vast City; a City of refuge, the mansion house of liberty, encompast and surrounded with his [God’s] protection; the shop of warre hath not there more anvils and hammers waking, to fashion out the plates and instruments of armed Justice in defence of beleaguer’d Truth, then there be pens and heads there, sitting by their ¹⁹ David Masson, The Life of John Milton (London, 1881–94; rpt. Gloucester, Mass.: Peter Smith, 1965), 3.112–13. ²⁰ Darrett B. Rutman, Winthrop’s Boston: Portrait of a Puritan Town 1630–1649 (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press for the Institute of Early American History and Culture, 1965), 4.

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studious lamps, musing, searching, revolving new notions and idea’s wherewith to present, as with their homage and their fealty the approaching Reformation: others as fast reading, trying all things, assenting to the force of reason and convincement. What could a man require more from a Nation so pliant and so prone to seek after knowledge. What wants there to such a towardly and pregnant soile, but wise and faithfull labourers, to make a knowing people, a Nation of Prophets, of Sages, and of Worthies. We reck’n more then five months yet to harvest; there need not be five weeks, had we but eyes to lift up, the fields are white already. (Areop., YP 2.553–4)

Once more the biblical resonances are crucial. Here they point both backwards to Old Testament Israel and forwards with a millenarian optimism. As Sirluck notes, cities of refuge were established by the Israelites, under Moses (YP 2.553, n. 236, citing Numbers 35). They are part of the foundation myths of Israel, and, as such, taking a Winthropian view, they type out the foundation of Puritan England as a state fit for a new chosen people. Williams, in contrast, asserts that ‘Doubtlesse that Canaan Land was not a patterne for all Lands: It was a none-such, unparalleld and unmatchable’ (Bloudy Tenent, 183). Milton rehearses the notion of England’s own special relationship to divine providence. Moses had wished all the children of Israel to be a nation of prophets (YP 2.556, n. 245, citing Numbers 11:29), something that may imminently be achieved in London. The allusion to an imminent harvest echoes the words of Christ, anticipating the completion of his mission and foreshadowing its millenary resolution ( John 4:35). The concept of London as a new Jerusalem finds its most eloquent expression in his remarkable analogy between Solomon’s foundation of the Temple (1 Kings 5–6) and the work of reformation now under way in the capital, a project in which ‘the men cry’d out against for schismaticks and sectaries’ have an integral role: ‘as if, while the Temple of the Lord was building, some cutting, some squaring the marble, others hewing the cedars, there should be a sort of irrationall men who could not consider there must be many schisms and many dissections made in the quarry and in the timber, ere the house of God can be built’ (Areop., YP 2.555). Milton conceptualizes the work of founding the Puritan utopia as a finite one—the building will be built, it will be finished—but when it is, it will still admit of diversity within a complex and artful design: ‘it cannot be united into a continuity, it can but be contiguous in this world’ (YP 2.555). In an undeveloped and untheorized way, Milton seems to be reaching towards a model of congregational independency within a broadly defined state church, which substantially accords with the New England model that Williams had rebelled against. Wilding has analysed the passage about the building of the Temple as an exhilarating evocation of the dignity of labour (Wilding, ‘Milton’s Areopagitica’, 16–17). Such labour had literally gone on with a similar frantic energy in Winthrop’s Boston, as ‘its


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people were immediately busy building, fencing, breaking ground, planting, building roads and bridges and fortifications, for as John Winthrop, Jr., was to write, they had ‘‘all thinges to doe, as in the beginninge of the world’’ ’ (Rutman, Winthrop’s Boston, 40). But London, too, had seen recent and concerted expenditure of human effort in the reinforcement of its defences through the construction of an outer defence of earthworks. Puritan utopias are won by the sweat of the brow as well as the efforts of the brain. But Areopagitica shows a pervasive uncertainty and some confusion about the stage the new reformation had reached and about the intentions of those who were driving it. Like Nye and his associates, Milton tries to talk to presbyterians and their supporters, those who controlled the Assembly of Divines and the Long Parliament; he persistently speaks the language of ‘we’ and ‘us’, as though he and they were still comrades, as in his anti-prelatical campaign of 1641–2. Milton, however, has gone a lot further than Nye down the road to presbyterian censure and ostracism. His first divorce tract placed him in that most difficult of polemical situations by identifying him as an egregious example of libertine heterodoxy. From there, surely, there was no way back into dialogue. But still he tries. He even vouchsafes a rare attack on Jacobus Arminius. I have argued elsewhere that Milton’s assault on prelacy was distinguished from the typical Puritan discourse of the early 1640s by its reticence on points of doctrine in general and on the Arminianism of Laudian churchmen, and I have attributed this to his own nascent Arminianism, which can be identified even in works written before ‘Lycidas’.²¹ Somewhat gratuitously, Milton observes in Areopagitica, ‘the acute and distinct Arminius was perverted meerly by the perusing of a namelesse discours writt’n at Delf, which at first he took in hand to confute’ (Areop., YP 2.519–20). Of course, as English Puritan criticism of Arminius goes, this is tepid to the point of deference: Arminianism was routinely confused with Catholicism and the ‘controversy over Arminianism and predestination was inextricably bound up with fears of Catholicism and the question of the Church of England’s relations with Rome’.²² Milton chooses to offer up the anecdote, as if to reassure his target readers, somewhat disingenuously perhaps, of the soundness of his own orientation. Another, more pervasive stratagem shows him hanging on to the disappearing coat-tails of presbyterianism: his reiterated distinction between ‘good ²¹ Thomas N. Corns, ‘Milton’s Antiprelatical Tracts and the Marginality of Doctrine’, in Stephen B. Dobranski and John P. Rumrich, eds., Milton and Heresy (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1998), 39–48; ‘Milton and Presbyterianism’, Milton Studies [of Korea] 10.2 (2000), 337–54; ‘Milton before ‘‘Lycidas’’ ’, in Graham Parry and Joad Raymond, eds., Milton and the Terms of Liberty (Cambridge: D. S. Brewer, 2002), 23–36. ²² Kevin Sharpe, The Personal Rule of Charles I (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1992), 301.

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books’ and ‘good men’ on the one hand and the generality of books and men on the other (Areop., YP 2.487, 492, 493, 500, 503, 504, 507, 510, 521, 531, 544, 549, 551, 554, 556, 564). It generates a problem that lies at the core of some of those contradictions noted at the start of this essay. Milton persistently produces arguments in favour of a general toleration and of a wholly uncensored press, only to pull back to require freedom for those whom fellow Puritans would recognize as within the pale of respectability. It marks the application in Areopagitica of a manoeuvre perfected in The Judgement of Martin Bucer (1644) and continued in the coda to Tetrachordon (1645), in which he lines up the opinions of men regarded by the mainstream of English Puritanism as authorities of impeccable standing in order to demonstrate that his own heterodoxy falls inside the range of those opinions. If Wycliffe, Luther, Melanchthon, Erasmus, Bucer and Fagius are ‘renowned men, worthy to be their [that is, presbyterians’ and their supporters’] leaders’ (Tetrachordon, YP 2.707) and if their doctrine of divorce approximates to his own, then he, too, should be accorded the rights to be heard and to be taken seriously. Like them, he is a good man, and, like theirs, his books are good books. But, ideologically, Milton seems on the move, towards redefining the relationship of church and state in ways that foreshadow his later thinking in, for example, A Treatise of Civil Power in Ecclesiastical Causes (1659). His assertion that ‘The State shall be my governours, but not my criticks’ (Areop., YP 2.534) points the way to a separating out of the civil magistrate from matters of conscience and belief in a manner that Williams could indeed have approved. Yet the latter in the early 1640s was profoundly suspicious of the congregational independents as they emerged in England as an alternative to presbyterianism: The third, though not so great [as prelatical and presbyterian supporters], yet growing faction is that (so called) Independent: I prejudice not the personall worth of any of the three sorts: This latter (as I beleeve this Discourse hath manifested) jumpes with the Prelates, and (though not more fully, yet) more explicitely then the Presbyterians cast down the Crowne of the Lord Jesus at the feet of the Civill Magistrate. And although they pretend to receive their Ministrie from the choice of 2 or 3 private persons in Church-covenant, yet would they faine perswade the Mother Old England to imitate her Daughter New Englands practice, viz. to keep out the Presbyterians, and only to embrace themselves, both as the States and the Peoples Bishops. (Bloudy Tenent, 200–1)

Were he to have reviewed the course of English political history from a vantage point in the mid-1650s, Williams could have congratulated himself, in qualified fashion, on his powers of prophecy. Successive governments from 1649 onwards were tolerant of some alternatives to congregationalism, and congregations which favoured presbyterian models of government were


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certainly allowed to flourish, even to generate overarching structures binding them together into larger organizations, as happened, for example, in London. Independency did not persecute them. Yet more radical groups were, with varying degrees of assiduity, hounded, in the case of Ranterism to extinction. Quakers, too, were spectacularly punished, by local magistrates and in the sensational trial and torture of James Nayler. In 1649 Milton found himself, as apologist for the Rump Parliament, solemnly assuring presbyterians that, though the overthrow of error ‘can be no work of the Civil sword’, the regicide regime would ‘not tolerate the free exercise of any Religion, which shall be found absolutely contrary to sound Doctrin or the power of godliness’ (Articles of Peace, YP 3.324, 325). So who, then, has decided which doctrine is sound? Milton speaks for a civil government, presumably one that is satisfied that it may set a bound to acceptable belief and use the civil sword, as a last resort, to curtail the ‘free exercise’ of conscience in the case of those outside that bound. Of course, why it was necessary to defend the state in these terms and to sacrifice radical sectaries to civil persecution is easily explained as an expedient for securing presbyterian compliance with the new regime. Yet Milton’s argument in government falls interestingly between the more ringing and declarative sentiments voiced in parts of Areopagitica and his eventual emergence, in the Restoration, as a friend of Quakers, a group as harried in New England as in the Old, and one which was to find surest haven in Williams’s absolutely tolerationist Rhode Island.²³ ²³ Alan Taylor, American Colonies (Harmondsworth: Penguin, 2002), 182.

5 Milton, Marvell and Toleration Nicholas von Maltzahn John Milton and Andrew Marvell have long been celebrated as apostles of religious toleration and toleration has long been celebrated as a defining value of liberalism. Already in their own lifetimes they won some praise for what they wrote on behalf of toleration, a praise renewed after the Revolution of 1688/9, and sounded variously to our own day. The applause for Milton has of course been longer, steadier, louder. Yet it is Marvell’s take on toleration that proved the more durable, becoming the norm of liberal tradition, especially in its most influential early modern expression: John Locke’s Letter Concerning Toleration. Marvell’s is the more familiar liberal perspective that contending faiths might agree to disagree, or even turn a blind eye on each other, with religion increasingly construed as a private practice tolerable within a secular state. This essay speaks first to Marvell’s place in the emergence of this principle of non-interference with others’ beliefs, a negative liberty in his case designed to secure free-thinking from religious persecution. Milton, by contrast, sees toleration as committing us to some collective discovery of Christian saving truth. I shall emphasize his insistence on our obligation to engage with competing views, in a positive liberty requiring dialogue between believers. Milton and Marvell have long been claimed for the tradition of liberalism. My premise is that their parallel careers and personal association have led commentators in their lifetime and since to collapse important religious and political distinctions between them. The aim here is to explore how their related but contrasting examples can enlarge our conception of that liberal tradition.

1 Milton and Marvell found themselves joined in controversy in 1673–4, when Marvell twice came publicly to Milton’s defence. The year 1673 marked the beginning of what may be thought of as a second Restoration, when, after the

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liberalizing of church and state that culminated in Charles II’s Declaration of Indulgence (1672), the Cavalier Parliament then forced the cancellation of that toleration (March 1673), the royal signature on the Test Act, and the end of the moderate Cabal administration. With the Earl of Danby’s rise to power, these changes meant the renewal of a High-Church regime harsher to dissent. Marvell had become prominent as a proponent of toleration late in 1672, when he supported the Declaration of Indulgence in The Rehearsal Transpros’d. Against him were then gathered what he mockingly styled a Posse Archidiaconatus, whose attacks on Marvell made much of his friendship with the notorious Milton, that canting proponent of divorce and regicide whose blindness was so plainly God’s judgement on his iniquities. In The Rehearsall Transpros’d: The Second Part (late 1673) and in his commendatory poem on Paradise Lost (c.April 1674), Marvell skilfully defended his older friend. Their friendship seems to have begun when Marvell sought employment with the revolutionary government in 1652/3. Marvell successfully cultivated the relation and Milton, now entirely blind, seems to have been grateful for the flattering attentions of the learned younger man. The friendship developed and lasted to the end of Milton’s days. The knowledgeable John Aubrey gave Marvell pride of place among Milton’s ‘familiar learned Acquaintance’.¹ A couple of years later, Marvell promised to write his late friend’s biography for Anthony Wood’s collections.² Before Marvell met that obligation, he too died, in 1678. We can only guess at what he might have written. Marvell’s relation to Milton had been at first dutiful and admiring, whether in the approach that won him Milton’s letter of reference in February 1653; in the assistance he offered Milton with the Defensio secunda, it would seem, which followed that spring; in Marvell’s lavish thanks and praise for that work in the spring of 1654, when the great Milton made sure to send a copy of the new publication to the menial Marvell; in his circulation of Milton’s work when in Saumur in 1656.³ But in his service to the House of Cromwell, and then in his fellow-service as a secretary for foreign correspondence in 1657 to 1660, Marvell’s independent direction may be surmised. ¹ Oxford, Bodleian Library, MS Aubrey 8, f. 63v . ² Oxford, Bodleian Library, MS Wood F39, f. 296r . ³ Nicholas von Maltzahn, An Andrew Marvell Chronology (Basingstoke: Palgrave Macmillan, 2005), 38, 41, 42–4, 46–59. That it was the Defensio secunda with which Marvell helped Milton, rather than Eikonoklastes (as Anne Sadleir reported, Cambridge, Trinity College, MS R.5.5), is my inference from Milton’s seeming only newly familiar with Marvell in February 1652/3; from the Defensio secunda being the work Milton had in hand that spring before Marvell’s recorded employment in Eton as William Dutton’s tutor; from Milton’s sending Marvell a copy at its publication; from Milton’s needing no assistance with Eikonoklastes because in 1649 he still had his sight and the publication was in English; and from the exceptionally contradictory allegiances the earlier involvement would require of Marvell in the summer of 1649.

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The change is conspicuous in Milton’s and Marvell’s diverging responses in 1658–9 to the government of Richard Cromwell—Milton more distant, Marvell ever closer the centre of power—and in their very different fortunes when the army then restored republican power in the spring and summer of 1659. Marvell now lost ground even as Milton seems better to have been trusted by the new-old parliament and its council, not least the again influential Sir Henry Vane, bitter republican rival in Hull to Marvell the Protectoral candidate in the parliamentary election of January 1658/9.⁴ The facts of their careers at that date have been misleadingly reported—note, for example, Marvell’s tellingly rough ride in the Whitehall office shuffle of the summer of 1659 (von Maltzahn, Marvell Chronology, 58)⁵—in a way that has obscured the pronounced difference in their fortunes. But whatever their political differences, their friendship endured the Restoration and may well have been strengthened by it. Marvell’s scrutiny in Parliament of Milton’s excessive prison fees (December 1660) shows some lasting commitment, as does the intermittent evidence of Marvell’s association with Milton thereafter. He was familiar enough with Milton’s Jewin Street household (1661–3) later to recall Samuel Parker’s presence there. After Marvell’s return from Russia (he was with the Carlisle embassy from the summer of 1663 to January 1664/5), they kept up their friendship, as appears from Marvell’s familiarity with Paradise Lost before its publication in October 1667 (attested by the allusions in ‘Last Instructions’, dated 4 September 1667) and from his later report that, ‘by chance’, he had not seen Milton for two years before The Rehearsal Transpros’d, which ‘after I undertook writing, I did more carefully avoid either visiting or sending to him, least I should any way involve him in my consequences’ (von Maltzahn, Marvell Chronology, 63, 97–8, 113).⁶ Strong as the friendship was, it did not require agreement on all matters. On the question of religious toleration, for example, Milton and Marvell’s interventions in 1667–8 articulate very different views. I have elsewhere explored the relation of Milton’s publication of Paradise Lost to the politics of 1667, both his bringing it to the press, probably in January or early February in a season of penitence after the calamities of plague, fire, war, ⁴ Vane had been angered by Marvell’s election as MP from Vane’s seat in Hull ( January 1658/9), unfairly owing to ‘the practices of some and the Influence of Court Party’, Hull City Archives, Borough Letters, 635 (10 May 1659). ⁵ Compare Pierre Legouis, Andrew Marvell: Poet, Puritan, Patriot, 2nd edn. (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1968), 117. ⁶ The Prose Works of Andrew Marvell, ed. Annabel Patterson, Martin Dzelzainis, Nicholas von Maltzahn, and Neil Keeble, 2 vols. (New Haven: Yale University Press, 2003), 1.417. Hereinafter cited as ‘Marvell, PWAM’.


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and economic recession, and then the epic appearing in print just as renewed calls for toleration greeted the meeting of Parliament in October 1667.⁷ His Protestantism remained uncompromising and apocalyptic. Marvell’s much suppler tactics show in ‘Last Instructions’ and more clearly still in his interventions in Parliament that winter. There, seeking to circumvent the Cavalier House of Commons, he favoured Charles II’s use of royal prerogative to achieve some ‘better Union and Composure in the minds of [his] Protestant Subjects in Matters of Religion’. For Marvell and others, this meant the king imposing a wider Comprehension in the English church.⁸ Marvell’s kindness to Presbyterians—with his Presbyterian friend Philip, Lord Wharton, he was prepared to encourage Charles II to exert ‘the Power inherent in You in Ecclesiasticall affairs by the Prerogative annext to Your Imperiall Crown’⁹—was not shared by Milton, as we shall see. At the beginning of the Cabal administration, with the High Church in retreat, Marvell was eager to work with the powers-that-be, whether the King or the Lords, to achieve a more comprehensive Church of England than the House of Commons would contemplate. Where Marvell favoured a more comprehensive but still national church, Milton early and late decried the very institution of a national church and the interference of the civil power in ecclesiastical causes. The difference between Milton and Marvell is more apparent still in 1673. It also found recognition at the time. Whatever the bitter prejudice of the Posse Archidiaconatus, which was quick to collapse any distinction between the two, the judgement now in another quarter was that Milton and Marvell were indeed quite distinct. In the year of the Indulgence, the Catholic Earl of Castlemaine recognized that The Rehearsal Transpros’d extended toleration even to his own religion, and accordingly celebrated it and its ‘witty, Masculine and most judicious Author’.¹⁰ His response to Marvell’s tract was ‘one of the first in print, and the first to be entirely positive’, whereas ‘towards Milton, Castlemaine displays only unremitting hostility’, perceiving the strict limits to ⁷ Nicholas von Maltzahn, ‘The First Reception of Paradise Lost (1667)’, Review of English Studies 47 (1996), 479–99. The February date is suggested by Simmons then also having Milton’s ‘Accedence commenced grammar’ to hand, which he needed to clear with the Stationers’ Company (5 Feb. 1667) since it might infringe on their monopoly on Latin grammars (London, Stationers’ Company, Court Book D, f. 127v , and also Waste Book 1661–68, f. 110v ); the licensing of the epic allowed Milton to contract with Samuel Simmons for its publication, 27 April 1667. ⁸ Journal of the House of Lords, n.d. 12.181. ⁹ Nicholas von Maltzahn, ‘Andrew Marvell and the Lord Wharton’, The Seventeenth Century 18 (2003), 256–7. In 1670, Marvell again shows an interest in the Lords’ efforts to qualify the Conventicles’ Bill with ‘a reserving clause for his Majestys ancient prerogative in all Ecclesiasticall things’, Andrew Marvell, Poems and Letters, 3rd edn., ed. H. M. Margoliouth and P. Legouis, 2 vols. (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1971), 2.104. ¹⁰ Roger Palmer, Earl of Castlemaine, A Full Answer and Confutation ([Antwerp], 1673), 10, 19.

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Milton’s ecumenism even in Of True Religion (1673).¹¹ And when Marvell a few years later published An Account of the Growth of Popery and Arbitrary Government, there is a notably antic quality to the ‘character of popery’ to which that tract turns after its constitutionalist introduction. Moreover, it makes that turn with an odd syntactic lurch, as if this whole character were but another passage of separate origin available for this assemblage (Marvell, PWAM 2.209, 227). Sharp as the wit is, it is still wit, and marks a hostility more against the Court of Rome than the Church of Rome, and most of all against France. To recognize the lesser animus of Marvell’s Account only requires comparison of that work with the much flatter denunciations of ‘popery’ from his contemporaries, or with the fiercer logic of Milton’s Of True Religion. Moreover, the Hobbesian logic of Marvell’s position, especially in The Rehearsall Transpros’d: The Second Part, has been tellingly contrasted with Samuel Parker’s thinking: Hobbes had made effective political authority a consequence of the decisions of self-interested individuals; his sovereignty was artificial and man-made. Parker was claiming, in a more conventionally Scholastic fashion, that political authority was a divinely-willed consequence of man’s natural sociability. Individuals were naturally born into societies, and under government.¹²

Marvell’s Hobbesian regard for the royal prerogative in matters of religion, whether in 1668 or in 1673, remained profoundly at odds with Milton’s distrust of any royal supremacy. As John Aubrey knew, even though Milton acknowledged Hobbes ‘to be a man of great parts, a learned man[,] Their Interests and tenets were diametrically [opposite,] did run counter to each other.’¹³ This was a fundamental difference. More generally, it marks Marvell’s prose of the 1670s as distinct from Milton’s example, even as he was in some part taking up the mantle that had fallen from Milton’s shoulders. Once more a poet with flair for lyrical and also satirical poetry was turning to works of his left hand. But Marvell’s emphases are different, and his style still more so. Milton’s high style, which controversialists like Samuel Butler found so vulnerable to their attacks, was now replaced by a coffee-house style of ‘à-lamode raillery’ more alert to competing interests, and backed by a Hobbesian conception that politics and even religion were interest-driven and in need of sovereign administration. ¹¹ Martin Dzelzainis, ‘Milton’s Of True Religion and the Earl of Castlemaine’, The Seventeenth Century 7 (1992), 53–69, 64, and Dzelzainis, ‘Marvell and the Earl of Castlemaine’, in Marvell and Liberty, ed. Dzelzainis and Warren Chernaik (Basingstoke: Macmillan, 1999), 290–312, 303. ¹² Jon Parkin, ‘Liberty Transpros’d: Marvell and Samuel Parker’, in Marvell and Liberty, ed. Dzelzainis and Chernaik, 269–89, 274. ¹³ Oxford, Bodleian Library, MS Aubrey 6, f. 63v .


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2 What then was Marvell’s religion that it had need of comprehension in an English national church or even toleration? Marvell is well-known for his hostility to High Church pretensions, which have been presumed to follow from Presbyterian allegiances as expressed in his satires and prose works of the Restoration. About this Marvell we know much, or think we do. Some fifteen years ago Willie Lamont described ‘The Religion of Andrew Marvell’ as a moderate Presbyterianism of the kind associated with the major moderate of the day, Richard Baxter, which in the Restoration sought Comprehension in a national church, this in disagreement with the Independents who insisted on a wider toleration. This was the so-called ‘Baxterian middle way’, which Lamont styled ‘a very clearly defined wing of Protestant nonconformity’. Against the interpretive uncertainties in which Marvell’s literary critics have long revelled, the historian Lamont confidently proposed that ‘we can learn what Andrew Marvell’s religion is’, especially by focusing on Marvell’s Short Historical Essay (1676) and the Remarks upon a Late Disingenuous Treatise (1678).¹⁴ Seeming to support Lamont’s argument was my later discovery of Marvell’s long cooperation with that important Presbyterian, the Lord Wharton, from 1660 to the end of Marvell’s life.¹⁵ Their shared purpose emerges in Marvell’s conspicuous parliamentary support in the fall of 1660 for the Worcester House Declaration,¹⁶ where the king favoured liberty of conscience, and continues to his later parliamentary intervention in the spring of 1677 against the Bishops’ Bill, which legislation sought to strengthen the episcopal hold on late Stuart politics. Lamont’s claims for Marvell’s religion have been skilfully elaborated by Neil Keeble in editing Marvell’s last tract from 1678, the Remarks upon a Late Disingenuous Treatise.¹⁷ ¹⁴ William Lamont, ‘The Religion of Andrew Marvell: Locating the ‘‘Bloody Horse’’ ’, in The Political Identity of Andrew Marvell, ed. Conal Condren and A. D. Cousins (Aldershot: Scolar Press, 1990), 135–56, 151, 137. Among those too ready to take Lamont at his word, see von Maltzahn, ‘Andrew Marvell and the Lord Wharton’, 252, 260. ¹⁵ Their association may already inform Marvell’s part in the debate on settling religion, 16 July 1660, where he sought with others to forestall further separate debate on church discipline, thus supporting at most an episcopal church without deans and chapters (Oxford, Bodleian Library, MS Dep. f. 9, 79v [Seymour Bowman parliamentary diary]); Wharton listed Marvell among his parliamentary ‘frends’ in 1660–2, and a few years after Marvell’s death might still recall him with affection as ‘a friend deceased’: von Maltzahn, ‘Andrew Marvell and the Lord Wharton’, 253, 257, 261. ¹⁶ Journal of the House of Commons, 8.191 (24 November 1660); Marvell, Poems and Letters, 2.6. ¹⁷ Marvell, Remarks, ed. Neil Keeble, in Marvell, PWAM 2.379–482. Keeble is also Baxter’s biographer (Richard Baxter: Puritan Man of Letters (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1982)) and editor, and has with Geoffrey Nuttall assembled an impressive Calendar of the Correspondence of Richard Baxter, 2 vols. (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1991).

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How far did Marvell need in the Remarks to be endorsing the position he there defends? Is he agreeing with the moderate Presbyterian John Howe, or is he just siding with him? Might he there and earlier have instead been seeking a roomier national church—not least at a time when a wider toleration seemed unlikely of political success—in which orthodoxy might prove less confining? And might not his apparent confessional solidarity with moderate Presbyterians exactly reflect the strategy, described over forty years ago by the historian Hugh Trevor-Roper,¹⁸ whereby free-thinking before the Enlightenment sought to protect itself against worse oppressions by consorting with Presbyterianism, or more widely Calvinism? Trevor-Roper memorably described the widespread phenomenon in which the free-thinking heirs of Erasmus, when threatened by the Catholic Reformation, made common cause with their stouter Calvinist brethren, wearing their ‘armour’ as he had it. In this view the Puritan Revolution proved retrograde, however, because it so polarized religious debate and political life. In short, the ‘armour’ might soon become a straitjacket. I cite the Trevor-Roper argument because the Marvell family begins to look like its living embodiment. This begins with Marvell’s minister father, the Revd Andrew Marvell (c.1585–1641). Marvell’s father matters to us because Marvell came in the 1670s to express views that strongly recall his father’s position, which he plainly meant to honour. The Revd Marvell senior proves a very interesting case indeed. He was a via media Church of England cleric, trained in the turn-of-the-century Cambridge that so fostered moderate Puritanism. By the 1630s, he was caught between a rock and hard place. The rock was the Laudian church. The hard place was the Hull church and especially its more radical component, who supported other ministers and lecturers in that town.¹⁹ Matters came to a head in 1638 when, after a long season of plague in Hull, the Laudian archbishop in York sought to reform the church in Hull. The church visitors plainly saw Marvell’s father as no eager agent of their reforms because he himself was in need of discipline. Even so, he struck the York officials as their best means of correcting the more radical church in Hull (von Maltzahn, Marvell Chronology, 22–7).²⁰ It may well be this episode that the poet Marvell later recalls at Appleton House, where in a Parthian shot, ¹⁸ Hugh Trevor-Roper, ‘Religious Origins of the Enlightenment’, in Religion, the Reformation and Social Change, 2nd edn. (London: Macmillan, 1972), 193–236. ¹⁹ We have from Marvell senior’s hand a list of complaints against those who challenged his ministry, Hull Central Library, MS ‘Sermons &c of the Rev. Andrew Marvell’ (Wilson-Barkworth volume), unfoliated. ²⁰ Ronald A. Marchant, The Puritans and the Church Courts in the Diocese of York, 1560–1642 (London: Longman, 1962), 262; Hull City Archives, Borough Records Miscellaneous (BRM), no. 166.


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turning away from his celebration of Fairfax’s garden, he opposes that place of ‘Conscience’ to ‘Th’Ambition’ of ‘proud Cawood Castle’, the archiepiscopal seat nearby, and ‘its Prelate great’ (‘Upon Appleton House’, 353–6, 363–6, in Miscellaneous Poems (1681), 88–9). Marvell was also proud to invoke his father in a later season of controversy, as an exemplary minister whose death before the Civil War and ‘Piety and Learning’ go far to consecrate his being ‘a Conformist to the established Rites of the Church of England’, as the younger Marvell was too. But Marvell then adds of his father that he was, ‘I confess none of the most over-running or eager in’ those established rites, and we may assume Marvell too shared in such restraint (Marvell, PWAM 1.241, 288–9). The moderation of the Revd Andrew Marvell followed from habits of learned free-thinking in the Erasmian tradition. His support for a more learned ministry in Hull and its surrounds appears from his proposal to start ‘a perpetuall Library for the Maister’ at the Charterhouse where he presided. This ‘good library’ would distinguish the port of Hull among the towns of the north and enable its churchmen ‘to deale in matters of Controversy, either to Confute an adversary, or to establish an irresolute staggerer’: ‘this will make the Schollers in and about the towne, still to live as it were in a Colledge, in the university, having the use of a library well furnisht’ (‘Sermons … of the Rev. Andrew Marvell’). He was prepared to dedicate his own books, collected at some expense, to this end. That his interests extended to Socinianism is indicated by the presence in the Revd Marvell’s papers of a translation into English of the heretical Racovian Catechism, this in his hand, it seems, and thus the first known English translation extant of that notorious proto-Unitarian document, one of the most scandalous works of the 1600s.²¹ Other of his writings show that Marvell’s father was no friend to the Athanasian Creed. He plainly shared the belief that it was ‘Romish and Popish’.²² One did not need to be Socinian even in a broad sense to have misgivings about the Athanasian Creed’s elaborate insistence on the tripersonality of Christ as an article of salvation. But it helped. My inference is that the moderate churchmanship of the Revd Marvell and of Andrew Marvell in the 1650s, -60s, and -70s was not designed to foster Presbyterian orthodoxy in a national church, but was directed toward emancipating Christian inquiry from institutional constraints deemed counter-productive to a free-thinking that was learned and pious, whether in the individual or in the fellowship of believers. From this perspective, feature ²¹ Bound out of sequence in ‘Sermons … of the Rev. Andrew Marvell’. ²² Quoted is the Socinian Paul Best, Journal of the House of Commons, 4.500 (4 April 1646), from Stephen D. Snobelen, ‘Best, Paul (1590–1657)’, in DNB; but many less exceptional figures shared the view, for example John Evelyn’s correspondent, John Beale, as noted in William Poole, Milton and the Idea of the Fall (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2005), 46.

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after feature of Marvell’s life and writings comes further into focus: whether his reverence for the ‘great Wit’ of that Erasmian moderate John Hales, whom he befriended while at Eton (1653–5) (Marvell, PWAM 1.130);²³ his parliamentary attempts to forestall the Restoration church settlement in 1660 and to contest it in later years; his relation to the Independent Calvinist John Owen in the Restoration but also Marvell’s rejection of the stringent Calvinism of Thomas Danson in 1678; his peculiar commitment in the Restoration to getting legislation for burning heretics off the books;²⁴ his anti-Athanasian position, which recalls his father’s. He knew he was not alone in his propensity for rational religion and joked about how readily latitudinarians in the Church of England—‘wheresoever the Inspection of Books is lodged’—might tolerate the printing of ‘Socinian Books’ which ‘sell as openly as the Bible’ (Marvell, PWAM 1.128). Marvell’s adversaries in the 1670s recognized his Socinian leanings, especially in the anti-Nicene Short Historical Essay appended to Mr. Smirke.²⁵ Calling an antagonist Socinian was no unusual insult in the 1670s. Marvell retorted the charge upon Samuel Parker in The Rehearsall Transpros’d: The Second Part: ‘No man can tell you truth but he must presently be a Socinian’ (Marvell, PWAM 1.396). Yet that the charge against Marvell might be not smoke but fire appears from the later ‘Socinian’ republication of Marvell’s Short Historical Essay, reprinted to cap a unitarian compilation in 1703, and printed again in a deist collection of 1709.²⁶ Moreover, Marvell was also the key figure in his beloved nephew William Popple’s intellectual formation. Popple, who after 1670 was based in France for twenty years, reveals in his writings a fascination with natural religion, coupled with a readiness to conform to Roman Catholicism in externals.²⁷ We should note that Popple was the first translator into English of Locke’s Letter Concerning Toleration (1689). His preface there famously insists on the need for ‘Absolute Liberty’ in religion, thus exceeding Locke’s own terms. Likewise in the 1690s, the early deist John Toland repeatedly quotes ‘the most ingenious ²³ Hales was conspicuously lenient in his view of ‘an Arian church’ in A Tract concerning Schisme (London, 1642), 10, a tract prized in The Rehearsal Transpros’d as well as its Second Part, Marvell, PWAM 1.130–5, 395–6; he had immediately been accused of Socinianism in the 1640s, e.g. Antidotes Against Some infectious passages in a Tract, concerning Schisme (London, 1642). ²⁴ See for example von Maltzahn, Marvell Chronology, 163, 183; Marvell, PWAM 2.72; Marvell, Poems and Letters, 2.192–3, 199. ²⁵ Simon Patrick, Falshood Unmaskt (London, 1676), 22–4; Jean Daillé, The Lively Picture of Mr Lewis Du Moulin (London, 1680), 9–10. ²⁶ Andrew Marvell, A Short Historical Essay (London, 1703), gathered into A Fifth Collection of Tracts (London, 1703); William Stephens, An Account of the Growth of Deism in England (London, 1709), 339–401. ²⁷ William Popple, A Rational Catechism (London, 1687); British Library, Add. MS 8888; Caroline Robbins, ‘Absolute Liberty: The Life and Thought of William Popple’, William and Mary Quarterly, 3rd ser., 24 (1967), 190–223.


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Mr. Andrew Marvell’, praising this ‘great Man’ as if a model for Toland as controversialist;²⁸ Toland was soon to surprise the world with his Christianity not Mysterious (1696). With Marvell’s father, Marvell himself, William Popple, John Locke and John Toland, and then those who later republish Marvell’s Short Historical Essay, we follow a path that leads from Erasmian religion, through Socinianism, toward deism. When we look at Marvell’s prose in the 1670s, it is easier to see what he is against than what he is for. This follows from the defensiveness natural to the controversialist, who does not wish to give hostages to fortune. We do know that in the Restoration Marvell conformed to the rites of the Church of England, at least outwardly, and took the oaths of conformity as required for his continuation in office as a Member of Parliament. He was also in the main tolerant of English Catholics, as Castlemaine acknowledged. But especially in his twin tracts of 1676, Mr Smirke and the Short Historical Essay, Marvell reveals himself to a surprising degree. He is against clerical power, hostile to Athanasius,²⁹ resents the proliferation of creeds, mocks the worldly interest expressed in church councils. He is very doubtful about the excessive claims made for the Holy Spirit, whether in the Nicene Council or since. His references to Socinianism are surprisingly equivocal, as if he meant to extend ‘the Latitude of Equivocation’ to himself.³⁰ He was too skilful an ironist to be caught out on this. But he is kind to Arius and perhaps even to Arianism; uneasy only about the clerical interest animating the Arian party.³¹ Marvell also still sees the magistrate as likely to be the best defender of liberty of conscience, with obedience to the magistrate given pride of place in the argument of the Short Historical Essay (Marvell, PWAM 2.168–71). This followed from his hopes of Charles II as a supporter of toleration against a reactionary House of Commons and a House of Lords in which the bishops sat. By contrast, the excesses of Archbishop Laud are in great part blamed for the English Revolution, as Marvell develops the line of argument in which moderate Puritans are seen as normative and the Laudian innovations of the 1630s as a characteristic piece of clerical overreaching.³² His hopes of the king led him to sometimes Hobbesian arguments about sovereignty and royal prerogative in religion. But the royal prerogative was to be exerted for liberty ²⁸ [John Toland,] A Letter from General Ludlow to Dr. Hollingworth (Amsterdam, 1692), iii; Slingsby Bethel (attr.), Ludlow No Lyar (Amsterdam, 1692), 7. ²⁹ See esp. Marvell, PWAM 2.19–21, 72–3, 75, 92, 134–5, 144. ³⁰ See esp. Marvell, PWAM 2.65, 76, 78, 82–3. ³¹ See esp. Marvell, PWAM 2.136, 140–2, 150. ³² This version of recent English church history had been promoted in The Rehearsal Transpros’d and its Second Part (1672, 1673), but is again the subtext in the Short Historical Essay (esp. Marvell, PWAM 2.128–9, 156, 160).

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of conscience, understood by Marvell as non-interference in others’ beliefs, a negative religious liberty, where we can agree to disagree.³³ When we do list what Marvell was for in his twin tracts of 1676, no elaborate theology emerges: ‘liberty of conscience’ he promotes, also humble service, moderation, the modest example of Gregory Nazianzen; fasting, prayer, piety, candour; a learned and disinterested clergy; peace in the church and the acceptance of conventicles, or unity rather than uniformity³⁴; the Apostles’ Creed; and an emphasis on the grace of ‘intensive’ rather ‘extensive’ faith, which spells doubt about complex doctrine like the Trinity, with telling reservations about the role of the Holy Spirit among the apostles or the first, Jewish Church.³⁵ The magistrate is to enforce a moderate and scriptural worship, in which the chief specification is only ‘that Jesus Christ is the Son of God’, which ‘would men even now believe that one thing thorowly, they would be better Christians, than under all their Creeds’ (Marvell, PWAM 2.67, 74). In this gentlemanly way of disarming clerisy, Marvell the minister’s son became an early and influential type of a significant English Enlightenment figure. As J. G. A. Pocock has observed, ‘At the end of the road, of course, lay Socinianism, to which the very logic of discussion seemed to point; but there were many stopping-places along the way, and the value of discussion was always that it might remain inconclusive, with Christian charity or enlightenment good taste taking the place of final commitment.’³⁶ Marvell might especially in his poetic satires transgress against the politeness later demanded of this gentlemanly ideal, but even if his ‘Poetick fury’ was held to ‘misguide his Pen’, his answer to what he variously termed the ‘Prelat’s Rage’ or ‘A Bishops Cruelty’ found high commendation.³⁷

3 Milton was less gentlemanly, especially where it came to Roman Catholics. The full title of Of True Religion in its boldest upper-case font advertises … what ³³ Annabel Patterson observes the limit on Marvell’s perhaps tactical Hobbesianism, Marvell, PWAM 1.212–13. ³⁴ See esp. Marvell, PWAM 2.118, 146, 159; 2.50, 170–1; see also his intervention in Parliament on behalf of the dissenters Hayes and Jekyll (von Maltzahn, Marvell Chronology, 120), and later his regard for Scots covenanters, Poems and Letters, 2.355–6. ³⁵ See esp. Marvell, PWAM 2.71 (and note), 76–7, 80–1, 88–9. ³⁶ J. G. A. Pocock, Barbarism and Religion, vol. 1: The Enlightenments of Edward Gibbon (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1998), 64. ³⁷ L. A. Davies, ‘An Unpublished Poem About Andrew Marvell’, Year in English Studies 1 (1971), 100–1: this anonymous poet sees Marvell enjoying a heavenly reward for deriding ‘A Princes Folly or Prelats Pride’. See also ‘Bermudas’ (l. 12) and Marvell’s epigram on Blood’s attempt on the Crown jewels (l. 8).


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best means may be us’d against the growth of POPERY. Famously he there derides the very term Roman Catholic as ‘a meer contradiction, one of the Popes Bulls, as if he should say, universal particular a Catholic Schismatic’ (TR, YP 8.422). But his strokes of wit are founded in his certainty that ‘Popery is the only or the greatest Heresie: and he who is so forward to brand all others for Hereticks, the obstinate Papist, the only Heretick’ (TR, YP 8.421–2). This has long perturbed those enlisting Milton as an apostle of toleration, who can stumble over his restriction, seek to excuse him on this point, or even perceive some softening of his stance at this late date.³⁸ But his logic in harshly defying Roman Catholicism bears emphasis, even as we learn of its part in Milton’s construction of Protestant nationhood.³⁹ What, after all, was this nation meant to defend? It was to be a bulwark against coercion in religion so that faith and works might bring the believer to salvation without risk of interference. Institutional interference, whether political or ecclesiastical or both, as with ‘popery’, jeopardized the community of believers needed for justification (saving faith) and sanctification (the resulting worship, good works) to be complete. Hence the sharp reservation against Roman Catholicism, of which confession Marvell proved so much more accepting. For Milton, the religious coercion he perceived as fundamental to that church followed from its reliance on secular rather than scriptural authority. The Roman Catholic commitment to a coercive institution prevents genuine communion and may preempt the saving experience of justification and sanctification. The Protestant commitment to sola scriptura invites toleration so that the dialogue of believers may fully contribute to salvation, since ‘God hath promis’d by his Spirit to teach all things’ (TR, YP 8.424). Hence Milton’s unwillingness to concede to the Church of England the role in contesting Roman power that was played, for example, by the Gallican church. This would be to harness religion for nation rather than for salvation, whereas nation remains for Milton a means, not an end. Conspicuous in Of True Religion is Milton’s refusal to endorse the institutional pretensions of the Church of England or Presbyterianism. Indeed he construes these as if another form of ‘popery’, for the true Protestant ‘disavowes all implicit Faith’—that is depending on others’ judgements in faith. Instead, Protestants must ‘on all occasions … give account of their Faith, either by Arguing, Preaching in their several Assemblies, Publick writing, and the freedom of Printing’ (TR, YP 8.426). We may recall Milton’s construction of the young Jesus’s intervention ³⁸ See Reuben Marquez Sanchez, Jr., ‘ ‘‘The Worst of Superstitions’’: Milton’s Of True Religion and the Issue of Religious Tolerance’, Prose Studies 9 (1986), 21–38. ³⁹ Elizabeth Sauer, ‘Milton’s Of True Religion, Protestant Nationhood, and the Negotiation of Liberty’, Milton Quarterly 40 (2006), 1–19.

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at the Temple, which opens into his mother’s belated revelation to him of the Annunciation, as a fundamental instance of scriptural discussion yielding Christian identity (Paradise Regained, 1.196–258). The theological positions he describes as contributing to the rich mix of Protestant religious liberty, including Lutheran, Calvinist, and Arminian, are nowhere linked to their denominational expressions. More theological than ecclesiological, these are all up for conscientious discussion. Moreover, a demanding rule of charity prevails against institutional constraints. Where we ‘charitably tolerate’ (TR, YP 8.426) and even ‘the hottest disputes among Protestants [are] calmly and charitably enquir’d into’ (TR, YP 8.424), no secular institution is to relieve us of the obligation to read and discuss scripture as the word of God. There is no refuge from the requirement of faith and worship. This is a much more strenuous and public religious observance than that demanded by Marvell’s more ethical and private emphases. The theological thrust is writ large in Milton’s De Doctrina Christiana as well as in the studious biblicism of Paradise Lost. Hence too Milton’s resentment of the Presbyterians’ ongoing struggle for comprehension in a national church, a far cry from the toleration he favoured. After Charles II was forced to revoke his Declaration of Indulgence, a comprehension may well have seemed to Milton a worse threat to his position than an under- or unenforced uniformity. The difficulty here is to see Milton’s case without too much submitting to the traditional historiography of Puritanism,⁴⁰ which has in considerable part been filtered through the lens of 1662 and Restoration religious settlement as codified in the Act of Uniformity, especially the widespread resignation of ministries it forced on Presbyterian incumbents on ‘Black Bartholomew’ (24 August 1662). That historiography has too often collapsed the sometimes very different interests of nonconformists. Moreover it has in some part cooperated with High Anglicanism in too much polarizing the spectrum of religious opinion, the strict binary reflecting the harshness of Restoration debate rather than contemporary efforts at compromise. Since the eighteenth century at least, it has puzzled commentators why Milton should in his Restoration publications remain hostile to Presbyterians. But it should be recalled that Milton had long shown no kindness to the Presbyterians. His History of Britain, published in 1670, reveals no warming of his regard for them. Its attack on their Westminster Assembly may have been excised from the History (the ‘Digression’) when it went to the press, but other waspish asides remain, conspicuously that lamenting ‘the Presbyters of our Age; who like well to sit in Assembly on ⁴⁰ Mark Goldie, ‘Roger Morrice and the History of Puritanism’, in Religious Identities in Britain, 1660–1832, ed. William Gibson and Robert G. Ingram (Aldershot: Ashgate, 2005), 11–14.


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the publick stipend’ (History, YP 5.116). In the Restoration, when Milton has been presumed finally to have a common cause with the Presbyterians, he seems instead to have viewed their sufferings as their just deserts for obstructing religious liberty, frustrating the English Revolution, and assisting the Restoration. ‘Martyrs bear witness to the truth’, he had often averred, ‘not to themselves’ (Eikonoklastes, YP 3.575). After Of True Religion, even as High Anglican reaction was encouraged by the success in overturning the Indulgence, Milton saw fit in republishing his Poems later in 1673 now to include his bitter sonnets impugning Presbyterians as well as that anti-Catholic cri de coeur, ‘On the late Massacre at Piedmont’ (CSP 342–3). There might be some doubt as to the target of ‘I did but prompt the age to quit their clogs’ (‘Sonnet XII. On the Detraction which followed upon my Writing Certain Treatises’, CSP 297), but Milton’s attack on Presbyterians was unmistakable in ‘A book was writ of late called Tetrachordon’ (‘Sonnet XI’, CSP 308), not least where he sneers at the barbarous dissonance of the Scots names of members of the Westminster Assembly. But it is the ferocity of his attack on Presbyterians in ‘On the New Forcers of Conscience under the Long Parliament’ that impresses most (Poems (1673), 69; CSP 298–300). Even as the end of the Cabal and the Earl of Danby’s rise to power occasioned the attempt at what may be thought a second Restoration with a renewal of the Clarendon Code, moderate Presbyterians might still hope to be joined with Anglicans, thereby becoming for Milton ‘new forcers of conscience’ under a new ‘long parliament’ (elected in 1661 and to be dissolved only in 1679). The next year appeared the second edition of Paradise Lost (1674), which revision allowed a more emphatic placement at the beginning of the twelfth book of the Nimrod passage with its republican thrust, the arrogation of political power now more conspicuously balanced against Michael’s description of the arrogation of spiritual power in the post-apostolic church, when ‘Wolves shall succeed for teachers, grievous Wolves’ (12.508). These forcers of ‘Spiritual lawes by carnal power’ are described by Milton as unbuilding God’s ‘living Temples, built by Faith to stand / Thir own Faith not anothers’; moreover Michael warns that ‘heavie persecution shall arise / On all who in the worship persevere / Of Spirit and Truth’ (12.521–33). So general is the condemnation of ‘Secular power’ in religion that it must be understood as a renewed attack on ‘popery’ in the widest sense, as intimated in Of True Religion. In these Restoration publications, Milton was airing grievances of earlier origin. His malice against Presbyterians in the late 1640s had been aggravated by their readiness to compromise with the imprisoned Charles, which backsliding Milton furiously denounces in the ‘Digression’ from The History of Britain, in The Tenure of Kings and Magistrates, in Eikonoklastes, and even in the Defensio. In the Tenure there is no mistaking his animus against those ‘bad men’ eager to

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collude with ‘Tyrants’, who only ‘would seeme good Patriots’ but are concerned only with ‘the intire advantages of thir own Faction’, given as they are to ‘levitie and shallowness of minde, or else a carnal admiring of that worldly pomp and greatness’ from which Charles I had fallen (Tenure, YP 3.190–1, 193). The tract finally cautions Presbyterians not ‘to belly-cheare in thir presumptuous Sion, or to promote designes, abuse and gull the simple Laity, and stirr up tumult, as the Prelats did, for the maintenance of thir pride and avarice’, lest they ‘be the Ministers of Mammon instead of Christ’, whom God would ‘root out’ as he did the bishops before them (Tenure, YP 3.241–2). The Tenure is in great part written against this ‘frustrated Faction’ of ‘our Adversaries’, which Presbyterians it instructs with arguments from earlier ‘Presbyterial’ authorities justifying resistance against tyranny (Tenure, YP 3.195, 198). Again in Eikonoklastes, Milton denounces the Presbyterian divines, or ‘wizzards’, as ‘no disciples of Christ, but of Iscariot’, who ‘had almost brought Religion to a kinde of trading monopoly’, even as they ‘comply with enemies in that wicked cause and interest which they have too oft’n curs’d in others’ (Eikonoklastes, YP 3.347–9).⁴¹ In later advising Cromwell or applauding Sir Henry Vane, Milton was no kinder to these ‘hireling wolves whose gospel is their maw’ (‘To the Lord General Cromwell’, 14, CSP 329); in 1659, he again sought in two tracts to forestall their success in what seemed a new season of opportunity after Cromwell’s death. Once Milton had arrived at the anti-Presbyterian views expressed in his sonnets of the 1640s, it is no wonder that his disgust should have deepened when Presbyterians then sought compromise with Charles I thereafter, even as that king or tyrant was eventually brought to the block. The question remains how soon Milton came to this view. When did his reaction set in against the Presbyterians with whom he had made common cause in the antiprelatical pamphlets of 1641–2? The change has long been associated with the Presbyterians’ censure of The Doctrine and Discipline of Divorce, first published in 1643 (George Thomason dates his copy 1 August), just as the Westminster Assembly had begun sitting. That work seems soon enough to have found a libertine audience, as Milton himself reports in addressing the second edition to Parliament and the Westminster Assembly ( Thomason, 2 February 1644); moreover, others had chosen to ‘rail’ against it ‘out of a waterish and queasy conscience because [they are] ever crazy and never yet sound’, claiming ‘that injury and licence is the best of this Book’ (YP 2.224–6). These dubiously conscientious judges may well be Assembly divines, although Herbert Palmer’s denunciation of the tract, as an example of the infamous consequences of toleration, came only in his sermon to Parliament later that ⁴¹ Milton develops the point in the second edition of Eikonoklastes.


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year (13 August 1644).⁴² The story then is of Milton’s bitterness at such betrayal by his sometime brothers-in-arms. The more sophisticated version of this story dwells on the ‘revolution’ in Milton’s thinking where, following the lead of parliamentary apologists of this date, he reconceives the relation of natural to divine law.⁴³ Hence the shock of Milton’s encounter with the rebarbative Westminster divines, unwilling thus to follow him in extrapolating from arguments in part their own, to which he reacted in part by trying to drive a nationalist wedge between the Scots Presbyterians and their English counterparts, not least his Smectymnuan associates of two years before. It would be easiest to follow Don Wolfe in redescribing the Smectymnuans as Independents,⁴⁴ but that they most definitely are not, even if Stephen Marshall might be many things to many men. How entirely had Milton made common cause with Presbyterians in the apparently Smectymnuan beginning of his career in prose? He himself distinguishes between his writing Of Reformation ‘to a Freind’, as its title declares, or ‘Amicum quendam’ as he reaffirms in the Defensio secunda, whereas the remaining antiprelatical pamphlets he wrote for love of truth (‘veritatis’) and sense of Christian duty (‘officii Christiani’) (Of Ref., YP 1.517; Second Defence, YP 4.622–3).⁴⁵ The implied friend is surely a Presbyterian in view of Milton’s comments on ‘the Discipline propounded’ and ‘this discipline we desire’ (Of Ref., YP 1.598, 605),⁴⁶ most likely his former tutor the Smectymnuan Thomas Young. But Milton may have had a more independent position than has commonly been assumed. In Of Reformation he is not yet performing the role he assumes in the remaining antiprelatical pamphlets, where he hastens to defend ‘certain eminent ministers’ (‘Ministros quosdam primarios’) whom he was later, when addressing a continental audience, reluctant to concede were in fact Presbyterians, lest they be confused with the ‘Presbyteriani quidam ministri’ accused of collusion with the tyrant Charles (Defensio secunda, 89, 92; Second Defence, YP 4.623, 626). Of Reformation is no very Presbyterian work: take, for example, Milton’s Aristotelian emphasis ‘that to govern well is to train up a Nation in true wisdom and vertue, and ⁴² Gordon Campbell, A Milton Chronology (Houndmills and New York: Macmillan and St Martin’s Press, 1997), 81. Palmer was as English as his name and an exceptionally moderate Presbyterian. ⁴³ This was the breakthrough of Ernest Sirluck, for which see esp. his introduction to YP 2.1–216, 52; compare Sirluck’s MA thesis on ‘Milton’s Political Thought: A Survey Preliminary to the Investigation of the Classical Influence’ (University of Toronto, 1941) and Ph.D. thesis ‘Milton and the Law of Nature’ (University of Toronto, 1948). ⁴⁴ Second Defence, YP 4.623 n. ⁴⁵ Joannis MiltonI angli pro populo anglicano defensio secunda (London, 1654), 89; Second Defence, YP 4.622–3. ⁴⁶ See also 1.546, 606.

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that which springs from thence magnanimity, (take heed of that)’ before he adds ‘that which is our beginning, regeneration, and happiest end, likenes to God, which in one word we call godlines’ (Of Ref., YP 1.571).⁴⁷ Its oratorical splendour does not enough mask its lack of more concerted argument, which Milton, had he been more Presbyterian, might have found much easier to generate. As an orator next on behalf of Smectymnuus, he then gained a fuller case to make. The question remains how soon, having at first attacked prelates, Milton came to see that ‘New Presbyter is but Old Priest writ large’, as when he later excoriated these latter-day Pharisees (‘On the New Forcers of Conscience under the Long Parliament’, 20, CSP 300). In the first version of ‘On the New Forcers of Conscience’ he associates them still more directly with William Prynne.⁴⁸ There was more than the Scots’ intervention to provoke his disaffection. Recent work by Sharon Achinstein has suggested that Milton might already in 1641–2 stand at a remove from the Presbyterians with whom he is so often associated and that his later break with them may have followed from his never having so entirely sided with them in the first place.⁴⁹ As Achinstein has it, we need to be more careful in assessing Milton’s allegiances at this date and in doing so ‘disentangle political ends from political means’. Her argument too accords with the Trevor-Roper thesis that more free-thinking dissidents, including Socinians, broadly or narrowly construed, and the Erasmian tradition on which they drew, might require ‘Calvinism, however intellectually reactionary, … [as] the necessary political ally of intellectual progress’, that when embattled they might don a Calvinist ‘suit of armour’ ( Trevor-Roper, ‘Religious Origins’, 234–6). Or a straitjacket, as it might prove. Milton would not be the first to find that the church so welcoming of the newcomer might prove less liberal once he was within it; the Smectymnuan association needed soon to be discarded. Although ‘intellectual progress’ toward toleration might also develop within Puritanism,⁵⁰ Milton was preparing for longer flight, and on the basis of that preparation was ⁴⁷ Richard Strier explores Milton’s assertion of the dignity of man in ‘Milton against humility’, in Religion and Culture in Renaissance England, ed. Claire McEachern and Debora Shuger (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1997), 258–86. ⁴⁸ John Milton, Poems: Reproduced in Facsimile from the Manuscript in Trinity College, Cambridge (Menston: Scolar Press, 1972), [48]. Prynne’s attack on ‘divorce at pleasure’ won Milton’s reproach in Colasterion (YP 2.722–4); as ‘a late hot Qurist for tithes’ he was still under the lash in Considerations Touching The likeliest means to remove Hirelings out of the Church in 1659 (56–7; YP 7.294). ⁴⁹ Sharon Achinstein, ‘Before Independency? John Milton in 1641’, MLA Convention, Philadelphia, 2004—I am grateful to the author for letting me see this in typescript. ⁵⁰ John Coffey, ‘Puritanism and Liberty Revisited: The Case for Toleration in the English Revolution’, Historical Journal 41 (1998), 961–85.


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capable of rapidly synthesizing fresh positions, as the divorce tracts show. Moreover, before and no doubt after his Italian trip, Milton was also keeping other less Calvinist company. For example, David Masson long ago proposed that it was John Hales of Eton to whom Milton owed his introduction to the Provost of Eton, Sir Henry Wotton, who cites ‘your said learned Friend’, ‘Mr. H.’, as one who might join them in dining there, were Milton to make some ‘farther stay in these parts’ (Sir Henry Wotton to Milton, 13 April 1638, YP 1.340).⁵¹ Milton seems in his years at nearby Horton to have benefited, as Marvell would later, from ‘having convers’d a while with the living remains of one of the clearest heads and best prepared brests in Christendom’, the John Hales whom Aubrey judged the first Socinian in England (Marvell, PWAM 1.130).⁵² It is not to be supposed that the reticent Hales need be entirely free with his views in such encounters, but Milton had plainly impressed that discerning scholar as suitable for introduction to his friend Wotton. An expansive sense that truth is discovered beyond the customary and orthodox animates Milton’s wide-ranging sympathies. By late 1644, Milton had faced enough of the reaction to the divorce tracts, and still more of the Stationers’ and Presbyterians’ work to renew prepublication licensing, to express his independence from those monopolists of truth in the memorable terms of Areopagitica. It is the logic of that work he is reported as having invoked when, faulted in 1652 for having licensed the Latin Racovian Catechism, he answered ‘yes, and that he had published a tract on that subject, that men should refrain from forbidding books; that in approving of that book he had done no more than what his opinion was’.⁵³ There is a consensus that Milton was no strict Socinian, nor were there many such doctrinaire heretics at this early date.⁵⁴ But his interest in such possibilities was already active and fearless. In the summer of 1652, Biddle’s translation of ⁵¹ John Milton, Poems (London, 1645), 71; David Masson, Life of John Milton, 6 vols. (London, 1859–94), 1.737–9. ⁵² Aubrey is thus quoted by Masson, who also describes Wotton’s character and reasonable theology, Life of John Milton, 1.528–31, 535–7. In addition to Clarendon’s elegiac recollection of such spirits at Great Tew, the milieu of Hales and Wotton is memorably evoked in Hugh Trevor-Roper, ‘The Great Tew Circle’, Catholics, Anglicans and Puritans: Seventeenth-Century Essays (London: Secker & Warburg, 1987, 1988), 166–230. ⁵³ J. Milton French, Life Records of John Milton, 5 vols. (New Brunswick, NJ: Rutgers University Press, 1949–58), 3.206. ⁵⁴ Dobranski, ‘Licensing Milton’s heresy’, in Milton and Heresy, ed. Dobranski and John P. Rumrich (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1998), 139–58; Michael Lieb, ‘Milton and the Socinian Heresy’, in Milton and the Grounds of Contention, ed. Mark R. Kelley, Michael Lieb, and John T. Shawcross (Pittsburgh: Duquesne University Press, 2003), 234–83. Dobranski seems unduly suspicious of the evidence, not least from Aitzema, on the point of Milton’s having licensed the Racovian Catechism; also too ready to take Christopher Hill’s word for Socinian (or Arminian) thinking ‘gradually merging with the ‘‘indigenous radical tradition’’ ’ (147), where the likes of John Hales are not to be found.

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The Racovian Catechisme appeared ( Thomason, 8 July), from ‘Amsterledam’ or perhaps somewhere nearer to London. For this work Milton and Marvell may have shared some regard as early as their meeting by the next February, 1652/3. How soon they were ready to acknowledge its interest each to the other remains uncertain. Milton had a talent for attracting younger friends, drawn to him, it seems, by his compelling freedom of thought, a liberty made the more attractive by the biblical and classical learning that sustained it. That Marvell was receptive we know; of how much and how soon remains unclear. But the strenuous engagements on which Milton insisted, early and late, and which carried him far in systematic theology as well as epic renarration of biblical history, are at a remove from Marvell’s more inflected, intricate, and intimate responses to such challenges. Their divergent ideas of toleration, which may be construed respectively as a positive and a negative conception of religious liberty, would be collapsed when later tradition made of Marvell Milton’s secretary and coreligionist. Milton’s poetry of course triumphed and only belatedly did Marvell’s encounter any like esteem, if still different in kind. But in the history of liberalism and the secular state, it is the position on toleration for which Marvell stands that has prevailed, or has done in the West. That has allowed an extraordinary freedom of religious inquiry but one perhaps also limited by the widely agreed concession of privacy, with narrowing expectations of conscience as an individual matter.

Part II Philosophical and Religious Engagements


6 Libertinism and Toleration: Milton, Bruno and Aretino James Grantham Turner Since therefore the knowledge and survay of vice is in this world so necessary to the constituting of human vertue, and the scanning of error to the confirmation of truth, how can we more safely, and with lesse danger scout into the regions of sin and falsity then by reading all manner of tractats, and hearing all manner of reason? And this is the benefit which may be had of books promiscuously read. (Areopagitica, YP 2.516–17)

Thinking about Milton and toleration has generally concentrated on religious diversity, the coercion of belief, or the expression of heterodox ideas (within Protestantism).¹ But questions of sexuality—regulation of marriage, sanctions against unchastity, censorship of erotica—haunt Milton’s discourse of toleration. The divorce tracts, most obviously, present sexual discontent as a crucial issue in the struggle for freedom and the rebuilding of a revolutionary male elite; they offer practical instances of toleration too, for example by suggesting that the wife’s adultery need not harm the marriage. In Paradise Lost, again, frank depictions of eroticism are flanked by polemics against those ‘hypocrites’ who deny Edenic sexuality or censor it behind ‘shows of seeming pure’. Fiercely as he defends chastity, Milton seems always ready to attack intolerance in the sexual realm. This chapter will focus on Areopagitica, where every instance of heterodoxy is matched by a parallel allusion to sexuality, even when describing scripture. ( The Licensing Order itself said nothing about bawdy writing, specifying the ¹ It would be redundant to document the absorption of Milton into the discourse of political history; outstanding examples are cited in the editors’ introduction and throughout this volume.

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danger as ‘defamation of Religion and government’ (YP 2.797).) The first step in Milton’s case for tolerating obscene sexual discourse—including Pietro Aretino, ‘that notorious ribald of Arezzo’, proscribed by the papal Index—is to demonstrate the futility of censoring not only books but talk, song, gesture, clothes, even the windows and balconies where lovers might flirt. But the heart of his argument involves, not the impracticality of censorship or the benefits of mere toleration, but the positive necessity of encountering unlawful sex in literary form—at least for the imagined community of ‘good’ readers whose sensibility lifts them ‘above the crowd’.² In the terms of the famous passage serving as my epigraph, Aretino provides a key instance of the ‘survay of vice’ that Milton identifies as not merely permissible, but ‘so necessary to the constituting of human vertue’ (Areop., YP 2.516). Much of what follows, then, will explore the implications of citing the ribald, pornographic Aretino in an argument ostensibly devoted to toleration of ‘all manner of tractates’ and ‘all manner of reason’ (Areop., YP 2.517). My most recent book drew on Milton’s theories of personal development to show the deep congruity between the scandalous hard-core writing of the period and the educational revolution for which it is justly famous; Aretino played a founding role in that libertine literary tradition. I already defined what I called Milton’s ‘ethics of confrontation’ in One Flesh, using key passages in Areopagitica, and here I develop one of his central ideas: that virtue is constituted by knowing forbidden sex as deeply as possible without actually doing it.³ Aretino’s writings, real and apocryphal, therefore offered precisely those ‘provoking objects’ or ‘objects of lust’ that typify the desirable plenitude of the world in Areopagitica, necessary for the unfallen Adam as much as for the warfaring Christian (Areop., YP 2.527). Immediately before the passage cited above, Milton condemns the ‘fugitive and cloister’d virtue’ of those who shun the hot, dusty struggle with vice, who fail to engage in ‘triall by what is contrary’ and to explore ‘the utmost that vice promises to her followers’ (YP 2.515). This conception of Aretino as the enlivening ‘contrary’, the epitome of a ‘salty’ obscenity that is beneficial and even necessary for the advanced reader, had been strikingly anticipated by another victim of Inquisitorial intolerance, Giordano Bruno, in the very dialogue for which he was burnt at the stake in 1600. I suggest in my first section that Bruno provides the essential link between Aretino and Milton, even though the English rebel never mentions the Italian heretic directly. Both Milton and Bruno propose that personal ² See Defensio secunda, CM 8.134 (‘supra vulgus’, in Milton’s explanation of the motives behind Areop.). ³ See James Grantham Turner, One Flesh: Paradisal Marriage and Sexual Relations in the Age of Milton (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1987), ch. 5.

Libertinism and Toleration: Milton, Bruno, Aretino

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growth depends on ‘contrariety’, and that the wise reader must therefore experience to the full the ‘ribald’ writings of libertines like Aretino. The editors of this volume seek to distance themselves from the anachronistic debate over whether Milton is good/progressive or bad/repressive, and to develop a specifically literary account of toleration. To clarify this process, I would like to identify three main ways in which toleration could be promoted. (1) De jure, it is achieved by campaigning for the abolition of legal strictures and the repression they encourage. (2) Theoretically, toleration is advanced by explicitly discussing the concept, developing an abstract language for that discussion, and formulating general principles that make it the basis of civilization. (3) But it is de facto or practical toleration that should interest the literary historian most. By this I mean admitting the proscribed into the sphere of discourse and representing it in a positive, empathetic light. Milton campaigned eloquently against repressive laws that affected himself, particularly after the divorce tracts were condemned, and I will show that he extends imaginative, ‘practical’ toleration to a range of erotic classics, as well as to the varied ‘tractates’ and ‘reasons’ of religious controversy. ‘The benefit of books promiscuously read’ mutates into the freedom to read promiscuous books—a freedom that becomes a right when cut off by unworthy censors. Milton’s use of the language of toleration, on the other hand, is more limited. Within Areopagitica, the word ‘tolerate’ entirely lacks the resonance it acquired in the Restoration. Peevish intolerance is duly mocked—for example in Plato, who appreciated libertine literature in reality but dreamed he could banish poetry from his theoretical republic (Areop., YP 2.522). But symmetry does not apply: intolerance may be condemned, but toleration is not thereby raised to a universal positive value, and often carries a belittling undertone. When Milton endorses Lord Brooke’s charitable view of the sectarians, he also labels them as misguided and distances them from ‘us’, the presumed circle of intellectuals and leaders. In the divorce tracts he urged readers not to blame those radicals, because their fervor can be explained as the result of pathological sexual frustration; now he condescendingly calls on Parliament ‘to tolerat them, though in some disconformity to our selves’ (Areop., YP 2.561). Differences among English revolutionaries ‘might be tolerated in peace’ because they amount to so little, because they should be defined as what St Paul called ‘things indifferent’ (2.563). At the time of writing, however, England was not ‘in peace’ but at war, that ‘speciall’ time when the Temple of Janus gapes open, the time that confers ‘priviledge’ on controversy (2.561). Milton’s most endearing plea for toleration is therefore hedged around with belligerent threats: when it comes to ‘neighboring … indifferences’ it is better that ‘many be tolerated, rather then all compell’d’; in contrast, we must

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ruthlessly ‘extirpat’ not only Roman Catholicism, the famous exception, but anything that Milton chooses to label ‘superstition’, ‘impious or evil’, ‘against faith or maners’ (2.565). In conspicuous contrast, he never suggests that libertine writing should be extirpated, however gross its offense to manners. The point of this preface is not to unmask Milton as intolerant, but to encourage a more complex view of the passions and interests that the issue of tolerance dredges up. I will focus on the third kind of tolerance, the practical, and on the sexual and corporeal aspects of reading. Making Milton a political and intellectual animal need not mean neglecting the ‘sensuous and passionate’. Considerable work has been done on the hermeneutics of reading and the ‘ontology of books’ in Areopagitica.⁴ I want to put the body back into this account of Milton’s ‘promiscuous’ reading, and into his furious intolerance of anything that prevents it.

1. Aretino, Bruno, and the Necessity of Ribaldry Pietro Aretino—the pen-name meaning ‘Peter from Arezzo’—appears in Areopagitica as a test-case for the futility of book-licensing, alongside Petronius a familiar example of the ‘infection’ emanating from evil courtiers that ‘infuses’ itself into the population despite anything that censorship can do. This stage of the formal counter-argument (‘First, is fear’d the infection that may spread’) begins with a typically aggressive reductio ad absurdum: ‘then all human learning and controversie in religious points must remove out of the world, yea the Bible it selfe; for that oftimes relates blasphemy not nicely, it describes the carnall sense of wicked men not unelegantly, it brings in holiest men passionately murmuring against Providence through all the arguments of Epicurus’ (Areop., YP 2.517). (Note how religious controversy morphs into ‘carnal’ sexuality within a single sentence.) Then follows the refutation of a further unspoken objection: Nor boots it to say for these [biblical and patristic writers], and all the heathen Writers of greatest infection, if it must be thought so, with whom is bound up the life of human ⁴ James Rovira, ‘Gathering the Scattered Body of Milton’s Areopagitica’, Renascence 57 (2005), 89. Rovira, like John D. Schaeffer in ‘Metonymies We Read By: Rhetoric, Truth and the Eucharist in Milton’s Areopagitica’, Milton Quarterly 34 (2000), 84–92, is still largely concerned with refuting earlier formulations by Stanley Fish and Lana Cable. Thomas Festa, ‘Repairing the Ruins: Milton As Reader and Educator’, Milton Studies 43 (2004), 35–63, includes a careful study of the reading process in Areop. (46–57 passim). Markus Klinge, ‘The Grotesque in Areopagitica’, Milton Studies 45 (2006), 82–128, continues the anti-Fish polemic by defining books as ‘daimons’ or ‘half-creatures’ (118), but cites Aretino only as a libeller and heretic, not as a ‘ribald’ and founder of sexual discourse (102, 126 n. 49).


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learning, that they writ in an unknown tongue, so long as we are sure those languages are known as well to the worst of men, who are both most able, and most diligent to instill the poison they suck, first into the Courts of Princes, acquainting them with the choisest delights, and criticisms of sin. As perhaps did that Petronius whom Nero call’d his Arbiter, the Master of his revels; and that notorious ribald of Arezzo, dreaded, and yet dear to the Italian Courtiers. (Areop., YP 518)

Strictly, Aretino illustrates only the transmission of oral corruption, conveying filth to the ear of Renaissance princes as Petronius did to Nero, and as Satan whispers into the ear of Eve to produce ‘inordinate desires’ (PL 4.808). Like Petronius, however, Aretino was famous as an author, a classic of depravity; indeed, his role as a courtier (satirized in his best-known comedy La Cortegiana) lasted only briefly, while he dominated print culture for many decades. Arguments in Areopagitica often do double duty, and I propose here that by implication Aretino also stands as an example of the depraved but vital discourse that must remain freely available to an elite readership. Aretino enjoyed a lurid reputation throughout Europe as an author of erotic practises and discourses, while in the English imagination Aretino was to sexuality as Machiavelli was to politics. He actually did write dialogues in the voice of prostitutes (literally ‘pornography’), and though his sonnets on the most explicit sexual engravings of Renaissance Italy circulated only in corrupt copies, his authentic letter on this exploit was published and widely read. In urban mythology, ‘Aretine’ invented and codified every sexual variant, and several familiar references in Ben Jonson’s comedies show how far he had penetrated the atmosphere. Corvino justifies prostituting his wife to the decrepit Volpone by contrasting him to: … some yong Frenchman, or hot Tuscane bloud, That had read Aretine, conn’d all his printes, Knew every quirke within lusts laborinth, And were profest critique in lechery. (III.vii.59–62)

And in The Alchemist Sir Epicure Mammon fantasizes about collecting, and performing, so many erotic postures that he will make Aretino seem ‘dull’ (II.ii.44).⁵ Knowledge of the Aretino-figure—and of Giordano Bruno—came closer to Milton when Thomas Carew staged his Court masque Coelum Brittanicum, the immediate precedent and perhaps antitype of his own A Masque. Carew dramatizes Bruno’s 1584 Spaccio della Bestia Trionfante, the very work that led ⁵ Ben Jonson, Complete Works, ed. C. H. Herford and Percy Simpson (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1937), 5.78, 319.

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to his prosecution and execution. Momus, the presenter of Carew’s masque, was probably also suggested by Bruno’s comedy Il Candelaio, which defines the necessary, revitalizing function of Momus in terms that anticipate Milton’s argument for confronting uncensored books: ribald mockery provides the ‘contrario’ that makes virtue ‘piu´ bella, manifesta e chiara’, ‘more beautiful, more manifest, more clear’; scurrility ‘confirms’ and ‘reinforces’ the good in Bruno, just as in Milton ‘the scanning of error’ leads to ‘the confirmation of truth’ (Areop., YP 2.516).⁶ In the Spaccio Bruno explicitly cites Aretino’s pornographic Ragionamenti in order to define a philosophical mode of reading that converts ribaldry into something like divinity. Following this hint, Carew’s Momus identifies himself as the follower of Rabelais and ‘old Peter Aretine’. As I show elsewhere, Momus’s ‘scurrilous infusion of bawdy double entendre contaminates and destabilizes the official doctrine of the entertainment—the reformation of a once-libertine Olympus, inspired by the virtuous marriage of Charles I and Henrietta Maria’.⁷ In any case, Milton saw himself as a European intellectual not a Little Englander, so even without these English sources he must be presumed familiar with Continental libertine and radical writings. He sought out the amorous classics as a youth, and on his Italian journey mingled in those free-thinking private academies whose members were categorized as (intellectual) libertini and in some cases persecuted or killed for their (sexually) libertine satires.⁸ Though he was less attuned to French culture, Milton could certainly learn about all the perversions of the libertins from the massively intolerant Father Franois Garasse, who like Thomas Edwards catalogued every transgression he could find, and more. To heat up the obscenity trial of the leading libertin Théophile de Viau, Garasse presents or invents a vast swarming conspiracy of atheists, priapists, and sodomites; this Jesuit treatise may have given Milton the image of a huge crowd of sceptics seeking to promote vagabond lust, such as those sons of Belial who ‘laugh broad’ at his divorce tracts or the chorus of ‘foolish tongues’ who jeer at God for placing Adam in a delicious Paradise and then allowing him to fall. Garasse denounces what he claims is a widespread doctrine, that ‘God and Nature put man in the world to enjoy its pleasures’ even more thoroughly than the animals do; Areopagitica insists that ‘many’ hold a similar opinion, that God is unjust for creating a ⁶ Giordano Bruno, Oeuvres complètes, vol. i: Chandelier, ed. Giovanni Aquilecchia and Giorgio Bárberi Squarotti, trans. Yves Hersant (Paris: Les Belles Lettres, 1993), 373. ⁷ James Grantham Turner, Libertines and Radicals in Early Modern London: Sexuality, Politics and Literary Culture, 1630–1685 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2001), 46. ⁸ Two examples discussed in my Schooling Sex: Libertine Literature and Erotic Education in Italy, France, and England, 1534–1685 (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2003), ch. 2, are Antonio Rocco and Ferrante Pallavicino, both from the Venetian Accademia degli Incogniti.


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libertine Adam then cruelly cutting him off from the pleasure that defines his existence (Areop., YP 2.527).⁹ Milton brought back a manuscript of the dangerous French-authored libertin tract Heptaplomeres, and in Florence the Academician Antonio Malatesti presented him with a manuscript of his own lewd sonnets, evidently responding to the English visitor’s interests. Moving in the circles he did, and priding himself on his solidarity with victims of Catholic intolerance such as Galileo, it is inconceivable that Milton would not have encountered Bruno’s as well as Aretino’s writings, by repute and probably in the original. Bruno’s embrace of Aretino began in the ‘Explicatory Epistle’ of the Spaccio, dedicated to Sir Philip Sidney (and therefore likely to be known to English literati). He defines himself as a ‘vulgar’ but ‘free’ speaker who refuses to ‘treat as shameful what Nature makes worshipful’ or ‘cover that which she reveals openly’, deliberately echoing Aretino’s naturalistic defence of his Modi sonnets, in a famous published letter.¹⁰ As Bruno spells out the hermeneutic principle that draws him towards the jocular mode, the literary equivalent of the coincidence of contraries that underlies his entire philosophical project, his focus shifts from authorship to reception. Confronted with ‘serious and jocose subjects’ mixed together, the reader must ‘think that all of them are equally worthy of being gazed upon through extraordinary spectacles’ (equalmente degni d’essere con non ordinarii occhiali remirati). Value, even ‘dignity’, derives from the reader’s capacity to synthesize from the entire range of subject-matter, to remirare or contemplate in repeated wonderment what is conventionally considered the most abject. And conversely the lewd and talentless reader can ruin even the most sacred truths: good people can ‘convert’ the utmost malignancy into something useful and beneficial, whereas at the opposite pole ‘i ribaldi’ can find ‘matter of scandal’ in the noblest subject—that is, the carnivalesque chorus of ‘ribalds’ who turn everything into comic mockery,

⁹ Franois Garasse, La Doctrine curieuse des beaux esprits de ce temps (Paris, 1623), esp. Book 6, chs. 6–7. See further my Schooling Sex, 44, 92–3, and Joan DeJean, The Reinvention of Obscenity: Sex, Lies, and Tabloids in Early Modern France (London and Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2002), ch. 1. ¹⁰ Spaccio, ‘Epistola Esplicatoria’, in Giordano Bruno, Dialoghi italiani: Dialoghi metafisici e dialoghi morali, ed. Giovanni Gentile, 3rd edn., ed. Giovanni Aquilecchia (Florence: Sansoni, 1985), 551; my translations make use of Bruno, The Expulsion of the Triumphant Beast, trans. and ed. Arthur D. Imerti (New Brunswick, NJ: Rutgers University Press, 1964), 71 (in subsequent references the Dialoghi citation is followed by the corresponding page in Imerti’s version). Bruno cites Aretino in many other places, but they are outside the scope of this essay.

