To resume our story from the Lords' Journals:—The device of the two Wardens for diverting the attention of the Peers was for the moment successful. The Peers on the same day (Sat. Dec. 28), as soon as the Wardens had withdrawn, passed this order: "Hereupon it is ordered, that it be referred to Mr. Justice Reeves and Mr. Justice Bacon to examine the said Woodward and Milton, and such others as the Master and Wardens of the Stationers' Company shall give information of, concerning the printing and publishing their Books and Pamphlets, and to examine also what they know concerning the Libel [the Libel against the Peers of which George Jeffrey had dispersed copies], who was the author, printer, and contriver of it; and the Gentleman-Usher shall attach the parties, and bring them before the Judges; and the Stationers are to be present at their examinations, and give evidence against them."
This was clearly a tighter action against Milton than the former one by the Commons. What came of it?—Woodward's business came up on the next Tuesday, Dec. 31, when Mr. Justice Bacon informed this House of some papers which Ezechiell Woodward [it was "Hezekiah" before] confessed he made: "Hereupon it is ordered, that Mr. Serjeant Whitfield shall peruse them over, and report them to this House; and, because the said Woodward is now in custody of the Gentleman-Usher, it is ordered, He shall be released, giving his own bond to appear before this House when he shall be summoned." Woodward's offence, it would therefore seem, was considered venial. He had nothing to do with the Libel that was the special subject of inquiry; and, though he had confessed to the authorship of some anonymous papers recently published, there seemed to be nothing formidable in them. He might go back to his house in Aldermanbury on his own recognisances. [Footnote: "Soft Answers unto Hard Censures, London 1645," is the title of a tract of Woodward's subsequent to the incident of the text, and possibly referring to it; after which I find him, so far as there is evidence, totally silent till 1656. In that year he published four new religious or politico religious pamphlets; which is the last I know of him at present.] But what of Milton? Not a word about him in the Journals of the same day. He was not in the custody of the Gentleman-Usher then at all events; and so far he had been more fortunate than Woodward. Possibly, he had had a call from the Usher in his house in Aldersgate Street on the Saturday or Monday, had accompanied him to the chambers of Mr. Justice Reeve or Mr. Justice Bacon, had confronted the Master and Wardens of the Stationers' Company there, and had there given such a satisfactory and straightforward account of his questioned pamphlets that there was no need for detaining him, or troubling him farther. Some report may have been made to the Peers by the Justices; but if so, it was of such a kind, and the Peers themselves had such information about Milton, that they thought it best to let the matter drop without the least farther mention of it. If even two or three of them had read the Areopagitica (and probably even more had), that alone would have honourably acquitted him. It appears, however, from a subsequent allusion by Milton himself, as if the Doctrine and Discipline of Divorce was still the real stumbling-block. On that subject too the Peers may have been a little liberal by this time. Was not the great Mr. Selden understood to hold opinions on Marriage and Divorce very much the same as those Mr. Milton had published? So the Peers may have reasoned for themselves; and it is not at all improbable that Selden, Vane, and others of the Lower House may have given them a hint what to do. And so the Booksellers were baulked again. Baillie and Gillespie, who did not leave London for their Scottish holiday till Jan. 6, 1644-5, may have been a little disappointed, and the Presbyterians generally. [Footnote: Authorities for this curious story are the entries in the Lords' Journals of the dates named—Vol. VII. pp. 91, 92, 97, 115, 116, and 118. The one-and-twenty Peers who were present on Saturday, Dec. 28, when the order for Milton's examination was issued were—Lord Grey of Wark, as Speaker; the Lord General the Earl of Essex; the Lord High Admiral the Earl of Warwick; Earls Rutland, Kent, Pembroke, Salisbury, Bolingbroke, Manchester, Nottingham, Northumberland, Denbigh, and Stamford; Viscount Saye and Sele; and Lords North, Montague, Howard of Escrick, Berkeley, Bruce, Willoughby of Parham, and Wharton. The same Peers, with the omission of the Earl of Northumberland and Lord Wharton, and the addition of the Earl of Suffolk (i.e. twenty Peers in all), were present on Dec. 31, when a report was made on Woodward's case, but none on Milton's.—Selden's Uxor Ebraica was published in 1646, and was then much welcomed by Milton.—That the Divines of the Westminster Assembly were at the back of this second prosecution of Milton, though the authorities of the Stationers' Company were the nominal accusers, is not only probable in itself, but is distinctly implied by Anthony Wood's reference to the affair (Fasti I. 483). "Upon the publication of the said three books of marriage and divorce," says Wood, with a slight error as to the number of the books on that subject then published, "the Assembly of Divines then sitting at Westminster took special notice of them; and thereupon, though the author had obliged them by his pen in his defence of Smectymnuus, and other their controversies had with the Bishops, they, impatient of having the clergy's jurisdiction (as they reckoned it) invaded, did, instead of answering or disproving what those books had asserted, cause him to be summoned before the House of Lords: but that House, whether approving the doctrine, or not favouring the accusers, did soon dismiss him.">[
THE DIVORCE CONTROVERSY CONTINUED: HERBERT PALMER'S SERMON PUBLISHED: OTHER ATTACKS ON MILTON.
