Introduction

Summary

Sets out the book’s main themes: Milton’s anticlericalism; his enduring concern to maximize liberty of conscience for heterodox godly lay intellectuals; Milton’s republicanism and its relatively minor place amongst his priorities; his political writing to be understood as partisan and polemical, not as philosophy; “follow the particular”; Milton’s multifarious, unsystematic liberty-talk; “strenuous liberty;” Milton’s tolerationist thought as proceeding from the lower ground; Milton’s poetry and prose not politically at odds, but differing in subject matter, audience, and purposes; unrepentant politics of the late poems. Brief discussion of archive and methods; summary of chapters.

This book is a study of Milton’s priorities. It tracks continuity and change over Milton’s career, and aims to discern among his shifting concerns which ones moved him most deeply. It distinguishes cart from horse, means from ends, enduring from ad hoc commitments. Milton’s political views, like most people’s, are best understood in light of his substantive interests as he saw them. Milton’s Strenuous Liberty offers an account of what those interests were.

That Milton’s concerns shifted over time should come as no surprise. Writers change, respond to altered circumstances, and do different things in different books. Over nearly five decades, Milton wrote lyric, epic, and dramatic poetry, history, theology, polemic, and propaganda. He lived and wrote through civil wars, regicide and revolution, and several changes in revolutionary government culminating in the disaster (as he saw it) of the Stuart Restoration. As Latin secretary and propagandist for the revolutionary government, Milton had a hand, or at least a pen, in these events; that is why he was briefly imprisoned after the Restoration. He wrote his greatest poems in the aftermath of political catastrophe. Given the reversals of fortune Milton experienced, the continuity in his writing is more striking than the change.

Beyond these public events, three events in Milton’s personal life left the most pronounced impact on his literary career. In reverse chronological order, the last was his blindness, which became total in early 1652. The second was the disastrous beginning of his marriage to Mary Powell. Something went wrong between the romantically inexperienced thirty-three-year-old poet and his teenage bride in the summer of 1642, and though they later reconciled the experience left scars. The first event was at once the most consequential and the most obscure; it may have been more process than event, if by event we mean something that happens at one particular moment. I refer to Milton’s decision not to enter the ministry.

From childhood at least into his Cambridge years, Milton intended to become a minister. He decided against it somewhere in the 1630s. As Chapter 1 will discuss further, we do not know just when and why he arrived at this decision. Milton himself may not have known. Most likely he abandoned the idea of taking orders gradually, for a mix of ideological and personal reasons. However we understand the causal nexus, the outcome was clear: Milton chose not to take orders, and thereafter displayed a consistent antipathy to those who made the opposite choice. This antipathy is the more striking because all English clergy were not in fact his adversaries. In the religious controversies of mid seventeenth-century England there were clerical voices to be found on all sides, and some prominent Independent divines, such as John Goodwin or Roger Williams, were often aligned with Milton, or he with them. Milton, however, consistently assailed his clerical enemies without claiming his clerical allies. For examples of worthy ministers of the Gospel he looked to the past.

Milton’s antipathy to professional clergy, first visible in “Lycidas,” emerges fully in his antiprelatical tracts of 1641–2 and would remain prominent in his writing thereafter. Had Milton written nothing beyond the 1641–2 tracts one could read them as antiprelatical rather than anticlerical, with their hostility directed toward conforming English clergy in the Laudian years rather than clergy tout court. The subsequent course of Milton’s career makes this distinction less important. From the early 1640s on, Milton’s anticlerical charges remained basically consistent; what shifted, with the changes in the English church through the years of civil war, Commonwealth, and Protectorate, were the ministers against whom he made them. Milton would have no more use for Presbyterian or Independent ministers than he had for Laudian priests. He opposed them on similar grounds, in similar terms.

Anticlericalism has been a subject hiding in plain sight in Milton studies. All attentive readers of Milton’s work will have noticed it; this book argues for its central importance. It comes in early and stands fast; it motivates, reinforces, and explains other Miltonic positions. Some aspects of Milton’s anticlericalism were widely shared among radical puritans; others were more distinctive. In Milton’s case, his anticlericalism was linked to his understanding of the visible church, and his strong sense of the dignity of the lay believer. Today we tend to associate anticlericalism with antireligious or irreligious sentiment, skepticism, or unbelief. Such forms of anticlericalism can be found in the early modern period, but not in Milton. He regarded true religion as more important than anything else, including poetry, and took himself to be a more serious and faithful Christian than his clerical adversaries.

To describe Milton as politically motivated by anticlericalism frames the matter negatively, in terms of what he was against rather than what he was for. Such framing is justifiable in that a national church and publicly financed priesthood existed throughout his lifetime; he kept opposing them through the mid-century changes in church and state because he needed to. But one could also frame the matter positively, as follows.

At the heart of Milton’s public agenda, from the early 1640s to the end of his life, was a concern to maximize liberty of conscience for heterodox godly lay intellectuals, a class that included himself. This priority held constant; other matters were secondary. Since this will be one of this book’s main theses, it is worth pausing to gloss each of its weight-bearing terms.

Liberty of conscience, for Milton, encompassed a number of freedoms or reforms generally desired among mid seventeenth-century Independents and sectaries. These included the freedom to interpret scripture according to one’s own conscientious understanding; the freedom to express those interpretations in person or in print, without prepublication licensing; freedom to worship with impunity outside the national parish system; freedom from compulsory tithes. After Milton’s evidently conformist youth, he pursued this agenda through all the mid-century changes in church and state. Milton sought maximal intra-Protestant toleration because he argued from a minority position among Protestants, and he sought liberty of conscience for Protestants only. With the majority of his godly compatriots, Milton did not entertain extending liberty of conscience to non-Christians or to Roman Catholics.

Heterodox is preferred here to “heretical” for its greater neutrality. As Chapter 3 will argue, Milton did not own these terms; given their negative charges, one would not expect him to. He used “orthodox” in the standard positive Protestant sense, to mean “Protestant.” Nevertheless De Doctrina Christiana shows that Milton arrived at some theological opinions that most English Protestants, including a majority of his fellow puritans, would have regarded with discomfort or alarm: his antitrinitarianism, his mortalism, his allowance of polygamy and divorce, his unusual Christology (go ahead, call it Arian).¹ DDC shows furthermore that Milton was well aware that these views ran counter to received opinion and expected resistance.² Since DDC as we have it is the latest state of an unfinished manuscript compiled and revised over many years, there is no saying just when he arrived at its various heterodox views. After the hostile reception of his divorce tracts, Milton kept his more controversial theological opinions out of his published English prose; to what extent they figure in the late poems is a large and disputed subject. But Milton’s eventual opposition to any form of English national church was fueled by an awareness that his heterodoxies would be countenanced by no politically viable form of English national church.

Godly will be used synonymously with “puritan,” both terms taken broadly to denote early modern English Protestants who sought further reformation in the English church and visible holiness in themselves. This broad usage encompasses Presbyterians, Independents, sectaries, and unaffiliated believers such as Milton. The term “puritan” has prompted endless historiographical debate because it was originally an exonym, used pejoratively of the godly by their opponents, and because puritans in Milton’s time, like evangelicals today, were a heterogeneous group with no single theology, ecclesiology, or politics. As long as this heterogeneity is kept in mind, there need be no objection to “godly” or “puritan” as categories of analysis, and there need be no doubt that the terms apply to Milton.³ Many prominent features of Milton’s thought were widely shared among his fellow puritans. These include his view of the English Reformation as incomplete;⁴ his view of the early Christian church as a model for reform; his opposition to ceremony in worship; his fierce anti-Catholicism, and tendency to identify ceremonialists in the English church with Catholics; his priority of inward sincerity over external form; his political preference for the virtuous few over the sinful many. In other respects Milton held minority views among the godly, or views more typical of puritanism’s radical wing. These minority opinions include his rejection of Calvinist double predestination, his eventually total opposition to a national church, his hardline support for regicide and revolution, and his various heterodoxies. Milton wrote primarily for a godly audience, and engaged in intra-puritan polemic. This too was typical. English puritanism was full of divisions and disputations.

