“Between Private Walls” 1645–1649(February, 1646), though he summarized Milton rather more fairly than did most of
his detractors:
That tis lawfull for a man to put away his wife upon indisposition, unfitnesse, or
contrariety of minde arising from a cause in nature unchangeable; and for dispropor-
tion and deadnesse of spirit, or something distastefull and averse in the immutable
bent of na[ture]; and man in regard of the freedome and eminency of his creation, is
a law to himself in this matter, being head of the other sex, which was made for him,
neither need he hear any judge therein above himself.^28In the second part (May, 1646), Edwards associated Milton with the female preacher
and lace-woman, Mrs Attaway, who reportedly appealed to his doctrine of divorce
as justification for leaving her unsanctified husband and running away with one
William Jenny, who was also married.^29 Amidst all this, Milton must have rejoiced
at the publication late in 1645 or early in 1646 of the Uxor Ebraica by the distin-
guished Hebraist and parliamentarian John Selden; later, he often cited Selden’s
learned and exhaustive discussion of the Jewish law of marriage and divorce as
support for his own views.^30
Milton responded to these personal attacks, and the larger threat to English liber-
ties that they embody, with poems rather than pamphlets: three sonnets not then
published but no doubt sent to friends and perhaps to sympathetic MPs. Like “Cap-
tain and Colonel,” the first two, probably written in the early months of 1646,
focus on an event in his own life that had widespread national ramifications. Their
place in the Trinity manuscript suggests (but does not prove) that they were written
after the sonnet to Lawes and that the sonnet beginning “I did but prompt the age
to quit their clogs / By the known rules of ancient liberty” was written first.^31
Under the heading “On the detraction which follow’d upon my writing certain
treatises,” that sonnet castigates the “barbarous noise” of his attackers who “bawl
for freedom” but have come woefully short of that mark, “For all this wast of
wealth, & loss of blood.” It is a savage counter-attack on the Presbyterian clergy
and pamphleteers who vilified Milton as a licentious heretic. The imagery, rein-
forced by the hissing of sibilants, reduces those opponents to animals and their
arguments to mindless animal noises: they comprise a whole menagerie of “Owls
and buzzards, asses, apes and dogs.” And they are like the “hindes that were
transform’d to frogs” who railed at Latona and her twin progeny (Apollo and Diana)
in Ovid, and the “hogs” who could not appreciate the “pearl” of the gospel preached
to them (Matthew 7:6).^32 Against that characterization Milton presents himself as a
classical republican orator recalling freeborn citizens to their “ancient liberty” of
free speech and divorce, and also as a Christian prophet who recovered in his di-
vorce tracts the gospel truth that makes men free (John 8:32). The sestet invites a
right-minded audience to recognize that the Presbyterians’ failure to understand
true liberty in Milton’s case spotlights vices in them that threaten the primary ends
for which the revolution was mounted: