¹ Research for the present study of these works was made possible by a grant from the American Association of University Women in 1953–54.

² Ernest Sirluck has called attention to several such shifts in his unpub. Ph.D. dissertation, “Milton and the Law of Nature” (Univ. of Toronto, 1948), pp. 9–56: In 1641 Milton found no fault with regal supremacy so long as the king supported the “one right discipline” in the church. In 1643–44 he recognized a government based upon parliamentary supremacy over the king. In 1649 he upheld the regicide, the newly established commonwealth without king or House of Lords, and the popular-sovereignty theory of government. In 1651 he reasserted this theory but also defended Pride's Purge (which excluded the majority of the representatives from the Commons and left the government in the hands of the remaining “Rump” Parliament) on the theory that the “better part” were worthy to rule the entire nation. In 1654 he denounced that Rump Parliament as having been justly deposed by Oliver Cromwell, indicated approval of the subsequent selection of the Little or Barebone's Parliament from among the Congregational and Sectarian churches (thus giving support to the theory of government by the “Saints”) but approved as well of its dispersal for political ineptitude, and also waxed enthusiastic about Cromwell's protectorate.

³ Studies in Milton (Lund, 1918), pp. xvi-xix; Milton and the Puritan Dilemma (Toronto, 1942), p. xx (a most illuminating study of Milton's relation to Puritan ideas and experience); “Milton and the Law of Nature,” pp. 202–243.

⁴ New Haven, 1915, pp. xxxix. Subsequent references to this tract will be to Clark's very useful edition which presents both versions for easy comparison; references to Milton's other tracts will be to volume and page of the Works of John Milton, ed. Frank A. Patterson, Columbia ed., 18 vols. (New York, 1931–38).

⁵ Milton and Forbidden Knowledge (New York, 1955), p. 147; Milton and the Puritan Dilemma, p. 288; Milton in the Puritan Revolution (New York, 1941), p. 287.

⁶ The validity of this assumption and method has been demonstrated by David Masson, Life of John Milton, 7 vols. (London, 1871–94); William Haller, Rise of Puritanism (New

⁷ Davies, Restoration of Charles II, pp. 355–363.

⁸ Of Civil Power was registered on 16 Feb. and first advertised in the contemporary newsbook, the Publick Intelligencer, No. 163, 7–14 Feb. 1659, p. 221. More precise dating is not possible, as the tract is not contained in George Thomason's extensive dated collection of Civil War pamphlets (from which source I have, whenever possible, supplied month and date of appearance for tracts mentioned in this study). The Thomason Catalogue does list The Likeliest Means among works acquired in Aug. 1659, but does not assign a specific date; the first advertisement in the news-books is in Mercurius Polilicus, No. 585, 1–8 Sept.1659, p. 713. See J. Milton French, Life Records of John Milton (New Brunswick, N. J., 1956), iv, 253–254, 273–275.

⁹ Defensio Secunda (VIII, 221–223).

¹⁰ He had criticized Oliver's government in regard to just these tendencies in Defensio Secunda (VIII, 229–239).

¹¹ The government-regulated newsbooks from Sept. 1658 to Feb. 1659 reprinted lengthy excerpts of such eulogies and pledges of support from cities and counties all over the nation, from the army and navy, and from many Presbyterian and Congregational churches. Typical is the address from Bridgewater, Publick Intelligencer, No. 149, 23 Oct.-1 Nov. 1658, p. 922, which declared Richard's calm succession to be a great blessing, “as if the God of Israel again had set up a Joshua to compleat that work which his servant Moses had brought to so good an issue.”

¹² An example is “The Humble Address of the Alderman, Recorder, Burgesses, Gentlemen, Ministers… Within the Town and Borough of Stamford in the County of Lincoln,” which asks that “a Godly painfull preaching Ministry may have all due encouragement,” that an effectual course may be taken “for the setling of Church government according to the word of God,” and that “the suppressing of Popery, Heresy, Blasphemy, Prophaneness, and all designs for the subversion of Magistracy and Ministry… may be effectually endeavored” (Publick Intelligencer, No. 160, 17–24 Jan. 1659, p. 162).

¹³ Defensio Secunda (VIII, 221–223).

¹⁴ See Edmund Ludlow, Memoirs, ed. C. H. Firth (Oxford, 1894), ii, 73–76; Davies, Restoration of Charles II, Chs. v and vi.