And now we are in the winter of 1644-5, when Parliament and all London, and all England, were astir with the two great businesses of the New- Modelling of the Parliamentary Army and the Self-Denying Ordinance. It was with public talk about these matters, and about such contemporary matters as the execution of Laud, the death of Century White, and the abortive Treaty of Uxbridge, that any immediate influence from Milton's Areopagitica must have mingled. In the midst of it all he had other labours on hand. They were still on the woful subject of Divorce.
Not only had the subject fastened on Milton with all the force of a propagandist passion, urging him to repeated expositions of it; there were, moreover, fresh external occasions calling on him not to desist. Of four such external occasions, amid others now unknown to us, we may here take note:—[Footnote: Palmer's Dedication of the Sermon.] Herbert Palmer's sermon, with the attack on Milton still remaining in it, had now been published. "Some bodily indispositions" had prevented Palmer from at once complying with the request of the two Houses that he would print the sermon; but at length, in September or October 1644, it had appeared. [Footnote: "By William Prynne, of Lincoln's Inn, Esquier: London, Printed for Michael Sparke, Sem., and are to be sold at the Blew Bible in Green Arbour, 1644." The Exact date of publication I ascertain from Thomason's note, "Sept. 16," in a copy in the British Museum.] About the same time (more precisely the 16th of September, 1644) there appeared one of Prynne's interminable publications, entitled "Twelve considerable serious Questions touching Church government: sadly propounded (out of a Reel Desire of Unitie and Tranquillity in Church and State) to all sober- minded Christians, cordially affecting a speedy settled Reformation and Brotherly Christian Union in all our Churches and Dominions, now miserably wasted with Civill Unnaturall Wars, and deplorably lacerated with Ecclesiastical Dissensions." Though with so long a title, the thing consists but of eight largish quarto pages, with a bristle of marginal references. "Having neither leisure nor opportunity," says Prynne, "to debate the late unhappy differences sprung up amongst us touching Church-government (disputed at large by Master Herle, Doctor Steward, Master Rutherford, Master Edwards, Master Durey, Master Goodwin, Master Nye, Master Sympson, and others), … I have (at the importunity of some Reverend friends) digested my subitane apprehensions of these distracting controversies into the ensuing considerable Questions." Accordingly, the Tract consists of 12 Queries propounded for consideration, each numbered and beginning with the word "Whether." We are concerned mainly with Query 11. It runs as follows:—"Whether that Independent Government which some contend for … be not of its own nature a very seminary of schisms and dangerous divisions in the Church and State? a floodgate to let in an inundation of all manner of heresies, errors, sects, religions, destructive opinions, libertinism and lawlessness, among us, without any sufficient means of preventing or suppressing them when introduced? Whether the final result of it (as Master Williams, in his late dangerous licentious work, A Bloudy Tenent, determines) will not really resolve itself into this detestable conclusion, that every man, whether he be Jew, Turk, Pagan, Papist, Arminian, Anabaptist, &c., ought to be left to his own free liberty of conscience, without any coercion or restraint, to embrace or publicly to profess what Religion, Opinion, Church government, he pleaseth and conceiveth to be truest, though never so erroneous, false, seditious, detestable in itself? And whether such a government as this ought to be embraced, much less established among us (the sad effects whereof we have already experimentally felt by the late dangerous increase of many Anabaptistical, Antinomian, Heretical, Atheistical opinions, as of The Soul's Mortality, Divorce at Pleasure, &c., lately broached, preached, printed in this famous city; which I hope our Grand Council will speedily and carefully suppress), &c." Here, and by no less a man than Prynne, Milton's Divorce Doctrine is publicly referred to as one of the enormities of the time, and coupled, as of coequal infamy, with the contemporary doctrine of the Mortality of the Soul vented in an anonymous tract. (3) Farther, in the month of November, or while the Areopagitica was in the press, there had appeared the first distinct Reply to Milton's original Divorce Treatise. It was a pamphlet, in 44 pages of small quarto, with this title:—"An Answer to a Book, Intituled, The Doctrine and Discipline of Divorce, or A Plea for Ladies and Gentlewomen, and all other Married Women, against Divorce. Wherein Both Sexes are vindicated from all bondage of Canon Law, and other mistakes whatsoever: And the Unsound Principles of the Author are examined and fully confuted by Authority of Holy Scripture, the Laws of this Land, and Sound Reason. London, Printed by G. M. for William Lee at the Turk's-Head in Fleet Street, next to the Miter Taverne. 