John Milton, Catholic

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Notes

1 Corthell and Corns, ‘Introduction’, 3, 4.

2 Carlin, ‘Toleration for Catholics in the Puritan Revolution’, 216.

3 Dzelzainis, ‘Milton, Sir Henry Vane the Younger and the Toleration of Catholics’, 73.

4 No such usage is recorded in Sterne and Kollmeier, Concordance to the English Prose of John Milton. This essay would not have been possible without the ready access to Milton’s prose that this invaluable work facilitates.

5 Ingram and Swaim, Concordance to Milton’s English Poetry, records no instance of ‘catholic’ or ‘catholick’ in the poetry, despite the extensive and pronounced hostility to Roman Catholicism in the poems, particularly Paradise Lost.

6 Corthell and Corns, ‘Introduction’, 4, 8; Sauer, ‘Milton and the Protestant Pope’, 18.

7 Tumbleson, Catholicism in the English Protestant Imagination, 13. On issues of terminology see Haefeli, ‘Introduction: Anti-Catholicism, Anti-Popery, and the British-American World’, 1– 21; Harris, ‘Anti-Catholicism and Anti-Popery in Seventeenth-Century England’, esp. 25–7, 34; Walsham, Church Papists, 8–10.

8 Milton, Complete Prose Works (hereafter CPW), 8: 422 (I am grateful to the anonymous Seventeenth-Century reviewer who pointed out that Milton is punning on ‘bull’, both ‘papal pronouncement’ and ‘self-contradictory proposition’ (OED, ‘bull’, n.2, 2, and n.4, 2a)). On the only occasion that Milton refers to ‘the Roman Catholick Church’ he is translating the Latin ‘Catholica Romana Ecclesia’ in A Declaration or Letters Patents of the Election of this present King of Poland (Milton, Complete Works, 6: 562 (hereafter CWJM, 6); CPW, 8: 603).

9 Harris, ‘Anti-Catholicism and Anti-Popery’, 26. The earliest citations in The Oxford English Dictionary (herefter OED) for senses I.2.a (‘universally Christian’) and I.2.b (‘designating the whole Christian Church or all Christians’) are from c.1443 and c.1456, antedating sense 1.5, ‘designating that part of the Christian Church which acknowledges the Pope as its head’ (1.5), which is known from 1543.

10 In letters written at the time of these negotiations to Henrietta Maria, captured after Naseby, Charles I consistently refers to the Parliamentarian English as rebels, and uses ‘Catholic’ for ‘Roman Catholic’ (‘the Confederate Catholikes in his Majesties Kingdome of Ireland’, ‘the Confederate Catholikes in France’, ‘Catholick Prince’ (The King’s Cabinet Opened, 21, 22, 31)).

11 This elision is evidenced by the common practice of indexing not ‘Roman Catholics’ and ‘Roman Catholicism’ but ‘Catholics’ and ‘Catholicism’ in works on Milton, and by similarly heading articles in reference works (e. g., Bennett, ‘Catholicism’, and Sauer, ‘Catholicism’).

12 Coffey, Persecution and Toleration in Protestant England, 54; Corthell and Corns, ‘Introduction’, 5; Bennett, ‘Catholicism’, 248.

13 ‘I, and such others, call our selves MEER CHRISTIANS, or CATHOLICK CHRISTIANS, against all Sects and Sectarian names’ (Baxter, Church-History of the Government of Bishops, sig. b1).

14 For this, and other parallels between Baxter and Milton, see Keeble, ‘Richard Baxter Meets John Milton’, which is drawn on here.

15 Baxter, Reliquiae Baxterianae, 3: 40. This rejection of Rome’s claim on catholicity was a commonplace of anti-Papal polemic; on the consequent ambiguities and controversies over the term catholic, see Milton, Catholic and Reformed, 150–7.

16 Corthell and Corns, ‘Introduction’, 6. The ‘tyranny of popery’ trampling on rights and liberties was a commonplace of anti-Papal polemic; see Lake, ‘Anti-Popery: the Structure of a Prejudice’, 184 and passim.

17 CWJM, 8.1: 7. OED’s first examples of both the noun and the adjective are from 1612.

18 Noted by Edwards, ‘The “World” of Paradise Lost’, 507, with reference to the annotation on Paradise Lost, 10: 313 in Milton, Paradise Lost, 557, and to Hill, Milton and the English Revolution, 391. This is OED’s first instance of the word in the sense ‘Of or relating to a bridge’ (II.6).

