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Source: John Milton, Areopagitica and Other Political Writings of John Milton, Foreword by John Alvis (Indianapolis: Liberty Fund, 1999).
We cannot put online the same edition of Milton's texts used in this Liberty Fund book for reasons of copyright. However, we have other editions of Milton's Prose Works online to which we have linked. The texts used in Alvis's edition are:
Alvis also wrote brief introductions to each selection which we also include here.
AREOPAGITICA
By a decree of Charles's Star Chamber July 11, 1637, the licensing of all
printed works was deputed to the two archbishops, the chancellors of Oxford
and Cambridge, and the Bishop of London, thereby insuring that control
would ultimately fall to Archbishop Laud. Although Milton expected prior
censorship to be relaxed under the revolutionary regime, on June 14, 1643,
Parliament passed an ordinance providing for licensing the press. Milton composed
Areopagitica as an appeal to Parliament to reconsider its recent decision,
arguing that England now deserved a press freed from most of the restraints
that the king had imposed. Milton published his pamphlet in 1644
under a title intended to recall the usages of ancient Greece. The Areopagus
was a court and senate of oldest Athens composed of about three hundred
members elected by the entire body of free Athenian citizens. Its name derives
from the site of assembly, a hill within the city dedicated to the god Ares. Although
Milton writes the appeal in the form of a public address to the legislative
body in the manner of the Greek orator Isocrates, he never intended that
it be delivered as an actual speech before Parliament. The argument failed of
its practical purposeÑParliament continued to impose constraints of prior licensing
upon authors.
THE TENURE OF KINGS
AND MAGISTRATES
The frst edition of The Tenure of Kings and Magistrates was published
in February 1648, a second in February 1649. From the argument itself one
can perceive easily enough the political stimulus that impelled Milton to write
the tract. Milton envisions two opponents: on the one hand, those who would
blame the parliamentary forces for having taken up arms against their legitimate
king; on the other hand, those (generally Presbyterians) who, having
stood against Charles initially, experienced misgivings subsequently and drew
back from executing the defeated monarch. Against the frst, Milton, employing
a very broad survey of authors who defended the justice of opposing and
of killing bad rulers, draws upon classical authorities and Christian writers.
Against the rebels who turned back at the point of regicide Milton conducts a
much more circumstantial argument that turns upon several contested issues
attached to particular events during the Civil War. The chief of these events
were the negotiations conducted between Charles and the Presbyterian faction
in Parliament that resulted in the king's subscribing to the Presbyterian concept
of church government embodied in their Òcovenant.Ó The resultant softening
of Presbyterian opposition to Charles, Milton along with other Independents
interpreted as a bid on the part of Presbyterians to make a separate
peace for the beneft of their sect and for the purpose of combating the rising
inßuence of Independents who found their strength in the army.
DEFENCE OF THE PEOPLE OF ENGLAND
In the reaction to Parliament's execution of Charles I probably no single writing
posed such a threat to Milton's party as the indictment of their deed by
Claude Salmasius (1588 Ð1653) in a lengthy Latin tract entitled Defensio
Regia pro Carlo Primo. Salmasius enjoyed a distinguished reputation as
the successor to the chair of the famous humanist J. C. Scaliger at Leyden,
and after the publication of his attack on the English regicides he was received
at the court of Queen Christina of Sweden. Salmasius's Defence argued monarchist
fundamentals as well as making an extended case against the parliamentary
rebels for having broken their oaths of fealty to Charles, for having
incited the realm to revolt, and for having executed the king without just cause
or due process of law. Salmasius drew upon philosophical sources, scriptural
interpretation, and the legal customs of England as he understood these.
In February 1651 Milton brought out his reply, Defensio pro Populo
Anglicano in Latin, at the behest of Parliament acting in his capacity of Secretary
of Foreign Tongues, a post to which he had been appointed in March
1649. Milton responds to Salmasius in kind following his opponent's argument
chapter by chapter and offering his own view of the philosophical tradition,
scripture, and the British constitution as well as quite a different understanding
of the events leading to the trial and execution of the king. Milton
also follows Salmasius in a vituperative, satirical invective that argues the man
as frequently as the principle. Thus Milton will ridicule his adversary for having
changed sides in controversy, for meddling in the affairs of a nation foreign
to him, and for having written in the pay of the son of the king he champions.
