summer; which was granted, on condition of her returning at the time appointed, Michaelmas [September 29, 1643] or thereabout." -In short, it had been a hasty marriage, unsuitable on both sides, and the greatest blunder of Milton's life. "Michaelmas being come," Phillips proceeds, " and no news of his wife's return, he sent for her by letter, and, receiving no answer, sent several other letters, which were also unanswered, so that he despatched down a foot-messenger with a letter, desiring her return; but the messenger came back, not only without an answer, at least a satisfactory one, but, to the best of my remembrance, reported that he was dismissed with some sort of contempt. This proceeding, in all probability, was grounded upon no other cause but this: viz. that, the family being generally addicted to the Cavalier Party, as they called it, and some of them possibly engaged in the King's service, they began to repent them of having matched the eldest daughter of the family to a person so contrary to them in opinion, and thought it would be a blot on their escutcheon whenever the Court should come to flourish again. However, it so incensed our author that he thought it would be dishonourable ever to receive her again after such a repulse, so that he forthwith prepared to fortify himself with arguments for such a resolution, and accordingly wrote "What he wrote will appear presently.

The Parliament meanwhile had virtually decreed the entire abolition of Episcopacy in England, and had called an Assembly of Puritan Divines to advise it as to the forms and creed of the future National Church. This Assembly met at Westminster, July 1, 1643, just at the time when Milton's wife left him to go back to her friends. In the following month the Parliament, finding that they had made but little advance in the war with Charles, applied to the Scots for armed aid. The Scots having agreed to this on the condition that the Parliament would do all it could to bring England into religious and ecclesiastical conformity with Scotland, an alliance was formed between the two nations on the basis of what was called the Solemn League and Covenant, to be signed by all the English Parliamentarians on the one hand and by the whole people of Scotland on the other (Sept. 1643). Some Scottish Divines then took their places in the Westminster Assembly; and in January 1643-4 a Scottish auxiliary army of 21,000 men entered England. For some time they

were rather inactive; but on the 2d of July 1644 they took part in the great battle of Marston Moor. In this battle, won chiefly by the exertions of Cromwell, then Lieutenant-general under the Earl of Manchester, the King's forces were disastrously beaten, and the North of England was secured for the Parliament.- -By this time there had appeared a dispute among the Parliamentarians themselves, which interfered much with the farther prosecution of the war, and was to be of immense consequence in the history of England for many years to come. It was the dispute between the Presbyterians and the Independents. It began first in the Westminster Assembly, when that body was required to advise Parliament as to the form of Church-government to be set up in England. The great majority of the English Divines, and of course all the Scottish Divines present, were for strict Presbytery, on the Scottish system of a gradation of Church Courts, from the small court of each parish or congregation, up to the district or Presbyterial Court, the Synod or Provincial Court, and so to the supreme authority of the whole Church, exercised by annual Representative Assemblies. They were also for the compulsory inclusion of every man, woman, and child, within the pale of such a Church, in attendance on its worship and subject to its discipline. A very small minority of the English Divines, however, dissented from these views. They maintained that, according to the Scriptural constitution of the Church, every voluntary congregation of Christians ought to be independent within itself, and that, though occasional meetings of ministers and members of different congregations might be useful for the purposes of consultation, any governing apparatus of Presbyteries, Synods, and Assemblies, for the control of individual congregations, was unlawful. They demanded further that, if a Presbyterian National Church were to be set up in England,—which the overwhelming drift of opinion in its favour seemed to make inevitable,— there should at least be a toleration of dissent from it, and liberty for all respectable Sects to form congregations for themselves. The debate soon extended itself through the English community at large; where, though the Presbyterians were also largely in the majority, there were yet scattered thousands of persons favourable to Independency. To the Independents there attached themselves the Baptists, the Brownists, the Antinomians, and a great many other sects

In

that had lurked in English society since Elizabeth's time, as well as free opinionists of all sorts, and many who, though agreeing sufficiently with the Presbyterians in their theology, yet held by the principle of Liberty of Conscience, and regarded spiritual compulsion by a Presbyterian Church as no less monstrous than the same under the Papacy or Prelacy. Independency, in all these various forms, had come to prevail largely in the Parliamentarian Army, and Cromwell was already marked there as the head of the Independents. Hence the English Presbyterians and the Scots had begun to look with great suspicion on the success of Cromwell and the Army-Independents in the field. They declared that Independency, with its principle of toleration, opened the door to all kinds of schisms, heresies, and blasphemies; they called the Army, all but the Scottish auxiliary portion of it, an Army of Sectaries; and they prophesied ruin to England if victory over the King should be won by such means. these circumstances it is not surprising that the Presbyterians and the Scottish auxiliaries should have contented themselves with a slow and cautious strategy, calculated to bring the King to terms rather than to beat him thoroughly, while Cromwell and the Independents had no such hesitation, but found both their duty and their safety in audacity and energy. In fact, before the end of 1644 it had become evident that the Independents were more extreme revolutionists than the Presbyterians, with peculiar democratic ideas bound up with their principle of religious freedom. Nominally, the Presbyterians and Independents, with the Scots, were united against the King on the basis of the same Solemn League and Covenant; but, in reality, the Independents had begun to doubt the utility of that document, to resent the interference of the Scots in English affairs, and to follow such courses as were suggested by free English reasonings on the Church question and on others. -There was no real objection on the part of the Independents to the establishment of a Presbyterian National Church in England, since that seemed to be the wish of the majority of the Parliamentarians. Accordingly, in January 1644-5 the establishment of such a Church was voted by Parliament. But Cromwell and the Independents took care that the question of a toleration of Dissent should be reserved. They were also powerful enough in Parliament to carry about the same time certain very important resolu

