Early Modern Nationalism and Milton's England 9781442687943

Table of contents :
Contents
Acknowledgments
Introduction: Milton’s Nationalism: Challenges and Questions
PART ONE. The Majesty of a Free People
1. Milton’s Nationalism and the English Revolution: Strains and Contradictions
2. Milton and the Struggle for the Representation of the Nation: Reading Paradise Lost through Eikonoklastes
3. Victory’s Crest: Milton, the English Nation, and Cromwell
PART TWO. Nationhood, the English Church, and Non-Conformity
4. Israel and English Protestant Nationalism: ‘Fast Sermons’ during the English Revolution
5. Look Homeward Angel: Guardian Angels and Nationhood in Seventeenth-Century England
6. The Invisible Nation: Church, State, and Schism in Milton’s England
PART THREE. Ethnicity and International Relations
7. Milton and the Limitations of Englishness
8. The Anglo-Scoto-Dutch Triangle: Milton and Marvell to 1660
9. Disappointed Nationalism: Milton in the Context of Seventeenth-Century Debates about the Nation-State
10. How Milton’s Nationalism Works: Globalization and the Possibilities of Positive Nationalism
PART FOUR. Milton’s Nationalism and Its Discontents: Gender, Luxury, Slavery
11. That Fatal Boadicea: Depicting Women in Milton’s History Of Britain, 1670
12. Consuming Nations: Milton and Luxury
13. Slavery, Resistance, and Nation in Milton and Locke
PART FIVE. The Nationalization of Milton
14. Milton: Nation and Reception
Contributors
Index

Citation preview

EARLY MODERN NATIONALISM AND MILTON’S ENGLAND

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EDITED BY DAVID LOEWENSTEIN AND PAUL STEVENS

Early Modern Nationalism and Milton’s England

U N I V E R S I T Y O F TO R O N TO P R E S S Toronto Buffalo London

© University of Toronto Press Incorporated 2008 Toronto Buffalo London www.utppublishing.com Printed in Canada ISBN 978-0-8020-8935-9

Printed on acid-free paper

Library and Archives Canada Cataloguing in Publication Early modern nationalism and Milton’s England / edited by David Loewenstein and Paul Stevens. Includes bibliographical references and index. ISBN 978-0-8020-8935-9 1. Milton, John, 1608–1674 – Political and social views. 2. Milton, John, 1608–1674 – Criticism and interpretation. 3. Nationalism – England – History – 17th century. 4. Nationalism in literature. 5. Nationalism and literature. 6. Great Britain – Politics and government – 1603–1714. I. Loewenstein, David II. Stevens, Paul, 1946– PR3592.P64E27 2008 821'.4 C2008-901775-7

University of Toronto Press acknowledges the financial assistance to its publishing program of the Canada Council for the Arts and the Ontario Arts Council. University of Toronto Press acknowledges the financial support for its publishing activities of the Government of Canada through the Book Publishing Industry Development Program (BPIDP).

In memory of Richard Helgerson

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Contents

Acknowledgments

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Introduction: Milton’s Nationalism: Challenges and Questions david loewenstein and paul stevens

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PART ONE: THE MAJESTY OF A FREE PEOPLE 11 Milton’s Nationalism and the English Revolution: Strains and Contradictions 25 david loewenstein 12 Milton and the Struggle for the Representation of the Nation: Reading Paradise Lost through Eikonoklastes 51 andrew hadfield 13 Victory’s Crest: Milton, the English Nation, and Cromwell warren chernaik PART TWO: NATIONHOOD, THE ENGLISH CHURCH, AND NON-CONFORMITY 14 Israel and English Protestant Nationalism: ‘Fast Sermons’ during the English Revolution 115 achsah guibbory

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15 Look Homeward Angel: Guardian Angels and Nationhood in Seventeenth-Century England 139 joad raymond 76 The Invisible Nation: Church, State, and Schism in Milton’s England 173 andrew escobedo PART THREE: ETHNICITY AND INTERNATIONAL RELATIONS 17 Milton and the Limitations of Englishness thomas n. corns

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18 The Anglo-Scoto-Dutch Triangle: Milton and Marvell to 1660 217 john kerrigan 19 Disappointed Nationalism: Milton in the Context of Seventeenth-Century Debates about the Nation-State victoria kahn 10 How Milton’s Nationalism Works: Globalization and the Possibilities of Positive Nationalism 273 paul stevens PART FOUR: MILTON’S NATIONALISM AND ITS DISCONTENTS: GENDER, LUXURY, SLAVERY 11 That Fatal Boadicea: Depicting Women in Milton’s History of Britain, 1670 305 willy maley 12 Consuming Nations: Milton and Luxury laura lunger knoppers

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13 Slavery, Resistance, and Nation in Milton and Locke mary nyquist

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Contents ix

PART FIVE: THE NATIONALIZATION OF MILTON 14 Milton: Nation and Reception nicholas von maltzahn List of Contributors 443 Index

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Acknowledgments

This book began some years ago at Cambridge University when we first became aware of our mutual interest in early modern nationalism and the need to place John Milton, Englishman, in the context of the exciting new research being pursued in that field of study. The project took on life through the energy, enthusiasm, and commitment of our distinguished contributors. Ideas for the volume were tried out at various conferences, most importantly the International Milton Symposium at Beaufort, South Carolina, in 2002, the MLA Convention at San Diego in 2003, the Newberry Milton Seminar at Chicago in 2004, the British Milton Seminar at Birmingham in 2005, the Middle Tennessee Milton Conference at Murfreesboro in 2005, and the Canada Milton Seminar at Toronto in 2005. We are grateful to all those who contributed to the stimulating discussions that ensued on those occasions, especially Sharon Achinstein, Cedric Brown, Charles Durham, Richard DuRocher, Martin Dzelzainis, Stephen Fallon, Marshall Grossman, Judith Herz, Albert Labriola, Michael Leib, John Leonard, Barbara Lewalski, Jennifer Lewin, Feisal Mohamed, David Norbrook, Kristin Pruitt, Balachandra Rajan, Jason Rosenblatt, Elizabeth Sauer, Regina Schwartz, John Shawcross, Nigel Smith, Rachel Trubowitz, Joseph Wittreich, and Ann-Julia Zweirlein. Numerous colleagues at our home institutions have offered advice and encouragement. At the University of Wisconsin-Madison, we would like to thank Heather Dubrow and Henry Turner. At Queen’s University, we are indebted to Elizabeth Hanson, Marta Straznicky, Tracy Ware, and Mel Wiebe, and at the University of Toronto to Alan Bewell, Melba Cuddy-Keane, David Galbraith, Elizabeth Harvey, Linda Hutcheon, Heather Jackson, and Victor Li. Brian Corman, Chair of English at Toronto, has been especially supportive.

xii Acknowledgments

The project was funded from various sources: we thank the Marjorie and Lorin Tiefenthaler Fund, the Canada Research Chairs program, the Department of English and Faculty of Arts and Science at the University of Toronto, and for the visiting fellowships that enabled us to complete the project, Lady Margaret Hall, Merton College, and All Souls College, Oxford. We are grateful to the staff of various libraries, especially Lari Langford and her staff at the Robarts Research Library (University of Toronto), and Sue Usher and her staff at the English Faculty Library (University of Oxford). In putting the manuscript together, we were fortunate to be able to rely on the diligence and outstanding editorial skills of Patricia Simmons. At the University of Toronto Press, Suzanne Rancourt was thoughtful and generous at every stage of the publication process. Barb Porter, Miriam Skey, and Ruth Pincoe were a pleasure to work with. The volume benefitted inestimably from acute and extraordinarily detailed reports by UTP’s two anonymous readers and by the Chair of its Manuscript Review Committee, Andy Orchard. Our work as editors has been made infinitely easier by the patient support and engaged companionship of the two scholars who happen to be our partners, Jennifer Loewenstein and Lynne Magnusson. This book is dedicated to the late Richard Helgerson, not only because of his ground-breaking work on early modern nationalism and English writing and because of the many personal kindnesses he has shown us and innumerable other colleagues, but because he remains a model of the best our discipline has to offer. As Milton might have put it, he stands as ‘a composition, and patterne of the best and honourablest things.’ David Loewenstein and Paul Stevens

EARLY MODERN NATIONALISM AND MILTON’S ENGLAND

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Introduction: Milton’s Nationalism: Challenges and Questions david loewenstein and paul stevens

Writing to a continental admirer, Peter Heimbach, in August 1666, Milton makes it clear that for much of his career he had been an English patriot, a man who had once proudly signed himself, when travelling abroad, ‘Joannes Miltonius, Anglus,’ and who had identified himself as ‘Englishman’ on the title pages of his Latin Defences of the English people.1 Yet despite its seductive attractions, patriotism, he reflects, had not rewarded him late in his career and in the cold political climate of Restoration England: ‘after having allured me by her lovely name, [patriotism] has almost expatriated me, as it were.’2 In the same way that he felt himself ‘Church-outed by the Prelates’ (CPW 1:823) in the early part of his career, he now feels himself expatriated by and within the country he had served so passionately, so that he concludes philosophically that ‘[o]ne’s Patria is wherever it is well with him’ (Patria est, ubicunque est bene) (CPW 8:4).3 Milton’s nationalism and patriotism – the two are even more closely aligned in his writings before the Restoration than after it4 – can be articulated in different forms at different times throughout his career. Even at the height of his zealous optimism for England’s future and providential mission in the early 1640s, we can discern the diverse, although often intersecting, strains in Milton’s nationalism. At times, Milton’s nationalism is intensely ethnic, rooted most positively in a sense of the native vitality of the English language: since ‘our English’ is ‘the language of men ever famous, and formost in the atchievements of liberty,’ he writes in Areopagitica, ‘[it] will not easily finde servile letters anow to spell such a dictatorie presumption [as imprimatur in] English’ (CPW 2:505). At other times, it is intensely religious, not a matter of nature but of divine election that contributes to

4 David Loewenstein and Paul Stevens

Milton’s sense of England’s exceptionalism, his vision of her as a Protestant nation set apart and singled out by God with a special role to play in history: had not ‘this great and Warlike Nation’ through God’s ‘grace and honour’ been ‘the first’ to ‘set up a Standard for the recovery of lost Truth, and blow the first Evangelick Trumpet to the Nations, holding up, as from a Hill, the new Lampe of saving light to all Christendome’ (Of Reformation, CPW 1:616, 525)? At other times, his nationalism is more overtly political, revealing Milton’s sophisticated grasp of the intellectual energy, the combative debate, and the plurality of opinions, including clashing ones, necessary for a civic nation in the making to be truly free: if citizens are to ‘advance truth in others, and from others to entertain it,’ then the Commonwealth must encourage open public discourse that allows political ideas to be vigorously tested (Areopagitica, CPW 2:539). Perhaps most famously, Milton’s nationalism is literary, closely connected with his creativity, vocation, and ambitions as a controversial prose writer and poet. In The Reason of Church-Government, he asserts that his vocation is not simply to be a poet, or even a religious poet, but a national poet who will contribute crucially to the formation, invention, and teaching of his nation: ‘[C]ontent with these British Ilands as my world,’ he observes, his purpose is not simply God’s glory, but ‘Gods glory by the honour and instruction of my country’; his purpose is to write, in his ‘native tongue,’ great poetic works ‘doctrinal and exemplary to a Nation’ (CPW 1:810–15). Milton had a keen sense that, as a visionary poet and polemicist, he could contribute something distinctive to the construction of what he called in Areopagitica ‘a Nation so pliant and so prone to seek after knowledge’ (CPW 2:554) – a nation that was inventing itself anew, a nation that was a dynamic, protean, and artificial construct. Yet, as we shall also see in this book, despite and perhaps because Milton’s literary vocation was often closely associated with his visionary aspirations for his ‘great and Warlike Nation,’ his relation to the nation was also highly conflicted, strained, and volatile, so that his rhetorical responses to it often vacillate between expressions of patriotic fervour and bitter lamentation, between national pride and disappointment, between national hope and doubt. Milton was torn between his intense identification with a mighty Protestant English ‘Nation chos’n before any other’ – so ‘that out of her as out of Sion should be proclaim’d and sounded forth the first tidings and trumpet of Reformation to all Europ’ (2:552) – and his revulsion at her repeated and shameful vulnerability to various kinds of servility, idolatry, and regal luxury.

Introduction: Milton’s Nationalism 5

These various articulations of Milton’s nationalism raise a number of major questions. First, to what extent are these diverse, yet often interconnected expressions of English nationalism – ethnic, religious, civic, and literary – compatible in Milton’s writings and career? How exactly are they related to one another and to the two interdependent, but distinct conceptions of the ‘nation’ that emerged in the early modern period: on the one hand, the nation as the state which recognizes its subjects as citizens and governs their daily life through various forms of law and administration and, on the other, the nation as an ‘imagined community’ which informs the identity of those citizens through a wide variety of cultural representations and forms, including poems and plays, patriotic festivals and religious rituals, sermons and ecclesiastical polemics, histories and chronicles, maps and travel writings, paintings and other visual artifacts.5 How did Milton himself, through his diverse writings in verse and prose, attempt to contribute to the process of national formation and self-determination during the tumultuous changes that unsettled seventeenth-century England? Second, how consistent or coherent is Milton’s nationalism over time? In what ways does his nationalism evolve as England encounters political and religious crises and undergoes a particularly traumatic period of civil war and experimental governments during the 1640s and 1650s? Does Milton, as the opening anecdote suggests, renounce or transcend his early nationalism after the bitter disappointments of the Restoration? Third, how representative or distinctive is Milton’s nationalism in the context of his culture? How does it illuminate the contingencies of the British problem in the seventeenth century (i.e., the complex relations and negotiations among the ‘nations’ of the Atlantic archipelago: England, Ireland, Scotland, and Wales), and to what extent does it anticipate or differ from later more powerful and aggressive forms of nationalism in the eighteenth, nineteenth, and twentieth centuries? Fourth, what is particularly distinctive or unique about Milton the nationalist? How and when does the poet and controversialist reform and rethink notions of nationhood in seventeenth-century England? Fifth and perhaps most important, in the final analysis, how useful a category is ‘nations and nationalism’ in explaining the imaginative achievements, religious polemics, and political tensions of Milton’s poetry and prose? What difficulties does it explain and highlight that other categories do not? These are some of the major questions and issues that the contributors to Early Modern Nationalism and Milton’s England attempt to address from a wide range of critical perspectives.

6 David Loewenstein and Paul Stevens

As a poet and controversialist, Milton has often been identified with the English nation. From the end of the seventeenth century on, he seems inseparable from England’s sense of its national identity. For the first earl of Shaftesbury, Dryden’s ‘Achitophel,’ for instance, writing before his death in 1683, Milton is already ‘our great Poet,’6 and even for a royalist like John Beale, Milton is considered something of a national resource: ‘Since we have lost Cowley,’ he writes in August 1667, ‘I wish we had a way to engage Milton upon some honest argument.’7 For early commentators, it was Paradise Lost that assured Milton of a central place in the cultural history and representation of England’s nationhood. The poem’s sublimity became England’s.8 According to Joseph Addison, for instance, writing in 1712, no man was a greater master of the sublime than Milton whose Paradise Lost he regarded as ‘a Work which does Honour to the English Nation.’9 For many, the sublimity of Paradise Lost became inseparable from Milton’s political writing and its advocacy of individual liberty. Echoes of Wordsworth’s cry, ‘Milton! Thou should’st be living at this hour: / England hath need of thee,’ and Wordworth’s yearning for the revolutionary Milton to ‘return to us again’ and restore England’s loss of ‘virtue, liberty, power’ resonate in the scholarship of Second World War patriots like G. Wilson Knight, A.S.P. Woodhouse, Arthur Barker, and Douglas Bush who selfconsciously write, like Milton himself, ‘at a time of national crisis,’10 often confusing Milton’s modernist denigrators, critics like F.R. Leavis and T.S. Eliot, with the ‘defeatist intellectuals’ of the inter-war years.11 Nevertheless, despite the familiar association of Milton with the English nation, focused and sustained analysis of the complex relationship between author and nation is a more recent critical development. That is partly because theoretically informed work on the nation as a cultural construct or artefact (discussed below) has enabled scholars in early modern English studies to investigate the various ways writers in sixteenth- and seventeenth-century England were themselves engaged in constructing and inventing the nation. Writing in a period characterized by an unprecedented outpouring of print in early modern England,12 the Milton of Areopagitica – envisioning his nation as especially ‘pliant and … prone to seek after knowledge’ during the tumultuous yet politically fertile decades of the English Revolution – could convey in his exhilarating and dense prose a powerful sense of a national community under construction: the English nation, with its ‘towardly and pregnant soile’ in the process of being forged and reformed by its newly politicized readers and writers, including

Introduction: Milton’s Nationalism 7

Milton himself, strenuously engaged in ‘much arguing, much writing, many opinions’ (CPW 2:554). Since the early 1980s ‘nations and nationalism’ as a category for literary analysis, including early modern English studies, has thus moved centre stage. The reasons for this are complex, partly to do with largescale geopolitical developments like the collapse of the Soviet Union, the accelerating growth of economic globalization, and the consequent erosion or re-appraisal of traditional forms of national sovereignty, and partly to do with more immediate disciplinary developments like the breakthrough conception of the nation as an ‘imagined political community.’ It is difficult to overestimate the importance of Benedict Anderson’s powerful reconceptualization of the work of social theorists like Ernest Gellner for literary studies.13 Most importantly, Anderson’s analysis of the nation as an ‘imagined political community,’ one ‘conceived in language, not in blood’ (145), as well as his perception of nationality and nationalism as ‘cultural artefacts’ (4), have enabled literary scholars to make a contribution to political science uniquely adapted to their skills in analysing verbal and aesthetic representations.14 Of course, Anderson, Ernest Gellner, and E.J. Hobsbawm, among influential theorists of nationalism, have posited that nations and nationalism are largely the product of the second half of the eighteenth century (when mass participation became critical) and therefore they analyse nationalism as basically a modern phenomenon; some early modern scholars, however, have pushed the roots of English nationalism back earlier, finding important evidence for the nation itself as an artificial and literary construct variously shaped by writers in sixteenth- and seventeenth-century England.15 The first fruits of this reconceptualization for early modern studies, especially those emphasizing the intersections between artistic and political representation, are evident in the landmark studies of Richard Helgerson on ‘the Elizabethan writing of England’ (1992), with his emphasis on various forms of writing constituting the nation, and David Norbrook on the seventeenth-century writing of the English Republic (1999).16 Norbrook’s study is especially instructive in the case of Milton, for while he acknowledges that the classical republicanism of writers like Milton ‘emerged in part as a vehicle for English nationalism,’ he nevertheless shows little interest in examining Milton’s nationalism or sense of nationhood as such, perhaps because the ideals of English republicanism, associated with a daring new experimental political world divested of monarchy and royal ceremony, seem more compelling

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and appealing than the disturbing and chauvinistic dimensions of English nationalism with its associations of national exceptionalism and ethnic prejudice.17 Yet in this respect, Norbrook’s ground-breaking study of English republican poetics and rhetoric is not altogether unusual, for the subject of Milton’s nationalism seems to have fallen between the cracks – specifically between the interstices of two of the discipline’s most powerful but, to some degree, independent interpretive communities in early modern historicist scholarship: those studying the nation and those studying Milton. The literary analysis of nations and nationalism in early modern studies has largely (though not exclusively) been the preserve of those scholars who have focused on expressions of intense national self-consciousness during the reigns of Elizabeth and James I and VI, in the England of Spenser and Shakespeare: first and second generation ‘new historicists,’ including Richard Helgerson, Andrew Hadfield, Claire McEachern, David Baker, Patrick Cheney, Jean Howard, and Phyllis Rackin, stand out among a growing number of other scholars.18 While an influential scholar like Stephen Greenblatt has had a great deal to say about early modern colonialism and issues of individual and national self-representation, he has limited the focus of his critical energy to the writing, representational practices, and cultural roles of art in the England of More, Spenser, Elizabeth I, and Shakespeare.19 The ‘new historicism’ has therefore had virtually nothing to say about matters of nationhood, national self-determination, and national selfrepresentation in relation to the unprecedented political and religious crises of Milton’s England, the period that most intensely contests the notion of the monarchy as the fundamental source of national identity and the most powerful and symbolic unifying force in the state. Similarly, for those scholars in literary studies whose primary focus has been Milton’s England only very recently has there been a stirring of interest in nations and nationalism. It is certainly true that since the late 1970s enormous critical energy has been redirected into the study of Milton’s politics, but most of that energy has been devoted to an analysis of his role as a controversialist in the English Revolution and its aftermath, with studies by Christopher Hill, Andrew Milner, Michael Wilding, Barbara Lewalski, Thomas Corns, Nigel Smith, Sharon Achinstein, David Loewenstein, and Victoria Kahn;20 and more recently to his crucial role in forging a republican literary and political tradition in seventeenthcentury England, with studies by Blair Worden, Nicholas von Maltzahn, David Armitage, and of course David Norbrook.21 Up to this point,

Introduction: Milton’s Nationalism 9

only a handful of essays and chapters have immediately concerned themselves in any detail with Milton’s expressions of nationalism and national identity, and there still exists no book-length study of the topic treating it in its full complexity and diversity.22 This dearth of critical interest and work is not because scholars have denied Milton’s imaginative investment in or identification with the nation.23 Rather, it is because they tend to take it for granted, and because they still have not fully appreciated the category’s explanatory force, nor chosen to interrogate the issues and challenges it raises for understanding Milton’s career and writings, including his deep ambivalence towards the nation itself. Our aim in this book is to alter this critical situation by demonstrating as cogently and comprehensively as possible the value of Milton to the study of nations and nationalism, and by exploring, from multiple critical perspectives, the importance of the ‘nation’ as a powerful imaginative construct and category in understanding Milton’s writings in prose and verse. We use the phrase ‘Milton’s England’ in the title of our book – Early Modern Nationalism and Milton’s England – less to suggest ‘the Age of Milton’ and more to underscore two issues central to our critical project: 1) Milton’s powerful if strained investment in the nation; and 2) the significance of the nation as an imaginative and political construct in his writings. Substantial critical discussion of Milton’s nationalism began in the 1990s. In 1996, Lawrence Lipking published a major article deploying Milton’s nationalism only to discredit the more positive aspects of Anderson’s theory of the ‘imagined community’ of nationality, suggesting that ‘Lycidas’ reveals the nation far less as ‘an imagined community united in bonds of sympathy and interest’ than as a ‘people bound together by bitter memories and common hatreds.’24 In response, Paul Stevens challenged Lipking’s critique as being too onesided. He offered an alternative view of Milton’s nationalism as essentially Janus-faced: that is, while it certainly can lead to exclusion and violence for the nation’s internal and external enemies, it also simultaneously and paradoxically idealizes and encourages full inclusion and equity for its citizens.25 Stevens’s focus on the maturing of a specifically modern nationalist ideology in Milton – both driven by and driving religious and secular forms of individualism, an ideology that the poet never altogether relinquishes – complicates the more generally accepted view that Milton’s investment in the nation simply declines or altogether disappears after the Restoration.26 Moreover, despite the poet’s profound disillusionment with England and with the

10 David Loewenstein and Paul Stevens

political and religious servility of the English people, his poetry is later coopted and assimilated into both American and British articulations of nationalism and imperial politics.27 The essays in Early Modern Nationalism and Milton’s England attempt to provide further nuance, complexity, and depth to the analysis of Milton’s nationalism, its political and religious contexts, its development in his career, and its impact in the later seventeenth and early eighteenth centuries. Ours is the first book to investigate major aspects of Milton’s nationalism, and we do so from a variety of critical perspectives in order to illuminate the diverse, sometimes conflicting and strained expressions of nationhood in Milton’s writings. Our aim, however, is not simply to assimilate a large early modern writer like Milton into the embrace of modernization theories of nations and nationalism, to make him eke out or reinforce the insights of Gellner or Anderson. We acknowledge a debt to these powerful, theoretically oriented accounts of nations and nationalism, but we do not wish to slavishly embrace them as the means to explain the centrality of nationhood to Milton’s career and writings. Rather, much more ambitiously, we wish to consider how Milton’s life and writings illuminate the key issues and questions outlined above at the same time that we explore the degree to which the category of nations and nationalism can help us better understand the complexities of seventeenth-century English politics and religion. We have therefore organized our book into five interconnected sections. The book’s first section, ‘The Majesty of a Free People,’ sets out the case for Milton’s political nationalism by attempting to address the question: how is his nationalism related to his revolutionary politics and writings and to those of his contemporaries? This group of essays indicates either directly or indirectly that Milton is properly considered a nationalist because in his writings England ceases to be a ‘sovereign realm’ and becomes a ‘sovereign nation’28 – that is, political sovereignty passes from the ‘king’ to the ‘people.’ The focus of Milton’s nationalism becomes the ‘majesty of a free people’ (a phrase taken from The Readie and Easie Way, CPW 7:428) and the problems and challenges that that transition entails. David Loewenstein’s essay starts off this section by examining Milton’s uneasy, often agonized relation to the English nation in the process of reinventing itself during the volatile revolutionary years. This essay highlights the ways Milton the controversialist struggled with the political ambiguities and religious tensions (including those fuelled by sectarianism) that threatened the unity and stability of the godly nation, in its various permutations and

Introduction: Milton’s Nationalism 11

experimental governments, during the 1640s and 1650s when the issue of the supreme authority of the people in a free nation became more pronounced. Andrew Hadfield and Warren Chernaik develop the significance of the transition of political sovereignty from the ‘king’ to the ‘people’ in their complementary expositions of Milton’s republicanism and preoccupation with liberty. Moving from the aggressive republicanism articulated in Eikonoklastes to the counter-Restoration politics of Paradise Lost (thereby stressing interconnections between the political prose and epic), Hadfield’s essay examines not only Milton’s concern with Parliament’s power to make and destroy kings (rather than the other way around), but also the imaginative and rhetorical ways the republican Milton articulates this emphasis in his controversial prose: for example, the ways Milton highlights parallels between English and Roman history or the polemical ways Milton responds to and employs early modern writers – Sidney, Shakespeare, Spenser, and George Buchanan – to make his republican arguments for the nation as representative of the people. As Hadfield goes on to show, Paradise Lost offers a particularly powerful ‘fable of national political decay’ in the poem’s dramatic treatment of the political world of hell where its fallen participants are easily manipulated like the slavish people seduced in 1649 by Eikon Basilike. In the final essay of this section, Chernaik directs our attention to the divergent and conflicting representations of Cromwell by Milton and his contemporaries during the revolutionary decades. How was English nationhood tested and contested by the emergence of Oliver Cromwell as the supreme military and political leader during these decades? Chernaik extends the analysis of nationalist Milton, political liberty, and tensions in revolutionary England by reconsidering, in his wide-ranging study, the varied responses by Milton, Marvell, and their fellow republicans (especially Marchamont Nedham and James Harrington) to Cromwell’s military ventures and political achievements. The fiercely divergent responses to Cromwell analysed in Chernaik’s essay – some radical republicans, including the Levellers, were savagely critical of him for betraying the liberties of the English people – reveal how notions of liberty, tyranny, and nationhood were intensely contested and redefined by Milton and his revolutionary contemporaries.29 The book’s second section, ‘Nationhood, the English Church, and Non-Conformity,’ examines more fully the intersections between religion and national identity in Milton’s England, and thereby adds a further dimension to the arguments of section I. The essays in this part of

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the book address the question: how does Milton’s religious fervour and his engagements in religious conflicts inform his emerging nationalism? Achsah Guibbory opens this section by examining the analogies drawn between biblical Israel and contemporary England in the struggle to redefine English Protestant nationhood and reform the church in England during the revolutionary years. In particular, she reexamines the force of popular belief in England’s divine election through an analysis of the rhetoric, zealous language, and biblical history employed in ‘fast sermons,’ those politicized sermons preached to Parliament which were instrumental in shaping national debates during the crises of the 1640s and 1650s. As Guibbory argues, the pervasive image of rebuilding the Jewish Temple in the fast sermons was crucial to the discourse of nationhood during the upheavals of mid-seventeenthcentury England; moreover, this rich trope tended to emphasize similarities rather than differences between contemporary England and ancient Israel. As Milton imaginatively reconfigures that potent image in Areopagitica and diverges from orthodox godly preachers who worried about the dangers of toleration, he transforms the metaphor of temple building to convey the inclusion of religious diversity and heterodox beliefs within the new English nation under construction. Joad Raymond also reexamines, in a richly historicized essay, the relation between Milton’s sense of Protestant, providential destiny and nationhood: the poet’s evocation of the protecting archangel Michael in ‘Lycidas,’ commanded to look homeward to the sufferings of the political body under the Laudian church, does indeed suggest a conception of elect nationhood – but one, Raymond argues, that also differs from modern notions of nationalism and empire and that has little to do with anti-Irish sentiment (as Lipking has proposed). Insofar as Raymond’s contribution offers a somewhat more sceptical view of early modern English nationalism,30 our book embraces a diverse range of arguments about nationalism in Milton’s England – what the Milton of Areopagitica might consider ‘brotherly dissimilitudes’ and ‘neighboring differences’ (CPW 2:555, 565) when it comes to debates about the nature and definition of nationalism in Milton and his England. In the concluding essay to this section on religion and nationhood, Andrew Escobedo explores the separation of nation from state in Milton’s radical rethinking of church government during the 1640s and 1650s. Especially suggestive is Escobedo’s argument that Congregationalist notions of an invisible church helped Milton to find ways to redefine and imagine the nation as a spiritual community – ‘the unity of Spirit’

Introduction: Milton’s Nationalism 13

as he calls it in Areopagitica (2:565) – independent of any single or coercive institutional form or authority. The third section of the book, ‘Ethnicity and International Relations,’ focuses on the relation between nationhood and internationalism, addressing the question: how should Milton’s concern for the English nation and Englishness be understood in relation to his investment in an international community represented by continental Europe and bound by universalist principles of civility and law? Or to put the question another way: how does Milton’s international outlook – his wider European perspective – enable him to transcend at times the limits and chauvinism of English nationalism? Thomas Corns’s concise and lucid piece examines the cultural restraints and ‘limitations of Englishness’ in Milton, including his abandonment of grand heroic narratives and providential English history in his incomplete History of Britain (1670). Corns thus points to the dangers of focusing too narrowly on Milton as a nationalist, specifically an ethnic nationalist. Mere Englishness is not enough to characterize this exceptionally cultured Protestant writer and polyglot republican intellectual who agonized over his nation’s failures and shortcomings in both the present and the past; as Corns stresses, ‘Milton’s Protestantism often had a pronounced internationalism.’ John Kerrigan’s politically informed, linguistically nuanced account of a Milton who is also ‘archipelagic in outlook’ enriches this argument further by amplifying Corns’s interest in an international Milton and thereby widening the critical perspective on Milton’s nationalism. Kerrigan challenges our tendency to compartmentalize events in the geopolitical triangle of England, Scotland, and the Netherlands; his essay thus posits a transnational, Europeanwide circulation of influence and questions the view of Milton as a narrow English patriot. At the same time he points to the tension between the desire for some form of wider Protestant confederation, on the one hand, and the inclination to return to a nativist nationalism, on the other. Focusing on the ‘disappointed nationalism’ of Samson Agonistes, Victoria Kahn examines a similar kind of tension as she situates Milton in the wider context of seventeenth-century debates about international law in relation to the claims of the nation-state: the conflict between national allegiance and the ‘law of nations’ (l. 890), powerfully dramatized in the bitter exchanges between Dalila and Samson, ‘still vexes modern versions of the nation,’ as Kahn pointedly observes. This section closes with an essay by Paul Stevens which partly seeks to heal the fissure Victoria Kahn so persuasively identifies and explores. There

14 David Loewenstein and Paul Stevens

is, Stevens argues, a more positive dimension to Milton’s redefinition of nationalism: Milton the controversialist emphasizes ‘the sovereignty of citizenship’ characterized by the agency and responsibility of knowing citizens in the nation. Stevens suggests how Milton’s imagined nation at its most idealistic and attractive – his civic or positive nationalism based on the public good – not only offers an alternative model of international relations governed by the ‘law of nations,’ but also enables Milton to challenge the limitations of a nationalism based on selfinterest and ethnicity. The book’s fourth section, ‘Milton’s Nationalism and Its Discontents: Gender, Luxury, Slavery,’ explores further some of the more negative, disturbing implications of Milton’s nationalism and his depiction of the nation, especially in terms of issues of gender, race, and the temptations of luxury. It addresses, from additional perspectives, the question: just how ideal is Milton’s conception of the nation, especially a nation he often genders in manly or (more negatively) in effeminate terms? Willy Maley, with characteristic wit and force, opens this section by reexamining in detail Milton’s unfinished History of Britain in relation to issues of national leadership and native manliness; he reveals how Milton’s anxiety about female rule in the History of Britain, especially notable in his sharply negative account of the warrior-queen Boadicea’s undisciplined and savage leadership, qualifies and darkens his patriotism – the implication being that the true or successful ‘puissant’ nation must be gendered male. Of course, one might note in response to Maley’s point that this was not always the case in the earlier prose of the revolutionary years, especially when Milton expresses his exhilarating hopes for the rejuvenating nation; in Areopagitica, for example, Milton’s memorable and imaginative vision of the ‘puissant’ Samson-like nation in 1644 involves a kind of gender fusion so that the nation is figured as both ‘she’ and ‘he’: ‘Methinks I see in my mind a noble and puissant Nation rousing herself like a strong man after sleep, and shaking her invincible locks’ (CPW 2:557–8). Laura Knoppers’s argument about the ‘luxurious nation,’ based on a remarkably wide range of texts by Milton, is related to Maley’s insofar as Milton’s antipathy to prelatical and royalist luxury shades into his contempt for national effeminacy. Drawing freely upon both biblical and classical sources, Milton depicts both the attractive and dangerous sides of luxury, as his works consider its impact on the nation and the English people, who bear some responsibility for its dissipating effects. Yet as ‘luxury’ changes its meaning with the rise of consumerism and the

Introduction: Milton’s Nationalism 15

craving pursuit of economic power, Milton is resolute in his determination to see it as a self-consuming form of effeminate intemperance. In its unchecked pursuit of ‘the luxurious expences of a nation upon trifles or superfluities’ (Readie and Easie Way, CPW 7:462), the English nation consumes itself as it grows ‘more numerously and excessively vitious then heretofore,’ as Milton contemptuously observes in 1673 (Of True Religion, CPW 8:438). This section of the book concludes with Mary Nyquist’s rigorously thought-through and provocative examination of the discordant relations between vigorous defences of political liberty, the expansion of colonial and commercial slavery, and the development of nationalism in Milton’s England. Nyquist’s comparison of Milton’s controversial writings and Paradise Lost with Locke’s Two Treatises of Government proves illuminating: unlike Locke, the republican Milton offers no defence of the institution of chattel slavery; nevertheless, his conception of a free nation, in which ultimate sovereignty and power reside in the people, does not eliminate it, even as Milton reviles political and ecclesiastical servility.31 The fifth section, ‘The Nationalization of Milton,’ brings our book to a close with a substantial essay on the reception of nationalist Milton in the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries. Nicholas von Maltzahn argues that nationalism after Milton adopts ‘the much celebrated sublimity of Milton’s poetry.’ Consequently, Paradise Lost, a poem that continues to give voice to Milton’s unchanged radical and republican sentiments, is paradoxically coopted during the British eighteenth century into the kind of cultural form of nationalism – a nationalist heroic poetry valorizing military glory and imperial expansionism – that the later Milton himself wants to challenge, subvert, and transcend. The contributions to Early Modern Nationalism and Milton’s England thus attempt to reveal and examine the complexities and multifaceted nature of Milton’s nationalism, including the tension between Milton’s close identification with a ‘puissant’ Protestant nation and his revulsion at its many shortcomings and dramatic relapses. At his most invigorating and visionary moments, such as in Areopagitica, Milton imagined England as ‘a Nation so pliant and so prone to seek after knowledge’ that she was being forged and newly invented by ‘much arguing, much writing, many opinions.’ Our hope is that this book will give new impetus to the further study of such matters as nationhood, national self-determination, and national self-representation in relation to the unprecedented political and religious crises of Milton’s England, in relation to Milton’s career and writings, and indeed in relation to the

16 David Loewenstein and Paul Stevens

role of the nation in our brave new twenty-first-century world. In doing so, we hope – and expect – that our book about John Milton, Englishman, and national community will also stimulate ‘much arguing, much writing, many opinions.’

NOTES 1 The Life Records of John Milton, ed. J. Milton French, 5 vols (New Brunswick: Rutgers University Press, 1949–58), 1:419. Thus Milton signed his name when travelling to Geneva in 1639. He also included a Latin motto from Horace: ‘Coelum non animum muto dum trans mare curro’ (I change the sky but not my mind when I cross the sea). For more on this, see Paul Stevens, ‘Milton’s Janus-faced Nationalism: Soliloquy, Subject, and the Modern Nation-State,’ JEGP 100.2 (2001): esp. 254–6. 2 The Complete Prose Works of John Milton, gen. ed. Don M. Wolfe, 8 vols (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1953–82), 8:4; subsequent quotations from Milton’s prose are taken from this edition and cited parenthetically as CPW in the text. 3 For the Latin, see The Works of John Milton, gen. ed. Frank A. Patterson, 18 vols in 21 (New York: Columbia University Press, 1931–8), 12:114. 4 Distinctions between Milton’s revolutionary nationalism and the ambiguities of his later patriotism are examined in David Loewenstein, ‘Late Milton: Early Modern Nationalist or Patriot?’ Milton Studies 48 (2008): 53–71. 5 One of the striking contributions of Richard Helgerson’s Forms of Nationhood: The Elizabethan Writing of England (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1992), a book discussed briefly below, is that it examines the discursive creation and representation of the Elizabethan nation by means of a wide range of forms produced by a generation of writers. See also David Cressy, Bonfires and Bells: National Memory and the Protestant Calendar in Elizabethan and Stuart England (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1989). 6 Quoted from John T. Shawcross, Milton: The Critical Heritage, 2 vols (London: Routledge & Kegan Paul, 1970), 1:145. 7 Quoted from William Poole, ‘Two Readers of Milton: John Beale and Abraham Hill,’ Milton Quarterly 38 (2004): 76. 8 See, e.g., Daniel Defoe in A Review of the State of the British Nation (18 August 1711): ‘[Paradise Lost] passes with a general Reputation for the greatest, best, and most sublime Work now in the English Tongue’; cited in Shawcross, Critical Heritage, 1:146.

Introduction: Milton’s Nationalism 17 9 Shawcross, Milton, 1:219. 10 William Wordsworth, ‘London, 1802’; and Arthur E. Barker, Milton and the Puritan Dilemma, 1641–60 (Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 1942), xi. 11 Douglas Bush, Paradise Lost in Our Time: Some Comments (Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 1945): ‘To defeatist intellectuals of the “Armistice” period, 1918–1939, any form of idealism was anathema, whether romantic or Miltonic’ (4). 12 The massive collection of the publisher and bookseller George Thomason, consisting of over 22,000 works including books, pamphlets, newsbooks, broadsides, and manuscripts, is a testament to the extraordinary impact of print between 1641 and 1660. Further work remains to be done on the significance of this huge outpouring of contemporary publications for constructing different, competing, and conflicting versions of the nation during this period. 13 Benedict Anderson, Imagined Communities: Reflections on the Origin and Spread of Nationalism (1983; rev. ed. London: Verso, 1991); Ernest Gellner, Nations and Nationalism (Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 1983). See also E.J. Hobsbawm, Nations and Nationalism since 1780: Programme, Myth, Reality, 2nd ed. (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1992), esp. 10; Homi K. Bhabha, ed., Nation and Narration (London: Routledge, 1990); and Anthony Giddens, The Nation-State and Violence (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1985). Cf. Adrian Hastings, The Construction of Nationhood: Ethnicity, Religion, and Nationalism (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1997). 14 See also the important study by Linda Colley, Britons: Forging the Nation, 1707–1837 (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1992; 2nd ed., 2005), which stresses ‘that element of counterfeit and invention that has characterized all nations at some point’ (xiv) and which acknowledges the impact of Anderson’s definition of nations as ‘artificial constructs’ (5). 15 See, however, Liah Greenfeld’s examination of the roots of nationalism in sixteenth-century England: Nationalism: Five Roads to Modernity (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1992). In Britons, Colley’s analysis of nationalism and patriotism begins with the invention of Great Britain in 1707 when the Parliament of Westminster passed the Act of Union linking Scotland to England and Wales, but she also examines the roots of this Protestant nationalism in the England of the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries; see esp. 11–54. Cf. Colin Kidd, British Identities before Nationalism: Ethnicity and Nationhood in the Atlantic World, 1600–1800 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1999), for the argument that nationalism is a modern invention and not to be conflated with the national consciousness of the early modern period. Most of the essays in

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16

17

18

19

20

the present volume challenge this thesis in one way or another, although see Joad Raymond’s essay below. Helgerson, Forms of Nationhood, and David Norbrook, Writing the English Republic: Poetry, Rhetoric and Politics, 1627–1660 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1999). Norbrook, Writing the English Republic, 20. Milton of course is a complicated case because his national chauvinism is complemented and enriched by his cultivated and self-conscious sense of himself as an international poet and polemicist, perhaps expressed most complexly in his Pro Populo Anglicano Defensio Secunda of 1654. See also the essays in section IV of this book, especially those by Thomas N. Corns and John Kerrigan. Helgerson, Forms of Nationhood; Andrew Hadfield, Literature, Politics and National Identity: Reformation to Renaissance (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1994), and Shakespeare, Spenser, and the Matter of Britain (Basingstoke: Palgrave Macmillan, 2003); Claire McEachern, The Poetics of English Nationhood, 1590–1612 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1996); David J. Baker, Between Nations: Shakespeare, Spenser, Marvell, and the Question of Britain (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 1997); Patrick Cheney, Shakespeare, National Poet-Playwright (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2004); Jean E. Howard and Phyllis Rackin, Engendering a Nation: A Feminist Account of Shakespeare’s English Histories (London: Routledge, 1997); Jodi Mikalachki, The Legacy of Boadicea: Gender and the Nation in Early Modern England (London: Routledge, 1998); British Identities and English Renaissance Literature, ed. David Baker and Willy Maley (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2002); Willy Maley, Nation, State and Empire in English Renaissance Literature: Shakespeare to Milton (Basingstoke: Palgrave Macmillan, 2003); Philip Schwyzer, Literature, Nationalism, and Memory in Early Modern England and Wales (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2004); and Cathy Shrank, Writing the Nation in Reformation England, 1530–1580 (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2004). See, among Greenblatt’s numerous books, Renaissance Self-Fashioning: From More to Shakespeare (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1980); Representing the English Renaissance, ed. Greenblatt (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1988); Shakespearean Negotiations: The Circulation of Social Energy in the English Renaissance (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1988); and Marvelous Possessions: The Wonder of the New World (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1991), although this last book is concerned more broadly with early modern European representational practices. These studies include Christopher Hill, Milton and the English Revolution (London: Faber, 1977), and The Experience of Defeat: Milton and Some

Introduction: Milton’s Nationalism 19 Contemporaries (London: Penguin, 1994); Andrew Milner, John Milton and the English Revolution: A Study in the Sociology of Literature (London: Macmillan, 1981); Michael Wilding, Dragons Teeth: Literature in the English Revolution (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1987), chs 2, 3, 8, 9; Barbara K. Lewalski, The Life of John Milton: A Critical Biography (Oxford: Blackwell, 2000); Mary Ann Radzinowicz, ‘The Politics of Paradise Lost,’ in Politics of Discourse: The Literature and History of Seventeenth-Century England, ed. Kevin Sharpe and Steven N. Zwicker (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1987), 204–29; Thomas N. Corns, Uncloistered Virtue: English Political Literature, 1640–1660 (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1992), chs 2, 3, 6, 8; David Quint, Epic and Empire: Politics and Generic Form from Virgil to Milton (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1993), chs 7, 8; Nigel Smith, Literature and Revolution in England, 1640–1660 (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1994); Sharon Achinstein, Milton and the Revolutionary Reader (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1994); David Loewenstein and James Grantham Turner, eds, Politics, Poetics, and Hermeneutics in Milton’s Prose (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1990); David Loewenstein, Representing Revolution in Milton and His Contemporaries: Religion, Politics, and Polemics in Radical Puritanism (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2001); and Victoria Kahn, Wayward Contracts: The Crisis of Political Obligations in England, 1640–1674 (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2004), esp. chs 5, 8, 10. 21 Blair Worden, ‘Milton’s Republicanism and the Tyranny of Heaven,’ in Machiavelli and Republicanism, ed. Gisela Bock, Quentin Skinner, and Maurizio Viroli (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1990), 225–45; Nicholas von Maltzhan, Milton’s History of Britain: Republican Historiography in the English Revolution (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1991); Milton and Republicanism, ed. David Armitage, Armand Himy, and Quentin Skinner (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1995); Norbrook, Writing the English Republic. 22 See, for instance, Lawrence Lipking, ‘The Genius of the Shore: Lycidas, Adamastor, and the Poetics of Nationalism,’ PMLA 111.2 (1996): 205–21; Paul Stevens, ‘“Leviticus Thinking” and the Rhetoric of Early Modern Colonialism,’ Criticism 35.3 (1993): 441–61, ‘Milton’s Janus-faced Nationalism,’ ‘Milton’s “Renunciation” of Cromwell: The Problem of Raleigh’s CabinetCouncil,’ Modern Philology 98.3 (2001): 363–92, and ‘Milton’s Nationalism and the Rights of Memory,’ in Imagining Death in Spenser and Milton, ed. Elizabeth J. Bellamy, Patrick Cheney, and Michael Schoenfeldt (London: Palgrave Macmillan, 2003), 171–84; Nicholas von Maltzahn, ‘The War in Heaven and the Miltonic Sublime,’ in A Nation Transformed: England after the Restoration, ed. Alan Houston and Steve Pincus (Cambridge: Cambridge

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23

24 25 26

27

28

29

University Press, 2001), ch. 6; Derek Hirst, ‘Literature and National Identity,’ in The Cambridge History of Early Modern English Literature, ed. David Loewenstein and Janel Mueller (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2002), ch. 21; Andrew Escobedo, Nationalism and Historical Loss in Renaissance England: Foxe, Dee, Spenser, Milton (Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 2004), chs 4–5; Elizabeth Sauer, ‘Milton’s Of True Religion, Protestant Nationhood, and the Negotiation of Liberty,’ Milton Quarterly 40.1 (2006): 1–19; and Rachel J.Trubowitz, ‘Body Politics in Paradise Lost,’ PMLA 121.2 (2006): 388–404. It is worth recalling that James Holly Hanford’s still highly readable biography of Milton, published nearly sixty years ago, was entitled John Milton, Englishman (New York: Crown, 1949); Hanford begins his book by referring to Milton as ‘an English patriot’ who ‘inherited the emotions and ideology of a great nationalistic movement’ (ix). Lipking, ‘The Genius of the Shore,’ 213. Stevens, ‘Milton’s Nationalism and the Rights of Memory,’ ‘“Leviticus Thinking”’ and ‘Milton’s Janus-Faced Nationalism.’ This last point, that Milton’s nationalism is more implicit in his Restoration writings, is examined further in Paul Stevens’s essay in this book: ‘How Milton’s Nationalism Works: Globalization and the Possibilities of Positive Nationalism.’ See Keith Stavely, ‘The World All Before Them: Milton and the Rising Glory of America,’ Eighteenth-Century Culture 20 (1990): 147–64; Stephen C. Behrendt, ‘Paradise Lost, History Painting, and Eighteenth-Century English Nationalism,’ Milton Studies 25 (1990): 141–59; Anne-Julia Zwierlein, ‘Pandemic Panoramas: Surveying Milton’s ‘vain empires’ in the Long Eighteenth Century,’ in Milton and the Terms of Liberty, ed. Graham Parry and Joad Raymond (Woodbridge: Boydell & Brewer, 2002), 191–214; Nicholas von Maltzahn, ‘The War in Heaven and the Miltonic Sublime’; and von Maltzahn’s essay, ‘Milton: Nation and Reception,’ which concludes Early Modern Nationalism and Milton’s England. Even a cursory review of A Concordance to Milton’s English Prose, ed. Laurence Sterne and Harold H. Kollmeier (Binghamton: Medieval & Renaissance Texts & Studies, 1985), reveals that Milton much more frequently employs the term ‘nation’ in his vernacular prose than the term ‘realm’ (in its various spellings). On Cromwell’s contemporary reputation, see also John Morrill, ‘Cromwell and His Contemporaries,’ in Oliver Cromwell and the English Revolution, ed. Morrill (London: Longman, 1990), 259–81. See also, Laura Lunger

Introduction: Milton’s Nationalism 21 Knoppers, Constructing Cromwell: Ceremony, Portrait, and Print, 1645–1661 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2000). 30 Cf. Colin Kidd, British Identities before Nationalism; and Krishnan Kumar, The Making of English National Identity (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2003). For a critique of Kidd’s argument that nationalist thinking is alien to the early modern period, see especially Paul Stevens’s essay in this volume. 31 To support her argument, Nyquist recalls the sublime and terrifying ending to Of Reformation where Milton, just after imagining himself as a visionary poet celebrating ‘the great and Warlike Nation,’ envisions the English prelates suffering a horrific punishment and well-deserved servility in hell: Milton imagines them debased below the other damned in hell who ‘in the anguish of their torture shall have no other ease then to exercise a Raving and Bestiall Tyranny over them as their Slaves and Negro’s’ (CPW 1:617).

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PART ONE The Majesty of a Free People

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1 Milton’s Nationalism and the English Revolution: Strains and Contradictions david loewenstein

The political and religious upheavals of the English Revolution had a complex effect on Milton the nationalist writer: they generated new nationalist fervour, created enormous expectations for national renewal and reform, and yet generated acute anxieties and disappointments expressed in his controversial prose works. Nevertheless, if Milton agonized over the English nation and expressed deep ambivalence about it during the revolutionary decades (as we began to see in the introduction to this book), he was hardly the only godly contemporary to do so. In an impassioned speech delivered by Oliver Cromwell to Parliament in September 1654, the new Protector lamented that Interregnum England had become ‘a nation rent and torn in spirit and principle from one end to another’;1 there Cromwell expressed his frustration at the explosive sectarian challenges to the authority of his experimental, indeed quasi-regal regime, the Protectorate. That speech articulated Cromwell’s sense that religious unity, so badly splintered at this moment during the Interregnum, was urgently needed to maintain a strong sense of national identity and collectivity – and his vision of the English nation united in godliness. ‘Disettlement and division, discontent and dissatisfaction’2 within the godly nation worried Cromwell above all else. Like Milton’s, Cromwell’s sense of nationality – his personal and cultural feeling of belonging to a nation – ran deeply: ‘We are Englishmen; that is one good account,’ he announced to Parliament two years later.3 Yet his sense of national election, unity, and triumphalism could also be profoundly shaken by anxieties about religious disunity and contention among the godly. Cromwell’s harsh language in 1654 with regard to the jarring sects – and his vision of the godly nation unsettled by radical sectarianism – contrast strikingly with

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Milton’s language and vision of ‘the unity of Spirit’ expressed ten years earlier in Areopagitica,4 a vision that embraced the outburst of Protestant sectarianism in England and ‘such noisome opinions’ and ‘contentions amongst Christians’ which so deeply troubled Cromwell.5 The spectre of sectarian growth, in Milton’s view, was not undermining a new, robust sense of national identity and threatening anarchy. To the contrary, the diversity and surge of radical sectarianism, fuelled by millenarian expectations, was a source of national strength, renewal, and, indeed, reinvention – enabling Britannia, ‘a noble and puissant Nation’ (CPW 2:558), to rouse herself like Samson. In later controversial writings, however, Milton the Protestant nationalist did not always so effectively reconcile or exploit rhetorically the political and religious tensions associated with the concept of a ‘nation’ during the 1640s and 1650s. In this essay I examine some of the strains, tensions, and contradictions associated with Milton’s evolving sense of nationality during the political and religious upheavals of the English Revolution. Although it may not have been coined until the late eighteenth century, the word ‘nationalism’ may also be used to describe Milton’s intense yet evolving sense of nationhood, especially if we are careful to differentiate it, say, from the organic ‘blood and soil’ (‘Blut und boden’) variant of nationalism that took hold across Europe in the nineteenth and twentieth centuries.6 Nationalisms of course vary widely across time and in relation to particular countries and cultures, and Milton’s sense of Protestant nationality certainly needs to be considered in relation to its own particular cultural contexts and historical pressures.7 My argument here is that during the revolutionary decades, Milton the controversialist reconfigured the language and concept of nationhood in striking ways, yet sometimes he creatively confronted major tensions and ambiguities associated with a newly emerging Protestant nationalism in the midst of the upheavals of the English Revolution (for example, the relation between national unity and divisive religious sectarianism) and sometimes he avoided confronting them directly (for example, troubling ambiguities over the nature of popular sovereignty during the experimental Republic). I In Nationalism: Five Roads to Modernity, Liah Greenfeld has shown that the emerging language of nationalism, by which she also means

Milton’s Nationalism and the English Revolution 27

‘national identity (or nationality) and consciousness, and collectivities based on them’ (i.e., nations), developed early in England and was already noticeable during the first part of the sixteenth century when, for example, the word ‘nation’ became synonymous with the word ‘people.’8 Recently early modern literary scholars (including Richard Helgerson, Andrew Hadfield, Claire McEachern, and David Baker) have themselves contributed a great deal to our thinking about the issues of nations, nationhood, and national self-representation in Elizabethan and early Stuart England.9 Yet by comparison literary scholars have done relatively little to examine these major issues, including the issue of nationalism and the struggle to reinvent England, during the revolutionary decades of seventeenth-century England when a sense of nationality was intensified by unprecedented political and religious upheavals and when it was often fuelled by apocalyptic and millenarian language and ideas. The time is thus surely ripe for more historically informed analyses of the nation and nationalism in the writings of Milton and his contemporaries, including the ways Milton attempted to imagine, forge, and reconstruct the godly nation in his revolutionary works.10 In Milton’s England, the language associated with the ‘nation’ – often a synonym for ‘people’ and ‘commonwealth,’ with the latter term defined more specifically in relation to the experimental Republic – took on less neutral and more polemical implications during the Civil Wars and Interregnum when the term ‘nation’ was frequently the main term for ‘England.’11 (Less common was the term ‘realm’ as in John of Gaunt’s famous line from Richard II: ‘This blessed plot, this earth, this realm, this England.’) Thus the Heads of Proposals offered by the army in 1647 promised Charles I that in the case of acceptance and ‘the things here before proposed being provided, for settling and securing the rights, liberties, peace and safety of the kingdom ... His majesty’s person, his Queen, and royal issue, may be restored to a condition of safety, honour and freedom in this nation’ (emphasis added). The language of the ‘nation,’ implying a new form of polity based upon the notion that ‘all just power’ derived from the people, was especially notable in the act erecting a High Court of Justice for the king’s trial, as well as those acts abolishing the House of Lords, the monarchy, and establishing the Commonwealth: the king ‘not content with the many encroachments which his predecessors had made upon the people in their rights and freedoms, hath had a wicked design totally to subvert

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the ancient and fundamental laws and liberties of this nation’ (emphasis added); and consequently trying him would prevent the further attempt ‘to imagine or contrive the enslaving or destroying of the English nation.’12 Acutely aware of this newly charged language of nationality during the revolutionary years, Milton often exploited, revised, and reinvigorated it in his major controversial writings where he had also expressed his fervent hope to produce literary works in his ‘native tongue’ in a range of genres ‘doctrinal and exemplary to a Nation’ (CPW 1:815) and aimed at engendering a new sense of national spirit. I wish to highlight here, however, some of the political and religious tensions underlying this language and concept of a reformed nation or a new commonwealth – tensions or contradictions sometimes, although not always, directly confronted and creatively exploited by Milton in his revolutionary writings. Milton’s sense of Protestant national identity continued to evolve during the revolutionary years as the concept of an English nation itself was tried and fiercely contested, and as political as well as religious circumstances changed, and as experimental Interregnum regimes revealed instabilities. In his political and religious texts of these volatile decades, we can see the enormous emotional and psychological power of early modern Protestant nationalism. Yet we can also see the ways that Milton continually struggled with and agonized over the notion of England as a godly ‘Nation chos’n before any other’ – an exceptional nation with a distinctive purpose – so ‘that out of her as out of Sion should be proclam’d and sounded forth the first tidings and trumpet of Reformation to all Europ’ (CPW 2:552). This essay examines Milton’s strained and volatile relation to the nation during these exhilarating yet unsettling decades of political and religious change and experimentation. In the early 1640s, notably in the dense and fiery apocalyptic prose of his first tract, Of Reformation Touching Church-Discipline in England (May 1641), Milton’s Protestant nationalism was heightened by the convergence of his fierce anti-Laudian perspective with his intense millenarian fervour and his vocational aspirations as a visionary national and poetic writer. Conveying a sharp sense of political and religious crisis, Of Reformation also conveys a great welter and range of rhetorical responses to England as Milton vacillates between exhilaration and profound frustration, between ecstatic praise and sharp admonishment, and between national pride and disappointment. Of Reformation already provides plenty of evidence for Milton as a fervent

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yet anguished nationalist during the revolutionary decades.13 These responses remind us, as Paul Stevens notes elsewhere in this book, how often Milton’s relation to the English nation is indeed ‘intensely agonistic,’14 especially as he struggles to reconcile its historic uniqueness and elect nationhood with its political ambiguities and shortcomings as a godly nation. In Of Reformation, Milton’s urgent hopes for England and his sense of its exceptionalism are fuelled by his nationalistic millenarianism, and yet he also struggles with his acute sense of disappointment at the English nation’s alarming relapses into unnatural ecclesiastical and political servility: England that was ‘the first that should set up a Standard for the recovery of lost Truth, and blow the first Evangelick Trumpet to the Nations’ now seems to ‘be last, and most unsettl’d in the enjoyment of that Peace, whereof she taught the way to others’; and given ‘the Precedencie which GOD gave this Iland, to be the first Restorer of buried Truth, [England] should have been followed with more happy successe, and sooner attain’d Perfection’ (CPW 1:525–6). Thus while Milton bitterly laments, with the voice of an elegiac national poet, his ‘deare Mother England ... in a mourning weed, with ashes upon her head, and teares abundantly flowing from her eyes’ as a result of all she has suffered under prelatical servility (CPW 1:585), he also imagines himself assuming the role of a different, heroic kind of national-religious poet who ‘may perhaps bee heard offering at high strains in new and lofty Measures to sing’ (CPW 1:616) of the reformed nation that will herald the coming of Christ’s kingdom. He yearns to write a Protestant national epic – ‘the Praise and the Heroick Song of all Posterity’ – addressed to the reformed nation, but this role as heroic national poet also remains contingent: his countrymen must ‘merit this’ (emphasis added) and ‘doe worthy, and Godlike deeds’ (CPW 1:597). Furthermore, Milton’s urgent sense of militant nationality – of England as a ‘great and Warlike Nation’ – is intensified by his millenarian fervour as he envisions Christ’s imminent return and reign (‘that day when thou the Eternall and shortly-expected King shalt open the Clouds to judge the severall Kingdomes of the World, and distributing Nationall Honours and Rewards to Religious and just Common-wealths, shalt put an end to all Earthly Tyrannies’), and as he simultaneously engages in a terrifying fantasy of the Laudian prelates ‘thrown downe eternally in the darkest and deepest Gulfe of HELL’ where they, having recently tyrannized over the godly and created both ecclesiastical and national servility, are themselves now subjected in Milton’s sublime and ferocious vision to a condition of horrific servility and subjection

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(since they are debased below the other damned in Hell) as ‘the basest, the lowermost, the most dejected, most underfoot and downe-trodden Vassals of Perdition’ (CPW 1:616–17). Milton’s vision of religious and national reform at this moment of ecclesiastical and political crisis was expressed, however, not only by his fiery and vituperative apocalypticism.15 It also finds expression in a kind of proto-republican nationalism, a vision of the English people who, living under a monarch finally liberated from the influence and power of Archbishop Laud and the earl of Strafford (the latter was executed in the same month Milton published his tract), can freely elect parliamentary representatives: thus in ‘the Common-wealth of England ... under a free, and untutor’d Monarch, the noblest, worthiest, and most prudent men, with full approbation, and suffrage of the People have in their power the supreame, and finall determination of highest Affaires’ (CPW 1:599). As we shall see below, the issue of the supreme power of the people in a free nation became even more pronounced and fraught with ambiguity during the violent birth of the infant Republic at the end of the decade. Similarly, Milton stresses in Of Reformation that the English people should freely elect their ministers: ‘And why should not the Piety, and Conscience of Englishmen as members of the Church be trusted in the Election of Pastors to Functions that nothing concerne a Monarch ... ?’ (CPW 1:600). Yet the relation of religious freedom to national renewal was about to be tested further as sectarianism, along with Presbyterian fears about its devastating impact on the church and nation, dramatically increased during the early 1640s; England was indeed ‘on edge,’ as David Cressy has put it, because of the fractious diversity that threatened, in the eyes of many contemporaries, not only traditional religious culture but the social fabric and political order.16 In this growing atmosphere of crisis and revolution, Milton the radical Protestant nationalist was thus prompted to rethink his vision of England as a ‘great and Warlike Nation’ – a unique Protestant nation capable of embracing growing sectarian divisions and the acute political and religious tensions they were generating. In Areopagitica (November 1644) Milton offered his most striking conceptualization of the godly ‘nation,’ a newly invented England which could absorb religious and political tensions, fuelled by the explosion of radical sectarianism and separatism, and become reinvigorated by them, vivid evidence that religion and the English Revolution ‘were deeply and inextricably linked.’17 In Milton’s case, national self-consciousness and feeling were indeed frequently expressed in

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zealous, religious terms as they are here: he characterizes England undergoing further religious and political reforms and experimentation, its reformation constantly under construction, as ‘a knowing people, [and] a Nation of Prophets’ (CPW 2:554) are engaged in remaking the new godly nation. Milton’s Temple of the Lord in Areopagitica serves as an elaborate metaphor for this process – some ‘building, some cutting, some squaring the marble, others hewing the cedars,’ a process of construction in the church and nation at large in which ‘there must be many schisms and many dissections made in the quarry and in the timber, ere the house of God can be built’ (CPW 2:555). Milton has taken a common enough trope – temple building or work – for godly reformation and nation building in the turbulent 1640s (it was, after all, frequently employed by Presbyterian preachers in their politicized sermons), and reconfigured it in fresh ways.18 No zealous Presbyterian minister preaching his ‘fast sermon’ before the Long Parliament would have configured the trope in such a way as to suggest that national unity and reformation could (and should) embrace sectarian divisions in the construction of the new godly nation.19 Yet that is precisely what Milton does, although he is addressing his tract to England’s Parliament rather than literally preaching before it: And when every stone is laid artfully together, it cannot be united into a continuity, it can but be contiguous in this world; neither can every peece of the building be of one form; nay rather the perfection consists in this, that out of many moderat varieties and brotherly dissimilitudes that are not vastly disproportionall arises the goodly and graceful symmetry that commends the whole pile and structure. (CPW 2.555)

Milton’s elaborate trope of the Temple of the Lord – a subtle image that contains proportion and disproportion, schism as well as unity – says a great deal about his vision of a new religious world that is not constrained by rigid religious dualisms and where religious truth may be both one and disparate. But it also reveals much about his vision of the ‘plaint’ nation in the making in 1644 – a new and reformed godly nation that can embrace religious differences and tensions (at least within a Protestant framework) and absorb them into its structure. That this is expressed in a dense metaphor combined with linguistic nuance – for example, Milton’s double negative ‘not vastly disproportionall’ – underscores the importance Milton attributes to writers themselves taking an active and imaginative role in reconceptualizing and refashioning the

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godly nation. As a nationalist, Milton himself is engaged in reconstructing and reforming the discourse of nationhood itself: Milton’s reconfiguring of the Temple of the Lord trope is a striking example of Milton investing the discourse of nationhood and reformation with new symbolic and political meaning. Milton’s refashioning of the Temple of the Lord trope to convey the possibility of combining national unity and religious division suggests too that Liah Greenfeld’s assertion that Milton is a good ‘example of the increasingly secular nationalism ... in the seventeenth century’20 needs significant qualification – not least because in his early tracts apocalyptic language and fiery millenarianism often blend with and reinforce an intense Protestant nationalism. In Areopagitica Milton’s concept of the warlike English nation undergoing a process of ‘great reformation’ (CPW 2:555) was not, however, only fuelled and defined by apocalyptic fervour and keen anti-Laudianism (as it was in Of Reformation). It was also complicated by his willingness to embrace different radical religious and separatist groups in this new ‘Nation of prophets,’ since Milton dared to envision his England as a dynamic, unfinished nation in which the dramatic outburst of sectarian activity and multiplying religious differences need not disrupt ‘the unity of Spirit’ (CPW 2:565). In this new godly nation, dispute, dissent, reading, and writing, stimulated by the outpouring of print during the 1640s that generated a new climate of intellectual energy and political experimentation, was invigorating a ‘pliant’ body politic, ‘a Nation not slow and dull, but of a quick, ingenious, and piercing spirit, acute to invent, suttle and sinewy to discours’ (CPW 2:554, 551). Linda Colley has used the evocative phrase ‘forging the nation’ to convey ‘the process of making’ the British Protestant nation and the element of ‘invention that has characterized all nations at some point.’21 In Areopagitica, Milton anticipates her use of this trope, giving it a militant inflection, when he envisions writers and readers – including those in the arena of political debate outside the direct control of government – themselves energetically and imaginatively engaged in forging the nation anew: ‘the shop of warre hath not there more anvils and hammers waking, to fashion out the plates, and instruments of armed Justice in defence of beleaguer’d Truth, then there be pens and heads there, sitting by their studious lamps, musing, searching, revolving new notions’ in ‘a Nation so pliant and so prone to seek after knowledge’ (CPW 2:554). A protean construct, Milton’s England in the process of being refashioned is open to new political possibilities and the discovery of new religious truths;

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it embraces strenuous ideological debate, while allowing for religious divisions and heterodox beliefs – ‘those neighboring differences ... whether in some point of doctrine or of discipline’ (CPW 2:565). The enormous proliferation of printed texts, following the collapse of official press censorship (in 1641),22 has been contributing to this process by encouraging, among its newly politicized and energized citizenry, ‘much arguing, much writing, [and] many opinions’ (CPW 2:554), including clashing ones, as well as coinciding with and helping to fuel the new ferment of sectarianism and culture of religious pluralism. Moreover, Milton’s nationalism in the midst of wartime England is particularly distinctive because he warns against the control of ideas, insisting in Areopagitica that the clash of ‘many opinions’ and vigorous debate, including ‘the liberty to know, to utter, and to argue freely according to conscience’ (CPW 2:560), are especially crucial during a time of national crisis and war, as well as during an age of religious fear and discord.23 Consequently, unlike a deeply frustrated Cromwell a decade later, the Milton of Areopagitica vigorously rejects the notion that schisms and sects – and the fragmentation of Protestant unity and the deepening fears concerning it – were perilous threats to godly reformation or to national unity and stability or to the recreation of the nation in revolutionary times. Rather, he makes this apparent weakness, especially in the eyes of more orthodox Puritans alarmed by increasingly ‘noisome opinions’ (to recall Cromwell’s phrase) created by the spread of sects and schisms, an unexpected source of Protestant national strength, renewal, and invention. In the midst of his vision of England’s divine election – that is, of England as ‘this Nation chos’n before any other’ – Milton dismisses ‘these fantastic terrors of sect and schism,’ concluding about the spectre of religious ‘divisions and subdivisions’ undoing and ruining the nation that ‘what some lament of, we rather should rejoyce at’ (CPW 2:552, 556, 554).24 Forging a new sense of national community at a moment of great religious ferment, Milton thus strives to balance the tension between unity and difference within the national polity. And his striking definition of the energetic, robust godly nation – a national community that could embrace so many schisms and divisions, that could be, simultaneously, unified and yet disparate (like the spiritual architecture of the Temple of the Lord with its ‘varieties’ and ‘dissimilitudes’ [555]) – is distinctive and powerfully imagined. Areopagitica thus marks Milton’s most creative response to the tension between zealous Protestant nationality – with its emphasis upon religious unity – and the threat of deepening religious divisions.

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II Milton’s later revolutionary tracts do not always confront so directly – and indeed exploit so vigorously, strategically, and quite so ingeniously – the religious and political tensions that seemed to threaten the unity and stability of the godly nation. Milton’s major tracts produced during the crisis of 1648–9, despite their searching critiques of the authority and images of royal power, offer an uneasier sense of the ‘nation’ and ‘Free State’ in the process of being reforged into an experimental republic.25 The new Commonwealth, after all, was born from a military coup against an elected assembly (the famous episode of 6 December 1648 known as Pride’s Purge) and yet its purged Parliament – the Rump which owed its power to the force of the army – could proclaim in early January 1649 the bold principle ‘that the people are, under God, the original of all just power’ and that ‘the supreme power in the nation’ was vested in the people’s representatives ‘being chosen by’ them.26 However, the Rump was far from constituting a revolutionary body, as many radicals soon enough perceived and some ventured to articulate in print: its appeal to popular sovereignty was fraught with ambiguity (since it never sought general elections), while its concessions to religious liberty also soon turned out to be limited.27 In May 1649, in one of the most serious crises of the English Revolution, it suppressed by force the Levellers whose republican convictions and sectarian sympathies were stronger than its own, and who powerfully challenged its ambiguous authority in such daring texts as England’s New Chains Discovered and The Second Part of Englands New-Chaines Discovered (February and March 1649), withering attacks on the infant regime ‘warning of the most dangerous thraldom and misery that ever threatened this much wasted Nation’ and invoking the spectre of a more insidious tyranny over the nation – ‘a new way of breaking the spirits of the English, which Strafford and Canterbury never dreampt of.’28 The infant regime’s troubling contradictions – resulting in ‘the uncertain and dangerous condition of the Common-wealth’ (as the Leveller polemicists put it)29 – were there from its beginnings, and a republican polemicist and Protestant nationalist like Milton was faced with the challenge of how to represent the experimental government of the new and fragile Commonwealth when the limits of the English Revolution were being severely tested. Like the Levellers, Milton was often inclined to identify himself, his writings, his actions, and his sense of personal responsibility intimately

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with the larger English nation and its destiny: imprisoned in the Tower in 1649, the highly contentious Lilburne, who presented himself in his works as a free-born Englishman, wrote that ‘as I am an individual, I am part of the whole Nation, and if it perish in the eye of reason, I and mine must perish with it.’30 Yet unlike the Levellers, whose views of liberty of conscience and ‘the right[s] of free born Men’ (CPW 3:206) resemble Milton’s,31 Milton chose at this moment not to denounce the Rump for continuing its self-perpetuation and assertion of power without electoral appeal or for not holding early general elections, thereby making it a questionable embodiment of the national will. In the case of The Tenure of Kings and Magistrates, where much of Milton’s rhetorical venom is reserved for the equivocal language and politics of the ‘prevaricating [Presbyterian] Divines’ (CPW 3:232) because they favoured a negotiated settlement with the king, Milton justifies on bold theoretical grounds Pride’s Purge and the regicide which generated the infant regime; he also insists, like other radical writers, that the power of kings and princes derives from the people ‘in whom the power yet remaines fundamentally’ (CPW 3:202), a claim Milton would continue to assert two years later, this time to a wider European audience, in his Defence of the English People (February 1651).32 Revolutionary England, whose Parliament and army have dared in Milton’s words to ‘doe what they doe without precedent,’ assumes a kind of heroic stature in Milton’s Tenure so that it is now leading other nations (as Milton had yearned it would in Of Reformation): ‘we have the honour to precede other Nations who are now labouring to be our followers’ (CPW 3:237, 236). It is the furious Presbyterians who are ‘Mercenary noisemakers’ (CPW 2:236) at this decisive moment in the reforging of revolutionary England, not the rebellious radical sects voicing their ‘noisome opinions,’ as Cromwell would complain a few years later. Yet in the Tenure Milton the controversialist never confronts, as the Levellers would do so keenly in the winter and spring of 1649, the political ambiguities of identifying the authority and power of the Rump, despite its revolutionary origins (including the Purge, the regicide, and the abolition of monarchy and the House of Lords), with the just and the supreme power of the people and the ‘natural and essential power of a free Nation’ (CPW 3:237). No doubt there is an element of political realism to Milton’s position in early 1649: for the moment and in such exhilarating but traumatic times (his Tenure was published two weeks after the regicide), the Rump probably seemed like the best hope for the struggling English nation and experimental infant Republic. Other major radical writers,

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however, expressed greater unease and scepticism over the new regime’s ability to reforge the nation so that it genuinely closed the gap between its ideal profession of popular sovereignty and a more sinister reality of political and religious power. In 1649 Gerrard Winstanley, the Digger leader and prophet, envisioned England, proclaimed a free Commonwealth, as the first of nations ‘which falls off from the covetous beastly Government’; yet he also warned, often in colourful, apocalyptic prose, that sinister forms of kingly power, supported by oppressive legal institutions and institutions of religious orthodoxy, were far from eradicated by the dramatic and unprecedented events of 1648–9: the Commonwealth, which was doing little to advance religious, social, or legal reform on behalf of the common people, was yet to become (in Winstanley’s words) ‘the Lilly among the Nations of the Earth.’33 In political and religious terms Milton was more radical than the cautious new government he chose to support (for example, he never regretted or showed uneasiness about the unpopular regicide, as most Rump MPs did, and he fervently opposed a national church supported by tithes);34 however, the major controversial writings he published in 1649 did not probe the ambiguities or contradictions of this experimental regime claiming to represent the power of the people and the nation at large. Those unresolved tensions would continue to trouble the nation and its cautious republican regime, resulting in further experimental governments and political instabilities during the Interregnum. Moreover, profoundly shaken in later 1649 was Milton’s sense of national election and nation building, especially his sense of national invention and potential closely connected in Areopagitica with a new culture of reading, writing, and much arguing stimulated by the explosion of print during the heady early days of the English Revolution. Milton’s vision of England as a vibrant ‘Nation ... subtle and sinewy to discours,’ full of active, discerning godly readers ‘sufficient both to judge aright, and to examine each matter’ in any books that came into their hands (to quote from Areopagitica, CPW 2:551, 511) was seriously challenged in this critical year. It proved harder to sustain that vision of a nation comprised of and forged by engaged and disputatious citizens ‘acute to invent’ as Milton undertook his massive polemical assault on the hugely successful Eikon Basilike, a work or ‘portraiture of his Majesty’ published just days after the king’s execution that claimed to record his meditations and devotional exercises during his final captivity. As Milton wrote in Eikonoklastes (October 1649), the people of ‘this afflicted Nation,’ prone ‘to a civil kinde of Idolatry in idolizing

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thir Kings’ (CPW 3:338, 343), had too quickly become ‘fatally stupifi’d and bewitch’d’ (CPW 3:347) under the powerful influence of the king’s seductive book with its tear-jerking depiction of martyrdom and piety. And although Milton was still anxious to believe that such ‘a besotted and degenerate baseness of spirit’ and ‘such low dejection and debasement of mind in the people’ was not ‘the natural disposition of an Englishman’ (CPW 3:344), the people had nevertheless allowed the clergy and king to infuse them – and the nation at large – with a sense of servility. It is as though Milton’s anxieties about a godly nation in danger of being seduced by the court – and dramatized fifteen years earlier in his Ludlow masque (1634) – had now come true, and during England’s acutest period of national crisis. Tested by the unprecedented revolutionary events of 1648–9, and offered a genuine alternative to monarchical power and a servile court, ‘many sober Englishmen’ had nevertheless allowed themselves to succumb to the ‘glozing words,’ ‘illusions,’ and Circean powers of the king’s ‘Sorcery’ (CPW 3:582, 601) – ‘inchanted,’ as the author of Comus caustically observes in 1649, ‘with the Circaean cup of servitude’ – and were therefore ‘running thir own heads into the Yoke of Bondage’ (3:488). Yet in Milton’s eyes it was ‘thir own voluntary … baseness’ (emphasis added); the ‘credulous and hapless herd’ (CPW 3:601) who had fallen for the king’s enchanting book and its counter-revolutionary narrative of recent history were not simply passive victims: they had chosen servility. Eikonoklastes’ thorough dismembering of the king’s image and rhetoric – since Milton admits that the king’s book has cunningly ‘putt Tyranny into an Art’ (3:344) – results in some of Milton’s most acerbic polemical writing. Yet the strain of his efforts (and the remarkable appeal of Eikon Basilike which went through no less than thirty-five editions within a year of the king’s execution) revealed the instability of the young English Republic and the difficulty and anguish that its polemical champion now faced in attempting to reform what he perceived to be ‘an ungratefull and pervers generation, who having first cry’d to God to be deliver’d from thir King, now murmur against God that heard thir praiers, and cry as loud for thir King against those that deliver’d them’ (CPW 3:346). Milton’s History of Britain, which he started to compose in this same year (1649),35 also expresses, through its lean, terse prose, a deeper uneasiness – and at times a bleakness – about England’s national identity, its earliest history full of ‘so many bare and reasonless Actions, so many names of Kings one after another, acting little more than mute

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persons in a Scene,’ that ‘it may likely’ prove ‘wearisom’ to read about (CPW 5:239). So Milton confesses near the end of the fourth book in the midst of narrating the history of eighth-century Saxon England with its endless petty wars. Moving from legendary times to the Norman Conquest, at which point the account wearily breaks off, Milton’s potentially ambitious History afforded ample parallels with and warnings for contemporary England, including the struggling, fragile Republic of 1649: after the Romans had left in the early fifth century, the British had had a history of repeated corruption and misrule and had failed – despite opportunities to do otherwise – to reform their institutions. Manly in war, the British were, however, unable to sustain institutions that ensured enduring civil liberty: ‘For libertie hath a sharp and double edge fitt onelie to be handl’d by just and vertuous men, to bad and dissolute it become[s] a mischief unweildie in thir own hands’ (CPW 5:449), as Milton caustically observes in the Digression. Milton’s History of Britain registers, in its weary prose and its incompleteness, the strains of trying to reconcile a sense of national election and exceptionalism with a troubled, often dark national history (‘the many miseries and desolations, brought by divine hand on a perverse Nation’), as well as with the political uncertainties of the present and its ‘late commotions’ (CPW 5:183, 441). If the History may be seen as a response to the crisis of the English Revolution, as Nicholas von Maltzhan has persuasively suggested, then it also registers more obliquely (in its long historical account) as well as more directly (in the Digression) its author’s deepening anxieties about England’s national election and historic uniqueness, tensions in the work registered by Milton’s selfconscious references to the weariness of reading his own historical narrative which indeed too often reads like a failed national saga.36 By the time Milton published his Pro Populo Anglicano Defensio Secunda in 1654, England did indeed seem, as Cromwell complained to the Protectorate Parliament that year, a ‘nation rent and torn in spirit and principle from one end to another.’ It was threatened by royalists and religious Presbyterians, by republican disaffection and disillusioned Independents, and by fiery, bitter sectarian attacks, notably by Fifth Monarchists and Quakers who now saw Cromwell, recently hailed by the saints as a second Moses leading the English people from bondage, as an apostate from the good old cause.37 Nevertheless, Milton’s Latin prose work, in which he presents himself to his continental audience as ‘John Milton, Englishman’ and in which he writes the recent perils of the nation in epic-scale terms, attempts to create in

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the midst of the troubled Protectorate something like an early modern version of ‘an imagined political community.’ I am of course referring to Benedict Anderson’s well-known study of nationalism, Imagined Communities, a book that, while focused on nationality in later centuries and often in different cultures, emphasizes the importance of ‘imagining’ and ‘creation’ in relation to national communities; it construes national identities essentially as cultural constructs or ‘artefacts.’38 The nation is therefore not simply a political entity; it is also a state of mind, and an intellectual and imaginative creation conceived in language. The English nation during the 1650s was in the ongoing process of reinventing itself, and this was certainly true when it came to its experimental governments.39 Cromwell’s quasi-regal Protectorate, established in December 1653, was no exception. A literary polemic such as Milton’s Second Defence of the English People was an attempt to contribute to this reinvention and writing of the English nation during the upheavals and instabilities of the Interregnum. In the Second Defence, where Milton self-consciously calls attention at the end to his powers and vocation as a national epic writer – as an English Homer or Virgil extolling the achievements of the English nation and erecting ‘a monument that will not soon pass away’ to its illustrious deeds ‘almost beyond any praise’ (CPW 4:685–6) – the reader is made more acutely aware of the constructed nature of the political community Milton has projected to European readers. There Milton uses his discourse to project an image of national unity to a wider European audience – a reminder that Milton’s nationalism was always complicated by his international perspective – and to commemorate a diverse and broad range of notable contemporary political and military figures: from Cromwell to Sir Thomas Fairfax to John Lambert (the most active supporter of the Protectorate, Lambert urged Cromwell to accept the crown) to Robert Overton to Bulstrode Whitelock, among numerous others. However in doing so, Milton, as England’s national mythmaker, plays down key differences among them, including those who had registered dissatisfaction with recent political events. For example, Whitelock and John Bradshaw (the latter an ardent republican and president of the High Court that tried the king) had both opposed Cromwell’s dissolution of the Rump in April 1653, while Robert Overton, a leading radical religious parliamentarian, republican, and military leader, as well as a friend of Milton, soon found himself imprisoned – without charge or trial or right of habeas corpus – for more than four years for his hostility towards the Protectorate.40

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Yet Milton’s vision of the nation as a newly created, imagined political community comprised of such meritorious figures and sustained by his forceful language of panegyric – as he extols Cromwell, pater patriae, whose deeds ‘surpass all degrees’ and outstrip ‘not only the achievements of our kings, but even the legends (fabulas) of our heroes’ (CPW 4:672) – is also shadowed by considerable anxiety and doubt. His political ‘warning voice’ (to borrow a phrase from Paradise Lost 4.1) can be heard strongly as he addresses Cromwell and his countrymen and apprises them of the dangers that lie ahead and threaten the Protectoral regime with self-destruction. Observing how ephemeral the power of the new state could turn out to be (it could ‘quickly vanish,’ he warns), Milton conveys how urgent it is for the nation to remain vigilant and not become enslaved to its own lusts, how it must restrain from factions, and how it must avoid slipping back ‘into royalist excess and folly’ (in regium luxum atque socordiam) or pursuing royalist ‘vanities’ and yielding to ‘the pomp of wealth and power’ (CPW 4:673–84).41 Unlike Cromwell (in the speech quoted at the outset of this essay), Milton does not single out sectarian opposition as one of the most urgent dangers threatening English national stability and religious unity at this moment.42 Nevertheless, he highlights these other dangers besetting the nation, so that the Second Defence registers a sense of strain – and its author’s uneasiness about the precariousness of the Protectorate’s authority and stability – as Milton’s strong warnings voice a much more sober, sharper note of political realism that complicates, and indeed exists in tension with, a more idealized, constructed vision of unified nationhood. Locating the strains, tensions, and pressures underlying Milton’s evolving visions of the nation or commonwealth is crucial, it seems to me, if we are to discern how Milton struggled with the ambiguous political regimes and often unstable, shifting politics and religious developments of the 1640s and 1650s. It makes us more alert to Milton’s complexities with regard to an emerging nationalism in England; and it makes us more aware of the various ways he attempted to imagine and construct the godly nation in his revolutionary writings, as both England and his Protestant nationalism were continually tested during these decades. Of course, it is important to stress that Milton’s sense of national identity was never altogether fixed, finished, or stable. Nor should we define it too narrowly. Milton was never a narrow English patriot confined by a staunch sense of Englishness. His sense of

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national identity was multifaceted and enriched by his yearning as an English writer to reach an international audience and to present himself as a highly cultured Protestant intellectual operating in a wider European context.43 And it remained dynamic, evolving, or mutated in relation to particular political contexts and crises. His literary and polemical vision of national identity, like the English nation itself during the 1640s and 1650s, was continually in the process of being reinvented and reconceived. We also need to remain especially attuned to the ways Milton’s narratives and visions of national separateness and election attempted to adjust to and frequently clashed with the shifting political realities he encountered during these years. III Let me offer, by way of conclusion, one further but salient example of this latter point taken from the second edition of The Readie and Easie Way to Establish a Free Commonwealth (early April 1660); this example illustrates Milton struggling rhetorically and conceptually with the political tensions associated with power, freedom, and nationhood at an acutely unstable moment just before the Restoration (which occurred the month after Milton published his revised edition). In this case, Milton the controversialist – revealing once again a deeply agonistic relation to the relapsing English nation – was painfully aware of the political strain involved in maintaining his revolutionary position visà-vis a desperately weakened Commonwealth. As the rising flood of enthusiasm for the monarchy alarmingly increased in the spring of 1660 and as the Commonwealth was rapidly collapsing inwardly – indeed, undone by its own internal strife44 – Milton dared at moments to cry out prophetically, with the elegiac voice of Jeremiah, against its dangerous and impending backsliding, as he urged his impulsive and ‘impetuous’ countrymen, caught up in this ‘deluge of epidemic madness,’ to ‘consider whither they are rushing’ (CPW 7:463). An impassioned Milton employed the language and spirit of ‘the good Old Cause’ (CPW 7:462), invoking a nostalgia for an imaginary time when all who had struggled in the nation against the king had been heroically united in a selfless common cause, thereby manifesting the vigorous civic virtue of the godly republican nation.45 Yet in April 1660 Milton, who expressed so powerfully a sense of great forces rushing out of control, could expect very little. The Restoration was indeed all but inevitable;

42 David Loewenstein

the Long Parliament had dissolved itself in March and toward the end of April the Convention Parliament would assemble, declaring that the government of the country ought to be by king, Lords, and Commons. Milton’s countrymen, many eager to embrace once again the Egyptian thraldom of kingship, would soon begin ‘so long a Lent of Servitude’ (CPW 7:408) and Milton recognized that the majority in his nation could not be convinced to ‘bethink themselves a little’ (CPW 7:463). They were about to betray their most precious birthright – a freedom won with the lives and ‘blood of so many thousand faithfull and valiant English men’ (CPW 7:423–4) – and they would thereby soon become one of those ‘nations grown corrupt / And by their vices brought to servitude,’ much like the weak Judah so bitterly condemned in Milton’s tragedy Samson Agonistes for preferring ‘Bondage with ease than strenuous liberty’:46 for ‘[t]hey who past reason and recoverie are devoted to kingship, perhaps will answer, that a greater part by far of the Nation will have it so; the rest therefor must yield’ (CPW 7:455). Nevertheless, as Milton eloquently continued to defend his vision of England as a ‘firm and free Commonwealth,’ he added a blunt passage in the tract’s second and enlarged edition which justified – this time in the frankest of terms – rule by the minority who would remain free when the majority in the nation, incapable of esteeming strenuous liberty, are leading England into renewed servility and, indeed, into ‘most certain miserie and thraldom’: Is it just or reasonable, that most voices against the main end of government should enslave the less number that would be free? More just it is doubtless, if it com to force, that a less number compell a greater to retain, which can be no wrong to them, thir libertie, then that a greater number for the pleasure of thir baseness, compell a less most injuriously to be thir fellow slaves. They who seek nothing but thir own just libertie, have alwaies right to winn it and to keep it, when ever they have power. (CPW 7:455)

Milton’s directness here is striking. He highlights the clash between the will of an ‘unfree’ majority in the nation with the right of the minority to be free from political and religious servility. The bold argument he makes, after all, conveys a contradiction or ambiguity that often lies at the heart of revolutionary movements which claim to represent the best interests of a people or nation: power in the hands of a minority who have the right values is the only way to secure liberty for them

Milton’s Nationalism and the English Revolution 43

– and for the misguided majority in an endangered nation – and is the only way, in Milton’s words, ‘to obtain a free Commonwealth’ (CPW 7:455) at this highly precarious moment in English history when the nation faces such terrible moral degradation. In April 1660 Milton’s candid argument about power and revolution took on a greater poignancy as he watched, with horror, his backsliding nation – a nation he had yearned to believe was an ‘extolld and magnifi’d nation,’ ‘chos’n before any other’ – now facing ‘a precipice of destruction’ and terrible humiliation brought on by ‘this epidemic madness’ (CPW 7:422, 2:552, 7:463). What is notable is that at this moment of acute crisis Milton, expressing enormous anguish at the ‘retrograde Motion’ of the nation ‘in Liberty and Spiritual Truths,’47 did not evade the disturbing contradiction underlying the revolutionary argument for placing power in the hands of the few as the only means to save a desperate nation from the impending disaster of a restored monarchy. Instead, writing with a reckless disregard for his own safety (Parliament would order his immediate arrest on 16 June),48 he now chose, on the very eve of the Restoration, to confront that unsettling contradiction with remarkable candour and directness. If Milton’s Protestant nationalism, then, was intensified during the revolutionary decades, it was often complicated by his acutely strained and tumultuous relation to the English nation, a nation whose collectivity he alternatively identified with and felt repelled by. Milton, then, was no simple Protestant nationalist. He was an anguished nationalist who struggled deeply with his conflicted national feelings and with the nation itself as it went through uncertain permutations, faced years of political experimentation, and confronted the consequences of religious conflict and fragmentation. His agonized, sometimes tempestuous relation to the nation stimulated and challenged Milton’s creativity as a writer and polemicist, even if it did not always prompt him, especially in 1649, to confront directly the political ambiguities of the regimes he wrote under. The legacy of that momentous struggle appears in the great poems Milton published during the Restoration when, paradoxically feeling ‘almost expatriated’ within his own nation, he poignantly and bitterly wrote (in 1666) that ‘One’s Patria is wherever it is well with him’ (ubicunque est bene) (CPW 8:4).49 In these dark postrevolutionary years, an embattled Milton carried his ideal of England within him; and in this respect, we might say, he became more of a conflicted and dissenting patriot – deeply ambivalent about his own patriotism – than a fervent or consistent nationalist.50

44 David Loewenstein NOTES I am grateful to Paul Stevens for his critical responses to earlier drafts of this essay and to participants in the British Milton Seminar (October 2005) for their acute comments and questions. I am also grateful to my wife, Jennifer Loewenstein, for sharing with me her understanding of modern nationalism. 1 The Writings and Speeches of Oliver Cromwell, ed. W.C. Abbott, 4 vols (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1937–47), 3:438. The speech was delivered to the first Protectorate Parliament on 4 September 1654. 2 Writings and Speeches, 3:582; from a speech delivered to Parliament in January 1654/5. 3 See his speech to Parliament on 17 September 1656: Writings and Speeches, 4:270. See also Christopher Hill, God’s Englishman: Oliver Cromwell and the English Revolution (Harmondsworth: Penguin, 1970); and Anthony Fletcher, ‘Oliver Cromwell and the Godly Nation,’ in Oliver Cromwell and the English Revolution, ed. John Morrill (London: Longman, 1990), 209–33. 4 The Complete Prose Works of John Milton, gen. ed. Don M. Wolfe, 8 vols (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1953–82), 2:565; subsequent quotations from Milton’s prose are taken from this edition and cited as CPW parenthetically in my text. 5 Writings and Speeches, 3:437. Cromwell was particularly anxious about the challenges posed by fiery Fifth Monarchists and pugnacious Quakers as well as by any ‘men of Levelling principles’ (3:435), including Ranters and Levellers (since the latter group was frequently associated not only with radical sectarianism but with levelling social hierarchy). 6 For more on the concept of nationalism in relation to Milton, see the introduction to this book and the essay by Paul Stevens, ‘How Milton’s Nationalism Works: Globalization and the Possibilities of Positive Nationalism,’ below. For the history of the term’s English and continental uses, see Anthony D. Smith, Theories of Nationalism, 2nd ed. (New York: Holmes & Meier, 1983), 167–8. 7 Cf. Colin Kidd, British Identities before Nationalism: Ethnicity and Nationhood in the Atlantic World, 1600–1800 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1999), who believes that the term ‘nationalism’ is a misleading and anachronistic label to apply to the early modern period. See also Hans Kohn, Nationalism: Its Meaning and History, rev. ed. (Princeton: Van Nostrand, 1965), 10–11; Ernest Gellner, Nations and Nationalism (Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 1983), ch. 4; Benedict Anderson, Imagined Communities: Reflections on the Origin and Spread of Nationalism (1983; rev. ed., London: Verso, 1991), 11; and E.J. Hobsbawm, Nations and Nationalism since 1780 (1990; rev.

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8 9

10

11 12

ed., Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1992). For a critique of the notion that nationality emerges no earlier than the late eighteenth century, see Tony Claydon and Ian McBride, ‘The Trials of the Chosen Peoples: Interpretations of Protestantism and National Identity in Britain and Ireland,’ in Protestantism and National Identity: Britain and Ireland, c. 1650–1850, ed. Tony Claydon (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1998), 3–29, esp. 8. See also the trenchant critique of Kidd by Stevens, in his essay ‘How Milton’s Nationalism Works: Globalization and the Possibilities of Positive Nationalism,’ below. Liah Greenfeld, Nationalism: Five Roads to Modernity (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1992), 3–4, 6–7; and chap. 1. See Richard Helgerson, Forms of Nationhood: The Elizabethan Writing of England (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1992); Andrew Hadfield, Literature, Politics, and National Identity: Reformation to Renaissance (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1994); Claire McEachern, The Poetics of English Nationhood, 1590–1612 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1996); and David J. Baker, Between Nations: Shakespeare, Spenser, Marvell and the Question of Britain (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 1997). Among recent valuable studies, see also Andrew Escobedo, Nationalism and Historical Loss in Renaissance England: Foxe, Dee, Spenser, Milton (Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 2004); Philip Schwyzer, Literature, Nationalism, and Memory in Early Modern England and Wales (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2004); and Willy Maley, Nation, State and Empire in English Renaissance Literature: Shakespeare to Milton (Basingstoke: Palgrave Macmillan, 2003). A notable exception here (in addition to the other contributors to the present volume) is Paul Stevens who has begun to explore the topic in a series of suggestive and powerful essays: ‘Milton’s Janus-Faced Nationalism: Soliloquy, Subject, and the Modern Nation State,’ JEGP 100 (2001): 247–68; ‘Milton’s “Renunciation” of Cromwell: The Problem of Raleigh’s CabinetCouncil,’ Modern Philology 98.3 (2001): 363–92; ‘Milton’s Nationalism and the Rights of Memory,’ in Imagining Death in Spenser and Milton, ed. Elizabeth J. Bellamy, Patrick Cheney, and Michael Schoenfeldt (Basingstoke: Palgrave Macmillan, 2003), 171–84; and his essay, ‘How Milton’s Nationalism Works,’ below. On Milton’s England, see also Derek Hirst, ‘Literature and National Identity,’ in The Cambridge History of Early Modern English Literature, ed. David Loewenstein and Janel Mueller (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2002), 633–63. See Greenfeld, Nationalism: Five Roads to Modernity, 40. Constitutional Documents of the Puritan Revolution, 1625–1660, ed. Samuel Rawson Gardiner (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1906), 321, 357. For the phrase

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13

14 15

16 17

18

19

20 21 22

‘all just power,’ see the Commons’ Resolution of 4 January 1649 in The Stuart Constitution: Documents and Commentary, ed. J.P. Kenyon, 2nd ed. (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1986), 292. On Milton as anguished nationalist, see my essay, ‘Late Milton: Early Modern Nationalist or Patriot?’ Milton Studies 48 (2008): 53–71; this is a special issue devoted to Milton and historicist criticism. See the essay by Stevens, ‘How Milton’s Nationalism Works,’ below (288). See also Janel Mueller, ‘Embodying Glory: The Apocalyptic Strain in Milton’s Of Reformation,’ in Politics, Poetics, and Hermeneutics in Milton’s Prose, ed. David Loewenstein and James G. Turner (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1990), 9–40. David Cressy, England on Edge: Crisis and Revolution, 1640–1642 (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2006), 211–47. See Religion in Revolutionary England, ed. Christopher Durston and Judith Maltby (Manchester: Manchester University Press, 2007); quotation from the editors’ ‘Introduction: Religion and Revolution in Seventeenth-Century England,’ 1. For religion as a crucial force in the English Revolution, see also John Morrill, The Nature of the English Revolution (Harlow: Longman, 1993), part 1. For Presbyterian political and religious uses of the trope for national purposes, see Aschah Guibbory’s essay, ‘Israel and English Protestant Nationalism: “Fast Sermons” during the English Revolution,’ in this book. On Milton’s reconception of the trope, see also my essay, ‘Toleration and the Specter of Heresy in Milton’s England,’ in Milton and Toleration, ed. Sharon Achinstein and Elizabeth Sauer (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2007), 68–9. See, for example, the sharp warnings about national and religious divisions in fast sermons preached by Edmund Calamy and Stephen Marshall: Calamy, An Indictment against England because of Her Selfe-Murdering Divisions: Together with an Exhortation to an England Preserving Unity and Concord (London, 1645), preached before the House of Lords; Marshall, The Right Understanding of the Times (London, 1647), 36, 38, preached before the Commons. Greenfeld, Nationalism: Five Roads to Modernity, 76. Linda Colley, Britons: Forging the Nation, 1707–1837, 2nd ed. (New Haven: Yale University Press, 2005), xiv. The statistical tables for annual book production compiled by John Barnard and Maureen Bell in The Cambridge History of the Book in Britain, vol. 4, ed. John Barnard and D.F. McKenzie, with the assistance of Bell (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2002), 783, indicate the volume of book production between 1641 and 1645: 9915 titles in total, 8316 published in

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23 24

25

26

27

28

London; the previous five years (1636–40) saw 3267 published, with 2537 in London. The peak year was 1642 (with 3666 titles published in total), with some decline thereafter, but Milton was not counting titles. He was expressing a sense of national possibility and invention stimulated by the new print culture of the Civil War years. For discussion of this distinctive aspect of Milton’s nationalism, see my essay ‘Late Milton: Early Modern Nationalist or Patriot?’: 56–7. Compare, for example, the language of Calamy’s fast sermon on divisions and threatened nationhood preached before the Lords on Christmas Day, 1644, about a month after Milton published Areopagitica: ‘If Divisions destroy a Nation, it is a miracle of mercy that England is yet a Nation: for our divisions are multiplied exceedingly. Our times run all upon divisions, and subdivisions.’ See An Indictment against England because of Her SelfeMurdering Divisions, 10. ‘Free State’ is the phrase linked to and given equal weight with ‘Commonwealth’ (‘a Commonwealth and Free State’) in Parliament’s Act of 19 May 1649: see Constitutional Documents, 388. The Stuart Constitution, 292 (Commons’ Resolutions, 4 January 1649). The best account of the Purge and the truncated House of Commons (originally elected eight years earlier) it left remains David Underdown, Pride’s Purge: Politics in the Puritan Revolution (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1971). The Rump feared the radical religious sects, placing more emphasis on its repressive Blasphemy Act (August 1650) against ‘Atheistical, Blasphemous and Execrable Opinions, derogatory to the honor of God, and destructive to humane Society’ than on promoting religious toleration. See Acts and Ordinances of the Interregnum, 1642–1660, ed. C.H. Firth and R.S. Rait, 2 vols (London, H.M. Stationery Office, 1911), 2:409–12. Nor did the Rump address ‘the thorny problem’ of tithes, an action that would have undermined the national church. See Austin Woolrych, Commonwealth to Protectorate (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1982), 7. The quotations are from The Second Part of Englands New-Chaines Discovered in The Leveller Tracts, 1647–1653, ed. William Haller and Godfrey Davies (New York: Columbia University Press, 1944), 189, 185. The previous text, Englands New Chaines Discovered ([London,] 1649) begins with Lilburne quoting back to Parliament its wording of the recent resolution that ‘the People (under God) are the original of all just Powers,’ a daring formulation which, Lilburne continues, has ‘given us thereby fair grounds to hope, that you really intend their Freedom and Prosperity’ (sig. Ar). The four principal Leveller leaders – John Lilburne, Richard Overton, Thomas Prince, and William Walwyn – were arrested and imprisoned at the end of

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29

30

31 32 33

34

35

36

37

March. On the Burford mutiny and the forceful suppression of the Levellers by Cromwell, see Ian Gentles, The New Model Army in England, Ireland and Scotland, 1645–1653 (Oxford: Blackwell, 1992), 331–49. See the title page of The Second Part of Englands New-Chaines, in Leveller Tracts, 172, and 185. The Council of State ordered Milton (on 26 March 1649) to respond to the Leveller texts fiercely assaulting the regime for betraying the revolution, but of course he never did; for discussion of Milton’s polemical silence in the midst of this political crisis, see my essay ‘Milton among the Religious Radicals and Sects: Polemical Engagements and Silences,’ Milton Studies 40 (2001), 224–8. An Impeachment of High Treason against Oliver Cromwell (London, 1649), 24. For other passages in which the Levellers identify themselves with the English nation, see Brian Manning, ‘The Levellers and Religion,’ in Radical Religion in the English Revolution, ed. J.F. McGregor and B. Reay (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1984), 70–1. For Lilburne’s assertion of himself as a ‘free-born Englishman,’ see, for example, The Oppressed Mans Oppressions Declared (London, 1646), 2, 11; Londons Liberty in Chains Discovered (London, 1646), 10–11, 71. For the inseparability of religious and political liberty in Leveller discourse, see Manning, ‘The Levellers and Religion,’ 78–90. For similar assertions, see Milton’s Defence of the English People, CPW 4:388, 484, 485, 500. The Works of Gerrard Winstanley, ed. George H. Sabine (Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 1941), 414, 541. See also my discussion of Winstanley and the Republic’s ambiguities in Representing Revolution in Milton and His Contemporaries: Religion, Politics, and Polemics in Radical Puritanism (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2001), chap. 2. The fullest account of the Rump Parliament and its cautious conservatism remains Blair Worden, The Rump Parliament, 1648–1653 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1974); also see Underdown, Pride’s Purge; and Woolrych, Commonwealth to Protectorate, esp. chs 1–4. Nicholas von Maltzahn has suggested that Milton wrote the first four books in the first months of 1649 in Milton’s History of Britain: Republican Historiography in the English Revolution (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1991), 22–3. A point I make in Milton and the Drama of History: Historical Vision, Iconoclasm, and the Literary Imagination (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1990), 86. See also Thomas N. Corns’s discussion of the History in ‘Milton and the Limitations of Englishness’ in this volume. The phrase ‘the good old cause’ was used more frequently in the last years of the Interregnum; nevertheless, it is also invoked in fiery, zealous attacks

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38

39 40

41

42

43 44

on Cromwell and the Protectorate in 1654: see, for example, the Fifth Monarchist Christopher Feake, The New Non-Conformist (London, 1654), 26. Anderson, Imagined Communities, for the nation as ‘an imagined political community,’ see esp. 6. On the element of artefact and invention ‘which enters into the making of nations,’ see also Hobsbawm, Nations and Nationalism since 1780, 10; Gellner, Nations and Nationalism, esp. 48–9; Claydon and McBride, ‘The Trials of the Chosen Peoples,’ 4–5; and Colley, Britons, xiv–xv, 5. See also Sean Kelsey, Inventing a Republic: The Political Culture of the English Commonwealth, 1649–1653 (Manchester: Manchester University Press, 1997). On Overton, see Barbara Taft, ‘“They that pursew perfaction on earth ...”: The Political Progress of Robert Overton,’ in Soldiers, Writers, and Statesmen of the English Revolution, ed. Ian Gentles, John Morrill, and Blair Worden (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1998), 286–303. For the Latin, see The Works of John Milton, gen. ed. Frank A. Patterson (New York: Columbia University Press, 1931–8), 8:242–4. See also my discussion of Milton’s sense of the Protectorate’s fragility in ‘Milton and the Poetics of Defense,’ in Politics, Poetics, and Hermeneutics in Milton’s Prose, ed. David Loewenstein and James Grantham Turner (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1990), 188–90; and Warren Chernaik’s essay, ‘Victory’s Crest: Milton, the English Nation, and Cromwell,’ in this volume. On the degree to which Cromwell himself assumed the outward trappings of monarchy (despite his aversion to the royal title), see Roy Sherwood, The Court of Oliver Cromwell (London: Croom Helm, 1977), and Oliver Cromwell: King in All but Name, 1653–1658 (New York: St Martin’s Press, 1997). Milton alludes to strident, unbridled sectarian critiques of Cromwell (CPW 4:683), but does not make them a major focus of his Second Defence. Other defenders of the Protectorate, including Marvell, Marchament Nedham, and John Hall, expressed greater anxiety and concern about sectarian threats: see my book Representing Revolution in Milton and His Contemporaries: Religion, Politics, and Polemics in Radical Puritanism (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2001), ch. 5. This topic is examined by the essays in the third section of this book. For detailed accounts of the Commonwealth undone by its own ineptitude and internal strife, see Austin Woolrych’s historical introduction to CPW 7:1–228; and Woolrych’s Britain in Revolution, 1625–1660 (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2002), 705–79, esp. 757–79 on the complex and shifting military and political developments of winter and spring 1660 (including the arrival of General George Monck in London, his ultimatum to the Rump, the restoration and dissolution of the Long Parliament, and Monck’s

50 David Loewenstein

45 46

47

48

49 50

negotiations with Charles II) that ensured the Restoration. See also the acute account in Thomas N. Corns, Uncloistered Virtue: English Political Literature, 1640–1660 (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1992), 279–93. On ‘the good old cause’ and its uses at the end of the Interregnum, see Woolrych, Britain in Revolution, 715–16, 722–3. Samson Agonistes, lines 268–9, 271, quoted from Milton: Complete Shorter Poems, ed. John Carey, 2nd ed. (London: Longman, 1997). Quentin Skinner has observed recently that ‘in his political tracts Milton has nothing explicit to say about this worst betrayal of the birthright of freedom’; see ‘John Milton and the Politics of Slavery,’ in Milton and the Terms of Liberty, ed. Graham Parry and Joad Raymond (Cambridge: D.S. Brewer, 2002), 21. But here, in The Readie and Easie Way, Milton does powerfully comment on this betrayal. I quote here phrases from Moses Wall’s letter to Milton (of 26 May 1659) in which Wall reports Milton complaining, near the end of the Interregnum, of ‘the Non-progresency of the nation, and its retrograde Motion of late’ (CPW 7:511). The Life Records of John Milton, ed. J. Milton French, 5 vols (New Brunswick: Rutgers University Press, 1949–58), 4:322 (though Milton was not arrested and imprisoned in the Tower until sometime in the autumn). On the same day Parliament requested the king to call in books defending the Commonwealth by Milton (his Defensio Prima and Eikonoklastes) and the radical Independent John Goodwin so that they could be burnt by the common hangman: Life Records, 4:323. Letter to Peter Heimbach dated 15 August 1666 (CPW 8:4); for the Latin, see Works of John Milton, 12:114. A discussion of the anguished political and religious poet who felt ‘almost expatriated’ within his country after the Restoration and who became a kind of dissenting patriot lies beyond the scope of this chapter; for discussion of the dissenter and late poet who, in his darkest years, was a profoundly uneasy and conflicted patriot, see my essay, ‘Late Milton: Early Modern Nationalist or Patriot?’

