INTENTION OF ANOTHER MARRIAGE: HIS WIFE'S RETURN AND RECONCILIATION WITH HIM.
In 1645 Milton still gloried in the asterisk. All the copies of the second and augmented edition of The Doctrine and Discipline of Divorce having been sold, there was a reprint of it in this year, forming substantially the third edition of the original treatise. None of his writings hitherto had been in such popular demand; and as, besides the three editions of the original Divorce treatise, there were also in circulation his Bucer Tract, his Tetrachordon, and his Colasterion, he had identified himself with the Divorce subject by a total mass of writing larger than he had yet devoted to any other. While his five Anti-Episcopal pamphlets, of 1641-42, make together 326 pages of his prose works in Pickering's edition, the four Divorce treatises, of 1643-45, make 378 pages of the same; so that, in mere quantity, Milton was 52 pages more a Divorcer than an Anti-Prelatist. He had now, however, as he had announced in his dedication of the Tetrachordon to Parliament, done all that he meant to do on the subject through the medium of mere pamphleteering. But he had hinted to Parliament, while making that announcement, that a man with his opinions might do more than write pamphlets in their behalf. "If the Law make not a timely provision," he had said, "let the Law, as reason is, bear the censure of the consequences." There was a covert threat here that Milton, if the Law would not allow him to marry again, might marry again in defiance of the Law.
Early in 1645, at all events, Milton did think of marrying again. His wife had been away from him for the better part of two years; and she was now nothing more in his memory than a girl who had been in his house in Aldersgate Street as his bride for a few weeks, whom he had found out in that short experience to be stupid and uncompanionable, who had then left him on some pretence, and gone back to her father's house, and whose only communications with him since had been a message or two of contempt and insult. Law or no law, it was all over between him and that girl! All the circumstances where known: his unfortunate position was the talk of neighbours; often, as we have imagined, kindly souls of women, young and older, must have had their colloquies and whispers about his pitiable bachelorhood caused by the shameful desertion of his wife. Kindly talk was all very well: but was there any unmarried lady willing to take the place of the deserter, if asked to do so? This was really the question in Aldergate Street, and in all the round of Milton's acquaintances. Candidates were not likely to be numerous, even among those freer Christian opinionists among whom Milton principally moved; and there was, moreover, a complication in the general difficulty. Milton, having blundered in his choice once, and having principled himself now with very high notions of feminine fitness, was very likely to be careful in a second choice. Was there accessible any lady in whom the two indispensable conditions of fitness and willingness could be found united? This was the problem for Milton, and it is on record that he tried to solve it. One remembers his sonnet "To a Virtuous Young Lady," written about the same time as that to the Lady Margaret Ley, and wonders whether the "virgin wise and pure" there commemorated for her excellencies of mind and character was thought of by him as the possible successor of Mary Powell. Can her name have been Miss Davis? That, at all events, was the name of the lady who was thought of as Mary Powell's probable successor. It is from Phillips that we have the particulars of the story:—
"Not very long after the setting forth of these treatises," says Phillips, referring to the Divorce Treatises, "having application made to him by several gentlemen of his acquaintance for the education of their sons, as understanding haply the progress he had infixed by his first undertakings of that nature, he laid out for a larger house, and soon found it out. But, in the interim, before he removed, there fell out a passage which, though it altered not the whole course he was going to steer, yet it put a stop, or rather an end, to a grand affair, which was more than probably thought to be then in agitation: it was indeed a design of marrying one of Dr. Davis's daughters, a very handsome and witty gentlewoman, but averse, as it is said, to this motion. However, the intelligence hereof, and the then declining state of the King's cause, and consequently of the circumstances of Justice Powell's family, caused them to set all engines on work to restore the late married woman to the station wherein they a little before had planted her. At last this device was pitched upon:—There dwelt in the Lane of St. Martin's-le- Grand, which was hard by, a relation of our author's, one Blackborough, whom it was known he often visited; and upon this occasion the visits were the more narrowly observed, and possibly there might be a combination between both parties, the friends on both sides concentring in the same action, though on different behalfs. One time above the rest, he making his usual visit, the wife was ready in another room, and on a sudden he was surprised to see one whom he thought to have never seen more, making submission and begging pardon on her knees before him. He might probably at first make some show of aversion and rejection; but partly his own generous nature, more inclinable to reconciliation than to perseverance in anger and revenge, and partly the strong intercession of friends on both sides, soon brought him to an act of oblivion, and a firm league of peace for the future; and it was at length concluded that she should remain at a friend's house, till such time as he was settled in his new house at Barbican, and all things for her reception in order. The place agreed on for her present abode was the Widow Webber's house in St. Clement's Churchyard, whose second daughter had been married to the other brother [Christopher Milton] many years before."
