Milton and the English Revolution. Christopher Hill

is the most eloquent pamphlet on this subject, but its arguments had been anticipated by Walwyn and Henry Robinson, and were to be repeated by many others. This position led some (though not Milton) to reject the very idea of heresy and blasphemy as punishable offences. Milton has been described, justly, as the first great English writer to urge his readers not to react automatically to smear and bogey words like ‘sect’, ‘schism’, ‘heretic’ or ‘blasphemer’.¹ But he had been preceded by John Goodwin’s Imputatio Fidei (1642); Selden, Agricola Carpenter and many others were to repeat the point.

      Toleration of the tender consciences of university-educated divines was one thing: in the early forties Presbyterians and Independents might have agreed on that. But when unlettered laymen began to usurp the pulpit that was something quite different. The acid test of radicalism came to be anti-clericalism, rejection of any distinction between clergy and laity, of any special clerical caste. The separatists Barrow and Greenwood had repudiated the word ‘layman’ as popish. A true church, they thought, could exist without ministers; any layman might preach.² ‘New Presbyter is but old priest writ large’, Milton told the Presbyterian clergy. As so often he was putting into epigrammatic form a radical commonplace. ‘So antichristian and dividing a term as clergy and laity,’ said no less a person than Oliver Cromwell; ‘a term unknown to any save the antichristian church’, William Dell echoed him.³

      From this attitude followed the doctrine denounced by Thomas Edwards, not only that laymen might preach but that ‘a poor plain countryman’ with the spirit of God was better than ‘the greatest philosopher, scholar or doctor’ without it.⁴ This was the religious equivalent of Cromwell’s russet-coated captain, who knew what he fought for and loved what he knew, and was therefore preferable to a gentleman who had rank and nothing more. From his first pamphlet Milton insisted that the essentials of Christianity were simple and easy to understand. ‘A plain unlearned man that lives well by that light which he has is better and wiser and edifies others more’ than ‘a learned hypocrite’. Any congregation might elect its own minister, any believer might preach. This looks forward to Christ’s attitude towards learning in Paradise Regained, and to Milton’s ‘We are all equally priests in Christ’ in the De Doctrina Christiana, where ‘philosophizing academics’ are attacked. A religious service should be a discussion, in which ‘the weakest of the brethren should have an opportunity’ to take part.⁵ In 1644 Milton envisaged higher education for lawyers and medical doctors, but not for the clergy.⁶

      The logic of all this was rejection of a state church, and in particular of ‘the ignoble hucksterage of piddling tithes’, ‘wrung out of men’s purses to maintain a disapproved ministry against their consciences’.¹ From the ‘blind mouths’ of Lycidas, through Areopagitica’s rejection of the legend that ‘the tenth part of learning stood or fell with the clergy’, down to The Likeliest Means to Remove Hirelings (1659), Milton’s attitude was consistent. Abolition of tithes was necessary to guarantee real religious liberty. If no clerical caste with legally fixed maintenance, then no training of such a caste at the universities. In 1659 Milton echoed Dell to write: ‘It is a fond error, though too much believed among us, to think that the university makes a minister of the Gospel.’² Oxford and Cambridge colleges were largely financed by impropriated tithes, and university divines by pluralism. As early as Areopagitica Milton had mocked ‘the complaint and lamentation of prelates’ that learning would be ‘for ever dasht and discouraged’ if pluralism were abolished, and he repeated the point in relation to tithes in The Likeliest Means of 1659.³ The wail was often heard in between.

      Tithes proved to be a dividing sword among the radicals, symbolized by the claim that Oliver Cromwell had promised to abolish them but failed to carry out this promise when he had the power to do so: instead he came down in favour of a state church. No Parliament ever voted down tithes, not even the Bareboncs Assembly, not even the restored Rump in 1659, of which Milton hoped so much. Far too many vested interests were involved. Nor were even the sectaries unanimous. Some Baptist ministers were prepared to accept livings in the Cromwellian church. Those who opposed ‘hirelings’ with the same passion as Milton were Levellers, Diggers, Quakers, most Baptists, Fifth Monarchists, the extreme radicals.