2 Milton and the Struggle for the Representation of the Nation: Reading Paradise Lost through Eikonoklastes andrew hadfield

When Milton was commissioned by the Council of State in the spring or early summer of 1649 to compose a response to the supposedly posthumously published thoughts of the late king, he was able to participate ‘in the kind of controversy of which he had earlier dreamed.’1 Milton quotes the opening sentence of Eikon Basilike in the first sentence of his Eikonoklastes in order to demolish the case made by the apologists of Charles: That which the King layes down heer as his first foundation, and as it were the head stone of his whole Structure, that He call’d this last Parlament not more by others advice and the necessity of his affaires, then by his own chois and inclination, is to all knowing men so apparently not true, that a more unlucky and inauspicious sentence, and more betok’ning the downfall of his whole Fabric, hardly could have come into his minde.2

There are many ways in which Milton’s consciously iconoclastic text seeks to refute the pious images that Eikon Basilike strives so hard to establish.3 While Eikon Basilike represents Charles as a humble and devoted servant of the English people, Eikonoklastes portrays him as a selfish, bloody, and avaricious hypocrite. The royalist text shows the king responsive to the needs of his people; the parliamentarian text counters that he rules only in the interests of himself, his family, and his closed circle of followers. The image of Charles as an honest, open, and impartial ruler is replaced by a picture of him as a devious Machiavellian.4 But the real issue at stake for Milton is encapsulated in this opening sentence – namely, the question of who has the right to represent and speak for the nation. In Eikon Basilike the king stands as a

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metonymic figure of the ideal nation he rules; in Eikonoklastes, Parliament has the right to direct, if not rule, the king. Such debates characterize any national form and no one person or group can ever assume sole right to speak for a nation, one among many reasons why it is so problematic to write about ‘national character’ as if this were a homogeneous entity, rather than the product of the variety of forces, institutions, and cross-currents that constitute any state or nation. Nevertheless, nations invariably contain competing groups of citizens who believe that they possess the sole right to articulate that nation’s identity. Yet, if their writings or speeches are examined carefully enough, inconsistencies and amorphous formulations can be found. At times, a small, select band can be seen to speak for the nation, often the intimate circle of the speaker in question; at others, much larger groups are assumed to support his or her assumptions.5 The story of the nation’s identity has to be told again and again to affirm its truth, and in these retellings that identity simply cannot remain the same.6 Milton is remarkably consistent in his representations of the national form and identity throughout his writings, a testimony to the careful thought that he gave this crucial question, as well as to the central place that it had in the lives of seventeenth-century English men and women. However, it should also be noted that Milton is able to represent his nation with such consistency because he has a straightforward perception of what it was and who could speak for it: the people as represented in Parliament. As David Loewenstein suggests in his essay above, Milton’s understanding of the relationship between the English people and England was, of course, modified, given the vast political changes that he witnessed in his life.7 But he never actually alters his belief that it is the people as represented by Parliament who should have the power to fashion the nation as they see fit. This is the substance of what he means by ‘the majesty of a free people.’8 Increasingly, this ideal proved impossible to achieve, the fault of the people themselves as well as their enemies. Nevertheless, it remained steadfast as a guide to godly political aspirations. Equally, it needs to be pointed out that the dispute was nothing new, and could be seen as the culmination of a structural ambiguity at the heart of the English constitution. It was generally accepted that the monarch ruled as a ‘king in Parliament,’ a formula that gestured towards a compromise between key competing elements within English society, but which was also open to fierce, confrontational debate. Those who were inclined to place emphasis on the role of the monarch

Milton and the Struggle for the Representation of the Nation 53

tended to argue that the king or queen was entitled to use the elected chamber in an advisory capacity only. Those who saw Parliament as the senior constitutional partner habitually argued that the monarch could not act without its consent. The 1590s witnessed a struggle between competing conceptions of the nation and the constitution.9 The accession of James VI of Scotland as James I of England meant that a king who implicitly believed in his own divine right now ruled, a potentially revolutionary transformation of the checks and balances of English constitutional thought, if not practice.10 James’s son, Charles, placed even greater emphasis on this fundamental belief, one of the reasons why he summoned Parliament only when he needed to raise money through taxation, a logical development of his father’s political practice.11 This political genealogy is explicitly acknowledged in the title of Eikon Basilike, as James published his advice for his eldest son and heir (then Henry, not Charles) as Basilikon Doron in 1598. The royal family is shown to take precedence over the other institutions of state.12 Milton establishes a quite different political agenda and genealogy to characterize the politics of the nation. For Milton it is Parliament that should come first and which has the power to make kings, not vice versa. Milton ridicules Charles’s stated notion that Parliament acts ‘as necessary to the begetting, or bringing forth of any one compleat act of public wisdom as the Suns influence is necessary to all natures productions,’ as an insult. Milton suggests that Charles characterizes Parliament as if it were ‘but a Female, and without his procreative reason.’ Rather, he counters, ‘it was a Parliament that first created Kings ... He ought then to have so thought of a Parliament, if he count it not Male, as of his Mother, which, to civil being, created both him, and the Royalty, he wore’ (109). Charles, in his behaviour, as well as the logic of his arguments, has reduced his kingdom to nothing but ‘a great baby’ (111). For Milton, of course, writing after the event, it is Charles who was the needy infant, an irrational tyrant who failed to see the impressive (masculine) power of the people he ruled. Milton argues tirelessly to prove that the royal family exists as an alien parasite on the English body politic, a political vision that is developed from the familiar theory of the ‘Norman yoke,’ which argued that the imposition of laws in the wake of the Norman Conquest eroded the traditional, popular freedoms established by the AngloSaxons.13 Milton was also working on his History of Britain at this time (published 1670), a text that made this case at greater length.14 Responding to the representation of the Irish Rebellion in Eikon Basilike as

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a sudden eruption against the king’s legitimate authority, Milton counters with the argument that the king valued the friendship of the Irish rebels over that of the English Parliament, a serious crime given the documented slaughter of English Protestants in the 1641 Uprising (Eikonoklastes, 122).15 Milton had also just produced a longer response to this event and its tangled role in the developing history of the wars of the Three Kingdoms in another work commissioned by the Council, The Observations upon the Articles of the Peace (May 1649).16 The materials necessary to represent the executed king in this way were all to hand. Charles is shown to be a monarch who is prepared to tyrannize his loyal subjects – and, in doing so, he reveals himself to be at odds with a native political tradition of republican representation. He is also a king who will use the hostile enemies of the people to protect himself, a further indication that such a ruler is inherently alien to an English tradition as he has his eyes on his own survival, not what his people need. Milton’s especial hatred for the Scots stemmed from what he saw as their betrayal of the ‘good old cause,’ but may also have been fuelled by the actions of Charles, who was, in the eyes of many Parliamentarians, a Scottish king like his father.17 However, Milton makes a much more telling and sustained comparison, one that pervades not just Eikonoklastes, but reappears throughout his poetry and prose. Milton tries to demonstrate that England will be a happier nation the more it takes as its model the Roman republic. Conversely, of course, the more it resembles Imperial Rome, especially Rome under the worst of the Julio-Claudians, the more political life will have degenerated from this ideal. In his chapter written in answer to that in Eikon Basilike, ‘The lifting and raising, Armies against the King,’ Milton makes the claim that a nation can only thrive properly when ethics and riches are aligned: ‘For wealth and plenty in a land where Justice raignes not, is no argument of a flourishing State, but of a neerness rather to ruin or commotion’ (78), a sardonic comment on the outbreak of the Civil War. This political formula is followed by a historical analogy, further designed to explain recent events in Britain. He echoes Charles’s criticisms of Parliament, ‘The dictates and overswaying insolence of Tumults and Rabbles,’ as a means of exposing the king’s inability to govern, turning the words against their original significance and context. Instead Milton links the king to the tyrannical figures of ancient Rome who undermined the property-owning democracy of the republic: ‘[D]id not Catiline plead in like manner against the Roman Senat and the injustice of

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thir trial, and the justice of his flight from Rome? Caesar also, then hatching Tyranny, injected the same scrupulous demurrs to stop the sentence of death in full and free Senat decreed on Lentulus and Cethegus two of Catilines accomplices, which were renew’d and urg’d for Strafford’ (81). As every student of Roman history would have known, Catiline’s execution was vigorously supported by the figure who came to represent the spirit of republican argument, Cicero, later an indirect casualty of Caesar’s triumph, making this case a key point in the polarization of Roman politics. Caesar’s objection to the trial of Catiline’s coconspirators was a step on the route to his eventual dictatorship, just as Charles’s attempt to intervene against Parliament’s decision to have the earl of Strafford executed was.18 English and Roman history are seamlessly mapped together, destined to follow the same cyclical course. Such passages add an extra dimension to Milton’s comparisons of Charles with the Julio-Claudian tyrants, Tiberius, Nero, and Caligula. Writing of Charles’s attempts to prosecute John Pym and four other MPs for treason by storming the House of Commons, Milton argues that he was, in fact, worse than Nero who, at least, showed some reluctance in such matters: ‘The Tyrant Nero, though not yet deserving that name, sett his hand so unwillingly to the execution of a condemned Person, as to wish He had not known letters’ (80).19 The comparison is repeated eight years later in the second edition of A Defence of the People of England, despite the objections made by Milton’s opponent on this occasion, Salmasius: ‘(although you consider it improper for Charles to be compared to that very cruel Nero), he very much resembled Nero: for he too had very often threatened to remove the senate from the commonwealth.’20 The point is the same in 1658 as it was in 1650: Charles’s tyranny is not fundamentally the result of his personal cruelty – which can be denied – but his contempt for the public institutions of state that belong to the people. As this passage makes clear, Milton’s conception of England is republican. It is a matter of debate when he first became convinced that republicanism was the best mode of political existence, or precisely what form it should take (republicanism did not necessarily preclude monarchy, but demanded that, if it existed, it should be carefully controlled by the elected institutions of state).21 Whatever the case, the execution of Charles, which Milton vigorously defended, served to define his political sympathies.22 As well as making use of examples from Roman history, Milton turned to other sources to transform the image of Charles as a stately

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martyr against its authors, and to replace an iconic representation with a lively public debate (and in so doing, place the authority of Parliament over that of the monarchy).23 Milton appeals to an English literary history to signal a line of authors whose work is concerned to limit the powers of kings and to establish their excesses for the literate public. The use of the example of Catiline may be part of this process, being a possible allusion to Ben Jonson’s play, Catiline, His Conspiracy (1611), a work that cast Cicero as the hero of Rome.24 In the opening chapter Milton cites Shakespeare’s Richard III as a means of characterizing the nature of Charles’s tyranny, conspicuously and provocatively summoning the spirit of the tradition of English letters to combat the aesthetic ideals and manoeuvres of the king: [T]he Poets also, and som English, have bin ... mindfull of Decorum, as to put never more pious words in the mouth of any person, then of a Tyrant. I shall not instance an abstruse Author, wherein the King might be less conversant, but one whom wee well know was the Closet Companion of these his solitudes, William Shakespeare; who introduces the Person of Richard the third, speaking in as high a strain of pietie, and mortification, as is uttered in any passage of this Book; and sometimes to the same sense and purpose with some words in this place, I Intended, saith he, not onely to oblige my Friends but mine enemies. The like saith Richard, Act 2, Scen. 1, I doe not know that Englishman alive With whom my soule is any jott at odds, More then the Infant that is borne to night; I thank my God for my humilitie. (10)

In citing Shakespeare Milton achieves two main purposes. First, he mocks Charles’s understanding of, even ability to read, the literature he claims he used to comfort himself in his times of tribulation. The king is shown to be ridiculous, actually like the worst characters represented in the books he reads. Second, Milton tries to show that the king and his apologists have misappropriated the English literary tradition, appropriating it as their own when, in fact, all important authors are really on the side of the people.25 In doing so, Milton is claiming another written tradition that constitutes the nation’s heritage as that of a common culture of argument and debate that he articulates for his readers, in direct opposition to the false, iconic use of texts, which reduces them to misleading aphorisms, demonstrated in Eikon Basilike.

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The point is further emphasized on the next page where Milton once again cites the use of a literary example to belittle Charles’s religious devotions. Charles is said to recite ‘a Prayer stol’n word for word from the mouth of a Heathen fiction praying to a heathen God, & that in no serious Book, but the vain amatorious Poem of Sr Philip Sidneys Arcadia, a Book in that kind full of worth and witt, but among religious thoughts, and duties not worthy to be nam’d, nor to be read at any time without good caution’ (11). Charles’s appropriation of what Milton sees as an unsuitable text is shown to be sacrilegious rather than a sign of the king’s adept pragmatism and ability to remain true to his religious beliefs whatever the circumstances.26 In the fourth chapter, ‘Upon the Insolvency of the Tumults,’ Milton initiates an even bolder move, exhibiting his confidence in his ability to reconstruct the national literary culture. Commenting on Charles’s complaints about the outbreak of violent unrest in England and the need for justice to be restored, Milton turns to Spenser, probably his favourite English author.27 Milton cites Spenser’s representation of justice as an example of what England needs at the moment: ‘If there were a man of iron, such as Talus, by our Poet Spencer, is fain’d to be the page of Justice, who with his iron flaile could doe all this, and expeditiously, without those deceitfull formes, and circumstances of Law, worse then ceremonies in Religion; I say God send it don, whether by one Talus, or by a thousand’ (35). At first glance, Milton appears to be agreeing with Charles, but in the following paragraph he makes it clear that Charles is the problem rather than the solution to the issue; as ever, it stems from Charles’s contemptuous attitude towards Parliament and partisan support of his own faction: But they subdu’d the men of conscience in Parlament, back’d and abetted all seditious and schismatical Proposals against government ecclesiastical and civil. Now wee may perceave the root of his hatred whence it springs. It was not the Kings grace or princely goodness, but this iron flaile the People, that drove the Bishops out of thir Baronies, out of thir Cathedrals, out of the Lords House, out of thir Copes and Surplices, and all those Papistical innovations. (35)

The king is shown to be the cause of injustice, someone who needs to be straightened by the use of the people’s iron flail, not a figure who

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has the right to wield it himself. Milton’s use of Spenser’s example would suggest that he was a careful and close reader of The Faerie Queene, given that Book 5, the legend of justice, ends with the queen and the knight of Justice, Artegall, at odds.28 The earlier claim made in Areopagitica (1644), a vociferous defence of the need for the public sphere to be defined by unlicensed reading, that ‘our sage and serious Poet Spencer [was] ... a better teacher than Scotus or Aquinas,’ is once again put into action.29 The king, obsessed with images and icons, is incapable of understanding the traditions that his nation has developed. More significantly still, perhaps, Milton was an avid and careful reader of George Buchanan (1506–82), the irascible and brilliant humanist who had been tutor to the young James VI.30 Buchanan had developed ‘resistance theory’ to its logical extreme, arguing that as the monarch was chosen by the people to govern them, he could be deposed by any godly person and not just the political class of magistrates as most ‘monarchomach’ theorists argued.31 Buchanan’s posthumously published History of Scotland (1582) cast Scottish history as a struggle between overbearing, tyrannical kings and the brave efforts of the people and Parliament to control their excesses. The apotheosis of Scottish tyranny was Mary Stuart, whose incompetence and reliance on her female sexuality plunged her nation into a ruinous civil war. Mary was not only worse than most of the dreadful catalogue of Scottish rulers, but especially culpable as she had received a humanist education and so had little excuse in Buchanan’s eyes for her failures. It is easy to see why the figure of Mary might have been of importance for Milton, given his later representation of female sexuality, deceitfulness, and government in the figures of Eve and Delilah. Her relevance to Eikonoklastes is also obvious enough. If the authors of Eikon Basilike made use of James’s Basilikon Doron as a means of reminding the reader of a history of sage royal advice, then Milton would counter with a reminder of her place within the Stuart genealogy. In one of his best polemical manoeuvres, he uses the example of Mary to undermine the central – in Milton’s eyes, blasphemous – claim of Eikon Basilike: The rest of his discours quite forgets the Title; and turns his Meditations upon death into obloquie and bitter vehemence against his Judges and accusers; imitating therein, not our Saviour, but his Grand-mother Mary Queen of Scots, as also in the most of his other scruples, exceptions and evasions: and from whom he seems to have learnt, as it were by heart, or

Milton and the Struggle for the Representation of the Nation 59 els by kind, that which is thought by his admirers to be the most vertuous, most manly, most Christian, and most Martyr-like both of his words and speeches heer, and of his answers and behaviour at his Tryall. (226–7)

The grand claims that Charles was really a second Christ, made most clearly in the striking visual image that prefaced Eikon Basilike, are here vigorously refuted. The Stuarts are shown to be self-contained within their own history of tyrannical monarchy, incapable of rational political thought, and, as all tyrants were, essentially effeminate (republican government was, of course, masculine in character).32 In fact, they have established a ‘spiritual Babel’ (227) and derive their authority ‘not from God, but from the beast’ (228). Buchanan’s habitual comparison of Mary with the whore of Babylon, returns to haunt the Stuart dynasty in the apocalyptic vision that concludes Milton’s text: Thus shall they be too and fro, doubtfull and ambiguous in all thir doings, untill at last, joyning thir Armies with the Beast, whose power first rais’d them, they shall perish with him by the King of Kings against whom they have rebell’d; and the Foules shall eat thir flesh. This is thir doom writt’n, Rev. 19. and the utmost that we find concerning them in these latter days; which we have much more cause to beleeve, then his unwarranted Revelation here, prophecying what shall follow after his death, with the spirit of Enmity, not of Saint John. (228)

The division between the nation as represented by the king, and as representative of the people, has opened up into an unbridgeable chasm, the result of the Civil War and the king’s execution. Milton has tried to use his rhetorical skills to move the competition for representation from the realm of the image to the level of argument. Of course, Milton’s efforts failed to save the Commonwealth in the longer run and it was Parliament itself that voted to restore the monarchy when Richard Cromwell’s government failed so miserably.33 Milton was implacably opposed to this decision, one that put intolerable pressure on his conception of Parliament, the direct expression of the people’s will, as the moral heart of the nation. As Barbara Lewalski has pointed out, Milton denounced the ‘besotted multitude who seem[ed] ready to creep back to the “detested thralldom of kingship,”’ contrasting them to ‘the liberty-loving minority’ who now had the right ‘to act as and for the whole’ [my emphasis].34 Milton faced the familiar problem of defining the nation and its identity when the two do not seem to be

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perfectly aligned. His solution, placing great emphasis on those who wished to defend ‘the good old cause’ as the upholders of the true spirit of English liberty, is a retreat from the apparent confidence of a work such as Eikonoklastes, as well as a contradiction. The assertion that those who opposed the decision to restore the monarchy were in fact a large minority did little to disguise this obvious problem.35 As many had clearly recognized, the English republic had failed to transform British politics as early optimists had hoped that it would. Its failures could be seen not simply in the political inadequacies of the Cromwellian regime, and its inability to establish liberty throughout the realm, but also in terms of the underestimation of the magnitude of the task that it had faced when it seized power. The republic had not fundamentally altered British political culture so that Cromwell became a substitute king and handed power over to his son. Moreover, he was represented as a monarch in official portraits, a problem that may have led to Milton hinting that Satan was a Cromwellian as well as an actual regal figure in Paradise Lost.36 The emphasis that Milton put on the need to establish a republican culture of political debate and civic engagement to replace the more rigid hierarchical, visual culture of the Stuarts shows how alive he had been to such issues from the start of the regime and how seriously he had taken the threat posed by such a brilliant propaganda work as Eikon Basilike.37 It is a sign of Milton’s consistent interest in the question of national identity that he wrestles with this issue, as well as a tribute to his bloody-minded nature that he was willing to make such assertions in support of an obviously losing cause, and prepared to place himself in such great personal danger.38 There was now no political nation for Milton to defend and the rest of his life saw him return to his literary labours. The three main works produced during the last fourteen years of his life are all, to a greater or lesser extent, further reflections on the relationship between the English nation and political and religious value. Milton did not turn away from politics, as so many in the past have suggested, privileging a personal paradise within over the possibility of establishing a heaven on earth. Rather, he argued that wider political change would not happen without individual change first. The republican experiment had failed because the English people were not yet ready to establish such a godly political form, being still in thrall to the tyrannous excesses of monarchy. Milton’s later works quite clearly qualify his earlier idealism and optimism. Nevertheless, Paradise Lost does present a republican ideal to the reader, one that has

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to be imagined and is not easy to represent in visual terms. The great images of the poem are invariably used to describe the fallen angels rather than those remaining in heaven, in itself a means of distinguishing godly, republican culture from the decayed, monarchical form operating in hell. As David Loewenstein has argued, Satan ‘remains politically conservative in Milton’s unorthodox Heaven where “Merit more than Birthright” and hereditary power is valued as the principal basis for authority and rule.’39 This opposition between the showy magnificence, alternately impressive and repulsive, of Satanic culture and the quiet dignity of the proper political debate and rational argument sanctioned by God, is one of the chief structuring devices of the early books of Paradise Lost. Before the fallen angels can even begin their debate, they construct Pandemonium, more a palace than a debating chamber, led by the greedy spirit of Mammon: Anon out of the earth a fabric huge Rose like an exhalation, with the sound Of dulcet symphonies and voices sweet, Built like a temple, where pilasters round Were set, and Doric pillars overlaid With golden architrave; nor did there want Cornice or frieze, with bossy sculptures graven, The roof was fretted gold. Not Babilon, Nor great Alcairo such magnificence Equalled in all their glories, to enshrine Belus or Serapis their gods, or seat Their kings, when Egypt with Assyria strove In wealth and luxury. The ascending pile Soon fixed her stately highth, and straight the doors Opening their brazen folds discover wide Within, her ample spaces, o’er the smooth And level pavement: from the arched roof Pendant by subtle magic many a row Of starry lamps and blazing cressets fed With naptha and asphaltus yielded light As from a sky.40

The bathetic emphasis of the clichéd simile in the last half line undercuts what has gone before, exposing the architectural labours of the fallen angels as a parody of God’s creation witnessed later. The subsequent

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description of the witnesses, ‘The hasty multitude / Admiring entered’ (1:730–1) exposes them as akin to the Englishmen who were prepared to forgo the godly revolution and return to the thrall of royalist government. They have left behind their divine gift of judgment and allowed their senses to mislead them, their vision obscuring rational reflection. What they see is a ‘pile,’ a building made up of miscellaneous elements from a range of cultures and styles. The basic design is classical Greek, as the Doric pillars indicate, but even these are overlaid with ‘golden architrave,’ perhaps an allusion to the pillars of St Peter’s in Rome, which Milton had visited on his Italian tour.41 The description suggests a host of mixed styles that overwhelm the senses so that clarity of thought is impeded, a common Protestant judgment of the art of the CounterReformation.42 There are cornices and friezes, so many it is implied, that the designs and pictures cannot be analysed. The references to the trinity of anti-Christian barbarian cultures – Babylon, Egypt, and Assyria – further suggests a parody of Christian design that shadows and undermines every manoeuvre of the fallen angels, as well as a tasteless, artistic melange (that the overall goal of what is seen might resemble a temple built to worship ‘Belus or Serapis’ further emphasizes the desperate lack of clarity of Pandemonium’s design). The light that issues from the ‘starry lamps’ and ‘blazing cressets’ will be qualified by the creation of earth that Satan later observes, again demonstrating that God is always one step ahead and has established the rules of the cosmic game. The references to ancient pagan cultures, the enemies of the Jews, and the seat of Roman Catholicism should alert rather than blind us to the fact that the primary point of comparison here is the extensive program of royal architecture erected in Stuart London during Milton’s lifetime. Both James and Charles were especially keen on architecture; the latter was also noted as the most cultured student of painting who ever sat on the English throne, and he was responsible for assembling the finest ever royal collection.43 They were responsible for a number of palatial buildings in London, the most significant of which were the Royal Banqueting House, the Queen’s House at Greenwich, the new portico on St Paul’s Cathedral, and the external decorations on Somerset House. Most of these were built by Inigo Jones and his circle, which probably further aroused Milton’s ire, given that Jones was well known for his quarrel over the substance of masques with his collaborator, Ben Jonson. It is unlikely that Milton would have taken Jones’s side, as Jones had emphasised the need for the visual arts to take precedence over the verbal arts, much to Jonson’s disgust.44 Comus had been

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written as a late masque form designed to prevent the agonistic form from being swamped by visual excess.45 The evidence would suggest that the representation of Pandemonium was designed to show how corrupting gorgeous art was, how it infected and impeded genuine political debate, and how the English had allowed their reformation to be blown off course by a failure to expunge such Satanic thought from their midst.46 The debate of the fallen angels itself, as has often been noted, is carefully orchestrated and the conclusion is never really in any doubt. Satan’s stage-managed triumph and plan to spoil God’s new lands in his guise as an imperial voyager, most like the conquistadors who founded the Spanish Empire in the Americas, is preplanned through the timely and deliberate intervention of Satan’s lieutenant, Beelzebub.47 The intellectual and literary resonances of the debate reinforce our understanding that the political failure of the fallen angels stems from their perverse reading of godly republican culture. What we witness is a parody of the form that the nation’s institutions should take, a reality made clear when we see how God consents to order political life in heaven. In doing so, Paradise Lost provides a critique of both Stuart monarchy and the Commonwealth that aped rather than transcended its limitations. One of the central issues that the fallen angels debate is the question of liberty. This issue is not immediately apparent in the opening two speeches of Moloch and Belial, but emerges in the speech of Mammon, seeking to build on the argument of Belial, that they remain in Hell because they do not have the power to threaten God. Mammon argues that if they persuade God to forgive them, then the best that they can hope for is a return to Heaven under abject circumstances where they will be obliged ‘to celebrate his throne / With warbled hymns, and to his Godhead sing / Forced hallelujahs’ (2:241–3). Instead, Mammon argues, they should seek a restricted but nonetheless real form of liberty in Hell: ‘and from our own / Live to ourselves, though in this vast recess, / Free, and to none accountable, preferring / Hard liberty before the easy yoke / Of servile pomp’ (2:253–7). The subsequent course of the debate places such hopes in an ironic perspective, as we realize that the fallen angels have failed to understand the proper meaning of free choice and liberty. Milton makes it clear that Mammon’s logic that they imitate God’s light wins general approval from the assembled hordes: ‘such applause was heard / As Mammon ended, and his sentence pleased, / Advising

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peace’ (2:290–2). Beelzebub intervenes to restore the hierarchy of Hell, his speech consciously echoing the substance and vocabulary of Mammon’s, as Mammon had imitated the arguments of Belial and Moloch. Beelzebub accepts that they have little chance of successfully assaulting heaven, and appeals to the belief that they need to establish their own sense of freedom, asking, ‘What if we find / Some easier enterprise?’ (2:344–5). The question is not genuine, but rhetorical (anthypophora [or rogation]), in itself a sign of how circumscribed the debate really is. Beelzebub argues that they need to corrupt man and so annoy God (2:370–3), a plan ‘first devised / By Satan’ (2:379–80). Satan’s acceptance of this new role – as the poem makes clear, one that was planned in advance – serves to make him their king, ‘now transcendent glory raised / Above his fellows, with monarchical pride / Conscious of highest worth’ (2:427–9). His speech contains a subtle echo of that of Richard III in Shakespeare’s play when that very English tyrant had Buckingham offer the crown to him so that he could accept it with false modesty (‘Wherefore do I assume / These royalties, and not refuse to reign, / Refusing to accept as great a share / Of hazard as of honour, due alike / To him who reigns’ [2:450–4]).48 The (parliamentary) liberty that has been on display in this episode is an illusion. The fallen angels have shown that they have abandoned the hard road of true liberty for the easier path of vice and luxury, and are content with revenge rather than triumph. As Satan departs for earth, ‘Towards him they bend / With awful reverence prone; and as a god / Extol him equal to the highest in heaven’ (2:477–9). The political surrender we have witnessed places in perspective the philosophical debate that some of the fallen angels undertake while Satan is away: Others apart sat on a hill retired, In thoughts more elevate, and reasoned high Of providence, foreknowledge, will and fate, Fixed fate, free will, foreknowledge absolute, And found no end, in wandering mazes lost. Of good and evil much they argued then, Of happiness and final misery, Passion and apathy, and glory and shame, Vain wisdom all, and false philosophy[.]

(2:557–65)

The fallen angels cannot hope to discuss such issues with any independence because they have just surrendered their liberty to Satan. They

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are bound to fail not simply because their philosophical insights are limited and because God has power over their every move, but also because they have not taken proper responsibility for their actions in the political arena and so betrayed those they should serve into intellectual slavery. The debate looks like rational argument at first glance, but is actually the opposite or parody of reason. The speeches seek to undermine what opponents say through sly tactics and the exploitation of the fear they all experience that God has the power to destroy them if he so wills, rather than being the proper discussion of the issues at stake. In Eikonoklastes, Milton had made the case that monarchy would make men into slaves or beasts (the fallen angels are here slaves in spite of all their philosophy, work that does actually mark them out as slaves who have abandoned reason) (56). In contrast, a ‘free Nation’ will elect a Parliament to establish its laws (54). The fallen angels have shown that they are not a ‘free Nation’ and that they do not possess the free will to use their reason to make decisions. Book 2 of Paradise Lost contains a fable of national political decay, a process of degeneration that happens before our eyes as Satan manipulates the assembled hordes in Pandemonium to establish himself as absolute ruler, a political history that Milton felt he had witnessed twice in England. Their acceptance of easy solutions to their problems, first in trying to transform Hell into a more comfortable dwelling place and then in agreeing to corrupt man rather than continue the war in Heaven or surrender (the course of action that they should have taken), show that they have a warped and lazy concept of ‘liberty,’ one at odds with that which a ‘free Nation’ should possess. The Son, in contrast, in both Paradise Lost and Paradise Regained is represented as a republican hero, eager to lead the people in the ways of virtue, but receptive to their relative state of grace. He knows that he cannot save them if they do not wish to save themselves, which shows that he is both a democrat and committed to the true concept of liberty. The Son acts of his own free will to save mankind, so God is able to raise him to his own level. This supreme act of election takes place in front of the assembled angels who, in contrast to the noisy and easily manipulated fallen angels, remain silent when God asks who will intervene to save man: He asked, but all the heavenly choir stood mute, And silence was in heaven: on man’s behalf

66 Andrew Hadfield Patron or intercessor none appeared, Much less that durst upon his own head draw The deadly forfeiture, and ransom set. And now without redemption all mankind Must have been lost, adjudged to death and hell By doom severe, had not the Son of God, In whom the fulness dwells of love divine, His dearest mediation thus renewed.

(3:217–26)

The moment is as dramatic and democratic as can possibly be achieved, given that the reader already knows the outcome. It is one of the key moments in the justification of God’s ways to man where the reader is aware of alternative outcomes imagined by the deity, a counterpart to the assembly in Pandemonium, and akin to Eve, and then Adam, eating the apple. The Son responds to God’s plea and his explanation that free will and election are not in conflict: Man shall not quite be lost, but saved who will, Yet not of will in him, but grace in me Freely vouchsafed ... Some have I chosen of peculiar grace Elect above the rest; so is my will[.]

(3:173–5, 183–4)

The Son’s offer that he will sacrifice his ‘unspotted soul’ (3:248) for the sake of mankind enables God to raise him to be his equal, as the true king who has earned his place through merit not birth: Here shalt thou sit incarnate, here shalt reign Both God and man, Son both of God and man, Anointed universal king, all power I give thee, reign for ever, and assume Thy merits; under thee as head supreme Thrones, princedoms, powers, dominions I reduce: All knees to thee shall bow[.]

(3:315–21)

Just as free will and election through merit are reconciled in God’s earlier words, so are kingship and republicanism in these.49 The ‘merit’ that the Son exhibits here is a deliberate contrast to that of Satan, who we see at the start of Book 2, ‘High on a throne of royal state ... by merit raised / To that bad eminence’ (2:1, 5–6). Satan’s dangerous journey is

Milton and the Struggle for the Representation of the Nation 67

admirable in its way, but placed in perspective by the Son’s promise to endure and triumph over death (Satan avoids conflict with death when he encounters him on his voyage to earth, fearful of the outcome [2:629–849]). Equally pointed is the contrast drawn between the visual emphasis of the elaborate similes used to describe the physical appearance of the fallen angels and the emphasis on harmonious sound in Heaven. When the Son is elevated by God The multitude of angels with a shout Loud as from numbers without number, sweet As from blest voices, uttering joy, heaven rung With jubilee, and loud hosannas filled The eternal regions: lowly reverent Towards either throne they bow, and to the ground With solemn adoration down they cast Their crowns inwove with amarant and gold.

(3:345–52)

While the trappings of monarchy are everywhere emphasized and exaggerated in Hell, in Heaven they are discarded when replaced by true merit. The early books of Paradise Lost provide us with models of the true and false nation. While Hell shows a dictator placing great emphasis on robes of state and seizing control of the nation’s political institutions in order to rule in his own petty interests, Heaven shows monarchs discarding their badges of office to pay tribute to the proper triumph of merit. If read in terms of a work such as Eikonoklastes, it is clear enough which path England has chosen to follow, both before and after the execution of Charles. In Book 3 of Paradise Regained Satan tempts Jesus by the subtle ploy of sidestepping his assault on his ‘virtue,’ which he acknowledges as having been proved in previous tests.50 Instead, Satan offers Jesus the possibility of political domination over the ten tribes of Israel: ‘Thou on the throne of David in full glory, / From Egypt to Euphrates and beyond / Shalt reign, and Rome or Caesar not need fear’ (3:383–5). The comparison makes the decision easy for the reader to predict. Satan sees the projected triumph of Jesus as a means of rivalling the Roman Empire first established – in effect – by Caesar when his coup ended the republic. He tempts Jesus by asking him to imitate rather than replace Caesar, a lure that a good republican finds easy to resist. Jesus’s response is that the world is not yet prepared for him to rule: ‘My time

68 Andrew Hadfield

I told thee, (and that time for thee / Were better farthest off) is not yet come’ (3:396–7). The temptation is repeated in Book 4 when Satan shows Jesus Rome and tries to persuade him to govern it in the interests of virtue. Again, Jesus finds it easy to resist, countering with the dismissive rhetorical question, ‘What wise and valiant man would seek to free / These thus degenerate, by themselves enslaved, / Or could of inward slaves make outward free?’ (4:143–5). A nation can only have a republican king if it is ready to be ruled by him; that is, if it is virtuous enough for the relationship to work. In the end it is the people who decide not the ruler, as republican theorists such as Buchanan had argued a century earlier. The godly revolution failed in England because the people were too slavish, too much of a rabble or horde to merit a proper ruler, a message that is implicit throughout both Paradise Lost and Paradise Regained.51 They were too keen on the nation represented in Eikon Basilike and not attentive enough to the warnings of Eikonoklastes.

NOTES 1 William Riley Parker, Milton: A Biography, rev. Gordon Campbell, 2 vols (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1968), 1:361. 2 John Milton, Eikonoklastes, rev. ed. (London, 1650), 1. Subsequent references are taken from this edition and cited parenthetically in my text. 3 See Nigel Smith, Literature and Revolution in England, 1640–1660 (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1994), 111–12, passim. 4 For analysis, see David Loewenstein, Milton and the Drama of History: Historical Vision, Iconoclasm and the Literary Imagination (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1990), ch. 3; Lana Cable, ‘Milton’s Iconoclastic Truth,’ in Politics, Poetics, and Hermeneutics in Milton’s Prose, ed. David Loewenstein and James Grantham Turner (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1990), 135–51; and Sharon Achinstein, Milton and the Revolutionary Reader (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1994), ch. 4. 5 For analysis, see Andrew Hadfield, Literature, Politics and National Identity: Reformation to Renaissance (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1994), esp. ‘Introduction: The Nation and Public Literature in the Sixteenth Century.’ 6 See Homi K. Bhabha, ‘Introduction: Narrating the Nation’ and ‘DissemiNation: Time, Narrative, and the Margins of the Modern Nation,’ in Nation and Narration, ed. Bhabha (London: Routledge, 1990), 1–8, 291–322. 7 See also Christopher Hill, Milton and the English Revolution (London: Faber, 1977); and David Loewenstein, Representing Revolution in Milton and His

Milton and the Struggle for the Representation of the Nation 69

8

9 10

11 12

13

14

15

16

17 18

Contemporaries: Religion, Politics, and Polemics in Radical Puritanism (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2001). Ready and Easie Way (1660), quoted from Complete Prose Works of John Milton, gen. ed. Don M. Wolfe, 8 vols (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1953–82), 7:428. The Reign of Elizabeth: Court and Culture in the Last Decade, ed. John Guy (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1995), esp. the introduction. Jenny Wormald, ‘James VI and I, Basilikon Doron and The Trew Law of Free Monarchies: The Scottish Context and the English Translation,’ in The Mental World of the Jacobean Court, ed. Linda Levy Peck (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1991), 36–54. Conrad Russell, The Crisis of Parliaments: English History, 1509–1660 (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1971), pt 5, chs 2–3. For discussion, see Glenn Burgess, The Politics of the Ancient Constitution: An Introduction to English Political Thought, 1603–1642 (Basingstoke: Macmillan, 1992); J.P. Sommerville, Politics and Ideology in England, 1601– 1640 (Harlow: Longman, 1986); and Kevin Sharpe, Remapping Early Modern England: The Culture of Seventeenth-Century Politics (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2000). J.G.A. Pocock, The Ancient Constitution and the Feudal Law: A Study of English Historical Thought in the Seventeenth Century, 2nd ed. (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1987). See Nicholas von Maltzahn, Milton’s History of Britain: Republican Historiography in the English Revolution (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1991), ch. 8; and Andrew Hadfield, ‘The English and Other Peoples,’ in A Companion to Milton, ed. Thomas N. Corns (Oxford: Blackwell, 2001), 174–90, esp. 179–82. On the rebellion, see Ulster 1641: Aspects of the Rising, ed. Brian Mac Cuarta (Belfast: Institute for Irish Studies, 1994); and Nicholas Canny, Making Ireland British, 1580–1650 (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2001), ch. 8. For comment, see Willy Maley, Nation, State and Empire in English Renaissance Literature: Shakespeare to Milton (Basingstoke: Macmillan, 2003), ch. 7; and Thomas N. Corns, ‘Milton’s Observations upon the Articles of Peace: Ireland under English Eyes,’ in Politics, Poetics and Hermeneutics in Milton’s Prose, ed. Loewenstein and Turner, 123–34. Parker, Milton, 301. On Caesar’s behaviour after Catiline’s conspiracy, see A History of Rome, ed. Marcel le Glay et al, 2nd ed. (Oxford: Blackwell, 2001), 124–5. On Strafford’s execution, see H.F. Kearney, Strafford in Ireland, 1633–41: A Study in Absolutism (Manchester: Manchester University Press, 1959).

70 Andrew Hadfield 19 See Robert Bucholz and Newton Key, Early Modern England, 1485–1714: A Narrative History (Oxford: Blackwell, 2004), 237. 20 John Milton, A Defence of the People of England in Political Writings, ed. Martin Dzelzainis (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1991), 51–254, at 240. 21 See Milton and Republicanism, ed. David Armitage, Armand Himy, and Quentin Skinner (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1995). On the variety and forms of republicanism, see Republicanism: A Shared European Heritage, ed. Martin van Gelderen and Quentin Skinner, 2 vols (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2002), vol. 1, pt 1. 22 On Milton’s reaction to Charles’s execution, see Barbara K. Lewalski, The Life of John Milton (Oxford: Blackwell, 2000), 224–6. 23 Loewenstein, Milton and the Drama of History, 57–8; Achinstein, Milton and the Revolutionary Reader, 167–8. 24 David Riggs, Ben Jonson: A Life (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1989), 176–7. 25 For a modern version of this argument, see Annabel Patterson, Reading Between the Lines (Madison: University of Wisconsin Press, 1993). 26 See Kevin Pask, The Emergence of the English Author: Scripting the Life of the Poet in Early Modern England (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1996), 77–8; and Joad Raymond, ‘The Literature of Controversy,’ in Companion to Milton, ed. Corns, 191–210, at 206–7. 27 For studies of Milton’s reading of Spenser, see Maureen Quilligan, Milton’s Spenser: The Politics of Reading (Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 1983); and Linda Gregerson, The Reformation of the Subject: Spenser, Milton and the English Protestant Epic (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1995). 28 See Jane Aptekar, Icons of Justice: Iconography and Thematic Imagery in Book V of The Faerie Queene (New York: Columbia University Press, 1969). It is often assumed that Spenser was a royal apologist, who was appropriated by Milton for his republican agenda: see, for example, Gregerson, Reformation of the Subject, 150. For a contrary argument see Andrew Hadfield, ‘Was Spenser a Republican?’ English 47 (1998): 169–82. 29 John Milton, Selected Prose, ed. C.A. Patrides (Harmondsworth: Penguin, 1974), 213. See also David Zaret, Origins of Democratic Culture: Printing, Petitions, and the Public Sphere in Early Modern England (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2000), 263. 30 On Milton’s reading of Buchanan, whose work he may have first encountered as a child, see Parker, Milton, 447, 589, passim. 31 See Robert M. Kingdon, ‘Calvinism and Resistance Theory, 1550–1580,’ in The Cambridge History of Political Thought, 1450–1700, ed. J.H. Burns and

Milton and the Struggle for the Representation of the Nation 71

32 33 34 35 36

37

38 39 40

41 42 43 44

Mark Goldie (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1991), 193–218; and J.H. Burns, ‘George Buchanan and the Anti-Monarchomachs,’ in Scots and Britons: Scottish Political Thought and the Union of 1603, ed. Roger A. Mason (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1994), 138–58. Rebecca W. Bushnell, Tragedies of Tyrants: Political Thought and Theater in the English Renaissance (Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 1990). Bucholz and Key, Early Modern England, 261–4. Lewalski, Life of John Milton, 395. See also Hill, Milton and the English Revolution, chs 27–8. Lewalski, Life of John Milton, 395. See Sean Kelsey, Inventing a Republic: The Political Culture of the English Commonwealth, 1649–1653 (Manchester: Manchester University Press, 1997); Laura Lunger Knoppers, ‘The Politics of Portraiture: Oliver Cromwell and the Plain Style,’ Renaissance Quarterly 51 (1998): 1283–319; and Kevin Sharpe, ‘“An Image Doting Rabble”: The Failure of Republican Culture in Seventeenth-Century England,’ in Refiguring Revolutions: Aesthetics and Politics from the English Revolution to the Romantic Revolution, ed. Kevin Sharpe and Steven N. Zwicker (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1998), 25– 56. For reservations about the identification of Cromwell with Milton’s Satan, see Robert T. Fallon, ‘A Second Defense: Milton’s Critique of Cromwell,’ Milton Studies 39 (2000): 167–83; Paul Stevens, ‘Milton’s “Renunciation” of Cromwell,’ Modern Philology 98:3 (2001): esp. 379–80; David Loewenstein, Representing Revolution, esp. 208; and Warren Chernaik in his essay below. On Stuart visual culture, see David Howarth, Images of Rule: Art and Politics in the English Renaissance, 1485–1649 (Basingstoke: Macmillan, 1997), ch. 4. On Milton’s realization of the propaganda value of Eikon Basilike, see Loewenstein, Milton and the Drama of History, 55–6; and Achinstein, Milton and the Revolutionary Reader, 148. Lewalski, Life of John Milton, ch. 12; and Parker, Milton, ch. 13. Loewenstein, Representing Revolution, 225–6. John Milton, Paradise Lost, ed. Alastair Fowler (London: Longman, 1968), 1:710–30. Subsequent references are taken from this edition and cited parenthetically in my text. Parker, Milton, 176–7. John N. King, Milton and Religious Controversy (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2000), ch. 3. Howarth, Images of Rule, 64, 141, passim. I am extremely grateful to Maurice Howard for advice on the subsequent passage. Riggs, Ben Jonson, 321–6.

72 Andrew Hadfield 45 Graham Parry, The Golden Age Restor’d: The Culture of the Stuart Court, 1603– 42 (Manchester: Manchester University Press, 1981), 190. 46 On the anxiety over the continued existence of royal art in government buildings during the Commonwealth, see Kelsey, Inventing a Republic, chs 1–3. 47 David Armitage, ‘John Milton: Poet against Empire,’ in Milton and Republicanism, ed. David Armitage, Armand Himy, and Quentin Skinner (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1995), 206–25. See also, J. Martin Evans, Milton’s Imperial Epic: Paradise Lost and the Discourse of Colonialism (Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 1996); and Paul Stevens, ‘Paradise Lost and the Colonial Imperative,’ Milton Studies 34 (1996): 3–21. 48 William Shakespeare, King Richard III, ed. Antony Hammond (London: Routledge, 1981), III, 7. See also Stevie Davies, Images of Kingship in Paradise Lost: Milton’s Politics and Christian Liberty (Columbia: University of Missouri Press, 1983), 36. 49 For further discussion, see Armand Himy, ‘Paradise Lost as a Republican “tractatus theologico-politicus,”’ in Milton and Republicanism, ed. Armitage et al, 118–34. 50 John Milton, Paradise Regained, in Complete Shorter Poems, ed. John Carey (London: Longman, 1968), 3:347–8. All subsequent quotations are taken from this edition and cited parenthetically in my text. 51 See, for example, Hill, Milton and the English Revolution, pt 6; Loewenstein, Milton and the Drama of History, ch. 5; and King, Milton and Religious Controversy, ch. 9.

3 Victory’s Crest: Milton, the English Nation, and Cromwell warren chernaik

What may not then our Isle presume While Victory his Crest does plume!1

Conquest and Freedom The subject of this essay is the ambivalence of Milton and several of his fellow republicans towards military conquest and particularly towards the figure of Oliver Cromwell. The war in Iraq might suggest a modern analogy: conquest looks very different to those delivering and those receiving the bombs. Even from the perspective of the victors, the praise of the conqueror Cromwell could be double-edged. Cromwell, ‘the Wars and Fortunes Son,’ with his sword held erect before him (‘Horatian Ode,’ 113–16), could appear to contemporaries as the patron of liberty, servant of the Commonwealth, or as its destroyer, bent on reducing the English people to servitude. Milton does not always treat Cromwell with such ambivalence, emphasizing his potential for harm. Milton’s sonnet addressed to Cromwell, ‘our chief of men,’ in May 1652, while arguing that ‘peace hath her victories / No less renowned than war,’ sees Cromwell primarily as conqueror, triumphant in a series of battles and ready to take on whatever ‘new foes’ may arise. ‘Peace and truth’ are projected as the Lord General’s ultimate aims, but these seem a long way off, as the ‘blood of Scots’ killed on the battlefield serves as ‘God’s trophies,’ reminding Cromwell that ‘much remains / To conquer still.’2 A similar view of Cromwell as God’s chosen warrior finds expression in Milton’s Second Defence:

74 Warren Chernaik He soon surpassed well-nigh the greatest generals both in the magnitude of his accomplishments and in the speed with which he achieved them ... It is impossible ... to describe with fitting dignity the capture of the many cities, to list the many battles ... in which he was never conquered nor put to flight, but traversed the entire realm of Britain with uninterrupted victory.3

In the extended passage praising Cromwell in the Second Defence, Milton emphasizes his ‘upright life’ and steadfast ‘faith dependent on God,’ presenting his military success as a direct consequence of his exemplary strength of character and ‘Christian virtue’: Commander first over himself, victor over himself, he had learned to achieve over himself the most effective triumph (in se prius imperator, sui victor, de se potissimum triumphare didiceret) ... [T]here flourished in him so great a power, whether of intellect and genius or of discipline ... that to his camp, as to the foremost school, not just of military science, but of religion and piety, he attracted from every side all men who were already good and brave, or else he made them such, chiefly by his own example.4

The terms of praise in Marvell’s ‘Horatian Ode’ are resolutely secular as well as double-edged – Cromwell in this poem is certainly not ‘guided by faith’ or represented as doing God’s work.5 But here again, ‘uninterrupted victory’ testifies to Cromwell’s heroic stature as one of the ‘greater Spirits,’ giving no quarter to less civilized or less resolute adversaries. Slain or humbled Irish serve the same function as ‘the blood of Scots’ for Milton: And now the Irish are asham’d To see themselves in one Year tam’d: So much one Man can do, That does both act and know. They can affirm his Praises best, And have, though overcome, confest How good he is, how just, And fit for highest Trust.

(73–80)

The ideology of ‘civilizing Conquest,’ in the ‘Horatian Ode’ as in Milton’s Observations upon the Articles of Peace, attributes moral superiority to the victors (as in the wholly illegitimate inference that Cromwell’s success in battle proves him to be ‘good,’ ‘just,’ and ‘fit

Milton, the English Nation, and Cromwell 75

for highest Trust’), while, like Prospero confronted by Caliban, treating the ‘Barbarisme and obdurate wilfulnesse’ of the subjugated Other with a degree of contempt. Thus, in the Observations, the ‘savage’ Irish are dismissed as impervious to ‘reason and demonstration,’ capable of being taught only by the most violent means, because of ‘a disposition not onely sottish but indocible and averse from all Civillity and amendment.’6 A similar polemical strategy is central to Marvell’s ‘The Character of Holland’ (1653), applied in this case to a powerful rival of the English nation, as the poet seeks to disable an adversary by volleys of wit. The facts of geography prove the barbarity of the ‘sordid’ Dutch, where the ‘Civility’ of the English justifies their imperial dominion: Holland, that scarce deserves the name of Land, As but th’off-scouring of the British Sand ... This indigested Vomit of the Sea Fell to the Dutch by just Propriety ... Nor can Civility there want for Tillage, Where wisely for their Court they chose a Village.

(1–2, 7–8, 77–8)

Edmund Waller’s Panegyrick to my Lord Protector (1655), in treating Cromwell’s victories over the Irish and over the Scots, until then ‘a Race unconquer’d, by their Clyme made bold,’ occludes any bloodshed or resistance by incorporating the vanquished into the British ‘seat of Empire,’ graciously extending to ‘the unwilling Scotch’ the privilege of becoming English: Preferr’d by Conquest, happily o’rethrowne, Falling they rise, to be with us made one; So kinde Dictators made, when they came home, Their vanquish’d Foes, free Citizens of Rome. Like favor find the Irish, with like Fate, Advanc’d to be a portion of our State.7

In Milton’s History of Britain, the ideology of ‘civilizing Conquest’ becomes more problematical, in part because here the barbarians are British and the conquerors Roman. David Quint in Epic and Empire has suggested that, running in parallel with the glorification of ‘imperial conquest’ in the Aeneid, there is a rival epic tradition, ‘epics of the defeated,’ originating in Lucan’s Pharsalia. If rebels against imperial sway

76 Warren Chernaik

are characterized as motivated by a love of freedom or a ‘courage never to submit or yield,’ then at least the possibility of sympathy, of ‘dissenting perspectives,’ is opened up.8 In the History of Britain, the reforms of the Roman conqueror Agricola are on the one hand ‘worthie actions; teaching and promoting like a public Father the institutes and customes of civil life,’ while on the other hand the introduction of ‘the Roman fashions’ among the early Britons ‘which the foolisher sort call’d civilitie ... was indeed a secret Art to prepare them for bondage.’9 In the Character of the Long Parliament, intended for the History of Britain but not published until 1681, Milton’s own English contemporaries are presented as barbarians, like their ancestors among the ancient Britons, deficient in the virtues of ‘civilitie, prudence, love of the public’ and ‘in good or bad success alike unteachable’: For the sunn, which wee want ripens witts as well as fruits; and as wine and oyle are imported to us from abroad, so must ripe understanding and many civil vertues bee imported into our minds from forren writings & examples of best ages: wee shall else miscarry still and com short in the attempt of any great enterprise. Hence did thir victories prove as fruitless as thir losses dangerous, and left them still conquering under the same grievances that men suffer conquerd.10

The ancient Britons, as Milton characterizes them in the History of Britain, were ‘right Barbarians’: courageous in battle and ‘adoring the name of liberty,’ they nevertheless were ignorant of ‘what it was to govern well themselves,’ showing in their actions ‘no rule, no foresight, no forecast, experience or estimation, either of themselves or of thir Enemies.’11 Under Roman rule, they were ‘bred up in liberal Arts’ and taught to ‘affect the Latine Eloquence’: ‘of the Romans we have cause not to say much worse, then that they beate us into some civilitie; likely else to have continu’d longer in a barbarous and savage manner of life.’12 In the unsettled conditions of 1648–9, Milton argues in the ‘Digression,’ the English people faced an opportunity similar to that of their British ancestors at the end of the period of Roman rule: The gaining or loosing of libertie is the greatest change to better or to worse that may befall a nation under civil goverment, and so discovers, as nothing more, what degree of understanding, or capacitie, what disposition to justice and civilitie there is among them.

Milton, the English Nation, and Cromwell 77

Milton consistently argues that ‘libertie hath a sharp and double edge fitt onelie to be handl’d by just and vertuous men’; according to ‘the known rules of ancient liberty’ as handed down by Aristotle, Cicero, and the republican tradition, ‘who loves that must first be wise and good.’13 Like the ancient Britons who, ‘having such a smooth occasion giv’n them to free themselves as ages have not afforded, such a manumission as never subjects had a fairer,’ failed to take advantage of the opportunity, Milton’s contemporaries faced a moment in history which could lead either to the establishment of ‘a just and well amended common-wealth’ or to further thraldom, ‘miserie and ruin,’ ‘ev’ry where wrong & oppression.’14 Towards the beginning of Book 3 of the History of Britain, Milton argues for the value of self-knowledge, facing uncomfortable truths, in nations as in individuals: For if it be a high point of wisdom in every private man, much more is it in a Nation to know it self; rather than puft up with vulgar flatteries, and encomiums, for want of self knowledge, to enterprise rashly and come off miserably in great undertakings.15

He makes a similar point in the peroration addressed to his ‘fellow countrymen’ at the end of the Second Defence of the English People, in juxtaposing great hopes and human weaknesses. The greatest conquest is the conquest over self, the ‘perseverance’ necessary to bring ‘great undertakings’ to successful completion: If after such brave deeds you ignobly fail, if you do aught unworthy of yourselves, be sure that posterity will speak out and pass judgment ... It will seem to posterity that a mighty harvest of glory was at hand, together with the opportunity for doing the greatest deeds, but that to this opportunity men were wanting.16

Here as elsewhere, Milton singles out self-mastery as the defining quality distinguishing free men from slaves. Men who are ‘slaves within doors,’ he says in The Tenure of Kings and Magistrates, are for this reason content ‘to have the public State conformably govern’d to the inward vitious rule, by which they govern themselves,’ finding rationalizations to ‘colour over thir base compliances’ to tyrants. Freedom entails responsibilities: it is easier to be servile than to be free, and freedom gained with painstaking effort can be quickly lost. ‘A nation

78 Warren Chernaik

which cannot rule and govern itself,’ Milton warns his countrymen in the Second Defence, may deliver itself into slavery to ‘masters whom it does not choose’: Such is the decree of law and of nature herself, that he who cannot control himself, who through poverty of intellect or madness cannot properly administer his own affairs, should not be his own master, but like a ward be given over to the power of another ... If to be a slave is hard, and you do not wish it, learn to obey right reason, to master yourselves.17

Milton’s consistent position, politically as well as theologically, is that individuals are ‘authors to themselves in all / Both what they judge and what they choose’ in a universe where foreknowledge is exclusively reserved to God and denied to humans. In a celebrated passage, the problematical aspects of which have been much discussed by critics, Milton uses a speech by God, addressed to his ‘only begotten Son,’ to set forth the theological doctrines embodied in the action of Paradise Lost, explicitly disavowing strict Calvinist views of predestination: ‘I formed them free, and free they must remain, / Till they enthrall themselves.’18 The two editions of The Readie and Easie Way to Establish a Free Commonwealth, published during the rapidly changing circumstances of 1660, as the Restoration of Charles II appeared more and more likely, address the consequences of choosing wrongly. The title is ironic, since Milton is arguing that the easy choice for the English nation – that by an ‘ingratefull backsliding,’ his fellow countrymen should surrender their freedom and ‘creep back ... to thir once abjur’d and detested thraldom of Kingship’ – is likely to prove disastrous.19 Milton’s arguments for republicanism and against monarchical government in The Readie and Easie Way seek to awaken national pride together with a sense of shame in his audience. He praises the ‘many thousand faithfull and valiant English men’ who, in ‘all the battels we have wonn,’ have succeeded in securing ‘all Scotland as to our conquest ... which never any of our kings could conquer’ – similar claims of unprecedented victories over the previously ‘unconquer’d’ Scots can be found in panegyrics of Cromwell by Waller and Payne Fisher.20 Yet, Milton argues, the victors have by their own folly become the vanquished. In contrasting ‘the majesty of a free people’ with ‘the base necessitie of court flatteries and prostrations,’ Milton is appealing to patriotism and the instinct of solidarity among those who fought against Charles I. As in Areopagitica, he argues that ‘brotherly dissimilitudes’ are

Milton, the English Nation, and Cromwell 79

to be welcomed among those united in a common cause.21 His sonnets to Fairfax, Cromwell, and Sir Henry Vane all present wisdom as a necessary complement to the ‘matchless fortitude’ of successful warriors, coupling ‘victory’ in battle with the ‘sage counsel’ which can ‘advise how war may best [be] upheld,’ the ‘nobler task’ and ‘no less renowned’ victories of peace. Marvell in the ‘Horatian Ode’ relies on the same traditional coupling of the virtues of Achilles and Ulysses in describing Cromwell as someone who can ‘both act and know.’22 In The Readie and Easie Way, adopting the prophetic stance, Milton strives against the odds ‘to forewarne my countrey in time,’ regretting that ‘the effects of wisdom are so little seen among us’: ‘Shall we never grow old anough to be wise[,] to make seasonable use of gravest autorities, experiences, examples?’23 Milton’s Samson similarly recognizes that the ‘high gift of strength,’ which had previously made him ‘the dread of Israel’s foes ... himself an army,’ was insufficient without wisdom, self-knowledge, and self-mastery: O impotence of mind, in body strong! But what is strength without a double share Of wisdom, vast, unwieldly, burdensome, Proudly secure, yet liable to fall By weakest subtleties, not made to rule, But to subserve where wisdom bears command.24

If the English nation at this critical juncture makes the wrong choice – like Samson, ‘sole author’ of whatever ‘evils hath befall’n’ as a result – the blame, Milton contends, lies with deficiencies in wisdom, an inability or refusal to heed the lessons of history, ‘gravest autorities, experiences, examples,’ and even to recognize where their true interest lies. In an eloquent passage in The Readie and Easie Way, Milton deploys all the rhetorical weapons at his command in contrasting freedom and bondage, glory and shame, courage and cowardice, victory in war and abject, ‘unmanly’ submission to their enemies: That a nation should be so valorous and courageous to winn thir liberty in the field, and when they have wonn it, should be so heartless and unwise in thir counsels, as not to know how to use it, value it, what to do with it or with themselves; but after ten or twelve years prosperous warr and contestation with tyrannie, basely and besottedly to run their necks again into the yoke which they have broken, and prostrate all the fruits of

80 Warren Chernaik their victorie for naught at the feet of the vanquishd, besides our loss of glorie, and such an example as kings or tyrants never yet had the like to boast of, will be an ignominie if it befall us, that never yet befell any nation possessed of thir libertie; worthie indeed themselves, whatsoever they be, to be for ever slaves.25

The Two Cromwells In the Second Defence, the History of Britain, and The Readie and Easie Way, Milton cites the lessons of history to help explain how and why, as he puts it in other texts, ‘violent lords’ from time to time ‘undeservedly enthral’ man’s ‘outward freedom,’ taking advantage of the propensity of fallible men and women to ‘give up thir understanding to a double tyrannie, of Custom from without, and blind affections within.’26 Marchamont Nedham’s republican manifesto, The Excellencie of a FreeState (1656), gives a number of instances from Roman history to illustrate the maxim that ‘Freedom is a Virgin that every one seeks to deflower ... so great is the Lust of mankinde after dominion.’ Like Milton, Nedham sees a degree of complicity between tyrants and their willing slaves, who see their ‘interest in base fawning, and the favour of present Great Ones’: ‘the greatest part’ of mankind, he argues, ‘was ever inclined to adore the Golden Idol of Tyranny in every Form.’27 ‘Immoderate Power,’ Nedham suggests, ‘soon lets in high and ambitious thoughts,’ and few men faced with the delicious prospect of ‘unbounded Power’ are able to resist temptation: How many Free-States & Common-wealths have paid dear for their Experience in this particular? who by trusting their own servants too far, have been forced, in the end to receive them for their Masters.

The remedy Nedham suggests, as a ‘prime Principle of State,’ is ‘To keep any man, though he have deserved never so well by good success or service, from being too great or popular: it is a notable means (and so esteemeth by all Free-States) to keep and preserve a Commonwealth from the Rapes of Usurpation.’28 Yet neither Nedham nor his fellow republican James Harrington explicitly states that Cromwell is such a man, greedy for power. Like the Cromwell of the ‘Horatian Ode,’ who ‘has his Sword and Spoyls ungirt, / To lay them at the Publick’s skirt,’ the Lord General is presented by Nedham and Harrington as, for the moment at least, content to act as servant of the people, yet also capable of savagery and destruction.29

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Nedham’s True State of the Case of the Commonwealth (1654), though written in support of the Protectorate settlement, nevertheless emphasizes the potential for tyranny in a situation where ‘all Power of Government [is] devolved upon the General, as Head of the Army,’ leaving ‘both the instituting and executing of Law to the arbitrary discretion of the Souldier,’ who is able ‘to execute his own will in place of Law, without check or controll.’30 Harrington in The Commonwealth of Oceana (1656), while praising Cromwell as a ‘most victorious captain and incomparable patriot,’ sees the nation as ‘ruined by his victory.’ Having ‘cast herself at his feet’ as supplicant, the English nation could develop in either of two directions: ‘what is there in nature that can arise out of these ashes, but a popular government, or a new monarchy to be erected by the victorious army?’31 Harrington’s proposal for dealing with the political crisis of 1653–5 differed considerably from that of Milton in the Second Defence, Marvell in The First Anniversary, and Nedham in A True State of the Case of the Commonwealth, all of which urged support for the Protectorate government under Cromwell. In The First Anniversary, Marvell presents Cromwell’s assumption of power as an unselfish acceptance of burdensome responsibility by a nurturing, benevolent ‘Father’ and guide, carefully avoiding the extremes of tyranny and anarchic license: For all delight of Life thou then didst lose, When to Command, thou didst thy self Depose; Resigning up thy Privacy so dear, To turn the headstrong Peoples Charioteer.

(221–4)

Where the analogies Marvell cites in the ‘Horatian Ode’ are largely, like those of Harrington and Nedham, from Roman history (‘A Caesar he ere long to Gaul, / To Italy an Hannibal’), in The First Anniversary he uses a series of biblical parallels to present Cromwell as one who, in spite of having ‘grown great’ by ‘Conquest,’ ‘wouldst not ... be Lord’ over his fellow man. Cromwell, Marvell argues, consciously resists the temptation of absolute power and has the self-discipline to ‘still refuse to Reign.’ Here again he is presented as serving others, as wise, provident, and attentive to the public interest, yet the imagery also suggests the twin dangers of anarchic desire and arbitrary power, two kinds of ‘Will’: Thou, and thine House, like Noah’s Eight did rest, Left by the Wars Flood on the Mountains crest:

82 Warren Chernaik And the large Vale lay subject to thy Will, Which thou but as a Husbandsman wouldst Till: And only didst for others plant the Vine Of Liberty, not drunken with its Wine.32

Harrington uses classical and biblical analogies to provide ‘the greatest examples’ to buttress his arguments, but to an entirely different effect. To him, a great conqueror, a Caesar or Alexander, is no better than a butcher; indeed, Julius Caesar, as one who has succeeded in having ‘perpetrated some heinous crime’ in invading the liberty of the Roman people, is ‘more execrable than Catiline’: To begin with Alexander, erecting trophies common with his sword and the pestilence, to what good of mankind did he infect the air with his heaps of carcasses? The sword of war, if it be any otherwise used than as the sword of magistracy for the fear and punishment of those that do evil, is as guilty in the sight of God as the sword of a murderer; nay more, for if the blood of Abel, of one innocent man, cried in the ears of the Lord for vengeance, what shall the blood of an innocent nation?33

True heroism, Harrington suggests in this passage, is incompatible with the pursuit of military glory. Like Milton in the later books of Paradise Lost and in Paradise Regained, Harrington sees the desire for ‘the throne of ambition’ – ‘to gain dominion and to keep it gained’ – and the worship of military prowess as indicative of false values, and not ‘what justly gives heroic name / To person or to poem’: Of this kind of empire, the throne of ambition, the quarry of a mighty hunter, it hath been truly said that it is but a great robbery. But if Alexander had restored the liberty of Greece, and propagated it unto mankind, he ... might have been truly called the Great.34

In the exchange between Michael and Adam in the last two books of Paradise Lost, Milton similarly attacks the adulation commonly accorded to ‘great conquerors,’ mistakenly gaining ‘renown on earth’ for success on the battlefield, allowing them to ‘bring home spoils with infinite / Manslaughter,’ as contrasted with ‘what most merits fame’ (11:688–99). The pursuit of ‘empire ... for glory’s sake’ is condemned even more unequivocally in Paradise Regained, where the kingdoms of the world are Satan’s domain. In rejecting the temptation to act in

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accordance with conventional ideas of heroism, the resolute Jesus of Paradise Regained scornfully dismisses ‘false glory,’ the acclaim of an ignorant multitude. The victims of war, humbled and enslaved, Milton suggests, are morally superior to their conquerors: They err who count it glorious to subdue By conquest far and wide, to overrun Large countries, and in field great battles win, Great cities by assault: what do these worthies, But rob and spoil, burn, slaughter, and enslave Peaceable nations, neighbouring, or remote, Made captive, yet deserving freedom more Than those their conquerors, who leave behind Nothing but ruin whereso’er they rove, And all the flourishing works of peace destroy.35

In the temptation of the kingdoms, Satan appeals to Jesus’s own youthful hopes of performing ‘victorious deeds ... heroic acts’ in defence of ‘public good’ and the nation of Israel, then under Roman domination. This passage in Book 1 may well reflect Milton’s own hopes during the 1640s of ‘a noble and puissant Nation rousing herself like a strong man after sleep, and shaking her invincible locks’: To rescue Israel from the Roman yoke, Thence to subdue and quell o’er all the earth Brute violence and proud tyrannic power, Till truth were freed, and equity restored.36

Where Harrington, like Marvell in The First Anniversary, distinguishes selfish ambition from virtuous action in defence of liberty, Milton’s uncompromising stance in Paradise Regained suggests that any action, even one in support of a good cause, is likely to be morally suspect. Satan tempts Jesus with the alluring prospect of becoming the deliverer of his people, restorer of liberty to the oppressed and downtrodden. Jesus’s firm answer to Satan rejects the possibility of active resistance to tyranny. The ‘captive tribes’ of Israel have ‘wrought their own captivity,’ just as the Romans, ‘victor once’ in the days of the republic when they were ‘just, / Frugal, and mild, and temperate,’ have, corrupted by the imperial vices of luxury and greed, been ‘deservedly made vassal’:

84 Warren Chernaik What wise and valiant man would seek to free Those thus degenerate, by themselves enslaved, Or could of inward slaves make outward free?37

Once a nation loses its inner freedom, Milton argues, then any action, even if it appears to be for a good cause, is necessarily vain. A nation loses its inner freedom once its constituent citizens allow themselves to ‘decline ... / From virtue, which is reason.’ Though the emphasis on the ‘paradise within’ and the redefinition of heroism as the ‘better fortitude’ of endurance, ‘suffering for truth’s sake,’ in Milton’s three major poems of the 1660s may well reflect the poet’s darkening hopes after the failure of the English revolution, his attitude towards the inscrutability of divine providence never altered: God does not need Either man’s work or his own gifts, who best Bear his mild yoke, they serve him best, his state Is kingly.38

The perspective of Milton’s fellow republicans Nedham and Harrington is more secular. In their writings of this period, republican Rome serves as a model for the infant English commonwealth. In The Excellencie of a Free-State, Nedham, following Machiavelli, argued that ‘the Sword, and Soveraignty, ever walk hand in hand together,’ praising a citizen army as guardians of the public liberty, where an army of mercenaries, ‘a Praetorian Band,’ could easily become the instruments of oppression: Rome it self, and the Territories about it, was trained up perpetually in Arms ... so long as Rome acted by the pure Principles of a Free-State ... In those days there was no difference, in order, between the Citizen, the Husbandsman, and the Souldier: for, he that was a Citizen, or Villager yesterday became a Souldier the next, if the Publick Liberty required it.39

Like Machiavelli in the Discourses, Nedham contrasts the vitality of the Roman republic with the decadence of the later empire, arguing that ‘the Romans flourished most when they were a Free-State.’ Under kings, the Romans were ‘a very inconsiderable People,’ but as a republic Rome ‘laid the Foundation and built the Structure of that wondrous Empire that overshadowed the whole World.’ ‘Courage and Magnanimity,’

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Nedham argues, are virtues that flourish in a republic and are lost with ‘the loss of Freedom’ under ‘Usurping Dictators’ and emperors. Characteristically, he cites modern instances – ‘the valiant Swisses, the Hollanders’ – along with the history of Rome, with particular application to the immediate situation of England in the mid 1650s, ‘our own Nation, when declared a Free-State.’40 Though Cromwell’s name is not mentioned, The Excellencie of a FreeState can be seen as a covert attack on Cromwell as a threat to ‘a Reestablishment of our Freedom in the hands of the People’ (58). Much more direct attacks on Cromwell as tyrant and usurper can be found in Leveller, republican, and Fifth Monarchist pamphlets, both in 1647–9 and in the mid 1650s. John Wildman’s A Call to all the Souldiers of the Armie, by the Free People of England (1647) imagines two Cromwells, good and bad: And if Cromwell instantly repent not and alter his course, let him know also that ye loved and honoured just, honest, sincere, and valiant Cromwell that loved his country and the liberties of his people above his life, yea, and hated the King as a man of blood, but that Cromwell ceasing to be such, he ceaseth to be the object of your love.41

William Walwyn’s The Bloody Project (1648) and Richard Overton’s The Hunting of the Foxes (1649) see a plot by ‘Cromwell and Ireton, and their faction of self-interessed Officers ... to grasp the sole dominion into their own hands’ in ‘a New Regality.’ The English nation, according to The Hunting of the Foxes, is ‘under a more absolute arbitrary Monarchy than before. We have not the change of a Kingdom to a Common wealth; we are only under the old cheat, the transmutation of Names, but with the addition of New Tyrannies to the old.’ As Walwyn puts it: To be short, all the quarrell we have at this day in the Kingdome, is no other then a quarrel of Interests, and Partyes, a pulling down of one Tyrant, to set up another, and instead of Liberty, heaping upon our selves a greater slavery than that we fought against.42

Walwyn, directing his appeal to the consciences of ‘soldiers and People,’ bitterly attacks the ‘great men in the City and Army’ who ‘have made you but the stairs by which they have mounted to Honor, Wealth and Power,’ while ‘you and your poor friends that depend

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on Farms, Trades, and small pay’ suffer. War and conquest, as presented here, are no better than murder: But if you have not killed and destroyed men enough for this, go on and destroy, kill and sley, till your consciences are swoln so full with the blood of the People, that they burst agen, and upon your death-beds may you see your selves the most horrid Murtherers that ever lived, since the time that Cain kild his brother without a just Cause.43

The Hunting of the Foxes, addressed to ‘all that have, and are still engaged in the Military Service of the Common-wealth,’ similarly distinguishes between ‘the Grandie-Deceivers,’ who ‘are become masters and usurpers of the name of the Army,’ and the common soldiers, citizens in arms. Like Nedham and Harrington, Overton contrasts a ‘Mercenary Army, hired to serve any Arbitrary power of a state,’ willing ‘to butcher the people for pay,’ with the ideal of independent, conscientious ‘English Souldiers, engaged for the Freedoms of England.’44 The Hunting of the Foxes is a defence of five soldiers in the New Model Army punished for disobedience, arguing that ‘our being Souldiers hath not deprived us of our Right as Commoners’: Further we desire you to consider, That the strength, the honour and being of the Officer ... doth consist in the Arme of the Souldier. Is it not the Souldier that endureth the heat and burden of the day, and performeth that work whereof the Officers beareth the glory and name?45

Edward Sexby, an even more ardent republican opponent of Cromwell, advances similar arguments in the Putney debates, again acting as spokesman for the ‘many thousands of us soldiers’ in the New Model Army: We have engaged in this kingdom and ventured our lives, and it was all for this: to recover our birthrights and privileges as Englishmen ... If we had not a right to the kingdom, we were mere mercenary soldiers ... I do think the poor and meaner of this kingdom ... have been the means of the preservation of this kingdom.46

In 1654, Wildman published an anonymous broadsheet, A Declaration of the Free-born People of England now in Armes against the Tyrannie and Oppression of Oliver Cromwell, fiercely attacking Cromwell as tyrant,

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hypocrite, and usurper, and arguing ‘the present necessity to take up Armes for the defence of our Native Rights & Freedoms, which are wholly invaded and swallowed up in the Pride and Ambition of Oliver Cromwell ESQ. who calls himself Lord Protector of England, and hath rendered all English-men no better than his Vassals.’ Wildman was arrested in February 1655, accused of planning an armed uprising, and remained in prison until June 1656. In the Declaration, Wildman presents Cromwell as having deceived the English people with ‘specious pretences and most alluring promises’: Wee did believe, as they told us, that our present sufferings were only like a rough stormy passage to the Haven of Justice, Right, and Freedome, wee could not suspect these ambitious Designes in Cromwell and his Confederates, that are now proclaimed to the World ... These things rocked us all asleep, with the pleasant Dreams of Liberty and Justice, until he hath made a Sacrifice of all our Lawes, Liberties and Properties unto his own Ambition.47

Both the Declaration and the Fifth Monarchist pamphlet The Protector, (So called,) In Part Unvailed (1655), purporting to be ‘By a late Member of the Army,’ cite Cromwell’s speech to the Protectorate Parliament as proof ‘that he hath dissolved all Civill Government, and that he had in himselfe an absolute unlimited arbitrary power without checke or controull.’ The plain truth is, we are at his mercy, by reason of the power of the sword, which is over us (which was never taken up on our part to this end) and he may do with us what he pleases ... if he will be good to us and use us well, so ... if we will cry Grace, Grace, and fall down and worship his Government ... he will say we are good Boyes, and will use us well.

Though the apocalyptic terminology prominent in The Protector Unvailed (‘The Monarchical foundation in which he stands, is that which the Lord by his Spirit in his People, and by their hands ... hath destroyed’) differs from the essentially secular, contractual language of Wildman’s Declaration, both see the Protectorate government as monarchy under another name and Cromwell as tyrant and deceiver.48 Republican attacks on Cromwell are carried one step further in Sexby’s Killing Noe Murder (1657), a call to tyrannicide. Like Milton in The Tenure of Kings and Magistrates – though, of course, Milton is attacking

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Charles I and never characterizes Cromwell in these terms – Sexby argues that a tyrant should be treated as an outlaw, ‘a common pest, and destroyer of mankinde,’ outside the bounds of civil society: And therefore a Tyrant that submits to no law; but his will and lust are the law, by which he governs himself and others, is no Magistrate, no Citizen or member of any Society, but an Ulcer and disease that destroyes it ... He is therefore in all reason to be reckoned in the number of those Savage Beasts, that fall not with others into any heard; that have no other defence but their own strength; making a prey of all thats weaker, and, by the same justice, being a prey to all that’s stronger then themselves.49

He who lives by the sword, Sexby suggests, must expect to die by the sword. Milton in The Tenure of Kings and Magistrates argues that ‘justice don upon a Tyrant is no more but the necessary self-defence of a whole Common wealth,’ and the author of The Protector Unvailed claims that a tyrant and ‘all those who have been Aiders and Abettors, to him’ become subject to a form of citizen’s arrest: it is ‘lawfull for any wellaffected Person or Officer, to proceed to apprehend him, or them, and bring them before the next Justice of the Peace.’50 Citing Aristotle, Tacitus, and Machiavelli to identify ‘the Markes of a Tyrant,’ Sexby accuses Cromwell of ‘spungie eyes, and a supple conscience,’ of gaining power by deception and maintaining power by ruthlessly suppressing any potential opposition: Almost all tyrants have been first Captaines & Generalls for the people: under pretence of vindicating, or defending theire Liberties. Ut imperium evertant Libertatem praeferunt; cum perverterunt, ipsam aggrediuntur, says Tacitus, to subvert the present Government, they pretend Liberty for the people, when the Government is downe, they then Invade that libertie them selves.51

As with the other attacks on Cromwell’s Protectorate by Levellers and republicans discussed above, Sexby’s immediate audience is ‘Officers and Soldiers of the Army’ who once fought side by side with Cromwell, seeking to awaken their consciences: For you that were the Champions of our Liberty, and to that purpose were raised, are you not become the instruments of our Slavery? And your

Milton, the English Nation, and Cromwell 89 hands that the people employ’d to take off the yoake from our necks, are not those the very hands they that now doe put it on? ... Give not posterity as well as your own Generation the occasion to mention you with infamie, and to curse that unfortunate valour, and successe of yours, that onely hath gained victories ... against the common-wealth.

Here again the contrast is between ‘Janizaries,’ hired killers who are ‘pimpes of tyranny ... slaves themselves, and making all others so,’ and free citizens bearing arms in defence of their native birthright. In an eloquent prefatory epistle addressed to fellow soldiers of the New Model Army ‘from one that was once one amongst you,’ Sexby presents them with a stark moral choice: to serve God and the cause of liberty as ‘true warfaring Christian[s]’ or to serve the base lusts of man, as the willing instruments of tyranny and oppression: Could ever England have thought to have seen that Armie that was never mentioned without the titles of Religious, Zealous, Faithfull, Couragious, the fence of her libertie at home, the terrour of her enemies abroad. Become her Gaolers? Not her Guard, but her oppressours? Not her Souldiers, but a Tyrants executioners?52

Though Milton never accuses Cromwell of apostacy or hypocrisy, betraying the cause of liberty and virtue, in Samson Agonistes and A Treatise of Civil Power he makes a similar distinction between serving God and serving fallible man, the ‘powers and kingdoms of this world, which are upheld by outward force only.’ Samson, initially refusing the ‘imperious’ commands of the Philistines to provide entertainment at their feast, says that, though he is ‘in their civil power,’ he is free to follow his own conscience: Commands are no constraints. If I obey them, I do it freely; venturing to displease God for the fear of man, and man prefer, Set God behind; which in his jealousy Shall never, unrepented, find forgiveness.53

Like Milton, Sexby locates ‘the root and source of all liberty’ in the right of each and every individual ‘to dispose and oeconomize in the Land which God hath giv’n them, as Maisters of Family in their own

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house and free inheritance’ – what Richard Overton in An Arrow against All Tyrants (1646) calls ‘a self propriety,’ ‘an individuall property by nature, not to be invaded or usurped by any’: But sure, no English man can be ignorant, that it is his Birth-right to be master of his own Estate; and that none can command any part of it but by his own grant and consent, either made expressly by himself, or Virtually by a Parliament.54

Going well beyond Milton, Sexby extends the principle of consent to justify the assassination of Cromwell, citing as precedent the biblical instances of Samson, Ehud, and others. Though Milton cites Ehud as an example of justified tyrannicide, he explicitly states his preference for ‘faire and op’n tryal ... [t]o teach lawless Kings, and all who so much adore them, that not mortal man, or his imperious will, but Justice is the onely true sovran and supreme Majesty upon earth.’ To Sexby, violent direct action is the ultimate expression of liberty, the remedy of the oppressed: The example of Ehud shews us the naturall and almost the only remedie against a Tyrant, and the way to free an opprest people from the slavery of an insulting Moabite, tis done by prayers and teares, with the help of a Dagger ... Now that which was lawfull for Samson to doe against many oppressours why is it unlawfull for us to do against one? Are our injuries lesse?55

Along with these biblical precedents, Sexby invokes the spirit of liberty in ‘old Rome,’ with the pantheon of republican heroes as models for imitation: ‘Our nation is not yet so barren of vertue, that we want noble examples to follow amongst ourselves.’ The choice facing his fellow Englishmen, and in particular the soldiers who fought in the New Model Army, Sexby argues, is complicity with tyranny and injustice or active resistance: To us particularly it belongs to bring this Monster to justice, whom he hath made the instruments of his Villainy, and sharers in the Curse and Detestation that is due to himself from all good men. Others only have their Liberty to vindicate, we our Liberty and our honour ... What the people at present endure, and posterity shall suffer, will all be laid at

Milton, the English Nation, and Cromwell 91 our doores ... for onely we under God have the power to pull down this Dagon which we have set up.56

Rather than being presented as God’s champion, like Milton’s Samson, triumphing over his oppressors and their false deity, Cromwell is depicted here as the enemy of God, an idol to be shattered. Milton and the Protectorate The Second Defence, like Marvell’s First Anniversary, is in part an attempt to defend Cromwell, newly installed as Lord Protector, against charges that he is yet another tyrant. In this Latin tract, addressed not to ‘one people alone’ but ‘to the entire assembly and council of all the most influential men, cities, and nations everywhere,’ Milton’s primary object is to refute the ‘slanderous accusations’ in the royalist Cry of the Royal Blood to Heaven, where Cromwell is maligned as boasting of his desire ‘to overthrow all monarchies, to destroy all kings,’ and as relying on ‘trickery and deceit.’ As Laura Knoppers has observed, the extended passage in praise of Cromwell as leader of the New Model Army ‘can be seen as responding to attacks on Cromwell by stressing above all his piety.’57 In presenting the New Model Army as ‘obedient to his command in all things,’ a body of soldiers motivated not by the licentiousness typical of the military but by ‘the code of Christian virtue,’ inspired by the example of a commander ‘well-versed in selfknowledge’ and discipline, Milton by implication refutes arguments by Levellers which sought to present the interests of proud and ambitious ‘grandees’ and common soldiers as irreconcilably opposed. In the Second Defence, Milton praises Cromwell in republican terms as ‘the liberator of your country, the author of liberty, and likewise its guardian and savior.’58 It has often been argued that Milton turned against Cromwell and the Protectorate regime during the 1650s and that the apparent praise of Cromwell in the Second Defence is in fact ‘coded criticism.’ According to Austin Woolrych, Milton ‘came ... to regard Cromwell’s assumption of the headship of state as an aberration from which the Commonwealth needed to make a painful recovery,’ and in the Second Defence expressed ‘certain reservations in committing himself to the Protectoral regime.’ Woolrych and others have argued that when Milton characterizes the restored Rump Parliament in 1659 as ‘the authors and

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best patrons of religious and civil libertie, that ever these Ilands brought forth’ and speaks of ‘a short but scandalous night of interruption’ to the cause of liberty, he is retrospectively repudiating ‘the whole of the Protectorate.’59 Blair Worden is confident that the Cromwellian regime ‘remains on probation’ in the Second Defence, and that any praise of Cromwell in that work and in the sonnet addressed to him in 1652 is hedged round ‘by doubt and by warning.’ ‘Troubled by Cromwell’s elevation,’ Worden claims, Milton saw the establishment of the Protectorate as a ‘failure ... calamitous to the cause which both the poet and the hero had served.’ David Armitage not only presents the Second Defence as ‘an admonition to Cromwell,’ but enlists Milton as advocate of the view that the Protectorate represented ‘moral decline,’ in which ‘popular liberty had been extinguished.’60 The view that the Second Defence represented ‘opposition from within’ and even gives ‘veiled expression to the hatred and mistrust which Cromwell inspired so widely’ has been contested by Robert Thomas Fallon, Paul Stevens, and others.61 There is no doubt that Milton’s commitment to radical republicanism, the conviction that ‘a free Commonwealth without single person or house of lords, is by far the best government, if it can be had,’ is as clear in the preface to Considerations touching the Likeliest Means to Remove Hirelings out of the Church (1659) as it is in The Readie and Easie Way to Establish a Free Commonwealth, published a year later. The preface to Hirelings presents the restoration of the Rump Parliament in 1659, after the brief reign of Richard Cromwell, as instrumental in the great task of delivering the English people ‘from the slavish dejection, wherin from father to son we were bred up and taught.’62 But, as Fallon and Corns have argued, ‘a short but scandalous night of interruption’ is an odd phrase to describe the six years of the Protectorate, and could equally well refer to the period of anarchy before the return of the Rump, in the two weeks between the forcible dissolution of Richard Cromwell’s Parliament and ‘the restoration of regular government.’ Hirelings, along with Milton’s other republican pamphlets of 1659–60, suggests the continuity of the non-monarchical Commonwealth, in one form or another, throughout the period of the English Revolution, as ‘a stable, abiding entity embodied in a series of manifestations.’ When Milton uses the word ‘interruption’ in The Readie and Easie Way, ‘those unhappie interruptions, which God hath remov’d’ and ‘the frequent disturbances, interruptions and dissolutions which the Parliament hath had’ refer to the naked rule of the sword in such actions as Lambert’s dissolution of the

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Rump in October 1659, in a period when there was no settled government, rather than to the entire period of the Protectorate.63 If by ‘a new dawning of Gods miraculous providence,’ the ‘care and tuition’ of liberty are in May 1659 ‘revolvd’ upon the ‘shoulders’ of the Rump Parliament, this does not mean that during the previous ten years other bodies and other individuals could not have been chosen ‘by the power of God’ to fulfil that role. In the Second Defence, Cromwell is addressed as ‘guardian’ of the liberty of his fellow citizens in a republican government: Consider again and again how precious a thing is this liberty which you hold, committed to your care, entrusted and commended to you by how dear a mother, your native land.64

Milton treats the Rump Parliament in a much less positive way in the Second Defence. There, as he does in the ‘Digression’ in the History of Britain, he presents it as ineffective, faction-ridden, dominated by the power of the few, inattentive to the public welfare: When you saw delays being contrived and every man more attentive to his private interest than to that of the state, when you saw the people complaining that they had been deluded of their hopes and circumvented by the power of the few, you put an end to the domination of these few men, since they, although so often warned, had refused to do so.65

This is essentially the way in which the Rump Parliament is characterized in Nedham’s True State of the Case of the Commonwealth, as interested only in perpetuating its own power, exemplifying a tyranny of the few, ‘corrupted’ by the exercise of ‘an unaccountable condition of Authority’: But when after the intercurrence of divers years, all our hopes were blasted, in regard particular Members became studious of Parties and private Interests, neglecting the publick ... a visible designe carried on by some among them, to have perpetuated the Power in their own Hands ... and were like in a short time to overwhelm the ancient Liberties and Properties of the People.66

Cromwell was thus, according to Milton and Nedham, entirely justified in dissolving the Rump, and the dissolution of the Nominated Parliament which followed shortly afterwards was no less inevitable, after

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that body had disappointed ‘the hopes conceived, and expectations raised’ when it met. Milton’s account of the Nominated Parliament is brief, where Nedham treats its failings more extensively, criticizing those members of Parliament whose ‘principles led them to a pulling down all, and establishing nothing,’ led by ‘a new Fury of Persecution’ and ‘fastening a mark of Antichristianism upon every thing they liked not’: Another Parliament was convened anew ... The elected members came together. They did nothing. When they in turn had at length exhausted themselves with disputes and quarrels, most of them considering themselves inadequate and unfit for executing such great tasks, they of their own accord dissolved the Parliament.67

In the Second Defence, Milton argues that the establishment of the Protectorate under Cromwell has not betrayed the principles of the revolution, that the exercise of power by those most worthy to rule is compatible with, even necessary for, the preservation of liberty. Cromwell is presented as ‘defender of liberty’ and ‘pillar and support of English interests,’ using his power to ‘restore to us our liberty, unharmed and even enhanced’: Cromwell, we are deserted! You alone remain. On you has fallen the whole burden of our affairs. On you alone they depend. In unison we acknowledge your unexcelled virtue. No one protests save such as seek equal honors, though inferior themselves, or begrudge the honors assigned to one more worthy, or do not understand that there is nothing in human society more pleasing to God, or more agreeable to reason, nothing in the state more just nothing more expedient, than the rule of the man most fit to rule. All know you to be that man, Cromwell!68

Milton’s polemical strategy here is similar to that in the opening lines of Waller’s Panegyrick to my Lord Protector, though Waller’s primary audience is former royalists rather than those who fought against the king. Any opposition to the Cromwellian Protectorate is occluded, dismissed as selfish factionalism, jealousy, the narrow perspective of unreasoning ‘partial Spirits’: While with a strong, and yet a gentle Hand You bridle Faction, and our Hearts command; Protect us from our Selves, and from the Foe,

Milton, the English Nation, and Cromwell 95 Make us Unite, and make us Conquer too; Let partial Spirits still aloud complain, Think themselves injur’d that they cannot Raign, And own no Liberty, but where they may Without controule upon their Fellows prey.69

Milton not only denigrates anti-Cromwellian sentiment as unworthy and disorderly ‘faction,’ he pretends it does not exist, as ‘all’ acknowledge ‘in unison’ Cromwell’s fitness to rule; in a later passage, Cromwell is ‘greeted by the spontaneous and heartfelt cries of all upright men.’70 In similar fashion, Fairfax’s retirement from public office, treated very differently in Marvell’s ‘Upon Appleton House,’ is presented as endorsement of Cromwell as reliable guardian of liberty, faithful servant of God and of the national interest: ‘For while you, Cromwell, are safe ... who would fear for the safety of England, when he sees God everywhere so favorable to you, so unmistakably at your side[?]’71 In a passage directed at his fellow republicans, Milton goes on to defend Cromwell against the charge that the Protectorate is monarchy under another name. Like Marvell in The First Anniversary, Milton presents Cromwell as scorning ‘the haughty titles which seem so great in the opinion of the mob.’ Both authors are dismissive of the ‘false Renown’ of ‘useless,’ inactive kings, who ‘only are against their Subjects strong.’ Cromwell is described in both works as one who by his accomplishments has ‘outstripped ... the achievements of our kings’: since titles are essentially meaningless, ‘your deeds recognize no other name as worthy of you’: For to be Cromwell was a greater thing, Than ought below, or yet above a King: Therefore thou rather didst thy Self depress, Yielding to Rule, because it made thee Less ... Abroad a King, he seems, and something more, At home a Subject on the equal Floor.72

Like Marvell in The First Anniversary, Milton sees the conferment of titles and public honours as limiting or binding public figures, allowing the victorious Cromwell, ‘the greatest and most illustrious citizen, the director of public counsels, the commander of the bravest armies,’ to descend from the heights of heroism to the workaday concerns of ordinary political life, in the interest of ‘the public good’:

96 Warren Chernaik For what is a title, except a certain limited degree of dignity? ... That since it is, not indeed worthy, but expedient for even the greatest capacities to be bounded and confined by some sort of human dignity, which is considered an honor, you assumed a certain title very like that of father of your country. You suffered and allowed yourself, not indeed to be borne aloft, but to come down so many degrees from the heights and be forced into a definite rank, so to speak, for the public good.73

In the Second Defence, Milton defends the Protectorate government by arguing, as Nedham does in The True State of the Case of the Protectorate, that ‘though the Commonwealth may appear with a new face in the outward Form, yet it remains still the same in Substance.’74 Cromwell’s refusal to assume the title of king is presented in the Second Defence as a commitment on his part to republican principles: The name of king you spurned from your far greater eminence, and rightly so. For if, when you became so great a figure, you were captivated by the title which as a private citizen you were able to send under the yoke and reduce to nothing, you would be doing almost the same thing as if, when you had subjugated some tribe of idolaters with the help of the true God, you were to worship the gods that you had conquered.75

The equation of monarchy with idolatry in the passage resembles a number of passages in The Readie and Easie Way, Paradise Lost, and elsewhere, in which the ‘yoke’ of bondage is contrasted with the strenuous pursuit of freedom. In most of these passages, the resumption of the empty pomp of monarchy, ‘choosing rather / Inglorious life with servitude,’ is associated with ‘the defection of a misguided and abus’d multitude’ characterized as ‘abject and ignoble ... spiritless and weak,’ rather than with ambitious men seeking power. The immediate circumstances of The Readie and Easie Way make the imminent danger one of ‘chusing ... a captain back for Egypt,’ under the influence of mistaken ideas of self-interest: To put our necks again under kingship, as was made use of by the Jews to returne back to Egypt and to the worship of their idol queen, because they falsly imagind that they then livd in more plentie and prosperity.76

It is wrong to see the passage on Cromwell’s spurning the title of king as a coded attack on him, accusing him of harbouring monarchical

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ambitions. As panegyric traditionally does, it offers counsel, praising the person addressed for doing what the panegyrist would like him to do, reminding him of the responsibilities with which he is entrusted. Cromwell’s situation, as Milton presents him here, is closely akin to that delineated in Marvell’s ‘Horatian Ode’ four years earlier: ‘Not yet grown stiffer with Command, / But still in the Republick’s hand’ (81–2). The paragraph that follows emphasizes the ‘high hopes’ and ‘great confidence’ placed in Cromwell as guardian of the liberties of the English nation. When Milton says that these hopes rest in Cromwell ‘alone’ – ‘that which she once sought from the most distinguished men of the entire nation, she now seeks from you alone and through you alone hopes to achieve’77 – he is not in any way endorsing rule by a ‘single person,’ but emphasizing the heavy weight of responsibility on Cromwell, after the failure of the Rump and the Nominated Parliament. Any power invested in Cromwell under the Protectorate government, Milton clearly indicates, is a trust, ‘entrusted’ to his ‘care’ – in the words of The Tenure of Kings and Magistrates: The power of Kings and Magistrates is nothing else, but what is only derivative, transferr’d and committed to them in trust from the People, to the Common good of them all, in whom the power yet remaines fundamentally, and cannot be tak’n from them, without a violation of thir natural birthright.78

A series of imperative verbs brings out the choice facing Cromwell and the English nation, appealing to honour as against shame, patriotic feelings and solidarity among those who fought side by side in the New Model Army as contrasted with divisiveness, self-seeking, and the extinction of ‘our liberty, so bravely won.’ By presenting alternative scenarios, Milton seeks to encourage one possible course of action, while warning against the other. Honor the great confidence reposed in you, honor your country’s singular hope in you. Honor the faces and wounds of the many brave men, all those who under your leadership have striven so vigorously for liberty. Honor the shades of those who have fallen in that very struggle. Honor too what foreign nations think and say of us, the high hopes which they have for themselves as a result of our liberty, so bravely won, and our republic, so gloriously born. If the republic should miscarry, so to speak, and as quickly vanish, surely no greater shame and disgrace could befall this country.79

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In addressing Cromwell, and later in addressing his ‘fellow countrymen,’ Milton presents the defence of liberty as beset with uncertainties. The spectre of Cromwell the tyrant looms over the powerful admonitory address to the Lord Protector. Cromwell, as presented, has the potential for becoming the patron of liberty or its destroyer. As David Loewenstein has pointed out, this passage ‘directly confronts the ... precarious political realities threatening the new state’: ‘even as he passionately celebrates the new regime, he anxiously envisions its potential demise.’80 Milton appeals here to republican principles, warning Cromwell that a ruler who violates the liberties of his subjects becomes, in the words of Milton’s Tenure, a slave to an ‘inward vitious rule’ within himself. Towards the end of the passage he associates the cause of liberty not only with ‘virtue’ but with ‘religious faith,’ equating the loss of liberty with the ‘first wound,’ the Fall of Man: Finally, honor yourself, so that, having achieved that liberty in pursuit of which you endured so many hardships and encountered so many perils, you may not permit it to be violated or in any degree diminished by others. Certainly you yourself cannot be free without us, for it has so been arranged by nature that he who attacks the liberty of others is himself the first of all to lose his own liberty and learns that he is the first of all to become a slave. And he deserves this fate. For if the very patron and tutelary god of liberty, as it were, if that man than whom no one has been considered more just, more holy, more excellent, shall afterwards attack that liberty which he himself has defended, such an act must necessarily be dangerous and well-nigh fatal not only to liberty itself but also to the cause of all virtue and piety. Honor itself, virtue itself will seem to have melted away, religious faith will be circumscribed, reputation will hereafter be a meagre thing. A deeper wound than this, after the first wound, can never be inflicted on the human race.81

Milton presents the burden of responsibility on Cromwell as a severe ‘test.’ After projecting two rival scenarios for the future of the English nation, under freedom or under tyranny, Milton indicates the possible scope of the victories of peace which, according to the sonnet addressed to Cromwell two years earlier, are ‘no less renowned than war.’ As Knoppers suggests, Cromwell is being challenged ‘to live up to his professed ideals,’ depicted as facing ‘trials’ which can confirm or disprove his heroic status, fulfil or disappoint the hope that he has ‘been raised by the power of God beyond all other men to this most exalted rank’ and remain immune to the temptations of power:

Milton, the English Nation, and Cromwell 99 To rule with wisdom three powerful nations, to desire to lead their peoples from base customs to a better standard of morality than before, to direct your solicitous mind and thoughts into the most distant regions, to be vigilant, to exercise foresight, to refuse no toil, to yield to no allurements of pleasure, to flee from the pomp of wealth and power, these are arduous tasks compared to which war is a mere game.82

The advice Milton gives Cromwell next is to give ‘the first share in your counsels’ under the Protectorate government to ‘those men whom you first cherished as comrades’ in the New Model Army. Nearly all those on Milton’s list, headed by Cromwell’s close associates Fleetwood and Lambert, already served on the Protectorate’s Council of State, so to a large extent Milton is praising Cromwell for doing what he has already done.83 Woolrych and Worden have argued that ‘the names that he chose to celebrate alongside Cromwell’s’ hint at disapproval of Cromwell’s regime, since two figures praised at length, Robert Overton and John Bradshaw, were republicans who were critical of Cromwell and did not support the Protectorate. Overton, for example, praised as a ‘merciful conqueror,’ combining courage and a humane temperament, had expressed to Cromwell his fears that ‘his lordship did only design to set up himself’ rather than to serve the public good. But, as Fallon has shown, such arguments do not hold up under scrutiny. The praise of Overton (and in an earlier passage, of Bradshaw, who presided over the trial of Charles I) did not amount to an endorsement of all Overton’s beliefs, and could easily have served ‘to recommend him to the Protector as a man who in the light of his loyal service was worthy of trust,’ despite any ‘brotherly dissimilitudes’ and ‘neighboring differences,’ in which ‘Truth may be on this side, or on the other, without being unlike herself.’84 Milton ends his advice to Cromwell by urging him that he should always ‘take the side of those who think that not just their own party or faction, but all citizens equally have an equal right to freedom’ and should reject the counsel of ‘those who do not believe themselves free unless they deny freedom to others.’85 In a powerful peroration, similar in many ways to the closing pages of The Readie and Easie Way, Milton warns his ‘fellow countrymen’ of the possibility that they may be ‘unworthy of liberty’: Many men has war made great whom peace makes small. If, having done with war, you neglect the arts of peace, if warfare is your peace and liberty, war your only virtue, your supreme glory, you will find, believe

100 Warren Chernaik me, that peace itself is your greatest enemy. Peace itself will be by far your hardest war, and what you thought liberty will prove to be your servitude.86

Freedom and slavery are redefined in moral terms, with the battlefield within the individual. Once again the emphasis is on self-knowledge and the love of virtue. Surrender to the tyrant within, ‘inordinate desires / And upstart passions,’ which usurp ‘the government / From free reason,’ will ultimately lead to the surrender of ‘outward freedom’: Unless you expel avarice, ambition, and luxury from your minds, yes, and extravagance from your families as well, you will find at home and within that tyrant who, you believed, was to be sought abroad and in the field – now even more stubborn.87

As he does consistently, Milton contrasts licence, ‘which never hath more scope or more indulgence then under Tyrants,’ with the selfregulating liberty of those recognizing the need to be ‘govern’d by reason’: ‘For indeed none can love freedom heartilie, but good men.’ Licence, Milton consistently argues, is the province of beasts ‘that bawl for freedom in their senseless mood,’ unaware that ‘truth would set them free’: However loudly they shout and boast about liberty, slaves they are at home and abroad, although they know it not. When at last they do perceive it and like wild horses fretting at the bit try to shake off the yoke, driven not by the love of true liberty (to which the good man alone can rightly aspire), but by pride and base desires, even though they take arms in repeated attempts, they will accomplish naught. They can perhaps change their servitude; they cannot cast it off.88

Like Nedham in The Excellencie of a Free-State, Milton cites ‘the ancient Romans, once they had been corrupted and dissipated by luxury,’ as an instance of those who had proved themselves ‘unworthy of liberty.’ The ‘Digression’ to The History of Britain similarly finds a lesson in history ‘that libertie sought out of season in a corrupt and degenerate age brought Rome it self into further slaverie.’ In the Second Defence as in Samson Agonistes, Milton couples ingratitude ‘to their very liberators,’ those ‘Whom God hath of his special favour raised / As their deliverer,’ with ‘nations grown corrupt’ and justly punished for ‘their

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vices’ with ‘servitude.’89 Unlike such radicals as Rainsborough and Wildman, who argued for an extended franchise in the Putney debates, on the grounds that ‘every person in England has as clear a right to elect his representatives as the greatest person in England,’ thus giving ‘his own free consent’ to the laws by which he is governed, Milton does not identify liberty with the right to vote. Men who are ‘easily corrupted,’ he says bitterly, will elect representatives who replicate their own moral failings: For why should anyone then claim for you freedom to vote or the power of sending to Parliament whomever you prefer? So that each of you could elect in the cities men of his own faction, or in the country towns choose that man, however unworthy, who has entertained you most lavishly at banquets and supplied farmers and peasants with more abundant drink? ... Or how could they suddenly become legislators for the whole nation who themselves have never known what law is, what reason, what right or justice, straight or crooked, licit or illicit; who think that all power resides in violence, all grandeur in pride and arrogance?90

In redefining liberty in terms of moral probity, here and in The Readie and Easie Way, Milton comes close to denying liberty, or justifying the abrogation of rights, for those who fail to measure up to his high standards. The problem, as stated in A Needful Corrective or Ballance in Popular Government (1659), by the republican Sir Henry Vane, is To shew how that depraved, corrupted, and self-interested will of man, in the great Body, which we call the People, being left to its own free motion, shall be prevailed with to espouse their true publick interest.91

Several passages in The Readie and Easie Way show how reluctant Milton was to allow the body of the populace ‘its own free motion’: the proposal for a permanent senate, whose members hold office for life, and, notoriously, the argument for the right of a virtuous minority to compel the unregenerate multitude if that ‘greater number’ chose to revert to kingship. Is it just or reasonable, that most voices against the main end of government should enslave the less number that would be free? More just it is doubtless, if it com to force, that a less number compell a greater to retain, which can be no wrong to them, thir libertie, then that a greater number

102 Warren Chernaik for the pleasure of thir baseness, compell a less most injuriously to be thir fellow slaves. They who seek nothing but thir own just libertie, have alwaies right to winn it and to keep it, when ever they have power, be the voices never so numerous that opposed it.92

In the Second Defence, as in Michael’s stern admonition to Adam in Paradise Lost, Book 12, the loss of freedom in ‘a nation which cannot rule and govern itself’ is seen as the ‘judgment just’ of God on those nations which ‘decline so low from virtue, which is reason’: ‘tyranny must be, / Though to the tyrant thereby no excuse.’ Tyrants will always be found who ‘will perch on your back and shoulders as if on beasts of burden, who will sell you at public auction, though you be victors in the war’: Just as to be free is precisely the same as to be pious, wise, just, and temperate, careful of one’s property, aloof from another’s, and thus finally to be magnanimous and brave, so to be the opposite of these qualities is the same as to be a slave. And by the customary judgment and, so to speak, just retaliation of God, it happens that a nation which cannot rule and govern itself, but has delivered itself into slavery to its own lusts, is enslaved also to other masters whom it does not choose, and serves not only voluntarily but also against its will.93

Passages of this kind can be read in two ways: as theodicy, explaining and justifying the ways of God in punishing transgressors and leaving sinful men and nations ‘to their own polluted ways,’ or as an exhortation to a people not yet hardened in sin and blinded by folly ‘to obey right reason, to master yourselves,’ exercising their free will ‘to ordain wisely as in this world of evill, in the midd’st whereof God hath plac’t us unavoidably.’ Milton’s aim in the address to his ‘fellow countrymen,’ as in The Readie and Easie Way, is ‘to forewarne my countrey in time’: For, my fellow countrymen, your own character is a mighty factor in the acquisition or retention of liberty. Unless your liberty is such as can neither be won nor lost by arms, but is of that kind alone which, sprung from piety, justice, temperance, in short, true virtue, has put down the deepest and most far-reaching roots in your souls, there will not be lacking one who will shortly wrench from you, even without weapons, that liberty which you boast of having sought by force of arms.94

Milton, the English Nation, and Cromwell 103

‘Conquerors’ and ‘Conquered,’ Marvell suggests in an attack on the institution of monarchy in The First Anniversary, are alike victims, seen by actual and potential tyrants as cannon fodder, potential rivals who must be crushed: Their other Wars seem but a feign’d contest, This Common Enemy is still opprest; If Conquerors, on them they turn their might; If Conquered, on them they wreak their Spight.

