Milton and the Jacobean Church of England

1. If you put a straight stick into water at an angle, it appears to be bent where it meets the surface. Perhaps there is a similar explanation for some apparent inconsistencies between the early and the later Milton. For example, why is it that the author of elegiac verses praising the Bishops of Winchester and Ely in 1626 could fifteen years later write three tracts roundly denouncing episcopacy? Something had changed, and I would suggest it was not just that the eighteen-year-old had matured; the church of his youth had been remarkably altered by 1641. (I am here partially differing with Nathaniel Henry, who minimizes these elegies as having little "ecclesiastical [or] religious significance."[1]) But while all readers of Lycidas may know that Milton considered "our corrupted clergy" to be "in their height" in 1637, during the peak of Archbishop William Laud's ascendancy, they cannot be counted upon to be well informed about the Jacobean church in which Milton grew up to the age of seventeen.

2. For some time now historians have been discovering more precisely the nature of the Church of England in the time of James I, and revising some old views, but Milton scholarship seems not to have taken much notice. Just what difference did it make to the poet that he was raised in a church significantly distinct from the one Laud and Charles I tried to foster? This paper will delineate recent findings about the nature of the Jacobean church, including features which were not instantly transformed in 1625, and try to assess some of Milton's debts to that body.

3. When I was an undergraduate and later (in the 1960s) a graduate student, ideas such as the following were current: Anglicans and puritans were thought of as two perfectly distinct, recognizable and coherent groups on the Jacobean religious scene, with no noticeable middle ground. Since puritans were by nature extreme, there could be no such thing as a moderate one. Most puritans were separatists, or at any rate opponents of the national English church. Elizabethan and Jacobean puritanism was believed to have led steadily and inevitably to the revolution of the 1640s. Attackers of ritual and episcopacy, the puritans were also (except for Milton and a few others) ignorant, wrong-minded people who hated plays, and whose only effects on English culture were harmful.

4. Under James, and especially under Archbishop George Abbot (so the story goes), the church suffered because of laxness toward the puritans. Nevertheless, James hated the puritans and had nothing in common with them. Ritual was more important than doctrine for Anglicans of this time. The Church of England was halfway between Geneva and Rome in its doctrine, and thus an Anglican like John Donne can also usefully be called a High Anglican or Anglo-Catholic. The puritans, but not the Anglicans, were Calvinist. Doctrine and preaching were the especial concerns of the puritans, but not of the Anglicans. The Anglicans in the Jacobean church were strongly influenced by Hooker, and the Laudians or Arminians were the most prominent group in the Jacobean church leadership.

5. Ideas such as these, many of them originating from partisans of the seventeenth century like Peter Heylyn and from the nineteenth-century Oxford movement, have all been shown by recent historical writers to be either false or seriously questionable for the Jacobean Church of England, 1603-25.[2] Milton scholars of the last few decades generally do not assert them, and some acknowledge the thoroughly Protestant nature of the Jacobean church, but most simply ignore that church in writing about Milton. I have not been able to locate one book or article on Milton that refers to any of the writings of the historians Peter Lake or Kenneth Fincham, mentioned in my next paragraph.[3] Stephen Honeygosky, in Milton's House of God: The Invisible and Visible Church, breaks important new ground in asserting that Milton continues to believe in a visible church, but shows no awareness that Milton's high esteem for Calvin as one of the "most learned theologians" and "great leaders of the church" was probably shared by most leaders of the Jacobean church, or that Calvin should not simply be linked with the "English puritan tradition" (36).

6. After decades during which historians have written many books about seventeenth-century puritans while generally neglecting the conformists (a term preferable to "Anglicans," which was not used till about 1635), writers such as Peter Lake and Kenneth Fincham have finally been paying detailed attention to the latter. In so doing they are clarifying the nature of the Jacobean Church.[4] According to the historical picture now emerging, scriptural doctrine (as in the moderate Calvinism of the Thirty-Nine Articles) continued to be the central, unifying force for the leadership of the church, as it had been in Elizabethan times.[5] Peter Lake has described the dominant Calvinist piety of the Elizabethan English church as "word-centred" (focused on the Scripture and preaching)--a term that is just as apt for the Jacobean church as a whole. Although Richard Hooker had sought to replace the existing piety with a sacrament-centred one (Lake, Moderate Puritans 173), few Jacobean church leaders followed that initiative. Fincham (Prelate as Pastor 293) reports that only about eight of James' sixty-six bishops could be counted as Arminian. (Like Tyacke and others, Fincham uses the term "Arminian" as a synonym for Laudian, in the sense of Anti-Calvinist. I take Milton's theological Arminianism to be a later development in his life, unrelated to the incipient Laudianism of the Jacobean period.) People like Neile and Andrewes were in a tiny minority that rose to power only after 1625, with the backing of Charles I. There is good evidence to show that John Donne, Dean of St. Paul's while Milton was at St. Paul's School, was not essentially a Laudian, but identified strongly with the rather Calvinist Jacobean Church.[6] (Similarly, Christopher Hodgkins demonstrates that George Herbert was a "Calvinist . . . lower-church Episcopalian" who "kept to the 'middle way' of his boyhood church.")[7]

