The English Civil War: A People’s History (Text Only)

by Diane Purkiss

  Milton sometimes portrayed himself as bravely sacrificing his poetic career to the cause of God, but it must have been reasonably easy to give up poetry when he wasn’t writing any in the first place. Any blocked writer knows how gladly the kettle and the garden and even housework beckon one away from that terribly blank page. And while poetry that stubbornly refuses to work undermines confidence, sapping self-belief, becoming a controversialist at least means that you are talked about. And at last he could feel that he was enlisted in the ranks of the army of the saints: ‘Should the church be brought under heavy oppression, and God have given me ability the while to reason against that man should be the author of so foul a deed, or should she by blessing from above on the industry and courage of faithful men change this her distracted estate into better days without the least furtherance or contribution of those few talents which God at that present had lent me, I forsee what stories I should hear within myself all my life after, of discourage and reproach.’ For Milton, too, the Church was scarily like the nation; it was actually more important that the Church be governed justly than that the nation be well governed: ‘quit yourselves like barons’, he told the corrupt clergy. He had, too, ideas to replace the dreadful festivals of the vulgar:

  Because the spirit of man cannot demean itself lively in this body without some recreating intermission of labour and serious things, it were happy for the commonwealth if our magistrates, as in those famous governments of old, would take into their care … the managing of our public sports and festival pastimes, that they might be … Such as may inure and harden our bodies by martial exercises to all warlike skill and performance, and may civilise, adorn, and make discreet our minds by the learned and affable meeting of frequent academies, and the procurement of wise and artful recitations sweetened with eloquent and graceful enticements to the love and practice of justice, temperance, and fortitude, instructing and bettering the nation at all opportunities … Whether this may not be, not only in pulpits, but after another persuasive method, at set and solemn panegyrics, in theatres, porches, and what other place or way may win most upon the people to receive at once both recreation and instruction, let them in authority consult.

  As ever, Milton did not exactly have his finger on the pulse of popular culture – or on the pulse of godly culture either, since this earnest programme was unlike what Harley and his committees eventually invented.

  But Milton’s new-found confidence was to be shattered, and in a wholly unexpected way. His father had made a loan to a Mr Richard Powell, of Forest Hill, Oxfordshire, a near neighbour of the estates of Milton’s recusant grandfather at Stanton St John. The interest was due on 12 June 1642, but Powell couldn’t pay it. His house was mortgaged; he’d already borrowed from others. Milton heard of it, and went up to talk things over in person. And there the thirty-three-year-old poet met Richard Powell’s daughter Mary, just seventeen. It was June. The courtship took a month. They were married sometime in early July; John and Mary went back to the house in Aldersgate Street, along with some of Mary’s relations, who stayed for the feasting. Finally, they left, and only Milton’s nephews remained with the couple.

  Mary was unused to grammar-school ways, and was upset when John beat the boys for disobedience. And she was hideously homesick for Forest Hill, for the life she had known. As the clouds of civil war descended, the Powell family began to panic. The king had ordered Oxford placed in readiness to defend itself. So Mary must come home. And John let her go. Before she left, he told her how disappointing he found her. And events provided her with the perfect excuse to stay away. By late summer of 1642, two armies lay between them. Nevertheless, John Milton was eager to join battle with his in-laws for possession of his wife; he sent a messenger demanding that Mary come back to him. The messenger was sent packing. And the war was closing the road to London; Parliament passed an order forbidding traffic with Oxford. The Battle of Edgehill was fought while the battle over Mary grew more intense. Forced, like every English family, to interpret and then to choose a side in the conflict, the Powells (with their notably Welsh name) had sided passionately with the king. And Milton had sided with Parliament, with equal ardour. The spear of war also divided him from his brother Christopher, Royal Commissioner of Sequestrations for three counties, active until 1646 on the king’s behalf. Meanwhile his wife and children, and the ailing John Milton Senior, fled to London after the siege of Reading. Milton wrote ruminatively that ‘it was a strange time, when man and wife were often the fiercest enemies, he at home with the children, she the mother of the family in the camp of the enemy threatening death and destruction to her husband’. He began to think that the laws on divorce were actually just as unfair as the laws of Church government had been. Why not write a pamphlet to say so?