¹⁵ The Harringtonian tracts of this period set forth the characteristic government machinery of James Harrington's Oceana (1656)—an agrarian law, a bicameral legislature with one house proposing measures and another voting, an annual rotation of parliament members and an elaborate secret balloting procedure—and manifested such faith in it that they saw no need to restrict the electorate to the “well-affected,” as did most other republicans. See Harrington's Art of Lawgiving (1659), and Politicaster (Aug. 1659), and his followers' Proposition in Order to the Proposing of a Commonwealth or Democracie (14 June 1659), and Petition of Divers Well-A ffected Persons (6 July 1659). The Levellers (relatively unimportant in 1659 and in part absorbed by the Harring-tonians) manifested in a few tracts such as England's Safely in the Law's Supremacy (23 June 1659, pp. 12–14) their characteristic distrust of all government, their plan to protect the people from it by a fundamental constitution or “Agreement,” and their model for an annually elected House of Commons.

¹⁶ For this position see A Declaration of the Well Affected to the Good Old Cause in the Cities of London, Westminster, and Southwark (2 May 1659); J[ohn] S[treeter], A Shield Against the Parthian Dart (22 June 1659); and A Model of a Demo-craticall Government (31 Aug. 1659).

¹⁷ The pamphlet is so dated in the Columbia MS.; there is no record of contemporary publication, the first edition being that of John Toland, in A Complete Collection of the Historical, Political, and Miscellaneous Works of John Milton (London, 1698), i, 779 ff. See French, Life Records, iv, 276.

¹⁸ The Derby Petition (Sept. 1659), in Sir Richard Baker, Chronicle of the Kings of England, continued by Edward Phillips (London, 1684), p. 655, contains an explicit statement of the army's view of its protective functions. And the army constantly set forth some variety of Select Senate plan —in their meetings with republicans before the recall of the Rump (Ludlow, Memoirs, ii, 73–76), in their petitions to the Rump (Humble Petition of the Officers, May 12, 1659, pp. 10–11), and in their abortive plans for settlement after the Rump's deposition (Guizot, Richard Cromwell, ii, 290–291). Cf. Davies, Restoration of Charles II, Ch. ix.

¹⁹ See A Needful Corrective or Ballance in Popular Government (1659), attributed to Vane in a contemporary note on the title page of the Bodleian copy, and Vane's similar plans reported by the French Ambassador Bordeaux (Guizot, i,185, 474–475). Aligned with this position were some Quakers, e.g., George Bishop, A Tender Visitation in Love (1659), and certain Baptists and Fifth Monarchy men, e.g., John Rogers, Diapoliteia (1659), pp. 76–77.

²⁰ Declaring that they would recognize “No King but Jesus,” and calling for the substitution of Israel's laws for those of England, they often proposed a government similar to that of the Barebone's Parliament of 1653, or else a ruling Sanhedrin of 70 holy persons. See John Canne, A Seasonable Word to the Parliament-Men (10 May 1659), p. 5; [Peter Chamberlin], Declaration and Proclamation of the Army of God (9 June 1659), pp. 1–7; and John Eliot, Christian Commonwealth (26 Oct. 1659), preface.

²¹ This argument for reconciliation was used by several Non-Separating Congregationalist leaders including John Owen, Phillip Nye, Joseph Caryl, William Bridges, and Matthew Barker, and also by Ludlow and Vane. See William Clarke, Papers, ed. C. H. Firth, Camden Soc. (London, 1901), iv, 123, 185; Baker, Chronicle, p. 670; Ludlow, Memoirs, ii, 139–170; and Archibald Johnston, Lord Waris-ton, Diary, ed. James D. Ogilvie (Edinburgh, 1940), iii, 145–146.

²² This tract was printed from MS in the Columbia ed. of the Works, xviii, 3–7; there is no record of contemporary publication but it is of course quite possible that published copies did not survive.

²³ This move began Monk's ambiguous and probably largely unpremeditated role in the Restoration. See Davies, Restoration of Charles II, Ch. x.

²⁴ Thomason dates this tract 3 March, though as French points out (Life Records, iv, 300) there is some evidence for publication in Feb. See Clark's edition (pp. vii-xvii) for a résumé of the internal evidence establishing the time of composition.

