He was, he thought, about to enter Paradise.
• • •
MARY POWELL LASTED IN her new life as Mrs. Milton for little more than a month before she moved back to Forest Hill. The official excuse was an “earnest suit” by her mother for her daughter’s company, with a promise that she would return to London in about four weeks’ time, that is, toward the end of September. Neither she nor her husband left a direct account of the domestic misery that must have sent her packing so soon after the wedding and with so flimsy an excuse. Milton’s nephew put the blame on the “philosophical life” at Aldersgate Street, irksome to a young woman who was accustomed to a lively country house. The seventeenth-century gossip John Aubrey, ferreting around for further details, heard that Mary had been raised “where there was a great deal of company and merriment, dancing etc.” She found herself in a somber house that no one came to visit, its quiet broken only by the weeping of the young schoolboys whom her husband was beating in the adjoining room. So much for joys of the philosophical life. Aubrey jotted down in his notebook a further cause of dissension: Mistress Powell was a Royalist, and “different religions do not well on the same bolster.”
Mary did not return at the appointed time, nor did she send word to clarify the situation. It was the abandoned husband who wrote to her, but he received no answer. He wrote again and then again, but still there was no response from Forest Hill. In the meantime, the national crisis worsened. Accounts of the past tend to keep the personal and the political in separate spheres, but of course they always bleed into one another.
In August 1642 a very young, unhappy woman fled from a marriage in which she felt trapped, and in the same month King Charles I took the fateful step in Nottingham of gathering his troops around him, raising his standard—a banner on which was written the motto “Give Caesar His Due”—and launching a civil war. Two events could not be more unlike, and yet they did not occur in separate universes. Milton and his bride may not have argued in bed over points of difference between Anglicanism and Puritanism, but the outbreak of hostilities would certainly have exacerbated and hardened whatever tensions had already been simmering. At the most practical level, travel between London—the heart of the Parliamentary party—and Royalist Oxfordshire became at first difficult, then risky, then extremely dangerous. Milton did not go to Forest Hill himself to fetch his wife, but when his letters went unanswered, he dispatched a servant. The servant returned, Milton’s nephew Edward Phillips recalled, not only without a satisfactory answer but also with the news that he had been “dismissed with some sort of contempt.”
The bride’s family had no doubt been enthusiastic at first about the match to the wealthy Londoner to whom they owed a great deal of money. At a different time, they might have urged, even compelled, their unhappy daughter to return to her lawful husband. But in the fall of 1642, from the perspective of Forest Hill, it appeared that the king, who had established his headquarters at nearby Oxford, would soon make mincemeat of his enemies. Once the court party gained the upper hand and restored order to the land, there would be a reckoning with the troublemakers. And among those who had disturbed the peace was the intemperate and arrogant man who had written those incendiary tracts against the bishops. Mary stayed put at Forest Hill.
And Milton? Milton remained in his house in London. It was not a pleasant time. He had made a catastrophic mistake, and he did not have the excuse of green youth. He had long prided himself on his profound learning, his moral rectitude, and his eloquence. He harbored—not as a well-kept secret but as an open promise to himself and the world—a sense that he was destined for greatness. Now he had shown himself to be a fool, the object at once of pity and of ridicule.
By late October the king’s army was moving steadily down the Thames valley toward London. The end of the insurrection was tantalizingly in sight. The royal forces reached Turnham Green—close enough to be the site now of a London Underground station on the District Line—only to encounter fortifications hastily erected by the trained militias, citizen bands of shopkeepers and artisans and apprentices, with a modest intermingling of old veterans. The king hesitated, assessed the situation (including the ominously approaching Parliamentary troops, led by the Earl of Essex), and pulled back. London was never again within his grasp.