  The resulting pamphlet is quite unconscious of its own courage. It doesn’t seem to realize how wildly unconventional its ideas are. Milton had never been able to give up hope of infecting the world with his own glowing ambition to be better, quicker, more learned. He argued that incompatible people should be allowed to get divorced. He didn’t use the word incompatible, and by people he meant men. He was only asking for simple justice, after all, for others, as well as himself. And the conscience of the husband, he felt, would always be the best arbiter of whether the couple were mismatched; he could simply state his decision in front of his minister and a few elders.

  It amazed Milton that his sober pamphlet was reviled as libertinism. But it didn’t deter him. He reprinted it, with some revisions, when the first edition sold out. His thinking about marriage was coming to affect his views of government. ‘He who marries intends as little to conspire his own ruin as he that swears allegiance; and as a whole people is in proportion to an ill government, so is one man to an ill marriage … To resist the highest magistrate, though tyrannising, God never gave us express allowance.’

  When Milton writes, with a shudder, that ‘instead of being one flesh, they will be rather two carcasses chained unnaturally together; or as it may happen, a living soul bound to a dead corpse’, he evokes a loneliness that goes beyond ordinary misery. The union that was supposed to confirm who he was actually threatened him with the oblivion he dreaded. This is one of many passages whose passion betrays an autobiographical ghost, flickering lightly and distortingly over the proclamations of reason and objectivity. He wrote: ‘There is a peculiar comfort in the married state besides the genial bed … We cannot therefore always be contemplative, or pragmatical abroad, but have need of some delightful intermissions, wherein the enlarged soul may leave off a while her severe schooling; and like a glad youth in wandering vacancy, may keep her holidays to joy and harmless pastime: which as she cannot well do without company, so in no company so well as where the different sex in most resembling unlikeness, and most unlike resemblance cannot but please best and be pleased in the aptitude of that variety.’ Of course, what this meant (as the feminist Mary Astell pointed out sixty years later) was that he wanted someone to soothe his pride and flatter his vanity, but hers is a brutal way of putting it.

  He never thought of blaming himself. He simply lamented his misery in terms designed to bring emotion to the aid of reason. ‘When the mind hangs off in an unclosing disproportion, though the body be as it ought … there all corporal delight will soon become unsavoury and contemptible.’ Sex is no fun when you feel yourself hated. The embrace of someone who doesn’t love you is the loneliest place imaginable. ‘And the solitariness of man, which God had namely and principally ordered to prevent by marriage, has no remedy, but lies under a worse condition than the loneliest single life; for in single life the absence and remoteness of a helper might inure him to expect his own comforts out of himself … but here the continual sight of his deluded thoughts without cure, must needs be to him … a daily trouble and pain of loss in some degree like that which Reprobates feel.’ Being married to the wrong person is hell, and damnation too. ‘The aggrieved person shall do more manly, to be extraordinary and singular
in claiming the due right whereof he is frustrated, than to piece up his lost contentment by visiting the Stews.’

  If there was one thing Milton longed to be, it was extraordinary and singular. His life went on, despite the war; he took in more pupils. He wrote no poetry. He wrote a treatise on how future leaders should be educated; here Milton was able to revenge himself at last on unsatisfactory Cambridge by suggesting that all universities should be abolished. Instead, there should be a single academy, at least one in every city, where shepherds and gardeners would instruct the young, alongside other professionals. It was an attractive idea, but the main goal was actually to produce disciplined army regiments: two hours a day were to be spent on drill. It was just like Milton to publish yet another ideal a month before the heavy pragmatics of the Battle of Marston Moor.