1644." [Footnote: Entered at Stationers' Hall, Oct. 31, 1644 (my notes from the Registers); Licensed Nov. 14 (the pamphlet itself); out in London, Nov. 19 (Thomason's note in copy in British Museum, Press Mark 12 G. o. 12/181)] Milton had now his wish: one of his adversaries had written a book, and could be wrestled with. Nay more, though the writer had not given his name, the licenser, Mr. Joseph Caryl, had, in his prefixed "Imprimatur," applauded the sentiments of the tract, and spoken slightingly of Milton. Mr. Caryl, therefore, on his own account, might deserve a word. (4) Finally, in January 1644-5, Dr. Daniel Featley, from his prison in "the Lord Peter's house in Aldersgate Street," close to Milton's own dwelling, had sent forth his "Dippers Dipt, or the Anabaptists Duck'd and Plung'd over Head and Eares" [Footnote: See antè, p. 138.] dedicating it publicly to the Parliament and privately to his "Reverend and much-esteemed friend, Mr. John Downam,"— the very person, by the bye, who had good-naturedly licensed Milton's Bucer pamphlet. Now, Featley, in this book, had been at Milton among others. Denouncing the Anabaptists on all sorts of grounds in his Epistle Dedicatory to the Parliament, he charges them especially with originating odious heresies beyond their own. "For they print," he says, "not only Anabaptism, from whence they take their name, but many other most damnable doctrines, tending to carnal liberty, Familism, and a medley and hodge-podge of all Religions. Witness the Book, printed 1644, called The Bloudy Tenent, which the author affirmeth he wrote in milk; and, if he did so, he hath put some ratsbane in it [Footnote: Featley blunders here. Roger Williams did not say he had written his book in milk, but that the Baptist Tract of 1620 which he reprints in his book was said to have been written in milk in prison on pieces of paper sent to the writer as stoppers to his milk-bottle—his friends outside deciphering the writing by heating the papers.]—as, namely, 'that it is the will and command of God that, since the coming of his son the Lord Jesus, a permission of the most Paganish, Jewish, Turkish, or Anti- Christian consciences and worships, be granted to all men in all nations and countries,' … Witness a Tractate on Divorce, in which the bonds of marriage are let loose to inordinate lust and putting away wives for many other causes besides that which our Saviour only approveth, viz. in case of Adultery. Witness a Pamphlet newly come forth, entitled Man's Mortality, in which the soul is cast into an Endymion sleep from the hour of death to the day of Judgment. Witness," &c. One other dreadful pamphlet is mentioned; but it is worthy of note that the persons with whom Milton now, as before, is most pertinaciously associated are Roger Williams and the author of Man's Mortality.
These external occasions and provocations co-operating with his unabated interest in the Divorce doctrine on personal and general grounds, Milton was busy, through the winter of 1644-5, on two new Divorce Treatises. They both appeared on the same day—March 4, 1644-5. The one was his TETRACHORDON; the other was his COLASTERION. Neither was licensed, and neither was registered. [Footnote: The date of publication is ascertained from copies of both among the King's Pamphlets in the British Museum— both with the Press Mark 19. G. e. 11/195. In both the printed year of publication on the title-page is 1645; but in both Thomason, the Collector, has put his pen through the 5, and has annexed in manuscript the date "March 4, 1644." Books published near the 25th of March were generally dated in the year then to begin.] Some account of these two Treatises must conclude our present section of Milton's Biography.
TETRACHORDON.
We shall take the TETRACHORDON first. It is a bulky treatise, consisting, in the original edition, of 104 small quarto pages; of which 6, not numbered, are occupied with a Dedication to Parliament, and the remaining 98 are numbered and form the body of the work. The following is the complete title:—
TETRACHORDON:
Expositions upon the foure chief places in Scripture, which treat of
Marriage, or nullities in Marriage.