The Insidious Infidel and the Captive Englishman in Milton's Divorce Tracts

In his five treatises on no-fault divorce, all generated during the years 1643 through 1645, John Milton imagines English men as the citizens upholding the commonwealth—as long as those Englishmen are not seduced, corrupted, or metaphorically bound and enslaved by their ill-matched wives. Milton's writings on divorce in this sense clearly depend upon, and amplify, “the broader social and political consequences of a marriage that authorizes [the husband] as a … political subject” (Dodds 62). While these gendered politics of the divorce tracts have now been well-studied,1 Milton also invokes in his divorce writings two related, particularly persistent, and broadly racializing analogies whose connected functions are currently less understood, or perhaps taken less seriously, than Milton and his culture would have. The first such pattern: when describing unhappy marriages, Milton constantly employs metaphors of captivity and bondage: the language of slavery. The second trope: Milton repeatedly refers to marriage with an “unbeliever,” “heretic,” or, as Milton often calls her, an “infidel” wife. Given that the term “infidel” was most often in Milton's day associated with followers of Islam, Milton's tracts do seem to be suggesting a racialized divide when they imagine the enslaved husband and the “infidel” wife. These rhetorics of the slave married to the heretic invite the question of which particular constructions of captivity and Islam are relevant to Milton's divorce tracts, especially when Milton seems frequently to suggest that they are actually not relevant to his arguments about unhappily married English Christians. Nabil Matar argues that “it would be fallacious to separate the early modern history and literature of Britain from the collusions and captivities, trade and piracy … so common between the Mediterranean Islamic world and England” (Britain and Barbary 11). Milton's divorce tracts appear to be one such site of connection: in these treatises, Milton asks the joined categories of “slave” and “infidel” to do political work both more specific and more significant than we have to date collectively understood.2 That political work would be more obvious to Milton's original audience, as they were living with the ambiguous fear which Milton's divorce tracts suggest. English citizens were being captured and enslaved in significant numbers by Islamic pirates in this period, and English governments were trying to address this alarming problem of Islamic piracy and human trafficking. Those same governments were also minimizing, outsourcing, or ignoring that same crisis of national security in order to protect key trade relationships and possible diplomatic alliances with the powerful and sophisticated Islamic powers of the Levant and the Barbary coast. Milton's divorce tracts are therefore trading in discourses of slaves and infidels which were particularly visible in the commonwealth of the 1640s. And in the mix of xenophobic hostility, gendered nationalism, cultural anxiety, and diplomatic dodging found in these tracts, Milton mirrors England's ambivalent perspectives on the Islamic world. These writings provoke and reflect English fears of being forcibly enslaved and bound to infidels, and their author intensifies this fear by gendering the slave (an English man) and the infidel (the unfit wife). Milton also deflects or disguises his own masculinist and xenophobic rhetoric, revealing the same ambivalence of his Parliamentary counterparts who were seeking peace, power, wine, and oil from the Islamic world. Protestant European nations in the seventeenth century had extremely complex interactions with the diverse Islamic communities of the Mediterranean basin and northern Africa.3 Northern European and Middle-Eastern cultures cooperated as trading partners; sometimes acted as diplomatic allies for or against Catholic forces; often competed with each other for mercantile markets; battled or collaborated in colonizing projects; and persistently demonized or sometimes praised each other as practitioners of differing religions.4 The English in particular in their encounters with Islamic cultures saw the Islamic world in all of its diversity: as impious, wealthy, and powerful; as admirable and threatening; as both hyper-masculinized and effeminate; and as opponents or allies seeking profitable trade, colonial domination, and a Protestant empire.5 This wider story—gendered, sexualized, spiritualized, and monetized—informs the particular international conflicts and collaborations between the English parliamentary government and the governments of the Levant, the Ottoman territories, and North Africa in the same decade in which Milton was writing of marriage and divorce. And this broader history is the context in which Milton's tracts invoke their strategic and political rhetorics of wifely infidel and husbandly captive. Milton by the 1644 edition of the Doctrine and Discipline of Divorce makes the new Parliamentary government his explicit audience, and for that Parliament in the early years of its ruling authority, “captive” and “infidel” were loaded terms. For Parliament and indeed for the English state in the first half of the 17th century, captivity and “the infidel” were not just metaphors but political realities. As Matar, MacLean, and others explain, the cycle of reciprocal raiding, capture and ransom