(29–32)

In his writings of this period, Milton shares with Marvell and Harrington the conviction that the ‘warfare of peace’ is ‘far more noble than the gory victories of war’: Unless you be victors here as well, that enemy and tyrant whom you have just now defeated in the field has either not been conquered at all or has been conquered in vain.95

NOTES 1 ‘An Horatian Ode upon Cromwel’s Return from Ireland,’ 97–8, in The Poems and Letters of Andrew Marvell, ed. H.M. Margoliouth and Pierre Legouis, 2 vols (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1971). All subsequent quotations of Marvell’s poems are from this edition. 2 ‘To the Lord General Cromwell,’ 1, 5, 6–7, 9–11, in John Milton, The Major Works, ed. Stephen Orgel and Jonathan Goldberg (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2003). Subsequent quotations of Milton’s poems are from this edition. 3 Second Defence of the English People, trans. Helen North, in Complete Prose Works of John Milton, gen. ed. Don M. Wolfe, 8 vols (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1953–82), 4.1:667–8; subsequent references taken from this edition are cited as CPW. For the Latin text, see The Works of John Milton, ed. F.A. Patterson et al., 18 vols (New York: Columbia University Press, 1931–8), 8:214; subsequent references to the Latin text are cited as Works. 4 CPW 4.1:667–8 (Works 8:214–16). This passage is discussed in Laura Lunger Knoppers, Constructing Cromwell (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2000), 93. As Knoppers points out (89–95, 207), a similar emphasis on Cromwell’s piety and self-denial is evident in Payne Fisher’s

104 Warren Chernaik Latin panegyrics and in the English translation by Thomas Manley, Veni; Vidi; Vici (London, 1651), 11: Blest Hero, whose uprightness all commands, Whose joy in vertue more than triumph stands ... Thus doest thou valiant Leader overthrow Thine enemies, thy selfe thus conquer too. 5 ‘To the Lord General Cromwell,’ 3, 6. 6 CPW 3:304. See the discussion of the Observations in Thomas N. Corns, ‘Milton’s Observations upon the Articles of Peace: Ireland under English Eyes,’ in Politics, Poetics, and Hermeneutics in Milton’s Prose, ed. David Loewenstein and James Grantham Turner (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1990), 123–34; and Paul Stevens, ‘“Leviticus Thinking” and the Rhetoric of Early Modern Colonialism,’ Criticism 35 (1993): 456–8. 7 Edmund Waller, A Panegyrick to my Lord Protector (London, 1655), 4–6. All quotations of the Panegyrick are from the 1655 folio edition. See my discussion of the poem in The Poetry of Limitation: A Study of Edmund Waller (New Haven and London: Yale University Press, 1968), 159–71. 8 David Quint, Epic and Empire: Politics and Generic Form from Virgil to Milton (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1993), 8–11; Paradise Lost, 1:108. 9 Milton, The History of Britain, CPW 5:85. 10 Character of the Long Parliament (‘The Digression’), CPW 5:451. The text of the Character published in 1681 differs in some respects from the manuscript; both are included in CPW 5: The ‘Digression’ was originally intended for Book 3 of the History of Britain, with an explicit ‘parallel betweene their state and ours in the late commotions’: ‘the late civil broils had cast us into a condition not much unlike to what the Britans then were in’ (CPW 5:128, 441). 11 History of Britain, CPW 5:80, 131. 12 CPW 5:61, 85. James Harrington makes a similar comment in The Commonwealth of Oceana: ‘If we have given over running up and down naked and with dappled hides, learned to write and read, to be instructed with good arts, for all these we are beholding to the Romans ... wherefore it seemeth to me that we ought not to detract from the memory of the Romans, by whose means we are as it were of beasts become men, and by whose means we might yet of obscure and ignorant men (if we thought not too well of ourselves) become a wise and great people.’ See his Commonwealth of Oceana and A System of Politics, ed. J.G.A. Pocock (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1992), 48; subsequent reference to Oceana are from this edition.

Milton, the English Nation, and Cromwell 105 13 ‘Digression,’ CPW 5:441, 449; Sonnet 12 (‘I did but prompt the age’), 2, 12. 14 ‘Digression,’ CPW 5:441, 443. Nicholas von Maltzahn, in Milton’s History of Britain: Republican Historiography in the English Revolution (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1991), has argued convincingly that the probable date of the ‘Digression’ is February 1649, after the execution of Charles I, reflecting ‘Milton’s corrosive misgivings about the Long Parliament and the Presbyterian Assembly’ at a time when ‘the form of government was yet to be decided’ (31, 37). Austin Woolrych has proposed a much later date of 1660 for the ‘Digression,’ more than a decade after the composition of Books 1–4 of the History of Britain, finding similarities with the despairing tone of passages in A Readie and Easie Way. See ‘The Date of the Digression in Milton’s History of Britain,’ in For Veronica Wedgwood These: Studies in Seventeenth-Century History, ed. Richard Ollard and Pamela Tudor-Craig (London: Collins, 1986), 217–46. But the severe criticism of Presbyterian divines in the ‘Digression’ is very similar to that in Milton’s ‘On the New Forcers of Conscience under the Long Parliament,’ and the reference to ‘so many years doeing and undoeing’ (CPW 5:441) could well refer to the period 1643– 9 and the widely recognized ineffectiveness of the Long Parliament. 15 CPW 5:130. 16 Second Defence, CPW 4.1:685 (Works 8:252–4). For the metaphor of the ‘mighty harvest,’ cf. Areopagitica, CPW 2:554. 17 Tenure of Kings and Magistrates, CPW 3:190–1; and Second Defence, CPW 4.1:684 (Works 8:250). On the basis of these ideas in Roman law, cf. Martin Dzelzainis, ‘Republicanism,’ in A Companion to Milton, ed. Thomas N. Corns (Oxford: Blackwell, 2003), 302–3. 18 Paradise Lost, 3:122–3, 80, 124–5. On the problematical aspects of Milton’s ventriloquism in this passage, see, for example, William Empson, Milton’s God (London: Chatto & Windus, 1965); and Dennis Danielson, ‘The Fall and Milton’s Theodicy,’ in The Cambridge Companion to Milton, ed. Dennis Danielson, 2nd ed. (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1999), 144–59. 19 Readie and Easie Way, CPW 7:422–3. There are of course several passages in which Milton argues, somewhat disingenuously, that ‘the way propounded’ in his proposal ‘is plane, easie and open before us ... not tangl’d with inconveniences’ (CPW 7:445). 20 CPW 7:423–4. Cf. Knoppers, Constructing Cromwell, 56–66. Fisher, like Marvell in the ‘Horatian Ode,’ praises the victorious Cromwell as ‘a hero who serves the republic rather than fighting to gain glory for himself’ (qtd. in Knoppers, 61). 21 Readie and EasieWay, CPW 7:428; and Areopagitica, CPW 2:555.

106 Warren Chernaik 22 ‘To the Lord General Cromwell,’ 3, 10–11; ‘On the Lord General Fairfax at the Siege of Colchester,’ 5–6, 9; ‘To Sir Henry Vane the Younger,’ 1, 5–7; and ‘Horatian Ode,’ 75–6. 23 CPW 7:448, 462. 24 Samson Agonistes, 52–7. 25 CPW 7:428; and cf. Samson Agonistes, 374–6. 26 Paradise Lost, 12:92–6; and cf. Tenure of Kings and Magistrates, CPW 3:190. 27 Marchamont Nedham, The Excellencie of a Free-State (London, 1656), 45, 78. Cf. Tenure of Kings and Magistrates, CPW 3:190–1. 28 Nedham, Excellencie of a Free-State, 197–8, 75. 29 ‘Horatian Ode,’ 89–90. Blair Worden has argued that both The Excellencie of a Free-State and The Commonwealth of Oceana are ‘anti-Cromwellian publications,’ satirizing the Protectorate regime and showing ‘detestation of Cromwell’: see ‘Milton and Marchamont Nedham,’ in Milton and Republicanism, ed. David Armitage, Armand Hiny, and Quentin Skinner (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1998), 175; and Worden’s essays on Nedham and Harrington in Republicanism, Liberty, and Commercial Society, ed. David Wootton (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 1994), 77–9, 119–26. But it is equally possible to see The Commonwealth of Oceana, dedicated to Cromwell, as presenting ‘an ideal version of Cromwell in the Lord Archon,’ able to ‘balance opposing interests’: see David Norbrook, Writing the English Republic: Poetry, Rhetoric and Politics 1627–1660 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1999), 364. The publication history of The Excellencie of a Free-State, much of which recycles material previously used by Nedham in The Case of the Commonwealth, Stated (1650) and Mercurius Politicus (1651–2), would argue against a reading of Excellencie as a straightforward attack on Cromwell. 30 [Marchamont Nedham], The True State of the Case of the Commonwealth (London, 1654), 22. 31 Harrington, Oceana, 56, 66. 32 ‘Horatian Ode,’ 101–2; and The First Anniversary, 250, 256, 258, 283–8 in The Poems and Letters of Andrew Marvell. For a discussion of these biblical analogies, see Annabel Patterson, Marvell and the Civic Crown (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1978), 79–88. 33 Harrington, Oceana, 249–50. In treating Julius Caesar as an instance of false renown and as the enemy of Roman liberty, Harrington is echoing Machiavelli: see Machiavelli, The Discourses, ed. Bernard Crick (Harmondsworth: Penguin, 1979), I.10, 135–8. Nedham in The Excellencie of a Free-State similarly treats Julius Caesar as one who abandoned his former principles and ‘turn’d his Armes on the Publick Liberty’ (198).

Milton, the English Nation, and Cromwell 107 34 Harrington, Oceana, 249–50; Paradise Regained, 2:434; and Paradise Lost, 9:40–1. 35 Paradise Regained, 3:45–53, 69, 71–80. The attack in Paradise Regained on the false values of ‘the people’ as ‘a miscellaneous rabble’ incapable of choosing rightly resembles the criticism of the ‘inconsiderate multitude’ intent on restoring monarchy in The Readie and Easie Way (CPW 7:496). For an interesting commentary on problematical aspects of Milton’s presentation of Jesus in Paradise Regained, see W.W. Robson, ‘The Better Fortitude,’ in The Living Milton, ed. Frank Kermode (London: Routledge and Kegan Paul, 1963), 124–37. 36 Paradise Regained, 1:202, 215–16, 217–20; and Areopagitica, CPW 2:558. In Book 2 of Paradise Regained, the disciples similarly mourn that ‘the kings of the earth ... oppress / Thy chosen’ with a ‘power unjust,’ and hope that ‘deliverance is at hand’ in which ‘the kingdom shall to Israel be restored’ (2:35–6, 44–5). 37 Paradise Regained, 3:414–15; 4:132–4, 143–5. 38 Paradise Lost, 9:31; 12:97–8, 569, 587; and Sonnet 16, 9–12. For readings of Milton’s post-Restoration poems as embodying a ‘political response to ... conditions of trial and oppression,’ see, e.g., Christopher Hill, Milton and the English Revolution (London: Faber, 1979), 347–90; and Barbara Lewalski, ‘“To try, and teach the erring Soul”: Milton’s Last Seven Years,’ in Milton and the Terms of Liberty, ed. Graham Parry and Joad Raymond (Cambridge: D.S. Brewer, 2002), 175–90. 39 Excellencie of a Free-State, 173–5, 178. On the ideal of the citizen soldier in Machiavelli, Nedham, Harrington, and Algernon Sidney, see the essays on English republicanism by Blair Worden in Republicanism, Liberty, and Commercial Society, ed. Wootton, 101–4, 168–71. 40 Excellencie of a Free-State, 55–8. On the Roman republic and empire, see Machiavelli, Discourses, I.10; and David Armitage, The Ideological Origins of the British Empire (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2000), 125–8, 132–6. 41 [John Wildman], A Call to All the Souldiers of the Armie (London, 1647), 6; and Excellencie of a Free-State, 58. Cf. [Richard Overton,] The Hunting of the Foxes (1649), in Leveller Manifestoes of the Puritan Revolution, ed. Don M. Wolfe (New York: Humanities Press, 1967), 369: ‘O Crumwell, O Ireton, how hath a little time and successe changed the honest shape of so many Officers!’ For a discussion of other attacks on Cromwell by Levellers and republicans during 1647–9 and the mid-1650s, see John Morrill, ‘Cromwell and His Contemporaries,’ in Oliver Cromwell and the English Revolution, ed. John Morrill (London: Longman, 1995), 259–81.

108 Warren Chernaik 42 The Hunting of the Foxes, 362, 364, 366, 372; and [William Walwyn], The Bloody Project; or A Discovery of the New Designe, in the Present War (1649), in The Writings of William Walwyn, ed. Jack R. McMichael and Barbara Taft (Athens and London: University of Georgia Press, 1989), 301. 43 Writings of Walwyn, 301, 306. Walwyn, unlike his fellow Leveller Overton, does not name Cromwell or Ireton, but directs his attack at ‘the severall Grandee Factions’ (296). 44 The Hunting of the Foxes, 358, 361, 366, 372–3. David Loewenstein compares The Hunting of the Foxes to a number of pamphlets by John Lilburne attacking Cromwell and the Grandees as dissemblers, contrasting them with ‘the honest Soldiers, and the rest of the Free-people of England’; see Representing Revolution in Milton and His Contemporaries: Religion, Politics, and Polemics in Radical Puritanism (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2001), 37–42. 45 The Hunting of the Foxes, 373–4. Though The Hunting of the Foxes purports to be by the five soldiers, its probable author is Overton: see Wolfe’s introduction, 356–7. 46 Sexby, quoted in Puritanism and Liberty, ed. A.S.P. Woodhouse (London: Dent, 1966), 69–70. 47 [John Wildman], A Declaration of the Free-born People (1654). Though the account of ‘Wildman’s plot’ in Maurice Ashley, John Wildman, Plotter and Postmaster (London: Jonathan Cape, 1947), 89–94, says that the Declaration was unpublished at the time of Wildman’s arrest, there are at least two separate editions dated 1654 in the British Library. As Morrill points out, republican attacks on Cromwell at this time treat him as ‘corrupted by power,’ covering his ‘ruthless ambition’ with a pretended devotion to liberty (‘Cromwell and His Contemporaries,’ 267–9). 48 Wildman, A Declaration of the Free-born People; and The Protector ... Unvailed (1655), 18, 42. 49 Milton, CPW 3:212; and [Edward Sexby], Killing Noe Murder (1657), sig. A4; Cf. John Locke, Two Treatises of Government, ed. Peter Laslett (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1963), II.xix.231: ‘This I am sure, whoever, either Ruler or Subject, by force goes about to invade the Rights of either Prince or People and lays the foundation for overturning the Constitution and Frame of any just Government, is guilty of the greatest Crime, I think, a Man is capable of ... And he that does it, is justly to be esteemed the common Enemy and Pest of Mankind; and is to be treated accordingly.’ 50 Milton, CPW 3:254; and The Protector Unvailed, 3. Sexby argues that ‘by the law of nature, ubi cessat judicium, when no justice can be had, every man must be his own magistrate, and do justice for himself’(Killing Noe Murder, sig. A4).

Milton, the English Nation, and Cromwell 109 51 Killing Noe Murder, sig. A3. On the classical republicanism of Killing Noe Murder, see Nigel Smith, Literature and Revolution in England, 1640–1660 (New Haven and London: Yale University Press, 1994), 151–3. 52 Killing Noe Murder, sig. A1v, B2v; and Milton, CPW 2:515. 53 A Treatise of Civil Power, CPW 7:255; and Samson Agonistes, 1352, 1367, 1372–6. 54 Milton, CPW 3:237; Killing Noe Murder, sig. A4v; and Richard Overton, An Arrow against all Tyrants (1646), 3. 55 Killing Noe Murder, sig. B1v; and Tenure of Kings and Mangistrates, CPW 3:213–15, 237. Milton’s Samson of course is not motivated by revenge for injuries done him, though his action against ‘many oppressours’ is no less violent. 56 Killing Noe Murder, sig. A4v. 57 CPW 4.1:554, 662–3, 666; Knoppers, Constructing Cromwell, 93. 58 CPW 4.1:667–9, 672. 59 Austin Woolrych, ‘Milton and Cromwell: “A Short but Scandalous Night of Interruption,”’ in Achievements of the Left Hand: Essays on the Prose of John Milton, ed. Michael Lieb and John T. Shawcross (Amherst: University of Massachusetts Press, 1979), 185–218, esp. 185, 192, 201–2; Worden, ‘Milton and Marchamont Nedham,’ in Milton and Republicanism, 178; Martin Dzelzainis, ‘Milton and the Protectorate in 1658,’ in Milton and Republicanism, 185; and CPW 7:274. 60 Worden, ‘Milton and Marchamont Nedham,’ 176; Blair Worden, ‘John Milton and Oliver Cromwell,’ in Soldiers, Writers and Statesmen of the English Revolution, ed. Ian Gentles, John Morrill, and Blair Worden (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1998), 244, 255; and David Armitage, ‘John Milton: Poet against Empire,’ in Milton and Republicanism, 210–11, 214. 61 Worden, ‘Milton and Marchamont Nedham,’ 175. See Robert Thomas Fallon, ‘A Second Defence: Milton’s Critique of Cromwell?’ Milton Studies 39 (2000): 167–83; and Paul Stevens, ‘Milton’s “Renunciation” of Cromwell: The Problem of Raleigh’s Cabinet-Council,’ Modern Philology 98.3 (2001): 363–92. 62 Readie and Easie Way, CPW 7:429; and Hirelings, CPW 7:274. 63 Corns, Uncloistered Virtue, 274; Robert Thomas Fallon, ‘Milton in the Anarchy, 1659–1660: A Question of Consistency,’ Studies in English Literature 21 (1981): 123–46; Woolrych, ‘Milton and Cromwell,’ 201; and CPW 7:421, 430. Woolrych gives a full account of rival interpretations of ‘a short but scandalous night of interruptions’ in ‘Milton and Cromwell,’ 201–9. 64 Hirelings, CPW 7:274; and Second Defence, CPW 4.1:672–3, 674 (Works 8:224, 226–8).

110 Warren Chernaik 65 CPW 4.1:671 (Works 8:230) Cf. ‘Digression,’ CPW 5:443: ‘But when once the superficial zeale and popular fumes that acted thir new magistracie were cool’d and spent in them, straite every one betooke himself, setting the common-wealth behinde and his private ends before, to doe as his own profit or ambition led him. Then was justice delai’d & soone after deny’d, spite and favour determin’d all: hence faction, then treacherie both at home and in the field, ev’ry where wrong & oppression.’ 66 Nedham, True State, 9, 11. Cf. [John Hall], A Letter written to a Gentleman in the Country, touching the Dissolution of the late Parliament and the Reasons Thereof (London, 1653): ‘Many of them were content to ... lay little designes for their own greatnesses; so that, while they seemed to look direct upon the publick Interest, their business was to look asquint upon their own ... For if you will allow a Commonwealth, you cannot allow anything more destructive to it than the continuation of many men in the same power, especially unlimited and supreme’ (4, 10). This pamphlet was erroneously attributed to Milton by Thomason. 67 CPW 4.1:671 (Works 8:220–2); and Nedham, True State, 13, 14. 68 CPW 4.1:670, 671–2, 674 (Works 8:218, 222, 228). See my discussion in The Poet’s Time: Politics and Religion in the Work of Andrew Marvell (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1983), 51–5. 69 Waller, Panegyrick (1655), lines 1–8. Waller’s appeal, like Milton’s, is in part patriotic: the subtitle of the 1655 quarto links ‘the present greatness and joynt interest of His Highness and this nation.’ 70 CPW 4.1:672 (Works 8:212). 71 CPW 4.1:670 (Works 8:218). 72 The First Anniversary, 24, 28, 41, 225–8, 389–90; and Second Defence, CPW 4.1:672 (Works 8:222–4). 73 CPW 4.1:672 (Works 8:222–4). 74 Nedham, True State, 28. 75 CPW 4.1:672 (Works 8:224). 76 Paradise Lost, 12:219–20; Defence of the People of England, CPW 4.1:532; and Readie and Easie Way, CPW 7:462–3. Cf. the address to ‘all Englishmen’ in Defence, attacking a ‘wish to ... return to slavery after your freedom had been won by God’s assistance and your own valor’ as ‘not simply a shameful act, but an ungodly and criminal act,’ comparable to ‘the sin of those who were overcome with longing for their former captivity in Egypt and were at length destroyed by God in countless disasters’ as ‘penalty for their slavish thoughts’ (CPW 4.1:531–2). 77 CPW 4.1:673 (Works 8:224). 78 CPW 3:202.

Milton, the English Nation, and Cromwell 111 79 CPW 4.1:673 (Works 8:214–16). 80 David Loewenstein, ‘Milton and the Poetics of Defense,’ in Politics, Poetics, and Hermeneutics in Milton’s Prose, ed. Loewenstein and Turner, 188–9. 81 CPW 3:190; CPW 4.1:673 (Works 8:226). 82 ‘To the Lord General Cromwell,’ 10–11; Knoppers, Constructing Cromwell, 95; and CPW 4.1:673–4 (Works 8:228). 83 CPW 4.1:674–8 (Works 8:228); see Norbrook, Writing the English Republic, 335–6. 84 Woolrych, ‘Milton and Cromwell,’ 192–4; Worden, ‘Milton and Marchamont Nedham,’ 177–8; Fallon, ‘Milton’s Critique,’ 192–7; and Areopagitica, CPW 2:555, 563, 565. 85 CPW 4.1:679 (Works 8:238). 86 CPW 4.1:680, 683 (Works 8:239, 240, 248). 87 Paradise Lost, 12:86–96; and CPW 4.1:680 (Works 8:240). 88 Tenure of Kings and Magistrates, CPW 3:190; Sonnet 12, lines 9–10; and CPW 4.1:683 (Works 8:248). 89 CPW 4.1:683 (Works 8:248); History of Britain, CPW 5:449; and Samson Agonistes, 268–76. 90 Puritanism and Liberty, ed. Woodhouse, 66; and CPW 4.1:682 (Works 8:244–6). The ‘Digression’ directs similar accusations at the members of the Long Parliament, with particular scorn directed at ‘some who had bin call’d from shops & warehouses without other merit to sit in supreme council,’ who ‘fell to hucster the commonwealth’ (CPW 5:445). 91 A Needful Corrective (1659), 6. Like Milton in The Readie and Easie Way, Vane favoured a severely limited franchise: ‘that in the time of the Commonwealths constituting, and in a Nation much divided in affection and interest ... none be admitted to the exercise of the right and priviledge of a free Citizen, for a season, but either such as are free born, in respect of their holy and righteous principles, flowing from the birth of the Spirit of God in them ... or else who, by their tried and good affection and faithfulness to common right and publick freedom, have deserved to be trusted with the keeping or bearing their owne Armes in the publick defence’ (7–8). Vane’s tract, a letter to Harrington, is discussed in CPW 7:105. 92 CPW 7:455. See also the discussion of this passage in David Loewenstein’s essay, ‘Milton’s Nationalism and the English Revolution: Strains and Contradictions,’ in this book, above. 93 Paradise Lost, 12:86–101; and CPW 4.1:680, 684 (Works 8:240, 248–50). 94 Paradise Lost, 12:106–10; CPW 4.1:680, 684 (Works 8:238–40, 250); Areopagitica, CPW 2:526; and Readie and Easie Way, CPW 7:462. 95 CPW 4.1:681 (Works 8:240–2).

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PART TWO Nationhood, the English Church, and Non-Conformity

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4 Israel and English Protestant Nationalism: ‘Fast Sermons’ during the English Revolution achsah guibbory

This essay examines the politicized sermons preached before Parliament at their monthly fasts in the 1640s, and the way in which the analogies they drew between England and biblical Israel contributed to the definition of English Protestant nationalism. These sermons were preoccupied with Israelite history, and this preoccupation needs to be seen within the context of not only the English Revolution but also the early modern habit of thinking about England’s experience and identity in terms of ancient Israel. In this essay, I offer an introduction to what is clearly a vast and complex subject. Almost forty years ago, William Haller argued that the idea of England as ‘the Elect Nation’ was a common assumption, from the days of Elizabeth through the English Revolution. Haller saw John Foxe’s Acts and Monuments as instrumental in articulating the image of England as Israel, a specially chosen nation enjoying God’s special favours – an idea that Michael Fixler argued was important for John Milton. Christopher Hill’s work further contributed to our understanding of the godly people’s preoccupation with the Old Testament. Yet for some time there has been a persistent, strong reaction against the views of Haller and Hill. Scholars have pointed out that Foxe himself was concerned with international Protestantism and not England’s special election; that it was only in the 1640s that the idea of England as the new Christian Israel became important (and then only briefly); and that parallels between England and Israel tended to be negative rather than positive, filled with warnings about what happens when nations lapse into idolatry.1 Indeed, Patrick Collinson recently objected to Hill’s characterization of the thinking of the seventeenth-century godly, insisting that the English have never thought of themselves as ‘the

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chosen’ nation, unlike the Jews or Ethiopians.2 Given the current interest in nations and nation formation, and a growing recognition that religion is something that still needs to be reckoned with, it is time to reexamine the early modern English habit of drawing Israelite analogies, for this habit was deeply bound up with the conceptualizing of the English nation. The tendency to think about England in terms of biblical Israel was pervasive, complex, and fluid, almost infinitely adaptable. Elizabeth I was often called England’s Deborah, and Israelite analogies were invoked when the Spanish Armada was defeated. James I, the first monarch to rule over both England and Scotland, eagerly embraced a sense of identification with the biblical king Solomon, under whose rule the entire nation of Israel was united. James thought his work in ‘building’ the Church of England – repairing and strengthening it – was like the holy work of Solomon, who built the Temple in Jerusalem that his father, David, had only envisioned. Israelite analogies were not simply commonplace or decorative rhetorical flourishes, but an indication of habits of belief, and a way of articulating identity. As they were part of the evolving discourse of ‘the nation,’ their meaning needs to be more exactly understood. Extended analogies (as well as briefer ones) between England and biblical Israel were based on a detailed knowledge of the Hebrew Bible, or Old Testament, which was understood to be Israel’s ‘history,’ even as that history was read typologically. In the late sixteenth and the seventeenth centuries, England, the ‘new’ ‘Christian Israel,’ was understood to be repeating and fulfilling biblical Israel’s history, both the history recorded in the Old Testament narrative and Israel’s future restoration to glory as foretold by the Hebrew prophets, particularly in Isaiah. Israelite analogies, that is, were part of the developing thinking about nationhood in England. They helped construct ideas of English nationhood, investing it with religious and not simply secular or political significance. In post-Reformation England, the nation had been intertwined with the church. Religious differences existed within a Protestant country in which Catholics (and some Jews, and even a few Muslims) lived, and within the church where Presbyterian-inclined clergy objected to episcopal government and Puritans objected to certain ceremonies that had been retained from the Church of Rome.3 But the monarch and Parliament, through various acts of uniformity and repression from 1559 on, had created a fiction in which nation and church were coterminous. Church attendance was compulsory and

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conformity of worship undergirded political order. Religion was the glue of the nation. James I found the model for this concurrence of religious and political order in ancient Israel – established in Canaan and flourishing with its centre in Jerusalem where there was a powerful king and a glorious temple. During the late 1620s and the 1630s, the English church became more ceremonial under Charles I and Archbishop William Laud. While critics of the ‘innovations’ charged that the church was sliding back into popery,4 defenders of the ceremonies turned to the ancient practices in the Jewish Temple, tracing lines of succession and continuity that they believed legitimated their Christian ceremonies. In this they followed Richard Hooker, who in his Lawes of Ecclesiasticall Politie had defended England’s ceremonial, episcopal church in part by looking back towards the Jews and the Jewish Temple: since ‘God him selfe’ was ‘the author of their lawes’ of worship, it was appropriate for the English Christian church to ‘frame it self to the Jewes example’ (bk 4, ch. 11). William Laud drew analogies between the English church and ‘the ancient Church of the Jewes’ when he preached at the opening of Parliament in 1625. John Cosin’s Devotions (1627) traced the antiquity of the controversial ‘Houres of Prayer’ to David and the practices of the ancient Jewish Temple.5 Responding to Puritan criticism, supporters of episcopacy derived prelacy not from Rome but from the Jewish high priests. A keen interest in the Jewish Temple, that is, appears among those loyal to the ceremonial Church of England, and it persisted after Parliament dismantled that church in the 1640s. For example, in 1650, Thomas Fuller – a moderate clergyman who favoured accommodation but was nevertheless loyal to the king and Anglican church – published his Pisgah-sight of Palestine, which attempted to visualize the exact form and dimensions of the Temple.6 The Jewish Temple would seem, that is, to have been the property of those devoted to the ceremonial, episcopal church. Thus it comes as something of a surprise to find the Puritan ‘fast sermons’ during the English Revolution positively invoking the example of the Temple. The following pages analyse the fast sermons’ preoccupation with the Temple, showing how central the Jewish Temple was to the writing of the nation in mid-seventeenth-century England. I will conclude by looking at Milton’s sonnet ‘On the New Forcers of Conscience Under the long Parliament’ and at a well-known passage towards the end of Areopagitica within the context of these fast sermons. Examining these writings and the use of Jewish biblical history in them will offer a new

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perspective on the construction of the English nation. In the process, it will also challenge certain ideas that have recently become influential among both literary scholars and historians – that the English did not think of themselves as an elect nation; that if they did so it was in terms of imminent apocalypse; and that the English always thought of the Jews as their defining ‘other.’ Rebuilding the Temple: Reconstructing England’s National Church Fast sermons flourished at the end of James’s reign, during the controversy over the Spanish Match, and were revived with the Long Parliament, beginning in late 1640, as England moved towards civil war and Parliament assumed the task of reform. Parliament ordered monthly national fasts, and ministers were invited to preach to Parliament on these fast days – one two-hour sermon in the morning, another in the afternoon. Most were preached in the House of Commons but some were preached to the House of Lords. These sermons were delivered mainly by Westminster Assembly Presbyterian divines, although a few independent ministers were asked to preach. Christopher Hill, John F. Wilson, Stephen Baskerville, and most recently Victoria Kahn have argued that these sermons were instrumental in inciting war, and in interpreting and shaping political events.7 A majority of the fast sermons were published and their visions disseminated to a larger, national audience. Taking as their text a biblical verse, encouraging or admonishing Parliament – and England – to be faithful to the godly work of reform, most fast sermons were structured by analogies drawn between contemporary England and biblical Israel. The sermons drew their texts primarily from the Old Testament rather than the New. Hill observes, ‘Of 240 sermons which got into print, the texts of 181 were drawn from the Old Testament, 59 from the New; a ratio of 3 to 1 ... From November 1640 to October 1645, the preponderance of the Old Testament is even more remarkable, 123 texts to the New Testament’s 26.’8 While the frequency of the parallels to Israel has been recognized, their rhetoric and language needs to be more closely scrutinized. It is not just a matter, however, of attending to the language of the fast sermons. We must attend to the Hebrew Bible as well, for the full significance of Israelite parallels in these fast sermons cannot be recognized unless we know the biblical history that was invoked and glimpse what import it

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was seen to have for England. Wilson explained the phenomenon of the reliance on the Old Testament by saying, ‘The history of Israel was precedential’ for these ministers, and reflected the tradition of ‘international Calvinism’ of using ‘scripture as normative precedent.’9 I would argue, however, that it was not simply a matter of precedent but a strong feeling of identification with biblical Israel; and that sense of identification had a distinctive English cast, counterbalancing the international emphasis of Protestantism. Godly England was God’s chosen nation, repeating the history of biblical Israel and the ancient Jews, but this time with the possibility of getting it ‘right’ – specifically, of course, because the English were Christians. To Puritans engaged in reforming a church that had supposedly become too ‘popish’ – a church that did not draw firm enough boundaries between the godly and ungodly – the biblical Jews, defined in the Hebrew Bible as a holy, separate people (the Hebrew word for ‘holy,’ k’dosh, means ‘separate’) were valued as predecessors of the ‘true’ Christian church, which also saw itself charged with separating from idolaters, who now seemed to be living uncomfortably close, indeed within the very boundaries of England. The ancient Jews, that is, were a people of great usefulness to Presbyterian clergy in the 1640s who urged Parliament to separate from the Laudian idolatry, to repent for England’s defection from God, and to pray for deliverance, hoping that if they used the critical moment rightly, the English would not, like the Jews, witness the destruction of their nation. Identifying the English with the ancient Jews and often adopting the voice of Israel’s prophets, Puritan preachers placed England’s afflictions and the necessary work of reform within the narrative of Jewish biblical history. Sermons grounded on biblical texts and analogies with the Israelites forged a connection between the godly and the ancient Jews that was a crucial element in the discourse of nationhood. Whereas defenders of the Stuart church had turned to the period of the united kingdom of Israel, when the Jews were at the height of their glory under Solomon and had a glorious Temple, Puritan fast sermons turned to different parts of Jewish history and the Old Testament. The historical analogy with the Israelites entering and conquering Canaan was useful to ministers who tried to encourage their audience to battle their siblings, to see clear distinctions among English Protestants who actually shared much of the same faith. Thus Stephen Marshall, on 23 February 1641/2, took as his text Judges 5:23, which cursed the inhabitants of Meroz who failed to come help the Lord. In this, the most

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famous of the Parliamentary fast sermons, Marshall drew a parallel between Englishmen reluctant to go to war and the inhabitants of Meroz who earned God’s curse for their reluctance. In early 1649, Milton would cite this sermon in The Tenure of Kings and Magistrates, as he argued against Presbyterians like Marshall who had been revolutionaries but later were reluctant to execute the defeated king. But in 1642 Marshall could say that, in England, as in biblical Israel, there could be ‘no Neuters.’10 A recurrent theme in the fast sermons from the early 1640s was that God was miraculously delivering the English from bondage and idolatry, and the godly had an obligation to participate in God’s holy war. Implicitly denying the claim that Laud’s church was the true successor of the Jewish Temple, biblical analogies in Puritan sermons appropriated Israelite history in the battle to redefine the English church. Fast sermons presented an alternative vision of England as Israel, drawing the boundaries of the English/Israelite ‘nation’ more closely. Analogies in the fast sermons varied. Some looked to the periods when the Israelites were struggling to enter or possess or subdue Canaan. Some looked to the later period when Israel, which had been united under David and Solomon, split into the northern and southern kingdoms (Israel/Ephraim and Judah), when Israel’s worship had become polluted with idolatry and the Jerusalem Temple itself stood in need of reform. But the most interesting and most frequently invoked analogy was to the rebuilding of the Temple in Jerusalem that followed the Jews’ return from exile in Babylon, beginning in 538 BCE, when the Persian king Cyrus conquered Babylonia and gave the Jews permission to return to Jerusalem. Analogies to this period of Jewish history implicitly identified the Laudian church, not with the Jewish Temple, but with the destroyers of that Temple, with Babylonian rule, recasting the Reformation position that the church under Rome had been under Babylonian captivity. The proposed reconstruction of the English church by the Presbyterians was thus marked as the true reformation. It was described in terms that specifically recalled the experience of the ancient Jews, and invited the English to identify with them. ‘Babylon,’ of course, had accrued a Christian, and specifically Protestant meaning: in Revelation, it signified the enemy of the Christian church, and for Protestants, the Church of Rome. But the fast sermon references to Babylon focus not on Revelation’s mystical apocalypse but on Jewish history, in all its specificity, as represented in post-exilic prophets like Haggai and Zechariah, and in the books of Nehemiah

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and Ezra. To say that the references to ancient Babylon are simply conventional Christian typology misses the specific, historical import of these preachers’ reading of the Bible. Jewish history was not simply folded into a Christian pattern, absorbed into a Christian eschatology, but rather remained the object of intense interest.11 England’s history was imagined as being tightly bound to ancient Israel’s, and especially Judah’s. At the first meeting of the Long Parliament in November 1640, Cornelius Burges linked the current situation in England with the Jews’ return from Babylon in his sermon ‘The Prophesie of Jeremiah. Chap. 50, v.5’: ‘They shall aske the way to Zion with their faces thitherward, saying, Come let us ioyne our selves unto the Lord in an everlasting Covenant that shall not be forgotten’ – a verse, Burges noted, that referred to the fourth year of Babylonian captivity under the tributary reign of Zedekiah. Burges’s sermon quickly went through three editions. Repeating Jeremiah’s words of encouragement to the ancient Jews in Babylon, Burges promised the English that ‘deliverance’ would be coming soon, as it did for ‘Judah.’12 The restoration of Zion and her church would occur for them as surely as it did for the Jews in Babylon. But in order to ensure their deliverance, Parliament and the people would need to take a ‘more solemne, strict, and inviolable Covenant to be his’ (4), as Nehemiah records that the Jews did when they returned from Babylon, guilty of not having kept the law in exile. Like their Jewish predecessors, the English had had many ‘miraculous deliverances’ (27). Particularly memorable were those in 1588 and 1605 from Catholic enemies who sought to invade England and overthrow the monarch and Reformed Church. Several times the English had also tried to purge the idolatry that remained in their church. Edward VI was ‘Josiah’ (36), and Elizabeth ‘that glorious Deborah’ (37). But recently England had sunk into ‘superstition and idolatry’ under the influence of ‘a packe of rotten men’ who, as in Josiah’s time, were ‘great pretenders to Devotion, but indeed mad upon Images, and Idols’ (37). The only remedy, now that they were about to come out of Babylon and return to Jerusalem where they would rebuild the temple, was to make a new ‘Covenant’ with God and confirm it with a fast, just as the ancient Jews did. As Burges developed his extended biblical analogy through the sermon, he moved from imagining the English still in Babylon, expecting deliverance, to imagining the English already returned to Jerusalem and rededicating themselves to God. He drew his audience forward on their journey. Preaching, Burges addressed the House of

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Commons as Judah, but in print his words addressed the English people. Kahn has shown how the rhetoric of a covenant with God became political in the fast sermons, empowering the nation as well as the individual, and authorizing ‘active resistance to the contract of government.’13 The whole idea of a covenantal relation, so important to the Westminster Assembly divines and to the Long Parliament, was rooted in a sense of identification of godly England with ancient Israel. As Stephen Marshall told the House of Commons in the second fast sermon preached that day, a renewed covenant would confirm that they were ‘a holy people, a Jeshurun, a righteous Nation.’14 The analogy between the contemporary experience of the godly and the experience of the Jews returning from captivity must have seemed particularly resonant as a number of Puritan-minded people had either left England in the 1630s or been sent into exile as punishment by the Star Chamber. From 1640 to 1642, some were now returning from what had been a literal exile in Holland, Guernsey, and America.15 Their experience, interpreted within a familiar biblical context, helped confirm the godly’s sense of their Israelite identity. The Presbyterian Edmund Calamy suggested that the English were like some of the ancient Jews who were reluctant to return from Babylonian exile. In a fast sermon preached in February 1641, urging Parliament to weep for England’s sins, Calamy worried that there were many in England who still liked ‘their former condition under the [Laudian] innovation.’ They were, he insisted, ‘like the Israelites in Babylon, that liked their habitations in Babylon so well, that when Cyrus gave them leave to goe to Jerusalem, they would not leave Babylon.’16 Calamy indicted those who remained attached to the ceremonies and supposedly idolatrous practices of Laud’s church. By the end of 1641, though, Calamy could speak of the godly as now already in Jerusalem, facing the task of rebuilding their city and temple. Addressing the members of Parliament as ‘Magistrates’ of Judah, he told them that, like Nehemiah and Zerubbabel, they would accomplish ‘the reparations of Gods House, by the help of the prophets of God,’ by whom Calamy meant the Presbyterian preachers like himself.17 Calamy reminded Parliament it had religious and not just political obligations: ‘Consider the famous examples of Ezra, Nehemiah, and Zerubbabel, what care they took for the re-building, not onely of the Walls, but also of the Temple of Jerusalem. It is not enough to set the State in tune, but you must remember to repair the Temple also.’18

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One might say that these were just metaphors, that in a reformed, Christian interpretation the temple building was really spiritual and inward, not material. Yet, the Presbyterian clergy had practical and material concerns as well as spiritual. As their church was thought of in terms of the Jerusalem Temple that needed to be built from the ground up, spiritual metaphors became more literalized; the vehicle of the analogy (Jewish history, the Old Testament) took up a larger portion of the sermons. The English were encouraged to think of themselves in terms of the Jews – facing similar problems and needing to do similar things: make covenants, undertake fasts of humiliation, and rebuild the Temple as in the days of Nehemiah. As John White said, preaching before the House of Lords in 1646, ‘our own condition’ is ‘every way answerable’ to ‘the state of the ancient Jewes’ suddenly delivered from Babylon.19 The reformation of the church of England, the rebuilding of the Temple, was the major, ongoing task of the Long Parliament. Modern accounts of this period have emphasized Puritan iconoclasm and some of the preachers spoke approvingly of the work of ‘pulling downe of the old.’20 But the vast majority of the sermons emphasized the work of building, not destroying the Temple as they turned to Jewish biblical history. Thomas Goodwin (one of the returned exiles), William Gouge, Jeremiah Whitaker, and others explained in detail the conditions of the Jews when they had returned and drew analogies with their own experience. Goodwin remarked that the building of the Christian temple may have started with the Reformation, but it was slow work and the Hebrew Bible explained the difficulties the English were now encountering. Though Zerubbabel laid the Temple’s foundations under the reign of Cyrus, it took until Nehemiah in the reign of Darius for the Temple to be completed.21 Several preachers countered the position of moderates who did not want war and who insisted, citing the example of David, that those who build the Temple cannot be men of blood. William Bridge preaching on Zechariah reminded the House of Commons that Zechariah’s account showed them that it was impossible to accomplish ‘great Reformation’ ‘without some kind of holy violence.’ Parliament was like Cyrus who had to use military force to conquer proud Babylon; their work of temple building would require ‘shedding of blood.’ Alexander Henderson concluded his 1643 sermon with a vivid description of Zerubbabel, Nehemiah, and Ezra, each ‘building the house of God’ with one hand but holding ‘a weapon’ in the other. This would be the

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image of the true militant church until the final days when, as Henderson repeated Isaiah 2:4 and Micah 4:3, ‘your swords be turned into ploughshares, and your speares into pruning-hooks.’22 Nehemiah, called in these sermons the ‘governor’ and ‘Patriot’ of the Jews, was the most frequently invoked biblical figure. Simeon Ash on 30 March 1642 told Parliament that Nehemiah also had been discouraged by the opposition but wept, mourned, prayed, and continued to labour. Thomas Wilson, in the dedicatory epistle to his printed sermon, consoled the House of Commons by saying Nehemiah too was scorned and resisted by the Jewish people when he was doing the Lord’s work.23 Puritan ministers hoped to encourage Parliament’s zeal in reforming the church with examples from this period of Jewish history, which was seen as being relived in the present. All these ministers read their own times and England’s experience through the lens of Jewish biblical history, which shaped their sense of the English nation, God’s chosen, having been in captivity or exile under the prelates, but now reforming their nation with their surviving remnant. Quoting Ezra 9:8 and Zechariah 3:2, John Bond on 27 March 1644 called Parliament ‘our remnant escaped,’ ‘the brand pluckt out of the fire,’ as if they were the remnant of Judah that God promised he would save. Bond urged Parliament in its activities of temple building: ‘You are hewing in the House of Parliament; the Divines are squaring in their Assembly ... Onward therefore Noble Builders, onward, up and be doing your several parts; your God is invincible.’24 The next months saw a flurry of fast sermons on the building of the Temple, even as there were setbacks. Edmund Staunton encouraged the House of Commons to be ‘so many Ezras, Zerubbabels, and Nehemiahs’ in ‘the building or a Temple and of a Jerusalem.’ Though John Greene lamented these ‘most sad dejecting times,’ he took heart from the fact that they were exactly like those Nehemiah encountered. Preaching after the king’s army had taken Bristol and York, Greene took as his text Nehemiah 1:3–4: ‘and they said unto me, The remnant that are left of the captivity there in the province are in great affliction and reproach: the wall of Jerusalem also is broken down, and the gates thereof are burned with fire. And it came to pass, when I heard these words, that I sat down and wept.’ Greene used the words of Nehemiah as he identified England, besieged by the king’s forces, with Jerusalem.25 Occasionally – as in a sermon by John Lightfoote – the invocation of the rebuilt Jewish Temple was accompanied by anti-Jewish sentiment.26

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Accusations of Judaizing had been part of the earlier objections to Laud’s introducing ‘popish’ ceremonies believed to be based on earlier forms of Jewish worship. Milton, for example, took this stance in The Reason of Church-Government as he argued that Christ had abolished the ceremonial law, and that it was wrong to ground evangelic government in ‘the imitation of the Jewish priesthood.’27 Yet the vast majority of these fast sermons stress not Christian supersession, but a sense of empathy with the ancient Jews. The typology of biblical Israel here emphasizes the connections, the similarities. Preaching on Zechariah, Henry Wilkinson told the House of Commons (which he called ‘the Mount of the Lord’) that their adversaries in rebuilding the Temple are ‘crafty,’ just as ‘was Nehemiah’s case’; and he encouraged them with Moses’s words to the Israelites as they were about to enter Canaan: ‘Be strong, and of a good courage.’28 This sense of kinship, so crucial in the discursive construction of England’s national identity, complicates James Shapiro’s influential thesis that the English in this period defined their identity against the Jew as ‘other.’29 These Israelite analogies were the building blocks of nation formation, and they emphasized sameness, not difference, even as they claimed that the English could inherit the promises made to the ancient Jews. As Isaiah had prophesied about Israel restored to glory (in a passage that had long been appropriated by Christians, sanctioning an evangelical impulse to propagate the gospel), England was now about to become a light to the ‘Nations.’ England seemed to be the redeemed Israel that Isaiah had spoken of. In November 1643, William Bridge, urging care in laying the ‘Stones of reformation’ in the ‘Temple’ with ‘most exactness,’ spoke of a letter he had received from a ‘learned Professor of Divinity’ in Europe who said that ‘the reformation of all the Churches in Christendom’ depended on England. Bridge took this letter as confirmation of England’s potential to fulfil the prophecy of Isaiah: ‘If it be done exactly, the beholding Nations will also come in, and say, We will take hold of your skirt, and your God shall be our God. When Judah shineth, and Gods glory resteth upon them, then Nations come in and joyne themselves unto them; Esa. 60.1, 2, 3.’30 In November 1645, John Dury, a member of the Westminster Assembly of Divines and a millenarian who in a few years would become involved with Menasseh ben Israel and the project for the readmission and conversion of the Jews, made a similar claim for England. Dury was a friend of Milton, who would several years later present Dury with a copy of Eikonoklastes (1649), Milton’s iconoclastic attack on Eikon

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Basilike, which presented Charles I as a Christ-like martyr of the Church of England. In 1645 Parliament was dismantling that church, but it was also, Dury said, building the walls and the Temple of the ‘spirituall Jerusalem’ to which ‘all the Israel’ of God would come. The Jersualem Dury had in mind may have been the purely ‘spirituall’ one of Revelation, but his language emphasized the material labour of the Jews’ returning to Jerusalem with the precious vessels of Solomon’s Temple, as he declared England’s unique, chosen status: ‘We are all entrusted to bear the vessels of the Lord ... in a more eminent way, then any other people of the world.’ Nothing like this has been done since ‘the daies of Nehemiah.’ Dury told the English Parliament, God is ‘more interessed [sic] in you, and in Scotland, then in any Nation whatsoever,’ and promised that ‘if we marre not our selves’ we would be made ‘instrumental’ towards the deliverance of others.31 Through the history of the Jews represented in the Old Testament, these preachers thus defined their godly identity and national tasks. But this history was also useful in defining the enemy. Invoking biblical analogies, Puritan and especially Presbyterian preachers sought to deprive their English enemies of the title of being the true Israel while claiming it for themselves. In 1642 Thomas Goodwin drew a parallel between the Laudian ‘Innovators’ who corrupted the ‘worship of God’ and the Samaritans, who, having once shared the Jews’ religion, became idolaters and impeded the rebuilding of the Temple. Obadiah Sedgwicke recalled the opposition Nehemiah encountered from Sanballat (governor of Samaria) and Tobiah, who opposed the building of Jerusalem’s walls.32 But the problem was not just with the Laudians or with some of England’s leaders in Parliament. The English, it seemed, were an idolatrous, ungodly bunch, perhaps worse than biblical Israel. ‘Millions of men and women,’ Robert Baylie complained in 1644, ‘live as they list, in Blasphemy and Drunkennesse, Chambering and Wantonnesse, Strife and Envy, Ignorance and Impietie.’ John Whincop lamented that while Parliament and some ‘penitent souls’ have been fasting and praying, most were engaged in ‘mounting Hawks, running their Hounds,’ or playing cards, swearing, and drinking in ‘Taverns and alehouses ... wallowing in their own vomit.’33 The same year, Henry Scudder worried that England’s wickedness was increasing and that, like Judah and Israel, the English would be destroyed. So he adopted the voices of a host a Hebrew prophets – Micah, Jeremiah, Isaiah, Hosea, Amos, and others – predicting that England would soon be destroyed for its

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multitudinous sins. He urged Parliament (in the dedicatory epistle for the printed version) to be ‘Mosesses and Phineasses to our Israel’ and turn away God’s wrath, avert the judgment, even if it required a purging that would kill the worst sinners.34 Many of these sermons represented the internal enemy to reformation, not as backsliders in Israel, but as the unchosen nation, the biblical enemy or antagonist to Israel. Preaching on Zechariah 2:7 (‘Deliver thy self, O Zion, that dwellest with the daughter of Babylon’), Francis Cheynell used the words of the Hebrew prophet to rouse the English ‘Zion’ to ‘deliver’ herself from a Babylon that was, literally, materially, part of her: ‘Two Nations, two manner of people struggling in the bowels of this Text and Kingdome, Jacob and Esau.’ In ‘almost every City, Town, and Parish,’ we will find ‘some brats of Babylon in our owne bosome.’35 Sermons like Cheynell’s – or John Greene’s, which identified the king’s forces with Nebuchadnezzar’s attacking Jerusalem – used the rhetoric of the Old Testament to divide England into the godly nation, self-identified, analogous to biblical Israel, and, on the other side, the enemies within who were estranged, rendered alien. No longer was England one nation – a united Israel as James I had dreamed – but rather two, Babylon and Judah, Esau and Jacob, siblings locked in a struggle for not just precedence but life as in the biblical Rebecca’s womb, and only one of them was Israel. This was the struggle that, in the Bible, defined the special position of Jacob and his progeny, and that Paul’s epistle to Romans used to present the younger, Christian church as Jacob displacing the Jews, only now it was turned against Christians within England who were being redefined as those cast out from the promise and disinherited. As the fast sermons remind us, the ‘nation’ was not a stable construct.36 The English Revolution, and later the experiments of the Commonwealth and Protectorate, put enormous pressure on it, as there were competing ideas of the ‘nation,’ who was part of it, and what it should be. In many of the fast sermons, the Laudian prelates, the king’s army, indeed all those loyal to the Anglican church – the majority of English people, it seemed – were no longer part of Sion, part of the holy nation. Rather, they were the Babylonians, the deadly enemy of Israel. The English/Israelite nation was far smaller than Charles or James I had imagined. The sense that God’s people – Israel – seemed increasingly only a small part of the English nation (a nation within a nation, as it were) was irreconcilably at odds with the desire to build a

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temple that would be the national church, like the Temple in Jerusalem that had been the centre of its people, the place from which Isaiah imagined the other nations seeking light. Reconfiguring the Temple: Milton and the Independents’ Challenge to Uniformity There has been a tendency among scholars to think of Puritans in the 1640s as primarily concerned with apocalyptic thinking, and drawn to Revelation with its vision of a new Jerusalem. But Revelation clearly says that in the heavenly Jerusalem, there would be ‘no Temple’ (Rev. 21:22), and conservative Puritans wanted a visible, earthly institution. The Jerusalem Temple, with its function as a unifying centre of the nation as well as a place of devotion to God, was in seventeenthcentury England intertwined with the idea of the nation. The image of the Temple appealed not only to the Laudian prelates but also to the Presbyterian ministers who in the 1640s faced the challenge of reconstructing the church. That the Presbyterian clergy preaching to the Long Parliament passionately urged reform by invoking the period when the Jews returned from Babylon to Jerusalem to rebuild their city and temple suggests a shared definition of English Protestant identity as bound up with the ‘nation’ of the Jews. In an important sense, the Presbyterian Westminster Assembly divines were, for all their desire for reform, extending the Laudian assumption that a national church was to England as the Jerusalem Temple had been to Israel. Recent work by historians Peter Lake and David Como has shown that Puritanism was not a monolithic ‘homogeneous ideology,’ that in the pre– Civil-War period a radical Puritan ‘underground’ was at odds with the conservative, orthodox mainstream of Puritanism. I would add that we see something of the tensions and contradictions between radical and conservative elements, however, even within the ‘orthodox’ Puritans who preached the fast sermons to Parliament during the Civil War.37 There was a radical aspect to the Puritan preachers as they encouraged the revolution, but it is important to recognize in their analogies to the rebuilding of the Temple in Jerusalem a profoundly conservative aspect of their thinking about the English church, which was envisioned to be national and centralized as the Presbyterians sought to impose God’s order on England. The nation was still ‘Israel.’ Its contours were imagined somewhat differently and more narrowly, but the church was still seen as an essential part of the nation, indeed defining it. All

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those invocations of Nehemiah’s rebuilding of the Temple in Jerusalem pointed to a national church, and so long as the church was understood as the heart of the nation, the Presbyterians could not imagine tolerating diversity. Although occasionally a minister would insist that the church will be spread over the world (that is, universal) or remind his audience that the Temple was not material, almost all the preachers who compared reform of the church to the Jews’ building of the second Temple favoured a national church. These Presbyterian ministers opposed a congregational polity, fearing that toleration of Protestant differences would only encourage heresy and anarchy.38 Hence the conflict in the mid 1640s of conservative Presbyterian divines with Independent ministers, who favoured gathered congregations and argued for liberty of conscience. In early 1646, after Parliament had ordered that the Directory for Public Worship be used in England, the Independent Thomas Goodwin invoked the image of the Jewish Temple, as he called Parliament the ‘covering Cherubims unto the Arke of God’; but, rather than identifying the temple with a national institution, he pleaded with Parliament to defend and protect the whole large body of God’s ‘saints,’ and not to oppress their consciences by insisting on conformity.39 That same year, Jeremiah Burroughs preached on Proverbs 14:34 (‘Righteousnesse exalteth a Nation, but sinne is a reproach to any people’). He told Parliament that no other assembly had ever had such an exalted responsibility or fasted so much, and he warned them not to abuse their responsibility. Echoing the Hebrew prophets, Burroughs said Parliament should be righteous and let righteousness flow like a stream to the rest of the nation, but, especially, they should not enforce conformity on others who seek righteousness and God, even if they take a different path: ‘Let not those who live peaceably, and labour to know the minde of Christ to the uttermost that they are able, be accounted the troublers of the Nation.’ Solomon’s proverb here is interpreted as supporting a Christian liberty, which grants all individuals the liberty to attempt to ‘know’ Christ, each to their own ability, and in their own way. Whereas the conservative Puritans saw such liberty as dangerous to the stability of nation, Burroughs insisted that those who seek Christ, albeit in unprescribed ways, should be esteemed, not reviled or oppressed: ‘A great care should be had, that violence be not used to force those things in Religion upon men, that they neither doe, nor it may be cannot understand.’40 Complaining against compulsion in doctrine as well as worship, Burroughs insists on both the importance and the limits of

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individual understanding. Sketching the argument that would become central for Milton from Areopagitica in the mid-1640s to the end of his life, Burroughs reminds his audience that ‘force’ has no place in religion. In November 1646, William Dell even more strongly warned Parliament not to harm the faithful by making laws for conformity in outward worship and government. Dell actually suggested that Parliament, having ‘shed much blood,’ was not qualified to reconstruct the church, which would be a work only for God, ‘the Prince of Peace.’41 But for mainstream, conservative Puritans who thought of reforming the church in terms of the rebuilding of the Temple, toleration and religious liberty seemed something that would undermine stability. William Jenkyns remarked that in order to build the ‘Temple’ they had to ‘demolish that Babel of a confused toleration of all practices.’42 As they thought of the godly community as a Christian Israel, set apart, always at war with idolatrous enemies, difference could only signify an intolerable blasphemy or heresy. There was, then, a genuine continuity between the Presbyterians and their Laudian predecessors, as Milton pointed out in his poem, written about the same time (1646?), ‘On the New Forcers of Conscience under the Long Parliament’: Because you have thrown off your Prelate Lord, And with stiff Vows renounc’d his Liturgy To seize the widow’d whore Plurality From them whose sin ye envied, not abhorr’d, Dare ye for this adjure the Civil Sword To force our Consciences that Christ set free, And ride us with a classic Hierarchy Taught ye by mere A.S. and Rotherford? Men whose Life, Learning, Faith and pure intent Would have been held in high esteem with Paul, Must now be nam’d and printed Heretics By shallow Edwards and Scotch what d’ye call: But we do hope to find out all your tricks, Your plots and packing worse than those of Trent, That so the Parliament May with their wholesome and preventive Shears Clip your Phylacteries, though baulk your Ears, And succor our just Fears, When they shall read this clearly in your charge: New Presbyter is but Old Priest writ Large.

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Like Burroughs and Dell in their fast sermons, Milton complains about those in the Long Parliament who only a few years earlier had seen themselves as advocates of freedom (throwing off their repressive ‘Prelate Lord’) but now wanted to impose their own laws on the godly, imprisoning the conscience that Christ liberated from the laws of the old, Mosaic covenant. As Paul said, ‘By the deeds of the law there shall no flesh be justified’ (Rom. 3:20); ‘Christ hath redeemed us from the curse of the law’ and ‘hath made us free’ (Gal. 3:13, 5:1). These were the notions that underlay the complaints of both the Independents and Milton. Burroughs had pleaded with Parliament to treasure the godly conscientious objectors. Milton similarly insists in his poem that they ‘Would have been held in high esteem with Paul.’ But Milton’s language is rougher, nastier, than Burroughs, for he is not trying to persuade a parliamentary audience but rather castigating it in the tradition of the Hebrew prophets, whom Christians interpreted as on their side, expressing a supposedly proto-Christian view. Identifying the Presbyterian divines with all the enemies of Christian liberty, with all those who would revive the laws of bondage, Milton denounces these ‘new forcers of conscience,’ exposing the hypocrisy of the powerhungry Presbyterian clergy in sexually suggestive language that draws on the biblical association of idolatry with fornication (see both Hosea and Revelation). These Presbyterians have dismantled the Church of England; they have outlawed episcopacy and ‘with stiff vows renounc’d’ the Laudian ‘Liturgy,’ only to take over the prelates positions (seizing ‘the widow’d whore Plurality’) and attempt to ‘force’ or rape the conscience of the godly. The hypocritical Presbyterians had actually ‘envied, not abhorr’d’ the Laudians, and now are embracing the very ‘Hierarchy’ they supposedly rejected when they outlawed prelacy. The Presbyterian divines are worse than the Roman Catholic Council of Trent, which had sought to counter the Reformation. Milton completes the genealogy as he voices the wish for Parliament to exercise preventive punishment with their ‘preventive Shears’ and ‘Clip your Phylacteries’ – a reference to the small boxes with Hebrew inscriptions inside worn by observant Jewish men in their daily morning prayers, and mocked by Christ when he denounced the Pharisees for their hypocrisy, for their attention to the externals of worship (Matt. 23:5). For Milton, the corrupt line of those who oppress the godly conscience runs from the Presbyterian divines back through the Laudian prelates to the Roman Catholic priests, and still further back to the Jewish ones. A discomforting anti-Judaism complicates Milton’s prophetic stance here. Milton’s Areopagitica is more generous, as Jason Rosenblatt has

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eloquently argued.43 It is within the context of these Presbyterian fast sermons that we need to read not only this sonnet but also Areopagitica, which scholars have long recognized marks Milton’s split with his former Presbyterian allies. In a sermon preached before Parliament on 13 August 1644, the Presbyterian divine Herbert Palmer had denounced Milton for his Doctrine and Discipline of Divorce. Responding to Palmer’s attack as well as Parliament’s intention to license books, Milton’s Areopagitica (1644), addressed to Parliament but like the fast sermons disseminated more widely in print, polemically engaged the conservative fast sermons which were linking the nation, conformity, and the Jewish Temple. Like the few Independent clergy who voiced their objections in their fast sermons, Milton (unordained but speaking with religious authority) eloquently defended liberty of conscience and ‘schism’ against the Presbyterians, who believed that only conformity and a national church would give stability to England and the church. Milton expressed the shared dream of England as a chosen Israelite nation, particularly in his concluding vision of England as ‘a noble and puissant Nation [Samson-like] rousing herself like a strong man after sleep,’ but he condemned the ‘iron yoke of outward conformity,’ which he feared Parliament would impose.44 Milton not only insisted that the individual believers are the true ‘temple of God’ (1 Cor. 3:16–17). He also reconstructed the image of the Jewish Temple, and the English nation, to make it actually embody diversity. In ‘building’ the ‘Temple of the Lord,’ he claims, there must be many schisms and many dissections made in the quarry and in the timber, ere the house of God can be built. And when every stone is laid artfully together, it cannot be united into a continuity, it can but be contiguous in this world; neither can every piece of the building be of one form; nay rather the perfection consists in this, that out of many moderate varieties and brotherly dissimilitudes that are not vastly disproportional, arises the goodly and the gracefull symmetry that commends the whole pile and structure. Let us therefore be more considerate builders, more wise in spiritual architecture. (744)

As we have seen, the fast sermons invoked the Jewish Temple as a pattern for the reconstruction of England’s church, but Milton’s revision is bold and significant. Whereas the Puritan sermons tended to literalize the temple, Milton insistently spiritualizes it, even as he uses the language of stones, timber, and structure. Where John Bond in March 1644

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had encouraged the ‘Noble Builders’ in Parliament in their work, seeking to energize them in the service of the nation, Milton voiced caution about the rebuilding and asked Parliament and the public to think differently, more inclusively about the nation. For the Presbyterians, the nation required a national church and conformity, both of which were symbolized for them by the Jewish Temple. But Milton emphasizes the conscience and individual differences as he insists that ‘the house of God’ cannot be build without ‘schisms’ and ‘dissections’ – metaphors that remind his audience of the material realities of building even as he uses those material images to suggest the necessity, value, and indeed beauty of variety. In this world, and specifically in the church and the English nation, there must be pieces of different ‘form[s].’ Many forms of worship may be valid. Where the Presbyterian divines feared heresy, Milton reconstructs the Temple to make room for sectarianism and heterodox beliefs. The implication is that not just the church but the English nation can accommodate heterodoxy. Indeed, in Milton’s rich image, the notion of orthodoxy disappears, for it seems impossible for the human reader/viewer to discriminate between the goodness of the stones that make up the ‘gracefull’ (in several senses) structure. Milton’s is a generous vision of church and nation, that allows for dissimilarities, difference, variety of peoples, ideas, and visions, albeit recognizing that to be tolerable such differences must be ‘moderate’ and ‘brotherly,’ not ‘vastly disproportional.’ Therein, of course, lies the crucial question – how does one define what differences are too great to be allowed, what ideas or people can never be included in the temple of God, or are too dangerous to be embraced in the nation?

NOTES Research for this essay was supported by a National Endowment for the Humanities Senior Research grant. As this essay is part of a much larger project, some of the material can only be summarized here. I am also grateful for valuable suggestions from Paul Stevens and David Loewenstein. 1 William Haller, Foxe’s Book of Martyrs and the Elect Nation (London: Jonathan Cape, 1963), esp. 239–49. See also Michael Fixler, Milton and the Kingdoms of God (London: Faber and Faber, 1964). Of Christopher Hill’s many writings, see esp. The English Bible and the Seventeenth-Century Revolution (1993; London: Penguin, 1994). Jesse Lander, ‘Foxe’s Books of Martyrs: Printing and Popularizing the Acts and Monuments,’ in Religion and Culture in Renaissance

134 Achsah Guibbory

2

3

4

5

6

7

England, ed. Claire McEachern and Debora Shuger (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1997), 69–92, summarizes the controversy over Haller’s thesis and modifies it, as does Richard Helgerson in Forms of Nationhood: The Elizabethan Writing of England (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1992), 263. Patrick Collinson, ‘Biblical Rhetoric: The English Nation and National Sentiment in the Prophetic Mode,’ in Religion and Culture in Renaissance England, ed. McEachern and Shuger, 15–45. For a related argument, see Thomas Corns’s essay in this volume, below. Research over the last hundred years has shown that there were Jews in Tudor and Stuart England (especially in London), leading James Shapiro to conclude that ‘there were Jews in Shakespeare’s England, though probably never more than a couple of hundred at any given time in the whole country’; see Shapiro, Shakespeare and the Jews (New York: Columbia University Press, 1996), 76. See particularly David S. Katz’s authoritative The Jews in the History of England, 1485–1850 (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1994). See Peter Lake, ‘Anti-Popery: The Structure of a Prejudice,’ in Conflict in Early Stuart England: Studies in Religion and Politics, 1603–1642, ed. Richard Cust and Ann Hughes (New York: Longman, 1989), 72–106; and Achsah Guibbory, Ceremony and Community from Herbert to Milton (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1998), 29, 150–3. Richard Hooker, Of the Lawes of Ecclesiasticall Politie, in The Folger Library Edition of the Works of Richard Hooker, gen. ed. W. Speed Hill, vols 1–2 (Cambridge, MA: The Belknap Press of Harvard University, 1977), 1:310; William Laud, A Sermon Preached on Munday, the sixt of February, At Westminster At the opening of the Parliament (1625), 22; and John Cosin, A Collection of Private Devotions (1627), ‘The Preface,’ sig. A8r. See also Guibbory, Ceremony and Community, esp. 28–34. In the entry in the new Dictionary of National Biography, W.B. Patterson aptly remarks, ‘Fuller’s Pisgah-Sight of Palestine (1650), a historical and geographical description of the Holy Land, was well received. It carried perhaps an implied message: if ancient Jerusalem and its temple could be rebuilt, so, too, could the nearly shattered Church of England.’ See Christopher Hill, ‘Fast Sermons and Politics, 1640–1660,’ in The English Bible and the Seventeenth-Century Revolution (London: Penguin, 1993), 79– 108; John F. Wilson, Pulpit in Parliament: Puritanism during the English Civil Wars 1640–1648 (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1969); Stephen Baskerville, Not Peace But a Sword: The Political Theology of the English Revolution (London: Routledge, 1993); and Victoria Kahn, Wayward Contracts: The Crisis of Political Obligation in England, 1640–1674 (Princeton: Princeton

‘Fast Sermons’ during the English Revolution 135

8 9 10 11

12

13 14 15

16

17

18 19

University Press, 2004), 113–20. See also Michael Walzer, The Revolution of the Saints (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1965). Hill, ‘Fast Sermons and Politics,’ 83. Wilson, Pulpit in Parliament, 143, 144. Stephen Marshall, Meroz Cursed (1642), 22. I here diverge from Thomas Luxon, who has argued that in Reformation typology, ‘lived history’ (present history and Jewish biblical history) is ‘emptied out,’ and Jeffrey S. Shoulson, who sees at this time the ‘reallegorizing of history.’ See Luxon, Literal Figures: Puritan Allegory and the Reformation Crisis in Representation (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1995), 2, 34–76; Shoulson, Milton and the Rabbis: Hebraism, Hellenism, and Christianity (New York: Columbia University Press, 2001), 74–5. Debora K. Shuger has emphasized the ‘historical method’ of Renaissance biblical scholarship which rendered the past simultaneously exemplary and alien. See Shuger, The Renaissance Bible: Scholarship, Sacrifice, and Subjectivity (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1994). Shuger’s interest is in the retellings of the Passion, not the understanding of the Old Testament, which I would argue was insisted on as being familiar (in every sense), not alien. Cornelius Burges, A Sermon Preached to the Honourable House of Commons Assembled in Parliament. At their Publique Fast. Novem. 17.1640, 3rd ed. (1641), 1. Subsequent quotations from Burges are cited parenthetically. Kahn, Wayword Contracts, 112–20; esp. 114. Stephen Marshall, A Sermon Preached before the Honourable House of Commons ... At their publike Fast, November 17, 1640 (1641), 25. Paul Christianson discusses the returned exiles, but does not give attention to the connection with biblical Jewish history; see Christianson, Reformers and Babylon: English Apocalyptic Visions from the Reformation to the Eve of the Civil War (Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 1978), 180–2. See also William L. Sachse, ‘The Migration of New Englanders to England, 1640– 1660,’ The American Historical Review 53 (1948): 251–78. Edmund Calamy, Gods free Mercy to England. Presented as a Pretious and Powerfull motive to Humiliation: In a Sermon before the Honourable House of Commons, at their late solemne Fast, Feb. 23, 1641 (1642), 44–5. Calamy, England’s Looking-Glasse. Presented in a Sermon. Preached before the Honorable House of Commons, At their late solemn Fast. December 22.1641 (1642), epistle dedicatory. Ibid., 31. John White, The Troubles of Jerusalems Restoration, or the Churches Reformation ... A Sermon before the House of Lords Novemb. 26, 1645 (1646), 6.

136 Achsah Guibbory 20 William Reyner, Babylons Ruining-Earthquake and the Restauration of Zion ... August 28. 1644 (1644). On iconoclasm, see John Phillips, The Reformation of Images: Destruction of Art in England, 1535–1660 (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1973); Margaret Aston, England’s Iconoclasts, vol. 1, Laws Against Images (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1988); Ernest B. Gilman, Iconoclasm and Poetry in the English Reformation: Down Went Dagon (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1986); David Loewenstein, Milton and the Drama of History: Historical Vision, Iconoclasm, and the Literary Imagination (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1990), and most recently his fine, nuanced study Representing Revolution in Milton and His Contemporaries: Religion, Politics, and Polemics in Radical Puritanism (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2001). 21 Thomas Goodwin, Zerubbabel’s Encouragement to Finish the Temple. A Sermon Preached ... Apr. 27. 1642 (1642); William Gouge, The Saints Support Preached 29 June 1642 (1642), epistle dedicatory; and Jeremiah Whittaker, Eirenopoios [?] ... 25 of January [1642/43] (1643). 22 William Bridge, A Sermon Preached Before the Honourable House of Commons, At their Publique Fast, Novemb. 29, 1643 (1643), epistle dedicatory, and 1, 17–18; Alexander Henderson, A Sermon Preached to the Honourable House of Commons. At their late solemne Fast, Wednesday, December 27.1643 (1644), 36. 23 Simeon Ash, The Best Refuge for the Most Oppressed ... Preached ... March 30. 1642 (1642), 52–3; and Thomas Wilson, Jerichoes Down-Fall, As it was Presented in a Sermon preached in St. Margarets Westminster, before the Honourable House of Commons At the late Solemne Fast, September [November?] 28.1646 (1643), epistle dedicatory. 24 John Bond, Salvation in a Mystery: Or a Prospective Glasse for Englands Case ... March 27, 1644 (1644), 54, 56–7. 25 Edmund Staunton, Rupes Israelis: The Rock of Israel ... Apr. 24.1644 (1644), ‘The Epistle’; and John Greene, Nehemiah’s Teares and Prayers for Judah’s Affliction, And the ruines and repaire of Jerusalem ... April 24.1644 (1644), 1–2, 8, 10, 11. 26 John Lightfoote, Elias Redivivus: A Sermon preached before the Honourable House of Commons, In the Parish of Saint Margarets Westminster, at the publike Fast, March 29 1643 (1643), 19, 21. 27 See John Milton, Complete Poems and Major Prose, ed. Merritt Y. Hughes (New York: Odyssey, 1957), 649. 28 Henry Wilkinson, Babylons Ruine, Jersualems Rising ... 25 Octob. 1643 (1644), 12, 15, 16, 32. 29 See Shapiro, Shakespeare and the Jews.

‘Fast Sermons’ during the English Revolution 137 30 Bridge, Sermon, 21, 22; Isa. 49:6. 31 John Dury, Israel’s Call to March out of Babylon unto Jerusalem ... Novemb. 26.1645 (1646), 49, 23, 24, 25, 5. 32 Thomas Goodwin, Zerubbabels Encouragement to Finish the Temple. A Sermon Preached ... Apr. 27.1642 (1642), 54; Obadiah Sedgwicke, England’s Preservation Preached ... on May, 25. 1642 (1642), 49; and Neh. 4:1–3, 6:1–6. 33 Robert Baylie, Satan the Leader in chief to all who resist the Reparation of Sion ... Feb. 28.1643 (1644), epistle dedicatory; and John Whincop, Gods Call to Weeping and Mourning: Set out in a Sermon Before the Honorable House of Commons ... at their late Solemne Fast, January 29.1644 (1646?), 7–8. 34 Henry Scudder, Gods warning to England by the Voyce of his Rod. Delivered in a Sermon, Preached ... before the House of Commons, at their late Solemn Fast, Octob. 30.1644 (1644), 2, 25, and passim. 35 Francis Cheynell, Sions Memento, and Gods alarum. In a Sermon at Westminster, before the Honourable House of Commons, on the 31 of May, 1643. The Solemn day of their monthly Fast (1643), 1, 20. 36 See the essays of David Loewenstein and Andrew Hadfield in this volume, above. 37 See Peter Lake, The Boxmaker’s Revenge: ‘Orthodoxy,’ ‘Heterodoxy,’ and the Politics of the Parish in Early Stuart London (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 2001), 389–413; and David R. Como, Blown by the Spirit: Puritanism and the Emergence of an Antinomian Underground in Pre-Civil-War England (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 2004), esp. 10–32. 38 For a detailed discussion of fears about toleration and the rhetoric employed to express them, see David Loewenstein, ‘Toleration and the Specter of Heresy in Milton’s England,’ in Milton and Toleration, ed. Sharon Achinstein and Elizabeth Sauer (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2007), 45–71. 39 Thomas Goodwin, The Great Interest of States & Kingdomes. A Sermon Preached ... Feb. 25. 1645 (1646), 33, 34. 40 Jeremiah Burroughs, A Sermon Preached Before the Honorable House of Commons Assembled in Parliament, At their late solemn Fast, August 26 (1646), 33, 34. 41 William Dell, Right Reformation: Or, the Reformation of the Church of the New Testament, Represented in Gospel-light ... November 25. 1646 (1646), 5, 13. 42 William Jenkyns, Reformations Remora; or Temporizing the stop of building the Temple [Feb. 25.1645/6] (1646), 35. 43 See Jason Rosenblatt, Torah and Law in Paradise Lost (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1994), who argues that Milton, with a Hebraic ‘monist

138 Achsah Guibbory inclusiveness,’ associates the Licensing Order with Roman Catholicism and the Church of England prelates, but not with Mosaic law (136, 113). 44 Herbert Palmer, The glasse of Gods providence towards His faithfvll ones ... Aug. 13. 1644 [5] (1644); and Areopagitica, in Complete Prose Works of John Milton, gen. ed. Don M. Wolfe, vol. 2, ed. Ernest Sirluck (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1959), 558, 563.

5 Look Homeward Angel: Guardian Angels and Nationhood in Seventeenth-Century England joad raymond

Ay mee whilst thee ^the floods and sounding seas *Shoars wash farre away, where ere thy bones are hurld whether beyond the stormie Hebrides where thou phapps under the humming tide visit’st the bottome of the monstrous world or whether thou to our moist vows deni’d x sleep’st by the fable of xCorineus old Bellerus where the great vision of the guarded mount looks toward Namanco ^s , and Bayona’s field looke homeward Angel now and melt wth ruth and O yee Dolphins waft the haplesse youth1

I What do we understand by home? These images from Milton’s ‘Lycidas’ are rooted in a belief in the nature and offices of angels that expresses his sense of place and of belonging to a community. In this essay I will elaborate this doctrine, and suggest its implications for modern accounts of early modern nationalism and national identity. In these lines, written in his notebook in November 1637, Milton imagines a displaced kind of mourning. Whereas the procession of mourners in Bion’s Lamentation for Adonis pass by the youth’s body on a ‘glorious bed of State,’ Milton’s mourners are deprived of such a focus.2 Edward King’s body was last seen in the Irish Sea, and, with its floating corpse, Milton’s pastoral elegy threatens to turn away from Theocritus and Virgil and, perhaps inadvertently, towards Lucan’s Pharsalia, another state-of-the-nation poem that exploits the pathos of

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unrecovered bodies. Cornelia laments there for her unburied husband Pompey: ‘Quid porro tumulis opus est aut ulla requiris / Instrumenta, dolor?’ (But what need is there of a grave, or why does grief require any trappings?). She consoles herself that his image endures in her breast.3 Perhaps one of the most extraordinary qualities of ‘Lycidas’ is that it can harbour such an intensity of both intertextual self-consciousness and sharp political criticism. Not only is the body lost, but the angel invoked as a figure of protection is unnamed. This renders all the more effective the unexpected change of subject in this sentence. When we read the verse ‘looke homeward Angel now and melt wth ruth,’ we ask ourselves: has Lycidas been renamed an ‘Angel,’ or is the unnamed angel addressed here ‘the great vision’ referred to earlier?4 In retrospect, as soon as we have identified the ‘guarded mount,’ it seems clear. The Angel is the vision seen on the mount, but for a moment we might be consoled by the idea that Lycidas has become an angel, instructed to face his old home, from which he has been mercifully delivered. This theme – the transmigration of Edward King – is picked up again later when the poet addresses Lycidas, ‘henceforth thou art the Genius of ye shoare.’5 Here Lycidas becomes a genius loci, a spirit associated with a particular feature of landscape, a pagan prefiguration of an angel.6 The earlier passage is confusing because it does not yield meanings easily, and because the poet’s voice, consistently unstable in ‘Lycidas,’ shifts from addressing Lycidas to addressing the Angel and the dolphins. The conspicuous change Milton made in the draft, from ‘Corineus’ to ‘Bellerus,’ suggests that he was not inclined to give anything away too easily, almost, as some critics have suggested, as if the poem is coded.7 The emendation merits some reflection. Corineus was one of Brutus’s companions in the legendary account written by Geoffrey of Monmouth of the settlement of Britain by Brutus, Aeneas’s great-grandson. This was a story that Milton would later retell at the beginning of his History of Britain. The land that Brutus arrived in was peopled by tyrannizing giants, which he proceeded to eliminate in the process of founding a civilized nation. Corineus he assigned to Cornwall, which pleased Corineus, as some of the biggest giants were hiding there: he proceeded to throw the greatest of the giants, Goëmagog, off a coastal cliff, giving its name to Langoëmagog.8 The name Milton chose in the earlier draft suggests an imperial myth for the settlement of Britain. But he then crossed it out, in favour of another name written into the

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landscape. Bellerus appears to be a coinage, but is clearly derived from Bellerium, the Latin name for Land’s End.9 Why is Bellerus a fable? The sense of ‘fable of Corineus’ is straightforward: it is the fabulous history of Geoffrey, and it is next to the location of this legend that Lycidas might sleep. The revised version is more indirect. At first reading it seems to be a fable that the reader has forgotten – perhaps another of Brutus’s companions, perhaps another giant10 – and perhaps the fable is that of the vision of the guarded mount, which is quite close to Land’s End. But Bellerus is at best the personification of Bellerium, no legend comes to the reader’s aid, and ‘quite close’ has insufficient explanatory force in such a dense passage. Instead the temptation for the reader is to find a different sense in ‘by’: instead of ‘near,’ it might mean ‘through the virtue of,’ or, more abstrusely, ‘in the sense accorded by.’ The next reference, to which this clause leads, does not resolve the obscurity. The vision of the mount is St Michael, who showed himself on St Michael’s Mount, located in the bay off the south side of Land’s End or Bellerium, and from this we can identify the Angel as Michael, archangel, head of the created angels, antagonist of Satan in Revelations. He is one of the four angels named in scripture (together with Raphael, Gabriel, and Uriel), yet he is not named here. The pages on Cornwall in Camden’s Britannia make this clear. There we find ‘Belerium’ identified as Land’s End, the story of Corineus, and also an account of the vision of the mount: In the very top heereof within the Fortresse, there was a Chappell consecrated to S. Michael, the Archangel, where William Earle of Cornwall and Moriton, who by the bounteous gift of King William the First had great lands, & large possessions in this tract, built a Cell for one or two monks; who avouched that S. Michael appeared in that mount: which apparition, or the like, the Italians challenge to their hill Garganus, and the Frenchmen likewise to their Michaels mount in Normandie.11

The ‘great vision,’ then, was seen by monks, and there was plenty of reason for Protestants to suspect this vision as popish superstition, founded on spurious theology and a desire to manipulate the credulous. Camden notes how monks of various nations seem to want to claim Michael as their own, and implies that there cannot have been more than one authentic vision. Milton also claims the angel as Britain’s, telling him to ‘looke homeward.’ What is at stake here?

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Milton takes up the vision, oddly close to a fable, certainly under suspicion of being a monkish fable, because it speaks to his idea of nationhood, and because it conforms to his theology. The Angel is, I shall argue, a local guardian angel, assigned to watch over a particular place. This is the sense in which an angel has a home other than heaven. It is a doctrine that appears elsewhere in Milton’s writing, in De Doctrina Christiana and Paradise Regained, and it gives shape to the conclusion of ‘Lycidas.’ The doctrine was widely elaborated in seventeenth-century Protestant theology; in the following section I will outline contemporary applications of the doctrine, in the third Milton’s use of it, and in the fourth section how it relates to providential notions of nationhood. II In 1592 Andrew Willett’s Synopsis Papismi, That is, A General Viewe of Papistry identified doctrine about the offices of angels as one of the clear differences between Protestants and Roman Catholics. He summarizes two errors in popish beliefs thus: ‘Michael (say they) is the protector and keeper of the whole Church of Christ, Dan. 10. 21. And as earthly kingdomes have their speciall angels for their protectors, so also have particular Churches’; moreover, ‘Everie one hath from his nativitie an Angell for his custodie and patronage against the wicked, before the face of God.’ Protestants hold opposite tenets: ‘The whole Church hath Christ himselfe, who is the true Michael, for her protector and defender: And so is that place in Daniel to be understood ... Secondly, It cannot be proved out of scripture, that kingdomes have their speciall Angels protectors,’ and moreover, ‘We nothing doubt of the protection of Gods Angelles: but that every one hath a proper Angell appointed for his protection from his nativitie, out of scripture it is not proved.’12 Credence in individual guardians was one of the three main points of disagreement between the faiths on the matter of angels, along with the existence of a pseudo-Dionysian hierarchy of angels, and the legitimacy of prayers to and worship of angels.13 Some Reformation theologians rejected all three, though in practice the distinction between Catholics and Protestants on angel theology was blurred. On the whole the Reformation stripped down the Catholic elaboration of angel doctrine, stressing the little that scripture had to say on the matter; while Protestants did not exactly depopulate heaven, they deprived angels of their roles as intermediaries and removed angels from everyday

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experience of worship. In his commentary on Genesis, glossing chapter 32, verse 2, Calvin notes that while one angel would certainly have been enough to protect Jacob, God generously provided him with many. He adds: ‘Wherefore they doe wickedly disgrace the goodness of God, whiche thinke everie one of us is defended by one Angel. And there is no doubt but yt the divel by this subtilty, hath gon about in some point to weken our faith.’14 A similar interpretation is placed upon this passage by Gervase Babington in his notes upon Genesis in 1592; and the annotations produced by the Westminster Assembly during the 1640s and early 1650s agree in phrasing so careful that it may prevaricate: ‘no Angel is restrained from a particular ministration to any of the elect; nor any of the elect so allotted to the custody of any Angel that he may not expect the protection of many.’15 A posthumously published tract by Christopher Love on the ministry of angels dismisses the doctrine of individual guardians, stating that it derogates from the honour due to them, and that it leads to other, bad doctrines.16 One of the charges against Laud in 1641 was that he and his clergymen appeared to have supported popish doctrines of angels, including prayers to them, recalling attacks on Richard Montagu in the 1620s.17 Protestants were far from unanimous on the point of guardians, despite Willett’s confident assurances. Many warned that angelic guardianship was simply beyond the certainty of scripture, and constituted a mystery into which it was impious to pry. Wollebius’s Medulla, a work with which Milton was familiar, declared: ‘We are not carefully to enquire, whether or not particular men, or Provinces are governed by certain Angels.’18 An anonymous author of 1655 was more emphatic: ‘But touching this mystery of Angels, let us reverently think of them, and not curiously search into the nature of them, considering the vileness of our creation, in respect of the glory of their creation.’19 These words are all the more significant as they appear as part of a critique of Sadducism: this author, like others, wished to retain as much as possible of angel doctrine as a defence against those who would deny the existence of a spirit world altogether. A number of Protestants defended the doctrine that angels were assigned to individuals. Luther accepted that individuals had personal angels who could be petitioned but not worshipped, though angels in general play a marginal role in his theology.20 Faith in individual guardian angels may have been more common among the more heterodox, such as John Pordage and Jacob Boehme, and interest in

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guardianship was stronger where Protestant speculation converged with occult philosophy. Responding to accusations of inaccuracy in their prediction of future events, astrologers argued that their predictions were averted by tutelary angels; critics of astrology said that the art impiously and blasphemously penetrated sacred mysteries, including those surrounding angels.21 Astrological traditions intimated that it was possible to identify one’s guardian angel by casting a nativity. The adept might try to communicate with angels in order to link spiritual knowledge with natural magic, or to penetrate the mysteries of the occult.22 John Dee, Jean Bodin, Athanasius Kircher, Girolamo Cardano, and others thought that they had successfully communicated with guardian angels.23 Astrological, alchemical, and Rosicrucian thought relied on heavily schematized accounts of angels and their human responsibilities. Nonetheless, other, less enthusiastic Protestants held the position that individuals, sometimes specifically elect individuals, were assigned particular angels to watch over them. The only systematic English treatise on angels in the early seventeenth century was written by John Salkeld, scion of an English recusant family who received a Jesuit education before converting to Protestantism.24 A Treatise of Angels (1613) expounds the principles of Thomist angel-learning for an English audience, and thus represents something of a bridge between the European Counter-Reformation and Anglicanism. For all of Salkeld’s reputation as an anti-Romanist preacher, he does not emphasize controversy or doctrinal difference. On the matter of individual guardian angels, for example, Salkeld declares that this is taken to be a firm belief proved out of scripture in the Catholic church, whereas among Protestants ‘it is not thought a matter of such moment and certaintie.’ He quotes Calvin’s Institutio to this effect, stating clearly that scripture gives no ground for belief, but adds: ‘Neverthelesse, many, even Protestants, thinke the affirmative part to be the truth.’ So many seem to agree on the scriptural grounds for belief in angelic custodianship (he quotes twenty pages of patristic opinions), that there must be some basis to their concurrence.25 The barrister William Austin (whose tombstone proclaims him to have been an angel) wrote in the 1620s a treatise, ‘Tutelar angels,’ which adopts essentially the same position: he supports the doctrine on the grounds that it is too venerable a belief to be erroneous.26 The preacher John Gumbleden nervously adopted a similar approach, asserting ‘’tis not altogether improbable, that every particular faithfull Man, hath his particular tutelary Angel assigned him of God, to defend, and protect him,’ for which he cited the sound reformers

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Zanchius, Bullinger, and Calvin as well as Augustine and Jerome.27 Also citing Zanchius, a sermon by John Bayly argued that though humans are protected by many angels, at least one angel was assigned in particular to each member of the godly, ‘as a Tutor or protector.’28 One anonymous author argued that just as there is continuous hierarchy in visible creation, so there must be in invisible creation intermediate beings between man and God, and that this proved the existence of tutelary angels, the lowest form of invisible being.29 Most significantly, Henry Lawrence’s Of Our Communion and Warre with Angels (1646) defended the doctrine of individual guardian angels for the elect, on the grounds of scriptural evidence.30 Despite slow sales this was widely cited and among the most influential of the handful of systematic treatises on angels in English. Lawrence had lived in Amsterdam to avoid persecution for his godly beliefs, and he would later become Lord President of Cromwell’s Council of State, and join the newly created upper house after the Humble Petition and Advice in 1657. Milton addressed Lawrence’s son Edward in a sonnet, as ‘of virtuous father the virtuous son,’ and he praised Henry directly in Defensio Secunda (1654), together with Edward Montague, as ‘summo ingenio ambos, optimisque artibus expolitos’ (men of high natural talents, and of greatest polish in the arts).31 There was, then, an inertia to this belief in individual guardians: while some Protestants insisted that there was no scriptural evidence to support it, others declared that Roman Catholic readings of a few scriptural places, or the venerable tradition of believing in them, justified the doctrine. It is possible that the doctrine fulfilled a psychological need, though a more sustainable argument is that its continuation in Protestant Britain reflects an increasing awareness of great distances, and the speeds needed to traverse them. Robert Dingley writes, in a 1654 tract that seeks specifically to demonstrate the existence of individual guardian angels, ‘A Bullet from a Musket flyes very swiftly; it will fly an 180. miles an hour, according to its motion: But the Sun moveth swifter, 1160000. miles in one hour. Now the Throne of God is very much above the visible Heavens; therefore certainly the Seat of Angels and blessed Souls is at an huge distance from us.’32 Dingley is discussing the ascent of souls to heaven, and proving that heaven is a real, physical place, but the corollary is that angels travel at a finite, if great velocity. Willett also notes that ‘the celeritie and agilitie of spirits is great,’ and Salkeld, denying that angels can be in more than one place at the same time, contends instead ‘that Angels have such swift

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motion, that they can be in almost an unimaginable short space of time in any place.’33 The logical consequence is that it must take an angel a considerable time to traverse the universe to come to a human’s aid – one thinks of Abdiel’s nocturnal flight across heaven at the boundaries between Books 5 and 6 of Paradise Lost. Thomas Heywood’s long poem Hierarchie of the Blessed Angels (1635) notes in a passage discussing Satan’s flight to earth the calculations of Persian mathematicians: if angels fly at a thousand miles an hour, it would take one at least six years and six months to descend from the eighth heaven.34 For the purposes of human protection this does not strictly matter because God, unlike angels, is omnipresent, and can come to assist without restriction of time and space should all hell break loose on earth. Angels, however, cannot. If angels, then, are to have a role intervening in human affairs, as all these authors wish to maintain, they must be stationed proximately. The notion of angelic guardianship supports this, and so became more useful as theologians recognized natural philosophical claims about space and velocity. The tenacity of the belief then could be seen to stem not from residuality as much as adaptability.35 While the doctrine of individual guardians remained an off-centre part of Protestant theology, another, related doctrine, seems to have found very widespread acceptance among writers that Milton knew well. Both Roman Catholic and reformed divines drew a distinction between angels who were assigned to a particular human, and those who were assigned to a particular place, country, or kingdom. The doctrine was elaborated in The Celestial Hierarchy, the fifth- or sixth-century treatise by the author who identifies himself as Dionysius the Areopagite (now commonly referred to as pseudo-Dionysius). PseudoDionysius divides angels into three ternions; the lowest, consisting of Principalities, Archangels, and Angels, are those closely involved in presiding over human hierarchies, and among their purposes is to establish ‘the boundaries of nations’: ‘the theologians also say that Michael presides over the government of the Jewish people and that this is in order to make clear that Israel, like the other nations, was assigned to one of the angels, to recognize through him the one universal ruling source. For there is only one Providence over all the world, a supra-being transcending all power visible and invisible; and over every nation there are presiding angels entrusted with the task of raising up toward that Providence, as their own source, everyone willing to follow, as far as possible.’36 Local guardians were sometimes specifically designated Principalities or Princes, one of pseudo-Dionysius’s orders,

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and a word suggesting worldly power. Calvin accepted the doctrine: ‘But whether to every of the faithfull be a severall Angell assigned for their defence, I dare not certainly affirme. Surely when Daniel bringeth in the Angell of the Persians, & the Angell of the Grecians, he sheweth that he ment, that there are to kingdomes and provinces certaine Angels appointed as governours.’37 Peter Martyr seems to concur: ‘They defend kingdoms and provinces (as it is written in Daniel).’38 In this doctrine of local guardianship, we can find an early modern means of understanding the significance of belonging to a place or nation. Among those who support the doctrine of individual guardians, the notion of a local guardian is frequently adduced in addition, perhaps in tangential support of the former. William Austin, for example, writes: ‘Neither is it strange, that one Angel should seeme sufficient to keepe one Man; since wee find in Daniel, that one Angel is Set over a Nation. And, it may well stand for likelihood; when we see daily before our Eies, that God sets one Man (a Creature, much more feeble) to rule and protect divers Kingdomes.’39 At the end of the century one noted that ‘Bodies Politick as well as Individual Persons have their Spiritual Watchmen allotted them.’40 An anonymous pamphleteer argued that the existence of guardians of place proved the existence of guardians of individuals: ‘It seems agreeable to Reason, that as each particular Kingdom hath it’s Guardian Angel, so each Province, City, Town, Village, and Particular family should have theirs likewise; and then it will be easily inferred that every individual Person, in each Family should have a Genius alloted to him.’41 Other, early modern British statements of the doctrine do not conflate the two in this way, but explore, like this pamphleteer, the size, parameters, and nature of the secular body with which the angel is associated. The astrologer William Lilly suggests that parahelii are ‘framed by the Guardian-Angels or Intelligencees [sic] of that Kingdom where they appear.’42 Henry Lawrence (his language less monarchical) agrees that not only ‘Provinces & Countries’ but also Churches have angels assigned to them.43 Robert Dingley expanded the list in 1654, making a politic nod to the Lord Protector under the new constitution: ‘It is therefore most probable, that Cities, Shires, Provinces, Islands, Churches and Kingdoms have particular Angels to be presidential over them, and that each Republick hath an Angel to be its protector.’44 The guardian angel protects natural bodies (islands), as well as those that are defined by politics (a shire) and religious community (a church) and whatever it might be that makes a ‘nation.’

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This doctrine did not receive universal assent. Wollebius cautioned against looking too closely into it. The Westminster Assembly’s Annotations evade the issue.45 The godly clergyman George Hughes, in his Analytical Exposition of Genesis (1672), consigns local guardians to the realms of rabbinical fantasy: some Jews think, he writes, ‘that one army of Angels were tutelaries for Syria, and they brought Jacob so farr, and then another host of angels which were tutelaries for Canaan, mett him, and conveyed him along thither; but this is a meer phansy.’46 John Patrick, in his Reflexions Upon the Devotions of the Roman Church (1674), suggests that Roman Catholic beliefs in guardian angels were formalized and made more elaborate in the early seventeenth century, introducing ‘bold and presuming speculations’ far beyond the legitimate interpretation of scripture: ‘howsoever some places may seem fairly to countenance this in the Scripture, and make it a probable opinion; that at some particular Seasons at least, there have been particular Angels deputed to preside over a Countrey or Province; and so also that they have had the charge of particular Persons; yet the evidence of it there, is not so cogent, as that it should be put as an Article of Faith into Summs of Divinity, or that Praters and Offices should be made to them, and they religiously courted and worshipped under that notion.’47 Scandalously and absurdly, Patrick reports, papists go so far as to assign guardian angels to monasteries, colleges, even altars. The vision of Michael at the monastery on St Michael’s Mount is, presumably, part of this popish fabulation. For all his antipopish rhetoric, Milton subscribed to just such an account of angelic guardianship. Although he follows much the same pattern as Ames and Wollebius in the chapter of De Doctrina Christiana on the ‘special government of angels,’ he differs from them in this tenet. ‘It is credible,’ he writes there, ‘that they also preside over peoples, kingdoms and fixed places’ (Præsidere etiam populis, regnis, et certis loci angelos credibile est), and among the texts he cites is Daniel 12:1, where Michael is the great prince who stands over the Jewish people.48 This is surely the sense intended by the Son in Paradise Regained when he refers to ‘his angels president / In every province.’49 Milton is more diffident about the idea of individual guardian angels, though he does not, in De Doctrina, directly rule them out. Instead he quotes several of the texts usually cited in support of the doctrine, and glosses: ‘Tutelares nempe in cœtibus fidelium, ut nonnulli putant.’ ‘To be sure, guardians at gatherings of the faithful, as some suppose,’ implicitly dismisses stronger readings of the same passages, but makes a

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concession to angelic representation and protection of communities; he notes that there are many more examples.50 When Milton appeals to ‘the great vision of the guarded mount’ in ‘Lycidas,’ he is not simply conjuring a poetic image, a monkish fable, or another echo of his pagan intertexts. The vision of St Michael as a protecting angel, assigned to a particular place, people, or nation, is one rooted in his theological beliefs. Milton calls upon the angel: it is a petition and not a prayer, but a communication nonetheless. When he summons the angel to ‘looke homeward’ he does so knowing that it is the angel’s responsibility to protect the people of the English nation; this is the sense in which an angel has a home. At the end of the poem the poet-swain twitches his mantle and heads for new woods and pastures. In 1638 Milton also departed his country – where popular demonstrations and well-received covenanting propaganda denounced the new prayer book in terms with which Milton, judging by the anticlerical passages of ‘Lycidas,’ would have concurred – and travelled into Italy.51 There it seems that Milton wrote his first poem after ‘Lycidas,’ a lyric addressed to the singer Leonora Baroni: Angelus unicuique suus (sic credite gentes) Obtigit æthereis ales ab ordinibus.

