Divorce Tract was in print and on sale in London on the 1st of August 1643, or two months before Phillips's fatal Michaelmas.1 One of two suppositions therefore:-(1) If Phillips is right in his statement that Milton's first Divorce Tract was caused by the obstinate refusal of his wife to return to him, and the insulting conduct of her family in detaining her and laughing at his letters and messages, then Phillips's dates in the whole matter of the marriage must be a little wrong. "About Whitsuntide it was (May 21, 1643) that my uncle left us in Aldersgate Street, on what turned out to be his marriage journey; in about a month's time he returned, bringing his wife, and some of her relations, with him (June 1643); the relations stayed about a week, during which there was much feasting and merriment; for about a month after they were gone the newly-married wife remained with my uncle; but then (late in July or early in August 1643), tired of a philosophical life, and pining for the society of home, she contrived a request from her family to have her with them during the rest of the summer-to which my uncle consented, on the 1 This may be the place for a word or two about the collector of those King's Pamphlets in the British Museum among which I have had so frequently to range for the purposes of this work, and to which, like other inquirers into English History from 1640 to 1660, I owe more items of information than I can count.-George Thomason was a London bookseller of the Civil War time; his place of business being the "Rose and Crown" in St. Paul's Churchyard. He was of Royalist sympathies; but his hobby was to collect impartially all the pamphlets, broad-sheets, &c., that teemed from the English press on both sides, and not only those that teemed from the English press, but also all published abroad that bore on current English questions. He began this labour in 1641, and pursued it indefatigably till after the Restoration; so that, at his death in or about 1666, he left a collection of about 33,000 pamphlets, &c. on English affairs, published between 1638 and 1662. The making of this collection had been the delight of his life; it had been his anxiety that no single tract, or printed scrap of any interest, should escape him. When he began to collect in 1641, he had taken pains to obtain copies of publications of the immediately preceding years; and after that his work had been facilitated by the notoriety of his passion for collecting. Booksellers and authors (Milton for one) seem occasionally to have sent copies of their pamphlets to Thomason. "Exact care hath been taken," he himself tells us in the Introduction to a MS. catalogue of his treasures, "that the very day is written upon most of them that they came out"; and this care of his has fixed the dates of many publications that would else have been unknown or but vaguely known.-For farther particulars of this interesting person, an account of the shifts to which he was put to save his collection from the chances of Parliamentarian pillage, and a history of the fortunes of his collection till it came to be part of the Library of King George III., and so of the British Museum, see Edwards's Memoirs of Libraries (1859), Vol. I. pp. 456–460. -I may add that I have seen a pencil jotting in Thomason's hand on one of the fly-leaves of his collection as fresh and legible, after 220 years, as if it had been written yesterday. understanding that she was to come back about Michaelmas (Sept. 29, 1643)." Such, re-expressed in words for the nonce, is Phillips's account as we have already given it. But, as the Divorce Tract was published August 1, 1643, it is clear that, if the cause of that Tract was the persistent, protracted, and contemptuous absence of his wife, then Phillips's memory must have been at fault, and he must have somewhat post-dated the marriage itself. The marriage in that case must have been before Whitsuntide 1643; and the return of the wife to her relations, her refusal to come back, and Milton's chagrin and anger so occasioned, must have been matters not of after Michaelmas 1643, but of at least a month or two before the August of that year. This is quite a tenable supposition; for there are other inaccuracies in Phillips, and the register of the place and date of Milton's marriage with Mary Powell has not been found. (2) On the whole, however, Phillips's recollections about the marriage are so circumstantial, and there is such a likelihood of their being true, that, until contradictory records shall be produced, it seems right to accept his dating. But then his explanation of the cause of his uncle's speculations about divorce must be wrong. The cause in that case cannot have been the obstinate refusal of his wife to return; for the Divorce Tract must have been written and ready for the press while she was still with him in the Aldersgate Street house (July 1643), and it was actually out (Aug. 1) before she can have reached her father's house at Forest Hill on her granted two months of leave till Michaelmas. What are we to make of this discrepancy? One is puzzled. That a man should have occupied himself on a Tract on Divorce ere his honeymoon was well overshould have written it perseveringly day after day within sound of his newly-wedded wife's footsteps and the very rustle of her dress on the stairs or in the neighbouring room -is a notion all but dreadful. And yet to some such notion, if Phillips's dating is correct, we seem to be shut up. But, if so, more is involved than Phillips knew. The cause of Milton's thoughts about divorce, in that case, must have been the agony of a deadly discovery of his wife's utter unfitness for him when as yet she had not been two months his wife. It must have been the unutterable pain of the disillusioned bridegroom, the gnawing sense of his irretrievable mistake. The vision must then pass before our minds of scenes in the Aldersgate Street house, the reverse of the happily connubial, before that sudden departure of the bride back to her father's home, and leading to that incident perhaps rather violently. One seems to hear the sound of differences, of conflicting opinions about this and that, of weeping