The Arthurian epic had been given up, and his mind was rov ing among many other subjects, and balancing their capabilities. How he wavered between Biblical subjects and heroic subjects from British history, and how many of each kind suggested them selves to him, one learns from a list in his own handwriting among the Milton mss. at Cambridge. It contains jottings of no fewer than 53 subjects from the Old Testament, eight from the Gospels, 33 from British and English history before the Conquest, and five from Scottish history. It is curious that all or most of them are headed or described as subjects for "tragedies," as if the epic form had now been abandoned for the dramatic. There are four separate drafts of a possible tragedy on the Greek model under the title of Paradise Lost, two of them merely enumerating the dramatis personae, but the last two indicating the plot and the division into acts. In 1641 he wrote in the Reason of Church Government that he was meditating a poem on high moral or religious subjects. But the fulfilment of these plans was in definitely postponed. Milton became absorbed in the ecclesiastical controversies following on the king's attempt to force the epis copal system on the Scots.
Not until the Church question became paramount did Milton enter actively into public affairs. On this question there were three parties : the high church party, who wanted episcopacy re tained; the middle party, who wanted it curtailed ; and the "root and-branch" party, who wanted it abolished. The manifesto of the high church party was issued by Joseph Hall, bishop of Exeter; it was answered in March 1640/41 by five Puritan clergymen, whose initials put together on the title-page formed the word "Smectymnuus." Thomas Young, Milton's old tutor, was largely responsible for the pamphlet, but Milton's own hand is also discernible in it, and he continued to aid the Smectymnu ans in their subsequent rejoinders to Hall's defences of himself.
In May 1641 he put forth a defence of the Smectymnuan side in Of Reformation touching Church Discipline in England and the Causes that hitherto have hindered it. He reviewed English ecclesiastical history, with an appeal to his countrymen to re sume that course of reformation which he considered to have been prematurely stopped in the preceding century, and to sweep away the last relics of papacy and prelacy. Among all the root and-branch pamphlets of the time it stood out, and stands out still, as the most thorough-going and tremendous. It was fol
lowed by four others in rapid succession—Of Prelatical Episcopacy and whether it may be deduced from the Apostolical Times (June 1641), Animadversions upon the Remonstrant's Defence against Smectymnuus (July 1641), The Reason of Church Government urged against Prelaty (Feb. 1641/42), Apology against a Pamphlet called a Modest Confutation of the Animadversions, etc. (March and April 1641/42). The first of these was directed chiefly against the middle party, with especial reply to the argu ments of Archbishop Ussher. The greatest of the four, and the most important of all Milton's anti-episcopal pamphlets after the first, is The Reason of Church Government. It is there that Mil ton takes his readers into his confidence, speaking at length of himself and his motives in becoming a controversialist. Poetry, he declares, was his real vocation; it was with reluctance that he had resolved to "leave a calm and pleasing solitariness, fed with cheerful and confident thoughts, to embark in a troubled sea of noises and hoarse disputes"; but duty had left him no option. The great poem or poems he had been meditating could wait; and meanwhile, though in prose-polemics he had the use only of his "left hand," that hand should be used with all its might in the cause of his country and of liberty.
Of Milton's life through the first months of the Civil War little is known. He remained in his house in Aldersgate street, teaching his nephews and other pupils; and the only scrap that came from his pen was the semi-jocose sonnet bearing the title "When the Assault was intended to the City." In the summer of 1643, however, there was a great change in the Aldersgate street household. About the end of May, as his nephew Edward Phillips remembered, Milton went away on a country journey, without saying whither or for what purpose; and, when he returned, about a month afterwards, it was with a young wife, and with some of her sisters and other relatives in her company. He had, in fact, been in the very headquarters of the king and the Royalist army in and round Oxford ; and the bride he brought back with him was a Mary Powell, the eldest daughter of Richard Powell, of Forest Hill, near Oxford. She was 17 years and four months old, while Milton was in his 35th year. However the marriage came about, it was a most unfortunate event. The Powell family were strongly Royalist, and the girl herself seems to have been frivolous and entirely unsuited for the studious life in Aldersgate street. Hardly were the honeymoon festivities over, when, her sisters and other relatives having returned to Forest Hill, she pined for home again and begged to be allowed to go back on a visit. Milton consented, on the understanding that the visit was to be a brief one. This seems to have been in July 1643. Soon, however, the intimation from Forest Hill was that he need not look ever to have his wife in his house again. The resolution seems to have been mainly the girl's own ; but, as the king's cause was then prospering in the field, Edward Phillips was probably right in his conjecture that the whole of the Powell family had repented of their sudden connection with so prominent a Parliamentarian and assailant of the Church of England as Milton. While his wife was away, his old father, who had been residing for three years with his younger and lawyer son at Read ing, came to take up his quarters in Aldersgate street.