Milton's Defence is called the First to distinguish the work from another
included in this volume in which he replies to a renewed attack mounted by
an anonymous follower of Salmasius the year after the First Defence was
published. Salmasius also wrote his own reply, which was published posthumously
in 1660.
SECOND DEFENCE OF
THE PEOPLE OF ENGLAND
The work now generally referred to as Second Defence of the People
of England was written in Latin (Joannis Miltoni Angli Pro Populo
Anglicano Defensio Secunda) and directed against a proroyalist diatribe
also in Latin composed anonymously and entitled The Cry of the Royal
Blood to Heaven Against English Parricides. A Frenchman, Alexander
More, was known to be the editor of the piece considered by Milton's party offensive
to their cause. More was an itinerant scholar who had recently been
ejected from an academic post in Middleburg for misconductÑapparently the
sort of misconduct of which Milton makes More the butt of his ridicule in the
pamphlet before us. Beyond the hearty invective, however, lie the important
issues of the revolution, the case against Charles, the defense of Commonwealth
policy, Milton's measured brief for Cromwell, and of great interest for
the modern student of the poet-pamphleteer, Milton's own apologia for his political
conduct as well as his account of his project for the furtherance of liberty
on several frontsÑpersonal, domestic, ecclesiastical, and civil.
THE READIE AND EASIE WAY TO
ESTABLISH A FREE COMMONWEALTH
Soon after the execution of Charles I the Rump Parliament had abolished the
offce of king, declaring it dangerous to liberty, unnecessary, and burdensome.
Eleven years later England seemed to be on the point of restoring a king in
the person of the son of the lately deposed monarch. On February 21, 1660,
the Rump, at the instigation of Maj. Gen. George Monk, readmitted members
who had been purged by Colonel Pride in 1648. Thus swollen with new
members tending to Presbyterianism and monarchy, Parliament appeared
ready for a return to monarchial government, and the question of the quali-
fcations for voting on new M.P.s set for April 26 loomed with some urgency.
Milton frst wrote an open letter to General Monk calling upon him to support
a republican regime strengthened by a perpetual grand council. Then, after
Monk had entered London on February 6, Milton wrote and hastily had
published the frst version of The Readie and Easie Way to Establish a
Free Commonwealth; And the Excellence Therof Compar’d with
the Inconveniencies and Dangers of Readmitting Kingship in This
Nation. Even after it had become certain that the impending parliament
would be composed of those favorable to the return of royalty, Milton rushed
through the press an enlarged edition of Easie Way just prior to the return of
Charles II in May of 1660. Failing as he had to avert the reversion of his
country to its pre-Commonwealth status, Milton nevertheless left in this appeal
to republicans his most detailed plan for consolidating the gains of the revolution
in a regime at once popularly based and arranged as an early version
of the federal system of compound government later to be adopted in the American
Constitutional Convention.
MR. JOHN MILTON'S CHARACTER
OF THE LONG PARLIAMENT
Replying to Salmasius in the First Defence Milton had said the government
obtained under the Commonwealth was not the best conceivable but the best
that could be had under the circumstances. How severe was the qualification
Milton had in mind may perhaps be gathered from what he admits in the following
selection from his History of Britain. This description of the failings
of offcers in Cromwell's party was written probably in 1648 as a digression
from Milton's account of similar failings among the British in the era soon after
the Roman removal. From the parallels he draws between the squandering of
two opportunities for establishing a broad liberty one can gather the difficulty
Milton perceived a brave people confronted in wielding the weapon he here
refers to as the two-edged sword of freedom.
FOREWORD BY JOHN ALVIS:
MILTON'S POLITICAL WRITINGS
Throughout his career as poet, political theorist, and embattled publicist,
John Milton pursued the one paramount project of discovering
ground for his love of liberty in laws of nature and of nature’s God.
This effort required a delay of his plans for a national epic during a
two-decade interval wherein Milton produced a series of prose works
defending and seeking to affect the course of the Puritan revolution.
