58 JOHN MILTON 
men, as they were called, men who would have trans- 
formed the Episcopal Church into a Presbyterian. 
Many of these soon passed on farther, and became 
Congregationalists or Independents. It was not doc- 
trinal questions that divided parties, it was not an 
affair of theology, but of ecclesiastical politics; repub- 
licanism was opposed to monarchy, alike in Church - 
and in State; Milton was from the first moment a 
Root-and-Branch man, his views were set forth with 
keen logic, invincible learning, and impassioned elo- 
quence; his pamphlets were read far and wide; he 
became a marked man, and the object of savage 
attacks. 
Curiously enough, the next series of Milton’s pam- 
phlets related to the subject of divorce, and were sug- 
gested by domestic difficulties of his own. A few 
miles from Oxford there lived one Richard Powell, a 
gentleman of good family and one of the county mag- 
istrates, a High Churchman withal and a stanch 
Cavalier. He had a large family of children and kept 
open house, and thither the Puritan poet turned his 
steps in May, 1643. Whether he went to talk about a 
debt of £500, which Mr. Powell had owed his father 
for sixteen years, or what other reason might have 
drawn him to that nest of royalists, does not appear. 
But when he returned to London in June, strange to 
tell, it was with one of the daughters, Mary Powell, as 
his bride. She was only seventeen, and as light- 
headed as Dora Copperfield. There was a brief frolic 
of cousins and bridesmaids, and then, when all had 
gone and the young girl was left alone in the society 
of this mighty thinker and scholar, more than twice 
her age, the sombre colour of such life soon came to 