Though Milton had been in training—a fastidious, long-haired poet shouldering a pike and marching up and down a parade ground—when the king’s army approached, he did not emerge from Aldersgate Street and rush to Turnham Green to erect barricades. Instead, he wrote a sonnet that he tacked to his door (or perhaps he only imagined doing so). The poem begged whoever happened to approach his defenseless house to protect the person within from harm. Why? Because this was the house of a poet, and a poet possesses the ability to “spread thy name o’er lands and seas.” This is not, it is fair to say, Milton at his most heroic. But it conveys, half-playfully and half-seriously, his faith in the power of poetry and in his own vocation. And the truth is that he was in his own way extraordinarily brave, though it was not a form of bravery that would catch the attention of a military historian.
At this moment of national crisis, Milton could have been expected either to lie low or, if he were determined to act rashly, to renew his polemic against the bishops. Instead, he did something else, something that took unbelievable courage or, alternatively, unbelievable self-absorption. He threw himself into writing a succession of impassioned tracts demanding that no-fault divorce with the right to remarry be made legally available to all English men and women. It was justified, he argued, by a proper understanding of the story of Adam and Eve.
Milton’s contemporaries found these tracts shocking, and for good reason. In seventeenth-century England, marriages were considered binding for life; they came to an end only with the death of a spouse. Back in the early sixteenth century, Henry VIII had broken with the Roman Catholic Church over what is often said to have been his demand for a divorce from Catherine of Aragon, his wife of eighteen years. In fact he was not seeking a divorce, nor did he receive one from the Protestant archbishop of Canterbury. Rather he was granted an annulment. The Church of England did not significantly change the Catholic understanding of marriage. It would take more than three hundred years before the changes for which Milton called were finally made legal in the Divorce Reform Act of 1969–73.
If a man and woman were legally wed—if there was no bigamy, incest, insanity, or other circumstance that should have prohibited betrothal in the first place and if the marriage was consummated—then the knot could not be untied. A wife whose husband repeatedly beat her or violently sodomized her might arouse sympathy. If the abuse was sufficiently cruel, she might even be granted a formal separation “from bed and board,” though these were by no means easy to obtain. But, short of a case of adultery or heresy, there would be no grant of divorce and no right to remarry. So too in cases of desertion: if a wife deserted her husband (or vice versa), the abandoned spouse might well be pitied, but neither he nor she could find another mate and start over again. As for incompatibility—the recognition that a relationship had broken down and could not be repaired—that was a traditional subject for comedy and not a matter for the courts.
As it stood then, Milton was stuck in a marriage that he regarded as a catastrophic mistake—and so, for that matter, was Mary. Everything in Milton’s nature rebelled against passively accepting the situation in which he now found himself. For years he had been saving himself for marriage. He was destined, he was absolutely convinced, for something better than the fate of quiet, melancholy compromise, seething resentment, or sly cheating that he saw all around him. Besides, the more he thought about it, the more the whole existing law seemed a nightmare, not just for him alone but for everyone.
The overwhelming problem was not that this law rested, as it did, on time-honored custom, hardened into the regulations of canon law. The free soul of a brave and learned person, Milton wrote, can easily sweep away “the rubbish of can
onical ignorance.” The truly serious issue was that the Messiah himself, citing the story of Adam and Eve, seemed explicitly to prohibit divorce, except on grounds of adultery.
In the gospel of Matthew, the Pharisees ask Jesus about the lawfulness of divorce. In reply, Jesus reminds them that in the book of Genesis the first man cleaves to his wife, and they become one flesh. “What therefore God hath joined together,” the Savior declares, “let not man put asunder” (Matt. 19:4–6). No Christian who hoped to change the divorce laws could ignore or easily evade this passage.
Facing the difficulty squarely, Milton reinterpreted Jesus’s words by invoking what was traditionally called “the law of charity.” The New Testament was good news; it could not possibly intend to make the Mosaic law more inflexible and burdensome. Therefore, he wrote, Jesus’s harsh pronouncements on divorce must not have meant what they seemed to mean. The Savior gave the Pharisees the answer that those “arrogant inquisitors” deserved. But the answer that he intended for men and women of good faith is entirely different, and the clue is his reference to Adam and Eve.
