Chapter 2.
Overview of 17th Century Thought on Liberty and Individualism
How would you feel if someone in your church (like your pastor) had to stand in the pulpit several times a year and read the following notice?
By order of his majesty King ______ (or Queen ______, or President ______) all are reminded that by the will of Almighty God he (or she) serves as your sovereign and that everyone is to give unquestioned obedience to all laws of the land legislated by his (or her) authority. There is to be no such thing as civil disobedience or peaceful resistance to the government of this nation. All acts of disobedience or resistance will be severely punished according to the divine rights of human government. The government will support and defend the church and religion. Religious leaders and people are expected in return to give absolute allegiance to the government and its officers and magistrates.
Monarchs required something very similar to this in England in the 17th century. Pastors were ordered by law to read from their pulpits such a "loyalty oath or requirement" supporting the "Divine Right of Kings" several times a year. They were forbidden to preach sermons lest they inflame the masses to rise in forceful resistance against the sovereign.
The Struggle for Power and Liberty
Democracy was a rare and precious jewel in England at the dawn of the 17th century. Few thinkers and writers had given systematic and comprehensive thought to the subject. Life continued as it had for generations, with most people working hard, suffering physically and personally, and gaining little in return. The commoners were not well fed, nor were they free. England's form of government included a parliament, but it could be called into session and ended by the King. In practice, kings tended to convene parliament only when they needed to raise money for wars or other expensive royal enterprises. Otherwise, the monarch ruled with near absolute power.
The nobility demanded democracy for themselves, without insisting that the common people enjoy the same benefits. Since the time of the Magna Carta they had forced concessions from the King that largely benefitted themselves and only incidentally gave the people certain limited rights. There was no real democracy or popular suffrage as we know it today. Ideas of universal human rights and liberties for all were not developed by the beginning of the 17th century. Nobles, barons, dukes, and aristocrats did little or nothing to promote these rights and freedoms for the public.
There was not even democracy in the church. The local parish church had little or no voice about who would become and remain their pastor or rector. The king appointed the archbishops and approved the appointment and ordination of all bishops, who, in turn appointed, moved, paid, and removed all local clergy in his diocese. No ordinary layman could be appointed to the clergy without meeting the requirements established by the king and the higher officials of the church. No one could act as a clergyman (by performing marriages, funerals, preaching, conducting worship services, or administering the sacraments) unless ordained, licensed, or appointed to do so by the King or the high officials of the church. And these officials made it clear that the church was not to operate as a democracy.
Nor were church leaders much interested in promoting or supporting any nascent ideas of democracy or personal liberty. The church was generally very wealthy, with large land holdings and valuable property. By government and royal decree the church received "tithes," or public tax revenue, to pay the salaries of church dignitaries and to meet current expenses of the church. Ecclesiastical authorities fiercely resisted the idea of the local members of the church giving sufficiently out of their own pockets to support the expenses of the church. As a result, such a well-financed church, with decades of tradition and people who had never known any other way, had enormous power. The established church supported the monarchy, and the king supported the Church and depended on the church dignitaries (called "Prelates") to do his will.
Furthermore, the established church had a long tradition of church authority and intolerance of diversity. The Church claimed the authority to define orthodox doctrine, and the common people had not yet learned how to read and interpret the Bible for themselves. Church and state denied well-educated laymen and non-Anglican theologians the right to read, study, and freely express religious opinions not in harmony with those of the established church. There was no such thing as acceptance of diversity in theological dogmas or ecclesiastical policy. Those who raised a different voice were harshly scorned and suppressed.
So the Church was not the place to look for emerging democracy. Outside the Church there were the beginnings of popular reform movements, but these were met with fierce resistance from the political establishment.
During the 17th century land owners and estate holders insisted on keeping to themselves the power to vote for public officials and thereby to influence government policy. This was generally the position of those in most European countries and in the American colonies until well into the 19th and 20th centuries. Women, slaves, lower class common people, Jews, Catholics, Muslims, atheists, dissenters, and certain others could not vote in elections or hold office in the government. They enjoyed little of what we would consider freedom today.
To be sure, there those who spoke and wrote about rights or liberties of "the people," but those who used the term "the people" had their own definitions in mind. Some (like the Presbyterians) meant the people who formed the professional and economic leaders of the country: lawyers, clergymen, merchants, freeholders, and naval officers. Others (like the Independents) thought of "the people" as the religious liberal minority, including gentlemen, prosperous business men, clergy, military officers, and shopkeepers, who worked to achieve liberty.
