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Printed and the Bloudy Tenent – ridiculed the contortions caused by the state control of religion, exposed the illogicalities of non-separating Congregationalism and defended the Baptist argument for toleration. The ‘bloody tenet’ that he attacked was the belief that governments could impose a particular form of worship, a belief that led to the mutilation and even death of men and women seeking their own way to God. It was better to bear persecution by ungodly men than to seek to persecute others. It was said that, in Providence, Williams had first fallen off from his ministry, then from church fellowship, baptism, communion and eventually from all the current ordinances of the church. He was waiting for new apostles, ready to raise a new church from among the ruins of anti-Christian apostasy. The contemporary label for this was ‘seeker’, a description which Williams explicitly rejected, but there is some truth to the claim that he became ‘what the opponents of Separatism had always prophesied would be its reductio ad absurdum, the one-man church’.42 On 9 August, Parliament ordered the Bloudy Tenent to be publicly burned.

Pamphlets engaged with one another, in an escalating debate of increasing and immense vitality and creativity.43 Freedom of religious assembly was closely related to the issue of freedom of expression, and John Milton, who had introduced Williams to his publisher, also got into trouble on this issue.44 Milton married a woman half his age in May 1643 after a month of courtship. After a month of marriage he was convinced that it was a mistake: his seventeen-year-old wife was not bookish, resented the restraints of his style of life and was uninterested by his intellectual pursuits. In fact, she found his views detestable and profane. She deserted him for her parental home and Milton published The doctrine and discipline of Divorce in August 1643. It signalled a shift in Milton’s career, at least on his own retrospective gloss, from a concern with religious liberty towards ‘domestic’ liberty – marriage, freedom of speech and education. This has a half-appeal to the modern reader, or perhaps an appeal to half of modern readers: he argued that marriage should be a union of soul and intellect, and in the absence of that men had a right to divorce. To seventeenth-century readers this was less than half-acceptable, of course, and attracted criticism. In the course of 1644 this put Milton on course to an argument for freedom of expression. He published an enlarged edition in February. In July he published a pamphlet citing the respectable reformer Martin Bucer in support of his views. Shortly after, he published his important tract Of Education, which laid out an extremely demanding intellectual training for the young citizen, another signal contribution to his arguments for domestic liberty; it made no mention, however, of the training girls would receive in order to make them appreciative of the conversation of their husbands.45

The hostile response to his tracts on divorce persuaded Parliament to consider prosecution – he had not sought a licence for their publication. It was this that led him to denounce prior restraint of publications, in the justly famous Areopagitica, which appeared without licence in November. It is often glossed as advocating a free market in expression, in which bad opinions would be driven out by good ones, individuals would be free to develop their views, and knowledge would increase. In fact, as with the divorce tracts, there are ambiguities: he did not raise any objection to the suppression of royalist opinions in time of war and excluded Roman Catholics from these freedoms, for example. These exceptions reflected the purpose of free speech – the promotion of virtue in society. Milton retained an attachment to the virtue and power of an educated elite. His tract Of Education was a manual for leaders in a mixed government, of Lords and Commons, and his defence of free speech was directed primarily at them.46

John Milton’s Areopagitica argued against pre-publication censorship