Milton's Divorce Pamphlet

In June 1643, soon after the opening of the Civil War, John Milton married Mary Powell, eldest daughter of an Oxfordshire gentleman, whose family were neighbors to the Miltons and had friendly business relations with them. She was seventeen. He brought her home in June; she went back, at her family's request, but with his consent, in July, but she refused to return to him at Michaelmas as had been agreed. For two years she was absent.

Milton solicited her return but was rejected. The indissolubility of his marriage oppressed Milton, so he argued that this principle was invalid. After his "divorce pamphlets" demonstrated why he might marry again, Milton proposed to a Miss F Davis, perhaps the "virtuous young lady" of Sonnet IX. She declined.

The collapse of the King's cause ruined the Powells, and they threw themselves on Milton's mercy. An ambush was laid, using Mary – and Adam's forgiveness of Eve in Paradise Lost may echo the positive outcome, for Milton took back his wife in the summer of 1645. When Oxford fell a year later Milton also received her whole family into his house in the London Barbican. Three daughters were born, but at the birth of a fourth Mary died, not yet twenty-seven.

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1643

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Data from the Cambridge History of English Literature