Phillips tells the story very clearly, and a little annotation is all that is wanted:—The lady whom Milton thought of, and had perhaps been thinking of for some time, as a possible substitute for Mary Powell, was "one of Dr. Davis's daughters." Who this Dr. Davis was, Phillips, writing at a time when the mere name was probably enough for Londoners, does not inform us; nor have I been able, with any certainty, to identify him. [Footnote: There had been a Thomas Davies, M.D., born about 1564, and educated at Christ's College, Cambridge, where he had graduated in medicine in 1591, and who was afterwards a medical practitioner in London, and Licentiate and Censor of the Royal College of Physicians there. As he had died in 1615, the youngest of any surviving daughters of his in 1645 must have been past her thirtieth year. But, on the whole, Phillips's words suggest that the Dr. Davis he means was alive in 1645 or had recently been alive; so that this is not likely to have been the one. There was a Nicholas Davis, or Davys, M.D., who had taken that degree at Leyden in 1638, had been incorporated in the same degree at Oxford in 1642, and may have been afterwards in practice in London (Munk's Roll of the Royal College of Physicians of London, and Wood's Fasti, II. 9). The date of his graduation at Leyden, however, seems rather late for the hypothesis that he was Phillips's Dr. Davis. After all, there may have been some other conspicuous Dr. Davis among Milton's acquaintances, and he need not have been a medical doctor.] Dr. Davis, at all events, dead or living, had daughters, one of them "a very handsome and witty gentlewoman," between whom and Milton there was some attempt to arrange a marriage. She herself, however, was naturally "averse to this motion;" and, indeed, one can hardly understand what kind of proposition could have been made to her or her friends. That something was in agitation, nevertheless, and that it was talked of more particularly in the spring and early summer of 1645, Phillips had a positive recollection, more by token because at that very time, he also remembered, his uncle had offers of more pupils than he could accommodate in the house in Aldersgate Street. He had consequently been looking about for a larger house, and had found one suitable close at hand, in the street called Barbican.
Was Miss Davis to be persuaded to be mistress of this new house? Would the "several gentlemen" of Milton's acquaintance who meant to board or half-board their sons with him, or would the spouses of those gentlemen, have been satisfied with that arrangement? The experiment was not to be tried. The house in Barbican had been taken, but Milton had not yet removed into it, when, to Miss Davis's relief, another arrangement was brought about.
Rumours of what was going on, and of the new house in Barbican, had been borne to Oxford, and the Foresthill mansion of the Powells. In any case the news of the Miss Davis project, the "grand affair," as Phillips calls it, could not but have caused some excitement there. But the news came at a time when the family-fortunes were no longer what they had been when Mary Powell had left her Parliamentarian husband and taken refuge again under the maternal wing, amid her Royalist relatives and acquaintances, close to the King's head-quarters. Crippled already, like other Royalist families, by necessary contributions to the King's cause, the Powells had begun to be aware, and more poignantly than others because of their more straitened means, that their sacrifices were likely to be all in vain— that Parliament was to be master, and to have the power of pains and penalties over those whom it called Delinquents. Especially after the shattering blow to the King at Naseby (June 14, 1645), doubt on the subject was nearly at an end. What was then more natural than that distressed Royalist families should be looking forward anxiously to the amount of new distress which the final triumph of Parliament would inflict upon them? And so in the Foresthill mansion there had been grave consultations between Mr. and Mrs. Powell and between Mrs. Powell and her daughter, ending in a resolution, in which Mrs. Powell was perhaps the last to acquiesce—for the daughter afterwards pleaded that her mother all along had been "the chief promoter of her frowardness" [Footnote: Wood, Fasti, I. 482.]—that it would be best for the daughter to return to London and try to make it up with Mr. Milton. At least one member of the family would thus have a roof over her head in the hard time coming; and might not Milton, with his Parliamentarian connexions, be able to befriend the family generally when the time did come? Soon after Naseby, accordingly, we are to imagine the poor young wife taking the journey to London, accompanied by her mother or some other relative, on her humiliating and dubious errand.
