“Between Private Walls” 1645–1649much as Presbyterian repression does. Milton constructs himself as a latter-day Sir
John Cheke, the great Protestant humanist, observing with heavy irony that Cheke’s
age, like his own, “hated not learning wors then toad or Asp” (not worse, but as
much).^35 Yet Cheke taught Greek to King Edward and to students at Cambridge
(and promoted the Reformation), whereas Milton’s book with its Greek title has
had no success teaching a deliberately ignorant populace. This sonnet offers no way
to bridge the gulf opened up between the academy and the city street.
Sometime during the next several months of 1646 Milton probably wrote his
sonetto caudato or sonnet with a coda or tail, titled in the Trinity manuscript, “On
the Forcers of Conscience.”^36 In June a compromise was reached on the matter of
parliamentary authority over church judiciaries, clearing the way for establishing
presbyteries, classes, and provincial synods nationwide; they were settled first in
London and Lancaster.^37 Throughout the autumn a committee of the Commons
was occupied with an ordinance for the suppression of blasphemies and heresies,
providing for fines, imprisonment, scourging, and hanging for various religious
offenses. In this sonnet Milton takes on the role of spokesman for the nation and
specifically for the Independent tolerationist cause, chastising the Presbyterians for
venality, Pharisaical hypocrisy, ambition, corruption, and power-grabbing. In a
trenchant figure, he portrays them as all too ready to “seize the widow’d whore
Plurality” from the prelates whom they deposed but in fact envied. In powerful,
prophetic terms, he challenges those calling so avidly for religious persecution: “Dare
yee for this adjure the civill sword / To force our Consciences that Christ sett free
/ And ride us with a classic Hierarchy / Taught yee by mere A. S. & Rotherford.”^38
He devises snide epithets for the antitolerationists: “shallow Edwards & Scotch
What d’ye call” point to Thomas Edwards of Gangraena fame and Robert Baillie,
the Scots Commissioner and author of the Dissuasive.^39 These men label as heretics
men (like Milton) of pure “life, learning, faith.”
This sonnet form, developed in Italy for comic or satirical purposes, adds to the
usual fourteen lines one or more “tails” of two and a half lines, meant to sting or
lash the subject. Milton, in what may be the first use of the form in English,^40 adds
two, using them to propose a political resolution:
That so the Parlament
May with their wholesome & preventive sheares
Clip your Phylacteries though bauke your eares
And succour our just feares
When they shall read this cleerly in your charge
New Presbyter is but old Preist writt large. (ll. 15–20)He seems to call for a polemic campaign to expose the Presbyterian machinations,
“worse then those of Trent.”^41 The specific proposal, “Clip your Phylacteries,”
alludes to Matthew 23:1–8, where Christ warns his disciples against following the