of both European and Islamic citizens had in fact gone on for centuries (MacLean and Matar, Britain and the Islamic World 10, 13, 125; see also Cruz). But these authors and others also note that in the Jacobean and Caroline eras, raiders from North Africa were increasingly aggressive in capturing for servitude or ransom thousands of English men and women either from English coastal towns, from English coastal waters, or from English merchant ships or forts in the Mediterranean (Britain and the Islamic World 7, 126-55).6 Matar suggests that the increasing reach of the “Barbary pirates,” as they were called, was a problem that likely exacerbated Charles I's political woes in the 1630s and 40s and upon which the new Parliamentary government capitalized (Britain and Barbary 38-39). Matar and Maclea further argue that “Stuart monarchs never adopted captivity as a royal cause; they left ransom and liberation to trading companies, parishes, individuals, and families” (Britain and the Islamic World 129). Ship Money, one of the more notorious levies of the 1630s Personal Rule, was intended to protect coastal towns from exactly the kind of danger that these North African pirates and traders represented (Matar, Britain and Barbary 38-39). But as Matar explains, Charles I was apparently unwilling, aside from one 1637 mission, to provide state action to protect, redeem, or negotiate for those of his citizens held for ransom (38-46). While Feisal Mohamed has recently charted Charles's efforts to start developing a more robust naval presence in response to Islamic shipping might, the Stuart crown did not at first have a viable response to these raids (“Lycidas”). Parliament, first under Charles and then in its early years in power, was less timid legislatively than the Stuart royals, drafting and then enacting several ordinances and statutes to raise funds, provide agents, and facilitate negotiations to return to England those citizens who were being held in North Africa and in other parts of the Islamic world (Matar, Britain and Barbary 68-72). These laws included the November 1641 “Act for the Reliefe of the Captives taken by Turkish, Moorish, and other Pirates, and to prevent the taking of others in Time to come” (64-68); the March 1643/44 “Ordinance for upholding the Government and Fellowship of merchants of England trading into the Levant Seas” (Acts 395); the April 1643 “Ordinance for Collections to be made for relief of Captives in Algiers” (Acts 134-35); the October 1644 “Ordinance for the Redemption of the Captives at Algiers” (Acts 553-54); and the January 1645 “Ordinance for the raising of Moneys for Redemption of distressed Captives” (Acts 609-11). Matar argues that these efforts helped to solidify Parliament's power as the principal state actor for England, including in international affairs (39-45). Certainly, in a time of intense internecine conflict, with daily and weekly shifts in the rules and structures of governance, the number of edicts put forth by Parliament on the subject of English subjects captured by North African ships suggests the political significance of the “Barbary pirates.” Real captives, English men and women enslaved by “infidels,” were a very live national and strategic focus for the same Parliamentary government to whom Milton was sending his divorce tracts. noe person has a right to an interest or share in the disposing of the affairs of the kingdom … that hath nott a permanent fix’d interest in this Kingedome, … otherwise I cannot tell what … any man can say why a forraigner coming in amongst us … by force or otherwise setling themselves heere, or att least by our permission having a being heere, why they should nott as well lay claime to itt as any other. (Clarke Papers 301-02) Cromwell's party is here making a slippery-slope argument to defend a much more limited male franchise than the Levellers had hoped for, and Ireton's scare-tactic here involves “the forraigner” and the stranger challenging English hegemony. Raising the specter of both a hostile invasion (“by force settling themselves here”) and a naïve open-borders policy (“by our permission having a being here”), Cromwell and Ireton clearly fear a “forraigner” “laying claime” to English law and policy-making. And despite their possibly self-interested moves to welcome Jews back into England in the mid-1650's,7 Cromwell's government policies also mostly followed this closed-borders and xenophobic trend. In Ireland and the War at Sea, 1641-1651, Elaine Murphy notes the ferocity and capital that Cromwell was willing to employ to suppress Irish dissent and claim Irish property (see also Blakemore and Murphy). Matar also tracks Cromwell's efforts to build up the English navy to provide defenses against both Irish and North African piracy while enabling their own English opportunistic naval ventures (Britain and Barbary 9-14). Parliament's statutes and Cromwell's investments in a defensive and then increasingly offensive naval fleet both suggest that while Cromwell might wish to continue productive trade through the Levant Company and other merchant networks, he was also imagining the switch to counter-attack and then extractivist violence that became English policy toward other Catholic and Islamic states and interests as the century progressed (8-9). Yee know also, Imprisonment for Debt, is not from the beginning; Yet ye thinke not of these many Thousand Persons and Families that are destroyed