7. James I took a keen interest in church politics, and helped shape the distinctive quality of the Church of England in his time. The report that at the Hampton Court Conference he threatened to "harry" the non-conforming puritans out of the land does not accurately reflect the extent to which James effectively made peace with moderate and conforming puritans. At Hampton Court he not only acceded to their request for a new translation of the Bible (a project in which puritans participated), but agreed with the puritans on a number of other matters, including the need to strengthen the church's preaching ministry (Fincham, Early Stuart Church 26). According to Fincham and Lake, James set out to separate the moderates from the extremists in the church, and to welcome the former, even if they were still apprehensive about ritual or church government, provided they could see these matters as "things indifferent" (172). As a result James eventually "presided over a settled church from which the political radicalism of puritanism had been removed" (181-82). Only two ministers are known to have been deprived for nonconformity from 1611 to 1625 (179), and from 1611 to 1619 no publications against the liturgy or episcopacy issued from the English press.

8. In these circumstances moderate and conforming puritans could flourish and get on with what Peter Lake describes as their "real agenda"--not presbyterianism or liturgical reform, but the advancement of the spiritual life (Moderate Puritans 284-85). The term "conforming puritan" might usefully describe even some bishops and archbishops;[8] others, like Samuel Ward, John Preston (who was offered a bishopric but refused it), and Richard Sibbes became influential at the universities, as lecturers and/or heads of colleges. Together with moderate conformists, they were at the centre of the English Protestant via media before Laud, which was located between the extremes of Rome and Amsterdam (not Geneva).[9] It is no wonder that a young Milton could fully identify with his church, and intend to enter its ministry.

9. We should notice that in Milton's youth there was no great divide between moderate conformists like John Donne and moderate or even fully conforming puritans. This is why Donne could well satisfy the benchers at Lincoln's Inn, where his predecessor and successor as reader in divinity were the moderate puritans Thomas Gataker and John Preston. Donne's own father-in-law Sir George More, with whom he came to be on very good terms, was a puritan active in Parliament, and Donne voiced sentiments like More's when, within a year of James' Declaration of Sports, he critiqued the Declaration ironically in a sermon.[10] In 1623 the puritan Thomas Adams dedicated one of his works, a Paul's Cross sermon called The Barren Tree, "To the Reuerend and learned Doctor Donne, Dean of St. Pauls, together with the Prebend Residentiaries of the same Church, my very good Patrons . . . in humble acknowledgement of your fauours" (A3r-v). A close friend of Donne's, Dr. Thomas Mountford, of the chapters at Westminster Abbey and St. Paul's Cathedral, repeatedly chose puritan lecturers for the parish church of which he was rector, St. Martin-in-the-Fields, beginning with Robert Hill. Thomas Gataker, a long time friend of Richard Stock, also preached occasionally at St. Martin's,[11] the London parish church of Magdalen Herbert and her family; later Milton's sister Anne Phillips attended here and maybe Milton himself, as his father had property in the parish.[12]

10. Richard Stock, Milton's pastor as the rector of All Hallows, Bread Street, was not so much on the fringe as near the heart of his church. Stock may never have been called by what was then still a mocking epithet, "puritan," though he fits some modern definitions. At St. John's College, Cambridge, he had been a favourite pupil of William Whitaker, one of whose Latin works he later translated. Although Harris Fletcher calls Whitaker "mildly antiprelatical," George Herbert hailed him as a "loyal warrior" for the Church, and Peter Lake takes him as an example of puritanism dissociated from presbyterianism or nonconformity--a puritanism marked instead by "insistence on the transformative effect of the word on the attitudes and behaviour of all true believers."[13]

11. Stock accepted godly episcopacy: his Paul's Cross sermon of November 1606 was printed in 1609 with a dedication to "the Right Reverend Father in God, Iames, by Gods prouidence, Lord Bishop of Bathe, and Welles" (sig. *3r)--James Montague, one of the many Calvinist bishops - citing favour Stock had received from him both at Cambridge university and in the church. In Stock's view Montague was "made ouerseer . . . for the furtherance of Gods glorie, the aduancement of Christs holie Gospell, [and] the comfort of his glorious spouse the Church" (*6v). But the text of his sermon, Isaiah 9:14-16, warning of the judgment of God on religious leaders that cause the people to err, can be seen as anticipating puritan (and more specifically Milton's) reaction in response to Laudian prelacy in later years.

