“Against... the Bishops” 1639–1642Ordinance giving parliament control of the armed forces, but Charles continued
with plans to lead an army to Ireland, claiming sole control of the army as his
prerogative.
Sometime after the first of the year, probably in March, an anonymous 40-page
answer to Milton’s Animadversions appeared, A Modest Confutation of a Slanderous and
Scurrilous Libell, Entituled, Animadversions upon the Remonstrants Defense Against
Smectymnuus.^71 Hall (then in prison) may have collaborated with one of his sons in
writing it, as Milton claims to have heard (CPW I, 897). The Confuter identifies
himself as a “young scholar” seeking to answer in kind the bitter and scornful
attacks on Hall’s life and books by an adversary he describes as a “Scurrilous Mime,”
and a “grim, lowring, bitter fool.”^72 Alluding to a particularly scurrilous attack on
the bishops (CPW I, 677), the Confuter offers to infer the unknown writer’s im-
moral character and lifestyle from
some scattered passages in his own writings.... It is like he spent his youth, in loytering,
bezelling, and harlotting [after which] grown to an Impostume in the brest of the
University, he was at length vomitted out thence into a Suburbe sinke about London.... He that would finde him after dinner, must search the Play-Houses, or the Bordelli,
for there I have traced him.... [Now he] blasphemes God and the King as ordinarily
as erewhile he drank Sack and swore.^73
Milton’s 55-page answer, entitled An Apology against a Pamphlet Call’d A Modest
Confutation of the Animadversions upon the Remonstrant against Smectymnuus, probably
appeared shortly after the first week in April.^74 Though this treatise is anonymous,
Milton seems to expect readers of Reason of Church-governement to recognize him as
he restates his qualifications for writing about ecclesiastical issues: “gifts of Gods
imparting” and “the wearisome labours and studious watchings, wherein I have
spent and tir’d out almost a whole youth” (CPW I, 869). And indeed, any discern-
ing reader of the two tracts would know that there could hardly be two such figures
on the contemporary scene.^75 Milton engages the Confutation section by section,
with jibes, sarcasm, fierce banter, vituperation, and ad hominem arguments, heaping
scorn on Hall as prose stylist, satirist, and theologian, and on the supposed young
speaker – “thou lozel Bachelour of Art” (CPW I, 920). Straining to explain his
apparent disregard of the biblical injunction to forgive enemies, he argues his need
to deflect scandal from the cause of truth and from his Smectymnuan associates,
since he now writes “not as mine own person, but as a member incorporate into
that truth whereof I was perswaded, and whereof I had declar’d openly to be a
partaker” (871). But the fiercely individualistic Milton cannot long contain himself
within the corporate identity, nor can he maintain the distance he asserts between
himself and his satiric persona: “The author is ever distinguisht from the person he
introduces” (880). To the contrary, in this tract he constructs another self-portrait
and further develops and defends his poetics of satire, in part to justify and explain