“Domestic or Personal Liberty” 1642–1645point for his English audience. In a postscript he somewhat truculently defends this
freedom, insisting that he has exercised an author’s prerogatives even as a translator:
“[I] never could delight in long citations, much lesse in whole traductions; Whether
it be natural disposition or education in me, or that my mother bore me a speaker
of what God made mine own, and not a translator” (478). He portrays himself,
however, as God’s agent in the divorce controversy, “a passive instrument under
some power and counsel higher and better then can be human” (433). Milton the
translator can demand equal status with his author since he is a teacher and prophet
instructed not by Bucer but by God. He vows to continue publishing what “may
render me best serviceable, either to this age, or if it so happ’n, to posteritie” (440),
apparently recognizing that his ideas about companionate marriage and divorce for
incompatibility may have to await a more enlightened age.
On July 2, 1644 the bloody Battle of Marston Moor was fought just outside
York, and proved a turning point for the parliamentary forces. More than 4,000
men were lost, most on the king’s side. York surrendered on July 5, placing the
entire north of England in parliament’s hands, save for a few towns. Chief credit for
the victory went to Lieutenant-General Oliver Cromwell, greatly enhancing his
military and political reputation and influence. During these months also the Tol-
eration Controversy intensified, as Presbyterians continued to insist on the duty of
the Christian magistrate to establish the Presbyterian church and enforce conform-
ity to it, in doctrine, worship, and church order. Alternatively, Erastian and other
secular-minded parliamentarians thought that toleration, as broad as could be ob-
tained, was the key to civic harmony.^87 Independents and Sectaries in the army and
the gathered churches sounded a call for broad toleration, grounding it on their
rightful Christian liberty to follow their consciences. Most tolerationists allowed
the magistrate some role in the church’s defense and stopped short of tolerating
open religious practice far outside the mainstream, e.g. Anabaptists, Antinomians,
Familists, Jews, Turks, and especially Roman Catholics.^88 Roger Williams, recently
returned from New England, set forth the most radical sectarian tolerationist posi-
tion: that to protect the elect from the sinful civil order and to allow for ongoing
revelations of the Spirit, Christ has completely separated church and state, so the
magistrate must tolerate any and all religious opinion and practice – even Roman
Catholics, Jews, and Muslims – since he has power only in civil matters.^89
Milton’s divorce tracts became something of a cause célèbre in this Toleration
Controversy. In calls for the suppression of notoriously wicked opinions, Milton is
often linked with the tolerationist Williams and the mortalist Richard Overton,
who argued in Mans Mortalitie that the soul dies with the body and both rise to-
gether at the Last Day.^90 In July, 1644 the Westminster Assembly urged parliament
to rein in the burgeoning sects and scandalous publications. On August 9 the Com-
mons ordered Williams’s Bloudy Tenant to be burned for promoting “the Toleration
of all sorts of Religion.” On August 13 Herbert Palmer’s sermon to the two houses
of parliament raged against “ungodly Toleration pleaded for under pretence of