Inspired by specific occasions, these writings were responses to antagonists
within his party, preemptive strikes against Royalist partisans,
or appeals to Parliament. Though Milton professed to deprecate these
pamphlets as work of his “left hand,” they develop a carefully articulated
course of thought and reveal connections between principle and
consequence on the order of acuity one looks for in works of more
than partisan polemical intent and transitory significance.
Milton concerned himself with a diversity of issues: church government,
divorce, freedom of thought, speech, and press, British constitutional
history, church-state relations, the characters of regimes,
the political implications of Christianity, the nature of representation
in Parliament, the interdependence of civil and personal virtue, the
progress of Reformation. Diversity of subject answers always, however,
to the unifying theme of preparing individuals to understand
and cultivate that coordination of freedoms and responsibilities that
Milton identified in the phrase “Christian liberty”—that is, the freedom
to work out one’s salvation won for all mankind by the Savior’s
intercession, example, and express teachings.
We should not be surprised therefore to discover that religious and
political issues are throughout the prose writings inseparably intertwined. Milton’s life as religious controversialist parallels his changing
affiliations in political controversy. The young man destined, as
he thought, for the clergy, first made common cause with Anglicans
against papist oppression. “Church-outed” by his refusal to subscribe
to oaths of conformity, Milton subsequently joined the Presbyterians
in their repudiation of the episcopal form of Protestantism, only to
break with John Knox’s sect when it became clear that the Presbyterians
meant to establish another national church. During the Civil
War, Milton initially found his party with the Independents, but
eventually he ceased to hold communion with any sect and ended by
constituting himself a church of one, professing the unique theology
worked out in his posthumously published The Christian Doctrine.
Similarly, in politics Milton began by accepting a monarchy prescribed,
he acknowledges, by British tradition, then transferred his
allegiance to the parliamentary revolution while maintaining that his
opposition to Charles I was a matter of resisting not monarchy but
tyranny. Appealing to the right of the people to establish such government
as they approve, Milton supported the Commonwealth and
Oliver Cromwell but thereafter argued the right of a minority to act
for the people against a return to royal government. He reposed his
allegiance consecutively in the people, then in the Long Parliament,
then in the Rump, then in Oliver Cromwell and his army, then, after
Cromwell’s death, in the restored Rump, then in the reseated full Parliament,
and, at last, on the eve of the Restoration, in General Monk.
Against tyrant—as Milton judged Charles to be—and bishops
Milton used the sword of a Presbyterian Parliament; against the Presbyters’
usurpation of conscience he invoked a purged Parliament representing,
he was aware, a minority. Against the Parliament remnant
he appealed to the troops of a military dictator whom Milton considered
a justifiable monarch. Against the return of king and bishops,
Milton reverted to a lesser evil in his first weapon, a Presbyterian Parliament.
Up through Cromwell’s Protectorate Milton was bargaining
for better terms, an ever-widening scope for the independent conscience.
After Cromwell’s death he sought to salvage the one indis-pensable thing—a Protestant republic—by yielding on almost everything
else: on tithing, on an established church, on a Parliament expanded
to include his inveterate Presbyterian opponents. When he
appealed to Monk in the letter that presented his eleventh-hour
scheme for sustaining a republic, Milton was willing to impose liberty
by force on a recalcitrant majority of the population. Presumably he
did not know that General Monk was already compounding with
Charles II for a Stuart restoration. At the end of his twenty years of
pamphleteering, with most of his confederates dead or on the way
to prison or execution, a Milton now blind and forced into hiding
found himself without a church and without a party.
His enemies charged both blindness and isolation to a bad cause
or inconsistency in a dubious one. The alternative lies in supposing
that a prudent consistency of principle required Milton to change
affiliations by adjusting to altered circumstances and by distancing
himself from associates less firm in their adherence to the main point.
That can be determined, if determined it can be, only by considering
the force of the argument that recorded the transitions, the most
substantial portions of which are represented in this collection of the
political writings. Milton’s career may be viewed as a continuing argument
and self-examination, the chief stations of which the following
synopsis will touch upon.