Further to the left were the "Levellers" whose support came from tradesmen, shopkeepers, apprentices, skilled workers, and common soldiers. Together they may have comprised about 5% of the population. By "the people" the Levellers probably meant the disenfranchised members of their own middle class. When another group known as "the Diggers"—widely regarded as agitators—spoke of "the people", they meant the lowest 50% of the population: farmers, servants, unskilled workers, common seamen, paupers, and vagrants. These poor people seemed uninterested in politics or were discouraged about the possibility of achieving any real freedom, liberty, or rights.
The Levellers and the Diggers were united in their resentment of the crass assumption on the part of the royalists and upper classes that the masses of ordinary workers were, and would always be, socially and intellectually inferior. One might think that these disenfranchised commoners would be natural pro-democracy supporters, but in fact many thriving farmers and freeholders were quite loyal to the King. Many others in the middle classes were very uncomfortable with the insecurity, instability, inconsistency and divisions of the anti-royalist parties.
The Risks and Excesses of Libertarian Ideas
Despite all these obstacles to change, those on the right (favoring and supporting the status quo) were coming under increased scrutiny, particularly in religious circles. The Reformers of Europe and England had lit a flame that would not easily go out. When believers read the Bible in their own language they saw that not everything they had been taught was true. In light of this, religious conservatives were increasingly viewed with skepticism by Protestants who had come through the Reformation with the conviction that things had to change quickly and drastically in the church and in religious life.
Things were changing in scientific and philosophical thought as well. Galileo and Kepler offered impressive and convincing new views of the nature of the universe. Medieval views would not do now. The Catholic Church resisted these changes and in 1633 forced Galileo, against his better judgment and scientific thought, to recant. This further hardened the distrust that Reformed clergy held for authoritarian religion of all kinds.
Yet those on the left (advocating some degree of liberty and democracy for "the people", whoever they defined "the people" to be) were, in the first few decades of the 17th century, far from stalwart in their support of these principles. In both Church and state, free and individual thinking was at first welcomed. But more often than not, church leaders withdrew from their earlier reformation ideals, and political leaders from their philosophical ideals, when their positions or livelihood were threatened. Some Reformed clergy who had preached the priesthood of the believer backed away from carrying out the doctrine in actual practice; others resisted attempts to make church structure more democratic and congregational.
In addition, there was a widespread perception that lower classes of common and uneducated people had no skills, ability to pay taxes, or valuable service to offer government or society. How could they possibly feel that they were the equals of kings, queens, dukes, earls, nobles, gentlemen, estate owners, and people better educated than they? How could the untrained layman or laywoman, farmer, tinker, mechanic or peasant possibly assume that he or she could read, understand, interpret, and teach or preach the message of the Bible as well as a university trained and officially ordained cleric could? (Wolfe 67-119).
To many on the left, the risk appeared too great that full freedom and liberty for the masses would lead to division, confusion, and rebellion. This led to a repeated pattern, played out throughout the 17th century, of the party or religion in power, whatever it might be, working against toleration of other parties or religions. When the Anglican Church enjoyed its establishment, it was intolerant of other churches, either Protestant or Catholic. Naturally, those other churches, large and small, demanded more toleration for themselves. Then, later, when Presbyterians became dominant in Scotland and England, they were quite intolerant of competition from other faiths.
Other religious groups then severely criticized the Presbyterians for their intolerance. Milton wrote a bitter poem "on the new Forcers of Conscience under the Long Parliament" in which he said that "New Presbyter is but Old Priest writ Large." By this he meant that the new Presbyterian establishment of religion was no better than the old Anglican Prelate establishment against which he had campaigned so passionately.
The Uneven Achievement of Freedom in the 17th Century
Achieving "establishment" status carried great benefit for a denomination. It meant that the government withheld all support for other religious groups, and that the established religion could use the arm of government to persecute minority churches and forbid them to meet and practice their faith. The Anglicans freely took advantage of this when they were in power, and the Presbyterians did the same when they were in power.
Once in power, most religious groups defined "toleration" to extend only to others in their group or party. Some Protestants were ready to grant a measure of toleration to most other Protestants, for example, but they were unwilling to tolerate Roman Catholics, whom they usually called "Papists." (Milton also held to this measure of limited toleration. The reasons he gave for withholding toleration for Catholics were generally political or "state" reasons. He, like many others, feared that Catholics gave their first political allegiance to the Pope in Rome. They therefore posed a constant threat of sedition to the native government.)