Jesus is instructing us to go back to the beginning of human life, to picture Adam alone in the Garden, and to grasp the end for which the Creator fashioned Eve. That end, Milton argued, was not first and foremost about sex. To believe that the bond of wedlock was principally instituted to satisfy and regulate the desires of the flesh was a fundamental error, one that collapsed humans into the category of mere beasts. The church, both Catholic and Anglican, had reduced what it meant for a man and a woman to be “one flesh” to the crude fact of ejaculation, what Milton called in one of his wilder phrases “the quintessence of an excrement.”
Still less, he thought, was the principal purpose of marriage the generation of children. Even the church court was not foolish enough to believe that a marriage was invalid because it failed to bring forth offspring. God commanded the first humans to be fruitful and multiply, along with the cattle of the fields and the birds of the air. But the first marriage—the marriage of Adam and Eve—was instituted for a different reason, perfectly encapsulated in God’s own words: “It is not good that man should be alone.” There is nothing complicated or obscure here; everyone should be able to grasp its meaning. “Loneliness is the first thing which God’s eye nam’d not good.” The principal end of marriage is neither sex nor children; it is companionship. A solitary Adam, though he dwelt in Paradise, would have been condemned to unhappiness. It was, as Milton put it, for the “prevention of loneliness to the mind and spirit” that God created woman and brought her as a helpmeet to the man.
Confident that he grasped the purpose of the original, paradisal marriage, Milton tapped into his personal anguish. He articulated clearly and forcefully, perhaps for the first time ever, an experience to which anyone who has been in an unhappy marriage can attest. If you are married to the wrong person, your loneliness—“God-forbidden loneliness”—is not diminished but heightened. It should not be possible, for your spouse is there in the room with you, but you feel more alone than when you were solitary. The silences are charged with pain, and words, even ones meant to end the isolation, only intensify it. That is what those weeks in the summer of 1642 had taught him. He found the lesson unbearable.
And what about Mary? It was she, after all, who had left behind her parents and eleven brothers and sisters and the familiar servants in lively, bustling Forest Hill, she who came at the age of seventeen to the somber house on Aldersgate Street, she who might well have found her much older, bookish, fiercely argumentative husband strange and off-putting. Mary was the one who in her new life must have felt excruciatingly lonely. It would be agreeable to think that Milton recognized her suffering, as well as his own, and in principle at least he was poised to do so. The incendiary pamphlet that he published anonymously in August 1643, a year after Mary had abandoned him, was entitled The Doctrine and Discipline of Divorce, Restored to the Good of Both Sexes. Both sexes, not just the male.
Yet everything in the way that Milton described the dilemma he took it upon himself to solve suggests that he was only truly alert to his own misery. He deemed his own performance as a husband to be perfectly just and proper; he thought that the words he spoke to his bride were met with maddening resistance. He was, he felt, the victim of a mute and spiritless mate who had deprived him of the “cheerful conversation” that was the whole point of marriage and that was only possible “when the minds are fitly disposed.”
How then could he have made so disastrous a mistake? He looked around at the marriages of his friends and acquaintances, including those whom he deemed far inferior to himself in both intelligence and morals, and he recognized that many of these marriages, perhaps all of them, were happier and wiser than his own. In the divorce tracts, though never directly acknowledging that he is reflecting on himself, Milton struggles to explain how it could have happened. The “bashful muteness of a virgin,” he now understood, may hide her sloth and dullness. Or the suitor may not have been granted sufficient “freedom of access” until it is too late. Or, if he has any lingering doubts, there are inevitably friends who try to persuade him “that acquaintance, as it increases, will amend all.”