²⁵ A Declaration of Many Thousand Well-Affected Persons, Inhabitants in and about the Cities of London and Westminster, 20 Jan. 1660, presents an example of the argument that the Rump's power should be continued because it alone could cope successfully with the crisis.

²⁶ See Calendar of the Clarendon State Papers (Oxford, 1932), iv, 425, 543—hereafter CCSP. Richard Baxter indicates in Reliquiae Baxterianae, ed. Matthew Sylvester (London, 1696), p. 216, that some moderate Presbyterians supported this agitation.

²⁷ Bordeaux reported that Monk was “believed to have come to London with the ambition of raising himself to a post similar to that held by the Prince of Orange” (Guizot, ii, 351). A pamphlet entitled Pedigree and Descent of His Excellencie, General George Monk (3 Feb. 1660) gives evidence of a movement to prove his royal blood and hence his claim to the throne.

²⁸ For a collection of these petitions from cities and counties all over England see A Happy Handfull, ed. John Williams, 2 May 1660.

²⁹ An example is No New Parliament (12 March 1660), pp. 1–5.

³⁰ “The Digression,” History of Britain (x, 319–321). Although this work was not published until 1670, and the digression not until 1681, it was begun about 1645 and finished before 1660; thus Milton's castigation of the Long Parliament was already on record at this writing. See J. H. Han-ford, A Milton Handbook (New York, 1926), pp. 88–91.

³¹ Since this tract's proposal of a new parliament constitutes a complete shift in Milton's argument of the past few months for perpetuation of the parliament in power, it was doubtless written when the calling of a new parliament had become an absolute certainty, that is, sometime after the Long Parliament's adjournment on 16 March.

³² For reports of the various proposals see John Thurloe, A Collection of State Papers, ed. Thomas Birch (London, 1742), VII, 887; Robert Wodrow, History of the Sufferings of the Church of Scotland (Edinburgh, 1721), i, 8–12; and CCSP, iv, 653–658. Most popular were the Isle of Wight conditions subscribed by Charles I in 1648, which would give parliament command of the army and navy and the right to appoint principal officials, and would suspend Episcopal church government for three years while a synod settled controversial issues. More rigid plans called for forcible imposition of Presbyterianism upon the nation, and permanent banishment of the queen, Edward Hyde, and other members of the court. Still other Presbyterians wanted to recall the king without formal conditions, trusting in his generosity.

³³ Dated 23 March 1660 were N. D., A Letter Intercepted and Plain English to His Excellencie the Lord Monk and the Officers of the Army, both imploring Monk to define an unambiguous policy of support to the commonwealth, and also News From Brussels, a satire on the Royalist pamphleteers' portrait of Charles as a saintly, all-merciful Protestant king. An apparently contemporary note on the Bodleian copy of this last tract attributes it and An Alarm to the Officers and Soldiers of the Army (April [?] 1660) to the combined efforts of a group of republicans and radicals, including Sir Henry Vane, Thomas Scot, Major Salloway, Livewell Chapman, and Marchamont Nedham, and some or all of these may well have constituted a coalition responsible for this flurry of radical pamphlets in late March and early April. Roger L'Estrange, who answered these pamphlets as soon as they appeared, believed Milton to be part author of Plain English and An Alarum—see his Treason Arraigned (3 April), pp. 2–3, Double Your Guards (5 April), and Physician Cure Thyself (23 April). Milton's authorship is doubtful, but the resemblance of his polemic tactics in these weeks to the tactics employed in these radical tracts suggests his close sympathy with the group producing them.

³⁴ Interestingly enough, Sir Henry Vane also took over Harringtonian language and certain aspects of the Harring-tonian model in his 1659 tract, A Needful Corrective or Bal-lance, perhaps also in an effort toward unity among commonwealth supporters.

³⁵ The terminus post quem is evident from Milton's reference to the sentencing of Griffith to the Tower on 2 April, and the terminus ante quem, 20 April, from Thomason's date for L'Estrange's reply to Milton, No Blinde Guides (Barker, p. 393).

³⁶ This meeting was alluded to in numerous tracts and letters, and described in detail in Baker's Chronicle, p. 693.

³⁷ Matthew Griffith, The Fear of God and the King (London, 1660), pp. 50–54.