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like the ‘ribald of Arezzo’ in Areopagitica or the Sons of Belial in the divorce tracts.¹¹ Bruno assumes, like Milton later, that ‘wicked’ material becomes the site of a hermeneutic contest over ways of seeing. The good observer ‘gazes and regazes’ through a special optic lens that converts turpitude into philosophical insight, while the ‘ribald’ turns everything into obscenity. In what is only a contradiction on the surface, the philosophical reader simultaneously repudiates and embraces the ribald. He establishes the greatest possible distance from the ‘vulgar’ but also playfully assumes, and subsumes, the wise folly of wantonness and the festive acceptance of everything—what we might call the carnivalesque model of tolerance. The ribald, like the scurra, performed a distinct social function as lewd jester-satirist, and the role could be assumed in an ‘Attic’ or Socratic spirit.¹² This was the principle behind the ‘Aretine’ character of Momus in Coelum Brittanicum, Carew’s adaptation for Court entertainment of one of Bruno’s most radical dialogues. Bruno’s praise of Aretino in the second dialogue of the Spaccio matches and exemplifies the process of reading recommended in his introductory letter, the ‘special optics’ that shift from the ribald to the enlightened perspective. The adept Saulino is surprised to hear, from Sophia or Divine Wisdom herself, that the gods’ public library contains the Priapea, popular romance, scurrilous poetry, and most notably ‘la Pippa, la Nanna, l’Antonia’—that is, the outrageously obscene Ragionamenti of Aretino. Sophia insists over Saulino’s protests that the true philosopher finds these texts ‘weighty and serious’, since ‘there is no reading-matter, no book’ that the gods exclude, provided it has some sale or ‘saltiness’. ‘Salt’ in this Priapic/Aretine context means salaciousness as well as Attic wit; readers familiar with Milton’s Sixth Prolusion and his Defences know how enthusiastically he promoted sales or displays of bawdy jocularity, provided they were couched in ‘elegant’ and ‘urbane’ Latin (Prolusiones, CM 12.238, 244).¹³ The divine mode of judgment (as opposed to that of the ‘common’ reader for whom these things are sinful, or the ‘ignorant’ scelerati who will derive ‘bad education’ from them) involves the aesthetic appreciation of creative mind at play: the gods ‘take pleasure in

¹¹ Spaccio, 555/74: ‘non e` cosa s´ı ria che non si converta in profitto ed utile de buoni; e non e` cosa tanto buona e degna che non possa esser caggione e materia di scandalo a’ ribaldi.’ ¹² For ribaldi as a social group, see Richard C. Trexler, Dependence in Context in Renaissance Florence (Binghamton, NY: Medieval and Renaissance Texts and Studies, 1994), 116–26; Milton combines ‘Scurra’ and ‘Ribald’ in one sentence in Animadversions (YP 1.732). ¹³ See John Milton, Latin Writings: A Selection, ed. John K. Hale (Assen: Van Gorcum; and Tempe, Ariz.: Medieval and Renaissance Texts and Studies, 1998), 12, 88 n. 20, 89 n. 77, 93 n. 84, and my ‘Milton among the Libertines’, in Christophe Tournu and Neil Forsyth, eds., Milton, Rights and Liberties (Berne: Peter Lang, 2007), 447–60.


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the multiform representation of all things, and in the multiform fruits of all kinds of genius’, the frutti moltiformi de tutti ingegni (Spaccio, 673–4/159–60). Sophia’s remark might seem like a facetious digression, but when Saulino earnestly presses her to exclude books written by ‘infamous, dishonorable, and dissolute’ authors she praises their ‘educational’ value as ‘fruits of cognition’ in the highest philosophical language. As Milton would later do, Bruno couples a vivid practical example of toleration—Aretino’s rude but ‘salty’ dialogues—with a theoretical justification, couched not as a matter of abstract rights but as an opportunity for personal growth in the reader. Both authors propose an interactive and transcendent model of reading based upon ‘trial by what is contrary’. Scurrilous writings, Sophia explains, teach ‘how laughter is set in motion, how disgust, pleasure, nausea; and in all there is wisdom and providence, and in everything there is everything, and where one contrary exists there the other exists to the utmost, each generating the other to the utmost’—massime è l’uno dove è l’altro contrario (Spaccio, 674/160). Already in the first dialogue she had proposed a full-blown theory of contraries, preparing for this account of ‘divine’ reading. ‘Wherever there is contrariety there is action and reaction, there is movement, there is diversity’ (Spaccio, 573/90–1). L’aumento e la perfezione, growth and perfecting, come from experiencing the clash of passions that include the most powerful erotic feelings: ‘the state of venereal ardor tortures you, the state of spent lust saddens you, but what satisfies in this is the transition from one state to the other’ (Spaccio, 571/89). As later in Milton, true reading must involve working emotions and not merely cerebral judgements. The dynamic, mutually maximizing, exchange of ‘contraries’ requires il riso, il fastidio, il piacere, la nausea—the full range of passions and gut reactions from delight to revulsion. It is tempting to discover in Bruno’s account of ‘growth and perfecting’ the core of Milton’s argument against repression in Areopagitica, the haughty assurance that ‘God sure esteems the growth and compleating of one vertuous person, more then the restraint of ten vitious’ (Areop., YP 2.528). Milton’s theories of passionate reading and ‘trial by what is contrary’ seem, then, to be powerfully foreshadowed in Bruno. And Bruno, again like Milton, applies vitalistic criteria to determine the ultimate value of discourse: the goddess Isis commends the ‘vive voci’ of those who worship divinity in Nature, in contrast to the ‘vane fantasie’ of false, conventional religion.¹⁴ Areopagitica likewise exalts the goddess Isis as the paradigm of active truth-seeking. Milton and Bruno both explicitly cite Aretino, as a prime example of carnal writing ¹⁴ Spaccio, 602/109, 778/237; for a fuller account of Bruno’s theology here, see my Libertines and Radicals, 45 (which includes an earlier version of the previous paragraph).

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‘bound up with the life of human learning’, writing that should not merely be tolerated, but positively and necessarily embraced as part of one’s ‘bold accustoming’ or ‘growth and compleating’. Both authors establish an elitist and ascetic morality on the principle that one must know wickedness to the utmost, emotionally as well as abstractly. Both authors argue for total exposure to dangerous representations, using many of the same concepts—the divine plenitude of the world, the interconnection of contraries, the intrinsic value of ‘living words’ even when their subject is notoriously ribald.

2. ‘That notorious ribald of Arezzo’ in Milton’s Argument for Toleration With this context in mind, we return to the specific moment in Areopagitica where Milton evokes the ‘notorious’ Pietro Aretino. What motivates this citation, and what work does it do in the evolving treatise? At first glance Aretino does seem to be marginal to the argument against book-licensing, a parallel instance of the futility of censorship showing how wicked ideas flow into the country orally rather than through the print medium. Thus ‘all the contagion that foreine books can infuse’—a vivid metaphor of pathological liquefaction that mingles with images of sea-borne imports—will ‘find a passage to the people’ via the ‘Courts of Princes’ and their corrupt Masters of the Revels (Areop., YP 2.518). And this will happen even if the press is severely ‘gagged’ and the wickedness is couched in a foreign language. Oddly, Milton’s third example after Petronius and Aretino is Sir Francis Bryan, a licentious courtier of Henry VIII who presumably poured out his poison in English, making him tangential to the point being refuted. By juxtaposing Aretino and specifically English Court officials Milton sacrifices his argument to the war effort, losing no chance to discredit the Cavalier festivities of Whitehall. On this local level he may be sniping at a specific target, the Court masque in which Carew exploited Bruno and ‘Peter Aretine’ for tainted royalist purposes. Bryan (identified only by his nickname ‘Vicar of Hell’) seems anomalous in this group, but common sexual associations link them; perhaps Milton is thinking of Petronius and Aretino as procurers of lewd fiction and Bryan as the pimp of his cousin Anne Boleyn. But what does Milton mean by this ‘contagion’, ‘poison’, or ‘infection’? What is the test-case or chief exemplum on which the fight against censorship takes its stand? Milton seems unclear whether he is principally concerned with unorthodox religious ideas or with dangerously arousing sexual representations. The case of pornography keeps bobbing up just when he seems to be launching a theological or intellectual point. The Aretino allusion comes in


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just such a double-focused passage. Milton is triumphantly defending ‘the benefit which may be had of books promiscuously read’, having just invoked (or recreated) Spenser’s Bower of Bliss episode as the supreme example of moral teaching, and having just declared that ‘the knowledge and survay of vice’ is absolutely ‘necessary to the constituting of human vertu’ (Areop., YP 2.516). He tries to maintain his rationalist focus on ‘human learning and controversie in religious points’, but immediately starts pointing out that the Bible itself ‘describes the carnall sense of wicked men not unelegantly’ and that the Church Fathers ‘transmit our ears through a hoard of heathenish obscenities’—a weirdly inverted phrase that has ‘our ears’ traveling ‘through’ the sexual world of antiquity described in such detail by Clement and Eusebius (2.517–18). In Milton’s short list of dangers presented by the Bible and the Church Fathers, blasphemy, Epicurism, obscurity, and heresy feature once each, but ‘carnal’ and ‘obscene’ sexuality four times; the ‘modest’ mention of the Talmudic Keri or euphemism is also associated with hard-core sexual reference, as becomes clear in Pro Se Defensio when Milton cites it again to justify ‘plain-speaking obscenity’ in his own attacks on Alexander More (Areop., YP 2.517; Pro se defensio, CM 9.110). We must not distort the meaning of ‘books promiscuously read’ by automatically supplying the modern, sexual meaning, but Milton’s examples reveal it lurking there nonetheless. ‘Promiscuous’ in Milton’s later verse might refer only to the mingling of large crowds, but in the hot-headed Areopagitica it certainly evokes orgies both physical and verbal: the Spartans might have banished Archilochus ‘for his broad verses’—a very rare case of censorship in the enlightened ancient world—but if so this only shows their hypocrisy and barbarity, since ‘they were as dissolute in their promiscuous conversing; whence Euripides affirmes in Andromache, that their women were all unchaste’ (Areop., YP 2.496). In his review of Classical censorship, Milton also stresses the lack of legal action against opinions ‘tending to voluptuousnesse’ such as ‘that libertine school of Cyrene’, denies that Ovid was really banished for his ‘wanton Poems’, and explodes the rigid laws of Plato’s Republic by citing Plato’s own liberal taste in erotic literature. Not only did Plato write ‘wanton epigrams and dialogues’ himself, but he constantly read Sophron Mimus and Aristophanes, ‘books of grossest infamy’. Aristophanes in particular—described as not only libellous but ‘the loosest of them all’, an obvious reference to sexual licentiousness—was valued so highly by Plato that he recommended him as essential reading for the ruler Dionysius. In the early Christian era, Chrysostom borrowed Aristophanes’s ‘scurrilous vehemence’ for his sermons, Jerome enjoyed ‘scurrill Plautus’, Basil appreciated the ‘sportfull Poem’ Margites (Areop., YP 2.494–6, 499, 523). Milton aligns himself with this alternative, non-repressive history, which involves cultivated appreciation of a low and

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frequently bawdy canon, and his vocabulary should not be interpreted as negative: in the controversy with More, Milton happily accepted the accusation of ‘scurrility’ since Socrates, the wisest oracle, had been called the Scurra Atticus (Pro se defensio, CM, 9.104; cf. Defence of Himself, YP 4.723). He even seems to exaggerate the ‘trash[iness]’ of this classical bawdy in order to savor its contradictory pleasures all the more, like Bruno’s gods. In this context, the dismissive-seeming reference to the ‘notorious ribald of Arezzo’ actually conveys a certain prestige. Aretino is ushered in with Petronius immediately after an august group of Church Fathers headed by St Jerome, who ‘discover more heresies than they well confute, and that oft for heresie which is the truer opinion’; he is thus placed among foundational writers from whom sovereign truths might be derived by reading against the grain. Aretino, Petronius, and Jerome are bracketed together by the phrase ‘these, and all the heathen Writers of greatest infection’ (Areop., YP 2.518). (Heathen, for the Protestant Milton, applied to modern Italians, to those who write about ‘heathenish obscenities’, and even to secular romances by other Protestants; Sidney’s Arcadia, cited in Areopagitica as the quintessential erotic text that censors long in vain to suppress, is denounced in Eikonoklastes as a ‘Heathen fiction’ as well as a ‘vain amatorious Poem’ (Eikon., YP 3.362).)¹⁵ This ‘heathen’ company confirms Aretino’s cultural clout, in fact: the Imperial adviser Petronius represents the ancient world, Henry VIII’s ‘finest’ courtier represents England,¹⁶ and between them sits enthroned ‘that notorious ribald of Arezzo, dreaded, and yet dear to the Italian Courtiers’. Though Milton degrades him with the title ‘ribald’ he also recognizes the ‘dread’ that Aretino could strike. He endorses the Italian writer’s proud claim to be the ‘Flagellum Principum’, the satyr whose bold sexuality makes him the fearless critic and ‘Scourge’ of princes rather than the sycophantic courtier.¹⁷ Milton’s bracketing-act itself hesitates between condemnation and canonization: the full phrase reads ‘the heathen writers of greatest infection, if it must be thought so, with whom is bound up the life of human learning’ (italics mine). Not only does he put the entire concept of ‘infection’ into doubt, but he positively asserts that Aretine pornography is ‘bound up with the life of human learning’. The designation is both vitalistic (‘life’) and intellectual (‘learning’). Bruno’s Isis had defined ‘living words’ as the ideal point where the human and ¹⁵ Cf. RCG, YP 1.812 (what the poets of ‘modern Italy … did for their country, I in my proportion with this over and above of being a Christian, might doe for mine’). ¹⁶ As Milton’s source Davanzati calls Sir Francis Bryan, according to the translation in Areop., YP 2.518 n. ¹⁷ This is the aspect of Aretino that Raymond B. Waddington brings out in his important book Aretino’s Satyr: Sexuality, Satire, and Self-Projection in Sixteenth-Century Literature and Art ( Toronto and Buffalo: University of Toronto Press, 2004).


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the divine meet, and Milton uses a similar life-based imagery for the discourses he most appreciates. ‘Bound up with the life of learning’ recalls the famous definition of good books as ‘the pretious life-blood of a master spirit’ (Areop., YP 2.493). Almost all Areopagitica’s metaphors for deep-experiential reading involve transformations of the living body that refine or concoct low-grade material into a valuable elixir, antidote, or seed, and all these physiological tropes tend towards the master-metaphor of sexual arousal, insemination, and propagation—the effects of ‘not unelegant’ representation of ‘carnal sense’. Milton rejects metaphors of the unhealthy body (toxic ‘transfusion’ of body fluids, feverish ‘infection’) in favor of the ‘heat’ of ‘triall’ (Areop., YP 2.515), the ‘tempering’ of drugs, and the state of alertness associated with procreative arousal. His vitalistic arguments for ‘promiscuous reading’ set up his depiction of revolutionary England as a kind of phallic androgyne, ‘piercing’ and ‘sinewy’, ‘pregnant’, ‘puissant’, ‘rousing herself like a strong man’, not ‘drooping’ but ‘erected’ by ‘the issue of [Parliament’s] vertu propagated in us’ (Areop., YP 2.551, 554, 557–9). The most striking example is his vision of the canon as a sperm bank where books that ‘contain a potencie of life in them … do preserve as in a violl the purest efficacie and extraction of that living intellect that bred them’, so that their ‘pretious life-blood’ will not ‘spill’ (Areop., YP 2.492–3)—words blazoned on many a nineteenth-century public library. Milton seems aware of something scandalous in the image, for he immediately breaks off to proclaim his innocence, ‘lest I should be condemn’d of introducing licence, while I oppose Licencing’ (Areop., YP 2.493). Milton confirms the positive element in his account of Aretino and Petronius when he describes them sharing with their fellow courtiers ‘the choicest delights and criticisms of sin’ (Areop., YP 2.518). This very suggestive phrase refers not to hostile critiques but—as I put it in Schooling Sex —to ‘sin evaluated, selected, and stylishly enhanced by critical intelligence’ (50). Milton seems here to cite another dramatic allusion to the mythic Aretino, author of every imaginable sexual perversion: we recall that the jealous husband in Jonson’s Volpone feared the student of Aretino who has mastered ‘every quirk within lust’s labyrinth’, and so graduated to the rank of ‘professed critic in lechery’. Aretino’s libertine discourse represents not just life but choice, the central tenet in Areopagitica, whose ethics of freedom derive from the principle that ‘reason is but choosing’ (Areop., YP 2.527). ‘Choicest delights’ arranged according to a libertine canon of taste correspond precisely to what is alluring about the Bible itself, which describes sexuality ‘not unelegantly’. Petronius is the Arbiter Elegantiarum. Milton frequently flatters his presumed reader as ‘elegant’, to establish the elite credentials that unite speaker and audience against the common crowd; Reason of Church Government appeals to ‘the elegant & learned reader’ over the heads of the controversialists, and Parliament

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in Areopagitica itself is assumed, improbably, to ‘imitate the old and elegant humanity of Greece’ (RCG, YP 1.807; Areop., YP 2.489). Milton describes his own sexual bantering as ‘elegans’ or ‘urbanitatis elegantulae licentia’ (Pro se defensio, CM 9.112; Prolusiones, CM 12.218); he also used elegantius frequently in his annotations on Euripides, according to Thomas Festa.¹⁸ ‘Elegance’ in Milton retains its etymological connection with choice, for good or evil, as well as its epicurean tang. Adam’s first fallen speech in Paradise Lost, for example, begins, ‘Eve, now I see thou art exact of taste, / And elegant’ (PL 9.1017–18) but this does not mean that the term is intrinsically tainted: by a ghastly irony, Adam echoes that intensely—and innocently—sensuous moment in Book 5 when Eve is planning lunch, deliberating, ‘What choice to choose for delicacy best, / What order, so contrived as not to mix / Tastes, not well joined, inelegant’ (PL 5.333–5). I am suggesting, then, that the evocation of Aretino and his ‘choicest delights of sin’ is not incidental but central to Areopagitica—to its ‘ethics of confrontation’ and to its homeopathic theory of reading. Aretino represents the superlative degree of sexual discourse, and sexuality represents the quintessential test-case of temptation because its knowledge is inescapably carnal, ‘stirring’ the body in a way that mere ideas cannot do.¹⁹ ‘Choicest delights’—the programmatic enhancement of pleasure to the maximum—are virtually synonymous with ‘the utmost that Vice promises to her followers’. Libertine reading is thus essential for any ‘warfaring Christian’ or Red Cross Knight who wants to achieve deep ‘apprehension’ of sin and avoid superficial or childlike knowledge, ‘fugitive and cloister’d vertue, unexercis’d and unbreath’d’ (Areop., YP 2.515). In short, Aretino is the Bower of Bliss. Milton’s metaphors of good and bad reading cannot of course be confined to erotic arousal, but they slide in that direction. Thus the maxim ‘that a wise man like a good refiner can gather gold out of the drossiest volume, and that a fool will be a fool with the best book’, becomes ‘a wise man will make better use of an idle pamphlet, then a fool will do of sacred Scripture’, because to the good reader ‘such books are not temptations, nor vanities, but usefull drugs and materialls wherewith to temper and compose effective and strong med’cins’ (Areop., YP 2.521). The medical image that replaces the metallurgical is not sexual per se, but sexuality is its active ingredient. Milton gives as his example of a necessary ‘material’ or ‘working minerall’, not brilliant heresy or unpalatable truth, but ‘idle’ tempting dross—clearly in the same category as the ribald ‘trash’ of Aristophanes that Plato nevertheless considered splendid ¹⁸ Festa, ‘Repairing the Ruins’, 38. ¹⁹ Cf. the thirst for knowledge that ‘God hath stirr’d up’ (Areop., YP 2.554). The following point is closely related to my Schooling Sex, 51.


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reading (Areop., YP 2.521). In seventeenth-century usage the innocuous word ‘idle’ (like ‘loose’, ‘broad’, or ‘wanton’) denoted lewd content rather than mere frivolity; the ‘Root and Branch’ petition, for example, went straight from ‘whoredoms and adulteries’ to ‘lascivious, idle, and unprofitable books and pamphlets’, naming as their example the bawdy Parlament of Women.²⁰ In Milton’s medical metaphor the reader’s own body is the laboratory: homeopathic ‘tempering’ cannot happen without ‘working’, a particularly virtuous transformation when the text is ‘idle’. In the context of Petronius and Aretino, wanton poems and elegant obscenities, ‘working’ must mean some kind of internal, erotic response to an aphrodisiac representation, some experience of passion that can then be converted into virtue by refusing to indulge it to ‘the utmost’. Paradise Lost provides the exact Latinate equivalent of this erotic-pharmaceutical ‘working’ when Adam and Eve eat their fill of the fruit: they hallucinate sprouting wings, but soon feel the drug’s true ‘operation … / Carnal desire enflaming’ (9.1012–13). These implications and associations become entirely explicit in the famous passage where Milton moves from sexual representation to the emotional condition of Adam in paradise: Wherefore did [God] creat passions within us, pleasures round about us, but that these rightly temper’d are the very ingredients of vertu? … Banish all objects of lust, shut up all youth into the severest discipline that can be exercis’d in any hermitage, ye cannot make them chaste, that came not thither so. (Areop., YP 2.527)

God Himself demands ‘continence’ and chastity among other virtues, yet deliberately places Adam and all his descendants in a voluptuous world—indeed, wantonly ‘powrs out before us ev’n to a profusenes all desirable things, and gives us minds that can wander beyond all limit and satiety’ (Areop., YP 2.528). In this extraordinary portrayal of the human condition, ‘objects of lust’ form the crucial pivot between the ‘passions within’ and ‘pleasures round about’, the profuse display of ‘all desirable things’ and the mental urge to transgress not only ‘limit’ but ‘satiety’ itself. Milton makes thought sound like libertine sex, an endlessly escalating sequence of intensities, pushing pleasure to ‘the utmost’ and beyond. This illustration of unlimited passion, which juxtaposes ‘lust’, greed for treasure, and unbounded mental fantasy, once again suggests the stock figure of Aretino. The dizzy possibilities of desire that must be known to the full before abstaining—what Jonson called ‘every quirk within lust’s labyrinth’ and Milton calls ‘the utmost that Vice promises to her followers’—sound like the sensual speculations of Sir Epicure Mammon, ²⁰ Cited in my Libertines and Radicals, 88; unlike Milton, of course, the petitioners sought to stamp this sort of thing out completely.

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who imagines that with his new wealth he will surround himself, literally, with every conceivable pleasure including the erotic postures and sensations that ‘dull Aretine/But coldly imitated’.²¹ But where Jonson satirized this urge, Milton—like Bruno before him—exults in this vision of a cornucopian providence, a deity who appreciates ‘the multiform fruits of all kinds of genius’ and encourages virtuous engagement with the full gamut of the passions. ‘Passion’ must not simply be equated with sexual desire, I realize. Scholars like Michael Schoenfeldt and Victoria Kahn have greatly enhanced our understanding of ‘the passions in general’ and Milton’s sense of their essential complexity.²² Within Areopagitica, the category ‘passion’ includes intellectual craving for knowledge, miserly longing for wealth, and even political indignation of the righteous kind: Milton’s tract begins by asserting that the excitement of addressing Parliament ‘hath got the power within me to a passion’ (Areop., YP 2.487). But the sexual meaning is both the prototype and the predominant instance, here as in Paradise Lost. When Adam recounts his wedding night to Raphael in Book 8 he identifies an emotion quite different from any other delight in sensory things: ‘here passion first I felt, / Commotion strange’ (PL 8.530–1). All other pleasure, in contrast, ‘works in the mind no change’—another confirmation that the archetype of internal ‘working’ is erotic desire (PL 8.525). In the epic the word passion is hedged in by Raphael’s somewhat obtuse moral condemnation, but this passage of Areopagitica explicitly evokes Adam in paradise as the supreme example of the necessity of temptation and the divine genesis of passion. Even in the unfallen state freedom means reason, reason means choosing, and choosing is meaningless without experiential engagement of those ‘passions within us’. If God had exempted Adam from sexual desire (or implanted it only after the fall) he would have been, in Milton’s famous phrase, ‘a meer artificiall Adam, such an Adam as he is in the motions’, a mere wooden puppet or empty simulacrum. Let me emphasize again that this scene of Adamic testing occurs in a string of allusions to libertine and erotic encounters. It comes shortly after polemic against the futility of licensing ‘wanton … dialogues’, ‘wanton garb’, the illicit conversations of ‘our youth, male and female together’, serenades on balconies, guitars, windows, ²¹ Alchemist, II.ii.44–5. Jonson’s character-name reminds us that this passage in Areop., going rapidly from the desires of the miser to those of the unchaste, replicates in miniature the Spenserian sequence he cites earlier, from the Cave of Mammon to the (Epicurean) Bower of Bliss. ²² Schoenfeldt, ‘ ‘‘Commotion Strange’’: Passion in Paradise Lost’, in Gail Kern Paster, Mary Floyd-Wilson and Katherine Rowe, eds., Reading the Early Modern Passions (Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 2004), 43–67; Kahn, Wayward Contracts: The Crisis of Political Obligation in England, 1640–1674 (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2004), esp. 197–222.


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‘all the airs and madrigalls, that whisper softnes in chambers’, and all the ballads that serve country folk as their ‘Arcadia’s’ (Areop., YP 2.523–6). The whole of material culture, in this brilliant satirical catalog, becomes a machine for producing ‘objects of lust’—so that when that phrase appears in the Adam sequence it renders explicit what was already a running theme. God not only left Adam free, but deliberately ‘set before him a provoking object, ever almost in his eyes’ (Areop., YP 2.527). The semantic history of ‘provoking’ is virtually the reverse of ‘promiscuous’, and in this context ‘provoking object’ would certainly denote an aphrodisiac for the seventeenth-century reader. Is this the forbidden apple, or is this Eve herself, whose first appearance in Paradise Lost spectacularly reasserts the innocence of the word ‘wanton’? Passion in its ‘utmost’ form—‘poured out’ in a series of ‘provoking objects’ that comprise ‘all desirable things’—is therefore not merely harmless or acceptable but constitutively ‘necessary’ for the supercharged kind of virtue now being ‘manifested’ and ‘propagated’ in Civil War London. And it is particularly requisite for the author, who must produce his test-tubes of ‘precious life-blood’—not to mention giving birth to ‘the issue of the brain’, explicitly paralleled with ‘the issue of the womb’ (Areop., YP 2.505)—without actually breaching continence. Well-known autobiographical passages elsewhere in Milton’s early prose make it abundantly clear that reading the erotic text provided Milton with the crucial testing-ground, where he could experience sexuality to the utmost (with all its fuel, allurement, desire, infusion, and incitement) while keeping himself above it.²³ In the Doctrine and Discipline of Divorce he had even flirted with the idea that non-committal sexual relationships satisfied his educational criteria: libertines eventually make the ‘most succesfull’ husbands because their ‘bold accustomings’ give them experience with the opposite sex (DDD, YP 2.249–50). It seems unlikely that Milton ever applied this experimentalism to himself; instead, he channeled his ‘bold’ desires into textual form. In Areopagitica he turns again from bodies to texts, once again advocating the benefits of libertine reading: Petronius, Aretino, and their ‘wanton’ progeny offer a vicarious version of the ‘bold accustoming’ necessary for growth. In the Apology for Smectymnuus Milton presented his ability to extract virtue from ‘the fuell of wantonnesse and loose living’ as a kind of miracle vouchsafed to him alone (Apology, YP 1.891). In the supremely confident Areopagitica he promotes it as a general rule, necessary for elite intellectuals and possibly for ‘all men’.²⁴ ²³ Discussed in my Schooling Sex, 49–51, and in more detail in ‘Milton among the Libertines’. ²⁴ The reading in YP 2.521 and in the original (‘to all men such books are not temptations, nor vanities, but usefull drugs’) elicits no emendation even though it refutes the entire argument, which depends on discriminating between wise men and ‘the rest’; a word has clearly been

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But did Milton put his called-for toleration of Aretino into practice, letting him ‘work’ within his text? A full answer lies beyond the scope of this chapter, but it would begin with suggestive parallels between the most erotic moments in Paradise Lost and Aretino’s sonnets on the Modi engravings: the first sonnet evokes Adam and Eve on seeing a couple embracing ‘Straight side by side’ (cf. PL 4.741); a later sonnet, for a complex posture in which the man stands up and lifts the woman, interprets him as striving to reach ‘paradiso’–or as Satan would say, to be ‘Imparadised in one another’s arms’ (PL 4.506).²⁵ I cannot prove that Milton saw these particular images of lovers side-by-side and leaning together, or these particular sonnets with their powerful associations of sexuality with Eden and their violent contrasts of idealization and ribaldry. In Areopagitica, only a few lines before Milton speaks about ‘objects of lust’ and ‘all desirable things’, the passionate Adam finds himself in a situation like that of an impressionable young man, militantly chaste but devoted to the ‘simple, sensuous and passionate’ art of poetry, who opens for the first time a volume of ‘Aretino’s Postures’. We know that Malatesti presented Milton with a volume of his own libertine sonnets, which frequently describe peasant sex in terms of pestles, mortars, and grinding mills—imagery that directly suggested the divorce tract’s ‘grinding in the mill of an undelighted and servil copulation’ (YP 2.258). Perhaps another worldly collector in a Florentine academy ‘set before [Milton] a provoking object, ever almost in his eyes’ (Areop., YP 2.527)—some version of ‘all desirable things’ with Aretino’s ribald commentary? Aretino may have been a ‘notorious ribald’ but he could also serve as the ‘dreaded yet dear’ master of sexual representation, who dared depict the carnal act ‘not unelegantly’, who turned ‘incitement’ into art and invested it with the cultural prestige of the Italian High Renaissance. Essential precisely because Good and Evil appear in the world ‘as two twins cleaving together’ (Areop., YP 2.514), the ‘ribaldi’ must be ‘brought in’ or interpolated as testing figures, opportunities for passionate confrontation. As a consequence of his dialectical and somatic theory of reading Milton has inferred from the necessity of provoking objects to the necessity of provoking persons—infamous interpreters like the ‘brood of Belial’ who clarify the difference of Licence and Liberty by treating the divorce tracts as a charter for debauchery, as if they were the ‘choicest delights and criticisms of sin’. The idea of reading in the ‘libertine school’, and thereby gaining virtual access to lust, fed his literary imagination omitted after all, or else such and men have been transposed, but Milton seems not to have noticed. ²⁵ Bette Talvacchia, Taking Positions: On the Erotic in Renaissance Culture (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1999), poems 1 and 11 in her numbering (in the latter sonnet, the ‘paradisal’ soliloquy is interrupted by an eye-witness who yells out ‘Ahi ribalda, ahi ribaldo!’).


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long before and long after he worked Aretino into his argument for toleration: where else to learn sales, to rehearse the role of Scurra Attica, and to form dramatic sensualist villains like Comus or the three Satans—one in ‘Quintum Novembris’ wrapping his ‘salacious loins’ in a monk’s garb (l. 84, CSP 41), one in Paradise Lost burning in ‘fierce desire’ or breathing ‘vain hopes, inordinate desires’ into Eve (PL 4.509, 808), one in Paradise Regained tempting Christ with beautiful nymphs and boys at a Classical banquet (CSP 2.352–61)? But the principle is articulated in Areopagitica most fully. Milton’s literary instincts encouraged empathetic projection into ‘the utmost that Vice promises to her followers’, which actually strengthened the case for his extirpation. As I show in Schooling Sex, hostile readers used Milton’s argument to brand him ‘a great agent for libertinism’. One Restoration satirist, commenting on exactly the ‘notorious ribald of Arezzo’ passage in Areopagitica that occasioned this essay, jeered that ‘the more modest Aretine, were he alive in this age, might be set to school again, to learn his own art of the blind school-master’.²⁶ Ironically, Milton’s display of practical tolerance for the libertine enemy had, like the forbidden fruit, ‘far other operation’—defining him as a figure who cannot be tolerated in an Age of Toleration. ²⁶ See Schooling Sex, 51, citing Richard Leigh, The Transproser Rehears’d (Oxford, 1673), 136–7 (a passage earlier brought to light by Christopher Hill, Milton and the English Revolution (1977; New York, 1979), 453–4).

7 Milton, Natural Law, and Toleration Jason P. Rosenblatt John Milton’s first published writings are marked by a Pauline absolutism that will not compound with human weakness as an inevitable condition lying within the bounds of divine forgiveness. In five substantial antiprelatical treatises published in 1641 and 1642, Milton traces the decline of the church from the perfect pattern of scripture clearly revealed, ‘backslid[ing] one way into the Jewish beggery, of old cast rudiments, and stumbl[ing] forward another way into the new-vomited Paganisme of sensuall Idolatry’ (Of Ref., YP 1.520). Milton’s mission is to recover the pristine original of the gospel by removing layers of ecclesiastical accretion, to rebuild the church according to the pattern stamped in religion’s golden age, and to prepare for the second coming, ‘when thou the Eternall and shortly-expected King shalt open the Clouds to judge the severall Kingdomes of the World’ (Of Ref., YP 1.616). Those who assist in that mission ‘shall receive, above the inferiour Orders of the Blessed, the Regall addition of Principalities, Legions, and Thrones in their glorious Titles, and in supereminence of beatifick Vision … shall clasp inseparable Hands with joy, and blisse in over measure for ever’ (Of Ref., YP 1.616). Those who attempt to thwart it ‘shall be thrown downe eternally into the darkest and deepest Gulfe of HELL,’ the ‘Slaves and Negro’s’ of the other damned, ‘the basest, the lowermost, the most dejected, most underfoot and downe-trodden Vassals of Perdition’ (Of Ref., YP 1.616–17). Is there any group, other than the Presbyterians, the ‘one right discipline’ (Of Ref., YP 1.605), whom Milton has not offended in these polemical tracts? Anglicans are condemned as Roman Catholics, and therefore as pagan idolaters, and also as Jews, who are identified with the sinful Canaanites God commanded them to displace: ‘for that which was to the Jew but jewish is to the Christian no better than Canaanitish’ (RCG, YP 1.845).¹ Arians and ¹ See also, among other examples in the antiprelatical tracts, Milton’s assertions that the English prelates have joined ‘the Pope and Papists to stop the furtherance of Reformation’ (Of

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Pelagians, martyred ‘by the Heathen for Christs sake’, are nevertheless ‘no true friends of Christ’ (Of Ref., YP 1.533–4), and Arminians are ‘tainted with that infection’ (Apology, YP 1.917). Both heaven and hell are hierarchical and imperial. Those condemned to everlasting perdition enjoy the satisfaction, expressed in racist language, of trampling and spurning the most damned of all, Milton’s non-Presbyterian antagonists. Reading Milton’s prose chronologically, there is no way to prepare for the differences between the last antiprelatical tract (April 1642) and the first divorce tract ( July 1643)—or, for most readers, between Volume 1 and Volume 2 of the Yale edition of Milton’s prose. The latter contains the great treatises written between 1643 and 1645—including the two editions of The Doctrine and Discipline of Divorce, Tetrachordon, Of Education, and the Areopagitica—which advocate, respectively, domestic liberty, educational reform, and ‘freedom to express oneself’ (Second Defence, YP 4.624). In these treatises Milton advocates freedom to divorce on grounds of incompatibility, religious toleration, and a rescinding by Parliament of a Licensing Order that would offend against both God and human reason by preventing the discovery of the good. Having severed his ties with the Presbyterians, Milton has allied himself with the Independents and Separatists. He can even speak with a measure of sympathy about Anabaptists, Familists, and Antinominans, ‘of life … not debausht’, attributing their excess zeal to ‘the restraint of some lawfull liberty, which ought to be giv’n men, and is deny’d them’ (DDD, YP 2.278). Scholars and biographers have found in The Doctrine and Discipline of Divorce traces of the bitter disappointment most likely caused by young Mary Powell’s refusal to leave her family and rejoin her new husband. Far more profound though less immediately noticeable than the occasional bitter tone are transformations in Milton’s theology, philosophy, and politics, and in his attitude toward human weakness. A young poet who seems always to have had a sense of personal election might have begun to feel profoundly abandoned—and not only by his wife. Beginning with the first divorce tract and extending through the Areopagitica, the former (and future) Pauline absolutist confronts with compassion a life of mistake and the inseparability of good and evil in this imperfect world. If Milton’s prose provides the doctrinal underpinnings of his greatest poetry, then his first marriage and separation constitute a major correlative of the Fall: like the prohibition, marriage is a ‘mysterious law’ (PL 4.750) instituted in paradise (Genesis 2:18), whose subjects find it at first easy to keep, then discover tragically that it has become impossible. Ref., YP 1.527) and that the ‘recreant Jew’, the Anglican, and the Roman Catholic have been seduced by ‘traditions and carnalities’ figured as adulteries (Apology, YP 1.895, 942).

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The motives of Milton’s transformation—psychological, environmental, religious, political—are overdetermined. Taken together, with a full recognition of their absolute incompatibility, Dayton Haskin’s exclusively religious explanation and Thomas Fulton’s exclusively secular one help us to understand the range and depth of the change. Milton’s assurance in the antiprelatical tracts that scripture has a fixed meaning gives way to the recognition in the divorce tracts that the pronouncements of Christ and Paul on the indissolubility of the marriage bond would make the misery of an unhappy spouse inescapable. Haskin is sensitive to the subtlest implications of the paradigm shift in Milton’s hermeneutics. These include a newly charitable conception of the analogy of faith, which undermines a literalistic interpretation of scripture, a waning confidence in the power of human reason, and a commitment to biblical authority precisely when the plain sense of scripture would seem to deny what he desires so passionately, the right to divorce. The complexity of scripture, like that of poetry, is a blessing. In the divorce tracts, Milton felt the saving power of interpretive freedom, which released him from the fear that his marriage was a permanent sign of reprobation, and in his poetry he associated complexity with copia and eloquence.² Fulton, concentrating on the Areopagitica, discusses the philosophical systems that allow Milton to make his intellectual arguments. He finds ‘the roots of liberal epistemology’ in the emergent natural law theory, which focused on finding universally agreed beliefs accessible to human reason instead of depending on established external authorities.³ Those authorities include theologians and the texts they adduce as irrefutable evidence, so Fulton traces a shift in Milton’s argumentation from biblical citation to the exercise of untrammeled moral cognition (‘reason is but choosing’). Consistently reading Milton’s biblical references as political rather than religious, he interprets the reference to the current ‘state of man’ (Areop., YP 2.514) in a postlapsarian world as ‘an argument from the state of nature’ (Fulton, ‘Areopagitica and the Roots of Liberal Epistemology’, 67). ² See Dayton Haskin, Milton’s Burden of Interpretation (Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 1994), 57–63. ³ See Thomas Fulton’s well-informed discussion in ‘Areopagitica and the Roots of Liberal Epistemology’, English Literary Renaissance 34 (2004), 42–82. I have also benefited from his unpublished paper ‘Resorting to Reason: Milton and the Hermeneutics of Science’. Like all students of early-modern natural law theory and the political conditions through which people acquire moral knowledge, Fulton is indebted to Richard Tuck, in particular his ‘Scepticism and Toleration in the Seventeenth Century’, in Susan Mendus, ed., Justifying Toleration: Conceptual and Historical Perspectives (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1988), 21–35. For the most balanced and comprehensive discussion of Milton’s writings against the bishops and in defense of ‘domestic or personal liberty’, see chapters 5 and 6 of Barbara K. Lewalski’s The Life of John Milton (Oxford: Blackwell, 2000). She summarizes Milton’s shifts in perspective on 155–6.


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When Milton refers, in The Tenure of Kings and Magistrates, to Deuteronomy 17, on the limitations of royal prerogative, and to 1 Samuel 8, on the rejection of the prophet’s government in favor of a king, he claims that the power of the people to choose, reject, retain, or depose their ruler, ‘though it cannot but stand with plain reason, shall be made good also by Scripture’ (Tenure, YP 3.206). This Fulton considers to be an ‘astonishing’ ‘defiance toward biblical precedent’ (Fulton, ‘Resorting to Reason’).⁴ But one might conclude instead that Milton is exercising not defiance but exegetical freedom, to a degree that would have been unthinkable in the antiprelatical tracts, where he warned that church discipline, ‘platform’d in the Bible’ (RCG, YP 1.750), is ‘beyond the faculty of man to frame, and … dangerous to be left to mans invention’ (RCG, YP 1.756). Indeed, the biblical verses are ambiguous, and exegetes never resolve the question whether the appointment of a king in Deuteronomy is a commandment to appoint a king or only a statement that such a king is possible.⁵ The chapter has been read both as a limitation on the growth of military power (the prohibition against multiplying horses) and as a warning against an extravagant lifestyle in the king’s court. Similarly, both royalists and republicans noted the ambiguity in 1 Samuel 8. God’s apparent waiver of his exclusive political role as king is conditional on both the king and the people understanding that they are still subject to God and that the king is nothing but an agent (1 Samuel 12:14–15). God is the king, Israel the vassal, and 2 Kings 11:17 describes a double covenant based on those that a human lord would make with the vassal. He would have the people swear to be loyal to him and then have them swear to be loyal to the vassal. In the same way, ‘Jehoiada made a covenant between the Lord and the king and the people, that they should be the Lord’s people; between the king also and the people.’ As Halbertal and Margalit point out, the ‘illusion of power … blurs the boundaries between the human and the divine and traps the powerful person in the myth of his own power. … The source of idolatry as political metaphor is pride and … power-drunkenness’ (Halbertal and Margolit, Idolatry, 221). Fulton traces Milton’s experimentation with a new, ‘self-authenticating method of ethical reasoning’, back to Hugo Grotius (‘Areopagitica and the ⁴ See also John Milton: Political Writings, ed. Martin Dzelzainis (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1991). Milton, commenting on Jehu’s special divine command to slay Jehoram (2 Kings 9:24), concludes that ‘where a thing grounded so much on natural reason hath the addition of a command from God, what does it but establish the lawfulness of such an act’ (YP 3.216). According to Dzelzainis, this proves that ‘for Milton the lawfulness of an act followed not from the expressed will of God, but from the fact that it was an intrinsically just and reasonable thing to do’ (xv). ⁵ See on this point Moshe Halbertal and Avishai Margalit, Idolatry, tr. Naomi Goldblum (Cambridge, Mass., and London: Harvard University Press, 1992), 290–1 nn. 4–6.

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Roots of Liberal Epistemology’, 53). But Grotius, in his magnum opus De Jure Belli ac Pacis libri tres (Paris, 1625), famously interprets 1 Samuel 8 in accord with the right of kings to act with impunity.⁶ For a reader interested in the relationship between religion and politics, scriptural hermeneutics and human cognition, there is a special pleasure in reading Grotius in the great 1738 edition of De Jure Belli ac Pacis by Jean Barbeyrac. Writing in the Huguenot diaspora of the 1690s, having been expelled from a religiously unified France, Barbeyrac, a more thoroughgoing natural law theorist than Grotius, had a special reason for separating religion from society and thus a special sensitivity to Grotius’s various difficulties in maintaining this distinction. Reading Barbeyrac’s notes, one is often reminded of Charles Kinbote’s annotations of John Shade’s Pale Fire, although the dissonance is the result of violent disagreement rather than misunderstanding or pathological narcissism. When Grotius interprets Samuel’s words about the effect of the right of kings, ‘that is, it implies the Obligation of Non-resistance’ (I.IV.3, 1.343), Barbeyrac quotes from Milton’s Defence (1.4), on ‘the Jews, even after the Captivity’, to prove the opposite: ‘The Example of the Machabees, and the whole History of that Nation, manifestly shew the contrary’ (I.IV.3, 1.343 n. 4). Barbeyrac considers Milton to be a champion of liberty, and his frequent footnote quotations from the Defence counter Grotius’s assertions in the text of a sovereign’s right to exercise virtually unlimited power. Sallust, in Catiline VI. 7, quotes Gaius Memmius, a tribune of the people: ‘to do what one wishes with impunity is to be a king.’ Milton’s antagonist, Salmasius, quotes the statement approvingly, as does Grotius. Barbeyrac’s evidence against Grotius is Milton’s against Salmasius. Moreover, in accord with his emphasis on individual conscience and a rationalist natural law theory, Barbeyrac, like Milton, reads the biblical text (1 Samuel 8) in the light of natural law as exemplified by the pagan Cicero. Milton tells Salmasius, who is ‘delighted’ with Memmius’s statement, that Cicero ‘could have shown you how to understand Sallust better, and Samuel too’ (First Defence, YP 4.350). Barbeyrac explains: This is said by Memmius, a Tribute of the Roman People, and a zealous Assertor of public Liberty. He had no Intention to compliment Kings with a Right to do what they pleased with Impunity; he only meant that Affairs usually take this Course, that such is the Custom of Kings, and the Success of their evil Actions. Upon which MILTON (Defens. Cap. II. p. 34) judiciously alledges the following Quotation from CICERO, which the Reader may compare with the Passage in the Book of SAMUEL. … This is ⁶ Hugo Grotius, The Rights of War and Peace [De Jure Belli ac Pacis], ed. J. Barbeyrac, tr. anon. (London, 1738), with a new introduction by Richard Tuck (Indianapolis: Liberty Fund, 2005), I.IV.3, 1.343. Parenthetic book, chapter, and section references are to this edition of Grotius.


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the Stile of their Orders, Take Notice, and obey … and this of their Menaces, If I find you here a second Time, you die. Terms, which we are not only to read and consider for our Amusement, but consider as a Lesson to caution us against coming under such a Power. (I.IV.2, 1.341)

When Milton in his divorce tracts breaks, at least temporarily, his link with Pauline dualism, he becomes part of a newer chain, beginning with Grotius and continuing with John Selden (De Jure Naturali et Gentium juxta Disciplinam Ebraeorum, 1640), the Hobbes of Leviathan (the chapters on natural law, esp. 14–15), Nathanael Culverwel (An Elegant and Learned Discourse of the Light of Nature, 1652), Richard Cumberland (De Legibus Naturae, 1672), Samuel von Pufendorf (De Jure Naturae et Gentium, 1672), Locke (especially his Epistola de Tolerantia, 1689), and Barbeyrac (his immense annotated editions of Grotius, Pufendorf, and Cumberland, and his own Science of Morality). This chain stretches across the Atlantic, and it is worth remembering that Barbeyrac’s Milton, a defender of liberty, is also the Milton of Jefferson and Madison. Grotius’s hortatory statement that Christ often bids us to ‘take up our Cross, [which] seems to require from us a greater Measure of Patience’ (I.IV.7, 1.365) so exasperates Barbeyrac that he must repeatedly assert the right of ‘a Man, unjustly oppressed, [to] employ what Force he is master of, for delivering him from Oppression’. And when, in the same section, Grotius praises the primitive Christians who rejoiced to suffer persecution for their religion, Barbeyrac notes, ‘We are very well assured that they entertained extravagant Notions on the Point before us, which put them on extending the Obligation of suffering Martyrdom, far beyond its just Bounds.’ He adds, ‘when the Emperors had embraced Christianity, the Christians proceeded on very different Principles. See MILTON, Defensio, Cap. IV. p. 136 &c.’ (1.366–7). Grotius quotes positively ‘that Saying of Marcus Antoninus the Philosopher, No one but GOD only can be the Judge of a Prince’, but Barbeyrac counters with ‘MILTON’S Exposition of this Passage, Defens. pro Pop. Anglic. Cap. II. p. 49’ (I.III.8, 1.268 n. 30). Milton cannot agree that the word autarchy in context means monarchy, ‘particularly since Marcus Aurelius was the best of emperors and … treated the people as had been done when the state was free’. Moreover, he revered ‘all tyrannicides or men who wished for that honor, and he tells also of his design for a commonwealth governed by just laws with equal rights for all’ (First Defence, YP 4.360). To cite one more example, Grotius, like Salmasius, cites what Milton calls ‘that old argument which is the masterpiece of our courtiers’ (First Defence, YP 4.361), David’s famous confession, ‘Against thee, thee only have I sinned’ (Psalm 51:5), as evidence that a king is answerable only to God (I.III.20,

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1.311–12). Barbeyrac responds that David has sinned against God’s most indisputable laws and thus has offended him: I am surprized that our Author … could adopt so unreasonable an Explication of DAVID’S Words, as that given by the Fathers of the Church, and the loose Conclusion, they draw from them. To speak with MILTON, in his Defensio pro Pop. Angl. Cap. II, p. 51 … is there any Probability that David, when he spoke these Words, penetrated with Sentiments of Humiliation and Repentance, thought of the Prerogative of Kings; and that he intended to boast of a pretended Power, which authorized the Commission of Rapin, Murder, and Adultery, and left his Subjects no Room for Complaint? I cannot think the most zealous Defenders of Power, how extravagantly soever they may compliment Kings with Impunity, and however strong an Obligation they may impose on Subjects of Non-Resistance, would venture to maintain, that a Prince, who takes away the Life of an innocent Man, or takes away a Subject’s Wife, sins against GOD alone; and that he is not guilty of a real Injustice in Regard to the Person killed, or the Husband. (1.311–12 n. 9)⁷

In the rest of this essay I want to suggest, with Fulton, that natural law theorists—in particular, Hugo Grotius and John Selden, who figure importantly in The Doctrine and Discipline of Divorce—account at least in part for the transformation that occurs in the prose tracts of 1643–5. But these two founders of the early modern science of morality do not diminish Milton’s commitment to the Bible. The common expositors of Christ’s and Paul’s pronouncements against divorce in the gospels and epistles would trap an unhappy spouse in a loveless marriage, but Milton learns from Grotius and Selden that exegetical and rational cognition can be compatible. Sometimes this requires going beyond Calvin and Luther to sources such as ‘the Rabbins and Maimonides’ (DDD, YP 2.257). Much of what Milton learns from Grotius and Selden bears both directly and indirectly on questions of toleration—on human beings with beliefs different from one’s own, and on the ideas and opinions that issue from diversity. Philology is not a valuefree discipline, and the philological skill Milton develops removes rather than evades some of the obstacles to divorce, at times like Portia in The Merchant of Venice, by submitting to the text more literally and rigorously than even Shylock thought to do. Sometimes, not always, the best way out is through. ⁷ See also I.III.8, 1.269 n. 33, where Barbeyrac relies on Milton to contextualize Grotius’s reference to ‘the Argive Tragedy of Suppliants’, where ‘the People … address the King in Aeschylus’ as one who is free, master of the laws, so that he does what he pleases. Barbeyrac’s note: ‘But, as MILTON observes, in his Defens. Pro Pop. Anglic. Cap. V. p. 174. The poet puts those Words into the Mouth of some foreign Women, who desiring the King of Argos’s Protection and Assistance against the Aegyptian Fleet in Pursuit of them, flatter him with an absolute Power, which did not belong to him.’


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In the antiprelatical tracts, scripture bears only a single sense, according to which the Mosaic law can be of no value in establishing precedent for the prelates: ‘For the imperfect and obscure institution of the Law, which the Apostles themselves doubt not oft-times to vilifie, cannot give rules to the compleat and glorious ministration of the Gospell, which lookes on the Law, as on a childe, not as on a tutor’ (RCG, YP 1.762). For the mature gospel to learn from ‘the infancy of the Law’ would be for ‘the stronger to imitate the weaker, the freeman to follow the captive, the learned to be lesson’d by the rude’ (RCG, YP 1.763). A chapter-heading in Reason of Church-Government warns ‘That it is dangerous and unworthy the Gospell to hold that Church-government is to be pattern’d by the Law, as B. Andrews and the Primat of Armagh maintaine’ (RCG, YP 1.761). The young Milton dares to demean two men of far greater learning than himself, Bishops Lancelot Andrewes and James Ussher. Both were friends of John Selden. The incomparable Andrewes, justly renowned for his scholarship and eloquence, was the only bishop who read with pleasure Selden’s controversial Historie of Tithes (1618) and supported him in the bitter aftermath of its publication.⁸ James Archbishop of Armagh taught the young Selden the rudiments of Hebrew, Aramaic, and probably Arabic in 1609, and he preached his funeral sermon. According to Richard Parr, Ussher ‘looked upon the person deceased as so great a Scholar, that himself was scarce worthy to carry his Books after him’.⁹ But this was extreme modesty, and Selden in turn described Ussher as ‘a miracle of learning’ in his preface to Marmora Arundelliana. How different Milton sounds even as early as the first edition of The Doctrine and Discipline of Divorce, where he concludes that it is ‘absurd to imagine that the covnant of grace should reform the exact and perfect law of works, eternal and immutable’ (DDD, YP 2.318). Of course the simplest explanation is that the Hebrew Bible permits divorce and the New Testament does not. Hence, on the issue of divorce, the law is clear and charitable, the gospel obscure, apparently severe (‘What … God hath joined together, let not man put asunder’ (Matthew 19:6)), and therefore in need of radical reinterpretation. Milton’s exposition of a Mosaic law for fallen humankind comprises some of his most mature and passionate prose. We hear in other Miltonic treatises the accent of judgment in relation to frail, erring humanity, but in the prose tracts of 1643–5 we hear the accent of sympathy as well. Where Christ rejects divorce for the Jews as a temporary concession to ‘the ⁸ Joannes Seldeni vindiciae secundum integritatem existimationis suae (1653), 16–17; quoted in G. J. Toomer, ‘Selden’s Historie of Tithes: Genesis, Publication, Aftermath’, Huntington Library Quarterly 65 (2002), 361. ⁹ Reported in Richard Parr, The Life Of … James Usher, Late Lord Arch-Bishop of Armagh … With a Collection of Three Hundred Letters (London, 1686), 75.

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hardnesse of your hearts’ (Matthew 19:8; Tetrachordon, YP 2.660), Milton interprets hardheartedness as a universal condition: ‘when it is in a good man taken for infirmity, and imperfection, which was in all the Apostles, whose weaknesse only, not utter want of beleef is call’d hardnes of heart’. The Fall hardens all hearts, not only among the Jews, and therefore God permitted divorce ‘partly for this hardnesse of heart, the imperfection and decay of man from original righteousnesse’. ‘If nothing now must be suffer’d for hardnes of heart, I say the very prosecution of our right by way of civil justice can no more bee suffer’d among Christians, for the hardnes of heart wherwith most men persue it. … But if it be plaine that the whole juridical law and civil power is only suffer’d under the Gospel, for the hardnes of our hearts, then wherefore should not that which Moses suffer’d, be suffer’d still by the same reason?’ (Tetrachordon, YP 2.661–2). Whereas the antiprelatical tracts apotheosize the spiritual aristocrats of the Reformation and anathematize the bishops and their supporters, the treatises on divorce, more than any other Miltonic works, emphasize commonality. In these tracts, Milton regards Christians as superior in faith but not in virtue: ‘Wee find … by experience that the Spirit of God in the Gospel hath been alwaies more effectual in the illumination of our minds to the gift of faith, then in the moving of our wills to any excellence of vertue, either above the Jews or the Heathen’ (DDD, YP 2.303). Christians unhappily matched should not presume upon the superior refinement of patience and suffering but should instead accept the relief divorce affords them: ‘If wee bee wors [than the Jews], or but as bad, which lamentable examples confirm wee are, then have wee more, or at least as much need of this permitted law, as they to whom God therfore gave it … under a harsher covenant’ (DDD, YP 2.354). To understand the transformations in Milton’s prose, it is helpful to recall that the 1643–5 prose tracts contain the first references to natural law theorists, who are generally more tolerant of religious diversity than the patristic, medieval, and Reformation theologians cited in the antiprelatical tracts. Instead of a Pauline dualism that pits the carnal children of loins against the spiritual children of faith, Grotius and Selden look for continuities among the cultures and religions of pagans, Jews, Muslims, and Christians. A religious rationalist such as Nathanael Culverwel, in his Discourse of the Light of Nature, arguing that the light of reason is available to all human beings, substitutes a new final clause for Colossians 3:11 that underscores the difference. What Paul says about evangelical light free to all, ‘we may say the very same in respect of the commonnesse of natural light. Where there is neither Greek nor Jew, circumcision nor uncircumcision, Barbarian, Scythian, bound nor free, but all these are one in respect of Nature, and


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natures Law, and natures Light.’¹⁰ Where Paul would heal the fundamental divisions of humankind by baptizing all nations in Christ, ‘for ye are all one in Christ Jesus’, Culverwel insists that all human beings already share the light of nature, a sign that the image of God in which all were created has not been lost. Grotius, in De Jure Belli ac Pacis, wants to identify as the true law of nature an extremely minimal set of rules that follow, as Richard Tuck puts it, ‘as a logical necessity from some non-controversial assumption about the world.’¹¹ Theoretically, the discovery of shared moral rules in the natural, pre-civil state of humankind would provide a basis for relationships among human beings anywhere in the world. This is in part what makes the work a pioneering contribution to international relations. Selden, a postskeptical humanist, differs from Grotius, positing an external source of natural law—that is, a universal divine positive law of perpetual obligation. In what is arguably his most important work, De Jure Naturali et Gentium, Selden follows the Talmud, which for him records a set of doctrines far older than classical antiquity. As both Tuck and J. P. Sommerville have demonstrated, natural law as conceived by Selden consists not of innate rational principles that are intuitively obvious but rather of specific divine pronouncements uttered by God at a point in historical time.¹² In De Jure’s 847 folio pages, Selden discusses the rabbinic identification of natural law with the divinely pronounced Adamic and Noachide laws, the praecepta Noachidarum, considered by rabbinic tradition as the minimal moral duties enjoined upon all of humankind. De Jure consists of seven books, corresponding to the seven commandments promulgated by God to the children of Noah—hence, to all of humankind: the prohibitions of blasphemy, idolatry, homicide, robbery, unchastity (incest, adultery, bestiality), eating a limb torn from a living animal, and the establishing of a civil judicial system in order to enforce these laws. Despite important differences, a common interest in natural law that crosses national borders links the Arminian Grotius and the Erastian Selden, as well as the emerging heretic Milton and the Huguenot Barbeyrac. Each observed ¹⁰ Nathanael Culverwel, An Elegant and Learned Discourse of the Light of Nature (1652), 68. ¹¹ Richard Tuck, ‘Grotius and Selden’, in J. H. Burns and Mark Goldie, eds., The Cambridge History of Political Thought, 1450–1700 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1991), 512. ¹² See Richard Tuck, Natural Rights Theories: Their Origin and Development (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1979), 82–100; J. P. Sommerville, ‘John Selden, The Law of Nature, and the Origins of Government’, The Historical Journal 27 (1984), 437–47. In the course of a uniformly excellent survey of the topic, Sommerville corrects Tuck by pointing out that for Selden six of the ‘Noachide’ laws go back not merely to a point in time after the Flood but all the way back to Eden—the seventh, the prohibition against eating the limb of a living animal, would have been irrelevant to our vegetarian first parents in paradise.

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at first hand the dangers of uniform religious practice, whether Catholic or Calvinist, and each in his own way defended a pluralist culture. Milton met Grotius (‘a most learned man … whom I ardently desired to meet’, Second Defence, YP 4.615) in May 1638, when the international jurist was in exile in Paris as an opponent of his native Holland’s orthodox state religion.¹³ Grotius employs his immense learning to build bridges between different cultures. A typical example from De Jure Belli ac Pacis is his defense of conventicles and assemblies, where he applies to Christians an ancient Jewish authority’s defense of Jews: ‘What Philo informs us to have been said by Augustus, of the Jewish Synagogues, is more truly and properly applicable to the Christian Congregations, That they were not Meetings for Revellings, or seditious Cabals, but pure Seminaries of Virtue.’ Grotius adds that Philo ‘shews elsewhere, how great a Difference there is between the Synagogues and the Mysteries of Paganism … which passage is well worth reading’, and he also cites on this point Josephus, Contra Apion (De Jure Belli II.XX.49, 2.1045).¹⁴ The passage reinforces a hierarchy maintained throughout the work of pagan, Hebraic, and Christian thought that corresponds to the tripartite crescendo of natural law, the Mosaic law, and the gospel. What makes it typical is the mix of sympathy for specifically Jewish thought and an insistence on the superiority of Christianity. Milton refers to ‘Hugo Grotius, a man of these times, one of the best learned’ (DDD, YP 2.238), ten times in the divorce tracts, beginning with the heading of the Preface to book 1 of The Doctrine and Discipline of Divorce (YP 2.234). Where the antiprelatical tracts segregate pagans or Jews from Christians, nature or law from gospel, Old Testament from New, the monist spirit of the 1643–5 tracts emphasizes congruity and inclusiveness. While maintaining the superiority of Christianity, Milton nevertheless treats as compatible all human beings’ natural rights as reasonable creatures, the rights of biblical Israel as members of a holy community, and the individual privilege of the regenerate Christian saint. He emphasizes the gospel’s perfect correspondence with Mosaic law ‘grounded on [the] morall reason’ of natural law (DDD, YP 2.264). In these tracts, as in paradise before the Fall, ‘God and Nature bid the same’ (PL 6.176), and Milton speaks of ‘the fundamentall law book of nature; which Moses never thwarts, but reverences’ (YP 2.272). Grotius is John Selden’s strong precursor, although the slightly younger scholar’s consideration of the ancient constitution of pre-Christian Britain, ¹³ See Lewalski, The Life of John Milton, 89 and 571 n. 7, on the possible influence on Milton’s poetry of Grotius’s Adamus Exul and Christus Patiens. ¹⁴ See also 1045 n. 5. Grotius cites Philo’s ‘De Legat. Ad Cajum (p. 1035. E. Edit. Paris)’ as well as ‘Lib. De Sacrificant’.


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Analecta Anglobritannica, precedes and parallels Grotius’s study of the early Netherlanders, De Antiquitate Reipublicae Batavicae. But Selden’s Mare Clausum was commissioned as a reply to Grotius’s Mare Liberum; and his De Jure Naturali can best be understood within the post-scholastic, antiAristotelian tradition of De Jure Belli.¹⁵ Selden’s intercultural studies are less judgmental and far less morally hierarchical than Grotius. I have recently suggested that Milton’s muse in Paradise Lost may owe something to Selden’s discussion in De Jure of the intellectus agens or active intellect, an external force, either God or a heavenly messenger, that actuates the mind’s cognitive faculties.¹⁶ Although Selden cites Maimonides most frequently on the idea of prophetic inspiration as an extraordinary overflow of light from the divine intellect, he also finds it in commentaries on Aristotle by the Muslim philosophers Avicenna and Averroes, as well as in the work of one of his heroes of intellectual bravery, Friar Roger Bacon. In an epic embodying a myth of universal appeal, it is fitting that Milton’s muse belong to Islam, Judaism, and Christianity.¹⁷ The capital importance of Hebrew philology in the divorce tracts makes Selden at least as important a Miltonic source as Grotius, since he outstrips his predecessor in the field of Hebraic and especially rabbinic scholarship. Milton reflects at some length on the meaning of what has been translated as ‘some uncleannesse; but in the Hebrew it sounds nakednes of ought, or any reall nakednes: which by all the learned interpreters is refer’d to the mind, as well as to the body’ (DDD, YP 2.244). Milton dedicates The Doctrine and Discipline of Divorce to Parliament and the Westminster Assembly, and Selden, a member of both bodies, is the only dedicatee of either to be named. Of the 149 members of the Assembly, 119 were divines, and only twenty were from the Commons, Selden among them. Milton had already noted that lay persons were invited to participate in the first Council of Nicaea (RCG, YP 1.839), and he may well have Selden in mind as one of those persons ‘of what liberall profession soever, of eminent spirit and breeding joyn’d with a diffuse and various knowledge of divine and human things; ¹⁵ For more on the relation between the two, see Richard Tuck’s ‘Grotius and Selden’, 499–529, and his Philosophy and Government 1572–1651 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1993), 154–221. ¹⁶ See Jason P. Rosenblatt, Renaissance England’s Chief Rabbi: John Selden (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2006), 212–16. ¹⁷ Selden’s magnificent Hebrew scholarship includes remarkable competence in the Babylonian-Aramaic texts of the Talmud. Less well known (and less magisterial) are his Arabic studies, which begin with Titles of Honor (1614) and extend up to the posthumously published third book of De Synedriis (1655). With the publication of Mare Clausum (1635), he introduced Arabic movable type into England. See G. J. Toomer, Eastern Wisedome and Learning: The Study of Arabic in Seventeenth-Century England (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1996), 64–71.

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able to balance and define good and evill, right and wrong, throughout every state of life’. These worthies Milton contrasts with ‘the narrow intellectuals of quotationists and common placers’ (DDD, YP 2.230). As a member of the Assembly, Selden delighted in confuting the jure divino claims of the Presbyterian divines. According to the eyewitness testimony of his friend Bulstrode Whitelocke, Mr. Selden spake admirably, and confuted divers of them in their own learning. And sometimes when they had cited a text of Scripture to prove their assertion, he would tell them, Perhaps in your little pocket-bibles with gilt leaves (which they would often pull out and read) the translation may be thus, but the Greek or the Hebrew signifies thus and thus, and so would totally silence them.¹⁸

The influence of Selden’s De Jure begins with the second edition of The Doctrine and Discipline of Divorce, and in the Preface Milton appeals to the fellow feeling of those ‘worthy Patriots’ who, like himself, have suffered for the cause of truth: ‘for who among ye of the formost that have travail’d in her behalfe to the good of Church, or State, hath not been often traduc’t to be the agent of his owne by-ends’ (DDD, YP 2.225). Besides the attacks suffered after the publication of his Historie of Tithes (1618), Selden was one of nine members of Parliament for whom the Privy Council issued warrants on 3 March 1629. His study was sealed, and he was committed to the Tower, ‘without any cause expressed and simply on the order of the king’.¹⁹ His two years in prison attest to his parliamentary labors on behalf of individual rights and in opposition to constitutional violations by King Charles and Archbishop Laud. It is fitting that Grotius appear at the beginning of the treatise, Selden at the end, where Milton refers to ‘the divine testimonies of God himself, lawgiving in person to a sanctify’d people’, available in ‘that noble volume, written by our learned Selden, Of the law of nature & of Nations [De Jure Naturali et Gentium], a work … worthy to be perus’d [by] whosoever studies to be a great man in wisdom, equity, and justice’ (DDD, YP 2.350). Grotius originates important ideas, which both Selden and Milton then develop. Indeed, Selden’s serious interest in the rabbinic Noachide laws may have begun with his reading of De Jure Belli, which takes note of ‘that antient Tradition among the Hebrewes, that GOD gave more Laws to the Sons of Noah, which were not all recorded by Moses’ (I.II.3, 1.193). Milton’s use of charity as a hermeneutic key to open the New Testament passages that seem to reject divorce unequivocally may have ¹⁸ Bulstrode Whitelocke, Memorials of the English Affairs (London, 1682), 71. ¹⁹ Selden, Vindiciae; cited in David Sandler Berkowitz, John Selden’s Formative Years: Politics and Society in Early Seventeenth-Century England (Washington, DC: Folger Shakespeare Library, 1988), 226–30.


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originated with his reading of Grotius’s Annotationes in Libros Evangeliorum (Amsterdam, 1641): If we rightly consider the Nature of all the Precepts of JESUS CHRIST, we shall find that Charity is their Principle and Perfection: Now Charity requires we should procure the Advantage of others, but so as to think of our own, and not be cruel to ourselves, as St. PAUL teaches, 2 Cor. viii 13.²⁰

Grotius, on the same text in Mark, anticipating Milton on ‘the apt and cheerfull conversation of man with woman’ (DDD, YP 2.235), asserts that ‘Matrimony was not instituted only for the Propagation of Mankind; the mutual Assistance which is expected from that Union is certainly to be considered.’ He also points out that the Bible leaves unstated but understood grounds for divorce other than adultery, such as attempted murder of a spouse or the murder of their children. Grotius, in advocating a ‘just Medium … between too credulous Jealousy and stupid Indolence’, begins to furnish Milton with a broader conception of fornication: [T]he Law is not able to judge of these things but by the rule of equity, and by permitting a wise man to walk the middle-way of prudent circumspection, neither wretchedly jealous, nor stupidly and tamely patient. To this purpose hath Grotius in his notes [Annotationes]. He shews also that fornication is tak’n in Scripture for such a continual headstrong behaviour, as tends to plain contempt of the husband: and proves it out of Judges 19.2. where the Levites wife is said to have playd the whoor against him; which Josephus and the Septuagint, with the Chaldaean, interpret only of ²⁰ Hugo Grotius, Annotationes in Quator Evangelia & Act Apostolorum [1641], rpt. in Opera ` si diligenter advertamus ad naturam omnium Theologicorum (Amsterdam, 1679), 2.53–4: ‘Quod Christi praeceptorum, reperiemus & originem eorum & consummationem in caritate consistere, quae ita nos vult aliis consulere ut ne in nos ipsos crudeles simus, quemadmodum docet Paulus II Corinth. VIII.13.’ This is the passage that Grotius whispered to Milton: ‘When I had almost finisht the first edition [of DDD], I chanc’t to read in the notes of Hugo Grotius upon the 5. of Matth … and somthing he whisper’d rather than disputed about the law of charity, and the true end of wedlock’ (Martin Bucer, YP 2.433–4). The translation is from Barbeyrac’s edition of De Jure Belli, II.V.9, 2.517 n. 7. Barbeyrac’s long note emphasizes the difference between Grotius’s restrictive view of divorce in De Jure Belli and his far more liberal interpretations sixteen years later in his Annotationes. In my book Renaissance England’s Chief Rabbi (145–7), I erroneously assumed that Milton refers to Grotius’s commentary on Matthew 5 in De Jure Belli. This led me to overstate the difference between Grotius and Milton on charity. In his brief commentary on Matthew 5, Grotius, who appears in both editions of Doctrine and Discipline (Selden appears only in the second edition), treats of numerous important ideas that Selden develops, and we can’t be absolutely certain which source Milton borrowed from: these include citations of Origen, Ambrose, and Epiphanius (Grotius, 50); the dispute between the schools of Hillel and Shammai on the meaning of Deuteronomy’s phrase ervath davar ‘nakednes of ought’, Grotius, 51; Milton, DDD, YP 2.244, 620; the story of Paulus Aemilius and the pinching shoe (Grotius, 51; DDD, YP 2.348); the Hebrew text of Judges 19:2 (Grotius, 53; DDD, YP 2.335); even the important idea attributed by Milton to Selden that the word fornication bears more than one sense (Grotius, 53).

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stubbornnes and rebellion against her husband: and to this I adde that Kimchi and the two other Rabbies who glosse the text, are in the same opinion. (DDD, YP 2.335)

It remains for the even more intimidatingly learned Selden to deconstruct the word fornication so that one might sue for divorce for any reason. For Milton, as for the most extreme among those overweening Pharisees whose excesses he attacks with zeal, ‘this law [of divorce] bounded no man; he might put away whatever found not favour in his eyes’ (Tetrachordon, YP 2.656–7). A passage in De Doctrina Christiana, which incidentally supports the Miltonic authorship of that work, clarifies the point: [A]s Selden demonstrated particularly well in his Uxor Hebraea, with the help of numerous Rabbinical texts, the word fornication, if it is considered in the light of the idiom of oriental languages, does not mean only adultery. It can … signify anything which is found to be persistently at variance with love, fidelity, help and society. (DDC, YP 6.378)

Jewish law provides the most important precedent for Milton’s argument that divorce should be granted for incompatibility, and Milton relies on Grotius and Selden as much for their skill in hermeneutics and Hebrew philology as for their views on moral epistemology. The title alone of Selden’s Uxor Ebraica, Seu de Nuptis & Divortis ex Iure Civili, Id Est, Divino & Talmudico, Veterum Ebraeorum [The Hebrew Spouse, or Three Books on Marriages and Divorces from the Civil Law, That is, Divine and Talmudic, of the Ancient Hebrews] reveals not only the author’s belief that post-biblical rabbinic law is ancient but also the reason that Milton finds it useful. But Samuel von Pufendorf reads the 1644 edition of The Doctrine and Discipline of Divorce entirely within the context of natural law theory in his monumental treatise De jurae naturae et gentium, or Law of Nature and Nations (1672), which Barbeyrac edited and annotated. Although Pufendorf explicitly refers to God as the origin of moral obligation, his investigation of the ultimate principles of moral experience concentrates on law as a human construction. His remarkable epitome of Milton’s treatise occupies more than six folio columns. On the subject of divorce, Pufendorf devotes only a single sentence to Grotius, summarizing the more conservative opinion in De Jure Belli that Christ came to ratify by a new law ‘what was before most agreeable to the divine Will’—namely, ‘that the Bond of Marriage should be perpetual’.²¹ He then turns briefly to Selden, on the talmudic dispute between ‘the Sammeans and the Hillelians’, the former arguing that only the discovery of baseness and ²¹ Samuel von Pufendorf, De jure naturae et gentium libri octo [1672] [On the Law of Nature and Nations in Eight Books], 5th edn., ed. Jean Barbeyrac, trans. Basil Kennet (London, 1749), 6.1.24, p. 582. Parenthetic page references are to this edition.


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dishonesty could justify divorce, the latter holding that spousal dislike was sufficient. Christ ‘declares in Favour of the Sammeans’ (582). But Pufendorf’s real interest is in Milton—in his passionate reasons for divorce, decidedly not in his biblical hermeneutics, which he rejects summarily: ‘When God was pleased to give Man a Helpmeet for him [Gen. 2:18], and afterwards commanded the primitive Couple to increase and multiply [Gen. 1:28], he did not hereby ordain two different ends of Marriage; but the latter Words seem designed to describe the chief Fruit arising … from the mutual Assistance first mentioned’ (583). Failing to understand that for Milton the word conversation includes not only habitual proximity and cooperation but also intimacy, Pufendorf pokes gruesome fun at the idea that it is the primary purpose of marriage. He quotes approvingly and at length, in both Latin and in Dryden’s translation, from Juvenal’s sixth satire, which bemoans the ‘Midnight Curse’ of marriage to a woman learned in languages, logic, and history, preferring instead ‘a quiet, humble Fool: / I hate a Wife, to whom I go to School’ (584). When Pufendorf disagrees with feminist Milton, he unintentionally judges himself, sounding like the late-middle-aged, cigar-smoking man at ease in his club chair, in a New Yorker cartoon, who confides to his friends, ‘I actually prefer same sex—as long as it doesn’t involve sex.’ Pufendorf assumes that once we remove ‘the Pleasures which by the Appointment of Nature sweeten and recommend’ ‘the Procreation of Offspring’, men alone make more agreeable companions: And thus we see, that Boys and old Men, those who have not felt the Passion of Love, and those who are past it, agree in preferring the Converse of their own Sex to all the Charms and all the Entertainments of the Fair. But Mr. Milton seems to dream of some more delicate and more refined Pleasures; and frames the Idea of a Wife suitable only to the Genius of a wise and learned Husband: He would have her able to be the Companion of his Studies, or to refresh him with her Wit, when he comes from severer Meditations, to compose his Cares with sweet Discourse, and charm away a melancholy Fit. (583)

Pufendorf sympathizes with the central argument of Milton’s treatise, that Christ’s pronouncements on divorce might ‘bear another Interpretation … more agreeable to the Gospel Clemency and Goodness … than that which is at present received’—namely, that mental or spiritual unfitness should be ‘a much weightier Cause of Divorce’ than any physical defect (584). Summarizing Milton’s arguments, Pufendorf frequently echoes the treatise’s own passionate tone: It is against the Law of Charity: Nay, it is most barbarous and inhuman, to confine and chain down a Man to such Miseries as are not to end until his Death; and which

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would admit of an easy Cure, did not the Severity of this positive Ordinance stand in the Way. (584) When … the Soul doth not find in Matrimony that sweet Agreement which it sought, so ill-matched a Pair live rather in the Misery and Hardship of a Prison, than in the Comfort of Society. (585)

Although Pufendorf is undeniably sexist, his paraphrase of Milton’s treatise emphasizes the injustice of the institution of marriage under canon law, which traps both partners, even more than it does the evil caused by an unfit wife: No Partnership can oblige Persons concerned, in Contradiction either to the chief End of its Institution, or to the Intentions and Hopes of both or of either Member. (584) It is repugnant to Nature, that two Minds directly opposite, and admitting of no Possibility of Union, should be tied together in a Bond never to be broken. The Christian Emperors have declared it as their Judgment, that the Plotting of either Party against the Life of the other, is a good Reason of Divorce. (585)

It has at least become possible to ask whether or not the inclusiveness of natural law theory relative to Reformation doctrine had a benign effect on Milton’s gender politics in his divorce tracts.²² Barbara Lewalski reminds us that Milton put his name to most of the tracts published between 1643 and 1645, ‘proudly proclaiming his ‘‘willingnesse to avouch what might be question’d’’ ’ (Life of John Milton, 155; Tetrachordon, ²² In the 1980s, the most powerful readings of Milton’s gender politics in the divorce tracts were overwhelmingly negative. See especially James Grantham Turner, One Flesh: Paradisal Marriage and Sexual Relations in the Age of Milton (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1987), and Mary Nyquist, ‘The Genesis of Gendered Subjectivity in the Divorce Tracts and in Paradise Lost’, in Nyquist and Margaret W. Ferguson, eds., Re-Membering Milton: Essays on the Texts and Traditions (London: Methuen, 1987), 99–127. It is curious that Turner reserves his most memorable description, ‘authentically ugly’ (229), not for the antiprelatical tracts but rather for DDD. More recently, essays in Catherine Gimelli Martin, ed., Milton and Gender (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2004), have attempted to provide a more positive view. Both sides can quote amply from the text to support their positions. See Gimelli Martin’s own essay in the collection, ‘Dalila, Misogyny, and Milton’s Christian Liberty of Divorce’, which identifies a ‘consistent tilt toward androgyny’ in the tracts, traceable to a monist attempt at ‘harmonious synthesis at every level of [Milton’s] creation’ (56). In ‘ ‘‘One Flesh, One Heart, One Soul’’: Renaissance Friendship and Miltonic Marriage’, Modern Philology 99 (2001), 266–92, Gregory Chaplin argues persuasively that Milton formed an idea of matrimony from the classically inspired doctrine of friendship that marked his relationship with Charles Diodati. For Chaplin, Milton’s position on rational conversation was so radical that it virtually makes ‘hierarchical gender difference … disappear’ (282). It would be apt if Diodati, the young medical student, were indeed a model for the sociable spirit Raphael, whose name means ‘God’s healing’ and whose conversation attempts to repair the psychic malaise caused by Eve’s satanically induced dream. Most recently, Thomas Luxon, in Single Imperfection: Milton, Marriage and Friendship (Pittsburgh: Duquesne University Press, 2005), argues that in the divorce tracts Milton attempts to redefine Protestant marriage as a heteroerotic version of classical friendship, originally a homoerotic cultural practice.


