Sir Henry Wotton had recommended, as the rule of his conduct, a celebrated Italian proverb, inculcating the policy of reserve and dissimulation. From a practised diplomatist, this advice was characteristic; but it did not suit the frankness of Milton’s manners, nor the nobleness of his mind. He has himself stated to us his own rule of conduct, which was to move no questions of controversy, yet not to evade them when pressed upon him by others. Upon this principle he acted, not without some offence to his associates, nor wholly without danger to himself. But the offence, doubtless, was blended with respect; the danger was passed; and he returned home with all his purposes fulfilled. He had conversed with Galileo; he had seen whatever was most interesting in the monuments of Roman grandeur, or the triumphs of Italian art; and he could report with truth, that in spite of his religion, every where undissembled, he had been honoured by the attentions of the great, and by the compliments of the learned.
After fifteen months of absence, Milton found himself again in London at a crisis of unusual interest. The king was on the eve of his second expedition against the Scotch; and we may suppose Milton to have been watching the course of events with profound anxiety, not without some anticipation of the patriotic labour which awaited him. Meantime he occupied himself with the education of his sister’s two sons, and soon after, by way of obtaining an honourable maintenance, increased the number of his pupils.
Dr. Johnson, himself at one period of his life a schoolmaster, on this occasion indulges in a sneer which is too injurious to be neglected. “Let not our veneration for Milton,” says he, “forbid us to look with some degree of merriment on great promises and small performance: on the man who hastens home because his countrymen are contending for their liberty; and when he reaches the scene of action, vapours away his patriotism in a private boarding-school.” It is not true that Milton had made “great promises,” or any promises at all. But if he had made the greatest, his exertions for the next sixteen years nobly redeemed them. In what way did Dr. Johnson expect that his patriotism should be expressed? As a soldier? Milton has himself urged his bodily weakness and intellectual strength, as reasons for following a line of duty for which he was better fitted. Was he influenced in his choice by fear of military dangers or hardships? Far from it: “for I did not,” he says, “shun those evils, without engaging to render to my fellow-citizens services much more useful, and attended with no less of danger.” What services were those? We shall state them in his own words, anticipated from an after period. “When I observed that there are in all three modes of liberty—first, ecclesiastical liberty; secondly, civil liberty; thirdly, domestic: having myself already treated of the first, and noticing that the magistrate was taking steps in behalf of the second, I concluded that the third, that is to say, domestic, or household liberty, remained to me as my peculiar province. And whereas this again is capable of a threefold division, accordingly as it regards the interests of conjugal life in the first place, or those of education in the second, or finally the freedom of speech, and the right of giving full publication to sound opinions,—I took it upon myself to defend all three, the first, by my Doctrine and Discipline of Divorce, the second, by my Tractate upon Education, the third, by my Areopagitica.”
In 1641 he conducted his defence of ecclesiastical liberty, in a series of attacks upon episcopacy. These are written in a bitter spirit of abusive hostility, for which we seek an insufficient apology in his exclusive converse with a party which held bishops in abhorrence, and in the low personal respectability of a large portion of the episcopal bench.
At Whitsuntide, in the year 1645, having reached his 35th year, he married Mary Powel, a young lady of good extraction in the county of Oxford. One month after, he allowed his wife to visit her family. This permission, in itself somewhat singular, the lady abused; for when summoned back to her home, she refused to return. Upon this provocation, Milton set himself seriously to consider the extent of the obligations imposed by the nuptial vow; and soon came to the conclusion, that in point of conscience it was not less dissoluble for hopeless incompatibility of temper than for positive adultery, and that human laws, in as far as they opposed this principle, called for reformation. These views he laid before the public in his Doctrine and Discipline of Divorce. In treating this question, he had relied entirely upon the force of argument, not aware that he had the countenance of any great authorities; but finding soon afterwards that some of the early reformers, Bucer and P. Martyr, had taken the same view as himself, he drew up an account of their comments on this subject. Hence arose the second of his tracts on Divorce. Meantime, as it was certain that many would abide by what they supposed to be the positive language of Scripture, in opposition to all authority whatsoever, he thought it advisable to write a third tract on the proper interpretation of the chief passages in Scripture, which refer to this point. A fourth tract, by way of answer to the different writers who had opposed his opinions, terminated the series.
Meantime the lady, whose rash conduct had provoked her husband into these speculations, saw reason to repent of her indiscretion, and finding that Milton held her desertion to have cancelled all claims upon his justice, wisely resolved upon making her appeal to his generosity. This appeal was not made in vain: in a single interview at the house of a common friend, where she had contrived to surprise him, and suddenly to throw herself at his feet, he granted her a full forgiveness: and so little did he allow himself to remember her misconduct, or that of her family, in having countenanced her desertion, that soon afterwards, when they were involved in the general ruin of the royal cause, he received the whole of them into his house, and exerted his political influence very freely in their behalf. Fully to appreciate this behaviour, we must recollect that Milton was not rich, and that no part of his wife’s marriage portion (£1000) was ever paid to him.