girlish wilfulness opposed to steady and perhaps too austere prohibitions. "Well, then, I will go back to my mother: I am sure I wish I had never-"! "Go"! And so the parting may have come about, not wholly by her arrangement, but harshly and with some quarrel on his part. There are not wanting subsequent facts that might lend a plausibility to this version of the story. Yet it is the other that one would wish to be true, and that would fit in most naturally with the facts as a whole. That version is that Milton, good-naturedly and perhaps taken by surprise, allowed his wife to go home for two months at her own request, or the request of her relatives, before he had been three months married, and that it was the insult of her nonreturn that revealed to him his mistake in her, and drove him into his speculations about divorce. Only, then, we repeat, Phillips's dating of the marriage and its incidents requires amendment. In any case the first edition of Milton's Doctrine and Discipline of Divorce was out in London on the 1st of August 1643.2 It was a pamphlet of forty-eight small quarto pages, with an extra page supplying two omitted passages. The text was printed continuously, without division into chapters; 1 Milton's mother-in-law, having occasion, seven years afterwards (1651), to advert to her daughter's return home so soon after her marriage, distinctly attributed it to Milton himself. The words are, "He having turned away his wife heretofore for a long space upon some other occasion." I do not think Mrs. Powell was a very accurate lady, and she had no fondness for Milton; but the words seem to imply more than a mere passive consent of Milton to his wife's proposal to revisit her family. 2 The supposition is always open a much later month. 66 But this is the and there was no author's name either on the title-page or at the end. Both in matter and in manner the Tract was one of the boldest that had ever been submitted to the reading of England. Its thesis is laid down near the beginning in these terms: "That indisposition, unfitness, or contrariety of mind, arising from a cause in nature unchangeable, hindering and ever likely to hinder the main benefits of conjugal society, which are solace and peace, is a greater reason of divorce than natural frigidity, especially if there be no children, and that there be mutual consent." This thesis Milton sets himself to argue in all sorts of ways—from natural reason and expediency; from the Scripture doctrine of marriage as it might be gathered from the Mosaic Law and the right interpretation of texts in the Old and New Testaments, notwithstanding one or two individual texts (like that of Matth. v. 31, 32) that had been hackneyed and misunderstood by mere literalists; and from opinions or indications of opinion on the subject that might be found in the works of some of the Protestant Reformers, and other eminent writers. His conclusion was that the notion of the indissolubility of marriage, or even the modified law of England and of other countries, authorizing divorce only for certain gross reasons, were mere relics of superstitious tradition, the concoction of the Canonists and Sacramentalists in the ages of sacerdotal tyranny, unworthy of more enlarged views of justice and liberty, and a canker and cause of incalculable misery in the heart of modern society. Again and again he indicates his consciousness that in announcing this conclusion, and trying to rouse his fellowcountrymen to the necessity of at once including a revision of the Marriage Law in the general Reformation then in progress, he is performing a great public service. Thus, at the very opening: "By which [the precedent of certain liberal "hints on the subject by Hugo Grotius], and mine own "apprehension of what public duty each man owes, I con"ceive myself exhorted among the rest to communicate such thoughts as I have, and offer them now, in this general "labour of Reformation, to the candid view both of Church 66 66 66 " and Magistrate; especially because I see it the hope of good men that those irregular and unspiritual courts have spun their utmost date in this land, and some better course must now be constituted. He, therefore, that by adventuring shall be so happy as with success to ease and set free the "minds of ingenuous and apprehensive men from this need"less thraldom; he that can prove it lawful and just to claim "the performance of a fit and matchable conversation no less "essential to the prime scope of marriage than the gift of bodily conjunction, or else to have an equal plea of divorce " as well as for that corporal deficiency; he that can but lend us the clue that winds out this labyrinth of servitude to "such a reasonable and expedient liberty as this deserves "to be reckoned among the public benefactors of civil and "human life, above the inventors of wine and oil.” 1 As such a benefactor, such a champion of a neglected truth and a suppressed human liberty, the anonymous writer offers himself. He knows that he stands alone at present, but he trusts to the power of demonstration addressed to the mind of England, then newly awakened and examining all institutions to their roots. There is not a word of avowed reference to his own case throughout; and yet from first to last we are aware of young Mary Powell in the background. Inability for "fit and matchable conversation": this is that supreme fault in a wife on which the descant is from first to last, and from which, when it is plainly ingrained and unamendable, the right of divorce is maintained to be, by the law of God and all civil reason, the due deliverance. Hopeless intellectual and spiritual incompatibility between husband and wife: it is on this, though not in these exact words, that Milton harps again and again as in his view the clearest invalidation of marriage, the frustration of the noblest and most divine ends of the institution; an essentially worse frustration, he dares to say in one place, than even that conjugal infidelity which "a gross and boorish opinion, how common soever," would alone resent or recognise. It is 1 This passage is from the first edition: it is not nearly so full in the second. VOL. III. E |