1942 was the tercentenary of the outbreak of the Civil War, and also of John Milton's marriage to his first wife, Marie Powell of Forest Hill, Oxford.[1] He was thirty-three at the time; she was sixteen. Since this book is a novel, not a biography, I need not write a learned preface to justify my conjectural reconstruction of the story—how he came to marry her, why she left him after a few weeks, why she returned three years later, and so on—but I have tried to answer all the outstanding questions plausibly and fairly in the course of the narrative.
Three centuries of English history do not seem an impossibly long time. The language and the details of social life have changed a good deal; yet war is still in fashion, the pike still obsolete, the English climate still uncertain, divorce-laws in no less of a muddle, most of the same stock people with family-faces still about, taxes as heavy as ever, newspapers as unreliable, the Colleges of Oxford University once more commandeered by the Government, and few of the political questions that the Civil Wars brought to a head yet finally settled—there is even a renewed complaint in the Press to-day of "unwarranted interference in secular affairs by the Archbishop of Canterbury."
The post-war Cromwellian solution of these political questions, which Milton endorsed, was drastic and unconstitutional—it would now be called "undisguised Fascism"; and democratic journalists and politicians who quote with approval Wordsworth's:
Milton, thou should'st be living at this hour.
England hath need of thee….
should read, or re-read, Milton's life and works. It is true that during the war he had written his famous Areopagitica, a plea for the freedom of the Press; but almost as soon as the fighting was over he became Assistant Press Censor for the Council of State and helped to enforce a most repressive Censorship law. This Council was the executive of a minority Government set up by the mutinous New Model Army, after they had suppressed the House of Lords and had forcibly reduced the Commons, by a purge of the conservative majority, to a small party of Independent members who were willing to co-operate in the execution of the King and the abolition of the Monarchy.
A glossary of obsolete words and phrases will be found at the end of this book. In those times the date of any day between January 1st and Lady Day was, in England, given in double notation (e.g. Marie Powell was baptized on January 24th, 1625–26); but in Scotland in single notation, as now. I have here adopted the single notation for the sake of clearness, also modern spelling and punctuation. The documents quoted in the Appendix give a fair idea of what this book would look like in contemporary dress. The value of money was then four or five times what it was at the outbreak of the present war; to a man of Milton's limited income the non-payment of the ￡1,500 which his father-in-law owed him was a very serious matter.
1942 was also the tercentenary of the battle of Newbury, in which the most sympathetic character of that period, Lucius Gary, the second Viscount Falkland, died fighting for King Charles. I have to thank my neighbour, the thirteenth Viscount (also a Lucius Cary), for his great kindness in helping me to get Wife to Mr. Milton ready for the printers.
R.G.
Galmpton, Brixham, Devon.