Milton and the English Revolution. Christopher Hill

Congregationalists like John Goodwin, General (Arminian) Baptists, Seekers (hardly an organized sect, but including men like Milton’s friend Roger Williams, Giles Randall, John Saltmarsh, William Walwyn, William Erbery), Behmenists, Socinians, Ranters. Ranters were hardly a sect, but Fuller and many others saw them as descendants of the Familists.¹ The name must serve to cover radical antinomians like Laurence Clarkson and Abiezer Coppe. From the Ranters, partly by reaction, were to derive the Muggletonians (led by John Reeve and Lodowick Muggleton, the two Last Witnesses of Revelation II) and the early Quakers (not yet pacifist in the sixteen-fifties, politically and socially very radical) led by George Fox and James Nayler. Ranters, Quakers and Muggletonians inherited much of the Familist tradition, and many radicals took over some Hermeticist ideas.²

      The Introductions to Volumes II and IV of the Yale edition of Milton’s Complete Prose Works show how closely the evolution of the poet’s ideas was linked to the general development of radical Parliamentary thinking. The traditional orthodoxy of Calvinism was rejected: so was belief in the Trinity. New-old heresies were preached – Arminianism, millenarianism, antinomianism, mortalism, materialism. In these heresies Milton shared an interest with Levellers, Diggers, Ranters, Seekers, Behmenists, Muggletonians, Socinians, some Baptists, some Quakers. Milton’s reaction to the confusing flux of the mid-forties was to return to the Bible, to evolve his own Bible-based theology; the ultimate outcome was the De Doctrina Christiana.

      Milton drew his ideas both from the Puritan and from the popular radical traditions. Recall once more the savage anti-clericalism of Lycidas and Milton’s repudiation of Constantine in his first pamphlet: both smack more of radical sectarianism than of orthodox Puritanism.³ As early as 1641 Milton was sneering at conservatives’ fear lest ‘we shall be all Brownists, Familists, Anabaptists. For the word “Puritan” seems to be quashed, and all that heretofore were counted such are now Brownists.’¹ In 1642 he declared that ‘the primitive Christians, in their times, were accounted such as are now called Familists and Adamites, or worse.’² This was an astonishingly liberal attitude for Milton to have taken. It is comparable with Gerard Manley Hopkins writing (in 1871, of all years) ‘horrible to say, in a manner I am a communist.’ But that was in a private letter.³ Milton mentioned Familists in the same breath with the early – and truest – Christians, in print, at a time when even Lord Brooke was carefully dissociating himself from Familism so as not to prejudice his plea for toleration. In The Reason of Church Government Milton spoke up for Arians as well as Anabaptists and Familists. By 1643 he had added anti-nomians to those on whose behalf he called for liberty. In the first edition of The Doctrine and Discipline of Divorce Milton referred to the ‘fanatic dreams’ of these sectaries; in the 1644 edition he added ‘(if we understand them not amiss)’,⁴ as though to make it clear that he was not necessarily condemning them.

      Familists and Anabaptists were the bogeymen of orthodoxy, accused of all sorts of heresies and anti-social beliefs: they were irredeemably lower-class and unrespectable. Spenser had damned them in the conventional way; Milton suggested that prelates used the unsavoury reputation of the radicals to smear all Puritans – a point often repeated without acknowledgement to Milton.⁵ Only one pamphlet spoke in defence of Familists before Milton wrote, and it may have been a papist reductio ad absurdum.⁶ Not until September 1643 did the future Leveller William Walwyn, in The Power of Love, join Milton’s courageous stand.⁷ As late as 1648 Samuel Rutherford thought it worth devoting a hundred pages of A Survey of the Spirituall Antichrist to ‘A Discovery of Familism in Mr. Saltmarsh’.⁸ Milton’s was an audacious position to take up so early, and it was not one that he found in the reading recorded in his Commonplace Book. As with his rejection of Constantine, the stimulus to his thinking is likely to have come from discussions after his return from Italy. It suggests once more that we should not dismiss Milton as an intellectual unaware of what humbler men and women were thinking. Was there perhaps a Familist group in Horton/Colnbrook?¹ In The Reason of Church Government Milton may have been consciously quoting the petition which English Familists presented to James I in 1604, claiming that they were misrepresented ‘much like as it was practised in the primitive church against the Christians’.² Saurat pointed out that Milton’s diatribe in Areopagitica against Church Fathers who ‘discover more heresies than they well confute, and that oft for heresy which is the true opinion’, included Irenaeus and Epiphanius, who wrote mostly against the Gnostics – comparable in many ways with the Familists.³

