Introduction
Milton wrote and published five tracts opposing the episcopal governmental structure of the Church of England; this is the first. Its full title is Of Reformation Touching Church-Discipline in England: And the Causes that hitherto have hindred it. It was published in May 1641. The other four anti-prelatical tracts include Of Prelatical Episcopacy (1641), Animadversions upon The Remonstrants Defence Against Smectymnuus (1641), The Reason of Church-Government Urged against Prelaty (1642), and An Apology against a Pamphlet Called a Modest Confutation of the Animadversions upon the Remonstrant against Smectymnuus (1642). The second, fourth and fifth of these respond to specific tracts defending prelacy or attacking anti-prelatical authors, who included, in addition to Milton, Stephen Marshall, Edmund Calamy, Thomas Young, Matthew Newcomen, and William Spurstow. The pen name Smectymnuus was formed by joining the initials of these men's names. Thomas Young, a Scottish Presbyterian minister, had been one of Milton's earliest tutors and a man Milton cherished as a friend. Two private letters Milton wrote to Young were later published and dated 1627 and 1628; Elegy 4 was also addressed to Young. It is tempting to suspect he is the "Freind" to whom Milton addresses this first of his published polemical tracts, but I tend to agree with Barbara Lewalski's notion that the "Freind" is a rhetorical construct, appropriate to the "Letter to a Friend" genre of political commentary, "an implied sympathetic auditor" who may be wavering in his convictions and needs the support of arguments in favor of the original Root and Branch Petition of December 1640 which called on Parliament to abolish episcopal church government from the "roots" and in all its "branches," without any compromises (The Life of John Milton, 129).
That said, Milton's respect for and gratitude towards Thomas Young may well have encouraged him to take up the polemical, rather than poetical, pen at this moment, setting aside his oft-announced epic poetic ambitions to serve a cause he cherished as much as his friend and teacher—the completion or perfection of the reformation of the English Church which he believed to have been left incomplete by monarchs from Henry to Elizabeth, and by early reformers like Thomas Cranmer, Nicholas Ridley, and Hugh Latimer. Even though John Foxe's Acts and Monuments celebrated those three as martyrs to the cause of Reformation, Milton treats them as little more than gradualists, clinging still to many features of Roman Catholic liturgy and discipline. If monarchs and churchmen of the 16th-century hindered the cause of Reformation, Milton regarded King Charles I and Archbishop William Laud as worse than hindrances, part of an "Antichristian" effort to roll back even the insufficient progress of previous monarchs and churchmen.
Before taking this introduction any further, I think it good to clear up some of Milton's terminology. Though he vigorously opposed prelacy (or what he sometimes terms "Prelatism"), Milton's use of the word "Bishop" is sometimes ambiguous. He believed that bishops of the early (or "Primitive") church had scriptural warrant, specifically in 1 Timothy 3, which says "if a man desire the office of a bishop, he desireth a good work." The epistle goes on to stipulate that a bishop "must be blameless, the husband of one wife, vigilant, sober, of good behaviour, given to hospitality, apt to teach; Not given to wine, no striker, not greedy of filthy lucre; but patient, not a brawler, not covetous." The prelates of his day, Milton charges, are, and have been for centuries, corrupted versions of the "true Apostolick Bishop" for when a bishop "steps up into the Chayre of Pontificall Pride, and changes a moderate and exemplary House, for a mis-govern'd and haughty Palace, spirituall Dignity for carnall Precedence, and secular high Office and employment for the high Negotiations of his Heavenly Embassage, Then he degrades, then hee un-Bishops himselfe; hee that makes him Bishop makes him no Bishop." In 1641, English Bishops had indeed renounced the Roman Catholic vow of celibacy, but they held seats in the House of Lords, lived in fine, sometimes gorgeous, palaces, and considered their authority to be any thing but "coequall and compresbyteriall" with Ministers and Deacons.
At this stage of his political development, Milton was still allied with the Presbyterian party of reformers in Parliament and the Church. He was not yet anti-monarchy, nor had he yet embraced the heterodoxies of Arianism and anti-Trinitarianism. Indeed Milton devotes a large part of this tract to challenging the notion that episcopal church government is essential to monarchy; instead he argues strenuously that history demonstrates how prelacy tends to infringe upon a monarch's power and corrupt the body politic of an otherwise sound monarchy. Prelacy, he argues, debases "Royall Dignity:"
what greater debasement can there be to Royall Dignity, whose towring, and stedfast heighth rests upon the unmovable foundations of Justice, and Heroick vertue, then to chaine it in a dependance of subsisting, or ruining to the painted Battlements, and gaudy rottennesse of Prelatrie, which want but one puffe of the Kings to blow them down like a past bord House built of Court-Cards.Milton subscribed to the conviction that corruption in church government could be traced largely to the Emperor Constantine who, by declaring an erstwhile persecuted sect to become the official religion of the Roman Empire in 313, initiated the precipitous decline of church government into "mis-shapen and enormous Prelatisme."
Milton's five anti-prelatical tracts belong to a swift flurry of pamphlets, pro and con, that can be said to begin with the Root and Brach Petition of December 1640. Signed by 15,000 men from the City of London (where Milton also resided), it pressed Parliament (the so-called "Long Parliament") to abolish episcopal government "with all its dependencies, roots and branches," that is, deaneries and prebends of all sorts. The following January (1641) about 700 clergymen proposed a compromise calling for bishops' removal from the House of Lords and from all secular functions. This more moderate proposal, eventually defeated by the House of Lords, prompted many a controversialist to enter the fray, sometimes by name, sometimes anonymously, and sometimes by pseudonym.
Bishop Joseph Hall, at Archbishop Laud's urging, had published a manifesto in February 1640 entitled Episcopacie by Divine Right Asserted which laid down the challenge to reformers like Milton and the champions of Presbyterian reforms. Nearly a year later, he attacked the reformist petitioners with An Humble Remonstrance to the Right Honorable, the Lords in the High Court of Parliament. Led by Thomas Young, the Smectymnuuans (see above) responded with An Answer to a Booke Entituled, An Humble Remonstrance denouncing the "Popish" liturgies of the English Prayer Book, and arguing that scripture authorizes a Presbyterian form of church government. Then, in April 1641, Hall published A Defence of the Humble remonstrance, against the Frivolous and false Exceptions of Smectymnuus. Late in May 1641, Archbishop James Ussher joined the fray on Hall's and Laud's side with The Judgment of Doctor Rainoldes touching the Original of Episcopacy. More Largely Confirmed out of Antiquity. Ussher declined to support Hall's contention that episcopacy was divinely ordained, but he claimed apostolic authority, scripture, and antiquity all supported the present organization of the Laudian church in England. In late may of 1641, Of Reformation appeared, anonymously.
Unlike most of the other participants in this flurry of pamphlets, Milton does not argue from the precedents of antiquity, nor does he pile up scripture quotations. Instead he relies on a brief history of what he regards as the insufficent Tudor Reformation, followed by indictments of the three most consequential groups of "hinderers of Reformation": Antiquarians (those who take antiquity for precedents worthy to follow), Libertines, and "Polititians." Again, I find myself in agreement with Barbara Lewalski when she says the tract is designed to render episcopacy "disgusting" (Life 129). His adaptation of Meninius Agrippa's Fable of the Body and the Monstrous Wen illustrates this tactic very nicely.
The copy text for Of Reformation is in The British Library 105 b.42.
