Milton's answer to the insult of his wife's desertion was most characteristic. The Doctrine and Discipline of Divorce, Restored to the good of both Sexes from the Bondage of Canon Law and other Mistakes was the title of a pamphlet put forth by him in August 1643, without his name, but with no effort at concealment, declaring the notion of a sacramental sanctity in the marriage relation to be a clerically invented superstition, and arguing that inherent incompatibility of character, or contrariety of mind, between two married persons is a perfectly just reason for divorce. There was no reference to his own case, except by implication; but the boldness of the speculation roused attention and sent a shock through London. It was a time when the authors of heresies of this sort, or of any sort, ran considerable risks. That there might be no obstacle to a more public prosecution, Milton put his name to a second and much enlarged edition of the tract, in February 1644, dedicated openly to the parliament and the as sembly. Then, for a month or two, during which the gossip about him and his monstrous doctrine was spreading more and more, he turned his attention to another subject. In June 1644 he published a treatise Of Education.
In July he returned to the divorce subject in a pamphlet addressed specially to the clergy and entitled The Judgment of Martin Bucer concerning Divorce. The outcry against him then reached its height. A sermon was preached against him before the houses of parliament, and efforts were made to bring him within parliamentary censure. The lead was taken by the Stationers' Company, who had a technical ground of complaint against him. His first divorce treatise, though published immediately after the "Printing Ordinance," requiring all publications to be licensed and registered in the books of the Stationers' Company, had been issued without license and without registration. Complaint to this effect was made against Milton, with some others liable to the same charge in a petition of the Stationers of the House of Commons in August 1644; and the matter came before committee both in that House and in the Lords.
It is to this circumstance that the world owes the most popular and eloquent, if not the greatest, of all Milton's prose writings, his famous Areopagitica, a Speech of Mr. John Milton for the Liberty of Unlicensed Printing, to the Parliament of England. It appeared on Nov. 25, 1644, deliberately unlicensed and un registered, and was a remonstrance addressed to the parliament, calling for the repeal of their ordinance of June 1643 and attacking the whole system of licensing and censorship of the press. Though repeal did not follow, the pamphlet virtually accomplished its purpose. The licensing system had received its death-blow; and, though the Stationers returned to the charge in another complaint to the House of Lords, Milton's offence against the press ordinance was condoned. To this period there belong, in the shape of verse,
only his sonnets ix. and x., the first to some anonymous lady, and the second "to the Lady Margaret Ley," with perhaps the Greek lines entitled Philosophus ad regein quendam. In March he published simultaneously his Tetrachordon: Expositions upon the four chief places of Scripture which treat of Marriage, and his Colasterion, a Reply to a nameless Answer against the Doctrine and Discipline of Divorce. In these he replied to his chief recent assailants, lay and clerical, with merciless severity.
So far as Milton was concerned personally, his interest in the divorce speculation came to an end in July or August when, by friendly interference, a reconciliation was effected be tween him and his wife. The ruin of the king's cause at Naseby had suggested to the Powells that it might be as well for their daughter to go back to her husband after their two years of sep aration.
By this time, having an increasing number of pupils, he had taken a house in Barbican, where he stayed till Sept. or Oct. Among his first occupations there must have been the revision of the proof sheets of the first edition of his collected poems. It appeared as a tiny volume, copies of which are now very rare, with the title, Poems of Mr. John Milton, both English and Latin, composed at several times. Printed by his true Copies. The songs were set in Musick by Mr. Henry Lawes. . . . The title-page gives the date 1645, but Jan. 2, 1645/6, seems to have been the exact day of its publication. In English there were only the four sonnets now numbered xi.–xiv., the first two entitled "On the Detraction which followed upon my writing certain Treatises," the third "To Mr. Henry Lawes on his Airs," and the fourth "To the Religious Memory of Mrs. Catherine Thomson," together with the powerful anti-Presbyterian invective or "tailed sonnet" entitled "On the New Forcers of Conscience under the Long Parliament"; and in Latin there were only the ode Ad Joannem Rousium, the Apologus de Rustico et Hero, and one interesting "Familiar Epistle" (April 1647) addressed to his Florentine friend Carlo Dati.
The fall of Oxford in 1646 compelled the whole of the Powell family to seek refuge in London, and most of them found shelter in Milton's house. His first child, Anne, was born there on July 29, that year; on Jan. 1, 1646/7, his father-in-law Richard Powell died there, leaving his affairs in confusion; and in the following March his own father died there, at the age of 84, and was buried in the adjacent church of St. Giles, Cripplegate.