But none of this quite accounts for why outright scoundrels often make good marriages, while those who “have spent their youth chastely” can so easily blunder into terrible ones. The answer, Milton thought, is that those who have flitted wildly from one lover to another have accumulated funds of valuable experience. But the chaste and inexperienced youth, if he makes a single fatal mistake, is told that there is nothing to be done: he must endure it for his whole life.
Milton refused to do so, at least not without a fight. Deprived of the cheerful conversation of wedlock and certain that he would never find it with the woman he had married, he felt arising in himself a different emotion he did not hesitate to name: “Then enters Hate,” he wrote about failed marriages, “not that Hate that sins, but that which only is natural dissatisfaction and the turning aside from a mistaken object.” Love had turned to loathing.
Milton was sickened by the thought of entrapment for life in a loveless marriage. He knew that he would never turn for solace to the brothel or to adultery. But to have sex with a partner you hate—“to grind in the mill,” as he put it, “of an undelighted and servile copulation”—was a form of “forced work.” Instead of one flesh, he wrote bitterly, there were “two carcasses chained unnaturally together,” or rather “a living soul bound to a dead corpse.” Could God be such a tyrant?
If God intended to inflict this misery upon him, then Milton would have to believe that rather than being one of the elect, he was what Calvinists called a reprobate, a sinner rejected by God. And if he refused to believe that he was one of the damned? There was for Milton a still worse fear, more terrible and perhaps more tempting than the feeling of reprobation. A sensitive person trapped forever in an unhappy marriage could begin to doubt that God had anything to do with it at all. The last and worst of a series of miserable alternatives that began with the whorehouse and the neighbor’s bed was atheism.
But none of it, Milton reasoned, was truly necessary. For the God who ordained marriage in the Garden of Eden could not possibly want to condemn all those who made an innocent mistake to a lifetime of unhappiness. If love, mutual help, and intimacy were to be an integral part of marriage, as God intended, then there had to be the possibility of divorce. Led astray by a corrupt church, men and women had been penned up in a prison of their own making, from which they desperately needed someone to lead them. A person who could provide the thread “that winds out this labyrinth of servitude,” Milton argued, “deserves to be reckoned among the public benefactors of civil and humane life, above the inventors of wine and oil.”
He understood that by 1644 his personal situation would be well known to many of his readers. It was a small world, one in which he had already made himself highly visible by his vehement published attacks on the bishops. Now that his young wife had
left him, he knew that his arguments for divorce would seem to some a mere personal brief. But what of that? He would transform a private crisis into the largest possible public claim, and in doing so he would be the savior of marriage itself, someone worthy of more grateful admiration than the inventors of wine and oil.
When in 1643 he first brought out The Doctrine and Discipline of Divorce (the title means in effect “the theory and practice” of divorce), he did so anonymously. But in the next year, after two printings sold out almost immediately, he issued a revised and expanded version, this time boldly affixing his name to the title page: John Milton.
Instead of admiration, there was a rush of ridicule and outrage. The Doctrine and Discipline of Divorce deserved “to be burnt by the Hangman”; its arguments were “little less than blasphemy against Christ himself.” As for Milton’s account of the intolerable loneliness felt by someone married to the wrong person, one of his opponents sneered, “You count no woman to due conversation accessible … except she can speak Hebrew, Greek, Latin, and French, and dispute against the canon law as well as you.”
Milton had argued that children of an unhappy marriage—“the children of wrath and anguish,” as he termed them—are worse off than those whose parents agree to a “peaceful divorce.” So too, he thought, unhappy wives have as much reason to welcome divorce and the possibility of remarriage as unhappy husbands. Why should women, any more than men, be forced to remain yoked to a spouse they have come to hate? But to almost all of Milton’s seventeenth-century contemporaries, these arguments seemed either wicked or appallingly naïve. They would license men, it was thought, to abandon their responsibility and undermine the institution that God himself had established in Eden. The poet who had once prided himself on his virginity and written a masque in celebration of chastity was clearing a broad path for libertines.