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YP 2.581). Unlike the dualistic, exclusionary, and anonymous antiprelatical tracts, these affirm the compatibility as well as the hierarchy of natural law, Mosaic law, and Gospel. The aesthetic counterpart of this progression is the inclusively tripartite crescendo movement in Milton’s poetry. One can, I think, discern the spirit of rejection in some of Milton’s less successful work. Like the antiprelatical tracts, which denounce Jewish/Catholic institutions and ceremonies, books 11 and 12 of Paradise Lost employ the negative typology of the Epistle to the Hebrews, emphasizing disparity rather than congruity (12.285–314), and the Pauline distinction between children of loins and children of faith (12.446–50). The right order of ascending value in Milton’s monistic treatises, including the 1644 edition of The Doctrine and Discipline of Divorce and Tetrachordon—from the natural law of human happiness to the Hebraic law of divorce in Deuteronomy 24 and then to Christian charity in the gospels—includes the lower in the higher without a turning away or rejection. This crescendo arrangement also informs some of Milton’s most successful poetry: the development of the idea of katharos in the successive quatrains of the nineteenth sonnet, which begin with Euripides’ Alcestis, extend to the levitical rites of purification after childbirth under ‘the old Law’, and conclude with a vision of absolute purity in a Christian heaven;²³ and the continuous but developing sense of the pastoral in Lycidas, narrated by a shepherd whose consolation is measured at least in part by the progression in meaning of the very words shepherd and pastoral, from classical aesthetics (ll. 64–84), through Hebraic-prophetic ethics (ll. 113–31), to the limitless reward of a Christian heaven purged of evil (ll. 165–85). A shaping force in Milton’s more expansive work is the formidable and wide-ranging scholarship of Grotius and Selden. ²³ See Leo Spitzer, ‘Understanding Milton’, in his Essays on English and American Literature, ed. Anna Hatcher (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1962), 116–31.

8 ‘A Taken Scandal not a Given’: Milton’s Equitable Grounds of Toleration Victoria Silver There are, as has been well said, not only depths of the abyss and of the dark; there are also depths of light: the mystery in what is utterly clear. Gerhard Von Rad

1 In one of those seemingly incalculable moves which have tended to confound Milton’s own interpreters, the great propounder of equality in Paradise Lost is Satan, the fallen archangel formerly known as Lucifer, whose idol is the fixed and categorical identity of the theologians’ God; and for whom creatural change, and the difference consequent upon such change, are—ironically in the event—anathema. This perverse revulsion begins with the distinction of Satan’s creator from himself; extends to the angelic hosts and especially Abdiel in his dissent from the mindless conformity of the apostate; and concludes with our first parents, whose divine likeness Satan immediately determines to impropriate through ‘mutual amity so strait, so close, / That I with you must dwell, or you with me’ (4.376–7). For satanic equality is not just outward conformity but the condition of psychological identity—implicit faith, suggestibility and submission of will, which are the irrational values that reign in heaven’s north and in hell. They are also the desiderata Milton ascribes to papal dominion in both A Treatise of Civil Power (1659) and his last tract, Of True Religion, Hæresie, Schism, Toleration (1673), with whose supremacy in spiritual malfeasance the Anglican church competes. In his view, the latter’s ecclesiology, whether episcopal or presbyterian, comparably inculcates such traits in refusing a policy of comprehension within itself—forbearance towards members in adiaphora or ‘things indifferent’ where nothing essential

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to salvation is at issue—as well as tolerance towards different religious opinions and practices outside the church. Indeed, Book 5 of Paradise Lost demonstrates how, when the postulate of the creator God is effectively removed from the creature’s picture of creation, an argument from natural and therefore equal right can have the perverse effect of eradicating what it notionally exists to protect: the liberty of the individual to observe the dictates of conscience and choose a singular or distinctive expression of faith within the limits of right and equal justice. For although the Protectorate proved the most tolerant Protestant regime in England to that date, Milton still associates it and especially its tithing and its Triers with ‘Erastus and state-tyranie over the church’ (TCP, YP 7.252); and in Civil Power, written on the verge of the Protectorate’s collapse and the recall of the Rump, he argues for the institutional separation of church and state, on the equitable principle that ‘To heal one conscience we must not wound another’ (TCP, YP 7.267): Lastly as a preface to force, it is the usual pretence, That although tender consciences shall be tolerated, yet scandals thereby given shall not be unpunished, prophane and licentious men shall not be encourag’d to neglect the performance of religious and holy duties by color of any law giving libertie to tender consciences. By which contrivance the way lies ready open to them hereafter who may be so minded, to take away by little and little, that liberty which Christ and his gospel, not any magistrate, hath right to give: though this kinde of his giving be but to give with one hand and take away with the other, which is a deluding not a giving. As for scandals, if any man be offended with the conscientious liberty of another, it is a taken scandal not a given. (TCP, YP 7.267)

As Cromwell and then Charles II learned to their chronic chagrin, toleration was not a policy broadly supported by the British people; for the value of civil order was bound to be a great good in an age where disorder was yet the rule, as William Holdsworth observes.¹ Thus the vast majority of those Protestants ¹ William Holdsworth, A History of English Law, 9 vols. (Boston: Little, Brown, 1927), 5.196. Holdsworth concludes his discussion of the continental method per inquisitionem and the common law’s public method of indictment with these salutary remarks for modern readers: We have seen that the manner in which the accused was deprived of or hampered in his liberty of defence, and the systematic use of torture, which make the history of this branch of the law one of the most revolting episodes in the history of mankind, were not only tolerated, but even applauded by a large body of public opinion. We have seen that they were applauded because the government was so weak and its enemies were so strong that it was felt, not without reason, that it must take every advantage of its enemies. It was, as [James] Stephen has said, ‘not strong enough to be generous.’ It would seem to follow, therefore, that the maintenance of a strong government and of habitual respect for the law are the conditions precedent for the existence of a criminal procedure which is fair to the accused. If a government once allows any body of men to become so strong that they can defy the law with impunity, if by its conduct it destroys that instinctive respect for the law to which civilized nations have painfully attained, it will be

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who both could and could not afford to reflect upon the fundamentals of religion embraced uniformity, as they had, in the ordinary way of things, done with Catholicism. The scandal thus ‘taken’ at the different or singular in religious opinion and practice was made an excuse for the civil institution of religious conformity, officiously disguised as a concern for public morality. Cromwell himself makes the same point in a letter to the Scottish Kirk in 1650: ‘Your pretended fear lest Error should step in, is like the man who would keep all the wine out of the country lest men should be drunk. It will be found an unjust and unwise jealousy to deprive a man of his natural liberty upon a supposition he may abuse it. When he doth abuse it, judge.’² However, this ‘pretended fear’ exceeds the desire for conformity in religion or its positive legislation, whether episcopal or presbyterian. It expresses the primal human anxiety to master the adventitious and unknown—the terror lest human unpredictability undermine civil order. And that anxiety extends to the interpretation and application of law itself, whose stated purpose is to secure peace and the commonweal. Thus it remains a venerable maxim of the English common law that ‘it is better to suffer a mischief than an inconvenience’; or as J. H. Baker glosses these words, it is better ‘to suffer hardship in individual cases than to make exceptions to clear rules’.³ So rather than admit circumstances justifying such an exception, either in the law itself or on emergent occasions when the facts warrant it, a judge would allow an injustice to stand or would even commit one, rather than muddy the lambent waters of the law. To do so in a system of precedent, it was felt, would only complicate and confound the administration of justice, which is directed and restricted by the tradition of previous judgments addressing comparable issues. No amount of careful qualification or acute degree of specificity, it was argued, could sufficiently inhibit the impact of a legal exception, much less begin to anticipate the flood of human contingencies it might open up. But if the sustained generality of the law undeniably ensures its intelligible, practicable application, this juridical concern with formal clarity can also conspire to foster a belief in the law’s autonomy, universality and inerrancy, and on that ground to justify the suffering of the innocent perpetrated by a merely legal judgment. For the claim of the law’s inerrancy effaces the constructive obliged, in order to regain its lost authority, to resort to methods similar to those which were found to be necessary in the sixteenth century. A nation cursed with such a government will begin to fear its criminals; and fear, as [S. R.] Gardiner has said, is the parent of cruelty. ² Oliver Cromwell’s Letters and Speeches, ed. Thomas Carlyle, 3 vols. (London: Chapman & Hall, 1886), 2.136–7. ³ J. H. Baker, An Introduction to English Legal History, 4th edn. (London: Butterworths, 2002), 102.


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role played by its all-too-human administrators, deflecting criticism from the actual abuse of judicial discretion, which the event of an anomalous case and judgment would expose. Such resistance also manifested itself in the matter of evidence; for the judiciary were equally reluctant to inquire into the detailed circumstances of any case which might justify making an exception. Due process of law therefore came increasingly to exclude all but formal or categorical proofs, with the admissible facts further circumscribed in their significance by the device of legal presumption (Baker, Introduction, 80). In his great final essay, ‘On experience’, Montaigne finds occasion to count the human cost of such legal formalism: Here is something which has happened in my time: some men had been condemned to death for murder; the sentence, if not pronounced, was at least settled and determined. At this juncture the judges were advised by the officials of a nearby lower court that they were holding some prisoners who had made a clean confession to that murder and thrown an undeniable light on the facts. The Court deliberated whether it ought to intervene to postpone the execution of the sentence already given against the first group. The judges considered the novelty of the situation; the precedent it would constitute for granting stays of execution, and the fact that once the sentence had been duly passed according to law they had no powers to change their minds. In short, those poor devils were sacrificed to judicial procedure.⁴

At one level, we confront in this episode the intuitive assumption that truth works by likeness or analogy, usually to ourselves and our own notions. The expectation of such a self-evident truth, which we find clear and distinct because in some degree automorphic, frequently serves as grounds for hostility towards any novel, unfamiliar or divergent way of life and understanding. Indeed, the principle of equity—understood as equal right to justice under the law—can in its application become a test of human comparability, of our conformity to a received paradigm or category of speech and action. Thus Bracton, in the Laws and Customs of England (c.1275), defines equity as ‘the bringing together of things, that which desires like right in like cases and puts all things on an equality’: ‘Equity is so to speak, uniformity, and turns upon matters of fact, that is, the words and acts of men.’⁵ He intends here to describe the equal in the sense of impartial administration of justice, as distinguished from ‘respect of persons’ or prosopolepsia—the corrupting regard for rank, wealth, power which undermines the integrity of any legal system. But that description also evokes how, ⁴ Michel de Montaigne, The Essays: A Selection, tr. and ed. M. A. Screech (London: Penguin, 1993), 371. ⁵ Bracton on the Laws and Customs of England, tr. and ed. Samuel E. Thorne, 3 vols. (Cambridge, Mass.: Belknap/Harvard University Press, 1968), 2.25.

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in its judgments, positive law or lex scripta works by likeness or analogy—in Bracton’s phrase, ‘a similibus ad similia’ (2.21)—and in the application of summum et strictum jus, the rigor of the law, even presumes to categorical identities. It was on such categorical grounds that both Tudor and Stuart regimes could enforce the various Acts of Supremacy and Uniformity in religion which attended the accession of each new Protestant monarch, even as that monarch would swear in the words of the coronation oath to do aequa et recta justitia, ‘equal and right justice and discretion in mercy and truth’ (Baker, Introduction, 98). Of course, the meaning of this clause was momentously disputed throughout the seventeenth century, with Robert Filmer construing royal ‘discretion’ differently from, say, Locke or Algernon Sidney. In effect, the conflict of the age engenders two senses of the ‘arbitrary’, depending upon an individual’s civil and ecclesiastical politics. One is imagined as judicial discretion whimsically exercised in construing and applying lex scripta, whose endless exceptions confound the law’s proper clarity and impartiality, effectively subverting the administration of equal justice. The other is conceived as strictum et summum jus, the unyielding construction and unbending imposition of categorical judgments on a circumstantial world to which they are alien, with the inevitable result summa injuria—the greatest harm done to justice and its human constituency. That divergence in understanding itself excites the primal fear of meaning’s contingency, which Descartes cannily exploits when he introduces his deus deceptor and the method he calls ‘ridiculous and hyperbolical doubt’ in the Meditations.⁶ To admit an exception is to admit a discrepancy between our ideas and our actualities; and unless we are bent on courting self-delusion or a wholesale quietism, such an anomaly obliges us to construe our experience differentially, not categorically: that is, it should constrain us to work against the appearances things have for us, not to save them. However, as Montaigne argues throughout The Essays, we are forever disinclined to do this, although ‘the induction which we wish to draw from the likeness between events is unsure since they all show unlikeness’ (Montaigne, Essays, 364). ‘Likeness’, he avers, ‘does not make things ‘‘one’’ as much as unlikeness makes them ‘‘other’’ ’ (365). Such discrepancies are the conceptual scandal of systematic knowledge—a threat to the ever-burgeoning egoism of the human species and our conviction that the world is as we think and say it is. Yet experience proves that the clarity achieved by likeness is always relative to the circumstances in which we apprehend something, even as the law’s presumption to that value, ⁶ The Philosophical Works of Descartes, tr. Elizabeth Haldane and G. R. T. Ross, 2 vols. (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1970), 1.198–9.


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whether in its language or in the train of legal precedent, always depends upon the case to which either is applied. This is equity understood not as formal equivalence or commensurability, but as the principle which, owing to the distinctive circumstances of a case, in its judgments recognizes the discrepant and exceptional. For whenever positive law, in its necessarily general representation of human action and speech, fails rightly to describe and adjudicate a case, equity intervenes in order to ensure equal justice to the parties at law. In effect, it recognizes that the law is a human artifact, humanly administered, and therefore fallible. So Joseph Story argues that equity, taken in its ‘general’ as against what he calls its ‘civil’ or ‘municipal’ sense, is a legal principle ‘contradistinguished from mere law or strictum jus’, and applied ‘to the interpretation and limitation of the words of positive or written laws; by construing them, not according to the letter, but according to the reason and the spirit of them’⁷: Every system of laws must necessarily be defective; and cases must occur to which the antecedent rules cannot be applied without injustice, or to which they cannot be applied at all…. The general words of a law may embrace all cases; and yet it may be clear that all could not have been intentionally embraced, for if they were, the obvious objects of the legislation might or would be defeated. (Story, Commentaries, 1.7)

Drawing on the locus classicus of equity, Aristotle’s account of epieikeia in the Nicomachean Ethics (5.10), Story remarks that ‘[i]n this sense Equity must have a place in every rational system of jurisprudence, if not in name, at least in substance’, inasmuch as ‘[i]t is impossible that any code, however minute and particular, should embrace or provide for the infinite variety of human affairs, or should furnish rules applicable to them all’ (Story, Commentaries, 1.6). In that sixteenth-century bible of English equity jurisprudence, Doctor and Student, Christopher St. Germain also echoes Aristotle: And for the plainer declaration what equity is, thou shalt understand, that sith the deeds and acts of men, for which laws have been ordained, happen in divers manners infinitely, it is not possible to make any general rule of the law, but that it shall fail in some case: and therefore makers of laws take heed to such things as may often come, and not to every particular case, for they could not though they would. And therefore, to follow the words of the law were in some case both against justice and the commonwealth. Wherefore in some cases it is necessary to l[ea]ve the words of the law, and to follow that reason and justice requireth, and to that intent equity is ordained; that is to say, to temper and mitigate the rigour of the law. And it is called also by some men epieikeia; the which is no other thing but an exception of the law of God, or the law of reason, from the general rules of the law of men, when they by ⁷ Joseph Story, Commentaries on Equity Jurisprudence, 13th edn., 2 vols. (1846; reprint, Littleton, Colo.: Fred B. Rothman, 1988), 1.6.

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reason of their generality, would in any particular case judge against the law of God or the law of reason; the which exception is secretly understood in every general rule of positive law. And so it appeareth, that equity taketh not away the very right, but only that that seemeth to be right by the general words of the law. … Wherefore it appeareth, that if any law were made without any such exception expressed or implied, it were manifestly unreasonable, and were not to be suffered: for such causes might come that he that would observe the law should break both the law of God and the law of reason.⁸

In sum, ‘Equity is a right wiseness that considereth all the particular circumstances of the deed, the which also is tempered with the sweetness of mercy’ (Saint Germain, Doctor and Student, 45). Equity justifies what the general terms of the law would otherwise render illicit and criminal: it legitimates the different, the anomalous, the problematic by extenuating for the circumstances of an action or speech, in the manner described by the Nicomachean Ethics (6.11) when it says that the equitable person is ‘considerate’ in judgment.⁹ To quote Terence Irwin, such a person ‘will often find something pardonable in cases where the inflexible application of a rule that is only [usually] true would result in mistaken blame’¹⁰—an order of equitable consideration that Cicero also remarks, distinguishing between justice and right where ‘a man has carelessly or under compulsion or by accident committed an action that in the case of persons acting deliberately and voluntarily would not be permissible’ (De Partitione Oratoriae 37).¹¹ Expedience understood this way is charitably, mercifully, to acknowledge the contingent nature of human experience, which we incorrigibly propose to master despite daily proof of human finitude, and so only succeed in effacing from our expressions about the world, in the process falsifying our relationship to it. The doctrine of legal inerrancy itself depends upon such an elision, becoming a source of injustice when we obliviously insist on the categorical sense of legal things at the expense of human actualities. Then the law devolves upon a formal, self-enclosed and self-perpetuating system, divorced in its concerns from the human world it is meant to describe and shape. Thus Harold Potter observes that equity jurisprudence originated in the prerogative of the monarch and his chief minister, the lord chancellor, to dispense aequa et recta ⁸ Christopher Saint Germain, Doctor and Student, 2nd edn. (1787; reprint, Birmingham, Ala.: Legal Classics Library, 1988), 45–6. ⁹ Aristotle, Nicomachean Ethics, tr. and ed. Terence Irwin (Indianapolis, Ind.: Hackett, 1985), 164–5. All parenthetical citations of the Ethics refer to this edition. ¹⁰ Nicomachean Ethics, 418. ¹¹ Cicero, De Oratore (Book III), De Fato, Paradoxica Stoicorum, De Partitione Oratoriae, tr. H. Rackham (Cambridge, Mass.: Loeb Library/Harvard University Press, 1977), 413. All parenthetical citations of De Partitione Oratoriae refer to this edition.


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justitia where the common law in its formalism was either unable or unwilling to do so, in the manner Montaigne recounts of the French judges. It was necessarily an indefinite jurisdiction, whose contingent exercise was further aggravated by the frailty of civil order in the medieval world, where might could and did oppress right with remarkable impunity.¹² This dispensation of extraordinary justice was represented as an expression not only of the monarch’s grace and mercy, which included the vexed prerogative of pardon, but also the royal conscience which the chancellor was said to embody in himself. Nor was it coincidental that such an organ of government developed under the aegis of ecclesiastical chancellors, who were themselves bred up under the canon law to adjudicate the right in cases of individual conscience, and whose procedures, like those that came to obtain in the court of Chancery, involved personal examination of the parties to any legal issue, as well as a detailed inquiry into the full circumstances of the case, introducing evidence of intent or mental state, the better to assess the moral significance and gravity of an action or speech. The result was to give legal standing and agency to the conscience—both the court’s and its constituency’s—which neither enjoyed to the same degree elsewhere, enabling its judges better to distinguish between, say, premeditated and inadvertent or incidental offenses, and thus to make a critical refinement in the sometimes blunt instrument of the common law, which in the name of a notional clarity discountenanced the peculiar evidence of conscience’s expression. For in its efforts simultaneously to forestall what it feared would be the endless exfoliation of exceptions, not to mention the scandal of legal error, a literal or categorical understanding of the law in effect disdains the due constraint exerted on inference by the particular circumstances surrounding any human expression, and consequently the discriminate, elucidating power of intent. This procedural denial of the full evidence of intent, conjoined to the heedless assumption of the law’s infallibility, could lead to interpretive incoherence especially when a judge was confronted with an anomalous case, whose result was psychological and moral incoherence in the world subject to such implacable legality. By contrast, the value and interpretive principle of equity admits the scandal of human fallibility in how we promulgate and administer the law that penalizes our malfeasance. In order to rectify the error endemic to any human enterprise, it negotiates between texts or judgments on the one hand, and their use and occasion on the other, exercising a careful discretion or latitude of interpretation within the parameters set by the words of the law (which ¹² Harold Potter, Historical Introduction to English Law and Its Institutions (London: Sweet & Maxwell, 1932), 492 ff.

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would include precedent judgments) and the force of particular circumstances. Moreover, as St. Germain attests and Potter explains, the grounds of equity’s justification were also taken from canon law, whose jurisdiction likewise ‘depended on the theory that the law of God governed the universe, and hence His law and the law of nature and reason, which was nearly synonymous, predominated over the rules of any State. A human law could not be valid in contradiction to divine law. … Consequently, the Chancellor arrogated to himself the right to interfere with the course of law in a particular instance, even where the general rule was just, if according to conscience it would work against the law of God’ (Potter, English Law, 495).

2 By St. Germain’s account, equity takes exception wherever a judgment ‘seemeth to be right by the general words of the law’, but in actuality is morally repugnant because unjust, thus aggravating the original wrong. He argues still further that whenever a human law, or that which is taken for law, is expressed absolutely, unconditionally, the divine imperatives of right and justice, embodied in natural law, require that such a law admit exceptions and remedy the wrong. For to do otherwise is not to do justice ex aequo et bono—in the phrase of Roman civil law, ‘from the fair and the good’ (Cicero, De Partitione Oratoriae, 37). What with the Catholic Inquisition, the Avignon papacy, and the wars of religion consequent upon the Reformation, Milton fairly observes that the very words ‘blasphemy’, ‘heresy’ and ‘schism’ had become imbued with a theopathic, not to say demonic aura, which militated against the popular understanding of dissenting practices, and which he would see dispelled by religious education. In the case of blasphemy, he challenges his Erastian opponents in Civil Power ‘not thus to terrifie and pose the people with a Greek word: but to teach them better what it is; being a most usual and common word in that language to signifie any slander, any malitious or evil speaking, whether against God or man or any thing to good belonging’ (TCP, YP 7.246). He himself takes heresy in its original usage as mere heterodoxy—a difference or departure from received opinion in religion or any intellectual matter—as Hobbes does, who unlike Milton chose to publish his blasphemous and heretical ideas. Schism, like sectarianism, is meaningless where there is no ecclesiastical institution or hierarchy above the congregational level and consequently no tithing, a situation which Milton in his restrictive antinomianism prefers, having long regarded such particular, local administration as the ‘primitive’ form of discipline practised in the early church.


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But until the psychological miasma surrounding these terms is dispersed, Milton’s distinction between ‘a taken scandal’ and ‘a given’ was no more likely in 1659 to find a receptive audience outside learned circles than his last-ditch effort to save the Good Old Cause. Juridically, positive law would be obliged to treat both heresy and blasphemy in categorical terms, thus effacing any difference of circumstance and intent, which of course the literalism of strictum et summum jus would not recognize in the first place. Given the juridical abuse of such legislation, it is curious that Milton would hold up for more than politic approval the commonwealth’s ‘prudent and well deliberated’ blasphemy ordinance of 1650, ‘where the Parlament defines blasphemie against God, as far as it is a crime belonging to civil judicature, pleniùs ac meliùs Chrysippo & Crantore; in plane English more warily, more judiciously, more orthodoxally then twice thir number of divines have don in many a prolix volume: although in all likelihood they whose whole studie and profession these things are should be most intelligent and authentic therin, as they are for the most part, yet neither they nor these unnerring always or infallible’ (TCP, YP 7.246–7). I will defer for the moment Milton’s assertion of human fallibility, a practical scepticism which, along with liberty of conscience, provides the grounds on which he removes all religion, not excluding Catholicism, from the purview and penalties of the magistrate, who would then address such concerns only when they became a substantive and so actionable threat to civil order. This is the significance of his phrase, ‘as far as it is a crime belonging to civil judicature’, by which Milton draws the always-fine line between religious expression and civil disturbance, in which latter category the ordinance places the social protests of the Ranters, by conduct if not by name. For with the due exception of persons ‘distempered with sickness, or distracted in brain’, it proscribes the behavior of those ‘who should abuse and turn into Licentiousness, the liberty given in matters of Conscience’.¹³ Yet unlike the Scottish Kirk, the ordinance focuses on intent, or in Milton’s phrase, scandal deliberately given—that is to say, the Ranters’ calculated outraging of public opinion and the common peace. So while the ordinance prohibits public speech denying the existence and offending against the holiness of God, it also proscribes such assertions as proclaiming oneself God, that all creatures are God or that God is within all creatures, none of which are monotheistic, much less Judeo-Christian tenets; that scripture does not prohibit ‘acts of Lying, Stealing, Cousening and Defrauding others’, which is arguable given the behavior of the patriarchs; that ‘the acts of Murther, ¹³ C. H. Firth and R. S. Rait, eds., Acts and Ordinances of the Interregnum, 1642–1660, 3 vols. (London: Stationery Office, 1911), 2.410.

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Adultery, Incest, Fornication, Uncleanness, Sodomy, Drunkenness, filthy and lascivious Speaking, are not things in themselves shameful, wicked, impious, abominable, and detestable’, again arguable from scripture; and finally, the Manichean expedient that ‘whatsoever is acted by them (whether Whoredom, Adultery, Drunkenness or the like open Wickedness) may be comitted without sin’, if demonstrably not without civil penalties (Firth and Rait, Acts and Ordinances, 2.410). Milton himself would, I suspect, have been willing to admit that some of these claims are indeed arguable from scripture, although he would probably have taken issue with the reasoning behind them. At the same time, observing his own distinction between a ‘taken’ and a ‘given’ scandal, he would have separated the Ranters’ opinions as such from their deliberate use as public provocation and, as the ordinance declares, to license every kind of civil offense from theft and fraud to public indecency. In short, it does not enforce religious opinion so much as civil order and the common peace. By the exceptions it makes and by the justification it gives, the ordinance itself admits the question of mental state or intent into law, distinguishing the private beliefs of religious conscience from acts of ‘open Wickedness’. It also shows that discernment between civil and religious which Milton desires to see in government, but on which he knows better than to depend, having lived through an era of summa jus, summa injuria in which the rigor of the law knew no bounds. I refer to the 1648 Act of the Long Parliament, which made felonious ‘the Preaching, Teaching, Printing, or Writing’ of blasphemy and heresy (Firth and Rait, Acts and Ordinances, 1.1133), and whose severe penalties the 1650 ordinance could be said to temper, earning not only Milton’s approval but his gratitude, which better explains its appearance here. For the earlier Act pretty much proscribes the fundamentals of his personal theology: antitrinitarianism and subordinationism if unabjured are punishable by death; Arminianism, mortalism and antinomianism by renunciation and imprisonment until sureties are given (Firth and Rait, Acts and Ordinances, 1.1133–6). Before the 1640s, such matters belonged to the jurisdiction of canon law and the ecclesiastical courts, in whose purview public morality also lay, and which at least admitted the forensic instrument and evidence of intent. But in England as elsewhere, its penalties were still those executed by the magistrate, running the gamut from the stocks, flogging, branding and mutilating to imprisonment, transportation and death. When the Long Parliament abrogated the authority of both ecclesiastical and prerogative courts as well as High Commission, moral and religious malfeasance fell under the jurisdiction of the common law—the courts of Common Pleas and King’s (or in commonwealth usage, ‘Upper’) Bench, with the consequent loss of canon law’s procedural and interpretive latitude.


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In a theopathic age, even the Protectorate with its positive and tacit policy of toleration was helpless to stave off the tongue-boring, pillorying, whipping and imprisonment of the Quaker, James Nayler, for blasphemously entering Bristol in 1656 as the Messiah, complete with palm leaves and ecstatic crowds.¹⁴ Yet Cromwell still managed to avert Nayler’s execution in the face of parliamentary and popular hysteria, as he had the Unitarian (or Socinian) John Biddle a year earlier.¹⁵ In this context, the penalties for public blasphemy levied by the 1650 ordinance appear moderate—for a first offense, six months’ imprisonment; for a second, exile from the commonwealth upon pain of death, while still allowing for the legal process of abjuration of felony—which is congruent with Civil Power’s detestation of material or physical coercion in religion. Indeed, the whole ordinance displays the sort of circumspection that Bacon for one praises in a good law: its unambiguous expression, its explicit statement of the lawmakers’ intent, its economical exceptions to the rule, and its carefully delimited description of the offense.¹⁶ Such circumspection is singularly absent from the comprehensive and unextenuated proscriptions of 1648; but however properly and temperately composed a law may be, it cannot control how its language will be construed and applied by a magistracy disinclined to observe its mitigating spirit. This John Bunyan discovered to his despair even before the Cavalier parliament’s oppressive legislation against nonconformity was enacted, and conventicles made sedition ipso facto in 1662, 1664, 1665, 1670 and so forth. For as the Restoration dictum categorically declares, ‘It is impossible for a Dissenter, not to be a REBEL.’¹⁷ But depending on the circumstances at hand, any expression or action can mean one way and then another—a fact of human usage as valid for the language and administration of the law as it is for those living under its ordination. Nor is all scandal taken, any more than it is given: both law ¹⁴ For a further account of Nayler, see G. E. Aylmer, Rebellion or Revolution? (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1986), 176–7; Robert Ashton, Reformation and Revolution 1558–1660 (London: Paladin, 1985), 414; and Derek Hirst, Authority and Conflict (London: Arnold, 1986), 342–5. Hirst’s second chapter is particularly good on the mental world in which England’s dissenting communities, both Catholic and Protestant, had to make their way, while Christopher Hill’s The World Turned Upside Down (Harmondsworth: Penguin, 1975) is as always the locus classicus for seventeenth-century sectarian history, with an extensive discussion of Nayler, especially 248–58. ¹⁵ Charles Firth, Oliver Cromwell and the Rule of the Puritans in England (1900; reprint, London: Oxford University Press/World Classics, 1972), 358. Hirst is more sceptical about Cromwell’s efforts on Nayler’s behalf. ¹⁶ The Works of Francis Bacon, ed. James Spedding, Robert Leslie Ellis, and Douglas Denon Heath, 7 vols. (London: Longman et al., 1861), 5.101–2. ¹⁷ Holdsworth separately cites this dictum and the source from which I quote it, Lord Halifax’s Letter to a Dissenter (London, 1687), 15, written in response to the still more controversial Declaration of Indulgence made by James II, that of course led to the arrest and trial of the Seven Bishops for resisting it, whose acquittal in turn may be said to have been the precipitating cause of the Glorious Revolution of 1688.

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and civility exist precisely to mediate our inevitable differences with each other, so that we can share a sociable existence in spite of our incorrigible egoism (of which twin facts the 1650 ordinance is well aware). On this head, it may be remembered, as one occasion for Areopagitica’s assault on the licensing ordinance in 1645, that Milton was condemned by name in the Long Parliament for advocating the dissolution of marriage on the grounds of mental as against sexual incompatibility, with his offending pamphlet, the Doctrine and Discipline of Divorce (1643/4), placed on the Long Parliament’s index.¹⁸ If ever Milton experienced the personal anguish of ‘taken scandal’, this was it, given the rumors that immediately sprang up of his licentiousness and even bigamy (made a capital crime in 1650); and his shocked attempts in subsequent tracts and the odd sonnet to vindicate both his views and himself amply testify to his abiding sense of injury. But whatever the role played by his own experience of misprision, Milton embodies the predicament of ‘scandal taken’ or ‘given’ in Satan’s outrage at the exaltation, initially articulated by this ontological hierarch as an offense against natural equality and right, and then as blasphemy against the godhead of the heavenly hosts. Thus when the Father singles out the person enthroned on heaven’s high hill as his Son, anointing him as Messiah, Lord Vicegerent of creation, Satan imagines not only that his rightful position has been usurped—which Raphael comparatively and so parodically describes as ‘of the first / If not the first archangel, great in power, / In favour and preeminence’ (PL 5.659–61)—but that his presumptive identity as the creature most proximate and therefore most like God has been ‘impaired’ (PL 5.665). In his eyes, the new monarch, who has ‘engrossed all power’ and ‘eclipsed’ angelic being (PL 5.775–6), is not the only begotten Son of the one true God: he is Satan’s creaturely equal, newly and ironically disclosed as such by the express spectacle of the Son’s deification. Nor are the angels themselves the powers the Son created by the Father, but ‘Natives and sons of heaven’ (PL 5.790), born with that world and to it, whose ‘puissance is our own’ because newly autochthonous (PL 5.864): ‘Remember’st thou / Thy making, while the maker gave thee being? / We know no time when we were not as now; / Know none before us, self-begot, self-raised / By our own quickening power’ (PL 5.857–61). They are gods ‘who without law / Err not’, possessed of perfect virtue that renders the seeming penalty attached to the Father’s decree at once superfluous and sacrilegious (PL 5.798–9), and whose ‘imperial titles’ proclaiming their right to rule are innate or self-evident, to be read off each angel as the cabalistic Adam reads the Hebrew name inscribed on every ¹⁸ See William Parker, Milton: A Biography, ed. Gordon Campbell, 2nd edn., 2 vols. (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1986), 1.244–8, 260–5.


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inferior animal (PL 5.801–2). Last but not least, the Father is transformed into a despot who defrauds his noble peers of their natural and lawful equality by arbitrarily imposing on them the rule of his favorite and court parasite, the Son—the faithless reading of the divine decree and its ostensible illogic. Yet once more, we are on the field of Runnymede, with Satan characterizing the exaltation and the Son’s figural begetting as something along the lines of a Caesarian apotheosis—a self-deification by the Father which involves the civil worship of the Son as his image. Accordingly, in addressing those as-yet-guiltless spirits in heaven’s north, Satan derides what he calls ‘Kneetribute … prostration vile, / Too much to one, but double how endured, / To one and to his image now proclaimed’ (PL 5.782–4). Moreover, he raises a novel fear—that the Son’s new creation or ennobling by royal prerogative and proclamation renders ‘merely titular’ all those angelic degrees, ranks and distinction which Satan mercilessly intones in imitation of his divine betters (PL 5.774). I need hardly point out the political significance of that charge, where the creation of new nobility is seen not only to undermine the wonted prestige and power of old titles, but by such a seemingly arbitrary dispensation, to render even hereditary rank revocable and suspect in value. And Satan promptly exploits this self-created anxiety when, made sleepless by indignity, he speaks of ‘new law from him who reigns’ to his ‘companion dear’ and ‘next subordinate’, the angel latterly known as Beelzebub (PL 5.671–3, 680). The episode also offers a further rhetorical instance of ‘taken’ scandal, when Satan describes the undisrupted sleep of his inferior companion as ‘dissent’ from their wonted unity of mind, and by implication, a moral blindness to the wrong done his chief and all the angelic hosts by the exception made of the Son (PL 5.679). It is a failure of class solidarity to which Satan swiftly awakens Beelzebub and the rest of his great cohort with apostasy’s drumbeat of equality: ‘Will ye submit your necks and choose to bend / The supple knee? Ye will not, if I trust / To know ye right, or if ye know yourselves’ (PL 5.787–9). Setting aside Milton’s irony, which here abounds in the devices of Satan’s habitual demagoguery—his false ingratiations, equivocating clauses, dubious abstractions and inflammatory iterations—every statement the malign spirit makes evacuates the hidden God from the world. Heaven begins to look a lot like the natural aristocracy of republicanism and thus like hell, to be governed by those angels acknowledged and elected primus inter pares—the best of the best. But as J. G. A. Pocock argues, republicanism in England was rarely if ever thoroughly Machiavellian and naturalized in Satan’s manner.¹⁹ Rather, ¹⁹ In The Machiavellian Moment (Princeton, N.J.: Princeton University Press, 1975), Pocock articulates something remarkably close to Satan’s sentiments when he describes the role of

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as Milton’s did, it usually took as its first principle a God who creates and erects human reason, from which divine gift derives any claim to natural right, equality and liberty—the grounds on which St. Germain argues an equitable exception from law, and Milton justifies religious dissent. Tellingly, a version of Satan’s outrage and its epiphenomena of fraud and violence inspired a thirteenth-century statute against what was called scandalum magnatum, injurious rumors supposedly spread about those temporal gods of scripture, the lordly and mighty, which the law sought to interdict—not so much to ward off the defamation of grandees as ‘to safeguard the peace of the kingdom’, since ‘the offended great one was only too ready to resort to arms to redress a fancied injury’ by the crown, as Holdsworth comments (History, 3.409). The circumstances of its enactment and its own language argue that the statute was actually devised to avert ‘a taken’ as against a ‘given’ scandal; but as Satan demonstrates by his own baronial rebellion, presented to his cadres as the angelic Magna Carta, positive law even in the form of a divine decree is helpless to stave off such psychological contingencies. For notwithstanding the notionally prophylactic effect of its penalty, which has no effect whatsoever on Satan’s limited imagination and bad conscience, only God himself could pull off such an impossibly totalitarian project of mind control, in which every thought not expressly allowed is forbidden. Even supernal law restricts itself to the demonstrable fact of an offense, which is why the satanic legions are guiltless in the eyes of heaven and their sin not actionable until the moment when they vote to revolt with their great chief against the regality of God, ‘upheld by old repute, / Consent or custom’ (PL 1.639–40). For in Satan’s heaven, there is no God as such, only the autarchy of angelic godhead.²⁰ That which exists must be seen to exist; but Milton’s God is a hidden God, a Deus absconditus sub contrario in Luther’s formulation—the creator irretrievably concealed beneath its contrary in the creature—whose very hiddenness expresses the ultimate and absolute distinction between deity and the world, unmade and made, while also constituting the salient condition of their relationship. For the creator’s invisibility elicits and tries the creature’s custom or second nature in justifying any people’s sense of political and legal uniqueness: ‘A claim to uniqueness was a claim to autonomy, and when it was asserted that there was nothing in English law and government that was not customary and autochthonous, the claim was being made that the English possessed a historical and immemorial sovereignty over themselves; they were not, and they had never been, anything which was not of their own making’ (341). Indicatively, Milton does not make a republican or any other argument that I can recall from the authority of custom or second nature—only from human equality before God. ²⁰ For an extended discussion of this issue and its theological sources, see my argument in Imperfect Sense (Princeton, N.J.: Princeton University Press, 2001), 45–93, 208–82.


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faith in its unseen maker and, by extension, all religious invisibilia including faith itself, which in the words of Hebrews 11:1 is ‘the assurance of things hoped for, the conviction of things not seen’. In the Christian Doctrine, where Milton argues for the Son’s subordination to deity per se, he uses this very distinction to analyze the character of scriptural theophany: for deity to be manifest, the hidden God requires ‘the Son, his image; in any other way he is invisible’ (DDC, YP 6.244); moreover, ‘God is inaudible just as he is invisible’, except through the Son as his Word (DDC, YP 6.239). All other theophany is either heraldic and mediated by angels, or prophetic and human. So when the speaker (as his wont) anticipates the eventual apostasy of humankind, he describes them as ‘corrupted to forsake / God their creator, and the invisible / Glory of him that made them’ (PL 1.368–70). But Satan, after the manner of lex scripta or positive law, only admits categorical evidence of godhead—what appears as such—while attending obsessively, like strictum jus, to its mere superficies. As a consequence, theophany as the mediated presence of deity escapes him, in a fashion not unlike the way that the evidence of conscience or intent, warranting a different construction and a procedural exception, escapes the notice of the common law or the literalism of strictum jus. In Civil Power, this differential understanding, which argues that any expression can mean more and other than it appears to do, enables us to ‘discern between civil and religious’, and to cure the disorder and corruption of either realm created by their Erastian conflation, which Satan’s reasoning mimics (TCP, YP 7.240). It also allows us to distinguish between dissent and insurgency, just and unjust, as well as scandal taken and given; because it is at this juncture that Abdiel gives the lie to angelic inerrancy and dissents from Satan’s atheism, exclaiming: ‘O argument blasphemous, false and proud!’ (PL 5.809).

3 Not accidentally, the competing figures of Satan and Abdiel, who naturally argue in utramque partem—on either side of the question of a creator God—appear alike in the broad outlines of their actions: each is scandalized by the blasphemous words of ostensibly divine authority and openly repudiates them, refusing to remain a member of the community over which it rules; and each subsequently takes up arms against professed godhead to effect its overthrow. Strictum jus would find nothing to choose between the two, both dissenters and insurgents against established authority and consequently both outlaws; and lex scripta would not admit into evidence the particular circumstances which would permit their discrimination. That is precisely why

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Milton argues that the magistrate has no place meddling in religion; for the difference between Satan and Abdiel does not lie in what is obvious but in what is incapable of more than probable demonstration—that their actions are done in good conscience and good faith, which in law only equity and its interpretive procedure can detect. And that inquisitorial method, it should be remembered, is largely imported from canon law, and to that extent a papistical invention.²¹ Equity can take exception to the false necessity imposed by such categorical imperatives, allowing it to pursue extraordinary justice ex aequo et bono. And in Chancery, extraordinary justice also involved exceptional procedures: the novel invention of a writ of subpoena to compel personal attendance and what was originally a viva voce examination by the court; an indefinite latitude of inquiry that would allow the chancellor or his proxies to construct a fully circumstantial account of the case, which would include considerations of intent or conscience—not only of the law but of the parties at law. Civil Power would make such an equitable exception for all religious opinion and practice, not excluding Catholicism, on the grounds that Christian liberty similarly ‘sets us free not only from the bondage of those ceremonies, but also from the forcible imposition of those circumstances, place and time in the worship of God: which though by him commanded in the old law, yet in respect of that veritie and freedom which is euangelical, S. Paul comprehends both kindes alike, that is to say, both ceremonie and circumstance, under one and the same contemtuous name of weak and beggarly rudiments, Gal. 4.3.9, 10. Col. 2.8. with 16’ (TCP, YP 7.262). ‘Ceremonies and circumstances’ are the mere externals of religion, the ‘weak and beggarly rudiments’ of the law whose enforcement is tantamount to idolatry in Milton’s eyes, and an offense against the liberty of the gospel—that freedom of understanding and choice that he invests in the faculty of conscience. To save his cause and his life, and later to staunch the outpouring of political and religious radicalism consequent upon his ideas, Luther became an Erastian perforce—although, as Milton remarks, the threat against this capital Protestant came not only from the papacy but from its anointed, the Holy Roman emperor (TCP, YP 7.243). Yet it is on the Pauline ground of Christian liberty which Luther himself revived in The Freedom of a Christian (1520) that Milton would radically restrict the legal domain of civil obligation, urging the separation of church and state: ²¹ It should be noted that, unlike England, where the inquisitorial procedure of canon law was confined to prerogative courts like Chancery and Star Chamber, its assimilation to criminal law on the continent had horrific consequences—as Holdsworth argues, legitimating the use of torture. See Holdsworth, History, vol. 5, for a comparison of the English and continental systems, and full discussion of Star Chamber’s history and procedure.


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Christ hath a government of his own, sufficient of it self to all his ends and purposes in governing his church; but much different from that of the civil magistrate; and the difference in this verie thing principally consists, that it governs not by outward force, and that for two reasons. First because it deals only with the inward man and his actions, which are all spiritual and to outward force not lyable: secondly to shew us the divine excellence of his spiritual kingdom, able without worldly force to subdue all the powers and kingdoms of this world, which are upheld by outward force only. That the inward man is nothing els but the inward part of man, his understanding and his will, and that his actions thence proceeding, yet not simply thence but from the work of divine grace upon them, are the whole matter of religion under the gospel, will appeer planely by considering what that religion is; whence we shall perceive yet more planely that it cannot be forc’d. What euangelic religion is, is told in two words, faith and charitie; or beleef and practise. That both these flow either the one from the understanding, the other from the will, or both jointly from both, once indeed naturally free, but now only as they are regenerat and wrought upon by divine grace, is in part evident to common sense and principles unquestiond, the rest by scripture. … (TCP, YP 7.255)

To the differing ends of civil and religious order, Milton argues that any subjective faculty like the understanding and will is by its very nature exempt from legislation and coercion. For conscience and its peculiar subject, the spiritual dimension or significance of things, are what Luther after Hebrews calls res non apparentes, things that like the hidden God do not appear as such. So Milton demands to know ‘how can such religion as this admit of force from man, or force be any way appli’d to such religion, especially under the free offer of grace in the gospel, but it must forthwith frustrate and make of no effect both the religion and the gospel?’ (TCP, YP 7.256). He takes exception to the intrusion of lex scripta in religion, not only because it reduces the impalpables of faith to the superficies of ‘ceremonies and circumstances’, the meretricious display of hypocrisy, but also because he resists the categorical logic of the law—Bracton’s a similibus ad similia—for whom equal justice is likeness and thus the enforcement of outward conformity at the expense of conscience, that religious faculty or intelligence which apprehends and enacts the dictates of faith and charity. As Hobbes of all people regularly insists, only God can judge the heart, which lies in the domain of invisibilia to which deity itself belongs, with the judgments of positive law restricted to visibilia, which is to say actionable in the sense of demonstrable offenses. The virtue of equity, as the principle of conscience whether embodied in common law or Chancery jurisprudence, is that it admits the distinction between the categorical or presumptive sense of speech and action, and their actual significance. And this differential order of meaning begins for Milton with the fact of deity’s hiddenness, and the

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abysmal difference between creator and created that Satan would deny. And it does so because conscience, like all religious meaning for Milton, is mediated by the manifold phenomena of temporal experience. Thus equity itself is not identical with the law, only with justice; and to the extent that lex scripta misrepresents a state of affairs by its categories and procedures, so equity intervenes to do justice precisely because its own procedures acknowledge the discrepancy between the ostensible and the actual sense of things where the categorical logic of positive law argues their likeness, and summum et strictum jus their identity. So where lex scripta confines the magistrate to the categorical sense of the law, common law procedure itself largely ensures that judgment is restricted to external facts and their presumptive construction, to which material and corporal penalties are then adduced. So when civil law is imported to religion, the inevitable result is to convert the spiritual exercise of faith and conscience into ‘weak and beggarly rudiments’, the outward shows of religion, which here as in the anti-prelatical pamphlets Milton associates with the repressive policies of the Laudian episcopate and of course the papacy. By contrast, the procedures of equity historically admit into evidence the individual expressions and particular circumstances which mediate human intent, precisely because it acknowledges the conscience of both the court and the parties at law, and with conscience the discrepancy between what appears and what is actually the case. Since conscience as a differential order of meaning has no legal standing in the civil law as applied to religion, the discrepant sense of the spiritual is evacuated perforce from religious practice, like God from Satan’s heaven; and with it goes all possibility of making those moral and religious discriminations in human speech and action which depend upon admitting circumstantial evidence and the elucidating force of intent. Abdiel looks just like Satan; Bunyan the loyalist instead looks like a Fifth Monarchy man (whose open sedition in Venner’s crackpot Rising of 1661 was made the pretext for Parliament’s harsh measures against nonconformity²²); and Milton himself looks like a libertine—as he does even to this day. On the grounds of divine and human equity, therefore, the author of Civil Power would remove religion from the civil jurisdiction of law, and from all compulsion except the suasive. For they address distinct if related orders of human experience and meaning whose conflation—whether by the Ranters ²² For a brief account, see J. P. Kenyon, Stuart England, 2nd edn. (London: Penguin, 1985), 197–8; a fuller, contemporary account appears in Bishop Burnet’s History of My Own Time, Part One: The Reign of Charles the Second, ed. Osmund Airy, 2 vols. (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1897), 1.278–9.


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or their Erastian opponents—is destructive of truth, justice and the right in either realm. But by enfranchising ‘civil judgment and punishment in causes ecclesiastical’, Erastianism establishes a ‘civil inquisition’, degrading to the instinctual reflex of ‘bodilie fear’ the free intelligence of conscience—‘that full perswasion whereby we are assur’d that our beleef and practise, as far as we are able to apprehend and probably make appeer, is according to the will of God & his Holy Spirit within us, which we ought to follow much rather then any law of man, as not only his word every where bids us, but the very dictate of reason tells us’ (TCP, YP 7.242). More grievously still, such an inquisition presumes to a capacity impossible in any creature, which is to judge infallibly, inerrantly in religious matters, as Satan claims for the gods of heaven but mostly himself, in his delusional effort to be most like God, to equal him (PL 1.248–9), and even to supercede him, having supposed that ‘one step higher / Would set me highest’ (PL 4.50–1). As Milton’s language inescapably declares—‘no less a pope or popedom than he at Rome’ (TCP, YP 7.244); ‘a popish commuting of penaltie, corporal for spiritual’ (TCP, YP 7.245); ‘a civil papacie’ (TCP, YP 7.244)—the epitome of such penal enforcement of thought is the papacy, which in its idolatry exalts human traditions over the authority of scripture, its own inerrancy over conscience and the illumination of the Holy Spirit, implicit faith sequestered from the sacred text over its unrestricted access and interpretation, and whose Holy Inquisition perverts canon law’s inquisitorial procedure into the bloody tenet of persecution. Thus Milton pictures the pope like he pictures Satan in Book 2, ‘sitting in the temple of God, as it were opposite to God, and exalting himself above all that is called god, or is worshipd, 2 Thess. 2.4.’; and, in case we might miss the point, he adds a gloss: ‘That is to say not only above all judges and magistrates, who though they be calld gods, are far beneath infallible, but also above God himself, by giving law both to the scripture, to the conscience, and to the spirit it self of God within us’—the aspiration, in short, of a Lucifer (TCP, YP 7.244). But since Protestant theology acknowledges ‘no other divine rule or autoritie from without us warrantable to one another as a common ground but the holy scripture, and no other within us but the illumination of the Holy Spirit. … which no man can know at all times to be in himself, much less to be at any time for certain in any other, it follows cleerly, that no man or body of men in these times can be the infallible judges or determiners in matter of religion to any other mens consciences but thir own’ (TCP, YP 7.242–3). For Milton, the criterion that validates exegesis and conscience at once is not orthodoxy but rather probability—that is to say, what usually happens or is meant under such circumstances—the value which in Aristotle (as eikos,

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cognate with epieikes or equity) and Cicero (as probabilis or verisimilis) governs any inference in the arena of human affairs: ‘Seeing therfore that no man, no synod, no session of men, though calld the church, can judge definitively the sense of scripture to another mans conscience, which is well known to be a general maxim of the Protestant religion, it follows planely, that he who holds in religion that beleef or those opinions which to his conscience and utmost understanding appeer with most evidence or probabilitie in the scripture, though to others he seem erroneous, can no more be justly censur’d for a heretic then his censurers’ (TCP, YP 7.247–8). It is precisely because the papacy has consistently resorted to the expedient of force to secure religious uniformity and thus its own hegemony over his own nation, that Milton like the vast majority of his fellow citizens regards Catholicism primarily as a political institution, not a religion—‘a Roman principalitie rather, endevoring to keep up her old universal dominion under a new name and meer shaddow of a catholic religion; being indeed more rightly nam’d a catholic heresie against the scripture; supported mainly by a civil, and, except in Rome, by a forein power: justly therfore to be suspected, not tolerated by the magistrate of another countrey’ (TCP, YP 7.254). He reiterates that civil justification for intolerance towards Catholicism, whose private services and household meetings Milton is hardly unique in regarding as a hotbed of foreign subversion and civil insurgency. But neither in Civil Power, nor the expediently anticatholic True Religion, does he sanction the use of corporal or monetary penalties against Catholics, although in True Religion he recommends the destruction of their images and the proscribing of their private worship as antichristian idolatry. The enforcement of that latter proscription would seem to require the levying of some civil penalty, as both Masson and Keith Stavely remark (TR, YP 8.431 n. 59); but Milton conspicuously fails to follow up this implication. Instead, despite a hundred years or more of fervent popular bigotry, regrettably fanned on this occasion by Charles II’s 1672 Declaration of Indulgence (which modestly allowed Catholics only private worship while removing all civil penalties for Protestants),²³ he succumbs to the general hysteria only insofar as he exploits it for the sake of nonconformist toleration. Thus, against the trend of current legislation, he abides by his principled resistance to force in religious matters, although his endorsement of that exception for Catholics could hardly be called ringing: ‘Are we to punish them by corporal punishment, or fines in their Estates, upon account of their Religion? I suppose it stands not with the Clemency of the Gospel, more then what ²³ For the full text of the 1672 Declaration, see J. P. Kenyon, The Stuart Constitution 1603–1688, 2nd edn. (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1986), 382–4.


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appertains to the security of the State’ (TR, YP 8.431). Instead, he restricts his recommendations to preventative measures designed to fend off Catholicism’s notionally deleterious effects, especially the irrational seduction images have for an implicit faith: educating the Protestant laity in the scriptures, allowing the free and open discussion of religious ideas, and the encouragement of each person’s moral amendment. Again, the distinction between Catholic and nonconformist prosecution is one of circumstance and intent, between civil insurgency and ecclesiastical dissent, which can only be argued in particular instances, and not categorically. For in the tract’s ongoing paradox, which informs almost every argument Milton makes, he contends that the effort forcibly to coerce the human mind will recoil back upon itself. This is the reflexive action that he famously exemplifies in the Areopagitica by his comparison of truth to the new Proteus, who when palpably constrained, assumes every shape but his own. For whenever we seek to circumscribe and fix the mind of God or our neighbor, we succeed only in disfiguring our own understanding and will. In Civil Power, the imposition of material penalties induces only hypocrisy and profanation in its victims while illustrating the corruption of their advocates, who in disdaining spiritual means betray the gospel’s fundamental principles of faith and charity: ‘Since force neither instructs in religion, nor begets repentance or amendment of life, but, on the contrarie, hardness of heart, formalitie, hypocrisie, and, as I said before, everie way increase of sin; more and more alienates the minde from a violent religion expelling out and compelling in, and reduces it to a condition like that which the Britains complain of in our storie, driven to and fro between the Picts and the sea’ (TCP, YP 7.269). True church discipline must be intelligible and voluntary, contingent upon the individual’s free and unforced consent, to be ‘exercis’d on them only who have willingly joind themselves in that covnant of union, and proceeds only to a separation from the rest, proceeds never to any corporal inforcement or forfeture of monie; which in spiritual things are the two arms of Antichrist, not of the true church; the one being an inquisition, the other no better than a temporal indulgence of sin for monie, whether by the church exacted or by the magistrate’ (TCP, YP 7.245). Accordingly, he concludes that ‘if [Catholics] ought not to be tolerated, it is for just reason of state more then of religion; which they who force, though professing to be protestants, deserve as little to be tolerated themselves, being no less guiltie of poperie in the most popish point’ (TCP, YP 7.254). This is not only a rhetorical maneuver—that is, to create an aversion to the practice by damning as papistical the Protestant imposition of civil penalties in religion: it is also to accuse the makers and enforcers of recusancy legislation of being no less antichristian than the Pope, by similarly substituting ‘corporal for

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spiritual’ (TCP, YP 7.245). Further, they do so on such dubious scriptural grounds as Paul’s adducing the authority of conscience in Romans 13:5—‘Be subject not only for wrath, but for conscience sake’ (TCP, YP 7.252)—to secure civil obedience explicitly in those civil things covered by what was called the ‘second’ and moral ‘table’ of the decalogue—adultery, murder, theft, false witness, and coveting—over against its initial religious prescriptions (13:9), and which Paul himself sums up in the Levitical terms of Jesus’ great commandment: ‘You shall love your neighbor as yourself’ (Matthew 22:39). The Erastian reading of Romans 13:5 isolates the verse from that context, focusing arbitrarily upon the simple interjection of the word ‘conscience’ in ‘this most wrested and vexd place of scripture’, in order to claim the magistrate’s jurisdiction in spiritual matters, which is to distort the clear trend of Paul’s argument, as Milton observes: ‘If from such uncertain or rather such improbable grounds as these they endue magistracie with spiritual judgment, they may as well invest him in the same spiritual kinde with power of utmost punishment … and then turn spiritual into corporal’ (TCP, YP 7.252). The problem of discernment thus raised consists in an inability to recognize that spiritual meanings do not operate like physical or monetary ones—not because they are somehow transcendent and so ineffable, but because they simply signify differently, neither objectively nor equivalently, fungibly. In Milton’s view, Erastianism assumes the opposite, an assumption expressed in both the legal criteria of blasphemy and heresy as well as their punishments: ‘How many persecutions then, imprisonments, banishments, penalties and stripes,’ he then exclaims: ‘how much bloodshed have the forcers of conscience to answer for, and protestants rather than papists!’ (TCP, YP 7.253). Given its inefficacy, coercion of opinion is nonsense in the very word, and immoral nonsense at that: ‘men must be exhorted to beware of scandals in Christian libertie, not forc’d by the magistrate; least while he goes about to take away the scandal, which is uncertain whether given or taken, he take away our liberty, which is the certain and the sacred gift of God, neither to be touchd by him, nor to be parted with by us’ (TCP, YP 7.267). Not only Milton’s admission of uncertainty in human relations, but his very distinction between ‘given or taken’ scandal recognizes the fundamentally interpretive character of our social existence, insofar as it involves the perpetual possibility of misunderstanding within the daily fact of mutual if not perfect comprehension. Milton makes this point by his own exegesis, which takes issue not only with the inferences of his Erastian opponents, but also with their interpretive procedure, which is to fragment the text into semantic particles, extracting at will a phrase or a sentence that can then be made to signify arbitrarily. In a world of controversy that invariably clothes its argument in chapter and verse, Milton can afford to do the same; but his own readings


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observe the grammatical-historical method of Erasmus and the reformers, which attends to just those circumstances of expression and occasion that are expediently elided by the strictum jus of such biblicism. Oddly enough, that method is identical with legal interpretation, as F. Vaughan Hawkins describes it, quoting Grotius: ‘Interpretatio est collectio mentis ex signis maxime probabilibus. It is a collecting of the intent from the most probable signs or marks.’²⁴ And as Hawkins goes on to argue, ‘Interpretation is in truth a species of equity, just as equity may be said to be a liberal interpretation of the law’: But in fact with no class of writings, nay, with no one writing, is it ever the case that it is inadmissible to travel in search of the intent beyond the mere meaning of the words. … in practice the two processes are impossible to separate: and it is hard to say where meaning in the sense of known and definite signification ends, and implication or inference begins to be added to it. Ordinary language is full of ellipses and ambiguities, which we solve unconsciously to ourselves by a reference to intention; and in some kinds of writing and speaking suggestion is almost without limit, and the meaning of the words bears a very small proportion to the amount of meaning conveyed or hinted at. A law, therefore, which enjoined a perfect written expression, would be impossible to be obeyed, and the command which gives rise to the necessity of the letter, in a legal writing, must itself be interpreted according to the spirit. ( Thayer, Preliminary Treatise on Evidence, 587)

A categorical fixation on securing the clarity and fixity of legal forms can only achieve those ends at the cost of what the coronation oath aptly calls ‘discretion in mercy and truth’—the human actuality whose indefinite nature Aristotle wisely distinguished from the objects of episteme and apodeixis, as he distinguished the intelligence of phronesis from mathematical facility (Nicomachean Ethics 6.7–9). But it is Hawkins’s point that their achievement is illusory, a specious and fleeting effect dispelled by the invariable contingency of human meaning. For the intent of any human expression, and any legal text, is circumstantial, probable, and as he observes with Milton, sociable, charitable: we do not make sense or law in an inhuman void, but in the context of other minds whose expressions we not only wish but are also morally obligated to understand. And we do so by reference to the probable signs or marks of that person’s intent—‘according to the spirit’—which necessarily include but are not restricted to the mere words or facts at issue. On this head, I would again invoke David Burrell’s always important correction in our vulgar understanding of the term: ‘for the medievals’, he remarks, ‘Spirit referred not in the first instance to an unfamiliar mode of existence, but a ²⁴ ‘On the Principles of Legal Interpretation, with Reference Especially to the Interpretation of Wills’, in James Bradley Thayer, A Preliminary Treatise on Evidence at the Common Law (1898; reprint, Fred B. Rothman, 1969), 577–605, esp. 580.

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capacity for relating on different levels and across the space-time parameters of bodies.’²⁵ For Wittgenstein as well, meaning is a relation in every sense of the word, and cannot be reduced to any one point, not even to the word itself. It is for Milton too. Perhaps the most egregious example he gives of forcing the scriptural text and conscience together is the Erastian account of a parable from Luke, whose wonted incongruities distinguish between the ostensible and figural, the literal and spiritual sense of its own expressions, and thereby received or worldly value from that which obtains in the kingdom of heaven. In the parable, a man invites many to a banquet who, when the time arrives and the banquet is ready, make their excuses, too occupied with worldly affairs to attend. Furious, he tells his servant, ‘Go out quickly to the street and lanes of the city, and bring in the poor and maimed and blind and lame’ (14:21). And when places yet remain at the table, he says again, ‘Go out to the highways and hedges, and compel people to come in, that my house may be filled’: ‘For I tell you, none of those men who were invited shall taste my banquet’ (14:22–4). It is significant that the context here is a banquet Jesus himself attends, where he exhorts the guests not only to the exercise of humility in worldly things, but to the charitable and equitable activity of dignifying the poor and suffering—inviting them to supper over those with a worldly claim and means to reciprocate in kind: ‘For you will be repaid at the resurrection of the just’ (14:13–14). Moreover, the following chapter immediately takes up the issue dear to its Greek author’s own heart, that of Christian universality, whose opening verses relate the Pharisees’ disdain and suspicion of Jesus because he admits to his company tax collectors and sinners—those who on the Levitical grounds of purity are excluded from religious community. The tradition of Jesus’ tolerance in this regard, which the gospels subsequently inscribe, justified the Pauline mission to the gentiles, whose apologist articulates the issue in Romans and Galatians by his distinction between law and gospel. Milton regularly invokes that distinction in Civil Power —most extensively in his account of Galatians’ allegory of the two Jerusalems—and his response to the Erastian reading of Luke’s parable reflects it in an unexpected manner: but magistrates under the gospel, our free, elective and rational worship, are most commonly busiest to force those things which in the gospel are either left free, nay somtimes abolishd when by them compelld, or els controverted equally by writers on both sides, and somtimes with odds on that side which is against them. By which means they punish that which they ought to favor and protect, or that with corporal punishment and of thir own inventing, which not they but the church hath receivd command to chastise with a spiritual rod only. Yet some are so eager in thir zeal of ²⁵ David B. Burrell, Knowing the Unknowable God (Notre Dame, Ind.: Notre Dame University Press, 1986), 23.


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forcing, that they refuse not to descend at length to the utmost shift of that parabolic prooff Luke 14. 16, &c. compell them to come in. therfore magistrates may compell in religion. As if a parable were to be straind through every word or phrase, and not expounded by the general scope therof: which is no other here than the earnest expression of Gods displeasure on those recusant Jewes, and his purpose to preferre the gentiles on any terms before them; expressd here by the word compell. But how compells he? doubtless no otherwise then he draws, without which no man can come to him, Joh. 6. 44: and that is by the inward perswasive motions of his spirit and by his ministers; not by the outward compulsions of a magistrate or his officers. (TCP, YP 7.260–1)

Arbitrarily to fasten upon the one word ‘compel’, and then—while ignoring the integral figuralism of parabolic discourse, as well as ‘the general scope’ of Jesus’ teachings—perversely to construe it in exclusive support of civil compulsion, is not only an interpretive but a moral absurdity. In Milton’s eyes, it is a violence done to the scriptural text in order to enfranchise worldly concerns and corporal means, and so exemplifies the Erastians’ willful disregard of the different because spiritual and elective operation of religious things. His own prophetic construction may appear equally tendentious to some; but again, it gains credibility from the scriptural context and from the historical circumstances of the gospel’s Greek composition, whose apostolic author could be nothing else but a product of Pauline evangelism, and who probably construed Jesus’ parable in that light, given its juxtaposition with Luke 15. Such tyrannizing over scripture and conscience as he ascribes to the Erastian position is what moves Milton to desire that religion be not only disestablished, but altogether uninstituted above the congregational level. Only then, he believes, can humanity engage without constraint in the true relations of the spirit: To protestants therfore whose common rule and touchstone is the scripture, nothing can with more conscience, more equitie, nothing more protestantly can be permitted then a free and lawful debate at all times by writing, conference or disputation of what opinion soever, disputable by scripture: concluding that no man in religion is properly a heretic at this day, but he who maintains traditions or opinions not probable by scripture; who, for aught I know, is the papist only; he the only heretic, who counts all heretics but himself. (TCP, YP 7.249)

It is therefore appropriate that the epilogue to Civil Power comes from Milton’s own practice and experience of singularity, as described by Bishop Burnet in his History of My Own Time: John Goodwin and Milton did also escape all censure, to the scandal of all people … Milton had appeared so boldly, though with much wit, and great purity and elegancy of his Latin style, against Salmasius and others, upon that argument,

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and had discovered so virulent a malice against the late king and all the family, and against monarchy, that it was a strange omission if he was forgot, and an odd strain of clemency if it was intended he should be forgotten; but he was not excepted out of the act of indemnity. Afterwards he came out of his concealment, and lived many years, much visited by all strangers, and much admired by all at home for the poems he writ, though he was then blind; chiefly that of Paradise Lost, in which there is a nobleness both of contrivance and execution, that, though he affected to write in blank verse without rithm, and made many new and rough words, yet it was esteemed the beautifullest and perfectest poem that was ever writ, at least in our language. (Burnet, History, 1.283–4)

9 Milton and Antitrinitarianism Martin Dzelzainis In 1687, the clergyman Stephen Nye initiated the so-called Unitarian Controversy by publishing A Brief History of the Unitarians, Called also Socinians. Bringing a cool simplicity to heated theological and patristic disputes, Nye sought to minimize doctrinal differences between those rejecting the orthodox account of the Trinity as comprised of three distinct persons—the Father, the Son, and the Holy Spirit—who are nevertheless equally divine and one in essence. According to Nye, ’tis to be noted that the Arians and Socinians agree in their Doctrine concerning God, that he is only one Person, the God and Father of our Lord Christ; but they differ concerning the Son and Holy Spirit. The Son, according to the Arians, was generated or created some time before the World, and in process of time, for great and necessary causes, became incarnate in our Nature: The Holy Ghost (they say) is the Creature of the Son, and subservient to him in the Work of Creation. But the Socinians deny, that the Son our Lord Christ had any Existence before he was born of Blessed Mary, being conceived in her by the holy Spirit of God: They say the Spirit is the Power and Inspiration of God … This difference notwithstanding, because they agree in the principal Article, that there is but one God, or but one who is God, both parties (Socinians and Arians) are called Unitarians, and esteem of one another as Christians and true Believers.¹

The message was that Arians and Socinians should agree to differ on questions such as whether the Son had pre-existed the Incarnation. Another simplification was Nye’s insistence on the Council of Constantinople in 381 as the pivotal event in the history of the Christian church. Before then, he argued, Christians were successively ‘Nazarens’ (followers of the Apostles’ Creed, which did not assert the godhead of the Son and the Holy Spirit), Arians, and upholders of the position on the Father and the Son adopted at the Council ¹ Stephen Nye, A Brief History of the Unitarians, Called also Socinians. In Four Letters, Written to a Friend (n.p., 1687), 33–4.

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of Nicaea in 325. That is to say, Nye distinguished—correctly—between the Nicene Creed, which made the Son co-equal and co-eternal with the Father, and the later ‘Doctrine, that Son and Holy Spirit are the same God with the Father, not only (as the Nicene fathers explained this matter) by Unity of Wills, and specifical Identity or sameness of Substance, but by numerical or true Identity and sameness of Substance and Nature’ (Brief History, p. 29). For although the Nicene Creed was specifically designed to counter Arianism and thus insisted on the full divinity of the Son as begotten, not made, and as of one substance with the Father, it made no comparable assertions about the Holy Spirit and was therefore only ‘binitarian’. It was the Niceno-Constantinopolitan Creed of 381 that took the further decisive step of declaring that the Spirit proceeded from the Father and was also fully divine, thereby asserting a truly trinitarian doctrine.² For more than a millennium, the enforcement of this doctrine by means of ‘terrible penal Laws’ had condemned those subscribing to one or other of the pre-trinitarian formulas to a marginal or interstitial existence. But the situation in the 1680s looked particularly bleak to Nye (Brief History, 29–30): now not only the Nazaren Faith, but the Arian and the Nicene (truly so called) are no where openly profest in the Territories of Christian Princes and States; except in a few Cities of Transilvania, and some Churches of the United Netherlands, in which Countries Liberty of Conscience makes a part of their Civil Rights and Franchises. But in the Turkish and other Mahometan and Pagan Dominions, where also the conquered Provinces of Christians have Liberty of Conscience, the Nazaren and Arian Churches are very numerous.

Why was this? One answer is that unlike Calvinists in Scotland or Lutherans in Sweden, antitrinitarians never succeeded in capturing a state for themselves—not that they would have wished to do so, given the pronounced antimagisterial tendency in their social and political thought.³ More important was the fact that throughout Europe the dogma they were rejecting was underwritten by the power of the state. As Jaroslav Pelikan puts it, ‘the unchallenged theological hegemony of the doctrine of the Trinity, beginning in the fourth century and ending in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries, ² See Jaroslav Pelikan, Credo: Historical and Theological Guide to Creeds and Confessions of Faith in the Christian Tradition (New Haven and London: Yale University Press, 2003), 22–9, and YP 6.50. ³ See Stanislas Kot, Socinianism in Poland: The Social and Political Ideas of the Polish Antitrinitarians in the Sixteenth and Seventeenth Centuries (Boston, Mass.: Starr King Press, 1957) and Sarah Mortimer, ‘Radical Heresy: Socinianism and Natural Law in the Early Seventeenth Century’, unpublished conference paper given at the Center for the Study of Books and Media, Princeton University (March 2006). My thanks to Sarah Mortimer for permission to cite her paper.

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was basically coextensive with the willingness and ability of civil authorities to go on enforcing it’ (Credo, 227).⁴ While Christian regimes that were not committed to the enforcement of trinitarianism, like that of the Elector Karl Ludwig, who ruled the Palatinate from 1649–80, did begin to appear in the later seventeenth century, they were still the exception. Even Holland, the most tolerant of the United Provinces, passed anti-Socinian legislation in 1653 which was often invoked by a Dutch Reformed Church that was deeply hostile to antitrinitarianism.⁵ Conversely, the reason why antitrinitarians could flourish in Muslim states was because these had no investment in trinitarian dogma. One place where antitrinitarianism did secure a foothold was Poland. Here the 1573 Confederation of Warsaw guaranteed Protestants of whatever sort equality with Catholics. The Minor Reformed Church was established at ´ in 1565, with its own library and a press. In the later sixteenth century, Rakow its leading light was an Italian, Fausto Sozzini (1539–1604), better known by his Latinized surname, Socinus, who was largely responsible for systematizing antitrinitarian doctrines which were then given definitive statement in the Racovian Catechism of 1605 by Valentin Smalcius, Johannes Volkelius (also responsible for the 1608 translation from Polish into German) and Hieronymus Moscorovius (also responsible for the Latin translation of 1609) (see YP 6.61–2). With the later Bibliotheca Fratrum Polonorum (1666–92), compiled by Socinian refugees in Holland, the Moscorovius translation of the Catechism was a key text in disseminating antitrinitarianism throughout early modern Europe, and nowhere more so than in England.

* The public scrutiny of trinitarian and christological dogma initiated by Nye came too late for John Milton, who it is widely agreed had become an Arian or ‘neo-Arian’ some years before his death in 1674.⁶ However, there is no agreement about exactly how and when he arrived at these insights. The aim of this essay is accordingly to retrace as far as possible his engagement with antitrinitarianism, working backwards from the end of his life—the period when we can be relatively certain about his Arianism. ⁴ In England, antitrinitarianism was only decriminalized by the so-called Trinity Act of 1813. ⁵ See Jonathan Israel, Radical Enlightenment: Philosophy and the Making of Modernity 1650–1750 (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2002), 31–3, 190, 195, 275, 277. ⁶ For this consensus, see especially Christopher Hill, Milton and the English Revolution (London: Faber, 1977), 295–6; Michael Bauman, Milton’s Arianism (Frankfurt: Lang, 1987) and John P. Rumrich, ‘Milton’s Arianism: Why it Matters’, in Stephen B. Dobranski and John P. Rumrich, eds., Milton and Heresy (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1998), 75–92. The label ‘neo-Arian’ is Pelikan’s (Credo, 496).

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The starting-point must be Milton’s unpublished theological treatise, De Doctrina Christiana, which, Barbara Lewalski suggests, ‘was finished in all essential respects in 1658–65, in tandem with Paradise Lost’.⁷ For only in Book 1, Chapter 5, ‘De Filio Dei’ (‘Of the Son of God’), did Milton make absolutely clear his view that the Son is not co-equal, co-eternal, or co-essential with the Father (see YP 6.203–80; CM 14.176–356). His other, published writings on religion were mostly concerned with ecclesiological topics such as episcopacy and tithes, though occasional asides—like the glance at Arians as ‘no true friends of Christ’ in Of Reformation (1641), or the prayer addressed to the ‘one Tri-personall GODHEAD’ with which that work concludes (YP 1.534, 614; cf. 6.68)—indicate his initial orthodoxy. However, in three tracts—Areopagitica (1644), A Treatise of Civil Power in Ecclesiastical Causes (1659), and Of True Religion, Hæresie, Schism, Toleration, And what best means may be us’d against the growth of Popery (1673)—he did address liberty of conscience, an issue of crucial importance to antitrinitarians, whose survival depended on toleration or, at least, an absence of the political will to enforce orthodoxy. The most immediately relevant of these works is Of True Religion, where Milton like Nye is more interested in finding common ground than sharpening differences. What all Protestants agree on ‘as the main Principles’ is ‘that the Rule of true Religion is the Word of God only: and that their Faith ought not to be an implicit faith, that is, to believe, though as the Church believes, against or without express authority of Scripture’. A Protestant is someone who works out their faith on the basis of their own and not another’s understanding of scripture, even if that understanding turns out to be mistaken. The content of a belief, right or wrong, matters less than how it came to be held. This, rather than the degree of mistakenness, is what differentiates heresy from error; ‘Heresie is in the Will and choice profestly against Scripture; error is against the Will, in misunderstanding the Scripture after all sincere endeavours to understand it rightly’. On this view, ‘the obstinate Papist, [is] the only Heretick’, whereas ‘Lutherans, Calvinists, Anabaptists, Socinians, Arminians’ are merely liable to err (YP 8.420, 421, 423). But this way of putting things also means that Milton can defend groups like the Socinians without having openly to endorse their characteristic beliefs; all he has to show is that their believers formed them conscientiously. Adopting the same cool and impersonal tone as Nye, he remarks that the Arian and Socinian are charg’d to dispute against the Trinity: they affirm to believe the Father, Son, and Holy Ghost, according to Scripture, and the Apostolic Creed; as for terms of Trinity, Triniunity, Coessentiality, Tripersonality, and the like, they ⁷ Barbara K. Lewalski, The Life of John Milton (Oxford: Blackwell, 2000), 416.


