Milton and the English Revolution. Christopher Hill

them’. This threatened ‘to leave us naked of our firmest and faithfullest neighbours abroad’.³

      To think well of the reformed religion is cause enough to make Laud one’s enemy, the Earl of Northumberland told the Earl of Leicester in December 1639.⁴ Government policy seemed to make sense only on the analysis put before the House of Commons in September 1642 by John Pym. It was the consequence of the undue influence of the ‘Jesuitical and prelatical faction’ which ‘threatened ruin … to all … the reformed churches’.⁵ In what seemed to many men to be a universal struggle between international popery and international Protestantism, Laud’s little Englandism looked hopelessly provincial: a step on the way to surrender to the Counter-Reformation culture which attracted the courtiers of Charles I and Henrietta Maria. ‘You and your prelatical party are more truly schismatics and sectaries’, Milton was to remind them in 1660, ‘than those whom you revile by those names.’⁶

      It is worth emphasizing how very radical were some of the positions which Milton adopted in his earliest pamphlets. For reasons of political discretion, perhaps, he aligned himself with the Smectymnuans. But he must already have been aware of wide discrepancies between himself and them. I shall mention later his not unfriendly reference to Familists.¹ His contemptuous dismissal of ‘the ignoble hucksterage of piddling tithes’ was more than resentment at financial extortion: it was part of a total rejection of any state church – not only of ecclesiastical jurisdiction but of the very existence of a separate clerical caste paid to preach. Ministers should be elected by their congregations, by plain artisans whom the defenders of prelacy call ‘the mutinous rabble’.² Milton may not yet have fully worked out the implications of this attitude: soon it was to unite him with all true radicals in the English Revolution. The issue of tithes – a state church or none – came to be the crucial issue dividing right from left.

      Or take an apparently more remote and theoretical point. The opening paragraphs of Milton’s first pamphlet, Of Reformation, discuss the Emperor Constantine. The official English Protestant tradition – the tradition of Jewell and Foxe – looked back to Constantine’s reign as the epoch in which Christianity triumphed, when the state became Christian. The really radical tradition, however, saw Constantine’s reign as the beginning of the apostacy. Several criticisms are involved – the close union of church and state, the rise of prelatical episcopacy, and the endowment of the church with great wealth. Erbery dated the rise of Antichrist from the time ‘when kingdoms came to be Christian’. John Reeve thought the apostacy began towards the end of the third century A.D.³

      So when Milton speaks in Of Reformation of the ‘most virgin times between Christ and Constantine’ he is aligning himself with this tradition, as against middle-of-the-road men who followed Foxe. ‘I am not of opinion to think the church … cannot subsist without clasping about the elm of worldly strength and felicity.’ Bishops ‘extol Constantine because he extolled them’. Through ‘Constantine’s lavish superstition’ the bishops set up ‘Mammon and their belly’ as their two gods.⁴ Milton returned to the same theme in 1659.⁵ The point was social as well as religious. Against the ‘large immunities’ and ‘great riches’ which Constantine had given to the clergy, against the ‘deluge of ceremonies’, Milton set ‘the homely and yeomanly’ religion of earlier Christians.⁶

      In the De Doctrina Milton adopted the radical view that religion had been ‘defiled with impurities for more than thirteen hundred years’.¹ If the apostacy dates from the union of church and state, then the English Reformation cannot be seen as a great turning point. The overthrow of papal power marked an advance. But the royal supremacy was a reversion to the least desirable aspects of Caesaro-papalism, and under it the prelatical authority of bishops flourished. The real reformation, a return to the practices of the primitive church, the reformation of ordinay believers, remained to be achieved. Foxe’s Book of Martyrs depicted the common people as the main enemy of Antichrist who is also the Pope. But ‘the people’ were expected to operate under the control of their betters: the example of Constantine justified ‘tarrying for the magistrate’. In the fifteen-eighties the Brownists and Field had called for reformation without tarrying for any. Since Christ is the only king, why tarry for an earthly magistrate? Now in 1641 the learned Milton gave this popular cause a historico-philosophical case. He was followed by William Prynne, in his brief radical phase, and by the Levellers.²

      Milton later tells us that it was because he had from his youth studied the distinctions between religious and civil rights that he felt he must intervene in the Smectymnuan controversy.³ Lycidas seems to confirm that these studies date at least from the late thirties. He may have arrived at his conclusions in his study at Horton. But nothing in the Commonplace Book suggests this: all references to Constantine that Milton copied out of books before 1641 are favourable or neutral.⁴ Wherever they came from, Milton’s conclusions reinforced those of the radical underground, and put their demands within a scheme of history. Not without reason did one of his early critics accuse Milton of associating with the ‘mutinous rabble’, and bringing ‘the very beasts of the people within the borders of the Mount’.⁵

      Milton, then, like the radicals, attached less significance to the Reformation than did either party to the Smectymnuan controversy. For him the true reformers were the Waldenses and in England Wyclif and his Lollard successors, the humble Marian martyrs and the persecuted sectaries. ‘The divine and admirable spirit of Wyclif’ anticipated Luther and Calvin, whose names might never have been known if the English reformer had not been silenced.¹ Milton knew that the Protestant Reformation had always been sullied by the material interests of ‘princes and cities’. In his perspective the Reformation was only an incident, part of a rising curve which extended from Wyclif to the English Revolution.

      Milton looked back with especial sympathy to ‘our first reformers’, the Waldenses, on whose behalf he wrote his glowing sonnet in 1655. He links Charles Diodati with the Waldenses by echoing the Epitaphium Damonis in the sonnet. ‘Priscamque fidem coluisse piumque’ (line 33) leads on to ‘Even them who kept thy truth so pure of old’.² From the sixteen-forties Milton was studying the history of the Waldenses. He thought that their religion might have continued ‘pure since the Apostles’; they endowed no churches and paid no tithes, maintaining their ministers ‘by alms only’. Their preachers ‘bred up themselves in trades, and especially in physic and surgery … that they might be no burden to the church’. Milton also – like John Goodwin – cited the Waldenses against pacifists, to argue that civil and religious liberty might be defended by force of arms. We shall see later the significance of these emphases. In 1649 Milton praised the Waldenses because ‘they have held the same doctrine and government since the time that Constantine with his mischievous donations poisoned … the whole church.’³

      We should not, then, be too surprised that the Reformation is not mentioned in Paradise Lost: the scamper over human history in the last two books is going very fast when we get to this date. In the early sixteen-forties ‘the bright and blissful Reformation’ had seemed one stage in a movement which started with Wyclif and culminated in the English Revolution. From the perspective of post-Restoration England the Reformation seemed just another false start under the rule of Antichrist, its permanent outcome the episcopal Church of England. The Restoration had put paid to the idea of ‘continuous reformation’, and this may have lessened the tactical desirability of looking back to Protestant predecessors. Psychologically, too, it meant that the sense of a continued upward movement was lost. But the Reformation for Milton had never played a unique part in human advance. Wyclif, perhaps because he was an Englishman, was almost equally important.⁴

      Lycidas, then, seems to me to lead directly on to the anti-episcopal pamphlets. Whatever consolations immortality might bring for the death of an individual, only divine intervention, the two-handed engine at the door, could remedy the apostacy of a church. ‘Of all those blessed souls which you have persecuted’, Milton told the bishops five years later, ‘and those miserable ones which you have lost, the just vengeance does not sleep.’¹ The strength of Lycidas comes from its fusion of the cultural and the personal. Until the land has ‘enfranchised herself from