‘An angel winged from the heavenly orders each individual (believe thus, you peoples) has as his lot.’52 Milton’s phrase is terse, and allows of two possibilities: he could be suggesting that the belief in tutelary angels is one held by Leonora’s audience at Rome, distancing himself from the belief; or the imperative credite might encourage the belief (‘believe me’). His theses on this point are not nailed to the door, any more than in De Doctrina. What the continuity between ‘Lycidas’ and ‘Ad Leonoram’ does indicate is Milton’s grasp of the force of this imagery: the intimate relations between humans and angels suggests the enchantment of the world, the operation of providence, hope emerging from a youth’s death in a time of religious darkness. III There is a special significance in Milton’s choice of angel. As pseudoDionysius indicates, scripture identifies Michael as the Principality responsible for protecting the Jewish people. The Christian church

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subsequently laid claim to Michael as its own, understanding itself to have succeeded the Jews as the true church and to have inherited the protecting angel with this status. Tomasso Campanella, in his Discourse Touching the Spanish Monarchy, translated into English in 1654, wrote that the Jews sought the support of God suffused through the universe, ‘Which custome of theirs the Christians also followed, when as the Archangel Michael had gone over from the Jewes, to the state of the Christians. For in all probability we ought to believe, that when any Empire is overthrown, the Angel of that goeth over to the Conquerour.’53 At the end of the century John Dryden described this as a commonplace: ‘’Tis a Doctrine almost Universally receiv’d by Christians, as well Protestants as Catholicks, that there are Guardian Angels appointed by God Almighty, as his Vicegerents, for the Protection and Government of Cities, Provinces, Kingdoms, and Monarchies; and those as well of Heathens, as of true Believers ... St. Michael is mention’d by his Name, as the Patron of the Jews, and is now taken by the Christians, as the Protector General of our Religion.’54 It was for this reason that competing visions of Michael were observed in Italy, France, and off the Cornish coast. After the Reformation these visions had a more specifically denominational appeal in the opposition between Roman Catholic and reformed churches. Not only did such a vision lay claim to an endorsement of the church, it also asserted a right to be seen as a (though not the) chosen people.55 To claim Michael as a protecting angel, then, was to draw upon a tradition that was rich with theological and ideological meanings. It was to present England or Britain as Israel, and its people as the Jews.56 Arise Evans exploited this tradition in 1654, following Cromwell’s accident on 29 September 1654, St Michael’s day. In a pamphlet he interprets this near-miss as a message from Michael: ‘I beseech you again consider seriously what befell you on Saint Michael the Archangels day last past, and know what an Angel Michael is said to be in Scripture ... He is also the Prince of the people of God, and their angel to protect them, against which people you have appeared much, to destroy them hitherto, Dan. 10.21.’ He has come in response to the prayers of the Protestant church, Evans says, and delivered a powerful omen. To listen to the angels is not to worship them, but to hold them in due estimation: ‘It is better, since we do not know the degrees of Angels, that we fall down flat before a Holy Angel, then stand against him, for all the Angels that we read of, did not refuse such a worship, and who can tell which is the Angel of Gods presence?’57 Marvell is responding to

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this argument when he presents Cromwell as an angel in The First Anniversary of the Government (1655).58 In this account Michael indeed has a home, the place or people to which he is assigned. When the narrator of ‘Lycidas’ (in what is surely another intertext for Marvell’s poem) conjures this angel, leaving it unnamed, and tells it to ‘looke homeward,’ Milton not only draws upon the doctrine of local guardians, he also presses upon Michael the responsibility for protecting his home, protecting the true church, and imagines this ‘home’ as a place coextensive with its people. As with the Jews, the people and the nation are one. Milton’s concern is with more than a missing body. His underlying theme is the sufferings of a political body. The poet who regrets the corruption of the church could hope for a providential intervention by the angel responsible for protecting the people who make that church. Though Milton’s landscape seems enchanted in places with pagan myth and ancient history, it is also identified with a godly people, and a strictly Christian theology. ‘Lycidas’ is a politically charged poem, a prophetic, Spenserian attack on Laudianism and a call for reformation.59 In this light, Samuel Johnson’s remarks on its poor judgment and frivolousness seem misdirected. Johnson observes how much of the poem’s apparatus, the ‘heathen deities’ and mourning shepherd, derives from a college education rather than grief or real invention, and adds: ‘This poem has yet a grosser fault. With these trifling fictions are mingled the most awful and sacred truths, such as ought never to be polluted with such irreverend combinations. The shepherd likewise is now feeder of sheep, and afterwards an ecclesiastical pastor, a superintendent of a Christian flock. Such equivocations are always unskilful; but here they are indecent, and at least approach to impiety, of which, however, I believe the writer not to have been conscious.’60 Johnson had a different notion of the funeral elegy from Milton, but always found Milton’s angels irritating, mainly, I suspect, because he did not understand Milton’s theology and natural philosophy – and that was in part because he would have disliked them more had he understood them – and thought that in Paradise Lost Milton had sacrificed theology for the sake of a good story and vice versa.61 To me Milton seems to have achieved an extraordinary consistency in these matters, and used his intellectual positions as the basis for elaborating narratives, and used his narratives as a means of explaining ideas. Nonetheless, something stands out in Johnson’s critique, a concern that has extended itself to much subsequent criticism, namely the relationship between the

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Christian and pagan imagery. This relationship becomes all the more unsettling once the angel’s role, and its theological foundations, have been elaborated. It is not, after all, a genial pagan god, a tree spirit, or an image borrowed from Virgil, but a precise part of Christian theology. The nature of the relationship between classical and Christian ideas remains central to the interpretation of the poem – though it is easy enough to claim that the former prefigures the latter, or that the two are seamlessly melded – because readers of the poem divide into those who wish to see it first and foremost as a contribution to a poetic tradition, a meditation on Milton’s own genesis as a poet, and those who present it as a political critique, an intervention in the public discourse of 1637.62 For the former party, the heathen imagery is the language that Milton shares with Theocritus and Virgil, whereas for the latter, the Christian pastoral fits into a tradition of political poetry shaped by Petrarch and Spenser. It is hard to see how the archangel Michael could stand shoulder to shoulder with old Damoetas, Mincius, and Neptune; but the fact is that in this poem he does, and with scandalous grace. Transformed into a genius loci, ‘the Genius of ye shoare,’ the classical figure of a spirit who is assigned to watch over a place, Lycidas bears an evident semblance to the local guardian angel. If the syntactical ambiguity surrounding ‘looke homeward Angel’ invites a momentary misconception that Lycidas is that angel, this line returns to that misconception and makes it true; he is a sort of angel, at least within the lesser world of heathen shadows. Carey notes a precedent in Virgil’s ‘Eclogue V,’ where the dead shepherd Daphnis is imagined as a god: ipsi laetitia voces ad sidera iactant intonsi montes; ipsae iam carmina rupes, ipsa sonant arbusta: ‘deus, deus ille, Menalca!’ sis bonus o felixque tuis! (The very mountains, with woods unshorn, joyously fling their voices starward; the very rocks, the very groves ring out the song: ‘A god is he, Menalcas!’ Be kind and gracious to thine own!)63

James Holly Hanford goes so far as to claim that Milton’s ‘genius of the shore’ is ‘more pagan than Christian’ because of Virgil’s use of the same idea in this eclogue.64 However, though the landscape celebrates

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Daphnis’s deification, the deity is not assigned to the landscape. Virgil does not write about a genius loci but a god, which is not the same thing as a spirit or an angel. A more likely echo is Sannazaro’s first piscatory eclogue, in which a shepherd named Lycidas laments a drowned shepherdess: At tu, sive altum felix colis aethera, seu jam Elysius inter manes coetusque verendos Lethaeos, sequeris per stagna liquentia piscesm Seu legis aeternos formoso pollice flores ... Aspice nos, mitisque veni; tu numen aquarum Semper eris, semper laetum piscantibus omen. (But you, whether you in felicity dwell in the high Aether, or now among the Elysian shades and venerable bands of Lethe pursue the fish through the crystal streams, or whether you pluck unwithering flowers with your lovely hands ... look down on us and gently come to us; you shall ever be the godhead of the waters, ever a happy sign to fishermen.)65

The passage itself echoes Virgil’s fifth eclogue.66 After wondering where she is now, Lycidas announces that his shepherdess is turned into a genius loci, a water deity, and beseeches her: ‘behold us.’ The similarity between Milton’s angels and these pagan intertexts is as superficial as that between ‘looke homeward’ and ‘aspice nos.’ Milton’s Lycidas returns from the company of saints in heaven to watch the shores and protect ‘all that wander in that perilous flood’ (l. 185), the flood being, presumably, the Irish sea. Though the notion of a ‘genius’ may be classical in origin, here it is thoroughly Christianized. While this does not hold for all of the classical elements in the poem, this one, at least, ought to have secured Dr Johnson’s approval. Milton’s angel is not a literary device, adapting classical poetry to a Christian context; it is a concept grounded in scholastic and reformation theology. It is more sacred truth than trifling fiction, and the association with Virgil’s eclogue is superficial. In choosing Michael Milton lays claim to a providential, Protestant destiny for the country he protects. In the light of this, Lycidas becomes one of an army of subaltern spirits watching over the land under the wing of Michael, as well as a symbol of the failure of the church. This angel too is looking homeward, to the sufferings of the political body, the people.

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IV Where does an angel look when it looks home? England? Britain? Ireland? the archipelago? heaven?67 We can now consider the implications of this doctrine for early modern understandings of national identity, and particularly for the form of nationalism that has been attributed to Milton. Lawrence Lipking offers a ‘militant, nationalistic reading’ of ‘Lycidas,’ rooted in its anti-Irish sentiment and aggressive sense of place, and such a reading is typical of recent scholarship that identifies a strong nationalistic strain in Milton’s writing, both poetry and prose.68 Much of the impetus behind this comes from work on imperialism and orientalism. Milton, a rhetorically gifted advocate of civil ideals, is seen to turn what is ‘other’ to the English state and English people into a barbarous mirror image of the ideals he sought to promote within. This is the logic of imperialism, which both destroys the humanity of the other in the articulation of selfhood, and uses the self-other contrast as the basis of conquest and self-interested governance in the name of virtue. Inspired in part by the work of Edward Said (and adapting Benedict Anderson’s account of the origins of nationalism) numerous scholars have mapped the role of literary texts in the construction of English or British national identity and nationalism, and its concomitant demonization of an ‘other’ in support of this imagined identity.69 It is above all in respect of the Irish that such destructive, stereotyping impulses are found in early modern literature, and where Milton is found complicit with such imperial designs it is because of his comments on the Irish in Eikonoklastes and Observations upon the Articles of Peace, two prose tracts of 1649, and, by inference or implication, other passages where the Irish or the Irish Rebellion are mentioned or seen to be alluded to. Ethnicity is usually seen to be the basis of this colonizing identity, and of the rhetoric on which it is based.70 Milton was appropriated to British imperial ambitions in the eighteenth century; today he seems an avatar of empire itself.71 A prehistory of the British empire has been inscribed on early modern English literature. Yet during this period there was no stable and coherent notion of English or British identity. This absence should have posed more of a problem to the chroniclers of nationalism then they have allowed. We are told that a nascent English ethnic identity, buffered by a providential sense of national destiny, provided the basis for verbal and physical assaults on the Irish; but also that these assaults

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were the means by which that ‘Englishness’ was constructed. There is an irrefutable circularity to the argument from ‘otherness,’ one that intimates a scholarly community discovering what it always knew was already there. The English colonization of Wales, Scotland, and Ireland, and the first British empire, is thereby conflated with the ideologies of the second British empire.72 The sixteenth- and seventeenth-century English had a range of identities – local, archipelagic, international – that foreclosed the possibility of a consistent Anglo-Saxonism; only later did a fully fledged nationalism develop, and that depended upon empire and the formation of an idea of the people that matched the idea of the state.73 Despite the union of the crowns of England (and therefore the dominion of Wales) and Scotland under a single monarch in 1603, the subjects of these crowns did not in the early modern period perceive themselves as an ethnically or culturally uniform people, participating in a single political framework or a single church.74 The hostility expressed towards foreigners – the Irish for their savagery, the French for their politesse – was not sufficient to constitute English or British national identity, nor was that hostility the consequence of a well-defined identity. Neither political institutions nor culture defined the nation. We do find Milton and others writing about matters of nationhood, and the nature of Englishness, however, though ‘Englishness’ is a word that only entered the English language c. 1805. We find them struggling to characterize what these things mean, and this is not because they are grasping for the concept that we moderns have formulated more exactly. The stirring words of Areopagitica (1644), ‘a Nation not slow and dull, but of a quick, ingenious, and piercing spirit, acute to invent, suttle and sinewy to discours, not beneath the reach of any point the highest that human capacity can soar to,’ seem to express a pride in the English nation that corresponds to the contempt for the capacities of the Irish expressed in Observations (1649) and elsewhere.75 We find in The Tenure of Kings and Magistrates (1649) a rather more wavering sentiment: ‘He therfore that keeps peace with me, neer or remote, of whatsoever Nation, is to mee as farr as all civil and human offices an Englishman and a neighbour: but if an Englishman forgetting all Laws, human, civil and religious, offend against life and liberty, to him offended and to the Law in his behalf, though born in the same womb, he is no better then a Turk, a Sarasin, a Heathen.’76 Milton evidently continued to engage with the complex relations between ideas like ‘nation,’ ‘Englishman,’ and ‘neighbour,’ and here we find

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a striking identification of nationhood with civil accord and neighbourliness above birth – associating poor neighbourliness with unchristian stereotypes, but suggesting by so doing that their otherness is a consequence of their uncivil behaviour. However, these sentiments are specific to context: in Areopagitica Milton sought to stir a largely London-based readership to oppose a shift towards religious intolerance in Parliament; in Observations Milton satisfied a government commission to write a tract opposing the arguments against an invasion of Ireland; in The Tenure he presented a series of historical-legal arguments in justification of the trial of the king as a tyrant. The rhetoric Milton uses in his prose pamphlets engages with the language of the immediate political circumstances, and we should not be surprised to find a tension between sentences, such as these, removed from context. A sense of nationhood, or, more precisely, a sense of the questions that need to be levelled at the political community leading the nation, often colours Milton’s writing, even where it is not his primary concern. ‘Lycidas’ is among the texts that evidence this. Critics have accounted for this interest, and the apparent contradictions it inspires, by inferring that Milton is engaged in imagining a community, a community more or less corresponding in span to the nation-state then in formation in the archipelago, and shaped by political institutions, communicative networks, and commercial markets.77 This approach to nationhood, advanced by Benedict Anderson in his influential Imagined Communities, accommodates the role played by print culture and incipient capitalism in the formation of national consciousness. Anderson contends that this mode of nationalism and modern notions of nationhood developed only in the late eighteenth century; but numerous recent literary scholars have found wanting in his account sufficient recognition of the polemical hostility towards alien individuals and communities that plays a part in many early modern texts. In particular, they contend, he understates the role of imperialism in the formation of nations and of the idea of nations; and they find clear evidence of nationalism much earlier in English history. Where Anderson sees a bonding into a community, these scholars see hatred and antipathy. A third approach, a dialectical synthesis of the former two, is outlined by Paul Stevens, who suggests that nations are in essence Janus-faced, and as their subjects or citizens look inward to the community they simultaneously turn all that is outward into the barbarous: as Milton mourns the dead in ‘Lycidas,’ he assimilates them to the story of

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the nation, a story from which his grievances are inseparable.78 For Stevens it is the ideal of belonging to a shared national destiny that defines the nation; when Milton criticizes the English it is in order to shape the ideal which, when they are properly English, they affirm (when an Englishman deviates from this ideal he is not English); when Milton condemns the ‘other,’ it is to remind the English of their destiny and of the true religion and civic virtues on which that destiny is founded. The rhetoric of community and of hatred are equally important to this project.79 Stevens’s approach offers a corrective to the ideal-typical approach of Anderson, and offers a compelling and persuasive account of Milton’s nationalist rhetoric. I have three reservations about it, however. First is the matter of geography. The ‘home’ must be linked to a physical place, as ‘Lycidas’ affirms, and in the nationalist’s eyes it cannot cease to be home when it ceases to be good; if civility alters the physical parameters of the nation, then one is not a nationalist in a recognizable sense. Second, Milton’s sense of Englishness is not an ethnic one; while it might seem natural to infer a sense of ethnic identity from the stereotyping of foreigners, this is unwarranted in the case of Milton, whose sense of Englishness is founded upon a notion of civility rather than race. Ethnic nationalism is a very rare position in early modern England, as it is contrary to contemporary understandings of scripture and natural philosophy.80 Third, accounts of early modern nationalism assume a political entity on which it was founded, an emergent nation-state. This concept, anachronistic to the seventeenth century, gives form to the inchoate materials of a sense of belonging, of providential destiny, of local and archipelagic identities, of civil responsibility focusing them on a stable political entity. With the nation-state in the picture, it becomes possible to find a stable foundation on which these mixed and contradictory ideologies can be pinned to turn them into the aggressive and righteous sense of belonging and of superiority that is modern nationalism. We can find seventeenth-century statements of patriotism and pride in the people’s accomplishments, but these are not attached to or constitutive of a fixed national identity that connects the individual with the state. Without the nation-state they are only diverse and contradictory ideologies; and the nation-state is an anachronism. It was not a concept used in early modern Britain, and it is not just the name but the thing that is inappropriate.81

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V The account of local guardian angels in early modern reformed theology speaks to this history of nationhood, and ‘Lycidas’ offers insight into Milton’s sense of it. Some general observations are necessary here. First, Milton’s reflections on nationhood and belonging to a community changed significantly over time. In his later years Milton’s sense of political and religious dislocation and disenfranchisement altered his ability to identify with the English or British as his people, as opposed to a remnant among them. Second, it had, as Hans Kohn observed, a ‘Catholic temper.’82 In his History of Britain Milton sways between expressing pride in the resistance of the Britons (whom he associates with the Welsh) and subsequently of the Saxons to Roman rule, and lamentation of their shortcomings, describing lavishly the failures of these people. The origins of the English people lie as much in the Celtic Britons as in the Anglo-Saxons, and the continuities are as much cultural and civic as they are ethnic.83 When in the 1639 poem Mansus he offers to sing of the kings of his native land (‘indigenas’), it is Arthur smashing Saxon phalanxes under the might of warring Britons that he mentions.84 In the History Milton grudgingly reiterates the story of Brutus, which he knows to be a fable, mainly in order to denigrate the Anglo-Saxons. Every moment of neopatriotism is balanced by one of disappointment. His hero is not his people but civility itself, and the villain the barbarism that is spread widely among peoples and nations.85 Milton’s expressions of pride cannot be separated from his ambivalence, the same ambivalence that caused him to criticize the English and British for backsliding (often in advance of the offence), and to adopt the voice of a Jeremiah.86 When he eventually wrote the English epic that he promised in Mansus and elsewhere, it neglected to mention the English people.87 Third, though Milton’s rhetoric is sometimes marked by phobia and caricature, this does not originate in a stable, nationally focused identity. When he articulates a sense of pride in the English people, it is not with a simple sense of belonging, for his attention is simultaneously drawn towards civic-minded reflection on the state of the island, towards the fate of Protestantism in Europe, and towards the spirit of liberty everywhere. In his most buoyant statements of national pride we find both qualifications, and a particularity of focus that takes us beyond England. In Areopagitica he asks: ‘Why else was this Nation chos’n before any other, that out of her as out of Sion should be proclam’d and

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sounded forth the first tidings and trumpet of Reformation to all Europ.’88 He adds that the prelates suppressed the light of Wyclif, and so the reforming glory went to our neighbours. England was a chosen nation, but not the chosen nation, and his concern is in any case with the light that spreads across Europe.89 Milton did himself define ‘patriotism’ in his later life, in his 1666 letter to Peter Heimbach. There he notes that he worked for the republican government in the 1650s not out of ‘Politicam’ (policy or politics) but out of ‘Pietatem in Patriam’ (dutifulness towards one’s country). The civic-minded tone of this Ciceronian phrase is clear, and it is with playfulness that he adds ‘Patria est, ubicunque est bene’ (one’s country is wherever it is good with one).90 We might attribute this to the political and rhetorical invention of a disillusioned public servant cum epic poet, but it is a commonplace. Milton probably read it in Cicero’s Tusculanarum Disputationum, where Cicero attributes these words to Pacuvius.91 Other poets played with similar notions, as in this early seventeenth-century epigram by John Owen, the Welsh Latinist who described himself as an Oxonian Cambro-Briton: Illa mihi patria est, ubi pascor, non ubi Nascor; Illa ubi sum Notus, non ubi Natus eram. Illa mihi Patria est, mihi quæ Patrimonia præbet, Hic, ubicunque Habeo quod satis est, Habito. (That is my country, where I am fed, not where I am born, that where I am known, not where I began; that is my country which supplies me with my patrimony, here, wheresoever I have that is enough, I live.)

The verse is accompanied by Cicero’s ‘Patria est ubicunque bene est,’ which Owen translates ‘Where I doe well, There I dwell.’92 One contemporary of Milton’s copied this text out into a commonplace book, and five folios later wrote down a list of national stereotypes.93 These seventeenth-century appropriations ironically overlooked the original, epicurean implications intended in Pacuvius’s drama. Cicero’s words were transformed into a very tenebrous expression of belonging; it was this reading that circulated. Milton’s definition turns one’s country into a matter of policy or politics; one’s country is not a matter of ethnicity or culture, but wherever one can identify oneself as a citizen, wherever one can be and do good.

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Interest in orientalism, imperialism, and empire, and in notions of ‘otherness’ has led critics to dwell on negative representations of the foreign, on caricatures and stereotypes, in pursuit of constructions of national identity. Milton has been fitted into an ethnically focused history of imperialism and nationalism; the fit benefits from hindsight, and is anachronistic. Much less has been offered on the positive, insular construction of identity, on the sense of national spirit, on what lies within the borders and boundaries of the nation. This is in part because there is so much less to say about the latter in early modern Britain, because there was no fixed sense of national identity tied to the state. Milton’s letter to Heimbach was written three decades and a lifetime after ‘Lycidas,’ and after his relationship with his country had suffered from his revolutionary hopes being fulfilled and then dashed: the reality of events satisfied both dimensions of his rhetoric, the militant optimism and the jeremiad. It was ‘dutifulness’ towards his country that had almost expatriated him (expatriavit), left him without a home. Writing from the perspective of 1666, however, Milton felt that he might still do some good for his country (‘utinam ne inutilis, quicquid muneris in hac vita restat mihi peragendum’).94 Patriotism – perhaps the positive dimension of nationalism – was in early modern Britain a relativistic sentiment.95 When one looks homeward, one looks towards what is good. The doctrine of local guardian angels, in ‘Lycidas’ and elsewhere, alerts us to the possibility of another way of thinking about belonging to a place, the idea of home. The St Michael of ‘Lycidas’ expresses a sense of Protestant, providential destiny, its remit delineates a community by mapping the shores that surround it, and in assuming a role of tutelary authority and protection it indicates a set of civic values that we associate with the nature of a good political community. In other words, the local guardian angel presents a substitute, or a metonym, for a missing notion of nationhood. The doctrine articulates a sense of what it means to be providentially attached to, to be identified with, to be rooted in a place. In ‘Lycidas’ Milton reflects upon belonging. The poem sketches a landscape for the reader, first in a passage where the poet-speaker asks the nymphs where they were when Lycidas drowned, and answers that they were not at the place of the fatality, not ‘on the steep, / Where your old bards, the famous Druids, lie, / Nor on the shaggy top of Mona high, / Nor yet where Deva spreads her wizard stream ...’ (ll. 52–5). Later the poet-speaker wonders where Lycidas’s bones are, and

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introduces the sequence ‘shores, and sounding seas ... Hebrides ... Bellerus’ (ll. 154–60). This emphasis on geography helps explain the substitution of Bellerus for Corineus: Milton chooses here place instead of legend. The imaginative landscape stretches from the Hebrides, Anglesey, the Welsh coastline, the Irish Sea, the Dee, and Land’s End to Michael’s Mount. Pseudo-Dionysius wrote that local guardian angels established ‘the boundaries of nations,’ and Michael’s boundaries in ‘Lycidas’ include the shores of Britain. They extend into the Irish sea, but the status of Ireland is unclear: its inclusion as King’s home and intended destination would be appropriate, but it may be that a Roman Catholic country simply cannot be included as part of a chosen nation. In either case, Milton presents no contention for the inclusion or exclusion of Ireland in or from Michael’s nation, from which it appears that Ireland is not a focus of his line of argument. It is easy to extrapolate anti-Irish sentiment backwards from his antiprelatical polemics of 1641–2, his commonplace-book notes probably made at the same time, and his Observations of 1649. Yet the poem itself does not suggest it. Nor does it seem right to infer that the geography of the poem is significantly shaped by antipopery, or by colonial ambitions.96 The references to Spain only instruct the angel to look home, to where the real threat lies. The poem does not trouble itself with faith in Ireland, though it explicitly addresses the failed reformation in Britain. The poem constructs a landscape through a series of peripheral points, including those in Wales and Scotland, but also reaches into the Irish sea. Ireland is probably not part of the imagined geography, which is concerned too much with shores, but its status is indeterminate. Michael’s protection is defined inclusively rather than exclusively; the angel’s home is not restricted to England. What is the nature of that community of belonging? As I have suggested, Michael’s commission extends (at least) over Britain and effects protection rather than exclusion; the problem to which he is the solution concerns internal corruption rather than national boundaries. Second, it follows that it is unclear whether he is assigned to the people or the nation. Seventeenth-century theological writings tended to isolate political or geographical units, stating that angels were assigned to nations and kingdoms or to major features of the landscape. Yet, as we have seen, Michael was specifically assigned to the Jewish people, and their fortunes suggest a conflation between nation and people, just as Reformed theology identified the true Church with believers, rather than the institutional or architectural infrastructure. The nation is the

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people. So it is in ‘Lycidas’: Michael is associated with a feature of the landscape, but he protects the mainland that is his ‘home,’ and his responsibility is to a chosen people, a people defined by civic values and neighbourliness, not race. His charge does not distinguish between people and land. This is more than prosopopoeia. It assumes a relationship between the nation and the people that is not based on political authority; the relationship between the nation and the people or land is not patrimonial. The most rigid or stable account of nationhood available to the early modern British was one that equated the nation with the king’s jurisdiction, that treated the people as the king’s subjects, and the nation as his personal territory: this is still some way short of a modern nation-state, not least because of Tudor and Stuart monarchs’ claims to territory in mainland Europe, and because of the decentralized nature of governance, but it is this entity that has been squeezed into the modern nation-state mould. To remove the notion of kingship from the relationship between the land and the people, therefore, could be seen as an antimonarchical gesture, a delineation of a notion of the people as citizens, or as having their identity through their tongue or their native landscape.97 It would be wrong, for reasons I have suggested, to see this as incipient nationalism, but it is yet another pattern of identity formation that links landscape, community, neighbourliness, religion, and, through the notion of protection, wellbeing: to have an angel looking over one is to be well. Third, the widespread Protestant belief in guardian angels reminds us that the land was still enchanted.98 The landscape is full of invisible meanings and spiritual beings.99 Seeking the roots of modern nationalism and national identity, looking for our reflection in the past, we overlook this; and it is a fact of considerable importance for understanding nationhood and identity in the early modern period. I use the word ‘enchanted’ for its defamiliarization effect, and because it stresses that the water nymphs and deities of classical literature – which we comfortably relegate to the past and transform into selfconsciously literary tropes – have their early modern Christian correlatives. Angels inhabit the landscape; they are witnesses to human actions, and rejoice in or lament for them; they are the instruments of providence. The landscape of pagan river gods, of Camus and Neptune, is not in essence incompatible with one in which St Peter rises to denounce ineffectual clergymen. Within the visible world there is an invisible, consubstantial one, and the government of this world – by God, through angels – asserts an association between the people

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and the land that is above and beyond worldly politics. This providentialism leads not to empire or race but to a sense of the history that is inscribed in the land, and a concern for the country, its faith, and its future. This agrees with what we have seen about Milton’s patriotism. One’s country is wherever it is well with one: but that does not mean that it is just anywhere.

NOTES Thanks to David Loewenstein and Paul Stevens for their comments. The errors are all my own; the translations from Latin are also my own, except where otherwise indicated. 1 ‘Lycidas’ quoted from Facsimile of the Manuscript of Milton’s Minor Poems, ed. William Aldis Wright (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1899), plate 31. 2 ‘Lamentation for Adonis,’ imitated by John Oldham, in Some New Pieces Never Before Publisht (London, 1681), 96. 3 Lucan, The Civil War, Loeb ed., trans. J.D. Duff (1928; Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1988), 508–9. 4 G.W. Pigman III argues that Lycidas is the angel, and that the angel is an appropriate figure for a minister of God. See Grief and English Renaissance Elegy (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1985), 117. While the latter point is certainly true, and the text raises that possibility through syntactic ambiguity, I cannot agree with the conclusion that the figure who is a ‘hapless youth’ in the subsequent line is this same angel. 5 Milton’s Minor Poems, plate 32. 6 For the relationship between angels and classical genii loci, as understood in seventeenth-century Britain, see Scala Naturæ: A Treatise Proving Both from Nature and Scripture the Existence of Good Genii, or Guardian-Angels (London, 1695), 24; Terræ-Filius [George Wither], Prosopopœia Britannica: Britans Genius, or, Good, Angel, Personated (London, 1648), 105 and passim; A Modest Enquiry in the Opinion Concerning a Guardian Angel (London, 1702), 3–4; S[amuel]. P[ordage]., Mundorum Explicatio; Or, The Explanation of an Hieroglyphical Figure (London, 1661), 52; John Pordage, ‘A Preliminary Treatise which may serve for an Introduction to the following Work,’ Bodleian Library MS Rawl. A. 404, p. 152; John Heydon, The Harmony of the World (London, 1662), 89–92; and Tomasso Campanella, A Discourse Touching the Spanish Monarchy, trans. Edmund Chilmead (London, 1654), 7. I owe this last reference to Nicole Greenspan.

164 Joad Raymond 7 David Norbrook, Poetry and Politics in the English Renaissance, 2nd ed. (1984; Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2002), 262–3; Michael Wilding, Dragons Teeth: Literature in the English Revolution (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1987), 10–12; John N. King, Milton and Religious Controversy: Satire and Polemic in Paradise Lost (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2000), 23–43; and Annabel Patterson, ‘“Forc’d Fingers”: Milton’s Early Poems and Ideological Constraint,’ in ‘The Muses Common-Weale’: Poetry and Politics in the Seventeenth Century, ed. Claude Summers and Ted-Larry Pebworth (Columbia, MO: University of Missouri Press, 1988), 9–22. 8 The Works of John Milton, ed. Frank A. Patterson, 20 vols (New York: Columbia University Press, 1931–40), 10:14. 9 John Milton, Complete Shorter Poems, ed. John Carey, 2nd ed. (1968; London: Longman, 1997), 254. 10 Pigman says that ‘Bellerus’ might be ‘the giant,’ but I cannot discern which; see his Grief and English Renaissance Elegy, 117. 11 William Camden, Britain, or A Chorographicall Description, trans. Philemon Holland (London, 1637), 187–8. 12 Andrew Willett, Synopsis Papismi (London, 1592), 293–4. 13 Robert H. West, Milton and the Angels (Athens, GA: University of Georgia Press, 1955), 49. 14 A Commentarie of John Calvine, upon the first booke of Moses called Genesis, trans. Thomas Tymme (London, 1578), 663–4. 15 Gervase Babington, Certaine Plaine, Briefe, and Comfortable Notes upon Everie Chapter of Genesis (London, 1592), f. 127v; Westminster Assembly, Annotations Upon all the Books of the Old and New Testament (London, 1651), at Gen. 32:2. The identical phrase appears in John Richardson, Choice Observations and Explanation Upon the Old Testament (London 1655), at Gen. 32:2. 16 Christopher Love, The Dejected Soules Cure: ... To which is added I. The Ministry of Angels to the Heirs of Salvation (London, 1657), 17–20. 17 The Protestation of the Two and Twenty Divines (London, 1643), sig. A2v; The Petition and Articles Exhibited in Parliament Against Doctor Heywood (London, 1641), 4; and R[obert]. B[aillie]. K., A Parallel of Brief Comparison of the Liturgie with the Masse-Book (London, 1641), 15–16. 18 John Wollebius, The Abridgement of Christian Divinity, trans. Alexander Ross (London, 1650), 52. 19 Reginald Scot, The Discovery of Witchcraft ... Whereunto is added An excellent Discourse of the Nature and Substance of Devils and Spirits, 3rd ed. (London, 1665), ‘Discourse,’ 10. 20 Luther’s Works, ed. Jaroslav Pelikan et al., 55 vols (Saint Louis: Concordia Publishing House, 1955–86), 42:113; 3:271–5 (worship of angels); 6:87–92;

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21

22 23

24 25

28:303–6; and 26:55–6 (commentaries which, surprisingly, do not mention guardians); though see also Luther, Thirtie Foure Special and Chosen Sermons, trans. William Gace (1581; London, 1649), 14, 262. John Pordage, Innocencie Appearing Through the Dark Mists of Pretended Guilt (London, 1655); Samuel Pordage, Mundorum Explicatio, 52–4; William Lilly, An Astrologicall Prediction Of the Occurrences in England, Part of the Yeers 1648, 1649, 1650 (London, 1648), 6; Lilly, Merlini Anglici Ephemeris 1648 (London, 1648 [1647]), A3v and passim; H. Johnsen, Anti-Merlinus (London, 1648), sig. A3v, 4, 21; Nathanael Homes, Dæmonologie and Theologie (London, 1650), 140; John Heydon, Theomagia, or the Temple of Wisdome: In Three Parts, Spiritual, Celestial, and Elemental (London, 1664), 3:126, 239; Durand Hotham, The Life of Jacob Behmen (London, 1654), sig. Dv; Christopher Fowler, Dæmonium Meridianum: Satan at Noon (London, 1655), 80; Philotheos Physiologus [Thomas Tryon], A Treatise of Dreams & Visions (London, 1689); Robert Fludd, Mosaicall Philosophy (London, 1659); Robert Fludd, Doctor Fludd’s Answer (London, 1631), 12–13; William Foster, Hoplocrisma-spongus: Or, A Sponge to Wipe Away the Weapon-Salve (London, 1631), 4, 48. Stuart Clark, Thinking with Demons: The Idea of Witchcraft in Early Modern Europe (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1997), 219–20. Henry More, An Antidote Against Enthusiasm, 2nd ed. (London, 1655), 245– 51; True and Faithful Relation of What Passed for Many Yeers Between Sr. John Dee ... and Some Spirits, ed. Meric Casaubon (London, 1659), 237, 394; Gabriel Naude, The History of Magick, trans. J. Davies (London, 1657), 143–64; author’s and translator’s prefaces to Jeremias Drexel, The AngelGuardian’s Clock (Rouen, 1630); John Heydon, Theomagia, or the Temple of Wisdome, vol. 3 (London, 1663), 239. Anthony Grafton, Cardano’s Cosmos: The Worlds and Works of a Renaissance Astrologer (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1999), 171; Robin Briggs, ‘Dubious Messengers: Bodin’s Demon, the Spirit World and the Sadducees,’ in Angels in the Early Modern World, ed. Peter Marshall and Alexandra Walsham, 168–90 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2006); Ingrid D. Rowland, ‘Athanasius Kircher’s Guardian Angel,’ in Conversations with Angels: Essays Towards a History of Spiritual Communication, 1100–1700, ed. Lauren Kassell and Joad Raymond (London: Palgrave, forthcoming); and Girolamo Cardano, The Book of My Life, trans. Jean Stone, intro. Anthony Grafton (New York: New York Review Books, 2002), 209–15. On Salkeld, see DNB, and West, Milton and the Angels, 43–9. ‘Not that it might not be, that in so obscure a question, one, or a few might not more truly judge; but because wee are not so easily to judge for one or a

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26

27

28 29 30

31 32 33

34 35

36 37 38

39 40 41 42

few, against innumerable men of the same religion and unitie, endued with great wits, and aboundant doctrine.’ Salkeld, A Treatise of Angels (London, 1613), 251–3, 270–1. William Austin, Devotionis Augustinianae Flamma, Or, Certaine Devout, Godly, and Learned Meditations (London, 1635), 250; I am grateful to Graham Parry for referring me to this work. Cf. also Robert Gell, Aggelokratia theon: Or A Sermon Touching Gods Government of the World by Angels (London, 1650) 17; and Edward Hyde, A Christian Vindication of Truth Against Errour (London, 1659), 351–3. John Gumbleden, Two Sermons: First, An Angel, in a Vision (London, 1657), 8; this sometimes appears as the second part of Christ Tempted: The Devil Conquered (London, 1657); it was preached in Oxford some years earlier. John Bayly, Two Sermons. The Angel Guardian. The Light Enlightening (Oxford, 1630), 9. Scala Naturæ, 3–4, 19–20. Lawrence, Of our Communion and Warre with Angels (‘Amsterdam’ [London?], 1646), 19–22. The same sheets were reissued with different titles in 1649, 1650, and 1652. Milton, Complete Shorter Poems, ed. Carey, 344; Milton, Pro Populo Anglicano defensio secunda (London, 1654), 159. Robert Dingley, Deputation of Angels (London, 1654), 142. Willet, Hexapla in Genesin (Cambridge, 1605), 55; Salkeld, Treatise of Angels, 69 (he is reinterpreting Origen and Tertullian here); contrast, however, J.A. Comenius, Naturall Philosophie Reformed (London, 1651), 237. Thomas Heywood, The Hierarchie of the Blessed Angels (London, 1635), 212. Ann Blair, ‘Mosaic Physics and the Search for a Pious Natural Philosophy in the Late Renaissance,’ Isis 91 (2000): 32–58; and Brian Harrison, The Bible, Protestantism, and the Rise of Natural Science (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1998). Pseudo-Dionysius: The Complete Works, trans. and ed. Colm Luibheid, Paul Rorem et al. (New York and Mahwah, NJ: Paulist Press, 1987), 172–3. Calvin, The Institution of Christian Religion, trans. Thomas Norton (London, 1611), 66. Pietro Martire Vermigli, The Common Places of the Most Famous and Renowmed Divine Doctor Peter Martyr, trans. Anthonie Marten [London, 1583], 357. Austin, Devotionis Augustinianae Flamma, 250. Scala Naturæ, 38. A Modest Enquiry, 11. Lilly, An Astrologicall Prediction Of the Occurrences in England, 6.

Guardian Angels and Nationhood in Seventeenth-Century England 167 43 44 45 46 47 48 49 50 51

52

53 54

55

56

Lawrence, Of our Communion and Warre with Angels, 22–3. Dingley, Deputation of Angels, 159–60. Annotations Upon all the Books of the Old and New Testament, at Dan. 10:13. George Hughes, An Analytical Exposition of the Whole first Book of Moses, Called Genesis (London, 1672), 407. John Patrick, Reflexions Upon the Devotions of the Roman Church (London, 1674), 417–18. Works of John Milton, ed. Patterson, 15:102. Paradise Regained 1:446–7, Milton, Complete Shorter Poems, ed. Carey, 441. Works of John Milton, ed. Patterson, 15:102. Joad Raymond, Pamphlets and Pamphleteering in Early Modern Britain (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2003), ch. 5; and Gordon Campbell, A Milton Chronology (Basingstoke: Macmillan, 1997), 56–68. For the possible influence of these events on ‘Lycidas,’ see Christopher Hill, Milton and the English Revolution (London: Faber and Faber, 1977), 49–53; and Norbrook, Poetry and Politics, 265–9. John Carey infers an elided reflexive pronoun in the parenthetical clause, translating it ‘believe me, you peoples,’ implying the poet’s own avouched commitment to the doctrine of tutelary angels. Charles Knapp in the Columbia edition renders it ‘such be your belief, ye people,’ which distances the poet from the doctrine. Milton, Complete Shorter Poems, ed. Carey, 257–8; and Works of John Milton, ed. Patterson, 1:228–9. Campanella, Discourse Touching the Spanish Monarchy, 7. ‘Discourse concerning the Original and Progress of Satire’ (1693), in The Works of John Dryden, vol. 4, ed. A.B. Chambers and William Frost (Berkeley, Los Angeles, London: University of California Press, 1974), 19–20. Christopher Hill, The English Bible and the Seventeenth-Century Revolution (London: Allen Lane, 1993), 264–70; John K. Hale, ‘England as Israel in Milton’s Writings,’ Early Modern Literary Studies 2.2 (1996): 3:1–54, URL: http://purl.oclc.org/emls/02–2/halemil2.html; Colin Kidd, British Identities before Nationalism: Ethnicity and Nationhood in the Atlantic World, 1600– 1800 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1999), 211–14. See Clay Hunt, Lycidas and the Italian Critics (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1979), 141–4, which manages by pure sleight of hand to link Michael to Arthur and thence to ‘the manifest destiny of the English nation.’ On similarities between ancient Israel and contemporary England, and the implications of this identification for the construction of Protestant nationhood in fast sermons of the period, see Achsah Guibbory’s essay, ‘Israel and English Protestant Nationalism: “Fast Sermons” during the English Revolution,’ above in this book.

168 Joad Raymond 57 Arise Evans, The Voice of Michael the Archangel, to His Highness The Lord Protector (London, 1654), 16, 17, 18, 19. Cf. Lilly, Astrologicall Prediction, on guardian angels and parahelii, in note 21, above. 58 See my forthcoming book, Milton’s Angels: The Early-Modern Imagination. 59 See n. 7, above. 60 Johnson, ‘Life of Milton,’ in John Milton: The Critical Heritage, ed. John T. Shawcross, 2 vols (1970–2; London: Routledge, 1995), 2:293–4. 61 Shawcross, ed., Milton: The Critical Heritage, 2:305. 62 The former camp is a very catholic one. See, for example, Hunt, Lycidas and the Italian Critics; J.M. Evans, The Road from Horton: Looking Backward in Lycidas (Victoria, BC: University of Victoria, 1983); Christopher Kendrick, ‘Anachronism in Lycidas,’ ELH 64 (1997): 1–40; and Lloyd Edward Kermode, ‘To the Shores of Life: Textual Recovery in Lycidas,’ Milton Quarterly 31 (1997): 11–25; for the latter approach, see n. 7, above. 63 Virgil, Eclogues, Georgics, Aeneid I-VI, Loeb ed., trans. H. Rushton Fairclough (1916; Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1998), 38–9. Milton, Complete Shorter Poems, ed. Carey, 256 n. 64 James H. Hanford, ‘The Pastoral Elegy and Milton’s Lycidas,’ in Milton’s Lycidas: The Tradition and the Poem, ed. C.A. Patrides (New York: Holt, Rinehart and Winston, 1961), 27–55, at 39–40. 65 Jacopo Sannazaro, Arcadia & Piscatorial Eclogues, trans. Ralph Nash (Detroit: Wayne State University Press, 1966), 162–3, lines 91–8; Hanford, ‘Pastoral Elegy,’ 46–7. 66 William J. Kennedy, Jacopo Sannazaro and the Uses of Pastoral (Hanover and London: University Press of New England, 1983), 160–1. 67 Lawrence Lipking, ‘The Genius of the Shore: Lycidas, Adamastor, and the Poetics of Nationalism,’ PMLA 111 (1996): 205–21, esp. 207–8. 68 Ibid., 210. 69 Edward W. Said, Culture and Imperialism (London: Chatto and Windus, 1993); on nationhood, see, for example, Stephen J. Greenblatt, Renaissance Self-Fashioning: From More to Shakespeare (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1980); Richard Helgerson, Forms of Nationhood: The Elizabethan Writing of England (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1992); Andrew Hadfield, Literature, Politics and National Identity: Reformation to Renaissance (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1994); Claire McEachern, The Poetics of English Nationhood, 1590–1612 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1996); David J. Baker, Between Nations: Shakespeare, Spenser, Marvell, and the Question of Britain (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 1997), and the chapters in the section ‘Literature and National Identity’ in The Cambridge History of English Literature, ed. David Loewenstein and Janel

Guardian Angels and Nationhood in Seventeenth-Century England 169 Mueller (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2002). On the colonial dimension, see Stephen J. Greenblatt, Marvelous Possessions: The Wonder of the New World (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1991) and New World Encounters, ed. Greenblatt (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1993); Peter Hulme and William H. Sherman, eds, ‘The Tempest’ and Its Travels (London: Reaktion, 2000); Balachandra Rajan and Elizabeth Sauer, eds, Milton and the Imperial Vision (Pittsburgh, PA: Duquesne University Press, 1999); Bruce McLeod, The Geography of Empire in English Literature, 1580–1745 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1999); Herbert Grabes, ‘“Elect Nation”: The Founding Myth of National Identity in Early Modern England,’ in Writing the Early Modern English Nation: The Transformation of National Identity in Sixteenth- and Seventeenth-Century England, ed. Grabes (Amsterdam and Athens, GA: Rodopi, [2001]), 173–89. For a critique see David Armitage, ‘Literature and Empire,’ in The Oxford History of the British Empire, vol. 1, The Origins of Empire: British Overseas Enterprise to the Close of the Seventeenth Century, ed. Nicholas Canny (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1998), 99–123. 70 See especially Thomas N. Corns, ‘Milton’s Observations upon the Articles of Peace: Ireland Under English Eyes,’ in Politics, Poetics, and Hermeneutics in Milton’s Prose, ed. David Loewenstein and James Grantham Turner (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1990), 123–34; Maley, ‘How Milton and Some Contemporaries Read Spenser’s View,’ in Representing Ireland: Literature and the Origins of Conflict, 1534–1660, ed. Brendan Bradshaw, Andrew Hadfield, and Willy Maley (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1993), 191–208; Linda Gregerson, ‘Colonials Write the Nation: Spenser, Milton, and England on the Margins,’ in Milton and the Imperial Vision, ed. Rajan and Sauer, 169–90; Walter S.H. Lim, The Arts of Empire: The Poetics of Colonialism from Ralegh to Milton (Newark: University of Delaware Press, 1998), ch. 5; David Loewenstein, Representing Revolution in Milton and His Contemporaries: Religion, Politics, and Polemics in Radical Puritanism (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2001), ch. 6. 71 On the eighteenth-century appropriation, see Anne-Julia Zwierlein, Majestick Milton: British Imperial Expansion and Transformations of Paradise Lost, 1667–1837 (Münster: LIT, 2001); for readings of Paradise Lost as an antiimperial epic, see: David Armitage, ‘John Milton: Poet Against Empire,’ in Milton and Republicanism, ed. David Armitage, Quentin Skinner, and Armand Himy (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1995), 206–25; David Quint, Epic and Empire: Politics and Generic Form from Virgil to Milton (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1983); and J. Martin Evans, Milton’s Imperial Epic: Paradise Lost and the Discourses of Colonialism (Ithaca and London: Cornell University Press, 1996).

170 Joad Raymond 72 David Armitage, The Ideological Origins of the British Empire (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2000); and Armitage, ‘Literature and Empire,’ in Oxford History of the British Empire, ed. Canny. 73 There is a substantial literature on this; among the works that directly influence this paragraph, see Linda Colley, Britons: Forging the Nation, 1707–1837 (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1992); Brendan Bradshaw and John Morrill, eds, The British Problem, c. 1534–1707: State Formation in the Atlantic Archipelago (Basingstoke: Macmillan, 1996); Benjamin Braude, ‘The Sons of Noah and the Construction of Ethnic and Geographical Identities in the Medieval and Early Modern Periods,’ William and Mary Quarterly, 3rd ser., 54 (1997): 101–42; Colin Kidd, British Identities before Nationalism: Ethnicity and Nationhood in the Atlantic World, 1600–1800 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1999); Krishnan Kumar, The Making of English National Identity (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2003). 74 Jenny Wormald, ‘James VI, James I and the Identity of Britain,’ in British Problem, ed. Bradshaw and Morrill, 148–71; and Arthur H. Williamson, Scottish National Consciousness in the Age of James VI: The Apocalypse, the Union, and the Shaping of Scotland’s Public Culture (Edinburgh: Donald, 1979). 75 Complete Prose Works of John Milton, gen. ed. Don M. Wolfe, 8 vols (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1953–82), 2:551; subsequent quotations from this edition are cited as CPW. Cf. Joad Raymond, ‘Complications of Interest: Milton, Scotland, Ireland, and National Identity in 1649,’ Review of English Studies 55 (2004): 315–45. For a different account of this passage and its definition of ‘an Englishman,’ see David Loewenstein, ‘Late Milton: Early Modern Nationalist or Patriot?’ in Milton Studies 48 (2008): 53–71. 76 CPW 3:215. 77 Benedict Anderson, Imagined Communities: Reflections on the Origin and Spread of Nationalism (1983; London: Verso, 1991). 78 Paul Stevens, ‘Milton’s Nationalism and the Rights of Memory,’ in Imagining Death in Spenser and Milton, ed. Elizabeth Jane Bellamy, Patrick Cheney, and Michael Schoenfeldt (Basingstoke: Palgrave Macmillan, 2003), 171–84. 79 In addition to ‘Milton’s Nationalism and the Rights of Memory,’ see Paul Stevens, ‘Spenser and Milton on Ireland: Civility, Exclusion, and the Politics of Wisdom,’ Ariel 26 (1995): 151–67; ‘Milton’s Janus-Faced Nationalism: Soliloquy, Subject, and the Modern Nation-State,’ Journal of English and Germanic Philology 100 (2001): 247–68; ‘“Leviticus Thinking” and the Rhetoric of Early Modern Colonialism,’ Criticism 35 (1993): 441–61; ‘Paradise Lost and the Colonial Imperative,’ Milton Studies 34 (1997): 3–21; and his essay ‘How Milton’s Nationalism Works: Globalization and the Possibilities of Positive Nationalism,’ in the present volume.

Guardian Angels and Nationhood in Seventeenth-Century England 171 80 Raymond, ‘Complications of Interest,’ 332–6; and Braude, ‘Sons of Noah.’ 81 Kumar, Making of English National Identity, ch. 6; Armitage, Ideological Origins of the British Empire, ch. 2; and Kidd, British Identities before Nationalism. 82 Hans Kohn, ‘The Genesis and Character of English Nationalism,’ Journal of the History of Ideas 1 (1940): 69–94, esp. 85; qtd in Kumar, Making of English National Identity, 127. 83 They are also, of course, a matter of climate. Milton’s concern in Of Education that ‘we Englishmen being farre northerly, doe not open our mouthes in the cold air, wide enough to grace a Southern tongue’ (CPW 2:383) is a recurrent refrain. Climate is imagined as a constant in affecting behaviour. 84 ‘Mansus,’ ll. 80–4; Works of John Milton, ed. Patterson, 1:292–3; Milton, Complete Shorter Poems, ed. Carey, 267. See also John K. Hale, Milton’s Languages: The Impact of Multilingualism on Style (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1997), 57, 62. 85 CPW 5; Raymond, ‘Complications of Interest’; Linda Gregerson, ‘A Colonial Writes the Commonwealth: Milton’s History of Britain,’ Prose Studies 19 (1996): 247–54; Nicholas von Maltzahn, Milton’s History of Britain: Republican Historiography in the English Revolution (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1991); and Graham Parry, ‘Milton’s History of Britain and the Seventeenth-Century Antiquarian Scene,’ Prose Studies 19 (1996): 238–46. 86 Raymond, ‘Complications of Interest,’ 328; Raymond, ‘The Cracking of the Republican Spokes,’ Prose Studies 19 (1996): 255–74; and Laura Lunger Knoppers, ‘Milton’s The Readie and Easie Way and the English Jeremiad,’ in Politics, Poetics, and Hermeneutics in Milton’s Prose, ed. Loewenstein and Turner, 213–25. 87 In Paradise Lost, that is. However, in Defensio Secunda he implies that this Latin prose work was his promised epic, a heroic celebration of his countrymen’s exploit (‘ita mihi quoque vel ad officium, vel ad excusationem satis fuerit, unam saltem popularium meorum heroicè rem gestam exornasse’); and Milton, Pro Populo Anglicano Defensio Secunda (London, 1654), 172. This patriotic account of deliverance from monarchy is, of course, situated within a European context. 88 CPW 2:552. 89 CPW 2:553; Milton makes the same point, with a similar interest in Europe, in the divorce tracts; CPW 2:231–2, 707. 90 Works of John Milton, ed. Patterson, 12:114–15. 91 Cicero, Tusculan Disputations, Loeb ed., trans. J.E. King (1927; London: Heineman, 1945), 532–3. 92 Epigrammatum Joannis Audoeni Cambro-Britanni Oxoniensis (London, 1659), 128.

172 Joad Raymond 93 Folger MS E.a.6, ff. 75r, 80r [anonymous commonplace book, 1650–70]. 94 Works of John Milton, ed. Patterson, 12:114–15. 95 Maurizio Viroli, For Love of Country: An Essay on Patriotism and Nationalism (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1995). 96 See, for example, Willy Maley, ‘How Milton and Some Contemporaries Read Spenser’s View,’ in Representing Ireland, ed. Bradshaw et al.; Lipking, ‘Genius of the Shore,’ esp. 209–13; and Raymond, ‘Complications of Interest.’ For the date of Milton’s reading of Spenser, see the location of the entries in the commonplace book, CPW 1:465, 496. 97 Kumar, Making of English National Identity, 98–103; Helgerson, Forms of Nationhood, ch. 3, though the afterword suggests the existence of a nationstate in seventeenth-century England; and Michelle O’Callaghan, The ‘Shepheards Nation’: Jacobean Spenserians and Early Stuart Political Culture (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 2000). 98 Cf. Robert W. Scribner, ‘The Reformation, Popular Magic, and the “Disenchantment of the World,”’ Journal of Interdisciplinary History 23 (1993): 475– 94, esp. 483–7. 99 As it is in A Masque Presented at Ludlow Castle, 1634; in this, however, less effort is made to unify the classical and the Christian: instead the world of river nymphs and ‘bright aerial spirits’ (l. 3) serves as an allegory for Christian values. ‘Lycidas’ is all the more disturbing for being not simply allegorical. Dr Johnson – who praised the Masque’s poetical language and condemned its ‘tediously instructive’ form (Shawcross, ed., Milton: The Critical Heritage, 2:297) – might have found more to criticize here, were it not for the fact that so much less theology is at stake.

6 The Invisible Nation: Church, State, and Schism in Milton’s England andrew escobedo

The nation is all around us. We see it everywhere: in our holidays, our cuisine, our neighbours, our sports, our laws, and our newspapers, all these forms reminding us daily of the existence of a national community. It is curious, therefore, how readily this visibility falters when we place some national forms under close scrutiny. A ‘national’ custom may in fact derive from regional or local sources. The typical neighbourhood of a nation usually owes more to class or ethnic ties than to national affiliation. A nation’s language may cross its borders, used by other nations, or be divided within by multiple dialects: nations rarely have their ‘own’ language. Such observations suggest that, when we look closely, the forms that make a nation visible can come to appear arbitrary, sliding into signifiers of other, seemingly underlying communal identities. Of course, we can likewise place these other identities under scrutiny and expose the constructedness of their forms, yet as often as not these forms appear natural in a way that national forms do not: region has dialect, race has skin colour, religion has worship practices, and so on.1 The nation, by contrast, possesses a more diffuse visibility, relying on signs that, in their abstractness, may appear arbitrarily imposed (a flag or a picture of the nation’s ruler) or that, in their material specificity, may ambiguously express extranational identity (does steak symbolize American vigour or Midwestern heartiness?). We see the nation everywhere, but it helps not to look too closely. This diffuse visibility partly explains why modern studies of the nation regularly seek to expose its forms as an illusory construct, a fabricated mask that surreptitiously serves the interests of ‘real’ underlying agendas, such as racial consciousness or economic class.2 Yet the nation’s ambiguous signification does not indicate its falseness so much

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as disclose visibility as one of the central problematics of the modern nation. The nation’s reliance on abstract ‘symbolic ties’3 is one of its strengths, giving it a frangible adaptability well suited to modern society. On the other hand, nations must struggle to be seen in order to impress their community on the hearts of citizens, and, even after that community takes hold, national identity remains open to contestation by (seemingly) more visible communal identities such as race, class, or religion. If the problem of visibility now inclines some modern commentators to question the nation’s genuine existence at this late point in its history, visibility presented an equally difficult challenge during the early modern emergence of the nation, as this essay will demonstrate. Attending to the ambiguous visibility of nationhood allows us to rethink a number of qualities regularly ascribed to the nation, both then and now. For one, we ought to revisit the common notion of ‘national unity,’ whether that unity be public consensus, cultural uniformity, or clear borders. The nation as intangible, on the contrary, as a diffuse overlay on daily social life, seems resistant to the typical forms of unity, moving in a centrifugal as much as centripetal direction. If we nonetheless continue to think of the nation’s existence as a function of its unity, we owe this habit of thought to the concept of the nation-state. The state works to make local communities resemble each other across a society, and states can be more or less unified and centralized. Indeed, the nation-state potentially answers the problem of obscure national representation, since the state provides the nation with an undeniable institutional visibility. So crucial does the state now seem to the nation that many historians of the phenomenon refuse to entertain the idea of a nation before nineteenth-century European statism.4 Some scholars have tried to offer alternatives to this view, either in the name of resisting the teleology of the nation-state,5 or by redescribing the nation as a cultural construct rather than as an institution. Benedict Anderson offers the most influential example of this latter approach, defining the nation as an ‘imagined community’ of ‘horizontal comradeship.’6 This justly celebrated interpretation goes far in addressing the problems of national visibility I mentioned earlier: for Anderson, we creatively impose national meaning onto daily life, making the nation our living fiction. This ‘we’ is, of course, part of the fiction, an attempt to soften (though not eliminate) the sharp edges of social division and difference. We perceive the nation in our mind’s eye. As Milton put it in 1644, ‘Methinks I see in my mind a noble and puissant Nation.’7

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It is less clear, however, how this mental image of community takes on the palpable, institutional form that it does. How does the nation come to seem external, an entity that can do things to us? The notion of the state, with its unifying network of communication and representation, appears unavoidable to some degree. The anthropologist Michael Herzfeld has recently sought to revise Anderson’s thesis in terms of the nation’s ‘cultural intimacy,’ the affective quality of communal selfidentification made in explicit opposition to the impersonal bureaucracy of the state.8 Taking the nation/state dichotomy itself as a symbolic construct, Herzfeld sees the terms of the opposition as mutually constitutive: the nation repudiates the state in order to define its intimate character, yet this repudiation reveals the state’s necessity: ‘Even citizens who claim to oppose the state invoke it – simply by talking of “it” in that way – [accusing] “it” of betraying the national interests of which it claims to be both expression and guardian. In the process, however, they all contribute, through these little acts of essentializing, to making it a permanent fixture in their lives’ (2). The state, meanwhile, must command the involvement of the very people inclined to reify the state and co-opt its official mythologies (24). Herzfeld takes Anderson’s imagined community and places it in dialectical relation with institutions of the state. As a product of cultural intimacy, the nation needs the state as the impersonal other against which it defines itself. Or, to put it in the terms of my discussion, the nation needs the palpable visibility of the state as both the expression and betrayal of its own otherwise invisible, intimate character. It may seem peculiar to begin a discussion about nationalism in Milton’s era with these observations about the nation-state, since the term itself did not come into usage until the late nineteenth century.9 Although the seventeenth century does yield examples of ‘state’ referring to the structure of governing bureaucracies, as distinct from the people or commonwealth,10 more often the two terms overlap. For example, sixteenth- and seventeenth-century non-conformist criticisms of the English church usually amounted to a criticism of the state. Additionally, state bureaucracy itself, as a centralized means of overseeing local populations, was quite meagre by modern standards. Indeed, the paucity of state apparatus in the seventeenth century leads some scholars to deny any national dimension to the English Civil War. Where there is no state, there can be no nation. Jonathan Scott cites this problem in his effort to revise the anachronism of nationalist assumptions about the period:

176 Andrew Escobedo Our modern imagination of revolution is deeply influenced by Marx. In Russia and China ‘revolutionaries’ succeeded by taking control of the awesome apparatus of the modern nation-state and using it to transform those societies. When seventeenth-century radicals – Ireton, Cromwell and others – came at last to take such control ... there was no such apparatus. Their attitude to what there was was: what do we do with it? ... Its relationship to them was hostile and negative: transcend and sweep [it] away as an obstacle to the closer union of man with God; keep it out of the hands of your enemies.11

This is shrewdly noted. Yet Scott here underestimates the degree to which iconoclasm against the state produces a national imaginary as well as obscuring it.12 This essay will trace some of the national effects of the mid-century frenzy of iconoclasm and sectarianism, most especially the emergence of a specifically English community defined in opposition to the idolatrous visibility of the state. The state did not, in the 1640s and 1650s, exist in the form it does today. The state did already exist then, however, as a ‘symbolic construct,’ to use Herzfeld’s term – as the negative other against which many non-conformist and antiformalist groups defined the goal of true religion, what some of them (especially those known as Congregationalists) often referred to as the ‘invisible church.’ The invisibility these sectarians wanted to protect from state abuse (Laudian or Presbyterian) was religious, not national, but their opposition between visible and invisible churches opened a space, by way of analogy, between state and nation. For some writers of this period, including Milton, the reformation and reduction of visible state apparatus made possible the intimacy of the English nation, a partially ‘imagined’ community that bears the trace of religious affect in its analogical relation to the invisible church of Christ. Whereas many English Congregationalists perceive the nation as a deceptive fiction used by the power-hungry state, Milton comes to see the nation as that aspect of English community that potentially escapes institutional reification by the state. English Space: The Visible and Invisible Church The doctrine of the visible and invisible church was a Reformist apologetic device intended to address the problem of schism.13 Early Protestants wanted to maintain the authentic unity of Christ’s church in the

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face of a massive division with Rome, so they transferred that unity from the church in the world to the spiritual community of the elect. Church historian and martyrologist John Foxe makes this distinction between the elect and general church membership in the second edition of his Acts and Monuments (1570): The visible church here in earth ... having in itself a difference of two sorts of people, so is it to be divided into two parts: ... the first in words and lips seem to honour Christ, and are in the visible church only, but not in the church invisible, and partake the outward sacraments of Christ, but not the inward blessing of Christ. The other are both in the visible, and also in the invisible church of Christ, which not in words only an outward profession, but also in heart do truly serve and honour Christ ...14

Division marks the visible church, whereas the invisible dimension defines the church’s genuine unity. Yet the visible is not to be discarded, because some of its members belong to the invisible church as well. The doctrine thus excuses schism with Rome but ideally protects against further schism within a properly reformed visible church, such as that in England. As Puritan opposition to the established Church of England grew in the 1580s and 1590s, church apologists such as Richard Hooker revised the doctrine so as to emphasize the institutional integrity of particular, visible, national churches. Authentic catholicity still resided in the invisible dimension of the church, but the integrity of the visible church was now found at the state level – not at the universal level (which made it too Romist), and not at the congregational level (which made it too Genevan). William Covell’s A Just and Temperate Defense of the Five Books of Ecclesiastical Polity by R. Hooker (1603) typifies the apologist inflection of the two-church doctrine. Covell insisted that particular visible churches must be understood as national churches, such as those of Rome, Corinth, and England.15 Just because most present-day Catholics professed outwardly only, lacking the invisible and inward seal of the elect, did not mean that Rome was not a visible church of Christ. To deny Rome’s churchly status per se was to claim, ludicrously, that Christ’s church had never possessed visible existence in history: And therefore it is strange for any man to deny them of Rome to be of the church; so I cannot but wonder, that they [Catholics] will ask where our

178 Andrew Escobedo church was before the birth of Martin Luther ... As there are which make the church of Rome no church at all, utterly, so we have them among us who, under pretence of imagined corruptions in our discipline, do give even as hard a judgment of the church of England itself.16

By rejecting Rome’s existence as a church in history, dissenters make Protestantism a mere novelty, consequently denying the legitimacy of the English church.17 As Rome goes, so goes England. Covell’s insistence about the national dimension of the visible church has more to do with state control of public worship than it does with national sentiment about England, but it nonetheless raises the question of national space, especially visible space. What spatial unit determines the identity of a particular visible church? To what degree does the place you live determine your membership in the visible church? Puritan writers disputed Covell’s answers to these questions well before the religious upheavals of the 1640s and 1650s. The covenant theologian William Ames, whose work strongly influenced the Congregationalists of later decades, considered at length the nature of the visible church in his Medulla S.S. Theologiae (1627). Ames had left England for the less religiously formalist atmosphere of the Netherlands in 1610, where he remained until his death in 1633; yet until then he stayed in regular contact with English Puritans. In his treatise he introduced the distinction that would echo in later Congregationalist writings: the compulsory membership of Jews in their national church versus the voluntary membership of Christians in small, local churches.18 For Ames, it was the national dimension of the Hebrew church that rendered its covenant unfree: Jewish birth automatically and irresistibly enrolled you as a member. The new covenant of Christ, by contrast, frees the believer from national constraint: ‘It is not contracted to some one people, as before, but is diffused through the whole world’ (200). The ‘diffused’ quality of Christ’s church signals Ames’s sense of the interpenetration between visible and invisible. It is both less spatially specific than a national church – scattered in congregations all over the world – but also more spatially specific: ‘Hence also it is most convenient that one particular church do not consist of more members than may meet together into one place to hear the Word of God’ (201–2). The particular visible church, now redefined as a small, local congregation, makes possible a voluntary rather than compulsory membership.

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Shedding utterly the church’s national identity, for so long part of the justification for the split with Rome, represents new territory, and one can sense Ames’s uncertainty about exactly what criterion would distinguish a church from an arbitrary gathering of people. He finds himself obliged to warn that ‘believers do not make a particular church, although peradventure many may meet and live together in the same place, unless they be joined together by a special bond among themselves: for so some one church should often be dissolved into many and many should be confounded into one’ (159).19 This anxiety about fuzzy borders represents the more problematic aspect of the church’s ‘diffused’ nature, a consequence of refusing the convenient boundedness of national specification. Yet Ames ultimately wants to expose the nation itself as mere human invention: The mystical church, as it is in its members, is no other way distributed, then, into the adjuncts and subjects in which respect we call the church of Belgia, of Brittany, of France, as we call the sea according to the shores which it was next to, the Belgick, British, French sea, although it be one and the same sea ... (202)

To divide the church into nations is like foolishly believing that human-imposed names make the waters of the English Channel fundamentally different from those of the Bay of Biscay. National distinctions have no true power to define, but instead serve the ‘pattern of civil government’ (202): national hierarchy over congregations will ‘rob the churches of their liberty, while they exercise, as it were, a regal, or rather tyrannical, dominion over the churches themselves’ (203). For Ames, the appeal to nation finally represents little more than a power play by the state. Before moving on to examine how Ames’s Congregationalist followers take up these ideas in more radical form during the Civil War and Interregnum period, it is worth pausing to consider Milton’s ‘Lycidas,’ a poem similarly concerned about the relationship between institutional worldliness and national space. The poem does not address the doctrine of the visible and invisible church, yet the attack on corrupt clergy (lines 113–31) resonates with contemporary Puritan criticism of the established church. Milton wrote the poem in 1637, a year which many church critics saw as the unhappy realization of Ames’s warning about state tyranny.20 If the poem, as many scholars have felt, marks a

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crucial moment of Milton’s disaffection with the established church, then what view of national space does this disaffection produce? ‘Lycidas’ ends up implying a relation between state and nation that anticipates Milton’s later political prose. St Peter’s angry vituperation against the Laudian bishops represents a low point for the poet and the nation. Hirelings in the Church of England have left the flock spiritually undernourished, and they ‘Rot inwardly’ (127).21 Peter’s denunciation, inserted almost in the middle of the poem, occurs in the midst of the poet’s restless survey of British geography, an excursion including Anglesey, the river Dee, the river Cam, the Hebrides, Land’s End, and St Michael’s Mount. The poet concludes his lament by granting Lycidas an apotheosis, but one that suspends the drowned youth between heaven and earth. Even as Lycidas is ‘mounted high’ (172), he still bears the physical trace of his earthly experience, ‘oozy locks’ (175). Likewise, his return to earth occurs only in spirit form – ‘the genius of the shore’ (183) – with ‘shore’ inflected as national space by the previous emphasis on British geography. Lycidas was lost somewhere off Britain’s western coast, but now inhabits the coast in heavenly form. The poem thus responds to the bishops’ deplorable worldliness by imbuing national space with spiritual protection. The last reference to a specifically English location, St Michael’s Mount, anticipates this nation-spirit association. When the poet asks the angel to ‘look homeward’ (163), where is the angel looking – England or heaven?22 This ambiguity may risk losing national specificity within a heavenly vision – it may make English space less distinct – but it also promises the nation a spiritual status it currently lacks. Ames responded to the pressures of ecclesiastical uniformity and worldliness by exposing national space as an illusion, a sleight-of-hand used by state bureaucracies, the false consciousness that artificially divides up the continuous sea into separate parts. St Peter’s denunciation likewise invokes a Puritan loathing for ecclesiastical worldliness and hypocrisy, but Milton nonetheless keeps the waters national. He responds by imagining a spiritualized national space unyoked from any specific institutional form. By the end of the poem, Englishness is almost unyoked from geography itself. Here I differ from some of the conclusions of Lawrence Lipking’s recent exploration of the nationalism of ‘Lycidas.’23 Lipking identifies the angel’s glance ‘homeward’ as a look towards Ireland, Edward King’s origin and his destination when his ship was lost, shrewdly linking the poem’s bitter tone to England’s anxiety about recalcitrant Irish papism. Lipking associates

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this anxiety with the poem’s attention to cartographic discourse and borders, and he sees the poem finally as a polemic in the fight for ‘a Britain unified by true religion and the sword,’ one safe from ‘barbarians and schismatics.’24 This is an elegant and provocative interpretation, rightly thematizing a central form of national visibility, the map. Yet Lycidas’s transformation into the genius of the shore does not confirm the poem’s earlier cartographic specificity so much as it blurs cartography, making national space ‘diffused,’ to borrow Ames’s word. Milton seems to leave deliberately ambiguous which English shore Lycidas inhabits, echoing the deliberate ambiguity of the ‘home’ towards which St Michael looks. This suggests that Milton is not so eager for distinct borders and national unity as he is for a national spirit that escapes the institutional tyranny of the Laudians and their foreign Catholic ally, ‘the grim wolf with privy paw’ (128). In the poem’s historical moment of 1637, it is the church establishment that had the rhetoric of English unity on its side, branding its Puritan detractors as ‘schismatics,’ not vice versa. Milton’s achievement in ‘Lycidas’ was to invoke an Amesian critique of state tyranny while maintaining the diffuse presence of a national spirit. As his career continued, Milton would develop the opposition between state and nation vis-à-vis the doctrine of the visible and invisible church. Seeing Is Believing: Congregationalist Scepticism My description of the visible and invisible church thus far risks confirming a common scholarly bias about seventeenth-century religious culture, namely, that the radicals emphasized the invisible dimension of the church whereas the conservative Anglicans25 (and later Presbyterians) emphasized the visible. In his study of the two-church doctrine in Milton’s writing, Stephen R. Honeygosky echoes this view: ‘What Milton and those to the left of the Puritan establishment shared was a concept of church that was predominantly mystical, spiritual, invisible, and increasingly internal.’26 In an important sense, however, the reverse is true. The non-conformists and antiformalists saw the visible dimension of the church as crucial – more so than Anglicans or Presbyterians – because unlike the conservatives they felt the visible church ought to match the purity of the invisible as much as possible. Ames insists that ‘because this new administration [under Christ] is so perfect, therefore it is meet also that the communion of saints in the church under the New Testament be ordained most perfect.’27 This concern for the perfection of

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the visible church explains why non-conformists were so unwilling to see church organization as a matter of theological ‘indifference,’ in the technical sense of not being crucial to salvation. How contrary is this attitude to Covell’s casual resignation to the imperfections of the visible church: ‘If by external profession they be Christians, then are they of the visible church of Christ ... yea, although they be impious idolaters, wicked heretics, persons excommunicable, such as we deny not to be even the limbs of Satan.’28 For him, the English church is superior to Rome, but you cannot expect it to be perfect – and its lack of perfection relieves no English citizens of their duty to conform as members of the Church of England: ‘We must join ourselves to some particular church, if we will be saved.’29 True, some Laudians of the 1630s did break with the conformists’ theological indifference about the visible church, insisting that the beauty of ceremony played a part in salvation. Yet even many conformists saw this as a fairly radical attitude.30 Most of those conservatives who followed Covell were confident that, aside from the basic issue of visible membership (‘some particular church’), the invisible dimension of the church answered concerns about election and reprobation. They thus saw the organization of the visible church as primarily a matter of civic duty and social order.31 The non-conformists of the 1640s and 1650s who came to be known as Congregationalists emphasized the visible dimension of the church even more strongly than their predecessors. Gone is Ames’s anxiety about small churches blurring into each other or drifting apart; the concern now is whether a believer has joined a sufficiently pure particular church. The Congregationalists confidently defined a true church as a self-governing congregation of voluntary membership, small enough so that all members can easily gather in the same place.32 In so doing, they made central the value of intimacy between their members, or, as they called it, ‘fellowship.’33 They identified this notion of the visible church with the invisible one to an unprecedented degree. John Cotton’s The True Constitution of a Particular Visible Church (1642), for example, defines the visible church in such a way as to make it nearly indistinguishable from the invisible.34 The Presbyterian Samuel Hudson responded with some exasperation in 1644: ‘Mr. Cotton tells us that a visible church is a mystic body, whereof Christ is the head ... but (with due respect for so grave and worthy a man) this seems to me to belong to an invisible church, not visible.’35 Yet the Congregationalists sought as far as possible to make the purity of the invisible church manifest in the visible congregation. In pursuing this goal, they were

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not (or did not intend to be) social radicals as, for example, the Levellers were. Most of them believed the state to be a necessary tool for civil order. John Owen, for example, was the architect of the 1652 Proposals for the Furtherance and Propagation of the Gospel, which sought to suppress heresies, and he advised Cromwell closely in the early 1650s. Likewise, throughout his career Jeremiah Burroughs tried to find common ground between the Independents and their opponents. The Congregationalists objected to the state only as it tried to impose uniformity in matters of worship. Yet this objection nonetheless embroiled them in bitter disputes about the nature, and even the existence, of a nation. The Congregationalist emphasis on an intimate setting for worship entailed what we could almost call a doctrine of visibility. In their polemic with the Presbyterians, these separatists repeatedly emphasized three themes: (1) as a particular church, the congregation governed itself – no state or church hierarchy had authority over it; (2) only voluntary membership constituted an authentic covenant with a congregation; and (3) mere geography (parish, county, or nation) could never determine the true membership of a congregation. All three of these concerns spoke to the question of visibility. Members who saw and mingled with each other stood a much better chance than a distant Presbyterian synod of maintaining church discipline and keeping worship pure. A sufficiently small congregation allowed the individual believer to know it familiarly, to judge it, and to decide voluntarily whether to join it (or leave it). Geographical determination automatically (and wrongly) enrolled people in a church because they happened to live near it, people who might otherwise never choose to associate with each other. Ideally, you do not have to imagine your congregation; it is right there in front of you. Seeing is believing. The small congregation was thus central. Yet what connection did it have with larger structures? Was there such a thing as a national church, and if so, what control did this church exert over the particular churches within it? These debates rested on new definitions of visible church space. Whereas Ames had granted the existence and validity of the universal visible church, Congregationalists now denied its status as a ‘true,’ or Christ-instituted, church. With this denial they attempted to disarm the powerful Presbyterian logic of greater over lesser, a logic that encouraged the subordination of local churches to a national church. Indeed, Samuel Hudson had defended the authority of a national church assembly by insisting on the theoretical priority of the

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universal church; in his water metaphor, ‘the church is as the sea, and particular churches as so many creeks, or arms and rivers, not running into the sea, but running from the sea, and receiving a tincture and season of her waters.’ If the universal church gives tincture to particular national churches, then it follows that the national church lends similar colour to smaller ones within it: ‘When a part of a national church shall join in particular consociation and community in a city or province ... they may receive denomination from thence.’36 The Presbyterian Daniel Cawdrey agreed: ‘The world and a nation differ but as greater and lesser, as part and the whole, and a particular church is but part of the catholic, and, so as, properly called a church.’37 Yet this logic, the Congregationalist responded, contradicted the English Reformation itself, implying a global church government over all particular national churches. ‘Little do men know how much they contribute towards the keeping of the Pope in his chair,’ observed William Bartlet in 1647, ‘by pleading so much as they do for such a universal visible church, subject to government.’38 In his Model of the Primitive Congregational Way, which became one of the standard articulations of Congregational theory, Bartlet insists that ‘the just extent ... of a true visible church under the Gospel is no other than ... one ordinary congregation or society of Saints, that can meet together in one place to worship God.’39 John Owen echoes this particularism a decade later: ‘No man can possibly be a member of a national church ... but by virtue of his being a member of some particular church in the nation, which concurs to the making up of the national church.’40 For Bartlet and Owen, the rivers run into the sea, lending it tincture, rather than the reverse. We could describe these distinctions in terms of the theological categories of totum integrale (the whole comprises the parts) and totum universale (the parts compose the whole).41 Yet this contrast distorts the Congregationalist perspective, since these separatists finally did not care about the ‘whole’ of the universal church as a meaningful entity. They granted its existence as the collection of Christian professors scattered all over the world, but its hugeness rendered it abstract, almost unreal: ‘The universal church we are speaking of is not a thing that hath, as such, a specificative form, from which it should be called a Universal Church, as a particular hath for its ground of being so called.’42 Outside the heat of debate, the Presbyterians might almost have agreed with Owen’s caveat about specific form, since they did not in fact seek to institute a popish world government. Rather, they took the universal church as a theoretical model of unity, one that found

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proper institutional realization at the national level. Robert Baillie described Presbyterianism as an ecclesiastical exfoliation that culminates in the nation, moving naturally from the smallest unit to the largest: ‘Let England once be countenanced by her superior powers, to enjoy the just and necessary liberty of Consistories for Congregations, of Presbyteries for Counties, of Synods for larger Shires, and National Assemblies for the whole Land ...’43 In much Presbyterian writing against the Congregational way, the nation serves as the mediating figure between the universal church and small parish churches. If you can imagine the entire universal church, then you can certainly imagine a national church, and so come to understand the authority of the state, the nation’s obvious extension. Congregational writers expressly refuse this national imaginary, insisting that, like the universal church, the English church is not Christinstituted. The author of the millenarian tract A Glimpse of Sion’s Glory (possibly Thomas Goodwin) argued in 1641 that ‘Christ hath given this power to his church not as a hierarchy, neither to a national Presbytery, but to a company of saints in a congregational way.’44 Jeremiah Burroughs, in his response to Thomas Edwards’s notoriously abusive Gangraena (1646), asked angrily, ‘What national worship hath Christ instituted? Doth our birth in the nation make us members of the Church? These things are so palpably plain to any that will understand, that it is tedious to spend time about them.’45 Here we return to a common theme in Congregational writing, that mere place cannot automatically determine true membership in a particular church. Owen expresses annoyance that he and his brethren are accused of schism ‘for not esteeming ourselves made members of a particular church against our wills, by buying or hiring a habitation with such a precinct of ground.’46 Locality alone, whether nation or parish, denies the believer a voluntary covenant with Christ, the foundational criterion for a true particular church. For this reason, we ought to attend to the Congregationalist focus on the visible as much as on the local. The voluntary, visible proximity of the members of a small congregation made possible an intimacy of ‘fellowship’ otherwise reserved for the invisible church. We should recall Bartlet’s definition of a true particular church which stresses the physical togetherness of members, ‘one ordinary congregation or society of Saints, that can meet together in one place to worship God.’47 John Owen likewise defined the particular church as a function of member propinquity, ‘a society of men, called by the word to the obedience of

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the faith in Christ and joint performance of the worship of God in the same individual ordinances.’48 Indeed, for Owen the necessity that members worship together simultaneously and intimately reveals the fictiveness of the so-called universal church: The formal reason constituting a particular church to be a particular church is that those of whom it doth consist do join together according to the mind of Christ in the exercise of the same numerical ordinances for his worship: and in this sense, the universal church cannot be said to be a church, as though it had such a particular form of its own; which that it hath, or should have, is not only false but impossible ... to the joint performance of any exercise of religion, that they should hear one sermon together, or partake of one sacrament, or have one officer for their rule and government, is ridiculous to imagine; not do any profess to think so ... but those only who have profit by the fable. (114–15, my emphases)

The manifest absurdity of all Christians in the world gathering together to hear a sermon is revealed by a failure of visualization: ‘ridiculous to imagine.’ The universal church lacks sufficient reality – it is a ‘fable’ – to count as a meaningful church unit. Its members could never hope to see each other all at once, and so could not participate in the requisite intimacy with one another. This practical invisibility likewise disqualifies the English church, which possesses neither the catholicity of the invisible church nor the specificity of a true congregational church. As an ecclesial unit, the national church has no ‘peculiar form of its own’ (236), as Owen puts it, because we cannot see it. This idea represents Owen’s central defence against the charge of schism: ‘It is impossible that a man should be guilty of offending against that which is not: we have not separated from a national church in the Presbyterian sense, as never having seen any such thing’ (252, my emphasis). The problem with the national church is that you have to imagine it; the Congregationalists refuse to do so. This refusal implicitly extends to the nation as well. In Michael Herzfeld’s account, as we have seen, the cultural intimacy of the nation derives from its opposition to the impersonal state. The Congregationalists do in fact use the state as the negative other against which they define their own intimate community, but in the process they define (or rather expose) the nation as a rhetorical construct of the state. That is to say, in their eyes the nation does not possess an independent existence that would allow it naturally to endow institutions within it

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(such as churches) with a national identity. Rather, it is the state that exists, all too palpably, seeking to impose an identity on churches by force. Bartlet repeatedly speaks of the ‘national church-state’ to make the connection unmistakable, a phrase suggesting that the claims of the nation in fact derive from the state. Owen several times observes that the Presbyterians’ vaunted national community in fact represents a bureaucratic hierarchy: ‘Nor is it pleaded that we are one national church because the people of the nation are generally baptized, and do profess the true faith, but because the particular congregations in it are ruled ... by lesser and greater assemblies’ (251). Yet this was only partly true of the Presbyterian attitude regarding nation and state. For them, the two terms implied each other; English (or sometimes British) comradeship both produced and was maintained by the state. Hudson acknowledged that a national church required ‘the same community of church government,’ but also suggested that a church’s distinctiveness went beyond bureaucratic structure: ‘The churches in France and the Netherlands have the same faith and worship and kind of government, but they are not of the same national community thereof.’49 Cawdrey charged the Congregationalists with seditiously disrupting ecclesiastical uniformity, but his complaint also possessed an affective, national resonance, accusing the separatists of ‘relinquishing communion [with the English church] and, at parting, to cast dirt in their Mother’s face that bear them ... as no honest woman.’50 Schism from the state disrupted national intimacy. Yet this was an intimacy the Congregationalists reserved either for the earthly community they could see – their congregation – or for that community beyond earthly life, the invisible church. Milton and the Invisible Nation Milton’s Christian Doctrine, as well as many of his other works in the 1640s and 1650s, reveals broad agreement with the central tenets of Congregationalism.51 Milton uniformly insists on congregational selfgovernment, voluntary membership, and the ecclesial priority of the particular over the universal.52 We know that some readers of his prose grouped him with the Congregationalists. For example, the Presbyterian Robert Baillie in a 1661 letter included ‘the two Goodwins [John and Thomas], blind Milton, Owen ...’ as members of the ‘maleficent’ Independents.53 Furthermore, Geoffrey F. Nuttall has recently drawn our attention to a letter that Milton wrote in 1659 – on behalf of a

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Congregationalist-leaning French church in London – to Jean de Labadie, himself known for his Congregational sympathies; the choice of Labadie as minister of this church may well have been Milton’s.54 Yet my purpose here is not to identify Milton as a Congregationalist, a radical sectarian, or indeed as a member of any particular group. Rather, considering the overlap between his ideas and those of church separatists sheds light on Milton’s conception of state and nation. Milton develops a notion of the national imaginary by rejecting, on the one hand, the Presbyterian idea that the state is the natural extension of the nation, and by rejecting, on the other hand, the Congregationalist idea that the nation is a false fiction produced by the state. Whereas Owen, Goodwin, Bartlet, and Burroughs point to the nation’s invisibility as a sign of its falsehood, Milton takes that invisibility as the nation’s potential for virtue. The nation can ideally serve as a spirit of the community, a genius of the shore, without simply identifying itself with any single, visible state form. The intersection between the visible and invisible churches does not, for Milton, have national significance in itself. Indeed, he fully agrees with the Congregational insistence that modern national churches are not true churches. During Hebrew times, Milton writes in Christian Doctrine, there was ‘only one national or universal Jewish church, and no particular churches’; yet since Christ has freed us from the Law, ‘now there is no national church and a great number of particular churches, each absolute in itself’ (CPW 6:602). Similarly, in his Likeliest Means to Remove Hirelings (1659), Milton maintains that Christ’s church is ‘not ti’d to nation, dioces or parish, but consist[s] of many particular churches complete in themselves’ (CPW 7:292). The millenarian nationalism in tracts such as Of Reformation thus does not extend to Milton’s ecclesiology. The nation cannot determine the identity of visible churches, each one of which is locally complete in itself and all of which compose the supranational universal church on earth. Milton likewise echoes the Congregational abhorrence of state interference in ecclesiastical matters. According to Christian Doctrine, a particular church ‘has no man, no assembly, and no convention on earth set over it’ (CPW 6:601). Milton emphasizes repeatedly the distinction between minister and magistrate in his Treatise of Civil Power (1659): ‘Many are the ministers of God, and thir offices no less different than many; none more different then state and church-government’ (CPW 7:250–1). As much as Bartlet and Owen, Milton wants the state out of religion, affirming the autonomy of each particular congregation.

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Milton especially shares with the Congregationalists the anti-statist belief that individual sects authentically manifest the whole, against the Presbyterian logic of greater over lesser. This particularism does not lead Milton to social radicalism any more than it does the Congregational writers, and as David Loewenstein has shown Milton often distances himself from specific schismatic groups.55 But the fact that Milton’s particularism is often theoretical rather than practical does not make it less relevant to his conception of society and ecclesiology. It crucially shapes how he talks about English community. In 1644 Samuel Hudson defends the priority of the universal (and by extension English) church over particular congregations with a tree metaphor: ‘The Church Catholic is as the tree, Christ as the root, and particular Churches as branches. She is the mother and they as daughters born of her.’56 In the same year Milton uses the same metaphor, but shifts the emphasis entirely: ‘Fool!’ Milton responds to the mocker of English schism, ‘He sees not the firm root out of which we all grow, though into branches: nor will beware until he see our small divided maniples cutting through at every angle of his ill united and unwieldy brigade’ (CPW 2:556). Both writers value the root, but for Hudson the branches are the subordinate daughters of the tree, whereas for Milton they represent the tree’s power, as Roman infantry. The militarism of the image is Milton’s, but its particularism comes from the Congregationalists. Yet Milton parts company with the Congregationalists on a crucial point: although he eschews state interference and denies national churches, he does not simply identify state and nation. Bartlet and Owen see the nation as the fiction of the state, a phantom lacking visible form. To deny the national identity of a congregation, in their view, is to deny the state’s authority over that congregation. Milton’s rejection of a state-controlled church, in contrast, does not come at the expense of the nation. Rather than identifying state and nation, he instead occasionally implies an analogy between state and visible church: much as ecclesiastical bureaucracy threatens to intrude on a congregation’s freedom, so a particular visible church – even a Christinstituted one – may impose on the individual believer’s conscience. In A Treatise on Civil Power, distinguishing between harmless heresy and dangerous schism, Milton insists that ‘we [ought] to believe what in our conscience we apprehend the scripture to say, though the visible church with all her doctors gainsay’ (CPW 7:248). Milton here glances at the distinction between visible and invisible, opposing conscience to the former, though we may be inclined to think that he has in mind the

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Presbyterian sense of church. But his comments in Christian Doctrine suggest that he in fact uses the term comprehensively: ‘No visible church, then, let alone any magistrate, has the right to impose its own interpretation upon the consciences of men as matters of legal obligation’ (CPW 6:584). Whereas elsewhere Milton is careful to defend the particular visible church against state intrusion, here he aligns church with magistrate. He develops this idea a few pages later: ‘It is not the visible church but the hearts of believers which, since Christ’s ascension, have continually constituted the pillar and ground of truth. They are the real house and church of the living God, I Tim. iii. 15’ (CPW 6:589). ‘Hearts of believers’ sounds like the invisible church, made distinct here from the less authentic visible church. The Congregationalists tried to identify the visible and invisible dimensions of the church as closely as possible; Milton insists on a difference. Indeed, for all his Congregational sympathies elsewhere in his writing, the visible church in these passages appears to resemble the state. This sharper distinction between visible and invisible results in part from Milton’s de-emphasis on the purity of the congregation – unlike the Congregationalists, who make purity one of the cornerstones of their doctrine. William Bartlet explained, for example, that regular local churches in England were unacceptable to his brethren because ‘experience tells us that parish churches for the general consist of loose, profane, scandalous livers.’57 Only the elect are to be admitted in Bartlet’s church. Milton finds this attitude merely precious, and although he firmly defends the right of visible churches to separate from one another, he disapproves of Congregational fastidiousness. As he remarks in Areopagitica, ‘Not that I can think well of every light separation, or that all in a Church is to be expected gold and silver and pretious stones’ (CPW 2:564). Milton especially condemns such purified exclusivity because it weakens communal sociability over matters not crucial to salvation: ‘those neighboring differences, or rather indifferences ... need not interrupt the unity of Spirit, if we could but find among us the bond of peace’ (CPW 2:565). Whereas the Congregationalists see the intimacy within a church as a function of its purity, Milton worries that too high an expectation of purity will break unity. Here we come to what initially seems a paradox in Areopagitica: a centripetal pull towards unity and bonding, on the one hand, versus a centrifugal particularism away from reifying centralization, on the other. The answer often made, of course, is that Milton refers only to a ‘unity of Spirit,’ not a social unity, and that he opposes this spiritual

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harmony to worldly forms of constraint, whether material or social.58 Yet this position divorces the issue of unity from political concerns, which seems unlikely in a tract that interweaves ecclesiastical and civil community throughout. Nigel Smith, by contrast, notes of the ‘unity of Spirit’ phrase that ‘the language of congregational unity and toleration ... is made to function on behalf of the republic.’59 This view rightly puts society back into the picture, yet raises a question: the republic as what? The state? Congregational unity is expressly opposed to state unity; think of Milton’s celebration of ‘our small divided maniples’ in Areopagitica. This is the same moderate anti-statism that leads Milton to insist that ‘the State shall be my governours, but not my criticks’ (CPW 2:534). The spiritual (rather than institutional) quality of this ‘unity’ in fact resonates with Milton’s definition of the invisible church in Christian Doctrine: It is from this union and communion with the Father and with Christ, and among the members of Christ’s body themselves, that there comes into being that mystic body, THE INVISIBLE CHURCH, the head of which is Christ ... It need not be subject to spatial considerations: it includes people from many remote countries, and from all ages since the creation of the world ... Eph. ii. 19 to the end of the chapter: no longer are you strangers and lodgers but fellow citizens of the saints, and the household of God: built on the foundation of apostles and prophets, Jesus Christ himself being its corner-stone. (CPW 6:499–500)

Here Milton offers a unity that is neither spatial nor temporal, comprising believers from all over the world, characterized by an invisibility that confirms its authenticity. The unity of the invisible church lacks, as we might expect, any national dimension. Yet Milton nonetheless borrows the citizen metaphor from Ephesians – ‘fellow citizens of the saints’ – suggesting that this spiritual intimacy is analogous to, and can be understood in terms of, social intimacy. I wish to suggest that this analogy between the invisible church and social intimacy represents the counterpart of the analogy Milton elsewhere implies between the visible church and the impersonal state. The social intimacy that Milton has in mind in Areopagitica is the English nation, a godly community defined by its potential ability to escape institutional formalisms such as book licensing. Milton takes the Congregationalist contrast between the intimate congregation and the impersonal state and applies it to the nation and the state, respectively.

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To say that Milton aligns the invisible church with the nation does not mean that he thinks England is elect or infallible, anymore than the visible church / state correspondence means that he thinks that congregations cannot be godly. Rather, these analogies allow Milton to conceive of an association between the spiritual and the social while also distinguishing between diffuse and centralized forms of community. As in Herzfeld’s formulation, the intimate English nation emerges in opposition to the impersonal state, and in this sense the iconoclasm of Areopagitica is national as well as religious. Milton forges the nation by stripping away the state apparatus that threatens to reify and betray it. The institution of licensing betrays ‘the common people,’ treating them as ‘a giddy, vitious, and ungrounded people ... That this is care or love of them, we cannot pretend ...’ (CPW 2:536–7). Rather than caring for the rights of its people, the state betrays the national character that merits those rights; free writing was ‘the peoples birthright and priviledge in time of Parlament’ (CPW 2:541). The nation, of course, continues to need the state to put that English character into action, to make it institutionally manifest. Yet as much as possible Milton defines the nation as an intimate, spiritual community in opposition to the coercive visibility of the state. This is part of the reason why Areopagitica, more than any of the other tracts Milton wrote, takes such pains to imagine the nation. England cannot (in his view) rely on any single state institution or political program to define it as a nation, yet this refusal to reify implicitly deprives England of convenient forms of visibility. The lack of clear visibility has haunted nations to the present day – a quality that inclines both seventeenth-century Congregationalists and twentieth-century scholars to doubt their genuine existence. Yet Milton sees this drawback also as an advantage, since England’s potential freedom from institutional reification allows him (and obliges him) to bring his nation into visibility only by an act of imagination or deictic invocation: Lords and Commons of England, consider what Nation it is wherof ye are, and wherof ye are the governours ... (CPW 2:551) Behold now this vast City; a City of refuge, the mansion house of liberty ... (CPW 2:553–4) Methinks I see in my mind a noble and puissant Nation rousing herself like a strong man after sleep ... (CPW 2:558)

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Here we have rich examples of Anderson’s ‘imagined communities,’ mental pictures that make visible England’s affective and spiritual intimacy without simply reducing it to a phantom. Indeed, to say that an act of imagination conjures national space in Areopagitica does not deny the nation’s reality. Although the cumulative effect of Milton’s deictic language (consider, behold, see) does make the nation imagined, it does not make it fictional, as the Congregationalists would claim. Milton carefully distinguishes his vision of England from the ‘Atlantick and Eutopian polities, which never can be drawn into use’ (CPW 2:526). National space is both imagined and real, a consequence of its analogical affiliation with the invisible church, a community free of worldly trappings and derived from the ‘hearts of believers’ (CPW 6:589). The imagined visibility of Milton’s sense of nation in Areopagitica might incline us to regard it as merely a piece of rhetoric in the service of his ‘real’ purposes. Yet, in that case, the nation serves as an ambiguous rhetorical advantage for his arguments against licensing, an advantage easily turned against him by his Presbyterian opponents, as the Congregationalists fully realized. Invoking nation as a reason to limit state control in fact represents an unusual argument in the 1640s, requiring a fairly novel separation of state and nation. Milton’s use of England in his tract underscores the manner in which nationalism represents a sense of identity more than it does an expression of principle (such as Presbyterianism or Republicanism), even when identity is used to promote principles. The national imaginary is therefore distinct from the invocation of a public sphere, a space of the sort that Sharon Achinstein describes as the construction of a revolutionary reader.60 Milton’s treatises certainly do posit a public forum of debate and persuasion, but so do those of Owen and Burroughs, authors who expressly deny the national imaginary. Whereas the public sphere tends to operate by principle and rhetoric position, Milton’s national imaginary emphasizes communal affect and identity. It posits an intimate comradeship based on English moral character whose virtue merits its liberation from the impersonal and impositional state. Milton’s images of nation are rhetorical to the core, of course, and Milton uses them as a means of addressing the public sphere. But they are not themselves simply identical to the public sphere, but rather manifest one of the goals of that sphere’s activity: a national community that Milton believes exists or could exist if the state would allow. He discloses the English people’s meritorious character

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not by adducing political principles they hold (principle and policy, though important, belong to the state), but rather by visualizing national activity: The shop of warre hath not there more anvils and hammers waking, to fashion out the plates and instruments of armed Justice in defence of beleaguer’d Truth, then there be pens and heads there, sitting by their studious lamps, musing, searching, revolving new notions and idea’s wherewith to present, as with their homage and their fealty the approaching Reformation: others as fast reading, trying all things, assenting to the force of reason and convincement. What could a man require more from a Nation so pliant and so prone to seek after knowledge. What wants there to such a towardly and pregnant soile, but wise and faithfull labourers, to make a knowing people, a Nation of Prophets, of Sages, and of Worthies. (CPW 2:554)

Milton urges state officials not to license books by showing them (asking them to see in their minds) the multitude of English readers and writers busily at work, seeking knowledge, wisdom, and innovation in order to produce a nation – ‘to make a knowing people, a Nation of Prophets.’ If a slight tautology begins to emerge here – a nation of English people creates the English nation – it does so in part because the nation depends so much in this tract on an act of imagination, without which it would remain invisible. The nation’s position on the border between visibility and invisibility, however, is what distinguishes it from the inauthentic state. The nation’s diffusion beyond any single institutional form likewise marks its relation to geography. Of course, England must somewhat depend on spatial considerations – space keeps a community national rather than global – yet nonetheless Milton rarely reduces England to geography, as we saw in ‘Lycidas.’ Even in rhetorical contexts that emphasize the spatial limits of national identity, Milton relies on a ‘spirit of unity’ more than on borders to define national amity. Again, he derives this definition partly from the nation’s analogical relation to the invisible church, which does not rely on ‘spatial considerations’ yet comprises a ‘community of citizens’ (CPW 6:499). In The Tenure of Kings and Magistrates, for example, Milton specifically wants to deny the king’s native Englishness as an argument for preserving his life, yet his denial ends up proposing national intimacy as a model for even transnational forms of human friendship:

The Invisible Nation 195 Who knows not that there is a mutual bond of amity and brother-hood between man and man over all the World, neither is it the English Sea that can sever us from that duty and relation: a straiter bond yet there is between fellow-subjects, neighbours, and friends; But when any of these doe one to another so as hostility could doe no worse, what doth the Law decree less against them, then op’n enemies and invaders?... Nor is it distance of place that makes enmitie, but enmity that makes distance. He therfore that keeps peace with me, neer or remote, of whatsoever Nation, is to mee as farr as all civil and human offices an Englishman and a neighbour: but if an Englishman forgetting all Laws, human, civil and religious, offend against life and liberty, to him offended and to the Law in his behalf, though born in the same womb, he is no better then a Turk, a Sarasin, a Heathen. (CPW 3:214–15)

Milton here finds the nation in the heart rather than in the landscape. The passage refuses to define English unity in terms of geography, since the ‘straiter bond’ that exists between fellow citizens appears to be simply an intensification of the global ‘bond of amity’ among all human beings. Or rather, national amity helps Milton to conceive of global amity in the first place, since transnational intimacy – the peaceful man, ‘of whatsoever Nation, is to mee as farr as all civil and human offices an Englishman and a neighbour’ – nonetheless takes national identity as the continuing model of affection: to be friendly means behaving ‘as ... an Englishman.’ Such are the possibilities of a community that exists both in the world and in our mind’s eye.61 As always, the nation’s diffuse visibility is both an advantage and a drawback. In the above passage Milton is talking about the limit of nationhood, not its capacity. In ‘Lycidas’ and Areopagitica, the nation was the genius of the shore and the spirit of unity, affectively bonding the English among themselves while protecting the nation from the threat of worldly pastors and state censors. In these texts, institutional schism potentially liberated the nation’s virtuous character. In many of his later tracts, by contrast, Milton still distinguishes implicitly between state and nation, but he invokes the state to signal what the nation cannot or will not do. That does not make these other tracts less nationalistic, but it does make them less patriotic. The passage in Tenure concludes by indicting the lawbreaking Englishman, exiling him to the exotic outreaches to dwell with Turks, Saracens, and heathens. This repudiation exposes the boundary of national intimacy, requiring instead the rational and institutional power of the state, ‘the Law.’ The state

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thus enacts the necessary exclusions that the diffused unity and amity of the nation is unable to perform, reminding us that Milton’s sense of nation is merely analogous to, not identical with, his sense of the invisible church. Such concessions to state activity suggests that the national imaginary can endure only so much schism, that it must exclude as well as tolerate. Paul Stevens has remarked on ‘the extraordinary difficulty [Milton] and so many of his contemporaries have in separating the articulation of absolute and universal truths from the contingent and particular demands of community.’62 It is this divide between absolute and contingent that modern nations have tried to negotiate, claiming for themselves an inherent national character and sovereignty but at the same time defining themselves comparatively in relation to other cultures, customs, and traditions. Milton tries to straddle this line by conceiving of England as more spiritual than the state but more earthly than the invisible church, as a historically and geographically limited community that nonetheless partakes in (or potentially partakes in) the intimate purity of Christ’s elect. When the nation is at its best, not seeing is believing.

NOTES I thank the editors of this volume for their generous and prudent advice about this essay; they helped me avoid several significant errors in my argument. The errors that remain, of course, belong to me. 1 The emphasis here, of course, is on relative appearance and intuitive impression. Other communal forms are not in fact more ‘real’ or ‘natural’ than national forms, and all communal identities are to some degree constructed. 2 On nation as a function of racial consciousness, see Elie Kedorie, Nationalism (1960), 4th ed. (Oxford: Blackwell, 1993), esp. 62–9. On nation as a function of economic class, see Ernest Gellner, Nations and Nationalism (Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 1983). 3 A reference, of course, to Slavoj Žižek’s observation that nations cannot rely only on ‘a network of purely symbolic ties,’ and are obliged to supplement such abstractions with more palpable forms: ‘the contingent materiality of the “common roots,” of “blood and soil,” and so on.’ See Slavoj Žižek, They Know Not What They Do: Enjoyment as a Political Factor (London: Verso, 1991), 20.