19 Cf. the view of Miller, Popery and Politics in England 1660–1688, 110, that Stuart monarchs did indeed favour Roman Catholicism because they ‘appreciated the obedience it inculcated as being thoroughly compatible with monarchical authority’.

20 Forsyth, ‘The English Church’, 292; Dzelzainis, ‘Milton, Sir Henry Vane the Younger and the Toleration of Catholics’, 74.

21 The political context of Milton’s refusal of toleration to Roman Catholicism is explored with particular reference to the Restoration years in Shawcross, ‘ “Connivers and the Worst of Superstitions” ’, and in Sauer, ‘Milton’s Of True Religion’.

22 Sauer, ‘Disestablishment’, 339. Lake, ‘Anti-Popery’, 187, notes its ‘allegiance to a foreign ruler’ as a ‘central characteristic of Popery in the eyes of English Protestants’ generally. See also Harris, ‘Anti-Catholicism and Anti-Popery’, 27–9; Miller, Popery and Politics, 67–8, 76–90 and passim; Milton, Catholic and Reformed, 42–6, 55–60; and on the recurrent political incentives to anti-Popery, Clifton, ’The Popular Fear of Catholics during the English Revolution’.

23 Paradise Lost, 5: 351-7, 2: 1–5, in Milton, Paradise Lost, 303, 110.

24 This is Milton’s emphasis, but not to the exclusion of such targets as the Mass, images and the invocation of saints adduced as evidence of superstition and idolatry by early modern anti-Papist polemic in general, on which see: Clifton, ‘Fear of Popery’, 146–9; Russell, Causes of the English Civil War, 77–80; Milton, Catholic and Reformed, 187–209.

25 The statement in Gregory, Catholics during the English Revolution, 86, that Milton denied toleration ‘specifically’ to those Roman Catholics ‘who believed in’ Popery and superstition is misleading in implying that to Milton’s mind there were Roman Catholics who did not so believe.

26 On this distinction, see: Haefeli, ‘Introduction’, 1–4; Harris, ‘Anti-Catholicism and Anti-Popery’, 25–7; Collings, ’Restoration Anti-Catholicism’.

27 This animosity was nevertheless compatible, in Milton as in his contemporaries, with admiration for, and indebtedness to, Roman Catholic culture and scholarship; see Milton, ‘Qualified Intolerance’; Di Cesare (ed.), Milton in Italy.

28 This ‘blindnesse of minde’ is Milton’s particular emphasis, but Rome’s exercise of a spiritual tyranny in general was a characteristic charge of anti-Popery; see Lake, ‘Anti-Popery’, 184–5.

29 For the consequences for reading habits, see Achinstein, Milton and the Revolutionary Reader.

30 With hardly more persuasiveness than Milton: see McDowell, The English Radical Imagination, on the educational background of mid-century radicals; and on Bunyan’s reading, Greaves, Glimpses of Glory, 603–07, and Campbell, ‘Fishing in Other Men’s Waters’.

31 Paradise Regained, 4: 288-90, in Milton, Complete Shorter Poems, 496.

32 Blasphemy was another matter, at least as construed by the 1650 Blasphemy Act, of which Milton approved as ‘prudent and well deliberated’, and so, in this one respect, of the magistrate’s intervention in religious affairs (CPW, 7: 246–7) but as a public matter of civic order, not a private point of conscience. The Act, was directed less against radical and heterodox opinions than against those who are ‘loose in all wicked and abominable Practices’ and ‘do deny the necessity of Civil and Moral Righteousness’, chiefly (it seems) antinomian enthusiasts. The only views (as opposed to behaviour) that it proscribed were denials of the Godhead and claims by persons ‘not distempered with sickness, or distracted in brain’ to self-divinity or that ‘any other meer Creature’ can be ‘very God’ (Firth and Rait (eds.), Acts and Ordinances of the Interregnum, 2: 409–12). .

33 On Milton’s consequent scorn for ‘the new godly heresy-makers’ and ‘aggressive heresy-hunters’ of his age’, and their ‘demonization of “erring” groups of Protestants’, see Loewenstein, Treacherous Faith, 267–95, quotations at 267, 270, 290.