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reject them as Scholastic Notions, not to be found in Scripture, which by a general Protestant Maxim is plain and perspicuous abundantly to explain its own meaning in the properest words, belonging to so high a Matter and so necessary to be known; a mystery indeed in their Sophistic Subtilties, but in Scripture a plain Doctrin. Their other Opinions are of less Moment. They dispute the satisfaction of Christ, or rather the word Satisfaction, as not Scriptural: but they acknowledge him both God and their Saviour. (YP 8.424–5)

Although Milton’s own beliefs cannot be inferred from these remarks, their upshot is clear: because Arians and Socinians base their opinions on scripture they are good Protestants and, being such, should not be persecuted by their co-religionists.⁸ Milton’s case for the toleration of antitrinitarianism ultimately rests on the argument that for one Protestant to persecute another is a form of self-contradiction since it negates their own ‘main Principles’. Somewhat less predictably, he contrasts the persecution of nonconformists in England with the toleration extended to Protestant minorities in some Catholic countries: ‘For if the French and Polonian Protestants injoy all this liberty among Papists’, he says, ‘much more may a Protestant justly expect it among Protestants’ (YP 8.426–7). This was disingenuous. Milton in 1673 knew, and had known for years, that Polish antitrinitarians were actually being persecuted. In the first edition of The Readie and Easie Way (March 1660), Poland is one of the examples Milton uses to illustrate the benefits of toleration and the costs of persecution: ‘I have heard from Polanders themselves that they never enjoid more peace, then when religion was most at libertie among them; that then first began thir troubles, when that king by instigation of the Jesuites began to force the Cossaks in matters of religion’ (YP 7.382). A first wave of persecution ´ in 1638 (at which point the in Poland led to the destruction of Rakow printing of Socinian works largely transferred to Holland). But in 1658 the Polish Diet proscribed antitrinitarianism altogether, and the following year brought forward the date by which Arians, Anabaptists, and Socinians had to leave Poland to July 1660 (hence Poland’s absence from Nye’s European map of antitrinitarianism). Some evidently fled to England since sympathizers like Thomas Firmin and John Knowles were collecting money for the relief of ‘banished Polanders’ in the early 1660s.⁹ What is intriguing therefore is Milton’s insistence that he learned about this persecution at first hand. ⁸ For a recent reading of the passage, see Michael Lieb, ‘Milton and the Socinian Heresy’, in Mark R. Kelly and John T. Shawcross, eds., Milton and the Grounds of Contention (Pittsburgh, Pa.: Duquesne University Press, 2003), 260–3. ⁹ See [Stephen Nye], The Life of Mr. Thomas Firmin (London, 1698), 25, and Walter H. Burgess, ‘John Knowles and Henry Hedworth: Seventeenth Century Unitarian Pioneers’, Transactions of the Unitarian Historical Society 5 (1931), 1–3.

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Even before the diaspora began Milton was aware of Jesuit-inspired intolerance because it features in the ‘Instructions for the Agent to Russia’ he drew up in April 1657.¹⁰ The envoy, Richard Bradshaw, was to urge the Grand Duke to accept the King of Sweden as a ‘confederate’ on the grounds that he would then be secure from the feare of force or innovation on the Russian religion, it being no principle of that protestant King to force consciences, as it is of the Polonian a Popish King; and that the Muscovitish religion, a branch of the Greek church, is not so different from the Protestant religion, as is the Popish and Polonian, which if it get footing in his dominion by Polonian Jesuits, will not fail to work alterations. (YP 5.787)

By the mid-1650s, Poland was clearly in the Counter-Reformation camp and bent on persecution. However, Milton would have been more aware still that antitrinitarians were under threat in Protestant England, as the proceedings against the most prominent of them, John Biddle, showed.¹¹ In March 1654, Milton’s employers, the protectoral council, commissioned the Independent spokesman, John Owen, to reply to Biddle’s Twofold Catechism (February 1654). Regarding this as no less than ‘a call from God to plead for his violated Truth’, Owen also incorporated a reply to the Racovian Catechism in his massive Vindiciae Evangelicae.¹² And in December 1654 the Barebones Parliament had Biddle arrested and ordered his Twofold Catechism and Apostolical and True Opinion Concerning the Holy Trinity (1653) to be burned. Although released in May 1655 following the dissolution of Parliament, he was re-arrested and charged with denying the divinity of Christ. This placed Cromwell in a dilemma. While a successful prosecution would alienate many of the godly, he could not permit toleration to be ‘stretched so farr as to countenance those who denie the divinity of our Saviour, or to bolster up any blasphemous opinion contrary to the fundamentall verities of religion’.¹³ He quietly had the case dropped and Biddle packed off to prison in the Scilly Isles. The ‘fundamentall verities’ were a different matter. Throughout the 1650s attempts were made to define these and have them underwritten by the ¹⁰ For Milton’s interest in Baltic affairs, see Martin Dzelzainis, ‘Juvenal, Charles X Gustavus and Milton’s Letter to Richard Jones’, The Seventeenth Century 9 (1994), 25–34. ¹¹ See H. J. McLachlan, Socinianism in Seventeenth Century England (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1951), 202–12, and Blair Worden, ‘Toleration and the Cromwellian Protectorate’, in W. J. Sheils, ed., Persecution and Toleration, Studies in Church History, 21 (Oxford: Basil Blackwell, 1984), 204–5, 218–22. ¹² John Owen, Vindiciae Evangelicae or, the Mystery of the Gospell Vindicated, and Socinianisme Examined (Oxford, 1655), sig. ¶3v . ¹³ W. C. Abbott, ed., Writings and Speeches of Oliver Cromwell, 4 vols. (Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 1937–47), 3.834, quoted in John Coffey, Persecution and Toleration in Protestant England 1558–1689 (Harlow: Pearson, 2000), 151.


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civil power. Success for religious conservatives finally came with The Humble Petition and Advice of 1657. Although the Confession of Faith outlined in Article 11 was to be ‘recommended to the people’ rather than made compulsory, liberty of conscience was denied to ‘Popery or Prelacy’ or to those who did not ‘profess faith in God the Father, and in Jesus Christ His eternal Son, the true God, and in the Holy Spirit, God co-equal with the Father and the Son, one God blessed for ever’. Nor would ‘such who publish horrible blasphemies’ be countenanced.¹⁴ This proscribing of antitrinitarianism may be what prompted Milton to resume work on De Doctrina Christiana, in which case we might see the treatise as a counter-statement of the fundamental verities even though there was no possibility of its being published under the Protectorate. Indeed, Article 11 probably contributed as much to Milton’s disenchantment with the Cromwellian regime as its increasingly monarchical tendencies. If Milton (as seems likely) was following the same trajectory into opposition as Sir Henry Vane the Younger, then he too would have concluded that Cromwell was ‘ayming at the Throne in spirituals as well as Temporals’.¹⁵

** Yet things had turned out very differently with the previous attempt to impose orthodoxy. This too was sparked off by a Socinian publication and headed by Owen. On 10 February 1652, Owen appeared at the bar of the House together with fourteen others and ‘presented a Petition, with a Paper annexed; being a Copy of a Warrant mentioned in the Petition, together with a printed Book’ (CJ 7.86). The petition took exception to the recent London edition of the Catechesis ecclesiarum quae in regno Poloniae—the Moscorovius translation of the Racovian Catechism.¹⁶ The warrant was a copy of that issued by the ¹⁴ S. R. Gardiner, ed., The Constitutional Documents of the Puritan Revolution, 3rd edn. (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1979), 454–5. For the debates on Article 11, see Journals of the House of Commons, 18–19 March 1657, 7.506–8; available online at http://www.british-history.ac.uk. Hereafter cited as CJ. ¹⁵ Sir Heny Vane, The Proceeds of the Protector (so called) and his Councill against Sir Henry Vane, Knight (London, 1656), 8. ¹⁶ It has not been noticed that there is a bibliographical puzzle about the edition of the Catechesis tabled by the petitioners. When Gilbert Millington reported from the committee appointed to investigate the work on 2 April, he produced ‘a Collection of the principal blasphemous Errors in that Book’, and specified that ‘the Deity of the Son is impugned from Page 43 to Page 108; and yet, Page 7, he makes this mere Man the Author of the Christian Religion’ (CJ 7.114). These page references do not match the British Library copy of the 1651 edition (E.1391[1]), which George Thomason dated ‘March’ on the title page (he also crossed out ‘RACOVIÆ’ and substituted ‘Londinj’); the statement said to be on p. 7 is found instead on p. 6, while the chapter ‘De Persona Christi’, in which the deity of the Son is discussed,

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Council of State on 27 January, ordering the ‘Serjeant at Armes attending this Councell to repaire to the House of William Dugard printer, and there to make seizure of a certain impression of Bookes entituled Catechesis Ecclesiarum Poloniae, and to require him to come forthwith to the Councell’.¹⁷ Their petition must also have invited a wider consideration of religious issues since Parliament responded by setting up two committees; a larger one to consider the Catechesis, and a smaller one to confer with the ministers and others about proposals to establish a state church maintained at the public expense. On 18 February, the petitioners duly submitted fifteen proposals to the Committee for the Propagation of the Gospel.¹⁸ By seventeenth-century standards, the proposals were strikingly tolerant of those ‘dissenting from the Doctrine and Way of Worship owned by the State’. All persons were required to hear the gospel preached on the sabbath—‘except such persons as through scruple of Conscience do abstain’. And no-one was required to take the sacrament ‘further then their Light shall lead them’ ([Owen et al.], Humble Proposals, 5). Shortly afterwards, however, Owen submitted a supplementary set of fifteen fundamental principles framed so as to exclude antitrinitarians in particular from toleration.¹⁹ With the Catechesis fresh in their minds, the ministers further insisted that ‘no persons be suffered to Preach, or Print any thing in opposition to those Principles of Christian Religion, which the Scripture plainly and clearly affirmes, that without the beliefe of them salvation is not to be obtained’ ([Owen et al.],

occupies pp. 38–100. But they do correspond closely to one of several editions issued with the false imprint Racoviae 1609: the copy reproduced in Early English Books Online, STC20083.3 (= London: H. Lownes, 1614?). The relevant statement (‘Ipso Religionis Christianæ autore, qui fuit homo divinus’) is at p. 7 while ‘De Persona Christi’ occupies pp. 41–107. The Bodleian Library catalogue lists two further copies with false 1609 imprints: 8◦ C 64 Th. Seld (= London, R. Young, after 1635), and a duodecimo edition, Vet. A3 f.1636 (= England?, after 1640?), the former of which is identical to STC 20083.3 while the latter is identical to E.1391[1] except that it has a different title page and also lacks the Latin life of Socinus and catalogue of his works appended in 1651 (i.e. E.1391[2]; what Milton probably licensed therefore was a reissue of the sheets that made up Vet. A3 f.1636 with a new title page and the contents of E.1391[2]). Perhaps lacking access to a specimen of E.1391[1], the petitioners substituted a version of the text as printed in 1614/1635 or later. ¹⁷ J. Milton French, Life Records of John Milton, 5 vols. (New Brunswick, N.J.: Rutgers University Press, 1949–58), 3.157. ¹⁸ CJ 7.258–9; the proposals were published on 31 March as The Humble Proposals of Mr. Owen, Mr. Tho. Goodwin, Mr. Nye, Mr. Sympson, and other Ministers, who presented the Petition to the Parliament (London, 1652: E.658[12]). ¹⁹ The fundamentals were not printed until 2 December 1652, in Proposals for the furtherance and propagation of the Gospell in this Nation (London, 1653 [sic]: E.683[12]), 5–21. They certainly existed by 30 March, the date of Thomason’s copy of Roger Williams, The Fourth Paper Presented by Maior Butler to the Honourable Committee of Parliament, for the Propagating the Gospel of Jesus Christ (London, 1652: E.658[9]), which refers to them at p. 23.


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Proposals, 5). To define fundamentals and then seek to foreclose public discussion of them was only to double the provocation. The response to the ministers’ scheme was a campaign in which Roger Williams orchestrated the talents of, among others, Milton, Vane, and Marchamont Nedham.²⁰ Williams himself led the way with pamphlets advocating unlimited toleration, the separation of church and state, and the disestablishment of the ministry.²¹ Nedham supplied two anticlerical editorials for Mercurius Politicus aimed at ‘the Church Nationall Pretenders’ and also printed a set of counter-proposals, possibly drafted by Biddle.²² Vane, who defended Biddle in 1647, the antitrinitarian MP John Fry in 1651, and the Massachusetts Socinian William Pynchon in 1652, supplied a treatise on idolatry he had drafted a year earlier, Zeal Examined: Or, A Discourse for Liberty of Conscience in Matters of Religion.²³ For his part, Milton made two very precise interventions. The first was a sonnet ‘To the Lord General Cromwell May 1652 On the proposals of certaine ministers at ye Committee for Propagation of the Gospell’. As Blair Worden has pointed out, Milton’s plea to Cromwell to ‘Help us to save free conscience from the paw / Of hireling wolves’ (CSP 329, ll. 13–14) is not addressed to someone who was ‘a fellow opponent of clerical intolerance’ (Worden, ‘John Milton and Oliver Cromwell’, 250). Rather Milton is trying, if possible, to detach Cromwell from his protégé Owen, who had probably been acting with Cromwell’s approval. The second was the sonnet Milton sent to Vane on 3 July 1652.²⁴ After praising Vane’s achievements as a statesman, Milton turned to his unmatched insight into the spheres of civil and religious liberty: besides to know Both spiritual power and civil, what each means, What severs each, thou hast learned, which few have done. The bounds of either sword to thee we owe; Therefore on thy firm hand Religion leans ²⁰ In what follows, I am deeply indebted to Carolyn Polizzotto’s excellent article, ‘The Campaign against The Humble Proposals of 1652’, Journal of Ecclesiastical History 38 (1987), 569–81, and Blair Worden, ‘John Milton and Oliver Cromwell’, in Ian Gentles, John Morrill and Blair Worden, eds., Soldiers, Writers and Statesmen of the English Revolution (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1998), 244–52. ²¹ See Williams, The Fourth Paper; The Bloody Tenent Yet More Bloody (London, 1652: Thomason’s copy, E.661[6], is dated 28 April); The Hirelings Ministry None of Christs (London, Printed in the second Moneth, 1652); and The Examiner Defended (London, 1652: Thomason’s copy, E.675[2], is dated 14 September). ²² Mercurius Politicus, no. 99, 22–9 April 1652, pp. 1553–6; no. 100, 29 April–6 May 1652, pp. 1576–8; no. 114 , 5–12 August 1652, pp. 1785–9. ²³ See Henry Vane, Zeal Examined (London, 1652: Thomason’s copy, E.667[15], is dated 15 June), Sig. Azr. For the attribution to Vane, see Polizzotto, ‘The Humble Proposals’, 579. ²⁴ See George Sikes, The Life and Death of Sir Henry Vane, Kt. (n.p., 1662), 93.

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Martin Dzelzainis In peace, and reckons thee her eldest son. (CSP 331, ll. 9–14)

Polizzotto plausibly suggests that this was Milton’s tribute to Vane’s Zeal Examined. If so, then it explains the alternative version of line 11 in the Trinity Manuscript, ‘Thou teachest best, which few have ever done’ (CSP 331; my emphasis), which only makes sense if Vane had published his views. However, while there was virtually nothing in Vane’s treatise to which Milton would not have subscribed, he—characteristically—did not want to imply any intellectual indebtedness to him and so substituted ‘thou hast learned’ for ‘Thou teachest’.²⁵ When the Committee for the Propagation of the Gospel reported in February 1653, the proposal to silence those who disagreed with the fundamentals had been dropped (see CJ 7.259). The success of the radicals’ campaign was also registered in The Instrument of Government (1653), the first protectoral constitution, Article 37 of which declared that all ‘such as profess faith in God by Jesus Christ’ would ‘not be restrained from, but shall be protected in, the profession of their faith’. The only exclusions were ‘Popery and Prelacy’ and those who, ‘under the profession of Christ, hold forth and practise licentiousness’ (Gardiner, Constitutional Documents, 416). While Catholics, Anglicans, and groups like the Ranters fell foul of the article, antitrinitarians—who could after all ‘profess faith in God by Jesus Christ’—did not. This respite proved short-lived. Not only was Biddle imprisoned and prosecuted within months but the Instrument itself was superseded by the markedly less tolerant Humble Petition and Advice.

*** The parliamentary committee investigating the Catechesis worked much more quickly. By 21 February, they had examined and re-examined Dugard, Francis ²⁵ John Coffey argues that Milton’s refusal of toleration for Catholics ‘is profoundly puzzling, since his close friends Vane and Williams had both argued at length for the toleration of idolaters’ (‘Persecution and Liberty Revisited: The Case for Toleration in the English Revolution’, Historical Journal 41 (1998), 969). But there were clear limits to Vane’s toleration: ‘by excusing of Idolaters, I doe not intend a necessary Toleration of Papists, much lesse of Priests and Jesuites, for though they may not come within the Magistrates Cognizance, by their worshipping of Images or the host in the Sacrament, yet they may as they maintain the Jurisdiction of a forreign power over their Consciences, if that forreign power doe maintain Principles that are inconsistent with all Magistrates and People that are not of his Religion. Now that the Pope doth so is most apparent, for he doth not onely declare us all to be Hereticks, but likewise that such Hereticks ought to be put to death when ever his Disciples have the power over them’ (Zeal Examined, sig. A3v ). This was also Milton’s view; as he puts it succinctly in A Treatise of Civil Power, ‘if they [papists] ought not to be tolerated, it is for just reason of state more then of religion’ (YP 7.254; cf. 2.565).


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Gouldman, and a Mr Walley, and found the first two guilty of printing and publishing the Catechesis. They had also examined Milton and unearthed ‘a Note under the Hand of Mr. John Milton, of the 10th of August 1650’ (French, Life Records, 2.321; 3.157; CJ 7.114). No official record of Milton’s examination or of any finding against him survives, but on 24 February/5 March 1652 Liewe van Aitzema reported to The Hague on the state of religion in the sister republic where, he said, ‘they permit all exercise of religion which does not err in the fundamentals and which is not papist’, a point apparently illustrated by the recent printing of the Catechesis: This was frowned upon by Parliament; the printer says that Mr. Milton had licensed it; Milton, when asked, said Yes, and that he had published a tract on that subject, that men should refrain from forbidding books; that in approving of that book he had done no more than what his opinion was. (French, Life Records, 3.206)

This strongly suggests that Milton in his capacity as licenser had authorized Dugard and Gouldman to publish the Catechesis. The outcome on 2 April was a vote finding the work ‘Blasphemous, Erronious, and Scandalous’ and ordering copies to be seized and burnt.²⁶ How effective the order was in suppressing it is unclear. In September 1652, a group of Presbyterian booksellers thanked Parliament for showing its ‘dislike’ of the Catechesis ‘by causing a few that could be taken to be burnt’ (my emphasis). The action was manifestly insufficient in their view because ‘there is no standing penal Law … to deter men from Writing, Printing and publishing the like for the future’. This was illustrated by the fact that ‘since the execution of that Justice some have presumed to publish the foresaid Catechism in English, in affront to the Parliament, and chiefly to the Lord Jesus’.²⁷ Most commentators agree that Milton’s involvement with the Catechesis is the key to determining when he abandoned the orthodox position on the Trinity. For John P. Rumrich, it was ‘the most concentrated and representative episode in Milton’s career as a religious controversialist’. Nevertheless he concedes that we simply ‘do not know when Milton found himself convinced by antitrinitarian arguments’.²⁸ Lewalski is similarly cautious: virtually all that we can be sure of on this score is that Milton was orthodox in 1629, when ²⁶ Votes of Parliament Touching the Book commonly called The Racovian Catechism (London, 1652: 669.f.16[45]), single sheet. ²⁷ [Luke Fawne, Samuel Gellibrand, Joshua Kirton, John Rothwell, Thomas Underhill, and Nathaniel Webb], A Beacon Set on Fire: Or The Humble Information of certain Stationers, Citizens of London, to the Parliament and Commonwealth of England (London, 1652), 16. The English translation was possibly by Biddle (see McLachlan, Socinianism, 191–3); Thomason’s copy of The Racovian Catechisme (‘Amsterledam’, 1652: E.1320[1]) is dated 8 July. ²⁸ John P. Rumrich, ‘Radical Heterodoxy and Heresy’, in Thomas N. Corns, ed., A Companion to Milton (Oxford: Blackwell, 2001), 150.

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he wrote the Nativity Ode, and may have stayed so until August 1650. As she suggests, it may have been ‘attending to this licensing duty [that] prompted Milton to begin to question Trinitarian doctrine’.²⁹ Likewise for Stephen B. Dobranski, it is ‘pleasing to speculate whether the incident of The Racovian Catechism served as a catalyst for some of Milton’s still inchoate heretical opinions’. However, he cautions against ‘using his antitrinitarianism to gloss his government licensing duties’ because this may be ‘to oversimplify how and when he came to accept such heretical opinions’. For while Milton was undoubtedly orthodox on the Trinity in the early 1640s it is also the case that even in 1649 ‘he was still referring publicly to the ‘‘infections of Arian and Pelagian Heresies’’ ’.³⁰ Nevertheless, all these commentators find themselves in a kind of Catch-22: for Milton to have licensed the Catechesis at all suggests a degree of sympathy for antitrinitarianism; however, it was only exposure to the Catechesis which made him think about these issues in the first place. In all this, two important pieces of evidence have been overlooked. The first is the significance of the date of Milton’s note apparently authorizing publication of the Catechesis: 10 August 1650. For this was the day after Parliament had passed the Blasphemy Act (see CJ 6.453–4). The Act was primarily aimed at suppressing the Ranters—antinomians who were thought to ‘deny the necessity of Civil and Moral Righteousness among men’. Anyone maintaining, whether in words or writing, ‘him or her self, or any other meer Creature, to be very God’, or denying that heaven or hell or God had any external reality, was liable to imprisonment for a first offence and banishment ‘out of the Commonwealth of England, and all the Dominions thereof’ for a second.³¹ However, this Act was far less stringent than the 1648 Ordinance it superseded, which had prescribed the death penalty for anyone who ‘by Preaching, Teaching, Printing, or Writing’ denied that God existed or maintained ‘that the Father is not God, the Son is not God, or that the Holy Ghost is not God, or that they Three are

²⁹ Lewalski, Life, 253. Lewalski also remarks that ‘by 1650, when he licensed the Racovian Catechism, he showed some sympathy for the Socinians’ (424). ³⁰ Stephen B. Dobranski, ‘Licensing Milton’s Heresy’, in Dobranski and Rumrich, eds., Milton and Heresy, 148, 154 (Dobranski’s emphasis). The quotation is from Chapter XVI of Eikonoklastes (‘Upon the Ordinance against the Common-Prayer Book’): ‘If then ancient Churches to remedie the infirmities of prayer, or rather the infections of Arian and Pelagian Heresies, neglecting that ordain’d and promis’d help of the spirit, betook them, almost four hundred yeares after Christ, to Liturgie thir own invention, wee are not to imitate them, nor to distrust God in the removal of that Truant help to our Devotion, which by him never was appointed’ (YP 3.507–8). However, it is residually unclear whether Milton’s parenthetical remark is his gloss or represents the view of the ‘ancient Churches’ whose example ‘wee are not to imitate’. ³¹ Act Against several Atheistical, Blasphemous and Execrable Opinions, Derogatory to the Honor of God, And destructive to Humane Society (London, 1650: E.1061[14]), 979–80, 982.


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not one eternall God’.³² The 1650 Act simply ignored the heresies listed by the Presbyterians in 1648; specifically, it did not proscribe antitrinitarian beliefs as such. Whereas Milton’s objections to the Ordinance partly explain why he threw his weight behind the Army’s purge of the Presbyterian-dominated Long Parliament in 1648, the emphasis on the social and political rather than doctrinal dimension of blasphemy in the Act passed by the Rump met with his full approval.³³ In 1659, he referred to it in A Treatise of Civil Power as that prudent and well deliberated act August 9. 1650; where the Parlament defines blasphemie against God, as far as it is a crime belonging to civil judicature, pleniùs ac meliùs Chrysippo & Crantore; in plane English more warily, more judiciously, more orthodoxally then twice thir number of divines have don in many a prolix volume. (YP 7.246–7)³⁴

Nine years on, what is striking is that the precise date of the Act has impressed itself on Milton’s memory. The reason for this is surely that he regarded the passing of the Act as the green light for the licensing of the Catechesis. Confident that the views that the work expressed were not officially proscribed, Milton could authorize Dugard and Gouldman to publish it. It is sometimes suggested that Milton was taking a risk in licensing such a notoriously heretical text, but it would be more true to say that he was careful to stay on the right side of the law. In gauging the position, Milton must have been acutely conscious of the work’s heterodox contents. The speed with which he responded to the passing of the Act also suggests that he had had it on his desk for some time, awaiting a propitious moment for its publication. But if Milton was eager to see the Catechesis in print at the first opportunity, this throws a slightly different light on van Aitzema’s report, in which Milton appears chiefly concerned to justify his decision on the grounds of its consistency with his published opinions on licensing. But this does not warrant the conclusion that he had no personal investment in the work itself. Although McLachlan suggests that Biddle was the prime mover behind the publication of the Catechesis (as well as being responsible for the English ³² An Ordinance of the Lords and Commons Assembled in Parliament, for the Punishing of Blasphemies and Heresies (London, 1648: E.437[29]), 1–2. For the passage of the Ordinance and its relation to earlier drafts in 1646, see Ann Hughes, ‘Gangraena’ and the Struggle for the English Revolution (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2004), 367–84. ³³ For Milton’s animus against the Presbyterians and their failure to distinguish between the spiritual and the civil sword, see the Digression to The History of Britain and Observations upon the Articles of Peace (YP 3.310–11, 326; 5.446–7). ³⁴ For the view that this ‘positive reference to the Act remains a vexed and, arguably, a contradictory moment in [Milton’s] radical religious writing’, see David Loewenstein, ‘Treason against God and State: Blasphemy in Milton’s Culture and Paradise Lost’, in Dobranski and Rumrich, eds., Milton and Heresy, 180.

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translation), it is entirely possible that Milton himself took the initiative, and was as much its publisher as its licenser (see McLachlan, Socinianism, 187–92). What needs to be explained in fact is not why Milton licensed the work but why it took so long for it to appear in print; as Dobranski points out, the gap between licensing and publication was unusually prolonged (‘Licensing Milton’s Heresy’, 143). There were however reasons to be cautious. The Council of State had recently taken a recognizance from the printer and publisher responsible for a work by the antitrinitarian John Knowles in July 1650, while in December ‘W. Smith’ was executed at York ‘for denying the Deity, Arian-like’.³⁵ Moreover, when Biddle was prosecuted in 1654, this was under the supposedly obsolete 1648 Ordinance (see Worden, ‘Toleration’, 220–1). One explanation for the timing may even be that, rather than the printing of the Catechesis sparking off Owen’s initiative, it was the other way round: that advance notice of moves by the Independents prompted Milton, Dugard, and Gouldman into action. The second piece of evidence is provided by Milton himself in the preface to De Doctrina Christiana when, in recounting how he departed from orthodoxy, Milton stresses the importance not of works with which he sympathized but of those with which he disagreed. I devote my attention to the Holy Scriptures alone. I follow no other heresy or sect. I had not even studied any of the so-called heretical writers, when the blunders of those who are styled orthodox, and their unthinking distortions of the sense of scripture, first taught me to agree with their opponents whenever these agreed with the Bible. (YP 6.123–4) [De me, libris tantummodo sacris adhaeresco; haeresin aliam, sectam aliam sequor nullam; haereticorum, quos vocant, libros perlegeram nullos, cum ex eorum numero, qui orthodoxi audiunt, re male gesta scripturisque incautius tractatis, sentire cum adversariis quoties illi sentiebant cum scripturis primo didici.] (CM 14.14)

We should take Milton at his word. In 1987, Michael Bauman drew attention to this passage but omitted to speculate on the identity of ‘those who are styled orthodox’, though it is noticeable that in his footnotes Bauman frequently cites Zacharias Ursinus’ Commentary on the Heidelberg Catechism, remarking on the coincidence between the views of Milton and those Ursinus summarized in the course of objecting to them (see Milton’s Arianism, 75, 102, 111, 114, 175, 190, 198). More recently, John Rogers has suggested that Milton was ³⁵ Calendar of State Papers Domestic, 1650, p. 518; The Ranters Recantation (London, 1651: Thomason’s copy, E.620[10], is dated 20 December), 5. Smith was however also guilty of ‘putting in execution several illegal practises against the Parliament’ (ibid.).


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responding directly to the arch-foe of the Arians, Athanasius.³⁶ An alternative and, I think, more plausible, candidate is the orthodox Lutheran theologian Johann Gerhard (1582–1637), whose magnum opus, a stupendous ninevolume collection of theological commonplaces, Locorum Theologicorum, was published in Geneva in 1639. Not only was Milton in Geneva that year, but we know he owned the Gerhard set and was reading it in the early 1640s since he refers to it twice in Tetrachordon (1645). On each occasion, moreover, Gerhard is deployed as an intermediate reference to the work of others (see YP 2.688, 712).³⁷ The significance of this is that Gerhard regarded himself as a front-line defender of orthodoxy against a multiple onslaught from what he called, in his dedication of the first volume to Christian II, Duke of Saxony in April 1610, ‘those recent heretics in Transylvania, Poland and neighbouring regions, who impugn the divinity of Christ and who can be called Samosatenians, Photinians and Servetians’.³⁸ What had alarmed Gerhard above all was the publication the year before of the Moscorovius translation of the Racovian Catechism. Since his first volume was concerned with the scriptures and their interpretation, the nature and attributes of God, the Trinity, the Holy Spirit, and the person and office of Christ, he could not afford to ignore these heretics, whom he most often labels ‘neo-samosateniani’, explicitly associating them with the third-century monotheist Paul of Samosata (also singled out by Owen as ‘the most notorious Head and Patron of this madnes’ (Vindiciae, 4)). In the course of refuting their heresies and blasphemies, Gerhard quotes exhaustively from the Catechesis. In view of this, it seems likely that when Milton came to reflect on ‘those who are styled orthodox’ in the preface to De Doctrina Christiana, Gerhard rather than Ursinus—or, for that matter, Athanasius—was the figure he had uppermost in mind. And if this is the case, then it follows that Milton was first prompted to question orthodox belief in the Trinity in the mid-1640s when he encountered the Catechesis in Gerhard’s volume. Ironically, the very work intended to stop antitrinitarianism in its tracks may well have brought about its deeper penetration into English religious discourse. ³⁶ See John Rogers, ‘Milton’s Arianism and the Exaltation of the Individual’, unpublished paper given at the Eighth International Milton Symposium, University of Grenoble (June 2005). My thanks to Professor Rogers for permission to cite his paper. ³⁷ The Yale editor’s annotation is inaccurate at this point: see Martin Dzelzainis, ‘Authors ‘‘not unknown’’ in Milton’s Tetrachordon’, Notes and Queries 243 (1998), 44–7. ³⁸ Gerhard, Locorum Theologicorum, 9 vols. (Geneva, 1639), I, sig. ∗ iijb: ‘recentiores illos in Transyluania, Polonia & vicinis regionibus haereticos, qui Christi diuinitata impugnant & Samosatenianos & P[h]otinianos & Seruetianos appellari posse’.

10 Milton and Catholicism Andrew Hadfield For many in the 1640s, the concept of toleration was a source of considerable anxiety and confusion. A series of works written by Independents argued a strong case for their liberty to practise their chosen form of religion. They were opposed with equal vigour by Presbyterians, eager to police the boundaries of acceptable religious observation and church government.¹ Such debates inevitably raised further questions. How could anyone ever be sure that the correct and proper limits had been applied and the desire to tolerate a range of possible opinion was not a Trojan horse that would let in a horde of evil heresies, causing further destructive debate and confusion? The test case was, of course, Catholicism, and, as has often been noted, many of the treatises by Independents arguing for their own liberties are notably vague about whether an official acceptance of their divergent views would necessitate an equal acceptance of the views of Catholics. Even such impassioned defenders of liberty as William Walwyn and John Goodwin are unclear—probably deliberately so—on the matter.² Avoidance of this key issue is understandable, and justifiable. Nearly thirty years later, after the Restoration, Charles II’s Declaration of Indulgence (15 March 1672) stated that nonconformists could worship publicly if they applied for the correct licence. The granting of liberties to private worship for Catholics proved far more problematic and met a barrage of resistance from Protestants, which led to the Test Act which became law on 29 March 1673. This required all office holders to swear to the Oaths of Allegiance and Supremacy and to ‘renounce the doctrine of transubstantiation’.³ A number of Presbyterian pamphlets examine the problematic nature of the case for toleration, exploiting the fear of Catholicism in England in the ¹ Anne Hughes, Gangraena and the Struggle for the English Revolution (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2004), 162 n. 87. ² Ernest Sirluck, ‘Introduction’ to Milton’s Areopagitica, YP 2.85, 112–13. ³ Keith F. Stavely, ‘Preface’ to Milton’s Of True Religion, YP 8.412.

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1640s.⁴ None of these is more coherent and well reasoned than the anonymous Anti-Toleration, Or a Modest Defence of the Letter of the London Ministers to the Reverend Assembly of Divines (1646). The arguments put forward in this work help to illuminate the nature of Milton’s interventions in the debates of the 1640s and 1670s, as well as his comments in his major poetical works. Milton emerges as a consistent thinker, clear in his views that Catholicism was the enemy of all the principles that the ‘good old cause’ held dear. However, this consistency is achieved because he defines Catholicism in a fluid manner, as a cluster of problems and errors, enabling him to exploit a deep-seated fear of popery, precisely the rhetorical strategy of the author of Anti-Toleration.⁵ If Milton shares much with the Independents, he also has a great deal in common with the Presbyterians, especially their views of the limits of toleration. Anti-Toleration is a response to a pamphlet by the Leveller, William Walwyn, Tolleration Justified, and Persecution Condemned (1646). Walwyn had based his argument on the centrality of reason in religion, arguing that toleration of a variety of opinions was justified because in the end reason would triumph, allowing everyone to understand what was true and what was false: ‘The more horrid and blasphemous the opinion is the easier suppressed by reason and argument, because it must necessarily be that the weaker the arguments are on one side the stronger they are on the other; the grosser the error is the more advantage truth has over it[.]’⁶ It is this faith in reason that the author of Anti-Toleration uses to unpack the arguments of Walwyn’s tract. The central fear that it exploits is that toleration, and the ‘pretended liberty of conscience’, will lead directly to the proliferation of heresy.⁷ The argument is—one often made in sectarian disputes—that liberty of conscience is a dangerous error

⁴ For examples of Presbyterian tracts opposing those of the Independents’ pleas for toleration, see A Letter of the Ministers of the City of London, Presented the first Jan. 1645. to the Reverend Assembly of Divines … against toleration (1645); A Necessary and Seasonable Testimony Against Toleration (1648); A Testimony of the Ministers in the Province of Essex, to the Trueth of Jesus Christ and to the Solemn League and Covenant; as also against the errors, heresies and blasphemies of these times, and the toleration of them (1648). See also the illustrated broadsheet, Proper Persecution, or the sandy foundations of a general toleration (1646), and the analysis in Alexandra Walsham, Charitable Hatred: Tolerance and Intolerance in England, 1500–1700 (Manchester: Manchester University Press, 2006), ch. 5. ⁵ On English ‘anti-popery’, see Peter Lake, ‘Anti-popery: the Structure of a Prejudice’, in Richard Cust and Anne Hughes, eds., Conflict in Early Stuart England: Studies in Religion and Politics, 1603–1642 (London: Longman, 1989), 72–106. ⁶ William Walwyn, Tolleration Justified, and Persecution Condemned (1646), 8. For recent comment on Walwyn and his place in debates on toleration, see Walsham, Charitable Hatred, ch. 5; Austin Woolrych, Britain in Revolution, 1625–1660 (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2002), 443–4. ⁷ Anon., Anti-Toleration, Or a Modest Defence of the Letter of the London Ministers to the Reverend Assembly of Divines (1646), 5. All subsequent references in parentheses in the text.

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that only serves to undermine church discipline.⁸ What appears to be a liberal move leads to anarchy and even tyranny, the result of individual arrogance and the appropriation of power. In a hard-hitting polemical manoeuvre, the author claims that ‘If AntiToleration be the true cause of hypocrisie, then (which is very blasphemy to utter) we shall make both God and Christ both in the Old and New Testament, the Authors of hypocrisie, they being in both so strict against Toleration’ (8). In essence, the author claims, Christianity is not a faith that is amenable to the reason of the individual conscience. Citing Walwyn’s words, ‘The more horrid and blasphemous the opinion is the easier suppressed by Reason and Argument’, a counter-argument is made: The matter of many blasphemous opinions depends not upon Reason, but faith, as the Trinity of Persons, the Incarnation and Divinity of Christ, &c. How then can these be confuted by Arguments, being themselves above Reason? And if you bring Scripture for proof, they will be as ready to deny Scripture, as to deny the Trinity, &c. Besides, a weak argument, and as strong affection, will prevail more then the strongest Arguments in the world, where a man affects not what is propounded. (21)

The institution of the church, not reason, is seen to be the main bulwark against the threat of chaos—‘A tyranny is far better than an Anarchy’ (33). Ironically enough, this argument was frequently used by Catholic apologists against their Protestant counterparts, as a means of refuting arguments based on the liberty—and certainty—of the individual conscience.⁹ However, the author of Anti-Toleration claims that it is the arguments of Walwyn and others that risk undermining the church and state by failing to see that universal toleration leads directly to heresy, the search for a common ground actually serving to destroy any semblance of unity: ‘He is so for Universals, that if I might guesse at his Religion (if he have any at all) I should suspect him to be a Catholike, and do mightily fear he is one of those croaking Frogs, sent out of the mouth of the Beast, and false Prophet, to blow the coals of dissension amongst us, Revel. 16. 13, 14’ (35). How seriously the apocalyptic reference is meant to be taken is unclear: but the link between the Independents and the Jesuits is designed to play on the fears of the godly that the ‘good old cause’ will be fatally undermined if it is pushed too far. Indeed, the fear that Catholicism might be tolerated actually predates the central debates on toleration of Independent sects, a response not only to ⁸ More generally on pamphlet culture and polemic in this period, see Joad Raymond, Pamphlets and Pamphleteering in Early Modern Britain (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2003), ch. 8; ‘The Literature of Controversy’, in Thomas N. Corns, ed., A Companion to Milton (Oxford: Blackwell, 2001), 191–210. ⁹ See, for example, William Allen, A Treatise made in Defence of the lawful power and authoritie of Priesthood to remedie sinnes (1567), 76–8.


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long-held fears about the role of Henrietta Maria leading to fears of popish plots in the late 1630s, but also a means of rallying Protestant opinion against the machinations of Charles as he sought to consolidate his power in the face of the growing opposition from Parliament.¹⁰ William Castle’s The Jesuits Undermining of Parliaments and Protestants with their foolish phancy of a toleration, discovered and censured (1642) fits into a larger pattern of English anti-Catholic rhetoric in the early modern period.¹¹ The reprint of a Catholic document pleading for toleration, along with the stern response of the archbishop of Canterbury, has a similar aim, reminding readers that the Gunpowder Plot followed soon after.¹² Milton’s interventions in these complex debates should be seen as a sustained attempt to work out some cardinal rules about the possibilities and limits of toleration. Milton, as is well attested, was consistently opposed to any toleration for Catholics.¹³ Areopagitica (1644) makes a clear case that Catholicism cannot be tolerated, a line of argument that distinguishes Milton from many other radical thinkers during the civil war.¹⁴ In a famous passage Milton explains why the need to avoid a ‘fugitive and cloister’d vertue’ (YP 2.515) does not extend to a desire to see Catholic writings re-enter the public sphere: Yet if all cannot be of one mind, as who looks they should be? this doubtles is more wholsome, more prudent, and more Christian that many be tolerated, rather then all compell’d. I mean not tolerated Popery, and open superstition, which as it extirpats all religions and civill supremacies, so it self should be extirpat, provided first that all charitable and compassionat means be us’d to win and regain the weak and the misled: that also which is impious or evil absolutely either against faith or maners no law can possibly permit, that intends not to unlaw it self. (YP 2.565) ¹⁰ Kevin Sharpe, The Personal Rule of Charles I (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1992), 8, 842–7; Woolrych, Britain in Revolution, ch. 7. ¹¹ See Arthur Marotti, ed., Catholicism and Anti-Catholicism in Early Modern English Texts (Basingstoke: Palgrave, 1999); Alison Shell, Catholicism, Controversy and the English Literary Imagination, 1558–1660 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1999); Ethan H. Shagan, ed., Catholics and the ‘Protestant nation’: Religious Politics and Identity in Early Modern England (Manchester: Manchester University Press, 2005). ¹² Anon., The Supplication of all the Papists of England to King James, At his first comming to the crowne, for a tolleration of their Religion (1642). ¹³ See John N. King, Milton and Religious Controversy (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2000), passim; Cedric C. Brown, ‘Great Senates and Godly Education: Politics and Cultural Renewal in Some Pre- and Post-revolutionary Texts of Milton’, in David Armitage, Armand Himy and Quentin Skinner, eds., Milton and Republicanism (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1995), 43–60. ¹⁴ For the wider issues and debate, see Nigel Smith, Literature and Revolution in England, 1640–1660 (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1994), passim; David Loewenstein, Representing Revolution in Milton and his Contemporaries: Religion, Politics and Polemics in Radical Puritanism (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2001).

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Areopagitica’s aim is to persuade Christians that faith and reason reinforce each other, together revealing a complete truth. They are not separate, sometimes divergent entities, as, for example, the author of Anti-Toleration claims. According to Milton, ‘A man may be a heretick in the truth; and if he beleeve things only because his Pastor sayes so, or the Assemby so determins, without knowing other reason, though his belief be true, yet the very truth he holds, becomes his heresie’ (YP 2.543). Milton’s position within the debates on toleration would seem to be clear and distinct. The active use of reason, when allied to a strong and proper faith, will answer all the questions that need to be asked. Differences between faiths can be tolerated, as there are many things which cannot be known, either because they are unknowable or because the answer to the questions posed has not yet been discovered. Toleration can only be exercised when truth is incomplete; it cannot be extended to errors, or heresies, which threaten to undermine the truth. Areopagitica is both a plea for toleration and an attempt to define its limits by resisting the notion that truth can ever be relative. But what did Milton actually mean by Catholicism? What exactly did he think was beyond the limits of toleration and why? Milton identifies a series of bad practices and erroneous beliefs that he associates with Popery throughout his writing career.¹⁵ He expresses a proper Puritan contempt for prelacy in the church, devoting one of his first pamphlets, Of Prelatical Episcopacy (1641), to the subject.¹⁶ He condemns the doctrine of purgatory in Animadversions (1641) (YP 1.702). He condemns what he sees as the Catholic transformation of the Eucharist into a ‘cannibal feast’ in Christian Doctrine (YP 6.554). In The Doctrine and Discipline of Divorce (1643) he is scathing in his assessment of marriage regarded as a ‘Papists Sacrament’ rather than ‘a human Society’, a judgement that indicates a complicated and wide-ranging understanding of popery or Catholicism as central to Milton’s imagination (YP 2.275). That there might be a circular logic at work in Milton’s thought would seem to be borne out by the concomitant judgement that Catholic hostility to divorce was actually a means of encouraging licence (YP 2.339–43). Elsewhere Milton is severe on erroneous reading practices that demand a ‘literal apprehension against the direct analogy of sense, reason, law, and Gospel’ (YP 2.431). Milton’s most serious objections are equally fundamental. Catholicism prohibits scripture (YP 8.437). The church is too easy with its offices and instead of providing its flock with proper discipline ¹⁵ My discussion is indebted to John T. Shawcross, ‘ ‘‘Connivers and the Worst of Superstitions’’: Milton on Popery and Toleration’, Literature and History, 3rd series, 7.2 (1998), 51–69; Raymond D. Tumbleson, Catholicism in the English Protestant Imagination: Nationalism, Religion, and Literature, 1660–1745 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1998), ch. 2. ¹⁶ YP 1.618–52. See also, Animadversions (1641) in YP 1.653–735, at p. 680.


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offers ‘easy Confession, easy Absolution, Pardons, Indulgences, Masses … Agnus Dei’s, Reliques, and the like’ (YP 8.439). And, perhaps most significantly of all, popery is equated with tyranny in A Defence of the People of England (1654), making Catholicism an un-English practice (YP 4.397). As this list makes clear, for Milton Catholicism was a variety of customs and conventions rather than simply an institution. At the very far end of the scale there was the abuse of proper religion by the papacy, which was a tyranny seeking to impose its will on all independent nations. But Catholicism was also a series of practices that had crept into every aspect of church government under Charles, leaving England governed by a very un-English church which practised a series of false rituals, promoted superstition instead of reason, and sought to transform an active and engaged congregation into a passive and pliant flock. As Peter Lake has put it, Puritans saw ‘popery as the natural religion for the fallen man’.¹⁷ In the last book of Paradise Lost Michael gives Adam a final vision of the future before he leaves the Garden of Eden. This bleak and troubled description makes it clear that one of the challenges that will haunt future generations will be the practical problem of sorting the godly sheep from the antichristian wolves, a problem that cannot be confined to institutional affiliations. Michael comforts Adam with the welcome news that the Apostles will spread the word of God throughout the nations of the earth and help win back the race of man to God. However, after their initial success: Wolves shall succeed for teachers, grievous wolves, Who all the sacred mysteries of heaven To their own vile advantages shall turn Of lucre and ambition, and the truth With superstitions and traditions taint, Left only in those written records pure, Though not but by the Spirit understood … will they then But force the spirit of grace it self, and bind His consort liberty; what, but unbuild His living temples, built by faith to stand, Their own faith not another’s: for on earth Who against faith and conscience can be heard Infallible? Yet many will presume: Whence heavy persecution shall arise On all who in the worship persevere Of spirit and truth[.] (PL 12.508–14, 524–33) ¹⁷ Lake, ‘Anti-popery’, 80.

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Milton does not make any attempt to distinguish between the enemies within the church and those outside it, giving the reader a clear sense that the oppressions, heresies, tyranny and blasphemies of Catholicism are a part of the established Restoration Church of England. Indeed, the main goal of those Anglicans restoring the church was to steer the fraught path between the Scylla of popery and the Charybdis of sectarianism.¹⁸ Paradise Lost makes it clear that the church has failed and that it now contains much of what it is supposed to confront, so that there is less to choose between Anglicanism and popery than there should be.¹⁹ The representation of religion in Paradise Lost is a far cry from that in Milton’s early work, in the Latin poem In Quintum Novembris, a work probably written to celebrate the anniversary of the Gunpowder Plot in 1626, and to give thanks for England’s deliverance from Catholicism. The devil in that poem inspired the evil Catholic plot to overthrow the godly reign of King James the Protestant peacemaker. The poem ends with proper order restored: ab alto Aethereus pater, et crudelibus obstitit ausis Papicolum; capti poenas raptantur ad acres; At pia thura Deo, et grati solvuntur honores; Compita laeta focis genialibus ominia fumant; Turba choros iuvenilis agit: quintoque Novembris Nulla dies toto occurrit celebratior anno. (220–6) But meanwhile our Heavenly Father looked down on his people with pity and put a stop to the Papists’ cruel venture. They are captured and hurried off to sharp punishments. Pious incense is burned and grateful honours paid to God. There is merrymaking at every crossroads and smoke rises from the festive bonfires: the young people dance in the crowds: in all the year there is no day more celebrated than the fifth of November.²⁰

In contrast, in both Paradise Lost and Paradise Regained such simple and straightforward divisions cannot be made with any confidence. Rather, the poems deliberately refuse to make such distinctions, and constantly challenge the reader to rethink his or her experience of the revolution of the 1640s and 1650s in the light of current religious and political developments.²¹ Satan, in each work, is not simply the force behind the Pope as he is in In Quintum Novembris. Milton’s representation of Catholicism is consistent: but the meaning of the cluster of practices, images and doctrines that characterize Catholicism ¹⁸ John Spurr, The Restoration Church of England, 1646–1689 (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1991), 64–8, passim. ¹⁹ Tumbleson, Catholicism in the English Protestant Imagination, 64–5. ²⁰ In Quintum Novembris, ll. 220–6. ²¹ Loewenstein, Representing Revolution, 203.


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changes radically. In 1626 it is clear that Milton thinks that Catholicism cannot be tolerated, a case made time and again throughout the 1640s in the Antiprelatical Tracts, although the attack here is against the creeping and underhand popery of the Laudian Church.²² The moral and theological issues do not change but the contingencies of political events transform circumstances so that the later major poems effectively acknowledge that toleration and non-toleration are not easy choices to make because the enemy is now within and has infected the godly. Milton was, of course, well aware of the threat of international Catholicism to England after the outbreak of the Thirty Years War in 1618—as In Quintum Novembris and Observations on the Articles of the Peace (1649) demonstrate.²³ But he was consistently aware of the need to balance an understanding of this external threat with a more general sense of anti-popery, the fear that bad practices and the enemy within would actually kill off the revolution. Read another way, Milton’s aim was always to defend Puritanism by purging the church of its Catholic elements.²⁴ The debates on toleration, as I have already suggested, are an important context for our understanding of Paradise Lost. While he was working on the poem, Milton wrote A Treatise of Civil Power in Ecclesiastical Causes: Shewing that it is not lawful for any power on earth to compell in matters of Religion (1659), a short and clear pamphlet designed to advise the new parliament on matters of religion.²⁵ The treatise makes the same case that Milton made early and late in his career, that Catholicism undermines proper Christian liberty, because of an inability to focus on scripture. Milton vigorously defends the possibility of heresy; or, rather, seeks to argue that what some may think of as heresy is actually just an understandable disagreement about the interpretation of scripture between like-minded Christians. This argument is made in defence of the pre-eminence of scripture over doctrine: Seeing therfore that no man, no synod, no session of men, though called the church, can judge definitively the sense of scripture to another mans conscience, which is well known to be a general maxim of the Protestant religion, it follows ²² Thomas Corns, ‘Milton’s Antiprelatical Tracts and the Marginality of Doctrine’, in Stephen B. Dobranski and John P. Rumrich, eds., Milton and Heresy (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1998), 39–48. ²³ Sharon Achinstein, ‘Milton and King Charles’, in Thomas N. Corns, ed., The Royal Image: Representations of Charles I (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1999), 141–61. More generally see Jonathan Scott, England’s Troubles: Seventeenth-Century English Political Instability in European Context (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2000), ch. 5. On the context of the Observations see Joad Raymond, ‘Complications of Interest: Milton, Scotland, Ireland, and National Identity in 1649’, Review of English Studies 55 (2004), 315–45. ²⁴ Achinstein, ‘Milton and King Charles’, 143. ²⁵ William Riley Parker, Milton: A Biography, ed. Gordon Campbell (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 2nd edn. 1996), 519.

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plainely, that he who holds in religion that beleef or those opinions which to his conscience and utmost understanding appeer with most evidence or probabilitie in the scripture, though to others he seem erroneous, can no more be justly censur’d for a heretic then his censurers; who do but the same thing themselves while they censure him for so doing. For ask them, or any Protestant, which hath most authoritie, the church or the scripture? they will answer, doubtless, that the scripture. (YP 7.247–8)²⁶

Milton’s pleas for toleration sound identical to those of many Levellers in the 1640s at this point in his argument, as he admits that persecution of error is much less important than enabling Christians to satisfy their own consciences by reading the Bible themselves and then engaging in the freedom of debate.²⁷ John Owen, in his eloquent defence of toleration and freedom of speech, argued that not only was ‘the attempt to suppresse any Opinions whatsoever by Force … for the most part fruitless’, but that ‘the Magistrate hath no warrant from the Word of God, nor command, rule, or precept to enable him, to force such persons to submit unto the truth as by him established, in those things, wherein they expresse a conscientious dissent’.²⁸ Milton also defends Christian liberty against a coercive norm imposed by the central authorities: ‘I have shewn that the civil power hath neither right, nor can do right by forcing religious things’ (YP 7.262). Where Milton and Owen differ is in their stated opinions about Catholicism.²⁹ Owen makes no mention of Catholicism, effectively side-stepping a complex issue detrimental to his case. Milton, as usual, dismisses any case for toleration of Catholicism as rapidly and brutally as he can: [A]s for poperie and idolatrie, why they … may not hence plead to be tolerated, I have much less to say. Their religion the more considerd, the less can be acknowledged a religion; but a Roman principalitie rather, endeavouring to keep up her old universal dominion under a new name and meer shaddow of a catholic religion; being indeed more rightly nam’d a catholic heresie against the scripture; supported mainly by a civil, and, except in Rome, by a forein, power: justly therfore to be suspected, not tolerated, by the magistrate of another countrey. Besides, of an implicit faith, which they profess, the conscience also becomes implicit; and so by voluntarie servitude to mans law, forfets her Christian libertie. (YP 7.254) ²⁶ See also Parker, Milton, 520–1; and Ch. 8 above. ²⁷ See, for example, Independencie Gods Veritie: Or, The Necessitie of Toleration (1647); Arguments for Toleration. Published for the satisfaction of all Moderate Men (1647). ²⁸ John Owen, A Sermon Preached to the Honourable House of Commons, in Parliament Assembled: With a discourse about toleration and the duty of the civill magistrate about religion, thereto annexed (1649), 62, 91–2. ²⁹ See also Nicholas McDowell’s comments on the difference between Milton’s conceptions of toleration and those of Richard Overton: ‘Latin and Leveller Ideas: Pedagogy and Power in the Writings of Richard Overton’, The Seventeenth Century 18 (2003), 230–51, p. 246.


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Milton’s emphasis here is on the issue of liberty, but the argument is the same as that developed later in Of True Religion that Catholicism cannot be tolerated because it forces its adherents to accept a dual—and hypocritical—system of obedience to sacred and secular powers.³⁰ The polemical thrust of the argument is that Parliament has concentrated on the heresies of the Independent sects, but that these are either unimportant or actually justifiable differences of interpretation that cannot be suppressed by force, as long as they derive from the honest conscience of the believer. Instead, they must be solved through the use of faith in line with right reason. Milton is advising Parliament not to spend its time chasing windmills by trying to suppress legitimate differences between Protestants and to concentrate on removing the intolerable threat of Catholicism so that Christian liberty can be upheld. One of the principal tasks that Milton set himself was to be able to distinguish between what could be tolerated and what could not, and it is in the spirit of this enterprise that we should read the stated goal of the opening sentence of Paradise Lost, to ‘justify the ways of God to men’ (1.26). Indeed, A Treatise of Civil Power in Ecclesiastical Causes can be seen as an explicit recognition that Milton’s own work may contain controversial interpretations of scripture, perhaps even errors. But it exists as part of a series of attempts to explain God’s purposes by reading the Bible in the light of reason and faith and, in doing so, defining what is legitimate and what not. In general terms, Satan can be seen as attempting to establish an illegitimate power over sections of God’s universe. His challenge to God’s hierarchy in heaven is carefully represented as an attempt to overthrow an order based on right not hereditary rank, because the Son is raised to his pre-eminent position above the other angels. Satan claims that God is a tyrant, his first speech ending with the claim that God ‘sole reigning holds the tyranny of heaven’ (Book 1, line 124), a version of events refuted by Abdiel when he confronts Satan who is planning his rebellion, as told to Adam by Raphael (5.826–9).³¹ As God explains, His Son is: By merit more than birthright Son of God, Found worthiest to be so by being good, Far more than great or high; because in thee Love hath abounded more than glory abounds, Therefore thy humiliation shall exalt With thee thy manhood also to this throne, Here shalt thou sit incarnate, here shalt reign Both God and man, Son both of God and man, ³⁰ See Shawcross, ‘Milton on Popery and Toleration’, 57. ³¹ David Loewenstein, ‘The Radical Religious Politics of Paradise Lost’, in Corns, ed., Companion to Milton, 348–62, at p. 354.

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Milton carefully explains that the Son’s position is based on the legitimate—and logical—argument that he deserves to rule because he is best suited to do so.³² After the failure of the war in heaven, Satan turns his attention to corrupting earth, having first staged a debate in Pandemonium, the devil’s parliament built under the command of Mammon. It is likely that Pandemonium is represented as a parody of a gorgeous Counter-Reformation building, possibly St Peter’s in Rome, which Milton saw in 1638.³³ His attempt to corrupt and conquer Adam and Eve is then seen in terms of more recent Spanish attempts to establish an empire in the New World.³⁴ In fact, the battle for the control of the Americas in the sixteenth and early seventeenth centuries was invariably seen in terms of a religious crusade by both English and Spanish propagandists, an extension of the sectarian conflict in Europe.³⁵ Even in the broadest terms of plot development and narrative progress, the links between Satan’s progress in Paradise Lost and Catholicism in Milton’s pamphlets is clear. Satan’s attempt to assert that he knows everything means that he exceeds the role of the good pastor, a comparison that is there for the reader to make. He tries to bully Eve into submission by pretending to know more than he does or than could possibly be known, rather than admitting that certain things can be known and some will escape the understanding of angels, fallen angels, and human beings. His speech is only ‘impregned / With reason’ (9. 737–8), a pretence of the real thing. But why does Eve fall? What is the nature of her sin? On the simplest level we might see Eve as akin to the naive Christian depicted in Areopagitica, who lapses into heresy because she does not trust her own conscience but ‘beleeve[s] things only because [her] Pastor sayes so’ (YP 2.543). Her error may start here, but the essence of her fall lies much deeper. In actually believing that the apple can confer on Adam and her a divine status, she has lapsed into what Milton invariably represented as the most serious, and the most capacious of sins, idolatry, one that he not only associated with Catholicism but used to define and characterize it.³⁶ Indeed, Satan’s reference ³² Loewenstein, ‘Radical Religious Politics of Paradise Lost’, 354. ³³ Parker, Milton, 172–4. ³⁴ David Armitage, ‘John Milton: Poet against Empire’, in Armitage et al., eds., Milton and Republicanism, 206–25. ³⁵ Andrew Hadfield, Literature, Travel and Colonialism in the English Renaissance, 1540–1625 (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1998), ch. 2; Anthony Pagden, The Fall of Natural Man: The American Indian and the Origins of Comparative Ethnology (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1982). ³⁶ King, Milton and Religious Controversy, ch. 8.


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to Eve as ‘Queen’ may be designed to compare her to Henrietta Maria, accused by many of being the principal Catholic influence at Charles’s court (see above, 189).³⁷ Her lines immediately preceding the Fall make the nature of her sin clear to the reader: Here grows the cure of all, this fruit divine, Fair to the eye, inviting to the taste, Of virtue to make wise: what hinders then To reach, and feed at once both body and mind? (9.776–9)

And straight after eating the fruit Eve starts to actually worship the tree: O sovereign, virtuous, precious of all trees In Paradise, of operation blest To sapience, hitherto obscured, infamed, And thy fair fruit let hang, as to no end Created; but henceforth my early care, Not without song, each morning, and due praise Shall tend thee[.] (9. 795–801)³⁸

Given how Milton represented Catholicism throughout his work, it is hard to resist the conclusion that Eve is here represented as a Catholic, specifically perhaps the erstwhile Catholic queen of England. The Fall may start as no more than a form of ‘pre-sin’, akin to Raphael’s pushing of the limits of tolerated knowledge in Book 8. Satan’s tempting, however, transforms what would have disappeared with proper advice into fully-fledged idolatry. In his last work, Of True Religion, Hæresie, Schism, Toleration (1673), written to defend the extension of freedom of worship to nonconformists and prevent the same rights being extended to Catholics, Milton provides a sharp and straightforward distinction between true and false versions of the faith. The treatise was an attempt to restate what Milton saw as the basic principles of the godly revolution and to remind readers that in increasingly secularized times, they should not lose sight of the biblical basis of their existence.³⁹ On the one side there are Protestants who see the truth: True Religion is the true Worship of God and Service of God, learnt and believed from the Word of God only. No Man or Angel can know how God would be worshipt and serv’d unless God reveal it: He hath Reveal’d and taught it us in the holy Scriptures by ³⁷ Shell, Catholicism, 146–63; Sharpe, Personal Rule, 837–42; Woolrych, Britain in Revolution, passim. ³⁸ For comment, see King, Milton and Religious Controversy, 157. ³⁹ Tumbleson, Catholicism in the English Protestant Imagination, 62–3.

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inspir’d Ministers, and in the Gospel by his own Son and his Apostles, with strictest command to reject all other traditions or additions whatsoever. (YP 8.419)

Milton admits that not everything is known, or can be known, but sees Protestants united by their common commitment to explicate the Bible, in line with the doctrine of Sola Scriptura.⁴⁰ Differences can be accepted, as long as this basic principle is agreed. Catholics, however, cannot be tolerated because their religion is founded on heresy and idolatry: Let us now enquire whether Popery be tolerable or no. Popery is a double thing to deal with, and claims a twofold Power, Ecclesiastical, and Political, both usurpt, and the one supporting the other. But Ecclesiastical is ever pretended to be Political. The Pope by this mixt faculty, pretends right to Kingdoms and States, and especially to this of England, Thrones and Unthrones Kings, and absolves the people from their obedience to them; sometimes interdicts to whole Nations the Publick worship of God, shutting up their Churches: and was wont to dreign away greatest part of the wealth of this then miserable Land, as part of his Patrimony, to maintain the Pride and Luxury of his Court and Prelates: and now since, through the infinite mercy and favour of God, we have shaken off his Babylonish Yoke, hath not ceas’d by his Spyes and Agents, Bulls and Emissaries, once to destroy both King and Parliament; perpetually to seduce, corrupt, and pervert as many as they can of the People. Whether therefore it be fit or reasonable, to tolerate men thus principl’d in Religion towards the State, I submit it to the consideration of all Magistrates, who are best able to provide for their own and publick safety. As for tolerating the exercise of their Religion, supposing their State activities not to be dangerous, I answer, that Toleration is either public or private; and the exercise of their Religion, as far as it is Idolatrous, can be tolerated neither way. (YP 8.429–30)

Catholicism is defined in two principal ways, mirroring the dual nature of its political and ecclesiastical authority. First, as popery, an allegiance to the Pope, whose aim is to enlarge his kingdom at the expense of the lawfully established governments of independent nations. Second, as a form of idolatry, the worship of inappropriate Gods and substitutes for God, enabling Milton to make a link between the failure of the decent Christian who slavishly follows his minister and does not exercise his reason actively enough depicted in Areopagitica, and the falsehood promoted by the Catholics. In fact, Milton argues, it is the duty of the honest Christian to expel their corrosive presence from the ecclesiastic fold and body politic: ‘we must remove their Idolatry, and all the furniture thereof, whether Idols, or the Mass wherein they adore God under bread and wine’. True Christians must not dispute with Catholics, but should place all their trust in Scripture (YP 8.431–2). The short treatise concludes with an exhortation to Protestants to set aside differences and read ⁴⁰ Jameela Lares, Milton and the Preaching Arts (Cambridge: James Clarke, 2001), 172.


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Scripture together in order to defeat the common enemy: ‘Another means to abate Popery arises from the constant reading of Scripture, wherein Beleivers who agree in the main, are every where exhorted to mutual forbearance and charity one towards the other, though dissenting in some opinions’ (YP 8.435). The Bible always comes first and a failure to use it as the starting point for an understanding of God’s universe is heresy, whether that failure is deliberate or involuntary.⁴¹ Once this basic premise is accepted there can be toleration of open debate. Paradise Lost, in line with Milton’s arguments in his prose works, notably Of True Religion, can be seen as a work of intolerance as well as an impassioned plea for tolerance. If at times Milton’s arguments resemble those of the Levellers and other Independents, elsewhere he seems more in tune with the Presbyterians, eager to police the boundaries of true faith.⁴² For Milton intolerance, though not persecution, could be justified because he believed the right group of heretics and schismatics could be identified, the Catholics who declared allegiance to a rival, hostile power, and whose religion was only idolatry. Of course, it was ever possible that true Christians could lapse into error and even heresy, and we witness characters in Paradise Lost very close to the boundaries of intolerable belief without lapsing into sin. Nevertheless, it was possible for the godly community to stop transgression. As faith was in line with reason, correctly exercised, open debate would head off any possible problems, which was why the boundaries of toleration could be extended so widely to embrace all forms of Protestant belief. As long as the scriptures were read and discussed, potential Catholic converts could be persuaded to remain within the fold. And had Adam been able to advise Eve properly, the evil wiles of Satan would have failed. ⁴¹ Regina M. Schwartz, ‘Milton on the Bible’, in Corns, ed., Companion to Milton, 37–54. ⁴² On Milton’s complex relationship with Presbyterianism, see Barbara K. Lewalski, The Life of John Milton (Oxford: Blackwell, 2000), 201–6, passim; John Rumrich, ‘Radical Heterodoxy and Heresy’, in Corns, ed., Companion to Milton, 141–56.


Part III Poetry and Rhetoric


11 Toleration and Nationhood in the 1650s: ‘Sonnet XV’ and the Case of Ireland Elizabeth Sauer The Poor of Lyons, called ‘Waldensians’ by their detractors, resided in the seventeenth century in two Piedmontese valleys of the Alps bordering on Italy and France.¹ While granted toleration within defined geographical boundaries, the Waldensians were not legally entitled to occupy the lower parts of the valley of the Pellice or the open plain. In 1655 Carlos Immanuel II, Duke of Savoy, at the instigation of his mother, Grand Duchess Christina of Lorraine, sent an army of four thousand led by the Marquis of Pianezza from Turin to expel the Waldensians from the regions outside the tolerated limits. Assisted by a communal militia and Irish Catholics who had been oppressed under Oliver Cromwell’s orders in their homeland, Pianezza’s army in the name of Louis XIV and Catholicism slaughtered the Waldensians in the ‘Piedmontese Easter’ massacre of April 1655. On 3 May, the marquis commemorated this civilizing conquest by raising a cross ‘as a sign of the faith and the might of his Royal Highness’ (Audisio, Waldensian, 205).² When news of the atrocity reached them, the English, though divided along political and religious lines, conveyed their solidarity for their ur-Protestant brethren, who had been slaughtered or had fled to the wintry mountain wasteland. Cromwell himself declared a day of humiliation, contributed generously to a collection of over £38,000 for the victims, and produced letters of protest to European rulers. As well as participating in the letter-writing campaign, Cromwell’s Latin Secretary, John A different version of this essay, originally titled ‘Tolerationism, the Irish Crisis, and Milton’s ‘‘On the Late Massacre in Piemont’’ ’, appeared in Milton Studies 44, ed. Albert C. Labriola, University of Pittsburgh Press, 2005. The essay is revised and reprinted by permission of the University of Pittsburgh Press. ¹ See Gabriel Audisio, The Waldensian Dissent: Persecution and Survival c.1170–c.1570, trans. Claire Davison (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1999). ² For the phrase ‘civilizing Conquest’ in Milton’s writings on Ireland, see YP 3.304.

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Milton, was said to have drafted an address delivered by Cromwell’s envoy, the mathematician and philosopher Sir Samuel Morland, to the court in Turin, and he also composed ‘On the late Massacre in Piedmont’.³ As I demonstrate in the following study of the poem’s dialogue with the conflictual cultural and political milieu in which it was generated, ‘Sonnet XV’ offers a tribute to the Waldensians in Milton’s native English tradition while advancing Protestant nationhood and toleration at home and abroad.⁴ Milton’s response to the bloody assault on the Waldensians takes on new meaning when set in relation to the controversial acts and expressions of ˇ zek ascribes an ‘ambiguous nation-building in Cromwellian England. Slavoj Ziˇ and contradictory nature’ to ‘the modern ‘‘nation’’ ’, which he defines as a ‘community delivered of the traditional ‘‘organic’’ ties, a community in which the pre-modern links tying down the individual to a particular estate, family, religious group, and so on, are broken’. In a reformulation of Benedict Anderson’s influential theory that the nation was from the start ‘conceived in ˇ zek determines that nationhood cannot ‘be reduced language, not in blood’, Ziˇ to a network of purely symbolic ties: there is always a kind of ‘‘surplus of the Real’’ that sticks to it—to define itself, ‘‘national identity’’ must appeal to the contingent materiality of the ‘‘common roots,’’ of ‘‘blood and soil,’’ and so on’. ‘The crucial point’, he avers, is ‘to conceive both aspects in their interconnection: it is precisely the new ‘‘suture’’ effected by the Nation which renders possible the ‘‘desuturing,’’ the disengagement from traditional organic ties’.⁵ As England’s champion writer, Milton contributed substantially to the forms of nationhood produced in conjunction with the imperatives and the ‘contingent materiality’ of ‘blood and soil’.⁶ In the historical narrative on the Piedmont massacre, the discursive and symbolic constructions of nationhood meet the material. The conjunction occurs as the colonization ³ Robert Thomas Fallon, Milton in Government (University Park, Pa.: Pennsylvania State University Press, 1993), 139–51, argues for the attribution of Morland’s speech to Milton. Cf. Michael Lieb, Milton and the Culture of Violence (Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 1994), 30 n. 27. Fallon concurs with the Columbia editors of CM about the ‘suggestive parallels between the sonnet and the speech to the duke, both composed at about the same time’ (143, 144). Barbara K. Lewalski supports Fallon’s reading in The Life of John Milton: A Critical Biography (Oxford: Blackwell, 2000), 330, 664 n. 38. ⁴ No manuscript version of ‘Sonnet XV’ exists. The only text of the poem is that of 1673. The edition used here is ‘Sonnet XV. On the Late Massacre in Piedmont’, CSP 342–3. ⁵ Benedict Anderson, Imagined Communities: Reflections on the Origin and Spread of Nationˇ zek, For They Know Not What They alism (London: Verso, 1983, rev. edn. 1991), 145. Slavoj Ziˇ ˇ zek Do: Enjoyment as a Political Factor (London: Verso, 1991), 20. Otherwise, Anderson and Ziˇ address unrelated subjects and do not cite each other’s works. ⁶ Paul Stevens, ‘Milton’s Janus-Faced Nationalism: Soliloquy, Subject, and the Modern Nation State’, Journal of English and Germanic Philology 100.2 (2001), 247–68. Stevens offers a brilliant ˇ zek in his study of Milton, which complicates the differentiation between civic application of Ziˇ and ethnic nationalisms (256–68).

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of Catholic territory in Ireland re-emerges as a subject of heated discussion in the kingdom, and as England’s confrontation with cultural, religious, and ˇ zek associated political diversity reaches a climax. The ‘new ‘‘sutures’’ ’ Ziˇ with the evolving nation stitch together the components of nation’s identity, though they remain under stress. To replace ‘organic ties’, these sutures must draw heavily on emotional binding, as illustrated in my reading of Milton’s ‘On the late Massacre in Piedmont’, in which the otherwise conventional turn from octave to sestet is generated by an emotional onrush rather than being allotted a formal space. The result of situating ‘Sonnet XV’ in the political and cultural milieu in which it was produced—one that highlights the Cromwellian government’s politics of religion—is a new facet to the poem’s critical tradition and the work it performs in the history of tolerationism and nationhood.⁷ The Miltonic voice in the sonnet merges with those of the martyrs and of the nation, as the verses resonate with Hebraic, Christian, journalistic, homely, nationalistic, and apocalyptic imagery. At the same time, the outrage that marked the historical and literary reactions to the Piedmont massacre provokes the cry for divine retribution in the sonnet and offers a pretext for the reinforcement of an imperialist ideology that materialized, among other ways, in the colonization of Ireland and proposed transplantation of Irish Catholics. The first section of this chapter, then, establishes a framework for interpreting Parliament’s reaction to the Piedmont massacre and to the corresponding English–Irish crisis; the second historicizes the ‘resolution’ Milton presents in the ‘sestet’, specifically the advancement of the Reformation through the planting of Protestantism in Catholic soils.⁸

⁷ The vast majority of studies on ‘Sonnet XV’ (more commonly known as ‘Sonnet XVIII’) contextualize the poem in terms of the Judeo-Christian tradition; see, for example, John K. Hale, ‘Milton’s Sonnet 18 and Psalm 137’, Milton Quarterly 29 (1995), 91; John R. Knott, ‘The Biblical Matrix of Milton’s ‘‘On the Late Massacre in Piemont’’ ’, Philological Quarterly 62 (1983), 259–63; John S. Lawry, ‘Milton’s Sonnet 18: ‘‘A Holocaust’’ ’, Milton Quarterly 17 (1983), 11–14; Kathryn Gail Brock, ‘Milton’s Sonnet XVIII and the Language of Controversy’, Milton Quarterly 16 (1982), 3–6; Charles E. Goldstein, ‘The Hebrew Element in Milton’s Sonnet XVIII’, Milton Quarterly 9 (1975), 111–14; Joseph G. Mayer offers a dialectical reading of the Sonnet in ‘Doubleness in Milton’s Late Sonnets’, in Albert C. Labriola, ed., Milton Studies, vol. 39 (Pittsburgh: University of Pittsburgh Press, 2001), 26–49, esp. 41–9. On the Sonnet’s dialogue with contemporary accounts, drawn from newsletters, journals, or political pamphlets, see Milton’s Sonnets, ed. E. A. J. Honigmann (London: Macmillan, 1966), 164–6; Joad Raymond, ‘The Daily Muse; or, Seventeenth-Century Poets Read the News’, The Seventeenth Century 10.2 (1995), 189–218, esp. 203–11; John T. Shawcross, ‘A Note on the Piedmont Massacre’, Milton Quarterly 6 (1972), 36; Anna K. Nardo, Milton’s Sonnets and the Ideal Community (Lincoln, Nebr.: University of Nebraska Press, 1979), 132–3; Lieb, Milton, 29–32. ⁸ Milton’s variations on the Petrarchan sonnet form resist the octave–sestet division. The section of the poem to which I refer in this sentence constitutes what Lewalski identified as the

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1. The Irish Crisis English nationhood emerged in conjunction with a culture of toleration and, paradoxically, a climate of intolerance and imperial ambition. ‘Toleration’ was a vexed term in the early modern era, and most often used pejoratively. Debates on the concept and limits of toleration focused instead on ‘liberty of conscience’, the aim of which was religious union. ‘There hath been much these dayes bygone concerning a general Toleration, and liberty of Conscience,’ James Hay begins in his address to Parliament, which quickly becomes a plea for ‘uniformity in Religion’: ‘by granting too large a Toleration, you dishonour God, and disorder the State.’⁹ True liberty was not synonymous with contemporary notions of liberalism but with the freedom to act according to God’s laws. Cromwell’s plea for religious unification in 1648 characterizes this early notion of tolerationism: ‘I profess to thee [Colonel Robert ‘Robin’ Hammond] I desire from my heart, I have prayed for it, I have waited for the day to see union and right understanding between the godly people (Scots, English, Jews, Gentiles, Presbyterians, Independents, Anabaptists, and all).’¹⁰ The Protector’s promotion of the Protestant League in 1654–5 anticipates his strong appeal in 1655 for Protestant unity: in condemning the Piedmontese massacre, Cromwell urges that warring Protestant parties ‘by brotherly consent and harmony unite into one’ (SP, YP 5.680). The realization of such a vision necessitated the management of any threats to liberty of conscience or religious harmony. It also makes conceivable the link between events as seemingly diverse as the English transplantation of Irish Catholics in the mid-1650s and the Interregnum government’s protestation against the atrocities committed upon the Waldensians. The Irish crisis and the persecution of the Waldensians are thus historically related insofar as these events, along with England’s military alliance with France, dominated Cromwell’s agenda and Continental politics in the mid-1650s. But they are also connected by virtue of the new sutures of nationalism and by the debates about tolerationism, which made possible Cromwell’s support of a culture of dissent; his anti-Catholicism in the verses following the ‘volta’ in the poem, which can be said to have a three-part structure: lines 1–4, 5–10a, 10b–14. ⁹ Blair Worden, ‘Toleration and the Cromwellian Protectorate’, in W. J. Shields, ed., Persecution and Toleration, Studies in Church History, 21 (Oxford: Basil Blackwell, 1984), 209–10; Collonel James Hays Speech to the Parlament upon the Debate concerning Toleration ([London,] 1655), 4, 5. ¹⁰ W. C. Abbott, ed., The Writings and Speeches of Oliver Cromwell, 4 vols. (New York: Russell & Russell, 1970), 1.677. Subsequent quotations from Abbott’s edition are cited parenthetically by volume and page number.