Intellectual: This is the respect in which Milton was most distinctive, not because the English godly lacked their share of intellectuals, but because intellectuals are nowhere numerous. (Milton’s poetic genius, of course, was much rarer still, and therefore politically irrelevant. Poets of genius are not an interest group.) Milton’s strain of radical puritanism had, from its earliest manifestations, a mandarin aspect, evident not only in the style of his arguments but in their substance. Areopagitica’s worry about the chilling effects of prepublication licensing upon intellectual exchange, for instance, was a highbrow concern; a far greater number of people were concerned about the ill effects of unlicensed printing.⁵ Milton knew his own gifts, as well he might, and from early on expressed a sense of himself as one set apart, bent on greatness.⁶ It is hard to fault Milton for his self-esteem, though as is often the case with abundantly gifted persons his gifts did not include an abundance of charity toward the less gifted.

Lay. This term will receive greatest emphasis in this study, because it has been least emphasized in prior scholarship. Much has been written about Milton’s heterodoxies, his puritanism, his intellectual and artistic development, his reading practices and sources, his sense of literary vocation. To these I would add his unusually strong sense of the rights and duties of a lay Christian, an identity even more fundamental to Milton than his identity as a poet. The concept of the priesthood of all believers was a foundational yet variously interpreted Reformation doctrine, derived from Martin Luther’s reading of 1 Peter 2.9.⁷ Milton took it further than Luther or most mainstream Protestants to effectively dissolve the distinction between laity and clergy. Milton’s strong sense of lay Christian dignity is the affirmative side of his anticlericalism. It justified his heterodoxies. It reinforced his self-esteem. It lent his poet’s vocation higher purpose.

Milton’s political choices proceeded from his judgments about which government, of the possibilities he saw at a given moment, would best support maximal religious liberty for heterodox godly lay intellectuals like himself. Thus when civil war began in 1642 he supported Parliament against the King; in 1649 he supported the proregicide minority within the Parliamentary coalition against the Presbyterian majority; in 1653 he supported Cromwell against the Rump; in summer 1659 he welcomed the Rump’s return; in later 1659–60 he desperately sought a settlement between Parliament and the Army that might stave off the return of the Stuart monarchy. By the spring of 1660 he would have accepted any government at all rather than the return of the House of Stuart, and he opposed the Stuart monarchy above all because he knew that it would roll back the religious liberties Independents had enjoyed during the Interregnum and reinstate diocesan episcopacy, “king and bishop united inseparably in one interest” (REW1, YP 7.357).

By comparison with his durable concern for godly Protestant liberty of conscience, Milton’s republicanism was a subordinate commitment, relatively low in the mix of his priorities. Whether, how, and how far the term “republican” applies to Milton depends, as such questions will, upon how the word is used. It will help to distinguish three senses, or families of sense. If we understand republicanism in the strict or constitutional sense, principled advocacy for government without a monarch, Milton was not a republican. He was not consistently antimonarchical.⁸ TKM argues for the right to depose kings who have become tyrants, not against monarchy in general. Eikonoklastes and the Latin Defenses justify the regicide, disparage Charles Stuart personally, assail royal prerogative rights, and deplore the common tendency to idolize kings, but stop short of principled argument for kingless government. 2 Def explicitly distinguishes between tyrants and kings,⁹ and includes extravagant praise of two monarchs, Queen Christina of Sweden and Lord Protector Oliver Cromwell. The closest thing to a full-dress antimonarchical statement Milton produced was The Ready and Easy Way (Feb.–Apr. 1660), dictated in haste as the tide was turning toward Restoration.¹⁰ Its scheme for a perpetual senate was a desperate effort to prevent the return of the Stuart kings by cementing in the unpopular status quo, and should be read as a provisional state-of-emergency proposal, as Milton himself indicates.¹¹

A second, broader sense of the term is that often described as classical or civic republicanism, a body of ideas about good government derived from ancient philosophers and historians and received in seventeenth-century England via Italian humanist political thought. If constitutional republicanism is a principle, classical republicanism is a syllabus. Scholars have given varying accounts of what the central classical republican ideas were, originally and in their early modern English reception: candidates include the rule of law, mixed government, consent of the governed, virtue as precondition for power, “neo-Roman” liberty.¹² There is greater consensus about the core of the syllabus: Plato’s Republic and Laws, Aristotle’s Politics and Nicomachean Ethics, Cicero’s De officiis, Polybius, Livy, Tacitus, Sallust, Machiavelli’s Discorsi. Milton knew these authors and texts, and drew upon them in his writing about politics.¹³ He drew upon them eclectically, as he did with all his reading, and there is no reason to believe that he saw “classical republicanism” as a distinct tradition or category, let alone one with which he consciously aligned. But if a republican is one informed or influenced by classical republican authors, Milton qualifies.

Third and last is the factional or party sense: republicans as opponents of particular monarchs or monarchical regimes, if not necessarily of monarchy in general. In revolutionary England, factional republicanism preceded the constitutional version: Charles I was defeated, tried, and executed, the Commons proclaimed England a Commonwealth, and principled arguments for kingless government followed.¹⁴ From the early 1640s on, Milton was deeply and consistently anti-Stuart. That deep-seated opposition drives his support for regicide¹⁵ and revolution in Tenure, Eikonoklastes, and the Latin Defenses, and his desperate proposal for a permanent senate in The Ready and Easy Way. How did he feel about the non-Stuart English monarchs of the period, Oliver and Richard Cromwell? If one supposes Milton a consistent antimonarchist, one would expect him to have opposed the Protectorate, and it has often been claimed that Milton’s fulsome praise of Oliver, Lord Protector in 2 Def (1654) was followed by a disaffection. Chapter 4 of this study argues that the evidence for Milton’s disaffection with Cromwell is thin. It is based mainly on inference from silence and on Milton’s post-Protectorate writings. After the fall of Richard Cromwell in April 1659, Milton threw in his lot with “commonwealthsmen” or supporters of the restored Rump Parliament, and spoke “the language of the good old cause” (REW1, YP 7.387). Even at that late stage, however, his support for the Parliament was equivocal. We should understand it not as Milton’s retrospective judgment on the failures of the Protectorate, nor as evidence of an abiding antimonarchism, but rather as his ad hoc response to the unstable, deteriorating political conditions of the moment. Whether a particular government would advance or restrict his religious liberty mattered far more to Milton than what form of government it was.

Milton’s most consistent political ideal, to the extent that he had one, was that of meritocracy, or aristocracy of virtue.¹⁶ The worthiest should rule, whoever they be. As Abdiel tells Satan in Paradise Lost, “God and Nature bid the same/ When he who rules is worthiest, and excels/ Them whom he governs” (PL 6.176–8). On this basis Milton justified Cromwell’s rule as Lord Protector:

[T]here is nothing in human society more pleasing to God, or more agreeable to reason; that there is nothing more just in a state, nothing more useful, than that the most worthy should possess the sovereign power. That you are such, Cromwell, that such have been your deeds, is acknowledged by all.

(CM 8.223)¹⁷

Forms of government might legitimately vary across time and place, depending on the circumstances and the moral condition of the people governed. “[T]he same government is fitting neither for all peoples nor for one people at all times; now one form is better, now another, as the courage and industry of the citizens waxes or wanes” (1 Def: YP 4.1.392, CM 7.190–3). A monarch might be suitable in a state where one person stood preeminent in virtue, as Milton claimed Cromwell did in 1654, but a hereditary monarchy is unlikely to produce this outcome: Kings, Milton observes, are not bred for excellence like Tutbury horses (Eikonoklastes 1st ed., YP 3.486). The right to rule derives from the people, and when a people’s condition changes or a ruler proves unworthy, the people have the right to change their governor or government by any available means.