Other Protestants were willing to extend toleration to Catholics, provided they first gave allegiance to the King and nominal acquiescence to the established church. These Protestants would then have allowed Catholics and other religious believers to practice their faith, on these terms, without oppression from the government. This position, however, was hard to "sell" to citizens who had learned certain lessons from experience and history. They had observed that once a religion grew powerful enough to preach freely, it could use that freedom to denounce the King or government.
In 17th century England, a license was written authority granting a right to do something. These rights could only be conferred by the government, and could also be withdrawn by the same government. By Milton's day, licenses were required for almost every commercial and social activity, from printing to preaching, and were widely despised as a symbol of arbitrary government control. Most Protestants felt that these activities needed no license because they were "inalienable" rights (as a later generation was to say).
Yet the Presbyterians especially opposed toleration of unlicensed lay preachers, particularly those in the Commonwealth Army who were so outspoken. In 1645 the Presbyterian-dominated parliament went so far as to pass a law allowing only officially ordained (and licensed) ministers to preach and conduct religious services, citing the by now age-old argument that allowing anyone to preach might lead some listeners to revolutionary ideas and religious heresy.
Magistrates, even Cromwell himself, widely ignored this law. Yet Presbyterian objections to toleration continued. Some pointed out that if the government allowed full liberty of conscience, it could logically then ban no false religion, including Roman Catholicism, Judaism, and the small extremist sects. Toleration was to be feared as a very radical and dangerous principle. The arguments that the Presbyterians had previously used against the Anglican Prelates for religious freedom and toleration were effectively now used against themselves.
When the minority religions petitioned for greater freedom (ironically, using some of the same arguments that the Presbyterians had used against the Anglican Prelates many years before), Presbyterians replied not by answering point by point, with reason and logic, but by heated rhetoric that merely listed a string of bitter accusations in emotionally charged language. The dominant state religion commonly argued that full toleration and complete religious liberty would result in the fall of the established state church and perhaps of religion itself. Possibly even the nation's government would collapse into total anarchy and economic ruin.
The Independents and colonial Puritans were often reminded that they did not always practice toleration either. It is true that, to their shame, they had driven Mrs. Hutchinson, Roger Williams, and others in the small religious groups in New England out of the colony. Many Congregationalists, Puritans, and Pilgrims of New England were spiritual brothers and sisters of the Independents in England. Nevertheless, they had not welcomed one Presbyterian or Baptist church into their community or fellowship as a sister church or alternate way of life. Critics in England would never let them forget this.
When Milton was younger he praised the Presbyterian church government as closer to the "one right discipline" revealed in Scripture. He had written and spoken clearly for religious liberty and toleration of the smaller groups and sects. When later the Presbyterians and some Independents turned away from the principle of freedom of religion and conscience, he was very disappointed and hurt. Milton strongly condemned the Presbyterian authorities when they followed the bad example of the Anglican Prelates. He was equally disappointed when his beloved Cromwell and the Rump Parliament wavered in their positions on separation of state and church.
The Place of John Milton Among His Contemporaries
As we know, Milton lived in a time when strong forces fiercely contended for English minds and hearts. We ask "Where does John Milton stand in comparison with his contemporaries?" Some literary critics and historians have almost given up on trying to classify or categorize Milton. He is so complex and different from any particular party that it is almost impossible to place him in any category except "John Milton." In many ways Milton was a Puritan, a humanist, a rebel, a scholar, and a genius.
Regarding the voting franchise, he had some very undemocratic ideas. In many of his early writings he showed sympathy and support for the individual. Throughout the middle of his career he revealed how he lacked confidence in the voices of the masses. These people he viewed as not sufficiently literate, cultured, refined, or capable of analytical thought and accurate judgment. In his opinion most of them were not able to discriminate between truth and error or between short-term good and long-term damage. In this respect, Milton did not differ from most of the other intellectuals of his time.
Milton expressed his thought on an ideal commonwealth in which he wished that the masses would be educated and qualified to vote and participate intelligently in the political process. At other times he recognized practical realities and yielded to more pragmatic positions on the nature of the state and the church and their relationship with each other. He often spoke of the "wheat and tares" growing together in the kingdom of God and in the church. Therefore, the church on earth could never be the ideal of perfect church. Also, as he matured and witnessed history happening around him, he came to recognize that there was no such thing as a utopia or ideal form of government.