34 Sauer, ‘Milton and the Protestant Pope’, 26.

35 Paradise Lost, 12: 527–9, in Milton, Paradise Lost, 671.

36 Tumbleson, Catholicism in the English Protestant Imagination, 44. Tumbleson is distinguishing Milton from Marvell for whom, he holds, ‘religion is an aspect of politics’.

37 ‘On the New Forcers of Conscience under the Long Parliament’, l. 6, in Milton, Shorter Poems, 299.

38 Paradise Lost, 12; 525-6, in Milton, Paradise Lost, 671.

39 As noted by Hadfield, ‘Milton and Catholicism’, 192–5.

40 Keeble, ‘Milton’s Christian Temper’, 107–10.

41 The unpublished De Doctrina, however, contains ‘what reads remarkably like a blueprint for Congregational ecclesiology’ (Nuttall, ‘Milton’s Churchmanship in 1659’, 227 (noted in Keeble, ‘Milton’s Christian Temper’, 114–15, to which this paragraph is indebted)); see CWJM, 8.2: 824–49. In a different, but related, vein, Ryan Shelton, ‘A Social History and Genealogy of Congregationalist New Covenant Theology in Milton’s Paradise Lost (1667)’, Ph.D. thesis (Queen’s University, Belfast, 2024), argues that a distinctively Congregational theology shapes Paradise Lost.

42 The distinction between separatism and Congregationalism is rather a matter of degree in the independence of particular churches than of clear ecclesiological difference. On the slipperiness of the terms in relation to seventeenth-century church gathering, see Cooper, ‘Congregationalists’; Ha (ed.), The Puritans on Independence; Nuttall, Visible Saints, 4–42.

43 Cotton, Way of the Congregational Churches, pt I, 10 (quoted in the OED).

44 Gribben, John Owen, 61, 65.

45 ‘To the Lord General Cromwell, l. 14, in Milton, Complete Shorter Poems, 329; Campbell and Corns, John Milton, 245–6; Gribben, John Owen, 137–40, 197–9; Polizzotto, ‘Campaign against The Humble Proposals of 1652’.

46 Cotton, Way of the Congregational Churches, pt I, 11.

47 Halcomb, ‘Godly Order and the Trumpet of Defiance’ 26.

48 The congregational emphasis of Milton’s thought is distinctive, but not his assertion that the true Catholic church embraced all Protestant churches; see Milton, Catholic and Reformed, 151, 378–84.

49 Quoted and discussed in Sauer, Milton, Toleration and Nationhood, 105, 112, and Sauer, ‘Milton’s Late Religious Tracts’, 339, with reference to Hale, ‘England as Israel in Milton’s Writings’.

50 On the Presbyterian reaction to Independency and sectarianism in the 1640s, see Hughes, Grangraena.

51 Samson Agonistes, l. 1659, in Milton, Complete Shorter Poems, 410. On this positive image see Michael Wilding’s argument against Milton’s ‘frequently alleged elitism’ and for his ‘commitment to the common people’ in his ‘Milton’s Areopagitica: Liberty for the Sects’, esp. 13–19, cited in a discussion of Milton’s ‘celebration of those outside the social elite’ in Corns, ‘ “In the sweat of thy face” ’, at 50–2.

52 Hill, Milton and the English Revolution, 438–9. For scepticism about Hill’s reading, see Campbell and Corns, John Milton, 362.

53 Paradise Lost, 7: 30-8, in Milton, Paradise Lost, 391–2.

54 On the contrast between the ‘vulgar’ and Milton’s intellectual peers, and the consequent slipperiness of the term ‘the people’ in whose interests Milton claims to write, see Paul Hammond’s authoritative discussion of the ‘tension between Milton’s aspirations for the nation and his limitation of trust to a small group of the committed [that] runs through his writings’ in Milton and the People, quotation at 49.

55 ‘Sonnet XI’, ll. 5–6, in Milton, Shorter Poems, 308.

56 Brown, ‘Horatian Signatures: Milton and Civilized Community’, 329. The compelling argument of McDowell, Poet of Revolution, that it was humanist scholarship and poetry rather than theological or religious partisanship that shaped Milton’s intellectual development and polemical practice provides a wealth of primary evidence elucidating this emphasis. His argument is no less relevant to Milton’s commitment to the intellectually rigorous but doctrinally inclusive nature of catholic Christianity (see esp. 357–409).

57 Paradise Lost, 3: 108, in Milton, Paradise Lost, 173.