      Instead of a regular beneficed clergy, Milton came to advocate itinerant preachers, maintained by voluntary contributions.⁴ This nostrum of the radicals was tried out by the Commissions for Propagating the Gospel in Wales and in the North Parts in the early fifties. The experiment was unpopular with conservatives; quarrels over it had something to do with the fall of the Rump in 1653. Milton’s sonnet to Oliver Cromwell in 1652 aimed at persuading him to resist conservative pressure for preservation of a state church, as another sonnet praised Vane for supporting a freer system. In 1659 Milton hoped to see the itinerant system backed up by local lay preachers. His proposals recall the organization of the Baptists and the Society of Friends: even more perhaps they look forward to the Methodists (just as Of Education looks forward to the Dissenting Academies).¹

      Milton rejected not only ‘the corrupt and venal discipline of clergy courts’, but all ‘coercive jurisdiction in the church’. He thought not only that the Pope was Antichrist, but that bishops were more antichristian than the Pope. Like John Saltmarsh, he thought that any state church was necessarily antichristian. When he made Antichrist Mammon’s son Milton may even have hinted at social interpretations akin to those of Gerrard Winstanley.² Milton pointed out that Christ used force only once – to drive money-changers out of the Temple. The coercive power of the secular magistrate in religious matters Milton similarly denied.³ ‘Since God became flesh’, John Reeve told the Lord Mayor of London in 1653, ‘no civil magistrate hath any authority from above to be judge of any man’s faith, because it is a spiritual invisible gift from God.’⁴ Milton would have agreed with the conclusion. Repudiation of a state church divided sectaries from Episcopalians and Presbyterians; denial of the authority of the magistrate brought about a division somewhere farther to the left. In each case Milton came to be with the more radical party.

      If there is no distinction between clergy and laity, ordinary people have the right to interpret the Bible for themselves. This led to what Edwards called anti-Scripturism – criticism of the contradictions of the Bible, denial that it was the Word of God.⁵ Milton did not go so far as Clement Writer, Walwyn, some Ranters and the Quaker Samuel Fisher.⁶ But – unlike Edwards – he would have insisted on the principle that the individual had a right and indeed a duty to study the Bible for himself, not taking his religion at second hand from Pope, church or priest. He likewise insisted that ‘the spirit of God, promised alike and given / To all believers’ was the test for interpreting the letter of the Bible. Such ‘spiritual illumination … is common to all men.’⁷ The distinction is a narrow one between this position and the Ranter and Quaker view that the spirit within believers was superior to the letter of Scripture, overriding it.

      Milton’s belief that worship is discussion, that the spirit in man is more important than any ecclesiastical authority, that each of us must interpret the Bible for himself, thus aligns him with Ranters, Quakers, anti-nomians: so does his conviction that men and women should strive to attain perfection on earth, even though Milton did not think they could ever succeed. His ultimate belief in the necessity of good works for salvation, the consequence of his emphasis on human freedom, aligns him with Arminians of the left like John Goodwin, General Baptists and Quakers, whilst his total rejection of sacramentalism and a state church puts him at the opposite pole to the Laudian ‘Arminians’ of the right. Milton accepted the heresy of adult baptism, at a time when the medical reformer William Rand thought that Henry Lawrence’s publication of his Treatise of Baptism was a more courageous act than risking his life on the field of battle.¹ This links Milton with Socinians and Anabaptists, though he seems to have joined no Baptist congregation. His decisive rejection of Sabbatarianism also puts him beyond the pale of ‘respectable’ Puritanism.²

      Milton was a radical millenarian long before Fifth Monarchism was thought of: he equated monarchy with Antichrist. In 1641 he associated his belief that Christ’s kingdom ‘is now at hand’ with his confidence in the potentialities of free and democratic