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European theater; the proposed readmission of the Jews in the 1655 Whitehall conference; his campaign against the Irish and war against the Spanish; and the Rump’s hostility toward English Levellers and Quakers.¹¹ These apparently contradictory positions were integral to the Interregnum government’s political, ecclesiastical, and imperial mission to advance the Reformation movement with which notions of nationhood and tolerationism became entangled. The various politico-religious campaigns of the Cromwellian government were extensions of the century-long war against Popery, anti-Catholicism having become entrenched in the rhetoric and practices of England’s nation formation. The history of conflict with Catholicism generated what Joad Raymond describes as a ‘typology of accounts of atrocities against Protestants’ to which narratives of suffering and persecution conformed to various degrees (Raymond, ‘Daily Muse’, 208). Newsbook writers thus compared the Piedmontese massacre to the oppression of the Cathars in France, to the slaughter of Huguenots in Paris on St Bartholomew’s Eve 1572, and to the attacks on Protestants by Catholic Irish rebels in 1641.¹² The martyrologies from the Marian era also haunted the nation’s cultural imagination. John Foxe’s Actes and Monuments—a 1563 version of the Book of Martyrs—documented the history of Protestant martyrdom and remained influential in Milton’s day. Actes and Monuments connects itself strongly to Milton’s Sonnet through its accounts of the Babylonian woe and through the idea that the blood of Marian martyrs nourished the soil in which the seeds of the nation are planted.¹³ Stephen Greenblatt explains that if Foxe’s book ‘dwelt lovingly upon scenes of horror, if it insisted again and again that beneath the institutions and symbolic language of the Catholic Church lay ‘‘mere power and violence’’, it was … because the revelation of such violence attacked that consensual unity for which More went to the scaffold’.¹⁴ At the same time, however, by encouraging their own ¹¹ See Christopher Hill, God’s Englishman: Oliver Cromwell and the English Revolution (Harmondsworth: Penguin, 1970), 262–3. ¹² Historian John Marshall notes that the Waldensians had contact with the Huguenots and had derived their confession of faith from that of the Huguenots in 1655 (Marshall, John Locke, Toleration and Early Enlightenment Culture (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2006), 55). Marshall establishes the connections between the events in Piedmont and Ireland with reference to J[ean] B[aptiste] Stouppe’s A Collection of the Several Papers … Concerning the Bloody and Barbarous Massacres … of many thousands of Reformed, or Protestants dwelling in the Vallies of Piedmont (London, 1655), 60. ¹³ John Foxe, Acts and monuments of matters most speciall and memorable, 3 vols. (London, 1641), vol. 2, 7.201–23. The account of the persecuted Waldensians during the period 1555–61 includes a letter appealing to the Duke of Savoy for toleration (7.210–11). On Foxe and national election, see William Haller, Foxe’s Book of Martyrs and the Elect Nation (London, 1663), esp. 224–8. ¹⁴ Stephen Greenblatt, Renaissance Self-Fashioning: From More to Shakespeare (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1980), 79.

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consensual unity, Actes and Monuments and the seventeenth-century Protestant counterparts it inspired reiterated Cromwell’s call for ‘brotherly consent and harmony’, thereby supplying some stitches for the sutures of the elect nation. In the age-old battle against Babylonian powers, the Waldensians, as the original defenders of the Reformed Religion, resisted Catholic oppression longer than any other of the English Protestant sectarians, who, in a demonstration of compassion and unity, now felt compelled to defend the cause of their ancestral brethren.¹⁵ In combination with details of specific atrocities and catalogues of individual martyrs, widely circulated journalistic reports of the violence against the Waldensian women and children sparked a national outcry for vengeance. Morland’s 1655 speech to the Duke of Savoy, a version of which was printed in his 1658 History, identifies details of the atrocities that also informed Milton’s sonnet. ‘Those wretched creatures’, complains Morland, ‘are now wandering, with their wives and children, houseless, roofless, poor, and destitute of all resource, through rugged and inhospitable spots and over snow-covered mountains … what was not dared and attempted against them? … some infants were dashed against the rocks, and the brains of others were cooked and eaten … heaven itself seems to be astounded by these cries.’¹⁶ Blending his voice with the nation-wide appeal for justice, Milton calls out not as a supporter of Independency nor as a harsh critic of Anglicanism but as an ‘enraged Protestant citizen … forgetting for the moment, like most Englishmen, the wars against the Irish and the massacres at Drogheda’.¹⁷ The speaker of ‘Sonnet XV’ thus cries: ‘Avenge O Lord thy slaughtered saints, whose bones / Lie scattered on the Alpine mountains cold’ (‘Sonnet XV. On the late Massacre in Piedmont’, CSP 342–3, ll. 1–2). The Waldensians were ‘Slain by the bloody Piedmontese that rolled / Mother with infant down the rocks. Their moans / The vales redoubled to the hills, and they / To heaven’ (7–10), the sonnet continues, offering further evidence of the shared imagery on which political testimonies, martyrologies, journals, newsbooks, and literary accounts all relied. ¹⁵ Mercurius Politicus, Numb. 257 (10–17 May 1655) in Joad Raymond, ed., Making the News: An Anthology of the Newsbooks of Revolutionary England, 1641–1660 (Moreton-in-Marsh: Windrush Press, 1993), 283. ¹⁶ [The First Draft of Samuel Morland’s Address to the Duke of Savoy, and his Mother], Additional State Papers, Frank Allen Patterson et al., eds., The Works of John Milton, 18 vols. (New York: Columbia University Press, 1931–8), 13.479–81. ¹⁷ As far as I have determined, Don M. Wolfe’s Introduction in vol. 4 of Complete Prose Works of John Milton is the only study on Milton that juxtaposes—if only in passing—the 1655 events at Piedmont with those in Ireland at this time (YP 4.273). See Marshall for late Restoration tracts which connect the Waldensians, Huguenots, the Glorious Revolution, and the Irish Revolution of 1688–91 designed to reinforce Protestant rule (John Locke, 89–92).


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One of the most popular and extensive histories of the massacre was produced by a Swiss minister and friend of Milton, Jean Baptiste Stouppe. Stouppe’s A Collection of the Several Papers (1655) lists in its subtitle the nations involved in the tragedy: ‘The Bloody and Barbarous Massacres … by the Duke of Savoy’s Forces, joyned therein with the French Army, and severall Irish Regiments’ (Stouppe, Collection, title page). This triple alliance provides an additional gloss on Milton’s ‘triple Tyrant’ (‘Sonnet XV’, l. 12), validly glossed by Miltonists as an image for the Pope and his three-tiered crown.¹⁸ Of particular concern here is the unexpected reference to the participation of the Irish in the assault. In his dedication to Cromwell in A Collection, Stouppe observes that the slaughter of the Waldensians should enrage the Protector all the more ‘because this cruell action was chiefely executed by the Irish, as in revenge to those who have driven them out of their own Country for the cruell Massacres they there committed’ (Stouppe, Collection, 3; Abbott, Writings, 3.707). In listing alleged causes for the massacre of the Waldensians, Stouppe cites and then dismisses the claim ‘That the Reformed have cruelly murthered the Catholiques in Ireland, and have wholly expelled them’ (Collection, 40); he continues by observing that the Catholics’ revenge involves ‘murther[ing] the Reformed in Piedmont, and clear[ing] the State of them, to lodge the Irish in their place’. The Irish are described shortly thereafter as enraged rebels who were justly ‘banished out of their Country, for Massacring the Protestants there’ (Collection, 41). Stouppe’s estimation in ‘To the Christian Reader’ that the dead Waldensians numbered six thousand (Collection, A3v ) was a huge inflation of the actual figure.¹⁹ The casualty rate was among the many aspects of A Collection of the Several Papers that Stouppe’s critics disputed. A Short and faithfull Account of the Late Commotions in the Valleys of Piedmont (1655)²⁰ evaluates Stouppe’s arguments without, however, dismissing them altogether. The author concludes that Stouppe’s papers ‘describe the punishment, and not ¹⁸ Among the critics who gloss line 8 accordingly are: Barbara Lewalski, Life, 353; Charles E. Goldstein, ‘Hebrew Element’, 111; Anna K. Nardo, Milton’s Sonnets, 133; Joseph G. Mayer, ‘Doubleness’, 44; Michael Lieb, Milton, 34; Lieb notes Milton’s previous reference: ‘In Eandem (In Proditionem Bombardicam)’, l. 3, CSP 36. ¹⁹ Compare Samuel Morland, who lists about 257 names of the massacred in The History of the Evangelical Churches (London, 1658), 362–79, and an additional 113 victims who died in prison (380–3). David Masson cites a figure of 300 in The Life of Milton: Narrated in Connexion with the Political, Ecclesiastical, and Literary History of His Time, 6 vols. (London: Macmillan, 1871–80), 5.39, while W. C. Abbott estimates ‘two or three hundred’ (Writings, 3.707). Also see Samuel Rawson Gardiner, History of the Commonwealth and Protectorate 1649–1656, 4 vols. (New York: AMS Press, 1965), 4.185. ²⁰ A Short and faithfull Account of the Late Commotions in the Valleys of Piedmont, with the Dominions of the Duke of Savoy. With some Reflections on Mr. Stouppe’s collected Papers touching the same businesse ([London], 1655).

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expresse the crime’ (Account, 6). Among the explanations for the slaughter that he provides is the Waldensians’ denial to the Catholics of ‘a Liberty of Conscience’, which entailed ‘not permitting their Priests to say Masse, but us[ing] many revilings and mockeries towards their Masse, and religious people; as at La Tour, they dressed an Asse in a Monks habit’ (Account, 3). A Short and faithfull Account, however, was no match for Stouppe’s popular treatise, which was heavily steeped in anti-Catholic sentiment. On George Thomason’s copy of A Short and faithfull Account one mischievous reader prefixed ‘un’ to the word ‘faithfull’ and added ‘written by a papist’ to the end of the title. Still, as Stouppe’s history reluctantly suggests, the English government was actively involved in denying ‘a Liberty of Conscience’ to those outside the faith, that is, those who opposed the Reformed Religion. When approached by Morland about the Piedmont massacre, the Duchess Christina, mother of Carlos Immanuel II, chastised the English government for doling out criticism while persecuting Catholics at home.²¹ In the final period of negotiations for the treaty between England and France in 1655, Antoine de BordeauxNeufville reminded English commissioners of the persecution of Catholics in England (Abbott, Writings, 3.718). But such public criticism was out of line; as Samuel Gardiner explains, the ‘doctrine that each prince was responsible to no external Power for his treatment of religious questions arising in his own dominions had not only been consecrated by the recent Treaties of Westphalia, but was firmly rooted in the conscience of Europe’ (Gardiner, History of the Commonwealth, 4.187). No foreign official as a result was entitled to chastise Cromwell for his treatment of the inhabitants of his kingdom. Nevertheless, the records of such judgements, particularly about the suppression of Irish Catholics, are inscribed in the history of the Piedmont massacre and of Protestant nationhood and toleration more generally. From August 1649 to May 1650, Cromwell led an army against the Irish, allegedly in retaliation for the 1641 Rebellion, anti-Catholicism having been ‘energized by first allegations and then legends of Irish rebellions and massacres’.²² Exposing the depths of his hostility, Cromwell accused the Irish clergy of having ignited the early revolt: ‘You are a part of Antichrist, whose Kingdom the Scripture so expressly speaks should be laid in blood; yea in the blood of the Saints’ (Abbott, Writings, 2.199). He probably derived his views on the Irish from Sir John Temple’s The Irish Rebellion (1646), a popular Protestant martyrology that presented a national myth hostile to ²¹ Gardiner, History of the Commonwealth, 4.189; Morland, History of the Evangelical Churches, 568–80. ²² Raymond D. Tumbleson, Catholicism in the English Protestant Imagination: Nationalism, Religion, and Literature, 1660–1745 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1998), 11.


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the Irish Catholics.²³ The ongoing holy war against the Catholics in Ireland would in turn avenge ‘the innocent blood that hath been shed’ and also ‘hold forth and maintain the lustre and glory of English liberty in a nation where’, Cromwell insisted, ‘we have an undoubted right to do it’ (Abbott, Writings, 2.205; Gentles, New Model Army, 372). Ireland had long been a thorn in England’s side. For Milton and his contemporaries, Ireland obstructed the establishment of a Protestant, anglocentric British nation. ‘[W]hole massachers have been committed on [the king’s] faithfull Subjects’ (Tenure, YP 3.197), Milton reminds the readers of The Tenure of Kings and Magistrates in defending Cromwell’s re-conquest of the rebellious Irish in 1649. Then just over a month later on 28 March 1649, Milton was appointed to advance the national cause by offering ‘some observations upon the Complicacon of interest wch is now amongst the severall designers against the peace of the Commonwealth’.²⁴ Observations upon the Articles of Peace with the Irish Rebels served as a response to a January 1649 treaty between the king’s lord lieutenant, James Butler, the Earl of Ormond, and the Confederate Catholics of Ireland, a treaty that threatened the new government. Milton refers to the Articles as one of the late king’s ‘Masterpieces’ (Observations, YP 3.301) in anticipation of his iconoclastic reading of Eikon Basilike in the same year. The main targets, however, are the authors of the Articles of Peace and the ‘Papist Rebels of Ireland’ (Observations, YP 3.300), whom he characterizes as ‘barbarous, savage, uncouth, but, worst of all, papistical in religious belief’.²⁵ Observations was in turn preoccupied with ‘a crucial phase of English domestic politics’, a phase in a larger narrative of national self-definition tied to questions of foreign policy and toleration.²⁶ Leaving the Irish ‘ashamed / To see themselves in one year tamed’,²⁷ Cromwell, England’s Gideon, returned victorious to England, where preparations would begin yet again for the transplantation of the Irish and the ²³ See T. C. Barnard, ‘Crisis of Identity among Irish Protestants, 1641–1685’, Past and Present 127 (May 1990), 52–9. Temple thus regarded the 1641 Rebellion in terms of a much larger clash between Catholicism and Protestantism. See I. J. Gentles, The New Model Army in England, Ireland and Scotland, 1645–1653 (Oxford: Blackwell, 1992), 371–2, 542 n. 126. ²⁴ Public Record Office, Order Book of the Council of State, SP Dom 25/62, p. 125; Masson, Life of Milton, 4.87, 98. Also see J. Milton French, ed., The Life Records of John Milton, 2 vols. (New York: Gordian Press, 1966), 2.240. ²⁵ See Wolfe, Introduction, YP 1.169. See also Willy Maley, ‘Milton and ‘‘the complication of interests’’ in Early Modern Ireland’, in Balachandra Rajan and Elizabeth Sauer, eds., Milton and the Imperial Vision (Pittsburgh: Duquesne University Press, 1999), 155–68. ²⁶ Thomas N. Corns, ‘Milton’s Observations upon the Articles of Peace: Ireland under English Eyes’, in David Loewenstein and James Grantham Turner, eds., Politics, Poetics, and Hermeneutics in Milton’s Prose (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1990), 123–34. ²⁷ Andrew Marvell, ‘An Horatian Ode’, in The Complete Poems, ed. Elizabeth Story Donno (Harmondsworth: Penguin, 1972; rpt. 1985), ll. 73–4.

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colonization of their country in the early and mid-1650s. Indeed, as Raymond Tumbleson recently remarked, ‘the blood of the martyrs was the seed of colonialism’ (Catholicism, 40). The incursion into Ireland represented something more than simply a foreign intrusion: inextricably entangled with the domestic affairs of England, it involved the English at the most basic level as a Protestant and imperial nation. The ‘Complicacon of interest’ in Ireland was translated in the case of the Piedmontese massacre into what Cromwell called ‘one common Interest’ in which the cause of the all Protestants was at stake.²⁸ Foreign correspondence about the tragedy, political dispatches and state papers to which Milton himself contributed, and the letters of protest he wrote, speak of the ‘fraternal bond’ between the English and the Waldensians, who have been murdered or banished to a wintry wasteland for their refusal to embrace the ‘Roman religion’ (SP, YP 5.684–701). Reformers in turn identified the victims as ur-Protestants. Like his contemporaries, Milton locates the Waldensians in the line of the early Christians: ‘those Churches in Piemont have held the same Doctrin and Goverment, since the time that Constantine with his mischeivous donations poyson’d Silvester and the whole Church. Others affirme they have so continu’d there since the Apostles’ (Eikon. YP 3.514).²⁹ Having resisted Constantine, who ‘marr’d all in the Church’, as acknowledged ‘even among men professing the Romish Faith’ (Of Ref., YP 1.559), the primitive sect remained pristine and constant throughout the centuries. Morland’s History of the Evangelical Churches (1658), modeled on Actes and Monuments, features the Waldensian massacre, while also quoting writers who attack the Catholic Church from within.³⁰ Morland highlights Petrarch’s derisive comments on the Church in various Petrarchan sonnets, including ‘Sonetto 110’, ‘Fontana di dolore’. Milton translates the first five lines of the sestet in Of Reformation as follows: Founded in chast and humble Povertie, ’Gainst them that rais’d thee dost thou lift thy horn, Impudent whoore, where hast thou plac’d thy hope? ²⁸ State Papers II, Letter 53, CM 13.169. ‘Pene unam esse’ (13.168) is translated in the Yale edition as ‘cause … common to … all’ (SP, YP 5.688). ²⁹ Also see Of Ref., YP 1.559–60; Likeliest Means, YP 7.291, 306, 308. In the second reference from The Likeliest Means, Milton mentions the author of the standard history of the Waldensians, Peter Gilles, who produced Histoire Ecclesiastique des Eglises Reformees (Geneva, 1644). ³⁰ Samuel Morland used similar images to those of Stouppe, and both his and Stouppe’s discussions of the duke’s motives reveal that his mother, Grand Duchess Christina, a granddaughter of Catherine de’ Medici, and the sister of Henrietta Maria, was the real force behind the massacre.


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In thy Adulterers, or thy ill got wealth? Another Constantine comes not in haste. (Of Ref., YP 1.559)³¹

Petrarch’s image of the papal court as Babylon—an identification that resonates throughout the Protestant literature of suffering—is in turn appropriated by Milton for his Petrarchan ‘On the late Massacre in Piedmont’, which he converts into a memorial for the ur-Protestant martyrs. ‘Sonnet XV’ calls on God to avenge the ‘slaughtered saints, whose bones / Lie scattered’ (1–2), reminiscent of God’s chosen who were dispersed by their enemies. Morland likewise echoes this cry for justice and vengeance throughout The History of the Evangelical Churches, from the title page on which he connects the Waldensians with the martyrs under the throne of God in Revelation 6:9: ‘I saw under the Altar the souls of them that were slain for the word of God, and for the testimony which they held; And they cried with a loud voice, saying, How long O Lord, holy and true, dost thou not judge and avenge our bloud on them that dwell on the earth’.³² In dialogue with contemporary accounts of the massacre and with biblical prophecies (Psalms, Jeremiah, Daniel, and Revelation), Milton in ‘Sonnet XV’ develops an alternative genealogy for the contemporary heroes.³³ As defenders of the truth ‘so pure of old’ (‘Sonnet XV’, l. 3), the Waldensians ‘in their ancient fold’ (6), are reminiscent of Old Testament Israelites and New Testament Christians who suffer ‘for truths sake’. Thus, while their founder, Pierre Valdes, did not secede from Catholicism until 1179, Milton sinks the sect’s roots (and thus Protestantism) in a more ancient tradition. Essentially, he designs for the Reformed Religion a primitive history that competes with the claims of Catholicism for an originary status. These urProtestants spurned idolatry, the speaker declares, in appealing for their preservation and inscription into ‘heavenly records’ or the ‘books of life’ (PL, 1.361, 363): ‘Even them who kept thy truth so pure of old / When all our fathers worshipped stocks and stones, / Forget not: in thy book record their groans / Who were thy sheep and in their ancient fold / Slain’ (‘Sonnet XV’, 3–6). Those who penetrate the sheepfold are the enemies of the Good Shepherd. In ‘Lycidas’, they are corrupt clergy who ‘Creep and intrude, and climb into the fold’ (‘Lycidas’, CSP 243–56, l. 115), while in Paradise Lost the ³¹ In Of Reformation Milton translates the first five lines of the sestet of Petrarch’s Sonnet 108, which is numbered 110 in Morland History, who quotes the entire ‘Sonetto’ (c3r ). ³² Morland, History, title page. Also see d2v and the final page of the Introduction. ³³ John R. Knott refers to the Waldensians as Milton’s ‘best contemporary examples of martyrdom’ in ‘ ‘‘Suffering for Truths sake’’: Milton and Martyrdom’, in Loewenstein and Turner, eds., Politics, Poetics, and Hermeneutics, 163.

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poet-narrator compares Satan to ‘a prowling wolf’ who steals his way into God’s ‘fold’ (PL, 4.183, 187). This first ‘grand thief’ reappears as the ‘lewd hirelings’ of Milton’s day (PL, 4.193); while in the case of the Waldensian massacre, the ‘bloody Piedmontese’ (‘Sonnet XV’, l. 7) perform Satan’s part. The rewriting of the Protestant history and specifically that of the Waldensians involved a typological identification with the elect of the Old Testament. Anti-Catholic literature frequently cited the example of the Israelites’ liberation from Babylon, their fall prophesying divine vengeance against the Roman church. Stouppe’s Collection takes advantage of this Protestant interpretation by casting the Waldensians as ‘poor banished men, who like the faithfull of old, are wandering in the wildernesses, in the Dens, in the Mountains and in the clefts of the earth: That they might sing as those that returned from the Babylonian Captivity, When the Lord turned again the Captivity of Zion, we were like them that dream: Then was our mouth filled with laughter, and our tongue with singing’ (Stouppe, Collection, 43–4). Also drawing on Hebrews 11:37–8, Morland’s History repeats the passages to describe the persecuted Waldensians (Morland, History, b). Noting that the psalmist interspersed ‘divers bitter complaints throughout the whole Book of Psalms’, Morland invokes Psalm 137 to characterize the persecuted Waldensians as a chosen people, who carry on the tradition of the exiled Israelites in Babylon: ‘they sat down and wept (as they had good reason) by the waters of Babylon, when they remembered Sion’ (Morland, History, b2). The appeal of the ‘Committee for the Affairs of the Poor Protestants in the Valleys of Piedmont’ echoes this popular sentiment, and the Committee implores God ‘to raise up Sion upon the Ruins of Babylon, hastening his work, and blessing the means to it’.³⁴ Recalling the deliverance from Babylonian captivity, Milton’s Sonnet correspondingly refers to the Waldensians’ flight from the ‘Babylonian woe’ (14). Woe, which reverberates throughout the biblical texts (Isaiah 5:8–22; Luke 11:42–52; Revelation 8:13), as it does in the poem, is ceremonial, melancholic, and prophetic. The octave’s end rhymes reinforce the elegiac nature of the verses: ‘bones’, ‘cold’, ‘old’, ‘stones’, ‘groans’, ‘fold’, ‘rolled’, ‘moans’. Sonically, then, the poem is dominated by the ‘o’ sound which both begets and sustains its avalanche. For the most part, the Sonnet is only Petrarchan by virtue of its rhyme scheme. Through the enjambment of the word ‘moans’, the poem in fact resists Petrarchan containment as the octave is melded to the sestet, in which the sound and sense of ‘sow’ and ‘grow’ are checked by the final ‘woe’. A seventeenth-century reader, susceptible to fears of international Catholic conspiracy, would have received an ‘additional emotional charge’ ³⁴ ‘Committee for the Affairs of the Poor Protestants in the Valleys of Piedmont’ (London, 1658), 4.


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when reading Milton’s concluding couplet, Joad Raymond maintains (‘Daily Muse’, 207).³⁵

2. Toleration at Home Though sown in sorrow, the seeds take root and mature, ultimately yielding a hundredfold crop. While the themes of dispersal and death predominate in both the octave and the sestet, the latter focuses more on planting and growing and enacts a final judgement on popery. ‘Plant’ specifically denotes the founding or establishing of a city, or more relevantly, a colony; 2 Samuel 7:10: ‘I will appoint a place for my people … and will plant them, that they may dwell in a place of their own.’ Milton himself frequently uses the term in reference to the planting of Christianity (PE, YP 1.651; Eikon., YP 3.490, 493), of faith (Areop., YP 2.567), of the gospel (History, YP 5.219), of churches (Eikon., YP 3.518), and of colonies (History, YP 5.5). Such practices are most controversial of course when they involve displacing or transplanting an existing people. The planting or colonization of Ireland in the mid-1650s through the establishment of English plantations involved the transplanting or what Francis Bacon had earlier called ‘displanting’ of the natives, namely Irish Catholics. While James Harrington recommended in The Commonwealth of Oceana that Panopea (Ireland) be ‘farmed out unto the Jews’ for pay³⁶—Jews being unlike Catholics marginally tolerable; and while Cromwell wrote to his son-inlaw Charles Fleetwood about settling Ireland with Piedmont refugees (Abbott, Writings, 3.715), proposals resurfaced for the transplantation of Catholic Irish. Of central concern was the segregation of Catholics in Connaught and Clare. Vincent Gookin, Surveyor-General of Ireland, and Cromwellian MP in the Irish Parliament, opposed forced transportations to Connaught in The Great Case of Transplantation in Ireland Discussed ([January] 1655) and in The Author and Case of Transplanting the Irish into Connaught Vindicated from the Unjust Aspersions of Col. Richard Laurence (12 May 1655). Gookin produced the latter in response to colonial fantasies of the Cromwellian Colonel Richard Lawrence, who in The Interest of England in the Irish Transplantation (9 March 1655) staunchly supported the segregation of the Irish and the English ³⁵ John K. Hale argues that Milton reserves some of the few positive references to Old Testament Israelites found in his later works for these ancestral Protestants who fly the ‘Babylonian woe’ (Hale, ‘England as Israel in Milton’s Writings’, Early Modern Literary Studies 2.2 (1996), 14). ³⁶ James Harrington, The Commonwealth of Oceana, in J. G. A. Pocock, ed., The Political Works of James Harrington (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1977), 159.

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settlement of Ireland. Homeland security and the defence of English interests become refrains throughout Lawrence’s work as he recounts in graphic detail the atrocities committed by the Irish against the English, and insists that ‘some of the Irish should be removed out of some parts of Ireland, to make way for the English Plantations, and if so, then a Plantation must be admitted to be essential in order [to maintain] the security of the English interest and People there’ (Lawrence, Interest, 16).³⁷ In his earlier work, Gookin already doubted the purity of the colonizers’ motives. Acknowledging the failure to evangelize the Irish in their own country, Gookin entertained the possibility that the English themselves might be at fault: ‘as if our business in Ireland was only to set up our own interests and not Christs’.³⁸ Then, several months later in his lengthy refutation of Lawrence’s argument, Gookin recommends a more civil form of colonization: ‘We may overspread them and incorporate them into ourselves, and so by an oneness take away the foundation of difference and fear together … we have opportunities of communicating better things unto them.’³⁹ Gookin’s solutions to the problems seem to accord with Milton’s sowing of Protestant seeds in Catholic territory. Gookin did recognize the difficulties involved in the colonizing act: ‘The unsetling of a nation is an easy work; the setling of a nation is not, it has cost much Blood and Treasure there’ (Great Case, 29). Some of his contemporaries were, however, more critical of even such cautious and ‘benevolent’ acts of colonization, assimilation, and apartheid that Gookin advanced in dealing with Irish Catholics and other religious ‘detractors’. Lord Cork, a pro-royalist who was nevertheless involved with the new Cromwellian order and attended the memorial in the city of Cork for the slain Waldensians, protested in 1658 against the ‘wickedness of many of this nation to fetch poor Irish people out of their beds and sell them into the Barbadoes’.⁴⁰ During the 1650s, Irish priests, Tories, and ‘vagrants’ were exiled to the colonies, including Jamaica and Barbados, where the prices on their heads ‘compare[d] unfavourably’ ³⁷ Richard Lawrence, The Interest of England in the Irish Transplantation (London, 9 March 1655), 16. On the significance of ‘planting’, also see Mary Fenton, ‘Hope, Land Ownership, and Milton’s ‘‘Paradise Within’’ ’, Studies in English Literature, 1500–1900 43.1 (2003), 151–80. ³⁸ Vincent Gookin, The Great Case of Transplantation in Ireland Discussed (London, [January] 1655), 3. ³⁹ Vincent Gookin, The Author and Case of Transplanting the Irish into Connaught Vindicated from the unjust Aspersions of Col. Richard Laurence (London, 12 May 1655), 41. See Mercurius Politicus (15–22 March 1655), 5197; (29 March–5 April 1655), 5241. ⁴⁰ Diary of Lord Cork, 18 January 1657/58, 14 July 1658, quoted in T. C. Barnard, ‘Crisis of Identity among Irish Protestants, 1641–1685’, Past and Present 127 (May 1990), 72 n. 91.


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with the prices for black slaves purchased by the West Indies planters.⁴¹ At the same time that Cork decried such practices, he was also known to have disagreed with a fellow magistrate’s ruling that a troublesome Quaker should be imprisoned (Barnard, ‘Crisis’, 72). In general, however, the lament for England’s own ‘slaughter’d Saints’—Quakers, other dissenters, Catholics, and Jews—fell on deaf ears. Parliamentary newsbook accounts of the 1650s illustrate England’s negotiation of cultural and religious differences in its management of such international and domestic affairs. The Weekly Post of early August 1655 documents or ‘impartially communicat[es]’ a range of foreign events, from the ‘great and lamentable Engagement between the English and the Spaniards’ in the wake of the collapse of the Western design, to the inflamed relations between England and France, to the subduing and taming of Ireland.⁴² The selfcongratulatory remarks on the subjection of Ireland are particularly revealing: By Letters further from Ireland was certified, that the business of setling the Military and Civil Affairs, and Course of Justice being now well over, the Lord Deputy Fleetwood is preparing for England with all speed … The Officers of the New Militia Troops in every Country, have been feasted at White hall, and great expressions of joy there were at the celebration thereof: May they not well laugh that wins? (Weekly Post, 1908)

As for the encounter between Protestant and Catholic forces in the European theatre, The Weekly Post reports: Mr. Moreland, Agent from his Highness, to the D. of Savoy, hath received his Answer, and is returning towards England, he is expected suddenly. The poor Protestants are still in Arms in the mountains and grow numerous, their brethren who fled returning to them from all parts. And whilest the Dukes forces were spoyling of their harvest in the valleys, they descended from the Hills, and after a hot dispute routed them, and took many prisoners. (Weekly Post, 1910)

Between these news reports on international events is a section, titled ‘Quaking Intelligence’, which marks George Fox’s entrance onto the nation’s political stage (1906–7). The newsbook characteristically links Fox with sorcery, witchcraft, and Catholic priesthood. Victimized from the time of their emergence by the government’s policies and judicial system, the Friends, called ‘Quakers’ by their detractors, consciously recorded their experiences. ⁴¹ John W. Blake, ‘Transportation from Ireland to America, 1653–60’, Irish Historical Studies 3 (1942–3), 275. Colonization and conversion were part of the same mandate. Cromwell himself proposed that upon being transported abroad, Irish girls would have to be restrained but Irish boys could potentially be educated to be ‘Englishmen, I mean rather, Christians’, Thurloe, State Papers, 4.23–4, 40; quoted in Blake, ‘Transportation’, 271 n. 3. ⁴² The Weekly Post, Numb. 283 (London, Tuesday 31 July to Tuesday 7 August 1655), 1905. References following immediately are to this document and cited parenthetically by page number.

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Their testimonials as persecuted saints were written alongside the history of the Waldensians’ tragedy in a Great Book of Sufferings. As sufferers for truth’s sake as they publicly identified themselves, Quakers issued a counter-plea to ‘forget not’ and to record their trials in God’s book, as Milton’s speaker urges for the Waldensians (‘Sonnet XV’, l. 5).⁴³ Moreover, Quakers made connections between various kinds of oppression in England and on the continent to which Milton and governmental officials of his day turned a blind eye. False Prophets, Anticrists, Deceivers, which are in the World (1655), the first work of Margaret Fell, Fox’s future spouse, exposes the hypocrisy of the English who allegedly aided their fellows on the continent while persecuting the Friends in their own country. Her addressees are ‘the Heads and Governours of this Nation, who have put forth a Declaration for the keeping of a Day of Humiliation for the Persecution (as they say) of poor Inhabitants in the Valley of Lucerna, Angrona, and others professing the Reformed Religion’.⁴⁴ Fell emphasizes the emptiness of the government’s fast to mark the event of the Waldensians’ massacre, noting that the officials’ inner condition remained unchanged and their correspondingly oppressive internal policies unaltered (False Prophets, 17). Reminding Cromwell of his commitment to toleration, Fell, in anticipation of the accounts in the Great Book of Sufferings, states: And whereas you take it into your consideration, the sad persecution, tyrany and cruelty exercised upon them, whom you call your Brethren, Protestants, and therein do contribute and administer to their wants outwardly … we who are sufferers by a Law derived from the Pope, are willing to joyn, and contribute with you to their outward necessities … but in the mean time while you are doing this, and taking notice of others cruelty, tyrany and persecution: turn your eye into your own bosoms, and see what is doing at home. (False Prophets, 18)

Descriptions of the Friends’ suffering are interspersed throughout, justifying Fell’s harsh accusations of the government’s ironic alignment with popery: ‘Therefore honestly consider what is done, whilest you are taking notice of others Cruelties abroad, lest you overlook what is done at home: for there is much difference in many things between the Popish Religion and the Protestant (as they call it) but in this persecution there is no difference’ (False Prophets, 20). In an appeal she repeats throughout her Restoration writings, Fell urges the English government to abandon its ‘Popish law’ (False Prophets, 21) which oppresses those in the homeland. ⁴³ In 1657 George Fox encouraged Quakers to present their sufferings to judges of assize, and in 1658 he organized a system of recording sufferings which would be incorporated by Ellis Hookes into the Great Book of Sufferings. But Quakers like Margaret Fell were already documenting their trials before 1657. ⁴⁴ Margaret Fell, False Prophets, Anticrists, Deceivers, which are in the World (London, 1655), title page.


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During the remaining years of the Interregnum, Royalists, Catholics, and Quakers alike continued to expose the limitations of Cromwell’s policies on civil liberty and religious toleration. Samuel Fisher’s The Scorned Quakers True and honest account describes the silencing of the Quaker after this famous 17 September 1656 parliamentary sitting. Identified by both Margaret Fell and himself as a sufferer ‘for Truth’s sake’, Fisher calls the magistrates to justice and repentance.⁴⁵ God, he warns, will ‘seek to snap and suppress them, as the old Israel their Type did upon Pharaoh and the AEgyptians, so that the more ye slay them, the more they shall grow and multiply; & their Blood shall be the Seed of that Church, that shall be called the Sion of the Lord’ (Scorned Quakers, 9–10). Here Tertullian’s statement ‘The blood of the Christians is the seed of a new life’ finds new ground in the testimony of a victim of Cromwell’s policies.⁴⁶ As Milton lamented the Waldensians’ fate and demanded revenge for the ‘slaughtered saints, whose bones / Lie scattered’ (‘Sonnet XV’, 1–2), so Fisher bemoans the ‘Remnant of Jacob’, left in the wilderness and ‘scattered, and shattered up and down in the dark and Gloomy day’ and ‘every where complained on, and accused by proud Haman’s Generation that ever hated them’ (Scorned Quakers, 31). The English government’s denunciation of the Piedmont massacre did not lead to greater toleration in the homeland. As well as policing what was outside of the pale, England’s national self-fashioning involved acts of internal colonization designed to suppress religious and cultural difference.⁴⁷ The main accounts of the Piedmont massacre locate the slain Waldensians in a providential narrative. Morland concludes his History of the Evangelical Churches with images of the empty fields and barns of the Waldensians, while also deploying the language that ‘Peter sometimes used of the scattered Churches in Pontus, Galatia, Cappadocia, Asia, and Bithynia’. The evangelist thereby assures the persecuted that God would reward their faithfulness in the midst of trial (Morland, History, 709). Milton in ‘Sonnet XV’ has a different type of consolation in mind, one reminiscent of, but not specific to, the experiences of Fisher and English dissenters generally. The Waldensians undergo a series of conversions from faithful Israelites scattered by the enemy (Knott, ‘Biblical Matrix’, 269) to New Testament martyrs, to ardent defenders of the Reformed Religion. Their death is avenged through the advancement of the Reformation ⁴⁵ Samuel Fisher, The Scorned Quakers True and honest Account, both why and What he should have spoken … on the 17th. day of the 7th. month 1656 (London, 1656). ⁴⁶ Apologeticus, 50; A. S. P. Woodhouse and Douglas Bush, eds., A Variorum Commentary on the Poems of John Milton, 2 vols. (New York: Columbia University Press, 1972), 2.440. Also see Lawry, ‘Milton’s Sonnet 18’, 11–14. ⁴⁷ Michael Hechter, Internal Colonialism: The Celtic Fringe in British National Development, 1536–1966 (Berkeley and Los Angeles: University of California Press, 1975), 9.

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as their remains are sown ‘O’er all the Italian fields’ (‘Sonnet XV’, l. 11) and as the blood of martyrdom seeps into Catholic soils. The concluding images in Sonnet XV combine the classical and biblical accounts of regeneration: the legend of Cadmus, the Phoenician prince, who grew an army of soldiers, which led to the founding of Thebes; Ezekiel’s prophecy of the Israelite nation springing to life from dry bones (37:1–14); the parable of the sower from the New Testament (Matthew 13:3–8; Mark 4:3–8; Luke 8:5–8). The martyred Waldensians’ ‘blood and ashes’ (‘Sonnet XV’, l. 10) cry for vengeance in the sestet (much like Abel’s blood in Genesis 4). The blood of ritually slain animals described in Mosaic Law and the ashes of sacrificed animals feature prominently in Hebrew rites as the agents and seeds of atonement and purification.⁴⁸ In the poem, the imagery of blood and ashes applies to the Waldensians as sacrificial, slaughtered sheep. The ‘bones … scattered on the Alpine mountains’ (‘Sonnet XV’, ll. 1–2) metamorphose into the ‘blood and ashes sow[n] / O’er all the Italian fields’ (ll. 10–11) where they regenerate. ‘Italian fields’ is no innocent image: its significance anticipates the reference to ‘the Hesperian Fields’ where Saturn fled, as recorded in a catalogue of the possessed and possessors of hell in Paradise Lost (PL 1.520). In ‘Sonnet XV’, the image is topical and politically charged, marking the site both of the tragedy and of a newly planted Reformation. Superimposed on the meaning of the ‘Italian fields’ is a biblically inflected typological reading of a transition from the Valley of Dry Bones (Ezekiel 31) and the valley of the shadow of death (Psalm 23) to the fields ripe for harvest (Matthew 9:37–8) and the field where the kernel of wheat is planted and then dies to produce new life ( John 12:24). ‘Neither is it therfore true’, Milton insisted in 1649, when he denounced the violence associated with the tyranny of kingship, that ‘Christianity is planted or watred with Christian blood’ (Eikon., YP 3.490). But a few years later, Tertullian’s famous adage serves as his consolation, conveyed by the sowing and reaping trope from the New Testament that he adopts (‘Sonnet XV’, ll. 10–13). Throughout his prose works Milton uses the term ‘sowing’ much more in a metaphorical than literal sense as he speaks about sowing opinions (Judgement of Martin Bucer, YP 2.432), diversity (Colasterion, YP 2.751), ‘spiritual things’ (Likeliest Means, YP 7.300), and sowing sedition or dissension (Observations, YP 3.322; History, YP 5.392). In his most powerful application of the term, he implores God to sow the seeds of vengeance, resulting in the ‘hundredfold’ regeneration of Protestantism ‘O’er all the Italian fields’. ⁴⁸ Charles E. Goldstein, ‘Hebrew Element’, 112–13. On the Waldensians and the Israelites, see Knott, ‘Biblical Matrix’, 259–63.


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‘Hundredfold’ (1. 13) refers to the growth of the fourth portion of seed cast by the sower of the Synoptic Gospels, a portion divided into three categories, yielding a hundredfold, sixtyfold and thirtyfold. The seed is the Word of God, which is received in various ways, with the hundredfold yield being the most fruitful. In accordance with St Cyprian’s interpretation of the parable of the sower, the hundredfold harvest is the result of the incarnation of the Word as blood through martyrdom.⁴⁹ This transformation is effected by God through the poet, the sower of the seeds, which, like books, are invested with a ‘potencie of life’ (Areop., YP 2.492). The meaning of sowing thus multiplies through the words of the poem itself. Blood stains the path to the Promised Land while the fertile language of ‘Sonnet XV’ serves as seed for an ascent: ‘hundredfold’ is the hundredth word in the sonnet, leaving eleven words to complete the sonnet.⁵⁰ Presented in these terms, Milton’s verse memorial of the tragedy marks a transition from death and destruction to rebirth (Lieb, Milton, 29). At the same time, by using a monosyllabic native English diction and Protestant imagery, Milton ‘Englished’ his Petrarchan sonnet, converting eroticism into passion and turning his notes to a tragic lament for all Protestants. Milton composed the Sonnet, as noted earlier, while participating in the Cromwellian government’s mission to spread the word about the Waldensian crisis. In his capacity as Latin Secretary, Milton wrote letters of protest, which were transmitted under Cromwell’s seal on 25 May 1655. His address to the United Provinces describes the letter-writing campaign to European heads of state, ranging from ‘Protestant princes and magistrates’ to the (Catholic) duke of Savoy and the king of France. A companion letter was directed to Cardinal Mazarin.⁵¹ For reasons of political expedience more than anything else, the correspondence to the French officials is gracious and cautious rather than vindictive, the English government having been involved at this time in negotiations with France to develop a military alliance against the Spaniards.⁵² In a plea for Protestant solidarity, Cromwell explains to the Duke: ⁴⁹ ‘The first fruit, that of a hundred-fold, belongs to martyrs; the second, sixty-fold, is yours.’ St Cyprian, The Dress of Virgins, Sister Angel Elizabeth Keenan (trans.), in Roy J. Deferrari, trans. and ed., Saint Cyprian: Treatises (New York: Fathers of the Church, 1958), 49; Manfred Siebald, ‘Sower, Parable of,’ in David Lyle Jeffrey, gen. ed., A Dictionary of Biblical Tradition in English Literature (Grand Rapids, Mich.: Eerdmans, 1992), 732–4. ⁵⁰ I am much indebted to John T. Shawcross for this observation about the Sonnet in our correspondence (2002). Also see Shawcross, ed., The Complete Poetry of John Milton (Garden City, NY: Anchor Books, 1963), 215 n. 6. ⁵¹ See Morland, History, 553. ⁵² An appeal directed at Cardinal Mazarin of France refers to ‘an even closer bond between this Commonwealth and the Kingdom of France’, the initial bond having been established through the negotiations for the November 1655 Treaty of Westminster; see SP, YP 5.700–1 and Charles Harding Firth, The Last Years of the Protectorate, 1656–1658, 2 vols. (London: Longmans, Green, 1909; reissued New York: Russell & Russell, 1964), 1.268–301; 2.177–222.

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we acknowledge that we are joined with them, not only by the communion of humanity, but also by the same Religion and indeed by a deeply felt fraternal bond, [and thus] we have judged it impossible to satisfy our duty toward God, or brotherly charity, or the profession of the same religion, if in this calamity and misery of our brethren we are affected solely by a sense of grief and do not also exert all our efforts to relieve, as much as in us lies, their many unexpected evils. (SP, YP 5.686)

The desired outcome of a united response to the assault on the Waldensians is cast as a triumph for Protestant diplomacy designed to yield much fruit: ‘if the Duke of Savoy will allow himself to be appeased and prevailed upon by the prayers of us all, we shall carry away a noble and plentiful harvest and reward from this labor which we have undertaken’ (SP, YP 5.693), Cromwell announces in his address to the Netherlands. Under pressure from the international European community and in reaction to the Waldensians’ recent military victories, the French government ordered an end to the persecution and restored the Waldensians’ rights at the 1655 ‘pacification’ of Pignerol (Abbott, Writings, 3.717). But within no time, the Duke resumed his assaults on Protestants, prompting Cromwell’s intervention again in 1658 (Fallon, Milton, 150–1).⁵³ In the meantime, the Cromwellian government rejected the proposal to readmit the Jews, declared war on Spain and the house of Austria, aggressively advanced the Western Design, extended the transplantation policy in Ireland, and suppressed dissenters at home. Such practices remind us of the exclusionary thinking that marked the origins of elect nationhood. While retaining a strong commitment to free-will theology, Milton too increasingly and paradoxically reserved his designation of the chosen for the fit though few (e.g. Eikon., YP 3.339–40). Though unrelated in all other regards, the Grand Duchess Christina of Lorraine, Antoine de Bourdeax-Neufville, Vincent Gookin, Lord Cork, and Samuel Fisher exposed attitudes and incidents of English intolerance; but their words fell on stony ground. At the same time, Margaret Fell identified the kinds of connections between domestic and foreign policies on toleration which Milton and other governmental officials disregarded in their response to the Irish and in their ready assimilation of the Waldensians into a Protestant providential narrative. In conclusion I have sought in this study to reread ‘Sonnet XV’ in terms of the ‘Complicacon of interest’—a phrase applied to the supporters of the Articles of Peace⁵⁴—implicit in political, religious, and tolerationist policies advanced by the Cromwellian government and championed by Milton in ⁵³ John Marshall documents the fate of the Waldensians in the Restoration era when the Duke of Savoy, Victor Amadeus II, ended toleration for the Waldensians in Piedmont, two months after the revocation of the Edict of Nantes (John Locke, 55–93, 401–2). ⁵⁴ See Maley, ‘Milton’, 155–68.


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the 1650s. By studying ‘Sonnet XV’ in the context of English cultural politics of the day, we discover how ‘the blood of the martyrs becomes the seed of colonialism’, thus capturing the imperial potential implicit in the acts and expressions of reformation/regeneration. Having admitted them into the (sheep)fold, Cromwell defended the cause of the Waldensians, and Milton memorialized their sufferings in his political and literary canon. As English colonizers proposed the planting of Protestants in Catholic Irish soils, Milton grafted the Protestant nation’s outrage about the Piedmont massacre onto an Italian poetic form and tradition. The rhetorical dexterity in fulminating against the Catholics while justifying the colonization of the Irish and the internal colonization of the sectarians and, in the same year, of the Jews marked the agendas and writings of early modern nationalists.⁵⁵ The chosen, imperial nation generates and sanctions territorial imperatives of blood and soil, while, as we have seen, sowing the seeds of intolerance abroad and at home. Indeed the measure of the emerging nation lies, then as now, in its foreign relations, tolerationist policies, and management of internal difference. ⁵⁵ On Milton and Jewish readmission, see Don M. Wolfe, ‘Limits of Miltonic Toleration’, Journal of English and Germanic Philology 60 (1961), 834–46, and Elizabeth Sauer, ‘Religious Toleration and Imperial Intolerance’, in Rajan and Sauer, eds., Milton and the Imperial Vision, 214–30.

12 Toleration in Milton’s Epics: A Chimera? Sharon Achinstein Where is toleration in Milton’s great epic poetry? There are in Paradise Lost and Paradise Regained, to be sure, as in Samson Agonistes, denunciations of persecution and challenges to repressive ecclesiological regimes (PL 12.508–40; PR 2.44–6); defences of freedom of conscience (PL 3.195); and, especially, applause for the lonely faithful who suffer ‘for truth’s sake’ (PL 12.569; PR 3.60–4; 3.98). Although Samson Agonistes can be seen as engaging with the controversies over dissent in the context of Restoration politics, it is notably difficult to find an imaginative representation of toleration in this, or in his other two great poems.¹ Instead, in Samson Agonistes, the plight of Milton’s Israelite hero makes a case against religious oppression, against oppression of the godly, at least.² Samson wails the wail of the tortured, at the limit of his tolerance: ‘Much more affliction than already felt / They cannot well impose, ¹ Protests against persecution have solidified the post-1660 dating of Paradise Lost, as links between Milton and dissenting politics in the Restoration have been established by David Loewenstein, Representing Revolution in Milton and His Contemporaries (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2001); Neil Keeble, The Literary Culture of Nonconformity in Later SeventeenthCentury England (Leicester: University of Leicester Press, 1997); Laura Knoppers, Historicizing Milton: Spectacle, Power, and Poetry in Restoration England (Athens, Ga.: University of Georgia Press, 1994); and my own Literature and Dissent in Milton’s England (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2003). On Samson Agonistes and dissent, see Christopher Warren, ‘When SelfPreservation Bids: Approaching Milton, Hobbes, and Dissent’, English Literary Renaissance 37.1 (2007); Sharon Achinstein, ‘Samson Agonistes and the Drama of Dissent’, Milton Studies 33 (1996), 133–58; Blair Worden, ‘Milton, Samson Agonistes, and the Restoration’, in Gerald MacLean, ed., Culture and Society in the Stuart Restoration: Literature, Drama, History (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1995), 111–36. On the significance of liberty of conscience arguments, see Richard Greaves, ‘ ‘‘Let Truth Be Free’’: John Bunyan and the Restoration Crisis of 1667–1673’, Albion 28 (Winter 1996), 587–605; Gary De Krey, ‘Rethinking the Restoration: Dissenting Cases for Conscience, 1667–1672’, Historical Journal 38 (1995), 57–60. We know less about Milton’s career as a licenser for the press under Cromwell than we would like; see Martin Dzelzainis in this volume, ch. 9. ² This to put aside for a moment the question of holy war and terrorism; see Feisel G. Mohamed, ‘Confronting Religious Violence: Milton’s Samson Agonistes’, PMLA 120.2 (2005), 327–40.

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nor I sustain’ (SA 1257–58). Oppression, rather than breaking one’s will or spirit, becomes another kind of trial for the faithful, perhaps even a sign of their election. When Samson declares, ‘My trust is in the living God’ (SA 1140), he gives the response of the faithful to their tormenters, a testimony to godly obedience. The Son in Paradise Regained, beset by Satan’s assaults, endures ‘terrors dire’ (4.31) with a calm placidity of faith: ‘Who best / Can suffer, best can do’ (PR 3.194–5).³ Looking at Milton’s representations of toleration in his great epics helps us to clarify what ‘toleration’ might mean for Milton. This essay addresses how poetry offered Milton a medium for expressing visions of tolerance. Indeed, stacking up Milton’s representations of tolerance in the great poems, we can see more clearly how his vision differs sharply from a post-enlightenment, secularist understanding. Some motivating questions are asked: Should we be satisfied that Milton’s denunciations of persecution and his diatribes against priestcraft constitute a commitment to toleration? What about the wider concepts of freedom of thought or tolerance of a variety of religions? Is the ideal of freedom to argue, as powerfully asserted in Areopagitica, a principle that is given realization in his great epics? Indeed, this essay shall explore how a look to his great epics reveals Milton as a critic of both secularism and tolerance in their many guises. Milton here emerges as a Christian fideist who is attempting to brace against the modernity spoken by scepticism and rationalism. Against the Satanic view that ‘nothing is true; everything is permitted’,⁴ Milton writes to reinstate an intolerance of permissiveness. And yet, his methods—a subtle literary engagement, an ‘Intangling’, as Stanley Fish has called them—offer a procedural principle of tolerance.⁵ Satan’s perspective is given a full airing, for example: but this process of airing views is nonetheless temporally bound to earthly contingency, a temporary condition. Indeed, as we shall see, in the many instances of free speech we overhear in the great poems, in the many battles between truth and falsehood, the aim of freedom of debate is freedom to demolish one’s enemy. This is rather different from a liberal defense of freedom of debate, or tolerance, as a goal in itself. In his epics, despite protests against persecuting priests and magistrates, there is, in fact, little imagining of what a tolerant society might look like. While Paradise Lost and Paradise Regained are full of ethico-political controversies, debates, and heterodox views, there are absent any positive ³ On Milton and martyrdom, see John R. Knott, Discourses of Martyrdom in English Literature, 1563–1694 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1993), 151–78. ⁴ Writes Nietzsche, quoting the motto of the Assassins, in On the Genealogy of Morals, 3.24, tr. Walter Kauffman (New York: Random House, 1989), 150. ⁵ Stanley Fish, Surprised by Sin: The Reader in Paradise Lost (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1971), 1.

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representations of toleration of different faiths.⁶ Indeed, there are many visible intolerances of Roman Catholic, pagan, and Jewish forms of worship (‘relics, beads, / Indulgences, dispenses, pardons, bulls, / The sport of winds’ (PL 3.491–3); ‘servile fear’ (PL 11.305).⁷ Absent, despite Milton’s covert assertion of heterodox theology, is advocacy of toleration such as had been found in literary works by More or Erasmus. Variety of opinion, while a rallying cry in his prose works, seems almost absent in the idealized portrait of the heavenly community in Paradise Lost, where angels are bound in uniform obedience to God. For God, unity is a sign of true obedience: Under his great vicegerent reign abide United as one individual Soul For ever happy: him who disobeys Me disobeys, breaks union, and that day Cast out from God and blessed vision, falls. (PL 5.609–13)

In the heavenly community, only the Son may legitimately challenge God (PL 1.150–66; 11.40–1); for the angelic society as a community at large, diversity ⁶ On Milton’s heterodoxy, see Martin Dzelzainis in this volume, ch. 9; and corroboration with his prose, where Milton goes out of his way to defend Arians and Socinians in Of True Religion (YP 8. 425–6); see Barbara Lewalski, ‘ ‘‘To try, and teach the erring Soul’’ ’, in Graham Parry and Joad Raymond, eds., Milton and the Terms of Liberty (Cambridge: D. S. Brewer, 2002), 175–90, 187; John Rogers, ‘Milton and the Heretical Priesthood of Christ’, in David Loewenstein and John Marshall, eds., Heresy, Literature, and Politics in Early Modern English Culture (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2006), 203–20; Steven Fallon, Milton among the Philosophers: Poetry and Materialism in Seventeenth-Century England (Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 1991); John P. Rumrich, ‘Milton’s Arianism: Why it Matters’, in Stephen B. Dobranski and John P. Rumrich, eds., Milton and Heresy (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1998), 75–92; Michael Lieb, ‘Milton and the Socinian Heresy’, in Mark R. Kelley, Michael Lieb and John T. Shawcross, eds., Milton and the Grounds of Contention (Pittsburgh: Duquesne University Press, 2003), 234–83; and David Loewenstein, ‘Milton among the Religious Radicals and Sects: Polemical Engagements and Silences’, Milton Studies 40 (2001); on Milton’s engagement with, and resistance to, heterodox ideas of the fall, see William Poole, Milton and the Idea of the Fall (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2005). ⁷ See John N. King, Milton and Religious Controversy: Satire and Polemic in Paradise Lost (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2000), 89–108; and for an excellent analysis that contrasts Milton’s attacks on pagan idolatry with Selden’s treatment, see Jason Rosenblatt, John Selden: Renaissance England’s Chief Rabbi (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2006), 74–92. On Milton and the Jews, see Douglas Brooks, ed., Milton and the Jews (Cambridge, forthcoming:); and A. Guibbory, ‘ ‘‘The Jewish Question’’ and ‘‘The Woman Question’’ in Samson Agonistes: Gender, Religion, and Nation’, in Catherine Gimelli Martin, ed., Milton and Gender (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2004), 184–203. On Eastern religions, see Balachandra Rajan, ‘Banyan Trees and Fig Leaves: Some Thoughts on Milton’s India’, in Elizabeth Sauer, ed., Milton and the Climates of Reading: Essays by Balachandra Rajan ( Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 2006), 72–82. Robert Markley, ‘ ‘‘The destin’d Walls/Of Cambalu’’: Milton, China, and the Ambiguities of the East’, in Balachandra Rajan, and Elizabeth Sauer, eds., Milton and the Imperial Vision (Pittsburgh: Duquesne University Press, 1999), 191–213.


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can only be seen as rebellion. In Paradise Lost, Milton offers different territorial spaces for confirmed differences: heaven and hell are geopolitical locations that provide allegorization of ineradicable difference.⁸ In his great epics, it seems, visions of tolerant societies elude Milton. But if we are tempted to explain this as a function of his avowed avoidance of the utopian impulse (‘to sequester into Atlantick or Utopian provinces’), then a look to his historical imagination in the poetry shows a refusal to imagine positive diversity there as well. The look to the past, so frequently deployed in early modern tolerationist thinkers in England, does not yield in Milton a better, more tolerant society. While each of the two epics retells the history of the True Church, there is little of the admiration of, or preference for, the ancient Israelite modes by way of historical or comparative analysis—often used to produce tolerationist precedent and example of interconfessional debate—on the order of Selden, who had in De Jure Naturali et Gentium juxta Disciplinam Ebraeorum (1640) established a relation between natural and Noachide laws, and whose work had influenced other radical independents’ tolerationist thinking.⁹ Absent in his epics, too, was a nationalist view of the ancient British past of a godly society of the Druids, in Areopagitica seen as the source of all pagan wisdom (YP 2.551–2). The Druids offered a counter-history to the orthodox Anglican bid for the earliest and truest English religious establishment, a counter-history favoured by John Selden, and the Independent Peter Sterry, Cromwell’s chaplain, who wrote a poem imagining the harmonious, Christian ideal, a model of nonconformist community. Sterry described the Druids’ ‘morall Friendship, founded upon Virtue, and regulated by it, mutually uniting the Lights, and Loves of Soules, in their Ascent to the Supreame Good’.¹⁰ While Areopagitica praised the combat of ideas, singing admiringly of the noisy and diverse city of London, in his epics, however, positive representation of human difference and diversity is difficult to find. ⁸ On Paradise Lost’s geopolitical scheme ratifying difference, see Julie Stone Peters, ‘A ‘‘Bridge over Chaos’’: De Jure Belli, Paradise Lost, Terror, Sovereignty, Globalism, and the Modern Law of Nations’, Comparative Literature 57.4 (2005), 273–93, 277. As Neil Forsyth argues, this is a difference Satan tries to ignore, in The Satanic Epic (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2003), 157. ⁹ See Rosenblatt, Selden, 161 (Henry Stubbe’s application of Selden’s work to tolerationist questions is discussed, 177, 183–7). This leaves aside Milton’s preference for Israelite over Christian interpretations on divorce in his Divorce Tracts. ¹⁰ Peter Sterry, ‘Of Divine Friendship’, in Nabil I. Matar, ed., Peter Sterry: Selected Writings (New York: Peter Lang, 1994), 178; and for Selden’s use of the Druids to formulate a natural and native religion in Analecton Anglo-Britannicon (1615) and in his commentary on Poly-Olbion, see Reid Barbour, John Selden: Measures of the Holy Commonwealth in Seventeenth-Century England ( Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 2003), 189–94. Regarding the Druids, one must compare Milton’s shift from a positive vision of the Druids in Mansus, 42; Epitaphum Damonis, 165–71; Areopagitica (YP 2.551–2) and the Divorce Tracts (YP 2.231); but note his worries

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There had been, of course, literary representations of tolerance in prior works of literature—think of More’s Utopia, for example, or Bodin’s Colloquium of the Seven, of which Milton allegedly had a surreptitious manuscript by 1662—or in any of a number of works comparing different faiths.¹¹ But while Milton’s major epics are vivid in their denunciations of those who would force consciences, they are not good places to look for explicit representations of toleration of varying faiths. They do not imagine, as do Henry Burton and Roger Williams, comparisons with Turkish toleration, for instance, or fictionalize members of different faiths conversing openly.¹² Unlike Grotius, Milton does not attempt to refute or convert Jews and Muslims directly, nor did he offer a Grotian, irenicist model of tolerance.¹³ The prudential¹⁴ or sceptical¹⁵ arguments for multi-faith tolerance offered by Milton’s contemporaries in Lycidas, 53–4; and outright hostility to the ‘factious and ambitious’ Druid priests, ‘uttering direfull praiers’ in The History of Britain (YP 5.75–6); the shift in his epic hero from Arthur to Adam may indicate a loss of favour of this social and religious vision. On the political vision of Druids, see Nicholas Von Maltzahn, Milton’s History of Britain: Republican Historiography in the English Revolution (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1991), 113–15. Extending this attitude, Toland satirizes and attacks Druids in his anti-priestcraft frenzy, History of the Druids (1726). ¹¹ Louis I. Bredvold, ‘Milton and Bodin’s Heptaplomeres’, Studies in Philology 21 (1924), 399–402. ¹² On thinking with Turks about toleration, see Nabil Matar, ‘The Toleration of Muslims in Renaissance England’, in J. C. Laursen, ed., Religious Toleration: ‘the variety of rites’ from Cyrus to Defoe (Basingstoke: Macmillan, 1999), 129; on interconfessional dialogue, see Nabil Matar, ‘Anglo-Muslim Disputation in the Early Modern Period’, in 1453–1699: Cultural Encounters Between East and West, ed. Matthew Birchwood and Matthew Dimmock (Amersham: Cambridge Scholars Press, 2005), 29–43. The Royalist Alexander Ross’s 1649 translation of the Qur’an, The Alcoran of Mahomet, was published in England in 1649, but it ran into trouble with the Council of State when printed and the printer was apprehended and copies of it seized; Ross himself was examined; see Nabil Matar, Islam in Britain, 1558–1685 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1998), 76–81. ¹³ Intellectually comparable to Milton is the defender of liberty of conscience Charles Wolseley, who in his work, The Reasonableness of Scripture-Belief (1672), specifically attacks atheists, Epicureans, and Muslims (167–73). Addressing Islam was also Hugo Grotius, True Religion Explained (1632); and in his earlier 1611 ms., Meletius, the Arminian Grotius, in the height of the Arminian controversy, defended tolerance on grounds of civil peace. See Hugo Grotius, Meletius Sive De Iis Quae inter Christianos conveniunt epistola, critical edn. and tr. Guillaume H. M. Posthumus Meyjes (Leiden: Brill, 1988). ¹⁴ Commercial arguments for toleration were included in those by Henry Robinson, Briefe Considerations concerning the Advancement of Trade and Navigation (1641); Quaker William Penn, The Great Case of Liberty of Conscience (1670), or his Englands Great Interest (1675), and William Temple, Observations (1673), in praising the Dutch, e.g; or in the developing discourse of ‘interest’ that wished to accommodate diverse ‘interests’ in a community, as in London Whig Slingsby Bethel’s Present Interest of England (1671). See John Marshall, John Locke, Toleration, and Early Enlightenment Culture (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2006), 152–3; and Jonathan Scott, Algernon Sidney and the Restoration Crisis (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1991), 133. ¹⁵ See Richard H. Popkin, ‘Scepticism and Irreligion in the Seventeenth and Eighteenth Centuries’, in Arjo Vanderjagt and Richard Popkin, eds., Skepticism and Irreligion in the


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seem absent. Infallibility arguments, however, are the most powerful in his attack on persecution, but not for a positive vision of multi-faith tolerance. Michael’s question, ‘for on earth / Who against faith and conscience can be heard / Infallible?’ (PL 12.528–30) is Milton’s strongest argument against persecution as a presumption of an infallible knowledge of God. In his assault on ‘outward Rites and specious forms’ (PL 12.534), Milton did echo contemporary attacks on the imposture of organized religions, but his attacks on imposture do not so much expose all religions as false as expose a false religion as against the true one, ‘Devils to adore for Deities’ (PL 1.73; cf 3.692; 4.122; 5.243; PR 1.430–2).¹⁶ Satan himself voices something like the imposture theory used by sceptics in the later seventeenth century to denounce ecclesiastical power, in asking Eve about the interdiction on the Tree of Knowledge: Why then was this forbid? Why but to awe, Why but to keep ye low and ignorant, His worshippers. (PL 9.703–5)

Satan’s assessment of false religion in a very real sense mirrors Milton’s: but his readers should know it’s a mistake to accuse God in this way. The only means of adjudicating these impostor claims is through faith. Rather than a various, combative pluralism, as imagined by his contemporary tolerationists, there is deep in Milton’s great poetry, on the contrary, a desire for a ‘unity of Spirit’, a ‘bond of peace’ (YP 2.565), as he writes in Areopagitica, citing Ephesians 4:3. When Adam praises his wife to Raphael, he emphasizes the unity of the couple: From all her words and actions mixed with love And sweet compliance, which declare unfeigned Union of mind, or in us both one soul; Harmony to behold in wedded pair More grateful than harmonious sound to the ear Yet these subject not[.] (8.602–7)

For Milton, musical harmony becomes the model for that unity of spirit, the married pair a paradigm for a community of the faithful. So, too, had Seventeenth and Eighteenth Centuries (Leiden: Brill, 1993), 1–11; Alan Levine, ed., Early Modern Skepticism and the Origins of Toleration (Oxford: Lexington Books, 1999). ¹⁶ On contemporary imposture literature, toleration and clandestine heterodoxy, see Richard H. Popkin, The Third Force in Seventeenth-Century Thought (Leiden: Brill, 1992); Mark Goldie, ‘Priestcraft and the Birth of Whiggism’, in N. Phillipson and Q. Skinner, eds., Political Discourse in Early Modern Britain (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1993).

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imagined Peter Sterry, but the Independent minister had ever insisted on the variety within that unity; his manuscript poem, probably circulating in the late 1660s and -70s, evokes the ancient Druids’ loving pair Amasis and Adamas as a harmony of a ‘Richly Varied Unity’, and ‘Rich Variety’s full Quire’.¹⁷ Milton’s Adam, in recounting this marital harmony to Raphael, also comes to the question of ‘variety,’ but his words make it clear that diversity is not an end in itself; one must make choices and exert preferences out of that variety: I to thee disclose What inward thence I feel, not therefore foiled, Who meet with various objects, from the sense Variously representing; yet still free Approve the best, and follow what I approve. (PL 8.607–11)

Out of multiplicity, then, choice: the experience of many perspectives is to offer occasions for pursuing the good, de-liberation: tolerance that ends with decision. Musical harmony as a principle of concord is given full dramatic rendering in Paradise Lost in the harmonious heavenly choir: ‘No voice exempt, no voice but well could join / Melodious part, such concord is in heaven’ (PL 3.370–1).¹⁸ Within this angelic community, vocal unity is represented through negative phrasing and the repetition of ‘no voice … no voice … ,’ a stylistic move iterating one of Milton’s most compelling tics, the negative prefixation, possibly reflecting the Ramist logic that created oppositions and bifurcations of thought. But here ‘no voice … no voice … ’ emphasizes the strong second beat of the iambic individual angels’ participation, a regularity in rhythm that ensures a harmony in a collection of every single voice: never simply an ‘all’. When we look more closely, however, there seems an evasiveness to describe the conditions of what, initially, appears an inclusive, freely voicing, community. While the absence of ‘exemption’ (‘No voice exempt’) suggests that nobody is cast off or excluded, on the other hand, we might say that nobody is released from the obligation of joining in. The modifying clause, however, makes it clear that it is in the first sense that we are to take the line. But the sense of being controlled, of obligation, or even of being bound by law, is still present. With the second clause, ‘no voice but well could join’, while ¹⁷ Matar’s dating (Peter Sterry, 11); Peter Sterry, ‘Of Divine Friendship,’ in Matar, ed., Peter Sterry, 193, 194. ¹⁸ On Milton’s analogy between the angels’ musical harmony and social union, see Diane Kelsey McColley, Poetry and Music in Seventeenth-Century England (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1997), 205–7.


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clarifying the voluntarist basis of the inclusion, however calls that voluntarism into question in another way. ‘But well could join’ means that no voice could do anything other than join, the voluntarism remaining an implicit, rather than an explicit aspect; the line might mean, ‘But well could [want to] join’, but we readers contribute the voluntarism here. The strained syntax, the doubling that so often implies Milton’s struggling for expression, establishes with greater urgency the reader’s role in making the meaning solid, but we are left, after all that work, wondering just how inclusive is this choir: could some not join—that is, were some unable to join? In what might that ‘inability’ consist? Or is it that some could not join well, that is, not make the harmony required by the demands of music? Questions about capability and aptness, we might say ‘fitness’ and ‘fewness’, cluster around this passage that offers up a model of community of harmonizing voices.¹⁹ Adam and Eve’s simple worship suggests another vision of uniform community. Before taking their rest, with an originary perfection and unity, the first humans offer their humble adoration to their maker, ‘unanimous’ (PL 4.736, 720–78). Milton takes care, as would be in keeping with his anticeremonialist intention, and his attacks on the Book of Common Prayer, not to be prescriptive in his realization of religious rites.²⁰ When, upon awakening, Adam and Eve pray ‘in various style’ (PL 5.146), they testify to their own personal relationships with God. To emphasize their individuality, and yet to permit its remaining private, Milton draws attention to the diversity of forms: Lowly they bowed adoring, and began Their orisons, each morning duly paid In various style, for neither various style Nor holy rapture wanted they to praise Their maker, in fit strains pronounced or sung Unmeditated, such prompt eloquence Flowed from their lips, in prose or numerous verse, More tunable than needed lute or harp To add more sweetness[.] (PL 5.144–52) ¹⁹ This ambiguity about the speech situation of those who ‘well could join’ echoes the translation Milton gives to the title-page Euripidean quotation for Areopagitica. There, part of the community, it is suggested, may not speak freely, but, whether this is by choice or not, is left unclear. Milton there saw it as a sign of true liberty when those, ‘Having to advise the public may speak free, / Who neither can nor will, may hold his peace.’ There are, then, some silent ones: ‘Who neither can nor will,’: perhaps ‘exempt’, as in the sense in the angelic choir in Paradise Lost, or perhaps unable to join ‘well’. ²⁰ On Milton’s anti-ceremonialism here, see Achsah Guibbory, Ceremony and Community from Herbert to Milton (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1998), 190–2, 205, 217.

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We are invited to consider the humble morning worship as an Ars Poetica defense of a true mode of worship, and of poetry—each born of rapture and adhering to a positive paradigm, ‘variety’, without compulsion. Yet clearly there are rules here: the orderliness of blank verse; the rhetorical posture of spontaneity; thus the protest against particular kinds of rules does not veer into the wholly subjective. Various style does not prescribe, but allows for an openness, one that may best reflect the copious bounty of the created world they praise. Concord in Paradise Lost thus is not an ideal for its own sake; it reflects the diverse commitments, obligations and choices made by individuals. And concord can be abused: representing Satan’s Parliament of Hell, Milton shows that debate can be the occasion for manipulation of the weak, a false harmony, as Satan ‘prevented all reply’ (PL 2.468). Unlike Lipsius and other reformers, Bodin for instance, Milton does not place as the highest priority concord or the civil peace—principles which bolstered their advocacy of a uniform national church. The humanist reformers’ argument for persecution was that it could better hold uniformity and concord: that it was a necessary brace against disorder and chaos. Schism would inevitably lead to sedition, it was thought, and for the magistrate to fail to prosecute heresy and schism was thought to invite God’s judgment on the whole community.²¹ On the contrary, Milton scorned some kinds of pusillanimous unanimity as he defends freedom and even multiplicity of opinion; in Areopagitica, his vision of ‘an obedient uniformity’ is to be bought at the cost of a ‘dull ease and the cessation of our knowledge’ (YP 2.545); the devils in Paradise Regained ‘unanimous’ declare loyalty to Satan their ‘dictator’ (PL 1.111, 113); Adam finds in his solitude a ‘unity defective’ (PL 8.425). A truer ‘harmony’ will result when truth is assiduously pursued, and not in ‘the forc’t and outward union of cold, and neutrall, and inwardly divided minds’ (YP 2.551). If Milton’s epics are not good places to look for images of tolerant societies, even more striking, given Milton’s advocacy of a wide intellectual freedom in Areopagitica, is the absence in these great poems of a full welcome to unrestricted intellectual or religious positions. Milton’s portrayal of freedom of thought is epitomized in his 1634 Masque Presented at Ludlow Castle, with the Lady’s bold rebuke to her oppressor: ‘Thou canst not touch the freedom of my mind’ (Masque, 663). But in his later poetry, leaving aside the question of abstract philosophical and scientific knowledge, vain presumption ²¹ Marshall, John Locke, Toleration, 230–3. On Bodin, see Joseph Lecler, Toleration and the Reformation, tr. T. L. Westow (London: Longman, 1960), 179–85; Jean Bodin, Colloquium of the Seven about Secrets of the Sublime (Colloquium Heptaplomeres de Rerum Sublimium Arcanis Abditis), tr. Marion L. D. Kuntz (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1975).


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and idle theorizing (PL 2.557–9; 8.172–8; PR 4.286–330), the toleration of full diversity of opinion is shown to have its limits. Indeed, strife among the ancient Israelite priests over matters of worship is condemned as leading to the loss of the Jewish Temple (PL 12.353–6). In Paradise Lost, though the fallen devils’ unanimity is based upon a falsehood, Milton has some admiration for it, as the poet leaps out of the poem to castigate human susceptibility to disagreement: O shame to men! Devil with Devil damned Firm concord holds, men only disagree Of creatures rational, though under hope Of heavenly grace: and God proclaiming peace, Yet live in hatred, enmity, and strife Among themselves, and levy cruel wars, Wasting the Earth, each other to destroy: As if (which might induce us to accord) Man had not hellish foes now besides, That day and night for his destruction wait. (PL 2.496–505)

While in the toleration theory of John Locke, liberty of conscience provided a basis for a defense of wide toleration of different forms of worship, this was however not the same thing as extending tolerance to all possible philosophical positions.²² In Paradise Lost, the loyal angel Abdiel’s fierce rebuke to Satan shows that atheism, materialism, scepticism and the like, are just out of the question (PL 6.143–4). Keeping in mind the distinction between freedom of worship and philosophical freedom, we will ask, how far does Milton extend his ideal of liberty of conscience? Liberty of conscience forms the basis of a Miltonic commitment to open debate and tolerance, offering strikingly religious colours. Milton’s chief philosophical-religious concerns in Paradise Lost may be seen in the larger intellectual context of the Restoration—to write against atheism, Epicureanism, scepticism and Hobbism.²³ Like some who were seeking in the Bible a true story to combat ²² See Jonathan I. Israel, ‘Spinoza, Locke and the Enlightenment Battle for Toleration’, in Ole Peter Grell and Roy Porter, eds., Toleration in Enlightenment Europe (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2000), 102–13. ²³ For the importance of distinguishing tolerance from scepticism, see Richard Tuck, ‘Scepticism and Toleration in the Seventeenth Century’, in Susan Mendus, ed., Justifying Toleration (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1988), 21–35; and, for the theological contexts of this period, see Nicholas Tyacke, ‘Arminianism and the Restoration Church’, in Tyacke, Aspects of English Protestantism, 1530–1700 (Manchester: Manchester University Press, 2001), 320–39; John Spurr, ‘ ‘‘The Strongest Bond of Conscience’’: Oaths and the Limits of Tolerance in Early Modern England’, in Harald Braun and Eward Vallance, eds., Contexts of Conscience in Early

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materialist natural histories—for instance, the tolerationist Matthew Hale, who turned to the story of creation to prove through reasoned inquiry the existence of God—Milton drew his readers’ attention to human creatureliness in his battle against irreligion.²⁴ As Adam recounts his first moments to Raphael in Paradise Lost, he acknowledges the self-evidence of a Creator behind the creation (PL 8.278).²⁵ Milton’s monism ought not, then, to be equated with the more radical positions of materialism or Spinozism; indeed, the ontology and ethics of Paradise Lost do depend upon a God above nature, as represented in the special qualities humans share with, but that are different from, animals.²⁶ Milton’s representation of the natural world may reflect a heterodox vitalism and monism, and his echoing Lucretius may engage with a dangerous Epicureanism, but he does not write God out of the picture in approaching Nature.²⁷ As John Leonard has put it, Milton’s Paradise Lost is, among other things, ‘an attempt to come to terms with the new ‘‘darkness visible’’ ’.²⁸ Against Epicurean arguments, Milton offers a divine ‘first cause’, though he does not produce a theory of providential intervention and action; nor is spirit wholly distinct from matter. Modern Europe (London: Palgrave, 2004), 151–65; Martin Sutherland, Peace, Toleration and Decay: The Ecclesiology of Later Stuart Dissent (Carlisle: Paternoster Press, 2003); B. R. White, ‘The Twilight of Puritanism in the Years Before and After 1688’, in O. Grell, J. I. Israel and N. Tyacke, eds., From Persecution to Toleration: The Glorious Revolution and Religion in England (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1991), 307–30; R. K. Webb, ‘The Emergence of Rational Dissent’, in K. Haakonssen, ed., Enlightenment and Religion: Rational Dissent in Eighteenth-Century Britain (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1996), 12–41. ²⁴ Matthew Hale, The Primitive Origination of Mankind, Considered and Examined According to the Light of Nature (1677). ²⁵ Karen Edwards, Milton and the Natural World: Science and Poetry in Paradise Lost (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1999), 64–81, subtly shows how Milton’s poem evokes self-evidence but also experimentalism in its arguments from the natural world. ²⁶ See Fallon, Milton among the Philosophers; and Rachel J. Trubowitz on Milton’s alleged ‘monism’ in ‘Body Politics in Paradise Lost’, PMLA 21.2 (2006), 388–404; Catharine Gimelli Martin, The Ruins of Allegory: Paradise Lost and the Metamorphoses of Epic Convention (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 1998), brilliantly explores the consequences of these incommensurabilities for signifying practices, 339–40. ²⁷ Norman Burns, in assessing Milton’s monism, cautions us that we should not equate mortalism with secularism, Christian Mortalism from Tyndale to Milton (Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 1972); see also, B. J. Gibbons, ‘Richard Overton and the Secularism of the Interregnum Radicals’, The Seventeenth Century 10.1 (1995), 63–75. On Milton and Lucretius, see Philip Hardie, ‘The Presence of Lucretius in Paradise Lost’, Milton Quarterly 29 (1995), 13–24; and David Quint masterfully shows the Christian Milton wrestling with Lucretius’ materialist and random cosmology in ‘Fear of Falling: Icarus, Phaethon, and Lucretius in Paradise Lost’, Renaissance Quarterly 57 (2004), 847–81. ²⁸ John Leonard, ‘Milton, Lucretius, and ‘‘the Void Profound of Unessential Night’’ ’, in Kristin A. Pruitt and Charles W. Durham, eds., Living Texts: Interpreting Milton (London: Associated University Presses, 2000), 198–217, 212.