thereby, yee are Rich, and abound in goods, and have need of nothing; but the afflictions of the poore; your hunger-starved brethren, ye have no compassion of; Your zeal makes a noise as farre as Argiere, to deliver those captived at the of but those whom your in your these are to to what between a man to an as a in or Argiere, and of men to in your to a man on the force from his he from a from his or against to for a and in Company of as he hath no to be for that and he to to a trade, or or not much any or be then that of a Levellers and other of the same decade in which Milton was writing his divorce tracts were also willing to the problem to the many of captivity to they English were The England's Parliament as the Islamic between a man to an as a in or Argiere, and of men to in your they The Parliament's when to zeal makes a noise as farre as Argiere, to deliver those captived at the of but those whom your in your these are to thinke an or English with those captived and enslaved in or these English were both with the of the Barbary pirates and to that in the of more relevant for Milton's is that the about the Barbary pirates was further by what were as the and of Islam and Islamic The cultural are in English As and others have many English tracts, and captivity the power of Islam for European men and especially when connected to and constantly both the of and and efforts to their the and of of his Islamic while that many English to In The and of a Ship of John their either to or to their and in Matar and in his and captivity as an and of the a gendered and in Matar and to other cultures and with a fear that English would be seduced, or into of one kind or argues and the and and by Islamic and their became a cultural for early modern English (see also and Islamic cultures also an for England's trade and colonial Matar, and and was trade with the Ottoman in this of their international trade (MacLean and Matar This with profitable was for the Parliamentary government of the the statutes for captives, for are the January and March 1643/44 ordinances the of from the in response to the of the Levant who was of many Thousand of the of this and to in (Acts March 1644 the Levant trade (Acts that they were while on trade and mercantile in the Mediterranean and the Islamic was to English of these in English culture of the 1630s and 40s are English gendered and Islamic Islamic and Islamic English and governments were to the of being as both and were also of both and on a of English men and women seduced, and to were in intense from as a crisis as well as a diplomatic And they hoped to from kind of mercantile with the Islamic powers of the Mediterranean as and cultures were all in this with these connected And these same all and divorce tracts and their gendered and politics as Milton's divorce tracts both and on this cultural about Islam in several key Milton invokes English fears of and by Islamic as he that to the English husband and in an unhappy Milton his by describing the as an “infidel” who the same kind of and as the English were in this taking the to this and Milton then his argument with that the limited of divorce to English is just as much an of English as the problem of the Barbary makes divorce law a of English from as much as Cromwell for the male And Milton also in a to the diplomatic and trade of his a those that the Parliamentary government has made with Milton's divorce tracts are a of the gendered political in which England was currently with its Islamic Milton constantly and the of for unhappily married Englishmen in the divorce tracts. to be Milton's tracts focus on the of the English husband whose original has been can be that was for and not man for … is not most likely that in his law had more man than the that was for Milton clearly husbandly and husbandly is to by And the husband is the tracts repeatedly he is so he is held against his Milton this of by imagining several of the English married each on this and of the to “the of The first such is by which “the of and through a which the married The of Doctrine and Discipline of Divorce refers to “the of and Milton is repeatedly by the law edicts the of marriage into the of a most and Milton and especially of the relevant as of as by the husband is by an and then made the of and by an law of Milton the that of men have up their to a on the suggesting and the of the Milton especially that a and of In imagining as a such he invokes the piracy for as he being by the who to his of and most Milton as a of the unhappy marriage in which the husband in particular is in the of an and held in the of and slavery. This is the of to which Milton most often English husband or a of a and in a and state of Milton is for the man “the right of their from such … Milton this of and and to the unhappy in to the in Milton's the and Parliament therefore the enslaved English … the of for these English in This of a and by the of a Milton's Parliamentary policy against North African pirates in these These of the enslaved husband are clearly intended to Milton's of husbandly but that is not all the work they As and others argue in other of the of the of is of to and the of a to the As the parliamentary of this repeatedly the government of England has in the of the and “the of all Government is the and of the and not to this into argues that the very of toward its political a of citizens whose in they not As explains, the English trade