The Experience of Defeat

Milton and Some Contemporaries

Christopher Hill

• Publisher: Verso
• Year: 2017
• Print ISBN: 9781784786694
• eBook ISBN: 9781784786700
• Topic: History
• Subtopic: British History
• Index: History

The Restoration, which re-established Charles II as king of England in 1660, marked the end of "God's cause"-a struggle for liberty and republican freedom. While most accounts of this period concentrate on the court, Christopher Hill focuses on those who mourned the passing of the most radical era in English history. The radical protestant clergy, as well as republican intellectuals and writers generally, had to explain why providence had forsaken the agents of God's work.

In The Experience of Defeat, Christopher Hill explores the writings and lives of the Levellers, the Ranters and the Diggers, as well as the work of George Fox and other important early Quakers. Some of them were pursued by the new regime, forced into hiding or exile; others compelled to recant. In particular Hill examines John Milton's late work, arguing that it came directly out of a painful reassessment of man and society that impelled him to "justify the ways of God to Man."

Chapter 1

Introduction

In an historian we are not to be critical for every punctilio, not relating to his main design; yet I think ’tis but just to demand that what he doth write be true.

Henry Stubbe, The Lord Bacons Relation of the Sweating-Sickness Examined (1671), p. 2

This book derives from two others which I published in the 1970s. In The World Turned Upside Down (1972) I tried to present the ferment of radical ideas which welled up in England in the revolutionary 1640s and 1650s. I suggested—almost as an afterthought—that Milton in the 1640s shared much of the Wordsworthian excitement of those days when it was bliss to be alive, but to be young was very heaven. This excitement comes across in Areopagitica and The Tenure of Kings and Magistrates. In Milton and the English Revolution (1977) I tried to work out in more detail Milton’s relationship to the radical ideas of the Revolution, and to suggest that for him the defeat of the Revolution which he had believed to be God’s Cause, and to which he had given up the best years of his life, was a shattering blow. The three great poems of his last years represent, among many other things, his attempt to come to terms with this defeat: to rethink his whole position in order to be able to ‘Assert eternal Providence/And justify the ways of God to men.’ Milton started Paradise Lost in about 1658, and finished it in 1665. In these years he was alone only in his genius. Many others were querying either the goodness or the omnipotence of a God who had apparently so badly let down his servants. The present book attempts to survey the reactions of other radicals to the experience of defeat.

The World Turned Upside Down was criticized for overstating the significance of the radical ideas which I portrayed. In the excitement of discovering far more and far more coherent ideas than I had anticipated, I may indeed have exaggerated the numerical significance of the radicals—though there is much investigation to be done before this can be stated with assurance. I do not think I exaggerated the historical significance of the ideas, both in themselves, and in the reaction which they provoked. They were the ideas of a minority, it is true; but then so were the ideas which dominated English society before 1640 and after 1660, under the protection of the censorship. The extraordinary difference between the novel ideas of the 1640s and 1650s and those which could be printed in the pre- and post-revolutionary periods must lead us to ask where the apparently new ideas came from, and where they went to. Had they been there, below the surface, in some form or other, before 1640? If so, that tells us something important about the society, about the role of the church and the censorship. If not, then we have to explain their sudden appearance and rapid diffusion once the censorship and ecclesiastical controls collapsed. I suggested that upper-class concern about the spread of radical ideas (and especially their apparent revival in 1659–60) made a significant contribution to the swing of opinion which brought the enemies of Charles I to support the restoration of his son in 1660. This suggestion has received some support, but again further investigation is needed.¹

Some critics disliked Milton and the English Revolution because in it I seemed to them to degrade Milton by relating him to the political and intellectual problems of the society in which he lived: they prefer to think of the great poet writing in a timeless vacuum. However inadequate the execution may have been, I am unrepentant about my attempt to associate what Milton wrote with the triumphs and defeat of his Cause. Our understanding of history can illuminate the writing of even the greatest of poets, just as no historian can possibly understand any epoch—least of all a revolutionary epoch—without grasping its impact on the great writers who are its most sensitive recorders. Where would our understanding of the Russian Revolution be without Chekhov and Gorky, without Blok’s The Twelve, in which Winstanley’s ‘head Leveller’ Jesus Christ leads the advancing revolutionary soldiers? How should we understand the French Revolution without Rousseau, Choderlos de Laclos, Beaumarchais and Stendhal? The Chinese Revolution of our own century has been illuminated by J. D. Spence’s study of scholars, novelists and poets, with epigraph from Areopagitica.²

Milton, vanguard intellectual as well as sensitive poet, seems to me essential for our understanding of the English Revolution. He was not only an active and deeply committed participant: he narrowly escaped being executed in 1660 for his participation. Properly understood, Paradise Lost, Paradise Regained and Samson Agonistes tell us as much about the Revolution as Parliamentary debates and state papers. Since my argument in Milton and the English Revolution did not meet with universal acceptance, I hope to strengthen it by considering the similar experiences which some of Milton’s contemporaries went through. Milton’s presence I hope will be felt throughout this book even when he is not specifically mentioned.