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Indeed, the very experience of material beings was an essential component of their freedom, conceived of as ‘liberty of conscience’, as had argued the anti-Calvinist ‘libertines’, those who rejected ecclesiastical discipline in the Netherlands a generation earlier on those grounds.²⁹ Milton is silent on the Cartesian distinction between mind and body and seems relatively uninterested in the avant-garde philosophical discussions taking place across international intellectual circles involving the legacies of Descartes and Spinoza. The resistance of Milton and others on the grounds of conscience was not because conscience was an inalienable right; its ownership was not to the humans in whose breasts conscience operated, but to God. While it was a ‘property’ of being human—one that significantly distinguished humans from beasts—however it did not belong to the human. The distinction between human and beast is significant, however (PL 4.754; 8.383–92, 594): the ‘conscience’ that grounds that distinction may indeed prevent a true tolerance from becoming operant in Milton.³⁰ Conscience for Milton was something different to that for Locke, who aligned conscience with human judgment, as in the Essay Concerning Human Understanding, where conscience ‘is nothing else but our own Opinion or Judgment of the Moral rectitude or pravity of our own actions’.³¹ Locke’s was a human faculty, humanly administered. Not so for Milton. Conscience was not simply a matter of individual decision, but part of a relationship with God: it was not simply an action but an embrace of obedience: his ‘umpire conscience’ (PL 3.195) is what God places in each breast. Whilst his God is above nature, Milton is, however, reluctant to emphasize the spiritual and immediate, providential interference of God. Although for Luther, conscience became the central feature of human experience, the experience of civil disorder in early modern Europe tempered attachments to absolute liberty of conscience. Luther’s support of the use of force against the 1525 Peasants’ Revolt, for example, or Calvin’s defense of Servetus’ execution allowed for a powerful magistrate to punish heresy. The Dutch reformers rejected the use of violence and force against heresy, preferring public debates and freedom of speech. It was in the Dutch experience, argues Martin Van Gelderen, that religion began to be seen as a private matter, with the state assuring peace though not unity. Some Dutch reformers, thus, ²⁹ Benjamin Kaplan, Calvinists and Libertines: Confession and Community in Utrecht, 1578–1620 (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1995). On Milton’s body-thinking, in addition to Turner, above, see the extraordinarily subtle essay by Michael Schoenfeldt, ‘ ‘‘Commotion Strange’’: Passion in Paradise Lost’, in Gail Kern Paster, Katherine Rowe and Mary Floyd-Wilson, eds., Reading the Early Modern Passions (Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 2004), 43–67. ³⁰ Compare, then, Milton with Richard Overton, Mans Mortalitie, as described brilliantly by Erica Fudge, Perceiving Animals: Human and Beasts in Early Modern English Culture (Basingstoke: Macmillan, 2000), 152–66. ³¹ John Locke, Essay, ed. H. Nidditch (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1975), 70.

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moved past Luther and Calvin to expand the notion of liberty of conscience to a principle of the autonomy of self-governance.³² Tolerance is good for the mean time: and we might say that Milton’s contribution to tolerance is to defend the openness during the mean time. Freedom of thought in Milton is, then, quite simply, not a secular principle. Although any thought may be entertained in Paradise Lost, ‘Evil into the mind of God or man / May come and go, so unapproved, and leave / No spot or blame behind’ (PL 5.117–19), the freedom of thought is permitted so that the thinker can correctly arrive at the mind of God and to obey (PL 3.103–4; 5.520–40). With his occasions for debate in both Paradise Lost and Paradise Regained all too often breaking into the absolutes of truth and falsehood, it is clear that argument and discussion only take you so far. In his exclusion of Roman Catholic printed works from his general freedom advocated for the press in Areopagitica and in Of True Religion, Milton applies the Aristotelian principle: ‘against them who deny Principles, we are not to dispute’ (YP 8.432). In Paradise Lost, this is echoed in Abdiel’s ending his conversation with Satan: ‘his back he turned’ (PL 5.906). There’s just no point in arguing further: end of conversation. Milton’s own methods nonetheless positively invite the confrontation with error, in his romance model of acquiring virtue, that Areopagitical principle of knowing truth by its opposite. As Milton put it in Areopagitica, ‘the knowledge of good is so involv’d and interwoven with the knowledge of evill, and in so many cunning resemblance hardly to be discern’d … what wisdome can there be to choose, what continence to forbeare without the knowledge of evill?’ (YP 2.514). The principle of good versus evil, of ‘trial by what is contrary’ (2.515), and the metaphors of warfare may only lead to a hardening of opinion—into fixed binaries—and this conversational logjam becomes evident in the great confrontation in Paradise Lost where Abdiel outs Satan’s blasphemy, and in Paradise Regained, where the emergence of the Son’s divinity is at the exposure of Satan’s utter fraudulence. Humanist disputation, but not for the sake of argument: for the sake of an active Faith. Yet the strategy of knowing truth by falsehood requires a phenomenological tolerance of such falsehood. Milton’s literary habit of surprise, operating at both the verbal and the conceptual levels, unmasks the (merely) conventional uses of language, revealing how the everyday usage is too lax. In his joy in exchanging the figural and literal uses of language, and in his use of tense and mode, Milton reveals that the first sense has no real substance and that there is ³² Martin, Van Gelderen, ‘Liberty, Civic Rights, and Duties in Sixteenth-Century Europe and the Rise of the Dutch Republic’, in Janet Coleman, ed., The Individual in Political Theory and Practice (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1996), 99–122, 117; and see Cable’s essay below.


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a second, deeper, truth to be made out of it, when care is taken to understand. In the pursuit of truth, therefore, the proliferation of opinion, even error, does not worry Milton. As Fish puts it, ‘the burden of his song is interpretative freedom, the freedom of a will whose choices are unconstrained by a deity who will nevertheless pass judgment on them. Interpretative freedom is therefore at once a glory … and a burden.’³³ In his great poetry, Milton achieves the effect of freedom of debate by his many representations of dialogue, and the final section of this essay explores the speech situations in which variety of opinion is welcomed. Jesus prefers words over force, verbal exchange considered both more ‘humane’ and more ‘heavenly’ than persecution (PR 1.221): By winning words to conquer willing hearts, And make persuasion do the work of fear; At least to try, and teach the erring soul Not wilfully misdoing, but unaware Misled; (PR 1.222–6)

However, the Son does indeed reserve the right to use force, ‘the stubborn only to subdue’, he adds (PR 1.226). Milton’s epics present dialogues not solely between enemy combatants however (as in the romance model), but in those situations where genuine communication and mutuality seem possible (Adam and Raphael, Adam and Eve, for instance, and even Milton and his reader). Freedom to discuss is part of that ‘fit conversation’, the foundation upon which a good marriage might be laid,³⁴ or the basis of a good author/reader relationship. Such friendly debates might become heated: the image of his city-dwellers in the activity of reformation gives that ‘there of necessity will be much arguing, much writing, many opinions’ (YP 2.554): and unlike Thomas Edwards, Milton seems not to mind that noise, so long as it serves the higher purpose of humans’ creation. Free discussion, debate, even disagreement, characterize Adam’s relationship with Raphael, as Milton defends their freedom of thought at the start of Book 9, where Milton’s language invites that of ‘permission’ to utter freely: No more of talk where God or angel guest With man, as with his friend, familiar used To sit indulgent, and with him partake ³³ Stanley Fish, How Milton Works (Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 2001), 508. ³⁴ See Thomas Luxon, Single Imperfection: Milton, Marriage and Friendship (Pittsburgh: Duquesne University Press, 2005), 57–93, on fit and unfit conversations.

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Milton’s voice merges with Adam’s as the freedom to discourse ‘unblamed’ is a latitude offered in the tolerant spaces of right inquiry for both the first human and those after him; ‘may I express thee unblamed?’ (PL 3.3). As Stanley Fish has suggested, Paradise Lost educates not simply through exposition but through a dramatic re-enactment of the process of learning. As the ‘plot’ of education is both mimetically and experientially projected from these poems, the activities of author, character and reader become one and the same, especially here in the opening of the ninth book; Milton soon follows this ‘blameless’ moment with a shift to ‘tragic’ (PL 9.6), where blame will all too soon be apportioned. Debate makes visible even a human difference of opinion with God; it might be said that Adam’s dialogue with God verges on criticism of his Creator. As Adam reports to Raphael his request to God to give him a mate, he stresses the permissiveness with which God tolerates his (seeming) dissent: ‘I with leave of speech implored’ … ‘I emboldened spake, and freedom used / Permissive, and acceptance found’ (PL 8.377, 434–5). Milton goes out of his way to emphasize the freedom of his speech situation. Adam’s questioning God’s ways is of course part of the plan; as it turns out, it is the only means by which God can test Adam’s reasoning ability. Adam’s resistance is predicated on a truth that he recognizes: he was made for more than solitude, and his dissidence is a testimonial of his proper self-understanding, his obedience to God’s creative direction. On the other hand, in the instance of the married couple’s disagreements, we observe that dissonance threatens to open up a dangerous weakness. Eve’s obedience to Adam is enjoined to inhibit disagreement within the household and to maintain proper obedience to God. Adam’s ‘permission’ (PL 9.378), Joan Bennet has argued, was just too permissive.³⁵ Their dispute in the garden before the Fall leads to all-out verbal warfare: ‘Thus they in mutual accusation spent / The fruitless hours, but neither self-condemning, / And of their vain contest appeared no end’ (PL 9.1187–9). Just as disagreements within the household between husband and wife can lead to a substantial diminishment of freedom, so too disagreement is shown to have been responsible for the collapse of Israelite religion (PL 12.353–6), and the shattering of Hebrew strength. Milton’s choosing to close Book 9 with this interminable argument ³⁵ Joan Bennet, Reviving Liberty: Radical Christian Humanism in Milton’s Great Poems (Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 1989), 111, 115.


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becomes a necessary act of closure, a formal resolution as divine fiat instead of a substantive agreement. Repentance and grace follow. Freedom of speech was to become for later philosophes, like Bayle and Toland, a pillar of toleration.³⁶ In Milton’s own lifetime it was seen as such, by Martin Clifford, for example, who in 1674 wrote, ‘for there cannot certainly in the World be found out, so mild and so peacable a Doctrine, as that which permits a difference in Beliefs; for what occasion can any man take to begin a quarrel, when both he himself is suffered quietly to enjoy his own Opinion, and his own opinion is this, that he ought to suffer others to do the same’.³⁷ In Milton’s writing there is much to lead us in that direction. His image of the collective project of reconstructing truth in Areopagitica recommends freedom of inquiry, and disagreement among the inquirers, as necessary to the task. However, in Milton’s great epics, public debate rarely leads to that long-sought concord; rather, it seems to offer occasion for hardening positions, for taking sides, for flushing out the enemy and testifying to one’s faith. Abdiel may not win his argument in the court of Satanic popular opinion (‘hostile scorn’—5.904), but his words merit God’s favour; Samson’s discussion with Dalila leads to a violent impasse—‘My sudden rage to tear thee joint by joint’ (SA 953); disputation with the Son does not convince the just—Satan’s dazzling performances and dramatic recreations are all failed rhetorical attempts as the Son remains ‘unmoved’ (PR 3.386; 4.109). While Milton is one to encourage the chance for talk, in his poetry, he seems most interested in those moments where debate and discussion break down.³⁸ The talking allows for the occasion of exposure of devotion or its opposite, the making public what had been secret. The apostate Satan asks the Son’s permission to ‘talk at least’ (1.485), and the Son’s response to that request offers what may be Milton’s most generous support for toleration: Thy coming hither, though I know thy scope, I bid not or forbid; do as thou find’st Permission from above; thou canst not more. (PR 1.494–6) ³⁶ John Toland, Tetradymus, 223. On Toland and freedom of speech as the basis for toleration, see Stephen H. Daniel, John Toland: His Methods, Manners, and Mind (Kingston: McGill-Queen’s University Press, 1984), 170; and Justin Champion, Republican Learning: John Toland and the Crisis of Christian Culture, 1696–1722 (Manchester: Manchester University Press, 2003). ³⁷ Martin Clifford, A Treatise of Humane Reason (1674), 11–12. ³⁸ On the new speech situations in the early modern public sphere, see David Norbrook, ‘Areopagitica, Censorship, and the Early Modern Public Sphere’, in Richard Burt, ed., The Administration of Aesthetics: Censorship, Political Criticism and the Public Sphere (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1994), 3–33.

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That permission, that laxity—even the freedom given to Satan to roam and to speak blasphemy, is granted by God. Thus God seems to offer a kind of tolerance of error.³⁹ As with the Jews, who had fallen into idolatry, Jesus lets them be, rejecting Satan’s urgings that he do his work to save them: No, let them serve Their enemies, who serve idols with God. Yet he at length, time to himself best known, Rememb’ring Abraham by some wondrous call May bring them back repentant and sincere, And at their passing cleave the Assyrian flood. (PR 3.431–6)

In the meantime, then, tolerance: ‘But I endure the time, till which expired,’ the Son gestures, wearily, ‘Thou hast permission on me’ (PR 4.174–5). Milton’s choice of the dramatic moment in the life of Christ in Paradise Regained reveals the transcendence of his approach: while this deity is very much a human, the moment of his assumption of special status is mysterious, eternal, not logically or naturally developing from action in the world. In Paradise Lost, God is ‘as if’ here; there is a distance. God’s presence in the world, however, would be acknowledged by the redeemed, rather than becoming an ‘activating’ ordinance.⁴⁰ Belief in this transcendent God involved an ecclesiology of the invisible church, a wholly spiritual reality, not to be confused with any particular organization or structure. It is why Milton on toleration is so difficult to assess. The invisible church, a consequence of God’s grace, comprised the elect, the saved, the ‘fit’ and ‘few’. Concrete buildings, set prayers, and uniformity of worship are the expressions of a visibilist ecclesiology. C. J. Sommerville has seen the move from communal to private faith with the decline of magic over the long early modern period; in particular, he finds a shift in emphasis from divine immanence to transcendence.⁴¹ If Laudian ecclesiology insisted on the immanence of God through the beauty of holiness, the nonconformist’s theology insisted on the otherness of God, who will rescue the fallen world from sin, but who, in the mean time, permits it. Milton’s millennialist view explains the ³⁹ Boyd Berry has seen God as a ‘permissive parent’ in Process of Speech: Puritan Religious Writing and Paradise Lost (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1976), 236–7; yet contrast Empson’s ‘disagreeable God’, Milton’s God (London: Chatto & Windus, 1965), 132–3. ⁴⁰ See also John Spurr, English Puritanism, 1603–1689 (Basingstoke: Macmillan, 1998), 185–6. ⁴¹ C. J. Sommerville, The Secularization of Early Modern England: From Religious Culture to Religious Faith (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1992), 19–32; and Sutherland, Peace, Toleration, 19–20, for his excellent analysis of these broader theological orientations.


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experience of a sinful here-and-now by an overarching divine plan: in ancient days, when God … at last Wearied with their iniquities, withdraw His presence from among them, and avert His holy eyes; resolving from thenceforth To leave them to their own polluted ways[.] (PL 12.106–10)

In contrast to secularizing visions of tolerance, then, a Miltonic defense of toleration does not only come out of the conception of freedom to judge, but out of his ideal of the church as invisible.⁴² A ‘paradise within’ is a strong statement in support of the invisible church, and the principle of charity, or pity, makes it clear why poetry might be a desirable means of its expression, offering the future through the present, conserving the contingency of the present through its gaze towards the end of time, inviting the reader to participate in that vision in all its fragility. Tolerance was to be a brace against unbelief, vital for civil society to protect the court of conscience, the invisible church. Eschatological expectation did not simply lead away from the worldly projects of state building, social formation and domestic harmony, however. Unlike Bunyan’s Christian who flees wife, children and city for an individual journey of redemption, Milton’s great epics imagine the social and political dimensions of personal actions. A republic, as Milton argues in his prose tracts, is the best mode of governance in which to encourage liberty, the conditions of which depend upon individual virtue and communal obligation. Although Milton does not use the language of building the Kingdom of God on earth, his millennial expectation allowed that church and state should be entirely separate. Just as the censor’s monopoly over freedom of thought degraded the being of humans to slaves, so too, the alienation of faith through intermediaries or the imposition of ritual and duties by a professional clergy demeaned the experience of true faith, made it a slave.⁴³ The enslavement was not simply due to external imposition—whether of tyrants, priests, or even God—however. Milton pictures that slavery as a consequence of the failed will: invited slavery, welcomed from within by the mismanagement of the bodily passions (‘Accuse not nature, she hath done her part; / Do thou but thine, and be not diffident / Of wisdom,’ Raphael teaches Adam (PL 8.561–3; cf. 11.521–2, 634): a lesson needed even before the Fall. ⁴² Contra Stephen R. Honeygosky, Milton’s House of God: The Invisible and Visible Church (Columbia: University of Missouri Press, 1993). ⁴³ See Quentin Skinner, Liberty before Liberalism (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1998), on the political side.

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Is the God justified, in the end, then, not a tolerant God: loving, yes; merciful, yes; just, yes (or no, if you are William Empson or a Romantic reader)? Or is Milton blinded by his age’s fanatical anti-popery? I take neither option to be the most productive for continuing our reflection on Milton and toleration, as this volume has asked us to do. ‘To Justify the ways of God to men’: the purpose of Milton’s poetry is to recommit to an understanding with the eyes of faith; to experience the causes of human liability to err; and to proceed with a cautious and hard-won virtue through to a life of faith and self-management and political life through reasoned action and self-discipline. One consequence of this is a wholly ethical program to combat the intolerances of error and superstition—a program like that of many secularists in the early modern period. The poems’ tolerationist concerns are primarily ethical: how to live until God speaks otherwise.⁴⁴ In his goal of separating church and state, in seeking an Independent ministry, Milton argues not for the sake of the state, for secular politics, but in order to protect belief and worship from coercion by worldly authorities.⁴⁵ In Christ’s wandering and temptation in the wilderness in Paradise Regained, Milton imagines not only the drama of the Son, but also of his followers, aroused by expectation of their Saviour. Secular politics, including toleration, could only ever have a provisional character. Yet that sense of provisionality enlarged the scope of toleration far beyond the questions of human worship. Because God’s judgments are temporally deferred, in Milton’s vision, what mattered to humans had to be in the here and now. Milton protects the ends of God’s mission by constructing a field of human endeavour in which men and women may form communities, worship, marry, and even divorce, and, above all, come to know themselves and to flourish. Milton presents a vision of tolerance from within Christianity, but he also expands the boundaries of permissible thoughts (and access to them) in defending a split between the contingent secular and the sacred to-come. ⁴⁴ On ‘rational religion’, more generally, see John Spurr, ‘ ‘‘Rational Religion’’ in Restoration England’, Journal of the History of Ideas 49 (1988), 563–85. ⁴⁵ In this, William Kolbrener, Milton’s Warring Angels: A Study of Critical Engagements (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1997), 39, on the irrelevance of politics to Milton, is acute.

13 Intolerance and the Virtues of Sacred Vehemence Paul Stevens One of the most obvious elements that disturbs Milton’s popular reputation as a liberal and his more particular reputation as an advocate of toleration is the violence of his language. Apart from his antipathy to Catholicism, it is the ferocity of his rhetoric that is most unsettling. As Don M. Wolfe pointed out years ago, Milton’s early prose writings are marked by a style ‘rarely equaled in violence’ among Puritan pamphleteers.¹ In its vehemence, it is precisely the kind of language that Milton’s contemporary Roger Williams associated with those who were opposed to toleration. Analyzing the toleration debate of 1643–4, Williams reflects on the way both sides wrote in ‘a marvellous different stile and manner. The Arguments against persecution in milke, the Answer for it (as I may say) in bloud.’² It seems something of a paradox then that when Milton does write against persecution he does it so dramatically in blood. In the first of his anti-prelatical tracts, his May 1641 pamphlet Of Reformation, for instance, even as Milton looks to the end of prelacy and the imminent liberation of conscience, his imagination dwells on the violent humiliation of the bishops: [They] shall be thrown downe eternally into the darkest and deepest Gulfe of HELL, where under the despightfull countrole, the trample and spurne of the Damned, that ¹ Don M. Wolfe, ‘Introduction’, YP 1.113. See also Thomas N. Corns, Uncloistered Virtue: English Political Literature, 1640–1660 (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1992); Sharon Achinstein, Milton and the Revolutionary Reader (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1994); Michael Lieb, Milton and the Culture of Violence (Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 1994); David Norbrook, Writing the English Republic: Poetry, Rhetoric and Politics, 1627–1660 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1999); John N. King, Milton and Religious Controversy: Satire and Polemic in Paradise Lost (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2000); David Loewenstein, Representing Revolution among Milton and his Contemporaries (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2001); and Thomas Kranidas, Milton and the Rhetoric of Zeal (Pittsburgh: Duquesne University Press, 2005). ² Roger Williams, The Bloudy Tenent of Persecution (London, 1644), 18.

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in the anguish of their Torture shall have no other ease then to exercise a Raving and Bestiall Tyranny over them as their Slaves and Negro’s, they shall remain in that plight for ever, the basest, the lowermost, the most dejected, most underfoot and downe-trodden Vassals of Perdition. (Of Ref., YP 1.616–17)

This often quoted passage is remarkable for the intensity of the writer’s desire to punish, to subject and exclude those people whose views and behavior he considers intolerable—an intensity registered in the repetition of so many insistent terms of dejection. When read in the context of the whole pamphlet, however, the violence of the bishops’ future punishment is clearly a projection of Milton’s own present, very personal feelings of subjection and exclusion. The outburst is not so much prophetic as confessional or expressive. The central purpose of the bishop’s political science, he complains in an earlier part of the tract, is not to educate the nation but to ‘mould the sufferance and subjection’ of the people, especially people like himself, ‘to the length of that foot that is to tread on their necks’ (Of Ref., YP 1.571). In a way that reveals his culture’s proto-racist sense of what degradation means, as he feels himself trodden down, so he feels himself no better than an African or a slave, a member of the accursed generation of Ham, an impure ethnic. His rage is palpable: gravest and worthiest ministers live under a regime of spite—indeed the people of God themselves redeem’d, and wash’d with Christs blood, and dignify’d with so many glorious titles of Saints, and sons in the Gospel, are now no better reputed then impure ethnicks, and lay dogs; stones & Pillars, and Crucifixes have now the honour, and the almes due to Christs living members; the Table of Communion now become a Table of separation stands like an exalted platforme upon the brow of the quire, fortifi’d with bulwark, and barricado, to keep off the profane touch of the Laicks, whilst the obscene, and surfeted Priest scruples not to paw, and mammock the sacramentall bread, as familiarly as his Tavern Bisket. And thus the people [are] vilifi’d and rejected … (Of Ref., YP 1.547–8)

The rhetorical resources of scripture, the Apocalyptical visions of damnation and the Levitical imperatives of purity and pollution, allow Milton ample scope to articulate and legitimize a range of extreme emotions.³ Most importantly, the intensity of the first passage quoted, even as it constitutes a displacement of the rage so evident in the second, emphasizes the radical nature of the discontinuity between Milton’s very real commitment to liberty of conscience, the essential freedom to be ‘searching, trying, examining all things’ (Of Ref., YP 1.566), and the violence of his reaction against those who would deny him that freedom. Far from being an isolated example, there is evidence to suggest that this discontinuity might well be a constant. ³ See Paul Stevens, ‘ ‘‘Leviticus thinking’’ and the Rhetoric of Early Modern Colonialism’, Criticism 35.3 (1993), 441–61.

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Over thirty years after the publication of Of Reformation, at the central moment of Milton’s last publication, the July 1674 edition of Paradise Lost, the rebel angels are made to suffer a fate similar to that of the bishops. In a poem whose ending is still difficult not to read as an exhortation to quietism, an encouragement to put aside the world and pursue a ‘paradise within thee, happier far’ (PL 12.587), God’s epic poet, Raphael, exults in the violent triumph of the Son. This, according to Alastair Fowler, is the ‘principal image of the poem’ (PL, pp. 25–9, 376–7 n.) and is directly related to the fate of the bishops in the anti-prelatical tracts since it is in fact a rewriting of the violent triumph of Zeal over the ‘Scarlet Prelats’ in Milton’s 1642 pamphlet An Apology (AP YP 1.900). In the poem, the Son of the living God, assuring his Father ‘whom thou hat’st, I hate’ (PL 6.734), ascends the chariot of paternal deity, changes his countenance into one of ‘terror’, and drives his flaming vehicle directly into the ranks of his enemies, crushing the ‘helmed heads’ of the now defenseless rebels, ‘thrones and mighty seraphim [lying] prostrate’ (PL 6.824–5, 839–41). For a present-day audience Milton’s violence continues to disturb and with the impact of the atrocities of September 11, 2001, still fresh in American and other Western minds, its significance has moved center-stage. One of the most incisive and eloquently argued accounts of the relation between the September 11 atrocities and Milton’s violence is Feisal G. Mohamed’s recent PMLA essay ‘Confronting Religious Violence: Milton’s Samson Agonistes’.⁴ Mohamed’s essay is distinguished by its forceful refusal to draw a line between the violence of Milton’s biblical hero and that of September 11’s Islamic hijackers. Most importantly, the essay refuses to distance Milton himself from that violence. It deconstructs the apparently bitter clash between John Carey and Stanley Fish over the virtue of Samson’s massacre to show how Fish no more than Carey can finally bring himself to believe that the author of one of the West’s most ‘cherished artifacts’ (Mohamed, ‘Confronting Religious Violence’, 338), the ‘subtle-minded poet’ Milton (336), could ever truly look ‘favorably on Samson’s final action’ (329). For that atrocity, so it is claimed, is profoundly alien to the cultural norms of the West’s humanist traditions. The essay demurs, insisting that, on the contrary, Milton could indeed valorize the violent destruction of his enemies, and it does so by drawing attention to his association with various traditions of spiritual militarism, most influentially perhaps that of defeated republicans like Henry Lawrence and Sir Henry Vane. From these heroes of the Good Old Cause Milton might have learned that the violence of spiritual resistance, says Mohamed, ‘is not a necessary evil at odds ⁴ Feisal G. Mohamed, ‘Confronting Religious Violence: Milton’s Samson Agonistes’, PMLA, 120.2 (2005), 327–40.

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with the teaching of Christ but it is rather an expression of the spiritual peace bestowed on the elect by the Mediator’ (333). The temptation to derogate this tradition and ‘associate Milton with skeptical humanism rather than religious enthusiasm’ is then almost wilfully anachronistic (337). The very real virtue of Mohamed’s intervention is that it establishes the ‘orientalist’ biases of even the best of critics, especially as they contribute, however unwittingly in the case of Fish, to the extraordinarily dangerous process of cultural polarization now at work in the world. This is a significant achievement. In the course of making this major polemical strike, however, Mohamed’s essay almost inevitably produces its own collateral damage. Two interrelated problems immediately come to mind. First, in successfully transforming what at first sight had seemed like such a facile analogy between New York’s twin towers and Samson’s twin pillars into something worth discussing, Mohamed’s essay inadvertently encourages the popular misconception that September 11 was primarily an act of religious violence. Despite its tentative dissolution of the divide between religion and politics, especially in its allusions to the republicanism of Lawrence and Vane, the essay’s emphasis on confronting religious violence occludes the degree to which September 11 was a political act. It effectively obscures the degree to which it was not simply a matter of religious zeal, an other-worldly or, from a secular point of view, highly irrational act of destruction, but a brutally pragmatic action, rooted in specific material grievances, however poorly articulated, and directed towards effecting specific this-worldly changes. It was a detestable act, but it was a political act. On 31 January 1947, after Jewish terrorists had committed a ‘series of detestable outrages’ including the destruction of the King David Hotel in Jerusalem killing over 90 people, Winston Churchill addressed the House of Commons and sought to provide a context for the extreme violence of the Jewish Lechi (Stern gang) and Etzel (Irgun) groups against his own countrymen and women. This required extraordinary courage not only because his audience was so hostile but because the same terrorists had murdered his own close friend, Walter Guinness, Lord Moyne, a few years before in 1944. To howls of derision, Churchill made it clear that the terrorists’ crimes, however heinous, however revolting, were not acts of utter mindlessness but political acts whose extremism was rooted in present-day desperation, and that it was incumbent on all sides to understand the causes of that desperation. Speaking of the Etzel terrorist, Dov Gruner, who under sentence of death had refused all entreaties to plead for a pardon, Churchill insisted: ‘The fortitude of this man, criminal though he be, must not escape the notice of this House.’⁵ No matter ⁵ Speech of 31 January 1947, Hansard, quoted in Martin Gilbert, Winston S. Churchill, 8 vols. (London: Heinemann, 1971–88), 8.296. Gilbert overstates the case in his speech ‘Churchill and


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what one thinks of Churchill’s intermittent and somewhat naive Zionism, his determination to understand the intolerable seems remarkable. We now find ourselves in Churchill’s position, but whether we will have the intelligence and courage not to dismiss September 11 as an act whose violence was merely ‘religious’ remains to be seen. The second problem is more immediate to the central issue of the present essay—that is, to the discontinuity between Milton’s rival desires for toleration, on the one hand, and for the violent exclusion and humiliation of those who appear to oppose it, on the other. Driven by the inadequacy of the analogy between September 11 and Samson, Mohamed’s essay tends to confuse the issue by taking Milton’s violence at face value. In many cases there is an obvious and incontrovertible relation between Milton’s articulations of violence and actual events. But in others there is not. Qualifying an argument similar to Mohamed’s back in 1996, David Norbrook worried about the dangers of taking Samson Agonistes too literally and urged his readers to remember that ‘the drama offers debate, not certainty’.⁶ He asked in some disbelief—was Milton really ‘calling for a guerrilla squad to pull down the Theatre Royal on its courtly patrons?’ (Norbrook, ‘The True Republican’, 5). One of the weaknesses of contemporary historicist criticism, as Norbrook seems to have been aware even then, in its moment of triumph, and especially now as it’s become ‘normal science’, is its in-built tendency to flatten out important rhetorical or formalist distinctions and treat all articulations as consciously direct or indirect political speech acts.⁷ The truth is that Milton’s rhetoric of violence is complex. It is subject to both considerable synchronic and diachronic variation—that is, while it comprehends a confusing range of different registers and functions, every bit as expressive as pragmatic, it also evolves over time in terms of sophistication. With experience and in response to various external political pressures, not to mention his own ambitions, Milton becomes more selective and reflective in the application of this kind the Middle East’, delivered to the Churchill Society for the Advance of Parliamentary Democracy, Toronto, 18 November 2003, but the central notion of Churchill’s desire to understand the intolerable remains valid. An important corrective to Gilbert’s tendency to idealize Churchill as a Zionist is the Israeli scholar Michael Cohen’s Churchill and the Jews, 2nd edn. (London: Frank Cass, 2003). ⁶ David Norbrook, ‘The True Republican: Putting the Politics Back into Milton’, Times Literary Supplement (2 February, 1996), 4–6, p. 5. ⁷ By historicist criticism I do not simply mean ‘new historicism’—I mean a general shift to a complex set of critical practices that embraces both the new historicism at one pole and the more empirical forms of criticism so powerfully informed by the work of Habermas and Skinner at the other. All these practices are predicated on the central historicist principle that the past is another country, that is, that it constitutes a discrete culture related to but ultimately different from our own.

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of rhetoric. Most importantly, the great poems of the 1660s and -70s prove a watershed. Released from the immediate, adversarial pressures of writing polemical pamphlets, if not from the desire for political engagement, they provide Milton with the opportunity to distill and reflect on many things, not least his own vehemence. In Samson Agonistes, for instance, religious enthusiasm, vehemence, or zeal is no longer the unproblematized heroic virtue of the anti-prelatical tracts but something much more ambivalent. In a way that seems more than a little ironic the force that incites Dalila to betray Samson is, according to the Godly hero himself, zeal: ‘But zeal moved thee; / To please thy gods thou didst it’ (SA 895–6). Indeed, religious enthusiasm is even more fully ironized as the ‘spirit of frenzy’ that urges the Philistines to ‘call in haste for their destroyer’ (SA 1675–8). As Samson suspects, the mere sight of him will move the Philistines to rage—not least, he says with all the disdain of a skeptical humanist, the ‘well-feasted priest then soonest fired / With zeal’ (SA 1419–20).⁸ In this essay, I want to emphasize the expressive as opposed to the purely pragmatic or political significance of Milton’s rhetoric of violence. That is, I want to consider what kind of action that rhetoric is meant to produce, but only in relation to the often intensely conflicted feelings that generate it.⁹ I want to do this in order to come to a better understanding of Milton’s intolerance. At the same time I want to suggest how his rhetoric of violence seems to develop into something less obviously at odds with his rival commitment to liberty of conscience. The argument falls into three parts: first, an analysis of the defense of vehemence in Milton’s discursive struggle against the bishops in 1641–2, then, of the conflicted reassertion of that vehemence in his pamphlet arguments against the king in 1649–51, and, finally, a discussion of the almost complete lack of vehemence in the final polemical writings of 1673–4. Most importantly, I want to suggest, albeit briefly, how the old Milton adapts to the new political reality of the 1670s. It is true that he never really writes against persecution in milk, but the blood, despite or because of Samson Agonistes and ⁸ Thomas Kranidas’s learned and unusually acute Milton and the Rhetoric of Zeal fails, for whatever reason, to discuss the ironization of zeal in Samson Agonistes. ⁹ The terms are, of course, those of M. H. Abrams in The Mirror and the Lamp: Romantic Theory and the Critical Tradition (1953; rpt. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1971), esp. 3–29. Useful as Abrams’ distinctions are, there is much more to be done in terms of rethinking formalist approaches to Milton. Milton studies remains largely innocent of the new culturally inflected formalism emerging out of discourse analysis which is beginning to have such an impact in Shakespeare studies—see, for example, Lynne Magnusson, Shakespeare and Social Dialogue (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1999) and David Schalkwyk, Speech and Performance in Shakespeare’s Plays and Sonnets (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2002). See also J. L. Austin, How to do Things with Words [1962], 2nd edn. (Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 1975) and Gillian Brown and George Yule, Discourse Analysis (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1983).


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especially after 1672, does become less evident, more mediated or etiolated, and certainly less disruptive. Let me begin with the tension between expressive and pragmatic functions in the anti-prelatical tracts.

Sacred Vehemence and the Struggle for Identity Consider the two examples with which we began. The destruction of the bishops in Of Reformation and the rebel angels in Paradise Lost may reveal a similar expressive animus, but they are hardly the same in terms of pragmatic design—that is, what kind of action they are meant to produce as opposed to what kinds of feeling generated them. Both the texts in which these violent passages occur are in some sense concerned to produce ‘revolution’, to effect moral or social change, but they are separated by several degrees of immediacy both from each other and from quotidian political practice. Of Reformation is obviously much closer to the heat and dust of political life than Paradise Lost. It is a strident, albeit belated, intervention in a highly charged political debate. Its overall purpose is to join with a group of Presbyterian ministers known as ‘Smectymnuus’ in effecting the reformation of church government and ending episcopacy. According to Thomas Corns, the pamphlet demands a root-and-branch extirpation of episcopacy at a moment when the antiprelatical movement appeared to be running into the sand of compromise (Corns, Uncloistered Virtue, 16–17). Its rhetoric of violence has both an explicitly pragmatic as well as a powerfully expressive purpose: its practical aim is to arouse emotion, or what Milton routinely calls ‘vehemence’, and galvanize resistance to those whose collapsing power continued to linger on. Looking back on the pamphlet over a decade later, Milton emphasizes the excitement of the occasion, the tract’s optimism and moment of opportunity. Early in 1641, he says in the Second Defence of 1654, ‘all mouths were opened against [the bishops]’, these events ‘thoroughly aroused’ me and I saw my moment—‘I perceived that men were following the true path of liberty and that from these beginnings, these first steps, they were making the most direct progress towards the liberation of all human life from slavery’ (Second Defence, YP 4.621–2). ‘The excitement, the exhilaration and expectancy of these months’, says Hugh Trevor-Roper, ‘is audible to us still.’¹⁰ Paradise Lost is clearly different. It’s not an excited intervention, but a gravely reflective, self-consciously literary artifact, an epic poem written out of the experience of defeat whose aims are not only moral and social but explicitly aesthetic. If its rhetoric of violence has any pragmatic purpose, it ¹⁰ Hugh Trevor-Roper, Catholics, Anglicans, and Puritans (London: Fontana, 1989), 250.

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is only very doubtfully vehement or immediately revolutionary. Obviously, some people could read it that way, but it is significant that Milton’s censors did not, and even a reader as hostile to the Good Old Cause as Milton’s royalist contemporary John Beale seems less impressed by the poem’s politics than its artistic achievement: ‘You will joyne with mee to whisper in a smile,’ he writes to John Evelyn in November 1668, ‘that he writes so good verse, that tis pity he ever wrote in prose.’¹¹ As innumerable modern critics have suggested, the specific violence of Book 6 itself is too schematic, cartoon-like, or burlesque, too self-defeating to be taken literally; it is written in a style that is certainly visually striking but simultaneously suggestive of Milton’s weariness with the spiritual militarism or ‘tedious havoc’ of his great original, Spenser (PL 9.30).¹² The Son’s military triumph could and still can be read to emphasize its political continuity with the violence of Of Reformation and its immediate source in the Apology, but doing so means ignoring so much. The poetic passage is in fact so imaginatively mediated, with so many carefully plotted caveats or register markers, that its distanced, figurative quality seems inescapable.¹³ Over and again, for instance, Raphael urges Adam to remember the context, that his epic story is a fiction, that the war in heaven is merely a figurative accommodation: ‘Immediate are the acts of God, more swift / Than time or motion, but to human ears / Cannot without process of speech be told, / So told as earthly notion can receive’ (PL 7.176–9). The difference between the articulation of violence in Of Reformation and Paradise Lost is then considerable. Most importantly, that difference is governed by both the degree and kind of instrumental control, pragmatic or aesthetic, which each text exercises over the writer’s emotional animus. ¹¹ Quoted by Nicholas von Maltzahn in ‘Laureate, Republican, Calvinist: An Early Response to Milton and Paradise Lost (1667)’, Milton Studies 29 (1993), 189. Norbrook argues that Beale felt the publication of Paradise Lost to be a ‘forceful, and deeply unwelcome, act’ (Writing the English Republic, 467), but in so doing he downplays Beale’s reaction to the poem as an aesthetic achievement—although it is not as ‘wonderfull’ as his earlier poetry, he says, it is still ‘excellent’ (quoted in von Maltzahn, ‘Laureate’, 185). Even when his negative feelings for the poem matured, they were focused on its religious rather than political effects: he came to feel that the blasphemies of Milton’s devils ‘beget a Bad, or afflict a good Spirit’ (December 1670, qtd. von Maltzahn, ‘Laureate’, 193). See also William Poole, ‘Two Early Readers of John Milton: John Beale and Abraham Hill’, Milton Quarterly 39.2 (2004), 76–99. ¹² See, for instance, the classic accounts in Arnold Stein, Answerable Style (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1953), 17–37, and J. B. Broadbent, Some Graver Subject: An Essay on ‘Paradise Lost’ (New York: Schocken, 1960), 218–34. According to von Maltzahn, the war in heaven is central to Milton’s profound critique of ‘original violence’, of what the poet calls ‘ ‘‘outward’’ or ‘‘worldly’’ or ‘‘fleshlie force’’ ’ (‘The War in Heaven and the Miltonic Sublime’, in Alan Houston and Steve Pincus, eds., A Nation Transformed: England after the Restoration (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2001), 154–5). ¹³ On register variation, see M. A. K. Halliday and Ruqaiya Hasan, Language, Context, and Text (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1989), 29–43.


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In Corns’s formidably acute and highly influential account of Milton’s forensic rhetoric in the anti-prelatical tracts, control, especially in the early tracts, is rarely an issue. Milton almost always seems to be in command. He is remarkably stable, extraordinarily knowledgeable and perceptive in his understanding of the dynamics of the political debate, full of guile and always calculating, deliberately antagonizing his adversaries and reassuring the revolutionary reader—all in order to construct his own imagined, textual community.¹⁴ Fascinating as Corns’s argument is, it is difficult not to feel that he overestimates Milton’s judgment and credits the early tracts, if not The Reason of Church-Government, with the kind of mastery that Milton himself happily assigns to them when he looks back over the period in the Second Defence: ‘I brought succor to the ministers who were, as it was said, scarcely able to withstand the eloquence of this bishop, and from that time onward, if the bishops made any response, I took a hand’ (Second Defence, YP 4.623). This is not what he said at the time, and his recurrent tendency to solipsistic self-congratulation does not fit well with the image of a writer skilled in his ability to subordinate self-representation to the construction of community.¹⁵ What Thomas Kranidas calls his ‘impropriety’ or just how lax or ill-conceived control in Milton’s early writings could be is best seen from his defense of vehemence.¹⁶ By vehemence Milton means what we have been calling his rhetoric of violence—that ‘vehement vein’ of ‘throwing out indignation, or scorn upon an object that merits it’ (AP, YP 1.899). In his 1634 Ludlow Masque, Milton idealizes that ‘vehement strain’ as ‘sacred vehemence’, an inspired form of eloquence beyond reason, quite literally beyond control. In the Lady’s response to Comus it appears as the power of Orpheus reducing the world to harmony, separating the true from the false, and, most importantly, destroying the latter. The Lady doesn’t try to convince Comus of his error, but should she try, so she claims, the ‘uncontrolled worth’ of her virtue ‘would kindle my rapt spirits / To such a flame of sacred vehemence’ that dumb things would sympathize and the brute earth itself would shake until ‘all thy magic structures ¹⁴ Corns’s narrowly defined partisan reader is not quite the same as Sharon Achinstein’s much broader, culturally significant, revolutionary reader, but they are clearly related. See Achinstein’s important Milton and the Revolutionary Reader, and for textual communities, see also Elizabeth Sauer’s recent ‘Paper Contestations’ and Textual Communities in England, 1640–75 ( Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 2005). ¹⁵ In the Apology, Milton made it clear that he had no doubts about the ministers’ ability or eloquence: ‘I had no fear but that the authors of Smectymnus … were prepar’d both with skill and purpose to returne a suffizing answer’ (AP, YP 1.872). ¹⁶ According to Kranidas, ‘Milton was regularly criticized for impropriety’—his ‘vehemence’ routinely ‘violated the expectations that his initially elegant and erudite style would raise in a reader’ (Milton and the Rhetoric of Zeal, 159).

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reared so high, / Were shattered into heaps o’er thy false head’ (Masque, 792–8). In this Michael Lieb hears a premonition of Samson destroying the temple of Dagon and evidence of Milton’s commitment to what he calls regenerative violence (Milton and the Culture of Violence, 106–8, 258–63). This may be so, but when ‘sacred vehemence’ is translated from poetry into the everyday world of pamphlet literature, its locutions often seem bathetic and its recorded effect is anything but regenerative. In his Animadversions of July 1641, Milton imagines himself as the Lady and Joseph Hall, then bishop of Exeter, as Comus—he identifies himself with those who ‘have wrought up their zealous souls into such vehemencies, as nothing could be more killingly spoken’ against a false dissimulator like Hall (Animadversions, YP 1.663). Unlike the Lady, Milton does try to convince his adversary, or at least show him the error of his ways, but the resulting vehemence turns out to be an incongruous mix of violent insults and self-indulgent biblical reveries. ‘Doe not think to Perswade us of your undaunted courage by misapplying to your selfe the words of holy David,’ he admonishes Hall, and then, with the kind of chutzpah that few of whatever constituency would find easy to take, he silently assigns himself the role of Moses in Exodus 32 (Animadversions, YP 1.665). In a direct address, speaking for the English nation, he patiently explains to God where He is likely to go wrong: ‘shouldst thou bring us thus far onward from Egypt to destroy us in this Wildernesse though wee deserve; yet thy great name would suffer in the rejoycing of thine enemies, and the deluded hope of all thy servants’ (Animadversions, YP 1.706). The response of Bishop Hall’s defender in the Modest Confutation of early 1642 is well-known: Milton’s vehemence, his violent satire, makes him seem no better than a ‘grim, lowring, bitter fool’ and those flights of fancy that transcend his violence may be ‘astounding’ but they are also perceived as ‘long, tedious, theatrical’, and ‘big-mouthed’.¹⁷ John Bramhall felt much the same. Speaking about Milton the following year as the ‘novice’ who wrote Of Reformation, he concludes: ‘It was truely said by Seneca, that the most contemptible Persons ever have the loosest tongues.’¹⁸ If one accepts Corns’s argument, then these responses only prove his contention that Milton doesn’t really want to convince his adversaries, merely consolidate his own imagined constituency. At some points this is clearly true, but at others it’s not. Besides ignoring the lack of control implicit in ¹⁷ A Modest Confutation of a Slanderous and Scurrilous Libell (London, 1642), sig. A3. For more on the theatricality of Milton’s style, see Paul Stevens, ‘Discontinuities in Milton’s Early Public Self-Representation’, Huntington Library Quarterly 51.4 (1988), 260–80, and ‘Milton’s Janus-Faced Nationalism: Soliloquy, Subject, and the Modern Nation State’, Journal of English and German Philology, 100.2 (2001), 247–68. ¹⁸ John Bramhall, The Serpent’s Salve, or, a Remedie for the Biting of an Aspe (London, 1643), 212.


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Milton’s risk-taking and self-absorbed insensitivities—what Milton himself later refers to as the perception in him of ‘some self-pleasing humor of vainglory’ (RCG, YP 1.806)—Corns’s argument shows little interest in Milton’s own explanation of what his ferocious rhetoric was meant to do. The most sustained and direct defense of vehemence comes in Milton’s final antiprelatical tract, his Apology of April 1642. He is responding to the anonymous Modest Confuter’s charge that ‘Violence hath been done to the person of a holy, and religious Prelat’ (YP 1.897). Milton’s first reaction is to shrug it off. But then in order to ‘satisfie any conscionable man’, that is, any reasonable person, he offers a painstaking defense founded on three principal grounds. First, he appeals to the received authority of classical prescription and biblical precedent. Christ, for instance, often deployed ‘bitter and irefull rebukes’ not so much to teach as to leave ‘excuselesse those his wilfull impugners’ (AP, YP 1.899–900). Second, he reasserts his overall pragmatic or political design. In times of opposition, he insists, the ‘coole unpassionate mildnesse of positive wisdome’ is not enough ‘to damp and astonish the proud resistance of carnall, and false Doctors’ (AP, YP 1.900). But dominating all is the third ground—legitimation drawn from his own particular, emotional needs. In this, he effectively offers an expressive theory of composition whose emphasis on the outpouring of feeling, the legitimacy of the public articulation of private emotion, Romantic poets would not have found unwelcome. Since no man is ‘forc’t wholly to dissolve that groundwork of nature which God created in him’, he says, no man should feel reluctant to express his peculiar passion: the choleric man, for instance, may rightly ‘expell quite the unsinning predominance of his anger’, for ‘each radicall humour and passion wrought upon and corrected as it ought, might be made the proper mould and foundation of every mans peculiar guifts, and vertues’ (AP, YP 1.900). He invokes the example of Luther who, often offending his own constituency, his ‘friends and favourers’, with the uncontrolled ‘fiercenesse of his spirit’, found he could not moderate his rhetoric without reaping the gleeful contempt of his adversaries (AP, YP 1.901). More importantly, he could not write effectively at all without the energy he drew from his ‘ardent spirit’ (AP, YP 1.901). Luther clearly speaks for Milton. His vehemence, his ‘sanctifi’d bitternesse’, may be pragmatic but it is also deeply and necessarily expressive, and that expressiveness is often violently out of control. As Milton himself confesses in the Reason of Church-Government, ‘the ardency of my mind’ often leads him astray (RCG, YP 1.830). What makes this lack of control so significant is the degree to which it reveals Milton’s struggle for what we would call self-realization or identity. The articulations of violence in the anti-prelatical tracts do constitute a series of political speech acts but the perlocutionary force of those acts is far less

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arresting than their primary, illocutionary power. That is, they call attention to themselves less as a series of directives than as a set of utterances both performing and measuring the intensity of Milton’s struggle for a specific sense of being. Milton is clearly a calculating polemicist; both his use of biblical rhetoric and his revival of the old Marprelate-like conventions of religious satire, especially in Animadversions, do suggest something of the extent to which the particular style of the tracts is a politically directed act of social invention. But neither what might be called ‘Leviticus thinking’ nor what John King calls ‘controversial merriment’ captures the individuality or distinctiveness of that invention.¹⁹ As Corns points out while considering what Milton means by the ardency of his spirit, ‘Writing of such introversion appears rarely in contemporary controversy’ (Uncloistered Virtue, 33). At the climax of his defense of vehemence in the Apology, Milton reveals how its articulations of violence, in the uncontrolled worth of his imagined virtue, constitute a self-realizing performance. As Milton insists on the need to ‘astonish’, magically to freeze his adversaries through the power of words, just as Shakespeare and Orpheus do, he personifies vehemence as the mighty warrior Zeal: then Zeale whose substance is ethereal, arming in compleat diamond ascends his fiery Chariot drawn with two blazing Meteors figur’d like beasts … resembling two of those four which Ezechiel and S. John saw, one visag’d like a Lion to expresse power, high autority and indignation, the other of count’nance like a man to cast derision and scorne … with these the invincible warriour Zeale shaking loosely the slack reins drives over the heads of Scarlet Prelats, and such as are insolent to maintaine traditions, brusing their stiffe necks under his flaming wheels. (AP, YP 1.900)

Immediately before he utters this powerful speech, Milton pleads with his readers ‘that I may have leave to soare a while as the Poets use’ (AP, YP 1.900). This plea does many things, not least it serves as a marker to indicate a change in register—that is, a shift towards the less pragmatic, more aestheticized representation of violence whose culmination we see in the ascent of the Son in Paradise Lost. Although, as I have suggested above, the register of the two representations is not the same—the ascent of Zeal still occurs in a political pamphlet—the plea does make it clear that the violence of Zeal is not to be taken at face value. Milton doesn’t really want to see the bishops’ heads crushed. At the time of publication, they were no longer a threat: all of them were excluded from Parliament and most of them were in prison. In April 1642, England may have been heading for civil war, but the antiprelatical debate was no longer anywhere near the eye of the storm. What ¹⁹ See Stevens, ‘ ‘‘Leviticus Thinking’’ ’ and King, Milton and Religious Controversy, 1–22.


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Milton wants in this passage, as the plea and so much else in the Reason of Church-Government and the Apology suggest, is to join the ‘Laureat fraternity’ and realize his talent as national poet (AP, YP 1.891). And here, for a moment, as he expresses his longing to be such a poet, he becomes one. A little later in the pamphlet Milton describes the actual execution of the Earl of Strafford the previous year as a ‘publick triumph’, an act of violence that had the practical effect of reviving the ‘fainted Common-wealth’ (AP, YP 1.919), but even this is not quite the unmediated celebration of violence it might at first seem. For almost immediately Milton reproduces it as the central act of another prose poem—a fantasy in which Strafford’s actual courage and dignity are caricatured in an allegory of tyranny ‘groveling upon the fatall block’ (AP, YP 1.924) and in which the author betrays his enormous pleasure not in violence but in his own extraordinary power with words. After ridiculing the Modest Confuter’s attempt to praise Parliament, he announces his intention to show him how it should be done in a ‘pleasing fit’ or song: ‘because it shall not be said I am apter to blame others then to make triall of my selfe, and that I may after this harsh discord touch upon a smoother string, awhile to entertaine my selfe and him that list, with some more pleasing fit’, I shall show the Confuter ‘what he might have better said in their praise’ had he possessed my skills (AP, YP 1.922). If the violent humiliation of the bishops in Of Reformation functions as a displacement of Milton’s own sense of exclusion and subjection, so here a year later the highly fictional representation of Strafford’s execution and the bishops’ bloody rout at the hands of Zeal measures the degree to which he feels free to assert himself as the individual he would really be—a poet of power and high authority enabled by what he perceives as England’s new-found toleration to search, try, and examine all things in order to write a work ‘doctrinal and exemplary to a Nation’ (RCG, YP 1.815). My point is that while the articulation of vehemence in the anti-prelatical tracts does little or nothing to damp and astonish the bishops, it does a great deal to enable John Milton to channel his rage, to build a ‘proper mould and foundation’ out of his own violent emotions for his ‘peculiar guifts, and vertues’. As Kranidas suspects, the chief virtue of sacred vehemence is energy, power and high authority—what Machiavelli means by virtù. At the same time, this does not mean that Milton had lost interest in the anti-prelatical cause, that he was opposed to actual violence, or that his violent rhetoric did not contribute to a heightening of political tensions. It means that the articulations of violence in these political tracts are consistently more expressive than pragmatic. There are, however, many occasions, especially in the regicide tracts, when it’s the other way around, when Milton is lethal, perfectly literal in his advocacy of violence. But even then the outward, political

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intent of his writings is not easily detached from the internal, emotional work they are doing, and this brings us to the heart of his intolerance.

Cursed Neuters and the Struggle for Community On the same day, 23 February 1642, that England’s dejected king said farewell to his wife, Henrietta Maria, at Dover, later galloping along the cliffs to keep her ship for France in sight as long as possible, the rebellious House of Commons crowded into St Margaret’s Chapel, Westminster, to hear a series of fast sermons. The mood was tense—the insurgency in Ireland raged on and war in England seemed a real possibility. The first and most famous sermon was delivered by Stephen Marshall, one of Milton’s Smectymnuan friends. His sermon, Meroz Cursed, is remembered for its advocacy of the most uncompromising and brutal violence.²⁰ Despite its plain style and almost complete lack of introversion, the sermon frequently reproduces moments that Milton would recognize as ‘sacred vehemence’. In Marshall’s remorselessly repetitive, logically circular process of speech, he offers his listeners zeal—‘motives and incentives to inflame your hearts’ (Marshall, Meroz Cursed, 25); he sets out to arouse their rapt spirits—‘curse the inhabitants of Meroz, continue to curse them, vehemently curse them, never leave cursing them’ (5). In its deliberative determination to show why Christian men and women should not refrain from shedding blood, the sermon stands as a compelling piece of evidence for Feisal Mohamed’s indictment of our forgetfulness about the West’s long history of religious violence. It also stands as a remarkable example of seventeenth-century ‘Leviticus thinking.’ The sermon defines the church of Christ as a ‘levitical’ community, that is, it reproduces the church in the image of biblical Israel, a national community separate to God and outside whose boundaries all is ‘deformed, uncleane, and [in] every way vain’ (38).²¹ The force of Marshall’s sermon is directed against all those who would be both of the community and outside it, all those who in time of opposition would be neutral—as Marshall insists, ‘the Lord acknowledges no neuters’ (22). The principal example of those who would be neutral, cold neuters, spiritually barren, is that of the inhabitants of Meroz in the Song of Deborah, Israelites who refused to join the nation in its war against Canaan: ‘Curse ye Meroz (said the Angell of the Lord) curse ye ²⁰ Stephen Marshall, Meroz Cursed, or A Sermon preached to the Honourable House of Commons at their late Solemn Fast (London, 1641/2). ²¹ The sermon willfully forgets what Roger Williams considers one of the principal sources of religious intolerance—that ancient Israel ‘is proved figurative and ceremoniall, and no patterne nor president for any Kingdom or Civill state in the world to follow’ (The Bloudy Tenent, a2v ).


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bitterly the inhabitants therof, because they came not to the helpe of the Lord’ ( Judges 5:23 quoted Marshall, Meroz Cursed, 1). For Marshall the meaning of this verse is unequivocal—you are either of the community or against it, you are either blessed or cursed, and being cursed, whether you are an enemy or a neutral, means being destroyed. In hammering home the point, Marshall reverses the transumptive power of the New Testament, assimilating the Gospel’s argument of grace back into the Old Testament curse: ‘This text curses all of them who came not to help him … it is a certaine rule, for it is Christs rule, he that is not with me, is against me’ (23). Paradoxically for a Christian minister, the true meaning of the New Testament is revealed in the Old. Jeremiah, for instance, is invoked to amplify what it means to be against Christ: ‘Cursed is he that does the worke of the Lord negligently; cursed is everyone that withholds his hand from shedding of bloud’ ( Jeremiah 48:10, quoted 10). Psalm 137 is then invoked to show how those who do the work of Christ’s church diligently are blessed—whatsoever that work might be, ‘good or evill’ (16): ‘Blessed is the man’, says the preacher, ‘that thus rewards Babylon, yea, blessed is the man that takes their little ones and dashes them against the stones’ (Psalm137:8–9, quoted 11). Marshall is no ancient Israelite, but a humanist educated, Protestant scholar. He knows full well that he is literalizing biblical poetry and advocating atrocity: What Souldiers heart [he reflects] would not start at this, not only when he is in hot bloud to cut downe armed enemies in the field, but afterward deliberately to come into a subdued City, and take the little ones upon the speares point, to take them by the heeles and beat out their braines against the walles, what inhumanity and barbarousnesse would this be thought? Yet if this worke be to revenge Gods Church against Babylon [he insists], he is a blessed man that takes and dashes the little ones against the stones. (Marshall, Meroz Cursed, 11–12)

The climactic ‘Yet’ is a Pilate-like abdication of responsibility—it’s not my choice, says Marshall, but that of the Word.²² That is, obedience to the letter of scripture, a tolerationist like Roger Williams might argue, is an evasion of one’s responsibility to read according to the light of the Spirit. In February 1642, as war looms and the Commons contemplates horror in Ireland, as Marshall slyly identifies Henrietta Maria’s father, Henri IV, the architect of the great tolerationist Edict of Nantes, with what it truly means to be a cursed ²² To the extent that tough-minded inhumanity becomes the measure of our virtue, Marshall’s exhortation anticipates such speech acts as that of Heinrich Himmler at Posen in October 1943: ‘Most of you men’, he said to his soldiers, ‘know what it is like to see 100 corpses, or 500 or 1000. To stand fast through this and, except for cases of human weakness, to have stayed decent… This is an unwritten and never-to-be written page of glory in our history’ (quoted in Michael Burleigh, The Third Reich: A New History (London: Pan, 2001), 660).

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neuter (Meroz Cursed, 34–5), intolerance had found its most authentic voice. The effect of Marshall’s sermon was electrifying and Parliament ordered its immediate publication.²³ The ruthlessly pragmatic determination of Milton’s Smectymnuan ally to incite ‘terrour’ (20) provides an obvious precedent for Samson Agonistes. In both texts, the Spirit of God moves believers to commit what we would consider atrocities: Marshall’s exhortation to revenge against Meroz and Babylon clearly has much in common with the Chorus’s understanding of Samson’s revenge against Gaza: ‘O dearly-bought revenge, yet glorious!’ (SA 1660). But things are not so straightforward. Milton either heard Meroz Cursed or read it soon after its publication, since he appears to allude to it at the opening of the Apology in April—nothing could be ‘more unlike a Christian’, he says, ‘[than] to be a cold neuter in the cause of the Church’ (AP, YP 1.868). According to Hugh Trevor-Roper, the relationship between Milton and Marshall went deep; they were ‘in collusion’, Marshall quoting Milton in his sermons and Milton so taken with Meroz that Marshall’s ‘advertisement’ for a singer who would set forth the nation’s triumphs in ‘an elegant and lofty verse’ explains Milton’s announcement of his poetic vocation in The Reason of Church-Government ( Trevor-Roper, Catholics, Anglicans, and Puritans, 255–6). However unlikely this is, there seems little question of the sermon’s immediate impact on Milton. Even so, as David Loewenstein has recently emphasized, Milton’s most memorial response to Marshall’s text is one of anger and contempt (Loewenstein, Representing Revolution, 180–90). Seven years later, its ‘levitical’ style turns out to be all a sham and it becomes clear that the enthusiasm of sacred vehemence can be dangerously misleading. The single most famous act of violence that Milton openly advocated was, of course, the execution of the king. About two weeks after that ‘memorable scene’ at Whitehall on 30 January 1649 Milton published his defense of the execution, The Tenure of Kings and Magistrates. This pamphlet ushered in a series of publications over 1649–51 in which the pragmatic advocacy or defense of violence seems to dominate, if not eliminate, any expressive function the representation of violence in the text might have. The Tenure itself seems to have little or nothing of the explicit introversion so evident in the anti-prelatical tracts. Its focus is outward and active. It is determined to instruct, to explain the sovereignty of the law, its constitution as an agreement ‘either fram’d, or consented to by all’, and the complete reasonableness of holding the king accountable to it by subjecting him to a ‘faire and op’n tryal’ ²³ See Paul Christianson, Reformers and Babylon: English Apocalyptic Visions from the Reformation to the Eve of the Civil War ( Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 1978), 183, and Anthony Fletcher, The Outbreak of the English Civil War (London: Edward Arnold, 1981), 344–5.


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(Tenure, YP 3.199, 237). Composed over the course of the trial and execution, the pamphlet’s style is characterized by a sense of practical urgency—we should not hesitate to act, he insists, for ‘the Common-wealth nigh perishes for want of deeds in substance, don with just and faithfull expedition’ (Tenure, YP 3.194). And yet despite its pragmatic clarity, the text is highly emotional. The enormity of the issue and Milton’s conflicted response to it is evident in the tract’s assimilation of Marshall’s Meroz into Shakespeare’s Macbeth.²⁴ The intense opposition of so many Presbyterian ministers to the trial and execution of the king clearly unnerved Milton. In the Serious and Faithfull Representation of 18 January 1649, 47 Scots and English ministers had disclaimed, detested, and abhorred the proceedings against the king, identifying them with the ‘wicked and bloody Tenents and Practices of Jesuites’.²⁵ This was too much for Milton. Overwhelmed by a sense of betrayal, he uses the Tenure to transform his former allies, these vehement preachers and ‘Pulpit-firebrands’ (Tenure, YP 1.243), including the author of Meroz Cursed, into the grotesque forms of the weird sisters in Macbeth. These ‘juggling fiends’, says Macbeth, who ‘palter with us in a double sense’ are no longer to be believed because while they ‘keep the word of promise to our ear’, they ‘break it to our hope’ (V.viii.17–22).²⁶ That is, once their promises create hope in us, they break them. Just as the equivocations of these witches misled Macbeth, Milton feels, so the violent rhetoric and false vehemence of these ministers have misled him—‘they have juggl’d and palter’d with the world’, they have ‘bandied and born armes against thir King, devested him, disannointed him, nay curs’d him all over in thir Pulpits and thir Pamphlets’, so much so that they have engaged ‘sincere and real men, beyond what is possible or honest to retreat from’ (Tenure, YP 3.191). The emotional intensity of the analogy is such that it is wildly overdetermined. Guilt suffocates everyone. The figures of Macbeth and his wife suffuse both the Presbyterian ministers and the king—all united in their despised ‘Scotchness’. While the king is a man of blood who has polluted the land with the slaughtered carcasses of ‘so many thousand Christians destroy’d’ (Tenure, YP 3.214), the ministers appear like Lady Macbeth unable ‘with all thir shifting and relapsing’ to ‘wash off the guiltiness from thir own hands’ (Tenure, YP 3.227). But most importantly, ²⁴ Recent attention to the presence of Shakespeare’s Macbeth in the Tenure is largely the result of Martin Dzelzainis’s ‘Milton, Macbeth, and Buchanan’, The Seventeenth Century 4 (1989), 55–66, and his edition of John Milton: The Political Writings (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1991), esp. ix–xix. ²⁵ A Serious and Faithfull Representation of the Judgments of the Ministers of the Gospell in the Province of London (London, 1641/2), 11. ²⁶ All quotations from Shakespeare are from Macbeth, ed. Robert S. Miola (New York: Norton, 2004).

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beside the bloody king and the paltering divines, it is Milton himself who is Macbeth. He is the tragic hero who took Marshall’s injunction to moral clarity and levitical violence at face value, who ‘endu’d with fortitude and Heroick vertue’ feared nothing but the curse of Meroz, ‘the curse writt’n against those That doe the worke of the Lord negligently’. He is the person of ‘noblest temper’ who has been betrayed by these paltering ministers to the danger of ‘destruction with themselves’ (Tenure, YP 3.191–2). We must go on, he argues, for we have already gone ‘beyond what is honest or possible to retreat from’. The insistent pragmatic force of the Tenure conceals enormous emotional distress—a sense of confusion and anger not only at the Presbyterians but at the hard reality of his complicity in actual as opposed to imagined or distant violence. For all his vehemence, Milton is no Spenser—no colonial undertaker who can experience the immediate horrors of guerrilla war, cast a cold eye on the starving as ‘so many anatomies of death’, and dismiss them with the summary judgment that ‘they themselves had wrought’ their terrible fate.²⁷ Milton’s response to Marshall’s betrayal is critical. Martin Dzelzainis’s anodyne charaterization of it as Milton ‘trying to embarrass the Presbyterians’ (Dzelzainis, ‘Milton, Macbeth and Buchanan’, 55) does scant justice to its expressive force. Milton reasserts the zeal of Meroz Cursed. To the degree that Presbyterian ministers are willing to plead for the king, to become backsliders, ‘hazarding the welfare of the whole Nation’ for one ‘whom so oft they have tearm’d Agag’ (Tenure, YP 3.193), to the degree that they have become a new set of hirelings importuning Parliament for the re-establishment of ‘Tithes and Oblations’ (Tenure, YP 3.241), they have become a faction, an excrescence like the bishops’ wen in Of Reformation to be cut off or rooted out. And just as the bishops were weeded out seven years earlier, so will God ‘root out them thir imitators’, visiting ‘upon thir own heads that curse ye Meroz, the very Motto of thir Pulpits, wherwith so frequently, not as Meroz, but more like Atheists they have blasphem’d the vengeance of God, and [traduc’d] the zeale of his people’ (Tenure, YP 3.242). At this point, it becomes clear that the violence of Milton’s intolerance is a function of his unusually intense commitment to community—but community in a very specific sense. The coherence and integrity of his imagined community, the community he so often identifies with the English nation as a metonym for all those seeking liberty of conscience, is essential to his own most powerful sense of who he is. As I have argued elsewhere, this is so because the idealized national community is so obviously made in his own image and likeness—it is a ‘Nation not slow and dull, but of a quick, ingenious, and piercing spirit, ²⁷ Edmund Spenser, A View of the State of Ireland [Dublin, 1633], ed. Andrew Hadfield and Willy Maley (Oxford: Blackwell, 1997), 102.


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acute to invent, suttle and sinewy to discours, not beneath the reach of any point the highest that human capacity can soar to’ (Areop., YP 2.551).²⁸ This mutually enabling identity of self and community is the principal point of all those ‘unusual things’ he would ‘venture and divulge’ to us in the 1642 pamphlets (RCG, YP 1.808). In the Apology, for instance, as he announces the assimilation of individual identity into community, it becomes clear just how much community is a part of his own imaginary world. He feels compelled, so he says, to respond to the Modest Confuter not for personal reasons, but because ‘I conceav’d my selfe to be now not as mine own person, but as a member incorporate into that truth whereof I was perswaded’ (AP, YP 1.871, my emphasis). That is, the ‘I’ may be assimilated, but the ‘assimilated I’ only exists, we are reminded, in the writer’s conceiving mind. This is solipsism of a high order, and part of Milton’s greatness lies in his ability to reflect on it and eventually satirize his own egotism, most graphically in the figure of Satan. Because Milton is ‘incorporated’ into the community he first came to imagine in the early 1640s, any threat to it is routinely overestimated as a material threat to his identity, and accordingly elicits the most extreme, albeit verbal, reaction. This explains his fascination with Gibeah and the strange story of the rape of the Levite’s wife in Judges 19–21. It is a story of apostasy, of those within the sacred community, the Benjaminites, so betraying its defining principles that only excision and the bloody re-membering of the community can resolve the harm it’s done. The polluted wife’s dead body is dismembered and its several parts dispatched to all the other tribes of Israel. Only when the tribes come together to destroy their own apostate kin is the nation truly re-membered. Both Irish rebels (Eikon., YP 3.482) and English rakes (Paradise Lost [1667], 1.499–505) are at some point identified with the Benjaminites or ‘sons of Belial’. They are abominations to be purged, just as the bishops and Presbyterians are seen at one time or another as malignant tumors to be excised. My point is, however, that Milton’s rhetorical violence often achieves its most desired effects not in the actions it imagines but in the words that express those actions. That is, his rhetorical violence is almost always as expressive as pragmatic. If the violence of the anti-prelatical tracts performs Milton’s struggle for individual identity, then that of the regicide tracts enacts the struggle to reintegrate that identity with its idealized community. Both stand as testaments to the virtù of the heroic writer. This, it seems to me, is a crucial context for Samson Agonistes. The register of the text is clearly marked out as a poem not a pamphlet, a classical tragedy whose pragmatic design is simultaneously moving in a number of different directions. Its political purpose relies on its only likely readers being sufficiently ²⁸ See Stevens, ‘Milton’s Janus-Faced Nationalism’.

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well educated to understand that its intention is not so much mass-murder as resistance. At the same time, its overall pragmatic design is emphatically aesthetic: as Milton patiently explains in his distinctive reworking of Aristotle, its aim is temperance and delight—‘to purge the mind of [pity and fear, or terror] and such-like passions, that is to temper and reduce them to just measure with a kind of delight, stirr’d up by seeing or reading those passions well imitated’ (SA, CSP 355). In this, the poem is meant to act out the expressive theory of composition by which Milton justified sacred vehemence in the Apology —the aesthetic power of Samson Agonistes comes from the poet’s ability to channel his rage, to build a ‘proper mould and foundation’ out of his violent emotions in order to realize his ‘peculiar guifts, and vertues’ (AP, YP 1.900). At the heart of Milton’s tragedy is a terrible sense of shame. The ‘tumours of a troubled mind’ (SA 185) register the existential disintegration of being, the separation of self from self and community. Samson is at variance with himself. The poem’s violent catastrophe both measures and performs the reintegration of that identity—this is evident from the way Samson explains his growing self-confidence—whatever may happen, ‘of me expect to hear / Nothing dishonourable, impure, unworthy / Our God, our Law, my nation, or myself’ (SA 1423–5). Samson’s self-confidence is confirmed in his father’s joyous conclusion that ‘Samson hath quit himself / Like Samson’ (SA 1709–10). There is a degree, then, to which the poem is an end in itself—not only do ‘apt words have power to suage / The tumours of a troubled mind’ (184–5) but in this case they do so by enabling Milton to realize the poetic identity he had mapped out for himself so many years before in the anti-prelatical tracts. The poem’s violence is a testimony to Milton’s virtù. It is true that the poem is a speech act part of whose perlocutionary force is political—it is a poem about resistance. But much more so its power is illocutionary—it enables Milton to temper his zeal and come to terms with the national community which in 1671 appeared to have deserted him. Things were, however, about to change.

Vehemence Etiolated and the Struggle for Comprehension Nothing demonstrates the success of contemporary criticism’s historicist orientation more succinctly than the fate of Milton’s last pamphlet, the 1674 Declaration, or Letters Patent. Until very recently Milton’s decision to translate and publish the Latin Diploma Electionis S.R.M. Poloniae, a text announcing the election of John Sobieski King of Poland, was considered incomprehensible. As late as 1982, Maurice Kelley was willing to agree with J. M. French to the effect that ‘[n]o satisfactory explanation for his [Milton’s] having performed


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this unusual task at this period in his age has been offered’ (‘Preface’ to LP, YP 8.442). For most scholars in the early 1980s, largely preoccupied with the need to relate Milton to ‘high theory’²⁹ and only dimly aware that the energies unleashed by the new historicism might lead to something other than even more post-structuralist theory, Milton’s intentions in publishing the Letters Patents must have seemed supremely unimportant—even the historian Christopher Hill seems to have missed the point.³⁰ Only in 1995, after new historicism had begun to coalesce with more rigorously empirical forms of historical inquiry, did Nicholas von Maltzahn quite brilliantly make what now seems the obvious connection. The translation was Milton’s oblique way of commenting on the exclusion crisis. The pamphlet offered aid and comfort to those Englishmen and women who wished to exclude the Catholic Duke of York from succeeding his brother Charles II as King of Protestant England, and it did so ‘by proposing the merits of elective kingship’.³¹ The ramifications of this interpretation shed considerable light on the etiolation of vehemence in Milton’s final pamphlets. The conventional way of representing the story of Milton’s life is that its terminus ad quem was the Restoration, the end of the Republic, and the experience of defeat—‘the world turned upside down’ in Hill’s words. Both the quietest and resistance-theory accounts of Milton’s final years accept this point. In the quietest account, given new life in Derek Wood’s passionately argued ‘Exiled from Light’ (2001),³² Milton turns from politics to religion, from hoarse disputes to the paradise within happier far. In the resistance-theory account, now canonized in Barbara Lewalski’s magisterial Life (2001),³³ Milton struggles on to the end, defeated but unconquered, his resistance manifesting itself in a thousand minor subversive speech acts. As Lewalski makes clear, Milton’s final years were in fact quite long—the fourteen or so years from May 1660 to November 1674 amounted to over a quarter of his total adult life span. During that period a great deal happened in the political life of the three kingdoms. Most importantly, the Restoration settlement showed its fragility, the exclusion crisis began, and events began moving rapidly, albeit erratically, ²⁹ At the 1985 dinner of the Milton Society of America in Chicago, for instance, Stanley Fish, in the process of deconstructing Of Prelatical Episcopacy, urged his audience not to be intimidated by the ascendency of Derrida: ‘Come on, we’re Miltonists—we can handle this stuff.’ ³⁰ See Christopher Hill, Milton and the English Revolution (Harmondsworth: Penguin, 1977), 219–20. ³¹ Von Maltzahn, ‘The Whig Milton, 1667–1700’, in David Armitage, Armand Himy, and Quentin Skinner, eds., Milton and Republicanism (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1995), 231. ³² Derek N. C. Wood, ‘Exiled from Light’: Divine Law, Morality, and Violence in Milton’s Samson Agonistes ( Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 2001). ³³ Barbara K. Lewalski, The Life of John Milton (Oxford: Blackwell, 2001).

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towards a new revolution, the ‘Glorious Revolution’ of 1688–9. For many the climax of that revolution was the Toleration Act of spring 1689—formal toleration was limited, but the act began the long process of reintegrating Protestant dissenters into the national community. They were not allowed full inclusion into the Church of England, or ‘comprehension’ as it was called,³⁴ and certain civil disabilities remained, but with the effective end of the penal laws and complete freedom of worship dissenters were granted more liberty and recognition than they had experienced since the end of the Republic.³⁵ The nation’s religious life between the Restoration and the Toleration Act was dominated by the struggle for comprehension. What distinguishes it from the earlier struggles of the 1640s and -50s is the powerful aversion among most English people to violent civil strife, and what the expressive force of Milton’s last pamphlets indicate more than anything else is his own struggle to understand and adapt to this new reality. Over the course of 1672–3 English Protestants achieved a momentary national solidarity in their opposition to Charles II’s March 1672 Declaration of Indulgence granting limited toleration to both Protestant dissenters and Catholic recusants. Many dissenters, including Milton, felt enormous alarm that the state’s indulgence to them would simultaneously compel their toleration of false religion in its most egregious form, indeed, in its defining form of popery. As Parliament forced the king to cancel the Declaration a year later in March 1673, bonfires blazed and Londoners danced in the streets, Milton published Of True Religion, and the heir to the throne was outed as a Catholic. According to the Test Act of 29 March 1673 which followed the cancellation, all office-holders were now required to take the Eucharist according to Anglican rites. The high-church Anglican John Evelyn spoke for many Protestant nationalists when he expressed his outrage at the Duke of York’s refusal—the Duke ‘gave exceeding griefe & scandal to the whole Nation; That the heyre of it, & the sonn of a Martyr for the Protestant Religion should apostatize; What the Consequences of this will be God onely knows, & Wise men dread’.³⁶ That the three kingdoms now had a Catholic heir was to dominate national politics for the next fifteen years. One radical solution was to switch from a hereditary to an elective monarchy and the obvious example of this, an example that became topical ³⁴ The importance of this term is made clear in Elizabeth Sauer’s fine article, ‘Milton’s Of True Religion, Protestant Nationhood, and the Negotiation of Liberty’, Milton Quarterly 40 (2006), 1–19. ³⁵ See Mark Kishlansky, A Monarchy Transformed: Britain, 1603–1714 (Harmondsworth: Penguin, 1996), 292–3; and Tim Harris, Revolution: The Great Crisis of the British Monarchy, 1685–1720 (London: Allen Lane, 2006), 350–2. ³⁶ The Diary of John Evelyn, ed. E. S. de Beer, 6 vols. (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1955), 4.7.


