Milton and the Rhetoric of Zeal

Two. Of Reformation: The Politics of Vision

The Politics of Vision 49 49 TWO Of Reformation The Politics of Vision In the carefully nurtured Puritan view of providential history, the year 1640–1641 joined 1588 and 1605 as another annus mirabilis.1 Like the defeat of the Spanish Armada and the discovery of the Gunpowder Plot, the falls of Lord Protector Strafford and Archbishop William Laud were seen as direct interventions by a God who really did take sides. The old calendar made it possible to include the “miraculous” deliverance of the Five Members of Parliament2 whom Charles had personally come to take into custody on 4 January 1642. Added to that was the triumphant return of the three Puritan martyrs, Bastwick, Burton, and Prynne, in November and December of 1640. However bizarrely constructed as history, this “evidence” of divine intervention was useful to those calling for swift and decisive action. Procrastination in God’s own cause was sin for those who would “[be] clad with zeal as a cloak” (Isaiah 59.17). Surely this political ferment contributed to the validation of the rhetoric of zeal; and surely it had a powerful and urgent appeal for Milton, drawing him away from 50 Milton and the Rhetoric of Zeal his sober, ambitious career itinerary, including the Grand Tour and the intentional sequestration at Horton and Hammersmith . Between late May (or early June) of 1641 and April of 1642 he produced five pamphlets on topics he would earlier have considered, if not beneath him, at least out of the immediate range of his interests and plans. He must have devoted virtually full attention to the case against prelacy for an entire year, a year that had an immense influence on his life and on the great poetic future for which he was preparing. Yet the ambiguities abound. How urgently did he feel the call to participate in the pamphlet wars? How long did he deliberate over the delaying of his literary plans? The internal struggle must have been intense; yet the report of that struggle in the Second Defense seems disingenuous. The anonymous publication of the first three tracts is puzzling, and the purported curtailment of the longed-for Grand Tour in favor of impulsive patriotism seems improbable: “Although I desired also to cross to Sicily and Greece, the sad tidings of civil war from England summoned me back. For I thought it base that I should travel abroad at my ease for the cultivation of my mind, while my fellow-citizens at home were fighting for liberty” (CPW, 4, pt. 1:618–19). By his own account the return took six months, a leisurely pace even in those days. Presumably he took some time to consider the personal costs before plunging into a controversial milieu whose call was urgent but obviously disruptive of his literary plans.3 Milton’s first polemical prose was the “Postscript” to the widely circulated Smectymnuan pamphlet, An Answer to a Booke entituled, An Humble Remonstrance.4 This vehement scholarly addendum to the arguments of the five Puritan clergymen against Bishop Joseph Hall has been attributed to Milton since at least Masson’s time; Don M. Wolfe summarizes the evidence for authorship as “formidable” and “compelling” (CPW, 1:961–65, 977–79).5 Milton’s own later statements about participating in the struggle against the prelates suggest specific contribution to a powerful polemical work. His relationship with Thomas Young, his leanings at that time The Politics of Vision 51 toward the Presbyterian party, the very tone and attitude of the argument suggest that the addendum to the Smectymnuan Answer is the “participation” to which those later comments refer. This “Postscript” is well worth a brief look as an apprentice work of suggestive vigor. The piece exudes a kind of leashed power, an implication, almost a threat, of resources and talents held back: “Though we might have added . . .”; “yet unwilling to break the thread of our discourse . . .”; “wee have chosen rather . . .”; “we wil bound ourselves . . . .” These locutions suggest a decision, made from strength, to limit the attack strictly to rebuttal of the historical claims made for prelacy by Bishop Hall, claims to which Milton refers with some condescension, as “severall occasions given us in the Remonstrance” (CPW, 1:966). But there is also a familiar vehemence in the tone, the pounding lists to which the reader becomes accustomed in the tracts: “those bitter fruits, Pride, Rebellion, Treason,Unthankefulnes, &c which have issued from Episcopacy...