12. Thomas Young, Milton's tutor for a few years before 1620, was unlike Stock a presbyterian, having protested in 1606 against the introduction of episcopacy in his native Scotland. However, holding first a benefice at Ware and later (1628) a post as vicar in Stowmarket, he was not a separatist like the Pilgrim Fathers, so that his leaving England in 1620 should not be associated with theirs, but was simply a search for more permanent and remunerative employment with the English church in Hamburg.[14] Young's continuance at Stowmarket until 1637 suggests that he was up to that time a conforming pastor, whose reactions against Laudian measures in the 1630s may have helped trigger the passage of protest in Lycidas.

13. Perhaps because modern readers are conscious of the English church's opposition to Roman Catholicism (reflected, interestingly, even in the sermons of John Donne,[15] but softened somewhat by the Laudians), we have trouble seeing or appreciating the relative breadth of the Jacobean church. Once there was agreement on essential doctrine, matters of ritual and polity were regarded as "things indifferent" on which the church could rule, but which it did not regard as essential to salvation. (Actually, James held that even some doctrines were "indifferent." He himself had Calvinist views on predestination, but unlike many of his leading bishops did not think it essential that everyone should.) It was on such a basis that James extended some tolerance to puritans, and even to those of papist inclination willing to acknowledge his and the church's authority (Fincham and Lake 182-86). Milton, who praised James in his early poems ("James I," A Milton Encyclopedia), later faulted the king for vacillating in his attitude toward Roman Catholics (Complete Prose Works 3.479-80).

14. Beginning in 1625 and even earlier, the Laudians sought to change the situation. They were unhappy with the tolerated variety in worship, which they considered disorder, and with the emphasis on preaching that most Jacobeans, including Donne, relished. The Laudians longed for a unity based not on the word, not on doctrine, but on uniformity of ritual. Also, they were notably more sacerdotal than most Jacobean church leaders. Kenneth Fincham (Prelate as Pastor 248-93) classes the largest category of James' bishops as "preaching pastors," while the Arminians tended to be "custodians of order."

15. The 1630s brought the greatest Laudian changes. In 1633 Laud became Archbishop of Canterbury, and his bishops, with the approval and encouragement of the king, tried to force their own style of piety on a largely reluctant church.[16] The treatment of George Herbert's book manuscripts in the 1630s gives an idea of the Laudian narrowness. It was only at Nicholas Ferrar's insistence that The Temple was allowed to be printed complete with the lines suggesting that Religion would next flee to America, and in the late 1630s the Laudian censors refused to approve the publication of Herbert's The Country Parson, while puritans were trying to get it published without alterations (Doerksen, "'Too Good.'") The English middle way was being narrowed and shifted over to the side on which the Laudians had once formed a small minority group. While in the Jacobean years and even later a civil war and executions of archbishop and king were unthinkable, let alone inevitable, it seems clear that the narrowness and insensitivity of some of the Laudian church authorities contributed significantly to making these things possible. John Milton was well aware of what was going on in his national church. In the Jacobean era it was perfectly understandable that he should have been "destin'd of a child" to the service of the English church "by the intentions of my parents and friends [including, perhaps, Richard Stock] . . . , and in mine own resolutions"; and of course the years of study in Cambridge were fully compatible with such a goal, but in the 1630s "perceaving what tyranny had invaded the Church [my emphasis]," as he later says, Milton felt himself to be "Church-outed by the Prelats" (Complete Prose Works 1.822-23).

