“Domestic or Personal Liberty” 1642–1645(740), a “Brain-worm” and “Country Hinde,” “a meer and arrant petti-fogger”
(743), “a snout” for whom no language is “low and degenerat anough” (747).
Milton thinks he deserves a learned opponent, and promises to answer in a very
different vein “any man equal to the matter” who will dispute with “civility and
faire Argument” (757–8). In Tetrachordon he managed an argument in that civil
mode, and seemed to suggest that he was ready to give over this fight for now. But
this unworthy answer evidently infuriated him and caused him to change his mind,
provoking him to promise in Colasterion to “refuse no occasion, and avoid no ad-
versary, either to maintane what I have begun, or to give it up for better reason”
(727).
Spring and summer of 1645 brought striking changes in the nation and in Milton’s
household. With Cromwell as lieutenant-general under Fairfax, the New Model
Army won notable victories. The Battle of Naseby (June 14) was a major turning
point of the war. The king, who commanded in person, suffered a major rout with
some 5,000 of his men captured, including major officers and much artillery. Also,
his secret cabinet was seized, containing incriminating revelations of covert dealings
with the Irish and the continental Catholic powers. Edward Phillips states – though
there is no confirming evidence – that about this time there was talk of making
Milton an adjutant-general in Waller’s army – a post that would involve giving
counsel and advice to the general.^114 But Milton took a different path. He leased a
large house in the Barbican opening off Aldergate Street, with a view to expanding
his school. According to Phillips he also hoped to marry again – ready, perhaps, to
proclaim his own divorce as Tetrachordon had hinted. Nothing is known of the
young woman in question beyond Phillips’s report that she is “one of Dr. Davis’s
Daughters, a very Handsome and Witty Gentlewoman, but averse, it is said, to this
Motion” (EL 66). This time, it seems, Milton sought a woman of wit.
The plan, whatever it amounted to, was circumvented by the reconciliation of
Milton and Mary Powell, probably in early summer, 1645.^115 That was stage-man-
aged, Phillips suggests, by the royalist Powells – suddenly vulnerable in the wake of
the king’s declining fortunes and needing the protection of a well-connected Puri-
tan – in collaboration with Milton’s relatives, the Blackboroughs. Just possibly the
scheme was triggered by Milton sending Mary a bill of divorce. Phillips describes
the reconciliation in terms that clearly owe a good deal to imagination and conjec-
ture, and his evaluation of Milton’s feelings and motives may be over-generous: he
was then 15 years old and certainly not an eyewitness to the scene. But his is the
only version we have from someone close to the event:
The Intelligence hereof [of the proposed marriage with Miss Davis], and the then
declining State of the king’s Cause, and consequently of the Circumstances of Justice
Powell’s family, caused them to set all Engines on Work, to restore the late Married
Woman to the Station wherein they a little before had planted her; at last this device
was pitch’d upon... the Friends on both sides concentring in the same action though