  And yet ideals were also and increasingly what the war was coming to be about. John Milton had been fighting his own little war against some Parliamentarians who were eager to censure his writings on divorce. In seeking to refute them, he wrote the most glorious of all his pamphlets, a learned and eloquent defence of the principle that all men should be given ‘the liberty to know, to utter and to argue freely according to conscience, above all liberties’. Milton borrowed from his beloved Greeks to find a way of talking about freedom, about its dependence on books, and in doing so gave to prose in English something it has never lost: a way of speaking about human liberty. What also shines out is Milton’s passion for books: books, he writes, ‘are not absolutely dead things, but do contain a potency of life in them to be as active as that soul was whose progeny they are … As good almost kill a man as kill a good book.’ As for books’ power to corrupt, Milton will have none of it: he argues that someone already steeped in evil can find evil even in a good book, so a really eager censor will have to ban the works of the Church Fathers and the Bible, too. If you suppress works of learning, Milton argues passionately, the result will be to stop people from learning about argument itself, to take from them the tools by which they can tell truth from falsehood. Even a bad book can be useful to a good and intelligent reader: ‘a wise man will make better use of an idle pamphlet than a fool will do of sacred Scripture’. ‘I cannot praise a fugitive and cloistered virtue,’ snorted Milton, glancing over his shoulder at monks and nuns, ‘unexercised and unbreathed, that never sallies out and sees her adversary, but slinks out of that race where that immortal garland is to be run for, not without dust and heat. Assuredly we bring not innocence into the world; we bring impurity much rather; that which purifies us is trial, and trial is by what is contrary.’

  Milton had stopped wanting the world to reflect him and his views in an admiring mirror. Instead, with this image he brilliantly turned his own passionate difference from it into proof of his own election, his own unique individuality. Now, as always, he wanted to find his own reflection in others again, by assigning to them the same glories of rationality and learning that he claimed for himself. Areopagitica, its rebarbative Greek title designed to put off the ignoramuses who had bought his pamphlets on divorce, at once holds out a hand to every man in the crowded London streets and soars above them on the wings of learning; it’s both astoundingly democratic and unbearably snobbish. Both attitudes can be found in the prefaratory poem, translated from Euripides’s Suppliant Women:

  This is true liberty when freeborn men

  Having to advise the public, may speak free:

  Which he who can and will, deserves high praise;

  Who neither can nor will may hold his peace.

  What can be juster in a state than this?

  It was printed on or about 23 November 1644, after the second Battle of Newbury. It was electric and staggering. And it was followed all too soon by more pamphlets on divorce.

  But there were limits to Milton’s searing liberalism. Later, Milton commemorated a massacre of Protestants in Piedmont, called ‘slaughter’d Saints’, as opposed to ‘our Fathers’, who ‘worship’t Stocks and stones’. In Of Civil Power, Roman Catholics are chief among those that magistrates exist to suppress, along with blasphemers and idolators. Indeed, Roman Catholics, Milton explains, cannot claim toleration on the same grounds as Protestants, since the Catholic has placed himself in ‘voluntary servitude to man’s law’ and hence his soul ‘forfeits her Christian liberty’. Moreover, Catholicism is not really a religion at all, but the Roman political state seeking dominion over other men, and is therefore ‘justly to be suspected, not tolerated, by the magistrate of another country’.

  The divisions in John Milton’s marriage were for him part of larger, more important divisions. He and his wife were parted, but that was part of a national fall, which would one day be righted by the triumph of the saints.

  The astounding thing is that this fiercely competitive, neurotic, insecure, emotionally constipated man whose prose writings often bore and sometimes hector did truly have the mind of a genius. Milton’s heart was not even as interesting as a foul rag-and-bone shop; it was more like a draper’s store circa 1950, with flannel cloth in neatly wound bolts. Yet somehow the alchemy of war wrought upon this unpromising material and transformed its baseness into an avalanche of pure gold. From the dry wastes of Milton’s egotism and emotional insensitivity somehow sprang skyrockets of bright angels, cascades of light, the mountains of Eden, and the bejewelled and velvet darkness of the most seductive Satan in Western literature. Of course we can catch glimpses of the splendours to come in the fugal sonorities of Areopagitica, in the starry courts of Comus, in the delicate fragile perfection of Lycidas. But Milton’s great epic still takes away the breath, in part because it is astounding that such grandeur came from such a difficult man, but it could only have been produced by that war acting on that man. Paradise Lost is arguably among the war’s greatest and most enduring consequences.

