Just four days after the date of the letter to Heimbach, i.e. on the 12th of November, 1656, there took place an event of no less consequence to the household in Petty France than Milton’s second marriage, after four years of widowerhood.  It was performed, as the Marriage Act then in force required, not by a clergyman, but by a justice of the peace, and is registered thus in the books of the parish of St. Mary Aldermanbury, London, under the year 1656:  “The agreement and intention of marriage between JOHN MILTON, Esq., of the Parish of Margaret’s in Westminster, and MRS. KATHARINE WOODCOCKE, of the Parish of Mary’s in Aldermanbury, was published three several market-days in three several weeks, viz. on Wednesday the 22nd and Monday the 27th of October, and on Monday the 3rd of November; and, no exceptions being made against their intention, they were, according to the Act of Parliament, married the 12th of November by Sir John Dethicke, Knight and Alderman, one of the Justices of Peace for this City of London."[1] Of this KATHARINE WOODCOCK (the “Mrs.” before whose name does not mean that she had been married before) we learn farther, from Phillips, that she was “the daughter of Captain Woodcock of Hackney”; and that is nearly all that we know of her family.  A Captain John Woodcock, who is found giving a receipt for L13 8_s._ to the Treasurer-at-War on Oct. 6, 1653, on the disbanding of his troop, may possibly have been her father, as no other Captain Woodcock of the time has been discovered.[2] There is reason to believe that Milton had not been acquainted with the lady before his blindness, and so that, literally, he had never seen her.  Not the less, for the brief space of her life allotted to their union, she was to be a light and blessing in his dark household.

[Footnote 1:  Given in Gentleman’s Magazine for June, 1840; but I owe my copy to the kindness of Colonel Chester, who took it direct from the Register of St. Mary, Aldermanbury; and who supplies me with the following information in connexion with it:  “It is generally said that the marriage took place in that church; but this, I think, may be doubted.  I noticed, in several instances, that, when the religious ceremony was performed after the civil one, the fact was recorded; but it is not so in this case.  I think that the City marriages at that period usually took place in the Guildhall, where a magistrate sat daily; though I believe they were sometimes solemnized at the residence of one of the parties.”]

[Footnote 2:  Phillips; Hunter’s Milton Gleanings, p. 35.  Colonel Chester tells me that, although Katharine Woodcock is described in the Register as “of the parish of Mary’s in Aldermanbury,” he found no trace of her family in that parish at the time.  “There were Woodcocks there at a much earlier period (say 100 years before); but about this time I found only one burial, that of Michael Woodcock, whose will I have since looked at, but which does not mention her.”  The conjecture that Mr. Francis Woodcock, minister of St. Olave’s, Southwark, was a relative, receives no support from what is known of his principles (see Vol.  III, 184).  A contemporary Puritan divine, Thomas Woodcock, for some time minister of St. Andrew Undershaft, is found living at Hackney after the Restoration.]