“Against... the Bishops” 1639–1642Petition of December 11, 1640, which was offered, Milton claimed in Animadver-
sions, by “great numbers of sober, and considerable men” as well as honest trades-
men (676). At length, with a fine rhetorical flourish, he intimates that parliament
dare not fail to achieve church reform, since God himself has become their agent:
At other times we count it ample honour when God voutsafes to make man the
instrument and subordinate worker of his gracious will... [but] to them he hath bin
pleas’d to make himselfe the agent, and immediat performer of their desires; dissolv-
ing their difficulties when they are thought inexplicable... what is it when God
himselfe condescends, and workes with his own hands to fulfill the requests of men... I see who is their assistant, who their confederat, who hath ingag’d his omnipo-
tent arme, to support and crown with successe... the full and perfet reformation of
his Church. (927–8)
With this notion of God seconding human agency, Milton has given over, whether
he fully realizes it or not, Calvinist predestinarian orthodoxy.
Milton also provides an autobiographical narrative to counter the Confuter’s
false and formulaic “character” of him as licentious, riotous, and penurious.^81 He
did not spend an “inordinat and riotous youth” at the university. He was not “vomited
out thence” but left after taking two degrees. The fellows of Christ’s showed him
“favour and respect... above any of my equals,” desiring him to stay on after
graduation and testifying in several letters to “their singular good affection” and
friendship.^82 Nor does he now live wantonly in a “Suburb sinke”: he rises early
with the birds, he reads “good Authors” or has them read to him “till the attention
bee weary, or memory have his full fraught,” and he exercises for health, mental
alertness, and in preparation for military service, when “the cause of religion, and
our Countries liberty... shall require firme hearts in sound bodies to stand and
cover their stations, rather then to see the ruine of our Protestation, and the
inforcement of a slavish life.”^83 This suggests that Milton now expects an armed
struggle, and that he may have been drilling with the trained bands;^84 in any event,
he imagines himself as a martial as well as a polemic Christian warrior. He does not
deny that he goes to playhouses in London, but counters that he saw much worse at
approved university theatricals, where clergymen and ministers-to-be made of them-
selves a “foule and ignominious” spectacle.^85
He flatly denies that he spends his evenings in bordellos, offering as evidence an
account of the moral formation produced by his studies and private reading. He
learned lessons of idealistic chastity and love, honor to women, and due self-regard
from the classical Orators, Historians, and Elegiac Poets, from Dante’s and Petrarch’s
sonnets, from “lofty Fables and Romances,” from Plato and Xenophon, from the
Pauline epistles, and from the descriptions in the Book of Revelation of the glory
awaiting those “not defil’d with women” – which means fornication, he insists,
since “marriage must not be call’d a defilement.”^86 As other safeguards against li-