Areopagitica attests Milton’s hopes for the reformers who would
come to constitute the Long Parliament. The pamphlet is dedicated
to that body, and its famous peroration on the nation’s rousing from
its long sleep under monks and prelates envisions all the good to be
expected from continued reformation. Even under Tudor and Stuart
monarchs censorship had been somewhat porous, and Milton himself
had been able to publish half a dozen tracts without passing them before
the eyes of a licenser. Parliament proposed no greater restrictions
than authors had previously evaded.Nonetheless, Milton expects better
from those who have stood out against Charles and his prelates.
Unlike his previously published divorce tracts (Doctrine and Discipline
of Divorce in 1643, The Judgement of Martin Bucer in 1644) that had subjected Milton to some notoriety, the argument for a free press
provoked little response. An unconvinced Parliament went forward
with its restraints upon what it deemed offensive publication. The interest
of Milton’s essay lies not in its effects—evidently it had none—
but in its intrinsic merits of reasoning upon the scope and limits of
political speech.
The Tenure of Kings and Magistrates (February 1648), arguing circumstantially
from Charles’s bad faith dealing with Cromwell’s Parliament
in the final months of the Civil War, attempts to convert, or at
any rate to neutralize, a Presbyterian faction, which, after first opposing
the Royalists, thereafter broke with an Independent-dominated
House of Commons over the question of what to do with the defeated
king. Against the Presbyterians-turned-Royalist Milton argues
chiefly the pusillanimity of their having become thus belatedly squeamish
after years of armed conflict during which they tried their best to
kill Charles in combat. Why do they now pull back from an execution
decreed after due judicial process? The more universal significance
of the pamphlet derives from Milton’s effort to discover theoretical
grounds in reason and revelation for setting limits to the authority of
monarchs and for punishing kings who overstep those boundaries.
Of the four works written to justify the parliamentary cause in
the Civil War—Tenure of Kings and Magistrates, Eikonoklastes, A Defence
of the English People, and The Second Defence—the first Defence is the lengthiest and most circumstantial. Milton wrote in response
to an indictment of the Independents published in late 1649 by the
famed continental scholar Salmasius (Claude de Saumaise). Milton’s
opponent’s Latin work had been titled Defensio Regia (A Defence of the
King) and had been addressed to the Stuart heir, Charles II. Milton’s
reply, written upon commission of Parliament, appeared in February
1651 bearing the title Joannis Miltoni Angli Pro Populo Anglicano Defensio
contra Claudii Anonymi, alias Salmasii, Defensionem Destructivam;
Milton had it reprinted in 1658 with fairly extensive additions. The
text presented in this collection is the later, expanded version referred
to subsequently by one of its variant abbreviations Def. 1.
A reader today will likely direct his interest toward the key ideas
that associate Def. 1 with Milton’s other political writings. In line with
Tenure of Kings and Magistrates, Milton proposes in Def. 1 that one distinguish
between kings proper—who by their devotion to the common
good deserve allegiance—and tyrants who, ruling for their own
interest at the expense of their subjects, ought to be resisted and, if
the means are available, deposed or even slain. Milton also invokes
Aristotle’s Politics as he had in Tenure of Kings and Magistrates to make
a further distinction based on the four kinds of kingship Aristotle says
are subordinate to law and the one form, pambasileia, which acknowledges
no restraint upon the will of the monarch (p. 132). However,
there may be a difference from Tenure of Kings and Magistrates in the
emphasis Milton now gives to church-state relations in Def. 1. Quite
clearly he makes in the latter a large assertion regarding the source of
a tyranny unique to Christendom. This new form of tyranny unanticipated
by Aristotle and Cicero perverts Gospel liberty because,
from Milton’s point of view, secular authority may not justly employ
civil coercion to produce doctrinal uniformity in religion. It is within
this conception of a Christian liberty necessary for determining from
scripture alone what to believe and thereupon freely living pursuant
to such beliefs that Milton equates tyranny with the ruler’s attempt to
enforce orthodoxy of doctrine and uniformity of church discipline
and liturgy.
The Second Defence of the People of England seeks, as had Def. 1, to
reply to the partisans of Charles by upholding the right of Parliament
to war against Charles and to execute the defeated enemy. This time,
however, Milton found himself obliged in view of personal attacks
launched by an anonymous author to vindicate not only his cause but
also his own character and role in the revolution. Consequently, large
portions of the work are personal apologia accompanied with vivid,
if not always edifying, counter invective directed against the man
Milton supposed to have been the author of The Cry of the Royal Blood
to Heaven Against the English Parricides.