Moving from Right to Left
Milton during his lifetime moved from the Right toward the Left respecting religious and civil freedom. However, he never was as far to the extreme left as John Lilburne (leader of the Levellers), William Walwyn, Robert Browne, Gerrard Winstanley (leader of the Diggers), John Goodwin, and Richard Overton. Milton never could bring himself to hold that certain human rights and freedoms were so inalienable that no government could ever take them away. This fundamental principle was not widely recognized until it was incorporated in the American Constitution in the last quarter of the 18th century, over a hundred years in the future as Milton wrote. Milton does not clearly advocate it in his time, although he does support principles of human freedom as derived from Natural Law.
Milton's position in the debates of 1647 between the conservative Independents on one side, and the army agitators and more revolutionary leaders of the Levellers on the other side, shows us where he stands. The soldiers in the revolutionary army presented a long list of grievances and demands that Wolfe wisely said were "more likely to be achieved in three centuries than in a single Parliament" (153). One of their demands urged the elimination of the veto power by the king or the House of Lords. Others called for the elimination of compulsive religious ordinances and for the abolition of tithes by taxation.
Their sweeping reforms would never be acceptable to the lawyers, clergy, business men or other influential citizens of the land. The army and the radicals considered the Parliament as tyrannous as the monarchy or the House of Lords. Some radical flames had been fanned by Milton's previous publications including Areopagitica three years earlier. His Doctrine and Discipline of Divorce the year before that, and The Reason of Church Government Urged Against Prelaty the previous year, added fuel to the fires.
Cromwell and his advisors were strongly influenced by fearsome predictions of impending anarchy and chaos if too much liberty were granted to the people. Through all the debates Milton was usually on the side crying out for more religious, political, and personal liberty. In the great gulf between radical Levellers and conservative Independents, Milton stood with the moderate Independents while insisting on his own variety of independency.
He sympathized with the wealthy soldiers who had lost their estates or property in the Parliamentary Cause. Likewise, he had compassion for those who never had property but risked their lives for the Cause, and were going home after the war without even being able to vote to elect their representatives in the Local Assemblies or National Parliament. In other ways he appeared contemptuous of the ill-bred manners and some thoughtless demands of the Commonwealth Army and their so-called "Agitators" (their term).
He continued to urge property ownership as a qualification for the voting franchise and for admission to the citizenship worthy of all basic liberties. The single exception was that no one should be coerced in matters of conscience. Milton was unwilling to go along with the extreme radicals who demanded a sudden and deep break with the past (Wolfe 165-67).
Milton as a Democratic Reformer
In spite of some conservative hesitations Milton is now considered a true democratic reformer in his age. Basic to his nature was his Christian individualism that he learned primarily from his own reading and study of the Scriptures. Milton first moved from a strong dependence on Scripture and faith to a warm embracing of the Presbyterian form of church government. His next intellectual move was to a rejection of all outward religious authority and to his own interpretation of Scripture as informed by reason and the inner illumination of the Holy Spirit.
Similarly, Wolf points out that "Milton, like his contemporaries, had soon learned to accept no authority in politics except that which to him seemed just and right" (326). Milton's own words in the Second Defense of the People of Enqland (1654) clarify his way of thinking during this crucial time:
I saw that a way was opening for the establishment of real liberty; that the foundation was laying for the deliverance of man from the yoke of slavery and superstition; that the principles of religion … would exert a salutary influence on the manners and constitution of the republic; and as I had from my youth studied the distinctions between religious and civil rights I perceived that if I … wished to be of use, I ought at least not to be wanting to my country, to my church, and to so many of my fellow-Christians, in a crisis of so much danger; I therefore determined to relinquish the other pursuits in which I was engaged, and transfer the whole force of my talents and my industry to this one important object. (Hughes ed., Milton's Complete Poems and Major Prose 830).
Milton no doubt wished that he could have been more effective in getting more of a separation between church and state. In various ways Milton tried to use his influence on Cromwell to abandon the notion of a state church. Milton wrote an excellent sonnet "To the Lord General Cromwell May 1652, on the Proposalls of Certaine Ministers at the Committee for Propagation of the Gospell". In it Milton warns that "new foes arise, threatening to bind our souls with secular chains." He concludes with the lines
Help us to save free Conscience from the paw Of hireling wolves whose Gospell is their maw.