16. One should note that in the Jacobean years church government had ceased to be an issue, because most puritans felt that they could work in a system in which the bishops were their allies. Besides Stock there were examples like Richard Bernard, deprived for nonconformity in 1605, but reinstated a few years later, in spite of continued occasional nonconformity. Bishop Montague, whom Stock had praised, deliberately invited Bernard into his diocese, where the latter became an eminent preacher and prolific writer of sermons (Fincham, Prelate as Pastor 193). Bernard's The Faithfull Shepherd, republished in a "very much inlarged" edition in 1621, was intended to help "further young Diuines in the studie of Diuinitie" (title page), but was dedicated to "the Most Reverend Father in God, Tobie [Matthew], by the diuine prouidence, Lord Archbishop of Yorke," and in the dedication the archbishop was himself referred to as "a most faithfull Shepherd, A Patron to all faithfull Pastors" (A3r). Daniel Featley, a conformist chaplain to Archbishop Abbot, borrowed Bernard's title for a sermon at the consecration of the Bishops of Oxford, Bristol, and Chester in 1619, in which he cautioned them in language that recalls the strictures against "our corrupted Clergy" in Lycidas: "Feede not your selves but the flocke." "Lord-like pride complyeth not with the humility of Christs Ministers." He also asked how a spiritual shepherd could "cure dimme and darke eyes, when himselfe was starke blinde" (Clavis Mystica 133, 137, 134-35). In 1617 Bernard challenged another bishop, Arthur Lake, to be vigilant: to "imitate the Good Shepherd and preach the gospel to his clergy, strengthening the diligent . . . and arousing the lethargic. The idle and profligate will be reformed with gentle discipline. The bishop will lead his flock through example, and protect orthodox doctrine from the barbs of Papists and Brownists alike."[17]

17. In Of Reformation, Milton's idea of a good "primitive" bishop includes humility, "incessant prayer, and preaching, continual watchings, and labours in his Ministery" (CPW 1.549) -- qualities of a kind that Fincham attributes to a number of leading Jacobean bishops (Prelate as Pastor, 250-76). But the Laudians, with their stress on sacerdotalism, alienated numbers of church people, and increasingly merited the distancing term "prelate," which smacks of wealth and power, rather than the shepherding more typical of their Jacobean predecessors. Thus Milton associates the Laudian bishop George Mountain with "the many- benefice-gaping mouth" and the "canary-sucking, and swan-eating palat" of a prelate (CPW 1.549). Similarly in Lycidas there is a complaint about hirelings "that for their bellies' sake / Creep and intrude and climb into the fold." They are called "Blind mouths" [my emphasis] because they lack the vision which I suggest Milton had earlier caught from Stock and others, of the "faithful herdman's art," of what Fincham called the "preaching pastor."[18] If Milton now viewed the Church of England differently, it was not he who had changed so much as his church.

18. What does Milton owe to the pre-Laudian Church of England? I want to propose seriously that Milton, like Donne, gains from the Jacobean church an impulse toward toleration in "things indifferent." In recognizing Donne as an important voice for religious toleration in England, W. K. Jordan wrote that "his thought is to be linked with that of the moderates who subscribed to no party rather than with the main stream of Anglican theory" (43)--Jordan, following the older views of the seventeenth-century church, could nevertheless see that Donne and the "moderates" were significantly different from Hooker and Laud. Two of Donne's contemporaries Jordan cites as making significant contributions to the development of religious toleration are Richard Bernard (37-38) and Richard Sibbes (358-61), both moderate Calvinist puritans. Influenced by the old dichotomy of puritans versus "Anglicans," Jordan seems unaware of the extent to which Donne, Bernard, and Sibbes share Calvinist theology. Of the latter he says:
    
    Sibbes was thoroughly Calvinistic in his doctrinal views, but he strove throughout his life to preserve the unity of the Church and to formulate a moderate religious conception which would ensure tolerance and charity for all Christian men. (359)
    
    I would suggest that Donne, Bernard, and Sibbes received an impetus toward such attitudes from their church, the Jacobean Church of England.[19] John Milton too grew up (to the age of seventeen) in that church, and it is there that he most likely received his first impressions of liberty and religious toleration.

19. Although the Jacobean church was not centred on the liturgy, it used the Book of Common Prayer regularly if not rigorously. Judith Maltby interestingly argues that a significant number of "Prayer Book protestants" during the 1630s "rather than forming a natural constituency for Laudianism, . . . helped to provide opposition to Laudian reforms" (Fincham, Early Stuart Church, 117). The youthful Milton, who might have bristled at a rigidly enforced church pattern, could absorb the Prayer Book's rhythms, its heavily scriptural phrasing. It thus makes good sense for Thomas Stroup to study Religious Rite and Ceremony in Milton's Poetry (1968). Alexander Chambers demonstrates that "On the Morning of Christ's Nativity" "both crowns and recapitulates the [liturgical] tradition of which it is a part" (143), and argues that the morning prayer of Adam and Eve in Paradise Lost, Book V, reflects Milton's response to a canticle for Morning Prayer, more than to directly biblical patterns (75). Similarly, the setting of St. Paul's Cathedral no doubt inspired some of the closing lines in "Il Penseroso," which reflect a love for "the high embowèd roof, / With antique pillars massy proof, / And storied windows richly dight," along with "service high and anthems clear." If it had not been for the Laudian changes, perhaps Milton might have become known as the poet of the English church.

