“Domestic or Personal Liberty” 1642–1645Ruth.”^17 She endures with “pity and ruth,” though at some emotional cost, those
friends who contemn her choices. The resolution describes her heavenly reward in
terms of erotic pleasure: this “Virgin wise and pure,” whose lamp is filled with oil
to greet the Bridegroom (Matthew 25:1–13), will join him as he “Passes to bliss”
with his “feastful friends.”
Sonnet X, titled “To ye Lady Margaret Ley,” is addressed to a neighbor in
Aldersgate Street to whom Milton turned for friendship and companionship during
the years of his wife’s absence.^18 Margaret’s political sympathies are unknown: her
own family were royalists but her husband John Hobson fought for parliament as a
lieutenant-colonel in the trained bands (the Westminster Regiment), and Milton’s
poem locates her with the lovers of liberty.^19 Edward Phillips describes Margaret’s
wit and intellect, and her admiration for Milton, in terms that hint at a mutual
attraction reaching beyond social friendship, though almost certainly not, given
Milton’s strict principles, to an affair:
Our Author, now as it were a single man again, made it his chief diversion now and
then in an Evening to visit the Lady Margaret Lee, daughter to the —— [James] Lee,
Earl of Marlborough, Lord High Treasurer of England, and President of the Privy Councel
to King James the First. This Lady, being a Woman of great Wit and Ingenuity, had a
particular Honour for him, and took much delight in his Company, as likewise her
Husband Captain Hobson, a very Accomplish’d Gentleman; and with what Esteem he
at the same time had for Her, appears by a Sonnet he made in praise of her. (EL 64)Phillips’s account and Milton’s sonnet suggest that Milton saw in the witty and
virtuous Margaret some version of what he wanted in a wife and did not obtain.
But the sonnet does not focus on her personal qualities. Milton praises Margaret
Ley by investing her with the nobility and virtues of her father: “by you, / Madam,
me thinks I see him living yet.” This praise by praising family is a common rhetori-
cal gesture, but it is complicated here by Milton’s emphasis on the insecurity of
historical knowledge, recent or ancient, domestic or political. The sonnet describes
James Ley, erstwhile Chief Justice, Lord High Treasurer, and Lord President of the
Council, as “unstain’d with gold or fee,” and as brought to his death by the disso-
lution of parliament (March 4, 1629) that began Charles I’s eleven-year arbitrary
rule: “Till the sad breaking of that Parlament / Broke him.” But Ley probably
succumbed on March 10 to simple physical decrepitude, there is no evidence that
he had parliamentarian sympathies, and some had questioned his fiscal integrity and
administrative competence.^20 The octave of the sonnet reads Ley’s story through a
legend about Isocrates, dubious but widely accepted by classical and Renaissance
authors: “that Old man eloquent” was thought to have starved himself to death
after Philip of Macedon conquered Athens and Thebes in 338 BC.^21 Milton prob-
ably believed both stories, but in the sestet he underscores the fragility of the his-
torical record, emphasizing rather its present uses: Milton, “later born,” did not