Who are “the people,” though, and who may legitimately act on their behalf?¹⁸ In defending regicide and revolution, Milton encountered a problem that the Commonwealth and Protectorate governments faced throughout their existence: They claimed their right to rule from the English people, yet never enjoyed widespread popular support. The execution of Charles I was deeply unpopular even among the Parliamentary side. The Long Parliament had to be purged to bring it about, and the purged Parliament had only the barest claim to be considered a representative body. So the new regime’s claims to govern by consent had to be carefully qualified. Milton’s principal strategy was to ground political authority in virtue rather than numbers. The purged Parliament, being its “better and sounder part” (pars potior, id est sanior: 1 Def, CM 7.356–7) rightly represents the people. The “uprighter sort” of magistrates and of the people may determine when a king has become a tyrant (TKM, OM 6.154). A freedom-loving few may compel a slavish multitude, by force if persuasion will not serve (REW2, OM 6.511). But who decides who the virtuous few are? Robert Filmer put the objection plainly in 1652:

[N]ay J.M. will not allow the major part of the Representors to be the people, but the sounder & better part only of them, & in right downe termes he tells us to determine who is a Tyrant, he leaves to Magistrates, at least to the uprighter sort of them and of the people, though in number less by many, to judge as they finde cause. If the sounder, the better, and the uprighter part have the power of the people, how shall we know, or who shall judge who they be?¹⁹

Filmer’s is a telling objection, devastatingly so if we read Milton as committed to meritocracy as an absolute principle – that is, if we commit the error of reading him philosophically. Milton has no answer for it, in Tenure or elsewhere. He does not pause to explain who belong to the pars potior, id est sanior of the Parliament, or which magistrates constitute the uprighter sort. They are those who view the pertinent issues as he does. Milton does not discuss how the uprighter magistrates and people are to determine when a king has become a tyrant, or what to do when consensus on the matter is lacking. When he asserts in The Ready and Easy Way that “[t]hey who seek nothing but thir own just libertie, have alwaies right to winn it and to keep it, when ever they have the power, be the voices never so numerous that oppose it” (REW2, YP 7.455) who counts as a liberty-seeker goes unexplained. We need not imagine that Milton’s partisan assumptions were visible only to a political opponent such as Filmer. When Milton declared, in the first months of the Protectorate, that all acknowledged Cromwell to be the worthiest to rule, the claim would have struck friend or foe alike as brazen exaggeration. Cromwell himself was well aware that there was no consensus at home or abroad about the legitimacy of his new Protectorate; hence the usefulness of defenses like Milton’s. Because Milton was often in the position of defending unpopular views, he was much concerned with what, in the vocabulary of a later procedural liberalism, we would call minority rights. But he did not share the usual liberal concern to balance minority rights with majority rule. One can enlist Milton as an ally or precursor of modern liberalism only by reading him very selectively, and ignoring his substantive aims.

The qualifications, omissions, and special pleading in Milton’s political writing are there not because Milton was an incompetent political thinker, but because he was playing a weak hand. In writing on behalf of the Commonwealth and Protectorate Milton knew that he was defending unpopular regimes and needed to avoid majoritarian arguments.²⁰ Had Commonwealth or Protectorate commanded anything like a majority of the English people’s support, Milton would have claimed it. Virtue, however, may be asserted when one has neither public opinion nor law nor tradition on one’s side. Milton was not alone in making such arguments. He had precedent in the antidemocratic strain in classical republicanism, and in the medieval political theorist Marsilius of Padua, whose Defensor pacis (1324) lays out a similarly qualified understanding of popular consent.²¹ Others of Milton’s party drew similar distinctions between the representatives of the people, in whom authority justly lies, and the multitude, which cannot be trusted to act in its own best interests.²²

Milton’s antipopulism was at once strategic and sincere. There is no paradox in that; partisans normally believe their own arguments. When in Eikonoklastes he assailed the “blockish vulgar” (YP 3.339), “mad multitude” (YP 3.345) and “inconstant, irrational, and Image-doting rabble” (YP 3.601) for being taken in by Eikon Basilike, he was trying to counter the success of the king’s book by portraying its many sympathetic readers as gullible yokels. There is no reason to doubt that so indeed he saw them, and that he was frustrated by the failure of the English public to support the godly revolutionary cause. Milton’s long-standing moral and political elitism, which weighed the rights of the virtuous few over the sinful many, preceded his political engagements, and made it easier for him to dismiss a politically unsupportive majority as a rude multitude; that the multitude proved politically unsupportive reinforced his moral and political elitism.²³ His antipopulist sentiments may also be found in contexts where he was not arguing strategically, as in these lines he wrote for Jesus in Paradise Regained:

For what is glory, but the blaze of fame,

The people’s praise, if always praise unmixed?

And what the people but a herd confused,

A miscellaneous rabble, who extol

Things vulgar, and well weighed, scarce worth the praise,

They praise and they admire they know not what;

And know not whom, but as one leads the other;

And what delight to be by such extolled,

To live upon their tongues and be their talk,

Of whom to be dispraised were no small praise?

His lot who dares be singularly good.

The intelligent among them and the wise

Are few, and glory scarce of few is raised.

(PR 3.47–59)

If you are tempted to conflate Milton’s eloquent salvos against tyranny with an egalitarian or democratizing spirit, recall this passage.

To understand Milton on politics, one must keep in mind that he wrote as a polemicist and propagandist, not as a political philosopher. I draw the polemic/propaganda distinction in Jason Peacey’s terms: polemic is the broader category, “books produced with the intention of advocating, promulgating and propagating a political message to a public audience.” Propaganda is a subcategory, “polemical works which appeared with the connivance of those political figures whose interests were best served by the existence of such books, tracts, and pamphlets.”²⁴ Polemic can be written by anyone; propaganda requires some link to political power. Milton’s antiprelatical tracts, divorce tracts, and Areopagitica are works of polemic, as are his pamphlets of 1659–60: Of Civil Power, Hirelings, REW. The works he wrote on behalf of the revolutionary government – Eikonoklastes, the First Defense, and Observations on the Articles of Peace with the Irish Rebels – are works of propaganda. Indeed we could locate these works in a sub-subcategory of counter-propaganda, since they were commissioned responses to other propagandistic works: Eikonoklastes to Eikon Basilike, 1 Def to Salmasius’s Defensio Regia, Observations on the Articles of Peace to the Earl of Ormond’s Articles of Peace. Tenure is a borderline case. Milton wrote it as a private citizen, but possibly at the behest of someone involved with the trial proceedings against Charles I.²⁵ 2 Def is another borderline case. It continues the battle against Salmasius Milton joined in 1 Def, but we have no evidence that it was commissioned. (Pro Se Defensio, Milton’s third and least-remembered essay in that exchange, was almost certainly not commissioned; it is not a work of propaganda, but the continuation of what had become a personal pamphlet duel.)²⁶ While the term “propaganda” is most often used pejoratively today, my Peaceyan usage is descriptive. Milton himself took pride in the commissioned writing he did for the government, particularly 1 Def, which brought him a measure of international fame, or notoriety.

In his polemical writing Milton worked like an orator or attorney: he started with a position and gathered arguments to support it. He cared less about their compatibility than their overall effect. When writing in response, as in the Latin Defenses, the form and content of his work were necessarily shaped by the work he was answering. He was often working quickly, in response to rapidly shifting events, which in several cases (TKM, Likeliest Means, REW) shifted between the start of composition and publication, rendering some of his initial aims moot. He had little if any time for revision, editing, fact-checking, or proofreading; after he became fully blind in 1652 he composed by dictation, which necessarily loosened his control over the printed text. Small wonder that his rhetoric ran away from him on occasion, or that his arguments were not always compatible. The greater wonder is that they cohere as well as they do.

