[3] This reconciliation could have come in part from the failure of the royalists, including Powell's family, to prevail during the English Civil War and the lack of justification to further distance themselves from Milton.
This marriage was far more successful than Milton's previous, but, like his first wife, Woodcock died from complications experienced while giving birth.
It is uncertain when the two first met, but Marvell knew Milton's works and included similar themes within his own poetry a few years prior.
Milton liked Marvell, and in his recommendation describes Marvell as[10] a man whom both by report, & converse I have had with him, of singular desert for the state to make us of; who also offers himselfe, if there by any imployment for him... if upon the death of Mr. Wakerly the Councell shall think that I shall need any assistant in the performance of my place (though for my part I find noe encumberances of that which belongs to me, except it be in point of attendance at Conferences with Ambassadors, which I much confesse, in my Condition I am not fit for) it would be hard for them to find a Man soe fit every way for the purpose as this Gentleman[11]The Council did not accept Marvell, and they instead made Philip Meadowes, a diplomat, assistant to Milton.
To Marjorie Nicolson, Milton spent his life combating and counteracting the philosophy of Hobbes, an individual that he believed was "The Atheist and Arch Heretic".
[15] However, this view was challenged a decade later by George Williamson, who believed that, in terms of philosophy and not theology or politics, Milton and Hobbes held similar beliefs.
Hobbes, according to Henry, was a follower of John Calvin's Psychopannychia, which "was a tract against the 'Anabaptist' doctrine of the sleep of the soul between death and resurrection, separating the two further.
Milton believed that the only way to stop Catholicism was to remove all centralised government and liturgical practices and, according to Timothy Rosendale, "he flatly denounces the liturgy as 'evil'" and as a "popish relic".
[20] Hobbes argued that this decentralisation could not have this effect because, as Patricia Springborg points out, the "national religions of the Reformed Church still retained theological doctrines which could give Roman Catholicism a foot-hold in the realm".