CHAPTER II. MILTON UNHAPPY IN HIS MARRIAGE: HIS FIRST DIVORCE TRACT: TWO EDITIONS OF IT. A WE left Milton in his house in Aldersgate Street in or about 1643, waiting for the promised return of his recentlywedded wife at Michaelmas, and meanwhile comfortable enough, with his books, his pupils, and the quiet companionship of his old father. We are now seven or eight months beyond that point in our general History. What had happened in the Aldersgate household in the interval? tremendous thing had happened. Milton had come to desire a divorce from his wife, and had written and published a Tract on Divorce, partly in the interest of his own private case, but really also with a view to suggest to the mind of England, then likely to be receptive of new ideas, certain thoughts on the whole subject of the English law of Marriage which had resulted from reflection on his own experience. Here is the story: "return. Michaelmas [Sept. 29, 1643] being come," says Phillips, " 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 at last he despatched down "a foot-messenger [to Forest Hill] with a letter, desiring her 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, who by this time had his head-quarters "at Oxford and was in some prospect of success, 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 that 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 accord ingly wrote," &c. Here Phillips goes on to enumerate Milton's various Divorce Tracts, the first of which in order of time was his Doctrine and Discipline of Divorce. Aubrey corroborates Phillips, but has little on the subject but what he may have picked up from gossip. "She was a ... Royalist, and went to her mother near Oxford: he sent "for her after some time, and I think his servant was evilly entreated,"—such are Aubrey's brief notes of the facts; after which come his own reflections on the rupture: "Two "opinions do not well on the same bolster;" and "What "man, especially contemplative, would like to have a young "wife environed and stormed by the sons of Mars, and those "of the enemy party?" Finally Wood, in his Fasti, does little more than repeat Aubrey: "Though he sent divers pressing invitations, yet he could not prevail upon her to "come back;" whereupon "he, being not able to bear this abuse, did therefore, upon consideration, after he had con"sulted many eminent authors, write the said book of "Divorce, with intentions to be separated from her."1 On all grounds Phillips's authority is the best. And yet there are difficulties in his account. According to that account, it was the non-return of Milton's wife at or about Michaelmas (Sept. 29) 1643, and not only her non-return then, but her obstinate and repeated refusal to return after that date, and the insulting conduct of her family to the messenger he finally sent to urge her return, that roused Milton's indignation, put the thought of divorce into his 1 Phillips's Memoir; Aubrey's Lives; and Wood's Fasti Oxon. I. 482-3. mind, and induced him to write his first Divorce Tract. If so, the tract could hardly have been ready till some weeks after Michaelmas 1643-say, till about Christmas of the same year. There is proof, however (and I do not think it has been observed before), that Milton's first Divorce Tract was already published and in circulation two months before the Michaelmas in question. The proof is not, where we might expect it, in the books of the Stationers' Company; for the Tract, like all Milton's previous pamphlets, was published by him, rather defiantly, without the required legal formalities of licence and registration. But there is a precious copy of it in Thomason's great collection of pamphlets, called "the King's Pamphlets," in the British Museum. The title in that copy is as follows: "The Doctrine and Discipline of Divorce, Restor'd, to the good of both Sexes, from the Bondage of Canon Law and other mistakes, to Christian Freedom, guided by the Rule of Charity; wherein also many places of Scripture have recovered their long-lost meaning: seasonable to be now thought on in the Reformation intended." Underneath this title there follows on the titlepage the quotation "Matth. xiii. 52. Every Scribe instructed to the Kingdome of Heav'n is like the Maister of a house which bringeth out of his treasurie things old and new;" and at the foot of the title-page is the legend "London, Printed by T. P. and M. S. in Goldsmiths' Alley: 1643."1 This printed legend alone would all but determine the publication to have been prior to Christmas 1643; but the question is set at rest by a manuscript note on the title-page, "Aug. 1st." The note was put there by, or by the direction of, the collector, Thomason, to indicate the day on which the copy came into his hands, and is to be relied on implicitly. The Tract, it will be observed, was anonymous; but the words "Written by J. Milton," penned on the title-page by the same hand that penned the date "Aug. 1st," show that the authorship was no secret from the all-prying Thomason. In short, on evidence absolutely conclusive, Milton's first 1 Copy in British Museum Library: Press-mark, 12. G. F. 17 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 to 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 informa tion 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 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 |