How were they to manage when they were in London? It was not a simple matter of going straight to the house in Aldersgate Street and obtaining admission. Ingenuity was necessary, and preparation of a mode for approaching Milton. But that, too, had been thought of. Communications were opened or had already been opened, with those of Milton's friends who, it was supposed, would be willing to co-operate in the intended reconciliation, if not in the wife's interest, at least in his. And which of all Milton's friends was not willing? In such cases, it is in the man himself that the storm rages; he alone passionately feels: the friends that stand by, even most sympathisingly, are cool and collected, regarding the principal only as a difficult patient, who must be soothed and humoured till he can be brought to reason. To Milton's friends his Divorce notion may have seemed a just enough speculation, or one at least about which they would not quarrel with him; the real question with them was as to the continued practical implication of his own life and prospects with such a speculation, infamous as it seemed to respectable society and to the leaders of religious opinion. Let him hold it, if he would, and even write for it still; but was he, at the age of thirty-seven, to wrap up his whole future life in it, and proceed as if he and it must be dashed to pieces together? Was not this reconciliation between him and his wife, of which there seemed now to be a chance, the best thing that could happen for him as well as for her? If once it were brought about, would not things adjust themselves so that the public would hear no more of the perilous stuff of the Divorce Doctrine, or hear of it only in dying echoes? So reasoned Milton's friends then, just as people would reason now in a similar case; and the friendly plot was arranged. Milton, it appears, was in the habit of dropping in, almost daily, in his walk City-wards from Aldersgate Street, on a kinsman of his, named Blackborough, whose house was in St. Martin's-le-Grand Lane— i.e. in that bend of Aldersgate Street which was within the Gate, and where now the General Post-Office of London stands. Here, some day in July or August 1645, he was surprised into an interview with his girl-wife. The good Blackborough had consented to aid and abet, and had lent his house for the purpose; and, other friends being at hand to second him, he had opened, let us say, the door of the room in which Mary Powell was waiting, had ushered Milton in, and had left them together. Then, as Phillips imagines, had come Milton's two moods in succession,— the first his instinctive mood of anger and rejection, and the second that mood of his slow relenting which was witnessed and helped through by the in-bustling friends:—
Mood First.
Samson. My wife, my traitress! let her not come near me!
Chorus. Yet on she moves; now stands and eyes thee fixt,
About to have spoke; but now, with head declined,
Like a fair flower surcharged with dew, she weeps,
And words addressed seem into tears dissolved,
Wetting the borders of her silken veil:
But now again she makes address to speak.
Dalila. With doubtful feet and wavering resolution
I came, still dreading thy displeasure, Samson,
Which to have merited, without excuse,
I cannot but acknowledge: yet, if tears
May expiate (though the fact more evil drew
In the perverse event than I foresaw),
My penance hath not slackened, though my pardon
No way assured. But conjugal affection,
Prevailing over fear and timorous doubt,
Hath led me on desirous to behold
Once more thy face, and know of thy estate;
If aught in my ability may serve
To lighten what thou suffer'st, and appease
Thy mind with what amends is in my power,
Though late, yet in some part to recompense
My rash, but more unfortunate, misdeed.
Samson. Out, out! hyæna! Samson Agonistes, 725-747.
Mood Second.
She ended weeping, and her lowly plight,
Immoveable till peace obtained from fault
Acknowledged and deplored, in Adam wrought
Commiseration: soon his heart relented
Towards her, his life so late and sole delight,
Now at his feet submissive in distress,
Creature so fair his reconcilement seeking,
His counsel whom she had displeased, his aid;
As one disarmed, his anger all he lost,
And thus with peaceful words upraised her soon.
Paradise Lost, X. 937-946.
Was this Milton's idealized history long afterwards of his own two moods in Blackborough's house in St. Martin's-le-Grand Lane some time in July or August 1645? So far as it was autobiography at all, I should not say that it was much idealized, except in so far as Dalila in the land of the Philistines, and Eve in Paradise, had to be represented poetically as beautiful, eloquent, and fascinating, while of poor Mary Powell's claims to beauty we know little, and our information as to her eloquence and fascination consists in our irremovable impression that it was of her that Milton had been thinking in that passage in his first Divorce Tract in which he described the hard fate of a man bound fast by marriage to "an image of earth and phlegm." From the side of Milton there was, I think, no idealizing: hardly else than as his own Samson, or his own Adam, in his poems, did Milton feel or speak on any important occasion of his own real experience. If, then, the second mood now prevailed, and he yielded, it was only, I believe, because despair for himself and pity for another overcame him jointly, and what was alone possible was accepted as disastrously fated. So much by way of necessary anticipation, and that there may not be a mistake, even for a moment, as to the real nature of the reconciliation that had been effected. Meanwhile, the friends of both wife and husband were delighted with their success; and, till the new house in the Barbican should be ready, young Mrs. Milton went to lodge in the house of the Widow Webber, Christopher Milton's mother-in-law, near St. Clement's Church in the Strand.