With his humanist learning and quick mind, Milton included a fair amount of philosophizing in his political writings. But there is a basic genre difference between works of political philosophy such as Leviathan or Oceana, whose primary aims are theoretical, and a polemical tract like Tenure, which starts from and justifies a partisan position, philosophizing ad hoc. Philosophers may also have their partisan commitments, and works of philosophy may also be influenced by concerns of the moment. But the basic difference remains. One could describe it in terms of genre, or method, or telos, or authorial cast of mind. Most political writing, like Milton’s, is polemical; works of political philosophy, then as now, make up a tiny fraction of political discourse. They are not therefore superior, merely atypical.

To describe Milton’s political writing as partisan and polemical rather than philosophical does not diminish it. To the contrary: it comes off better when understood for what it was. If we read Tenure or the Latin Defenses as essays in political theory, their partisanship must be counted as a serious flaw. If we read them as polemic or propaganda, Milton can be given due credit for making the best of a difficult case. Milton could not have provided an ideologically neutral description of the “uprighter sort” that would have satisfied a royalist like Filmer, but he was not trying to. In his political writings he pursued the usual polemicist’s aims of influencing the less committed and providing talking points for his own side.²⁷ As partisans generally do, he took for granted that his was in fact the side of virtue, for reasons too fundamental to require spelling out in the heat of rhetorical battle. There is no harm in including Milton in the history of English political theory so long as it is kept in mind that his political theorizing was occasional and instrumental, subordinate to his partisan interests. One aim of this study is to shift discussion of Milton’s politics from the ad hoc theorizing Milton produced to the substantive ends for which he produced it. If there is a precept I have tried to observe more often than any other, it is this: follow the particular. Or as Wittgenstein puts it “back to the rough ground!”²⁸

“Follow the particular” applies first of all to that Miltonic keyword “liberty.” Milton employed the rhetoric of liberty (or freedom, which he used synonymously) throughout his career: in his arguments against episcopal church-government, for divorce, against prepublication licensing, for the trial and execution of Charles I, against publicly financed ministers, for mutual toleration among Protestants, even in his choice of blank verse over rhyme in Paradise Lost. Liberty figures in Milton’s self-representation: He lost his eyesight, he writes in one sonnet, “in liberty’s defense, my noble task.” It connects to other keywords in his poems and prose: reason, virtue, free will, choice. It has long been placed at the heart of his thinking: Milton “look’d upon true and absolute Freedom to be the greatest Happiness of this Life, whether to Societies or single Persons” wrote John Toland in 1699.²⁹ Milton on liberty has been explored in a number of illuminating studies;³⁰ I depart from this body of scholarship mainly insofar as it treats Miltonic liberty as a single thing, a concept or value or goal or theory or organizing principle.³¹ “Liberty” in Milton is best understood rhetorically not systematically, as a word he used in multiple senses and contexts, to various ends.

“Liberty,” in the mid seventeenth century as before and since,³² was a flexible and contested term, positive in valence and adaptable to many agendas. The word appeared in hundreds of pamphlet titles during the crisis years of 1640–60, used most often in religious senses by the godly, and in political senses by the parliamentary side.³³ Liberty was also invoked by royalists, including the king. “I do stand more for the liberty of my people, than any here that come to be my pretended judges,” said Charles I at his trial.³⁴ In political usage, an older sense of liberty as permission or privilege (granted to some not all, revocable, and assuming a sovereign to grant it) coexisted in tension with an emerging sense of liberty as fundamental right, universal and inalienable.³⁵ The older sense of liberty as privilege appealed most readily to royalists, the newer sense of liberty as right to parliamentarians. “Christian liberty,” for Protestants, was a theological concept first of all: freedom, granted by divine grace received through faith, from the penalty of sin or, in Milton’s antinomian formulation, freedom under the Gospel from the entirety of Mosaic Law (DDC 1.27). A second available meaning of “Christian liberty” approached one modern understanding of religious freedom: “It signified the immunity or exemption of churches from the secular power.”³⁶ Both senses can be found in Milton. Since liberty or freedom, however understood, was universally taken as a good thing, arguments over liberty in Milton’s England frequently involved semantic contest between true and false senses of the word. Phrases emerged as ideological battlefields: “liberty of the people,” “liberty of the subject,” “civil and religious liberty,” “liberty of conscience.”

Milton’s liberty-talk is multifarious, ranging across religious, political, and other senses and contexts. Here is a nonexhaustive list of examples.

• liberty as political autonomy: “Should I of these the liberty regard/ Who freed, as to their ancient patrimony,/ Unhumbled, unrepentant, unreformed” (PR 3.427–9)

• liberty as freedom from imprisonment: “what hope I have/ With good success to work his liberty” (SA 1453–4)

• Liberty personified: “What will they then/ But force the spirit of grace itself, and bind/ His consort liberty” (PL 12.524–6)

• “true liberty” (PL 12.83) which according to the archangel Michael existed for humanity only between Adam’s and Eve’s creation and their fall

• “true and substantial liberty” [libertas vera ac solida] to be sought not without but within (2 Def)³⁷

• “ancient liberty”: “I did but prompt the age to quit their clogs/ By the known laws of ancient liberty”

• “civil liberty” to bring grievances for redress to the civil authorities: “For this is not the liberty which wee can hope, that no grievance ever should arise in the Commonwealth, that let no man in this World expect; but when complaints are freely heard, deeply consider’d and speedily reform’d, then is the utmost bound of civill liberty attain’d, that wise men looke for.” (Areopagitica, YP 2.487)

• “religious and civil liberty”: “the authors and best patrons of religious and civil libertie, that ever these Ilands brought forth” (Likeliest Means, YP 7.274)

• Christian liberty, in the theological sense: freedom under the new dispensation of the Gospel from the entirety of the Mosaic Law (DDC 1.27: “de Evangelio, et Libertate Christiana,” OM 8.690–726)

• Christian liberty as freedom from state interference: “Of civil libertie I have written heretofore by the appointment, and not without the approbation of civil power; of Christian liberty I write now” (TCP, YP 7.243)

• three-part taxonomy: ecclesiastical, domestic or personal, civil [“Ecclesiasticam, domesticam seu privatam, atque civilem”] (2 Def, YP 4.1.624, CM 8.130)

• two-part taxonomy: “The whole freedom of man consists either in spiritual or civil libertie” (REW1, YP 7.379)

Although the range of Milton’s liberty-talk is wider than most, the fact that it varied is not in itself remarkable. Any author might use multiple senses of a common polysemous word; one would expect it in an author as linguistically resourceful and politically engaged as Milton. Since liberty-talk was ubiquitous in the political discourse of the time, especially on Milton’s side of the civil war, it is unsurprising to find it prominent in Milton’s political writing. The deeper one ventures into the vast mid seventeenth-century pamphlet literature the less distinctive Milton’s uses of “liberty” will appear, though perhaps only Milton would describe his choice of blank verse over rhyme for Paradise Lost as “ancient liberty recovered to heroic poem from the troublesome and modern bondage of rhyming” (PL, 55).

In Milton’s wide-ranging liberty-talk we can find themes, patterns, and recurring concerns, but there is no overarching doctrine of Miltonic liberty. Milton never sought or needed one, and there is no need for scholars to construct one on his behalf. The closest thing we find to it in his writing, the three-part taxonomy in 2 Def – ecclesiastical, domestic, and civil liberty – is plainly occasional. Milton employs it to explain, a decade after the fact, how he came to write his divorce tracts; somewhat disingenuously his account makes no mention of his own interrupted marriage. That this three-part taxonomy did not figure prominently in his thinking is evident from the fact that he did not use it elsewhere, and offered a different taxonomy in REW. To understand Milton it is less important to study what he said about liberty in general than to examine what he wanted liberty for: that is, the specific freedoms he sought. Follow the particular.

