“Against... the Bishops” 1639–16425
“All Mouths Were Opened Against
... the Bishops” 1639–1642
When Milton returned to England in July or August, 1639, the nation was in a state
of precarious peace. The First Bishops’ War with Scotland began and ended while
he was away. The Scots responded to the king’s efforts to impose Laudian ecclesi-
astical directives upon them by repudiating bishops and the Book of Common Prayer
and establishing a national Presbyterian church.^1 Taking this as a direct challenge to
his authority, the king launched a military action against Scotland in January, 1639,
but suffered a disastrous embarrassment as his outnumbered, demoralized, and dis-
ordered forces retreated without engaging the enemy in a formal battle. A peace
accord was signed on June 19, 1639, but Charles left little doubt that he meant to
return to subdue his rebellious Scots subjects.
In England as well the first major clash was over bishops and liturgy. The classic
historiography of the English Revolution, associated with Samuel Gardiner, Max
Weber, R. H. Tawney, Lawrence Stone, and Christopher Hill, interprets that event
in terms of social and ideological conflicts: of Anglicanism with Puritanism, of royal
with parliamentary supremacy, of a patriarchal economy with emergent individual-
ism, of a rising middle class with a declining aristocracy, and of theories of absolute
monarchy with social contract theories of the state.^2 Some revisionist historians –
Conrad Russell, John Morrill, Kevin Sharpe, and Mark Kishlansky – deny the
importance of such factors, arguing that traditional belief systems and hierarchies
remained stable in local communities and attributing the outbreak of war to acci-
dents, mistakes, and functional breakdowns in government exacerbated by irra-
tional fears of popery.^3 But whatever the larger force of the revisionist argument
(itself under revision),^4 Milton clearly thought the revolution was about profound
religious and political differences, and intended his polemical tracts to participate in
the fierce parliamentary debates and pamphlet wars prompted by those conflicts.
Writing of these years later in the Defensio Secunda (1654), Milton portrays him-
self as a scholar who made a reasoned and conscientious decision to interrupt the