“Domestic or Personal Liberty” 1642–1645Liberty of Conscience,” and cited, as audacious examples of the threat it posed to
religion and civil order, blasphemers, idolaters, heretics, those who refuse to take
oaths, bear arms, or pay taxes, and Milton on divorce:
If any plead Conscience for the Lawfulness of Polygamy; (or for divorce for other
causes then Christ and His Apostles mention; of which a wicked booke is abroad and
uncensured, though deserving to be burnt, whose Author hath been so impudent as to set his
Name to it and dedicate it to yourselves); or for Liberty to marry incestuously – will you
grant a Toleration for all this?^91In late August the Stationers petitioned parliament to enforce the laws against unli-
censed, blasphemous pamphlets and protect the Stationers’ franchise, and the Com-
mons charged its Committee on Printing to seek out “the Authors, Printers, and
Publishers, of the Pamphlets against the Immortality of the Soul [Overton] and
Concerning Divorce.”^92 On September 13 Cromwell, whose stock as a successful
military leader was rising steadily, drafted a motion in parliament for a limited
toleration of Independency.^93 A few days later the formidable William Prynne de-
nounced Independency and the tolerationist pamphlets of Williams and others, that
have contributed to “the late dangerous increase of many Anabaptistical, Antinomian,
Heresicall, Atheisticall opinions, as of the soules mortalitie, divorce at pleasure, &c. ...
which I hope our Grand Council will speedily and carefully suppress.”^94 In early
November Palmer’s sermon with its attack on Milton was published.
On or before November 14, 1644 an anonymous reply to Milton’s DDD 1
appeared, An Answer to a Book, Intituled, The Doctrine and Discipline of Divorce.^95 A
specific reference to Milton’s residence at Aldersgate, and perhaps to the hastiness
of his marriage,^96 indicates that the author had some knowledge of Milton, but he
either did not know, or chose to ignore, the expanded DDD 2 and the Bucer trea-
tise. This 44-page pamphlet was hardly the serious scholarly answer Milton so often
called for, though its legalistic arguments support the hearsay that the chief author
was a lawyer. With some elitist scorn, Milton reports hearing rumors that the tract
was written by “an actual Serving-man... turn’d Sollicitor” (CPW II, 726–7),
with help from one or two fledgling divines and from the noted Presbyterian divine
Joseph Caryl who licensed the tract and added a gratuitous commendation.^97 The
anonymous answerer disposes briskly of Milton’s enumerated reasons for divorce,
repeating the literal interpretations of the scripture texts that Milton sought to re-
interpret, and appealing often to Canon law and English law. He ridicules Milton’s
comments on wives, wryly observing that most are not, in Milton’s nastiest phrase,
“images of earth and fleame,” but have spirit enough for other men of good quali-
ties, whether or not they can “speak Hebrew, Greek, Latine, & French, and dispute
canon law” as Milton seems to expect.^98 Adopting the tone of a man of the world
answering a woolly-headed fanatic whose descriptions of love and of marriage he
found simply incomprehensible, he declares himself baffled by Milton’s notion of