tions.

The Parliamentary general-in-chief, Essex, having recently sustained a great defeat, and the war having turned otherwise in the King's favour, it was resolved, really through Cromwell's influence, that the Army should be entirely remodelled, that Essex, Waller, Manchester, and all the chief officers till then in command should lay down their commissions, and that the New-modelled Army should be commanded by Fairfax as general-in-chief, with officers under him not having seats in Parliament (Feb.—April, 1645). The Newmodelled Army having taken the field, with Cromwell exceptionally retained in it as second in command to Fairfax, the result was at once seen. On June 14, 1645, there was fought the great battle of Naseby, in which the King was utterly ruined. The war was to straggle on in detail for a year more; but Naseby had virtually finished it. After that

battle, of course, the Independents and Sectaries, with their principle of Religious Toleration, had fuller sway in the politics of England, and the Presbyterians and their Scottish friends were checked.

Through those two important years Milton, deserted by his wife, had been living on in Aldersgate Street. Shortly after his wife's departure, his aged father, dislodged from Christopher Milton's house in Reading by the capture of that town by the Parliamentarians in April 1643, had come permanently to live with him. The teaching of his two nephews, and of a few sons of friends who were admitted daily to share their lessons, had been one of the occupations of his enforced bachelorhood. His industry otherwise is attested by the fact that six new pamphlets came from his pen during the two years. One was a little Tract on Education, addressed (June 1644) to a friend of his, Samuel Hartlib, a well-known German, living in London, and busy with all kinds of projects and speculations. It expounded Milton's views of an improved system of education for gentlemen's sons, that should supersede the existing public schools and universities. It was followed (Nov. 1644) by his famous "Areopagitica, or Speech for the Liberty of Unlicensed Printing," addressed to the Parliament, and urging them to repeal an Ordinance they had passed in June 1643 for the Regulation of the Press by a staff of official censors. In this pamphlet there was abundant evidence that Milton, as might have been inferred from his passion for intellectual liberty from his

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earliest youth, was in political sympathy with the Independents. It was the most eloquent plea for freedom of opinion and speech on all subjects that had yet appeared in the English or in any other tongue. But, indeed, by this time Milton and the Presbyterians were at open war for reasons more peculiar and personal. Hardly had his wife left him when he had published (August 1643) an extraordinary pamphlet entitled "The Doctrine and Discipline of Divorce Restored, to the Good of both Sexes," in which, without mention of his own case, but with implied reference to it, he argued that obstinate incompatibility of mind or temper between husband and wife is as lawful a ground for divorce as infidelity, and that any two persons who, after marriage, found that they did not suit each other, should be at liberty, on complying with certain public formalities, to separate and marry again. A second and much enlarged edition of this treatise appeared in February 1643-4, openly dedicated to the Parliament; and the same doctrine was advocated in three subsequent tracts: viz., "The Judgment of Martin Bucer concerning Divorce” (July 1644); Tetrachordon, or Expositions upon the four chief places in Scripture which treat of Marriage" (March 1644-5); and "Colasterion: a Reply to a Nameless Answer against the Doctrine and Discipline of Divorce" (March 1644-5). It is impossible now to imagine adequately the commotion caused in the religious world of London and of England by Milton's four Divorce Pamphlets. He was denounced and stigmatised at once as a heretic of the worst kind, the promulgator of a doctrine of hideous import, that would corrupt public morals and sap the very foundations of society. He was preached against from the pulpit, written against in books, named everywhere among the orthodox with horror and execration. Presbyterian Divines, in particular, were violent in their attacks upon him, coupling him with the most notorious heretics and sectaries of the time, and pointing to him as an example of the excesses to which Toleration would lead. They complained of him to Parliament, so that actually twice he and his writings were the subject of Parliamentary notice and inquiry. There were men in Parliament, however, who knew him; and, though his Divorce doctrine shocked many of the Independents as well as the Presbyterians, the general feeling among the Independents was that it ought to be regarded in his case only as the eccentric speculation of a very

The