Milton’s ‘Radicalism’ in the Tyrannicide Tracts

Abstract

In the major political prose works which he published from 1649 to 1654, Milton argues that it was not the parliamentarians but Charles Stuart and his supporters who were the real rebels during the wars of the 1640s. He claims that during this period, the parliamentarians did not fight to overturn law, church, and government, but to preserve peace, to maintain the old, orthodox form of Christianity which had only partially been re-established in England, and to defend English law and the civil liberties it safeguarded. He disavows any hostility to true monarchy and asserts the right of all peoples to choose for themselves whatever form of government they wish. He argues that, since by 1649 Charles Stuart had long been deposed, there was no regicide but merely a legal execution, one which was also consistent with the ancient constitution of England and the political thought of the champion of ancient Roman laws and customs, Cicero. All of this supports several recent accounts of Interregnum political thought and rhetoric and challenges much of the work, from Christopher Hill on, which makes Milton out to be a radical.

Notes

1. Christopher Hill, Milton and the English Revolution (New York: Penguin, 1977), 5.

2. Michael Wilding, Dragons Teeth: Literature in the English Revolution (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1987), 19, 84, 57, 66, 77, 4.

3. David Loewenstein, Representing Revolution in Milton and his Contemporaries (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2001), 1, 2, 11; “Milton’s Nationalism and the English Revolution: Strains and Contradictions,” in Early Modern Nationalism and Milton’s England, ed. David Loewenstein and Paul Stevens (Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 2008), 25–50; “Late Milton: Early Modern Nationalist or Patriot?” Milton Studies 48 (2008): 53–71.

4. Timothy Morton and Nigel Smith, “Introduction,” in Radicalism in British Literary Culture, 1650–1830, ed. Timothy Morton and Nigel Smith (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2002), 8.

5. Nicholas McDowell, The English Radical Imagination: Culture, Religion, and Revolution, 1630–1660 (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 2003), 1–4, 47–48. For other accounts of Milton which emphasize his “radicalism” and commitments to “revolution” and “rebellion,” see Merritt Y. Hughes, “Milton as a Revolutionary,” in Ten Perspectives on Milton (New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 1965), 240–75; “Milton, John,” in Biographical Dictionary of British Radicals in the Seventeenth Century, ed. Richard Greaves and Robert Zaller, vol. 2 (Brighton: The Harvester Press, 1983); Sharon Achinstein, Milton and the Revolutionary Reader (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1994); John Rogers, The Matter of Revolution (Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 1996); Barbara Lewalski, “How Radical Was the Young Milton?” in Milton and Heresy, ed. Stephen Dobranski and John Rumrich (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1998), 49–72; John Rumrich, “Radical Heterodoxy and Heresy,” in A Companion to Milton, ed. Thomas Corns (Oxford: Blackwell, 2001), 141–56; Nigel Smith, Is Milton Better than Shakespeare? (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2008).

6. J. C. Davis, “Radicalism in a Traditional Society: The Evaluation of Radical Thought in the English Commonwealth 1649–1660,” History of Political Thought 3 (1982): 194, 203, 197, 204.

7. Conal Condren, The Language of Politics in Seventeenth-Century England (New York: St. Martin’s Press, 1994), 143, 115, 160, 127, 158, 162. As Condren notes, his argument is in the spirit of J. C. D. Clark’s Revolution and Rebellion: State and Society in England in the Seventeenth and Eighteenth Centuries (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1986).

8. Glenn Burgess, The Politics of the Ancient Constitution (Houndmills, Basingstoke: Macmillan, 1992), 95. All three of these scholars have elaborated upon these views in their essays in English Radicalism, 1550–1850, ed. Glenn Burgess and Matthew Festenstein (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2007).

9. Milton’s usage in the poetry also conforms with this usage. See “rebel,” “revolt,” and their cognates in A Concordance to Milton’s English Poetry, ed. William Ingram and Kathleen Swaim (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1972), 446, 457.