The Invisible Nation 197 4 Elie Kedourie, Nationalism (1960), 4th ed. (London: Hutchinson, 1993), 1–11; Anthony Smith, Theories of Nationalism (London: Duckworth, 1971), 21; and Eric Hobsbawm, Nations and Nationalism since 1780 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1990), 9–10. See also Joad Raymond’s essay above. 5 For example, Tom Nairn, The Break-Up of Britain (London: New Left Books, 1977). Also, see Carla Hesse and Thomas Laqueur, who, in their introduction to a special issue of Representations (‘Nations before Nationalism,’ Representations 47 [1994]: 1–12), identify their effort ‘to rescue national cultures and nations from the thrall of an ideology, nationalism, and from the specific political form that is its telos – the nation-state’ (1). 6 Benedict Anderson, Imagined Communities (London: Verso, 1983), 15–16. 7 Complete Prose Works of John Milton, gen. ed. Don M. Wolfe, 8 vols (New Haven and London: Yale University Press, 1953–82), 2:557–8. All subsequent quotations from Milton’s prose are taken from this edition and cited as CPW parenthetically in my text. 8 Michael Herzfeld, Cultural Intimacy: Social Poetics in the Nation-State (New York: Routledge, 1997). Quotations will be cited parenthetically in my text. 9 The OED records no example of ‘nation-state’ until 1895, and ‘nation’ often functions as a synonym for ‘state’ in the seventeenth century. 10 OED, ‘state, n.’ def 28a. 11 Jonathan Scott, England’s Troubles (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2000), 34. 12 Not all iconoclasm of the period was specifically against the state, per se; some of it sought to protect the state from the encroachments of Laudian ‘innovation.’ See John Morrill, The Nature of the English Revolution (New York: Longman, 1993), 151–5. Yet, as we shall see, many schismatic groups associated Laudian and later Presbyterian impositions with the state itself. 13 See esp. Randall Otto, ‘The Remnant Church,’ Journal of Christian Theological Research 7 (2002): 15. 14 John Foxe, Acts and Monuments (London, 1570), sig. e1r. 15 William Covell, A Just and Temperate Defense of the Five Books of Ecclesiastical Polity by R. Hooker (London, 1603), 69. 16 Ibid., 73, 74. 17 The English reformers could never entirely escape this problem of novelty. I discuss this problem in Nationalism and Historical Loss in Renaissance England: Foxe, Dee, Spenser, Milton (Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 2004), esp. chs 1 and 5. 18 William Ames, The Marrow of Sacred Divinity (London, 1642). Ames notes that ‘the Church of the Jews was a national Church, and in some respects catholick, or universal, as the believing proselytes of every Nation under

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19 20

21 22

23 24 25

26 27 28 29 30

heaven were bound to join themselves to that one Church’ (197, my emphases). Under Christ’s dispensation, by contrast, the visible church becomes local, not national: ‘That visibility, which is in distinct companies or congregations, doth not only make a visible church, but touching the outward form doth make so many visible churches as there are distinct congregations’ (157). Quotations will be cited parenthetically in my text. On this passage, see Stephen R. Honeygosky, Milton’s House of God: The Invisible and Visible Church (Columbia: University of Missouri Press, 1993), 56. The year 1637 saw the calling of the Scottish Covenant against the English Prayer Book, the arrest of the antiformalist bishop John Williams, the notorious punishment of William Prynne, and a Star Chamber order limiting press freedom. On these contexts for ‘Lycidas,’ see David Norbrook, Poetry and Politics in the English Renaissance (London: Routledge & Kegan Paul, 1984), 270–85, and Joad Raymond’s essay above. Milton’s poetry is quoted from John Milton: Complete Shorter Poems, ed. John Carey, 2nd ed. (New York: Longman, 1997). This nation-heaven pattern – a penultimate reference to British history, followed by a final appeal to divine memorial – also appears in Milton’s letter to John Baptista Manso and in ‘Epitaphium Damonis.’ In ‘Manso,’ Milton speaks of his desire to write of ‘indigenas ... in carmina reges’ (line 80) just before he voices his hope to dwell ‘caelicolum semotus in aethera divum’ (line 95). In ‘Damon,’ he discusses his planned tale of the ‘Brittonicum’ (line 171) just before he describes his lost friend ‘Heroumque animas inter, divosque perennes’ (line 205). Lipking, ‘The Genius of the Shore: Lycidas, Adamastor, and the Poetics of Nationalism,’ PMLA 111 (1996): 205–21. Ibid., 212 and 210. The term ‘Anglican’ has been criticized because it implies an opposition to Puritan ideas that in fact broadly permeated the early Stuart church. See Nicholas Tyacke, ‘Puritanism, Arminianism, and Counter-Revolution,’ in The Origins of the English Civil War, ed. Conrad Russell (New York: Barnes & Noble, 1973). But I use the term not to mean antipuritanism but rather conformity to the canons of the Church of England. Honeygosky, Milton’s House of God, 42. Ames, Marrow of Theology, 200–1. Covell, Just and Temperate Defense, 72. Ibid., 76. See Peter Lake on the Laudian emphasis on visible beauty in ‘The Laudian Style: Order, Uniformity, and the Pursuit of the Beauty of Holiness in the 1630s,’ in The Early Stuart Church, 1603–1642, ed. Kenneth Fincham

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31

32

33 34

35 36 37 38 39 40 41 42 43 44 45 46 47

(Stanford: Stanford University Press, 1993), 161–85. Lake emphasizes the radical quality of the Laudian evaluation of the visible church: ‘Even to quite moderate divines raised within what we might term the English reformed tradition, many features of Laudianism appeared at best worrying and at worst frankly popish’ (173). My thanks to Professor Catherine Gimelli Martin for her generous private advice to me about the differing emphases conformists and non-conformists placed on the visible or invisible church. In an email message to me she discussed the High Church theological indifference to visible ceremony, noting that ‘the Anglicans casually gathered at Great Tew provide an excellent example of this.’ On the High Church theological latitude about visible worship, see Henry R. McAdoo, The Spirit of Anglicanism (New York: Charles Scribner’s Sons, 1965), esp. ch. 1. For relevant comments about how these ecclesiastical issues impact Milton, see Daniel W. Doerksen, ‘Milton and the Jacobean Church of England,’ Early Modern Literary Studies 1.1 (1995): 5.1–23; http://purl.oclc.org/emls/01–1/ doermilt.html. The classic and still the best general study of the Congregationalists is Geoffrey F. Nuttall, Visible Saints: The Congregational Way, 1640–1660 (Oxford: Basil Blackwell, 1957). On the prominence of Congregational fellowship, see Nuttall, Visible Saints, esp. 70–100. Cotton himself had a complicated relationship with Congregationalist doctrine, but these separatists nonetheless often found his writings congenial to their own. Samuel Hudson, The Essence and Unity of the Church Catholic Visible (London, 1644), 7. Ibid., 39 and 6. Daniel Cawdrey, Independency a Great Schism (London, 1657), 158. William Bartlet, Ichnographia, or, A Model of the Primitive Congregational Way (London, 1647), 51. Ibid., my emphasis. John Owen, Of Schism (London, 1657), 251. On this distinction, see Honeygosky, Milton’s House of God, 46. Owen, Of Schism, 113. Robert Baillie, A Dissuasive from the Errours of the Time (London, 1645), 8. A Glimpse of Sion’s Glory (London, 1641), sig. ¶1r. Jeremiah Burroughs, A Vindication of Mr. Burroughs (London, 1646), 23. Owen, Of Schism, 256. Bartlet, Ichnographia, 51.

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52

53

54 55 56 57 58

59

Owen, Of Schism, 201. Hudson, Essence and Unity, 6. Cawdrey, Independency a Great Schism, 167. Milton’s authorship of Christian Doctrine has, of course, been challenged. See William B. Hunter, Visitation Unimplored: Milton and the Authorship of ‘De Doctrina Christiana’ (Pittsburgh: Duquesne University Press, 1998). Nonetheless, the strong similarity between ecclesial views in Christian Doctrine and the rest of Milton’s prose makes me reasonably confident in his authorship. Congregational self-government: ‘Any church which is composed of these parts, although it may have only a few members, is to be considered a selfcontained and complete church, in that it has a supreme right in matters of religion’ (CPW 6:601). Voluntary membership: ‘It is a sign of faithlessness ... to imagine that churches need to be ruled by force of arms and by magistrates’ (CPW 6:613). Particular over universal: ‘A great number of particular churches ... joined together by a bond of mutual equality, form a single, catholic church’ (CPW 6:602–3). Robert Baillie, Letters and Journals, ed. D. Laing (Edinburgh: Ogle, 1841–2), 3:443. See also Geoffrey F. Nuttall, ‘Milton’s Churchmanship in 1659: His Letter to Jean de Labadie,’ Milton Quarterly 35.4 (2001): 227–31, esp. 227. In an earlier treatise Baillie had already associated Milton’s heretical ideas about divorce with Congregationalism, although there he acknowledged that ‘I do not know certainly whether this man professeth Independency.’ See A Dissuasive from the Errours of the Time (London, 1645), 116. Fifteen years later Baillie appears to have become certain. My thanks to David Loewenstein for pointing out this earlier reference to me. Nuttall, ‘Milton’s Churchmanship.’ Loewenstein, ‘Milton among the Religious Radicals and Sects: Polemical Engagements and Silences,’ Milton Studies 40 (2002): 222–47. Hudson, Essence and Unity of Church Catholic Visible, 39. Bartlet, Ichnographia, 65. The most provocative form of this argument is in Stanley Fish, ‘Driving from the Letter: Truth and Indeterminacy in Milton’s Areopagitica,’ in Remembering Milton: Essays on the Texts and Traditions, ed. Mary Nyquist and Margaret W. Ferguson (New York: Methuen, 1988), 234–54. Nigel Smith, ‘Areopagitica: Voicing Contexts, 1643–5,’ in Politics, Poetics, and Hermeneutics in Milton’s Prose, ed. David Loewenstein and James Grantham Turner (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1990), 114. Since the English Republic does not technically begin until 1649, I assume Smith uses ‘republic’ here more generically, as res publica.

The Invisible Nation 201 60 Sharon Achinstein, Milton and the Revolutionary Reader (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1994). For her specific comments on Areopagitica, see 58–70. 61 For further discussion of this passage, see Joad Raymond’s essay, ‘Look Homeward Angel,’ above, and David Loewenstein, ‘Late Milton: Early Modern Nationalist or Patriot?’ in Milton Studies 48 (2008): 57–8. 62 Paul Stevens, ‘Milton and the New World: Custom, Relativism, and the Discipline of Shame,’ in Milton and the Imperial Vision, ed. Balachandra Rajan and Elizabeth Sauer (Pittsburgh: Duquesne University Press, 1999), 111.

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PART THREE Ethnicity and International Relations

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7 Milton and the Limitations of Englishness thomas n. corns

Latterly, as a glance at the catalogue of any moderately well-stocked university library will disclose, ‘the rise of nationalism’ has replaced ‘the rising bourgeoisie’ as the permanently ascending category of English or British historiography. This essay does not resist the current orthodoxy that, in the early modern period, and at an accelerating rate through the seventeenth century, people living in England developed a clearer sense of what it meant to be English and what the concept of Englishness may have meant. In a literary context, that process is variously manifest, from the benign topographical poetry of Michael Drayton’s Poly-Olbion (1612, 1622), which of course includes a depiction of Wales, to the savagely and tendentiously deleterious stereotyping of other peoples, from Nashe, through Middleton, Cleveland, Nedham, and others to Marvell and beyond. This stereotyping obliquely asserts the characteristics of Englishness in the assertion of its difference from whatever is deemed to characterize the foreigner. But much evidence supports Colin Kidd’s elegant thesis that the impetus towards defining the English identity in the early modern period was ‘shaped by the gravitational pull of ... first-order determinants of public debate,’ among which he highlights ‘the mainstays of the early modern world view – respect for the authority of the Bible, one’s confession and the established institutions of church and state.’ Thus, Kidd concludes: The familiar staples of early modern political discourse – ancient constitutions, conquest theory, regnal status within composite states and ecclesiastical polity – exerted an enormous influence on the expression of identity. Thus, although ethnic identities were not absent from the early modern world, the form they took rendered them vulnerable to colonisation by other ideological types ...1

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Kidd particularly emphasizes how the arguments from national identity were appropriated to establish the legitimacy of institutions. The literature with which this essay engages is often concerned with legitimizing hostilities between England and other countries, and my argument is that such tendentious stereotyping was inherently problematic in ways which Milton and the more astute among his contemporaries understood and sometimes resisted. The problem emerged in acute form in John Cleveland’s evidently influential poem, ‘The Rebell Scot,’ instigated by Scotland’s entry into the first English civil war on the side of Parliament. The confessional component Kidd speaks of is immediately evident as Cleveland accepts the denominational stereotype of the puritan as the grasping, hypocritical killjoy; however, Cleveland extends the stereotype until it becomes a racial one. In his account, Scots are ‘Citizens o’th World; they’re all in all, / Scotland’s a Nation Epidemicall,’ though they travel, not to learn foreign manners, but to fill their pockets. With a strange kind of optimism and in a precise, indecent, and suggestive metaphor Cleveland notes: Sure England hath the Hemerods, and these On the North Posterne of the patient seize, Like Leeches: thus they physically thirst After our blood, but in the cure shall burst.

Note the density and complexity of the imagery: the northern border is England’s back door or postern; but the anus is a sort of back door, too; and around it, there are manifestations of national disorder, analogous to haemorrhoids, and haemorrhoids can be treated by affixing leeches, which in turn feed till they burst; as may the Scots. In the course of the metaphor, England’s centrality is asserted and the neighbour state reduced to a parasitic appendage, not only other but lesser. But such manoeuvres are always difficult from royalist or court poets because of the extraordinary mating strategies of the Stuart royal family that left them as monarchs of Scotland and England but also close relations to the Bourbon and Orangist dynasties. Indeed, Charles II was minded to consider himself very much the head of this extended royal clan.2 Cleveland sees his problem, and his poem contains a curious caveat – not all Scots are contemptible, especially not the house of Stuart: after all, ‘CHARLES came thence’ (that is, Charles I, who was born in Scotland and was king of Scotland). Again, most of the states

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with which England had intermittently hostile dealings in the seventeenth century were, like England, so factionalized as to make the generalization of national stereotyping difficult to maintain. France had its Huguenots; the United Provinces had republicans as well as Orangists; Scotland had its loyalists, preeminently, in Cleveland’s phrase, in the ‘loyall Band’ of the royalists’ then current hero, James Graham, the marquis of Montrose.3 For all its inherent problems, Cleveland’s stereotyping stuck and proved serviceable. Certainly, Marchamont Nedham with facility appropriated it through the early issues of Mercurius Politicus, written against the background of the second English civil war, in which Scotland, now siding with the king, was poised to invade England.4 Cleveland’s poem retained a resonance long after its author’s death in 1658. Indeed, in 1667 in ‘The Last Instructions to a Painter’ Marvell (in all probability) not only celebrated the exceptional (in both senses) conduct of the heroic Scottish soldier Archibald Douglas in a naval encounter with the Dutch but he also reworked that description in ‘The Loyall Scot,’ a poem which opens with the amusing fiction of the ghosts of Elysium selecting Cleveland, ‘as a favourable Pennance,’ to write the poem of welcome to Douglas’s shade: ‘Much had hee Cur’d the Humor of his vein.’5 Marvell himself received an interesting variation on this treatment in his own representation of the Dutch. In 1653, at the time of the first Anglo-Dutch war, he wrote ‘The Character of Holland,’ carefully characterizing the Dutch as promoters of and sympathetic to religious radicalism, the ‘Staple of Sects and Mint of Schisme,’ at a time when the English republic was suppressing Ranters and Quakers and establishing its credentials as guardian of Protestant respectability. Marvell finds himself constrained to exploit a hostile stereotype by the polemical context and to add to its tendentious development. English propagandists from several parts of the political spectrum over the rest of the century would recognize the usefulness of having such a serviceable way of denigrating the Dutch. Moreover, not only does the poem stereotype the Dutch but it also by implication asserts the orthodoxy of republican England and identifies an inherent commitment to religious propriety as part of England’s national identity. A sizeable fragment of the poem appeared again during the third Anglo-Dutch war and quite probably, also, in the second Anglo-Dutch war.6 By that time, of course, Marvell, as a partisan of what is variously identified as the Country party or the proto-Whigs, perceived the solemnly Protestant Dutch

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as England’s natural allies against Catholic France. The joke would have been savoured by Cleveland’s ghost. Milton never got himself into the difficulties Marvell and Cleveland faced because his own resort to ethnic stereotypes was more transparently denominational, though the issues remained problematic. An aversion to Catholicism or Presbyterianism overrides ethnic considerations. In his Observations on the Irish Articles of Peace, the native Irish are easily enough dismissed as too ‘indocible,’ too primitive even to learn the principles of animal husbandry, still ploughing ‘with horses by the Tayle.’7 But his real concerns are with tainting the leadership of Presbyterians throughout the British isles with the behaviour of the Scottish presbytery of Belfast. It is their status as Presbyterians, not Scots, nor settlers in Ireland, that interests him polemically, though their disadvantages as foreigners in a marginal territory do not pass unexploited.8 That is not to say that Milton forgoes the opportunity afforded him by the received image of the indigenous Catholics. Throughout his work as apologist for the republican regime Milton laboured under the disadvantage that the opinion of most Englishmen was predisposed against him. With the Irish campaign, however, the case was different. English anti-Catholic sentiment had been massively intensified through the early 1640s as atrocity stories associated with the 1641 uprising were transmitted luridly in publications like Thomas Morley’s Remonstrance of the Barbarous Cruelties and Bloudy Murders Committed By the Irish Rebels Against the Protestants in Ireland ... Being the examinations of many who were eye-witnesses of the same ... Presented to the whole kingdome of England, that thereby they may see the Rebels inhumane dealings, prevent their pernicious practises, relieve their poore brethrens necessities, and fight for the Religions, Laws, and Liberties (London, 1644), a tract which certainly lived up to its title page. Of course, it is an easy game to play, and Milton plays it to serve his principal polemical objectives. The Catholic Irish, indeed, are primitive, ignorant, and vicious. But that easy stereotype is made to serve a much subtler strategy aimed elsewhere, at Presbyterianism in Ireland and at its English apologists. It deepens the Presbyterian and for that matter royalist guilt by association. How could they, though Protestants, associate themselves in the Articles of Peace they have entered into with such creatures? It strengthens, too, the claims of Milton and the Rump to speak for England, for the Protestant interest, and for England’s rights to govern and control a subject and degenerate people. Similarly, when Italy in general or Rome or Savoy in particular are deleteriously represented, the terms are explicitly anti-Catholic. Thus, in

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Areopagitica those manifestations of press control, in a sprightly personification, which appear in ‘the Piatza of one Title page’ are explicitly priestly, marked by ‘their shav’n reverences’ (CPW 2:504). The ‘bloody Piedmontese’ massacre the Waldensians out of popish frenzy; as much Italian as their assailants, the Waldensians themselves are ‘saints.’9 Milton’s Protestantism often had a pronounced internationalism. Milton’s treatment of Italy illustrates particularly well the conflicted nature of his appeals of notions of national identity. Sometimes the Italian intelligensia appear as fellow sufferers under repressive regimes that share common features (typically, an enthusiasm for prelatical hierarchy, albeit across the denominational divide): ‘I have sat among their lerned men, for that honor I had, and bin counted happy to be born in such a place of Philosophic freedom, as they suppos’d England was, while themselvs did nothing but bemoan the servil condition into which lerning amongst them was brought’ (CPW 2:537–8). ‘Supposed’ declares his recognition of a common oppression uniting English and Italians. But elsewhere, as when he recalls that his poems delivered in private academies were well received, he notes the Italians generally devalue the efforts of men from northern Europe, owing to a general sense of cultural superiority which he does not challenge. Indeed, he goes on to speak of setting himself a program of study aimed at dragging his native culture closer to the achievement of that of Italy (CPW 1:809–12). However, in other discourses, since the days of the Marian exiles, England had been figured as singularly privileged, a Christian chosen people analogous to the status of Old Testament Israel.10 Most obviously, perhaps, the woodcut on the title page of the Geneva Bible shows Israelites fleeing Egypt to the promised land with texts that unmistakably tie that experience, typologically, to the experience of English Protestantism. Even here, however, the issues are not straightforward. It is the Geneva Bible because England had proved too threatening to her most progressive theologians and Geneva had given them shelter and also provided a model and inspiration for the English Reformation. Milton sometimes adopts the Tudor reformers’ notion of England’s special mission. In The Doctrine and Discipline of Divorce, for example, he addresses thus the Long Parliament and the Westminster Assembly of Divines: Who but Alcuin and Wicklef our Country men open’d the eyes of Europe, the one in arts, the other in Religion. Let not England forget her precedence of teaching nations how to live.

210 Thomas N. Corns Know, Worthies, know and exercise the privilege of your honour’d Country. (CPW 2:231–2)

Moreover, he extends the world-historical role of England from religious mission to a sort of providential republicanism. Thus, in The Readie and Easie Way England is figured as a ‘nation no less noble and well fitted to the liberty of a Commonwealth, then the ancient Greeks and Romans’ (CPW 7:420). Whatever the status of such comments within Milton’s system of beliefs and values, he knows that, in the longer view of history, England’s role has not been particularly distinguished. Indeed, his first tract, Of Reformation (1641), is a historical rhapsody in which the course of English ecclesiastical history is represented as a recurrent process of failure and betrayal. Protestant bishops emerge as no better than their Catholic predecessors, and even martyred prelates achieve nothing in the promotion of national piety since they are necessarily corrupted by their office, secured by a form of church government retained, exceptionally, by the English version of reformation. England, since ‘Wicklef,’ had contributed little to the Reformation, a point he handles very defensively in Areopagitica: ‘As our obdurate Clergy have with violence demean’d the matter, we are become hitherto the latest and the backwardest Schollers’ (CPW 2:553). The passage leads into another variant on the positive national image. England may have no record of achievement, but change is imminent. In a studied compliment to the Long Parliament and perhaps to the Westminster Assembly of Divines he urges: ‘What could a man require more from a Nation so pliant and so prone to seek after knowledge. What wants there to such a towardly and pregnant soile, but wise and faithful labourers, to make a knowing people, a Nation of Prophets?’ (CPW 2:554). The polemical thrust, which emphasizes the irrelevance of minor ideological fragmentation in the context of such national vigour, is plain enough. Parliament is urged to look beyond the immediate issue, particularly the rise of sects and their associated heterodoxies, to rejoice in its role as the founders of a new Jerusalem, though the vision he offers rests, unsubstantiated, in a hazy futurity. Certainly, almost nothing in England’s past, in his view, supports such optimism. As he remarks in ‘On the late Massacre in Piedmont,’ Waldensianism anticipated the northern Reformation, leading them to the ‘truth’ at a time ‘When all our fathers worshipped stocks and stones.’11 His review of the early history of the inhabitants of Britain suggests neither a providential guidance nor evidence of a singular potential to

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lead the peoples of the world. Milton’s most extensive engagement with the history of the English people comes in The History of Britain, That part especially now called England, a work he evidently tinkered with through the mid-century and which he eventually published in 1670. This neglected masterpiece of verve, wit, and playfulness spiritedly rehearses Miltonic themes. His perspective on the people who had inhabited Britain before the Norman Conquest subordinates any concern with national identity to his recurrent and pervasive values of anticlericalism and, widely defined, antimonarchism and republicanism. Milton does not present a national history that celebrates either Britain or England. Rather, early history depicts primitivism, ignorance, corruption, and depravity. He represents his Britons as no better than savages. Milton, of course, always displays the Englishman’s easy contempt for the other peoples of the British Isles, for the Scots (less evident here than elsewhere), for the Welsh in their ‘Mountanous and Barren Corner,’ for the ‘wild Irish’ in their ‘Bogs.’ But his forefathers, it seems, were no better, save when beaten, like children, into a temporary civility by the Romans.12 This is not the prehistory of a chosen people; or at least, whatever the subsequent history of England, it owes nothing to that past. Milton’s indifference to precedent and to the contemporary consequence of what may have happened formerly leads him to ignore the arguments of radical constitutionalists that preConquest England manifested a legal system or an ancient and mixed constitution that could usefully be invoked in his own age. The past Milton establishes is valueless in his own age. Helpfully, no doubt, for the republican position, it cannot show the customary and time-hallowed status of monarchism because numerous forms of government are to be found in the pre-Conquest period. Vortigern was ‘chief rather than sole King.’ The early Saxon settlers had ‘7 absolute Kingdoms.’ Edward ‘had the whole Iland in subjection, yet so as petty Kings reign’d under him.’ There is even a republic, somewhat longer lived than the English Republic of his own day, in Northumbria after the death of Ethelred, and an obvious glee informs his comments: ‘thir Kings one after another so oft’n slain by the people, no man dareing, though never so ambitious, to take up the Scepter which many had found so hot, (the only effectual cure of ambition that I have read) for the space of 33 years’ – note that minatory parenthesis. Milton savours attempts to assert the ancient status of royal lineages. Hengist and Horsa are allegedly ‘descended in the fourth degree from Woden; of whom, deify’d for the fame of his acts, most Kings of those Nations

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derive thir pedigree.’ Ethelwolf’s chroniclers ‘write ... his Pedigree, from Son to Father, up to Adam,’ an amusing anticipation of Sir Robert Filmer’s perspective, perhaps, and certainly a reduction to absurdity of attempts to depict a kingly Adam as a prototypical monarch.13 A playful anticlericalism and an abrasive puritanical Protestantism pervade the text, and support its best jokes. When Augustine meets with Ethelbert as a prelude to the conversion of England, the king ‘chose a place to meet them under the open Sky, possest with an old perswasion, that all Spells, if they should use any to deceive him, so it were not within doors, would be unavailable ...’ Milton describes from his source, Bede, how Augustine’s party advance, with their standard, their silver cross, their ‘painted image’ of Christ, ‘singing thir solemn Litanies,’ and adds, tartly, his own observation that thus, probably, they increased his suspicion that a spell was being wrought;14 so much for gay antiphons still favoured by papists and prelates in his own age. The monk Elmer not only claimed the power of prophecy but also sustained serious injury in an experiment in manned flight; how strange he ‘could not foresee, when time was, the breaking of his own Legs for soaring too high’ (CPW 5:394). Milton uses the lamentations of his sources as a route into a broader and transhistorical attack on the clergy that narrows into anti-Presbyterianism. Those ‘suttle Prowlers, Pastors in Name, but indeed Wolves ... seising on the Ministry as a Trade, not a Spiritual Charge’ occupy the same ethical status as the Presbyterian divines in The Tenure of Kings and Magistrates ‘rambling from Benefice to Benefice, like rav’nous Wolves seeking where they may devour the biggest’ (CPW 5:175, 241). Milton’s history is a journey away from grand narratives. He abandons the myth of England as a chosen and privileged nation. He abandons the legacy of sixteenth-century Protestant historiography, the legacy of John Foxe and John Bale, with its patient chronicling of the sufferings and triumph of the godly in the providential progress towards an English reformation. He virtually abandons a providential view of history altogether. Good men frequently suffer; bad men may triumph, few are punished for their actions, but each successive civilization ends in disaster. He rejects, too, from the principles of Guicciardini and Machiavelli, that the study of history can give lessons by which subsequent ages can conduct themselves politically, for political action emerges as unworthy or ineffectual.

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Milton’s is a narrative without heroes and without consequence. It begins doubting the enterprise of historiography: Certainly oft-times we see that wise men, and of best abilitie have forborn to write the Acts of thir own daies, while they beheld with a just loathing and disdain, not only how unworthy, how pervers, how corrupt, but often how ignoble, how petty, how below all History the persons and thir actions were; who either by fortune, or som rude election had attain’d as a sore judgment, and ignominie upon the Land, to have cheif sway in managing the Commonwealth. (CPW 5:1–2)

It ends, echoing William of Malmesbury, with a general reflection that evidently merited italics: ‘As the long suffering of God permits bad men to enjoy prosperous daies with their good, so his severity oft times exempts not good men from thir share in evil times with the bad’ (CPW 5:403). What intervenes shows a perspective shaped by very different imperatives from a straightforward engagement with Englishness or its precursor (and successor), Britishness; Milton’s political and religious agenda, opportunistically pursued in the difficult circumstances of the Restoration, squeezes out celebration of nationhood, offering instead a view of England as merely the site of reiterated folly and corruption. Moreover, as a fairly well-travelled humanist intellectual, Milton knew how peripheral English life and culture were to the mainstream of continental European thought and art, how dependent on continental Europe the English intelligentsia were, and how the English were perceived and represented in continental Europe. In the seventeenth century England was positioned on the edge of European consciousness, its language rarely understood outside mercantile ports with direct links to England, its towering literary achievements unconsidered by the French or Spanish or Germans or Italians (though the Dutch evidently had some enthusiasm for its works of popular piety in translation). Occasionally, a play of Shakespeare had been translated; there’s a Dutch Taming of the Shrew, for example. Latin works by English authors did fare better. Bacon’s Latin writings were often pirated. But English was so unfamiliar that, as late as 1665, an appropriate translator could not be found in Paris for the Philosophical Transactions of the Royal Society.15 At the same time, English intellectuals were acutely aware of their own dependency on continental scholarship and presses for both classical works and recent writing. Historians of the printed book have

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analysed private libraries: ‘Congreve’s library, much more strongly biased towards English literature than most, depended on Continental printing for 40 per cent of its titles. Locke’s library is probably more typical – of his three and half thousand books fewer than half were printed in Britain ... and only 39 per cent were in English ...’16 No record of Milton’s library is extant, though if we consider his commonplace book, especially if we pick out entries that relate to thought, rather than details of British history, once more a high level of continental indebtedness is evident. Again, Milton had read Dante and Petrarch and Ariosto and cited them even in his controversial prose; he well knew that the Italian literati were not citing Shakespeare and Spenser and Jonson. Using the account of the Oldenburg diplomat, Hermann Mylius, the only contemporary diarist to record conversations with Milton, Leo Miller demonstrates the kinds of embarrassment experienced by Milton the polyglot intellectual in the service of the English Republic. Indeed, Mylius reported Milton’s comment, by way of apology for how the diplomat had been treated, that ‘in the Council, not more than three or four had ever been out of England.’17 Of course, in his defences of that regime, Milton attempts to speak for England, seemingly buying into the kind of rhetoric that Marvell used when he envisaged Cromwell marching on Rome or being courted by continental monarchs.18 Explicitly, on the title pages of the first two Latin defences, he speaks ‘Pro Populo Anglicano.’ Indeed, I suspect the force of that asserted Englishness is complex, an assertion to continental Europe that – finally – England has moved to the forefront of political innovation. When on the title page of his Latin defences, he styles himself ‘Angl[us],’ is he saying to continental Europe that here, finally, is an English thinker and writer that deserves their attention? But he knows the image of the English in continental Europe as marginalized dullards. He remarks on it in his autobiographical digression in The Reason of Church-Government,19 and even by the time he writes Paradise Lost he entertains the possibility that the ‘cold / Climate’ could indeed stop creativity. As Robert Burton, cited by Alastair Fowler, noted, ‘In these northern countries, the people are ... generally dull.’20 In ‘At a Vacation Exercise’ the youthful Milton indeed proclaimed, ‘Hail native language,’21 as if single-handedly asserting the transcendence of vernacular literature. But the concept of Englishness across his oeuvre is complex and conflictory. He can play the English patriot

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with brass-necked audacity, but other agendas, cultural and religious, more profoundly drive the ways in which he perceives and represents the issues of national identity. Late in his career, in his last known letter to any correspondent, he wrote to Peter Heimbach to assure him that he had survived the plague of 1665. Heimbach had written of his return to his ‘heavenly patria.’ Milton responds, in a resonant phrase, ‘One’s Patria is wherever it is well with him’ (CPW 8:2, 4). The comment reflects, perhaps, an awareness that national belonging is overridden by a larger allegiance to an international community of progressive intellectuals. He writes, after all, as a polyglot apologist for a former regime addressing a servant of the Elector of Brandenburg who had formerly sought employment as secretary to the English representative in The Hague. But he suggests, too, the singularity of his own creative genius and a notion that, while nowhere may really own it, in a sense it belongs everywhere, a spirit too mercurial for the cultural constraints of mere Englishness.

NOTES 1 Colin Kidd, British Identities before Nationalism: Ethnicity and Nationhood in the Atlantic World, 1600–1800 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1999), 287–8. 2 Ronald Hutton, Charles II (1989; rpt. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1991), 290. 3 John Cleveland, The Poems of John Cleveland, ed. Brian Morris and Eleanor Withington (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1967), 29–32. All quotations are from this edition. 4 Mercurius Politicus, persistently in the issues for 1650. 5 Andrew Marvell, The Poems and Letters of Andrew Marvell, ed. H.M. Margoliouth, 3rd ed., rev. Pierre Legouis with E.E. Duncan-Jones (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1971), 1:164–5, 180–7. 6 Marvell, Poems and Letters, 1:309. 7 Complete Prose Works of John Milton, gen. ed. Don M. Wolfe, 8 vols (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1953–82), 3:304, 303; subsequent quotations taken from this edition are cited as CPW parenthetically in my text. 8 Thomas N. Corns, ‘Milton’s Observations upon the Articles of Peace: Ireland under English Eyes,’ in Politics, Poetics, and Hermeneutics in Milton’s Prose, ed. David Loewenstein and James Grantham Turner (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1990), 130–3.

216 Thomas N. Corns 9 John Milton, Complete Shorter Poems, ed. John Carey, 2nd ed. (London: Longman, 1997). 10 See Achsah Guibbory’s essay above. 11 ‘On the late Massacre in Piedmont,’ lines 3–4, in John Milton, Complete Shorter Poems. 12 CPW 5:183, 59, 58, 101, 61. 13 CPW 5:141, 185, 304, 255, 145, 268. On Milton’s History in relation to English republicanism, see especially Nicholas von Maltzahn, Milton’s History of Britain: Republican Historiography in the English Revolution (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1991). 14 CPW 5:188 and note 12. 15 P.G. Hoftijzer, ‘British Books Abroad: The Continent,’ in The Cambridge History of the Book in Britain, vol. 4, ed. John Barnard and D.F. McKenzie with Maureen Bell (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2002), 735–7. 16 John Barnard, introduction to History of the Book, 4:6. 17 Leo Miller, John Milton and the Oldenburg Safeguard (New York: Loewenthal Press, 1985), 172. 18 Marvell, ‘An Horatian Ode upon Cromwel’s Return from Ireland’ and ‘The First Anniversary of the Government under O.C.,’ Poems and Letters, 1:94, 111. 19 CPW 1:810, where he speaks more generally of Italian perspectives on northern Europe. 20 See John Milton, Paradise Lost, ed. Alastair Fowler, 2nd ed. (London: Longman, 1998), 9:44–5 and note. 21 Complete Shorter Poems, 79.

8 The Anglo-Scoto-Dutch Triangle: Milton and Marvell to 1660 john kerrigan

The execution of Charles I in January 1649 appalled his followers in the three kingdoms and alienated much continental opinion, but nowhere was its impact greater than among the royalist exiles – many of them Scots – who had gathered in The Hague around the Prince of Wales. When the battle-hardened earl of Montrose (a leading figure in the entourage) heard the news, he fainted clean away,1 then wrote a poem promising revenge: ‘I’le sing thy Obsequies, with Trumpet sounds, / And write thy Epitaph with Bloud and Wounds.’2 Montrose’s campaign may be said to have begun in May 1649 with the assassination, apparently by the earl’s men, of the Dutch-born Cambridge scholar, Isaac Dorislaus, who had returned to the United Provinces to represent the English Commonwealth. This murder heightened tension, but it was only one example of the wars of the three kingdoms reaching into the Netherlands. Entangled with English politics since at least the 1580s, when Elizabeth I backed the Dutch against their Spanish rulers (the earl of Leicester became their Governor-General), and within a few decades integrated even more firmly into archipelagic affairs when the Stadholder Willem van Oranje took the crown from James II and VII, the United Provinces were a crucible of the military and literary conflicts that troubled mid-seventeenth-century Britain and Ireland. Montrose’s plan to take arms and men from the Netherlands to Scotland was compromised from the start. Though he had been one of the earliest signatories of the Scottish national Covenant, he had defied the Kirk by opposing the abolition of episcopacy in England, and his 1644–6 campaign in Scotland with Alasdair Mac Colla and his Irish Catholic troops further estranged him from the Kirk party. When its commissioners reached The Hague to negotiate with Prince Charles,

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they refused to be in the same room as Montrose.3 Like his father inclined to back competing factions as a form of insurance, Charles encouraged both sides, so that Montrose reached Scotland in 1650 knowing that many royalists would now turn caution into a principle and not rise until the Kirk backed the Stuarts. After a short but gallant campaign, he was captured, brought to Edinburgh, and tried. The horror of his sentence is captured in a poem which he supposedly wrote with the point of a diamond on the window of his cell: On Himself, upon hearing what was his Sentence Let them bestow on ev’ry Airth a Limb; Open all my Veins, that I may swim To Thee my Saviour, in that Crimson Lake; Then place my purboil’d Head upon a Stake; Scatter my Ashes, throw them in the Air: Lord (Since Thou know’st where all these Atoms are) I’m hopeful, once Thou’lt recollect my Dust, And confident Thou’lt raise me with the Just.4

These grisly lines are not quite gruesome enough. Montrose was ignobly hanged, and after being hacked into pieces, so that several ‘airths’ or regions could put his limbs on display, his trunk was buried in unconsecrated ground. For Iain Lom of the Macdonalds, who regarded Montrose as a traditional Highland warrior-leader, the spoiling of his body – Bu ro mhath rudhadh gruaidhe ‘N am tarrainn suas gu trod; Deud chailc bu ro mhath dlùthadh Fo mhala chaoil gun mhùgaich ...5

– was particularly vile. But the fate of Montrose’s corpse, and most conspicuously his parboiled head, which spent a decade grinning from a spike on the Edinburgh tolbooth, was widely deplored. It even found its way into the correspondence of John Milton. In a letter dated 15 January 1653,6 the Scottish royalist Andrew Sandelands, who had been at university with Milton,7 advised him, as Secretary for Foreign Tongues of the English Republic, how the regime could secure

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the timber and tar that it needed to equip its navy, which was fighting the first of the three wars that racked Anglo-Dutch relations in the seventeenth century (1652–4, 1665–7, and 1672–4).8 Warning, or, as a royalist, boasting, that no Scot would agree to log the Caledonian forests ‘because it is reputed a disservice to ye king and Country,’ Sandelands outlines a plan by which ‘ye State undertaking ye worke ym selves may have abundance of tarre for nothing and timber which will not only defray all charges but pay yor garriesons in ye Highlands & North of Scotland.’ In return, he seeks ‘ye gift of yt weatherbeaten scull of my Noble and truly honoble. patron’ Montrose. This is an extraordinary appeal; but a shared hatred (by this date) of ‘Jac Presbyter’ was a strong enough motive for the ultraroyalist to woo the republican; Sandelands wants the head ‘that it remaine noe longer a Contemptuous object & ludibrium Presbyterorum Scotorum (laughing-stock of the Scottish Presbyterians), who ar thee bassest of men.’9 Montrose’s head interests me because his campaign and Sandelands’s letter both foreground an Anglo-Scoto-Dutch triangle that has been insufficiently explored by historians10 and hardly noticed by literary scholars. As a result, few seem to be aware that, while the Commonwealth was tightening its grip on Ireland and Scotland, in the wake of the victories celebrated by Marvell’s ‘Horatian Ode’ and Milton’s sonnet to Cromwell, it sought union with the United Provinces – a project which collapsed into the First Anglo-Dutch War, and precipitated Milton’s sonnet to Sir Henry Vane and Marvell’s ‘Character of Holland.’ Indeed, that ebullient satire was probably written to demonstrate Marvell’s employability just when Sandelands was lobbying Milton; a letter dated 21 February 1653 from Milton to the President of the Council of State indicates Marvell’s knowledge of the United Provinces (which he had visited in the early to mid-1640s) and of the Dutch language and recommends that he be made his assistant as Secretary for Foreign Tongues.11 The triangular matrix was multibraided and full of conflicts. There were regional contacts (e.g., East Anglia and Holland) and differences – between the west and (Episcopalian) east of Scotland, for instance, or between such Protestant cities as Leiden and the royalist-Catholic areas of the Dutch Republic that shaded southwards into the Spanish Netherlands. National identities were bolstered by war propaganda, but in every part of the jigsaw there were potent dissenting minorities, eager to cross-collaborate. And elites could invoke ethnic stereotypes (as Milton and Marvell both did) without regarding them as comprehensively

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valid. That the matrix incorporated variables, however, did not make its interactions any less intense. One reason why the Dutch connection makes for a richer triangulation with Britain than can be found between, say, Britain and France at this date, is precisely that the links included so much contention as well as so much that was compatible. The vitality of the Anglo-Scottish axis should not be underrated. Though the English, after a flurry of panegyric and satire around the regal union of 1603, preferred to ignore the frigid north, they were rudely awoken to Scottish affairs by the signing of the Covenant. Thereafter, friction between sections of the English and the Scots led to violence in 1639–40, 1644, 1648, and 1650–1, while union was in varying degrees a feature of the Solemn League and Covenant between the Scots Estates and the English Parliament (1643), the Scottish Engagement with Charles I (1647), the coronation of his son as king of Great Britain at Scone (1651), and a short-term achievement of the Protectorate (1654–60).12 To judge from poems and pamphlets, however, while the Cromwellians incorporated Scotland largely to complete the defeat of royalism and bolster the security of the Commonwealth, and were encouraged in this by antipathy, they positively sought union with the Netherlands because of perceived affinity and historical involvement, and were driven into hostility by Dutch reluctance. To the south, there was more contact than is often realized. The English looked to Dutch models in painting, architecture, and such practical arts as fen drainage. The reclamation of large parts of East Anglia with Dutch help can only have made more evident what the marking of dykes, sandbanks, and sea-lanes on maps was imparting,13 that the British archipelago extended physically into the Netherlands – that patchwork of canals and polders derided as a ‘quagmire isle.’14 Through the medium of newsbooks, both peoples were kept informed about their neighbours across the water. When the Orangeist prince, Willem II, died in 1650, a satirical Dutch epitaph was reprinted, with a translation, in the English government newsletter, Mercurius Politicus,15 and throughout the 1650s this widely read journal published letters from Leiden, Amsterdam, and The Hague, made ventriloquistic comedy out of Dutch reactions to English success,16 and summarized Dutch publications.17 Owen Felltham’s spirited, mocking, and sympathetically imaginative Brief Character of the Low-Countries under the States (1628? pub. 1648/51) was only the most celebrated of a number of such accounts. Though the Dutch were not the object of as much abuse as the Scots, they could be accused of the same greed and duplicity. When

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Felltham’s Brief Character was republished as Batavia: Or, The Hollander Displayed (1672), it was printed along with Sir Antony Weldon’s contemptuous ‘Perfect Description of the People and Country of Scotland.’ It is not necessary to labour the point that, from the mid-sixteenth century onwards, the Scottish and the Dutch were drawn together by trade, higher education, Latin literacy, and religious affinity.18 On a continent where English/Inglis of any kind was hardly ever spoken, parts of the United Provinces thus became relatively anglophone (much as parishes in East Anglia and London picked up some Dutch). Many Scots and English texts, including James VI and I’s Basilikon Doron and Milton’s Doctrine and Discipline of Divorce, were published in Dutch translation;19 but anglophone books also circulated (as did English theatre companies) and found their way into libraries, in part because Dutch printers turned out enormous numbers of English-language texts for shipping or smuggling into London and the Scottish ports.20 Ships carried exported goods to the Low Countries and returned from Veere, Rotterdam, or Middelburg with books by such Presbyterian authors as George Gillespie and Robert Baillie.21 The trade was so large that works produced in England sometimes purported to have been published in the United Provinces to avoid censorship or other difficulties. Marvell’s Account of the Growth of Popery, and Arbitrary Government (1677) has ‘Amsterdam’ on its title page for that reason. For such poets as Milton and Marvell – well-travelled, widely read, and informed – but also for the likes of George Wither (Puritan, prolific, and broadly pro-Dutch), what happened in Britain was part of European politics. The projected Anglo-Dutch union was international in its design to strengthen North European Protestantism against the CounterReformation. This European reach was integral to English insularity, given the way England (then, as now) defined itself in relation to what the channel both divides and connects. Union would have reestablished the footprint on the continent that had been part of England’s self-image since the Middle Ages – an image of imperial prowess that had been dented by the loss of Calais a century earlier and that would be temporarily gratified when Cromwell took Dunkirk from the Spanish. Although Anglo-Dutch union failed to materialize, it is not surprising (though it is bizarre) to find Marvell, as late as 1677, attributing a common border to both countries when he says that ‘the Spanish Nether-land ... had alwayes been considered as the natural Frontier of England.’22 This bears on the paradoxical way in which the moves to unite England with the Netherlands (inspired by classical-republican but

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also Dutch models of state construction)23 were complicated by national sentiment. Even Milton’s well-known appeals to Englishness have a way of proving, under scrutiny, to be tactical in purpose, socially stratified (the common people lapse from a native love of liberty into deluded royalism) and seamed with disappointment.24 The pamphlet literature shows, however, that ethnic as well as religious values could be tapped and reinforced during the mid-century crisis.25 And certainly, from the eloquent passage in Areopagitica (1645) that imagines England as ‘a noble and puissant Nation rousing herself like a strong man after sleep’ (CPW 2:558)26 to the crying-up of the Republic’s victories around the archipelago in Defensio secunda (1654),27 Milton projects a patriotism that did not easily square with the Protestant internationalism that encouraged the 1651 union.28 Infusions of patriotic feeling with the politics of liberty were, if anything, stronger in the United Provinces, which had only finally shaken off Spanish rule in 1648. A number of the English statesmen who supported union were nourished by currents of Dutch thought that argued for a people’s right to self-determination.29 The social group that fostered the development of the word ‘patriot’ in the 1650s30 was imprinted by ideas from a country with which it sought a union that would dilute the integrity of the nation. The Dutch intellectual Constantijn Huygens is one product of this interface: frequent visitor to England and assiduous reader of its poetry, translator into Dutch of nineteen poems by Donne – texts which Marvell may have had a hand in circulating31 – as well as of many verses by James VI and I’s jester Archie Armstrong.32 Huygens had the sort of interlingual facility which led him to start one poem in English then modulate into Dutch,33 and to exploit the language of the enemy during periods of conflict. Hence his playful, belated epitaph for the Scotsman William Welwood (fl. 1577–1622), author of works that asserted first Scottish Jacobean and then British sovereignty over coastal waters that the Dutch claimed the right to navigate and fish: Well wood I Welwood lived and saw himself undone, Even after he is gone. Well wood he, by mij troth I know not, weepe or laugh, At such an Epitaphe.34

Dutch naval success refutes Wellwood so patly that even he would find it hard not to laugh at the burial of his arguments. Dated 1 February 1653, this contribution to ultra-archipelagic English takes us back to the

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moment of Sandelands’s correspondence with Milton about Montrose, of Milton’s recommendation of Marvell to Secretary Bradshaw, and of the younger poet’s ‘Character of Holland.’ It gives us a Dutch angle on a phase of Anglo-Dutch conflict when things were going well for the United Provinces, and foregrounds once again the triangulating presence of Scottish issues. Having established the significance of the Anglo-Scoto-Dutch triangle, I now want to suggest how Milton and Marvell figure in it. To do so is to help dispel the residually Whig view of both writers as narrowly English patriots, rather than archipelagic in outlook. Scholarship has begun to correct the inherited account. ‘Lycidas’ has been returned to North Wales and the Irish sea,35 the Mask Presented at Ludlow-Castle, 1634 – still widely known as Comus – to the Welsh Marches;36 Milton’s hostile account of Catholic Ireland in his Observations upon the Articles of Peace has generated debate,37 and Satan’s revolt in Paradise Lost has been linked to Charles I’s incitement (according to Milton and others) of the Irish Rebellion of 1641.38 Some have even noticed, beyond Marvell’s ‘Horatian Ode,’ that his ‘Loyall Scot’ advocates British union, and that he shows a great deal of sympathy for Presbyterians north of the border during the 1670s.39 Yet the devolution of analysis remains woefully incomplete. This is particularly surprising in the case of Milton, given that he owed so much to the thinking of ‘Jac Presbyter’ about church and state. He absorbed the ethos early. Between the ages of ten and twelve he was taught by the Scottish Presbyterian Thomas Young, and at eighteen he addressed a Latin elegy to him while Young was a chaplain in Hamburg40 – getting a taste of the European wars of religion that the Presbyterians would bring to Britain. When Charles I resisted the Covenant, Milton was himself abroad, but on his return to England he gave polemical support to the Scots, no doubt stirred by the propaganda that was reaching England from printers in the United Provinces as well as Scotland.41 Of Reformation (1641) zealously exhorts: ‘Goe on both hand in hand O NATIONS never to be disunited ... joyn your invincible might to doe worthy, and Godlike deeds, and then he that seeks to break your union, a cleaving curse be his inheritance to all generations’ (CPW 1:597). In The Reason of Church-Government (1642), Milton’s scope enlarges to take in the Irish Rebellion. He shows no searching interest, however, in the dislocations and injustices of Ireland, but uses the rising to fuel a pro-Scottish attack on prelates. The

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bishops are responsible for the ‘cruelties’ of ‘these murdrous Irish,’ because they have failed to bring the Reformation to Ireland and thus denied the people spiritual sustenance (CPW 1:798). Although it is doubtful that Milton was ever a Presbyterian,42 he supported the group of Scottish and English Presbyters known as Smectymnuus (one of whom was Young) and in 1643 signed the Solemn League and Covenant. The usual explanation for his change of heart – that Presbyterian attacks on his divorce tracts persuaded him that a remodelling of the church along Kirk lines would replicate old abuses – is no doubt substantially true; but Milton, already tolerant of sectarianism in Church-Government, was also troubled by the readiness with which Presbyterians could follow Montrose’s path from Covenanter to Cavalier. In the sonnet ‘A Book was writ’ (1647?), he thus adds the name of George Gillespie, one of the Scots who spoke for the Kirk in the body designed to reform the English church (the Westminster Assembly),43 to a list of Montrose’s soldiers in the campaign of 1644–6. Compared with such hard names, he asks, is the title of his divorce tract, Tetrachordon, so difficult? Cries the stall-reader, bless us! what a word on A title page is this! And some in file Stand spelling fals, while one might walk to MileEnd Green. Why is it harder Sirs then Gordon, Colkitto, or Macdonnel, or Galasp? Those rugged names to our like mouths grow sleek That would have made Quintilian stare and gasp. Thy age, like ours, O Soul of Sir John Cheek, Hated not Learning wors than Toad or Asp; When thou taught’s Cambridge, and King Edward Greek.

Some of these names are so ‘barbarous’ (the manuscript reading for ‘rugged’) that even the Scots cannot get their mouths around them: Colkitto is a Lowlands simplification of ‘Coll Keitach,’ the patronym sometimes applied to Montrose’s lieutenant, Alasdair Mac Colla. ‘Galasp’ shows the English struggling with the more familiar – though also Gaelic-derived – Gillespie.44 Yet the ludicrous ease with which this contraction rhymes with ‘gasp’ shows how readily a Scottish accent can creep into English mouths, making names as ‘rugged’ as the Cairngorms seem fitting (‘sleek’) to the culturally invaded. Milton views the Westminster Assembly as entrenching the power of the Scots; still

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occupying the four northern counties of England in the wake of the Bishops’ Wars,45 they now threaten to corrupt the reform of the church, replacing rule by bishops with the repressive greed of Presbyters. As a good Renaissance humanist, Milton represents cultural encroachment as linguistic pollution. Much turns on ‘our like mouths,’ which makes most sense as ‘“rugged” also.’ This is John Carey’s gloss, and he also points out that ‘in his discussion of “barbarisms” Quintilian I v 8 includes the use of foreign words, and cites examples.’46 Abandoning the rhetoric of 1641, Milton casts the Scots as ‘foreign’ infiltrators who are endangering English identity. Hostility of this sort grew,47 especially in the New Model Army, because, after handing Charles I to the London Parliament for money in 1647 – for only half the back pay promised them by the English, but the episode reinforced the stereotype of the impoverished, grasping Jockie, whose true religion was avarice – the Scots muddied Parliament’s negotations with the king by secretly agreeing with him the proPresbyterian Engagement that helped trigger, in April–May 1648, the second Civil War. The Scottish reputation for greed was now compounded with evidence of duplicity. Milton’s reaction can be found in his translations of Psalms 80–8, which lament the invasion of Israel/England by rampaging outsiders (‘Why hast thou laid her Hedges low / And brok’n down her Fence’),48 but also, more explicitly, in the heroic sonnet ‘On the Lord General Fairfax,’ written between 8 July and 17 August. By this date, Parliamentarians needed reassurance not just because the Scots had invaded England but because the fleet, having defected to Prince Charles in Holland, was blockading the Thames. ‘Thy firm unshak’n vertue,’ Milton reassures, ‘ever brings / Victory home.’ There is no attempt now to present Britain as a shared Protestant realm (Scotland must be other, for England to be ‘home’), even in this panegyric to a pro-Presbyterian general: though new rebellions raise Thir Hydra heads, & the fals North displaies Her brok’n league, to impe her serpent wings, O yet a nobler task awaites thy hand; For what can Warrs but endless War still breed, Till Truth, & Right from Violence be freed, And Public Faith cleard from the shamefull brand Of Public Fraud. In vain doth Valour bleed While Avarice, & Rapine share the land.

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Paradise Lost was not yet written, but we know that Milton was preparing the ground and there are surely pre-echoes here. Recalling Isaiah 1449 but also the proverbial falseness of the north, restated in republican propaganda,50 Milton, in the epic, gives ‘the Quarters of the North ... the spacious North’ to Satan (5:689, 726). Raphael locates Lucifer’s palace not just in ‘the limits of the North’ but in the celestial Highlands, ‘High on a Hill ... as a Mount / Raised on a Mount’ (5:755–60), and the good angels sight the bad before war breaks out in heaven as armed ranks bristling across a specifically northern horizon (6:78–86). The ‘brok’n league’ of the sonnet is the Solemn League and Covenant, troubling to the Independents because of its arguable implication that Presbyterian government should be adopted in the English church, but for them voided by the influx of Scottish troops in the renewed war that Fairfax was now fighting. Everything ‘fals’ descends from Eve and Adam’s sin, but earlier from the fall of Lucifer and the rebel angels who were created glorious but turned into serpents; here that lapse is recapitulated in the ‘serpent wings’ of the once-heroic (c. 1641) Scots. Meanwhile the epic resonance of the sonnet’s rhetorical question, ‘what can Warrs but endless War still breed,’ situates the England of fraud, avarice, and rapine in Chaos, the elemental sphere ‘Of endless Warrs,’ that Sin shows to Satan in Paradise Lost (2:897). It also anticipates the military deadlock that God describes in the war in heaven: in perpetual fight they needs must last Endless, and no solution will be found: Warr wearied hath perform’d what Warr can do ...

(6:693–5)

Fairfax has no fiery chariot, but like Christ, at least in this, he must break the cycle of ‘endless War’ and stem the tide of sin by the exercise of moral authority. His victory cannot be merely military: success in battle is assured (in the encomiastic idiom of the poem, as in the War in Heaven); that is the easy part. The shape of Milton’s thinking here recurs in Paradise Lost. If the Irish Rebellion left its mark on the epic, by showing Charles, in league with the rebels, to resemble Satan and the fallen angels, so, rather more obviously, did the corrupted militancy of the Scots. The stubbornness of their royalism – the blindness to God’s decision that drove Montrose and his followers into exile, and allowed the Kirk to compact with the Prince of Wales – remained a threat, and the work that Milton wrote, in January 1649, to justify Charles I’s trial, The Tenure

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of Kings and Magistrates, sets a pattern for the other prose works of this momentous year by turning against the Presbyterians the weapons he had picked up from them in his antiepiscopal pamphlets. A key section of the treatise relates how the Scottish Protestants opposed Mary of Lorraine, mother of Mary, queen of Scots, to preserve their religion. Milton invokes Buchanan. In support of his contention that kings derive authority from the people he quotes a number of continental thinkers, but adds: ‘Of the Scotch Divines I need not mention others then the famousest among them, Knox, & his fellow Labourers in the reformation of Scotland; whose large Treatises on this subject, defend the same Opinion. To cite them sufficiently, were to insert thir whole Books, writt’n purposely on this argument’ (CPW 3:248). The now infamous Observations upon the Articles of Peace is also best understood in an Anglo-Scottish context, despite the occasion of the treatise being the refutation of texts from Ireland.51 Of the four publications which Milton reviewed it was not the three involving the Ormondists and the pro-Parliamentarian forces in Leinster that detained him,52 but the Necessary Representation in which the Belfast Presbytery denounced the execution of Charles I. Scholars have rightly been troubled that, with Cromwell’s punitive invasion imminent, Milton should have made atrocities against Irish Catholics more likely by regurgitating impossibly large statistics for the massacre of Protestants in the 1641 Rebellion, and by calling such native customs as roasting oats in straw ‘absurd and savage.’53 For reasons that quickly become apparent, however, Milton lavishes much more space and forensic energy on the Ulster-Scots elders of Belfast. Though they write from a ‘barbarous nook of Ireland’ (CPW 3:327), their statement is, by their own admission, ‘a Scotch Protestation, usherd in by a Scotch interest’ (CPW 3:330), and a troubling indication of how too many Scots would tend. By denouncing the Belfast Presbytery, Milton was able to attack a ‘fals North’ that it would have been premature and undiplomatic to have taken on directly. As it happens, the Belfast Presbytery had discouraged its members from joining the royalist Engagers in Scotland and fighting in England in 1648, and even as he wrote (though Milton may not have realized this) a body of Ulster Covenanters was resisting the Necessary Representation;54 but Milton feared – with the Kirk’s commissioners already in The Hague – that the Scots were in danger of forgetting the lessons of history: ‘These blockish Presbyters of Clandeboy know not that John Knox, who was the first founder of Presbytery in Scotland, taught

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professedly the doctrine of deposing, and of killing Kings. And thus while they deny that any such rule can be found, the rule is found in their own Country’ (CPW 3:329) – that country not being the one that they inhabit. Milton exploits the overdetermined position of Ulster, as a seat both of the 1641 Rebellion by Irish Catholics and of Scottish encroachment (yet again) into a kingdom under English sovereignty, to shift the political agenda from a country (Ireland) that he regards as merely troublesome towards one that in his view poses a threat to the revolution.55 He secures this by blurring the distinction that has so often been made between the Scots and mere Irish in the province. Noting their support around Derry for the Gaelic leader Owen Roe O’Neill, he denounces the Belfast Presbyterians as ‘a generation of High-land theevs and Red-shanks’ (those mercenary soldiers from the Western Isles). They are as Gaelic – and some of them were – as their uncivil Irish neighbours (CPW 3:333). Milton is sharply antagonistic towards the Scots in the Observations, yet the arguments drawn out of him show that he was not motivated by obtuse xenophobia (however willing he was to exploit such sentiment in his readers) but by a practical, disabused mistrust of the impulse of Scottish Presbyterians, as but one faction (though a strong one) in a smaller, weaker nation than England, to protect their interests by seeking alliance, influence, and advantage outside the borders of ‘their own Country,’ even if that meant challenging the power of the godly English to dominate the archipelago. The informed, pragmatic astuteness of Milton’s animosity put him ahead of most English opinion in fearing that an alliance between Ulster-Scots Presbyterians and mere Irish would extend across the North Channel; but once the erstwhile leader of pan-Gaelic royalism, the earl of Montrose, landed in Scotland, in March 1650, it became a common belief that the Scots would seek to join ‘with the Rebels of Ireland, for the common cause of his clouted Majesty, and to compleat the work of Reformation, that the Teigs and Presbyters may both become one Body (as they desire) According to the Covenant.’56 When the ‘clouted’ prince of Wales (so young he should be in nappies) arrived in Edinburgh, some three months later, he found ‘for his better entertainment,’ as Mercurius Politicus wickedly put it, ‘Montrose’s head of the Kirks own dressing, provided for his Break-fast, and mounted on the Town-house, on purpose to bid him welcome.’57 Charles was prepared to stomach this repast not just for the sake of the Scottish crown

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but to secure the more ambitious title, required by the ongoing unionism of the Solemn League and Covenant, ‘King of Great Britain and Ireland.’58 The Commonwealth and its apologists could not ignore this claim to authority south of the border, and a run of anti-Scottish pamphlets followed, with such titles as The Changeable Covenant and The False Brother.59 Marvell’s ‘Horatian Ode’ (May–July 1650) has points of contact with this literature, though it has traditionally been read as a diptych contrasting the mixed virtues of Oliver Cromwell with those of Charles I, and it has tended in recent scholarship, like Milton’s Observations, to be thought about in relation to Ireland. This is justified by its full title, ‘An Horatian Ode upon Cromwel’s Return from Ireland,’60 as well as by its inclusion of a twelve-line passage in which the Irish are said to have confessed how good Cromwell is, and how just – ignoring the atrocities of Drogheda and Wexford; but the rhetorical energies of the poem turn on the Lord General’s preparations to invade Scotland. The occasio of the ode is signalled in its second line (‘The forward Youth that would appear / Must now forsake his Muses dear’), and this ‘now’ returns when attention shifts from Ireland, and what is vaguely threatened to unfree states on the Continent, to Scotland as an immediate objective: ‘The Pict no shelter now shall find / Within his party-colour’d mind’ (lines 105–6). If we can be guided by what Marvell wrote a few years later, the Pict represents the Scots at their most primitively uncivil.61 His mind is ‘party-colour’d’ because factious and conspiratorial – twin implications of ‘party’ at this date – and because he thinks, as he dresses, like a clown, in tartan motley (lurking in the heather, he hides under ‘the Plad’).62 This places him beyond the Highland line, among the followers of Montrose. Even if he is taken as standing in for the Scots as a whole, his presence deflects hostility from Lowland Presbyterians. Only months before, the poet had been employed by Fairfax, who, despite the bloodshed forced on him by Scottish participation in the second Civil War, had some sympathy with the Kirk, and who refused to invade Scotland, leaving that task to Cromwell. How far should we look in the ‘Horatian Ode’ for hints of the pan-British outlook that figure in ‘The Loyall Scot’? Given the climate of 1650, not very far perhaps, though it may show an impulse to inclusiveness, rather than Anglocentric complacency, that Marvell should write, just before the lines about the Pict, of the potentially glorious future of ‘our Isle’ under Cromwell.

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However this passage is interpreted, it draws into its shifting fields reminders that there was much for the English Republic to resolve within Britain, without looking for trouble on the Continent. That contemporary manuscripts read ‘kingdoms’ where the text printed (then rescinded) in 1681 says that Cromwell ‘cast the Kingdome old / Into another Mold’ is further evidence that, whatever Marvell’s intentions at that point, the poem’s reception caught it up in archipelagic pluralities. Yet one cannot read far in the anti-Scottish literature of 1650–1 without finding a Dutch dimension. Even those English readers who were unaware of the two-way print-flow between Amsterdam and Edinburgh at the time would have found on the London bookstalls such works as Anglia Liberata: Or, The Rights of the People of England, Maintained against the Pretences of the Scotish King – a pamphlet which reproduces, supposedly from a Dutch source, an English quarrel with the pro-Stuart Scottish ambassador in the Netherlands, the reply of ‘an ingenious Dutch-man’ to the ambassador’s case, and a further reply from an English author who, like Milton, refutes the Scots with their own precedents.63 This was the setting for the attempts, in 1651, to negotiate a union between the English Republic and the United Provinces. The Dutch resisted the overtures on Anglo-Scottish grounds, at first because of uncertainty about the outcome of the renewed civil wars, but then, once that doubt was removed by Cromwell’s victory against the Scots at Worcester (September 1651),64 because they did not want to lose their independence as they saw the Scots losing theirs. Union might mean domination. The political and religious similarities between royalist Presbyterians in Britain and the union-resistant Orangeists damaged that section of the Dutch in the eyes of Independents like Milton. It was now that English pamphlets began to dovetail stereotypes of the Scots and the Dutch, saying that both were false, self-serving, and only interested in money. With this grew a feeling among republicans that the Dutch should either accept union or suffer the same coercion as had been used against the Scots, a sentiment that spurred the output of Anglophobic publications in the Netherlands. It has been plausibly argued by Steven Pincus that ‘war between England and the United Provinces broke out not because of their irreconcilable economic differences, but because popular images had been created on each side of the North Sea which made it impossible to negotiate a peaceful settlement.’65 Like Marvell later, Milton was involved in diplomacy with the Netherlands. He translated documents for the Council of State, learned

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some Dutch, and developed a respectful relationship with the ambassador Adrian Pauw.66 One of his earliest tasks was to deal with letters from the United Provinces regretting the murder of Dorislaus. The claims of the state affected his representation of the Dutch (and the Scots) as directly as they did the writings of Marvell, who pressed his case for patronage by composing a Latin poem to celebrate Oliver St John’s mission to The Hague.67 Milton had urged the merits of an alliance with the Dutch as early as Of Reformation,68 but that context presses more urgently on the two Defences of the English People, published in 1651 and 1654, which frame the war of 1652–4. Those controverted in the Defences, Salmasius and Morus, were professors in the United Provinces (though Salmasius had moved on), and both sought, according to Milton, to seduce Dutch youth from the path of liberty. English ambassadors went to the Netherlands armed with the Defensio prima; twenty-five copies were ordered on behalf of the Dutch government. There were Dutch translations of this treatise, and of John Rowland’s reply, by the end of 1651.69 Yet while Defensio prima engages with the Dutch, it keeps referring (this being Milton) to the wretched example of the Scots. Addressing an anglophone audience in Eikonoklastes (1649), Milton had cast the Dunfermline-born Charles I as a duplicitious Scot. Even though his Presbyterian countrymen had been ‘robustious’ with the bishops, Charles had gone to Edinburgh (in 1641), and when defeated by the English in 1646 had handed himself over to the Scottish Army, ‘which argues ... that to England he continu’d still, as he was indeed, a stranger ... to the Scots onely a native King.’ Moreover, Charles proved willing to give the Scots (and the Irish) the ecclesiastical reforms they requested (‘preferring, as some thought, the desires of Scotland before his own interest and Honour’), but not to satisfy the English. In short, he dealt with the archipelago as David did the multiple polity of the Hebrews: ‘Ireland was as Ephraim, the strength of his head, Scotland, as Iudah, was his Law-giver; but over England as over Edom he meant to cast his Shoo.’70 The idea that Charles was primarily a Scottish monarch continues in the Defensio prima, where Milton repeats the charge that he sought to bribe the Scots by promising that they could annex the four northern counties of England that they occupied after the Bishops’ Wars.71 But he now somewhat perversely insists that the Scots had no right to stop the English trying and executing the king.72 The impact of the Defensio prima was so great that the Dutch tried to head off its successor, though it was exported to the Netherlands in

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quantities and reprinted there. We hear in June and July 1654 of the Dutch ambassador, Willem Nieupoort, trying to persuade Milton not to publish the Defensio secunda, by asking John Thurloe, Secretary of the Council, to intervene with Cromwell, and by sending two mutual friends to visit the poet. Though Milton refused to be diverted, he undertook to say nothing to the prejudice of the United Provinces. In practice, he seized the opportunity to criticize the now-humbled Netherlands for trying to save Charles I from execution and for paltering in 1651;73 and his admiration for the Dutch in defeat does not prevent him from once more pressing for the union that had precipitated the war. Milton characterizes his attack on his intellectual enemies as a contribution to the war effort.74 Meanwhile he keeps Scottish issues in view, not just in relation to the execution of Charles I but in the climactic encomium on Cromwell and his victories (CPW 4:641–3, 670). If one turns to the small amount of poetry that Milton completed during these years, similar concerns emerge. Take the sonnet, To the Lord Generall Cromwell May 1652 On the proposalls of certaine ministers at ye Commtee for Propagation of the Gospell Cromwell, our cheif of men, who through a cloud Not of warr onely, but detractions rude, Guided by faith & matchless Fortitude To peace & truth thy glorious way hast plough’d, And on the neck of crowned Fortune proud Hast reard Gods Trophies & his work pursu’d, While Darwen stream with blood of Scotts imbru’d, And Dunbarr feild resounds thy praises loud, And Worcesters laureat wreath; yet much remaines To conquer still; peace hath her victories No less renownd then warr, new foes aries Threatning to bind our souls with secular chaines: Helpe us to save free Conscience from the paw Of hireling wolves whose Gospell is their maw.

It has been pointed out that the words ‘peace & truth’ appear on a coin minted to celebrate Cromwell’s victories;75 but since they had earlier been used to epitomize the aims of the Solemn League and Covenant they figure ironically in a sonnet which deals with a union by conquest,

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on terms welcome to English Independents. Milton’s list of battles is not random: as any contemporary would recognize, he selects victories won against the Scots – at Preston (1648), Dunbar (1650), and then, at a structurally loaded juncture, as Cromwell’s triumphs sweep beyond the octave and reach the volta at a caesura, Worcester (1651). The phrase ‘Worcesters laureat wreath’ replaced the manuscript reading ‘twenty battles more’ because this was, indeed, the single triumph that sealed the success of the Republic, and made the United Provinces acknowledge its power. In that context the date of the sonnet is significant, not just because May 1652 was when the Committee for the Propagation of the Gospel seemed in danger of constructing a quasi-Presbyterian church (an English Kirk) in which the clergy would be paid through tithes, but because tension between England and the Netherlands was at this stage so high that a discourtesy in the channel started the Battle of the Downs (19 May). The Dutch were provocatively flying the colours of the House of Orange, and were earlier said to have flaunted those of the king of the Scots.76 Though the sonnet is about winning the peace,77 it would not make military prowess such a syntactically unrelenting force were the Republic externally secure. Designed to stir Cromwell into protecting the right of all free souls to determine their own forms of worship, it broadcasts a larger message concerning the power of the godly nation. Many of the same personnel were involved in Anglo-Scottish and Anglo-Dutch conflict: Cromwell himself, Oliver St John, and also Sir Henry Vane, subject of a second sonnet written between Milton’s Defences. Dated July 1652, this poem comes after a worsening diplomatic situation had led to the departure of the Dutch ambassadors, and it more or less coincides with the publication of the Republic’s Declaration against the Dutch – in effect, a declaration of war – which Milton translated into Latin. In ‘To Sir Henry Vane the Younger,’ the addressee is wise in giving counsel, Whether to settle peace or to unfold The drift of hollow states hard to be spelld, Then to advise how warr may best, upheld, Move by her two maine nerves, Iron & Gold In all her equipage; besides to know Both spirituall powre & civill, what each meanes, What severs each thou ‘hast learnt, which few have don

234 John Kerrigan The bounds of either sword to thee we ow. Therfore on thy firme hand religion leanes In peace, and reck’ns thee her eldest son.

As in the Cromwell sonnet the final appeal is to the case for freedom of worship. But the politics of that are now explicitly tied into diplomacy and war. Scottish and Dutch affairs flow together in the phrase ‘Whether to settle peace’ – as they did in Vane’s state business during spring and summer 1652, when, as a key member of parliament’s Irish and Scottish Committee, he had a leading role in the pacification of Scotland while he negotiated with the Dutch.78 ‘To settle peace,’ in other words, means to make the peace in Scotland stable but also to strike a deal with the Netherlands. Compound in another way is ‘The drift of hollow states,’ which puns on States of Holland (the formal title of the most powerful of the seven provinces in the Netherlands), the Low Countries – low in morals as well as in relation to sea-level (a routine wordplay in antiDutch writing) – and hollow in geology (built on a morass, not solid rock) as well as in deceit (full of hollow promises) and in making lots of noise (empty vessels make most sound, as the proverb has it). ‘Hard to be spelld’ indicates the obscure tenor of Dutch politicians in the first half of 1652 but perhaps also in the period after their ambassadors left (in June) and Vane was put in charge of correspondence with the United Provinces79 – at which point his job was literally to ‘unfold’ and ‘spell.’ Dutch deviousness on and off paper was much remarked on, by Marvell in his poem to St John among others. But ‘hard to be spelld’ also cues the reader to unpack the meanings hidden in the phrase ‘drift of hollow states,’ and shows Milton, if only subconsciously, recalling the anti-Scottish sentiment of that earlier sonnet against Presbyterianism, ‘A Book was writ of late,’ where the words ‘spelling fals’ and ‘Why is it harder Sirs then Gordon, / Colkitto, or Macdonnel, or Galasp?’ first came together. St John, Cromwell, and Vane were among the most pro-Dutch members of the new regime. The war of 1651–4 was prosecuted by those who sought union not destruction. This paradox is reflected in Marvell’s ‘The Character of Holland,’ which strikes me (pace some eminent readers)80 as relatively tolerant of the enemy – more mockingly abusive, even admiringly derisive, than hostile, and disinclined to describe bloodshed (the sea laughs at the Dutch who seem to fire butter

The Anglo-Scoto-Dutch Triangle 235

and cheese at the English). This is compatible with Marvell’s postRestoration attachment to the Netherlands, but it may also point to the circumstances of composition. In the background, undergirding all, was a desire for union. And when Marvell was actually writing, most likely in February–March 1653, the Holland of his title (the most potent of the seven United Provinces) was suing for peace.81 Though Marvell’s debt to anti-Dutch satire is often mentioned, his poem owes more to the witty-fantastical idiom of Felltham’s pre-war Brief Character than to such ugly products of the conflict as The Dutch-mens Pedigree: Or, A Relation, shewing how they were first Bred, and Descended from a Horse-turd, which was enclosed in a Butter-Box (1653). Even so, Marvell’s opening line is – like Milton’s pun on ‘hollow states’ – unflattering: Holland, that scarce deserves the name of Land, As but th’Off-scouring of the Brittish Sand; And so much Earth as was contributed By English Pilots when they heav’d the Lead … This indigested vomit of the Sea Fell to the Dutch by just Propriety.

(1–8)

Holland can hardly be called land because it is a mass of mud and water. More literally and phonetically, take ‘Land’ away from ‘Holland’ and you are left with a ‘hole,’ a dark, menial dwelling. What follows is no more complimentary, yet there is a unionist subtext to ‘Off-scouring of the Brittish Sand,’ because it makes the landforms consubstantial. The idea was not unique. In Huygens’s ‘De uijtlandighe herder,’ for instance, which was quite likely known to Marvell, an exiled shepherd is placed Aende blancke Britter stranden, Daer de Son ten Zuijden blaeckt, Daer de vlacke Vlaender-landen Eertijds laghen aengehaeckt, (Kan de ghissing over weghen Vande leeper letter-liên ...)82

While ‘Off-scouring’ ties Holland into a union with the chalk-white strand across the channel, ‘Brittish’ points further north, and is a telling word choice given the contrast with ‘English Pilots.’ Marvell tacitly

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reassures us that the prevarication of the ‘hollow states’ is vain, now that the Republic has conquered Scotland. That Sandelands was at this time advising Milton on how to pay for garrisons in the Highlands is a reminder that ‘Brittish’ is more an assertion than an assurance. Bulletins in Mercurius Politicus show that the level of threat among the particoloured Scots waxed and waned with Dutch success.83 As for ‘just Propriety,’ it rebuts the likes of Huygens’s epigram on Welwood, written at this time. Pace Grotius’s Mare Liberum, the most formidable contribution to the Dutch side of the argument, gibed at later in the poem, the reality of naval power confirmed the rightness of British dominion, leaving the Hollanders entitled only to the mud puked up by the sea. While never sacrificing satire, Marvell deftly traces threads of interconnectedness that make Dutch attempts to fight their neighbours absurd as well as vain. Is their drainage system not governed by an English commission (line 52)? Even their proffered treaties (in 1651) were designed to invade by stealth, not to oppose from across the water (lines 117–18). A similar tactic governs the bristling paronomasia of the poem, which is, like Milton’s sonnets, interested in ‘hard’ words.84 When the sea invades the polders, there are ‘Whole sholes of Dutch serv’d up for Cabillau ... For pickled Herring, pickled Heeren chang’d’ (32–4). Yet Dutch kabeljauw (codfish) is about as hard as it gets. Marvell gives his poem a Dutch flavour by using terms that were familiar from newsbooks and satires, such as Heeren, terms which, often enough, so shadow English as to sound like a form of pidgin. The formula Hoogmogenden (‘high and mighty’), for example, often used in accounts of Dutch affairs, is evoked in the punning little beast fable: ‘How fit a Title clothes their Governours, / Themselves the Hogs as all their subjects Bores!’ (79–80). It was, and is, routine to make fun of foreigners by giving them words which have inappropriate meanings when heard as English. ‘The Character of Holland’ does a bit of that (Herring/Heeren), but it favours words whose Dutch meanings are close to English ones – most ‘boers’ were rustics, hence ‘boors’ as well as ‘boars.’ This makes the Netherlanders seem more like comic dialect speakers than aliens (the polders are as British as Shropshire). The high-profile placing of Dutch words that were current (however briefly) in English – e.g., the ‘Dyke-grave’ who maintains sea-walls, ‘Hans-in-Kelder’ (i.e., Hans in the cellar, ‘child in the womb’)85 – reinforces this convergence. And Marvell exploits the point, which Felltham had made with philological gravitas, that ‘still among us all our old words are Dutch’:86

The Anglo-Scoto-Dutch Triangle 237 Or what a Spectacle the Skipper gross, A Water-Hercules Butter-Coloss, Tunn’d up with all their sev’ral Towns of Beer; When Stagg’ring upon some Land, Snick and Sneer, They try, like Statuaries, if they can Cut out each others Athos to a Man:87 And carve in their large Bodies, where they please, The Armes of the United Provinces.

(93–100)

‘Skipper’ and ‘Snick and Sneer’ (thrust and cut) are Dutch imports into English of this period. Their presence alerts the reader to the common fabric of both tongues: the shared Germanic roots of ‘gross’ and ‘land’ (‘some Land’ nicely mocks the marshiness of the provinces); the Latin borrowing ‘colossus’ truncated to match Dutch koloss; and the fact that Bier can mean ‘beer’ – appropriate to tuns – and can introduce town names, in both languages. The Dutch are split into ‘sev’ral Towns’ (whereas Britain is putatively whole); their mode of interaction is, to put it mildly, divisive, all about cutting up, carving each other with quarrelsome weapons; but they do have a living connection with English and thus with the English. It is a sign of continuity in the politics of the extended archipelago that Marvell’s poem (originally circulated only in manuscript) was printed up to this point in 1665 and 1672, during the second and third Anglo-Dutch Wars. These texts have a non-authorial conclusion in praise of Restoration naval commanders. Why do they not also reproduce the fifty-plus remaining lines of the 1653 text? Partly because union – less of an issue in the later wars – is so pronounced a theme in them. ‘But when such Amity at home is show’d; / What then are their confederacies abroad?’ (lines 101–2). Given that the Dutch enjoy drunken brawling, why should we be surprised that they are so bad at uniting with the English? What makes their behaviour the more fatuous is that alliance, indeed dependency, is an historical fact, though the Dutch (as at the Battle of the Downs) refuse to signal this: all ancient Rights and Leagues must vail, Rather then to the English strike their sail; To whom their weather-beaten Province ows It self, when as some greater Vessel tows A Cock-boat tost with the same wind and fate; We buoy’d so often up their sinking State.

(107–12)

238 John Kerrigan

The singular form ‘Province’ is presumably a hypercorrect reference to the Holland of Marvell’s title, just one of the United Provinces; yet if the term is primarily selective, it simultaneously allows the insinuation that part if not all of the Netherlands constitutes a province of England – the larger vessel towing behind it a puny unstable boat, a state that threatens to swamp with water as the dykes are beaten by the sea. Given all this emphasis on continuity, linguistic overlap, and common history, it is not surprising to learn that in 1653 ‘at least some English politicians were looking forward to an Anglo-Dutch alliance with the same enthusiasm which lay behind the 1651 mission,’88 nor that when, in April 1654, the conflict was resolved – within a week of an Act uniting Ireland and Scotland with England – it was represented in some quarters not as a crushing victory but a joining together with the Dutch.89 In the years which followed, the Protectorate would turn its aggression towards Spain. But as late as 1659, in the context of the recall of the Rump, moves were being made by Vane and others who shared his outlook to combine England with its errant ‘Province,’ only for the dynamics of 1651–2 to recur, and for talk of ‘nearest union’90 to turn within months to threats of war. This is the proper context for understanding Milton’s courageous warning to his fellow countrymen, in A Readie and Easie Way (1660), where he says that the return of the Stuarts will ‘redound the more to our shame, if we but look on our neighbours the United Provinces, to us inferiour in all outward advantages: who notwithstanding, in the midst of greater difficulties, couragiously, wisely, constantly went through with the same work, and are settl’d in all the happie injoiments of a potent and flourishing Republick to this day’ (CPW 7:357). Modern scholars have largely missed in this text the pro-Rump approval of the Netherlands which contemporaries instantly registered. Thus, in The Dignity of Kingship Asserted (1660), George Starkey goes out of his way to rebut Milton’s claims regarding the make-up of the Netherlands (it is a hotch-potch, not a commonwealth), and recycles familiar slights about Dutch boorishness and money-grubbing. That Starkey’s treatise was reprinted after the Restoration, under the new, more vaunting title, Monarchy Triumphing over Traiterous Republicans (1661), is symptomatic. The Dutch continued to figure as objects of abuse and attraction, because of both what they could be made to stand for and what they could provide materially, for rebellion; but whereas, during the Interregnum, the Low Countries attracted hard-up Cavaliers, they later became a hotbed of dissent. While the Anglo-Scoto-Dutch

The Anglo-Scoto-Dutch Triangle 239

triangle was if anything reinforced by the emergence of a Williamite solution to the challenge of Stuart absolutism, the alliances around it shifted, and Kirk Presbyterians learned to cooperate, as they had in the late 1630s and early 1640s, with English radicals.91 Scottish polemicists like James Stewart and the Covenanter poet and wit William Cleland made common cause in the Netherlands with such Englishmen as John Locke. Marvell’s pro-Dutch opposition to Stuart policy in Scotland as well as England, especially towards the end of his life, is well known, at least in outline. To tie Milton into a conclusion, let me end, however, by citing A Letter from Amsterdam, to a Friend in England (1678), a progovernment satire which assumes the voice of an English radical on a secret visit to The Hague. The radical reports to his friend: We were last night no less than Three Nations together at Supper; but all of a Knot: nothing can untie us but want of Money. My Scots Fugitive was so sharp and quick upon sight of Flesh-meat, that he laid aside his long Grace, and without blessing God, or cursing the Duke of L[auderdale] he fell to, and fed like a Farmer, whilst I, snapping a bit now and then, fell to tunning up Old Hock in Min Heer the Burgomaster; for our Companion is of such a humour, that till he be top-full, he never vents his Oracles against the house of Orange, and Court of England.92

Though it can be found in other contexts, ‘Three Nations’ was used by Parliamentarians during the Interregnum to substitute for the royalisttainted phrase ‘the three kingdoms.’ Yet now the nations are not England/Wales, Scotland, and Ireland but the components of our triangle, represented stereotypically in the starveling Scot, boorish Hollander, and spare and calculating English Puritan. According to the radical persona, these make up a ‘Three-fold Cord ... strong enough to hang, or hamper all our Adversaries’ (3). It is, however, a project which requires guile and propaganda. We should ‘bring on new Accounts of [the] Growth of Popery and Arbitrary Government,’ the radical says – a reference to Marvell’s Dutchinspired treatise. ‘Make sure of Andrew,’ he advises, ‘Hee’s a shrewd man against Popery.’ As for revolution, we should bring it on in England by looking for trouble north of the border. In what sounds like a biblically informed echo of the passage in Milton’s Of Reformation quoted earlier in this essay (‘Goe on both hand in hand O NATIONS’), the speaker says: ‘Tis fine, to see our Scottish Friends trace the old

240 John Kerrigan

Method of 1640 ... They, and we have walkt hand in hand like Brethren ever since. What have we to do next, but to revive and rake that Phoenix the COVENANT, out of its Ashes?’ (Letter from Amsterdam, 4). Though opportunistically false about the relationship between English radicals and Scottish Covenanters from the mid-1640s to the late 1660s, this has a certain cogency. It shows a well-read satirist not just recognizing the danger of an Anglo-Scottish alliance, at a time when Stuart policy was to maximize royal power by keeping the two kingdoms distinct, but, by setting his tract in the Netherlands, asserting the persistent importance of the Anglo-Scoto-Dutch triangle.

NOTES 1 George Wishart, Memoirs of James, Marquis of Montrose, 1639–1650, ed. Alexander Murdoch and H.F. Morland Simpson (London: Longmans, Green, 1983), 228. 2 ‘Upon the Death of King Charles the First,’ in Poetry and Revolution: An Anthology of British and Irish Verse, 1625–1660, ed. Peter Davidson (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1998), 361. 3 Edward Hyde, earl of Clarendon, The History of the Rebellion and Civil Wars in England, ed. W. Dunn Macray, 6 vols (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1888), 5:17. 4 For the diamond point, see, for example, Ronald Williams, Montrose: Cavalier in Mourning (London: Barrie and Jenkins, 1975), 387; poem in Poetry and Revolution, ed. Davidson, 362–3, who doubts the received attribution. 5 ‘Cumha Mhontrois,’ lines 35–8; ‘Lament for Montrose’: ‘splendid was the flushing of his cheek when drawing up to fight. Teeth of chalk, regularly set, below slender eyebrows without frown.’ Text and trans. in Poetry and Revolution, ed. Davidson, 461–3 (462–3). 6 The exchange survives patchily, though we know that Milton had written to Sandelands on 3 January, and a letter from him to Milton (29 January) asks for relief. On 11 April 1654, Sandelands told John Thurloe in a letter that he had employed John Phillips, Milton’s nephew. See Gordon Campbell, A Milton Chronology (Basingstoke: Macmillan, 1997), 145–7, 152. 7 Milton was at Christ’s College, Cambridge, 1625–32; Sandelands was a Fellow from 1624–30, and was succeeded by Edward King, the Lycidas of Milton’s elegy. 8 At the time, the Dutch had blocked the Danish Sound so effectively that ships were unable to bring naval supplies from the Baltic; see Jonathan

The Anglo-Scoto-Dutch Triangle 241

9

10

11 12 13

14 15 16 17 18

19

20

Israel, The Dutch Republic: Its Rise, Greatness, and Fall 1477–1806 (Oxford, Clarendon Press, 1995), 721. On shortages see J.R. Jones, The Anglo-Dutch Wars of the Seventeenth Century (London: Longman, 1996), 41. Milton’s prose is quoted from Complete Prose Works of John Milton, gen. ed. Don M. Wolfe, 8 vols (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1953–82), 4:2:856–8. Subsequent quotations from Milton’s prose are taken from this edition and cited as CPW parenthetically in my text. See Pieter Geyl, Orange and Stuart 1641–72 [1939], trans. Arnold Pomerans (London: Weidenfeld and Nicolson, 1969); Steven C.A. Pincus, Protestantism and Patriotism: Ideologies and the Making of English Foreign Policy, 1650–1668 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1996); and, more broadly, Keith L. Sprunger, Dutch Puritanism: A History of English and Scottish Churches in the Netherlands in the Sixteenth and Seventeenth Centuries (Leiden: Brill, 1982); also Jonathan Scott, England’s Troubles: Seventeenth-Century English Political Instability in European Context (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2000). This letter to John Bradshaw follows the one to Sandelands just quoted in CPW 4:2, 858–60. The Rump Parliament imposed ‘union’ and ‘incorporation’ on Scotland and Ireland as early as 1652, but the measures were only resolved in 1654. See, for example, William Johnson [Willem Jans Blaeu], The Light of Navigation (Amsterdam, 1612); J. Colom, The New Fierie Sea-Colomne (Amsterdam, 1649); the anonymous Pas-Caert van Texel tot aen den Hoofden (Amsterdam, 1660), and John Seller, The Coastal Pilot (London, 1670) and The English Pilot (London, 1671). For example, The Dutch Boare Dissected: Or, A Description of Hogg-Land (London, 1665). Mercurius Politicus 33 (16–23 January 1651), 535–50. Ibid., 90 (19–26 February 1652), 1425–40, (1434–6); 143 (3–10 March 1653), 2277–92, (2282–4). Ibid., 121 (23–30 September 1652), 1897–1912, (1910); 129 (18–25 November 1652), 2025–40, (2026–32). For a well-documented brief survey, see Christopher A. Whatley with Derek J. Patrick, The Scots and the Union (Edinburgh: Edinburgh University Press, 2006), 72–80. A version of Lewis Bayly’s ubiquitous Practice of Piety went through thirtytwo editions between 1620 and 1688; Maria A. Schenkeveld, Dutch Literature in the Age of Rembrandt: Themes and Ideas (Amsterdam: John Benjamins, 1991), 145. Alastair J. Mann, The Scottish Book Trade, 1500 to 1720: Print Commerce and Print Control in Early Modern Scotland (East Linton: Tuckwell, 2000), ch. 3;

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21

22 23

24 25

26

27

28

K.L. Sprunger, Trumpets from the Tower: English Puritan Printing in the Netherlands 1600–1640 (Leiden: Brill, 1994); and, for royalist printing, P.G. Hoftijzer, ‘British Books Abroad: The Continent,’ in The Cambridge History of the Book in Britain, vol. 4, ed. John Barnard and D.F. McKenzie (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1999), 735–43 (740). See George Gillespie, A Dispute against the English-Popish Ceremonies, Obtruded vpon the Church of Scotland (Amsterdam and Leiden, 1637); Robert Baillie, A Review of Doctor Bramble, Late Bishop of Londenderry, His Faire Warning against the Scotes Disciplin (Delft, 1649); Ladensium autokatakrisis, The Canterburians Self-Conviction: Or, An Evident Demonstration of the Avowed Arminianisme, Poperie, and Tyrannie of that Faction, by their Owne Confessions (Amsterdam, 1640). Cf. Mann, Scottish Book Trade, 82–3. Marvell, An Account of the Growth of Popery, and Arbitrary Government in England ([London], 1677), 17–18. On the former, see Blair Worden, ‘Classical Republicanism and the Puritan Revolution,’ in History and Imagination: Essays in Honour of H.R. Trevor-Roper, ed. Hugh Lloyd-Jones, Valerie Pearl, and Blair Worden (London: Duckworth, 1981), 182–200; on the latter, more loosely federal scheme, see Pincus, Protestantism and Patriotism, 150. The absorption of republican and Dutch traditions into Anglo-Scottish Puritan thought, even before the 1640s, can be traced through the work of Thomas Scott; see Markku Peltonen, Classical Humanism and Republicanism in English Political Thought 1570–1640 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1995), ch. 5. See Thomas Corns’s essay above and Victoria Kahn’s essay below. For a bold, often persuasive, account, see Mark Stoyle, Soldiers and Strangers: An Ethnic History of the English Civil War (New Haven: Yale University Press, 2005). For anticipations, see Of Reformation (1641) and The Reason of ChurchGovernment (1642), in CPW 1:525–6, 969–70, though at both points a slippage from England to ‘this Iland’ suggests an awareness of British aspects of the English Reformation. Both the first and second Defences are more fully known as Pro Populo Anglicano defensio, and, like the poet’s Pro Se defensio (1655), they are introduced by title pages headed Joannis MiltonI ANGLI – though how far this is a declaration of national pride, as against a mark of identification for continental readers, is open to debate. The self-conscious Englishness of government at this date is explored by Sean Kelsey, Inventing a Republic: The Political Culture of the English Commonwealth 1649–1653 (Manchester: Manchester University Press, 1997).

The Anglo-Scoto-Dutch Triangle 243 29 Cf. Hugo Grotius in the intellectual biography of Milton, Peter du Moulin in that of Marvell, and the republican thought of Pieter and Johan de la Court in that of Algernon Sidney. 30 See Ronald Knowles, ‘The “All-Attoning Name”: The Word Patriot in Seventeenth-Century England,’ Modern Language Review 96 (2001): 624–43, esp. 631–5. 31 This is a natural way of reading Richard Leigh (or Samuel Butler), The Transproser Rehears’d: Or, The Fifth Act of Mr Bayes’s Play (Oxford [London?], 1673), 30 – though the polemicist’s point may equally be that Donne’s poems in Dutch epitomize what we would now call doubleDutch, a state of dull obscurity to which Marvell also aspires: ‘methinks you might have so much studied the Readers diversion, and your own, as to have exercised your happy talent of Rhyming, in Transversing [Hales’s] Treatise of Schism, and for the Titles dear sake you might have made all the Verses rung Ism in their several changes. I dare assure you Sir, the work would have been more gratefully accepted than Donns Poems turn’d into Dutch.’ The texts referred to are those printed in Huygens’s Korenbloemen of 1658 and 1672. Cf. ‘Aen Joff.w Luchtenburgh, met myn vertaelde dicht uyt het Engelsch van Donne’ [To the Lady Luchtenburgh, with My Poems Translated from the English of Donne’], dated 10 March 1654, in A Selection of the Poems of Sir Constantijn Huygens (1596–1687): A Parallel Text, ed. and trans. Peter Davidson and Adriaan van der Weel (Amsterdam: Amsterdam University Press, 1996). On the authorship of the treatise, see Nicholas von Maltzahn, ‘Samuel Butler’s Milton,’ Studies in Philology 92 (1995): 482–95. 32 Selection of the Poems of Huygens, ed. and trans. Davidson and van der Weel, Appendix 3. 33 See ‘A Mad[ame] Swann’ (1660), in De Gedichten van Constantijn Huygens, ed. J.A. Worp, 9 vols (Groningen: J.B. Wolters, 1892–9), 6:275–7. 34 Well wood I = I very much wish. Selection of the Poems of Huygens, ed. Davidson and van der Weel, 195. 35 Lawrence Lipking, ‘The Genius of the Shore: Lycidas, Adamastor, and the Poetics of Nationalism,’ PMLA 111 (1996): 205–21; Sara van den Berg, ‘Two Kings and a Lady: Milton and the Irish Protestants, 1637–1649,’ Milton Seminar, Newberry Library, Chicago, 1998. 36 See, for example, Michael Wilding, ‘Milton’s A Masque Presented at Ludlow Castle, 1634: Theatre and Politics on the Border,’ Milton Quarterly 21.4 (1987): 1–12; and Philip Schwyzer, ‘Purity and Danger on the West Bank of the Severn: The Cultural Geography of A Masque Presented at Ludlow Castle, 1634,’ Representations 60 (1997): 22–48.

244 John Kerrigan 37 See, for example, Thomas N. Corns, ‘Milton’s Observations upon the Articles of Peace: Ireland under English Eyes,’ in Politics, Poetics, and Hermeneutics in Milton’s Prose, ed. David Loewenstein and James Grantham Turner (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1990), 123–34; Jim Daems, ‘Dividing Conjunctions: Milton’s Observations upon the Articles of Peace,’ Milton Quarterly 33.2 (May 1999): 51–5; and Joad Raymond’s sceptical ‘Complications of Interest: Milton, Scotland, Ireland, and National Identity in 1649,’ Review of English Studies 55 (2004): 315–45. 38 The perception goes back some decades, but see esp. David Loewenstein, ‘An Ambiguous Monster: Rebellion in Milton’s Polemics and Paradise Lost,’ Huntington Library Quarterly 55 (1992): 295–315, and his Representing Revolution in Milton and His Contemporaries: Religion, Politics, and Polemics in Radical Puritanism (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2001), 195–201; see also Catherine Canino, ‘The Discourse of Hell: Paradise Lost and the Irish Rebellion,’ Milton Quarterly 32 (1998): 15–23. 39 See, for example, my ‘British Marvell, 1660–1697,’ in Mighty Europe 1400– 1700: Writing an Early Modern Continent, ed. Andrew Hiscock (Bern: Peter Lang, 2007), 33–54, and Archipelagic English: Literature, History, and Politics 1603–1707 (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2008), ch. 9. 40 ‘Elegia quarta. Anno ætatis 18.’ Milton’s poetry is quoted from The Riverside Milton, ed. Roy Flannagan (Boston: Houghton Mifflin, 1998). 41 On the ‘Scottish origins of the explosion of print, 1637–1642,’ and the publication axis that ran at this date (as later) ‘between Glasgow, Edinburgh, London, Leiden and Amsterdam,’ see Joad Raymond, Pamphlets and Pamphleteering in Early Modern Britain (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2003), ch. 5. 42 Cf. Thomas N. Corns, ‘Milton and Presbyterianism,’ Milton Studies (Korea) 10 (2000): 337–54. 43 See Iain H. Murray, ‘The Scots at the Westminster Assembly: With Special Reference to the Dispute on Church Government and Its Aftermath,’ The Banner of Truth 371–2 (Aug-Sept 1994), 6–40. 44 Cf. ‘shallow Edwards and Scotch what d’ ye call,’ in ‘On the New Forcers of Conscience’ (1646), where Milton cannot get his tongue and/or mind around the name of Robert Baillie, author of A Dissuasive from the Errours of the Time (London, 1645), or some other of that ilk. 45 This was exactly the sort of expansionism that he had written against when urging both nations to join hands, in Of Reformation: ‘but seeke onely Vertue, not to extend your Limits’ (CPW 1:597). 46 John Milton: Complete Shorter Poems, ed. John Carey, 2nd ed. (London: Longman, 1997), 308.

The Anglo-Scoto-Dutch Triangle 245 47 See, for example, the playlet, The Scottish Politike Presbyter, Slaine by an English Independent (London, 1647). 48 Psalm 80:49–50; for wider discussion see Margaret Boddy, ‘Milton’s Translation of Psalms 80–88,’ Modern Philology 64 (1966): 1–9. 49 Isaiah 14:12–13: ‘How art thou fallen from heaven, O Lucifer, son of the morning! … For thou hast said in thine heart, I will ascend into heaven … I will sit also … in the sides of the north.’ 50 See, for example, Nedham, The Case of the Commonwealth of England, Stated: Or, The Equity, Utility, and Necessity, of a Submission to the Present Government (London, 1650), 38: ‘Its an old saying, nullum bonum ex Aquilone, no good comes out of the North; and of all others, Royallists should be the least apt to believe any Benefit to come out of that Nation, from whence proceeded the Ruin and Destruction of the late King, and all their Party.’ 51 Calendar of State Papers, Domestic, 1649–1650, 57. 52 Observations upon the Articles of Peace, in CPW 3:308, 303–4. 53 See, for example, Corns, ‘Milton’s Observations.’ 54 Phil Kilroy, Protestant Dissent and Controversy in Ireland 1660–1714 (Cork: Cork University Press, 1994), 16–17. 55 For a different account of the Scottish axis in the Observations, see Willy Maley, Nation, State and Empire in English Renaissance Literature: Shakespeare to Milton (London: Palgrave, 2003), ch. 7. 56 Mercurius Politicus 5 (4–11 July 1650), 71. Cf. Eikonoklastes, in CPW 3:496. 57 Mercurius Politicus 1 (6–13 June 1650), 3. 58 For contexts, see David Stevenson, Revolution and Counter-Revolution in Scotland, 1644–1651 (London: Royal Historical Society, 1977), chs 3–5. 59 Thomas May, The Changeable Covenant: Shewing in a Brief Series of Relations, how the Scots from Time to Time have Imposed upon England (London, 1650); Cuthbert Sydenham, The False Brother: Or, A New Map of Scotland, Drawn by an English Pencil; being a short history of the political and civil transactions between these two nations since their first friendship: wherein the many secret designs, and dangerous aspects and influences of that nation on England are discovered; with the juglings of their commissioners with the late King, Parliament, and city (London, 1651). 60 Marvell’s poetry is quoted from The Poems and Letters of Andrew Marvell, ed. H.M. Margoliouth, 3rd ed., rev. Pierre Legouis with E.E. Duncan-Jones, vol. 1 (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1971), 1. 61 Cf. Marvell’s attack on the Fifth Monarchists, in ‘The First Anniversary of the Government under O.C.,’ lines 317–18: ‘Oh Race most hypocritically strict! / Bent to reduce us to the ancient Pict.’

246 John Kerrigan 62 Or, who thinks as patchily as his ancestors were daubed with body-paint (the name of the Picts was thought to derive from Latin picti, ‘painted, tattooed’). 63 Anglia Liberata: Or, The Rights of the People of England, Maintained against the Pretences of the Scotish King (London, 1651), 62–3: ‘no less than fifty of their Kings have been punished with death,’ ‘Buchanan, their own Historian ... Rutherford in his Lex, Rex.’ 64 The Scottishness of the defeated army was emphasised in Commonwealth writing to play down English disaffection with the Republic; see, e.g., Payne Fisher, Irenodia gratulatoria ([London, 1652]), trans. Thomas Manley as Veni; Vidi; Vici: The Triumphs of the Most Excellent and Illustrious Oliver Cromwell (London, 1652), 53–67. 65 Pincus, Protestantism and Patriotism, 75. 66 It would be interesting to know whether he dealt directly with the poet and diplomat Jacob Cats, who headed a Dutch delegation to England in 1651. Milton’s role in all this, explored by Leo Miller, John Milton’s Writings in the Anglo-Dutch Negotiations, 1651–1654 (Pittsburgh: Duquesne University Press, 1992), and Robert Thomas Fallon, Milton in Government (University Park, PA: Pennsylvania State University Press, 1993), ch. 2, is charted in Campbell, Milton Chronology. 67 ‘In Legationem Domini Oliveri St John ad Provincias Fœderatas.’ 68 CPW 1:586. 69 Du Moulin’s Regii sanguinus clamor (The Hague, 1652), with its nasty swipes at Milton (he was a worm, he was mud), was also published in Dutch. 70 Eikonoklastes, in CPW 3:394–5, 487–8 (cf. Ps. 60:7–8, 108:8–9). 71 Eikonoklastes, in CPW 3:385; Defence, in CPW 4.1:522. 72 Defence, in CPW 4.1:525–6. 73 Second Defence of the English People, in CPW 4.1:644, 657. 74 Defence, 322; Second Defence, 591–2 (cf. CPW 4.2:1045). 75 For an informative survey, see Barbara K. Lewalski, The Life of John Milton (Oxford: Blackwell, 2000), 286–7. 76 Pincus, Protestantism and Patriotism, 70–1. 77 In the contextualizing scholarship, Blair Worden, ‘John Milton and Oliver Cromwell,’ in Soldiers, Writers and Statesmen of the English Revolution, ed. Ian Gentles, John Morrill, and Blair Worden (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1998), 243–64 deserves particular attention. 78 Violet Rowe, Sir Henry Vane the Younger: A Study in Political and Administrative History (London: Athlone Press, 1970), 141–8. 79 Pincus, Protestantism and Patriotism, 24.

The Anglo-Scoto-Dutch Triangle 247 80 See John Kenyon, ‘Andrew Marvell: Life and Times,’ in Andrew Marvell: Essays on the Tercentenary of his Death, ed. R.L. Brett (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1979), 1–35; and Annabel M. Patterson, Marvell and the Civic Crown (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1978), 119–22. 81 Contrast the punitive tone of Milton’s translation of Psalm 2, dated 8 August 1653, which followed a summer of defeats for the stubbornly irreconcileable Dutch: ‘I on thee bestow / Th’ Heathen ... them shalt thou bring full low / With Iron Scepter bruis’d.’ 82 ‘De uijtlandighe herder: Aenden heere Daniel Heins, Ridder etc.’ [‘The Exiled Shepherd: To the Lord Daniel Heinsius, Knight etc.’]: ‘On the chalkwhite strand of Britain, / Where the sun to southwards burns, / To which shores our Flemish lowlands / Were connected, long ago / (If we may believe the theories / Of deep scholars of our days ...’), in Selection of the Poems of Huygens, ed. and trans. Davidson and van der Weel, 64–5. 83 Highland rebels mustered near ‘Ruthuen-castle, a Garison of ours,’ reportedly lost heart when ‘a brother of the Lord Ogilby’s came to them, and made a relation of the conflict at sea, how that the Dutch were routed and run home ... immediately after they dispersed themselves’ (Mercurius Politicus 168 [25 August–1 September 1653]: 2687–2702; 2687). The threat was not insignificant: from autumn 1653 into early 1654 Sir Thomas Middleton was preparing an invasion force in Holland, with the backing of the Princess Royal and the Orangeists, to support the Highlanders. 84 For a different account of Dutch in the poem, see Richard Todd, ‘Equilibrium and National Stereotyping in “The Character of Holland,”’ in On the Celebrated and Neglected Poems of Andrew Marvell, ed. Claude J. Summers and Ted-Larry Pebworth (Columbia: University of Missouri Press, 1992), 169–91, esp. 179–80, 189–90. 85 Lines 49 and 66. 86 A Brief Character of the Low-Countries under the States (London, 1652), 77–8. 87 They hack one other, like sculptors working stone – like Deinocrates, who wanted to cut Mount Athos into an image of Alexander – as though trying to reduce each other’s bulk to human form. 88 Pincus, Protestantism and Patriotism, 153. 89 Hence the language of the title, Articles of Peace, Union and Confederation, Concluded and Agreed between His Highness Oliver Lord Protector of the Common-wealth of England, Scotland and Ireland, and the Dominions thereto Belonging. And the Lords the States General of the United Provinces of the Netherlands (London, 1654). For literary versions of this unionism, see, for example, Musarum Oxoniensium (Oxford, 1654), 61 (‘The noble Thames, doth now the Texell wed, / As old Alphëus Arethusa did’ – from a poem by R. Gorges), 67

248 John Kerrigan (‘Holland and Wee are reunited Lands’ – by Robert Mathew), 94 (‘Our reunited Seas, like streams that grow / Into one River doe the smoother flow’ – by the young J. Locke, then a Student of Christ Church), 97 (‘Joyn’d by the Isthmus of confederate Peace, / We are now no more an Isle but Chersonese – by Jo. Ailmer), 99 (‘Hermophroditus so and Salmacise / [Whose Bodyes Joyn’d in a perpetuall Kisse] / With our two States received like Union; / Went Two into the Streame, Return’d but One’ – by Will. Godolphin), and, most conceitedly, 103 (‘That Wales and Netherlands should now be one, / Is no darke Riddle but a truth late knowne’ – by Ro. Whitehall). 90 Rowe, Sir Henry Vane, 221. 91 See, for example, Richard L. Greaves, Deliver Us from Evil: The Radical Underground in Britain, 1660–1663 (New York: Oxford University Press, 1986), Enemies under His Feet: Radicals and Nonconformists in Britain, 1664–1677 (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 1990), and Secrets of the Kingdom: British Radicals from the Popish Plot to the Revolution of 1688–89 (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 1992); Richard Ashcraft, Revolutionary Politics and Locke’s ‘Two Treatises of Government’ (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1986); and Ginny Gardner, The Scottish Exile Community in the Netherlands, 1660–1690 (East Linton: Tuckwell, 2004). 92 A Letter from Amsterdam, to a Friend in England (London, 1678), 1.