  XVII The Power of Heaven: Marston Moor and Cromwell

  The year 1644 ended some stories in silence and partings. When the ever-flexible friend the Earl of Holland had reappeared at the queen’s side in 1643, eager to proclaim his repentance for his support of Parliament, she found his constant visits irritating. And then autumn began, with steady rain and cold, so that everyone was confined to their miserable Oxford lodgings, with plenty of unfilled leisure to notice their poverty and crowding.

  Henrietta was pregnant again, miserably pregnant as she always was, ill and aching from what may have been rheumatism brought on by the pregnancy itself. Bad news began to trickle in, too; Montrose rode out of Oxford in March to raise Scotland for the king, but the king’s enemies there were already on the move. As the army of the Scots crossed the border, it became obvious to everyone that Henrietta must leave for France, even though by now she didn’t really know where to go. The islands of safety were being overwhelmed one by one. So in early summer of 1644, she began a journey into despair. Travelling hurt her terribly, jolting her on hard or muddy roads and aggravating her ‘rheum’, as she called it. Her physician called it hysteria, and it is hard for us to outguess him today. But she knew she had to go, to protect her unborn baby. She left Oxford on 17 April 1644. The king and the two princes, reluctant to say their goodbyes, went with her and shared the first night’s halt with her in Abingdon. Next morning she said her goodbyes to her two sons. She then set out, westwards, into the Vale of the White Horse. But the king turned east, back to Oxford, while she made her way south to Exeter, where she had her baby, another tiny daughter. She left the new baby behind, in part because of the danger at sea. Then she sailed to France.

  She and Charles had said their last goodbyes. They would never meet again.

  For Henrietta, the war was over. She would go on intriguing for French backing for Charles, but she would not succeed.

  Sometimes we get glimpses of the way the royal family appeared to ordinary citizens. A woman called Anne Smith, ‘being diabolically affected towards our most serene Lady Mary now Queen of England and towards Prince Charles the Prince of Wales and the other children of the k
ing and queen, publicly spoke and uttered these false and seditious words, to wit, “The King’s children are bastards, And that the queen was delivered of a child at Oxford when the King had not been with her a twelvemonth before.”’ It was probably not the first time she had said it. By now the gap between the lived lives of the royal family and people’s perceptions of them was cavernous. They had lost control of their images. They had lost control of London. Now they were to lose control of the nation as well.

  Parliamentarians, too, had reason to despair. The Battle of Cropredy Bridge on 29 June 1644 dealt a crucial blow to their morale, because after it so many despaired of success that desertions from Waller’s army became a haemorrhage. Even the trained bands had had enough, and slunk home quietly. The Tower Hamlets men, from Anna Trapnel’s part of London, were among those who had been firm under fire. Now they may have begun to wonder why they had bothered.

  It was from this desperate hour that the man emerged. When Oliver Cromwell’s military career began, he was alongside men who lacked experience – most of the officers had never been in a battle. The main problem they faced at first was keeping their troops in order. Men who had not wanted to fight in the first place deserted at the first opportunity. If they couldn’t get clean away, they would at least hope to while away the hours in plunder or drinking. Sickness in turn reduced the ranks, thinning them to paper.

  Cromwell needed to be a good leader to manage men like that. He always excelled at staying close to the men under his command. His authority was based on tight military discipline, but also on real interest in his men and their welfare. He was relentless with soldiers who ran away or misbehaved. In his regiment ‘no man swears but he pays his twelvepence; if he be drunk he is set in the stocks or worse; if one calls the other roundhead, he is cashiered; insomuch as the countries where they come leap for joy of them, and come in and join with them’. An exaggeration, perhaps, but after some of the disorderly forces led by others, the Eastern Counties had cause to rejoice that disciplined troops were in the area. Cromwell also supported his troops loyally if they kept the rules. He tried to make sure they were paid properly, and defended them if they were unjustly accused of plunder or other criminal activities. He also drilled his men, taking them into battle in close, tight formation. When they broke through, he made them re-form and attack again and he wouldn’t allow them to rush off after plunder. ‘I have a lovely company’, he wrote in September 1643. ‘They are no Anabaptists, they are sober Godfearing Christians.’