The other subject of the Second Defence is Oliver Cromwell. Milton considers himself called upon to rescue Cromwell from the aspersions
cast his way in The Cry, but he may also have been impelled by his
own awareness that the deeds of the Lord Protector posed a serious
problem for such a thinker as Milton prided himself upon being—
one for whom consistency of principle was the touchstone guaranteeing
self-respect and courage. The difficulty existed because championing
Cromwell required speaking on behalf of a powerful figure
who in turning out a parliament and ruling through the army seemed
to have gathered in his hands fully as much power as Charles, or
rather more. Without the title of king, was not Cromwell subject to
the same onus against arbitrary power as Charles Stuart?
Cromwell can best keep his claim to the honors due the "pater
patriae" if, but only if, he can reverse his present inclination to side
with that Presbyterian faction bent upon substituting their own version
of a state-sponsored clergy for the bishops they have displaced.
Milton enjoins Cromwell to “leave the church to itself,” by which
he means to require of Cromwell a positive effort in the direction of
disestablishment of religion, entailing the abolition of laws taxing
Englishmen for support of clergymen. Milton makes the principle as
plain as he can state it: “I could wish that you should take away all
power from the church” (p. 406).
Generally speaking, Cromwell must preside over a government
that governs less. Milton would have him institute fewer new laws
than he abrogates old ones: “laws have been provided only to restrain
malignity; to form and increase virtue, the most excellent thing is
liberty” (p. 407). Finally, the failed advocate of removing prior restraints
upon publications renews his plea for “freedom of inquiry”
(p. 407). Cromwell will forfeit his greatness if he should favor the repressive
element of his party over the libertarian.
The more radical contractarian feature of the doctrine first argued
in Tenure of Kings and Magistrates still obtains: Cromwell’s tenure
as chief magistrate rests, as had Charles Stuart’s tenure of his kingship,
upon Cromwell’s observance of that natural, if implicit, understanding
between rulers and ruled, which lays it down that the ruler forfeits his authority once he begins to govern with a view to self-interest at the
expense of the common good of the people. The common good
Milton tends to view under the aspect of liberty, and liberty he tends
to view, at least in the period from 1640 to 1660, in terms of a salutary
but not an inevitable progression from what he terms private to
what he terms “civil” freedom. On the political front that progress
moves from ecclesiastical liberation (congregational replacing hierarchical
organization) to republican government dominated by an aristocracy
of Protestant leaders who act in the name of the people even
if they cannot count on popular approval. This progress from one
recovered liberty to the next constitutes the historic drama; in order
to take a part in that drama Milton chose to put aside for a time his
poetic ambitions.
One may gather further indications of Milton’s reservations regarding
Commonwealth achievements and his recognition of notable
limitations of Puritan policy from the characterization of the revolution
Parliament inserted as a digression into his History of Britain (included
in the present volume as Mr. John Miltons Character of the Long
Parliament). These observations were written most probably sometime
in 1648 after Milton had had time to assess the illiberal turn given
the revolution by Presbyterian ambitions toward establishmentarianism,
by Parliament’s continuation of the Royalists’ restraints upon free
speech, and by various repressive measures deemed necessary by the
victorious Roundheads that bore down hard on the liberties of local
communities and individuals within them. Milton seems to have considered
his own personal financial reverses—suffered largely because
his wife’s family were loyalists—to have been a parcel of the victor’s
reliance on oppressive, if not downright vindictive, administration of
their newly acquired offices. Still, by far the graver offense in Milton’s
eyes was his party’s violation of that particular liberty won by Christ’s
blood and the birthright de jure, though under neither kings nor Parliament
de facto, of every Christian soul. The Puritan cohort had
tainted their good cause, Milton maintained, by selling Christian liberty
for such emoluments as hireling ministers could snatch from their Anglican predecessors while committee men for their own gain practiced
a similar debauchery upon civil freedom. In the Character Milton
comes near stating outright the revolution has failed, and he does state
clearly enough that his fellow partisans squandered the best chances
of England for that full liberty that he had envisioned as his country’s
reward for assuming world leadership in reform.