³⁸ Sirluck's argument is summarized as follows: “The social contract was a suitable reply to the Royalists' cry of monarchy by divine right, but it led to the supremacy of the majority. Of what avail was it against the contention, levelled simultaneously from left and right and… indisputably true, that the Commonwealth was imposed, against the will of the majority in parliament and nation, by a minority possessing command of the army? To meet this attack Eikonoklastes hinted, and the first Defence developed, a new doctrine of ‘divine right’: the right of the regenerate to execute the will of God. In the first Defence this coexists, incongruously, with the social contract; in the Second Defence, although there are some verbal reminiscences of the earlier theory, the doctrine of the ‘better part’ in effect stands alone.” See his review, “That Grand Whig Milton,” MP, lii (Aug. 1954), 65).

³⁹ Scurrilous allusions to Milton's personal and political life appeared in such tracts as The Character of the Rump (17 March 1660), pp. 2–3; A Free Parliament-Lelany (17 March 1660); William Collinne, The Spirit of the Phanatiques Dissected (24 March 1660), and others. For a collection of these references see W. R. Parker, Milton's Contemporary Reputation (Columbus, Ohio, 1940), pp. 98–103. Milton added several passages to his new version specifically answering such attacks (pp. 12–13, 33).

⁴⁰ In late April, a flood of Royalist “Declarations” appeared with this burden, from the “nobility, knights and gentry” of Essex, Oxford, Hertford, Kent, London, and elsewhere. For an investigation of the considerable amount of conscious deception in such Royalist propaganda see R. S. Bosher, The Making of the Restoration Settlement: The Influence of the Laudians (London, 1951), pp. 130–138.

⁴¹ See An Alarum, and Eye-Salve for the English Armie (1660).

⁴² Ludlow, Memoirs, ii, 242, 251–252.

⁴³ See Davies, Restoration of Charles II, pp. 334–337.

⁴⁴ Readie and Easie Way, p. 41. The italicized portion, except for the phrase “0 earth, earth, earth,” is an addition to the second version.

⁴⁵ This definition of goals (the common formula of the Puritan cause) was utilized by Milton throughout his polemic. In 1659 his conception of religious liberty involved virtually complete Protestant religious toleration and also church disestablishment; he referred to it in the Readie and Easie Way as “This libertie of conscience, which above all other things ought to be to all men dearest and most precious” (p. 36). In the same tract he defined civil liberty as the enjoyment of civil rights, the due administration of justice, and the “advanc'ments of every person according to his merit” (pp. 37–39).

⁴⁶ Readie and Easie Way, p. 17.

⁴⁷ Milton acknowledges Aristotelian influence in the Readie and Easie Way (p. 31), and refers frequently to the republican models of Greece and Rome as well as to those of modern Venice and the United Netherlands (pp. 24, 26, 29). See Z. S. Fink, The Classical Republicans (Evanston, 111., 1945), for a discussion of this indebtedness. The superiority of a commonwealth form is unequivocally asserted in the Readie and Easie Way (pp. 15, 20), and Brief Notes (vi, 160). Milton held this view since 1649, and his departures from it were more apparent than real. His support of Cromwell in 1654 was coupled with a plea to the people to make themselves worthy to elect parliaments, and with an instruction to Cromwell to share power with a council of able men (Defensio Secunda [vii, 229–235])—provisions which seem to envisage the protectorate as a kind of aristocratic commonwealth with unicameral legislature and council of state. His failure to recognize Richard's protectorate, his support of the army government as a second-best expedient only, and his extreme reluctance to propose a temporary monarchy have already been noted.

⁴⁸ An Arrow Against All Tyrants (London, 1646), p. 3.

⁴⁹ This doctrine, a constant point of reference in Milton's prose, was fully developed in the theological work, De Doclrina Christiana, ca. 1658–60. (For dating see Maurice Kelley, This Great Argument, Princeton, 1941, pp. 8–71.) In De Doclrina (xvi, 153–155) Milton offers the following definition: “CHRISTIAN LIBERTY is that whereby WE ARE LOOSED AS IT WERE BY ENFRANCHISEMENT, THROUGH CHRIST OUR DELIVERER, FROM THE BONDAGE OF SLN, AND CONSEQUENTLY FROM THE RULE OF THE LAW AND OF MAN; TO THE INTENT THAT BEING MADE SONS INSTEAD OF SERVANTS, AND PERFECT MEN INSTEAD OF CHILDREN, WE MAY SERVE GOD IN LOVE THROUGH THE GUIDANCE OF THE SPIRIT OF TRUTH.” Thus Milton favored few institutional restrictions so that the regenerate might use their liberty and thus develop in virtue.

