6 - Milton, Satan, Salmasius and Abdiel

Summary

It makes as much sense to see Milton as an unconscious monarchist as an unconscious diabolist, an adherent without knowing it, not of the Devil's, but of the king's party. There are certainly passages in Paradise Lost which invite a royalist interpretation.

Thus William Myers in Milton and Free Will. In the preceding pages, Myers has been contrasting the allusiveness of Milton's expression of republicanism in his later poems with the obvious royalism prevalent in Heaven and the just as obvious ‘likeness between Satan's and the Good Old Cause’, in Paradise Lost.

There is nothing strikingly original in such observations, which were first made ages ago, and have sometimes led readers to believe that in Paradise Lost Milton reneged on his old principles and consigned rebels and republicans, including Cromwell, the regicides and perhaps his own former self, to Hell in company with Satan. Or conversely that being himself an old unrepentant rebel he must have had some sort of lurking sympathy for Satan's politics.

It will be my contention in this paper, not only that both interpretations are misguided, but that Milton's treatment of God's heavenly kingship and Satan's rebellion can be viewed as complementary elements in his republican strategy. In other words, I believe that he made monarchy in Heaven justify republicanism on earth–so that Myers's notion of Milton as an unconscious monarchist in fact makes much less sense than Blake's remark about his being ‘of the Devil's party without knowing it’, which at least did not invite a directly political reading.