10. John Milton, The Tenure of Kings and Magistrates, in Political Writings, ed. Martin Dzelzainis (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1991), 4. Further references to this work are to this edition and are included in the text. In the rest of the essay, I refer in the same way to the following editions of Milton’s prose works: Eikonoklastes in Answer to a Book Intitl’d Eikon Basilike, The Portrature of his sacred Majesty in his Solitudes and Sufferings, in vol. 3 of The Complete Prose Works of John Milton, ed. Merritt Y. Hughes (New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 1962); A Defence of the People of England by John Milton, an Englishman in reply to A Defence of the King by Claudius Anonymous, alias Salmasius, trans. Claire Gruzelier, in Political Writings; John Milton Englishman Second Defence of The English People Against the Base Anonymous Libel, Entitled The Cry of the Royal Blood to Heaven, against the English Parricides, trans. Helen North, in vol. 4 of The Complete Prose Works, ed. Don Wolfe (New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 1966).

11. Defensio Prima, in vol. 7 of The Works of John Milton (New York: Columbia University Press, 1932), 246.

12. The identification with, and citation and imitation of, Cicero runs through all four tracts. See John Hale, “Milton and the Rationale of Insulting,” in Milton and Heresy, 159–75; Milton’s Languages: The Impact of Multilingualism on Style (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1997), 93–102; Martin Dzelzainis, “Milton and the Limits of Ciceronian Rhetoric,” in English Renaissance Prose: History, Language, and Politics, ed. Neil Rhodes (Tempe, AZ: Medieval and Renaissance Texts and Studies, 1997), 203–26; Hugh Jenkins, “Quid Nomine Populi Intelligi Velimus: Defining the ‘People’ in The Second Defence,” Milton Studies 46 (2006): 191–209; Joad Raymond, “John Milton, European: The Rhetoric of Milton’s Defences,” in The Oxford Handbook of Milton, 272–90.

13. The readie and easie way to establish a free Commonwealth…, in vol. 7 of The Complete Prose Works of John Milton, ed. Robert Ayers, 2d ed. (New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 1982), 462.

14. Conrad Russell, The Causes of the Civil War (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1990), 23. See also Condren, The Language of Politics in Seventeenth-Century England, 120, 123. For the German provenance of some English ideas of self-defence during the period, see Robert v. Friedeburg, “‘Self-Defence,’ and Sovereignty: The Reception and Application of German Political Thought in England and Scotland, 1628–69,” History of Political Thought 23 (2002): 238–65.

15. Condren, The Language of Politics in Seventeenth-Century England, 125.

16. For the observation that Milton did not advocate regicide, see Martin Dzelzainis, “Milton and the Regicide,” in John Milton: Life, Writing, Reputation, ed. Paul Hammond and Blair Worden (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2010), 91–105; William Walker, “Antiformalism, Antimonarchism, and Republicanism in Milton’s ‘Regicide Tracts,’” Modern Philology 108 (2011): 507–37 (a version of “The Antiformalist Strain in Milton’s ‘Regicide Tracts,’” a paper I gave at the Ninth International Milton Symposium in London, July 2008).

17. Burgess, “The Impact on Political Thought: Rhetorics for Troubled Times,” in The Impact of the English Civil War, ed. John Morrill (London: Collins & Brown, 1991), 74.

18. Burgess, “The Impact on Political Thought,” 74.

19. Milton recalls the point in the Second Defence with a passing reference to “Sparta, a state endowed with an excellent constitution” (577).

20. See Walker, “Antiformalism, Antimonarchism, and Republicanism in Milton’s ‘Regicide Tracts.’”

21. See William Walker, “Rhetoric, Passion, and Belief in The Readie and Easie Way,” Milton Studies 52 (2011): 23–57.

22. Nicholas von Maltzahn, Milton’s ‘History of Britain’: Republican Historiography in the English Revolution (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1991), 198–223; Annabel Patterson, Reading between the Lines (London: Routledge, 1993), 225–36; Janelle Greenberg, The Radical Face of the Ancient Constitution: St. Edward’s ‘Laws’ in Early Modern Political Thought (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2001), 236–42; Peter Herman, Destabilizing Milton:‘Paradise Lost’ and the Poetics of Incertitude (New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2005), 61–81.

23. Greenberg, The Radical Face of the Ancient Constitution, 27.

24. For an account of the views of these authors and the contexts within which they were developed, see Quentin Skinner, The Age of Reformation, vol. 2 of The Foundations of Modern Political Thought (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1978), 239–348.

25. Blair Worden, “Milton and Marchamont Nedham,” in Milton and Republicanism, ed. David Armitage, Armand Himy, and Quentin Skinner (Cambridge: Cambridge Univesity Press, 1995), 168.