9 Disappointed Nationalism: Milton in the Context of Seventeenth-Century Debates about the Nation-State victoria kahn

It is a general complaint that this Nation of late years, is grown more numerously and excessively vitious then heretofore: Pride, Luxury, Drunkenness, Whoredom, Cursing, Swearing, bold and open Atheism every where abounding ... And hainous Transgressions oft times bring the slight professors of true Religion, to gross Idolatry. All controversies being permitted, falshood will appear more false, and truth the more truth. Of True Religion (1673)1

Milton’s Samson Agonistes is a poem for dark times – our own as well as Milton’s. Published in 1671, some ten years after the restoration of Charles II, Samson Agonistes represents Milton’s late meditation on what we might call the Stuart administration. It’s commonplace to say that the blind Milton, in internal exile, must have felt like Samson, ‘expos’d / To daily fraud, contempt, abuse and wrong, / ... / In power of others, never in [his] own’ (ll. 75–8). Lately, it has been hard not to find Samson – in the words of the Chorus – ‘a mirror of our fickle state.’ But it is not only Samson’s depression that seems apt to present political circumstances. It is also his meditation on the relationship between nationalism and international law. This essay, then, takes its impetus from contemporary events, and traces the seventeenth-century genealogy of the modern conflict between nationalism and international law. My argument is that, by the time he came to write Samson Agonistes, Milton was not only disappointed with developments in England; he had also come to understand the vexed relationship between the claims of the nation-state and

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the law of nations. When Samson charges Dalila with acting ‘against the law of nature, [the] law of nations’ (l. 890) – the standard seventeenthcentury phrase for international law – Dalila famously responds that the Philistines will celebrate her for having chosen ‘to save her country from a fierce destroyer’ (ll. 984–5). In this exchange, the respective claims of the two nation-states – not to mention the Hebrew God and the Philistine Dagon – seem more on a par than the young Milton would have allowed.2 Earlier in his career, Milton had regularly drawn on the law of nature and of nations to defend his own conception of England’s providential role. In Areopagitica he asserted that God ‘reveal[s] Himself to his servants, and as his manner is, first to his Englishmen’ (CPW 2:553). Although he depicted the civil war as a ‘war of Truth’ in which the fate of the nation was up for grabs, he also expressed confidence that a vigorous exchange of opinions would further the true understanding of the nation (CPW 2:562). In support of such optimism, he cited the English legal scholar John Selden, ‘whose volume of naturall & national laws proves ... that all opinions, yea errors, known, read, and collated, are of main service & assistance towards the speedy attainment of what is truest’ (CPW 2:513). This is the Milton who is singled out for criticism by Robert Filmer in The Originall of Government – a little-read text published in 1652, in which Filmer criticizes Milton as a confederate of Hugo Grotius, the great seventeenth-century exponent of international law. By the time Milton published Samson Agonistes, however, he was much less sanguine about the compatibility of nationalism with the ‘law of nature’ and ‘the law of nations.’ Moreover, he made the meaning of ‘the nation’ itself subject to debate. At the centre of this debate is the figure of Dalila, with her own claims for a specifically Philistine national self-interest. In this context, we might say that Dalila is a figure for Milton’s disappointed nationalism. Even more, she stands for the conflict between nationalism and international law that still vexes modern versions of the nation. Early Modern Nationalism? Let me begin with a modern example. In 1955 the United States ratified the Geneva Convention, yet at the present moment an unspecified number of individuals are being held and probably tortured at Guantánamo Bay, in violation of that treaty.3 This casuistical violation of international law by means of offshore detention of so-called enemy combattants is a vivid illustration of the perceived conflict – at

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least on the part of the Bush administration – between international law and national sovereignty. But there are even more sobering examples that nations are also our only guarantee of international law. In 1994 Romeo Dallaire, the United Nations commander in Rwanda, alerted the UN of the imminent genocide of the Tutsi but was refused permission to act because the member nations of the UN, including above all the United States, were unwilling to uphold the UN convention against genocide. This, we might say, is the antinomy of nationalism: it is both the condition of international order and the obstacle to such order. We think of this antinomy as a particularly modern one, in part because nationalism itself is frequently analysed as a distinctively modern phenomenon. In Nations and Nationalism since 1780, Eric Hobsbawm declared that the modern sense of the word ‘nation’ is no older than the eighteenth century.4 Hobsbawm accepts Ernest Gellner’s definition of nationalism as a principle which holds that the political and national unit should be congruent (9), and which implies that duty to the nation overrides other public obligations. Like Gellner, Hobsbawm stresses the elements of ‘artefact, invention, [and] social engineering’ in nationalism. What this means is that, for both scholars, nationalism does not simply presuppose the modern territorial state. It also presupposes a certain level of technological and economic development. Nationalism may even be produced or required by this level of development. According to this functionalist definition, nationalism is the nation-wide, standardized discourse of national identity – itself a function of printing, mass education, and mass literacy. This standardized discourse facilitates the ‘categorical identities’ and fungible skills that are necessary to capitalist economies.5 Benedict Anderson has also presented nationalism as a distinctively modern phenomenon (though one whose preconditions are Protestantism and print capitalism). In Anderson’s well-known account, nationalism emerged when older, international, or even intercontinental ‘sodalities’ such as Christendom ‘lost their axiomatic grip on men’s minds.’ Instead of the idea that ‘a particular script-language offered privileged access to ontological truth,’ we find a new secular experience of time – produced in part by the new awareness of the simultaneity of the reading experience in print capitalism.6 This new secular experience of time displaced the older, divine, or transcendental guarantee of sovereignty. At the same time, the nation-state displaced the dynastic kingdom. Much of this, as scholars of the seventeenth-century

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have recognized, is applicable to the early modern period. Nevertheless, although Anderson discussed the contributions of Protestantism and print capitalism to the idea of the nation-state, he insisted that nationalism first developed in the new world, rather than the old (191). What is striking, then, about these important, recent accounts of nationalism is that Hobsbawm, Gellner, and Anderson don’t believe that there is such a thing as early modern nationalism. They don’t recognize their own definitions of nationalism in the early modern period. This may be because nationalist sentiment didn’t precede the nation in these earlier centuries, as Gellner and Hobsbawm argued it did in the nineteenth century. Or it may be because, in the early modern period, dynastic nationalism coexisted with other forms of nationalism, rather than one simply supplanting the other.7 And yet, although none of the scholars I have mentioned note this, what Hobsbawm calls the elements of artefact, invention, and social engineering have an early modern equivalent in seventeenth-century discussions of the nation-state as an artefact, as well as in discussions of the relationship of the nationstate to international law. Let me now say a word about literary scholarship on the question of nationalism. Although Gellner and others have neglected the early modern period, literary scholars have drawn on their work to argue for a variety of early modern nationalisms. Here, the emphasis has fallen less on the elements of artefact, invention, and social engineering than on the contest between the absolutist state and various countervailing forces. To cite one important example, Richard Helgerson’s Forms of Nationhood explored the move from a dynastic sense of communal identity to postdynastic nationalism in England.8 Drawing on G.R. Elton’s view that England in ‘the sixteenth century saw the creation of the modern sovereign state,’ Helgerson argued that ‘sovereignty of this sort’ demanded the articulation of a ‘national sense of self’ (4). According to Helgerson, no single nationalism emerged in the sixteenth century. Instead, early modern England was a nation divided between competing visions: absolute monarchy versus the common law, apocalyptics versus apologetics, Foxe’s elect nation versus Hooker’s ecclesiastical polity.9 Alongside this narrative of competing visions of the nation, however, Helgerson elaborates another narrative concerning the emergence of the state. Forms of Nationhood concludes with a discussion of Hobbes, who draws on and transforms alternative visions of the nation: Hooker’s apologetic discourse influences books 1 and 2 of Leviathan, while Foxe’s apocalyptic discourse shapes books 3 and 4 of Leviathan. According to

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Helgerson, Hobbes’s goal is not to produce a grand Hegelian synthesis but rather to subvert both Hooker and Foxe. In doing so, Hobbes articulates a new, hybrid political discourse that transcends the nation: Nothing about the figure [of Leviathan] is specifically English. Rather than representing England, his mortal god represents a political order that could and, according to Hobbes, should be instituted anywhere and everywhere. Less concerned with community and national particularity than with rule and an abstract system of order, Leviathan belongs not to a discourse of the nation but to a discourse of the state. (295)

Building on these two different accounts, Helgerson then draws conflicting conclusions about the relationship of the nation to the state. On the one hand, he tells us that in the early modern period ‘the fruitful nation’ is multiple, particular, inclusive, and gendered female, in contrast to the state, which is unitary, abstract, exclusive, and – as in the frontispiece to Leviathan – gendered male (297). The nation-state as it develops in the seventeenth century and after is ‘an unstable and precariously balanced unity’ of these two opposing tendencies (300). On the other hand, Helgerson argues that the idea of the state fulfils the not-so-hidden imperative of sixteenth-century English nationalism. In redescribing the nation as a state, Hobbes ‘merely recognized’ the deeper implications of the absolutist discourse first articulated by Henry VIII: When in 1534 parliament declared that England was and had always been an empire, and that its king was supreme head of both church and state, it invented Leviathan. Hobbes merely recognized and named the novel beast. (292)10

Of course, in his conclusion Helgerson might also have discussed Milton as an inheritor and bricoleur of Foxe’s apocalyptic discourse of the elect nation and Hooker’s apologetic rationalism. And the end result would have been a diametrically opposed vision of the state. This is because Milton is not a defender of absolutism, but of the people as a self-determining entity that exists prior to its political constitution and that gives itself its own constitution in time.11 This is not the nation invented by Henry VIII, but one both older and newer than that. In Eikonoklastes Milton praised this nation in terms of its ‘old English fortitude and love of Freedom’ (CPW 3:344), and in Areopagitica he

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described it as ‘a Nation not slow and dull, but of a quick, ingenious, and piercing spirit’ (CPW 2:551). Milton’s England is a nation of both inherited and natural rights. Above all, it is a nation in which natural rights – rights of self-preservation and self-determination, which are also at the basis of international law – serve as the basis or template for the civic rights guaranteed by the state. In a compromise analogous to his theological compromise regarding works and faith, Milton’s nation-state is both natural and achieved, a matter of God-given grace and individual works. I want to suggest that the two hybrid versions of the nation-state articulated by Hobbes and Milton are not as antithetical as they might seem, and that – against Helgerson – both need to be distinguished from the moment in 1534 when Parliament declared that England was and had always been an empire. Something new happens to the discourse of the nation in the seventeenth century, and this new discourse of the nation is inseparable from the new discourse of international law. The late sixteenth-century sense of nation as equivalent to the king and Parliament, or to the English people conceived of as the repository of sovereignty, is supplemented by the new discourse of the law of nature and of nations. The native nationalism of Bale, Ascham, and Elyot needs to be amplified by the very different idiom in seventeenthcentury continental debates about the laws of war and peace. These debates help inflect the discourse of the nation in the direction of the state, which in turn threatens the very foundation of the nation. This, at least, is the implicit claim of Filmer’s Originall of Government, which links the new seventeenth-century discourses of the nation-state to developments in international law. Filmer’s analysis, I argue, in turn sheds light on the disappointed nationalism of Milton’s Samson Agonistes, including its figuration in Dalila as Samson’s wife. Filmer on the Nation and International Law Filmer is, of course, best known as the most prominent seventeenthcentury theorist of divine right patriarchalism. He is, we might say, the seventeenth-century proponent of family values. According to Filmer, government has its origin and model in the patriarchal family, which is itself a divine institution. But an equally important part of Filmer’s output – and a corollary of his patriarchalism – were a number of treatises criticizing the new discourses of contractual obligation and popular sovereignty. The Originall of Government (1652) was one of these

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works. In this short treatise, Filmer attacked Hobbes’s Leviathan (1651), Milton’s Defence of the English People (1651), and Grotius’s De jure belli ac pacis (On the law of war and peace), first published in 1625. Filmer saw that two of the most dangerous thinkers about the English nation – at least from his perspective – were in league, somehow, with the father of international law. In terms of the early modern discourse of nationalism, we can say that Filmer saw Hobbes, Milton, and Grotius as articulating the shift from a dynastic conception of communal identity to a postdynastic nation-state. This is a conception of the nation as predicated on a combination of will, artifice, and natural rights, that is, rights whose existence is logically prior to the nation and whose reach is both intra- and international. That is, natural rights govern the relation of subject and sovereign as well as the relations between sovereign states. Filmer, I think, correctly saw that the discourse of the nationstate advanced by Hobbes and Milton could just as well legitimate the destruction of the nation as he conceived of it. In Filmer’s account, Hobbes, Milton, and Grotius are less theorists of the nation than of international norms of conduct and of reasoning which threaten the very stability of the Commonwealth. It is significant, I think, that the word ‘nation’ only appears once in Filmer’s text. Filmer prefers the terms ‘kingdom’ and ‘government.’ This preference conforms to Liah Greenfeld’s analysis of the growing use of the term nation in the late sixteenth and early seventeenth century to refer to the people conceived of as the repository of sovereignty.12 This conception of the nation is the object of Filmer’s attack and he dissects it in the three parts of his treatise, first in his parody of Hobbes’s notion of consent, then in his dismantling of Milton’s notion of the people, and finally in a critique of Grotius’s notion of natural law and the law of nations. For Filmer, references to consent, the people, and the law of nations all point to a dangerous voluntarism. They point to what Gellner and Hobsbawm described as the elements of artefact, invention, and social engineering in the construction of the nation, that is, to those elements that underwrite the new discourse of the state. In his discussion of Hobbes, Filmer singles out Hobbes’s implausible fantasy of all of the future citizens of a state consenting to government: ‘Nay, it is not possible in the smallest kingdom, [even if] all men should spend their whole lives in nothing else but running up and down to covenant.’ Filmer then goes on to make fun of Hobbes’s theory of consent: ‘I consent with him about the rights of exercising government,’ he writes teasingly, ‘but I cannot agree to his means of

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acquiring it.’ And he goes on to remark that it would be ridiculous for anyone to consent to transfer his right to a sovereign who is not a party to the contract.13 As Filmer explains, the whole notion of natural rights is problematic on biblical grounds. How can Hobbes speak of the individual’s right to all things in the state of nature when the Bible clearly tells us that God created Adam and gave him ‘dominion’ over all creation, including Eve (187)? The notion of individual natural right and individual consent are incompatible with the structure of the family and with the patriarchal model of sovereignty. By contrast, government for Filmer is simply not a matter of choice, just as it was not in the power of the Jews – in Filmer’s words – ‘to choose whether God should be their God’ (195). Voluntarism is also at the heart of Filmer’s criticism of Grotius. To seventeenth-century readers, Grotius would not only have conjured up the argument that there are certain natural laws and natural rights governing the behaviour of states towards each other, both in wartime and in peacetime. He would also have been associated with a voluntarist account of human association, according to which human beings choose to set up their governments and legitimate them by means of consent. In The Originall of Government, Filmer is essentially interested in the implications of Grotius’s account of international law for the English nation. Although Grotius himself defended absolutist forms of government, Filmer saw clearly that the principles Grotius defended could just as well be used to undermine absolutism.14 Like Hobbes and Milton in their different ways, Grotius defines natural law as the law of reason and argues that human beings can bring new moral obligations into existence. This is because, while God commands some laws, he allows or permits human beings to establish others. One of Grotius’s chief examples is the voluntary establishment of property after an initial period in the state of nature when all things were held in common. Filmer rejects this argument, noting once again that God gave Adam ‘dominion’ over all things in Eden (215–17). Grotius’s voluntarist account of the origin of property is dangerous, according to Filmer, because it drives a wedge of convention between nature and society and thus undermines Filmer’s own account of the natural and patriarchal origins of government. ‘If property be brought in by human law, as Grotius teacheth, then the moral law depends upon the will of man’ (218). And this in turn leads to other ‘dangerous and seditious conclusions,’ such as the belief that government also depends on the will of man and that the people have a right to resist their rulers

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(220). As Filmer was well aware, Milton for one had drawn this conclusion in The Tenure of Kings and Magistrates (1649): ‘since the King or Magistrate holds his autoritie of the people both originaly and naturally for their good in the first place, and not his own, then may the people, as they shall judge it for the best, either choose him or reject him, retaine him or depose him though no Tyrant, meerly by the liberty and right of free born Men, to be govern’d as seems to them best’ (CPW 3:206). Milton later reasserted the right of resistance in the Defence of the English People, the text that Filmer rebuts in The Originall of Government. In his rebuttal of Grotius, Filmer exposes a further problem with De jure belli ac pacis’s defence of absolutism. Specifically, Filmer takes issue with Grotius’s use of the marriage contract as an analogy for the irrevocable contract of absolute government.15 Here Filmer’s critique of Grotius is helpful for understanding the similarities between Grotius as a defender of absolutism and Milton as one of its most prominent critics. This critique also helps explain the centrality of marriage to Milton’s reflections on the nation in Samson Agonistes. In seventeenth-century Europe, marriage was seen both as a natural relationship of hierarchy and as the exemplary instance of voluntary subordination. Marriage thus had an important role to play in ideological defences of absolute monarchy as simultaneously natural and willed, predetermined but voluntarily accepted. But the analogy was a troubled one because the metaphor of the marriage contract could suggest that the relationship of subject and sovereign was contractual as well. Although Grotius argues that marriage and government are both ‘human institutions,’ brought into existence by will and consent, Filmer notes that he is unwilling to draw the logical conclusion ‘that women may choose their husbands as he tells us the people may choose their kings, by giving their husbands as little power and for as little time as they please’ (224). (One wonders whether Filmer had read The Doctrine and Discipline of Divorce [1643], where Milton used the contractual view of government as an argument for the husband’s right to divorce.) Filmer’s chief objection to Grotius here is that the comparison of government to a marriage contract insinuates a kind of voluntarism into the relationship of sovereign and subject. Instead of stating this directly, however, he turns the tables and argues that ‘the necessity of the continuance of the wife’s obedience depends upon the law of God, which hath made the bond of matrimony indissolvable’ (225). The logical implication of Grotius’s reference to the divine institution of marriage, Filmer implies, is that government too is a divine institution, not a matter of human volition.

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Filmer was right to single out the marriage analogy as a particularly troublesome moment in Grotius’s account of absolutism. In De jure belli ac pacis Grotius first compared voluntary subjection to an absolute monarch with a slave contract. He later condemned the slave contract as a base form of subjection and compared absolutism instead with marriage. This new comparison both mitigated and justified the slavishness of voluntary but irrevocable subjection. Arguing against the claim that the person who invests power in another has the greater authority (which would mean that the people have authority over the sovereign), Grotius observed that this ‘does not hold true of a situation brought about by an act of the will, from which a compulsory relationship results, as is the case of a woman giving authority over herself to her husband, whom she must ever after obey.’ Yet, unlike the slave contract which is characterized by the slave’s ‘servile fear’ of his master, the marriage relationship is characterized by affection, close friendship, and ‘association.’16 The implication of this comparison to marriage is that, just as a wife is subordinate to her husband, the people are subordinate to the sovereign, whom they both affectionately and irrevocably consent to obey. The marriage contract thus answered some of Grotius’s anxieties about the potentially ‘servile’ nature of absolute political subordination. But, in using the language of association, Grotius also prompted the reader to consider whether husband and wife, sovereign and subject, might be natural equals – just as all nations were equal in the eyes of international law, according to ‘the law of nature and of nations.’ Though Filmer could not know this in 1652, Milton would raise precisely these questions in his depiction of Samson’s marriage to Dalila. For all these reasons, Filmer finds Grotius’s voluntarist conception of government and the nation-state both implausible and illogical. In comparing government to marriage, Grotius undermines his claims since the relationship of husband and wife institutes rights and obligations that are divinely ordained and for that reason unchangeable. Moreover, Grotius’s voluntarism is dangerous because it attempts to justify what Hobbes called a commonwealth by acquisition – that is, the conquest of a nation by a usurper or foreign power and the subsequent ratification of that conquest by the people’s consent (a situation not unlike the Jews under the Philistines). If the seventeenth-century discourse of nationalism sometimes equates sovereignty with popular consent, nationalism here is the vehicle of its own destruction or at the very least its radical transformation. To put this another way, if you base your defence of the

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nation on natural law or the natural right of self-preservation and selfdetermination, then nationalism is not a matter of intrinsic identity, custom, or tradition. Instead, nationalism implies the conventionality and thus fungibility of national identity; it implies the transformation of the nation into a nation-state. And this in turn, Filmer implies, threatens the hierarchy of gender identity as well.17 What is Milton doing in the company of Hobbes and Grotius? Filmer certainly thinks of them as sharing a conception of society and government as voluntary and consensual, even contractual. But, as Filmer makes clear, Milton draws the more radical conclusions. Beginning with Grotius’s view that government depends on the will of the people, Milton argued in his Defence of the English People that the people have an irrevocable right to resist their rulers. He based this view – and the right understanding of the nation – on ‘that law of Nature and of God which holds that whatever is for the safety of the state is right and just’ (CPW 4:317–18). Rather than shoring up patriarchalism, the law of nature dictates an understanding of sovereignty as artificial or manmade. As Milton noted in a later passage in the Defence: ‘Fathers and kings are very different things: Our fathers begot us, but our kings did not, and it is we, rather, who created the king’ (CPW 4:327). It’s not surprising, then, that Filmer’s criticism of Grotius leads, as though by a natural progression, to a rebuttal of Milton’s Defence. Just as Filmer mocks Hobbes’s language of consent, so in his specific comments on Milton’s Defence of the English People, Filmer mocks Milton’s equivocal understanding of the ‘people’: ‘Come to our modern politicians, and ask them who the people is – though they talk big of the people, yet they take up and are content with a few representers (as they call them) of the whole people’ (198). According to Filmer, Milton goes even further: ‘Nay, JM will not allow the major part of the representers to be the people, but the “sounder and better part only” of them’ (199). In these comments, Filmer ridicules Milton’s elitism, an elitism Milton shared with Cromwell and the Rump Parliament: in the early 1650s, the English republic claimed to derive its power from the people but refused to call for new elections, as the Levellers demanded. This elitism would intensify in later years when Milton defended minority rule in The Readie and Easie Way to Establish a Free Commonwealth (1659). But, even as Filmer exposes Milton’s limited tolerance for popular rule, he also appears to understand and fear the democratic conclusions that might be drawn from Milton’s conception of the nation-state – with its rooting of power in the people and its

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emphasis on choice of government and consent. And he goes on to stigmatize Milton’s emphasis on freedom to choose one’s government as the political equivalent of the freedom to choose one’s religion. Just as Filmer ridiculed Hobbes’s emphasis on consent by comparing it to the choice of whether God should be one’s God, so he mocks Milton’s emphasis on popular sovereignty by comparing it to the decision to be polytheistic. According to Milton’s reasoning, Filmer snidely observes, ‘Every man may be of any religion, or of no religion. Greece and Rome have been as famous for polytheism, or multitudes of gods, as of governors; and imagining aristocracy and democracy in heaven, as on earth’ (207–8). It is almost as though Filmer were anticipating Book 3 of Paradise Lost where God proclaims Christ his son by ‘merit,’ and imagines a time when ‘God shall be All in All’ and the ‘regal Sceptre’ shall no more be needed (3:290, 341, 340). In these passages, even Milton seems to entertain the idea that the religious equivalent of the principles underlying popular sovereignty is not monotheism but rather polytheism or pantheism. Dalila and the Antinomy of Nationalism The paradoxes of the nation-state that Filmer explores in The Originall of Government are vividly illustrated in Milton’s late poem, Samson Agonistes. For Filmer, as we have seen, the nation implies a patriarchal order modelled on the natural hierarchies of father and son, husband and wife. Appeals to the principle of consent, individual natural rights, and the fiction of ‘the people’ all presuppose a voluntarism that runs counter to customary ideas of the family and government. Milton, of course, was no fan of custom. He was, however, increasingly aware of the tensions between the ‘law of nature’ and the ‘law of nations’ on the one hand and the English nation on the other. In Samson Agonistes, Milton grapples with the paradoxes of his voluntarism, which pits the English nation against the Restoration state. Before turning to Samson Agonistes, it may be helpful to glance at a prose work close to it in time, Milton’s Readie and Easie Way to Establish a Free Commonwealth. In this treatise, written on the eve of the Restoration, Milton deliberately plays with the language of nation and state in a way that suggests his increasing ambivalence about the English people. In general, Milton equates the nation with the people, and the state with any particular form of government. Asserting that ‘All wise nations’ have condemned tyranny, he urges the English nation to choose

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that form of state that involves a ‘Councel of State’ (CPW 7:409, 433) The English nation will achieve true happiness when it elects to be ‘a free state’ (CPW 7:446) or ‘a free Commonwealth,’ ‘held by wisest men in all ages the noblest, the manliest, the equallest, the justest government’ (CPW 7:424). The danger of placing such election in the hands of the multitude, however, is that they will choose voluntary enslavement to a king, which entails a different kind of ‘state.’ Monarchy will lead to ‘the multiplying of a servile crew, not of servants only, but of nobility and gentry, bred up then to the hopes not of public, but of court offices’ (CPW 7:425). The king in turn will ‘set a pompous face upon the superficial actings of State, to pageant himself up and down in progress among the perpetual bowings and cringings of an abject people’ (CPW 7:426). State, here, is no longer simply a neutral term for government; instead, it conjures up the wrong choice of government, the Hobbesian choice of voluntary servitude to an absolute monarch. Milton’s equation of the wrong kind of state with a ‘servile crew’ anticipates the exchange in Samson Agonistes between Samson and Dalila. Dalila claims in her defence that ‘to the public good / Private respects must yield’ (ll. 867–8). To this nationalist argument from reason of state, Samson famously replies, ... if aught against my life Thy country sought of thee, it sought unjustly, Against the law of nature, law of nations, No more thy country, but an impious crew Of men conspiring to uphold thir state By worse than hostile deeds, violating the ends For which our country is a name so dear.

(888–94)

Samson reasons that Dalila’s marriage ought to trump her national allegiance. He then claims that this argument is supported by international law, which defines what counts as a nation, as opposed to ‘an impious crew.’ According to Samson’s reasoning, true nationalism and international law cannot contradict each other: both are based on natural law or right reason. In contrast to the nation, Samson associates Dalila and the Philistines with an idea of ‘state,’ a restless seeking after power that is simultaneously more abstract and more crudely materialist than Samson’s affective and nationalist ideal of country. As in The Readie and Easie Way or the description of Satan’s corrupt, orientalized ‘state’ in Paradise Lost (2:1), ‘state’ here conjures up personal dominion,

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rank, dignity, and display, as much as or more than it does the nationstate. Moreover, in contrast to Milton’s equation of a free nation with the ‘manliest’ form of state in The Readie and Easie Way (CPW 7:424), Samson deliberately effeminizes the idea of the state by linking it to Dalila.18 Milton, however, does not let Samson have the only word on the relation of nation to state. Nor does he simply let stand Samson’s argument for wifely subordination. Instead, he allows Dalila to explore the gender logic of the political contract, much as Filmer does in his critique of Grotius.19 Dalila responds by borrowing from Samson’s own earlier argument about why it was permissible for him to marry a Philistine: ‘I knew / From intimate impulse, and therefore urg’d / The Marriage on; that by occasion hence / I might begin Israel’s Deliverance’ (ll. 222–5). Although Dalila says nothing about intimate impulses, she refuses the asymmetry of Samson’s claim that, as a wife, her nationalism must give way to his. Instead she argues that, in her case as well, national allegiance trumps marriage. In doing so, she implies that Samson’s appeal to the law of nature and of nations is merely a ruse to enforce the patriarchal power of the husband over the wife – that Samson is making a merely expedient appeal to international law in the service of national and domestic self-interest: But in my country where I most desire, In Ekron, Gaza, Asdod, and in Gath I shall be nam’d among the famousest Of Women, sung at solemn festivals, Living and dead recorded, who to save Her country from a fierce destroyer, chose Above the faith of wedlock bands, my tomb ...

(ll. 980–6)

It is usual to dismiss Dalila’s arguments as self-serving casuistry, and some of Dalila’s arguments may strike us this way. But I think Milton also intended us to take Dalila’s arguments more seriously. First, Milton went out of his way to make her Samson’s wife rather than a harlot. And he did so not simply to aggravate Dalila’s betrayal, as some critics have argued, but rather to magnify her claims. Unlike Filmer and Grotius, both of whom declared that a husband has ‘property’ in the person of his wife, who thereby owes him allegiance before all others, Milton was willing to entertain the idea that a wife might

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govern her husband. In The Doctrine and Discipline of Divorce Milton had argued: ‘particular exceptions may have place, if she exceed her husband in prudence and dexterity, and he contentedly yeld, for then a superior and more naturall law comes in, that the wiser should govern the lesse wise, whether male or female’ (CPW 2:589). In making Dalila a wife, Milton deliberately raises the question of whether her relationship to Samson is one of subordination or not, a question – the divorce tracts suggest – that needs to be answered one case at a time. It is not Milton but the unreliable Chorus who closes down this question, asserting, as Filmer did, that God ‘Gave to the man despotic power / Over his female in due awe’ (ll. 1054–5).20 Milton further complicates the issue of allegiance by making Dalila a Philistine. In Of True Religion, his attack on English ‘popery,’ Milton explicitly urged toleration for foreign Catholics, ‘Privileg’d by the Law of Nations.’21 As both a wife and a foreigner, of a different religion and nation, Dalila embodies the conflicting claims of nations under the law of nations. In Dalila, then, Milton begins to imagine something like cultural relativism, that is, the equal claim of radically different cultures.22 At the same time, Dalila also embodies the antinomy of nationalism, its simultaneous dependence on and resistance to the law of nations. Milton encourages us to entertain these paradoxes by giving Dalila some of his – and Samson’s – best arguments. Chief among these is Dalila’s comparison of herself to the Old Testament heroine, celebrated in Judges: ‘Jael, who with inhospitable guile / Smote Sisera sleeping through the Temples nail’d’ (ll. 989–90). Jael, that is, was justified in violating the code of hospitality for religious and national purposes. John Bunyan, for one, certainly understood Jael this way: in Pilgrim’s Progress, he places her in House Beautiful where Christian views her hammer and nail.23 Dalila thus has a legitimate claim on our attention when she asks what distinguishes her behaviour from Jael’s. Far from simply stigmatizing Dalila as ‘a manifest Serpent’ (l. 997), in the words of the usually obtuse Chorus, Milton represents her as a worthy opponent. Of course, some ‘revisionist’ readers have interpreted the exchange between Samson and Dalila, along with other moments in Samson Agonistes, as demonstrating Milton’s criticism of the Old Testament ethic of violence and retribution – a criticism that condemns Jews and Gentiles alike. Dalila may see herself as a female Samson, the revisionists argue, but this only means that, like Samson, she falls short of the

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New Testament ethic of forgiveness and solidarity with human kind. This argument is sometimes extended to the relationship between royalists and republicans in seventeenth-century England. In the aftermath of the failed revolution, so the argument runs, Milton comes to understand ‘the identity of motivation on both sides’: he now sees that in practice the English revolutionaries were no better than the royalists, hence the reason for their defeat.24 Revisionist critics have not tended to apply this reading of Samson in terms of ‘fallen un-Christian morality under the Law’ to the idea of the nation.25 And yet, it would certainly be possible to argue that Samson Agonistes demonstrates the failure of nationalism – not just the contingent failure of the English revolution but the impossibility of nationalism’s success. Nationalism inevitably and fatally turns the figurative blood of ‘blood and belonging’ into the literal bloodshed of war, and this is the antithesis of the international sodality of Christendom.26 I want to suggest a different interpretation of the symmetry between Samson and Dalila, one more in line with Empson’s famous defence of her. In this interpretation, Milton is not opposed to war and bloodshed. He has not changed his mind from the time when he vociferously defended both in The Tenure of Kings and Magistrates. Nor does he think the nation-state is incompatible with the millenarian hopes of Protestantism.27 But he is concerned – or, at least, wants to explore the possibility – that the arguments Samson has advanced in terms of the law of nature and of nations may not support the nationalist conclusions that Samson draws. Here it is not so much Christianity that is at odds with the idea of the nation, but rather the very ‘law of nature’ and ‘law of nations’ that Milton had repeatedly drawn on in his earlier political tracts. In the exchange between Samson and Dalila, Milton gives his strongest arguments to Samson’s opponent in the hope of clarifying, by contraries, the true idea of the nation. And he further strengthens these arguments by making Dalila Samson’s wife because – throughout Milton’s career – the figure of the wife has been implicated in the antinomy between nature and consent, the nation and the state, the law of nature and the law of nations.28 In the figure of Dalila and in Samson Agonistes as a whole, consent as a principle of legitimation is itself put in question. Like Hobbes in the conclusion to Leviathan, Milton is aware that the right of self-preservation and the principle of consent cannot distinguish between good and bad governments, republics and monarchies.29 Hobbes once sarcastically

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observed that people ‘give their consent out of hatred, fear, hope, love or any other passion or emotion rather than reason.’ In a similar vein, Milton argued that the English people had irrationally consented to the Restoration, thereby instituting an effeminized version of the state rather than the manly nation he had celebrated in his early prose tracts.30 Like Grotius, Milton was aware as well that the law of nature and of nations sanctions different religions in different countries, and perhaps within the same country as well, under certain conditions. In Dalila, accordingly, we see both the Philistine argument for, and the Miltonic criticism of, the Restoration; we see, that is, the difficulty of predicating liberation on consent. When, in defence of her estrangement from Samson, Dalila describes ‘what sieges girt me round, ere I consented; / Which might have aw’d the best resolv’d of men, / The constantest to have yielded without blame’ (ll. 846–8), her argument suggests the thinking of those Englishmen and women who consented to the Restoration. At the same time, her argument echoes Samson’s own confession of yielding to Dalila (l. 407). What are we to make of these parallels? Those readers who have stressed the similarities between Samson and Dalila – and thus the similarities between republican and royalist – are right; but it is not Milton’s habit to have similarities erase differences. I believe instead that Milton intends his readers to discriminate between Samson’s and Dalila’s competing arguments – and thus, in Filmer’s words, ‘to choose whether God should be their God’ – even as he stages his own increasing uncertainty about the rational basis, and claims, of the nation-state.31 Taken to its logical extreme, the international law of nature and of nations does not privilege the Jewish people, just as it does not privilege England. Instead, it provides a justification for Dalila’s actions, just as it arguably provides a justification for Dagon or for what Filmer imagined as the choice of polytheism. Judging from her arguments, Dalila may be the only character in Samson Agonistes besides Samson who has learned Milton’s lesson about not being servile. The problem is, she is on the wrong side – at least as far as Samson is concerned, and probably the godly reader of the Restoration as well. In counting up the strikes against Dalila, the modern reader also cannot fail to notice that Dalila encourages Samson to be servile and accept her offer of ‘domestic ease’ (l. 917).32 In this light, it is significant that Dalila has nothing to say about intimate impulses. In the face of the Restoration, Milton may be suggesting, mere rational appeals to the law of nature and

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voluntarist appeals to consent such as Dalila’s may indeed produce a state, but one that fails to live up to England’s providential mission as a nation. In his Life of Milton, Samuel Johnson equated Milton’s poetic achievement with the honour of England.33 In doing so, Johnson echoed Milton’s own description of his heroic literary achievements in The Second Defence, which concludes with Milton’s hope that his prose tracts may serve to exalt the ‘glory of [his] countrymen’ and to serve as ‘an example to posterity’ (CPW 4:685).34 But it is not so clear that Milton, at the end of his life, shared this optimism – or would have wanted to be so clearly identified with the English people. In fact, it is arguable that much of his poetic energy in his last years was devoted to distinguishing himself from the English, to castigating his cowardly fellow citizens, and to staging scenes of his own failed pedagogy. In Samson Agonistes, the Philistine giant Harapha taunts Samson by pointing out that Israel still serves and Samson himself remarks defensively, ‘if their servile minds / Me their Deliverer sent would not receive, / But to thir Masters gave me up for nought, / Th’ unworthier they; whence to this day they serve’ (ll. 1213–16). From one obvious perspective, Milton’s disappointed nationalism follows directly from the failure of the English republic. From another, as I have tried to suggest in this essay, Milton’s disappointed nationalism is a logical consequence of Milton’s own discourse of the nation-state. This is a discourse caught between the nation and the state, that is, between the late sixteenth-century sense of the English people, and the emerging discourse of international law, that is, the law of nature and of nations. If Samson stands for the English republic in Samson Agonistes, Dalila represents Milton’s understanding that there is no rational basis for preferring England to any other nation, especially given the behaviour of his fellow citizens at the Restoration. To return to Helgerson’s discussion of Hobbes in Forms of Nationhood, Milton too tries to combine Foxe’s discourse of the elect nation with Hooker’s rationalism. The result, however, is not the all-powerful Leviathan, but rather a recognition of the antinomy of nationalism: the recognition that the universal principles that inform the law of nature and of nations, and that explain the emergence of nations, also undermine the rational claim of any particular nation to be the bearer of God’s word.

Seventeenth-Century Debates about the Nation-State 267 NOTES 1 Milton’s prose is quoted from Complete Prose Works of John Milton, gen. ed. Don M. Wolfe, 8 vols (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1953–82), hereafter cited as CPW, and his poetry from John Milton: Complete Poems and Major Prose, ed. Merritt Y. Hughes (Indianapolis: Odyssey, 1957), hereafter cited in the text. This essay was completed in 2004. 2 In ‘A Defense of Delilah,’ Sewanee Review 68 (1960): 240–55, William Empson proposed that Samson Agonistes presents the Jews and Philistines as parts of a single nation, along the lines of England after the Norman Conquest. He then went on to argue that Dalila’s marriage to Samson ‘is essential to the poem, because it yields a particularly shocking moral paradox’ (246). That paradox, while never clearly spelled out by Empson, appears to be that Milton ‘alleged no moral superiority for Jehovah’s religion over Dagon’s’ (249). It would have been too easy to make Dalila contemptible. Only by marrying Dalila to Samson and elevating her to a position of moral equivalence with Samson could Milton dramatize the mystery of Samson’s fall and the ‘disastrous end of the Commonwealth’ (253). And only in this way could Samson’s story illustrate the further paradox that ‘the common judgments of the world are wrong,’ and that ‘the ways of God are not our ways’ (240, 241). Whatever we make of the claim that the Jews and Philistines are a single nation in Samson Agonistes, Empson is clearly right to argue that Dalila’s marriage to Samson is essential to the poem and to link that marriage to the idea of the nation. 3 On 11 July 2006, following the Supreme Court ruling striking down proposed special military tribunals, the Bush administration finally conceded that ‘terror’ suspects held by the United States had a right under international law to the basic human and legal protections afforded by the Geneva convention. 4 E.J. Hobsbawm, Nations and Nationalism since 1780 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1990). See also Ernest Gellner, Nations and Nationalism (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1983). 5 Charles Taylor, ‘Nationalism and Modernity,’ in The State of the Nation: Ernest Gellner and the Theory of Nationalism, ed. John A. Hall (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1998), 193. Taylor stresses that modern nationalism was caused not only by the homogenization functionally required by modern economies, but also, as Benedict Anderson argued, by ‘a revolution in our social imaginary.’ See Benedict Anderson, Imagined Communities: Reflections on the Origins and Spread of Nationalism, 2nd ed. (London: Verso, 1991), 197.

268 Victoria Kahn 6 Anderson, Imagined Communities, 36. 7 Gellner, Nations and Nationalism, 39; and Hobsbawm, Nations and Nationalism since 1780, ch. 1. See also Colin Kidd, British Identities Before Nationalism (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1999), who argues that, while ‘national consciousness’ may have existed in the early modern period, this should not be equated with ‘nationalism,’ i.e., the elevation of the nation above all other sources of identity. A similar critique is offered by Krishan Kumar in The Making of English National Identity (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2003). Kumar particularly takes issue with what is sometimes called dynastic nationalism: nationalism, for Kumar, locates sovereignty in the people, not in the king (101). For both Kumar and Kidd, early modern England is not yet nationalist since nationalism requires ‘a nation linked by the horizontal ties of nationhood rising above the ties of class, region, and religion’ (Kumar, Making of English National Identity, 103). In contrast to these accounts, I believe that many English men and women had a sense of the nation in the early modern period and that this sense of the nation was at times seen to be perfectly compatible with a Protestant sense of England’s providential mission. In Milton’s early writings, in particular, providentialism strengthened rather than weakened nationalist feeling. 8 Richard Helgerson, Forms of Nationhood: The Elizabethan Writing of England (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1992). 9 The view that Foxe articulates a nationalist view of the elect nation (associated most prominently with William Haller’s Foxe’s Book of Martyrs and the Elect Nation [London: Jonathan Cape, 1963] was challenged by Katharine R. Firth in The Apocalyptic Tradition in Reformation Britain, 1530–1645 (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1979). According to Firth, Foxe’s apocalypticism was universalist and made no special claims for England as an elect nation. However, Firth does note that seventeenth-century writers such as Milton read Foxe and other Elizabethans as defending a nationalist account of election (107, 235–6). See also Achsah Guibbory’s essay above. 10 A few pages later, Helgerson links Hobbes with Shakespeare and Hooker: ‘Like Shakespeare and Hooker, Hobbes restores the deposed sovereign. The England he imagines is identified with an absolute governing order’ (294). In the concluding pages of the book, however, Helgerson cautions that Hobbes represents one pole of thinking about the nation-state in early modern England. Against Hobbes’s vision of ‘a hegemonically unified state,’ Helgerson sets Drayton, whose Poly-Olbion celebrates the multiplicity and diversity of the nation. He also cautions against accepting a nation’s claim to be ‘natural’ or ‘immemorial’: ‘Neither the nation nor the state has always been there. Both were continually reconstituted in an ongoing exchange

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11

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between individual needs, communal interests, and discursive forms, an exchange that continues to be driven, as it was in sixteenth-century England, by alienation and emulation – forces antithetical to the nation’s fundamental sense of its distinguishing and enabling self-likeness’ (301). See Taylor, ‘Nationalism and Modernity,’ 198. Taylor links this new idea of the nation to seventeenth-century social contract theory but then argues (incorrectly, I believe) that this idea of the nation only became part of ‘the social imaginary’ in the eighteenth century. Earlier in Forms of Nationhood, Helgerson assimilates Milton to statist ideology, even while admitting that Milton is no believer in political absolutism: ‘the poet moves into the place formerly reserved for the ruler, appropriating as he does so the ancient forms that once stood for imperial power ... Instead of defending against royal usurpation by associating poetry with the immemorial rights and customs of the English people or with the chivalric ethos of the feudal nobility, Milton himself does the usurping’ – i.e., he arrogates to himself the position of the monarch (61). In Wayward Contracts: The Crisis of Political Obligation in England, 1640–1674 (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2004), I have argued, in contrast, that Milton’s conception of his relationship to his reader was not monarchical but contractualist. Liah Greenfeld, Nationalism: Five Roads to Modernity (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1992), 6–7. This seems plausible whether or not one wants to accept Greenfeld’s larger claim that Tudor nationalism was protodemocratic. For a critique of this claim, see Kumar, The Making of English National Identity, 89–120, esp. 99–101. Robert Filmer, The Originall of Government, in Patriarcha and Other Writings, ed. Johann P. Sommerville (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1991), 189, 190. On the availability of Grotius to both absolutist and republican readings, see Richard Tuck, Natural Rights Theories (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1979), ch. 7, and Tuck, Philosophy and Government, 1572–1651 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1993), ch. 6. Hugo Grotius, De jure belli ac pacis libri tres, ed. James Brown Scott, trans. Francis W. Kelsey et al. (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1925), 1.3.8.13. Ibid., 1.3.8.13 and 2.5.8.1–2.5.9.4. In 2.5.8.1, Grotius portrays the wife as naturally subordinate to her husband, whom she also consents to obey. He also notes that, according to the law of nature, ‘the wife ... becomes a member of the husband’s family.’ But he goes on to observe that ‘the law of Christ has brought marriage between Christians ... to a higher norm of perfection.’ Although this observation is first made with reference to the

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Jewish custom of taking more than one wife, Grotius extends it to the mutual power husband and wife exert over each other. In contrast to Helgerson, who understands the early modern state as a traditionally masculinist principle of association, as opposed to the feminine connotations of the nation, Filmer suggests that the very idea of the ‘state’ has the power to undermine traditional filiations and thus gender relations. See Forms of Nationhood, 297–8. See OED, s.v. state, II. 15 and ff. For other passages where Milton effeminizes the idea of the state, see his discussion of Charles’s court in Eikonoklastes, e.g., CPW 3:421, and his view that the English nation has been made effeminate by the prelates in Of Reformation. Here I take issue with Mary Nyquist’s reading of Samson Agonistes in ‘“Profuse, proud Cleopatra”: “Barbarism” and Female Rule in Early Modern English Republicanism,’ Women’s Studies 24 (1994): 83–130. Nyquist argues that Milton deliberately effeminizes and orientalizes the Philistines, as he does Samson prior to the recovery of his strength, and that this unwittingly reveals ‘the male supremacist assumptions of Milton’s republicanism.’ Drawing on Carole Pateman, Nyquist writes: ‘But that [Dalila’s deeds] are ‘worse than hostile,’ jeopardizing the very identity of the nation-state, also reveals the extent to which a patriarchal sexual contract underwrites the early modern social contract’ (118). I see Milton, instead, as deliberately exposing and exploring these assumptions. On despotical power, see Filmer, The Originall of Government, 206. Milton, Of True Religion, in CPW 8:431, also cited in Paul Stevens’s essay below. For a compatible argument, see Paul Stevens, ‘Milton and the New World,’ in Milton and the Imperial Vision, ed. Balachandra Rajan and Elizabeth Sauer (Pittsburgh: Duquesne University Press, 1999), 90–111. See also Abraham Stoll, ‘Milton Stages Cherbury,’ in Altering Eyes: New Perspectives on ‘Samson Agonistes,’ ed. Mark R. Kelley and Joseph Wittreich (Newark and London: University of Delaware Press, 2002), 281–306. See Norman T. Burns, ‘“Then Stood Up Phinehas”: Milton’s Antinomianism and Samson’s,’ Milton Studies 33 (1996): 27–46, esp. 36, on this passage in Bunyan. Burns ultimately argues that ‘neither Milton nor his contemporaries were likely to confuse Dalila’s “motions” with the leadings of the Spirit of Truth’ (36). Derek N.C. Wood, ‘Exiled from Light’: Divine Law, Morality, and Violence in Milton’s ‘Samson Agonistes’ (Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 2001), 114. Yet Wood goes on to say, ‘We can be certain that Milton did not for a moment believe God was on the side of Charles II’ (174). The revolution failed, not because both sides were equally right but because the revolutionaries

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were sinful and incompetent and squandered their God-given opportunity (174). See also Joseph Wittreich, Shifting Contexts: Reinterpreting ‘Samson Agonistes’ (Pittsburgh, PA: Duquesne University Press, 2002), 246–7. Wood, ‘Exiled from Light,’ 115. See Andrew Hiscock, ‘“Retiring from the Popular Noise”: The Nation and Its Fugitive Images in Milton’s Samson Agonistes,’ English 50 (2001): 89–110. Hiscock argues that ‘Milton textualises the anxieties surrounding the idea of national allegiance’ (90). Countering Mary Ann Radzinowicz’s view that Samson’s idea of the nation is clearly distinguished from Dalila’s, Hiscock writes, ‘It becomes increasingly difficult as Milton’s text progresses to differentiate between representations of the nation according to such clearly adjusted value systems’ (102). But the radical implications of this insight are elided when Hiscock goes on to read Samson Agonistes in the same way that Wood and Wittreich do, as demonstrating the inadequacy of Samson’s Old Testament violence and the superiority of Christ’s patient heroism in Paradise Regained (106). I take the phrase ‘blood and belonging’ from Michael Ignatieff’s book, Blood and Belonging: Journeys into the New Nationalism (London: Vintage, 1993). For the view that Samson Agonistes dramatizes the failure of an Old Testament ethic of violence, see Wittreich, Shifting Contexts; and Wood, ‘Exiled from Light.’ Also relevant is the polemical exchange set off by John Carey’s ‘A Work in Praise of Terrorism: September 11 and Samson Agonistes,’ TLS 6 September 2002. On this point, see the essay by Paul Stevens, ‘How Milton’s Nationalism Works: Globalization and the Possibilities of Positive Nationalism,’ below. Other critics have also challenged the ‘revisionist’ view. See, among others, Michael Lieb, Milton and the Culture of Violence (Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 1994); Norman Burns, ‘“Then Stood Up Phinehas”’; David Loewenstein, Representing Revolution in Milton and His Contemporaries (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2001), ch. 9; and Stanley Fish, How Milton Works (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2001), 391–473. I discuss Milton’s earlier exploration of this antinomy (in The Doctrine and Discipline of Divorce and in Paradise Lost) in Wayward Contracts. Filmer criticizes Hobbes for being unable to discriminate between monarchical or popular government in The Originall of Government, 190. In ‘The Phoenix and the Crocodile: Milton’s Natural Law Debate with Hobbes Retried in the Tragic Forum of Samson Agonistes,’ in The English Civil Wars in the Literary Imagination, ed. Claude J. Summers and Ted-Larry Pebworth (Columbia: University of Missouri Press, 1999), 242–70, Catherine Gimelli Martin reads Dalila and the Philistines as advancing a Hobbesian understanding of natural law and political power.

272 Victoria Kahn 30 Hobbes, De cive, ed. and trans. Richard Tuck and Michael Silverthorne (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1998), 1.2.1, p. 33. Whereas Filmer worried that the voluntarism of contract would dismantle all natural social relations, Hobbes worried that it might not dismantle them enough. 31 See William Kerrigan, ‘The Irrational Coherence of Samson Agonistes,’ Milton Studies 22 (1986): 217–32, for a reading of Samson Agonistes as a drama of the will. In ‘Samson Agonistes and the Drama of Dissent,’ Milton Studies 33 (1996): 133–58, Sharon Achinstein reads Samson Agonistes as addressing the condition of dissenters during the Restoration: ‘The play asks, What are the moral conditions under which free consent may be offered?’ (148). I believe the play also dramatizes Milton’s understanding that even free consent is a problem. 32 See Virginia R. Mollenkott, ‘Relativism in Samson Agonistes,’ Studies in Philology 67 (1970): 89–103, where Mollenkott argues for ‘making careful distinctions in the point of view: from the vantage point of God versus Dagon, Dalila as the instrument of Dagon is clearly in the wrong. But on the human level, Dalila’s reasons for betraying Samson are valid in their own way; Samson’s accusations are valid in another way; and Milton has his own reasons for allowing Dalila to plead her cause so eloquently (96).’ Similarly, Samson is the tool of God’s purposes but, on the human level, ‘Samson’s conduct is at least as reprehensible as Dalila’s’ (98). Mollenkott does not equate this ‘relativistic handling of the temporal plane’ of the drama with relativism, since salvation is still determined by ‘obedience to the one true God’ (102, 101). In ‘Milton’s Samson and the “New Acquist of True [Political] Experience,”’ Milton Studies 24 (1988): 233–51, Barbara Kiefer Lewalski argues that Samson ‘challenges Dalila’s relativism by appealing to widely shared human values,’ including ‘the law of nature and nations, which privileges the marital union and loyalty of wife to husband above the claims of the magistrates or the state’ (241). It is clear Samson is appealing to the widely shared ‘law of nature and of nations’ but, against Lewalski, I think Milton is interested in exploring how these empower Dalila as well as Samson. Lewalski does not cite any texts to support her claim that the law of nature and of nations privileges the wife’s duty above those owed to the state. 33 Samuel Johnson, Life of Milton, in The Six Chief Lives from Johnson’s ‘Lives of the Poets,’ ed. Matthew Arnold (1878; 1892; rpt. London: Macmillan, 1915), 111. 34 See also Milton, The Reason of Church-Government, on his ambition to compose works ‘doctrinal and exemplary to a Nation’ (CPW 1:815).

10 How Milton’s Nationalism Works: Globalization and the Possibilities of Positive Nationalism paul stevens

When Milton’s formidable contemporary and godly co-religionist Lucy Hutchinson looks back over her life, she counts it a blessing and signal act of providence that she was born an Englishwoman: ‘Whosoever considers England will find it no small favour of God to have bene made one of its natives, both upon spirituall and outward accounts.’1 Her idealistic representation of England is Shakespearean in its biblical intensity. Like John of Gaunt’s England, hers is another Eden – ‘a paradice,’she says, ‘a garden enclosed’ like the beloved of the Song of Solomon (281, 279).2 The outward signs of God’s favour are evident everywhere, in England’s climate and prosperity, in its history of active and contemplative virtue, its valour and learning. The spiritual signs are equally apparent in its history of piety and devotion. It was here in England, she asserts, that Christendom first witnessed ‘the early dawn of Gospell light’ in the work of Wyclif and that it first saw in Henry VIII a prince willing to break ‘the antichristian yoke off from his owne and his subjects necks’ (281). Compared to the hortus conclusus of England ‘a more plentifull harvest of devout confessors, constant martirs, and holy worshippers of God hath not growne in any field of the church’ (281). What is extraordinary about Hutchinson’s patriotism is that it is articulated in the midst of defeat, that is, sometime between 1668 and 1674, in almost exactly the same period that Milton published his three greatest poems.3 Hutchinson’s sorrows were every bit as great as Milton’s. Her husband, the regicide Colonel John Hutchinson had been arrested, pardoned after a humiliating appeal orchestrated by his wife, re-arrested and left to die in Sandown Castle – a belated martyrdom for his role in the service of the ‘good old cause.’ In spite of all this, in spite of the failure of her confessional aspirations, both

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political and religious, she can still rejoice in being English. Being English for Hutchinson, it needs to be emphasized, means more than belonging to an ethnic group; even though the nation has fallen on hard times, being English still means inhabiting an astonishingly rich culture with its own clearly defined heroic narrative. Patriotic sentiments like Hutchinson’s, from the policy statements of Queen Elizabeth to those of Cromwell, from Shakespeare to Milton, are commonplace throughout the seventeenth century and their inspiration is not only biblical. Just after he had published his 1674 poem in praise of Paradise Lost, Samuel Barrow, for instance, began work on a pamphlet in praise of the English regiments which had fought with the French against the Spanish at the Battle of the Dunes outside Dunkirk in 1658.4 His inspiration is Xenophon’s Anabasis. The exploits of Cromwell’s ‘Six Thousand English,’ as Barrow calls them, are meant to recall those of Xenophon’s Ten Thousand Greeks. The march of Xenophon’s army through the Persian empire to the sea was routinely read as a pan-Hellenic national epic, the ten thousand mercenaries transforming themselves into a unified polity, a masculinist microcosm of the Greek oikoumene. The climax of their fighting retreat through Asia Minor is the mountain-top sight of the sea, and just as the Greeks rejoice when they finally see thalatta, so here in Barrow’s text, the English are made to give ‘a shout of rejoicing’ as they crest the ‘rising hills of sand’ and finally see their enemy drawn up by the sea – they give a shout ‘that made a roaring echo betwixt the sea and the canal’ (411). Barrow can hardly contain his joy as the English Redcoats like Greek hoplites ‘clear shocked [the enemy] off their ground’ (414). It is a matter of national pride even for a Restoration audience. It doesn’t matter whether the troops are Cromwellian or not – they are still Redcoats.5 ‘[T]he Right they did their country, by their behaviour,’ the pamphlet’s advertisement explains, ‘might make some amends for the Occasion of being in that service’ (404) – that is, in Louis XIV’s foreign, Catholic service. The Englishness of their heroism might transcend the dubious political cause in which they were employed. The almost obsessive recurrence of sentiments such as these is interesting for many reasons but most importantly because it casts considerable doubt on the credibility of the recent argument that the use of terms such as ‘nationalist’ and ‘nationalism’ in relation to Milton’s England is anachronistic. ‘[N]ationalist thinking,’ says Colin Kidd, the Scots historian and most forceful exponent of this argument, is clearly ‘alien to the early modern era.’6 He feels as confident as he does in making such a counterintuitive

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claim because of the very specific way he defines nationalism. He follows John Breuilly in defining the term as a political doctrine built on three principal assumptions – first, ‘that “there exists a nation with an explicit and peculiar character,”’ second, ‘that “the interests and values of this nation take priority over all other interests and values,”’ and third ‘that the nation “be as independent as possible,” with an aspiration, “usually” to “political sovereignty”’ (5). The first and third of these assumptions are the least persuasive in sustaining Kidd’s argument. Despite the ease with which English ethnicity may be deconstructed, seventeenth-century English people themselves stubbornly assumed that they did indeed have their own explicit and peculiar character – when Cromwell’s army entered Scotland in July 1650, the ordinary soldiers drawn from all over England and speaking a variety of dialects had not the slightest doubt that they had entered a foreign country, and even Milton for all his worries about the English people never doubted that they had an identifiable character. Similarly, despite the actual union of the three kingdoms and the putative union of the Commonwealth with the United Provinces, the English, as Hutchinson’s testimony suggests, gloried in the sovereignty of their nation. One of the many reasons why Queen Elizabeth was revered throughout the seventeenth century, even by republicans like Hutchinson and James Harrington, was her willingness to imagine her realm as a sovereign nation, an autonomous community that embraced all in their Englishness: ‘I am come amongst you, as you see ... ,’ she says to her troops at Tilbury in 1588, ‘not for my recreation and disport, but being resolved in the midst of the heat of battle, to live or die amongst you all; to lay down for my God, and for my kingdom, and for my people, my honor and my blood, even in the dust. I know I have the body of a weak and feeble woman; but I have the heart and stomach of a king, and of a king of England too, and think foul scorn that Parma, or Spain, or any prince of Europe should dare to invade the borders of my realm.’7 Shakespeare’s Henriad, as it remembers speeches such as this and is remembered in nationalist reveries such as Hutchinson’s, is clearly Elizabethan. Kidd sees his best card as the second assumption that in nationalism the interests and values of the nation take priority over all other interests and values and so he moves to reinforce it by quoting Peter Alter: ‘In nationalism, the nation is placed upon the highest pedestal; its value resides in its capacity as the sole, binding agency of meaning and justification’ (5, my emphasis). The problem with this move, however, is that not only is it difficult to imagine any seventeenth-century nation,

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polity, or ethnicity, claiming or assuming such a principle, it is also just as hard to imagine any twentieth-century or contemporary nation doing so. The idea that nationalism is to be defined by the degree to which polities or ethnicities believe or have believed themselves to constitute ‘the sole, binding agency of meaning and justification’ is so extreme that in the twentieth century, for example, only such monstrous regimes as those of Nazi Germany or Imperial Japan could be said to be truly nationalist. Obviously nations give priority to their own interests and values, but they rarely do so absolutely and they almost always subscribe to commonly held or at least communicable principles – how else could they make the compromises necessary for international relations? What this suggests is that nationalism as defined by Kidd through Breuilly and Alter is only of limited explanatory force; it certainly does not mean that nationalism was alien to the early modern era8 – while the first and third assumptions are applicable to the seventeenth century, the second as it is developed by Kidd is so extreme that it is not clear that it is applicable to any period. Nationalism as imagined by Benedict Anderson building on the work of thinkers from Ernest Renan to Ernest Gellner, and recently reinterpreted by Charles Taylor and many others, is, however, another matter.9 Anderson’s idea of the nation as an imagined community has been so influential because it frames the issue considerably more subtly and suggestively than Kidd and his authorities do, and consequently it allows us to explain so much more. It seems difficult not to believe, then, that over the course of the seventeenth century, most English people, though certainly not all, came to see the nation as the category of community best able to realize their aspirations, both ‘spirituall and outward’ as Hutchinson might put it. The imagined community of the nation doesn’t stand in opposition to ‘the claims of church, confession, kingdom and constitution’ (1) as Kidd argues but it serves as their matrix or crucible. The most intense public desires of seventeenth-century English people are overwhelmingly articulated in terms of what the nation and its defining institutions could or should be. The nation is imagined as both an ethnicity and a polity but its constitution as an ethnicity is always, or almost always, subordinate to its potential as a polity. Enormous energy is devoted to studying, imagining, and arguing about the precise form of this national community and none more so than by John Milton, Englishman. The principal aim of this essay is, however, not only to suggest the legitimacy of studying Milton in the context of early modern nationalism

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but to make two further arguments: first, to suggest the importance of the political work of literary criticism, what Stanley Fish derides as the temptations of history and politics, and second, to suggest how Milton’s thinking about the nation might illuminate the present-day possibilities of positive or civic nationalism, especially in the context of globalization. Let me begin with political criticism. The Temptations of History and Politics The present essay was first conceived as a response to Stanley Fish’s polemical attack on contemporary criticism delivered at the MLA in New York in December 2002, but it is now clear that there are larger issues at stake. Fish argued that since Milton is a great poet but only a mediocre political thinker, the proper study of Milton now as at any other time is the poetry. It’s the poetry, stupid. The politics should only be studied as an aid or background to the poetry. As Fish put it in a recent Critical Inquiry article, we should, of course, ‘attend, as most of us always have, to the political (and economic and social) concerns that find their way into ... [Milton’s literary works], and we should treat them seriously,’ but only ‘as components in an aesthetic structure.’10 There are, as Fish’s MLA audience immediately made clear, innumerable ways of contesting this proposition. The most obvious is that the prescriptive distinction Fish wants to maintain between the aesthetic and the political is not always tenable and for many, including Milton himself, not always desirable. This is so because political concerns do not so much ‘find their way’ into the poetry through some leak or imagined failure of aesthetic quality control as constitute it. That is, Milton’s poetry is often, both in form and content, as political as his political prose is poetical – ‘image dense’ in David Norbrook’s succinct phrase.11 Fish’s distinction is not always desirable because there are critical times when it really does not matter whether one writes with one’s left or right hand. This is implicit in sonnets that advise generals on the virtues of peace, pastoral elegies that denounce our corrupted clergy, or exhortations that urge us to accept the poet’s prose defences of the English people in lieu of his long promised epic poem (CPW 4.1:685).12 Viewed from this perspective, as Norbrook has so eloquently argued,13 both kinds of writing, the poetry and the prose, are best understood as speech acts. One may be more immediately simple, sensuous, and passionate than the other, but all Milton’s writing is meant to move, persuade, educate, precipitate

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action that will lead to both the personal and public good. In this, in his articulation of what the good might be imagined to be, Milton, like so many other great Renaissance writers, allows us access to the origins of what has come to be called ‘modernity’; that is, his work allows us insight into who we are as members of a particular, historically specific culture. This is of enormous importance because one of the central present-day failings of our culture, whether in the United States, Canada, Britain, or numerous other countries, is its public sphere’s extraordinarily short memory span. Most people get their understanding of large-scale cultural issues like the war in Iraq, ‘globalization,’ or ‘nationalism’ from the mass media. The problem with this is that not only do the TV and newspapers present the most complex and critical issues as ‘stories,’ commodities to be consumed and forgotten with bewildering rapidity, but they locate these stories in historical contexts which often seem remarkably limited. ‘Real’ history, that is, the kind of history that media producers feel confident their audiences will recognize and see as relevant, only seems to have begun about a hundred years ago – if that. This systemic, mediainduced amnesia condemns general public discussion as opposed to various forms of specialized discussion, academic or otherwise, to a profoundly disabling myopia. Public political discourse is often alarmist, sensational, and painfully simplistic. Fish ends his Critical Inquiry article by insisting that ‘Politics does not need our professional help’ (378). My point is precisely the reverse. Not only does politics need our help, but the means by which we may provide that help is readily apparent in so many of the practices that Fish attacks. What I want to suggest in this essay is, then, that so much of the cultural analysis that literary critics now do has the potential to bridge the gap between academic and public discourse and so enrich the latter. In particular, I want to emphasize what can be gained by studying great poets like Shakespeare or Milton in terms of our need for cultural memory, and cultural history in terms of its need for their textual complexity. As the historian Natalie Zemon Davis has recently argued, a sensitivity to the complexity of literary texts has a deeply enrichening effect – it makes the historian sensitive to the rhetorical constitution of all her texts, even the most mundane. This in turn allows her to ‘conceive the movement to expression, oral or written, as an innovative action in itself, one to be examined along with the content of what was said.’14 Let me try to amplify what I am proposing with reference to the ongoing debate over globalization in such a way that might bring Milton’s nationalism into focus.

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In the March 2004 issue of Harper’s Magazine John Ralston Saul argues that globalism has collapsed and that we are about to witness a rebirth of nationalism.15 He suggests that the virtues of the sovereign nation-state have been occluded by the quasi-religious rhetoric of globalization theory. Ralston Saul’s article has been universally criticized. According to Canada’s leading newspaper, the Toronto Globe and Mail, for instance, Ralston Saul needs an ‘intellectual cold shower.’ ‘It’s foolish,’ says the paper’s editorial leader, ‘to suggest that economic liberalism was ever a religious phenomenon’ and as for nationalism Ralston Saul should ‘review his 20th-century history.’16 My first point is that this is a prima facie case in which specialized academic discussion, the study of literature as cultural history, might be deployed to enrich public discussion. To be specific, had the parameters of media discourse allowed Ralston Saul a deeper, more nuanced historical perspective he might have found it much easier, first, to demonstrate the religious quality of globalization theory and, second, to explain the past achievements and still powerful possibilities of the modern nation-state. Indeed, he might have deployed Shakespeare to demonstrate the first point and Milton the second. Such deployment, it needs to be emphasized, is not a matter of making crude or truly anachronistic comparisons, like John Carey’s recent depiction of Milton’s Samson as a seventeenth-century suicide bomber,17 but of having the patience to seek and identify the genealogical relationship between the past and present. It is not a matter of analogies but of what old-fashioned new historicists used to call homologies. Globalization and the Argument of Grace What a deeper historical perspective would have made most immediately clear about globalization is that modern, Western capitalism was global from its inception. How else are we to explain the genuinely paradigm-shifting expansion of Europe in the Renaissance if not in terms of the beginning of the present world economy? As Immanuel Wallerstein and many others have emphasized, it is in the sixteenth century, not the twentieth, that the global economy begins.18 It is in the sixteenth century that the massive influx of gold and silver from America first financed the voyages that established a vast network of ‘factories’ or trading settlements in Africa, India, the East Indies, China, and Japan, and brought silk and porcelain, nutmeg and pepper to Lisbon, Amsterdam, and rain-soaked Deptford – ‘The east with

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incense and the west with gold,’ as Dryden puts it.19 In order for economic activity on this world-wide scale to develop in early modern Christendom, it had to articulate itself in religious terms, and one of the many ways it did this was through the Christian argument of grace. We can see that argument clearly at work in a popular drama like The Merchant of Venice.20 As soon as one mentions The Merchant of Venice in a Canadian context, what immediately comes to mind is the Stratford Ontario Festival and charges of anti-Semitism. Despite Shakespeare’s famous concession to Shylock’s humanity – ‘Hath not a Jew eyes?’ (III.i.55) – the play is irredeemably anti-Jewish.21 It is not, however, anti-Semitic in the classic twentieth-century sense of the word because Shylock is most virulently satirized for not being a capitalist, that is, for not being an adventuring, risk-taking, truly globalizing capitalist. The merchant of Venice is not Shylock but the gracious Christian, Antonio. At the heart of the play is the opposition between the New Testament’s understanding of the Hebrew law and its own gospel. According to the New Testament, the law given to Moses on Mount Sinai turns on the principle of absolute, unswerving equity, quid pro quo, this for that, and is symbolized by a scales or balance. The gospel as it is given out by Christ in the Sermon on the Mount writes back to the law – fulfils and transumes it. The gospel goes beyond the law, urging its believers not to rely on quid-pro-quo thinking, to go the extra mile, to turn the other cheek all in the hope of producing a moral surplus and precipitating a circulation of grace (Matt. 5–7). As Portia explains, the nature of grace is such that it cannot be compelled; it ‘droppeth as the gentle rain from heaven / Upon the place beneath,’ but it doubles the dividend – ‘It is twice blest; it blesseth him that gives and him that takes’ (IV.i.181–4). In Shakespeare’s play, global capitalism, the kind of risk taking that produces wealth infinitely greater than that even imagined by Shylock and his thrifty usury, is idealized as a manifestation of this circulation of grace. The risk taking of the great trading companies like the Dutch Vereenigde Oostindische Compagnie or the English East India Company is called ‘venture,’ and venture, says Antonio, ‘is a thing not in our power to bring to pass’; it requires faith since it is ‘swayed and fashioned by the hand of heaven’ (I.iii.89–90). In the same way that an East India Company ‘adventure’ might risk all in an ocean voyage to buy cotton in India in order to buy spices in the Moluccas and Chinese silk in Siam in order to sell these commodities in England at 300 per cent profit,22 so Antonio’s hazard in accepting Shylock’s bond of a

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pound of flesh to finance Bassanio in his venture to win Portia frees her forensic skills to go beyond the law, turn it against Shylock, liberate Antonio, and so produce a net gain for everyone – including, according to the dubious logic of the play, Shylock, who gets to become a gracious Christian. Nor, it needs to be emphasized, is this commercialization of grace un-scriptural. In Matt. 25:14–30, Christ himself explains grace in terms of the workings of capital. He who is afraid and buries his talent or capital will be cast into outer darkness, but he who risks all, invests and doubles his talents or capital will enjoy the kingdom of heaven. As Max Weber and R.H. Tawney suggested long since, the success of Western capitalism is incomprehensible without the parable of the talents.23 It should come as no surprise then that when we turn to recent globalization theory we hear so many echoes of the early modern argument of grace. Alex Callinicos in his recent book Against the Third Way draws our attention to Tony Blair at his most breathlessly apocalyptic: ‘I believe it is no exaggeration to say that we are in the middle of the greatest economic, technological, and social upheaval since the Industrial Revolution over two hundred years ago.’24 Blair’s advisor, Charles Leadbeater, is even more excited: ‘We are moving into a post-capitalist society – open and innovative, and yet inclusive and cooperative.’ The force driving us towards this brave new world is not exactly grace but the creative surplus or circulation of intellectual energy known as the ‘knowledge economy.’ No longer will we prosper by the physical production of material goods – ‘We’re all in the thin air business these days,’ says Leadbeater, ‘the real assets of the modern economy come out of our heads not out of the ground – ideas, knowledge, skills, talent, and creativity.’25 In other words, globalization is driven by our willingness to capitalize on our talent. This involves hazard, and risk taking is a central feature of the work of a much more sophisticated theorist like Anthony Giddens. For Giddens globalization will not come without accepting risk. We need faith; to be specific, one needs ‘a generalized trust in distant events over which one has no control.’26 It could be Antonio speaking. No matter how The Merchant of Venice was received in 1600, no contemporary audience can help but find it disquieting. That disquiet is focused in the fate of Shylock. In his conversion to Christianity he is certainly allowed to enter the imagined community of Christ’s shining city on a hill (Matt. 5:14) – but he is not enfranchised so much as assimilated; his conversion is forced and his losses are enormous. And it is

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central to my argument that they are precisely the same kind of losses that the critics of globalization warn us against. Shylock is deprived of individual agency – he has no choice – and just as important, he is deprived of his difference: he loses his Jewishness, his own way of being in the world. Globalization, as seen even by its most thoughtful advocates like Giddens, means a decline in individual agency and subjection to a process of homogenization. In the words of the Indian scholar Dipesh Chakrabarty, globalization as the latest extension of Western modernity, especially as economic and political power coalesce into a new world order, means erasing the possibility of a plurality of ways of being in the world – foreclosing ‘the plural ways of being human that are contained in the very different orientations to the world.’27 If studying Shakespeare can clarify the dangers of globalization and its inclusive rhetoric, so studying Milton might help us understand what Ralston Saul was trying to get at in his closing reference to ‘a more complex and interesting form of positive nationalism,’ a nationalism ‘based on the public good.’28 Indeed, had Ralston Saul been allowed a deeper historical perspective he might have realized the degree to which he was being ventriloquized by Milton at his most inspired. In order to explain this point we next need to reestablish the continuity and religious inflection of Milton’s civic nationalism. The Troubled Continuity of Milton’s Nationalism It may at first sight seem somewhat perverse to invoke Milton to illuminate the possibilities of Ralston Saul’s ‘positive nationalism’ when there is so much evidence to suggest that Milton, unlike Lucy Hutchinson, lost faith in the possibilities of his own nation. Perhaps most telling, towards the end of his life, in a letter to Peter Heimbach, a German state councillor from Cleves, Milton wrote of his seduction by the siren patriotism: One of those Virtues [which you ascribe to me] has not so pleasantly repaid to me the charity of hospitality, however, for the one you call Policy (and which I would prefer to call Patriotism), after having allured me by her lovely name, has almost expatriated me, as it were. (CPW 8:4)

Just as he was church-outed by the prelates so long before,29 now he feels expatriated by his own country and concludes that ‘One’s Patria is wherever it is well with him’ (CPW 8:4). The letter was written in

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August 1666 during Dryden’s year of wonders and suggests the degree to which Milton and other dissenters who laboured under the harsh and insulting restrictions of the Clarendon Code felt out of tune with the strident nationalism of Restoration England. A year later in the same year that Dryden actually published Annus Mirabilis, his celebration of England’s commercial and imperial destiny, Milton published the first edition of Paradise Lost, his grave and intensely reflective interrogation of human failure.30 Milton’s biblical poem, once conceived as a national epic, now makes no explicit mention of England or her manifest destiny. The truth is, however, that Milton’s doubts about England and the English were there from the beginning – they were longstanding and recurrent. In the winter of 1648–9, for instance, in an unpublished passage from his History of Britain, Milton wondered if the failure of the Long Parliament to realize England’s potential greatness could not be explained naturally, that is, in terms of England’s cold, wet climate: For Britain (to speake a truth not oft spok’n) as it is a land fruitful enough of men stout and couragious in warr, so it is naturallie not over fertil of men able to govern justlie & prudently in peace ... Valiant indeed and prosperous to winn a field, but to know the end and reason of winning, unjudicious and unwise, in good or bad success alike unteachable. For the sunn, which wee want ripens witts as well as fruits.31

At this moment the character flaws of English ethnicity seem intractable and sharply at odds with the future Milton had once imagined for the nation. Indeed, at this moment the English do not seem to be that different from the Irish, one of the most despised of their ‘defining others,’ a people whom Milton was to describe a few months later in May 1649 as ‘indocible and averse to all Civillity and amendment’ (Observations upon the Late Peace, CPW 3:304). Unteachability becomes a constant refrain, and as one might expect after the climactic failure of the English to learn the arguments of responsible civil government in May 1660, they seem to have been erased from the book of Milton’s poetry. Unlike the Aeneid, for instance, where Jupiter, the father of gods and men, closes Virgil’s divine council with a vision of Rome’s future world dominion (I:254–96), Paradise Lost rejects the earthly nation – God the Father closes Milton’s divine council with a vision of his own future dominion, of ‘New Heav’n and Earth’ ([1667] 3:335), that is, of a kingdom not of this world. The millenarianism of Paradise Lost and the

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other great poems of Milton’s Restoration period is well known, pervasive, and difficult to avoid. Most famously in Paradise Regained (1671) Milton’s Jesus is emphatic in his rejection of the earthly empire of Rome for the millenarian visions of Daniel: Know therefore when my season comes to sit On David’s Throne, it shall be like a tree Spreading and overshadowing all the Earth, Or as a stone that shall to pieces dash All Monarchies besides throughout the world, And of my Kingdom there shall be no end.

(4:146–51)

Milton’s millenarianism is as crucial as it is, however, not because it confirms the end of political engagement but because it suggests its continuity – it intensifies and complicates it. And indeed, it suggests, so I want to argue, that Milton’s rejection of his native country might not be quite what it seems to be. It has become something of a commonplace to begin any account of early modern English nationalism with Thomas Cromwell’s preamble to the 1533 act in restraint of appeals from English subjects to foreign princes, specifically from members of the English church to the See of Rome.32 The fundamental reason for this restraint or prohibition, the preamble insisted, was because ‘this realm of England is an Empire,’ independent and entirely sovereign.33 Although, as David Armitage has recently pointed out, notions of England’s absolute or ‘imperial’ sovereignty did not begin with the Henrician revolution in government,34 England’s break with papacy took on enormous significance for a nationalism that increasingly came to define itself as Protestant.35 For many, England was England to the degree that it rejected the global authority of the pope. Many, following Henry VIII’s historian, Polydore Virgil, remembered the passage in Gildas’s De Excidio which suggested that England’s original, ancient Britain had converted to Christianity independently of the see of Rome as early as the reign of the emperor Tiberius.36 Richard Helgerson makes the critical point: ‘If one event more than any other determined the extraordinary sixteenth-century outpouring of writing about England ... it was the separation of the English church from the church of Rome.’37 In much the same way that world-wide capitalism first articulated itself in terms such as those of the argument of grace, so this new English nationalism looked back to the exceptionalism of the break with Rome and recurrently articulated

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its future in terms of rebuilding the Temple and the millenarian hopes of Daniel and the Book of Revelation.38 The future as it was articulated in scripture’s divine history became one of the principal conceptual means by which the English nation could imagine itself as being different or exceptional in human history. Nowhere is this appeal to a sense of national election more evident than in the rhetoric of Marian exiles like John Foxe, especially when the suffering of the invisible church and its faith in a millenarian future came to inform the identity of the visible, state church in Elizabethan England.39 For many radical Protestants, when the visible church and the nation it shaped conformed to their ideals, it became easy to see the nation as elect; when it strayed from these ideals and betrayed or rejected them, however, it became equally easy to see the nation as Babylon, Egypt, or Philistine Gaza. After the miraculous defeat of the Armada in 1588, divine election came to be seen as a central, if not entirely uncontested, element in the country’s newly reforming national imaginary. As numerous scholars have demonstrated, this particular pattern of representation, the identification of England’s national future with millenarian hope, comes to a climax at the outbreak of the English Revolution,40 and it is, of course, a major component in the revolutionary rhetoric of Milton’s antiprelatical tracts of 1641–2. His sense of pride in England’s national election is palpable – had not England been the first to ‘set up a Standard for the recovery of lost Truth, and blow the first Evangelick Trumpet to the Nations, holding up, as from a Hill, the new Lampe of saving light to all Christendome’ (Of Reformation [May 1641], CPW 1:525)? Most importantly for the present argument, the passionate appeal of these pamphlets to apocalyptical texts like Daniel and Revelation anticipates the violent and threatening millenarianism of the Restoration poems. As David Loewenstein has recently shown, the threat of Milton’s Jesus to dash all worldly monarchies to pieces rehearses the polemicist’s own much earlier explicitly political threat to ‘batter, and throw down’ the bishops’ ‘Nebuchadnessars Image’ (Animadversions [July 1641], CPW 1:700).41 Both threats are immediately inspired by the terrible power of the same text from Daniel (2:31–45) announcing the advent of a Fifth Monarchy, that is, God’s kingdom on earth. Although Milton was never a Fifth-monarchy-man, the angry and fully engaged political implications of these speech acts even when delivered by the inward-looking Jesus are unmistakable.42 The continuity between the two utterances suggests that in 1671 the nationalism is still there, if

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only in potentia. That is, in 1641 the nationalism is explicit, while in 1671 it is only implicit, seriously inhibited by the sheer difficulty of imagining how the invisible church of those persecuted by such injustices as the recent 1670 Conventicle Act might ever again become the visible church of the nation. Even in 1641, however, Milton is not as sure as he sounds, for even at the height of his optimism for the nation’s future, he is conscious of the weakness of the English. The nation seems a lot like ancient Israel in ways that are not necessarily desirable, always backsliding, stiff-necked, and always capable of electing a captain back for Egypt. In Animadversions Milton imagines himself as the Moses of Exodus 32 persuading an irate Jehovah not to destroy the Israelite English (CPW 1:706), and in Of Reformation he wonders, much less melodramatically, how it should have come to pass that England, which was once first in God’s grace and honour, ‘should now be last, and most unsettl’d in the enjoyment of that Peace, whereof she taught the way to others’ (CPW 1:525). But Milton’s doubts about the English in the summer of 1641 were belied by events – as they were to be throughout his career. The backsliding English whom Milton doubts in the antiprelatical tracts of 1641–2 turn out to be the same nation that casts off episcopacy and defeats the king in a long and bloody civil war. This is the nation that arouses the passionate admiration of the poet in Areopagitica in 1644, the nation that replaces the king as its own Samson: ‘Methinks I see in my mind a noble and puissant Nation rousing herself like a strong man after sleep, and shaking her invincible locks’ (CPW 2:557– 8).43 Similarly, the mutton-headed English whom Milton considers unteachable in the digression from the History of Britain in 1648–9 turn out to be the same nation that establishes a republic and whom Milton personifies and celebrates as an epic hero in his great prose defences of the people a few years later (CPW 4.1:685). In the Second Defence of 1654, for instance, he thanks God that ‘I was born at a time in the history of my country when her citizens, with pre-eminent virtue and a nobility and steadfastness surpassing all the glory of their ancestors ... freed the state from grievous tyranny and the church from unworthy servitude’ (CPW 4.1:548–9). Want of the sun does not seem to be too much of a problem now. Most importantly, the wayward English whom he feels had expatriated him in 1666 turn out to be the same nation that with some rousing motion appears to have awoken from its viciousness, its pride, and its luxury,44 and remembered its defining Reformation past and opposes any relaxation of restraint against the church of Rome in

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March 1673. As Londoners danced in the streets at the cancellation of Charles II’s Declaration of Indulgence, Milton wrote his last political pamphlet, Of True Religion, rejoicing with ‘the greatest part of the Nation’ that ‘God hath giv’n a heart to the people to remember still their great and happy deliverance from Popish Thralldom, and to esteem so highly the precious benefit of his Gospel, so freely and so peacefully injoy’d among them’ (CPW 8:417). As England seems to be coming to herself again, so Milton can rejoin his Patria. Since some have already begun to speak out, he says, ‘I thought it no less then a common duty to lend my hand, how unable soever, to so good a Purpose’ (CPW 8:417–18). Maybe England will realize its destiny after all.45 It is perfectly possible, as Thomas Corns has suggested, that many of these nationalist sentiments are disingenuous, largely a matter of Milton the consummate rhetorician playing the patriot with all the ‘brass-necked audacity’ of Dr. Johnson’s scoundrel,46 but there are, it seems to me, other explanations. Milton’s doubts, disillusionment, and disappointment with the nation are clearly occasional, that is, they are entirely contingent on its performance. As suggested above, the chief explanatory force of the term ‘nation’ lies in its capacity to suggest how England’s sovereignty over the course of the sixteenth and early seventeenth centuries began to shift from ‘the king’ to ‘the people.’ Milton is properly called a nationalist because in his writings England ceases to be a ‘sovereign realm’ and becomes a ‘sovereign nation,’ increasing the importance of both the people and, in theory at least, English ethnicity. But for Milton at his most rigorous, the English are truly the English he grew up believing in, the people truly ‘the people,’ only to the degree that they are capable of assuming the ‘majesty of a free people’ (CPW 7:428),47 of living up to the religious and civic ideals articulated in the country’s post-Reformation imaginary, and so, paradoxically, transcending the constraints of their own quotidian ethnicity precisely as they realize its imagined promise. And it is those ideals that are of most immediate relevance to the present argument. It is true that Milton’s nationalism is Janus-faced. As I have argued elsewhere, the civic nation he imagines is always capable of reproducing itself in self-regarding ethnic terms.48 Unlike the English at their best, Hindus, he says, are the dullest of mortals (First Defence, CPW 4.1:551), Danes are unjust and inhuman (History of Britain, CPW 5.1:345), Turks, Saracens, and Heathens are by definition incapable of observing the law (The Tenure of Kings and Magistrates, CPW 3:215), and so on. This is the nationalism Ralston Saul is being urged to remember

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by his critics. It is what Slavoj Žižek explains as a ‘surplus of the Real,’ that is, the contingent materiality of ‘common roots’ or ‘blood and soil’ that sticks to the civic nation as representations of the nation become overly affective or self-regarding, naturalizing what are in fact discursive or symbolic ties.49 Consider the way exceptionalism becomes solipsism even in something as ostensibly admirable as Pericles’s funeral oration.50 It is the kind of thinking that draws Milton to exclusion and violence. Michael Lieb has emphasized Milton’s strange fascination with Gibeah and the story of the Levite’s concubine in Judges 19–21. In Eikonoklastes (1649), at one of his most negative nationalist moments, Milton deploys the story to explain the Irish rebellion of October 1641. He identifies the Irish with the Benjaminites who rape the Levite’s concubine and the English reaction with Israel’s bloody response – the Levite dismembers his concubine’s body, sending the parts to the tribes of Israel who reunite and re-member both the body and the nation in the regenerative violence of Israel’s retribution. English atrocities against the Irish are justified thus – ‘Did not all Israel doe as much against the Benjamits’ (CPW 3:482)? As Lieb acutely observes, the Hebrew for the ‘base fellows’(Judges 19:22) who actually commit the rape is bnay-bliya’al, which the 1611 Authorized Version translates as ‘certain sons of Belial.’51 And these are, of course, the same ‘Sons of Belial’ whom Milton remembers in his 1667 Paradise Lost (I.499–505), swollen with insolence and wine, wandering the darkened streets of Restoration London, privileged members of the nation that had expatriated him. At this terrible moment, the English have become the defiled Irish and the temptation to purifying violence is implicit. But it is only a moment, not a constant. The negative side of Milton’s nationalism, truly disturbing as it often is, is only one face of Janus. Its extremism is occasioned by the experience of oppression or threat, the imminent collapse of identity. Indeed, threat exacerbated by the rhetoric of self-pitying and outraged suffering is the key to so many of the excesses of negative nationalism. Milton’s relation to the nation is intensely agonistic, but when those pressures, the threat of oppression or the collapse of identity, are removed it becomes possible to see the other side of Janus’s contro-versial face. And so, it needs to be emphasized, there is much more to Milton’s nationalism and his understanding of the modern nation-state than the dark passions of Gibeah. At his most inspired, Milton transcends ethnic solipsism, the exclusion and violence of ‘Leviticus thinking,’52 and reveals how nationalism at its most positive might work. If Milton’s millenarianism

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suggests the continuity of his nationalism, deconstructing the old opposition between radical activist and quietist saint that Fish wants to maintain,53 so his Protestant emphasis on the priesthood of all believers, on interiority, and dialogic interaction explains the individualism at the heart of his civic nationalism. The Protestant’s unmediated, direct access to God through reading scripture, preaching, and praying breathes life into the classical conception of the citizen’s unmediated, direct access to the state.54 In Milton’s nation every citizen has the potential to be a king: citizens in whom virtue dwells don’t need ‘Kings to make them happy, but are the architects of thir own happiness; and whether to themselves or others are not less then Kings’ (Eikonoklastes, CPW 3:542). Far from being the mediocre political thinker imagined by Fish, Milton in his poetry and prose allows us to see how our extraordinary present-day confidence in the sovereignty of citizenship is a function of the modern nation-state. The two are historically inseparable. Following thinkers like Grotius and Selden, Milton also allows us to see how this confidence and the relations between citizens it animates within the imagined nation might provide an enabling analogy for relations between nations themselves in the world community. Dialogism and the International Possibilities of the Modern Nation-State It was a matter of considerable disappointment to Milton’s great nineteenth-century liberal biographer, David Masson, that the poet should end his career with a pamphlet denying Catholics toleration.55 But Of True Religion, like the ‘self-evident’ rejection of the nation discussed above, is not quite what it appears to be. The principal suasive purpose of the pamphlet is not exclusion but consensus.56 Milton goes out of his way to stress that he writes not for ‘Learned Men’ but for the ‘Common apprehension’ of his fellow countrymen and women (CPW 8:418–19). Roman Catholicism, whose very name for Milton is a divisive contradiction, is to be excluded from the polity because it constitutes a fundamental assault on liberty of conscience and the priesthood of all believers: it denies the two basic principles on which both true religion and by extension the civic nation rest. Catholicism first denies that knowledge of God comes from scripture alone and it then affirms that belief in God can be ‘an implicit faith’ (CPW 8:419–20). The second point is the critical one here. It means that Catholicism encourages Christians not to make the effort to come to understanding ‘by their

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own diligent study’ and panders to their desire to ‘be sav’d by a Deputy.’ Implicit faith is personified as a tardy schoolboy, as intellectual or spiritual laziness: ‘Hence comes implicit faith, ever learning and never taught, much hearing and small proficience, till want of Fundamental knowledge easily turns to superstition or Popery’ (CPW 8:434). The emphasis in Milton is always on intellectual or spiritual energy both moved by and in the service of the Holy Spirit, both moved by and in dialogue with the words of others, and so not surprisingly when he turns directly to explain the alternative to implicit faith his text resonates with echoes of the impassioned dialogism of Areopagitica, the most powerful of his overtly nationalist texts. The difference between the two speech acts, Areopagitica (November 1644) and Of True Religion (March 1673), is largely one of register and emphasis, not substance. The continuity between the two utterances suggests that in 1673 working out one’s salvation is still a matter of every individual bearing witness with fear and trembling, and, though it is not made explicit, every citizen bearing responsibility for the public good. Every member of the imagined community of the national church – or every member ‘at least of any breeding or capacity,’ he is now willing to concede – ought to be grounded in spiritual knowledge, able to examine his or her teachers, search the scriptures and prove all things (CPW 8:435–6). Members should do this as individuals looking inwards but also as a community in dialogue. In the same way that Adam urges Eve to stay and face the adversary together with him, arguing that conversation is no distraction (Paradise Lost [1674] 9:226–69), so here Milton urges his countrymen and women to oppose the alienness of Catholicism and transform toleration among themselves into Protestant solidarity: ‘To save our selves therefore, and resist the common enemy, it concerns us mainly to agree within our selves, that with joynt forces we may not only hold our own, but get ground’ (CPW 8:436). Resurgent opposition to Catholicism is the occasion or immediate means by which Milton is arguing for a renewal of the nation he perceived in Areopagitica some thirty years before. In that speech act, true community means dialogue governed by reason – modelled not so much on Blair Hoxby’s neo-conservative ‘free marketplace of ideas’ as on an idealized forum or academy,57 that is, a place where one would find pens and heads ‘sitting by their studious lamps, musing, searching, revolving new notions and ideas, ... reading, trying all things, [and only] assenting to the force of reason and convincement’ (CPW 2:554). And so it is here:

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‘How shall we prove all things, which includes all opinions at least founded on scripture, unless we not only tolerate them, but patiently hear them, and seriously read them?’ (CPW 8:436). In Areopagitica, it is critical to read ‘promiscuously’ in order to ‘advance truth in others, and from others to entertain it’ (CPW 2:516–17, 539, my emphasis). And so it is here: ‘There is no Learned man but will confess he hath profited by reading Controversies, his Senses awakt, his Judgement sharpn’d, and the truth which he holds more firmly establish’t’ (CPW 8:438). For Milton, the essence of true community is liberty of conscience, that is, the individual’s freedom to realize his or her own God-given talent for spiritual knowledge as opposed to economic gain in open dialogue. The ‘nation’ as opposed to realms, kingdoms, governments, or empires is the name that signifies the polity most capable of effecting this public good. The importance of Milton for Ralston Saul’s argument is that he allows us to see how the Protestant emphasis on the community as a priesthood of all believers, a nation of prophets or individuals thinking dialogically within the framework of reason, energizes republican notions of citizenship and allows us a glimpse of what the nation might be. It is the vision of a nation not obsessed with material gain but standing absolute for truth in all her teeming forms, a nation capable of separating vehicle from tenor and not confusing talent with capital. In this, the nation can be seen not only as the polity best able to guarantee individual agency, but also, to the degree that the dialogism of the civic nation provides an analogy for the international ‘law of nations,’ as the polity most likely to evolve into the body best able to protect cultural difference. Milton is not the only poet to remember Areopagitica in the Restoration years. As Achsah Guibbory has so astutely noticed,58 Dryden, Milton’s erstwhile colleague in Cromwell’s government, ends his Annus Mirabilis by exploiting one of Milton’s most famous nationalist images – ‘Methinks I see in my mind a noble and puissant Nation rousing herself like a strong man after sleep, and shaking her invincible locks’ (CPW 2:557–8). But when Dryden co-opts Milton’s lines they turn to dross, the commonplace materiality of everything the elder poet struggled to transcend. As London is being rebuilt after the Great Fire of September 1666, Dryden confides: Methinks already from this chymic flame I see a city of more precious mould:

292 Paul Stevens Rich as the town which gives the Indies name, With silver paved, and all divine with gold. Already, labouring with a mighty fate, She shakes the rubbish from her mounting brow, And seems to have renewed her charter’s date Which heaven will to the death of time allow.

(1169–76)

This is Milton’s nation seen through Mammon’s eyes, and what follows is not a vision of the dialogic nation, ‘a Nation so pliant and so prone to seek after knowledge’ (CPW 2:554), but a new Rome committed to the pursuit of wealth, ‘widening streets,’ and global economic empire. In this vision, the merchant of Venice will become the merchant of London: the ‘venturous merchant’ will ‘here unlade him and depart no more’ (1197–2000). Like some stock Portia, full of ‘modern pride,’ London will behold ‘hourly suitors come: / The east with incense and the west with gold / Will stand like suppliants to receive her doom’ (1184–8). The argument of grace turns into an undisguised argument of raw economic power, and Dryden’s vision of globalization turns out to be one of ruthless competition and unilateral war – the Dutch will be defeated and the ‘British ocean shall such triumphs boast / That those who now disdain our trade to share’ will be reduced to penury and outlawed: they shall ‘rob like pirates on our wealthy coast’ (1206–8). Milton’s understanding of international relations is somewhat different. One of the many political fruits of open or free dialogue is consent, and in the theory of the dialogic nation Milton imagines in The Tenure of Kings and Magistrates (February 1649) consent is central. Relations between citizens are not based on status, tradition, or custom but on consent, and consent is in turn governed by law. Relations between citizens are based on consent because, as scripture makes clear, men and women were ‘borne free, being the image and resemblance of God himself, and were by privilege above all creatures, born to command and not to obey’ (CPW 3:198–9).59 Consent is subject to law because having fallen through ‘Adams transgression’ men and women found it necessary to ordain some authority to maintain order and in turn to subordinate that authority to laws ‘either fram’d, or consented to by all’ (CPW 3:199). As Victoria Kahn has emphasized, this consensual or dialogic theory of relations between citizens within the nation constitutes the principal model for Milton’s understanding of relations between nations themselves within Christendom and, to some extent at

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least, the world community as a whole.60 As individual citizens consent to be governed by national law, so sovereign nations consent to be governed by ‘the law of nations.’ In his advocacy of this consensual model of ‘the law of nations,’ Milton, like Hobbes and Grotius, draws the ire of traditionalists like Sir Robert Filmer,61 but while the immediate advantages of the model are not difficult to see, its deeper implications are not so obvious. The importance of the analogy is twofold. First, it enables sovereign nations to transcend the limitations of a nationalism based entirely on self-interest or ethnicity. Despite his failure to fully include Moslems and other non-Christians in his understanding of a world community, Milton comes close to this point of transcendence when he argues: ‘He therfore that keeps peace with me, neer or remote, of whatsoever Nation, is to mee as farr as all civil and human offices an Englishman and a neighbour: but if an Englishman forgetting all Laws, human, civil and religious, offend against life and liberty, to him offended and to the Law in his behalf, though born in the same womb, he is no better then a Turk, a Sarasin, a Heathen’ (CPW 3:215). Second and perhaps more important, the analogy enables international law to protect ethnic and cultural differences not only between sovereign nations but within them. As Milton begins to move towards this principle in Of True Religion, he concedes a vital point and agrees that foreign Catholics should be protected in the practice of their religion by the ‘Law of Nations’ (CPW 8:431). The point is that were there no sovereign Catholic nations this cultural or religious difference would be erased. Similarly today, Ralston Saul might respond to his globalizing adversaries that American or Canadian citizens whose cultural origins are Icelandic or Xhosa are enabled in maintaining their heritage by the existence of a sovereign Iceland or a sovereign South Africa, and vice versa. One of the most important aspects of the positive nationalism Ralston Saul wants to imagine is this – that, as Milton’s theory of the nation begins to suggest however inadvertently, a genuine, vibrant multiculturalism is enabled by the existence of sovereign nations living in dialogue through the law of nations.62 Obviously, Milton is no twenty-first-century multiculturalist, and relativism as it is articulated by Dalilah in Samson Agonistes is seen as a temptation, but the irony is that the relativism essential to multiculturalism is implicit in the trajectory of so much of his thinking about the nation, Dalilah serving as an indicator of where his mind has wandered. In his 1647 letter to a citizen of the Florentine republic, his

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Catholic friend, Carlo Dati, for instance, this relativism becomes explicit. Milton apologizes for having ‘spoken rather sharply ... against the Roman Pope,’ but knows that Dati will forgive him ‘whenever mention be made of your religion according to our custom,’ nostro more (CPW 2:764). For a moment, however brief, the difference between Catholicism and Protestantism is merely a matter of national custom. My point is, then, that if Shakespeare allows insight into how globalization diminishes agency and difference, Milton allows us similar insight into the way in which the modern nation-state might protect or even enable them. Conclusion Let me conclude by returning to globalization. According to the postMarxist globalizers, Michael Hardt and Antonio Negri writing in 2000, as world economic competition is subordinated to a harmonious political order, the sovereignty of nation-states will wither away and a new imperium like that of ancient Rome will emerge.63 As recent events have made clear, however, globalization’s erosion of the principle of national sovereignty has merely produced an asymmetry or vacuum to be filled by the fanatical terrorism of globalization’s losers, on the one hand, and by the equally violent and ruthless unilateralism of globalization’s winners, the most powerful nation-states, on the other – the two sides locked in a mutually uncomprehending, fearful synergy. It is a story worthy of Thucydides. The chief casualty of this impasse is the rule of law. Lawyers like Harvard’s Alan Dershowitz or Britain’s former prime minister Tony Blair appeal to necessity and actively seek to undermine the hard-won norms of national and international law, Dershowitz calling for the legalization of torture and Blair for that of preemptive war. In their hands, law would change to the point where it would become legalism – what Milton sees as framing mischief by law, that is, chasing ‘after legal formulas,’ lingering ‘almost on the individual letters of the law,’ interpreting a ‘written law too artfully and maliciously,’ and so failing to preserve the justice of the law.64 All these characterizations apply to the thinking of Dershowitz, Blair, and the egregious U.S. Judge Jay Bybee.65 For Milton, Blair is no Englishman, not simply because he is an ethnic Scot, but because he would offend against life and liberty by forgetting or rescinding the critical analogy between the law of citizens and the law of nations, an analogy predicated on Milton’s conception

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of a civic, consensual, or dialogic nation. That form of civic nationalism not globalizing fantasies, Ralston Saul might argue, has allowed us to become what we are at our best. It has allowed us to transcend our ethnicity without erasing it, and know that ‘the rule of law is not a mask or illusion’ but ‘our true nature.’ This last phrase is Michael Ignatieff’s, but Ignatieff too betrays the ideals he articulates in an argument which, after much hand-wringing, caves in to necessity and justifies both torture and preemptive war.66 Ralston Saul knows all too well that arguments based on necessity are dangerous, and could have told Ignatieff that ‘necessity, [as] Pitt the Younger said, is the excuse of every tyranny.’67 But had Ralston Saul a deeper historical perspective, he would have known that Pitt was merely quoting Milton: ‘So spake the Fiend, and with necessity, / The Tyrant’s plea, excus’d his devilish deeds’ (Paradise Lost [1674] 4:393–4).68

NOTES 1 The Life of Mrs. Lucy Hutchinson, Written by Herself: A Fragment. In Lucy Hutchinson, Memoirs of the Life of Colonel Hutchinson, ed. James Sutherland (London: Oxford University Press, 1973), 279. References hereafter cited in the text. 2 Cf. Richard II (II.i.30–68). A somewhat garbled version of Shakespeare’s speech was given widespread currency by Robert Allot in his popular anthology, England’s Parnassus or Flowers of Our Moderne Poets (London, 1600). 3 Cf. David Norbrook’s edition of Lucy Hutchinson’s Order and Disorder (Oxford: Blackwell, 2001), xi. 4 A True and Just Relation of Major-General Sir Thomas Morgan’s Progress in France and Flanders with the Six Thousand English was not finally published until long after the 1688 Glorious Revolution in 1699. It is quoted here from Stuart Tracts, 1603–1693, introduction by C.H. Firth (New York: Cooper Square, 1964). For more on Barrow, see Nicholas von Maltzahn, ‘“I admired Thee”: Samuel Barrow, Doctor and Poet,’ Milton Quarterly 19 (1995): 25–8. 5 The Restoration army of Charles II followed the tradition established by the New Model Army in wearing redcoats. The New Model Army became one of the nation’s defining institutions – Cromwell’s Life Guard became the Royal Horse Guards, the present-day Blues and Royals, and after Venner’s uprising in 1661 Monck’s Regiment became the 2nd Regiment of Foot Guards, the present-day Coldstream Guards. The triumph of the New Model Army was not only in effecting the victory of Parliament over the

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6

7 8 9

10

11 12

king, but also that of the national over the local and feudal. See, for instance, Mark Kishlansky, The Rise of the New Model Army (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1979); Ian Gentles, The New Model Army in England, Ireland, and Scotland 1645–1653 (Oxford: Blackwell, 1992); and John Childs, ‘The Resoration Army, 1660–1702,’ in The Oxford History of the British Army, ed. David Chandler (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1996), 46–66. Colin Kidd, British Identities Before Nationalism: Ethnicity and Nationhood in the Atlantic World (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1999), 5. See also Krishan Kumar, The Making of English National Identity (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2003); and Victoria Kahn’s critique, ‘Disappointed Nationalism: Milton in the Context of Seventeenth-Century Debates over the Nation-State,’ above. The Armada speech is quoted from Cabala, Mysteries of State, in Letters of the Great Ministers of K. James and K. Charles (London, 1654), 259–60. For a related argument, see David Loewenstein, ‘Milton’s Nationalism and the English Revolution’ above. See Ernest Renan, ‘What is a Nation?’ (1882), in Nation and Narration, ed. Homi K. Bhabha (London and New York: Routledge, 1990), 8–22; Ernest Gellner, Thought and Change (1964; rev. ed. London: Weidenfeld and Nicolson, 1972); Benedict Anderson, Imagined Communities: Reflections on the Origin and Spread of Nationalism (1983; rev. ed. London: Verso, 1992); and Charles Taylor, ‘Nationalism and Modernity,’ in The State of the Nation, ed. John A. Hall (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1998), 191–221. Stanley Fish, ‘Theory’s Hope,’ Critical Inquiry 30 (2004): 378, my emphasis. For other versions of the same argument by Fish, see ‘Why We Built the Ivory Tower,’ The New York Times, 21 May 2004, and ‘Why Milton Matters,’ in Milton Studies 44, ed. Albert C. Labriola (Pittsburgh: University Of Pittsburgh Press, 2004), 1–12. The ‘temptations’ of history and politics, elaborated with Fish’s characteristically formidable rhetorical agility, are, of course, central to the argument of How Milton Works (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2001). David Norbrook, Writing the English Republic: Poetry, Rhetoric and Politics, 1627–1660 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1999), 9. Milton’s prose is quoted from The Complete Prose Works of John Milton, gen. ed. Don M. Wolfe, 8 vols (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1953–82), hereafter cited as CPW, and his poetry from John Milton, Paradise Lost (London, 1667; rpt. Menston: Scolar Press, 1968); and John Milton: Complete Poems and Major Prose, ed. Merritt Y. Hughes (Indianapolis: Odyssey Press, 1957).