⁵⁰ Readie and Easie Way, p. 39; “Proposalls” (xviii, 4).

⁵¹ A. S. P. Woodhouse has admirably schematized the various Puritan positions on this issue. The theocratic view merged or united the concerns, laws, and institutions of the two orders, giving complete dominance to the spiritual; in rigid Presbyterian theory this led to control of the state by the national church, and, in millenarian theory, to government by the “Visible Saints.” The segregationist position, maintained by the Levellers and some Baptists, asserted the quite distinct concerns and laws of the two orders and their institutions, thus completely separating them so that church and state could not coerce or directly assist each other. The broad center position, occupied by Non-Separating Congre-gationalists, Independents, and most Sectaries, distinguished to some degree between the laws and concerns of the two orders and the functions of their institutions, but did not wholly segregate them. See “Introduction,” Puritanism and Liberty, pp. 14–100.

⁵² Of Civil Power allows the civil authority to exercise some restraint over blasphemy, idolatry, and Roman Catholicism (pp. 10–11, 19–20), but evidently on the ground, in the first two cases, that these can be discerned as evil by the natural law itself, the law directing civil governments (p. 40). The Likeliest Means permits the magistrate to offer a certain, carefully defined financial aid to the church, but only out of what might be argued to be the church's own property, e.g., that expropriated by the state from the Roman Catholic Church at the Reformation (pp. 79–80).

⁵³ Readie and Easie Way, p. 28; Tenure (v, 57); Defensio (VII, 127–128).

⁵⁴ See the sermons of the Non-Separating Congregational-ists John Owen and Thomas Goodwin, cited in Geoffrey Nuttall, The Holy Spirit in Puritan Faith and Experience (Oxford, 1947), p. 110; and the writings of the Independent, John Goodwin, e.g., Anti-Cavalierisme (London, 1642), pp. 31–34, and of the Leveller, John Lilburne, e.g., A Copie of a Letter (London, 1645), pp. 1–7. Even Richard Baxter, a moderate Presbyterian, expressed some sympathy with this expectation in A Holy Commonwealth (London, 1659), pp. 221–223.

⁵⁵ Letter to a Friend (vi, 102–104).

⁵⁶ Brief Notes (vi, 156). Cf. Readie and Easie Way, p. 15; Defensio (VII, 157).

⁵⁷ Defensio (VII, 267).

⁵⁸ Brief Notes declares (vi, 158, 160) that the law of nature does not prescribe forms of government, but that free commonwealths have always been considered best “for civil, vertuous and industrious Nations.” Cf. Defensio (vii, 275279). Readie and Easie Way (p. 32), referring to I Samuel viii, suggests that God's law offers the same freedom and reiterates the same preference, and Defensio (vii, 77) gives a fuller exegesis of this reference: “It appears by God's own witness that all nations and peoples have always possessed free choice to erect what form of government they will, and also to change it into what they will…. A commonwealth, moreover, in the opinion of God, was, under human conditions, a more perfect form of government than a monarchy, and more useful for His own people; for He himself set up this government.”

⁵⁹ Readie and Easie Way, pp. 15–16. The very tenuous argument making Christ a good Commonwealthsman is as follows: “God in much displeasure gave a king to the Israelites, and imputed it a sin to them that they sought one: but Christ apparently forbids his disciples to admitt of any such heathenish government: the kings of the gentiles, saith he, exercise lordship over them; and… are call'd benefactors. But ye shall not be so: but he that is greatest among you, let him be as the younger; and he that is chief, as he that serveth…. That he speaks of civil government, is manifest…. And what government comes neerer to this precept of Christ, then a free Commonwealth.” See Mark x. 42–45; Luke xxii. 25–27. Cf. Defensio, vii, 145–159.

⁶⁰ De Doctrina (xv, 203–215; xvi, 153–163).

⁶¹ Milton and Forbidden Knowledge, p. 147 (see n. 5, above).

⁶² For this comparison see Woodhouse, “Milton, Puritanism and Liberty,” UTQ, iv (July 1935), 483–513.

⁶³ Readie and Easie Way, pp. 14, 32–34.