_a_) _The views of Milton._--With the opening of the Stuart era, therefore, a reactionary policy with respect to divorce was established. For two centuries and a half thereafter the principles of the ancient canon law were administered by the English spiritual courts. In fact, it was now more difficult than before the Reformation to escape the marriage tie;[255] for the papal dispensation could grant no relief, and in consequence of the decrease in the number of restraints to a valid marriage, the decree of nullity was not so often a convenient subterfuge. Only the rich or noble were able to afford the costly remedy of a special act of Parliament to cure their matrimonial ills. Hence it is not a little surprising that the Puritan Revolution brought with it no change in this regard. One would naturally expect the Independents under Cromwell's leadership, by whom the remarkable civil-marriage law of 1653 was conceived, to relegate the whole matter of divorce and nullity to the temporal courts under proper legal conditions; yet there seems to be no record of such a course. [Footnote 255: JEAFFRESON, _Brides and Bridals_, II, 315, perhaps with too much emphasis, thus describes the effects of 32 H. VIII., c. 38: "It rendered wedlock easier of entrance, but closed all the many gates which had hitherto afforded spouses the means of escape from conjugal wretchedness.... The Elizabethan jest, that compared matrimony to a public rout, was no less applicable to wedlock in Catholic than to marriage in Protestant England; but whereas our ancestors before the Reformation could always get out of the press by a few permissible falsehoods and the payment of money, the marriage law of Protestant times declared that, having once forced their way into the crowd, they should remain in it till death came to their relief."]