in is … in England's of Milton's divorce tracts on the of the unhappy they are this kind of social that the of a husband is an state for an Milton's of and that such captivity is the most and most significant kind of is an state for an while Milton the language of found in those Parliamentary statutes on captured English he is or with the of an the and … from which Englishmen to be enslaved or by Barbary pirates or by European to be less of for Milton than to be and Milton is in this sense on the political of his such of or political captivity a of English this political is clearly relevant for Milton's Milton's tracts on divorce then his cultural to by also repeatedly suggesting that the ill-matched can be through the of the the and the Milton makes the is a in … much to be that the between and is as he is a argument from the of an which should his from the of is to by or … through the of and unfit and so at … to of Milton the question of the infidel that same language of and captivity is The is the from the infidel and Milton own language of in the relevant from against his in or to be with to have and his to be with and this be to a Milton this we are called, he peace, not to … why should we in under a imagines the husband to an infidel as The infidel is not a but a of for notes that encounters with captivity in the Mediterranean world a cultural context for the of but they also in Milton's an of the through this to the Milton also the language of and frequently in describing the unhappy marriage to an “infidel” the of and in Stuart and captivity Milton's husband is by a by or by his for the wifely that was in the of the which Milton a Mediterranean of seems to be and Milton is clearly willing to in his divorce tracts of and Milton the of his husband and infidel by making marriage a of national the Levellers of this same he is willing to lay the question of an captivity at the of In this a specific and masculinist Milton's about the infidel and the captived Milton argues that was “the of a to this by first into his power the right of just Milton is national and he that no-fault divorce is a and us by a than that the Milton is divorce as national he Parliament that they have in their a and to from what what in ye know in what a and from the of and Milton is making that he Parliament as the of national and in in marriage not England of nations to Milton and he here that international and divorce are the same of to divorce argues that is that his should not the of the Milton that “the and of a commonwealth … a to from the which is marriage and the … can up a of while the and that is and divorce to the both of and he as and indeed all be from the so that be Milton in his tracts to to “the of and all the of In of as a Milton imagines the as a of in their Milton clearly the the and the as the of a English Milton the diplomatic of this in English the English enslaved captured the order to Parliament into his argument that marriage in England, between English the same rhetoric, the same and of and those men enslaved in and as between the political of male And Milton's that has to the English husband and the of English to which and indeed Milton's own is with Parliament's in the that Milton's divorce tracts also seem to or Islamic For with and his rhetoric, Milton both and the problem of marriage to an especially to the in which this is In the of on these in his divorce writings in but also in the two of The Doctrine and Discipline of Milton argues that the of of the heretic is for as can be to the permission to divorce this us now of And Milton for that “the who in is or … is than an infidel in both and that the husband to such a is toward “the of more than Milton suggests that “the person therefore hath as a to his from this as from the of an infidel” Milton to be that the of is by the of more he the that the Milton his to be taken up by Parliament for all not for those who to be by an argues that a English has the same as those Milton to his Parliamentary of and to of Parliament's to provide as the government of the and to argue that the of the back to the English and its so much infidels that they and male English citizens whose and interests are into (Clarke Papers back to English between English men and is also that many other English and was willing to as a than As John and as a in their against Islam … to be as in many to than of the divorce tracts have no time Catholic the and is not of a to Islam to say that is not as as the but Milton's tracts are willing to more than Islamic in order to two under the of Milton's of against the infidel is to the of Parliament as Milton in the divorce tracts that between and and cannot perhaps be his to by the of the Levant Parliament that its of marriage laws the … the of and perhaps not two key to England from the Levant While Milton's tracts are to the infidel with the by his work seems to have an on English and trade as Milton to that ill-matched are the infidels who were English that the infidel and the heretic are not the of and husbandly but he is also to the to the who not English And by this while not Milton at least his argument to of the to whom he he of the an heretic and he also the to which his tracts a As Cromwell and Parliament see Islamic as gendered and complex for and political power, so Milton is willing to the with for his own the tracts claim that the of the infidel is us now of in the Milton's writings on divorce