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in May 1674, was the election of John Sobieski as John III of Poland. Milton published his account of the election, the Letters Patents, in July 1674, the same month that he brought out the second edition of Paradise Lost. What is most relevant about the pamphlet to the present argument is the paradox of Milton extolling the virtues of one Catholic king to exclude the succession of another. The paradox is most immediately resolved, however, by the pamphlet’s pragmatic emphasis on the ‘convenience’ of elective succession and by its expressive longing for a national hero—a Samson, a Cromwell, or a Monck (at least up until May 1660), someone, as Milton explained to Henry Oldenburg back in December 1659, who would not ‘compile a history of our troubles but one who [would] happily end them’ (Private Correspondence, YP 7.515).³⁷ The curious resemblance between Sobieski’s climactic act of heroism at the siege of Chocimum (Fall 1673) as it is related in the Letters Patents and that of Charles II’s illegitimate son, the Protestant Duke of Monmouth, at the siege of Maastricht (21 June 1673) as it was celebrated in all kinds of popular displays might be meant to suggest that England’s Sobieski was already at hand. In almost exactly the same way that Monmouth, accompanied on foot by the young John Churchill and at the head of a handful of grenadiers, stormed one of the Dutch defenses’ key batteries, so what is ‘most to be admired’, says Milton’s text, is that Sobieski ‘on Foot at the head of the foot-forces made thorough and forced his way to the Battery, hazarding his life devoted to God and his Countrey’ (LP, YP 8.449).³⁸ Equally important, the resolution of the paradox is predicated on two further points—respect for national difference implicit in notions like ‘the Law of Nations’ (TR, YP 8.431) and admiration for Poland’s idealized reputation as a place of religious toleration. As Milton explains in Of True Religion, the spiritual (as opposed to institutional) comprehension he seeks in the three kingdoms is no greater than that already experienced by Protestants in the tolerationist states of France and Poland, states in which toleration had been legally established the previous century by the Edict of Nantes (1598) and the Confederation of Warsaw (1573): ‘For if the French and Polonian Protestants injoy all this liberty among Papists,’ Milton says, ‘much more may a Protestant justly expect it among Protestants’ (TR, YP 8.426–7). In effectively allowing the fundamental freedom to disavow ‘all implicit Faith’ (TR, YP 8.426) and thereby the binding authority of institutionalized religion, Sobieski as the head of this tolerationist state is being identified with Henrietta Maria’s father, Henri ³⁷ See Paul Stevens, ‘Milton’s ‘‘Renunciation’’ of Cromwell: The Problem of Raleigh’s Cabinet-Council’, Modern Philology 98.3 (2001), esp. 389–92. ³⁸ See Paul Stevens, ‘Milton’s Letters Patents and the Duke of Monmouth’, paper presented at the MLA Annual Convention, Philadelphia, December 2006.

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IV—but neither he nor Sobieski are now to be considered cold neuters. In the Letters Patents and in Milton’s wildly idealized Poland, religious violence has been exiled. Milton’s text can still dwell on ‘cruel slaughter’ and the way the ‘desperation of the Turks whetted [the Christians’] valour’ (LP, YP 8.449), but the violence has been dispatched to the borders, and directed outwards against European Christianity’s traditional enemies, infidel Turks and other ‘oriental’ heathens—all those peoples Milton could not bring himself to imagine in the Tenure as real nations, that is, nations subject to ‘Laws, human, civil, and religious’ (Tenure, YP 3.215). In Milton’s struggle for comprehension, for a new national community, sacred vehemence has little or no place within its boundaries. Nowhere is this more evident than in Of True Religion.³⁹ As the idealized national community of tolerationist Poland is defined in opposition to Turks and Tartars, so the ideal national community of tolerationist England is defined in opposition to Catholicism. And both are defined in opposition to the intolerant state of affairs in contemporary Restoration England. Boundaries do not disappear, but the register in which they are articulated shifts dramatically. In Of True Religion, Milton comes closer than ever to writing ‘against persecution in milk’. As he considers how best to root out the ‘Romish Weed’ (TR, YP 8.417), he explains his proposals without violence and with all kinds of moderate qualification. First, ever willing to observe international law, he emphasizes that by popery he means only as it exists ‘in our Natives, and not Forreigners’ who are ‘Privileg’d by the Law of Nations’ (TR, YP 8.431). Second and more importantly, less than two years after the publication of Samson Agonistes, he is explicit in his rejection of religious violence: ‘corporal punishment, or fines’ stand not with ‘the Clemency of the Gospel’, he supposes. Judicial violence is only permissible if the actions of Catholics endanger ‘the security of the State’ (TR, YP 8.431). The etiolation, diffusion, or draining away of vehemence may have many causes—censorship and Milton’s relative weakness before the formidable power of the Anglican state are obvious contenders—but what I’ve been trying to suggest by focusing on the expressive function of Milton’s texts is something else. The popular demand for the cancellation of the Declaration of Indulgence, that God had ‘giv’n a heart to the people’ (TR, YP 8.417), also gave a heart to Milton and accelerated the convergence of two powerful developments. First, the ³⁹ For recent work on Of True Religion, see Elizabeth Sauer, ‘Milton’s Of True Religion’; Nicholas von Maltzahn, ‘Milton, Marvell, and Toleration’, paper delivered at the Canada Milton Seminar II, Toronto, April 2006 and printed in a revised version in this volume, ch. 5; and Paul Stevens, ‘How Milton’s Nationalism Works: Globalization and the Possibilities of Positive Nationalism’, in David Loewenstein and Paul Stevens, eds., Early Modern Nationalism and Milton’s England ( Toronto: University of Toronto Press, forthcoming 2007).


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self-realization of identity in the completion of the great poems of 1667–71, that is, the fulfillment of his spiritual vocation, made vehemence or ardency of spirit less necessary or compulsive. And second, the new struggle for spiritual comprehension within the Anglican state made it self-evidently ineffective. The challenge that faced Milton’s admirers in 1688, says von Maltzahn, ‘was to transform Milton from a republican to a Whig moderate enough to applaud the Revolution Settlement’ (‘Whig Milton’, 242). My point is that in terms of vehemence or religious enthusiasm, if not so many other things, he was ahead of them. The emergence of a more moderate Milton owes something to Milton’s own adaptability. It encourages his admirers, both then and now, to see the degree to which he was struggling to move beyond the kind of polarization that increasingly disfigures our own world and to look at his enduring commitment to liberty of conscience and its truly open-ended dialogism free from the intolerance, vehemence, and virtù that ironically and disturbingly made so much of its actual expression possible.

14 Secularizing Conscience in Milton’s Republican Community Lana Cable The problem with toleration, for a freedom of conscience advocate like John Milton, is that toleration and freedom of conscience imply disparate and even opposed conceptual realms. Toleration is necessitated by temporal uncertainty and the variables that distinguish human beings one from another: the objective in practice of toleration is civil concord. By contrast, freedom of conscience is necessitated by the unchanging certitude that is presumed to characterize the realm of the divine: the objective in permitting freedom of conscience—as Milton sees it—is not civil concord but oneness with eternal God. Thus, to the extent that seventeenth-century visionaries of faith pursued the interests of free conscience in the political arena, toleration might supply logistical support for journeying from the temporal to the eternal realm. But the temporal objectives of toleration provided only an intermediate staging area for the visionary of faith, an ethical space that facilitated sorting, stocking and repacking of the spirit for its move onward to a higher end. In effect, toleration as a virtue was most prized by devout freedom of conscience advocates when it was practiced by someone else; whereas striving toward divine union was work one took up by and for onself. At the same time, freedom of conscience was prized enough by tolerationists to warrant their putting up with diverse viewpoints, but only so long as proponents of those viewpoints did not disturb the peace. The preceding analysis greatly oversimplifies historical reality, of course. Milton himself moved continually between temporal and eternal frames of reference in order to construct arguments that pertained to toleration. Moreover, what ‘toleration’ could signify early in the century, as when the moderate Anglican Henry Jacob published An Humble Supplication for Toleration and Libertie in 1609, bore little resemblance to what it signified eight decades later, when the 1689 Bill of Toleration was finally passed. But

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this dramatic change of signification for the word was political rather than conceptual. Duality of ethical reference—the temporal realm of toleration versus the eternal realm of free conscience—should be kept in mind for examining toleration throughout the decades that bound Milton’s literary and political world, because it was the potentially contradictory values of these two realms that made seventeenth-century ethical debates intractable.

Ready and Easy Non-toleration Classical republican thinkers, including Milton, struggled to reconcile temporal and eternal realms by bringing the valuational force of a transcendent verity down to earth in secular form, testing their proposals by what Blair Worden terms a ‘politics of virtue’. Despite disparate agendas and ideological incoherence among leaders in the movement, the republican politics of virtue strives to anchor ethical life outside of self-serving claims for individual freedom, so as to pursue practical reforms that would also promote common interest in universal human good. Thus if republican virtue ‘meant different things at different times’, it nevertheless always in Worden’s view ‘asserted man’s capacity to shape his destiny on this earth’.¹ Yet exactly how that destiny might be shaped mattered a great deal, since the changeable definitions of republican virtue meant more than different things: they could mean contradictory things, as demonstrated by even a limited sampling from Milton’s sonnets. There we find Margaret Ley, who praises her father’s ‘noble virtues’ so truly that she herself is judged by all others ‘to possess them’ (‘Sonnet X. To the Lady Margaret Ley’, CSP 290–1); but we find also the unnamed virgin of ‘Sonnet IX’ whose ‘growing virtues’ cause others to ‘fret their spleen’ (‘Sonnet IX’, CSP 291–2). And this virtuous provocation to spiteful resentment seems innocuous when compared to the virtue of General Cromwell, whose ‘glorious way’ of blood crowns him with ‘Worcester’s laureate wreath’ (‘To the Lord General Cromwell’, CSP 328–9); or to the virtue of General Fairfax, whose bloodletting also ‘brings / Victory home’. Yet it is virtue as well that leads Henry Vane to resist bloody recourse, by judging ‘What severs’ civil from religious power and ‘what each means’ (‘To Sir Henry Vane the Younger’, CSP 330–1). Nor is virtue defined by Milton only in political and religious terms. The virtuous judgment of Edward Lawrence produces intimate conviviality: a ‘neat repast’ of ‘Attic taste, with wine’ whose delights are best honored by sparing ¹ Blair Worden, ‘Marchamont Nedham and English Republicanism’ in David Wootton, ed., Republicanism, Liberty, and Commercial Society, 1649–1776 (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 1994), 46–7.

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‘[t]o interpose them oft’ (‘Sonnet XVII’, CSP 344). Virtuous judgment might also dispel the dark mood of Cyriack Skinner, whose ‘deep thoughts’ Milton would ‘drench / In mirth’ so that his friend will ‘measure life … Toward solid good’ rather than fret so much about politics (‘Sonnet XVIII’, CSP 345–6).² What the sonnet portraits tell us about Milton’s classical virtue is that it can be invoked as a standard in a variety of cases, but neither virtue itself nor what it validates can be defined. Indeed, virtue’s practical role as a transcendent verity for upholding human good depends in the sonnets on temporal circumstances that could as easily produce harm: resentment, bloodshed, arbitrary rulings, overindulgence, neglect of duty. The ethical force of a politics of virtue amounts to little more than a gesture made by ambiguous outward signs.³ The politics of virtue nonetheless served multiple republican interests by providing a secular rhetoric for prosecuting reform in ecclesiastical and political institutions alike. Seventeenth-century English activists were creating their own role in the extended European and transatlantic ‘Machiavellian moment’: they too sought political ways of bringing historical contingency under control.⁴ Yet to control contingency by invoking a transcendent secular verity was not necessarily easier than controlling it by religious doctrine: temporal and eternal realms remained difficult to reconcile. For example, on the eve of the 1660 Restoration, when Milton’s hope for a free commonwealth was about to be dashed, he proclaimed a standard of virtue that over fifteen years earlier he had defined as essential to republican government. That standard was to be maintained by the discipline outlined in Of Education and meant ‘to repair the ruins of our first parents by regaining to know ² The complementary variety of Milton’s sonnet portraits leads Anna Nardo to read them as comprising a new kind of sonnet sequence, ‘not one integral work of art’, but rather, Milton’s ‘ideal of the New Jerusalem … A living, inclusive community’. See Anna Nardo, Milton’s Sonnets and the Ideal Community (Lincoln and London: University of Nebraska Press, 1979), 5. The skeptical tenor of the present study should not be interpreted as questioning the genuineness of Milton’s optimism in imagining a community such as Nardo’s analysis brings to life. ³ Although what Martin Dzelzainis calls the ‘moral economy’ of Milton’s republican commonwealth demands cultivation of the virtues by rulers and ruled alike, the resulting ‘virtuous circle’ leaves virtue itself still undefined. See ‘Milton’s Classical Republicanism’ in David Armitage, Armand Himy and Quentin Skinner, eds., Milton and Republicanism (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1995), 3–24. Nigel Smith compares Milton’s undefinable classical virtue with that of populist republican John Streater, who similarly emphasizes the ‘heroic spirit or ethos of liberty’ rather than ‘the fine details of its implementation’: see ‘Popular Republicanism in the 1650s’, in Armitage et al., Milton and Republicanism, 137–55; citation, 149. ⁴ J. G. A. Pocock, The Machiavellian Moment: Florentine Political Thought and the Atlantic Republican Tradition (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1975). David Wootton discusses the centrality of historical contingency in Pocock’s analysis and explains the historical shift whereby republican focus on the politics of virtue, liberty and rights mutates into focus on utilitarian economics: see his introduction, ‘The Republican Tradition: From Commonwealth to Common Sense’ in Wootton, ed., Republicanism, Liberty, and Commercial Society, 1649–1776 (Stanford, Calif.: Stanford University Press, 1994), 1–41.


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God aright … to imitate him, to be like him … by possessing our souls of true vertue’ (Of Ed., YP 2.366–7). Possessing our souls of godlike virtue by his method would outrank classical models, Milton argued, because unlike ‘those ancient and famous schools of Pythagoras, Plato, Isocrates, Aristotle,’ his own educational program would be ‘equally good both for Peace and warre’ (Of Ed., YP 2.407–8). A perfect indifference to historical contingency would be cultivated in future leaders of the commonwealth, by drilling them in alternating doses of aesthetic refinement and soldierly violence. The specifics of Milton’s plan are instructive to recall. At regular daily intervals, the students are to ‘be taken up in recreating and composing their travail’d spirits’ by means of music known for its ‘power over dispositions and manners, to smooth and make them gentle’ (Of Ed., YP 2.409–11). But this regulated gentleness is to be broken off two hours before supper ‘by a sudden alarum or watch word, to be call’d out to their military motions … of embattailing, marching, encamping, fortifying, besieging and battering’ (Of Ed., YP 2.411). The great merit of the academy’s oscillating regimen is that it will produce graduates capable of exercising their godlike virtue without concern for what calls it into action (‘equally good both for Peace and warre’). They will be unconcerned because transcendence above historical contingency is the express purpose in ‘possessing our souls of true vertue’. The stability achieved by such a discipline might on the face of it seem valuable. But indifference to cause is indifference as well to consequence: a leadership disciplined in transcendent virtue detaches itself from actual human experience. In the years that followed Milton’s writing Of Education, it was actual experience that led freedom of conscience advocates themselves to bridge the divide between temporal and eternal realms. As they pressed for legislation to ensure freedom at least for their own godfearing and godseeking consciences, their claims on behalf of individual spiritual sovereignty gradually acquired secular definitions, in the form of legally defensible rights of citizenship, such as freedoms of speech, press and association.⁵ This is not to suggest that secularizing of conscience amounted to an identifiable or self-declared political movement. Secularizers of conscience would have formed as disparate a community as tolerationists, had either been thought of in specifically communal terms. That disparateness helps to explain the uproar created by Charles II when he tried to harness toleration under the 1672 Declaration of Indulgence. The declaration’s ostensible evenhandedness—toleration of Catholics as well ⁵ Richard Greaves illuminates the history of activism by Restoration religious radicals whose nonconformity threatened primarily because of the popular appeal of political causes couched in religious terms. See Richard L. Greaves, Secrets of the Kingdom: British Radicals from the Popish Plot to the Revolution of 1688–1689 (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 1992).

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as Protestant nonconformists—was perceived by the opposition as camouflage for rule by fiat: the king’s indulgence would leave free conscience beholden to the king’s pleasure rather than protected by law. Such a toleration and such a freedom would have been slavery to a neo-Roman republican, Quentin Skinner argues: ‘a state or nation will … be counted as living in slavery if its capacity for action is in any way dependent on the will of anyone other than the body of its own citizens.’⁶ This is why even cancelling the Declaration of Indulgence and agreeing to the 1673 Test Act that excluded Catholics from power did nothing to redeem Charles from charges of popery: the fundamental debate was not about religious belief but political power, in a struggle toward government by law rather than edict. Meanwhile, in the minds of many republicans, the politics of virtue would yield ultimately to a politics of vested material interest and utilitarian economics. Indeed, tolerationist republicans like Henry Neville and other Harringtonians saw classical Roman virtue as a marker of ancient Rome’s poverty, not of its freedom; therefore, any political reforms that also aimed at prosperity would have to confront corruption by addressing first the economic interests of all citizens, including Catholics.⁷ For Milton, however, not even collapse of the republican cause deterred his belief that temporal political hopes could be made to conform to a transcendent ethical ideal. In The Readie and Easie Way to Establish A Free Commonwealth, Milton’s conception of republican virtue rises not only above peace and war but also above the people whose support is required to make the commonwealth free: ‘most voices ought not alwaies to prevail where main matters are in question; … there being in number little vertue’ (REW, YP 7.415). A curious thing happens to secular republican virtue in this argument. First, Milton disdains the greater ‘number’ of people for their ‘little vertue’, yet he acknowledges the need for virtue to be instilled in each of them. For now it is not just the people’s leaders who require transcendent virtue, but the people themselves: their ‘corrupt and faulty education’ must be reformed, in order to make them ‘fittest to chuse’ (REW, YP 7.443). Milton’s concern for fitness to choose thus puts a reformist edge on classical virtue. But rather than propose educational reforms to cultivate that virtue, he subordinates virtue to a trait that is clearly oriented to the realm of the transcendent divine. He gives priority to faith: ‘faith not without vertue, temperance, modestie, sobrietie, parsimonie, ⁶ Quentin Skinner, Liberty Before Liberalism (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1998), 49. ⁷ See Blair Worden, ‘Republicanism and the Restoration, 1660–1683’ in Wootton, ed., Republicanism, Liberty, and Commercial Society, 139–93; Neville references, 144–52.


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justice; … to place every one his privat welfare and happiness in the public peace, libertie and safetie’ (REW, YP 7.443). The traits that accompany faith and animate its presence both in the argument and in the world are ancillary, not definitive or necessary. Faith may ‘place … happiness’ in circumstances like public peace and safety, but faith’s happiness does not depend on these. In the civil realm of Milton’s commonwealth, republican virtue is only one of a string of handmaids to faith, who travels ‘not without’ them, but who does not really need them because her goals are not the same as theirs. Faith trumps contingency, whereas qualities like temperance, modesty, sobriety and parsimony merely cope with it. As with the perspective held by free conscience on toleration, divine faith makes use of these qualities only in the temporal realm. This is why the ‘chosen Patriots’ among Milton’s faithful population have so little actual governing to do that ‘most of thir business will be in forein affairs’ (REW, YP 7.443). Milton’s ready and easy way requires the people to have already established themselves as a free commonwealth: a collection of citizens so like-minded that the need for toleration, or government itself, disappears. Yet he calls for that commonwealth at a moment of temporal crisis in which not even he can identify which citizens might be ‘fittest to chuse’. Judging from the temporal evidence he offers in The Readie and Easie Way, those fit citizens may be hard to identify because they don’t exist. Milton berates the citizenry for failing to choose; he maintains that only a select few have a right to choose; he insists that it is not too late to choose. But then he condemns the people when they do choose, for they choose free trade (the ‘forein or domestic slaverie’ of a ‘rotten’ march into ‘luxurie’ (REW, YP 7.462)) rather than free conscience.⁸ Their choice crystallizes for Milton the problem with toleration, for in his eyes, choosing toward mere temporal ends cancels freedom of conscience. Fully to explain why, perhaps even to himself, will require him to compose an epic poem around the question: the cosmology of Paradise Lost sets out the complete rationale whereby God, not temporal circumstance or contingency, is the reference point for exercising freedom of conscience. ‘Not free, what proof could they have given sincere / Of true allegiance, constant faith or love’ (PL 3.103–4), God asks, and neither the question nor the answer has to do with historical contingency. As he writes The Readie and Easie Way, Milton either does not fully recognize or does not wish to reveal how completely his free commonwealth depends not on republican ideas, nor on a system of laws, nor on procedural guarantees for free election ⁸ Milton’s program of transcendent education for the elite was expressly designed, acccording to Cedric Brown, to save the multitude from this kind of self-enslavement: see ‘Great Senates and Godly Education’, in Armitage, Himy, and Skinner, eds., Milton and Republicanism, 43–60.

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by fit choosers of well-trained leaders. Without explicitly saying so, Milton defines his free republican commonwealth as a contradiction in terms: secular theocracy. This contradiction is not resolved in The Readie and Easie Way. How a commonwealth could address historical contingency without answering either to history or to contingency is not so much rationalized by Milton as it is rhetorically juggled. Since ‘we could not serve two contrary maisters, God and the king’ (REW, YP 7.411), elimination of the king logically turns commonwealth service over to the remaining master. But rather than considering the implications of theocracy, Milton hedges by introducing an alternative pair of ‘contrary masters’ conformable to secular republican principles: ‘or the king and that more supreme law, sworn in the first place to maintain, our safetie and our libertie … the law of nature only, which is the only law of laws truly and properly to all mankinde fundamental; the beginning and the end of all Government’ (REW, YP 7.411–13). With natural law (‘sworn in the first place’ and newly reasserted) as ‘the only law of laws’, divine law seems to have been left outside the governmental framework. Yet after broadening the reach of safety and liberty by ‘supreme law’ to encompass ‘all mankinde’ and ‘all Government’, Milton backtracks. If Parliament and the people ‘will throughly reforme’ they must begin with ‘church reformation (if they throughly intend it) to evangelic rules’, as opposed to ecclesiastical canon rules, which he defines as ‘meer positive laws, neither natural nor moral’ (REW, YP 7.413). Thus Milton slips natural law neatly under the domain of evangelism, but he does it discreetly enough to leave himself free to invoke at his rhetorical or ideological convenience the authority of either religious or secular absolutes: an evangelical God or natural law or liberty of conscience, whichever best serves the polemical need of the moment. As a result, Milton’s claims for commonwealth freedom in Readie and Easie Way turn out to be not only both eternal and temporal, but also both universal and exclusionary, sometimes within a single sentence. He rails against ‘new injunctions to manacle the native liberty of mankinde; turning all vertue into prescription, servitude, and necessitie’; yet before reaching a stop, he baptizes mankind’s native liberty and virtue by deploring ‘the great impairing and frustrating of Christian libertie’ (REW, YP 7.445). The secular values of temporal liberty and virtue have both been rescued by Milton’s argument, but you still have to be a Christian to deserve them. And his closing words may carry exclusion even further as he distinguishes between men who are temporalists (‘ther will want at no time who are good at circumstances’) and men who are eternalists (‘who set thir mindes on main matters … I finde not many’). The man he ultimately does find is Jeremiah, who also had only trees and stones and soil to hear his cry that all the earth’s ‘perverse inhabitants are deaf’ (REW, YP 7.462–3).


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Exclusion and Deliberative Pathos Milton’s exclusionary rhetoric in The Readie and Easie Way is impassioned, but the concerns that gave rise to it were neither imaginary nor merely partisan. From 1660 until the 1688–9 revolution, debates over what can and cannot be tolerated continued in the Protestant reform mode of squaring off over what from a distance might look like differences of religious faith, primarily Protestant versus Catholic. But the debate was not over religious doctrine, nor could practicing toleration to accommodate differing spiritual beliefs settle the issue. During the long-running crisis over who would succeed Charles II, for example, 95 per cent of the pamphlet literature did not even deal with the Catholic Duke of York or the particular threat that would be posed by his ascending the throne.⁹ The primary debate was rather over the current arbitrary policies of Charles II and his abuse of Parliament, a concern that was variously figured as the threat of popery to Protestantism, or the threat of kingly authority over parliamentary government. During the reign of Charles I it had been arbitrary rule, not transubstantiation, that polemicists had in mind when they branded the king’s practices ‘popery’. So when Charles II displayed similar arbitrariness, it was not only religious radicals who charged him with popish tyranny. Recent reassessments of Restoration political history demonstrate that beneath the profligacy and scandal that inspired literary satire during the later Stuart reign, there thrived a culture of power abuse that until recent decades has been largely overlooked. In his two-volume study of republican martyr Algernon Sidney, Jonathan Scott traces the parallels between events that led to rebellion against Charles I and events that alienated Parliament and polarized society by the end of 1680. There was good reason to fear that the reign of Charles II could lead to history repeating itself. Conflict with Parliament over finances, repeated suspension of sessions, foreign influence over the king that included but did not stop at religious influence: all these parallels raised in the minds of those who had experienced it the specter of civil war and another lurch into extreme government. That Charles was beholden to the French Catholic king who had harbored him in exile was no secret to the parliamentary opposition or to controversialists who before and after the Popish Plot ⁹ My treatment of events related to the Exclusion Crisis is indebted to Jonathan Scott, Algernon Sidney and the Restoration Crisis, 1677–1683 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1991). The statistics regarding the response in controversial literature to the succession issue may be found on p. 21. Subsequent page references appear in the text of my argument. For a full history of the republican thinking and political actions that involve Sidney, see Jonathan Scott, Algernon Sidney and the English Republic, 1623–1677 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1988).

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kept anti-Catholic sentiment stirred up. But in late 1678, at the height of alarm over the Popish Plot, it was revealed to Parliament that their repeated prorogations during the 1670s had been the result of a secret deal made between Charles II and Louis XIV. The French king was paying Charles substantial sums of money to keep Parliament out of session and thus excluded from influence over European Protestant affairs. The public outrage sparked by this revelation revived and consolidated republican power behind the ‘managed confrontation’ over parliamentary rights that culminated in the Commons passing the long-debated bill of exclusion (Scott, Restoration Crisis, 34–6, 64–72). The Exclusion Crisis was not simply an effort to keep Catholic King James from ascending the throne: it was rather a growing conviction in Parliament, particularly in the lower house, that the repeated episodes of conflict with Charles II were proving arbitrary government to be inextricable from Stuart monarchy. Yet the revival of republican power created a ripple of concern that the Good Old Cause could also revive, along with its entailments. Since the City of London and House of Commons were now united in resistance to arbitrary government, the rhetoric coming from both echoed the polarizing rhetoric of the old radicalism. Quickly the House of Lords and the king moved to quash the threat. The exclusion bill was defeated in the upper house, and Charles reminded the public that ‘their last experience of ‘‘arbitrary government’’ had in fact come … not from a royal, but from an out-of-control parliamentary power’ (Scott, Restoration Crisis, 45). Less than two months after the Commons passed their bill, Charles dissolved their session and convened a new parliament, pointedly in Oxford rather than London. Yet public memory of arbitrary government included a popish monarchy as well as a military junta: the citizenry knew from experience that models of government in themselves provided no guarantee against repressive rule. The polarization that resulted from the revival of republicanism amounted to a battle over whose absolutism is less arbitrary and unaccountable. Events surrounding the Exclusion Crisis demonstrated that the essential forces contributing to political conflict in 1680 differed little from those of 1660 or 1640, except that those who feared arbitrary rule now seemed to be running out of options. Historical contingency had exposed the fallacy of appropriating transcendent verities—faith, virtue, divine right—in the hope of imposing order on temporal conditions. Since identifiable political parties emerged from the turmoil of the Exclusion Crisis, it is often assumed that partisanship defined the conflict. But this assumption depends on clearly delineated alternative principles of governance, according to which the relative merits of contrasting agendas can be considered and determined. Modern notions of partisanship are too far evolved and


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contrived to describe the party experience of the 1670s. Party loyalties were not only not hardened; they didn’t exist: ‘To a large extent, and with the important exception of some hardliners on both sides, 1678’s ‘‘whigs’’ were 1681’s ‘‘tories’’ ’ (Scott, Restoration Crisis, 47). The dilemma created by having no clear ideological perspective for dealing with political conflict crystallizes the challenge for both toleration and freedom of conscience. Secularizing conscience meant choosing well in an ethical space left confused or even vacant by failed efforts of leaders and institutions to meet their own expectations. For a visionary of faith like Milton, this did not defeat free conscience so long as the concept of a divine absolute remained accessible, as in the cosmology for choosing that he built into Paradise Lost. That John Dryden would have seen fit to treat this cosmology as a mere matter of style, hopelessly out of date, makes pragmatic sense in the political context, as does his wish to bring the ethical power of that cosmology under temporal control by tagging Milton’s lines. Whether or not Paradise Lost would have had the popular appeal required to make it a subversive force in revaluing republican ethics of conscience during the 1670s is beside the point, although the poem’s capacity for such influence is demonstrated by its reception among later republican theorists like Thomas Jefferson.¹⁰ But for secularizing consciences set adrift by the turbulence of later Stuart political culture, the elusiveness of ethical anchorage for public decision-making could be daunting. For Milton, this political dilemma is reflected more by his treatment of free choice in Samson Agonistes than it is in Paradise Lost or Paradise Regained, where ethical footing is unambiguously secured by representing the transcendent realm of the divine. While obviously no secularizer himself, Samson dramatizes the experience of deliberative anxiety that would have been familiar to Restoration secularizers of conscience, regardless of whether they were secularizers by design, as pragmatists in a changing temporal world, or by inadvertence, as collateral damages in the wars of truth. Milton’s dramatization of the anxiety and tragic potential of politically significant choices depends in Samson Agonistes on avoiding mimetic treatment of the divine. The world in which we witness Samson’s struggles over free conscience insists on remaining temporal. Samson’s deliberative impasse prior to entering the Philistine arena is familiar, and as Stanley Fish has shown, his protracted debate with himself over sacred versus profane acts simply surrenders to the word ‘yet’. ‘Yet that he may dispense with me or thee’ catapults Samson out of reasoning discourse, or into higher reality, or both, depending on how ¹⁰ See Hugh Jenkins, ‘Jefferson (Re) Reading Milton’, Milton Quarterly 32.1 (March 1998), 32–8.

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you choose.¹¹ Readers who look to Samson hoping to comprehend human choices that provoke cataclysm in the political arena naturally want to know more about what leads him to disjoin rational analysis from claims on a divine absolute. The question of whether or not this discontinuity of thought makes Milton’s Samson a terrorist continues to stir passions in academic circles.¹² But the more psychologically revealing question remains not whether Samson is or is not a terrorist, but rather, what exactly is it that leads him to make that leap from the temporal realm of rational analysis into a supra-rational or sub-rational or non-rational, possibly non-existent realm, one definable in temporal terms only as relinquishment of will itself? A moment of insight into Samson’s apparent discontinuity of thought, and evidence of the familiarity with which Restoration political culture confronted deliberative anxiety, comes from a jarring but revelatory juxtaposition. The Duke of Buckingham’s Prince Volscius (who like Milton’s Samson also appears in 1671) deliberates not on sacred versus profane spiritual acts, but, rather, on a fashionably secular surrogate, action for honor versus action for love. Like Samson reading the import of his divine strength through the status of his hair (‘How slight the gift was’ (SA 59)), Volscius reads the import of his own ethical dilemma through the dressing of his lower limbs: Sometimes with stubborn honour, like this boot, My mind is guarded, and resolv’d to do’t: Sometimes, again, that very mind, by love Disarmed, like this other leg does prove. … What shall I do? what conduct shall I find To lead me through this twilight of my mind?¹³

Much as Samson does in the tragic twilight of his own mind, Prince Volscius in a bathetic parody of tragic bewilderment finds himself mocked by the flimsiness of the ethical principle he seizes on to sort out his dilemma. Merely to think about donning his war boots is enough to remind Volscius of the pleasures of leaving them off, just as Samson’s recollected glories of strength inevitably plunge him into reliving the shame of giving away his secret. ¹¹ Stanley Fish, ‘Question and Answer in Samson Agonistes’, Critical Quarterly 11 (1969), 254; ‘Spectacle and Evidence in Samson Agonistes’, Critical Inquiry 15 (Spring 1989), 578. ¹² See John Carey, ‘A Work in Praise of Terrorism? September 11 and Samson Agonistes’, The Times Literary Supplement, 6 September 2002, 15–16; see responding articles by Joseph Wittreich, David Loewenstein, Michael Lieb and Stanley Fish in Albert Labriola and Michael Lieb, eds., Milton in the Age of Fish: Essays on Authorship, Text, and Terrorism (Pittsburgh: Duquesne University Press, 2006). ¹³ George Villiers, The Rehearsal, in Brice Harris, ed., Restoration Plays (New York: Modern Library, 1953), 35; the cited passage is in Act 3, Scene 5.


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Despite their distance from each other in dignity and genre, Samson and Volscius share a common burden: their capacity for reason obliges each of them to use reasoning, even if limits in their knowledge or understanding run them into a deliberative dead end. It is the deliberative dead end that marks Samson’s forsaking of reason altogether, surrendering to an unknown will whatever he possesses both of his deliberative faculties and of his own free will. Prince Volscius, unable to discover by deliberation much of a will in the first place, free or fettered, hobbles off the stage, one boot off and one on, fed up with having to make ethical choices at all. In short, no sooner do Samson and Volscius each face dilemmas that require consideration of what ethical choosing actually means, than both heroes start casting about for ways to be rid of their freedom to choose. In narratives that function less as deliberative process than as deliberative pathos, Samson and Volscius alike finish by trading in the demands of rational analysis for a refund of their purchase on absolutes. Deliberative pathos dramatizes the inward experience of conflict between temporal and eternal realms of value. It maps the affective territory of freedom of conscience, the emotional contours of a mental activity that Milton all too casually in Areopagitica equates with reason. By the time of the Restoration, the territory of free conscience had come to include not just the private domain of individual intellectual and spiritual life, but also the public domain of every act of civic choice: free conscience meant future-shaping in all its promise and its peril. In that context, Milton’s talismanic ‘reason is but choosing’ (Areop., YP 2.527) offered a beacon that illuminated only the smoothest parts of a treacherous landscape. The landscape’s treacherousness grew increasingly familiar to those of Milton’s republican community who survived him to witness the Exclusion Crisis. The turmoil of 1680 made especially poignant the on- and off-stage agon of trying to merge temporal and eternal realms into a single liberating concept of secular republicanism. The struggle yielded two broad categories of analysis. Political analysis examined relations between temporal and eternal frameworks for ethical authority in the community; while psychological analysis examined individual conflicts between instinctive, life-affirming personal drives on the one hand and civic duty on the other.

Intolerable Virtue By coincidence or by design, Nathaniel Lee’s Lucius Junius Brutus was first performed three weeks after the republican-sponsored bill of exclusion had been passed by the House of Commons and thrown out by the House of Lords.

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Lee’s dramatic study of the founding of the Roman republic opened in the first week of December 1680 to high acclaim. After no more than six performances the play was shut down, about three weeks before a still defiant House of Commons was itself shut down. Yet the time was ripe for Lee’s play not merely because the Popish Plot, the Exclusion Crisis, and debates over toleration kept English minds focused on republican ideas about free conscience and the rule of law.¹⁴ Lee’s powerful affective tragedy was timely because the political situation generated extraordinary psychological tension with its experience of intolerable political choosing. Lee’s tragedy wrenches because we witness the human machinations behind a secularized individual conscience being sucked into and destroyed for an ideologically constructed political cause, also secular, but of dubious value. Because the play was suppressed by the Lord Chamberlain for containing ‘Scandalous Expressions & Reflections vpon ye Government’,¹⁵ critical convention has largely followed the court’s lead in placing Lee among Whig constitutionalists and anti-monarchists. But if a good many 1678 Whigs really were the Tories of 1681, Lee would surely have been one of that bewildered and disconcerted number, particularly in light of his subsequent collaborations with Dryden. Appearing at the height of the Exclusion Crisis, Lucius Junius Brutus is best viewed as a reflection on the political turmoil itself, with its polarizing conflicts over arbitrary rule, and its exploration of the despair that an increasingly ungovernable temporal realm must have generated in a secularized, idealistic individual conscience. Viewed not as polemic, but as an examination of deliberative pathos, the play provides comfort to no political party. Lee in fact depicts rationales for both republican and monarchical allegiance. But to Lee and to the play, more important than what people think in politics is how they think: political ¹⁴ Comprehensive historical, biographical and critical commentary on Lee and his play are provided by J. M. Armistead, Nathaniel Lee (Boston: Twayne Publishers, G. K. Hall & Co., 1979). See especially ‘The Playwright and His Milieu’, 17–31, and ‘Providential Surgery: Lucius Junius Brutus’, 130–43. Armistead’s reading of the play as a study in republican psychology of ‘hybrid moral vigor’ that favors ‘superhuman law over savage prerogative’ (132–3) is supported by Antony Hammond, ‘The ‘‘Greatest Action’’: Lee’s ‘‘Lucius Junius Brutus’’ ’, in Antony Coleman and Antony Hammond, eds., Poetry and Drama 1570–1700 (London and New York: Methuen, 1981), 173–85. But analysis of political psychology leads others to explore the private psychology of Lee’s hero. Joyce MacDonald reads Brutus’s triumphal paternalism through the ‘sovereign masculinity’ of the Exclusion Crisis in ‘Public Wounds: Sexual Bodies and the Origins of the State in Nathaniel Lee’s Lucius Junius Brutus’, Studies in Eighteenth-Century Culture 32 (2003), 229–44; and J. Peter Verdurmen finds Brutus’s sadism to be ‘politics-cancelling’ in ‘Lucius Junius Brutus and Restoration Tragedy: the Politics of Trauma’, Journal of European Studies 19.2 (1989), 81–98. ¹⁵ John Loftis, Nathaniel Lee: Lucius Junius Brutus (Lincoln, Nebr.: University of Nebraska Press, 1967). The citation is from the ‘Introduction’, xii; subsequent references to lines in the play are identified in the text.


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analysis and psychological analysis combine to expose the reckless trafficking in transcendent ethical values that underpins temporal order. For Lee’s Brutus, merely founding a constitutional polity is not enough to liberate Rome. To create perfect freedom for the people, he must invest his republican constitution with the ethical status of a divine absolute. His ideal Roman republic makes demands similar to the demands Milton’s Samson ascribes to God: unwavering submission of all mortal attributes, including individual reasoning and free will. By sacrificing to the free Roman republic every last vestige of his own humanity, by actually breaking with human identity in the name of the virtuous ideal, Brutus thinks he can obliterate contingency and circumstance, and with these, constitutionalism’s dependence on fallible human reasoning and choice. At the hands of Brutus, deliberative process and deliberative pathos alike go down to defeat. His final speech is delivered from a senate chamber mired in gore: headless bodies and the blood of innocents and guilty alike surround him as he makes a prayer to Jove that is also a final proclamation: the entire world, he believes, has finally achieved a state of absolute virtue, perfect liberty and everlasting peace. This shocking denouement is the logical outcome of Brutus’s contradictory principle of republican liberty: it must be simultaneously temporal and eternal. His vision for Roman freedom is a utopian steady state that, like Milton’s self-governing free commonwealth, could in fact work as easily under monarchical rule as under republican rule, since rule itself is not needed. But in order to achieve the idealized stasis he desires, Brutus must induce others to consign to free republican Rome whatever might contribute to the condition of deliberative pathos. The ingredients of that pathos include every experience and sensory perception and field of reasoning choice that citizens might regard as the natural realm of free conscience and individual will: emotional attachments, domestic virtues and responsibilities, personal hopes, fears or ambitions. The resulting consignment of individual will to the remote ethical absolute that Brutus labels Roman virtue forms the eternal principle on which his idealized republic is to stand. This consignment of individual will is elaborated most fully in Brutus’s dealings with his virtuous son Titus. Titus’s value to Brutus lies not in how the youth might contribute to republican governance with his virtuous character, but rather in how his virtue can be appropriated to republican symbolism. Brutus inventories Titus’s virtues with meticulous detachment: sweet manners, open air, clear brow, manly plain dealing—it is impossible for Brutus not to love Titus. But Titus registers Brutus’s detailed scrutiny as draining him of personal identity, ‘dissolving’ his natural being in order to ‘screw’ him to a performance that will strip him of humanity. ‘Yes, Titus,’ responds Brutus, pleased by his son’s quick insight: ‘I find our genii know

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each other well’ (II.292–3). To embody the absolute virtue of the free Roman republic, he wants possession of Titus’s virtuous soul: ‘If thou art mine, thou art not Teraminta’s’ (II.328). Language conventionalized by heroic play love-and-honor conflicts leads some critics to underestimate the demand that Titus banish his beloved. But how far we are from Prince Volscius territory is shown by the affective detail that Lee builds into the fight for Titus’s soul. When Brutus demands that his son ‘answer to th’austerity of my virtue’ (II.309), Titus responds with a cry of human identity eviscerated: ‘Conscience, heart, and bowels, / Am I a man? Have I my flesh about me?’ (II.346–7). The scene is as graphic a staging as we might imagine of the definition Roger Williams gives to forcing of conscience: ‘soul rape’.¹⁶ It is Brutus alone who claims that his demand serves a higher good and that every other concern ‘must all be lost when honor, / When Rome, the world, and the gods come to claim us’ (II.380–1). What Titus tells Teraminta after the assault has nothing to do with honor, world or gods: ‘My father wrought me up,’ he confesses, ‘I know not how, to swear I know not what, / That I would send thee hence’ (II.482–4). When Titus first yields to Brutus, then betrays him to save Teraminta, and finally recoils from his betrayal, the effect on Brutus is surprisingly complex. Titus’s failure to be absolute for Roman virtue leaves Brutus momentarily bereft of device: ‘I’m at a loss of thought, and must acknowledge / The councils of the gods are fathomless; / Nay, ’tis the hardest task perhaps of life / To be assured of what is vice or virtue’ (IV.275–8). This moment of ethical uncertainty is his only genuinely deliberative moment in the play, an admission of the contingency without which there can be no human meaning, and because of which there will always be pathos. But since being ‘at a loss’ is intolerable for Brutus, he moves quickly to restore his drive toward the ethical absolute. Like Samson, he turns his deliberations on the axis of a ‘yet’. He devises a way for the councils of the gods not to be ‘fathomless’: ‘Yet after all I justify the gods, / And will conclude there’s reason supernatural / That guides us through the world with vast discretion’ (IV.293–5). Not only will Brutus himself ‘justify’ the gods; he ‘will conclude’ their supernatural reason in such a way as to convert his son’s failure into a pattern of his own virtue. Brutus will represent Titus’s death sentence as if it had been determined not by himself, but by a cosmic justice machine turned by ‘the very hand of Jove’ (IV.509). Brutus’s move to ‘fix’ Titus as a symbol of his own virtue by his son’s beheading will once again be mocked by circumstance, but not before the execution’s symbolism is imbedded in republican record: Roman justice makes no distinction of ¹⁶ Samuel L. Caldwell, ed., The Complete Writings of Roger Williams, 7 vols. (New York: Russell & Russell, 1963), 3.182.


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persons, in life or in death. Ultimately, Titus spurns appropriation of his identity to Roman symbolism by having the loyal Valerius fulfill a promise made to him earlier. With a sword, not the executioner’s axe, Valerius runs the young man through, robbing Brutus of his transcendent symbol of Roman ‘justice’. Lee’s spectacle of ordinary human virtue sacrificed to the greater good of a free republic argues that nothing of value survives absolute rule, and nothing heroic comes of transcending what is human. Nevertheless, the urge toward absolutism and transcendence persisted in secular republican ideology and iconography. Pierre-Narciss Guerin’s 1793 painting La Morte de Brutus, in the Museum of the French Revolution at Vizille, depicts the slain Roman republican hero being carried off the battlefield by his compatriots. The painting upset revolutionaries, many of whom would have preferred to see Brutus heroically astride a rearing stallion, to convey the virtuous fortitude of the new republic. Instead, Guerin’s Brutus is obviously dead: his skin is ghastly pale and drawn, his head lolls, and his limbs are stretched and nearly disjointed by the weight of his body as his friends struggle to lift him out of the fray. Critics who thought the painting too morbidly realistic apparently overlooked how its appropriation of divinity mimes another work of art. With great care, Guerin painted his dead Brutus to evoke the iconic power of Michelangelo’s Pietà. Since in Eikonoklastes Milton excoriated appropriation of Christian imagery to confer divinity on Charles I, he might have been equally disturbed to see this tactic used to promote republican ideals. But the evidence of his own ambiguous trafficking between temporal and eternal realms in republican politics suggests that we will never be sure.

15 Milton, Islam and the Ottomans Gerald MacLean That Milton himself seldom referred directly to Islam, to Muhammad, or to the Ottomans, ‘the scourge of God’ as they were commonly known, should not lead us to presume that he was either ignorant of, or entirely indifferent to, the crucial place that they had come to occupy in the seventeenth-century debates concerning religious toleration, political freedom and national identities. Taking a lead from Arab-Islamic responses to Milton that have focused on his treatment of Satan, I will suggest that Milton’s unorthodox treatment of ancient sources has made him attractive to a variety of Muslim thinkers who recognize in Milton’s literary works an attitude toward religious toleration remarkably in line with their own traditions. Of Ottoman statecraft in this respect, Géza David has observed that, while ‘it would be an exaggeration to speak here of religious toleration in the modern sense’, Christianity in the Balkans continued to thrive during the Ottoman occupation of the sixteenth century: new churches were built, Christian art flourished, church leaders retained the right of taxation and of jurisdiction in religious and civil law. In many areas of the Balkans, large contingents of Christian soldiers guarded strategic areas, outnumbered Muslim troops, and never once initiated anti-Ottoman movements. In the secular sphere, traditional taxes on the sale of wine and on pigs slaughtered for Christmas were permitted to continue unabated under Ottoman administrators who drank no wine nor ate any pork.¹ Indeed, to western Europeans of Milton’s era who were accustomed ‘to monarchies which attempted to impose uniformity of faith’, the legal and My thanks to Sharon Achinstein and Elizabeth Sauer for invaluable comments on earlier drafts of this essay, and to audiences at Sussex, Reading, and Cambridge for challenging questions. ¹ Géza David, ‘Administration in Ottoman Europe’, in Metin Kunt and Christine Woodhead, eds., Süleyman the Magnificent and His Age: The Ottoman Empire in the Early Modern World (London: Longman, 1995), 71–90.

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religious pluralism of the Ottoman Empire was among its most striking features.²

Toleration and the Ottomans ‘May not Christians be ashamed to be taught of a Turke?’ William Bedwell, 1615

Consider, for instance, the anxiety that accompanied the recognition that the Ottomans were more tolerant of religious differences than the rulers of European Christian states, such as the Habsburgs, French, and Venetians, who sought to impose religious uniformity. In 1529, Martin Luther uttered a half-truth when noticing: ‘some praise the Turk’s government because he allows every one to believe what he will so long as he remains temporal lord, yet this reputation is not true, for he does not allow Christians to come together in public.’³ In fairness to Luther, he probably did not know that Mehmed II (r. 1451–63), known in the west as ‘the Conqueror’, allowed the Genoese community of Galata ‘to trade, travel, own property and worship as they pleased’ following his capture of Istanbul in 1453 despite the fact that they had assisted in the city’s defence.⁴ Next year, far from preventing Christians from gathering to worship, Mehmed had George-Gennadios Scholarius installed Patriarch of the Orthodox Church; a position left vacant for many years under the Byzantines.⁵ Mehmed’s motives were to repopulate the city with skilled Anatolians of the Greek faith, but this was not the act of a despot seeking to expel, persecute or convert Christians. Jean Bodin is often cited for observing: The great emperour of the Turkes doth with as great devotion as any prince in the world honour and observe the religion by him received from his ancestours, and yet detesteth hee not the straunge religions of others; but to the contrarie permitteth every man to live according to his conscience: yea and that more is, neere unto his pallace at ² Colin Imber, Ebu’s-Su’ud: The Islamic Legal Tradition (Edinburgh: Edinburgh University Press, 1997), 6. ³ Martin Luther, ‘On War Against the Turk, 1529’, cited by Daniel Goffman, The Ottoman Empire and Early Modern Europe (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2002), 110. ⁴ Colin Imber, The Ottoman Empire, 1300–1481 (Istanbul: Isis Press, 1990), 158, citing E. Dallegio d’Allesio, ‘Le texte grec du Trait, conclu par les Génois de Galata avec Mehmet II, le 1er juin, 1453’, Hellenika 11 (1939), 115–24. ⁵ Philip Mansel, Constantinople: City of the World’s Desire, 1453–1924 (1995; rpt. Harmondsworth: Penguin, 1997), 9–10.

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Pera, suffereth foure divers religions, viz. That of the Jews, that of the Christians, that of the Grecians, and that of the Mohametanes.⁶

Bodin was not far off the mark. Certainly by modern standards, the Ottoman state was discriminatory, imposing higher taxes on non-Muslims living within its borders than on Muslims, and dictating unenforceable sumptuary laws. But by contemporary standards ‘the Muslim treatment of Jews and Christians was relatively tolerant and liberal’.⁷ When Milton was born, information about Ottoman attitudes and policies toward non-Muslims was widely available in English as well as other European languages.⁸ Often employed by Anglo-Protestant writers as a stick to beat Roman Catholicism, the argument that the Ottoman sultan was less intolerant than the Pope took several different forms even as it was reiterated throughout Milton’s lifetime. William Biddulph, an English chaplain in Aleppo, was by no means ecumenical in his outlook and was consistently worried that he would be spiritually contaminated by contact with Jews, Muslims, pagans, Roman Catholics and members of the Eastern Christian communities. But in his Travels (1609), published a year after Milton’s birth, even he felt impelled to concede: I hold it better for Merchants and other Christians to sojourne and to use trade and trafficke amongst Turkes then Papists; for, the Turke giveth libertie of conscience to all men, and liketh well of every man that is forward and zealous in his owne religion. But among the Papists no man can buy and sell, unlesse hee beare the markes of the beast as S. John foretold, Revelation 13:17.⁹

In Istanbul three years later, preaching at the funeral of Anne, Lady Glover, the first English ambassadorial wife to reside in Pera, William Forde used the occasion to denounce the Pope in no uncertain terms. ‘The Turke’, he declared, ‘permitteth Christs Gospel to be preached; the Pope condemneth it to the racke and inquisition; who is the better man?’¹⁰ Later English travellers who wrote of visiting Ottoman lands, such as George Sandys (1615) and Henry Blount (1636), also reported on Ottoman toleration of other religions.¹¹ ⁶ Jean Bodin, The six Bookes of a Commonweale, trans. Richard Knolles (London: G. Bishop, 1606), 6.537. The Ottomans had no palace at Pera. ⁷ Hugh Goddard, A History of Christian–Muslim Relations (Edinburgh: Edinburgh University Press, 2000), 68. ⁸ See Matthew Dimmock, New Turkes: Dramatizing Islam and the Ottomans in Early Modern England (Aldershot: Ashgate, 2005) for a recent assessment. ⁹ William Biddulph, The Travels of certaine Englishmen (London: Thomas Haveland for William Aspey, 1609), 60–1. ¹⁰ William Forde, A Sermon Preached at Constantinople (London: Edward Griffin for Francis Constable, 1616), sig. A2. ¹¹ For Sandys, see James Ellison, George Sandys: Travel, Colonialism and Tolerance in the Seventeenth Century (Cambridge: D. S. Brewer, 2002), 76–7.


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Among his reasons for travelling, Blount listed the desire to witness for himself the ‘sects which live under the Turkes, as Greekes, Armenians, Freinks, and Zinganaes, but especially the Jewes’.¹² Throughout the century this coexistence of so many potentially antagonistic communities within Ottoman society fascinated early British visitors for whom the establishment of mosques, synagogues or Orthodox churches in London, Dublin or Edinburgh would have been inconceivable. At the same time, Ottoman toleration, combined with the appeal of ‘turning Turk’, proved so compelling that, in 1612, three thousand British mariners were living and working in the Ottoman regencies of North Africa and refused to return.¹³ For men of humble origins, freedom of religion may have been less important than access to wealth and status, but for Hugh Holland, the Westminster-educated poet and sometime fellow of Trinity College, Cambridge, living in the Ottoman Empire provided liberty to practise the Roman Catholicism to which he had converted.¹⁴ It was, however, not only chaplains, travellers, mariners and converts with direct experience of the Muslim world who acknowledged that the Ottomans permitted liberty of conscience. Nor was the Pope the exclusive target of reproof since the same case would be made against bishops, and later the Presbyterians; that they too should be ashamed to be less Christian in their policies than the Ottomans. For the Baptist Leonard Busher writing in 1614, the ‘Turks’ exemplified how governments should respect individual conscience. Busher’s pamphlet Religions Peace catalogued numerous reasons why religious persecution contravened Christian belief and has been hailed as ‘the earliest treatise known to be extant’ on the ‘great theme’ of liberty of conscience.¹⁵ Busher addressed himself to King James and ‘the Princely and right Honorable Parliament’: ¹² Henry Blount, A Voyage into the Levant (London: John Leggatt for Andrew Crooke, 1636), 2. ¹³ On 4 Feb. 1612, the Venetian ambassador in London, Antonio Foscarini, wrote to the Doge and Senate after consulting with Lord Salisbury: ‘Council has resolved to grant an universal pardon to the pirates subjects of his Majesty, as has been asked for in their name by ten of them who are now in Ireland. The Prince has lent his authority to this scheme as he wishes to see the mariners of this Kingdom augmented by those who are now buccaneering and whose number is put down at three thousand men’, Calendar of State Papers: Venetian, Vol. XII: 1610–1613, ed. Horatio F. Brow (London: Stationery Office, 1905), 283. ¹⁴ Holland eventually returned to England where, in the words of Thomas Fuller, ‘he grumbled out the rest of his life in visible discontentment’, The History of the Worthies of England, ed. John Nichols, 2 vols. (London: Rivington et al., 1811), 2.267; see S. G. Culliford, ‘Hugh Holland in Turkey’, Modern Language Notes 69.7 (November 1954), 489–93; and Louise Guiney, Recusant Poets (London: Sheed and Ward, 1938). ¹⁵ So Edward Bean Underhill, editor of Tracts on Liberty of Conscience and Persecution, 1614–1661 (London: J. Hadden, 1846), 6.

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I read that a Bishop of Rome would have constrained a Turkish Emperor to the Christian faith, unto whom the emperor answered, I beleeve that as Christ was an excellent Prophet, but he did never (so far as I understand) command that men should with the power of weapons bee constrained to beleeve his law; and verily, I also do force no man to beleeve Mahomets law. Also I read that Jews, Christians, and Turks are tolerated in Constantinople, and yet are peaceable, though so contrary the one to the other. If this be so, how much more ought Christians not to force one another to Religion? and how much more ought Christians to tolerate Christians when as the Turks do tolerate them? shall we be lesse mercifull then the Turks? or shall we learne the Turks to persecute Christians?¹⁶

A year after Busher’s pamphlet appeared, the Arabic scholar William Bedwell echoed Busher’s words in an ironic reversal, asking: ‘May not Christians be ashamed to be taught of a Turke?’¹⁷ Bedwell’s book, Mohammedis Imposturae: that is, A Discovery of the Manifold Forgeries, Falshoods, and horrible impieties of the blasphemous Seducer Mohammed (1615), was the earliest serious attempt to explicate Islam for English readers. Yet Bedwell was so far from being an apologist for Islam that the modern Arabist Alastair Hamilton notes how his ‘object [was] not to understand Islam, but to attack it and expose it to ridicule’ while showing ‘that the Qur’an is inadequate for salvation and to prove the importance of translating the Gospels into Arabic’.¹⁸ Despite hostility to Islam, Bedwell conceded that Christians might have something to learn from ‘the Turke’. For his part, Busher found further lessons to be learned from Ottoman precedent and shifted his attack beyond bishops to include intolerant Protestants. In listing reasons against religious persecution, he turns the Ottoman example into a sliding scale of blame, invoking Paul’s letter to the Romans, 2:1–3, to show that Protestants who prosecuted other Christians were worse than ‘Papists’, ‘Turks’ or pagans. ‘Fourteenthly,’ he writes because the burning, banishing, hanging, and imprisoning of men and women, by Protestants, for difference of Religion, do justifie the burning, banishing, and imprisoning of men and women, by the Papists, for difference of religion, even as the Papists doe justifie the Turks and Pagans in such like cruelty and tyranny; wherein now is the Protestants more mercifull then the Papists, or the Papists then the Turks? Wherefore as the Papists (when they complain of the Turks and Pagans, for their bloody persecution) doe therein condemn themselves, because they are found to do the same, yea worse, for it is greater tyranny for one Christian to force & kil another, then for Turks and Pagans to kil a christian [sic] for that is no such great wonder, ¹⁶ Leonard Busher, Religions Peace: Or, A Plea for Liberty of Conscience (London: John Sweeting, 1646), 6. My thanks to David Loewenstein for drawing my attention to this work. ¹⁷ William Bedwell, Mohammedis Imposturae (London: Richard Field, 1615), sig. G2. ¹⁸ Alastair Hamilton, William Bedwell the Arabist, 1563–1632 (Leiden: Brill, 1985), 68–9.


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seeing it is a paganish part, who have no better knowledge, but Christians should have better knowledge and more mercy then to play the pagans against christians: So also the Protestants, when they complain of the Papists for their bloody and beastly persecution, doe therein condemn themselves, seeing they doe the same, for which they blame others, and so are rebuked of the Scripture, which saith, Therefore thou art inexusable O thou man, whoseover thou art that blamest another, for in that thou judgest another, thou condemnest thyself, for thou that judgest doest the same things: and thinkest thou this O human (that judgest them which do such things, and thou doest the same) that thou shalt escape the judgment of God? (Religions Peace, 12–13)

Published in Amsterdam in the year of the Addled Parliament, Busher’s tract was ignored by the king and the Members of Parliament to whom it was addressed. But among radical sectarians it was not forgotten. In the spring of 1646 it was reprinted just as the Westminster Assembly was preparing to proclaim the Confession of Faith that, to the horror of Milton and others, would establish Presbyterianism in England.¹⁹ Even as Milton was composing his sonnet ‘On the New Forcers of Conscience’ to expose how the envy, ‘tricks’ and ‘plots’ of the Westminster divines rendered ‘New Presbyter … but old Priest writ large’, Busher’s lesson from the Ottomans found new life. The Independent preacher Henry Burton, whose earlier writings were known to Milton, was probably responsible for the reissue of Religion’s Peace.²⁰ It appeared with a new epistle ‘To the Presbyterian Reader’ signed ‘H.B.’ that explicitly aimed to include not only the ‘Papists’ and Laudian bishops of Busher’s initial attack, but also ‘my Brethren in the Presbyterian way’ who were currently assembled in Westminster and needed to be warned ‘that this Nation will never be happy … till liberty of Conscience be allowed’ (sig. A3v ). Citing examples from Ottoman history to highlight Christian hypocrisy was not restricted to radical preachers and theologians.²¹ In 1656 Francis Osborne noted how Ottoman ‘Practise [was] not so bad as some Christians’, instancing ‘the French Massacre; the foulnes of which story hath not yet been matched by Mahumet, or any of his disciples’.²² In 1660 the Cambridge Platonist Henry More—who had been at Christ’s College at the same time as Milton—devoted entire sections of his Explanation of The grand Mystery of Godliness to show ¹⁹ The title-page license by John Bachiler is dated 1 April, while George Thomason dated his copy on 25 April. A copy was listed in the library of Milton’s friend, Nathan Paget; see Christopher Hill, Milton and the English Revolution (1977; rpt. London: Faber, 1997), 494. ²⁰ Christopher Hill argues that Milton aimed Areopagitica at Parliament in hopes of persuading them to reject the Westminster Assembly and suggests that he drew upon earlier writings by Burton, among others; see Milton, 150–1. ²¹ See C. Edmund Bosworth, ‘The Prophet Vindicated: A Restoration Treatise on Islam and Muhammad’, Religion: A Journal of Religion and Religions 6.1 (1976), 1–12. ²² Francis Osborne, Politicall Reflections upon the Government of the Turks (London: Thomas Robinson, 1656), 115, 117.

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how Muhammad was ‘far more orthodox in the main points of Religion then the above-named Impostours’, namely the Quaker David George, and the Familist Henry Nicolas.²³ Further instances of citing Ottoman toleration to chastise Christians appeared throughout the century, but it is an argument that Milton never made.

Milton, Islam and Arab-Islamic Criticism Milton’s references to Islam and the Ottomans tend to be oblique, learned, illustrative, polemical, incidental and surprisingly stereotyping. Allusions to the East in his poetry are of the exoticizing kind which, by Milton’s era, had begun replacing the expressions of fear and loathing characteristic of the medieval period when Christian recognition of ‘the obvious material superiority of the Muslim ruling peoples’ had created ‘an inferiority complex towards the Muslim world’ (Bosworth, ‘Prophet’, 1, 2). Although Arabic was taught in his day at Cambridge, and an English version of the Qur’an appeared in the pivotal year of 1649, Milton’s writings might seem to suggest that he was less than profoundly interested in Arabic, Islam, or the Ottomans. Perhaps, then, it is not entirely surprising that the recent resurgence of interest in England’s intellectual and cultural relations with the Muslim world during the early modern period has continued to pass Milton by. Focused instead on Shakespeare and the largely imaginative theatrical representations of Turks, Moors and Jews, recent studies have demonstrated that Renaissance England—and Europe generally—was far more deeply preoccupied and influenced by Islamic and eastern cultures than previous generations cared to admit. But they have so far had little to say about Milton: the forthcoming Milton Encyclopedia is entirely silent on Islam, Muhammad and the Ottomans.²⁴ Can it be that Milton, perhaps the most learned, engaged, and copious writer of his generation on topics political and religious, really had nothing of interest to say about Islam and the Muslim world? Throughout the 1640s, Milton was very much a public figure who was paid to be in the know. In March of 1649, the year The Alcoran of Mahomet appeared, he was appointed Secretary for the Foreign Tongues by the Council of State only some weeks after publishing The Tenure of Kings and Magistrates in February. Spending much of that year writing Eikonoklastes—a work that revisits the issue of idolatry that had been so crucial for establishing the ²³ Henry More, An Explanation of The grand Mystery of Godliness (London: John Flesher for W. Morden, 1660), 155. My thanks to Sarah Hutton for drawing my attention to this work. ²⁴ http://www/bangor.ac.uk/english/MiltonEncyclopedia/full-list-headwords.htm when accessed on 1 November 2005.


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trade agreements between Elizabeth and the Ottomans—can Milton have been unaware of the furor throughout the spring and summer following plans to publish an English Qur’an? What are we to make of Milton’s seeming silence? Was he not at all concerned or interested by the publication of an English translation of the Qur’an in that signal year of 1649?²⁵ In the only scholarly study of Milton and Islam to be published, John Milton and the Arab-Islamic Culture, Professor Eid Abdallah Dahiyat of the University of Jordan writes: ‘there is no concrete evidence that Milton read the Qur’an.’²⁶ Nonetheless, Dahiyat reminds us, Milton could have learned a great deal about Islam and the culture of Muslim peoples from reading works such as Richard Knolles’s General History of the Turks (1603), George Sandys’s Relation of a Journey (1615), and Andrew More’s Compendius History of the Turks (1660) as well as Samuel Purchas’s Hakluytus Posthumous. Why Dahiyat selects these works is not clear: we know Milton was interested in Purchas, but More’s summary history, published in the year of the Restoration by which time Milton was blind, is an intriguing choice. Dahiyat’s point, however, is well taken: Milton must have been reasonably well informed about the history and current state of the Ottoman Empire. According to Dahiyat, Milton’s relation to Islam has been at the centre of disagreement and even controversy among Arab-Islamic scholars, critics and writers for some time, his treatment of Satan in Paradise Lost receiving particular attention. What these writers share is a desire to assimilate Milton into their own projects and agendas. On one hand there are those like Luwis ‘Awad, the distinguished scholar and ‘former professor of English literature at the University of Cairo’, who in 1967 declared Milton’s works to be entirely in accordance with the teachings of Islam: When we read Paradise Lost, we feel that Milton is a devout Muslim. This is reflected in his rejection of Prelates and their mediation between God and His creatures. You also find Milton as a lover of life on earth. He interprets the Bible in practical and personal ways. He advocates divorce and considers man superior to woman. He also hates the rituals of church and the icons. He draws on the Old Testament, not the New Testament. For these reasons, I have already said that Milton was not Christian, but rather a pious Muslim. (Cited in Dahiyat, Milton, 68)

I cannot imagine what Milton would have made of this enthusiastic claim on his devotions and loyalties, but fashioning Milton in the critic’s own ²⁵ The Alcoran of Mahomet (London: [np], 1649) was published 7 May 1649. On the contemporary controversy, see my ‘Before Orientalism? Islam, Ottomans, and Moors in the English Renaissance’, Review 22 (2000), 229–47. ²⁶ Eid Abdallah Dahiyat, John Milton and the Arab-Islamic Culture (Amman: Shukayr and Akasheh, 1987), 70.

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image is an approach that has also been adopted by numerous Christian and Jewish scholars for their own purposes: according to Paul Stevens, Stephen Greenblatt has even tried to make Milton an American.²⁷ Numerous Arab critics, often with political or aesthetic rather than religious motives, have launched attempts to assimilate Milton by finding Arabic sources for those aspects of Milton’s poetry that they most admire; many have suggested that Milton was indebted to the Risalatu-al-qhufran (Epistle of Forgiveness) by the great Arab poet Abu al-’Ala al-Ma’arr¯ı(973–1057 CE) (Dahiyat, Milton, 70–5). Satan has regularly been at the centre of such attempts to assimilate Milton. According to Dahiyat, the Romantic belief that Satan was Milton’s energetic and rebellious hero greatly influenced many twentieth-century Arab writers, intellectuals, poets, and critics. A Lebanese philosopher, Omar Farrukh, went so far as to claim that Milton had been directly influenced by the Qur’anic account of Satan, and that Paradise Lost offered readers ‘an echo of what is said of the devil in the Qur’an’ (cited Dahiyat, Milton, 70). Writing in 1948, Farrukh was not alone in wanting to link Milton’s Satan with the Qur’anic version. Mahmud al-Khaf¯ıf, writing in 1946, considered Paradise Lost to be ‘the story of Iblis who rebelled’, while S.afa Khulus.¯ı, ‘former professor of Arabic at the University of Baghdad’ writing in 1957—with Suez no doubt very much in his thoughts—argued that Satan was ‘Milton himself, Milton the revolutionary’ (Dahiyat, Milton, 78–85). Such responses to Milton are hardly idiosyncratic. Inspired by Shelley’s reading of Milton’s Satan as a revolutionary hero, ‘Abas Mahmud al-‘Aqqad, ‘one of the most outstanding twentieth century Arab writers’, wrote an entire book, Iblis (1969), that re-examines the history of the devil with Milton’s Satan ever before him. Rather than finding evidence that Milton ever read any Arabic poetry or the Qur’an, Dahiyat discovers that Arab poets have written about Satan, the revolutionary hero, with the Romantic understanding of Milton’s text in mind (Dahiyat, Milton, 80–95). Based on Paradise Lost and al-Ma‘arr¯ı’s Risalatu-al-qhufran, the Iraqi revolutionary poet Jam¯ıl Sudqi az-Zahaw¯ı wrote his highly praised Thawreh fil Jahum (A Revolution in Hell) in 1931 claiming that, like Milton, he ‘wrote the poem after failing to stage a revolutionary war on earth’ (cited in Dahiyat, Milton, 82). Al-‘Aqqad also composed several poems based on Milton’s Satan that promoted the need for rebellion against tyranny. ²⁷ Paul Stevens, ‘Milton and the New World: Custom, Relativism, and the Discipline of Shame’, in Balachandra Rajan and Elizabeth Sauer, eds., Milton and the Imperial Vision (Pittsburg: Duquesne University Press, 1999), 90–111; ref. to Greenblatt, p. 90. As Stevens points out, the most sustained efforts to make Milton an American appear in J. Martin Evans, Milton’s Imperial Epic: Paradise Lost and the Discourse of Colonialism (Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 1996).


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The history of Arab-Islamic critical response to Milton is the history of attempts by academics, writers, critics and poets, to make Milton their own. How can we understand this affinity, this attraction? What we are to make of this desire for Milton? What is the significance of this project, common among Arab-Islamic writers of widely different views, to refashion Milton’s imaginative writing as an integral part of their own religious, political and poetic endeavors? The question does seem especially important at a time when there are those in positions of considerable authority who would insist that these things are impossible and cannot be; that the Islamic and Christian traditions and world views are not simply incompatible, but inevitably locked into a clashing conflict with no common grounds: certainly no shared interest in understanding the nature of evil. Dahiyat may be right to dismiss many of their claims on scholarly grounds, but that does not mean we should ignore or dismiss these writers’ eagerness to make Milton speak to them, with them, and even for them. That desire, which crosses an enormous but evidently bridgeable divide, is itself a fact that must not be ignored or forgotten. And it is equally important, I think, to take these writers’ enthusiasm seriously, regardless of its aims or purposes. However misguided or misinformed some of these efforts might seem in a scholarly context, the desire they express is powerful evidence that writers schooled in the Islamic tradition can and do recognize common cause with the Christian tradition; at least with Milton’s often revolutionary version of it. What made them want Milton to be part of their own story must be of interest and importance if we are to continue the endeavor of making clear that, in the early modern period, as today, there were and are numerous points of contact between and among Christians, Jews and Muslims that are in the process of being erased but should not be forgotten.

Satan and Iblis One recurrent point of contact, one site where readers of Milton from the Arab-Islamic world most often find Milton telling them a familiar story, is the Qur’anic version of how envy transformed Iblis into Satan and directly led to the temptation and fall of Adam and Eve from Paradise. Dahiyat insists that Milton’s sources for his treatment of Satan in Paradise Lost did not include the Qur’an, but rather included ‘the Old and New Testaments, the books of the Apocrypha and Pseudepigrapha, Talmud, Targums, as well as … classical mythology’. Dahiyat writes: ‘There is no concrete evidence that Milton read the Qur’an’ (Dahiyat, Milton, 70). But absence of evidence has never been evidence of absence. So in these extraordinary times, when any signs of attraction or agreement or affiliation between the Arab-Islamic world and

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the Christian West are worth supporting and pursuing, I propose to pursue a counterfactual question: What if Milton did read the 1649 Alcoran? What would he there have found out about the Islamic Satan? Satan shows up often in the Qur’an, but only nine times is he also named Iblis, and on these I will focus. The English Alcoran of 1649 translates both Satan and Iblis as ‘Devil’, but the distinction is worth noting. Iblis, from Arabic roots suggesting desperation and rebellion, is (like Lucifer) the name of the heavenly member who is thrown out and renamed Satan, from Arabic roots suggesting perversity and enmity. The first time Iblis is named in the Qur’an occurs early on in Surah 2, Al Baqarah ( The Cow or Heifer) when Allah describes commanding the inhabitants of Heaven to bow before Adam. The passage is given thus in the 1649 translation: Remember thou, that we said to the Angels, Humble yourselves before Adam; they all humbled themselves, except the Devil: He was already proud, and in the number of the wicked. We said unto Adam, Dwell thou and thy wife in Paradise, and eat there what thou likest, but approach not that Tree, least thou be in the number of the unjust. The Devil made them to sin, and depart from the Grace in which they were; then we said to them, descend you enemies one to another, you shall have a dwelling upon Earth, and goods wherewith to live for a time. (Surah 2:34, in Alcoran, 4)

In this translation—which was rendered into English from a French translation—the first ‘Devil’ who exceptionally refused to bow to Adam from pride, is named Iblis (desperation and rebellion) and the second ‘Devil’ who leads mankind astray is named Satan (perversity and enmity).²⁸ A further point which the 1649 translation obscures is that Iblis was also exceptional because he was not an Angel but a Jinn, as a later Surah makes clear. All the Angels humbled themselves, in other words, but not so Iblis, who was no Angel but a Jinn who had been specially elected to Heaven for his piety (Yusuf ‘Al¯ı, Meaning, 25 n. 49). Apart from the heavenly origins it gives to Adam, the Qur’anic account is otherwise much in line with Milton’s version of events—‘All seemed well pleased, all seemed, but were not all’ (Surah 5:617). Satan’s envy causes him to seek revenge on Adam and Eve by deceiving them into eating from the forbidden tree, resulting in their expulsion from and the wasting of Paradise. Iblis next appears in Surah 7, Al A’raf ( The Heights) which provides a fuller explanation of how his refusal to bow in Heaven directly causes Adam and Eve to lose Paradise. Allah is complaining to mankind about human ingratitude. I give the passage at length since the other Iblis passages provide variant versions of this basic narrative. ²⁸ ‘Abdullah Yusuf ‘Al¯ı, The Meaning of the Holy Qur’an: Tenth Edition (Beltsville, Md.: amana, 2003), 25 n. 52.


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We gave you your habitation on the Earth, and there bestowed on you what was necessary for your nourishment; but few of you are grateful to me. We created and formed you, and commanded the Angels to worship Adam, which they performed, except the devill [Iblis], to whom we said, what hindred thee to worship Adam when we commanded thee? He answered, I am better then he, thou hast created me of fire and hast created man of the mire of the earth; then said we to him, depart out of Paradise, it is not the habitation of the proud, thou shalt be in the number of them that shall be laden with ignominy; the devill [Satan] answered, let me alone untill the day of the Resurrection of the dead; wherefore hast thou tempted me? I will seduce men from the right way, I will hinder them on the right hand, and on the left, and on all sides, to believe in thy Law, and the greatest part of them shall be ungratefull: we said to him be gone out of Paradise, thou shalt be abhorred of all the world, and deprived of my mercy; I will fill hell with such as shall follow thee. O Adam dwell with thy wife in Paradise, and there eat of whatsoever shall please thee, but approach not that Tree, lest thou with thy wife be in the number of the unjust. The devill [Satan] tempted them and dispoyled their bodies of their vestments of grace; he said to them, God hath forbidden you to eat of the fruit of that Tree that you may not be Angels, or eternall; he sware that he spake the truth, and filled them with ignominy, because of their pride. They knew their nakedness, having eaten of that fruit, and to cover themselves, took leaves of Paradise; their Lord called them, and said … Depart out of Paradise, ye enemies of each other, you shall inhabit the earth, untill the time appointed. (Surah 7:11–22, 24–5; Alcoran, 91–2)

Those who are more familiar with Paradise Lost than with Milton’s polyglot sources will no doubt recognize how and why so many Arab-Islamic readers of Milton have found his ways of thinking amenable to their own. Iblis’s initial break arises from envy of Adam, leading to the double fall, the causal link between the expulsion of Satan, the expulsion of Adam and Eve, and the devastation of Paradise. In seeking revenge by tempting Adam and Eve—the objects of his envy—to disobey on promise of becoming immortal, the Qur’anic Satan proceeds from motives and employs strategies remarkably similar to those of Milton’s Satan. Attributing human suffering and death to a sequence, or working through, of human motives—envy, pride, revenge—that were first diabolically personated and acted out in Heaven by Iblis becoming Satan, the Qur’an and Paradise Lost (esp. 5.657–65) have rather more in common than either has with Genesis. In Surah 15, Al Hijr (named for a valley), the tale of Iblis’s expulsion is retold including Satan’s promise to seek revenge on mankind, but this time he admits that there will be those whom he will fail to tempt from obedience; Allah replies: ‘this is the right way, thou hast no power over the righteous who follow my Law, but only over the Infidels, for whom hell is prepared’ (Surah 15:41–4; Alcoran, 160). The same emphasis appears in Surah 17, Al Isra’ ( The

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Night Journey). Some will be saved after all, but so far not a word about any except Satan being expelled from Heaven. In Surah 18, Al Kahf ( The Cave), the importance of Iblis being a Jinn and not an Angel becomes clear, or perhaps more arcane and obscure, and the point is entirely lost in the 1649 translation, which gives: Thy Lord is unjust to none; Remember thou that we commanded the Angels to prostrate themselves before Adam, and that they humbled themselves, except the Devill, who was in the number of the Angels, he disobeyed his Lord; nevertheless Adam and his posterity have obeyed him, although he is their open enemy, and particularly of the Infidels. (Surah 18:49–50; Alcoran, 181)

A more accurate translation, that of ‘Abdullah Yusuf ‘Al¯ı helps: … not one will thy Lord Treat with injustice. Behold! We said To the angels, ‘Bow down To Adam’: they bowed down Except Iblis. He was One of the Jinns, and he Broke the Command Of his Lord. Will ye then take him And his progeny as protectors Rather than Me? And they Are enemies to you! Evil would be the exchange For the wrongdoers! (Surah 18:49–50; Yusuf ‘Al¯ı, Meaning, 722)

In addition to specifying that Iblis was a Jinn, this translation also corrects 1649 by making it clear that the ‘progeny’ or ‘posterity’ belong to Satan and not to Adam. According to Peter J. Awn, what is at issue is that orthodox Judaic and Islamic theology agree that Angels cannot sin, so Iblis has to be denied angelic status.²⁹ Originally a Jinn named Azazil/Azazel (or Harith), Iblis was elevated to Heaven on account of his great piety, though some commentators think his sincerity was always in question. The other thing angels cannot do is reproduce among themselves, but having started out a Jinn, Iblis retained his carnal nature. This verse from Al Kahf is used to suggest that Iblis not only refused to bow to Adam but that he also gave way to his carnality while ²⁹ Peter J. Awn, Satan’s Tragedy and Redemption: Iblis in Sufi Psychology (Leiden: Brill, 1983), 27.