His thoughts now settled upon the subject of education, which it must not be forgotten that he connected systematically with domestic liberty. In 1644 he published his essay on this great theme, in the form of a letter to his friend Hartlib, himself a person of no slight consideration. In the same year he wrote his ‘Areopagitica, a speech for the liberty of unlicensed printing.’ This we are to consider in the light of an oral pleading, or regular oration, for he tells us expressly [Def. 2.] that he wrote it “ad justæ orationis modum.” It is the finest specimen extant of generous scorn. And very remarkable it is, that Milton, who broke the ground on this great theme, has exhausted the arguments which bear upon it. He opened the subject: he closed it. And were there no other monument of his patriotism and his genius, for this alone he would deserve to be held in perpetual veneration. In the following year, 1645, was published the first collection of his early poems: with his sanction, undoubtedly, but probably not upon his suggestion. The times were too full of anxiety to allow of much encouragement to polite literature: at no period were there fewer readers of poetry. And for himself in particular, with the exception of a few sonnets, it is probable that he composed as little as others read, for the next ten years: so great were his political exertions.
Early in 1649 the king was put to death. For a full view of the state of parties which led to this memorable event, we must refer the reader to the history of the times. That act was done by the Independent party, to which Milton belonged, and was precipitated by the intrigues of the Presbyterians, who were making common cause with the king, to ensure the overthrow of the Independents. The lamentations and outcries of the Presbyterians were long and loud. Under colour of a generous sympathy with the unhappy prince, they mourned for their own political extinction, and the triumph of their enemies. This Milton well knew, and to expose the selfishness of their clamours, as well as to disarm their appeals to the popular feeling, he now published his ‘Tenure of Kings and Magistrates.’ In the first part of this, he addresses himself to the general question of tyrannicide, justifying it, first, by arguments of general reason, and secondly, by the authority of the reformers. But in the latter part he argues the case personally, contending that the Presbyterians at least were not entitled to condemn the king’s death, who, in levying war, and doing battle against the king’s person, had done so much that tended to no other result. “If then,” is his argument, “in these proceedings against their king, they may not finish, by the usual course of justice, what they have begun, they could not lawfully begin at all.” The argument seems inconclusive, even as addressed ad hominem: the struggle bore the character of a war between independent parties, rather than a judicial inquiry, and in war the life of a prisoner becomes sacred.
At this time the Council of State had resolved no longer to employ the language of a rival people in their international concerns, but to use the Latin tongue as a neutral and indifferent instrument. The office of Latin Secretary, therefore, was created, and bestowed upon Milton. His hours from henceforth must have been pretty well occupied by official labours. Yet at this time he undertook a service to the state, more invidious, and perhaps more perilous, than any in which his politics ever involved him. On the very day of the king’s execution, and even below the scaffold, had been sold the earliest copies of a work, admirably fitted to shake the new government, and for the sensation which it produced at the time, and the lasting controversy which it has engendered, one of the most remarkable known in literary history. This was the ‘Eikon Basilike, or Royal Image,’ professing to be a series of meditations drawn up by the late king, on the leading events from the very beginning of the national troubles. Appearing at this critical moment, and co-operating with the strong reaction of the public mind, already effected in the king’s favour by his violent death, this book produced an impression absolutely unparalleled in any age. Fifty thousand copies, it is asserted, were sold within one year; and a posthumous power was thus given to the king’s name by one little book, which exceeded, in alarm to his enemies, all that his armies could accomplish in his lifetime. No remedy could meet the evil in degree. As the only one that seemed fitted to it in kind, Milton drew up a running commentary upon each separate head of the original: and as that had been entitled the king’s image, he gave to his own the title of ‘Eikonoclastes, or Image-breaker,’ “the famous surname of many Greek emperors, who broke all superstitious images in pieces.”
This work was drawn up with the usual polemic ability of Milton; but by its very plan and purpose, it threw him upon difficulties which no ability could meet. It had that inevitable disadvantage which belongs to all ministerial and secondary works: the order and choice of topics being all determined by the Eikon, Milton, for the first time, wore an air of constraint and servility, following a leader and obeying his motions, as an engraver is controlled by the designer, or a translator by his original. It is plain, from the pains he took to exonerate himself from such a reproach, that he felt his task to be an invidious one. The majesty of grief, expressing itself with Christian meekness, and appealing, as it were from the grave, to the consciences of men, could not be violated without a recoil of angry feeling, ruinous to the effect of any logic, or rhetoric the most persuasive. The affliction of a great prince, his solitude, his rigorous imprisonment, his constancy to some purposes which were not selfish, his dignity of demeanour in the midst of his heavy trials, and his truly Christian fortitude in his final sufferings—these formed a rhetoric which made its way to all hearts. Against such influences the eloquence of Greece would have been vain. The nation was spell-bound; and a majority of its population neither could or would be disenchanted.