This book deals with ideas. We know something of the practical consequences of defeat. After 1660 nearly one in five of the beneficed ministers lost their livings, without even the meagre compensation which the ejected of the 1640s and 1650s had received. Lay dissenters had to endure nearly thirty years of sporadic but often very damaging persecution.¹ My concern is not so much with the fate of radicals after the restoration, but to study how some individuals coped with the experience of living through a revolution which they initially welcomed, and with the defeat of that revolution—a defeat which for some of them occurred before 1660. Those whom I have selected for discussion had to be taken from the few who left evidence of their reactions: many radicals lapsed into silence. I have tried to show what my chosen characters thought the Revolution had been about, where it had gone wrong, and how they adapted to its defeat. I hope that the cumulative effect of their testimony will be to reinforce the argument of The World Turned Upside Down, that there was an intellectually significant and numerically not insignificant congeries of radical ideas; and to demonstrate that Milton was one of many revolutionaries wrestling with common problems.

The experience of defeat meant recognizing the collapse of the system of ideas which had previously sustained action, and attempting to discover new explanations, new perspectives. The first defeat of the more extreme radicals came in and after 1649. Leveller leaders were arrested and imprisoned, Leveller-led mutinies in the Army were suppressed, culminating in the total rout of mutinous regiments at Burford in May 1649. After that the Leveller leaders abandoned hope of winning control of the Army and either subsided into the obscurity from which they had briefly emerged, or took to underground conspiracy, sometimes in conjunction with Royalists. The less numerous Diggers were dispersed in April-May 1650; Ranters were made to recant in 1650–1. Both groupings ceased to exist in any organized form.¹

Fifth Monarchists appeared strong in the Army in 1653, when they collaborated in the dismissal of the Rump of the Long Parliament and its replacement by Barebone’s Parliament. But they too had no effective organization, and were divided in their aims. Very few dogs barked at the disappearance of either the Rump or Barebone’s Parliament. Venner’s tiny Fifth Monarchist group staged revolts in London in 1657 and 1661. But apart from their readiness to use violence, their programme differed little from those of other radicals. There had been a strong millenarian element among those who sat in judgement on Charles I in 1649: many regicides executed after the restoration still held tenaciously on to the conviction of divine approval which they believed had justified their action.² But—significantly—many of those executed by the restored government had been imprisoned under the Protectorate. 1660 was only the confirmation of their defeat. In the 1650s William Erbery, William Sedgwick, Isaac Penington and early Quakers lectured the Army on its duties but had no aspirations to win control over it. Adaptation of their ideas to defeat proceeded throughout the decade: 1660 was a final blow. I suspect the same was true of Milton.³

I look at some Independent revolutionaries—Oliver Cromwell and his chaplains, John Owen and Thomas Goodwin, at the republican James Harrington.⁴ I have included a group of moderate Puritan ministers, who also found themselves among the defeated after 1660.⁵ Quakers adopted the peace principle in January 1661 and organized themselves more rigidly as a sect; the Harringtonians adapted their master’s ideas to the constitutional and economic circumstances of the restoration period. Finally I look in more detail at the ideas of other survivors—Samuel Pordage, author of an epic on the Fall of Man well before Milton: he went on to be a Whig exclusionist; Andrew Marvell, who passed from millenarianism to Harringtonianism; Henry Stubbe, who advanced from being a disciple of Henry Vane through Harringtonianism to something like deism.⁶

I hope I have brought together characters interesting in their own right. I have made no great literary discoveries; but Erbery, Sedgwick and Isaac Penington in his early pamphlets are no mean writers of English prose. Samuel Pordage is far from being a distinguished poet. I sympathize with the lines attributed to Rochester:

Poet, who’er thou art, God damn thee,
Go hang thyself, and burn thy Mariamne.

But the analogies between Pordage’s epic and the writings of Milton and Bunyan help to put the latter two into historical context.¹ The total effect should, I hope, be to flesh out our experience of what the restoration meant. For many, perhaps for most, it was a return to normality; for others, not the least sensitive, it was a defeat no less devastating for having been long foreseen.