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still in Heaven to produce the ‘progeny’ that Allah is warning us not to take ‘as protectors’. In this reading which is based on commentaries by Al Tabar¯ı and Al Baydawi, Iblis is so excited by his desperate rebellion that he becomes filled with passionate desire, his lust produces progeny, and his children ‘are the armies of devils who roam creation fomenting evil, and they stand forth as living witnesses to Iblis’ radical difference from the Angels’ (Awn, Satan, 28). As in Milton’s account, the sexualized Satan of Sufi commentaries brings with him from Heaven those who later become false gods and inspire mankind to evil. Iblis appears four more times in the Qur’an. We can read of how he tempted Adam in the garden, how Iblis and his ‘hosts’ will be thrown into the fires of hell, how some will sin without his needing to tempt them, and be reminded once more that he was expelled from Heaven for refusing to bow to Adam. Clearly the Qur’anic version is not quite Milton’s vision of things, though there are numerous and remarkable points of contact where Milton’s learned and unorthodox approach to reinterpreting the Old Testament and other ancient sources makes him attractive to Arab-Islamic readers and writers. Like the Sufi commentators, he too wanted Satan to leave Heaven with diabolic followers already in tow (PL 5.668–9, 710), and he liked the idea of Satanic sexuality being spontaneously stimulated at the moment of rebellion; though he reserved the moment when Satan’s carnality gives birth for other purposes, and he defied old-fashioned orthodoxies about angels to provide Satan with his diabolic entourage. Among them appears a ‘cherub tall’ named Azazel who holds aloft Satan’s ‘imperial ensign’ in Book 1. Alastair Fowler is doubtless correct to associate the name with the chief of the fallen Angels in ‘the apocryphal apocalypse The Book of Enoch’, though he is obliged to admit that, since Enoch was not ‘directly accessible’ to Milton, the poet would have had to rely on other secondary sources. Fowler favours Christian commentaries on the cabbala since, in this tradition, Azazel figures as one of four standardbearers in Satan’s army, and this fits nicely with what we otherwise know of Milton’s interest in Judaic tradition and history and his knowledge of Hebrew (Fowler, ed., PL, p. 93 n.). Sensibly, Fowler suggests that Milton could have learned of Azazel from the Old Testament, and from writings on the Christian cabbala by Johannes Reuchlin, Archangelus of Borgo Nuovo, and Robert Fludd that Milton is known to have consulted. But since cabbala is really esoteric, this chain of authorities begs the very question it seeks to answer: what were Reuchlin, Archangelus and Fludd using for their sources when enquiring into the secret traditions of Jewish mysticism? Since Islam took much of its angelology from that very Judaic tradition, I suspect it would not be too difficult to discover among their common sources that the Jinn, whose piety raised him to Heaven

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until he was expelled, and the standardbearer in Satan’s army, are closely related.

By Way of Conclusion While Milton wrote nearly nothing about Islam and very little about the Ottomans, this does not allow us to imagine that he was uninformed or even uninterested. Indeed, Milton’s relative silence on topics that many in England considered urgent, suggests a tactical negligence rather than indifference. For Milton, Islam did not require refutation, much less toleration. Milton evidently found nothing in Islam that needed disputing or even deserving of attention since it could all be accounted for in the more general history of imperialism that followed the expulsion of Satan from Heaven, as told in pre-Qur’anic sources. Milton may not have read the Alcoran of 1649, and we know he knew no Arabic, yet it is easy to understand why so many different writers from the Arab-Islamic world should find so much affinity with Milton’s views on how the world became the place it is. In revising the story of the double fall for his own purposes, he seems to have come close to reproducing key elements of the Qur’anic version of how evil entered into the human world. The question then follows: how can we be sure that Luwis ‘Awad was wrong to claim that Milton was, in many respects, ‘a pious Muslim’?

Afterword Ann Hughes It is not surprising that some of the approaches in this impressive and diverse collection are familiar to a historian of the mid-seventeenth century while others are less so. In recent decades, to their great benefit, historians have become more engaged with the methods of literary scholars, alert to issues of language, genre and audience, as literary scholars have enthusiastically embraced historicist methods. Indeed Paul Stevens, in one of the most stimulating essays in this volume, finds it necessary to warn against overenthusiastic evocations of historical context, reminding us that poems and pamphlets have varying relationships with the ‘heat and dust of political life’. These wide-ranging essays have much to contribute to historians’ understanding of toleration in early modern England. In the first place, they broaden the topic by stressing (as in the essays by James Turner and Nigel Smith) that it is not simply about religious toleration within a Christian, or even more narrowly a Protestant framework, and that it was a European-wide concern—both in theory and in practice—as well as an issue for England, or the ‘Atlantic archipelago’. Within a European framework, neither English ideas nor English practice appear particularly advanced when compared to the United Provinces, Poland-Lithuania or indeed the Balkan areas under the political control of the Turks. A full account of toleration must consider other creeds and other peoples ( Jews, Turks, Muslims, Native Americans); and encompass attitudes to behaviour more broadly as well as to religious belief. Milton, in his famous autobiographical passages in the ‘Second Defence’ connected all aspects of human life, under the rubric of liberty, rather than toleration: … asking myself whether I could in any way advance the cause of true and substantial liberty, which must be sought, not without, but within, and which is best achieved, not by the sword, but by a life rightly undertaken and rightly conducted. Since, then, I observed that there are, in all, three varieties of liberty without which civilized life is scarcely possible, namely ecclesiastical liberty, domestic or personal liberty, and civil liberty. (YP 4.624)

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Within the specific discussions of religious freedom, liberty is usually seen as a narrower concept than toleration; toleration was a term of abuse deployed by Presbyterians, and then deployed unashamedly by radicals such as Walwyn, and, less often, by Milton. On the other hand, recent discussions of republicanism have argued for liberty as an overarching justification for political resistance and change. This volume is most welcome in its aspirations to connect the republican Milton with the Milton who, albeit ambiguously, argued for religious liberty.¹ Turner, Silver, and Rosenblatt consider broader intellectual and social currents underlying Milton’s contribution to toleration, but most contributors focus quite appropriately on religious toleration. Like these contributors, historians have conceptualized toleration as a theme within both intellectual and social history, the emergence both of an idea, and of acceptance of practical coexistence. ( This is not to suggest that there are no connections between ideas and behaviour, but it is to suggest that theories do not map directly on to practice or vice versa.²) Within the history of ideas, the ‘growth’ of toleration is associated with both religious scepticism and religious heterodoxy, but it is not reducible to them. There is an obvious connection between holding heterodox, outlawed ideas, particularly in the case of Milton and his contemporaries, anti-trinitarian ideas, and a commitment to free-thinking or more general toleration. However, this might be a pragmatic, temporary stance, pending some future admission into the ranks of the orthodox, or the powerful. Milton’s condemnation of the Presbyterians as persecuted critics of orthodoxy turned persecutors is discussed in several essays while Roger Williams, as Thomas Corns shows, had a clear understanding of the limits of Congregationalist liberty. As Cromwell said, ‘Liberty of conscience is a natural right; and he that would have it ought to give it, having liberty to settle what he likes for the public. Indeed, that hath been one of the vanities of our contests. Every sect saith, Oh give me liberty. But give him it, and to his power he will not yield it to anybody else.’³ Sharon Achinstein vividly shows that Milton’s own hostility to persecution did not always imply a commitment to toleration, and that freedom of debate might mean ‘freedom to demolish one’s enemy’. Milton illustrates the complex connections between the intellectual heresies summed up as ‘Socinianism’ and the political and religious ferment of the ¹ See, for example, Quentin Skinner and Martin van Gelderen, eds., Republicanism: A Shared European Heritage, vol. 1 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2002). ² John Coffey, Persecution and Toleration in England 1558–1689 (Harlow: Longman, 2000); Alexandra Walsham, Charitable Hatred: Tolerance and Intolerance in England, 1500–1700 (Manchester: Manchester University Press, 2006). ³ Cromwell’s speech to Parliament 12 September 1654, from Ivan Roots, ed., Speeches of Oliver Cromwell (London: Dent, 1989), 51.

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mid-seventeenth century. Milton’s anti-trinitarianism, as Dzelzainis and von Maltzahn show, located him within elite European intellectual currents and was shared, in England, by ‘Anglican Socinians’, men who were politically moderate or even conservative. On the other hand, ‘Socinianism’ divided Milton from Goodwin, as ‘Arminianism’ united them. As von Maltzahn’s very illuminating comparison between Marvell and Milton shows, no neat checklist of opinions or stances in specific political circumstances can be used to label individuals radical or moderate. Von Maltzahn also shows liberty of conscience was by no means identical to a modern liberal notion of toleration. It might again be seen as a transitional stance, the freedom to engage in a variety of ways in a ‘collective discovery of Christian saving truths’.⁴ In Thomas Corns’ account, Roger Williams might more easily argue for complete toleration because he had a much more limited vision than Milton of the potential of civil power for moral and religious regeneration. For Williams, religious diversity was no threat to civil authority; for Milton, believing in politics as a moral and virtuous endeavour—or, in Achinstein’s discussion because of his overwhelmingly ethical and religious framework—corrupt and erroneous opinions were fatal. The aim of freedom of speech, or liberty of conscience, might thus be unity, not diversity. But, on the other hand, there were those, including sometimes Milton, who spurned the paranoia and horror with which the heresy hunters, described by David Loewenstein, contemplated toleration, and accepted division as normal. William Walwyn wrote, ‘All times have produced men of severall wayes, and I believe no man thinkes there will be an agreement of judgement as longe as this World lasts: If ever there be, in all probability it must proceed from the power and efficacie of Truth, not from constraint.’⁵ Robert Lord Brooke, whose example was evoked in Areopagitica, wrote in 1642 that ‘it is clear in Reason, that Divisions, Sects, Schisms, and Heresies must come’. There were, Brooke argued, alternative approaches to division and error: the forced ‘Unity of Darknesse and Ignorance’ as found in Spain, or, and much to be preferred, the United Provinces ‘who let every Church please her selfe in her owne way, so long as she leaveth the State to her selfe … I wishe heartily, men would remember, that even Nature her selfe as much abhors a forced violent Union, as a Rent or Division’.⁶ In Areopagitica, Milton claimed Brooke as ‘a worthy and undoubted patron of ⁴ The classic statement of this argument is Blair Worden, ‘Toleration and the Cromwellian Protectorate’ in W. J. Sheils, ed., Persecution and Toleration, Studies in Church History, 21 (Oxford: Blackwell, 1984). ⁵ William Walwyn, The Compassionate Samaritane (1644), 53. ⁶ Robert Greville, Lord Brooke, A Discourse Opening the Nature of that Episcopacie, which is Exercised in England (London, 1642), 88, 90–1.

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this argument’, a man who had ‘sacrificed his life and fortunes to the church and commonwealth’, approaching ‘sects and schism’ with a meekness worthy of Christ himself. These relaxed attitudes contributed along with the more developed intellectual positions discussed throughout this volume to a view that it was possible to tolerate doctrines regarded as evil or erroneous, and, as Brooke and Goodwin argued, to separate religious and civil authority. Milton’s stance within this framework is elusive, or perhaps simply contradictory. He paraphrases Brooke: ‘He there exhorts us to hear with patience and humility those, however they be miscall’d, that desire to live purely, in such a use of God’s ordinances as the best guidance of their conscience gives them, and to tolerat them, though in some disconformity to our selves.’ Again in the well-known passage on building the temple, astutely analyzed by David Loewenstein, Milton seems to share the acceptance of difference, or to develop a complex understanding of truth as diverse. Yet it is worth noting that perfection, the ‘goodly and the gracefull symmetry’ is made up of ‘many moderat varieties and brotherly dissimilitudes that are not vastly disproportionall’ (Areop., YP 2.555). This does not suggest the toleration of a wide range of difference; it is much easier to associate this pronouncement with the more circumscribed position suggested in the essays by Corns, Sauer, and to some extent Achinstein; and to assimilate it with the account of Cromwell and the congregational independents by Blair Worden, referred to by von Maltzahn. If, however, as James Turner insists, we should think about process, about moves towards practical coexistence rather than theoretical pronouncements of principle, a different Milton emerges. David Loewenstein emphasizes the sheer bravery in resisting the dehumanizing, violent rhetoric of the heresy hunters, men who did not shrink from actual violence against those who affronted their unitary view of religious truth. This Milton insisted that freedom of thought could lead to being ‘a heretic in the truth’, if that truth was accepted unthinkingly. Turner’s location of Areopagitica within libertine currents which held that virtue was only possible alongside ‘the knowledge and survay of vice’ again suggests that Milton could conceive of the long-term coexistence of conflicting opinions and behaviour, that he could imagine pluralism. This volume thus gives us many different Miltons. He looks different in different historical contexts, in writing in different genres and from different points of view. We have a tolerant Milton and a Milton who opposes toleration and secularism; a Milton who appeals to natural law or to the principles of equity; a Milton prone to Pauline absolutism and the exclusionary rhetoric of an English Protestant nationalist as well as a Milton who accepts openness and uncertainty while rejecting restrictive binaries. The volume as a whole, and

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certainly the contributions by Stevens and Achinstein, stress the ambiguities or contradictions in Milton’s arguments on toleration. But within some essays, the stress on complexity is qualified by a need to come to some final judgement on Milton, to excuse or justify him, according to some pre-existing idealized standard drawn sometimes from a view of seventeenth-century possibilities, sometimes from modern liberal criteria. Many of the contributors share a personal identification with Milton which is rarely exhibited by historians. Milton’s violent rhetoric sits uneasily with his liberal reputation; his views of the Turks are surprisingly stereotyped, and unlike Williams and Selden amongst other contemporaries he never uses the ‘Turkish argument’ for toleration. His attitudes to Catholics (and sometimes to Presbyterians) require uneasy justification. Andrew Hadfield, distinctive in this company, sees Milton (as indeed he saw himself) as ‘remarkably consistent’, not least in his opposition to Catholicism as a false religion, or a force for political oppression rather than a religion at all. Silver, in contrast, argues that a sense of human fallibility, and a belief in notions of equity, were grounds for exempting all religion, including Catholicism, from the purview of the civil power. Sauer’s account of his denunciations of Catholic persecution can be contrasted with Stevens’ discussion of how a later Milton praised one Catholic ruler, John Sobieski (in 1674), in order to forestall the accession of another. Historians are less likely to be disappointed by Milton, or, on the other hand, less prone to want to approve, and thus driven to justify or explain.⁷ For historians, the pamphlets inevitably loom larger than the poems, as they probably did to Milton’s own contemporaries before 1660. This Milton was by turns from 1641–2, a polemicist who was ostensibly part of the Puritan mainstream, a scandalous proponent of divorce, a public servant, a learned if abusive defender of regicide and the English republic on a European stage, and an intemperate and ultimately unavailing opponent of the restoration. He is an interesting and illuminating figure, but he does not dominate a historical narrative as he does a literary canon, albeit that writing and reading are forms of action, as the introduction here insists. The profound identification with Milton at once drives the subtle insights and illuminating arguments contained in these essays, but it also, at times, cuts across the emphasis on complexity, political and religious context, and generic choice which is also present within most contributions. The assumed self-definition of the historian as more detached, however compromised, may have something to offer here. Milton resists all attempts to categorize or co-opt him, and perhaps historians are in the end more at ease about this. ⁷ Christopher Hill is perhaps an exception: Milton and the English Revolution (London: Faber, 1977).

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On the other hand, these literary scholars are much less squeamish than most historians now are about appealing to grand narratives of liberalism and modernity, or drawing on Milton to address contemporary problems, and this is to be welcomed. Of course Milton’s life and writings cannot provide instruction for us today, blueprints or naive lessons from the past to the present. The essays in this volume force us, in the spirit of the introduction, to take from Milton’s towering and complex imagination, a commitment to grapple with our own dilemmas. All of the essays have something to offer here, and I can only pick out some of the insights most striking to me: Maclean’s account of parallels, adaptations, and appropriations of Milton’s Satan by Islam; Loewenstein’s discussion of how Milton sought to develop a complex vision of truth; Stevens’ riveting analysis of the various utterances of rage and violence in Milton’s writings. The quest for a community in which truth, virtue, and liberty were fostered underlay Milton’s promotion of freedom of speech, and perhaps a vision of toleration, but his political and religious stance might also qualify tolerance, promoting denunciation, contempt and writing ‘in blood’ against bloody persecution. We inhabit a world where the potential conflicts between commitment and openness, engagement and tolerance, truth and diversity are unresolved. The questioning of the value of privacy prompted by von Maltzahn’s comparison of Marvell and Milton, the regret at the ‘narrowing expectations of conscience as an individual matter’ are, without risk of anachronism, still relevant today.

Index Biblical references are in canonical order.

Abbott, W. C. 176n, 206, 209, 209n, 210, 211 Abrams, M. H. 248 absolutism 25, 40, 126, 127, 278, 283, 302 Achinstein, S. 7n, 15n, 18, 33n, 65n, 74, 74n, 102, 102n, 193n, 243n, 251n, 300, 301, 302, 303 Act of Supremacy 1534/1559 11, 148 Act of Uniformity 1559 11, 13, 98, 148 Actes and Monuments (Foxe) 207, 208, 212 Adam: in Islam 294, 295, 297 Milton on 35, 108, 112, 113, 120, 122–4, 156, 191, 195, 196, 199, 229–31, 232, 234, 237–8, 241, 250, 293 see also Eve adultery 107, 135, 139, 140, 166 Alcoran of Mahomet 294, 295, 296, 298 see also Qur’an Allah 294, 295, 296–7 Allen, William 188n America see USA Anabaptists 11, 24, 27, 29, 37, 58, 127, 174, 175 Anderson, Benedict 204, 204n Anglican Church 144, 264 see also Church of England; High Anglicanism Anglicans 126, 180, 192, 208, 227 anti-authoritarianism 52, 53, 59, 67 anti-Catholicism 2, 14, 17, 214 Cromwell and 206–7, 210 England 207, 276 see also Catholicism anti-popery 2, 7, 193, 242 anti-priestcraft 2, 102 Anti-Toleration, Or a Modest Defence of the Letter of the London Ministers (Anon) 187–8, 190 anti-trinitarianism 9, 17, 18, 25, 29, 35, 37, 39, 42, 48, 154, 171–85, 301 Antinomism 13, 127, 154

antiprelatical tracts 18, 100, 101, 126, 127, 128, 129, 133, 134, 136, 143, 162, 193, 243, 245, 248, 249, 253–5 see also pamphlets Apocrypha. Book of Enoch. English. 297 Apologeticall Narration, Humbly Submitted to the Honourable Houses of Parliament, An (Nye) 80–1 Apostles 133, 134, 191 Apostolical and True Opinion Concerning the Holy Trinity (Biddle) 176 Arcadia (Sidney) 118 Aretino, Pietro 108, 109, 110–11, 113, 114–15, 118, 119, 120 Modi (sonnets) 113 Ragionamenti 112, 114 Arianism 95, 126–7, 171–2, 173, 174–5, 182 Aristotle 101, 137, 150n, 163–4, 236, 262 Arminianism 27, 28, 42, 77, 83, 98, 127, 135, 154, 174, 184, 301 Armistead, J. M. 280n Armitage, David 16n, 189n, 196n, 270n, 273n Ashton, Robert 155n Athanasius 93, 95, 184, 185 atheism 8, 29, 30, 32, 35, 159, 233 Aubrey, John 87, 90, 90n, 103 Audisio, Gabriel 203n Austin, J. L. 248n ‘Awad, Luwis 291, 298 Awn, Peter J. 296, 296n, 297 Aylmer, G. E. 155n Bacon, Francis 155n Bacon, Friar Roger 137 Baillie, Robert 54 Baker, J. H. 146n,147, 148 baptism 26, 38, 48, 135 Baptists 29, 32, 38, 287 Barbeyrac, Jean 18, 130, 132, 135, 139n, 140, 140n Science of Morality 131

306 Barker, Arthur E. 14n, 23n Barnard, T. C. 211n, 216n, 217 Barradori, Giovanna 5n Barrow, Henry 11 Bauman, Michael 173n, 184 Baxter, Richard 91 Bayle, Pierre 239 Beale, John 250 Bedwell, William 288, 288n, 289 Beelzebub see Satan beliefs 95–6, 107 Bennett, Joan 238, 238n Berry, Boyd 240n Bethel, Slingsby 228n Bible: carnal sex in 117, 119 divorce in 139 interpretation of 28, 167, 194, 198–9, 233–4 see also New Testament; Old Testament Bible. N. T. Matthew. English. 22:23–33 60 5:14 81 5:44 61, 63 7:15 62 9:37–8 220 13 79 13:3–8 220 19:6 133 19:8 134 22:39 166 Bible. N. T. Mark. English. 4:3–8 220 Bible. N. T. Luke. English. 8:5–8 220 11:42–52 214 14:13–14 168 14:21–4 168 15 169 Bible. N. T. Acts of the Apostles. English. 5:37–9 52 26:5 36 Bible. N. T. Paul’s Epistle to the Romans. English. 288 Bible. N. T. Corinthians. English. 11:18 67 15:9 62 Bible. N. T. Galatians. English. 1:13 62 Bible. N. T. Ephesians. English. 4:3 229 Bible. N. T. Colossians. English. 3:11 134 Bible. N. T. Titus. English. 1:16 55 3:10–11 56 Bible. N. T. 2 Peter.English. 2:1 67

Index Bible. N. T. Hebrews. English. 11:1 159 11:37–8 214 Bible. N. T. Revelations. English. 6:9 213 8:13 214 13:17 286 19 79 Bible. O. T. Genesis.English. 295 2:18 127 4 220 Bible. O. T. Exodus. English. 3:6 60 32 252 Bible. O. T. Numbers.English. 11:29 82 35 82 Bible. O. T. Deuteronomy. English. 17 129 24 143 Bible. O. T. Judges. English. 5:23 257 19:2 139 19–21 261 Bible. O. T. 1 Samuel. English. 8 129, 130 12:14–15 129 Bible. O. T. 2 Samuel. English. 7:10 215 Bible. O. T. 2 Kings.English. 11:17 129 Bible. O. T. Psalms. English. 137 257 Bible. O. T. Isaiah.English. 5:8–22 214 Bible. O. T. JeremiahEnglish. 48:10 257 Bible. O. T. Ezekiel. English. 31 220 Biddle, John 1, 23, 29, 33, 155, 176, 179, 180, 183–4 Biddulph, William 286 Birchwood, Matthew 228n bishops 287, 288 punishment of 243–5, 248, 249, 254, 255, 261 Blake, John W. 217n blasphemy 32, 57–8, 70, 110, 117, 135, 159, 166, 176, 177, 185, 188, 192, 240 in law 152, 153, 154 Blasphemy Act 1648 154 Blasphemy Act 1650 13, 153, 182, 183 Blount, Charles 8, 31 Blount, Henry 286, 286n, 287, 287n Blum, Abbe 73, 73n Bodian, Miriam 34n Bodin, Jean 25, 232, 232n, 285–6, 286n Colloquium Heptaplomeres 25, 113, 228 Book of Common Prayer 12, 29, 39, 231

Index Book of Martyrs and the Elect Nation (Foxe) 207 books 121 licensing of 31–2, 110, 116, 119, 183–4 Bordeaux-Neufville, Antoine de 210, 222 Bossuet, Jacques-Bénigne 38 Bosworth, Edmund C. 289n, 290 Boyle, Richard, 2nd Earl of Cork (1612–1698) 216, 217, 222 Bracton, Henry de 147–8, 161 Bradshaw, Richard 176 Bramhall, John 252, 252n Braun, Harald 233n Bredvold, Louis I. 228n Bremer, Francis 75, 76 Broadbent, J. B. 250n Brock, Kathryn Gail 205n Brooke, Humphrey 50n Brooks, Douglas 2n, 226n Brow, Horatio F. 287n Brown, Cedric C. 189n, 273n Brown, Gilliam 248n Bruno, Giordano 32, 108, 111, 112n, 113–15, 118 Il Candelaio 112 Coelum Brittanicum 114 Spaccio della Bestia Trionfante 111–12, 112, 114–15 Brutus 281–3 Bryan, Sir Francis 116 Bucer, Martin 84 Bunyan, John 155, 162, 241 Burgess, Walter H. 175n Burleigh, Michael 257n Burnet, Gilbert, Bishop of Salisbury History of My Own Time 169–70 Burns, J. H. 135n Burns, Norman 9n, 234n Burrell, David 167–8, 168n Burrough, Edward 70n Burt, Richard 239n Burton, Henry 228, 289 Bush, Douglas 219n Busher, Leonard 297, 288n Butler, Samuel 90 Butterwick, Richard 25n Cable, Lana 18, 110n Caldwell, Samuel L. 282n Calvinism 27, 28, 75, 76, 80, 92, 94, 98, 102, 103, 132, 136, 172, 174, 135, 236 Campbell, Gordon 76n, 101n

307 Campion, Edmund 11 canon law 151, 154, 163 see also law Carew, Thomas 111, 114 Carey, John 245, 278n carnality 115–16, 297 Castle, William 189 Castlemaine, 1st Earl of see Palmer, Roger, 1st Earl of Castlemaine Catechesis Ecclesiarum quae in Regno Poloniae (Moscorovius) 177–8, 180–3 Catholicism 2, 7, 25, 26, 27, 28, 30, 37, 40, 43, 83, 94, 110, 136, 188 England 33, 38, 95, 145–6, 160, 186–7, 189, 215, 217, 219, 266, 271–2, 286 intolerance of 72–3, 75, 226 Milton’s antipathy to 7, 18, 32, 96–7, 110, 126, 164–5, 186–99, 236, 243, 303 see also anti-Catholicism; anti-Popery; anti-priestcraft; Milton, and Catholics Cavalier Parliament (1660–7) 33, 87, 116, 155 Cecil, William 11 censorship 52–3, 72, 84, 107, 108, 109, 112, 116, 117, 250 Champion, Justin 2n, 8, 8n, 239n Chaplin, Gregory 142n Charles I, King of England 12, 13, 14, 24, 99–100, 112, 138, 189, 191, 197, 256, 258, 275 Charles II, King of England 33, 87, 89, 95, 98, 145, 164, 186, 263, 264, 271, 275–6 Charron, Pierre 30 Cherniak, Warren 90n Chillingworth, William 29 Christ 42, 60, 82, 93, 128, 131, 132, 185, 188, 242, 245, 253, 257 on divorce 133, 141–2 as God, denial of 37, 176 parables of 78–9 Christianity 35, 36, 40, 86, 137, 168, 173, 178, 215, 242, 266, 284, 299 Christians 24, 29, 30, 34, 41, 126, 134, 136, 171, 190, 194, 198, 212, 213, 274, 286, 288, 292, 293 persecution of 131, 288 sects 66–7 church 41, 117, 165, 188 attendance 12, 26, 79 government 26, 80, 186, 191, 248 invisible 240, 241

308 church (cont.) and state, separation 76, 84, 145, 160–1, 179, 241–2 Church of England 11, 36, 37, 38, 76, 79, 97, 264 Restoration 33, 192 as state church 12 see also High Anglicanism Christianson, Paul 258n Churchill, Sir Winston 246–7 Cicero 130, 150n, 152, 164 civil power 72, 134, 176–7, 194 Civil War (England) 32, 51, 78, 275 Clarendon, 1st Earl of see Hyde, Edward, 1st Earl of Clarendon Clark, Stuart 37n clergy 30, 39, 50, 58, 59, 74, 96, 210, 213, 241 Clifford, Martin 239, 239n Coffey, John 3n, 7, 7n, 8n, 10n, 12n, 15n, 30n, 51n, 54n, 57n, 102n, 176n, 180n Coleman, Antony 280n Coleman, Janet 236n Commentary on the Heidelberg Catechism (Ursinus) 184 common law 145n, 146, 151, 154, 159, 161, 162, 167n see also law commonwealth 272–3, 281 of England 33 freedom 274 Commonwealth of Poland-Lithuania 24, 25, 26, 40, 299 community 261, 262, 266 complications of interest 222–3 comprehension 264, 265, 266 English church 89, 91, 144–5, 267 national church 98 Condren, Conal 91n Confederation of Warsaw 1573 173, 265 Confession of Faith see Westminster Confession of Faith conformity 11, 25, 39, 95, 146 congregationalism 84–5 conscience 10, 13, 42, 52, 113, 160, 162, 163–4, 166, 168, 169, 228, 235, 280 individual 26, 104, 130, 151, 194, 287, 304 liberty of 2, 3, 10, 12, 15–16, 27, 37, 46, 58, 77, 91, 95–6, 153, 174, 177, 187, 188, 206, 210, 233, 235, 236, 241, 243, 244, 248, 260–1, 267, 268–9, 271, 273, 277, 279, 280, 287, 300, 301

Index conversion 25, 34, 76, 77 Coornhert, Dirck Volkerstzoon 27, 32, 43 Defensio Processus de non Occidendis Haereticis 27 Cork, Earl of see Boyle, Richard Corns, Thomas 7, 17, 74n, 83n, 181n, 188n, 193n, 211n, 243n, 249, 251, 251n, 253, 254, 300, 301, 302 Cotton, John 78 Council of Nicea 137, 171–2 Counter-Remonstrants see Calvinism Counter-Reformation 176, 196 Cousins, A. D. 91n Cranford, James 60, 60n Creppell, Ingrid 6n Cressy, David 4, 4n, 46n, 48n, 65n Cretensis: or a Briefe Answer to An Ulcerous Treatise 49, 54, 55 Cromwell, Oliver, Lord Protector 12, 87, 100, 145, 146, 155, 176, 177, 179, 203–6, 208, 210, 211–12, 215, 218, 219, 221–3, 265, 269, 300, 302 cultural polarization 246 Culverwel, Nathanael 131, 134, 135, 135n Elegant and Learned Discourse of the Light of Nature, An 131, 134 Cust, Richard 187n Da Costa, Uriel 34, 34n Dahiyat, Eid Abdallah 291, 291n, 292 Daillé, Jean 94 Danby, Earl of see Osborne, Thomas, 1st Earl of Danby Daniel, Stephen H. 239n Danson, Thomas 94 David, Géza 284, 284n Davies, Godfrey 50n Davies, L. A. 96n Davis, J. C. 4n, 12n De Beer, E. S. 264n De Krey, Gary S. 3n, 13n, 224n de las Casas, Bartolomé 25 De Partitione Oratoriae (Cicero) 150, 152 De Vivo, Filippo 32n Declaration of Breda (1660) 33 Declaration of Indulgence (1672) 13–14, 98, 164, 186, 264, 266, 271, 272 Deferrari, Roy J. 221n DeJean, Joan 113n Denck, Hans 25 Descartes, René 148n, 235 Meditations 148 Dickson, Donald R. 32n

Index Dimmock, Matthew 228n, 286n disestablishment of church and state 2, 12, 40–1, 179 dissent 13–14, 159, 224, 206 dissenters 12, 13, 152, 155, 217, 222 divine law 101 divorce: Milton on 23, 48, 76, 81, 83, 84, 87, 103, 109, 127, 131, 133, 140, 141, 303 incompatibility as grounds for 140 Pufendorf on 140 St Paul on 132 see also Christ on Dobranski, Stephen B. 2n, 15n, 70n, 83n, 103n, 173n, 182, 182n, 184, 193n, 226n Doctor and Student (St. Germain) 149–50, 150n Dohm, Burkhard 25n Druids 227, 230 Dryden, John 277, 280 Dugard, William, printer 178, 180–1, 183 Dunn, John 3n Durham, Charles W. 234n Dutch Reformed Church 26–7, 173 Dzelzainis, Martin 7, 18, 88n, 90n, 129n, 176n, 185n, 224n, 226n, 259n, 270n, 301 Edict of Nantes (1685) 33, 40, 257, 265 Edward VI, King of England 11 Edwards, Karen 234n Edwards, Thomas 45, 45n, 46, 48, 48n, 49, 50, 53, 54n, 55, 58, 58n, 60, 61, 62, 66, 75, 112, 237 Gangraena 45–6, 50, 54, 57, 60, 63, 66 Elizabeth I, Queen of England 11, 24 Elliott, Emory 78, 78n Ellison, James 286n Elton, G. R. 10n England 76, 173, 208, 210, 216, 256, 299 and France 210, 221 Irish crisis 205 nationhood 206 Protectorate 145, 155 Revolution 46, 56, 79, 86, 95 Enlightenment 1, 17 in England 96 free-thinking 8, 25, 92 enquiry: freedom of 9–10, 18, 36 religious 104 epic poetry 225, 227–8, 232, 237, 239, 241, 248, 249, 250, 261, 267

309 Epicureanism 43, 233, 234 episcopacy 12, 73, 174, 249 Episcopius, Simon 27, 27n, 28 equity 17, 18, 147–9, 151–2, 160, 161, 162, 164 Erasmus, Desiderius 92, 93, 94, 95, 102, 167, 226 Erastianism 11, 152, 163, 166, 168, 169 Erastians 135–6, 159, 160, 162, 166 Euripides 117, 120, 143 Alcestis 143 Europe 13, 29, 76 Ottoman Empire and 34–5 Protestantism in 42, 276 religion of 38, 40 Evans, J. Martin 16, 16n, 292n Eve 35, 111, 120, 121, 123, 124, 125, 196–7, 199, 207, 229, 231, 237, 238, 293, 294, 295 see also Adam Evelyn, John 250, 264 Everard, Robert 38 Exclusion Bill crisis 276, 279, 280 Fagius, Paul 84 faiths 37, 98, 128, 144, 158–9, 160, 161, 162, 163, 165, 179, 197, 199, 210, 226, 228, 229, 240, 241, 242, 268, 272–3, 277, 284–5 and reason 190, 195 Fallon, Steven 9n, 204n, 222, 226n, 234n Familists 38, 127, 290 Fell, Margaret 218n, 222 False Prophets, Anticrists, Deceivers, Which are in the World 218 Fenton, Mary 216n Ferguson, Margaret W. 73n, 74n, 142n Festa, Thomas 110n, 120, 120n Fifth Monarchists 42, 162 Filmer, Robert 148 Fincham, Kenneth 12 Firmin, Thomas 175 Firth, C. H. 153n, 154, 155n, 221n Fish, Stanley 5n, 74, 74n, 110n, 225, 225n, 237, 237n, 238, 245, 246, 263n, 277, 278n Fisher, Samuel 219, 219n, 222 Fleetwood, Charles 215 Fletcher, Anthony 59n, 258n Flint, K. 31n Floyd-Wilson, Mary 235n Forde, William 286, 286n fornication 139–140

310 fornication (cont.) see also marriage Forsyth, Neil 227n Fowler, Alastair 245, 297 Fox, George 217–18 Foxe, John 207n, 208, 212 France 33, 39, 90, 94, 112, 206, 217, 221, 275 freedom of thought in 8, 10 massacre in 289 Protestants in 37, 265 religion of: divided 40; unified 24, 130 Wars of Religion 59; see also Huguenots; Waldensians Franck, Sebastian 25 free will 17, 26, 42, 48, 222 free-thinking 31, 86, 93, 102, 112 freedom 225, 241 intellectual 232 interpretative 237 of speech 72, 194, 235, 238, 239, 271, 301, 304 of thought see thought, freedom of see also conscience, liberty of French, J. Milton 103n, 178n, 181, 211n, 262 Fry, John, MP 179 Fulton, Thomas 128, 128n, 129, 132 Galilei, Galileo 32, 113 Garasse, Father François 112, 113n Gardiner, S. R. 61n, 177n, 180, 209n, 210, 210n Geneva 18, 26, 185 Gentile, Giovanni 113 Gentles, I. J. 211, 211n George, David 290 Gerhard, Johann 185, 185n Gibbons, B. J. 234n Gibson, William 98n Gilbert, Martin 246n, 247n Glorious Revolution (1688–9) 33, 263–4 God 135, 140, 144, 145, 161, 185, 182, 188, 191, 221, 234, 240 belief in 31, 177, 180 kings and 131–2 Milton on 158–9, 233–4, 268, 273 unjust 112–13 Goddard, Hugh 286n Goffman, Daniel 285n Goldie, Mark 3n, 13n, 76, 77n, 98n, 135n, 229n Goldstein, Charles E. 205n, 209n, 220n

Index Goodwin, John 17, 46, 47n, 49, 49n, 50, 50n, 51–6, 56n, 57, 57n, 61, 63, 64–6, 69, 186, 301, 302 Catalogue, or Black Bill 54–5 Imputatio Fidei, or, A Treatise of Justification 50, 51 M.S. to A.S. with A Plea for Libertie of Conscience 53, 56, 57 Sion-Colledg Visited 55 Theomachia; or The Grand Imprudence of Men Running the Hazard of Fighting Against God 52–3 Gookin, Victor 215, 216, 216n, 222 Author and Case of Transplanting the Irish into Connaught Vindicated, The 215 Great Case of Transplantation in Ireland Discussed, The 215 gospels 126, 133, 134, 136, 143, 160, 168–9, 178, 257, 288 Gouldman, Francis 180–1, 183 Greaves, Richard 224n, 271n Greenblatt, Stephen 207, 207n, 292n Gregory, Brad S. 39n Grell, Ole Peter 10n, 14n, 233n, 234n Greville, Robert, 2nd Baron Brooke 301n, 302 Grotius, Hugo 6, 18, 28n, 129–30, 130n, 131, 132, 134, 135–7, 139, 139n, 140, 143, 167, 228, 228 Annotationes in Libros Evangeliorum 139 De Antiquitate Reipublicae Batavicae 137 De Jure Belli ac Pacis Libri Tres 130, 135, 136, 140 Gruner, Dov 246–7 Guibbory, Achsah 15n, 68n, 226n, 231 Guiney, Louise 287n Gulliford, S. G. 287n Gunpowder Plot 11, 189, 192 Haakonssen, K. 234n Hadfield, Andrew 7, 18, 196n Haereseo-Machia 48, 48n, 49, 67 Halbertal, Moshe 129, 129n Hale, John K. 205n, 215n Hale, Matthew 234, 234n Hales, John 29, 42, 94, 94n, 103 Haller, William 14n, 50n, 207n Halliday, M. A. K. 250n Hamilton, Alexander 288, 288n Hammond, Antony 280n Hardie, Philip 234n Harrington, James 15, 16n, 215, 215n, 272 Commonwealth of Oceana, The 215

Index System of Politics 15 Harris, Tim 3n Hasan, Ruqaiya 250 Haskin, Dayton 128, 128n Hawkins, F. Vaughan 167 Hay, James 206 Hebraism 6, 136 Hebrew philology 137, 140 Hebrews 159, 161 Hechter, Michael 219n Henri IV, King of France 265–6 Henrietta Maria, Queen (wife of Charles I, King of England) 112, 189, 197, 256, 257 Henry VIII, King of England 10–11, 116, 118 heresies 29, 35–6, 67, 117, 120, 152, 166, 174, 183, 187, 188, 190, 193, 195, 196, 198, 199, 232, 300 in England 39, 45–71 in law 152–4 punishment of 57–8, 235 heretics 37, 75, 135, 185 hunters of 54, 56, 62–3, 302 Herford, C. H. 111n heterodoxy 1, 8, 17, 32, 38, 60, 81, 83, 225, 234, 300 Milton and 84, 152, 183, 226 in Areopagitica 107–8 within Protestantism 107 High Anglicanism 87, 91, 98, 99 see also Church of England Hill, Christopher 12n, 42, 64n, 155n, 173n, 207n, 263, 263n, 289n, 303n Hill, Thomas 68n Himy, Armand 189n, 270n, 273n Hirst, Derek 155n historicism 263 History of the Evangelical Churches of the Valleys of Piemont, The (Morland) 208, 212, 213, 214, 219 Hobbes, Thomas 6, 90, 95, 131, 152, 161, 233 Leviathan 131 Holdsworth, William 145, 145n, 155n, 158, 160n Holland 26–7, 136, 173, 175 Holland, Hugh 287 Holstun, James 8n Holy Roman Empire 40, 160 Holy Spirit 95, 96, 163, 172, 177, 182–3, 185 Honeygosky, Stephen R. 241n

311 Honigmann, E. A. J. 205n House of Commons 89, 95, 246, 256, 276, 279, 280 House of Lords 95, 276, 279 Houston, Alan 250n Howe, John 92 Hughes, Anne 4, 4n, 5n, 38n, 45n, 55n, 75, 75n, 186n, 187n Huguenots 33, 34–5, 40, 130, 135 St Bartholomew’s Eve massacre of (Paris) 207 Hull 88, 92, 93 humanism 6, 135, 232, 236, 245, 246 Humble Petition and Advice 177, 180 Humble Proposals of Mr. Owen, The (Owen et al.) 178–9 Hunter, Michael 8n Iblis see Satan, and Iblis idolatry 29, 41, 135, 160, 163, 164, 179, 196, 197–8, 213, 240, 290 Illo, John 2n, 73 Imber, Colin 285n Imerti, Arthur D. 113 imperialism 16, 18, 205, 207, 212, 223, 298 imposture theory 229 Independency 32, 36, 38, 46, 50, 51, 53, 56, 59, 61, 62, 77, 81, 94, 101, 127, 176, 184, 186, 187, 188–9, 199, 208, 302 indigenous Americans 25 Ingram, Robert G. 98n Inquisition 24, 32, 34, 108, 152, 163 insurgency 165, 159 The Instrument of Government (1653) 180 Interest of England in the Irish Transplantation, The (Lawrence) 215–16 Interregnum: England 23, 32, 39, 57, 59, 207, 219 intolerance 1, 2, 27, 30, 32, 43, 50, 70, 107, 108, 109, 110, 176, 179, 206, 209, 223, 225, 226, 242, 248, 256, 260, 267 against Catholics 13, 17, 18, 33, 37, 72–3, 75, 164, 199, 205, 210, 211, 226 by Catholics 113 colonization and 204–5, 211–12, 216, 223 in England 211–12, 217, 222, 223, 258 see also heresies; Jews; violence, rhetoric of; Waldensians, persecution of Ireland 42, 207 transplantation of Catholics to 206, 215, 222

312 Ireland (cont.) Protestants in 73, 207 segregation of 215–16 violence in 33–4 Irish Rebellion 60, 78 Irish Rebellion, The (Temple) 210–11 Irwin, Terence 150 Islam 34–5, 137, 284, 288, 290, 291, 292, 297, 298 Iblis in 294, 295 see also Satan, and Iblis Israel 78, 82, 256, 261 Israelites: liberation from Babylon 214 priests, strife among 233 Israel, Jonathan 8, 8n, 14n, 118, 173n, 233n, 234n Italy 31–2, 40, 112 Jacob, James R. 9n Jacob, Margaret C. 8, 8n, 9n James, Duke of York (1633–1701) 263, 264, 275 James I, King of England (James VI, of Scotland) 11, 24, 80, 192, 287 James II, King of England 33 Jefferson, Thomas 131, 277 Jeffrey, David Lyle 221n Jehlen, Myra 80n Jenkins, Hugh 277n Jesuits 26, 37, 112, 176, 188, 259 Jesus 60, 97–8, 166, 168–9, 177, 180, 237, 240 Jews 24, 27, 29, 30–1, 34–5, 60, 126, 134, 136, 140, 215, 226, 240, 286, 290, 292, 293 conversion of 228 divorce and 133–4 persecution of 217, 223 prejudices against 34 readmission to England of 13, 207, 222 Jonson, Ben 111, 111n, 119 Jordan, W. K. 11n Judaism 137 theology of 296, 297 Kaplan, Benjamin J. 4n, 235n Keeble, N. H. 13n, 15n, 33n, 88n, 91, 91n, 224n Kelley, Mark R. 103n, 226n Kelley, Maurice 9n, 262 Kelly, Mark R. 175n Kendrick, Christopher 73

Index Kenyon, J. P. 162n, 164n Kinbote, Charles 130 King, John N. 15n, 189n, 196n, 197, 226n, 243n, 254 king 274 execution of 258–9 kings (in Bible) 129–31 Kishlansky, Marky 264n Klinger, Markus 110n Knights, Mark 14n Knoppers, Laura Lunger 46n, 224n Knott, John R. 205n, 213n, 219, 225n Knowles, John 175, 184 Kolbrener, William 242n Kot, Stanislas 172n Kranidas, Thomas 243n, 248n, 251, 251n La Court, Pieter de 28, 28n Labriola, Albert C. 203n, 205n, 278n Lacey, Douglas 13 Lake, Peter 12n, 38n, 187n, 191, 191n Lamont, Willie 91, 91n Landes, Joan B. 46n Lares, Jarneela 198n Larmore, Charles 16 Laud, Archbishop William 12, 33, 73, 95, 138 Laudian church 26, 58, 83, 92, 162, 240 Laurence, Ann 36n Laursen, John Christian 10n, 25n, 30n, 228n law: civil 41, 84, 146–9, 152, 162 international 266 see also canon law; common law; natural law Lawrence, Edward 269 Lawrence, Henry 245, 246 Lawrence, Richard 215–16, 216n Lawry, John S. 205n Laws and Customs of England (1275) (Bracton) 147, 147n Le Clerc, Jean 28 Lecler, Joseph 10n, 11n, 232n Lee, Nathaniel 279–83 Lucius Junius Brutus 279–83 legal theory 18 Legate, Bartholomew 39 Legouis, Pierre 89n Leonard, John 234, 234n Leti, Gregorio 28 Levellers 57, 62, 194, 199, 207 Levine, Alan 229n

Index Lewalski, Barbara K. 23n, 75, 75n, 128n, 136n, 142, 174, 174n, 181n, 182n, 199n, 204n, 205n, 206n, 209n, 226n, 263, 263n lex scripta 148, 159, 161, 162 liberalism 5, 14, 15, 72, 74, 86, 104, 243, 301, 304 in England 17, 206 libertinism 4, 17–18, 34, 37, 75, 119, 120, 162, 235, 302 writing 6, 109–10, 112–13 liberty 31, 43, 130, 158, 299 Christian 194–5 of individual 145 New World 131 and Protestantism 41 religious 50, 104 liberty of conscience see conscience, liberty of Licensing Ordinance (1643/1645) 66, 107–8, 156 see also books, licensing Lieb, Michael 26n, 103n, 175n, 204n, 205n, 209n, 221, 226n, 243n, 252, 278n Limborch, Philippus van 28, 28n Lipsius, Justus 27, 232 Politicorum Libri Sex 27 Liu, Tai 51n Locke, John 2, 18, 24, 31, 38, 40, 74, 86, 148, 233, 235 Essay Concerning Human Understanding 235 Letter Concerning Toleration, A 40, 94, 131 Locorum Theologicorum (Gerhard) 185 Loewenstein, David 7, 15, 15n, 17, 26n, 41n, 64n, 68n, 183n, 189n, 192n, 195n, 196n, 211n, 213n, 224n, 226n, 243n, 258n, 266n, 278n, 301, 302 Loftis, John 280n London 104, 227, 276 congregations 84–5 as new Jerusalem 80, 81, 82, 83 Long Parliament 72, 83, 154, 156, 183 Louis XIV, King of France (1638–1715) 33, 40, 221, 276 Lucifer see Satan Lucretius 43, 234 Lutaud, Olivier 59n Luther, Martin 84, 132, 158, 160, 161, 235, 236, 253, 285, 285n Lutheranism 27, 98, 174, 185 Luxon, Thomas 142n, 237n

313 MacCulloch, Diarmid 47n MacDonald, Joyce 280n Machiavelli, Niccolo 255, 270 MacLean, Gerald 19, 224n magistrates, and religion 53, 67, 76, 80, 85, 153–155, 159–62, 163, 166, 168, 219, 225, 232 Malatesti, Antonio 113 Maley, Willy 222n Mansel, Philip 285n Marchant, Ronald A. 92n Margalit, Avishai 129, 129n Markley, Robert 226n Marotti, Arthur 189n marriage 48 Grotius on 139 Milton on 127, 156, 190 Pufendorf on 140–2 regulation of 107 Marshall, John 3n, 23n, 26n, 27n, 29n, 37n, 46n, 68n, 207n, 208n, 222n, 226n, 228n, 232n Marshall, Stephen 68n, 101, 256, 256n, 257, 257n, 258 Meroz Cursed 256–60 Martin, Catherine Gimelli 142n, 226n, 234n martyrology, Protestant 210–11 Marvell, Andrew, Revd (c.1585–1641) (father of Andrew Marvell) 92–3, 95 Marvell, Andrew 17, 39, 43, 86–95, 95n, 96, 96n, 103, 104, 211n, 304 Account of the Growth of Popery and Arbitrary Government, An 90 Last Instructions to a Painter 89 Miscellaneous Poems 93 Mr. Smirke: or the Divine in Mode 94, 95, 96 On Mr. Milton’s Paradise Lost 87 Rehearsal Transpros’d, The 87, 88, 89 Rehearsal Transpros’d: The Second Part 87, 90, 94 Remarks Upon a Late Disingenuous Treatise 91, 92 Short Historical Essay 91, 94, 94n, 95, 96 Upon Appleton House 93 see also Milton, Paradise Lost Mary I, Queen of England 11, 39 Massachusetts Bay colony 76, 78, 79 Masson, David 80, 81n, 103, 103n, 164, 209n Matar, N. I. 35n, 227n, 228n

314 materialism 4, 9, 233, 234 Mayer, Joseph G. 205n, 209n McColley, Diane Kelsey 230n McDowell, Nicholas 15n, 194 McEachern, Claire 102n McKay, Derek 35n McLachlan, H. J. 26n, 176n, 183, 184 Medieval Spain 24 Melanchthon, Philipp 84 Mendus, Susan 128n, 233n Mennonites 24 Holland 26 millenarianism 78–9, 81, 82, 240 Milton, John: Animadversions 190, 252, 254 An Apology 245, 250, 253, 254, 255, 258, 261, 262 Areopagitica 1, 9, 30, 31, 36, 41, 52–53, 72–74, 81, 83–5, 103, 107–25, 127, 156, 165, 174, 189, 190, 196, 221, 225, 227, 229, 236, 239, 261, 279, 301–2; heresy in 49–50, 63–71; dignity of labour in 82–3; vision of new Jerusalem in 81–2; idea of religious truth in 51, 69 Colasterion 220 De Doctrina Christiana 2, 36n, 98, 159, 174, 177, 185, 190 Declaration, or Letters Patent 262, 263, 265, 266 A Defence of the People of England 191 Defensio Regia pro Carolo 131 Defensio Secunda 87, 99, 101, 114, 136, 249, 251, 299 Doctrine and Discipline of Divorce 1, 75, 100, 103, 107, 114, 127, 128, 131, 132, 133, 136–8, 140, 143, 156, 190 Eikonoklastes 98–100, 118, 212, 220, 221, 283, 290 History of Britain 98–100, 220 In Quintum Novembris 192, 193 Judgment of Martin Bucer 84, 220 The Likeliest Means 2, 220 Lycidas 83, 143, 213 Masque (at Ludlow Castle) 232, 251–2 Observations Upon the Articles of Peace 2, 85, 193, 211, 222–3 Of Education 36, 127, 270, 271 Of Prelatical Episcopacy 190 Of Reformation 73, 101, 174, 212–13, 243, 245, 249, 250, 255

Index Of True Religion, Haeresie, Schism, Toleration 2, 14, 28, 90, 96–7, 99–100, 144, 164, 174, 195, 197, 199, 236, 264, 265, 266 On the New Forcers of Conscience Under the Long Parliament 53, 76, 99, 102, 289 Paradise Lost 2, 16, 43, 88–9, 98, 99, 107, 120, 137, 143, 145, 170,173, 192, 193, 195, 199, 213–14, 220, 224, 225–7, 230, 231, 233, 234, 236, 238, 245, 249, 250, 254, 261, 264, 273, 277; Abdiel in 144, 159–60, 162, 195, 233, 236, 239; Christ in 240; Marvell on 87, 88; Raphael in 122, 156, 195, 197, 229, 230, 234, 237, 238, 241, 245, 250; Satan in 19, 35, 144, 292, 293, 295. See also Adam; Eve; God, Milton on Paradise Regained 2, 16, 97, 192, 224, 225–6, 232, 236, 240, 242 Poems (1645) 2, 99, 103n Private Correspondence 265 Pro Populo Anglicano Defensio (First Defence) 130, 131 Pro Se Defensio 117, 118, 120 Prolusiones 114, 120 The Readie and Easie Way to Establish a Free Commonwealth 27,175, 272, 273, 274, 275 The Reason of Church-Government 64–5, 119, 133, 251, 253, 255, 258 Samson Agonistes 2, 224–5, 247, 248, 258, 261–2, 266, 277 Second Defence of the People of England 1, 127 Sonnets (1640s) 100; ‘On the New Forcers of Conscience’ 53, 53n, 67, 99, 102; ‘Sonnet IX: To A Virtuous Young Lady’ 269; ‘Sonnet X: To The Lady Margaret Ley’ 269; ‘Sonnet XI’ 99; ‘Sonnet XII: On the Detraction’ 76, 99; ‘Sonnet XV: On The Late Massacre in Piedmont’ 18, 99, 204–5, 208, 209, 214–5, 219–20, 221, 222, 223; ‘Sonnet XVII’ 270; ‘Sonnet XVIII’ 270; ‘To Sir Henry Vane the Younger’ 179–80, 269; ‘To the Lord General Cromwell’ 100, 179 Tenure of Kings and Magistrates 1, 99–100, 129, 211, 258, 259, 266, 290

Index Tetrachordon 84 , 99, 127, 134, 142n, 143, 185 Treatise of Civil Power in Ecclesiastical Causes, A 2,18, 36, 84, 144, 145, 152, 154, 159–60, 162, 164, 165, 168, 169, 174, 183, 193, 195 see also Catholicism, Milton’s antipathy to; divorce, Milton on; God, Milton on; heterodoxy, Milton; marriage, Milton on; persecution, Milton on; Petrarch, Milton’s sonnets in style of; popery, Milton on; Presbyterians, Milton on; Satan, Milton on; violence, rhetoric in Milton Minor Reformed Church 173 minorities 34–5, 38 Mohamed, Feisal G. 224n, 245, 245n, 246, 247, 256 monarchy 264–5 monism 136, 143, 234 monotheism 153, 185 Montaigne, Michel 30, 59, 147n, 151 Essays, The 148 On Experience 147 Monmouth, Duke of see Scott, James morality 28, 40, 116, 132, 140, 146, 154 More, Alexander 117, 118 More, E. S. 51n More, Henry 289–90n Compendius History of the Turks 291 Explanation of The Grand Mystery of Godliness 289–90 More, Saint Sir Thomas 226, 228 Morland, Sir Samuel, 1st Baronet 204, 208, 209n, 212–13n, 214, 219, 221n Morrill, John 59n, 78, 78n mortalism 48, 154 Mortimer, Sarah 172n Mosaic Law 30, 42, 133, 136, 143, 220 Moscorovius, Hieronymus 173 Moses 82, 138 Mueller, Janel 15n, 70n Muslims 19, 29, 30–1, 34–5, 134, 137, 173, 228, 286, 290, 291, 293, 298 religious toleration 24, 287 Nardo, Anna K. 205n, 209n, 270n nation state 24, 36 nationhood 33–4, 203–23 national church 38, 47, 80, 232

315 England 89, 92, 93 natural law 4, 6, 17, 18, 37, 101, 132, 135, 136, 140, 141, 143, 227, 274 see also law Nayler, James 33, 85, 155 Nazianzen, Gregory 96 Nederman, Cary J. 10n, 24n, 25n, 30n Nedham, Marchamont Mercurius Politicus 179 Nelson, Holly 32n Netherlands 39, 222, 235 Neville, Henry 272 New England 76, 79–81, 82, 85 New Testament 66, 78, 133, 136, 188, 213, 219, 220, 257, 293 rejection of divorce 138–9 New World 16, 17, 25, 50, 196 Nichols, John 287n Nicolas, Henry 290 Nicomachean Ethics (Aristotle) 149, 150, 167 Nidditch, H. 235n Noachide laws 135, 138, 227 Noah 135 nonconformists 13, 33, 98, 164, 186 freedom of worship of 197 indulgence of 14 legislation against 155 persecution of 165, 175 Protestant 34, 91, 272 religious 33 Norbrook, David 15, 15n, 74, 74n, 239n, 243n, 247, 247n, 250n Nye, Philip 80, 81, 83 Nye, Stephen 171, 171n, 172–4, 175, 175n Brief History of the Unitarians, Called also Socinians, A 171, 172, 173 Nyquist, Mary 73n, 74n, 142n Oaths of Allegiance and Supremacy 186 Old Testament 61, 78, 82, 136, 188, 213, 214, 257, 293, 297 orthodoxy 91, 136, 174, 177, 181–2, 184, 185 Osborne, Francis 289, 289n Osborne, Thomas, 1st Earl of Danby 87, 99 Ottoman Empire 35, 284, 288, 289, 290, 191, 298, 299 religious pluralism in 284–7, 290 Overton, Richard 29, 57n, 235n Owen, John 94, 176, 176n, 177–9, 184, 185, 194, 194n

316 paganism 29, 34, 134, 136, 226, 286 Pagden, Anthony 25n, 196n Pagitt, Ephraim 75, 75n Palmer, Herbert 100–1 Palmer, Roger, 1st Earl of Castlemaine 89, 89n, 90, 95 pamphlets 46, 51, 66, 121, 179, 193, 248, 249, 259, 275, 287 Leveller 187 of Milton 2, 196, 243, 248, 252, 255, 261, 263, 265 Presbyterian 186–7 see also antiprelatical tracts papacy 144, 160, 162, 163, 164, 191, 213 Avignon 152 Parker, Samuel 88, 90 Parker, William 156n Parker, William Riley 193n, 194n, 196n Parr, Richard 133, 133n Parry, Graham 15n, 83n, 226n Parson, Robert 11 partisanship 276–7 Paster, Gail Kern 235n Patrick, Simon 94n Patterson, Annabel 14n, 24n, 73, 88n, 96n Patterson, Frank Allen 208n Pauline implications 56, 66, 67, 126, 127, 131, 134, 143, 160, 168, 169, 302 Peace of Augsburg (1555) 40 Peace of Westphalia (1648) 40, 210 Peasants’ Revolt (1525) 235 Pelagians 127, 182 Pelikan, Jaroslav 172, 172n, 173n Penn, William 228n Pepys, Samuel 13, 13n persecution 4–5, 14, 163 in Bible 30 of Catholicism 11, 13, 39, 113, 165, 180 in name of Jesus 40 Milton on 224, 225, 228–9, 248–9, 300 In Poland 175 religion in England and 8 Presbyterian clergy 58 see also intolerance; heretics Peters, Julie Stone 227n Petrarch: Milton’s sonnets in style of 212–14, 221 Petronius 110, 111, 116, 118, 119 Pettegree, Andrew 3n Phillipson, N. 229n Piedmont crisis (Italy) 7, 13, 210, 212, 214, 219, 223 see also Waldensians, massacre

Index Pincus, Steve 250n Plato 109, 117, 120–1 Pocock, G. A. 96, 96n, 157, 157n, 270n poetry see epic poetry Poland 10, 18, 25 anti-trinitarianism in 173, 175 persecution in 175–6 religious toleration in 265–6 Poland-Lithuania see Commonwealth of Poland-Lithuania Polizotto, Carolyn 179n Pollmann, Judith 27n Poole, Kristen 15n Poole, William 9, 9n, 226n, 250n Poor Men of Lyons see Waldensians popery 18, 177, 180, 275 Marvell on 90 Milton on 96–7, 99–100, 187, 190–1, 198–9, 266 persecution of Quakers and 218 wars against 207 Popish Plots (1679–81) 13, 189, 275–6, 280 Popkin, Richard H. 228n, 229n Popple, William 40, 94, 94n, 95 Porter, Roy 10n, 233n Potter, Harold 150–1, 151n, 152 predestination 29, 50, 79 prelacy 81, 83, 101–2, 177, 180, 190, 243 Presbyterians 1, 12, 17, 32, 36, 38, 42, 47, 52, 53, 58, 64–6, 75, 76, 81, 83–4, 84–5, 91, 92, 126, 138, 144, 181, 183, 186, 187, 199, 249, 261, 287, 300 London 48, 51, 55 Milton on 98–102, 127, 303 mobilization of 81 opposition to trial and execution of king 259 writers 54 press: control of 59 Presbyterian 59–60 liberty of 2, 3, 23, 31, 65, 84, 236, 271 priestcraft 8, 31, 77 see also anti-priestcraft propaganda 63, 66, 67–70, 76 Protestant League 12, 206 Protestantism 2, 10, 13, 14, 24, 26, 30, 31, 32, 33, 36, 37, 45–6, 56, 69, 73, 75, 76, 89, 97–8, 145, 160, 163, 164, 165, 174, 175, 186, 188, 197–8, 205–8, 210, 212, 213, 214, 216, 220–2, 268, 275, 288, 302

Index persecution 11, 39, 40, 41, 207 Pruitt, Kristin A. 234n Prynne, William 102 Pufendorf, Samuel [von] 18, 140, 140n, 141 De Jure Naturae et Gentium 131, 140 Puritanism 9, 12, 14, 29, 33, 38, 39, 42, 65, 76, 78, 79, 83, 84, 190, 191 England 80, 82, 95, 98, 102, 193, 303 Puritan Revolution 92 Pynchon, William 179 Quakers 12, 13, 29, 32–3, 37, 38, 43, 70, 73, 85, 207, 217–19, 290 persecution of 38–9, 85, 155 Questier, Michael 38n Quint, David 16, 16n, 234n Qur’an 288, 290, 291, 294, 297, 298 in English 291 Satan in 292, 295, 296 Iblis and 293 rabbinic scholarship 137, 138, 140 Racovian Catechism 1, 23, 29, 103–4, 173, 176, 177, 181, 182, 185 radical sectarianism 47, 59, 65, 66, 289 see also sectarianism radicalism 12, 160 persecution and 39 political 9 sectarian 4 see also dissent; names of individual radical groups and radicals Rait, R. S. 153n, 154 Rajan, Balachandra 9n, 16n, 211n, 223n, 226n, 292n Ranters 73, 85, 153, 154, 162–3, 180 rationalism 225 Raymond, Joad 15n, 65n, 83n, 188n, 193n, 205n, 207, 208n, 215, 226n reading 115, 119, 120 recusancy 165, 264 Recusancy Laws 1581 11 Recusants 11 Reformation 24, 29, 37, 40, 61, 83, 134, 142, 152, 205, 207, 219–20 Reformed Religion 208, 210, 213, 218, 219 Rehearsal, The (Villiers) 278n Relation of a Journey (Sandys) 291 religion 16, 55, 64, 68, 70, 97, 130, 146, 158, 164, 174, 205, 206, 287, 300 anarchy and 49, 53–4 controversy over 17, 55, 108, 110 diversity of 107, 134, 181, 230, 301

317 as private matter 26, 86, 164, 186, 231, 234–5, 240 reason in 187, 190 truths of 51, 57, 61 unity of 14, 24, 26, 37, 49, 58, 69, 98 Religious Peace (Busher) 287, 288 Remer, Gary 6n Republic (Plato) 117 republicanism 6, 14, 15, 18, 42–3, 157, 241, 246, 270, 273, 279, 283 English 74, 88, 263, 264, 266, 268, 276; collapse of 272 liberty and 281 secular 279, 283 virtue and 273 Restoration 2, 13, 33, 38, 233, 278 English 43, 85, 88, 98–9, 109, 155, 186, 263–4, 266, 270, 275, 303; church 91; church settlement of 94; second 86–7, 99 politics 224 writings 218 Rhode Island 76, 85 ribaldry 114, 116, 118 Robinson, Henry 228n Rogers, John 9, 9n, 184, 185n, 226n Roman Catholics see Catholicism Roman Church see Catholicism Rome 26, 281, 282 and Church of England 83 classical 272 Court of 90 republican 280 Root and Branch Petition 1640 12, 121 Rosenblatt, Jason 6, 6n, 18, 137n, 226n, 227n, 300 Ross, Alexander 228n Rovira, James 110n Rowe, Katherine 235n Royalists 219, 250 Ruar, Martin 26 Rump Parliament (1648) 12, 85, 145, 207 Rumrich, John P. 2n, 9n, 15n, 70n, 83n, 103n, 173n, 181, 181n, 182n, 193n, 199n, 226n Rutman, Darrett B. 81n, 83 sacred vehemence 248, 251–6, 258, 266, 267 Salomon, H. P. 34n Samson 224, 225, 245, 246, 247, 248, 252, 258, 262, 268, 277, 278–9, 281, 282 see also Milton, Samson Agonistes

318 Sanchez, Reuben Marquez 97n Sandys, George 286 Sassoon, I. S. P. 34n Satan 111, 160, 163, 199, 214, 239, 292, 298 denial of creator 161–2 equality 144, 156–7 heaven 158–9, 195–6; expulsion from 298 and Iblis (Islam) 294–6, 297, 304 Milton on 163, 192–3, 197, 199, 225, 229, 232, 236, 240, 261; Muslin responses to 284 outrage of 157–8 theophany of 159 see also Milton, Paradise Lost Sauer, Elizabeth 7, 9n, 13n, 16n, 18, 34n, 59n, 70n, 97n, 112n, 114n, 119, 120n, 139n, 158n, 211n, 223n, 224n, 226n, 251n, 264n, 266n, 292n, 302 Savoy, Duke of (Carlos Immanuel II) 203, 208, 209, 221, 222 Savoy Declaration (1658) 36 scepticism 7, 30, 48–9, 56, 59, 67, 78, 112, 153, 225, 228, 233, 300 Schaeffer, John D. 110n schisms 56, 60, 64, 67, 68, 69, 152, 232 schismatics 35, 37 see also separatists Schochet, Gordon 13n Schoenfeldt, Michael 235n Schwartz, Regina M. 199n Scilly Isles 176 Scorned Quakers True and Honest Account, The (Fisher) 219 Scotland Calvinists of 76, 172 Kirk of 153 violence in 33 Scott, James, 1st Duke of Monmouth (1649–1685) 265 Scott, Jonathan 7n, 11n, 193n, 228n, 275n, 275n scriptures 37–8, 50, 52, 57, 96, 98, 120, 126, 128, 129, 130, 133, 154, 158, 159, 163, 165–6, 168–9, 174, 175, 178, 185, 190, 193, 195, 198–9, 244, 257 reading 41, 43, 53 sexuality and 107–8 Second Anglo-Dutch War 13 sectarianism 45, 56, 63, 68, 85, 109, 152, 187, 192, 196, 208, 223 see also radical sectarianism

Index secularism 4, 18, 28–9, 30, 36, 40, 80, 99, 118, 197, 225, 242, 271, 274, 277, 278, 302 Selden, John 6, 18, 131, 132, 133, 134, 135, 137, 137n, 138, 138n, 140, 143, 227, 227n, 303 Analecta Anglobritannica 137 De Jure Naturali et Gentium Juxta Disciplinam Ebraeorum 131, 135, 137, 138, 227 Historie of Tithes 133, 138 Mare Liberum 137 Uxor Ebraica (Hebrew Spouse) 140 separatists 12, 27, 29, 41, 56, 58, 59, 61, 62, 63, 65, 127 September 11 245, 246, 247 sexuality 9, 10, 18, 107, 110, 116–8, 120 Sevelle, Max 80n Shagan, Ethan H. 189n Sharpe, Kevin 83n, 189n Shawcross, John T. 103n, 175n, 190n, 195n, 205n, 221n, 226n Sheils, W. J. 32n, 176n, 301n Shell, Alison 189n, 197n Shields, W. J. 206n Shuger, Debora 102n Sidney, Algernon 148, 275 Sidney, Sir Philip 113, 118 Siebald, Manfred 221n Silver, Victoria 6–7, 18, 300 Simpson, Percy 111n Sirluck, Ernest 73, 82, 101n, 186n Skinner, Cyriack 270 Skinner, Quentin 15n, 17, 189n, 229n, 241n, 247n, 270n, 272, 272n, 273n Smalcius, Valentin 173 Smectymnuus 76, 81, 101–2, 249, 256, 258 Smith, Nigel 8, 8n, 15, 15n, 26n, 31n, 32n, 34n, 41n, 64n, 189n, 270n, 299 Sobieski, John, King John III of Poland (1674–1696) 262, 265–6, 303 Socinianism 24, 25–6, 28, 32, 35, 93, 94, 95, 96, 102, 103, 171, 173, 174, 175, 177, 300–1 anti-Socianism 173 see also anti-trinitarianism Sola Scriptura 97, 198 Sommerville, C. J. 240, 240n Sommerville, J. P. 135, 135n soteriology 76, 80 Sozzino, Fausto (Socinus) 25, 173 Spain 13, 24, 196, 207, 217, 221, 222, 301 speech 256

Index acts 262, 263 political 247, 253–4 situations 237 Spenser, Edmund 117, 260n Faerie Queene, The Book I 35–6 View of the State of Ireland, A 260n Spinoza, Baruch 30, 30n, 31, 234, 235 Spitzer, Leo 143n Spurr, John 3n, 192n, 233n, 240n, 242n St. Augustine 37 St. Cyprian 221 St. Germain, Christopher 149–50, 150n, 152, 158 St. Jerome 117, 118 St. Paul 36, 55, 56, 62, 109, 128, 132, 134–5, 160, 166 St. Peter 52, 67, 134 St Peter’s of Rome 196 state church 54, 56, 82, 178 see also Church of England Stavely, Keith 164, 186n Stein, Arnold 250n Sterry, Peter 227, 227n, 230, 230n Steuart, Adam 53, 53n Stevens, Paul 5, 16n, 18, 24n, 68n, 204n, 244n, 252n, 254n, 261n, 265n, 266n, 292n, 299, 303, 304 Story, Joseph 149, 149n Stouppe, Jean Baptiste 209–10 Collection of the Several Papers, A 209, 214 Strafford, Earl of see Wentworth, Thomas, 1st Earl of Strafford Strier, Richard 103n Stubbe, Henry 8 Sutherland, Martin 234n, 240n Synoptic Gospels 221 see also gospels Talmud 32, 117, 135, 293 Taylor, Alan 85n Temple, Sir William 28, 228 terrorism 245–6, 278 Tertullian 36, 219, 220 Test Act (1673) 87, 186, 264, 272 Testimonie to the Truth of Jesus Christ, A 55 Thayer, James Bradley 167n theology 9–10, 42, 104, 116, 127 Thirty Years War 40, 75, 78, 193 Thirty-Nine Articles 1563 11 Thomason, George 100, 104, 210 thought, freedom of 8, 17–18, 30, 31, 236, 241, 277

319 tithes 152, 174 Toland, John 31n, 94–5, 95n, 228n, 239, 239n Christianity Not Mysterious 95 toleration see conscience; freedom; intolerance; liberty; religion: diversity; republicanism; thought, freedom of Toleration Act (1689) 14, 264, 268–9 Tolmie, Murray 51n Toomer, G. J. 137n Trevor-Roper, Hugh 92, 92n, 102, 103n, 249, 249n, 258 Trexler, Richard C. 114 Trinity 26, 96, 171, 172–5, 181, 182, 185 see also anti-trinitarianism Trubowitz, Rachel J. 9n, 234n Trumbach, Randolph 34n truth 36, 40, 69, 147, 190, 236–7, 302 by falsehood 225, 236 Tuck, Richard 7n, 26n, 128n, 135, 135n, 137n, 233n Tumbleson, Raymond D. 190n, 192n, 197n, 210, 212 Turkey 228, 266, 288, 290, 299, 303 Turner, James 9, 10, 299, 300, 302 Turner, James Grantham 6, 9n, 17, 34n, 41n, 64n, 108n, 112n, 142n, 211n, 213n Twofold Catechism (Biddle) 176 Tyacke, Nicholas 14, 14n, 233n, 234n Underhill, Edward Bean 287n United Provinces 24, 28, 173, 221, 299, 301 Unitarianism 35, 93, 94, 155, 171 Ursinus, Zacharias 185 USA 24, 74, 78 Utopia (More) 228 Valdes, Pierre 213 Vallance, Edward 233n van Aitzema, Liewe 181, 183 Van Gelderen, Martin 235, 236n Vanderjagt, Arjo 228n Vane, Sir Henry 7, 88, 100, 177, 177n, 179, 179n, 180, 245, 246, 269 Zeal Examined: Or, A Discourse for Liberty of Conscience in Matters of Religion 179, 180 Veil, Charles Marie de 38 Verdurmen, J. Peter 280n Vicars, John 50n Vindiciae Evengelicae (Overton) 176, 185 violence 5–6, 38, 39, 256

320 violence (cont.) civil strife and 264 compulsion by human authorities 53 religious 245–6, 256, 266 of rhetoric in Milton 243, 245, 247, 248–50, 255–6, 303 tyranny of kingship as 220 virtue 281, 283 classical 272 politics of 269, 270–1 Vitoria, Francisco 25 Volkelius, Johannes 173 Volpone (Jonson) 119 von Maltzahn, Nicholas 2n, 7, 15, 15n, 17, 39n, 87n, 88, 88n, 89n, 91n, 92, 94n, 228n, 250n, 263, 263n, 266n, 267, 301, 302, 304 Waddington, Raymond B. 118n Waldensians (Piedmont) 13, 40, 208, 216, 218, 220, 222, 223 Massacre of (1655) 203–6, 207–10, 212, 214, 221 persecution, end of 222 Walkerm, George 50 Walsham, Alexandra 2, 3, 3n, 4n, 10n, 11n, 30n, 40n, 69n, 187n Walwyn, William 17, 29, 47, 47n, 49, 50, 53, 56, 57–58, 58n, 59n, 60n, 62, 63, 64–6, 186, 187n, 188, 300, 301, 301n Compassionate Samaritan, The 58 Demurre to the Bill for Preventing the Growth and Spreading of Heresie, A 57 Prediction of Mr. Edwards His Conversion and Recantation 62 Tolleration Justified, and Persecution Condemned 187 Writings 57, 57n, 59n, 60n, 63n Wars of Religion 78, 152 Warren, Christopher 224n Webb, R. K. 234n Webster, Tom 3 Weekly Post 217, 217n, 218 Wentworth, Thomas, 1st Earl of Strafford 255

Index Westminster Assembly of Divines 36, 50, 61, 67, 80, 83, 98–100, 137, 138, 289 Westminster Confession of Faith 13, 36n, 177, 289 Wharton, Philip, 4th Baron Wharton 89, 91 Whig history 2, 15, 16, 17, 24, 76, 267, 280 White, B. R. 234n Whitelocke, Bulstrode 138, 138n Wightman, Edward 39 Wilding, Michael 74, 74n, 82 William III, King of England 33 Williams, Bernard 56, 56n Williams, G. H. 26n Williams, Roger 7, 8, 23, 29, 49n, 74–80, 81, 82, 84, 85, 179, 228, 243, 243n, 256n, 257, 282, 282n, 300, 301, 303 Bloudy Tenent, of Persecution, for Cause of Conscience 74–5, 77, 78, 79, 82, 84 Christenings Make Not Christians 77, 77n Key Into The Language of America 77 Winstanley, Gerrard 58–9, 59n Winthrop, John 78, 79, 80, 81, 82, 83 Wittgenstein, Ludwig 168 Wittreich, Joseph 73, 278n Wolfe, Don M. 2n, 101, 208n, 211n, 223n, 243, 243n Wolseley, Charles 228n Wood, Anthony 87 Wood, Derek N. C. 263, 263n Woodhouse, A. S. P. 14n, 219n Woolrych, Austin 187n, 189n Wootton, David 8n, 270n, 272n Worcester House Declaration 91 Worden, Blair 7, 7n, 12n, 176n, 179, 179n, 184, 206n, 224n, 268, 269n, 272n, 301n, 302 Wotton, Sir Henry, Provost of Eton 42, 103 Wycliffe, John 25, 84 York, Duke of see James, Duke of York Young, Thomas 81, 101 Yule, George 248n Yusuf ‘Ali, Abdullah 294, 294n, 296 Zagorin, Perez 51n, 67n ˇ zek, Slavoj 204, 204n, 205 Ziˇ Zurbuchen, Simone 15, 15n, 16n

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