“Domestic or Personal Liberty” 1642–1645The Judgement of Martin Bucer, concerning Divorce, which sometimes translates and
sometimes epitomizes the chapters of Bucer’s work dealing with marriage and di-
vorce.^84 The preface, signed “John Milton,” offers the work as from Bucer and
himself. This time he pointedly ignores the Westminster Assembly, complaining
bitterly about the response of his former Presbyterian colleagues, “of whose profes-
sion and supposed knowledge I had better hope,” and dismayed by the fact that
those who praised him for the antiprelatical tracts have now “lavishly traduc’d” him
but refused him the courtesy of a formal response:
They have stood now almost this whole year clamouring a farre off, while the book
hath bin twice printed, twice bought up, & never once vouchsaft a friendly confer-
ence with the author, who would be glad and thankfull to be shewn an error, either
by privat dispute, or public answer, and could retract, as well as wise men before him;
might also be worth the gaining, as one who heertofore, hath done good service to
the church. (CPW II, 435–7)Bucer was licensed by John Downham, registered by the Stationers on July 15,
and the title page bears the imprimatur, “Publisht by Authoritie.” The epigraph –
“Art thou a teacher of Israel, and know’st not these things?” (John 3:10) – ridicules
his clerical detractors who, in denouncing Milton’s views on divorce as “licentious,
new, and dangerous” (436), have unwittingly defamed the venerable Bucer. An-
ticipating Areopagitica, Milton underscores the irony and the danger in the fact that
he, as an English patriot, had only tried in his divorce tracts to do “for mine own
Country” what those “admired strangers,” Bucer and Erasmus, did for it, but Bucer
on divorce could be licensed while Milton on divorce could not:
If these thir books... be publisht and republisht... and mine containing but the
same thing, shall in a time of reformation, a time of free speaking, free writing, not
find a permission to the Presse, I referre me to wisest men, whether truth be suffer’d
to be truth, or liberty to be liberty now among us, and be not again in danger of new
fetters and captivity after all our hopes and labours lost: and whether learning be not
(which our enemies too profetically fear’d) in the way to be trodd’n down again by
ignorance.^85He begins with thirteen testimonials to Bucer as biblical scholar and reformer – and
five to Bucer’s associate Paulus Fagius – from Calvin, Beza, John Foxe, Peter Mar-
tyr, and others. Then, taking up the role of adviser to parliament, he charges them
in a lengthy epistle to fulfill their “inestimable trust, the asserting of our just liber-
ties” (438). Terming Bucer “the Apostle of our Church,” he argues his special
claim to their attention since, in a book written for England, he proposed divorce
“as a most necessary and prime part of discipline in every Christian government”
(432).
But while Milton here enlists the “the autority, the lerning, godlines” of Bucer