If there is a single theme more salient than any other in Milton’s liberty-talk, it is the traditional idea that liberty depends on virtue. Only the virtuous deserve their freedom. Only they will put it to good use. Only they really desire it; only they, possessing it, can preserve it. The rest seek license, liberty’s corrupt opposite. “License they mean when they cry liberty/ For who loves that, must first be wise and good” (Sonnet XII 11–12, CSP 297). The priority of virtue to liberty is a central Miltonic idea, recurrent in his poetry and prose. It has deep classical, Christian, and Renaissance humanist roots.³⁸ It accords with Milton’s meritocratic political ideal: They should govern others who have first established government over themselves, showing themselves fit for freedom – as Milton declares in 2 Def that Cromwell has, and as Milton’s Jesus declares in Paradise Regained that the Roman emperors have not. It “works from the inside out.”³⁹

Sometimes, however, Milton’s liberty-talk works from the outside in. Take this passage in Areopagitica:

If it be desir’d to know the immediat cause of all this free writing and free speaking, there cannot be assign’d a truer then your own mild, and free, and human government; it is the liberty, Lords and Commons, which your own valorous and happy counsels have purchast us, liberty which is the nurse of all great wits; this is that which hath rarify’d and enlighten’d our spirits like the influence of heav’n; this is that which hath enfranchis’d, enlarg’d and lifted up our apprehensions degrees above themselves. Ye cannot make us now lesse capable, lesse knowing, lesse eagarly pursuing of the truth, unlesse ye first make your selves, that made us so, lesse the lovers, lesse the founders of our true liberty.

(Areopagitica, YP 2.559)

Or this piece of Milton’s advice to Cromwell in 2 Def:

You should keep only those laws that are essential and pass others – not such as subject good men with bad to the same yoke, nor, while they take precautions against the wiles of the wicked, forbid also that which should be free for good men – but rather such laws as appertain only to crimes and do not forbid actions of themselves licit, merely because of the guilt of those who abuse them. For laws are made only to curb wickedness, but nothing can so effectively mould and create virtue as liberty.

(2 Def, YP 4.1.679)⁴⁰

In these passages liberty precedes virtue. It provides the conditions under which the wise and good may flourish. It molds and creates virtue; it nurses wit. Milton reverses his usual order of priority in these passages for tactical reasons. The particular liberty he seeks in both cases is relief from laws he finds onerous. Since he is arguing for legislative change, he focuses on the causal impact of laws, and represents the legislative changes he seeks as conducive to virtue. The Areopagitica passage is a bold bit of strategic flattery aimed at Parliament. It redescribes the late proliferation of unregulated printing, which had prompted the 1643 Licensing Order, as a positive result of Parliament’s good government rather than a negative consequence of the wartime breakdown of Caroline press controls; it figures the Lords and Commons as patrons of the godly intellectuals for whom Milton speaks. The 2 Def passage, without specifying which laws Milton would have Cromwell repeal, makes a point often made in antiregulation arguments: Laws should be written as narrowly as possible, to punish malefactors without burdening the innocent.

Milton’s main pattern wherein virtue precedes liberty and exceptions wherein liberty precedes virtue serve different rhetorical purposes, but they are not at odds. They share an underlying assumption that law and policy should be made for the benefit of the most deserving. Start there, grant freedom to the virtuous, and let the rest make out as they may. If the virtuous are few, so be it. “For God sure esteems the growth and compleating of one vertuous person, more then the restraint of ten vitious” (Areopagitica, YP 2.528). This priority can make Milton sound like a modern libertarian, though the analogy should not be pushed too far. What modern libertarians usually want above all else is not to pay taxes, and while that motive contributed to Milton’s opposition to tithes, his deeper concerns were noneconomic. Tithes were an affront because they compelled buy-in to an ecclesial system he found scripturally unjustified and spiritually infantilizing. They constrained lay Christians to “sit all thir life long at the feet of a pulpited divine” (Hirelings, YP 7.303) who was, as Milton saw it, very likely their moral and intellectual inferior. A good Christian has no need of a pulpited divine, as a good author has no need of a licenser. In his attack on tithes in Hirelings (1659) and his attack on prepublication licensing in Areopagitica (1644), Milton objects to the constraint of the morally and intellectually superior by their inferiors. What matters is who is being constrained by whom: godly lay intellectuals by the clergy, in both cases. Follow the particular.

Most of Milton’s liberty-talk, I have said, is broadly consistent with those of his contemporaries who shared his ecclesio-political interests. The most distinctively Miltonic usage – distinctive in that it incorporates various core Miltonic preoccupations – is found in the phrase “strenuous liberty.” The phrase, derived from Sallust, occurs in Samson Agonistes, in the passage early in the play wherein Samson laments that his fellow Israelites have failed to join him in revolt against the Philistines:

But what more oft in nations grown corrupt,

And by their vices brought to servitude,

Than to love bondage more than liberty,

Bondage with ease than strenuous liberty;

And to despise, or envy, or suspect

Whom God hath of his special favour raised

As their deliverer; if he aught begin,

How frequent to desert him, and at last

To heap ingratitude on worthiest deeds?

(SA 268–76)

Nations, Milton’s Samson claims, end up with the governments they deserve. “By their vices” makes the point that loss of political freedom – in this case Israel’s subjection to the Philistines – results from individual or collective moral failings. If virtue is prerequisite for liberty, where virtue is absent bondage will follow, and in nations grown corrupt the majority may be expected to prefer bondage to freedom for the same reason that they may be expected to prefer vice to virtue: because it is easier. To be merited and preserved, liberty must be strenuous.

The passage contains a topical analogy. As with the corrupted Hebrews of Samson’s day, so with the English of Milton’s day, who in 1660 had chosen bondage over liberty by welcoming back the Stuart monarchy they had expelled in 1649.⁴¹ The analogy attributes the failure of the English commonwealth to the decadent majority who welcomed back the king. It casts Milton and his revolutionary party in the position of Samson: a freedom-loving militant vanguard betrayed by lack of public support. Its politics are unrepentant, even defiant.

The passage implies a relation between divine and human agency in keeping with Milton’s emphasis on human free will. God provides, at times and places of his choosing, sufficient conditions for political freedom, raising up specially favored individuals like Samson to lead the way. It is up to the people to follow or not. Since God works mysteriously, we should not expect to predict his interventions, nor to interpret them perfectly after the fact. Nevertheless we may trust that God responds, however mysteriously, to individual and/or collective moral desert. And it is possible for the divinely favored to recognize and act upon heavenly promptings. Paradise Regained and Samson Agonistes, published together in 1671, both feature protagonists who do so.

The passage is bitter but not fatalistic. Neither Israel’s failure nor England’s was inevitable; rather, these failures conform to a historical pattern (“what more oft” means “what is more common,” not “everywhere and always”) already evident in the Hebrew Bible, wherein a people proves morally unworthy of its divinely favored leaders and is punished by loss of freedom. Before the Restoration, Milton exhorted the English people to deserve their liberty and warned them not to squander the opportunity that God and his victorious military saints had provided them. In the late poems, completed after that opportunity had been squandered, Milton’s prevailing tone shifts from exhortation to sober acknowledgment that in this fallen world the virtuous may expect to be outnumbered, betrayed, and mistreated until Christ’s return. Good governments therefore will be less common than bad ones. Yet worldly political conditions are mutable. Nations do not have to grow corrupt. When they do, they may decline further, or they may improve. God may punish them with tyrants, or he may, in his own time, raise up new faithful champions, whom a people may choose to follow or not. And worldly political conditions release nobody from the individual moral responsibility that attends free will. God does not promise or require that our efforts will succeed; he requires willing service, to the best of our differing abilities, under whatever conditions in which we find ourselves. (This is also the message of Milton’s sonnet “When I consider how my light is spent.”)⁴²

“Strenuous liberty” is not a doctrine, but a point of view compressed into a noun phrase.⁴³ It serves as the title for this book because it sums up Milton’s moral and political priorities as well as any phrase he composed. Here is his meritocracy, or aristocracy of virtue. Here is virtue as prerequisite for freedom. Here is his link between national political outcomes and moral desert. Here is his robust understanding of free will, and the responsibility that free will imposes. Here is his recognition that most persons may prove unworthy of freedom, but all are divinely obligated to try.

