Milton and the English Revolution. Christopher Hill

to be enjoyed here and now. This may be expressed as an antinomian libertinism: the elect are exempt from the moral law since God is in them, they partake of Christ’s nature. Such doctrines were denounced by Thomas Rogers in 1607.²

      If at death the body returns into its elements, as a drop of water taken out of the ocean returns to it again, mortalism can also lead to scepticism about the physical existence of heaven and hell. Some Lollards denied their existence, and placed Purgatory in this world. The devil, too, was internalized. This could combine with allegorical interpretations of the Bible to make the whole Christian myth describe conflicts which take place only within the believer. Familists were said to believe that Christ and Antichrist were not real persons, heaven and hell not real places: all were states of mind. The Grindletonians, like Thomas Münzer before them and Gerrard Winstanley after them, emphasized the spirit as against the letter of the Bible, a doctrine not unknown to Milton.³ Lollards objected to church marriage, thinking that it should be a civil ceremony. ‘Marriage is superfluous’, the Venetian Ambassador reported heretics as saying in 1499.⁴ Familists married and divorced by simple declaration before the congregation. Through them the attitude passed to Ranters and Quakers. Some Lollards may have advocated polygamy, though the evidence is doubtful. It was defended by Kentish heretics in 1572.⁵

      Another complex of ideas that interwove with the Lollard-Familist tradition was Hermeticism. The rediscovery and translation of the Hermetic texts in the fifteenth century was of great intellectual significance all over Europe. These writings almost certainly date from the third century A.D., but they were widely believed to be of much greater antiquity. The original Hermetic philosophers appear to have fused Platonic and Stoic ideas, adding some Jewish and Egyptian concepts.⁶ Through them many tenets of the ancient world were given fresh life in renaissance Europe. The belief that there was a primitive theology which antedated but anticipated Christianity was attractive to many intellectuals, including Francis Bacon, as was the idea of a secret, esoteric wisdom known only to initiates. Hermetic doctrine stressed the original unity of all mankind. But at a lower level Hermeticist ideas fitted in with the magical practices of the peasantry, and were taken up by ‘cunning men’ who catered for the needs of ordinary people, especially in Protestant countries where Catholic magic was frowned on, and also by astrologers.¹

      The fact that Hermeticist ideas could appeal both to élitist intellectuals keeping their secret wisdom from the vulgar and to lower-class magicians makes their place in the great melting-pot of ideas in the sixteen-forties and -fifties difficult to assess. They contributed to the thinking of medical radicals like Culpeper, of political and social radicals like Winstanley and the Ranters – and of Milton. Not all Hermeticists were radicals, by a long way; but most radicals were Hermeticists.

      There were other sixteenth-century influences from the Continent – not only German and Dutch Anabaptism, which historians have stressed perhaps too much, but also the more elusive influence of anti-Trinitarians like Servetus and Ochino, and of the Dutch Familist Henry Niklaes.² In this book I deal principally with Milton’s relation to the English underground tradition: I say little about continental influences, such as that of Jacob Boehme (1575–1624), many of whose works were translated into English in the liberty of the sixteen-forties and -fifties. They had probably circulated in manuscript earlier: they were certainly widely influential among the radicals.³ There are problems in this area with which I am not competent to deal. What is the relationship of plebeian English Familism to the intellectual Familism of the Netherlands and Spain?⁴ And to ‘libertine’ trends among advanced intellectuals from Elizabeth’s reign onwards? Frances Yates has postulated the existence of a European intellectual underground extending from Bruno to the Rosicrucians, with important English links.⁵ This hypothesis might explain, for example, how Milton so easily gained his entry into Italian academies, and how he obtained his early knowledge of Familism.⁶ There is room for detailed research in this area.

      Before 1640 the traditions I have been describing circulated verbally. Historians, themselves the products of a literary culture, relying so much on written or printed evidence, are always likely to under-estimate verbal transmission of ideas. Men did not need to read books to become acquainted with heresy: indeed censored books were the last place in which they would expect to find it. Again and again the great heresiarchs deny being influenced by their predecessors. Luther was astonished to find that he was reproducing Hus’s heresies; Milton was astonished and delighted to find that many Protestant divines had anticipated his views on divorce.

      I see Milton as a man who moved uneasily between the second and third cultures. In this he is not unique. John Foxe had claimed Lollards and Marian martyrs as predecessors of the Elizabethan church, though many of them would have been persecuted only slightly less ferociously by the authorities of that church. The preaching brethren whom Haller studied hoped in the first four decades of the seventeenth century by Bible-teaching and by discipline to control and organize the powerful forces of the third culture: Oliver Cromwell and others like him decided that toleration of spokesmen for this culture was necessary if popular energies were to be harnessed to defeat the Royalists. Milton’s belief that God reveals truths ‘first to his Englishmen’ drew on this popular heretical tradition.¹

      In speaking of two cultures, I refer to two bodies of ideas, not to groups of individuals. When we analyse the ultimate logic of these blocks of ideas we can see that they are antagonistic. Some men in the seventeenth century consistently adhered to the full logic of one or other ideological position: some were aware of political consequences. Others pursued a course of action which led steadily in one direction – Lilburne, Wither, Milton. Ideas are not, however, a reflex of economics. Once a body of ideas is in existence, individuals can take up some or all of it for the most diverse and personal reasons. But the fact that individuals hedge, fudge, are inconsistent, seek a quiet life, does not preclude the possibility of differentiating between the bodies of ideas which they muddle. On the whole, Puritans supported Parliament in the Civil War; but some whose ideas at least contain elements of Puritanism supported the King. Richard Baxter moved one way, Francis Quarles and Richard Holdsworth the other. Many like George Herbert and Nicholas Ferrar straddle the gap untidily. Such exceptions prove nothing. In our day some millionaires subscribe to Labour Party funds, and there are Tory working men. This does not invalidate the generalization that on the whole the Labour Party is a working-class party, the Conservative Party the party of men of property.

      This consideration applies especially to what I have called the third culture. Ideas tend to be expressed by intellectuals: that is what intellectuals are for. Before 1640 authentic expressions of well-thought-out ideas of the third culture are hard to come by. Intellectuals of lower-class origin, if they were to get on in the world, had to adopt (and mostly no doubt conscientiously did adopt) ruling-class ideas, or at least the ‘respectable’ alternative ideas of Puritanism. Those intellectuals who played with the third culture were often arrogant and irresponsible aristocrats and their hangers-on – like Sir Walter Ralegh and his dependants who were accused of atheism in the fifteen-nineties. Ralegh patronized a group which runs across classes, from intellectuals of plebeian origin like Marlowe and Hariot down to the shoemaker in Sherborne who said that men in his locality believed that hell was poverty in this world.¹ Hariot had doubts about the existence of heaven and hell, but he insisted on the social necessity of maintaining popular belief in them, since ‘this opinion worketh so much in many of the common and simple sort of people that it maketh them have great respect to their governors, and also great care what they do to avoid torment after death and to enjoy bliss.’²

      Such men drew on the European libertine tradition as well as on the body of ideas which I have called Familist. The two are strangely intermingled.³ Upper-class intellectuals who played about with libertine or Familist ideas were perhaps not always wholly serious. Often a desire to shock, to épater, entered in – as with Inns of Court poets who glorified the supposed promiscuity and communism of the Golden Age. Conversely, we should not look for a coherent body of ideas among lower-class Familists. Rather there was a confused remembrance of ideas floating down from various systems of thought, some obsolete;⁴ a great deal of popular magic and naive belief in direct divine intervention were mixed up with what in the free discussion of the sixteen-forties were to emerge as serious and coherent