In the early years of the English civil war John Milton turned his mind from the poetic arts and committed himself to writing some of the most searing pamphlet polemic of the 1640s. With the nation convulsed by violence, he set about finding causal explanations for the revolutionary ferment, and saw its roots in the 1530s and the unfinished nature of the Protestant Reformation. Only by completing the work of Reformation, Milton thought, would the English come closer to God and lasting peace.

Such arguments had domestic as well as national urgency for Milton, much in need of peace himself, as he tried to extricate himself from his stupendously misguided marriage to Mary Powell, half his age and from a royalist family. These struggles led the republican and future regicide apologist to write the first of several scandalising, sometimes bracingly misogynistic, pamphlets in favour of divorce, featuring an unlikely monarchical hero: ‘Harry VIII’.

Evangelical protestantism, rapacity and, above all, the promotion of family characterised both men

Evangelical protestantism, rapacity and, above all, the promotion of family characterised both men

The Doctrine and Discipline of Divorce (1643) exulted in Henry VIII’s conduct in the Great Matter of his divorce, since it revealed ‘all the tyranny of Rome by discovering this which they exercised over divorce, and to make [Henry] the beginner of a reformation to this whole kingdome by asserting… the right of just divorce’. Heroic, rational divorce, in Milton’s telling, was the Reformation in its purest, butchest guise, a liberation from the deathly constrictions of Roman Catholic custom. That English ecclesiastical law had not been sufficiently updated, and still forbade divorce except in........

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