Strenuous liberty, as Milton saw it, was nowhere more important than in the exercise of religion. Politics depends upon morality, and morality depends on true religion – indeed is inseparable from it, for the notion of a secular morality would have seemed to Milton not so much erroneous as unintelligible. True religion, as Milton defined it in his last published tract (Of True Religion, 1673), is “true Worship and Service of God, learnt and believed from the Word of God only.” Milton presented this definition as one that all Protestants should accept without controversy, but he derived radically individualist implications from the latter clause. All Protestants have the right and duty to interpret the Word of God for themselves. No Protestant therefore may force other Protestants to worship contrary to their own conscientious interpretation of God’s Word: to do so would be to compel their brethren to implicit faith, which is no faith at all. In order that all Protestants may exercise the strenuous liberty God requires, they must be granted freedom of conscience – which freedom would entail, on the part of the state, pan-Protestant religious toleration.

“Toleration,” like “liberty,” means little until you follow the particular. All depends on what is to be tolerated by whom. In modern liberal usage “toleration” and “tolerance,” unmodified, are usually taken to be good things; but compare “zero-tolerance policy,” which assumes the contrary. Unlike “liberty,” “toleration” was primarily used in Milton’s time in a negative sense. Its most common meaning was the permission of false or objectionable religion: “a pernicious, God-provoking, Truth-defacing, Church-ruinating, & State-shaking toleration”⁴⁴ as the Scottish Presbyterian divine George Gillespie put it. Godly tolerationists like Milton usually argued not for toleration but for liberty of conscience. As is common with ideologically contested terms, there were exceptions and inconsistencies of usage.⁴⁵ But that “toleration” was mainly heard as negative, and “liberty of conscience” mainly heard as positive, can be seen in cases where the two terms are set against each other, as in “ungodly toleration pleaded for under pretence of liberty of conscience” from the title page of Herbert Palmer’s 1644 sermon in which he assailed Milton’s pamphlet on divorce.⁴⁶

For godly tolerationists, the preferred ground of argument was principle. Liberty of conscience is or should be a core value for all who profess themselves Protestant; since all may err, the civil power has no business imposing upon the free conscience; such imposition was in any case bound to fail, since inward persuasion cannot be forced. Some godly tolerationists, though not Milton, followed such reasoning so far as to advocate toleration in the state even for “the most Paganish, Jewish, Turkish, or anti-christian consciences.”⁴⁷

The preferred ground for antitolerationists was the particular: What, would you have us tolerate that? Egregious examples of heresy, blasphemy, or outrageous behavior would be adduced as a reductio ad absurdum of tolerationist principles. How, asked Samuel Rutherford, are judges not to punish statements like “the Trinitie is but a fiction, Christ is no more God then another holy man. Yea, Christ was but an Impostor”?⁴⁸ Heresiographies like Thomas Edwards’s Gangraena, which assembled sensationalized catalogues of sectarian opinions and practices, performed this reductio ad absurdum at scale.⁴⁹

Questions of toleration, religious or otherwise, involve two general preconditions: disapproval, and the power to act upon that disapproval. You need only tolerate that of which you disapprove. And those of whom toleration is asked, be they magistrates or neighbors, must be capable of withholding toleration, or the request is pointless. The weak are not asked to tolerate the strong, or the minority to tolerate the majority: They have no choice. Principled toleration, as opposed to the de facto acceptance of what you cannot stamp out, exists when both preconditions are satisfied. The philosopher Brian Leiter formulates the matter thus:

Where a genuine “principle of toleration” gets its purchase is in the cases where one group (call it the “dominant” group) actively disapproves of what another group (call it the “disfavored” group) believes or does; where the dominant group has the means at its disposal to effectively and reliably change or end the disfavored group’s beliefs or practices; and yet still the dominant group acknowledges that there are moral or epistemic reasons (that is, reasons pertaining to knowledge or truth) to permit the disfavored group to keep on believing and doing what it does.⁵⁰

Most arguments for religious toleration, in Milton’s time or ours, are not examples of principled toleration in Leiter’s sense, but rather calls for principled toleration to be practiced by others. They are arguments for them to tolerate us, wherein they are dominant and we are disfavored, not arguments for us to tolerate them. Such arguments are made from the lower ground, to employ an image of Richard Baxter’s.⁵¹ From the higher ground, the dominant or majority position, the most common response to calls for toleration is this: You ask of us more than you know, because the practices you want tolerated do not trouble you as they trouble us. You speak of your principles, but what of ours? For those members of the dominant group who occupy positions of authority, granting toleration will look like a risk, a potential vulnerability. If something is wrong, threatening, or unpopular, and you have the power to prevent it, is it not your duty to do so? Would tolerating it not give you at least the appearance of moral laxity or weakness, a point to be exploited by your rivals? It is no surprise that the phrase “zero-tolerance policy” belongs to the language of officialese; the phrase assumes that what is not to be tolerated is pernicious, and declares an institutional will to stamp it out. Principled toleration is especially challenging where religion is concerned, since it requires that your moral and epistemic reasons for toleration outweigh your disapproval. The more seriously you take the truth claims of your religion, the more strongly you are likely to disapprove of beliefs and practices contrary to those claims.

In Milton’s England, even during the Commonwealth and Protectorate when Independents held sway in the English church, expressions of principled religious toleration in Leiter’s sense were extremely rare.⁵² Antitolerationist Presbyterian divines like Gillespie and Rutherford represented the majority view among the mid century godly; they were genuinely disturbed by sectarian activity, and took for granted that a compulsory national church was necessary to the common good. Even those who favored broad accommodation or “comprehension” within a national church were often uneasy about how far to permit freedom of worship outside of it. Most arguments for religious toleration in Milton’s England were made from the lower ground, by the religiously disfavored seeking toleration from the dominant. This is not to say that tolerationist thought and public policy in seventeenth-century England lacked any element of principle, or that godly tolerationist appeals to principle were insincere.⁵³ Godly tolerationists’ principles and their self-interest combined in mutual support, as principle and self-interest usually do. But lower-ground tolerationism was and is the normal case, and it was the case for Milton.

Milton argued for broad intra-Protestant religious toleration because he needed to. His heterodox opinions, his antitrinitarianism above all, situated him on the lower ground with respect to the godly mainstream. His lay anticlericalism was as important a factor as his heterodoxy, and his tolerationist arguments were consistently bound up with his anticlerical ones. The problem, as Milton saw it, was that by maintaining an established church and publicly financed ministry the state empowered the clergy to force the consciences of lay Christians, and he was often in the position of appealing to the state (as in “New Forcers,” discussed in Chapter 1) on behalf of godly lay Christians for protection against conscience-forcing clergy. As a layman, he was not concerned with the challenges of ministering to a parish or congregation; as a private citizen, he was not concerned with the challenges of maintaining civic order.