      The context in which Milton related Familists to early Christians is his criticism of those who smear and slander good men. There are two possible explanations of Milton’s attitude. One – the less likely – is that he was a Familist sympathizer himself, who made the comparison with early Christians as explicitly as he thought prudent. The other explanation is that Milton’s remark was (consciously or unconsciously) deliberately ambiguous: conservative slander of Familists reminded him of attacks on the early Christians, but he did not need to commit himself on whether the similarity extended any further: perhaps he himself did not know. We shall meet again with equivocations which may be tactical or may be genuinely revealing of Milton’s ambiguous relationship to the third culture.⁴

      There is a good book to be written one day on the subject of taverns and ale-houses as centres of political information and organization during the English Revolution. Henrician Anabaptists, Marian and Elizabethan Familists used ale-houses as bases for proselitization.⁵ James I allowed the traditional village sports on Sundays because he feared that otherwise men would go to ale-houses and there talk sedition.⁶ In 1641 religion was ‘the common discourse and table-talk in every tavern and ale-house’. News-sheets were read aloud in taverns, so that the illiterate could know what was going on: taverns were distribution centres for pamphlets and news-books. In the early forties information was disseminated to supporters of Parliament in London through ‘daily tavern clubs in each ward’. It was convenient that Isaac Penington, leader of the London Puritans and father of Milton’s friend, ran an ordinary. Baptists, Levellers, Ranters, Muggletonians, Quakers and the precursors of the Royal Society all met in taverns. The Rota Club in 1659–60 alternated between a coffee-house and a tavern. Men competed to ‘make themselves famous’ in the society of taverns and ale-houses, as they no doubt did in Charles II’s reign in the coffee-houses and ‘twopenny clubs’ for mechanics. In the revolutionary decades smoking was still rather a naughty new habit: for Ranters and others it was a means of heightening consciousness akin to drug-taking in our own society.¹ We should not read anything of this into the evening pipe which Milton enjoyed, but we may assume that the author of Areopagitica would be familiar with the tavern society of ‘the mansion house of liberty’ in which these exciting discussions were going on. ‘Where there is much desire to learn,’ Milton wrote, ‘there of necessity will be much arguing, much writing, many opinions; for opinion in good men is but knowledge in the making…. What some lament of, we should rather rejoice at…. Yet these are the men cried out against for schismatics and sectaries.’²

      For the Scots Samuel Rutherford and Robert Baillie, for Daniel Featley, former rector of Milton’s church, All Hallows, Bread St., for Thomas Edwards, Herbert Palmer, Alexander Ross, William Prynne, Ephraim Pagitt, and for countless other conservative Parliamentarians the heresies which were appearing in print seemed blasphemous and intolerable. Milton was named by Edwards, Baillie and Pagitt in their lists of dangerous heretics; he was unmistakably referred to by others. He was associated in the minds of enemies of the radicals with their heresies. Milton did not reject the association. In The Doctrine and Discipline of Divorce he suggested that the ‘fanatic dreams (if we understand them not amiss)’ of Anabaptists, Familists and antinomians derived ‘partly if not chiefly from the restraint of some lawful liberty’.³ In his sonnet ‘On the new forcers of conscience’ he aligned himself with

      Men whose life, learning, faith and pure intent

      Would have been held in high esteem with Paul

      but who

      Must now be named and printed heretics

      By shallow Edwards and Scotch what d’ye call.¹

      This