Even when Cromwell assumed the Protectorate (December 1653), pledging the continuance of the state church, Milton advised him not to continue the state church but to abolish it. Nevertheless Milton continued to support Cromwell as England's best hope of some measure of liberty at least for Protestant dissenters. In spite of all that Milton and others of like mind could do, Cromwell failed to insist on complete separation of church and state.
British public opinion even now does not support the idea of complete separation of church and state as expressed in the First Amendment to the Constitution of the United States: "Congress shall make no law respecting the establishment of religion." The English have thought otherwise, and still do today. They are willing to accept a measure of union between church and state, and see nothing wrong with it. A notable statement of the Revolutionary Army's position on this matter included the following:
The Body of the Army never declared themselves either against the Magistrates' power in matters of religion, or that the Magistrate might not hold forth a public Profession of Doctrine and Discipline … but moved only for the taking away of all Coercive power … and for the repealing of all Acts imposing penalties for not coming to Church.
Since Milton did deny the Magistrate's power in matters of religion, he would have gone further than the radical army was willing to go at this point. What the army wanted, and what Cromwell too wanted, was the widest possible toleration, but what Milton wanted was the complete disestablishment of the state church so there would be no need for "toleration" in any form. He felt convinced that an established church, supported by public tax funds, and enjoying a privileged position, would eventually persecute its competitors. Then there would be no freedom, not even toleration, for minority groups. History has shown that in this Milton was right, and the American First Amendment was and is the best policy for the country and for the church.
Milton often sat at the meetings of the Council of State. While there he must have disagreed with and spoken out against the "Instrument of Government," which functioned for a time as England's first written constitution. In this document there was no provision for separation of church and state, although there very well might have been if Cromwell himself had strongly supported it. This "Instrument of Government" provided specifically for a state church and for the continuance of tax-supported tithes.
In February 1659, less than two months before Richard Cromwell's Parliament met, Milton published a pamphlet that revealed again his position against a state church and for separating the functions of church and government. The full title of this pamphlet is A Treatise of Civil Power in Ecclesiastical Causes Showing that it is not lawful for any power of Earth to compel in Matters of Religion (Hughes ed., Milton's Complete Poems and Major Prose 839-55). This is a late work of Milton's, and almost his final word on the subject of religious freedom. His single later work is his Ready and Easy Way to Establish a free Commonwealth, which was written a year later under pressure as an expedient alternative to the looming restoration of the monarchy. He bases his argument on many scripture passages that he quotes in full.
The Treatise of Civil Power argues that since only the individual conscience can be the final interpreter of Scripture, no particular church can be the final arbiter of religious belief, "much less the Magistrate." Another reason he gives why it is unlawful for the civil magistrate to use force in matters of religion is that Christ has a different kind of government "sufficient to itself" for governing his church. The principle of Christ's church government is that "it deals only with the inward man and his actions, which are all spiritual and to outward force not liable." Since religion is an affair of the inner man, no outward force can change man's spiritual nature against his will.
Therefore, religion must be voluntary, or it is no religion at all. Thus, there can be no democratic reform without voluntary spiritual reform and commitment. The settlement of religious issues belongs not to the magistrate but to "each particular church by persuasive and spiritual means within itself." This requires a complete separation of church and state, or at least a prohibition against a state church.
So throughout his service with the Cromwell Protectorate and government Milton remained both supporter and critic of this government and cause. In the face of Cromwell's vacillating policy Milton constantly demanded that the government deny civil support in funds and in power to religious ministers and officials. He believed, too, that personal and private freedom required some legal provision for divorce, despite ecclesiastical law. He continued to speak out and publish his thoughts on freedom, especially against those who would impose on others "the tyranny of their own misshapen customs and opinions." His greatest fear was that the Protector whom he loved and admired would mistakenly introduce laws that "would inevitably lead to the undue restraint of liberty" (Barker 182).
Milton's final position on liberty was perhaps expressed most eloquently in the beautiful passage at the end of Paradise Lost. Here Adam and Eve walk "hand in hand" from the Garden to look for a "paradise within," which the narrating persona suggests will be "happier far" than any outward social and political commonwealth. Such internal happiness is perhaps the greatest hope and alternative to any earthly paradise built on even the best thought regarding civil freedom or social liberty.