Milton’s lower-ground situation drives an often overlooked dimension of his rhetoric: the impulse not to alienate more conservative godly readers. (This impulse is prominent, for example, in Milton’s account of heresy, the subject of Chapter 3.) Of Milton’s various intended audiences, the consistent core could be described as a puritan big tent:⁵⁴ readers with whom he expected to share certain common assumptions, authorities, and reference points, and whom he aimed to convince of his more controversial points from that common ground. This was a heterogeneous group whose divisions were increasingly visible by the mid 1640s, and Milton’s sense of his place within it shifted over time. When he first ventured into prose controversy in the antiprelatical tracts, Milton took himself to be writing from the heart of a then relatively unified puritan opposition to the English bishops. With the Doctrine and Discipline of Divorce (1643) he alienated godly readers whom he had hoped, perhaps naively, to persuade; their negative reaction surprised and angered him. From Areopagitica (late 1644) forward, as the Presbyterian/Independent divide deepened and Milton radicalized, he wrote with an increasing awareness of his lower-ground position within the broader godly coalition, and did what he could to reach readers in the sober godly center: not declared opponents like Presbyterian divines, but anyone uncommitted or convincible. Because he knew when he was arguing radical positions, he tried to make those positions as broadly palatable as possible. His strategies included emphasizing his own respectability, citing mainstream, broadly accepted Protestant sources,⁵⁵ keeping his most controversial theological views to himself, and rhetorically minimizing differences among the godly even or especially when those differences were vast. These are all logical choices when writing from the lower ground. Areopagitica’s rhetoric of “neighboring differences, or rather indifferences” stresses the proximity between Presbyterians, Independents, and sectaries, and makes clear that the goal is not pluralism for its own sake, but convergence upon truth – by which Milton means a specifically godly Protestant truth, the “reforming of Reformation it self” (YP 2.553).⁵⁶ Areopagitica’s notorious qualification near its end – “I mean not tolerated Popery, and open superstition … that also which is impious or evil absolutely either against faith or maners no law can possibly permit, that intends not to unlaw it self” (YP 2.565) – makes a gesture of reassurance toward conservative puritan readers: You can trust me, I’m not on the lunatic fringe with Roger Williams. Milton would move closer ecclesiologically to Williams in the 1650s,⁵⁷ but he never joined him in advocating toleration for false religion.

My argument provides an ordering of Milton’s priorities, not a debunking. The picture I have sketched of Milton so far, and will develop in the following chapters, does not diminish him intellectually, morally, or otherwise. I stress this point to preempt misreading of my argument along the following lines: “You thought of Milton as the courageous defender of free will, free conscience, a free press, and a free people’s right to cast off tyrants? Never mind all that, just remember that he was a partisan who hated priests.” The claims advanced here – that Milton was politically motivated by his anticlericalism, that his most consistent priority in public affairs was liberty of conscience for heterodox godly lay intellectuals, that his political writing was partisan not philosophical, that his liberty-talk should be understood rhetorically not systematically, that he argued for religious toleration from the lower ground – do not show Milton as a hypocrite or a hack. They show Milton as a normal political participant, arguing for his interests as he perceived them and defending those interests in principled terms for maximal rhetorical reach. So do most persons engaged in public life, then or now.

Perceived self-interest need not reduce to financial or class interest. In Milton’s case it did not. John Milton was a prosperous Londoner, well-to-do even after his losses at the Restoration (CC 313) and as attentive to his personal finances as one might expect the eldest son of a successful scrivener to be. Like many another propertied puritan he had a strong respect for property rights, and included property-rights-based arguments in his attacks on venal clergy. But the debates he entered and the positions he took were not mainly about money. Even his opposition to tithes was only partly about money. His antiegalitarian tendencies were those of a godly intellectual, not a proto-capitalist. During the civil wars and Interregnum, Milton shared in the general godly revolutionary hope of reforming England into an exemplary Protestant nation whose saints might lead and flourish. If the saints were a minority they must lead nevertheless, and with time and good government, Milton hoped, the English people would become more virtuous individually and collectively, and more accepting of godly rule. After the Restoration such hopes were dashed, and Milton’s political concerns shifted from offense to defense: from building a godly nation to preserving what could be preserved for the free conscience in adverse times.

What I have said so far about Milton’s priorities mainly concerns his public agenda. It applies most obviously to Milton’s prose, and his polemical prose above all. What about Milton’s poetry, the main reason why most of us read him in the first place? Insofar as the poetry is political, this study will argue, its politics are largely consistent with the prose. We have limited opportunity for synchronic comparison because Milton wrote mostly poetry before 1640, mostly prose ca. 1640–60, and mostly poetry thereafter. Where we can compare, however, poetry and prose track together in political terms. Milton’s early poems, the majority of which were first printed in the 1645 volume, are not for the most part political. The poems of the middle period are few though exceptionally fine, and the political ones, such as “New Forcers” or the sonnets to Cromwell and Vane, provide valuable evidence for the development of his public agenda. I find a politically unrepentant Milton in the late poems, who never retreated from or disavowed the Good Old Cause. Samson Agonistes is the most topical of the three late masterpieces, dealing as it does with a pertinent subject for defeated revolutionaries after 1660: godly resistance under conditions of political subjugation. Paradise Lost, wider in scope, takes a long view of history wherein the catastrophe of 1660 becomes but one of the defeats that the righteous few can expect to suffer at the hands of the worldly many until the “day/ Appear of respiration to the just/ And vengeance to the wicked” (PL XII.539–41). Earthly politics diminish in importance in Paradise Regained. For all Satan’s efforts to interest the Son of God in the kingdoms of the world, the Son puts them in their place, and a minor place it is. This is not a change of political position on Milton’s part; it is a change of subject or perspective, and we need not assume that the change was wholly due to the Restoration. Milton never abandoned his top public priority of maximal freedom of worship for the heterodox godly. This is clear from his publication of Of True Religion in 1673, when he thought he had an opening, provided by the anti-Catholic backlash to Charles II’s Declaration of Indulgence, to make the case once more for pan-Protestant toleration.

The important differences between Milton’s poetry and prose are not political. Milton saw poetry as the loftier endeavor.⁵⁸ He wrote his polemical tracts to influence public opinion and state policy on affairs of the moment; he wrote his poems to “leave something so written to aftertimes, as they should not willingly let it die” (RCG, YP 1.810). Milton wrote his vernacular prose for a broad godly readership; he wrote his poems for fit readers down the centuries. His polemical writings aim to improve political conditions for the virtuous. His late poems aim to improve the virtue of his readers. The prose tracts engage contemporary adversaries, often acrimoniously. The late poetry enters into dialogue with Homer and Virgil, Spenser, Ariosto, and Tasso, Greek tragedy, and above all scripture, creating a complex network of intertextual relationships that are sometimes rivalrous but by no means always adversarial.⁵⁹ To understand Milton’s prose, one needs detailed historical context. The poems have their topical dimensions, but if you focus only on the topical you will miss the forest for the trees. One of the challenges in writing about Milton lies in discerning when he is responding to Presbyterian pamphlets or parliamentary ordinances, and when to Genesis or the Aeneid or the problem of evil. Milton never retreated from his public agenda; his public agenda was never all he cared about.

Milton’s mature poetry, like Dante’s or Spenser’s, is morally didactic. It aims to instruct its readers in truth and virtue, with truth and virtue understood in Christian terms. This point should be obvious, and few critics will explicitly deny it; but many allow themselves to forget it, or to resist its implications. One commonly resisted implication is that the problems raised in Milton’s poetry are, for the most part, meant to have solutions. This is normal in morally didactic Christian poetry; recall how much of the Divine Comedy consists of the posing and answering of doubts. Sometimes Milton will raise a question in order to leave it unanswered, as when Raphael tells Adam not to worry about planetary motion; Raphael (and/or Milton) does so in this case to teach a broader lesson about the proper limits of human knowledge. When, on some smaller points, Milton leaves alternatives open, as when he considers briefly where God got the skins with which he clothes Adam and Eve at Gen. 3:21 – “or slain/ Or as the snake with youthful coat repaid” (PL X.217–18) – this is not evidence for a “poetics of incertitude” or any such thing;⁶⁰ it demonstrates what Milton would have seen as ordinary sound exegetical practice, as applicable to biblical poetry as to biblical commentary. Scripture is truth, human interpretation of scripture fallible. What the biblical text does not explain, an exegete explains as best he can, and knowing where explanations come to an end is part of the exegetical task. At that point you leave the uncertainties uncertain, trusting that God has given us the scripture he wanted us to have, and that he will furnish the consciences of his saints with certainty enough on matters necessary for salvation.

