The English Reformers under Edward VI and his enlightened advisers, including Archbishop Cranmer, took liberal views of marriage, and were prepared to carry through many admirable reforms.  The early death of that King exerted a profound influence on the legal history of English marriage.  The Catholic reaction under Queen Mary killed off the more radical Reformers, while the subsequent accession of Queen Elizabeth, whose attitude towards marriage was grudging, illiberal, and old-fashioned, approximating to that of her father, Henry VIII (as witnessed, for instance, in her decided opposition to the marriage of the clergy), permanently affected English marriage law.  It became less liberal than that of other Protestant countries, and closer to that of Catholic countries.

The reform of marriage attempted by the Puritans began in England in 1644, when an Act was passed asserting “marriage to be no sacrament, nor peculiar to the Church of God, but common to mankind and of public interest to every Commonwealth.”  The Act added, notwithstanding, that it was expedient marriage should be solemnized by “a lawful minister of the Word.”  The more radical Act of 1653 swept away this provision, and made marriage purely secular.  The banns were to be published (by registrars specially appointed) in the Church, or (if the parties desired) the market-place.  The marriage was to be performed by a Justice of the Peace; the age of consent to marriage for a man was made sixteen, for a woman fourteen (Scobell’s Acts and Ordinances, pp. 86, 236).  The Restoration abolished this sensible Act, and reintroduced Canon-law traditions, but the Puritan conception of marriage was carried over to America, where it took root and flourished.

It was out of Puritanism, moreover, as represented by Milton, that the first genuinely modern though as yet still imperfect conception of the marriage relationship was destined to emerge.  The early Reformers in this matter acted mainly from an obscure instinct of natural revolt in an environment of plebeian materialism.  The Puritans were moved by their feeling for simplicity and civil order as the conditions for religious freedom.  Milton, in his Doctrine and Discipline of Divorce, published in 1643, when he was thirty-five years of age, proclaimed the supremacy of the substance of marriage over the form of it, and the spiritual autonomy of the individual in the regulation of that form.  He had grasped the meaning of that conception of personal responsibility which is the foundation of sexual relationships as they are beginning to appear to men to-day.  If Milton had left behind him only his writings on marriage and divorce they would have sufficed to stamp him with the seal of genius.  Christendom had to wait a century and a half before another man of genius of the first rank, Wilhelm von Humboldt, spoke out with equal authority and clearness in favor of free marriage and free divorce.