1649 Better known today to students of English as the author of Paradise Lost (1667), John Milton was also a radical political activist and an opponent of inherited power and privilege – a republican in a monarchical age. He believed that natural law overrode the divine right of kings, and his politics were based on the idea, developed by the Dutch political theorist Hugo Grotius (1583–45), that monarchs ruled according to an implied contract between free individuals and their ruler, in which the people agreed to obey in return for peace and security of person and property under law.
Kings who broke this contract – those, for instance, who governed for themselves alone or for a clique instead of the common good – could be deprived of their power and replaced. That’s exactly what Parliament thought Charles I had done, and they fought and financed six years of bitter civil warfare to prove it. By the beginning of December 1648, the Parliamentary army’s victory was complete and the king was in prison.
But having fought and defeated him – indeed, as Milton argued, tried often enough to kill him in the field – some parliamentarians drew back from the prospect of trying the king for treason, deposing him and executing him if found guilty. Some of these foot-draggers were royalists; the majority belonged to the Presbyterian branch of the Protestant cause.
On 6 December, Colonel Thomas Pride put a brutal end to the debate by leading troops into the House of Commons to eject the temporisers. The rest, who came to be known as the ‘Rump Parliament’, quickly got on with the business of trying the king. A commission they set up found him guilty, deposed him and put him to death on 30 January. Milton almost certainly witnessed the public beheading of the monarch.
The Tenure of Kings and Magistrates, Milton’s polemic published only a fortnight after the king’s death, targets not the royalists – a lost cause so far as he was concerned – but those backsliding Presbyterians. In this, it might be said, he gives an early sign of the factionalism that would eventually undo Cromwell’s Republic.
What was the point, he argued, of waging war on the king, then refusing the logical outcome of that rebellion? In a sense they had already killed the king, in that they had deprived him of his official status – that second ‘body’ beyond the personal that bestowed monarchical authority.
Milton’s pamphlet attempted to persuade not only by its logic but also by a special kind of rhetoric that one might call ligature syntax. Here’s how it works:
Others, who have been fiercest against their Prince, under the notion of a Tyrant, and no meane indenciaries of the Warre against him, when God out of his providence and high disposal hath delivered him into the hand of their brethren, on a suddaine and in a new garb of Allegiance, which their doings have long since cancell’d, they plead for him, pity him, extol him, protest against those that talk of bringing him to the tryall of Justice, which is the sword of God, superior to all mortall things, in whose hand soever by apparent signs his testified wil is to put it.
If you parse, or diagram, this sentence, the main clause consists of a subject – ‘Others’ – and a predicate of four parallel verbs – ‘plead … pity … extol … protest’. All the rest is syntactically subordinate, serving to modify the main clause in one way or another. The relative clauses ‘who … Prince’ and ‘no meane … him’ are adjectival descriptors of those ‘Others’. ‘When … brethren’ is adverbial, telling when. So is ‘on a suddaine … Allegiance’, telling both when and how. The adjectival clause ‘which … cancell’d’ moves a further step down the ladder of subordination, modifying ‘Allegiance’, which is already serving as a modifier. On that same lower level is the clause ‘That talk … Justice’, which modifies ‘those’ (who would proceed with the trial).
Then, going even further down the ladder – to rungs three, four, five and (believe it or not) six below the main clause – Milton slips in the dagger. The ‘tryall’ is described as one ‘of Justice’, which in turn is modified by ‘sword’, and that again by ‘of God’, which is finally modified by the parallel clauses ‘superior … things’ and ‘in whose hand … to put it’.
To put it in terms of information, what was the big news that Milton was trying to convey? That it was God’s justice to kill the king. Only he couldn’t presume to say so directly; instead he had to bury the message deep in the bowels of one of the most complex English sentences ever published.
Anyway, it did the business – at least insofar as it got Milton a job in Cromwell’s government. In March of that year they appointed him Secretary for Foreign Tongues – in effect, their propagandist, or (in modern terms) spin doctor. His first job was to answer the highly effective Eikon Basilike (Sacred Image of the King), a miscellany – purporting to be written by the imprisoned Charles himself – of diary entries, pious reflections on the institution of monarchy and prayers for his enemies. Milton’s riposte, Eikonoklastes (The Image Breaker), did little to counter the effect of this masterpiece of royalist propaganda.
More successful – though for obvious reasons hardly a bestseller in his native country – was his answer (in Latin) to Defensio Regia, pro Carlo I, by Salmasius (Claude Saumaise, the French classical scholar). Milton’s Defensio pro populo Anglicano (1651) asked the European proponents of monarchy what business it was of theirs how the English worked out their own political destiny.
Other treatises followed, and defensios to even more absurd continental attacks, but they all wound up on the bonfire after the fall of the republican Commonwealth and the death of Cromwell. In the autumn of 1659 Milton himself was put in prison. His punishment might have been a lengthy stay there – or worse – had it not been for the intervention of his secretary, the metaphysical poet Andrew Marvell, by now an MP. By 30 May 1660, the Stuarts were back in the driving seat in the form of Charles II, newly ‘restored’ to the throne. Milton, now blind, got on with Paradise Lost.