To say that Milton aimed to solve the problems he raised in his poems is not to say that he succeeded. The uncertainties, tensions, contradictions, injustices, ambiguities, subversions, evasions, horrors, and doubts that generations of readers have found in Milton’s poetry most certainly exist. The mistake is to suppose that Milton put them there on purpose. They are there despite his best efforts. They are not there because his intellectual or artistic powers were inadequate to his subject matter; they are there because he was struggling with inherited moral and intellectual problems that could not be solved. If Milton could not justify the ways of God to men, could not explain away the difficulties that arise once one patches a Christian interpretation onto an ancient Near Eastern myth about the first two people being tricked by a talking serpent, it wasn’t for lack of trying. To understand Milton it is not necessary to believe what he believed, or to find his answers satisfying. But it is necessary to acknowledge that he aimed to produce answers, that he brought all of his learning, intelligence, and artistry to bear on the task, and that he took for granted that much was at stake in getting the answers right. To be praised for raising the questions he would have taken as condescending nonsense; any fool could raise the questions. The fact that Milton wrote a long treatise on Christian doctrine should suffice to demonstrate the point. Why would one undertake such a project unless one felt that getting Christian doctrine right was a fundamentally important task?

A study of Milton’s priorities has a lot of material to go on. There is the large and varied corpus of Milton’s work, published and in manuscript. There is the record of contemporary response. There is the strong first-person voice in Milton’s poetry and prose, taking a stand or making a case. Even when Milton is not writing in propria persona it is usually clear enough which positions are authorial, and which voices are meant to be read as morally authoritative. (The usual way to develop this point is to contrast Milton with Shakespeare.) Milton was the kind of author who lets you know where he stands.

To know where Milton stands is the easy part. To proceed from there to a sense of Milton’s priorities, one must pay close attention to context, genre, and rhetorical aims. For the occasional prose, one must bring to bear contextual knowledge of each occasion. This is not simply a matter of surrounding Milton’s writings with an ever-thicker body of intertext and historical fact. One must consider the limits of Milton’s knowledge, the more so when he was writing in reaction to rapidly shifting events, as in Tenure or The Ready and Easy Way. We cannot assume that Milton read every contemporary poem or pamphlet, or had access to all the information available to modern scholars. One must also take into account the limits of our own knowledge. How much of 2 Def was written before Commonwealth became Protectorate in December 1653? How much of Paradise Lost was written before the Restoration? When did Milton write Samson Agonistes? When did he arrive at the various heterodoxies expressed in De Doctrina Christiana, and what further changes might he have made had he completed the work? Such unknowns constrain how precisely we are able to contextualize.

This study takes three main approaches to the question of priority. The first is diachronic: It examines continuity and change over the course of Milton’s career. That is my core argument for the priority of Milton’s anticlericalism: It holds constant over decades while other Miltonic views change. The second approach is synchronic or contextual. It considers, in a particular text, how the pieces fit together, and how they respond to pressures of the moment. This approach includes questions of audience: which readerships Milton was trying to reach, and by what means. Intended readerships are fuzzy but not ineffable; there is much to be discerned about them from the arguments an author makes, the authorities they cite, and what they take for granted. For the third approach, particularly essential for the poetry, I have no more precise term than critical judgment: reading as attentively as possible, and determining, as best one can, what seems most important to the author in a given passage or text.

The seven chapters to follow fall into two parts, the first four chapters mainly concerned with Milton’s prose, the last three with his late biblical poems. Chapters 1 and 2 provide a thick description of Milton’s anticlericalism, tracing it through his career, describing its main recurring features and the changing contexts in which these features recur. They show that Milton’s anticlericalism was propositional as well as attitudinal: not merely a dim view of priests (though he certainly had that) but a core element of his thought. The two chapters tell a single chronological story, divided for greater uniformity in length.

Chapter 3, “How Milton Defined Heresy and Why,” is a case study in Milton’s strategic self-positioning. It argues against the hitherto prevailing view that Milton attempted to reclaim the terms “heresy” and “heretic.” I will show that he never did. Milton did however develop an unusual understanding of these terms, and the chapter describes how and why he did so. In so doing so it considers the role that Milton’s view of heresy played in his broader thinking about religion, and considers what this matter tells us about Milton’s sense of his own relation to his audience.

Chapter 4 examines a test case for my account of Milton’s political priorities: Milton’s view of the Cromwellian Protectorate. The Protectorate presents a test case because it was a monarchy, and it has often been alleged that Milton grew more disaffected with Cromwell’s government as it grew more monarchical in its later phase. My findings cast doubt on this view. While the Cromwellian religious settlement fell short of the disestablishment Milton wanted, Cromwell favored religious toleration more strongly than his parliaments did, and Milton supported him in foreign affairs. The chapter’s upshot is to reinforce the claim made above: not that Milton lacked principles, but that his firmest principles were not constitutional ones.

The second part of the book concerns the late poems. Here the emphases shift, not because Milton’s political priorities changed but because his two Paradise poems set worldly political concerns in a much broader context. Paradise Lost and Paradise Regained, as I read them, show Milton grappling with problems deeply embedded within the Christian religion as he inherited it; his heterodoxies are effects, not causes, of this struggle. In Samson Agonistes, by contrast with the Paradise poems, Milton responded more closely to recent events. The deep coherence of the two 1671 poems, beyond the historically contingent fact that they were first published together in one volume, lies in their representation of heroes who follow promptings they recognize as divine. In doing so Milton’s Jesus and Milton’s Samson are both exemplars of strenuous liberty.

Chapter 5, “How the Trouble Starts in Paradise Lost,” concerns the politics of Satan’s rebellion. Like many other critics I find this aspect of the poem irresistibly interesting, but I do not read it topically; rather, I treat it as a narrative problem that Milton approached like a historical novelist working with thin source material. The trouble, in Milton’s telling, starts from God’s deliberate alteration of the heavenly hierarchy. Heavenly hierarchy leads to the broader problem of obedience tests, biblical and Miltonic; and that problem leads to still broader questions of theodicy and Milton’s use of scripture. The chapter’s argument supports the Empsonian view that the deepest difficulties in Paradise Lost are inherited ones.

Milton’s priorities in Paradise Regained, I argue in Chapter 6, are moral rather than Christological or political. The chapter applies this thesis to some enduring critical questions around the poem: the question of the Son’s identity, the purpose of the temptation, and the nature of the poem’s outcome; lastly it shows how Satan is like a Washington lobbyist. It reads Paradise Regained as a contemptus mundi poem, one that makes strenuous moral demands upon its readers.

Chapter 7, “The Political Messages of Samson Agonistes,” defends the view that Milton intended his hero as a hero, morally superior to his various interlocutors and divinely favored at the end. It examines the leading counter-arguments: the argument from source modification, the argument from multiple traditions, and the argument from contrast with Christ. Its final section considers the poem’s politics, and whether it is anachronistic to call Samson Agonistes a work in praise of terrorism. While last in the book, this chapter was the first to be written; I republish it here because the view it argues against, that Samson Agonistes is an essentially ambiguous text, remains alive and well. In terms of the book’s broader argument, it completes the picture of a politically unrepentant late Milton.