How Milton’s Nationalism Works 297 13 Norbrook, Writing the English Republic, esp. 1–22. 14 Natalie Zemon Davis, ‘The Historian and Literary Uses,’ Profession (2003): 24. 15 John Ralston Saul, ‘The Collapse of Globalism and the Re-birth of Nationalism,’ Harper’s Magazine (March 2004), 33–43. Ralston Saul has since expanded his thesis in The Collapse of Globalism and the Reinvention of the World (Toronto: Viking, 2005), but not in such a way that it affects the present argument about the limitations of media discourse. 16 Leader, The Globe and Mail, 27 February 2004. 17 John Carey, ‘Samson Agonistes and September 11,’ The Times Literary Supplement, 6 September 2002. 18 See, for instance, Jagdish Bhagwati, In Defense of Globalization (New York: Oxford University Press, 2004), 21–2; or Immanuel Wallerstein, The Capitalist World Economy (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1979), 19: ‘Capitalism was from the beginning an affair of the world economy ... It is a misreading of the situation to claim that it is only in the twentieth century that capitalism became “world-wide.”’ 19 John Dryden, Annus Mirabilis, l. 1187. Dryden is quoted from The Poems of John Dryden, vol. 1, ed. Paul Hammond (London and New York: Longmans, 1995). 20 This part of the argument is developed more fully in Paul Stevens, ‘Heterogenizing Imagination: Globalization, The Merchant of Venice, and the Work of Literary Criticism,’ New Literary History 36.3 (summer 2005): 425–37. 21 Shakespeare is quoted from The Merchant of Venice, ed. Jay L. Halio, The Oxford Shakespeare (Oxford: Clarendon, 1993). 22 See, for instance, the account of the East India Company’s seventh voyage (1611–15) in John Keay, The Honourable Company: A History of the English East India Company (London: HarperCollins, 1991), 61–4. 23 See, for instance, R.H. Tawney, Religion and the Rise of Capitalism (1926; rpt. Harmondsworth: Penguin, 1964), 197–270. For more on the ideological orientation of The Merchant of Venice, see, for instance, Walter Cohen, Drama of a Nation: Public Theater in Renaissance England and Spain (Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 1985); Michael Nerlich, Ideology of Adventure, vol. 1, trans. Ruth Crawley (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1987); Michael Ferber, ‘The Ideology of The Merchant of Venice,’ English Literary Renaissance 20 (1990): 431–64; John Gillies, Shakespeare and the Geography of Difference (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1994); and Theodore B. Leinwand, Theatre, Finance, and Society in Early Modern England (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1999), esp. 113–20. 24 Blair, qtd in Alex Callinicos, Against the Third Way (Cambridge: Polity Press, 2001), 29.

298 Paul Stevens 25 Leadbeater, qtd in ibid. 26 Anthony Giddens, The Consequences of Modernity (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1990), 133. 27 Dipesh Chakrabarty, Provincializing Europe: Postcolonial Thought and Historical Difference (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2000), 241. 28 Ralston Saul, ‘The Collapse of Globalism,’ 43. 29 The Reason of Church-Government (January 1642), CPW 1:823. 30 See Achsah Guibbory, ‘Milton’s 1667 Paradise Lost in Its Historical / Literary Contexts,’ in Paradise Lost: A Poem Written in Ten Books, ed. Michael Lieb and John T. Shawcross (Pittsburgh: Duquesne University Press, 2007); Barbara K. Lewalski, The Life of Milton: A Critical Biography (Oxford: Blackwell, 2000), 452, 444; and Blair Hoxby, Mammon’s Music: Literature and Economics in the Age of Milton (New Haven and London: Yale University Press, 2002), 287–8. 31 The Digression from the History of Britain (CPW 5.1:451) was published after Milton’s death in Sir Roger L’Estrange’s 1681 edition of the MS. digression called Mr John Miltons Character of the Long Parliament and Assembly of Divines. See Nicholas von Maltzahn, Milton’s History of Britain: Republican Historiography in the English Revolution (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1991), 1–21, 22–48. 32 See, for instance, Claire McEachern, The Poetics of English Nationhood (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1996), 1–4. See also Richard Helgerson, Forms of Nationhood: The Elizabethan Writing of England (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1992), 292; and David Armitage, The Ideological Origins of the British Empire (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2001), 34–5. 33 The act is quoted from English Historical Documents 1485–1558, ed. C.H. Williams (London: Eyre & Spottiswoode, 1967), 728. 34 Armitage, Ideological Origins, 34–5. 35 See, for instance, Linda Colley, Britons: Forging the Nation, 1707–1837 (1992; rpt. London: Vintage, 1994); and Arthur F. Marotti, Religious Ideology and Cultural Fantasy: Catholic and Anti-Catholic Discourses in Early Modern England (Notre Dame, IN: University of Notre Dame Press, 2004). 36 See von Maltzahn, Milton’s History of Britain, 22–3. On the ancient British origin of the Church of England, see Kidd, British Identities, 99–122. 37 Helgerson, Forms of Nationhood, 251. 38 See the essay by Achsah Guibbory, ‘Israel and English Protestant Nationalism: “Fast Sermons” during the English Revolution,’ above. 39 See, for instance, William Haller, Foxe’s Book of Martyrs and the Elect Nation (London: Jonathan Cape, 1963); and Paul Christianson, Reformers in Babylon: English Apocalyptic Visions from the Reformation to the Eve of the Civil War

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40

41

42 43 44 45

46 47 48

(Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 1978), esp. 39–46. On the invisible church as a model for the nation, see the essay by Andrew Escobedo, ‘The Invisible Nation: Church, State, and Schism in Milton’s England,’ above. See, for instance, Michael Walzer, The Revolution of the Saints: A Study in the Origins of Radical Politics (London: Weidenfeld & Nicolson, 1966); Michael Fixler, Milton and the Kingdoms of God (London: Faber and Faber, 1968); Paul Christianson, Reformers and Babylon: English Apocalyptic Visions from the Reformation to the Eve of the Civil War (Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 1978); and David Loewenstein, Milton and the Drama of History: Historical Vision, Iconoclasm, and the Literary Imagination (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1990). See David Loewenstein, Representing Revolution in Milton and His Contemporaries: Religion, Politics, and Polemics in Radical Puritanism (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2001), 264–5. Loewenstein, Representing Revolution, 256–7. The king appears as Samson in The Reason of Church-Government (CPW 1:858–9). For more on England as self-consuming nation, see the essay by Laura Lunger Knoppers, ‘Consuming Nations: Milton and Luxury,’ below. In July 1674, as late as five months before his death, Milton lent his hand again. As England now lived in fear of a Catholic succession, Milton, in his anonymous translation of the Letters Patents declaring John Sobieski King of Poland, offered the nation a solution in the form of an elective monarchy. See Nicholas von Maltzahn, ‘The Whig Milton, 1667–1700,’ in Milton and Republicanism, ed. David Armitage et al. (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1995), 231; see also Paul Stevens, ‘Intolerance and the Virtues of Sacred Vehemence,’ in Milton and Toleration, ed. Sharon Achinstein and Elizabeth Sauer (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2007), 243–67, and ‘Milton’s Polish Pamphlet and the Duke of Monmouth,’ Milton Studies 48 (2008): 72–94. See the essay by Thomas N. Corns, ‘Milton and the Limitations of Englishness,’ above (214–15). See the essay by Warren Chernaik, ‘Victory’s Crest: Milton, the English Nation, and Cromwell,’ above. See, for instance, Paul Stevens, ‘“Leviticus Thinking” and the Rhetoric of Early Modern Colonialism,’ Criticism 35 (1993): 441–61; ‘Milton’s Janusfaced Nationalism: Soliloquy, Subject and the Modern Nation State,’ JEGP 100.2 (2001): 247–68; and ‘Milton’s Nationalism and the Rights of Memory,’ in Imagining Death in Spenser and Milton, ed. E.J. Bellamy et al. (New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2003), 171–84.

300 Paul Stevens 49 Slavoj Žižek, They Know Not What They Do: Enjoyment as a Political Factor (London: Verso, 1991), 20. 50 See Thucydides, The History of the Peloponnesian War, trans. Charles Forster Smith, 4 vols, Loeb Classical Library (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1956), I:319–41 [Book II:xxxv–xlvi]. 51 Michael Lieb, Milton and the Culture of Violence (Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 1994), 126–7. 52 See Stevens, ‘“Leviticus Thinking.”’ 53 Fish reformulates the opposition as the difference between a commitment to the ‘historically real’ and the ‘really real’ (How Milton Works, 572). 54 On citizenship as ‘direct access,’ see Taylor, ‘Nationalism and Modernity,’ 191–218. 55 David Masson, The Life of John Milton, 6 vols (Gloucester, MA: Peter Smith, 1965), esp. 6:696–9. 56 Cf. Martin Dzelzainis on the ‘ingenuity Milton expended in contriving formulas that were acceptable to many and offensive to few.’ See his ‘Milton’s Of True Religion and the Earl of Castlemaine,’ The Seventeenth-Century 7.1 (1992): 64. See also Barbara K. Lewalski, The Life of John Milton (Oxford: Blackwell, 2001), 501–4; and Elizabeth Sauer, ‘Milton’s Of True Religion, Protestant Nationhood, and the Negotiation of Liberty,’ Milton Quarterly 40 (2006): 1–19. 57 Hoxby, Mammon’s Music 42. For a trenchant critique of Hoxby’s neoconservative thesis, see David Hawkes, ‘Cost for Comus,’ The Times Literary Supplement, 2 April 2004, 10. 58 Guibbory, ‘Milton’s 1667 Paradise Lost in its Historical/Literary Contexts.’ 59 Tony Davies hears an anticipation of the opening of Jefferson’s Declaration of Independence in these lines; see ‘Borrowed Language: Milton, Jefferson, Mirabeau,’ in Milton and Republicanism, 261. 60 See the essay by Victoria Kahn, ‘Disappointed Nationalism: Milton in the Context of Seventeeth-Century Debates about the Nation-State,’ above. 61 See, for example, Observations concerning the Originall of Government (1652) in Sir Robert Filmer, Patriarcha and Other Writings, ed. Johann P. Sommerville (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1991), esp. 215–16, and Kahn, ‘Disappointed Nationalism.’ 62 This, I would also argue, is what will best produce ‘an international balance in which the prism of civilization is neither naïve market economies nor national selfishness’ (Ralston Saul, ‘The Collapse of Globalism,’ 43). 63 Michael Hardt and Antonio Negri, Empire (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2000), 3–21. 64 First Defence, quoted from John Milton: Political Writings, ed. Martin

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65

66 67 68

Dzelzainis, trans. Claire Gruzelier (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1991), 87. See CPW 4.1:351. Excerpts from Jay S. Bybee’s U.S. Department of Justice Memorandum (1 August 2002) on the legal justifications for torture are reproduced in The New York Times, 27 June 2004, B7. Michael Ignatieff, ‘Lesser Evils,’ New York Times Magazine, 2 May 2004, 94. Ralston Saul, ‘The Collapse of Globalism,’ 43. On Milton’s own appeals to necessity, see Paul Stevens, ‘Milton’s “Renunciation” of Cromwell: The Problem of Raleigh’s Cabinet-Council,’ Modern Philology 98.3 (2001): esp. 379–80.

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PART FOUR Milton’s Nationalism and Its Discontents: Gender, Luxury, Slavery

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11 That Fatal Boadicea: Depicting Women in Milton’s History Of Britain, 1670 willy maley

In the most memorable moment in Irvine Welsh’s novel Trainspotting, Mark Renton, ringleader of assorted Edinburgh addicts and outlaws, delivers a diatribe about his country’s colonial status: It’s nae good blamin it oan the English fir colonising us. Ah don’t hate the English. They’re just wankers. We are colonised by wankers. We can’t even pick a decent, vibrant, healthy culture to be colonised by. No. We’re ruled by effete arseholes. What does that make us? The lowest of the fuckin low, the scum of the earth. The most wretched, servile, miserable, pathetic trash that was ever shat intae creation. Ah don’t hate the English. They just git oan wi the shite thuv goat. Ah hate the Scots.1

Although he may have balked at the diction, Milton would have understood the sexual politics of such self-loathing, but had the good fortune to be able to say something different in relation to colonization by ‘a decent, vibrant, healthy culture’ in his History of Britain: ‘of the Romans we have cause not to say much worse, than that they beate us into som civilitie; likely else to have continu’d longer in a barbarous and savage manner of life.’2 Here Milton flies the flag for flagellation. The ancient Britons did ‘pick a decent, vibrant, healthy culture to be colonised by,’ and in the course of Operation Enduring Civility the Romans liberated the Britons to within an inch of their lives, liberated them out of their lands, their lore, and their licentious ways. Unfortunately, when the Romans withdrew, the Britons went on to be ‘colonised by wankers,’ and ‘ruled by effete arseholes’ like the Saxons, the Danes, and, to add insult to injury, those ‘cheese-eating surrender monkeys,’ the Normans, who brought with them not civility, or even early modernity, but, in Milton’s words, ‘gibberish.’3

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To be colonized once is tragic; to be colonized twice is carelessness. To be subject to successive ‘inundations’ and invasions is to display a distinct lack of manly qualities. In his Observations upon the Articles of Peace (1649), Milton described the Irish as a people ‘who rejecting the ingenuity of all other Nations to improve and waxe more civill by a civilizing Conquest, though all these many yeares better shown and taught, preferre their own absurd and savage Customes before the most convincing evidence of reason and demonstration: a testimony of their true Barbarisme and obdurate wilfulnesse to be expected no lesse in other matters of greatest moment’ (CPW 3:304). Unsurprisingly, the Irish figure prominently when Milton waxes on the ancient Britons’ lack of such ingenuity. The account of intransigence in the face of a good beating, designed to instil civility, is characterized as a feminine trait. The Observations is a key text to be read alongside the History. It deals substantially with Scottish as well as Irish matters,4 and in its riposte to the Belfast Presbytery it can be seen to tie together several of Milton’s concerns. But it remains a relatively neglected work, a minor piece of prose published in a year of major prose works. It is harder to explain the neglect of Milton’s History of Britain, the longest tract he published in his lifetime. Milton’s History of Britain has not had a good press.5 What critical and historical debate there is dwells on the dating of the ‘Digression,’ the posthumously published, 2,500-word alleged out-take from the History.6 The ‘Digression,’ totem of topicality, has drawn attention away from the text as originally published. In Milton’s History, there are many digressions. The History itself is one long digression. For a pyrotechnic piece of prose bristling with polemical energy, crisscrossed with comets, omens, and portents, full of shooting stars and stripes, its reception has been that of a damp squib. It has had its admirers. Yale editor French Fogle called it ‘the most unified, condensed, and continuous narrative of pre-Conquest England that had yet appeared’ (CPW 5.1:xlviii). But such supporters are in the minority. Historians of the early modern period have continually expressed dissatisfaction with Milton’s failure to get beyond the Norman Conquest; with his pessimistic perspective on the English people, particularly the Saxons, seen by others as a saving grace between the Roman and Norman Conquests; and with the sense that a great and original writer is hobbled by the necessity of being derivative (something that he rose above in Paradise Lost). Christopher Hill pointed to ‘the contrast between Milton’s upbeat view of England as a chosen nation in his writings of 1641–4, and again in the Defences of the People of England of

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1651 and 1654, and the pessimistic view of English national character in the digression.’7 According to John Morrill, ‘Milton’s History of Britain has always been one of his least appealing books, lacking the polemical clarity required by the Whig historiographers of the century after its publication in 1670, emitting too little light to attract the moths and Miltonic antiquarians of more recent generations, and generally looking like an abandoned and unloved gift.’8 For David Underdown, ‘written in stages several years apart, published ... years after its composition, and in places gutted by the censor ... the History presents daunting problems for the modern scholar.’9 David Norbrook calls it ‘a work which quickly confounds any expectations that it would be an epideictic nationalist work,’ and Sharon Achinstein sees it as ‘advice literature’ but of a flawed kind: ‘In his epic history, Milton amply used previous historians, chronologers and antiquarians, and recycled their materials into one massive, nigh unreadable, composite.’10 The History of Britain reads like a prose version of Paradise Lost, recounting a series of falls, each holding out the promise of redemption. In his History, Milton debunked myths, gored sacred cows, and ripped up ancestries that others had grown accustomed to. A key feature of the work is that Milton’s anticlericalism runs so deep it prevents him from acknowledging the achievements of the Saxons. Unlike many contemporaries, Milton saw no Anglo-Saxon Golden Age betrayed by the Normans, instead representing the Saxons as just another unworthy crew. Moreover, if there was no salvation in the Saxons, then the ancient Britons were ‘Progenitors not to be glori’d in’ (60). In keeping with the later poems, effeminacy and emasculating women were the enemies of native manliness. Milton gave short shrift to the icons of British mythology, and none more so than Boadicea, Queen of the Iceni. Anxiety about female rule, and unruly or overruling women in general, is a marked feature of the History. Milton’s is a militantly masculine nationalism. Richard Greaves says of Milton, ‘his History is a jeremiad, his writing censorious, not chauvinistic.’11 But Milton’s writing is chauvinistic in one sense. The elect nation is gendered. Gender-aware readings of Milton and of colonialism, nationalism, and republicanism in the period make the History of Britain appear far less worthy of neglect. The Backlash against Boadicea For many readers of the History of Britain carried away by Milton’s majestic narrative sweep, there is a fatal Boadicea that keeps tapping on the shoulder. Gender was Milton’s blind spot, yet he was, like the

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original Peeping Tom, struck blind by looking.12 Though in the History he admires Cordelia, and Lady Godiva, ‘a Woman of great praise’ (340), Milton largely viewed women as obstacles in the path of colonial civility and national independence. Milton’s gender blindness extends to many of his male critics and especially those who identify with his radical or republican politics.13 In a bracketed aside in his review of Nicholas von Maltzahn’s monograph on Milton’s History of Britain, David Underdown remarks: ‘More might be said of the way in which Milton’s narrative is constructed on conventional assumptions about gender’ (212). And more has been said. Charles Firth, in a lecture entitled ‘Milton as an Historian’ delivered to the British Academy almost a hundred years ago, laid considerable stress on Milton’s representation of women and pointed to the most telling instance, the depiction of Boadicea.14 How conventional these assumptions are, and how particular to Milton, is a matter for debate, but Boadicea is just one figure, albeit arguably the most important, in a series that runs from Cordelia to Godiva. They are not all rulers, but when they overrule their husbands they come in for sharp rebuke. Jodi Mikalachki has argued that ‘early modern historiographers gave disproportionate attention to examples of female authority in accounts of ancient Britain, from the establishment of the nation’s first “gunarchie” under Queen Cordeilla, to the invocation of native goddesses and the political and military responses of British queens to Roman rule.’15 Obsessing over female rule did not begin and end with Elizabeth, though her reign gave an edge to existing anxieties.16 Cordelia is not the first female ruler alluded to in the History, but she is the first queen likely to be familiar to literary critics. Charles Firth suggests that ‘the space devoted in the History of Britain to the story of Lear and Cordelia is probably a tribute to Shakespeare’ (67). But Milton’s Cordelia appears closer to Holinshed’s Cordelia, described as ‘being a woman of a manly courage’ (qtd. in Mikalachki 75). According to Firth, ‘Milton’s comments continually remind us that he held very strong views about the subjection of women. He is as bitter against “the monstrous regiment of women” as John Knox himself. Cordelia’s nephews rebel against her in spite of her virtues, “not bearing that a Kingdom should be govern’d by a Woman”’ (67). Firth, however, fails to give the full quotation from Milton, which puts Cordelia in a positive light: Wherin her piety so prosper’d, as that she vanquish’d her impious Sisters with those Dukes, and Leir again, as saith the story, three years obtain’d

Depicting Women in Milton’s History of Britain 309 the Crown. To whom dying, Cordeilla with all Regal Solemnities gave Burial in the Town of Leicestre. And then as right Heir succeeding, and her Husband dead, Rul’d the Land five years in Peace. Until Marganus and Cunedagius her two Sisters Sons, not bearing that a Kingdom should be govern’d by a Woman, in the unseasonablest time to raise that quarrel against a Woman so worthy, make War against her, depose her, and imprison her; of which impatient, and now long unexercis’d to suffer, she there, as is related, kill’d herself. (27)

Timing and merit are the two reasons for Milton’s disapproval of the actions of Cordelia’s nephews (‘in the unseasonablest time to raise that quarrel against a Woman so worthy’). Martia, coming chronologically after Cordelia, still in the realm of ‘prehistory,’ is dealt a better hand by Milton’s predecessors than the one he gives her: Guitheline his Son, is also remember’d, as a just and good Prince, and his Wife Martia to have excell’d so much in wisdom, as to venture upon a new Institution of Laws. Which King Alfred translating call’d Marchen Leage, but more truly therby is meant, the Mercian Law; not translated by Alfred, but digested or incorporated with the West-Saxon. In the minority of her Son she had the rule, and then, as may be suppos’d, brought forth these Laws, not her self, for Laws are Masculin Births, but by the advice of her sagest Counselors; and therin she might doe vertuously, since it befell her to supply the nonage of her Son: else nothing more awry from the Law of God and Nature, than that a Woman should give Laws to Men. (32)

Constance Nicholas, in her notes to the Columbia edition of the History, observes that ‘Milton is disinclined to give credit to a woman for such an accomplishment’ (33)17 while French Fogle, in his Yale edition, comments: ‘That man should be in subjection to woman was to Milton, of course, a total reversal of the divine and human order’(CPW 5.1:32, note 99). The fact that Milton begins and ends his History with female figures who are, in his eyes, women of worth, does not change his gendered view of history. More typical – ‘conventional’ – is the unnamed sister of King Canute (c. 1053 AD), ‘a Woman of much Infamy for the trade she drove of buying up English Youths and Maids to sell in Denmark, wherof she made great gain; but e’re long was struck with thunder, and dy’d’ (337). This thunderstruck human trafficker or slave mistress is emblematic of the fate of the ‘unworthy’ women in Milton’s History, whether the judgment is his, history’s, or the heavens’. Time

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and again in the History, excess and inadequacy become associated with effeminacy, and effeminacy is a condition that leads to rightful conquest and colonization by more manly powers, or worse still, a shameful submission to militarily stronger but only marginally more masculine authority. In an early and extensive passage Milton describes the Britons in mixed terms with periodic forays into the present: ‘in courage and warlike readiness to take advantage by ambush or sudden onset, not inferiour to the Romans, nor Cassibelan to Caesar, in Weapons, Armes, and the skill of Encamping, Embattailing, Fortifying, overmatch’t’ (58). Ever eager to draw analogies between past and present, Milton adds an aside: Thir bodies most part naked, only painted with woad in sundrie figures to seem terrible as they thought, but poursu’d by Enemies, not nice of thir painting to run into Bogs, worse than wild Irish up to the Neck, and there to stay many daies holding a certain morsel in thir mouths no bigger than a bean, to suffice hunger; but that receit, and the temperance it taught, is long since unknown among us. (58–9)

In Paradise Lost Milton praised Adam and Eve’s unadorned appearance – ‘with native honour clad / In naked majesty’ (PL 4:289–90) – but here in a convoluted passage the supposed simplicity of ancient British dress yields to decorousness, which leads to cowardice, which is offset by thrift. There are precious few of us left who could hide in the bogs for days with nothing but a bean to get by on. In the same passage Milton takes another opportunity to berate his contemporaries: ‘yet gallantrie they had, painting thir own skins with several Portratures of Beast, Bird, or Flower, A Vanitie which hath not yet left us, remov’d only from the skin to the skirt behung now with as many colour’d Ribands and Gew-gawes’ (59). The ancient Britons begin to sound more and more like the English of Milton’s day, ‘thir Civil Government under many Princes and States, not confederate or consulting in common, but mistrustful, and ofttimes warring one with the other, which gave them up one by one an easie Conquest to the Romans’ (60). They are subject to the same kind of troubles and temptations that afflict Milton’s contemporaries, and predictably civil disorder and sexual disorder go hand in hand, as the druids, the priests of the ancient Britons, ‘contending somtimes about the Archpriesthood not without Civil Warr and slaughter; nor restrein’d

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they the People under them from a lew’d adulterous and incestuous life, ten or twelv men absurdly against Nature, possessing one woman as thir common Wife, though of neerest Kin, Mother, Daughter, or Sister; Progenitors not to be glori’d in’ (60). Civility and sexuality are intimately linked in Milton’s discourse, a point reinforced when he introduces two prominent women, Cartismandua, queen of the Brigantes, and Agrippina, the wife of Claudius, each castigated for assuming an authority that properly belongs to men. Cartismandua’s betrayal of the British leader Caractacus, the youngest son of ‘Cunobeline’ (Cymbeline), triggers one of the most significant Romano-British encounters in the History: ‘This the Romans thought a famous Victorie; wherin the Wife and Daughter of Caractacus were tak’n, his Brothers also reduc’d to obedience; himself escaping to Cartismandua Queen of the Brigantes, against faith giv’n was to the Victors deliverd bound’ (69). The conduct of Cartismandua contrasts with the courtesy shown to Caractacus by Claudius when, as captive, he is paraded in Rome, having held out against the Romans nine years, saith Tacitus, but by truer computation, seaven. Wherby his name was up through all the adjoyning Provinces, eev’n to Italy and Rome: many desiring to see who he was, that could withstand so many years the Roman Puissance: and Caesar to extoll his own Victorie, extoll’d the man whom he had vanquish’d. Beeing brought to Rome, the people as to a Solemn spectacle were call’d together, the Emperor’s Guard stood in Armes. In order came first the Kings Servants, bearing his Trophies won in other Warrs, next, his Brothers, Wife, and Daughter, last himself. The behaviour of others through fear was low and degenerate: he only neither in countenance, word, or action, submissive, standing at the Tribunal of Claudius, briefly spake to this purpose. If my Mind, Caesar, had bin as moderate in the highth of Fortune, as my Birth and Dignitie was eminent, I might have come a freind rather than a captive into this Cittie. Nor couldst thou have dislik’d him for a Confederate, so Noble of Descent, and Ruling so many Nations. My present estate to me disgracefull, to thee is glorious. I had Riches, Horses, Armes, and Men; no wonder then if I contended, not to lose them. But if by Fate, yours only must be Empire, then of necessitie ours among the rest must be subjection. If I sooner had bin brought to yeild, my Misfortune had bin less notorious, your Conquest had bin less renown’d, and in your severest determining of me, both will be soon forgott’n. But if you grant that I shall live, by me will live to you for ever that praise which is so neer divine, the clemency of a Conquerour. Caesar mov’d at

312 Willy Maley such a spectacle of Fortune, but especially at the nobleness of his bearing it, gave him pardon, and to all the rest. (69–71)

The curtain comes down on this redemptive scene of male bonding in the wake of female betrayal with a sinister suggestion that the Romans are susceptible to the same corrupting influence: ‘They all unbound, submissely thank him, and did like reverence to Agrippina the Emperors Wife, who sat by in State: a new and disdained sight to the manly eyes of Romans, a Woman sitting public in her Female pride among Ensignes and Armed Cohorts’ (71). Cartismandua commits a crime as heinous as the betrayal of Caractacus when she ditches her husband, Venutius, for one of his squires, Vellocatus: This deed so odious and full of infamie, disturb’d the whole State: Venutius with other Forces, and the help of her own Subjects, who detested the example of so foule a fact, and with all the uncomliness of thir Subjection to the Monarchie of a Woman, a peece of manhood not every day to be found among Britans, though shee had got by suttle train his Brother with many of his Kindred into her hands, brought her soon below the confidence of beeing able to resist longer. When imploring the Roman aid, with much adoe, and after many a hard encounter she escap’d the punishment which was readie to have seis’d her. (73)

If Cartismandua’s betrayal of Caractacus leads to his bonding with Claudius in Rome, then her betrayal of her husband almost leads to the abandonment of the Roman conquest: Venutius thus debar’d the autority of ruling his own Houshold, justly turnes his anger against the Romans themselvs; whose magnanimitie not wont to undertake dishonourable causes, had arrogantly intermeddl’d in his domestic affaires, to uphold the Rebellion of an adultress against her Husband. And the Kingdom he retain’d against thir utmost opposition; and of Warr gave them thir fill: first in a sharpe conflict of uncertain event, then against the Legion of Caesius Nasica. Insomuch that Didius growing old, and mannaging the Warr by Deputies, had work anough to stand on his defence, with the gaining now and then of a small Castle. And Nero (for in that part of the Ile things continu’d in the same plight to the Reigne of Vespatian) was minded but for shame to have withdrawn the Roman Forces out of Britan. (73–4)

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In The Doctrine and Discipline of Divorce (1643; revised 1644), Milton drew an analogy between the position of the husband in an unhappy marriage and the plight of the populace in an unhappy state: He who marries, intends as little to conspire his own ruine, as he that swears Allegiance: and as a whole people is in proportion to an ill Government, so is one man to an ill mariage. If they against any authority, Covnant, or Statute, may by the soveraign edict of charity, save not only their lives, but honest liberties from unworthy bondage, as well may he against any private Covnant, which hee never enter’d to his mischief, redeem himself from unsupportable disturbances to honest peace, and just contentment. (CPW 2:229)

In the History, the unhappy marital state of Venutius, ‘debar’d the autority of ruling his own Houshold,’ condoned by the colonizer, leads to a state of war and threatens to overturn Roman rule. The spectre of female excess awaits the next Roman Governor, Suetonius Paulinus, greeted on his arrival by ‘many women like furies running to and fro in dismal habit with hair loose about thir shoulders’ (74). The ensuing broadside against Boadicea is crucial to Milton’s notion of a needful and deserved conquest. Milton’s depiction of Boadicea captures the anxiety around female rule and vindicates the narrative of a civilizing conquest with which Milton’s account of the Roman occupation is preoccupied. In this case it is not conquest that emasculates but emasculation that engenders conquest. Until now, Milton has been rooting for Team Britain, but when the British ruler is female she ceases to be Head of Homeland Security and becomes the leader of the insurgency and an enemy of civility. Civility must prevail, even if that entails an antipatriotic stance with regard to his progenitors. Jodi Mikalachki’s valuable work, The Legacy of Boadicea, usefully complicates the received idea that Milton was unique in undermining her. In fact, as Mikalachki shows, attitudes to Boadicea switched from praise to prejudice throughout the early modern period. She was criticized in Holinshed’s Chronicles (1577); celebrated, however guardedly, in Spenser’s The Ruines of Time (1591) and in Book 2 of The Faerie Queene (1590); and roundly condemned in very Miltonic terms in John Fletcher’s play Bonduca (first performed around 1610). William Blake echoed Milton’s emphasis on women but with a different inflexion. In a note on ‘Subjects for “The History

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of England, a small book of Engravings,’ in 1793, Blake wrote: ‘8. Boadicea inspiring the Britons against the Romans. The Britons’ distress & depopulation. Women fleeing from War. Women in a Siege.’18 Later, with a little help from Cowper and Tennyson, as Marina Warner observes in Monuments and Maidens, Boadicea will become the prototype for Britannia: The mythical Britannia, late Victorian champion of right and might, interlocks with an historical character, whose exploits were retrieved from ancient annals of antiquity during the century, Boadicea or Boudicca, and the interaction between Britannia and the ancient British Queen still informed the conception of Britain entertained by enthusiasts of the Falklands war. Boadicea is inherited from the Victorians and is redolent of selective mythmaking, a real figure colonized to become a symbol of British greatness in a Victorian myth of Empire.19

Charles Firth appears to have in mind the modern notion of Boadicea as a prototype of Britannia when he comments on Milton’s treatment of her in the History: Perhaps the most curious example of Milton’s prejudice against women is that afforded by his treatment of Boadicea. Previous historians had regarded the warrior-queen as a national heroine; he represents her merely as a virago, ‘a distracted Woeman, with as mad a Crew at her heeles.’ (89)

Milton’s treatment of Boadicea is less original than Firth implies – his prejudiced portrayal draws on Holinshed – but it is significant in terms of the elements it brings together. According to Mikalachki, If her defeat by Suetonius is the ultimate verdict on the inability of women to exercise sovereignty, Boadicea’s conduct of the revolt is the strongest evidence of her savage female excess. Holinshed emphasizes the Britons’ cruelty in killing captives of all ages and sexes. His condemnation of the lack of discipline and savage violence of the troops under Boadicea’s command culminates in an atrocity story that places grotesque emphasis on the overwhelmingly female nature of the rebellion: They spared neither age nor sex: women of great nobility and worthy fame, they took and hanged up naked, and cutting off their paps,

Depicting Women in Milton’s History of Britain 315 sewed them to their mouths, that they might seem as if they sucked and fed on them, and some of their bodies they stretched out in length, and thrust them, on sharp stakes. This grotesque expression of ancient British savagery points to early modern anxiety about the overwhelming femininity of native origins. (13–14)

Unlike Caractacus, her male predecessor, overmastered with his dignity intact, Boadicea, in Milton’s book, is without any redeeming feature. While Caractacus in captivity stands shoulder to shoulder with Emperor Claudius, Boadicea proves incapable of respecting her betters. In his 1947 essay ‘Milton’s Attitude towards Women in the History of Britain,’ Edward Le Comte briefly examined some of the moments where Milton invoked a particular masculine model of nationhood.20 Le Comte begins by noting that while the representation of women in other tracts by Milton derived chiefly from the rhetoric of religious controversy, ‘in the History of Britain the voice that speaks out on the inferiority and proper subjection of women is at times unmistakably Milton’s own. To heap up discredit upon what John Knox called “the monstrous regiment of women” he will go out of his way, whether by parenthetical remark, or by free alteration of his sources, or, in one case, by sheer misinterpretation of the original Latin’ (977). Le Comte cites Milton’s treatment of arguably the most prominent female figure in early British history as a prime example of his bias: It is well known how prejudiced is the account of Boadicea ... The national idol is thoroughly shattered. Milton, who ends by making her a frenzied bungler, begins by stripping her of her eloquence ... Even the classical historians, whom Milton ordinarily prefers, are not listened to when they make Boadicea a noble orator ... The old sore rankles again. With a woman as commander-in-chief the Britons naturally had no chance in the field ... Milton’s male disgust could hardly have found more vigorous expression. This is history with a vengeance. (979)

History with a vengeance is one way of characterizing Milton’s depiction of women in the text. Another would be history haunted by histrionics. The key question concerns the ‘old sore’ of Milton’s misogyny, whether as the cause of his republican historiography, or the effect of his antipathy towards weakness and excess, both of which he depicts as feminine traits.

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Earning Your Stripes, or, Druid, Where’s My Scar? In Shakespeare’s Coriolanus, the eponymous Roman warrior refuses to display his wounds. In Fletcher’s Bonduca, the eponymous British warrior queen, also known as Boadicea, boasts of her victory over the Romans to her two daughters, Hengo and Nennius, and is roundly rebuked by her cousin Caratach, who deems such declarations unmanly.21 Paradoxically, Bonduca’s representation of the Romans as weak and womanly undercuts her celebration of a great victory and marks her out as female and flawed: bonduca. The hardy Romanes? O ye Gods of Britain, The rust of Arms, the blushing shame of souldiers; Are these the men that conquer by inheritance? The Fortune-makers? these the Julians, Enter Caratach. That with the Sun measure the end of Nature, Making the world but one Rome and one Caesar? Shame, how they flee! Caesars soft soul dwells in ’em, Their mothers got ’em sleeping, pleasure nurst ’em, Their bodies sweat with sweet oils, loves allurements, Not lustie Arms. Dare they send these to seek us, These Romane Girls? Is Britain grown so wanton? Twice we have beat ’em, Nennius, scatter’d ’em ... Made Themes for songs to shame ’em, and a woman, A woman beat ’em, Nennius; a weak woman, A woman beat these Romanes. caratach. So it seems. A man would shame to talk so.

(I.i.1–17)

Ironically, by claiming that the Romans are unmanly, the queen cheapens the British victory. Caratach puts the ‘man’ back into ‘Roman,’ and challenges the basis for Bonduca’s boasting. The overcoming of an unworthy foe is not worth trumpeting: Ye call the Romanes fearful, fleeing Romanes, And Romane Girls, the lees of Caesars pleasures: Does this become a doer? are they such? bonduca. They are no more. caratach. Where is your Conquest then?

(I.i.35–9)

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When Bonduca suggests to Caratach that ‘Ye doat upon these Romanes,’ he owns the charge: Witnesse these wounds, I do; they were fairly given. I love an enemy: I was born a souldier; And he that in the head on’s Troop defies me, Bending my manly body with his sword, I make a Mistris. Yellow-tressed Hymen Ne’er ty’d a longing Virgin with more joy, Then I am married to that man that wounds me.

(I.i.56–62)

Victory and vanquishing alike must be taken like a man. Here the ‘natural’ (homo-social and heroic) takes precedence over the ‘national.’ There are no boundaries between men, and being beaten by one’s brother, foreign or familiar, if one’s better, is preferable to being bested by a woman.22 Bonduca’s deriding of her enemies as ‘girlie men’ backfires, as overpowering such an effeminate opponent is a source of shame rather than pride.23 Milton’s treatment of Boadicea is similar to Fletcher’s. Speechifying about her stripes before her massed troops unfits her for leadership. But let us back up a bit, because before Milton gets to Boadicea he has put a lot of labour into his historical narrative. Here is how he leads in to Boadicea’s revolt: ‘While thus Paulinus had his thought still fix’d before, to goe on winning, his back lay broad op’n to occasion of losing more behind’ (75). And that is where we come in – with Paulinus’s back lying broad open. There ensues a long passage, but a vital one, that sets the pattern for what follows: Prasutagus King of the Icenians abounding in wealth had left Caesar Coheir with his two Daughters; thereby hoping to have secur’d from all wrong both his Kingdome and his House; which fell out far otherwise. For under colour to oversee and take possession of the Emperour’s new Inheritance, his Kingdom became a prey to Centurions, his House to rav’ning Officers, his Wife Boadicea violated with Stripes, his Daughters with Rape, the wealthiest of his Subjects, as it were by the Will and Testament of their King thrown out of thir Estates, his Kindred made little better than Slaves. The new Colony also at Camalodunum took House or Land from whome they pleas’d, terming them Slaves and Vassals; the Souldiers complying with the Colony, out of hope hereafter to use the same licence themselvs. (75)

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The subsequent slave revolt is given a distinctly female stamp – the statue of the goddess Victory falls, favouring the British, and their women predict the downfall of Roman rule: Thus provok’t by heaviest sufferings, and thus invited by opportunities in the absence of Paulinus, the Icenians, and by their Example the Trinobantes, and as many else as hated servitude, rise up in Armes. Of these ensuing troubles many foregoing signes appear’d: the image of Victorie at Camalodunum fell down of it self with her face turn’d as it were to the Britans; certaine Women in a kind of ecstasie foretold of Calamities to come; in the Counsel-House were heard by night barbarous noises, in the Theater hideous howlings, in the Creek horrid sights betok’ning the destruction of that Colony; heerto the Ocean seeming of a bloody hew, and human shapes at a low ebb left imprinted on the sand, wrought in the Britans new courage, in the Romans unwonted fears. (76)

While the Romans regroup, the fury of the female-led anticolonial uprising is upon those ‘who through weakness of Sex or Age, or love of the place went not along’ when the others fled. The resultant carnage provokes revulsion in Milton: In this massacre, about 70 thousand Romans and thir associats in the places above-mention’d, of a certaine, lost thir lives. None might be spar’d, none ransom’d, but tasted all either a present or a lingring Death; no crueltie that either outrage, or the insolence of success putt into thir heads, was left unacted. The Roman Wives and Virgins hang’d up all naked, had thir Breasts cut off, and sow’d to thir mouths; that in the grimness of Death they might seem to eat thir own flesh; while the Britans fell to feasting and carousing in the Temple of Andate thir Goddess of Victorie. (77–8)

Milton is as bemused as the Romans to find women on the field of battle, as spectators, participants, and, most galling of all, as leaders of men: The Britans in Companies and Squadrons were every where shouting and swarming, such a multitude as at other time never; no less reckon’d than 200 and 30 thousand, so fierce and confident of Victorie, that thir Wives also came in Waggons to sit and behold the sport, as they made full account, of killing Romans: a folly doubtless for the serious Romans to smile at, as a sure tok’n of prospering that day: a Woeman also was thir Commander in Chief. For Boadicea and her Daughters ride about in a

Depicting Women in Milton’s History of Britain 319 Chariot, telling the tall Champions as a great encouragement, that with the Britans it was usual for Woemen to be thir Leaders. (78–9)

Female rule is one thing, but what irks Milton most is the way in which his sources have embellished their accounts, putting bombast into the mouth of Boadicea. Curiously, he conflates their method with her madness, so that the inappropriate invention of speeches is compounded by the undignified conduct of the rebel queen in precisely those accounts: A deal of other fondness they put into her mouth, not worth recital; how she was lash’d, how her Daughters were handl’d, things worthier silence, retirement, and a Vail, than for a Woeman to repeat, as don to hir own person, or to hear repeated before an host of men. The Greek Historian setts her in the field on a high heap of Turves, in a loose-bodied Gown declaming, a Spear in her hand, a Hare in her bosome, which after a long circumlocution she was to let slip among them for luck sake, then praying to Andate the British Goddess, to talk again as fondly as before. And this they do out of a vanity, hoping to embellish and set out thir Historie with the strangeness of our manners, not careing in the mean while to brand us with the rankest note of Barbarism, as if in Britain Woemen were Men, and Men Woemen. (79)

Milton professes to ‘affect not set speeches in a Historie, unless known for certain to have bin so spok’n in effect as they are writ’n, nor then, unless worth rehearsal ... Much less therfore do I purpose heer or elsewhere to Copie out tedious Orations without decorum, though in thir Authors compos’d ready to my hand’ (79). This is a way of silencing Boadicea. Milton has already given us a set speech by Caractacus, deemed worthy of rehearsal since it provided backslapping bonhomie of a type Milton approved. By contrast, Boadicea’s backsliding behaviour is decidedly unmanly, her downfall deserved: Hitherto what we have heard of Cassibelan, Togadumnus, Venusius, and Caractacus hath bin full of magnanimitie, soberness, and martial skill: but the truth is, that in this Battel, and whole business, the Britans never more plainly manifested themselves to be right Barbarians; no rule, no foresight, no forecast, experience or estimation, either of themselves or of thir Enemies; such confusion, such impotence, as seem’d likest not to a Warr, but to the wild hurrey of a distracted Woeman, with as mad a Crew at her heeles. (79–80)

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Atrocity begets atrocity, massacre leads to massacre, as the Romans take their revenge on the Britons who were taking theirs on the Romans: The Roman slew all; Men, Woemen, and the very drawing Horses lay heap’d along the field in a gory mixture of slaughter. About fowr-score thousand Britans are said to have bin slain on the place; of the Enemy scarse 400 and not many more wounded. Boadicea poyson’d her self, or, as others say, sick’n’d and dy’d. She was of Stature big and tall, of visage grim and stern, harsh of voice, her hair of bright colour flowing down to her hipps; she wore a plighted Garment of divers colours, with a great gold’n Chain; button’d over all a thick robe. Gildas calls her the craftie Lioness, and leaves an ill fame upon her doings. Dion sets down otherwise the order of this fight, and that the field was not won without much difficultie, nor without intention of the Britans to give another Battel, had not the Death of Boadicea come betweene. (80–1)

Constance Nicholas points out that ‘Dion is describing Boadicea’s actions before the British successes, not her actions before the British defeat’ (48). She also notes that ‘Boadicea, queen of the Iceni, in urging her soldiers to battle recalls that it was not unusual for the Britons to wage war under the conduct of a woman [Annalium 14: 35]. Tacitus also points out that the Britons made no distinction between the sexes in succession to the throne [De Vita Julii Agricolae 16]’ (46). French Fogle says of Milton’s version of Boadicea: ‘With his British pride, Milton resents the older historians who have emphasized the barbaric customs and superstitions of the Britons at the expense of historical accuracy, but he is even more severe with Boadicea for her usurpation of man’s proper role of military leader and for her inefficiency in military planning and exercise of command’ (CPW 5.1:80, note 48). Is the representation of Boadicea ‘emblematic of Milton’s depiction of the early Britons’ or of his depiction of women as a rule? According to Jodi Mikalachki, ‘Boadicea’s treatment in reconstructions of Roman Britain is the best single example of the intersection of early modern misogyny with anxiety about savage native origins’ (12–13). Mikalachki maintains that ‘one of the most disturbing aspects of British antiquity as documented by the Romans was the Britons’ apparent indifference to the masculinist principle of gender hierarchy’ (11). If Boadicea’s revolt was intemperate so too is the Roman response: ‘For it is certaine, that Suetonius, though else a worthie man, over-proud of his Victorie, gave too much way to his anger against the Britans’ (81).

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Milton ends the passage on Boadicea on a light note, but one still strongly marked by the politics of gender: ‘Classician therfore sending such word to Rome, that these severe proceedings would beget an endless Warr, Polycletus, no Roman but a Courtier, was sent by Nero to examin how things went. He admonishing Suetonius to use more mildness, aw’d the Armie, and to the Britans gave matter of Laughter. Who so much eeven till then were nurs’d up in thir Native Libertie, as to wonder that so great a General with his whole Armie should be at the rebuke and ordering of a Court Servitor’ (81–2). Milton’s antimonarchism, combined with a militant masculinity, means that the influence of a court servitor is as unpalatable as the indiscipline of a warrior queen. The depiction of Boadicea is not so much characteristic of Milton’s approach to the ancient Britons as it is indicative of his attitude to female rule. Milton’s depiction of Boadicea is part of the antifeminist backlash. He chastises her for exposing her stripes. She is double whipped. In fact she gets a triple whammy, from Tacitus, Cassius Dion, and Milton. Coppélia Kahn, in Roman Shakespeare, focuses on the way in which Coriolanus – like Caractacus – keeps his wounds to himself and honours his enemy: ‘“I had rather have my wounds to heal again / Than hear say how I got them” (II.ii.69–70).’24 But there are times when men can display their wounds and let them speak for themselves. If Boadicea’s stripes are an embarrassment then the only other allusion to stripes in the text is handled very differently. Here, Milton puts his otherwise unrelenting anticlericalism on hold. He suspends his disbelief when he deems a tale worth telling, as with the story of how King Eadbald saw the light when he saw the stripes: But Eadbald, within the year, by an extraordinary means became penitent. For when Laurence the Arch-bishop and Successor of Austin was preparing to ship for France, after Justus and Mellitus, the Story goes, if it be worth beleeving, that Saint Peter, in whose Church he spent the night before in watching and praying, appear’d to him, and to make the Vision more sensible, gave him many stripes for offering to desert his flock; at sight wherof the King (to whom next morning he shewed the marks of what he had suffer’d, by whom and for what cause) relenting and in great fear dissolv’d his incestuous marriage, and appli’d himself to the Christian Faith more sincerely than before, with all his people. (172)

The Index to the Columbia Edition of the Works of Milton cites the word ‘stripes,’ but does not mention either of the two occurrences of the

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word in The History of Britain, the first time as tragedy, the second as farce.25 In the ‘Cyclops’ episode of Ulysses, a novel not short on images of chastisement, James Joyce has the Irish Citizen raise the spectre of British stripes: – I’Il tell you what about it, says the citizen. Hell upon earth it is. Read the revelations that’s going on in the papers about flogging on the training ships at Portsmouth. A fellow writes that calls himself Disgusted One. So he starts telling us about corporal punishment and about the crew of tars and officers and rearadmirals drawn up in cocked hats and the parson with his protestant bible to witness punishment and a young lad brought out, howling for his ma, and they tie him down on the buttend of a gun. – A rump and dozen, says the citizen, was what that old ruffian sir John Beresford called it but the modern God’s Englishman calls it caning on the breech. And says John Wyse: – ’Tis a custom more honoured in the breach than in the observance. Then he was telling us the master at arms comes along with a long cane and he draws out and he flogs the bloody backside off of the poor lad till he yells meila murder. – That’s your glorious British navy, says the citizen, that bosses the earth. The fellows that never will be slaves, with the only hereditary chamber on the face of God’s earth and their land in the hands of a dozen gamehogs and cottonball barons. That’s the great empire they boast about of drudges and whipped serfs.26

The song the Citizen cites, ‘Rule Britannia,’ written in 1740 by a Scot, James Thomson, contains the refrain: ‘Rule, Britannia! Britannia, rule the waves! / Britons never, never, never shall be slaves!’ Perhaps given what Marina Warner says of that imperial female figure’s precursor, the song that sums up Britain’s double yoke as postcolonial empire should be ‘Rule Boadicea.’ Slavery features prominently in Milton’s postcolonial history.27 In the midst of monks, monarchs, and misogyny, Milton, utterly exasperated, exclaims: ‘But when God hath decreed servitude on a sinful Nation, fitted by thir own Vices for no condition but servile, all Estates of Government are alike unable to avoid it’ (223). The History is haunted by histrionics.

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Homage to Caledonia Milton’s other women in the History, a mixed bunch, betray the same sorts of anxiety, as in this colourful account of an exchange between the Roman Empress Julia and the wife of a Scot around 210 AD: While Peace held, the Empress Julia meeting on a time certain British Ladies, and discoursing with the Wife of Argentocoxus a Caledonian, cast out a scoff against the looseness of our Iland Women; whose manner then was to use promiscuously the company of divers men. Whom straight the British Woman boldly thus answer’d: Much better do we Britans fulfill the work of Nature than you Romans; we with the best men accustom op’nly; you with the basest commit private adulteries. Whether she thought this answer might serve to justifie the practice of her Countrie, as when Vices are compar’d, the greater seems to justifie the less, or whether the Law and Custome wherein she was bred, had wip’t out of her conscience the better dictate of Nature, and not convinc’t her of the shame; certain it is that whereas other Nations us’d a liberty not unnatural for one man to have many Wives, the Britans altogether as licentious, but more absurd and preposterous in thir licence, had one or many Wives in common among ten or twelve Husbands; and those for the most part incestuously. (99–100)

Still later, describing the situation of Sexburga in 674 AD, Milton appears more the messenger than the misogynist, insofar as he is neither analysing nor advocating but merely reporting, but the fact that Milton chooses to recount such details suggests that they are of significance to him: Sebbi having Reign’d over the East-Saxons thirty years, not long before his death, though long before desiring, took on him the Habit of a Monk; and drew his Wife at length, though unwilling, to the same Devotion. Kenwalk also dying, left the Government to Sexburga his Wife, who out-liv’d him in it but one year, driv’n out, saith Mat. West. by the Nobles, disdaining Female Government. (192)

Disdaining female government is central to Milton’s grim historical and national perspective in the History. His remaining female figures display the characteristics of indiscretion, infidelity, and untrustworthiness exemplified by Boadicea and Cartismandua:

324 Willy Maley In Mercia, Kenulf the 6th year after [c. 819 AD], having reign’d with great praise of his Religious mind and Vertues, both in Peace and War, deceas’d. His Son Kenelm, a Child of seven years, was committed to the care of his Elder Sister Quendred; who with a female ambition aspiring to the Crown, hir’d one who had the charge of his Nurture, to murder him, led into a woody place upon pretence of hunting. The murder, as is reported, was miraculously reveal’d; but to tell how, by a Dove dropping a writt’n Note on the Altar at Rome, is a long story, told, though out of order, by Malmsbury; and under the year 821 by Mat. West. where I leave it to be sought by such as are more credulous than I wish my Readers. Only the Note was to this purpose. Low in a Mead of Kine under a Thorn, Of head bereft li’th poor Kenelm King-born. (218–19)

Stringently sceptical for the most part, Milton is ready to believe the worst when the tale is of a wicked woman, though there are warriorwomen worth praising: ‘About the same time [c. 917 AD] Elfled the Kings Sister sent her Army of Mercians into Wales, who routed the Welch, took the Castle of Bricnam-mere by Brecknock, and brought away the Kings Wife of that Country, with other Prisners. Not long after she took Derby from the Danes, and the Castle by a sharp assault’ (254–5). Five years later Elfled proves herself to be the sort of self-effacing woman that Milton can admire: ‘During his abode there, Elfled his Sister a martial Woeman, who after her Husbands death would no more marry, but gave her self to Publick Affairs, repairing and fortifying many Towns, warring somtimes, dy’d at Tamworth the Cheif Seat of Mercia, wherof by guift of Alfred her Father, she was Lady or Queen; whereby that whole Nation became obedient to King Edward, as did also North Wales, with Howel, Cledaucus, and Jeothwell thir Kings’ (258– 9). The History ends with two women living in the decade before the Norman Conquest. First, the notorious sister of King Canute already alluded to – ‘a Woman of much Infamy for the trade she drove of buying up English Youths and Maids to sell in Denmark, wherof she made great gain; but e’re long was struck with thunder, and dy’d’ (337) – then Lady Godiva: ‘About the same time also dy’d Earl Leofric in a good old age, a man of no less Vertue than Power in his time, Religious, Prudent and Faithful to his Country, happily wedded to Godiva a Woman of great praise’ (340). Sadly, for the Saxons it is not the good example of Godiva but the bad one of Boadicea that haunts England on the eve of a conquest that has none of the nobility of the Roman one:

Depicting Women in Milton’s History of Britain 325 Not a few years before the Normans came, the Clergy, though in Edward the Confessors daies, had lost all good Literature and Religion, scarse able to read and understand thir Latin Service: He was a miracle to others who knew his Grammar. The Monks went clad in fine Stuffs, and made no difference what they eat; which though in it self no fault, yet to thir Consciences was irreligious. The Great Men giv’n to Gluttony and dissolute Life, made a prey of the Common People, abuseing thir Daughters whom they had in Service, then turning them off to the Stews; the meaner sort tipling together night and day, spent all they had in Drunkenness, attended with other Vices which effeminate mens minds. (356–7)

Like Eve and Dalila, Milton’s other women of the late period, Boadicea typifies that fatal concoction of dalliance, deceit, and desire, that womanly weakness that constantly threatens to undermine a ‘natural,’ native need for a liberty in line with the masculine principles of Rome, before those principles were corrupted. Elmer, The Birdman of Britain Milton’s opposition to female rule is matched by his anticlericalism. He was stuck with monks for the best and worst parts of his History, and is arguably still stuck with them. Engels called universities ‘Protestant monasteries,’ which might explain why the modern monks of historiography have taken issue with Milton’s dismissal of monkish history. The History ends on a flat note with 1066 and all that entails, but before he gets to the Norman yoke, Milton cracks a joke – one with a serious aspect. The tale of the flying monk, another action ‘absurdly against Nature,’ is one of many salutary lessons about ambition. Introducing ‘Harold Son of Earl Godwin,’ Milton writes: no sooner plac’t in the Throne, but began to frame himself by all manner of compliances to gain affection, endeavour’d to make good Laws, repeal’d bad, became a great Patron to Church and Church-men, courteous and affable to all reputed good, a hater of evil doers, charg’d all his Officers to punish Theeves, Robbers, and all disturbers of the Peace, while he himself by Sea and Land labour’d in the defence of his Countrey: so good an actor is ambition. In the mean while a blazing Star, seven Mornings together, about the end of April, was seen to stream terribly, not only over England, but other parts of the World; foretelling heer, as was thought, the great Changes approaching: plainliest prognosticated by

326 Willy Maley Elmer a Monk of Malmsbury, who could not foresee, when time was, the breaking of his own Legs for soaring too high. He in his youth strangely aspiring, had made and fitted Wings to his Hands and Feet; with these on the top of a Tower, spread out to gather Air, he flew more than a Furlong; but the wind being too high, came fluttering down, to the maiming of all his Limbs; yet so conceited of his Art, that he attributed the cause of his fall to the want of a Tail, as Birds have, which he forgot to make to his hinder parts. This story, though seeming otherwise too light in the midst of a sad narration, yet for the strangeness thereof, I thought worthy anough the placing as I found it plac’t in my Author. But to digress no farder. (347–8)

And it is a digression, one of many in a digressive work. In Elmer, a latter-day Icarus, but with slightly less serious consequences, it is tempting to see the story of Milton’s History. Milton is flying, even when he is flailing. An early modern Elmer, ill-equipped to soar with the sources and resources at his disposal, he makes the most of what he has to hand. Although he obviously likes a good story, he omits the tale of Alfred and the cakes, perhaps because he deems baking to be unmanly. We do, however, get our notice drawn to Alfred’s haemorrhoids: ‘His Body was diseas’d in his youth with a great soreness in the Seige, and that ceasing of it self, with another inward pain of unknown cause, which held him by frequent fits to his dying day’ (251).28 Between the slave mistress, the flying monk, and the monarch’s piles, the History could be said to end on a low note. Chariots of Ire In a fine essay, Mary Nyquist notes, citing Book 9 of Paradise Lost, that ‘A new feature of “fallen” consciousness, “guilty shame,” appears at this moment, personified, interestingly, as masculine, frantic, but ineffectual in its attempts to conceal all that has been lost: “hee cover’d, but his Robe / Uncover’d more” (9.1058–9).’29 For Nyquist, ‘The civic virtue honored by republicans is unambiguously gendered: principled dedication to the public good is a male prerogative, to be practiced in the public sphere. The most influential studies of early modern republicanism disregard gender issues, however. Even more rigorously avoided is an exploration of possible inter-relations between European republicanism and colonialism’ (86). Boadicea, unlike Cleopatra or Dalila, is ‘English’

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and ‘European,’ however problematic those terms were – and still are.30 Boadicea is, in Milton’s view, distinctly inferior to her male counterparts, British and Roman. Nyquist goes on to suggest that ‘within history ... “liberty” constantly has to struggle against re-enslavement, one of the consequences of which is that during the early stages of colonialism as well as now, in our neo-colonial era, it gets imagined – and ruthlessly exercised over – against barbarized demonic or despotic forces. Another is that true heroism, issuing in rigorously “public” action, must shield its prized, interiorized strength from the enervating effects of female laps’ (123–4). Milton’s History is full of laps and lapses, replete with the pathos of a Prospero, possessed of rhetorical authority, but in political exile, who looks too closely into his own history only to discover the rage of Caliban. Although set in ‘Britain,’ that confused and contested site still under construction, it is arguably – perhaps unarguably – a ‘postcolonial’ text, one whose complex interplay of gender, nation, and empire is of much more interest to modern readers – and early modern specialists – than recent characterizations of it would allow. Milton’s History is postcolonial insofar as it follows the fortunes of Britain in the period after Roman colonization, up to the Norman Conquest. Whatever the present actions of England in colonizing Ireland, a process Milton supported, the lesson of the History was that England itself had a colonial legacy that continued to impinge on its liberty. Milton could be both anticolonial in his attitude to post-Roman settlement, and especially submission to the Saxons, and colonial in his support for Britain as a successor to Rome. Returning to my opening gambit, it could be argued that Trainspotting too is engaged in the deployment of discourses of antieffeminacy in its quest for a strain of militant masculinity that would prove resistant to colonization, or at least sensible enough to yield only to a manly superiority. Renton and Milton are singing from the same hymn sheet. By a curious coincidence, readers who go ‘trainspotting’ in Britain today may see a locomotive engine called Boadicea. The fiercely independent and resourceful British queen also lends her name to the British newsletter for disabled women.31 Women are a driving force in British history, but for Milton they have a disabling effect on the type of masculine authority he envisages as an antidote to the excesses of monarchy. That fatal Boadicea makes and mars Milton’s conception of national identity. Broad as Milton’s vision of liberty was in other respects, his gender politics made his a narrow nationalism.

328 Willy Maley NOTES 1 Irvine Welsh, Trainspotting (1993; rpt. New York; Norton, 1996), 78. This is an interior monologue in the novel, but the 1996 film version much more strikingly features a group of urban warriors looking at a stereotypical Highland landscape and rebelling against its lure. Although the speech was seen as an antidote to the nationalism of Braveheart (dir. Mel Gibson, 1995) and to a lesser extent Rob Roy (dir. Michael Caton-Jones, 1995) the masculine fear of being overmastered by an effeminate enemy marks all three cinematic depictions of Scottishness. See my ‘Braveheart: Raising the Stakes of History,’ Irish Review 22 (summer 1998): 67–80. 2 John Milton, The History of Britain (1670; 1677), 60. All quotations are taken from The History of Britain: John Milton: A Facsimile Edition with a Critical Introduction [1670; 2nd ed. 1677], ed. Graham Parry (Stamford: Watkins, 1991). Hereafter cited in the text. In the Yale edition, French Fogle dispenses with Milton’s helpful table and substitutes an index of authors and works, which means that Boadicea, the focus of this essay, drops out altogether, since she is neither an author nor a work. Other than The History of Britain, Milton’s prose is quoted from the Yale edition – The Complete Prose Works of John Milton, gen. ed. Don M. Wolfe, 8 vols (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1953–82). Hereafter cited as CPW in the text. 3 The phrase ‘Bonjour you cheese-eating surrender monkeys’ was uttered by dour Scottish Groundsman Willie in an episode of The Simpsons, a line that undercuts the historical ‘Auld Alliance’ between the two countries. 4 See the essays of Joad Raymond,‘Look Homeward Angel: Guardian Angels and Nationhood in Seventeenth-Century England,’ and John Kerrigan, ‘The Anglo-Scoto-Dutch Triangle: Milton and Marvell in 1660,’ above. 5 The one monograph on the subject is an invaluable guide, but for the purposes of this essay it offers only a passing reference to Boadicea. See Nicholas von Maltzahn, Milton’s History of Britain: Republican Historiography in the English Revolution (1991; rpt. Oxford: Clarendon Press, 2002), 112. 6 See Nicholas von Maltzahn, ‘Dating the Digression in Milton’s History of Britain,’ Historical Journal 36.4 (1993): 945–6; and Austin Woolrych, ‘The Date of the Digression in Milton’s History of Britain,’ in For Veronica Wedgwood These: Studies in Seventeenth-Century History, ed. Richard Ollard and Pamela Tudor-Craig (London: Collins, 1986), 217–46, and ‘Dating Milton’s History of Britain,’ Historical Journal 36.4 (1993): 929–43. 7 Christopher Hill, ‘Review of Nicholas von Maltzahn, Milton’s History of Britain: Republican Historiography in the English Revolution (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1991),’ English Historical Review 110.435 (1995): 192.

Depicting Women in Milton’s History of Britain 329 8 John Morrill, ‘Review of Nicholas von Maltzahn, Milton’s History of Britain: Republican Historiography in the English Revolution (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1991),’ Review of English Studies 45.177 (1994): 110–11. 9 David Underdown, ‘Review of Nicholas von Maltzahn, Milton’s History of Britain: Republican Historiography in the English Revolution (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1991),’ Renaissance Quarterly 47.1 (1994): 211. 10 David Norbrook, Writing the English Republic: Poetry, Rhetoric, and Politics, 1627–1660 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1999), 188; and Sharon Achinstein, ‘Review of Nicholas von Maltzahn, Milton’s History of Britain: Republican Historiography in the English Revolution (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1991),’ Prose Studies 16.2 (1993): 115–16. 11 Richard L. Greaves, ‘Review of Nicholas von Maltzahn, Milton’s History of Britain: Republican Historiography in the English Revolution (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1991),’ Historian 55.4 (1993): 770–1. 12 See Daniel Donoghue, ‘Peeping Tom,’ in Lady Godiva: A Literary History of the Legend (Malden, MA: Blackwell, 2003), 69–80. 13 Myself included, since despite his antipathy towards Catholics, effeminacy, women, the Scots, and the Irish, I still find something to admire in Milton’s politics. 14 Charles H. Firth, ‘Milton as an Historian,’ in Essays Historical and Literary (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1938), 61–102. Hereafter cited in the text. 15 Jodi Mikalachki, The Legacy of Boadicea: Gender and Nation in Early Modern England (London: Routledge, 1998), 11. Hereafter cited in the text. 16 See Julia M. Walker, ed., Dissing Elizabeth: Negative Representations of Gloriana (Durham and London: Duke University Press, 1998); and Katherine Eggert, Showing Like a Queen: Female Authority and Literary Experiment in Spenser, Shakespeare, and Milton (Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 2000). 17 Constance Nicholas’s introduction and notes are published separately in Constance Nicholas, Introduction and Notes to Milton’s History of Britain (Urbana: University of Illinois Press, 1957). Hereafter cited in the text. 18 William Blake, ‘[Subjects for “The History of England, a small book of Engravings”],’ in Blake: Complete Writings with Variant Readings, ed. Geoffrey L. Keynes (1966; rpt. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1972), 116. 19 Marina Warner, Monuments and Maidens: The Allegory of the Female Form (1985; London: Vintage, 1996), 49. 20 Edward S. Le Comte, ‘Milton’s Attitude towards Women in the History of Britain,’ PMLA 62.4 (1947): 977–83. 21 Cyrus Hoy, ed., Bonduca, in The Dramatic Works in the Beaumont and Fletcher Canon, gen. ed. Fredson Bowers (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press,

330 Willy Maley

22 23

24 25 26 27 28 29

30

31

1979), 6:149–259. For detailed discussion of the important issues thrown up by this play, see Julie Crawford, ‘Fletcher’s The Tragedie of Bonduca and the Anxieties of the Masculine Government of James I,’ Studies in English Literature 39.2 (1999): 357–81; and Claire Jowitt, ‘Colonialism, Politics, and Romanization in John Fletcher’s Bonduca,’ Studies in English Literature 43.2 (2003): 475–94. See Eve Kosofsky Sedgwick, Between Men: English Literature and Male Homosocial Desire (New York: Columbia University Press, 1985). The phrase ‘girlie men’ is an insult that originates in a ‘Saturday Night Live’ sketch in which two weightlifters consider less muscular men to be less than men. The ‘Governator’ (or ‘Gropenführer’), Arnold Schwarzenegger, notoriously used the slur at his 2004 Republican National Convention Address: ‘And to those critics who are so pessimistic about our economy, I say: “Don’t be economic girlie men!”’ Coppélia Kahn, Roman Shakespeare: Warriors, Wounds, and Women (London: Routledge, 1997), 153. An Index to the Columbia Edition of the Works of John Milton, ed. F.A. Fogle, 2 vols (New York: Columbia University Press, 1940), 2:188. James Joyce, Ulysses: The 1922 Text, ed. Jeri Johnson (1993; rpt. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1998), 315. See Mary Nyquist’s essay, ‘Slavery, Resistance, and Nation in Milton and Locke,’ below. See Hugh Jenkins, ‘Shrugging off the Norman Yoke: Milton’s History of Britain and the Levellers,’ English Literary Renaissance 29.2 (1999): 321. Mary Nyquist, ‘“Profuse, Proud Cleopatra”: “Barbarism” and Female Rule in Early Modern English Republicanism,’ Women’s Studies 24 (1995): 123. Hereafter cited in the text. There are versions of ‘England’ and of ‘Europe’ that would exclude Boadicea, queen of the Iceni, who appears in many modern accounts as a Celtic warrior-queen. See Jane Webster, ‘Ethnographic Barbarity: Colonial Discourse and “Celtic Warrior Societies,”’ in Roman Imperialism: Postcolonial Perspectives, ed. Jane Webster and Nicholas J. Cooper (Leicester: School of Archaeological Studies, University of Leicester, 1996), 111–23. Boadicea is a bimonthly newsletter for disabled women published by Greater London Action on Disability (GLAD).

12 Consuming Nations: Milton and Luxury laura lunger knoppers

I am never to forget the unexpressable luxury, & prophanesse, gaming, & all dissolution, and as it were total forgetfullnesse of God … which this day sennight, I was witnesse of; the King, sitting & toying with his Concubines Portsmouth, Cleaveland, & Mazarine: &c A french boy singing love songs, in that glorious Gallery, whilst about 20 of the greate Courtiers & other dissolute persons were at Basset round a large table, a bank of at least 2000 in Gold before them … it being a sceane of uttmost vanity; and surely as they thought would never have an End: six days after was all in the dust. John Evelyn1

The scene of luxury that John Evelyn witnessed just before the death of Charles II in 1685 evokes concerns dating back to the Restoration of 1660.2 While Evelyn was a staunch royalist who had welcomed the return of the king as miraculous, he later reflected that Charles, a ‘prince of many Virtues, & many greate Imperfections,’ had ‘brought a politer way of living, which passed to Luxurie & intollerable expense.’3 Easy of access and virtue, the king presided over a court that was, in Evelyn’s view, increasingly extravagant in everything from revelling and feasting to mistresses to the little spaniels that Charles allowed to lie in his bed-chamber, ‘where often times he suffered the bitches to puppy & give suck, which rendred it very offensive, & indeed made the whole Court nasty & stinking.’4 The advancing luxury of the court of Charles II marked for Evelyn and other contemporaries a consuming nation that was itself consumed – in plague, fire, and war.5 Luxury was part of an emerging national character both in positive and negative terms in late seventeenth-century England. A Western tradition critiqued luxury (from the Latin luxuria, f. luxu-s, abundance,

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sumptuous enjoyment) as lasciviousness, excess, and extravagant indulgence, whether in women, material objects, revelry, or feasting.6 While Roman historians and satirists blamed luxury for the downfall of the republic, Christian writers focused on luxury as an individual vice, most often linked with lust and lasciviousness.7 Yet with the consumer revolution of the early modern period, this view of luxury increasingly came under scrutiny, and from the 1690s onwards saw defences of luxury as stimulating trade and a consumer economy.8 Luxury shapes Milton’s developing formulation of the nation, from the antiprelatical and regicidal prose, through Paradise Lost, Paradise Regained, and Samson Agonistes, to his late prose work, Of True Religion. For Milton, luxury, fuelled by intemperance, brought imbalance, sloth, and disease to the individual body and the body politic; Milton’s nationalism remains rooted in the physiological and material, as well as the historical. Luxury as a structuring principle is thus another important aspect of what Paul Stevens has pointed to as Milton’s ‘Janus-faced nationalism,’ a liminal quality of abstract and real, imagined and material, inclusive and exclusive, looking forward and backward.9 While Milton’s prose and poetry, as Stevens aptly notes, transfer power from king to sovereign subject, Milton also transfers accountability and, ultimately, blame for luxury, from prelate and prince to the people themselves.10 In conceptualizing the nation, then, Milton does not so much think of imagined communities, the dominant model of early modern nationhood in current scholarship, as of bodily metaphors of intemperance and corruption and of varying structures that foster or redress that corruption, affecting the health of the body politic.11 As such, Milton provides in many ways a counter-example to the progressive narratives of much work on both modern-day and early-modern nationalism, including Richard Helgerson’s Whiggish account of imagined communities leading up to parliamentary opposition against absolute monarchy in the civil wars.12 Rather, Milton’s increasing focus on the nation coincides with an increasing fear of (albeit also a kind of fascination with) luxury, which sends both individuals and nations into an intemperate state, plunging towards purgation. The Banquet and Roman Luxury Milton draws most heavily upon Roman historians and satirists in his formulation of luxury as an individual and national vice. References to the excesses of banqueting and revelry in the late republic and empire

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recur throughout Milton’s prose and poetry, even shaping (as we shall see) his treatment of biblical texts such as Adam and Eve’s gluttony at the moment of the fall, Satan’s proffered banquet to the Son, and the Philistines’ feast of Dagon. Luxury in republican and imperial Rome provides an archetype against which Milton’s own nation can be measured: but, significantly, it is a model not of republican achievement (the focus of much recent scholarship), but of failure.13 The vast sums spent on feasting and banquets in ancient Rome were seen as an archetypal sign of luxury, attacked by satirists such as Horace and Juvenal and blamed by Livy and other Roman historians for the fall of the Republic.14 Such banquets were perhaps most memorably recorded in satires of individual (fictional) patrons: Horace’s rich Nasidienus, who serves lavish dishes designed to whet the jaded appetite – wild boar with turnips, lettuces, radishes, and fish-pickle; lamprey surrounded by swimming shrimp – but whose guests laugh at him, offering mock laments on Fortune when his canopy crashes down.15 Featured in Juvenal’s 4th Satire is Crispinus who spends six thousand sesterces on a single mullet sent to flatter the emperor.16 Juvenal’s 5th Satire focuses on the banquet given by Virro, who drinks Setian wine in a golden cup encrusted with amber and beryl and eats delicate white bread, a lobster garnished with asparagus, the finest lamprey from the Straits of Sicily, goose liver, and a boar piping hot, while his humiliated guest receives inferior wine from a cracked cup, toadstools, sickly greens, a rotten apple, and ‘an eel, first cousin to a water snake, or perchance a pike mottled with ice-spots.’17 Even more elaborate, vulgar, and licentious is the banquet of Trimalchio in Petronius’s Satyricon.18 The rich and boastful former slave Trimalchio urinates in public in a silver chamber pot, regales his guests with details of his own constipation and advice on flatulence, quarrels violently with his wife over a comely slave boy, instigates a series of crude practical jokes on his guests, and stages a maudlin, drunken version of his own funeral. Petronius’s narrator, Encolpius, casts a careful but cynical eye over Trimalchio’s ostentatious but utterly vulgar banquet: hors d’oeuvres of peahen’s eggs, stuffed figpeckers enclosed in pastry shells, and dormice rolled in honey and poppy seed; entrées of wild boar surrounded by suckling pigs made of simnel cakes and a pig stuffed with sausages and black puddings; and a dessert of cakes and a confectionary Priapus holding on his generously endowed member fruits and grapes that, when grabbed for by the guests, squirt out sticky yellow saffron.

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The function of these outrageous and sometimes obscene fictional banquets seems to be partly to moralize and partly to entertain. According to Tacitus, Petronius himself was a favourite courtier, ‘Arbiter of Elegance,’ in the extravagant and licentious court of Nero.19 Rather than ‘a debauchee and wastrel,’ Petronius was considered an ‘artist of extravagance’ [erudito luxus, literally scholar in luxury]: ‘Then, lapsing into the habit, or copying the features of vice, he was adopted into the narrow circle of Nero’s intimates as his Arbiter of Elegance (elegantiae arbiter); the jaded emperor finding charm and delicacy in nothing save what Petronius had commended.’20 Yet details of luxury and extravagant banquets are also part of a broader historiography intended to be exemplary both to the individual and to a people. Suetonius’s Lives of Tiberius, Caligula, Nero, and Vitellius all feature details of riotous and extravagant banqueting, including the practice of vomiting mid-way to make way for more food.21 Livy spells out the importance of both good and bad examples in history: ‘What chiefly makes the study of history wholesome and profitable is this, that you behold the lessons of every kind of experience set forth as on a conspicuous monument; from these you may choose for yourself and for your own state what to imitate, from these mark for avoidance what is shameful.’22 Livy points specifically to ‘avarice and luxury’ as cause for the downfall of the Roman republic: despite a noble past, ‘riches have brought in avarice, and excessive pleasures the longing to carry wantonness and license [per luxum] to the point of ruin for oneself and of universal destruction.’23 Later, Livy points to the East as the foreign source of luxury (luxuriae … peregrinae origo), introduced into Rome by the army from Asia, and exemplified in couches of bronze, valuable robes, tapestries, luxurious furniture, and above all, expensive and elaborate banquets, which in turn were the seed of future luxury (semina erant futurae luxuriae).24 This is a narrative and dramatic lesson for the individual – and for the nation. It was a lesson not lost upon Milton. As we shall now see, Milton draws both explicitly and implicitly upon Roman satirists (Horace, Juvenal, Petronius) and historians such as Livy in articulating the downward spiral of a nation due to luxury. Milton became increasingly concerned not only with the individual and national propensity to luxury, but with finding the appropriate social, economic, and political structures to redress this failing in the body politic.

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‘Lewdly Pamper’d Luxury’ in the Courts of Kings and Prelates The degeneration of Rome, particularly as figured in the bacchic revelry of the banquet under the republic and empire, shapes Milton’s formulation of temptation in his 1634 A Maske Presented at Ludlow Castle and links that luxury to later, more nationalistic articulations.25 The figure of Comus represents the dual attractiveness and repulsion that help to explain Milton’s lifelong obsession with luxury; in the masque, as in the Roman banquets that we have been exploring, luxury is of foreign import, introduced by the son of Circe and Bacchus, and linking Wales with degenerate Rome through such details as the anointing of the hair and the carrying out of the rites of Cotytto.26 Comus is first seen as a figure of revelry: ‘Meanwhile welcome Joy and Feast, / Midnight shout and revelry, / Tipsy dance and Jollity. / Braid your Locks with rosy Twine / Dropping odors, dropping Wine’ (102–6). And the central temptation is staged in the setting of a banquet: ‘a stately Palace set out with all manner of deliciousness; soft Music, Tables, spread with all dainties (SD, p. 105).’ The ‘grim aspects’ (694) of the ‘ugly-headed Monsters’ (695) reveal the effects of intemperance to the Lady, who charges Comus with ‘lewdly-pamper’d Luxury’ (770) and denounces the ‘swinish gluttony’ (776) that ‘Ne’er looks to Heav’n amidst his gorgeous feast’ (777). Yet such is the power of intemperance that the Lady remains trapped in her chair, stuck by the gums of ‘glutinous [gluttonous?] heat’ (917).27 Even when its effects are physically manifested, luxury is an attractive force that the individual must struggle to resist. The masque, however, is more reformist than revolutionary, critiquing the luxury of aristocracy and court in the courtly genre of the masque and through the virtue of an aristocratic young Lady;28 the young Milton does not yet ponder how luxury might affect not only aristocratic bodies but the broader body politic. By the early 1640s, Milton deploys the banquet in a much more radical critique of the courts of prelates and kings. Hence, Of Reformation (1641) contrasts the true governance of a nation, ‘to train up a Nation in true wisdom and vertue’ (CPW 1:571)29 with the modern politicians who seek to make the people servile ‘by count’nancing upon riot, luxury, and ignorance’ (CPW 1:572). Milton warns that the prelates have tried to weaken the people through luxury, luring them from the Sabbath to ‘gaming, jigging, wassailing, and mixed dancing’ (CPW 1:589). The policies of the prelates follow classical and biblical example:

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Cyrus, who could not tame the Lydians ‘whilst they kept themselves from Luxury,’ but by setting up ‘Stews, dancing, feasting, & dicing … made them soone his slaves’ (CPW 1:588), and the ‘Reprobate hireling Preist Balaam’ who subdued the Israelites to Moab not by force but ‘by this divellish Pollicy, to draw them from the Sanctuary of God to the luxurious, and ribald feasts of Baal-peor’ (CPW 1:589). A Defence of the People of England (1651) critiques the ‘luxury and sloth, and then a crew of all the heresies and vices … that trooped into the church’ with the wealth of Constantine (CW 7:257), while the Second Defence of the People of England (1654) denounces the ‘pest of luxury in the church’ and the profligate clergy ‘living in luxury’ (CW 8:183).30 A Defence of the People of England similarly points to luxury at the court of Charles I, luxury that is detrimental to the broader nation. Indeed, in one of his many sallies at his opponent, Salmasius, Milton ironically links up the defender of the late king with Petronius, arbiter of elegance under Nero (and earlier referenced in Areopagitica as one of the ‘worst of men’ [CPW 2:518]). Accusing Salmasius, not for the first time, of bad Latin, Milton writes: ‘I have transcribed these lines, not for their elegance [elegantia], for they are barbarously expressed, nor because I think there needs any additional answer to them, for they answer themselves – they explode and damn themselves – by their barefaced falsehood and loathsomeness’ (CW 7:383). Rather, Milton proposes to recommend Salmasius for court office ‘that among so many places as there are at court they may procure for you some preferment or office that may be fit for you’ (CW 7:383). Of course, given his execrable Latin, as well as the many other personal faults with which Milton charges his opponent, this seeming recommendation has a barbed edge: ‘You shall not be, like the famous Petronius, Master of the Royal Literary Graces [elegantiae, literally of elegance] – you are too ignorant for that – but you shall be Lord High Master of the Royal Treacheries [perfidiae arbiter]’ (CW 7:383–5). Milton hence uses the excesses of the Roman empire to impugn king and courtier, with corrupting implications for the nation as a whole. As luxury marks the reign of Nero and other emperors, Milton alleges corrupting luxury in the court of Charles I that wastes the resources of the nation, now linked more broadly with the people. Hence, Milton maintains that he would ‘be content to pass by in silence the life [Charles] spent amid banquets, plays, and bevies and troops of women: for what can there be in luxury and excess worth relating?’ (CW 7:515). But, Charles’s luxury did ‘much mischief’ by his example.

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And given that the time Charles ‘spent upon his lusts and sports’ was stolen from the state, such ‘private’ behaviour affects the nation as a whole: ‘lastly, he squandered away upon the luxury of his household boundless wealth, uncounted sums of money which were not his own but the public revenue of the nation. So it was in his private life at home that he first began to be an ill king’ (CW 7:517). In A Defence, Milton also introduces the charge – parallel to that against the prelates in Of Reformation – that the king sought to weaken and corrupt the people through luxury. He scoffs at Salmasius’s complaint that ‘With their quarrels [the English] defaced and dishonored an island which under its kings was happy and swam in luxury’ (CW 7:285). Not for the first time, Milton adopts a sardonic tone: ‘Yea, when [England’s] moral ruin through luxury was almost accomplished that it might the more indifferently bear with enslavement – when its laws were abolished, and its religion bought and sold – then they delivered it from slavery (CW 7:285–7). Milton mocks the spectre of a ‘Stoic of the severest’ who nonetheless considers an ‘island swimming in luxury’ to be happy: ‘I am sure no such doctrine ever came from Zeno’s porch’ (CW 7:287). Rather, Salmasius, as perfidiae arbiter, takes his place in a long line of courtiers and sycophants who appeal to the basest instincts of emperor and king. ‘All National Judgments’: The Luxurious Nation The luxury of the nation derided in A Defence but blamed on kings and courtiers, becomes, in the Second Defence, fully the responsibility of the people themselves, as Milton continues to move towards a conception of the nation defined apart from kingship. It is significant that Milton does not use the term ‘luxury’ in his advice to Oliver Cromwell. Rather, with Cromwell, Milton is concerned with putting into place the structures of church and state that would enhance the liberty of the people and foster self-discipline and temperance. The extent to which Milton’s commentary on Cromwell is panegyric or veiled critique, flowering in a full-fledged renunciation in The Readie and Easie Way, is a much-debated subject and largely beyond the scope of this essay.31 What is most relevant is that, unlike the largely trumped-up charges of moral and material luxury against Charles I, and in striking contrast to his lifelong obsession with luxury at the court of kings and prelates, Milton does not raise the charge or indeed even warn Cromwell against luxury.32 Rather, he warns him to leave the church to the

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church, to put into place proper modes of education, and to resist the allurements of power. Milton’s anxieties about luxury are transferred to the people themselves, as he increasingly imagines a nation without a king, but a nation that nonetheless is apt to be corrupted by intemperance and luxury. Luxury – the archetypal national vice – looms now not for prince, but (as also with the ancient and modern Romans) for the English people: ‘Unless you banish avarice, ambition, luxury from your thoughts, and all excess even from your families,’ Milton warns the people, ‘the tyrant, whom you imagined was to be sought abroad, and in the field, you will find at home, will find within’ (CW 8:241). Thus Milton envisions not a nation policing its boundaries against a contaminating Other, or even an unequivocal narrative of national progress, but an internal purgation: ‘Thus nation presses on nation; or the sounder part of a nation thrusts out the more corrupt. Thus have you thrust out the royalists’ (CW 8:243). In this process of nation building, as with a body, the corruption is purged and the ‘sounder part’ remains: but there is danger that the corruption will spread: ‘If you suffer yourselves to turn aside to the same vices; to imitate them; to follow the same courses … you will, in effect, be royalists yourselves’ (CW 8:243). Hence, the English follow the Romans not only in their achievements, but in their degeneration: ‘But no man, not Cromwell himself, not the whole nation of those deliverers the Brutuses, if it should revisit us … [would] deliver you again, if you are thus easily corrupted’ (CW 8:245). Again, Milton focuses specifically on feasting and drink as signs of intemperance: Who would fight, Milton questions, for the liberty of voting for one ‘who should treat you with the most lavish feasting, or … the greatest quantity of drink?’ (CW 8:245–7). Such a nation does not deserve to be free: ‘This is what very frequently happened even to the ancient Romans, after they had become effeminate and unnerved through luxury: and much more did it happen to the modern Romans’ (CW 8:249). Implicitly invoking a history of denunciations of Roman luxury, Milton defines the nation not so much by geography, shared language, religion, or even culture as by a kind of national character, evinced negatively in intemperance and corruption. Luxury plays an even more central role in Milton’s late prose tract, The Readie and Easie Way (1660), now with focus on the corruption and disease spreading through the body politic. The people’s own folly is objectified in that great exemplar of luxury: a royal court, which they

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foolishly seek to return. In sharp contrast to the virtuous public servants of a republic, ‘wherin they who are greatest, are perpetual servants and drudges to the public at thir own cost and charges,’ a king ‘must be ador’d like a Demigod, with a dissolute and haughtie court about him, of vast expense and luxurie, masks and revels, to the debaushing of our prime gentry, both male and female’ (CPW 7:425). The ‘vast and lavish price of our subjection and their debausherie’ includes a king who indulges in culinary excess, the ‘eating and drinking of excessive dainties’ (CPW 7:426). Milton points to the court of the French king Louis XIV with its ‘enticements and preferments’ (CPW 7:426) as a current example of monarchical (foreign and Catholic) luxury. Milton’s warnings against the luxury of the court resonate with his earlier writings on the courts of both prelates and kings, luxurious in themselves and conscious purveyors of luxury to weaken the people. Yet by shifting responsibility to the people, Milton comes to recognize that the luxury of a monarch reflects the people’s own luxury. Thus Milton decries the ‘luxurious expences of a nation upon trifles or superfluities’ (CPW 7:461–2), the misguided demand to ‘foregoe & set to sale religion, libertie, honor, safetie, all concernments Divine or human to keep up trading.’ If they persist in such national backsliding, the English nation will incur ‘those calamities which attend alwaies and unavoidably on luxurie, all national judgments under forein or domestic slaverie’ (CPW 7:462). In such national luxury, the English follow the failings not only of the Roman republic and empire, but also of Judah.33 Hence, the Jews under Jeremiah seek to return to Egypt and the worship of their idol queen because they imagine ‘that they then livd in more plentie and prosperitie’ (CPW 7:462). In Jeremiah 44, the people return to the worship of the idol queen of Egypt: ‘But we will certainly do whatsoever thing goeth forth out of our own mouth, to burn incense unto the queen of heaven, and to pour out drink offerings unto her, as we have done, we, and our father, our kings, and our princes … for then had we plenty of victuals and were well, and saw not evil.’ But the people’s defiance of God’s commands brings down the curse that they will be consumed: ‘Behold, I will watch over them for evil, and not for good, and all the men of Judah that are in the land of Egypt shall be consumed by the sword and by the famine, until there be an end of them’ (KJV, Jer. 44:27). Here in stark and explicit terms, Milton makes clear that the consuming nation will itself be consumed, having brought upon itself divine judgment.

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‘In Courts and Palaces he also reigns’: Belial and Luxury in the Restoration The celebrations marking the return of Charles II and the licentious character of the new court must have seemed to Milton like the worst possible fulfilment of his dire predictions in The Readie and Easie Way. Yet despite the many dangers that Milton faced, the appearance of Belial in Book 1 of Paradise Lost signals that his Restoration poetry continues the critique of the luxurious nation that increasingly marked his prose.34 As a figure of sloth, Belial (‘than whom a Spirit more lewd / Fell not from Heaven’ [1.490–1]) recalls the association of sloth and luxury in Milton’s prose and evokes a tradition of Roman luxury that seems highly relevant in the Restoration milieu. Reigning in ‘Courts and Palaces … / And in luxurious Cities, where the noise / Of riot ascends above thir loftiest Tow’rs’ (1.497–9), Belial and his followers are linked (significantly, in present tense) with night-time revelry: ‘And when Night / Darkens the Streets, then wander forth the Sons / Of Belial, flown with insolence and wine’ (1.500–2).35 While Paradise Lost points to a specific biblical context for the sons of Belial (the rape and dismemberment of the concubine of Gibeah), Milton’s audience would likely have also recognized an equally pertinent – and politically pointed – context in the revelry and carousing of the Roman banquet. Tacitus’s account of Petronius, to which (as we have seen) Milton twice directly alludes, emphasizes Nero’s early forays into the streets at night and the licentious court nightlife which Petronius comes to orchestrate: ‘He was a man whose day was passed in sleep, his nights in the social duties and amenities of life.’36 Similarly, Tacitus characterizes Petronius as idle and slothful: ‘others industry may raise to greatness – Petronius had idled into fame.’37 The figure of Belial thus alerts the reader to the role of luxury in the epic and to the current political implications of the fall of Adam and Eve. Their intemperance, their fall into luxury has – as with Judah and early Romans – national implications. The motif of luxury links the individual temptations with the history of nations in each of Milton’s Restoration poems, as well as with the more explicit nationalist concerns of his prose.38 The temptations to luxury that each protagonist faces through Satanic or idolatrous banquets make the poems, as Milton had envisioned in The Reason of Church-Government, ‘doctrinal and exemplary to a Nation’ (CPW 1:815), both as warning and as ideal.

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‘Exact of Taste / And Elegant’: Eve as elegantiae arbiter in Paradise Lost By positioning Eve as the mistress of the feast in Paradise Lost, Milton situates the primal couple in a resonant tradition of luxury, making clear the broader national significance of their intemperance.39 The meal that Adam and Eve share with the angel has no biblical analogue; but among other thematic functions, it demonstrates the temperance of the unfallen couple, living amid the ‘Luxurious’ (9.209) but innocent fecundity of the garden. As Raphael approaches, Adam urges Eve to ‘go with speed, / And what thy stores contain, bring forth and pour / Abundance, fit to honor and receive / Our Heav’nly stranger’ (5.313– 16). And while the fruits are drawn from ‘India East or West, or middle shore / In Pontus or the Punic Coast’ (5.339–40), like the Roman banquet gathered from the far-flung quarters of the empire, the Edenic meal is both temperate and (significantly) elegant: So saying, with dispatchful looks in haste She turns, on hospitable thoughts intent What choice to choose for delicacy best, What order, so contriv’d as not to mix Tastes, not well join’d, inelegant, but bring Taste after taste upheld with kindliest change.

(5.331–6)

Eve is an unfallen mistress of ceremonies as she crushes ‘inoffensive must, and meaths / From many a berry’ (5.345–6), in contrast to fermented wine, and as she strews the ground with natural ‘Rose and Odors from the shrub unfum’d’ (5.349). While Eve ministers naked, ‘in those hearts, / Love unlibidinous reign’d’ (5.448–9), unlike the sexualized atmosphere with attractive slaves of both sexes in the Roman banquet, or, perhaps, the traditional appearance of naked mime performers at Roman festivals, particularly the Floralia.40 In contrast to Roman excess and intemperance, such as shown by Seneca’s reminiscence of a time before what ‘was nourishment to a hungry man became a burden to the full stomach,’41 Adam and Eve eat temperately and only what they need: ‘with meats and drinks they had suffic’d / Not burd’n’d Nature’ (5.451–2). But under the external influence of Satanic rhetoric, Eve also becomes a mistress of ceremonies in a depraved sense, in the fall in

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Paradise Lost. Multiple senses – sight, smell, touch – are aroused, as, at the hour of noon, Eve’s appetite is ‘rais’d by the smell / So savory of that Fruit, which with desire, / Inclinable now grown to touch or taste, / Solicited her longing eye’ (9.740–3). The temperance evinced in the earlier meal with the angel is replaced by greedy indulgence: ‘Greedily she ingorg’d without restraint, / And knew not eating Death’ (9.791–2). When a drunken Adam praises Eve as ‘exact of taste, / And elegant’ (9.1017–18), his words not only contrast with the temperate ‘Taste after taste’ (5.336) served at the banquet with Raphael but, I would argue, evoke the infamous elegantiae arbiter, Pretorius, presiding over the extravagant and immoral court of the emperor Nero. Adam praises Eve’s ‘taste’ in a multilayered pun: ‘Eve, now I see thou are exact of taste, / And elegant, of Sapience no small part, / Since to each meaning savor we apply, / And Palate call judicious’ (9.1017–20). A similar linkage of elegance, feasting, and luxury is found in Milton’s History of Britain, when he writes that in conquering Britain, Agricola encouraged British youth to adapt Roman customs: ‘voluptuous life, proud Buildings, Baths, and the elegance of Banqueting; which the foolisher sort call’d civilitie, but was indeed a secret Art to prepare them for bondage’ (CPW 5:85). Adam and Eve’s private banquet is followed by sexual ‘play,’ as they take ‘thir fill of Love and Love’s disport’ (9.1042). ‘As with new Wine intoxicated both’ (9.1008), Adam and Eve become extravagant revellers in a poignant echo of the sons of Belial, also (as we have seen) linked with Petronius and the court of Nero: ‘And when Night / Darkens the Streets, then wander forth the Sons / Of Belial, flown with insolence and wine’ (1.500–2). As such, Adam and Eve’s fall is linked specifically with a particular kind of national character and corruption through the body politic. ‘No homely morsels’: Sin and Death and Foreign Luxury Deriving directly from the fall of Adam and Eve, the grotesque and excessive banquet of Sin and Death in Paradise Lost points not only to the corruption attendant upon intemperance and gluttony, but to the extravagance in foreign luxury held responsible for the degeneration of Rome. Emblematic of the culinary excess of Vitellius in Suetonius’s Lives is an enormous platter, which he calls the ‘Shield of Minerva, Defender of the City,’ on which are mingled ‘the livers of pike, the

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brains of pheasants and peacocks, the tongues of flamingoes and the milt of lampreys, brought by his captains and triremes from the whole empire, from Parthia to the Spanish strait.’42 Not only is the menu conspicuously wasteful – the flamingos are killed only for their tongues, the pheasants and peacocks only for their brains, and the lampreys only for their milt (sperm-filled reproductive glands) – but the entire empire is ransacked in an attempt to sate the jaded appetite of the gluttonous emperor. Satan is the initial master of revels in Milton’s even more outrageous and destructive infernal feast.43 When first meeting Sin and Death, Satan promises to bring them to a place where ‘ye shall be fed and fill’d / Immeasurably, all things shall be your prey’ (2.843–4). After the fall, Death follows Sin towards a decaying earth: ‘such a scent I draw / Of carnage, prey innumerable, and taste / The savor of Death from all things there that live’ (10.267–9). The image of Death turning a giant ‘Nostril wide into the murky Air, / Sagacious of his Quarry from so far’ (10.280–1) grotesquely echoes and parodies the scent that arouses Eve’s appetite to eat the forbidden fruit. Equally significant, in our context, is Sin’s promise to Death of an extravagant banquet characterized by its exoticism, having ‘No homely morsels’: Thou therefore on these Herbs, and Fruits, and Flow’rs Feed first, on each Beast next, and Fish, and Fowl, No homely morsels, and whatever thing The Scythe of Time mows down, devour unspar’d, Till I in Man residing through the Race, His thoughts, his looks, words, actions all infect, And season him thy last and sweetest prey.

(10.603–9)

Like the banquets of Nero, Vitellius, and Caligula, or the imagined extravagance of Trimalchio, Crispinius, and Nasidienus, Sin offers ‘No homely morsels’ but well-seasoned, extravagant fare drawn from another world. Juvenal’s 11th Satire draws an extensive contrast between the humble fruits and fare of the fatherland (patria), which Curius serves to his guests, and a decadent banquet, drawn from all over the world.44 In Milton’s reductio ad absurdum of luxury, Adam and Eve themselves become the banquet, consumed by a devouring Death. Yet if Satan, and then Sin, seem to be the elegantiae arbiter, overseeing the

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extravagant revels, Milton makes clear that a divine master remains in control. The bitter ashes that Satan and the other fallen angels are forced to chew link up with a vision of Sin and Death as ‘lick[ing] up the draff and filth / Which man’s polluting Sin with taint hath shed’ (10.630–1), until ‘cramm’d and gorg’d, nigh burst / With suckt and glutted offal’ (10.632–3), they are slung down to ‘seal up [the] ravenous Jaws’ (10.637) of the mouth of hell. The consuming scavengers, Sin and Death, are themselves consumed. ‘Where luxury late reign’d’: Divine Judgment and the Consuming Nation Taking up the motif of intemperance and eating from the Edenic and infernal banquets, Michael’s prophetic vision in the final two books of Paradise Lost explicitly extends the lessons of luxury to the nation.45 As Adam is led from repentance to faith and obedience, he learns that intemperance brings disease both to the individual and to the body politic. ‘The rule of not too much, by temperance taught’ (11.531) serves as the structuring principle, linking the sins of individuals with the (disastrous) history of nations.46 Michael’s vision shows how the nations, in ‘triumph and luxurious wealth’ (11.788), move seemingly inexorably to ‘pleasure, ease, and sloth, / Surfeit, and lust’ (11.794–5). Yet the degeneration of the conquering nation, which turns in peace to ‘jollity and game, / To luxury and riot, feast and dance’ (11.714–15), does not go unchecked; rather, divine judgment looms. The ‘one just man,’ Noah, emerges to denounce divine wrath and prophesy divine judgment through the flood: and ‘in thir Palaces / Where luxury late reign’d, Sea-monsters whelp’d / And stabled’ (11.750–2). In this graphic vision of sea monsters inhabiting the former palaces of the rich, Milton shows how the intemperately consuming nation too is consumed. The multiple meals and multiple trials of temperance in Paradise Lost are clearly significant for Milton’s ideal of the nation, based on the model of the disciplined and temperate individual. Paradise Lost frames its individual accounts of feasting with communal and national warnings against luxury. Thus, while it is perhaps not the national epic that Milton once envisioned, Paradise Lost is still a poem ‘doctrinal and exemplary for a Nation.’ As the poem reflects upon the Restoration milieu in which it is published, the luxurious feasts

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become not simply signs of individual vice and consequences but a mirror which reflects the failings of the nation as a whole. ‘Sumptuous Gluttonies’ and the Temperate Son in Paradise Regained Both Paradise Regained and Samson Agonistes, published together in a single volume in 1671, continue to reflect upon the intemperance of the body and the diseases of the body politic under the rubric of luxury. All of the temptations in Paradise Regained are in some sense temptations to luxury, to what is not needed, and the Son rejects them in precisely those terms. But the most overt example of luxury in the poem is the lavish (and unbiblical) banquet that Satan conjures up in the wilderness. As master of the revels, Satan proffers a banquet that appears, significantly, ‘in regal mode,’ evoking the Restoration luxury also linked with Belial (who lurks ‘in Courts and Regal Chambers’ [2.183]) and drawing upon a long tradition of excessive Roman banquets: A Table richly spread, in regal mode, With dishes pil’d, and meats of noblest sort And savor, Beasts of chase, or Fowl of game, In pastry built, or from the spit, or boil’d, Grisamber steam’d; all Fish from Sea or Shore, Freshet, or purling Brook, of shell or fin, And exquisitest name, for which was drain’d Pontus and Lucrine Bay, and Afric Coast.

(2.340–7)

The rich banquet is linked back to the Lady’s denunciation of ‘lewdly pamper’d Luxury’ (770) in Comus, and the narrator also makes clear the link with the fall of Eve: ‘Alas, how simple, to these Cates compar’d, / Was the crude Apple that diverted Eve!’ (2.348–9). The description once again recalls the luxurious banquets with foodstuffs drawn from throughout the empire. Juvenal’s 4th Satire comments on ‘old debauches of the Imperial Court’ of Nero: ‘No one in my time had more skill in the eating art than he. He could tell at the first bite whether an oyster had been bred at Circeii, or on the Lucrine rocks, and or on the beds of Rutupiae’; similarly, Juvenal’s 5th Satire laments that ‘in the rage for gluttony our own seas have given out; the nets of the fish-market are for ever raking our home Waters.’47

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Further, the banquet includes some of the other amenities seen in extravagant Roman feasts: odours, comely boys (with homoerotic overtones), and nymphs: And at a stately sideboard by the wine That fragrant smell diffus’d, in order stood Tall stripling youths rich clad, of fairer hue Than Ganymede or Hylas; distant more Under the Trees now tripp’d, now solemn stood Nymphs of Diana’s train, and Naiades With fruits and flowers from Amalthea’s horn.