Other characters tempted me. There are things to say about George Wither and John Bunyan in this context, but I have said most of them already.² I have also written about William Dell and John Webster, radical reformers who might otherwise have found a place in Chapter Four,³ and briefly about the adaptations made by Milton’s nephews, John and Edward Phillips.⁴ Broghill was intriguing as an ex-royalist who became Cromwell’s right-hand man in Scotland. He helped to bring Ireland to accept the restoration, and then was an early writer of heroic drama in rhymed couplets, preceding Dryden. But although Broghill did less well financially under Charles II than under Oliver,⁵ nevertheless such great aristocrats can switch easily from one regime to another without the word ‘defeat’ being applicable. Ashley-Cooper, later Earl of Shaftesbury, is another example; so is the more complex William Howard, later Lord Howard of Escrick, to whom I refer briefly in Chapter Two. Algernon Sidney was an aristocratic republican who (as Milton put it) ‘has ever been loyal to our side’,⁶ and continued the political struggle until his execution in 1683. His Discourses concerning Government (published posthumously in 1698) handed on many of the political ideas of the English revolutionaries to eighteenth-century Whigs, American and French republicans. He was of greater historical significance than some I have included, but evidence concerning his experience of defeat is meagre. Marchamont Nedham, whose writings also became part of the Whig canon, still remains as difficult to assess as Henry Stubbe was before the work of J. R. Jacob.¹ I did not feel capable of tackling that very complicated man.

Robert Everard seemed an intriguing candidate for inclusion. He was a spokesman for the Agitators in the Putney Debates in 1647 who became an Army officer and sectarian preacher and pamphleteer. His critique of the doctrine of original sin was ‘spread far and near, to the deceiving of many poor souls and to the troubling of others’, Nathaniel Stephens lamented in 1658.² After the restoration Everard was the only former revolutionary who publicly converted to Roman Catholicism. But the pamphlet in which he announced this conversion is most disappointing. It purports to record the conversation of a Catholic layman, and one can well believe that Everard himself did not compose it.³ Apart from a few expressions of regret for his own role in the civil war, the pamphlet could have been written at any time, anywhere: it is not directed to the specific problems of post-revolutionary England. The unknown speaker throughout assumes what was necessary to be proved, that no certainty is to be found outside the Roman church.

Sir Henry Vane might have been added to my republicans, but I shrank from the impenetrable thickets of his prose. I might have looked at more Quakers: George Bishop and Anthony Pearson both diverge from the accepted image. John Sadler and Henry Denne would have been interesting: so would the great naturalist John Ray, who resigned his fellowship at Trinity College, Cambridge, in 1662 to live on the charity of others and who survived to welcome ‘the yoke of slavery … broken’ in 1688.⁴ I might have made more of those whom defeat drove into emigration—Joseph Salmon, Edward Byllynge, John Perrot. I could have added Edward Taylor, church- and school-outed by the restored prelates, who had to go to New England to get a university education. There he wrote nature poetry in the metaphysical mode. He too lived to welcome 1688, having retained an ‘aversion to the aristocracy of England, alike in church and state’.¹ He might have been balanced against Thomas Traherne, whom at one time I thought of including. Radical influences on Traherne are important, but the worst defeat he suffered at the restoration was to have to be re-ordained at the age of 24.

I was disappointed not to be able to find any woman who left adequate evidence of her experience of defeat. Women played an important part in the religious sects, so this is a comment on the survival of evidence about women in the seventeenth century. Lucy Hutchinson should have been a candidate, but in her Memoirs of her husband she is far too concerned to cover up the Colonel’s weaknesses to allow her own views to come through. We get the impression that she was the stronger character of the two, but she would have repudiated such an idea.² Margaret Fell was another possibility, but her main contribution was in the sphere of Quaker organization rather than of ideas. Mary Cary and Anna Trapnell both fell silent after defeat. Aphra Behn was not visibly a radical before 1660. Who else?

One problem to be faced in dealing with seventeenth-century England, and particularly with radicals, is the censorship. It was there all the time before 1640, its strictness increasing in the 1630s. In the 1640s it was intermittent and rarely effective: it was gradually restored in the 1650s, though there was still greater freedom for radical voices to be heard than after 1660. I discussed some of the effects of the censorship in Milton and the English Revolution:³ we must never forget its existence, and how exceptional men felt its brief absence to be. ‘I must speak plain to you,’ Gerrard Winstanley told Oliver Cromwell in 1651, ‘lest my spir...

Table of contents

• Cover Page
• Halftitle Page
• Title Page
• Copyright Page
• Dedication
• Contents
• Preface
• Abbreviations
• Chapter 1: Introduction
• Chapter 2: The First Losers, 1649–1651
• Chapter 3: The Second Losers, 1653–1660
• Chapter 4: Seekers
• Chapter 5: Quakers, 1651–1661
• Chapter 6: Independents and Republicans
• Chapter 7: Some Conservative Puritan Ministers
• Chapter 8: Survivors
• Chapter 9: Army, Saints, People
• Chapter 10: Conclusion: Milton and the Experience of Defeat
• Notes
• Index