The Readie and Easie Way to Establish a Free Commonwealth holds
interest for us as a record of Milton’s final thoughts on the constitutional
crisis that had absorbed his energies for two decades and now
seemed to threaten his position, certainly, his life not improbably.
The treatise has besides an importance out of all proportion to its
brevity because it reveals the positive side of an argument Milton had
hitherto conducted chiefly from the negative. Here he not only recasts
the liabilities of monarchy but also itemizes the advantages of a
practical and immediate republican remedy. The impending Parliament
must seat members predominately “well-affected,” meaning:
opposed to monarchy, resolved against any reinstitution of a House
of Lords, and sympathetic to the Good Old Cause. This urgent expedient
merely gives force to the purpose of fashioning a polity adapted
to advancing religious reformation as a confirmed way of life for the
British people. That purpose in turn creates the genetic code that will
find articulation in every feature of the new body politic.
Perhaps the most remarkable feature of Milton’s proposal lies
in its scheme for transforming England into a federation of semi-independent
counties, “every county . . . made a kind of subordinate
commonwealth.” He urges a compound government on the supposition
that national concerns diverge from local. The national legislative
body would confine itself to matters of foreign policy, war, and
“rais[ing] and manag[ing] the public revenue”(p. 427). The counties
would send representatives to the national legislature and keep in
their own hands the administration of civil law, elections of magistrates,
and education. Milton seeks to remove some of the odium toward
Parliament that had been aroused in the smaller towns and the
countryside by Cromwell’s “committees” (p. 432). But there are also sufficient reasons of principle for the idea of decentralizing. Milton
thinks a citizenry’s exercise of its freedoms instills love of independence
as well as energy and competency in the conduct of public business.
From such a vantage a large, centralized government—even if
it be the arm of a commonwealth—appears halfway to the despotism
and sloth of a centralized monarchy. Milton acknowledges that the
great failing of his party was its inability to put England on a course
tending toward decentralization during, or at least after, the Civil
War (p. 426). He takes confidence, however, from the example of the
Dutch states, which have shown how even an excess of decentralization
(individual states may nullify without limit) has produced vigorous
industry and resolute Protestantism.
Milton would thus erect his commonwealth on the foundation of
a new aristocracy determined by election rather than birth or royal
patent. The electorate, one observes, has already been winnowed of
the “disaffected,” leaving the reins of political power in the hands of
men antimonarchical, antiprelatical, and pro-Reformation. Now, at
the moment when he perceives England in such peril that he risks
nothing further by plain speaking, Milton in this his most openly revolutionary
work deals explicitly with a matter that may be discerned
in earlier writings by investigation but that never before had been so
manifest. Milton’s political thinking veers toward democratic or seemingly
democratic principles of contract when his object is to contest
the prerogatives of monarchs. Yet when it comes to envisioning the
terms of an actual workable model of a republic, Milton’s distrust of
the capacities of the populace comes to make itself felt. He devises institutions
that in some sort consult the people so as to be able to claim
the sanctions of general consent. At the same time, however, Milton
conceives the necessity of so distancing the legislature from the general
populace as to insulate policy-making from popular clamors. Accordingly,
in the present model he proposes to moderate the democratic
feature of nationwide elections with the aristocratic device of
a pyramidal electoral scheme. He devises a combination of successively
narrowing suffrages with successively refined rosters of candi-dates. Obviously Milton desires to see an aristocracy arising from a
popular base so as to combine the advantages of consent-grounded
authority with the less universally distributed virtues of intelligence,
stability, and deliberative ability, not to say, dedication to Protestant
reform. Milton’s aim in this final effort is the same as that which underlines
both Defences, The Tenure of Kings and Magistrates, Areopagitica, and Of Education as well as the antiprelatical arguments and even the
divorce tracts: to seek in a select minority of Protestant anti-Royalists
the seedground for a commonwealth devoted to recovery of the civil
liberty produced by ancient republics combined with that inner, private
liberty to be had only by adding to classical republicanism the
purifying zeal of a Christianity intent on perpetual reform.
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