26. I find no evidence of Milton’s heretical antitrinitarian beliefs in the tyrannicide tracts; neither do those who have looked for it there. See John Rumrich, “Milton’s Arianism: Why It Matters,” in Milton and Heresy, 75–92; Stephen Dobranski, “Licensing Milton’s Heresy,” in Milton and Heresy, 139–58; Martin Dzelzainis, “Milton and Antitrinitarianism,” in Milton and Toleration, ed. Sharon Achinstein and Elizabeth Sauer (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2007), 171–85. For the scant evidence of Milton’s millenarianism in these works, see Barbara Lewalski, “Milton and the Millennium,” in Milton and the Ends of Time, ed. Juliet Cummins (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2003), 13–28; Stella Revard, “Milton and Millenarianism…,” in Milton and the Ends of Time, 57–62. Dobranski and Rumrich claim that “for Milton, the desirability of toleration followed from his authentically Protestant devotion to individual interpretation of scripture and an Arminian emphasis on the dignity of human will and reason” (“Introduction: Heretical Milton,” in Milton and Heresy, 5). But in the tyrannicide tracts, Milton nowhere retracts the explicit pejorative reference to Arminius we find in Areopagitica, and he avoids the kind of direct discussion of predestination, grace, and freedom of the will that, in De Doctrina Christiana, reveals his Arminian inclinations. As for the monism that is sometimes taken to be a component of Milton’s radicalism and that, according to Rogers, underlies Milton’s “liberalism” in tracts such as The Tenure and A Defence, Rogers provides no evidence of it from these tracts. That is because, as Stephen Fallon rightly observes, “there is little conclusive evidence” of Milton’s “materialist monism” in these works. See Rogers, The Matter of Revolution, 103–12; Fallon, Milton among the Philosophers (Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 1991), 96.

27. For the qualified “radicalism” of this argument, see Dzelzainis, “Introduction,” in Political Writings, ix–xxv; Stephen Fallon, “‘The Strangest Piece of Reason’: Milton’s Tenure of Kings and Magistrates,” in The Oxford Handbook of Milton, ed. Nicholas McDowell and Nigel Smith (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2009), 241–51.

28. A Declaration of the Parliament of England, Expressing the Grounds of their late Proceedings, And of Setling the present Government In the way of A Free State (March 22, 1649), in vol. 1 of The Struggle for Sovereignty, Seventeenth-Century English Political Tracts, ed. Joyce Lee Malcolm (Indianapolis, IN: Liberty Fund, 1999), 386–87.

29. See Davis, “Radicalism in a Traditional Society”; Alan Cromartie, “The Rule of Law,” in Revolution and Restoration: England in the 1650s, ed. John Morrill (London: Collins & Brown, 1992), 55.

30. See, for example, Russell, The Causes of the English Civil War; John Morrill, “The Religious Context of the English Civil War,” in The Nature of the English Revolution (London: Longman, 1993), 45–68; Austin Wollrych, Britain in Revolution 1625–1660 (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2002); Steve Pincus, 1688: The First Modern Revolution (New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 2009).

31. Patrick Collinson, The Reformation (New York: Modern Library, 2006), 18.

32. John Coffey, “Puritanism and Liberty Revisited: The Case for Toleration in the English Revolution,” The Historical Journal 41 (1998): 973.

33. Nicholas Tyacke, “Puritanism, Arminianism, and Counter-Revolution,” in Origins of the English Civil War, ed. Conrad Russell (London: Macmillan, 1973), 143. Tyacke elaborates upon the point in Anti-Calvinists: The Rise of English Arminianism c. 1590-1640 (1987; Oxford: Clarendon Press, 2011).

34. Von Maltzahn, Milton’s ‘History of Britain,’ 198–223. For the dating of the composition of The History of Britain, see von Maltzahn, Milton’s ‘History of Britain’; Blair Worden, Literature and Politics in Cromwellian England (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2007), 410–26; Martin Dzelzainis, “Dating and Meaning: Samson Agonistes and the ‘Digression’ to Milton’s History of Britain,” Milton Studies 48 (2008): 160–77.

35. See Ruth Mohl’s edition of the Commonplace Book, in vol. 1 of Complete Prose Works, ed. Don Wolfe (New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 1953); Thomas Fulton, Historical Milton (Amherst, MA: University of Massachusetts Press, 2010).