20. What has not been sufficiently noted (or at least stated) is that Milton, with Donne, Herbert, and others, owes a tremendous debt to a church which (though it did not neglect the biblical sacraments) was dominated by the Word.[20] This was true of the English church as a whole (before the Laudian changes), not just the puritans within it. Georgia Christopher appropriately draws attention to the links between Milton and the writings of Luther and Calvin in terms of their common "word-based piety," since Milton "shared their attitude toward sacred texts and their belief in a 'verbal" sacrament."[21] But she does not recognize how pervasive such a piety was in the Church of England. The Thirty- Nine Articles make the church's strongly biblical position clear, as Milton acknowledged in his 1673 tract Of True Religion:
    
    With good and Religious Reason therefore all Protestant Churches with one consent, and particularly the Church of England in Her thirty nine Articles, Artic. 6th, 19th, 20th, 21st, and elsewhere, maintain . . . as [a] main Principle . . . of true Religion . . . that the Rule of true Religion is the Word of God only . . . . (CPW 8.419-20)[22]
    
    The English church position on this matter was not mere theory. Article XIX, defining the church, insists on the "pure Word of God preached" (my emphasis), and in the church of James and in the experience of Donne and Milton biblical sermons were of the essence. To judge by printings, Bibles must also have been ubiquitous.

21. More than that, along with Protestants generally, the English read the Bible as literary. Calvin, trained as a humanist, published an edition of Seneca before embarking on a life in which he commented on almost all parts of the Bible, with many literary perceptions, as in his Sermons on Job, which went through four editions in English translation alone. From Wyatt and Sidney on, most English poets in Reformation times tried their hand at vernacular verse translations of the Psalms. Donne praised such efforts by Philip and Mary Sidney in verse of his own, as well as giving his version of "The Lamentations of Jeremy"; and Milton's renderings of some Psalms are well known. In the preface to the second book of The Reason of Church Government, where he speaks of his church-outing, Milton also shows his keen awareness of the literary genres of the Bible--Job as a brief epic, the Song of Solomon as "divine pastoral Drama," the "Apocalyps of Saint John" as "the majestick image of a high and stately Tragedy," and the "frequent songs" in the law and prophets "over all the kinds of Lyrick poesy . . . incomparable" (CPW 1.813-16).

22. It was the Jacobean Church of England (in this respect the heir of Reformed Christianity more generally, and of the similarly word-centred Elizabethan Church, which we can associate with Spenser) that fostered some of the very best writers of biblically-inspired literature: the Donne of the Sermons, George Herbert,[23] and (I claim here) John Milton. Milton without the Reformation is unthinkable, and the Reformation with its scriptural emphasis was first mediated to him by his own pre-Laudian English church. C.A. Patrides, still not aware of the degree of Jacobean Calvinism, nevertheless rightly turned to Donne, Herbert, and other Church of England writers to illuminate the biblical background for Milton and his age.[24] Patrides could see a literary impact in these English church readings of scripture, and consequently claimed that "The creative form which Milton and Herbert and Donne [note the grouping] imposed on words appealed in the end to the prototypical activities of the creative Word" (183). For the Bible, not so much a book of rules as a unique collection of fascinating stories and poems reflecting human experience and full of rich symbolism, gave these writers not only themes, but literary impulses. If Donne had been preoccupied with external order as the Laudians were, his sermons would, I suggest, have lost much of their vitality; and much the same can be said for Herbert's poetry.[25] Milton, not only in his prose writings, but in his most excellent poetry, has constant recourse to scripture. Georgia Christopher argues that Milton's word-based theology, "properly considered, . . . helps to make his poetry simple, passionate, and even sensuous" (19). Unlike Laud and his cohorts, we should be thankful that the Jacobean Church of England, which first nurtured Milton, was so word-centred.

23. In his last published tract, Of True Religion, Milton wrote that while the Roman church "permits not her Laity to read the Bible in their own tongue: Our Church on the contrary hath proposd it to all men, and to this end translated it into English, with profitable Notes . . . that all sorts and degrees of men, not understanding the Original, may read it in their Mother Tongue" (CPW 8.434). By referring to the 1611 Authorized Version, and elsewhere in the same tract in detail to the Thirty-Nine Articles with their strongly biblical stance, as well as to the importance of preaching, Milton near the end of his life gave evidence of the stamp that the Jacobean church, "Our Church" as he says here, had placed upon him.[26] In spite of, and perhaps because of the ways in which Milton and the church both changed in Laudian times, we need to recognize that stamp.

Notes

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