(2.350–6)

Rich foods and youths, accompanied by ‘Harmonious Airs’ (2.362), ‘Arabian odors’ (2.364), and ‘Flora’s earliest smells’ (2.365) mark the banquet as appealing to all senses, arousing all appetites. The Son’s abrupt rejection marks a model of temperance for the individual and, in the context of Restoration church and state, for the nation.48 The temptation of ‘great and glorious Rome’ in Paradise Regained is likewise explicitly connected with wealth and banqueting. The Son rejects Rome – with its ‘gilded battlements, conspicuous far, / Turrets and Terraces, and glittering Spires. / Many a fair Edifice besides’ (4.53–5) – in terms of luxury: ‘Nor doth this grandeur and majestic show / Of luxury, though call’d magnificence, / More than of arms before, allure mine eye’ (4.110–12). Significantly, he reminds Satan that he has omitted their ‘sumptuous gluttonies, and gorgeous feasts’ (4.114), going on to list famous Roman wines and the excess of ‘Citron tables or Atlantic stone’ (4.115) and of ‘Crystal and Murrhine cups emboss’d with Gems / And studs of Pearl’ (4.119–20). As the world is scoured for the decadence of the feast, the Son refuses to liberate the Romans ‘Luxurious by thir wealth, and greedier still / And from the daily Scene effeminate’ (4.141–2). As in Paradise Lost, Milton does not just define the individual – or nation – negatively in Paradise Regained. Rather, the poem ends with positive, temperate eating, evoking the earlier angelic feast in Paradise Lost (5.632–41). Having rejected luxury and the Satanic banquet, the hungry Son receives heavenly repast, as angels bear him to a flowery valley and offer ‘A table of Celestial Food, Divine, / Ambrosial, Fruits fetcht from the tree of life, / And from the fount of life Ambrosial drink’ (4.588–90). The lesson of Paradise Regained for both the individual and

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the nation is one of resistance and rejection, of temperance in the face of indulgence and excessive consumption. ‘A Popular Feast’ in Samson Agonistes As with Paradise Regained, Milton melds biblical and classical traditions in a depiction of feasting in Samson Agonistes, but the sharply contrasting ending of the tragedy offers an alternative response to the luxurious nation.49 Indeed scholars have not noticed how far from the Judges account – or anything in the Hebrew Bible – is Milton’s description of the revelling Philistines. By boldly reworking the Philistine sacrifice to Dagon as a luxurious Roman banquet, Milton highlights the dire consequences of both individual and national luxury, through intemperance specifically in eating and drinking. As the drama opens, Samson is poured out on the ground, evoking the linkage of sloth and luxury. As a Nazarite, Samson measures his actions in terms of food and drink: ‘Desire of wine and all delicious drinks, / Which many a famous Warrior overturns, / Thou couldst repress’ (541–3). But while temperate in food and drink, Samson succumbs to luxury vis-à-vis women: ‘But what avail’d this temperance, not complete / Against another object more enticing?’ (558–9). Indeed, the griefs that ‘pain’ Samson as ‘a ling’ring disease’ (618) show (as we saw in Paradise Lost) the natural physiological outcome of luxury. Again in Samson Agonistes, individual luxury shapes Milton’s construction of the nation. Samson’s intemperance is paralleled not only by his own corrupt and enslaved nation, but even more extravagantly by the feasting, idolatrous Philistines. We learn from Samson’s first speech that the Philistines are revelling: ‘This day a solemn Feast the people hold / To Dagon thir Sea-Idol, and forbid / Laborious works’ (12–14). Manoa focuses on the Philistine banquet as emblem of Samson’s failure and humiliation: ‘A worse thing yet remains. / This day the Philistines a popular Feast / Here celebrate in Gaza; and proclaim / Great Pomp, and Sacrifice, and Praises loud / To Dagon’ (433–7). The arrival of the ‘bedeckt, ornate, and gay’ Dalila (712), ridiculously overdressed if her main object is to visit a blind man, is best seen in the context of her attendance at the Philistine feast, where, we are later told, ‘Lords, Ladies, Captains, Counsellors, or Priests, / Thir choice nobility and flower’ (1653–4) from all Philistia are in attendance. Dalila as ‘rich Philistian Matron’ (722) is linked back with the ‘Table richly

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spread’ (2.340) and ‘youths rich clad’ (2.352) of Satan’s proffered feast in Paradise Regained: she represents consumption of all kinds, appealing to all senses. Dalila’s ‘Amber scent of odorous perfume’ (720) recalls the ‘amber scent’ of the East in Paradise Lost,50 the ‘scent’ (9.587) of the apple that allures Eve, and its parody in the ‘scent[ing]’ of monstrous Death with his giant nostril and the ‘scent of living Carcasses’ (10.277). ‘Amber’ further evokes the fish ‘Grisamber steam’d’ (2.344) in the banquet that Satan offers to the Son in Paradise Regained. The ‘sumptuous Dalila’ (1072), like the ‘sumptuous gluttonies’ (4.114) rejected by the Son in Paradise Regained and the ‘sumptuous courts’ decried by Milton in The Readie and Easie Way, is a walking image of luxury. Dalila recalls the warnings against luxury, in, for example, Claudian’s praise of Stilicho’s consulship for his resistance of ‘fair fronted wantonness’ and luxury (luxuria): ‘that sweet curse, which surrendering to the arbitrament of the body dulls the wits with darkness, enervating the limbs with bane more deadly than that of Circe. Fair, indeed, is her face, but none is fouler within; dyed are her cheeks; clothed about is she with treacherous lures … Many hath she caught with the bait of pleasure.’51 Such a description resonates with Samson’s rejection of Dalila as emblematic of intemperance – both hers and his own. Indeed, he rejects her in terms of excessive or dangerous eating and drinking: as a kind of Circe figure wielding a ‘fair enchanted cup, and warbling charms’ and using the ‘bait of honied words.’ Milton renders the Philistine feast, in sharp contrast to Judges, as a kind of banquet that falls within a tradition of Roman luxury. The Officer’s description (‘This day to Dagon is a solemn Feast, / With Sacrifices, Triumph, Pomp, and Games’ [1311–12]) and Samson’s initial refusal – ‘Have they not Sword-players, and ev’ry sort / Of Gymnic Artists, Wrestlers, Riders, Runners, / Jugglers and Dancers, Antics, Mummers, Mimics’ (1323–5) – sounds more like the entertainment at a drunken Roman affair than anything found in Judges or the Hebrew Bible. Samson, significantly, is commanded to come and perform as ‘our Slave, / Our Captive, at the public Mill our drudge’ (1392–3). As such, Samson inverts the meaning of the slave’s performance. The revelling, consuming Philistines evoke a history of luxury from Greeks to Romans to the prelates and courts of Milton’s own day. Samson intuits: ‘Lords are Lordliest in thir wine; / And the well-feasted Priest then soonest fir’d / With zeal, if aught Religion seem concern’d: / No less the people on thir Holy-days / Impetuous, insolent, unquenchable’ (1418–22). Samson, of course, literally pulls down the Temple. Yet the

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Philistines are also self-consuming, destroyed by their own excess: ‘While thir hearts were jocund and sublime, / Drunk with Idolatry, drunk with Wine, / And fat regorg’d of Bulls and Goats’ (1669–71). Intent only on ‘sport and play’ (1679) in calling for the slave Samson, the Philistines ‘unwittingly importun’d / Thir own destruction to come speedy upon them’ (1680–1). As in Milton’s earlier constructions, the self-consuming nation gives way not to despair but to a divine standard. The Israelites, it is true, must take advantage of Samson’s act. That they plan to celebrate Samson’s death at a feast (‘The Virgins also shall on feastful days / Visit his Tomb with flowers’ [1741–2]) is somewhat ominous. Yet the ending of Samson Agonistes resonates with alternative possibilities for the English under restored church and monarch, the luxurious prelates and princes of Milton’s earlier prose. Luxury might be countered by resistance and rejection, as with the Son in Paradise Regained; but even the fallen individual, regaining discipline, might also transform national character and, like Samson, throw off external bondage. ‘This Nation of late years’: Of True Religion In his final prose tract, Of True Religion (1673), published shortly after Paradise Regained and Samson Agonistes, Milton again directly comments upon a nation bent on moral intemperance and luxury. Hence, he concludes the tract with a dire warning that ‘it is a general complaint that this Nation of late years, is grown more numerously and excessively vitious then heretofore; Pride, Luxury, Drunkenness, Whoredom, Cursing, Swearing, bold and open Atheism every where abounding’ (CPW 8.438). Here Milton places the blame not on the court of Charles II, but on the ‘Nation,’ which like the figure of Samson in Milton’s classical tragedy, brings upon itself punishment and tragic purgation: ‘For God, when men sin outragiously, and will not be admonisht, gives over chastizing them, perhaps by Pestilence, Fire, Sword, or Famin, which may all turn to their good, and takes up his severest punishments, hardness, besottedness of heart, and Idolatry, to their final perdition’ (CPW 8.439). While the very act of writing indicates that Milton has not given up hope, his view of the nation is here at its darkest. Once again, the luxurious nation is threatened not by an external force, but by its own internal corruption. The national punishments that Milton predicted more than a decade earlier in The Readie and Easie Way, and which for him (as

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well as many of his contemporaries) took shape in fire, plague, and war, were not, in fact, the most dire outcome. Utter perdition would come if God stopped punishing the errant nation, leaving it to its own moral and material intemperance. From his earliest to his latest writings, then, Milton is concerned with luxury as a vice that corrupts individual bodies and, in turn, the body politic. Yet in late seventeenth-century England, in which king and court set the model for conspicuous consumption of all kinds, this negative (albeit traditional) view of luxury would be increasingly challenged by a new focus on a consumer society and a nation defined in part by its economic prosperity.52 For Bernard Mandeville, writing near the beginning of the eighteenth century, the individual vice of luxury fuelled the economy, benefiting the nation as a whole.53 Milton’s view, harkening back to physical concepts of the intemperate body and body politic, was precisely the reverse: the discipline of the individual was the model for and basis of the health and discipline of the whole. It would not have occurred to Milton to justify ‘lewdly pamper’d Luxury’ (Comus, 770) or the ‘luxurious expences of a nation upon trifles or superfluities’ (CPW 7:462) on the grounds of national prosperity. Rather, for Milton such luxury would inevitably, as with the ancient Romans, bring the body politic to its own self-destruction.

NOTES 1 The Diary of John Evelyn, ed. E.S. de Beer (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1955), 6 February 1685, 4:413–14. 2 See Neil Keeble, ‘“Luxury with Charles restor’d?” The Temper of the Times,’ in The Restoration: England in the 1660s (Oxford: Blackwell, 2002), 159–82. 3 Evelyn, Diary, 4:409–10. 4 Ibid., 410. 5 See, for instance, Evelyn’s comment on 10 October 1666 on the ‘late dreadfull Conflagration, added to the Plage & Warr, the most dismall judgments [that] could be inflicted & indeede but what we highly deserved for our prodigious ingratitude, burning Lusts, disolute Court, profane & abominable lives, under such dispensations of Gods continued favour,’ Diary, 3:464. On moralistic interpretations of plague, fire, and war, see also my Historicizing Milton: Spectacle, Poetry, and Power in Restoration England (Athens: University of Georgia Press, 1994), ch. 6. My treatment of the self-consuming

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6

7

8

9

10 11

12

13

nation in this essay is indebted to Stanley Fish’s seminal Self-Consuming Artifacts: The Experience of Seventeenth-Century Literature (Berkeley and Los Angeles: University of California Press, 1972). John Sekora, Luxury: The Concept in Western Thought, Eden to Smollett (Baltimore, MA: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1977); and Christopher J. Berry, The Idea of Luxury (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1994). On Roman responses to luxury, see Sekora, Luxury, 34–9; Berry, Idea of Luxury, 63–86; Andrew Dalby, Empire of Pleasures: Luxury and Indulgence in the Roman World (London and New York: Routledge, 2000); and primary sources cited throughout this essay. On early Christian responses, see Sekora, Luxury, 39–47; and Berry, Idea of Luxury, 87–100. With a focus on the eighteenth century, see Consumption and the World of Goods, ed. John Brewer and Roy Porter (London and New York: Routledge, 1993); Consumers and Luxury: Consumer Culture in Europe, 1650–1850, ed. Maxine Berg and Helen Clifford (Manchester: Manchester University Press, 1999); and, arguing that consumerism and luxury goods already mark seventeenth-century England, see Linda Levy Peck, ‘Luxury and War: Reconsidering Luxury Consumption in Seventeenth-Century England,’ Albion 34.1 (2002): 1–23. On the early modern culture of commodities and conspicuous consumption, see also Lisa Jardine, Worldly Goods: A New History of the Renaissance (New York: Nan A. Talese, 1996). Paul Stevens, ‘Milton’s Janus-faced Nationalism: Soliloquy, Subject, and the Modern Nation State,’ Journal of English and Germanic Philology 100.2 (April 2001): 247–68. See also Stevens’s ‘Milton’s Nationalism and the Rights of Memory,’ in Imagining Death in Spenser and Milton, ed. Elizabeth Jane Bellamy, Patrick Cheney, and Michael Schoenfeldt (Basingstoke: Palgrave, 2003), 171–84. Stevens, ‘Milton’s Janus-faced Nationalism.’ Accounts of nationalism by literary scholars draw heavily on Benedict Anderson’s Imagined Communities: Reflections on the Origin and Spread of Nationalism (1983; rpt. London: Verso, 1991). Richard Helgerson, Forms of Nationhood: The Elizabethan Writing of England (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1992). See also Andrew Hadfield, Literature, Politics, and National Identity: Reformation to Renaissance (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1994); and Claire McEachern, The Poetics of English Nationhood, 1590–1612 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1996). This strand of luxury which I am tracing is, then, a significant departure from Milton’s uses of classical republicanism as a positive model for the nation. On Milton and republicanism, see especially David Norbrook, Writing

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14

15

16 17 18

19 20 21

22 23 24 25

26

27

28

the English Republic: Poetry, Rhetoric and Politics, 1627–1660 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1999), and Milton and Republicanism, ed. David Armitage, Armand Himy, and Quentin Skinner (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1995). Berry, Idea of Luxury; Jasper Griffin, ‘Augustan Poetry and the Life of Luxury,’ in his Latin Poets and Roman Life (London: Duckworth, 1985), 1–31. Andrew Dalby, ‘Luxury’ and ‘Excess,’ in Food in the Ancient World From A to Z (London and New York: Routledge, 2003). Horace, 2nd Satire, viii, in Satires, Epistles, and Ars Poetica, trans. H. Rushton Fairclough, Loeb Classic Library (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1970), 237–45. Juvenal, 4th Satire, in Juvenal and Persius, trans. G.G. Ramsay, Loeb Classic Library (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1961), 57–69. Juvenal, 5th Satire, in Juvenal and Persius, 69–83. Petronius, Satyricon, trans. Michael Heseltine, Loeb Classic Library (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1969), 45–183. On the banquet of Trimalchio as self-consuming, see Niall W. Slater, Reading Petronius (Baltimore, MA: The John Hopkins University Press, 1990), 50–86. Tacitus, Annals, Book XVI, trans. John Jackson, Loeb Classic Library (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1962), 4:364–5. Ibid., 362–5. Suetonius, ‘Tiberius,’ ‘Caligula,’ ‘Nero,’ and ‘Vitellius,’ in Suetonius, Lives of the Caesars, trans. J.C. Rolfe, Loeb Classic Library (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1964), 1:289–402; 403–97; 2:85–188, 247–77. Livy, History of Rome, trans. E. Sage, Loeb Classic Library (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1934), vol. 1, book 1, preface, 6–7. Ibid. Ibid., vol. 14, Book XXXIX, ch. 6, 234–7. Comus, in John Milton: Complete Poems and Major Prose, ed. Merritt Y. Hughes (New York: Macmillan, 1957). All references to Milton’s poetry are to this edition and will be given parenthetically by book and line numbers. Hughes, in his notes to Comus, cites Juvenal’s attack on the rites of the goddess Cotytto in his 2nd Satire as a condemnation of superstitious Rome (93, note 129). The suggestive pun of glutinous / gluttonous is part of Michael Schoenfeldt’s richly insightful chapter on Milton’s alimental vision, in Bodies and Selves in Early Modern England: Physiology and Inwardness in Spenser, Shakespeare, Herbert, and Milton (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1999), 131–68 [reference is to 149]. On Comus as a reformed masque more generally, see Barbara K. Lewalski,

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30

31

32

‘Milton’s Comus and the Politics of Masquing,’ in Politics of the Stuart Court Masque, ed. and intro. David Bevington and Peter Holbrook (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1998), 296–320; and David Norbrook, ‘The Reformation of the Masque,’ in Court Masque, ed. David Lindley (Manchester: Manchester University Press, 1984), 94–110. On luxury and trade in Comus, see Blair Hoxby, Mammon’s Music: Literature and Economics in the Age of Milton (New Haven and London: Yale University Press, 2002), esp. 17–24. Milton’s English prose is cited from Complete Prose Works of John Milton, gen. ed. Don M. Wolfe 8 vols (New Haven; Yale University Press, 1953–82). Volume and page numbers are given parenthetically in the text, preceded by the abbreviation CPW. On Milton’s Latin prose, see note 30 below. Because of my close focus on particular terms (especially the Latin luxuria), for Milton’s Latin prose I prefer the more literal translation of the Columbia edition. All citations for Milton’s Defences are taken from The Works of John Milton, ed. Frank Allen Patterson et al 18 vols (New York: Columbia University Press, 1931–8) and are given parenthetically in the text by volume and page number, preceded by the abbreviation CW. The classic articulation of Milton’s alleged repudiation of Cromwell is Austin Woolrych, ‘Milton and Cromwell: “A Short but Scandalous Night of Interruption?”’ in Achievements of the Left Hand: Essays on the Prose of John Milton, ed. Michael Lieb and John Shawcross (Amherst: University of Massachusetts Press, 1974), 185–218. Most recently on this debate, see Martin Dzelzainis, ‘Milton and the Protectorate in 1658,’ in Milton and Republicanism, ed. Armitage, Himy, and Skinner, 181–205; Laura Knoppers, ‘Late Political Prose,’ in A Companion to Milton, ed. Thomas Corns (Oxford: Blackwell, 2001), 309–26; and Paul Stevens, ‘Milton’s “Renunciation” of Cromwell: The Problem of Raleigh’s Cabinet Council,’ Modern Philology 98 (2001): 363–92. Luxury is not, in fact, one of the charges (e.g., of hypocrisy, ambition, Machiavellianism) that recur in attacks on the controversial figure of Cromwell. In fact, a late satiric text, The Court & Kitchin of Elizabeth, Commonly called Joan Cromwel (London, 1664) claims that ‘it was by all men much wondred at, that he was so little guilty of any luxurious and Epicurean Excesses either in his meat or drink’ (sig. B), unlike the ‘sanguinous Tribe’ of Roman emperors (Tiberius, Caligula, Nero, Otho, Domitian) with whom Cromwell was otherwise linked (sig. B2). The text goes on to attribute Cromwell’s ‘abstemiousnesse and temperance’ to the sordidness and frugality of his wife. For a more extensive argument that the Cromwellian Protectorate appropriated and adapted, rather than simply aped, the trappings of monarchy, see Knoppers, Constructing Cromwell: Ceremony, Portrait, and Print, 1645–1661 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2000).

354 Laura Lunger Knoppers 33 Knoppers, ‘Milton’s The Readie and Easie Way and the English Jeremiad,’ in Politics, Poetics, and Hermeneutics in Milton’s Prose, ed. David Loewenstein and James Turner (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1990), 213–25. 34 Recent scholars have variously rebutted the long-held view that Milton’s poetry turned away from politics after the Restoration. See especially Steven Zwicker, Lines of Authority: Politics and English Culture, 1649–1689 (Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 1993); Sharon Achinstein, Milton and the Revolutionary Reader (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1994); Knoppers, Historicizing Milton; David Loewenstein, Representing Revolution in Milton and His Contemporaries: Religion, Politics, and Polemics in Radical Puritanism (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2001); and Blair Hoxby, Mammon’s Music. 35 On Belial and Restoration licentiousness, albeit not with reference to the Roman subtexts, see James Grantham Turner, Libertines and Radicals in Early Modern London; Sexuality, Politics, and Literary Culture, 1630–1685 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2002), 164–6. 36 Tacitus, Annals, Book XVI, 362–3. 37 Ibid. 38 For discussion of how Milton invokes the sons of Belial to characterize the English as defiled Irish, see Stevens’s essay, ‘How Milton’s Nationalism Works: Globalization and the Possibilities of Positive Nationalism,’ above. 39 On Adam and Eve’s intemperate feasting, albeit with a focus on individual rather than national implications, see Schoenfeldt, Bodies and Selves, 131–68. 40 Jasper Griffin, Latin Poets and Roman Life (London: Duckworth, 1985), 104. 41 Seneca, Epistles, trans. Richard Gummere (London: William Heinemann, 1925), 3:67. 42 Suetonius, ‘Vitellius,’ Lives of the Caesars, 2:266–7. 43 On intemperance and the infernal feasts in Paradise Lost, see Schoenfeldt, Bodies and Selves, 155–6. 44 Juvenal, 11th Satire, 221–35. 45 See Schoenfeldt, Bodies and Selves, 159–67. 46 See the commentary on luxury, violence, and history in Hoxby, Mammon’s Music, 174–7. 47 Juvenal, 4th Satire, 66–9; 5th Satire v, 76–7. 48 Loewenstein, Representing Revolution, 242–68, points to links with Quakers in Paradise Regained that make its denunciation of luxury particularly sharp and resonant. 49 On Samson Agonistes in a Restoration context, see Nicholas Jose, Ideas of Restoration in English Literature (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1984); Knoppers, Historicizing Milton, chs 2 and 6; Loewenstein, Representing

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50

51

52

53

Revolution, ch. 9; and Gregory M. Colón Semenza, Sports, Politics, and Literature in the English Renaissance (Newark: University of Delaware Press, 2003), ch. 6. Mary Nyquist’s essay on orientalism and Dalila is particularly resonant not only for Samson Agonistes and republicanism but for thinking about a history of Roman luxury. See Mary Nyquist, ‘“Profuse, proud Cleopatra”: “Barbarism” and Female Rule in Early Modern English Republicanism,’ Women’s Studies 24 (1994): 85–130. Claudian, ‘On Stilicho’s Consulship,’ in Claudian, trans. Maurice Platnauer, Loeb Classic Library (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1963), vol. 2, Book 2, 10–13. Specifically on the demoralization of luxury, see Berry, The Idea of Luxury, 101–25. For primary and secondary texts on the rise of a consumer society, see note 8, above. Bernard Mandeville, The Fable of the Bees, or, Private Vices, Publick Benefits (London, 1714). On Mandeville, see Berry, Idea of Luxury, 126–34.

13 Slavery, Resistance, and Nation in Milton and Locke mary nyquist

Those who want John Locke to be consistently liberal have sometimes found a condemnation of slavery in the ringing words that open Two Treatises of Government: ‘Slavery is so vile and miserable an Estate of Man, and so directly opposite to the generous Temper and Courage of our Nation; that ’tis hardly to be conceived, that an Englishman, much less a Gentleman, should plead for’t.’1 The English gentleman in question is Robert Filmer, who defends royal absolutism by arguing that the state into which all are born is subjection to paternal-cum-monarchical power. Far from pleading for the institution of slavery, Filmer avoids any serious consideration of it, his aim being to counter the heady, enthusiastic celebration of natural freedom appearing in the literature of popular sovereignty. If any one is interested in ‘abolition,’ it is Filmer, who wants to put a complete stop to the rhetorically inflammatory appeals to political ‘slavery’ in which his opponents provocatively engage. The word ‘slave,’ Filmer accurately if rather desperately points out, does not appear in Greek or Roman texts.2 Appeals to ‘slavery’ such as Locke’s exemplify the very usage Filmer would like to discourage. In the tradition of western European radicalism to which Two Treatises belongs, the collective dependency of political subjects upon the arbitrary rule of an absolute monarch is a condition of abject degradation which is persistently represented as figurative ‘slavery.’ So well established is this figurative identity in the literature of political resistance that a whole cluster of politically encoded associations is evoked by terms which originally relate to chattel slavery. Locke refers to Filmer as ‘an Advocate of Slavery,’ the expression with which John Milton addresses his adversary, the royalist Salmasius, in his Defence of the People of England. In a less temperate spirit than Locke’s, Milton draws

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extensively on this topos throughout the Defence, when, for example, Salmasius is told he is a perfect candidate for slavery in a mill; when his ‘servile’ words are said to be the product not of ‘a free man in a free state’ (Salmasius is a citizen of the Dutch Republic) but rather of ‘some workhouse or slave auction block’; and when he is portrayed as a slave trader: ‘You are so disgusting a keeper and a public pimp of slavery that even the lowest band of slaves on any sale platform ought to curse and spit at you!’3 Milton, too, has well-wishers who would prefer that he be remembered as a champion of liberty tout court. It can be intimated that in opposing royal absolutism and its attendant forms of servility, Milton opposes slavery itself. Or it is implied that the very eloquence of Milton’s defence of liberty – the contrary of the ‘slavery’ he vituperates – makes him a natural forefather of later, liberal causes, including the abolition of Atlantic slavery.4 This, however, is to perpetuate the obfuscatory privileging of figurative slavery in which Milton, Locke, and other theorists of resistance engage. In this essay, I hope to clarify the vexed, complex relations between representations of actual bondage and its rhetorical counterpart, political ‘slavery’ – which can be either civil or national – as they appear in texts by Milton and Locke. The complexity of these relations is in large part owing to the peculiar synthesis of Greco-Roman and Christian traditions on which what I am calling the topos of slavery and tyranny draws. Originating in Greek and, then, Roman conceptions of political liberty, a liberty enjoyed only by ruling male citizens, this topos stigmatizes the tyrannical rule that is liberty’s primary antagonist as well as the metaphorical slavery that is its insulting, threatened antithesis. When fused with the preoccupations of Protestant Christianity, this topos provides the guiding conceptual and rhetorical principles for early modern theories of resistance, which proliferate in a creative frenzy of publishing activity during the English revolution. Generally used to advocate the rights of privileged, European males, this topos identifies political with chattel slavery in order to aggrandize specifically political claims. In the process, relations between political and actual bondage are often mystified, or at least formulated in ways that give rise to what for modern readers can be interpretative dilemmas. A disturbingly contradictory relation develops in seventeenthcentury England between the passionately idealistic, universalist language in which liberal tenets are often expressed and the brutally dehumanizing practices of Atlantic slavery.5 The notion that English

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citizens have an especially robust love of their natural freedom, whose transcendent value they know how to appreciate, appears as a commonplace of Civil War, Commonwealth, and Restoration nationalist discourses. An aptitude for holding liberty in high esteem becomes a defining feature of English nationalism. In mentioning ‘the generous Temper and Courage of our Nation,’ Locke appeals to a developed, multi-institutionalized nationalism, one by no means confined to committed radicals. Yet during this very same period, England takes the lead over other western European nations in the highly competitive colonial slave trade, which is increasingly racialized over the course of the seventeenth century as Africa becomes almost exclusively the geographical origin of people purchased by Atlantic traders. Robin Blackburn claims that by the end of the seventeenth century, ‘The English plantation colonies registered a greater concentration of slaves, and a more exclusive equation of slavery with dark skin colour, than had hitherto been witnessed in any European colony.’6 In this context, where bondage occurs elsewhere, far from the metropolitan centre, and to non-Christian non-Europeans, assertions of national self-sovereignty and natural liberties have a peculiar resonance, particularly when such assertions receive much of their rhetorical strength from accompanying assaults upon the degrading political ‘slavery’ with which freeborn subjects, very often explicitly English, are so often being threatened. If set against the relative paucity of literature dealing directly with colonial slavery in mid- and late- seventeenth-century England, the prevalence of polemical texts exploiting the topos of slavery and tyranny, often for avowedly national aims, has an ethno-religious exclusivity it is now possible to recognize as tacitly racialized. I A familiar, overtly polemical passage from Paradise Lost (1667) will serve as my point of departure.7 That Nimrod, like early modern royalists, lays claim to a divine right to rule – ‘from heaven claiming second sovereignty’ – involves him directly in the ideological battles over sovereignty in which Milton continues to engage: Till one shall rise Of proud ambitious heart, who not content With fair equality, fraternal state, Will arrogate Dominion undeserv’d

Slavery, Resistance, and Nation in Milton and Locke 359 Over his brethren, and quite dispossess Concord and law of Nature from the Earth; Hunting (and Men not Beasts shall be his game) With War and hostile snare such as refuse Subjection to his Empire tyrannous: A mighty Hunter thence he shall be styl’d Before the Lord, as in despite of Heav’n, Or from Heav’n claiming second Sovranty; And from Rebellion shall derive his name, Though of Rebellion others he accuse.

(12.24–37)8

Even without the adjective ‘tyrannous,’ tyranny is clearly signalled by the phrase ‘arrogate Dominion undeserv’d / Over his brethren.’ In early modern European debates on political sovereignty, ‘dominion’ is a key term. As deployed in the field of meanings organized by the topos of slavery and tyranny, it is associated with the tyrant’s offensive reduction of his subjects to the status of ‘slaves.’ ‘Dominion,’ which in Roman law denotes individual ownership – literally, ownership by the head-of-household or dominus – in certain contexts specifically connotes slave-mastery, a connotation Cicero and other advocates of republicanism exploit when characterizing the tyrant’s rule. By contrast with the republic or commonwealth in which, its supporters hold, public wealth is held in common, the monarch who conceives of himself as dominus of his people arrogates ownership to himself. In early modern republican and democratic discourses, such a monarch is by definition a tyrant, one who tends to achieve his ends either by falsely claiming divine authority or by the use of force. In Paradise Lost’s brief narrative, royalist ideology, war, violation of the law of nature, and a distinctively political ‘subjection’ accompany tyranny, which results from Nimrod’s use of a predatory force. That Nimrod ‘was a mighty hunter before the Lord’ appears in Genesis 10.9.9 That he hunts ‘men not beasts’ is Milton’s way of characterizing him as a true tyrant, who, according to Greco-Roman conventions, takes pleasure in demeaning his subjects or, worse, in shedding their blood. Turning fellow human beings by ‘war’ into enemies (as ‘hostile snare’ indicates), Nimrod hunts men as beasts; he pursues humankind in a predatory fashion suitable for animals, treating human beings as ‘game.’ Yet something even more interesting is happening alongside this etiology of tyrannous conquest. In a controversial section of Politics, Aristotle mounts a defence of chattel slavery while discussing na-

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ture’s provision of non-human animals for the use of humankind. Whether tame or wild, he explains, animals can be used for labour, for food, and in the form of the various products made from them. Aristotle then employs the notion that acquisition is an ‘art’ in order to defend both the naturalness of slavery and the notion of a just war, the just war being a conventional means of acquiring slaves who deserve enslavement: ‘The art of war is a natural art of acquisition, for the art of acquisition includes hunting, an art which we ought to practise against wild beasts, and against men who, though intended by nature to be governed, will not submit; for war of such a kind is naturally just.’10 What brings Paradise Lost into relation with this passage is its emphasis on human resistance to subjection. For Aristotle, war-as-hunting has as its object the submission of ‘men who, though intended by nature to be governed, will not submit.’ Likewise, in Paradise Lost Nimrod uses his art (‘hostile snare’) to capture ‘such as refuse / Subjection to his Empire tyrannous.’ Significantly, Nimrod is not said actually to kill his human prey. Implicitly, they thereby become, as they are when acquired with Aristotle’s ‘art,’ prisoners of war available for enslavement. Far from being natural, however, in Paradise Lost the subjection resulting from Nimrod’s hunting is fundamentally unnatural as well as illegitimate. In this passage, it can therefore be argued, Milton both critiques and rewrites Aristotle’s defence of natural slavery. Insofar as it is evoked by Nimrod’s reduction of humankind to beasts, chattel slavery is rejected as – with reference to divinely created origins – unnatural. Because this reduction involves the loss of a previously enjoyed freedom, however, chattel slavery is the figurative point of reference for the slavery Nimrod institutes. Figuratively, the distinction between freeborn and enslaved emerges in Paradise Lost’s depiction of a primitive condition of ‘fair equality, fraternal state,’ a condition Nimrod’s hunting brings to a tragic end. If it is so central, why isn’t the term ‘slavery’ used – or at least its less novel, Latinate ancestor, ‘servitude’? Politically attuned readers would, after all, immediately associate coerced political subjection, explicitly ‘tyrannous,’ with political, that is, metaphorical, slavery. One explanation could be that at this historical juncture, when Milton is under scrutiny by Restoration censors, the terms ‘slavery’ and ‘servitude’ may simply be too inflammatory. Another, which I would like to advance, is that Milton avoids this usage until he is able to differentiate political from chattel slavery, something he cannot do until chattel slavery is introduced into human history; for Christian commentators this occurs

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when Noah curses Canaan, descendant(s) of his son Ham. In Genesis, however, this curse precedes the emergence of Nimrod’s tyranny. Indeed, Nimrod is one of Ham’s descendants, his son Cush’s son. According to the biblical narrative, Paradise Lost’s divine source, the curse should, then, already have been mentioned. So the real question is why does Paradise Lost bring it in well after having narrated the rise of Nimrod’s tyrannous rule? Why does Milton present these two episodes in exactly the reverse order in which they appear in Genesis (the story of Noah’s curse is given in Genesis 9:12–27, while Nimrod arises in 10:8–14)? I want to propose that this narrative repositioning is central to Paradise Lost’s treatment of slavery in two major, interrelated ways. First, by postponing the story of Noah’s curse until after Michael and Adam discuss Nimrod’s tyranny, Paradise Lost is able to foreground the inviolability of human freedom so as to set Christianity against the doctrine of natural slavery. Such inviolability is crucial, however, not because Milton opposes institutional slavery but because he wants to safeguard political liberty, conceived as political (that is, figurative) slavery’s antithesis. Second, by assigning narrative priority to Nimrod’s story, Paradise Lost can give pride of place to issues relating to a specifically political freedom and ‘slavery,’ which is differentiated from its unfree counterpart only later, when the curse of Canaan serves as a point of reference. Highlighted by this revision of Aristotle, political freedom is the subject of the passage that follows: O execrable Son so to aspire Above his Brethren, to himself assuming Authority usurpt, from God not giv’n: He gave us only over Beast, Fish, Fowl Dominion absolute; that right we hold By his donation; but Man over men He made not Lord; such title to himself Reserving, human left from human free.

(12.64–71)

As Adam expounds it, ‘dominion absolute’ applies to only two forms of rule: human over non-human nature and the deity’s over his creation. So categorical is Adam’s pronouncement that the claim he deduces – a formulation, I believe, of what earlier gets referred to as the ‘law of nature’ – appears to have the status of an immutable truth: ‘Man over men / He made not Lord’; or, restated, ‘human left from human free.’ Together with the rewriting of Aristotle’s defence of natural

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slavery, this represents as irreducibly biblical the Roman and, later, natural law view, central to the early modern and enlightenment literature of political resistance, that other forms of ‘dominion’ are social, not natural, phenomena. ‘Absolute,’ when qualifying rule or ‘dominion,’ here, as elsewhere in the political literature Milton and his fellow radicals author, is the contrary of conditional or consensual, and in this sense is associated with an illegitimate, tyrannous assumption of lordship. That the Creator alone is appropriately ‘Lord’ over human beings is a principle to which Milton adheres with stunning, if protean, tenacity throughout his writings. In Eikonoklastes, for example, Charles I is castigated for the obduracy of his will, ‘that would have bin our Lord’ (CW 5:258). This is relevant to Nimrod’s tyranny because Milton represents Nimrod usurping the deity’s position (‘to himself assuming / Authority usurpt, from God not giv’n’) in addition to reducing humans to animals, thereby transgressing both limits placed on human ‘dominion.’ For Milton and his radical contemporaries, tyranny, when doubly transgressive in this way, is almost always bound up with ‘dominion.’ In addition to its negative connotations in theories of legitimate resistance, a positive form of ‘dominion’ appears in an immensely important scriptural text that repeatedly appears in early modern debates on sovereignty, since it constitutes a divine gift or ‘donation’ of ‘dominion’: ‘and have dominion over the fish of the sea, and over the fowl of the air, and over every living thing that moveth upon the earth’ (Genesis 1:28). With respect to this grant of ‘dominion,’ Paradise Lost refers to both Eve and Adam as ‘lords’ of creation. In the passage in question, though, what Paradise Lost – by means of Adam, who receives this donation directly – insists upon is its precisely delimited character: ‘He gave us only over Beast, Fish, Fowl / Dominion absolute; that right we hold / By his donation.’ Confined to non-human animals, this divinely bestowed dominion, which I shall call animal-mastery, does not belong to any of the categories of rule discussed by Aristotle (who, from Milton’s perspective, lacks divine revelation on the absolute priority of human freedom). Interestingly, in specifying the limits of human dominion, Adam mentions only ‘Beast, Fish, Fowl.’ Given the recent introduction of death into Paradise Lost’s fallen world, where non-human animals war with one another and are alienated from humankind, together with the narratives of human-on-human violence – culminating in the recent mention of Nimrod’s life-threatening hunting – to which Adam has been listening, the omission of a reference to ‘earth’ draws attention to

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a key feature of ‘dominion’ in early modern debates on sovereignty, namely, the master’s power over the very lives of his subjects. As a specific privilege of ‘dominion,’ the power of life and death is sometimes signalled by the term ‘absolute,’ which Adam uses here. The power of taking the lives of non-human creatures for the purposes of eating their flesh is granted humankind in a later chapter of Genesis, where a second grant of dominion, given to Noah after the flood, begins with ‘beast,’ as does Paradise Lost in the lines above (Genesis 9:1–4).11 The earlier grant, by contrast, appears to confine both human and non-human animals to the consumption of vegetable nature, which, of course, has been true of Paradise Lost’s vegetarian Adam and Eve (Genesis 1:29, 30). Since Michael has recently finished telling the story of Noah and the flood, it is possible that Milton here unifies the two grants, so as to update the initial donation (Gen. 1:28–9) for the circumstances Adam and his fallen, carnivorous descendants now contemplate. What Adam elucidates, in this case, is the exact degree of likeness between humankind and its creator: where the creator possesses absolute dominion, including the power of taking life, over his creatures, humankind possesses this power only over beast, fish and fowl. If this is so, then Milton’s exegesis of the two distinct grants of donation (Gen. 1:28–9, and 9:4) is close to Locke’s in The First Treatise, where he rebuts Filmer’s claim that the initial grant of dominion makes Adam an absolute monarch. With the grant in Genesis 1:28–30, Locke says, satirically, Adam, ‘as absolute a Monarch as he was, could not make bold with a Lark or a Rabbet to satisfie his hunger, and had the Herbs but in common with the Beasts, as is plain from 1 Gen. 29 and 30.’ Of the grant to Noah and his sons, however, Locke says, ‘They had then given them the utmost Property Man is capable of, which is to have a right to destroy any thing by using it; Every moving thing that Liveth, saith God, shall be Meat for you, which was not allowed to Adam in his Charter’ (I.39). Rhetorically, Adam’s speech is doing more than this, though, since it makes large, general claims on behalf of human freedom. Adam’s central assertion – ‘but man over men / He made not lord; such title to himself / Reserving, human left from human free’ – opens up a grand, expansive vision of freedom that applies, apparently universally, to all human relations. The distinction between animal-mastery, which is legitimate, and the dominion of ‘man over men,’ which is not, gives both ‘man’ and ‘men’ generic status by presupposing distinct, hierarchically ordered species. That ‘human from human’ is logically equivalent to

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‘man over men’ reinforces this generic signification. If according to the law of nature Adam espouses, distinctions among humans do not warrant ‘dominion,’ the institution of slavery is neither natural nor legitimate. The conventions of contemporary political discourse, however, including the role ‘dominion’ plays in radical usage of the slavery and tyranny topos, encourage one to read Adam’s assertion with primary if not exclusive reference to political freedom. Adam objects, after all, to sovereignty usurped by an individual over fellow human beings who are conceived as a collective, precisely the emphasis to be found in classical republicanism. ‘Man over men / He made not Lord’ is how he puts it, not ‘Man over man’ or ‘Men over men’ (my italics). As Milton employs it, the topos of slavery and tyranny consistently has the effect of stigmatizing the bad ruler’s very likeness to the slave-master. As a consequence, while only figurative slavery is overtly at issue, it is not possible to elide the discursive dependency of political ‘slavery’ on literal, human bondage. From whatever angle Adam’s speech is approached, slavery haunts it, as a disallowed possibility. This emphasis on injustice appears in the way Adam’s speech is freighted with negatives – ‘from God not giv’n,’ ‘He made not Lord’ – as well as a stress on freedom from oppression, ‘human left from human free.’ A positive formulation of the law of nature has to be intuited from this patterned negation. Likewise, ‘true liberty,’ which, according to Michael’s response, has been lost as a result of the Fall, appears knowable only by means of its negation: ‘true liberty’ is not threatened or defined by its antagonistic counterparts, slavery and tyranny. Continuing on the topic of dominion and subjection, Michael spells out the sociopolitical implications of this loss in a lengthy excursus on liberty, slavery, and tyranny. The following passage, I suggest, functions to knit the tyranny introduced earlier by Nimrod’s story to the slavery instituted by the curse of Canaan, with which it concludes. For the first time since the telling of Nimrod’s story, Paradise Lost uses the word ‘servitude.’ Now that the curse of Canaan is about to appear, slavery can be thematized: Justly thou abhorr’st That Son, who on the quiet state of men Such trouble brought, affecting to subdue Rational Liberty; yet know withal, Since thy original lapse, true Liberty Is lost, which always with right Reason dwells

Slavery, Resistance, and Nation in Milton and Locke 365 Twinn’d, and from her hath no dividual being: Reason in man obscur’d, or not obey’d, Immediately inordinate desires And upstart Passions catch the Government From Reason, and to servitude reduce Man till then free. Therefore since hee permits Within himself unworthy Powers to reign Over free Reason, God in Judgment just Subjects him from without to violent Lords; Who oft as undeservedly enthral His outward freedom: Tyranny must be, Though to the Tyrant thereby no excuse. Yet sometimes Nations will decline so low From virtue, which is reason, that no wrong, But Justice, and some fatal curse annexed Deprives them of thir outward liberty, Thir inward lost: Witness the irreverent Son, Of him who built the Ark, who for the shame Done to his Father, heard this heavy curse, Servant of Servants, on his vicious Race.

(12.79–104)

Taken as a whole, this passage organizes degrees of servitude hierarchically, with the most completely interior coming first and the most exterior last – the last being, of course, actual bondage. In keeping with Christian theology’s systematic privileging of inward states, institutionalized by the Platonism of the early Church Fathers, the first ‘servitude’ is ethico-spiritual (86–90). In effect, the Christian doctrine of original sin provides the content of this mode of ‘servitude.’ The inwardness of ethico-spiritual servitude is the corollary of ‘true,’ prelapsarian liberty, forfeited in the Fall. Even though a subversion of proper rule – ‘Passions’ wrest the ‘Government’ from ‘Reason’ – this first mode of servitude is not associated with tyranny. In spite of being complete – ‘and to servitude reduce / Man till then free’ – it does not manifest itself outwardly. Yet it creates the conditions of possibility for political freedom’s loss. ‘Tyranny’ is reserved for the second mode of servitude, the ‘outward’ bondage Milton’s radical contemporaries associate with unjust political rule (90–6). While the emphasis remains on divine punishment, ‘Therefore’ acts as a pivot between the first and second modes of servitude, which are thereby related causally as well as analogically:

366 Mary Nyquist Therefore since hee permits Within himself unworthy Powers to reign Over free Reason, God in Judgment just Subjects him from without to violent Lords; Who oft as undeservedly enthral His outward freedom: Tyranny must be, Though to the Tyrant thereby no excuse.

(12.90–6)

Subjection ‘from without to violent Lords’ is both a consequence of inward servitude and its exact, sociopolitical counterpart: the rule (‘reign’) within of ‘unworthy Powers’ (related to the earlier ‘inordinate desires’ and ‘upstart Passions’) merits the rule ‘from without’ of ‘violent Lords,’ who go on to ‘undeservedly enthral / His outward freedom.’ ‘Enthral’ is as close to ‘enslave’ as the language of this passage comes; taken in conjunction with ‘tyranny,’ it constitutes a decorously muted version of the topos of slavery and tyranny. Juridical language, which presents tyranny as a ‘just judgment,’ does not, though, preclude judgment on the tyrant who takes advantage of his subjects’ servility: ‘Tyranny must be, / Though to the Tyrant thereby no excuse.’ Recapitulating Christianity’s paradoxical stance on suffering and injustice, Paradise Lost’s Creator permits tyranny to occur as a punishment but also condemns it. Although resistance to unjust rule is scarcely recommended in this passage, indirectly, unemphatically, it is validated. Michael’s excursus responds to the questions raised by Nimrod’s behaviour by explaining tyranny with reference to original sin, a juridically structured theological doctrine that has the Deity punishing Eve and Adam’s forfeiting of their created goodness with a hereditary condition of sinfulness or unfreedom. Though all of their descendants suffer this penalty, individuals, and even nations, can, of course, be further rewarded or punished. Chattel slavery may no longer be practised within western European countries, but early modern inhabitants are acquainted with various forms of penal servitude, understood as the state’s withdrawal of liberty from those who have forfeited it. The belief that nations can suffer bondage, defeat, or worse as a punishment for collective spiritual perversity is also deeply ingrained in the culture of early modern Protestant England. In a treatise published in 1649, for example, Antony Ascham represents the subjects of what is generally regarded as a peculiarly Asiatic form of absolute, royal rule as so bereft of community or rights that they can be compared only to slaves in ancient Rome or ‘those who were anciently excommunicated,

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of whom it was said, That they had Wolves heads, that is men might kill them as pardonably as they might Wolves.’ An entire people can be reduced to such abjection, Ascham explains: ‘For God many times finding some nations grossely peccant and obnoxious to his severest Justice, instead of destroying them, gives them up as a prey to another Crowne.’12 Israel itself, Ascham notes, was enslaved to Nebuchadnezzar in this way. Since consent is not at issue for nations in such a condition, Ascham excludes them from his discussion of de facto rule, the pressing concern he addresses at this moment in Of the Confusions and Revolutions of Governments. By contrast, in A Defence, published in 1651, Milton does not hesitate to find in even the most severe divine punishment an occasion for collective self-liberation. Rebutting Salmasius’s interpretation of this episode of Israel’s history, Milton concedes that God permits King Nebuchadnezzar to reduce various kingdoms to slavery but refuses to conclude that resignation is the only appropriate response to such a penalty: That he allowed them to be in such a position, I would not deny, but I never heard that he delivered them over to it. Or if God gives people into slavery whenever a tyrant is more powerful than his people, why may he not likewise be said to set them free whenever a people are more powerful than their tyrant? Shall the tyrant claim his tyranny as something received from God and we not claim our liberty likewise from him? (Defence 117)

Should resistance against tyranny be denied, all of civil society would be annihilated, Milton argues, and humankind as a whole would be reduced ‘almost to the condition of four-footed animals: since tyrants, if they are lifted up above all law, will hold equal right and power over both the species of beasts and of men’ (Defence 118). Compared with such powerful claims, which appear throughout Milton’s treatises on regicide, the language in Paradise Lost is noticeably restrained. Tyranny’s unnaturalness, however, is consistently maintained, both in the opening remarks, which refer back to Nimrod’s ‘affecting to subdue Rational Liberty,’ where ‘affecting’ stresses the categorical impossibility of doing so, as well as in the ‘undeservedly’ which modifies ‘enthral.’ The hereditary consequences of the Fall are not particularly disabling if, as Paradise Lost asserts, rational liberty cannot be subdued. What, then, about the third, more severe, mode of servitude? Unlike the first and second modes of servitude, which are clearly connected, the second and third are not. ‘Yet’ (12.97), which suggests difference,

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actually introduces what amounts to a complete disjunction. Though in some sense a by-product of original sin, the third, irremediable form of enslavement is not presented as a further consequence of subjection to tyranny, as it could be. Causally, it therefore stands alone, not being directly related to the prior mode of servitude. What about analogically? Here there is continuity, as the same basic structure – divine punishment meted out to human fault – appears. In this case, as with the second, political mode of servitude, God imposes the loss of ‘outward liberty’ as a penalty for the loss of ‘inward’ (though the emphasis on a decline in ‘virtue’ makes this appear comparatively less inward). Indeed, like the topos on which this entire excursus depends, a carefully constructed correspondence between political servitude and human bondage carries the meanings: the’outward freedom’ enthralled by the tyrant is the exact analogue of the ‘outward liberty’ surrendered by those who become ‘servant of servants.’ But the correspondence goes no further. For whereas the tyrant ‘undeservedly’ enthrals the political subject, whose outward liberty is thereby illegitimately alienated, those who are actually enslaved are said to suffer no ‘wrong.’ Initially, it might seem that they are guilty of no ‘wrong,’ but their moral degeneration works against such a reading. The tortuous syntax of ‘that no wrong, / But justice, and some fatal curse annexed / Deprives them of thir outward liberty,’ can be disentangled only if it is understood that a contrast between political and actual slavery is here being established, and that in denying an anticipated charge of illegitimacy, Milton employs the language of defence. Though in the case of political subjection or ‘slavery’ the tyrant is in the wrong, there is ‘no wrong’ – in the ethical or legal sense of injury – involved in literal, bodily servitude (my emphasis). Likewise, where subjection to tyranny is divinely permitted as a penalty, ‘though to the tyrant thereby no excuse,’ actual bondage is directly rather than permissively brought about: ‘justice, and some fatal curse annexed / Deprives them of thir outward liberty.’ Nothing mitigates the juridical sentence which is executed on those condemned to be ‘servants of servants.’ The impression that divine justice acts directly upon those condemned and accursed is strengthened by the absence of conquerors or slave-masters and, even more dramatically, by Milton’s decision to sever the Genesis curse from its human speaker, Noah. In implying that enslavement has a divine origin, Milton’s syntax rhetorically annexes Noah’s curse to God’s justice, thereby clinching its defence of enslavement.13

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Actual, institutional slavery is significantly set apart in two additional ways, both of which differentiate political from institutional slavery, and, implicitly, civilized from barbarous, as well as, at least potentially, European from non-European subjects. First, despite the claim that ‘true liberty’ has been lost as a result of the Fall, the generic subject of both interior and political modes of servitude retains certain vestiges of freedom. The word ‘free’ appears in both sections. In retracing the trajectory of a fall (‘and to servitude reduce / Man till then free’), the rhetorical structure of the first mode of servitude suggests not so much a condition of inherited evil (that is, original sin) as a process of individual or psychic repetition, with freedom never being entirely lost. Similarly, as has already been suggested, political subjection is represented so as to imply a right of resistance. By contrast, the ‘curse’ appears to ratify a state of irrevocable loss (‘Thir inward lost’). What, though, is the status of this curse vis-à-vis the original sin with which this excursus begins? If ‘true liberty’ has already been lost, why are these nations so severely punished for having lost their ‘inward’ liberty? That they, too, suffer the prior penalty of original sin is implied by their inclusion in Michael’s disquisition. On the other hand, the very discreteness of human bondage as a mode of servitude – one not straightforwardly related to its predecessors – suggests a status somehow outside the confines of generic ‘Man,’ as does the curse’s additive, supplementary character, stressed by its annexation to divine justice. Taking this a step further – a step that early modern colonialism haphazardly takes by means of tropes of pollution, civil privation, and savagery – one might argue that in setting these nations apart, Paradise Lost simultaneously keeps them within humankind, under the jurisdiction of a single Judge, and yet places them outside normative humanity. Or, to put this another way, the penal character which human bondage shares with original sin is both emphasized and flagrantly exceeded. There is obviously no question here of polygenetic origins. Nor is there any suggestion that slavery is natural in the sense of part of an original divine plan. On the other hand, by excluding institutional slavery from Adam’s reflections on Nimrod’s tyranny as well as by portraying it as an irregular species of original sin, Paradise Lost creates the impression that it involves a separate order of humanity. A division is erected between the nations justly destined for slavery (the curse is ‘fatal’) and those whose penalty is merely undeserved tyranny. Further, the first two modes of human servitude are joined grammatically by the third person singular pronoun, giving them a shared,

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individual subject. Though there is nothing unusual about a singular ethico-spiritual ‘Man’ (‘hee permits,’ ‘Within himself’), it is rather surprising that political servitude, too, involves the third-person singular pronoun, since tyranny is possible only with regard to a collectivity, polity or state. In this excursus, however, tyranny oppresses a thirdperson singular, generic man (‘subjects him,’ ‘His outward freedom’) whose identity is thereby continuous with his ethico-spiritual forebear. The third-person plural, signifying membership in a collectivity, is reserved for the anomalous third mode of servitude, in which entire ‘nations’ are accursed (‘thir outward liberty, / Thir inward lost’). In itself, the shift from singular to plural pronouns separates off the first two modes of servitude from slavery, the third. Forming their own, selfenclosed unit, the first two modes of servitude and freedom are grammatically associated with a generic, representative individual who enjoys civil liberty – the very being who is, of course, the basic unit of early modern liberal discourses. By contrast, the degenerate ‘nations’ who deserve enslavement do so as an undifferentiated collective, just as the curse falls not on the individual whose act prompts it but on ‘his vicious Race,’ which, significantly, remains unnamed. 14 By what means are ‘Nations’ subjected to the curse of Ham? Were this curse not bound up, in its exegetical history, with actual, institutional servitude, Paradise Lost’s third mode of slavery could be read as a legitimation of colonial conquest, in which case, as in the passage from Ascham’s Confusions and Revolutions cited earlier, those subjugated would deservedly lack civil status. But this shows just how closely interrelated conquest (as an instrument of divine justice), the absence of civil status, and institutional slavery are assumed to be. In its original context, it is now agreed, Noah’s curse rationalizes the servile status of Canaanites within Israel, a status which was legitimated for centuries after the conquest of Canaan by the notion that it was a hereditary condition of birth.15 Over the centuries, Jewish, Muslim, and Christian traditions have assigned Ham a wide variety of ethnic and geographic identities: Syrians, sub-Saharan Africans, and Balkan Slavs have all been ‘Canaanites,’ while Persians, Mongols, and Jews have been associated with Ham.16 At the time Milton writes, however, black Africans are for western Europeans the accursed ‘vicious race,’ an identification Paradise Lost can assume its readers will make when specifying actual, institutional slavery. A scholarly consensus has arisen in recent years regarding the unique, historically determinate, racialized configuration which in early modern western Europe links

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the curse of Ham (or, more exactly, his son Canaan) with slavery, darkness, and sub-Saharan Africa.17 ‘Race,’ in the phrase ‘vicious race,’ does not, of course, have the pseudoscientific sense that developed in nineteenth-century European discourses; it is a synonym for people or nation. Used with reference to the curse of Canaan, though, this phrase generates many of the fixed, pejorative meanings associated with subsequent schemas which position Africans at the bottom of a racialized hierarchy. How extensive the network of racialized meanings associated with the curse of Canaan is can be gleaned from a later English publication, Atlas Maritimus (1728), which refers to Africa as a ‘Nation’ whose inhabitants are ‘the worst People of any Country under the Sun,’ a view elaborated with numerous racialist stereotypes. Atlas Maritimus, concerned with Africa’s wasted commercial potential rather than with slavery, whets its contemporaries’ appetite for expropriating Africa’s uncultivated lands by presenting Africans as a ‘vile accursed Race,’ and as ‘the blasted Race of old Cham, and his son Canaan’ (Cham is a common equivalent for ‘Ham’).18 Milton assumes the legitimacy of institutionalized human bondage, yet does not reveal an independent interest in it. Like other political theorists of his time, Milton formulates his resistance to political ‘slavery’ in terms that draw almost exclusively on classical and biblical sources. Does this mean, as is often assumed, that contemporaneous practices and concerns are necessarily irrelevant? At one point in A Defence, two distinct, culturally specific practices – the boring of an ear to indicate a condition of permanent enslavement in ancient Hebrew society, and the gypsum-whitening of feet as a sign that the captive in question is to be sold as a slave in ancient Rome – are brought together in a caustic castigation of Salmasius: ‘Not if you were a knight holed through with both ears pierced, not if you stood forward with gypsum-whitened feet would you be so much the cheapest of all the slaves as you now are, being the author of so shameful an opinion as this’ (Defence 185). Here Milton’s invective exposes Salmasius to public contempt by positioning him, for all to see, as a slave whose subhumanity is visibly displayed in physical markers, markers such as are used on animals. In the castigation of Salmasius cited earlier – in which Salmasius, slavery’s ‘public pimp,’ is being cussed and spat upon by the meanest of the slaves standing on an auction block – the scene of imagined, public shaming is likewise that of the slave-market. It cannot be merely fanciful to suggest that the vividness with which Milton associates Salmasius with the auction block draws at least some of its

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energy, together with its capacity to shame, from the commercial trade in captive Africans to which both English and Dutch are at that very moment heavily committed. At this point in A Defence, Milton is rebutting Salmasius’s view that an entire people can voluntarily subject themselves to the king just as individuals are free to sell themselves into servitude. Milton responds not only by verbally shaming Salmasius (rhetorically degrading him even further than the slaves with whom he voluntarily associates) but also by arguing that Salmasius’s views place the monarch in the position of a slave-master who is entitled to ‘deliver the same people to any other master of all or sell them off at a price’ (Defence 185). Throughout both his first and second defences of the English people, Milton vehemently defends the self-evident truth that the ‘people’ – or at least any people, such as the English, who are worthy of being self-governing – can never be reduced to such lowly, subhuman status. In another act of vituperation, Milton casts Salmasius in the role of ‘chief priest’ of a saint that Salmasius has newly created, ‘Saint Royal Tyranny.’ In this capacity, Milton awards him another of the ‘papal titles’: ‘you will be “a slave also of slaves” – not of God, but of the court, since that curse upon Canaan seems to have clung closely to your body’ (Defence 205). In this passage, the humour, such as it is, depends on a familiar, ideologically organized yoking (often orientalized) of idolatry, absolute monarchy, natural servility, and heathenism – servility in this case, by means of the Hamitic curse, having an essentialized relation with the body. Though not here distinctly racialized, the Hamitic curse is suggestively animalized, since immediately before and after this passage, Salmasius is insistently identified as a wolf, a loathsome beast, and, lastly, as one of the lowly ‘mob.’ As a slur – deployed by one privileged white European against another – Milton’s metacurse is no more or less inventive than the intimately related sexualized aspersions Milton ceaselessly casts on Salmasius’s masculinity. Its capacity to shame derives from the superordination of issues relating to figurative over actual, contemporary, commercialized slavery for a purely rhetorical end: transference of the powerful stigma associated with institutional slavery to Salmasius, apologist of royal absolutism. Shame, slavery, black Africans, and complete abjection are explicitly brought together in one of Milton’s early anti-episcopal tracts, Of Reformation (1641), which ends with the speaker’s condemnation of those obstinately hindering the divinely blessed reformation now underway. In performative anticipation of the divine judgment to come, the speaker curses these obstructors of justice, projecting a future in which they

Slavery, Resistance, and Nation in Milton and Locke 373 after a shamefull end in this Life (which God grant them) shall be thrown downe eternally into the darkest and deepest Gulfe of HELL, where under the despightfull controule, the trample and spurne of all the other Damned, that in the anguish of their Torture shall have no other ease then to exercise a Raving and Bestiall Tyranny over them as their Slaves and Negro’s, they shall remaine in that plight for ever, the basest, the lowermost, the most dejected, most underfoot and downe-trodden Vassals of Perdition. (CW 3.1.79)

Only a single word – ‘Negro’s’ – differentiates this passage from those in which Milton alludes to slavery as practised in ancient Israel, Greece, or Rome. Along with the self-multiplying superlatives, this fleeting allusion to contemporary, Atlantic slavery intensifies the effect, rhetorically, of an ever-falling, brutally downward spiral of degradation. Like the slurs just cited, this racialized curse does not even incidentally concern itself with the Africans to whom the defenders of episcopacy are being compared. The fate of these servile apologists is controlled, rhetorically, by the topos of slavery and tyranny. Tyranny, which as deployed by this topos is essentially diabolical, is here exercised by the ‘other Damned.’ The phrase ‘Raving and Bestiall’ merely amplifies the inherent lawlessness of ‘Tyranny,’ just as ‘Negro’s’ underlines the abjectness of ‘Slaves,’ whom the language of curse passionately tramples further and further down by its concluding superlative phrases. Here, as with the curse of Canaan appearing in Paradise Lost, slavery is the product of divine judgment and penalty. Slavery in this passage, however, is a figure for a condition of absolute destitution as much as the material practice of human bondage. Evidence that Milton was early on in his career aware of Euro-colonial slavery ‘Negro’s also testifies to its profound racialization. II Compared with his reflections on property, which have been discussed extensively in relation to early modern capitalism, colonialism, and liberalism, Locke’s defence of slavery in the Second Treatise has received astonishingly little attention. David B. Davis’s observation that Locke is the last major European political theorist to defend chattel slavery has often been repeated.19 In the absence of rigorous consideration, though, Locke’s belatedness has occasionally been viewed as evidence of an incipient egalitarianism. In his edition of Locke’s Political Writings, for

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example, David Wootton claims that the arguments of the Second Treatise ‘could easily be developed to support democracy and to demonstrate the illegitimacy of chattel slavery,’ illegitimacy which, in his view, is the only defensible conclusion to be drawn from Locke’s discussion.20 Wootton, of course, is aware of Locke’s active involvement in the development of policy and legislation regarding colonial slavery, as are the generations of readers who have benefited from Peter Laslett’s edition of Two Treatises of Government.21 Yet for many commentators, Locke’s personal investment in New World slavery merely makes the incomprehensibility of his defence of slavery all the more baffling. So inexplicably bad is Locke’s reasoning on this topic, it would seem, that it has been best to ignore it altogether or to conclude, on the basis of comments made in ‘Of Conquest,’ that Locke opposes hereditary slavery and, hence, slavery itself. The progression of ideas in ‘Of Slavery’ is, undeniably, difficult to follow. As with the passages from Paradise Lost just examined, this difficulty owes much to early modern radicalism’s analogical discursive practice, which is attended in Two Treatises by an unannounced transition to a consideration of chattel slavery alone. Matters are even further complicated, I will argue, by Locke’s use of a peculiarly abstract, theoretical language which has been developed to rationalize, at one and the same time, both chattel slavery and the liberties of freeborn citizens. In what follows, I hope to demonstrate the coherence of Locke’s discussion of chattel slavery, which I take to be a serious, unambiguous defence, by situating it in two different contexts: first, that developed by Locke himself in the Second Treatise; and, second, chattel slavery understood as a penal condition that is also a consequence of military defeat. With regard to Two Treatises itself, the interpretive challenges of ‘Of Slavery’ have been disastrously compounded by a failure to appreciate the distinction Locke draws between tyrannous and despotical rule. In his chapter, ‘Of Tyranny,’ Locke defines tyranny conventionally, in terms that derive ultimately from Aristotle, as the ruler’s irresponsible substitution of private for public ends (II.199). Because it consists of an abuse of the power by which citizens have consented to be governed, tyranny appears only within civil society, where it takes the form of a violation of law: ‘Where-ever Law ends, Tyranny begins, if the Law be transgressed to another’s harm’ (II.202). Like other republican or liberal theorists, Locke uses the topos of slavery and tyranny to represent those oppressed by such wilfully unaccountable, tyrannous rulers as disenfranchised ‘slaves.’ In the same disparaging, satiric vein with which he opens the Two Treatises, Locke attacks apologists for royal absolutism as

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‘those Egyptian Under-Taskmasters,’ who ‘whilst it seem’d to serve their turn, resolv’d all Government into absolute Tyranny, and would have all Men born to, what their mean Souls fitted them for, Slavery’ (II.239). Only somewhat less rhetorically, when arguing that absolute monarchy is incompatible with civil society, Locke decries the degraded condition of ‘the Subject, or rather Slave of an Absolute Prince’ (II.91). Together with his radical forebears and contemporaries, Locke conceptualizes tyranny in terms that legitimate resistance, which is the primary concern of both ‘Of Tyranny’ and the subsequent, final chapter, ‘Of the Dissolution of Government.’ ‘Despotical’ power is an entirely different matter, however: against despotical power there is no right of resistance. Locke uses the adjective ‘despotical’ very precisely, with reference both to a form of monarchical rule acquired by conquest – equivalent, roughly, to what Bodin calls ‘Lordly Monarchy’ – and to the rule of the household slavemaster.22 Though it is like tyranny in being incompatible with civil society, despotical rule for Locke constitutes a distinct, legitimate form of rule. In this, despotical rule differs from tyranny as well as from absolute monarchy insofar as it is tyrannous. To indicate that despotical rule is one of several forms of legitimate power, Locke uses only the adjectival form, ‘despotical,’ which initially appears in chapter IV, ‘Of Slavery.’ When first considered at some length, it is again with reference to slavery, in chapter XV, ‘Of Paternal, Political, and Despotical Power, Considered Together.’ The third context in which despotical power comes up is in chapter XVI, ‘Of Conquest,’ where despotical power is the legitimate power a conqueror holds over those of the conquered who are guilty of opposing him in an unjust war. In this chapter, Locke differentiates ‘perfect Despotical Power’ from every conceivable illegitimate variant, industriously closing off every avenue of potentially invasive rule from those who do not deserve it. Whatever the context, for Locke despotical power involves the power of life and death over those who are justly subjected to it, a power Locke invariably describes as ‘absolute.’ In ‘Of Conquest,’ for example, the legitimacy of the conqueror’s despotical power over the lives of those who have unjustly taken up arms against him is beyond question; the conquered who are justly subject to it are at one point referred to as ‘slaves’ (II.189). In spite of this theoretically respectable, ideologically motivated consistency, and in the face of unmistakable indications that slave-mastery, not monarchy, is under discussion, Laslett annotates chapter XV’s

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section on ‘despotical’ power with materials on absolute monarchy and tyranny, going so far as to propose that Locke has James II in mind when vilifying the despot.23 Nowhere, however, either in this chapter or in Two Treatises as a whole, does Locke disparage either the despot or despotical power. Ironically, in many respects this section of chapter XV provides a clearer defence of slavery than does ‘Of Slavery.’ Laslett’s remarks clearly do much to obscure the cogency – to say nothing of blunting the impact – of Locke’ s comments on slavery. Should Two Treatises take any responsibility for encouraging its readers to collapse tyranny and despotical rule? Though I am convinced that this confusion is a post-abolition phenomenon, Locke does introduce an unsettling, novel feature into his discussion of arbitrary rule by using language which is usually strongly affective in a neutral, dispassionate manner. Specifically, he employs language conventionally associated with the abominations of tyranny to characterize despotical rule as a legitimate form of absolute dominion: both involve the exercise of ‘Absolute, Arbitrary Power.’ Despite clearly established differences – in terms of the right of resistance, they are complete, polar opposites – tyranny and despotical rule are occasionally referred to by means of the very same language. To the extent that they are, tyranny and slave-mastery become strangely, disturbingly alike, if not equivalent. This equivalence occurs, however, only at the very apex of theoretical abstraction, where arbitrary, absolute power robs its subjects of their most essential rights. Basically, what tyranny and despotical rule share is all that is signified by ‘dominion’ in Hobbes’s major theoretical works, which, in a related, polemically motivated tactic, divest ‘dominion’ of the inflammatory associations with injustice it carries in radical literature. Locke, however, strips arbitrary, absolute power of its negative connotations only when treating despotical power; only in such contexts does the language of arbitrary rule decline affective or ethical response. The significance of such systematic selectivity cannot be overstated. By its means, Locke is able to use an ostensibly value-free conception of arbitrary rule in defence of chattel slavery while retaining solidarity with the radical tradition that energetically opposes a vilified ‘slavery’ for political subjects. Slave-mastery, by contrast, Locke represents in dispassionate, propositional language. In ‘Of Paternal, Political, and Despotical Power, considered together,’ Locke provides the following definition: ‘Despotial Power is an Absolute, Arbitrary Power one Man has over another, to take away his Life, whenever he pleases’ (II.172). Observe that Locke here defines despotical power as a

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relation between individuals; though both parties are represented as abstract individuals, their roles are recognizably that of slave-master and slave. Commentators have had such difficulty with ‘Of Slavery’ in part because Locke differentiates the despotical rule of the conqueror from that of the slave-master only implicitly. So important is theoretical consistency regarding the power of terminating life, which is the basis of their abstract identity, that Locke does not draw attention to differences. The conqueror’s despotical rule, though, involves a community of people or nation, whereas the slave-master’s power – discussed in ‘Of Slavery’ and in the final section of chapter XV – is conceptualized vis-à-vis an individual slave. In ‘Of Conquest,’ Locke produces an array of distinctions, subcategories, and circumstances meant to limit the conqueror’s despotical power to those of the conquered who unjustly acted against him. Assiduously defending the rights of those who are innocent, Locke is arguing, by the end of the chapter, that a conqueror lacking ‘lawful Title’ to ‘Dominion’ over such people is an ‘Aggressor’ if he attempts to invade their rights. As an aggressor entering ‘a state of War against them’ such a conqueror, basically a tyrant-by-acquisition, ‘has no better a Right of Principality, he, nor any of his Successors, than Hingar, or Hubba the Danes had here in England; or Spartacus, had he Conquered Italy would have had; which is to have their Yoke cast off, as soon as God shall give those under their subjection Courage and Opportunity to do it’ (II.196). In one of the more inflammatory passages of The Second Treatise, Locke goes on to illustrate the basic tenets of resistance theory with reference to familiar biblical examples of divinely approved acts of revolt against the government of a conquering nation. Locke’s mention of Spartacus, leader of the largest recorded slave insurgency in the ancient Mediterranean world, is significant, as Spartacus’s hypothetically successful revolution would self-evidently require to be overthrown. Needless to say, legitimate, divinely sanctioned resistance on the part of the enslaved is inconceivable for Locke. The purpose of plantation societies’ increasingly complicated legislation regarding racialized slavery – with much of which Locke had every reason to be familiar – is either to preempt or retaliate against the ongoing antislavery protest and struggle in what Hilary Beckles calls the ‘200 Years’ War’ launched by Africans and their descendants against slaveholders.24 For Locke, as for other early modern political theorists, the institution of slavery is not properly political. Political power Locke

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invariably conceives as deriving from the multiple ‘Members’ of the civil order they have united to create. By definition, those who are enslaved cannot be said to create institutionalized slavery. Though the just conqueror’s power is also extrapolitical, having been achieved by force, it is extrapolitical in a different sense from that of the slavemaster’s, which is ‘private’ or familial. The power of the slave-master (referred to as ‘lord’ by Locke) over her or his slaves belongs with the father’s (or parents’) rule over his (or their) children, the husband’s rule over his wife, and the master’s rule over servants. That is, like other relations within the patriarchal household, it is exercised in private, at the individual slaveholder’s discretion. At the same time, however, slave-mastery does not fully belong to this familial set, for by contrast with these other, familial relations, the slaveholder’s disciplinary power extends to the taking of its subject’s life: alone among other forms of private rule, it entails the power of life and death. In a process that Locke assumes rather than analyses, slave-mastery is unique in originating outside the household and in retaining its connection with the power a conqueror gains in warfare (for Locke always assumed to be a ‘just’ war). Before turning to ‘Of Slavery,’ another feature of Locke’s rhetorical practice that contributes to difficulties of interpretation must be examined, namely, his tendency to posit individual subjects even when referring to social roles or members of a group. In itself, there is nothing perplexing in this practice, which, as is well known, is integral to Locke’s conception of the individual as bearer of both natural and civil liberties. By repeatedly using singular pronouns, Locke showcases the individual as the foundational unit of community, at the same time divesting this being of any distracting inessentials such as gender, ethnicity, class position, nationality, historical moment, and so on. The abstract, representative status of this ahistorical being is shared by the first-person pronoun Locke occasionally uses when illustrating a point. Not merely a persona for the impersonal theorist, this ‘I’ assumes an irresistibly representative status, whose various privileges are all the more potent, rhetorically, for being unacknowledged. Though this device is used often, it is introduced in an especially subtle fashion when Locke elaborates civil liberty’s distinctive regulated-yet-free character in ‘Of Slavery’s opening section: ‘A Liberty to follow my own Will in all things, where the Rule prescribes not; and not to be subject to the inconstant, uncertain, unknown, Arbitrary Will of another Man.’ This passage will be examined below in its immediate context. At this point

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it is worth noting that the first-person possessive in ‘my own Will’ – which is the only first-person pronoun in this section – makes the theorist’s ‘I’ a representative of the community of rational, freeborn citizens ‘under Government’ at the same time that it invites readers to identify with this assertively privileged, diversely entitled position. Rulers are also often referred to as individuals. Though in theory neither legitimate political power nor tyranny is necessarily held by individual rulers – as a perversion of legitimate political power, tyranny is possible under any form of government, not only under monarchy – in practice Locke, like most theorists, refers to rulers in the singular, as in the phrase cited above, ‘in the hands of the Magistrate.’ Whether political power is exercised by an individual or a group, the good to which it is to be committed is a collective good, which, if neglected, becomes a collectively suffered wrong. Whenever formally treating either political rule or tyranny, Locke assumes a community of subjects, a nation. What is true of legitimate political power and of tyranny is also true of despotical power when considered in ‘Of Conquest,’ where conquerors are sometimes and the conquered are always plural. In this chapter, when the conqueror’s power is said to be ‘purely Despotical,’ it is characterized as power over multiple subjects: ‘He has an Absolute Power over the Lives of those, who by an Unjust War have forfeited them.’ In the preceding chapter, however, as we have seen, despotical power is defined as a relation between individuals (‘Power one Man has over another’). Insofar as it is so defined, despotical power, I am assuming, is synonymous with chattel slave-mastery, where ownership of each and every individual slave – each being individual ‘chattel’ – resides with a single master (or ‘lord’). Consistently, then, Locke’s despotical rule is atypical in having both public and private dimensions. In the context of conquest, where national identity is at stake, despotical rule is exercised over a multiplicity of subjects. Yet in the other contexts in which Locke considers it – ‘Of Slavery’ and ‘Of Paternal, Political, and Despotical Power’ – despotical rule is familial, being exercised by an individual master over her or his slave. We are now, I hope, in a position to look fairly closely at ‘Of Slavery,’ which, significantly, opens by asserting that both natural and civil liberty involve freedom from the ‘Dominion’ of any human ‘Will,’ and continues by rebutting Filmer’s conflation of liberty and licence. By situating his discussion in the context of early modern debates on sovereignty, as well as by drawing on the negative connotations of ‘Dominion,’ Locke signals a commitment to opposing political

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‘slavery’ (II.22).25 This commitment is furthered in the well-known passage that follows (most often quoted without an acknowledgment that it comes from ‘Of Slavery’): 22. … But Freedom of Men under Government, is, to have a standing Rule to live by, common to every one of that Society, and made by the Legislative Power erected in it; A Liberty to follow my own Will in all things, where the Rule prescribes not; and not to be subject to the inconstant, uncertain, unknown, Arbitrary Will of another Man. As Freedom of Nature is to be under no other restraint but the Law of Nature.

The language used here is uncannily equivocal. On the one hand, arbitrary rule has the negative traits conventionally associated with tyranny, where the individual ruler’s arbitrary ‘Will’ usurps the will and good of the community. Given the explicit concern with ‘Government’ or civil society, arbitrary rule is, initially, at least, primarily associated with tyranny. On the other hand, arbitrary rule does not seem as outrageous or intolerable as it usually does. Subjection to ‘the inconstant, uncertain, unknown, Arbitrary Will of another Man’ is undesirable because such dependency is demeaning. Degrading to freeborn men and potentially a condition of figurative ‘slavery,’ it is not necessarily threatening to either property or life. The ‘Will’ of the ruler or, analogically, the master – for analogical reasoning is clearly already at work – is definitely ‘Arbitrary’ yet not actually ‘Absolute.’ Because Locke represents a state of affairs which does not actually pertain in civilized society, such abjection appears unthinkably, almost absurdly, alien to mature, rationally organized social relations. Political liberty (and its contrary, political ‘slavery’) continues to be – again, initially – the dominant context for Locke’s reference to ‘Absolute, Arbitrary Power’ in the opening phrase of the two subsequent, centrally problematical sections of ‘Of Slavery,’ which are here cited in their entirety: 23. This Freedom from Absolute, Arbitrary Power, is so necessary to, and closely joyned with a Man’s Preservation, that he cannot part with it, but by what forfeits his Preservation and Life together. For a Man, not having the Power of his own Life, cannot, by Compact, or his own Consent, enslave himself to any one, nor put himself under the Absolute, Arbitrary Power of another, to take away his Life, when he pleases. No body can give more Power than he has himself; and he that cannot take away

Slavery, Resistance, and Nation in Milton and Locke 381 his own Life, cannot give another power over it. Indeed having, by his fault, forfeited his own Life, by some Act that deserves Death; he, to whom he has forfeited it, may (when he has him in his Power) delay to take it, and make use of him to his own Service, and he does him no injury by it. For, whenever he finds the hardship of his Slavery out-weigh the value of his Life, ’tis in his Power, by resisting the Will of his Master, to draw on himself the Death he desires. 24. This is the perfect condition of Slavery, which is nothing else, but the State of War continued, between a lawful Conquerour, and a Captive. For, if once Compact enter between them, and make an agreement for a limited Power on the one side, and Obedience on the other, the State of War and Slavery ceases, as long as the Compact endures. For, as has been said, no Man can, by agreement, pass over to another that which he hath not in himself, a Power over his own Life. I confess, we find among the Jews, as well as other Nations, that Men did sell themselves; but, ’tis plain, this was only to Drudgery, not to Slavery. For, it is evident, the Person sold was not under an Absolute, Arbitrary, Despotical Power. For the Master could not have power to kill him, at any time, whom, at a certain time, he was obliged to let go free out of his Service: and the Master of such a Servant was so far from having an Arbitrary Power over his Life, that he could not, at pleasure, so much as maim him, but the loss of an Eye, or Tooth, set him free, Exod. XXI.

The opening stress on ‘freedom from’ invasive or arbitrary rule suggests a continuing preoccupation with political liberty, even more so in being tied to a denial that one can ‘part with’ this freedom. Such denials, using this phraseology, are virtually de rigueur in discussions of the theoretical bases of popular sovereignty or of the social compact. ‘Preservation’ is similarly a familiar feature of such theorization, which frequently argues from the naturalness of individual self-preservation to that of the people as a whole. Despite Locke’s individualist formulations, the language of the opening sentence of section 23 uses conventions associated with the topos of slavery and tyranny as it appears in early modern theories of resistance. At the same time, by adding ‘Absolute’ to the ‘Arbitrary’ rule mentioned in the preceding section, Locke introduces the issue of the slave-master’s power over the life of his or her slave. Strategically, the slave-master’s power to terminate life has been reserved for this section in which, eventually, chattel slavery comes to predominate. That a free people would not willingly institute their own enslavement is the central, a priori truth the topos of slavery and tyranny

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is licensed to purvey. In terms of the analogical discourse that this topos authorizes, subjection to absolute monarchical power, which includes the power of life and death, is ‘slavery.’ When read alongside other treatises on the essential character of human liberty, Locke’s emphasis, in the second sentence, on the utter irrationality of consenting to a condition of such radical vulnerability – of voluntarily placing oneself ‘under the Absolute, Arbitrary Power of another, to take away his Life, when he pleases’ – is fully conventional. So familiar is the argument that no rational being would voluntarily submit to a power that could potentially wreak her/his destruction – would, in Locke’s words, ‘part with’ or ‘give’ her/his freedom – that the unusual character of some of Locke’s formulations does not immediately register. Assent to the propositions articulated in the first three sentences of section 23 would, I believe, readily be given by readers sympathetic to basic, radical principles and accustomed to the language in which they are expressed. In this context, the assumed subject of the hypothesized transactions – the man who cannot part with his freedom – is the freeborn, male, European citizen whose active participation in public life demands conditions appropriate to his status as a member of a community of equally free citizens. Notice that ‘Cannot’ appears three times in section 23, once in each of the three opening sentences. What I earlier referred to as an unannounced transition occurs with the fourth sentence. ‘Indeed’ appears to introduce a higher-level demonstration of the preceding, which is the very opposite to what actually happens at this stage. For what cannot be done in the way of submitting to arbitrary rule suddenly can, unproblematically, be done. What is wholly irrational, even impossible, in relation to the freeborn subject, becomes thinkable, permissible, and possible for the subject who merits enslavement. Chattel slavery leaps into sharp, single-topic focus when a verdict is suddenly delivered on the individual-to-be-enslaved. This individual is, without warning, without any tribunal, subject not only to judgment but also to an attendant sentence of death, ‘having, by his fault, forfeited his own Life, by some Act that deserves Death.’ The shift in perspective here is just as jarring, and as telling, as that which occurs in Paradise Lost’s defence of slavery. There is, all at once, ‘no injury’ (‘no wrong’ but instead ‘justice,’ to use the corresponding phrase in Paradise Lost) involved in extracting ‘Service’ from an enslaved individual who is being subjected to the threat of death. The very abruptness with which the language of penal condemnation is introduced, conjoined with its sanctioning of what formerly cannot take

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place, signals a shift in the kind of ‘slavery’ now under discussion. Chattel slavery, unambiguously the topic of the concluding paragraph, thus remains the primary focus of attention for the remainder of ‘Of Slavery,’ though, as will be seen, analogical aims continue to be met. To understand how Locke uses the language of penal condemnation, something needs to be said about his highly original theorization of the power of life and death. This all-important disciplinary power figures prominently in early modern debates on sovereignty. Locke, like other theorists of resistance, holds that in civil society it belongs to the law itself, what Locke calls ‘the legislative Power,’ rather than to any individual or sovereign. Indeed, when formally defining ‘Political Power,’ the first thing Locke mentions is ‘a Right of making Laws with Penalties of Death’ (I.3). This is true only in civil society, however, because, in Locke’s state of nature, which revises that of Hobbes, everyone possesses the power of life and death. Whereas for Hobbes the ensuing violence and anarchy necessitates the institution of a single, absolute holder of sovereign power, for Locke the individuals who hold such power tend to regulate its exercise according to the law of nature. Not immediately an expression of self-preservation, as it is for Hobbes, Locke constructs the power of life and death as intrinsically juridical. By nature, human beings possess a disciplinary power that includes the right to take the life of another, though to be exercised in a moderate manner limiting punishment to the ends of reparation and restraint. In Locke’s words, ‘every Man hath a Right to punish the Offender, and be Executioner of the Law of Nature’ (I.8). Locke is concerned that this doctrine, of central importance to ‘Of Slavery,’ will strike his readers as ‘very strange.’ Equally strange, I want to insist, is the crucial role played by Locke’s complementary doctrine that one is prohibited from exercising such a power over one’s self: ‘For a Man, not having the Power of his own Life, cannot, by Compact, or his own Consent, enslave himself to any one, nor put himself under the Absolute, Arbitrary Power of another, to take away his Life, when he pleases.’ Though subordinated so that it almost slips by, the phrase ‘not having the Power of his own Life’ is, in effect, the major premise of the syllogistic reasoning that unfolds in the opening three sentences of section 23: no individual has the power of life and death over herself or himself (a power that a slave-master holds over his slave); one cannot give away what one does not have; therefore, one cannot enslave oneself. Given its significance – Locke appeals to this prohibited right directly three times in sections 23 and 24 – one wants

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to ask, why does an individual lack this power? A Christian readership would know that ‘the Power of his own Life,’ namely, suicide, is a species of murder as well as a sin against the Creator’s gift of life. Locke’s orthodoxy in prohibiting suicide is strange only in the context of the Second Treatise, which posits a state of nature in which murder – in the form of rationally executed capital punishment – is fully sanctioned. In ‘The State of Nature,’ when rebutting the view that natural liberty is equivalent to licence, Locke immediately stipulates that the natural individual ‘has not Liberty to destroy himself.’ The question, if homicide, why not suicide? is thereby preempted. Insisting that the law of nature instructs human beings not to injure one another without good reason, Locke reminds his readers (in a passage considered central to his reflections on property) that they are ‘all the Workmanship of one Omnipotent, and infinitely wise Maker; All the Servants of one Sovereign Master, sent into the World by his order and about his business, they are his Property, whose Workmanship they are, made to last during his, not one anothers Pleasure’ (271). Though Locke here is concerned with the individual’s treatment of others, it is presumably as the ‘Property’ of their Maker that human beings are not free to dispose of their own lives. As has been seen, that the Creator alone is properly ‘Lord’ of humankind is a commonplace of resistance theory, though ordinarily it is used to deny that an earthly sovereign is in any sense divine. In developing its corollary – that the Creator is a ‘Sovereign Master’ whose creatures are his ‘Property’ – Locke literalizes the deity’s ‘dominion’ over his creatures. Rewriting the traditional Christian prohibition against suicide, Locke grounds the impossibility of voluntarily alienating one’s own freedom on one’s status as ‘Property’ of the ‘Sovereign Master.’ One cannot enslave oneself because the Sovereign Master is proprietor of one’s life; He alone holds the power of life and death over the individual qua individual. Strategically, the ‘Man’ of Locke’s preliminary assertions is thereby placed within the protective bonds of an asocial, spiritual relationship with his Creator, who will not permit him to part with his freedom. For Locke, then, in an idiosyncratic but consequential move, the absence of a natural right to terminate one’s own life, a feature of natural liberty, becomes the hinge on which the right of resistance and the right to enslave both turn. Curiously, Henry Hammond, a highly influential apologist for royal absolutism during the period of the English civil wars, insists upon this very same postulate – that the power of life and

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death is a power no one possesses vis-à-vis one’s own life. Hammond, though, is convinced that what he calls ‘the No-power over a mans own Life’ undermines philosophical arguments for sovereignty’s popular origins.26 In ‘Of Slavery,’ by contrast, Locke uses this very ‘No-power’ to safeguard the representative individual’s natural freedom, the impossibility of parting with such a ‘No-right’ ensuring that such freedom is not vulnerable to any superior earthly power. The very asocial nature of the individual’s relationship with the Creator, the true Sovereign, guarantees that she or he cannot transfer this ‘No-power’ to another. In ‘Of Slavery,’ this happy state of affairs does not last long. At the very moment the representative individual enters into social relations with a criminalized antagonist, absolute power comes into its own. Being both innocent of crime and in a merely defensive relationship to the individual-to-be-enslaved’s inaugural, aggressive act, the naturally free individual has both right and might on his or her side. As Locke sets it out, the individual-to-be-enslaved, as aggressor, initiates a situation of social relatedness by committing an unspecified offence, an offence so serious that it places her or him in the absolute power of a slave master. In the movement of his argument Locke represents a subtle but radical transformation of the universal individual’s positionality. In effect, this transformation occurs when the liberal subject is awarded the privilege of legitimately – that is innocently or defensively – wielding the executive power of natural law: ‘he, to whom he has forfeited it, may (when he has him in his Power) delay to take it, and make use of him to his own Service, and he does him no injury by it.’ Initially holding a divinely sanctioned, self-preservative ‘No-power’ over his own life, the liberal individual becomes a holder of a limitless ‘despotical power’ – that is, a slave-master with the power of life and death over his or her slave. Since, for Locke, a chattel slave and a freeborn man are polar opposites, analogical reasoning ceases at the moment an individual – here, the individual-to-be-enslaved – becomes subject to despotical power. As Locke asks, rhetorically, in chapter XV, ‘For what Compact can be made with a Man that is not Master of his own Life? What Condition can he perform? And if he be once allowed to be Master of his own Life, the Despotical, Arbitrary Power of his Master ceases’ (II.172). The import of the transition on which I have commented – which can be registered even more strongly when the distinctiveness of his position is appreciated – arises entirely from the central role despotical power plays in Locke’s theorization of slavery.

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III To tease out the unarticulated presuppositions of this transformation, we need to consider the peculiar conjoining of penal and military discourses in ‘Of Slavery’, the final context I wish to explore. If we ask, directly, why the individual-to-be-enslaved can part with her or his freedom, the obvious answer is because she or he must part with it when subjected to force. With reference to chattel slavery, Locke consistently assumes that the force used against the individual(s) to-beenslaved is legitimate – so impeccably legitimate that it does not have to be called force. What kind of force, though? Significantly, the only overtly military reference in ‘Of Slavery’ appears after the individualto-be-enslaved has been criminalized and the slave-master empowered, that is, when the following section introduces the phrase, ‘a lawful Conquerour, and a Captive.’ This phrase suggests that the situation Locke postulates is the ‘just war,’ in which the vanquished ‘forfeit’ their lives to their military victors, thereby becoming slaves. Derived from military practice in a great number of historical and geopolitical contexts, this understanding of slavery often informs early modern European political, philosophical, and literary representations of slavery. In Locke’s discussion of ‘despotical power’ in chapter XV, the just war is said to be the only means of instituting a condition of institutional slavery: ‘And thus Captives, taken in a just and lawful War, and such only, are subject to a Despotical Power, which as it arises not from Compact, so neither is it capable of any, but is the state of War continued.’ Compared with this chapter, and with ‘Of Conquest,’ however, ‘Of Slavery’ seems to go out of its way to play down the role of actual, military encounter. Even in the sentence where ‘a lawful Conquerour, and a Captive’ appears, emphasis falls on the continuing ‘State of War,’ which has in the previous chapter been conceptualized as a pre- or extra-social ‘war’ with disciplinary ends; the ‘State of War’ itself does not necessarily involve either military activity or even groups. Why this ambiguous withdrawal from the scene of battle? This does not become clearer when set against Locke’s claim that the ‘State of War’ is initiated by either an act of force or an intention to act with life-threatening force. Against such aggression, or the threat thereof, the innocent party has a ‘Right of War’ in the absence of a common judge or positive laws. In chapter XV, the captive-to-be-enslaved is definitely responsible for using force to place himself in the state of war with his captor: ‘Tis the unjust use of force then, that puts a Man into

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the state of War with another, and thereby he, that is guilty of it, makes a forfeiture of his Life.’ ‘Of Slavery,’ however, does not claim that the individual-deserving-enslavement threatens or uses force. Instead, when chattel slavery first comes in to single-topic focus (in the preceding paragraph of section 23), Locke represents it as the product of juridical judgment. The fate of enslavement is sealed when the (not-representative) individual commits an unspecified, criminal ‘fault’ or ‘Act’: ‘Indeed having, by his fault, forfeited his own Life, by some Act that deserves Death; he, to whom he has forfeited it, may (when he has him in his Power) delay to take it.’ As Locke constructs the scene of enslavement, the individual merits enslavement prior to becoming subject to despotical power, but not necessarily, it seems, because using or threatening force. To say that narrative development is strategically truncated in this passage would be to understate the effect of the measured, cool abstractness of ‘some Act that deserves Death,’ a phrase that clearly satisfies the demands of ideology, not story. What might the ‘fault’ or ‘Act’ that ‘deserves Death’ be? In ‘The State of Nature,’ Locke says that ‘lesser breaches of that Law’ – meaning ‘lesser’ than murder – can be punished with the severity that befits the offence and offender. This principle, though, is of no use in reconstructing a hypothetical scene of enslavement, as Locke has deliberately removed the slightest trace of realist contextualization from this ‘fault’ or ‘Act.’ An unspecified, merely categorical crime, it condemns its actor to death. Not exactly, however, for death as a juridical sentence – known in civil society as capital punishment – is not the same as the power of life and death, which is held by an individual outside civil society, and which is as limitless as the ‘State of War.’ This distinction, though, is precisely what is fudged by Locke’s stressing of juridical over military language. ‘Forfeiture,’ in the forms of ‘forfeit’ that appear in ‘Of Slavery,’ as in the passage from chapter XV cited above, definitely belongs to this privileged, juridical semantic field, being associated with laws of contract, property, and treason. Note, further, that the authoritative, theoretical voice which pronounces the death sentence actually prevents the subject-to-be-enslaved from attaining the status of grammatical subjecthood. Stripped of all particularity and affect, the criminalized subject-to-be-enslaved appears only in the possessive case (‘his fault’ ‘his own life’), while the grammatical subject is, quite literally, the slave-master. As grammatical subject, the enslaver quite literally takes possession of the to-be-enslaved, who, having authored a crime, has ‘forfeited his life’ to him, who thereby claims it: ‘he to

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whom he has forfeited it.’ Even syntactically, then, those who merit enslavement enter the scene of enslavement adjudged and accursed. The very opaqueness of the to-be-enslaved’s inaugural ‘fault,’ together with its distance from the just war on which slavery is elsewhere said to be founded, gives Locke’s abruptly introduced defence something like the eerily irrational quality of a curse. By foregrounding penal, juridical language, Locke’s discussion could be said to provide a secular counterpart to the curse of Canaan, and, arguably, given the pervasive nexus of penalty, slavery and Africanness at the time, subliminally recalls it. In any case, Locke obviously expects his readers to follow his exceptionally compressed reworking of a commonplace regarding the extraction of unfree labour: that the enslaver’s disciplinary power is, if not equivalent to, certainly a by-product of, the right of war. To put this in terms more closely related to Locke’s, the victor possesses the right to withhold death so as to compel labour by means of death’s ongoing, indefinitely deferred threat. It must be stressed that Locke is not alone in granting the military victor such a right, which clearly exceeds that of taking the enslaved’s life. The view that the exploitative deferral of the death penalty is not a supplement to the victor’s right but rather a gracious proffering of the gift of life has a venerable lineage, dating to imperial Rome, where the term for slaves, servi, is said to derive etymologically from servare, to save or to preserve. Grotius, who cites this etiological myth approvingly, explains that the ‘law of nations’ authorizes the enslavement of prisoners of war so that when captors recognize slavery’s advantages, they ‘might willingly refrain from recourse to the utmost degree of severity, in accordance with which they could have slain the captives, either immediately or after a delay.’ Slavery, as Grotius presents it, benevolently spares prisoners of war the death they dread at the same time as it civilizes the victors, whose decision to refrain from murder must, he says, be made voluntarily, on the basis of a conviction of the greater advantages as well as higher humanity of substituting enslavement for death.27 It is not difficult to see how welcome to members of a slave-holding elite such a self-serving mystification of the origins of their power would be. Even in ancient Rome, where warfare was not the exclusive origin of slavery, such an emphasis on warfare is ideologically motivated.28 In the context of the everexpanding commercial character of the early modern Atlantic slave trade, where warfare, when it occurs, often takes place among African nations which have been encouraged to vie for trade in African labourers

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with merchants backed by competing western European nation-states, the view that slavery originates in a ‘just’ military victory is, transparently, an ideologically charged fiction. If Locke is the last major European theorist to defend slavery, it is perhaps because the gap between colonial slavery’s ostensible military origins and its thoroughly commercial realities has become unbridgeable in the terms political philosophy traditionally employs. How does Locke’s defence of slavery rely upon his melding of despotical power’s supposed military origins with its penal, disciplinary ends? We have seen that in ‘Of Slavery’ one effect, achieved in the crucial transition to the topic of human bondage, is to position the enslaved as having already been convicted. (‘Having, by his fault, forfeited his own Life, by some Act that deserves Death,’ indicates that not only the ‘Act’ but also the sentencing lies in the past.) Those familiar with the workings of Atlantic plantation societies would, I suspect, instantly recognize that concerns relating to discipline are herein implicitly raised. In defending English colonial interests, as I assume him to be doing, Locke focuses attention on the private nature of the slavemaster’s disciplinary power, yet without detracting from this power’s presumed legitimacy, even its legality. Locke himself helps to establish the legality of the slave-master’s inherently extra-legal disciplinary power of life and death in article 110 of ‘The Fundamental Constitutions of Carolina,’ which states: ‘Every freeman of Carolina shall have absolute power and authority over his Negro slaves, of what opinion or religion soever.’ (The last phrase ensures that a conversion to Christianity will not result in civil freedom, a concern explicitly addressed in article 107.)29 Locke would be acutely aware that the aim of such legislation was not to regulate the individual slave-master’s disciplinary behaviour but, on the contrary, to protect it from any untoward, intrusive challenges. In the larger context of colonial plantation society’s investment in institutional slavery, such legislation seeks to empower slave-holders against the threat of any and all forms of resistance, individual or collective, on the part of those engaged in antislavery struggle. From this vantage point, Locke’s argument benefits from highlighting juridical penalty in at least three additional, closely interrelated ways. First, the enslaver is represented not as a military figure but rather as wielding nothing more exceptional than the ‘Executive Power of the Law of Nature,’ a power everyone in the state of nature possesses. It is suggested that such power is available to the slave-master whether or not actual warfare plays a role in the acquisition of his

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slaves. Second, attention is readily but unobtrusively focused on the one-to-one relation of enslaver to enslaved as opposed to that between a conqueror and his multiple captives. The context thereby posited is clearly domestic rather than military, familial rather than national, private rather than public. Third, and most pointedly, it enables Locke to stage a moment of imagined, ongoing discipline which need not be related to an occasion of hypothetical acquisition, a moment which is characterized by the slave-master’s secure possession of absolute power over the interminably culpable enslaved (‘when he has him in his Power’). By these means, Locke is able to bypass both the commercial nature of the contemporary art of acquiring slaves and the problematical relation, at the level of theory and law, between the ‘right of war’ and the exercise of disciplinary power. In the statement that follows (the final sentence of section 23), then, though the enslaved is subject to the threat of imminent death, this threat is portrayed not as originating in warfare but rather as indefinitely deferred in what thereby becomes a scene of private, domestic exploitation (the enslaved who has forfeited his life to the slave-master is pressed into her or his ‘own service’). Since, Locke insists, the condition of ‘perfect Slavery’ lies outside civil society, being fundamentally extra-contractual, even the power of deferral is denied the enslaved. Having already forfeited her or his own life, having become the property of a master, and living under the perpetual threat of death, the enslaved is for Locke quite literally socially dead (to use the phrase Orlando Patterson has so powerfully joined to slavery),30 and is therefore incapable of committing suicide. Although the slave is actually the grammatical subject of the final sentence, the power of ‘delay’ belongs solely to the slavemaster. So firmly instituted is the death penalty that the act of precipitating it is not suicidal: the death the enslaved ‘desires’ is merely the death he or she deserves but has not yet undergone. Locke insists upon the justness of the action of which the penal consequence is ‘perfect Slavery.’ For Christianity, there is clearly nothing new in the association between slavery (figurative or not) and penalty. In Paradise Lost, some ‘nations’ deserve bondage when they decline too far from virtue, the deity’s curse of Canaan being the paradigmatic instance of a justly enslaved ‘vicious race.’ For the sake of preserving the apparently inclusive abstractness of his juridical discourse, Locke omits overt markers of differential susceptibility to enslavement in his discussion of chattel slavery. In the second paragraph of section 24, which has not yet been discussed, however, Locke specifically exempts

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Israel and other ‘Nations’ from this institution. As Locke uses them, the texts from Exodus do not demonstrate what they often do for other resistance theorists – that Hebrew slavery is different from Greek and Roman, or that Hebrew slavery, being impermanent, ought to provide a model for any kind of political ‘slavery.’ Instead, these texts provide Locke with evidence that the chosen people enjoy freedom from the degrading rigours of chattel slavery. The Creator, Locke indicates, does not permit his people to fall under any absolute, arbitrary, despotical power. Ancient Israel, God’s chosen nation, is the site of affective national identity for many western European Protestant nation-states, and in especially powerful ways for English and Dutch varieties of republicanism, both elite and popular.31 On a level that at the time Locke writes is profoundly commonsensical, Israel is associated with a network of English privileges that facilitate mercantile, colonial, and liberal-democratic national enterprises. The development of Locke’s ‘On Slavery’ illustrates a significant, if implicit, disjunction between ‘Nations’ that can be subjected to chattel slavery and those that cannot.32 Ultimately, this may be the most significant import of the reiterated, overdetermined ‘cannot,’ which secures the liberty already assumed to be in the possession of God’s chosen people and, a fortiori, of the English, or certainly those English savvy enough to appreciate what is theirs by right. Like Milton, Locke expects his chosen readers to negotiate servitude’s different registers by implicitly racializing contemporary, Atlantic slavery, offering, in ‘Of Slavery,’ a compactly rationalized counterpart to his contemporaries’ Africanization of the curse of Canaan. It must be reemphasized, though, that, unlike Milton, Locke has a doubleaimed agenda in ‘Of Slavery,’ which seeks to defend simultaneously the right of resistance and the institution of chattel slavery. Designed to legitimate political resistance on the part of freeborn citizens who are threatened with political ‘slavery,’ the theoretical apparatus of Two Treatises is deployed to annihilate the possibility of resistance for those who are subjected to slavery’s institutional sentence.

NOTES 1 John Locke, Two Treatises of Government, ed. Peter Laslett (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1960; student edition, 1988), I.i.141. All subsequent references to Locke’s Two Treatises will be to this edition and cited

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2

3

4

5

parenthetically by book and paragraph numbers in the text. Fairly recently, in a TLS review of books on slavery and abolition, Howard Temperley illustrated European opposition to slavery by stating, ‘In 1689, John Locke dismissed slavery as too contemptible to be defended by an Englishman,’ TLS, 4 October 2002, 3. Robert Filmer, ‘Observations upon Aristotles Politiques,’ in Patriarcha and Other Writings, ed. Johann P. Sommerville (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1991), 262. Milton’s A Defence of the People of England is quoted from Milton: Political Writings, ed. Martin Dzelzainis (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1991), 83, 78–9, 184. Hereafter cited in the text as Defence. Dzelzainis uses ‘O Advocate of Slavery’ to translate ‘servitutis conciliator’ (249). For Milton’s Latin text, with facing-page English translation, see The Works of John Milton, gen. ed. Frank Allen Patterson, 18 vols (New York: Columbia University Press, 1931–8), 7:544, 45. Hereafter cited in the text as CW. Though Anne-Julia Zwierlein is attentive to the imperialist dimensions of British abolitionism, she argues that Milton has an exclusive interest in figurative slavery, which later writers racialize when they appropriate his republican principles and language; see Majestick Milton: British Imperial Expansion and Transformations of Paradise Lost, 1667–1837 (Munster: LIT, 2001), 353–98. I am grateful to Paul Stevens for bringing Zwierlein’s study to my attention. Interrelations between universalist proclamations of liberty and exclusionist, racialized colonialist practices have often received attention. See, for example, David Brion Davis’s comment on ‘the momentous division between an increasing devotion to liberty in Europe and an expanding mercantile system based on Negro labor in America,’ in The Problem of Slavery in Western Culture (Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 1966), 108–9; Edmund S. Morgan’s American Slavery, American Freedom: The Ordeal of Colonial Virginia (New York: Norton, 1975) is an exploration of what he calls ‘the American paradox’ – of ‘how slavery and freedom made their way to England’s first American colony and grew there together, the one supporting the other’ (6); Michel-Rolph Trouillot remarks, drily, ‘The more European merchants and mercenaries bought and conquered other men and women, the more European philosophers wrote and talked about Man,’ in Silencing the Past: Power and the Production of History (Boston: Beacon Press, 1995), 75; as Robin Blackburn, The Making of New World Slavery: From the Baroque to the Modern, 1492–1800 (London: Verso, 1997), puts it, ‘Slavery was developed to its greatest extent in the New World precisely by the peoples of North Western Europe who most detested it at home’ (18).

Slavery, Resistance, and Nation in Milton and Locke 393 6 Blackburn, The Making of New World Slavery, 270. 7 Nicholas von Maltzahn demonstrates that the passages discussed here are perceived to express an unrepentant republicanism by a contemporary reader, John Beale, who writes that ‘Milton holds to his old Principle. Lib 10 verse 918 & 927, 954, 972 &’ [referring to the original ten-book edition], a point Beale makes in the service of pressing for tighter licensing controls, ‘Laureate, Republican, Calvinist: An Early Response to Milton and Paradise Lost (1667),’ Milton Studies 29 (1993): 189. See also von Maltzahn, ‘The First Reception of Paradise Lost (1667),’ Review of English Studies, ns, 27.188 (1996): 496–9. 8 This and all further references to Paradise Lost will be to John Milton: Complete Poems and Major Prose, ed. Merritt Y. Hughes (Indianapolis: Odyssey Press, 1957). 9 References to the Christian Bible will be to the King James version. 10 Aristotle, The Politics, ed. Stephen Everson (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1988), 11 [I.8.1256b.22–6]. 11 Paul Stevens discusses the command to replenish and subdue the earth in the donation of Genesis 1:28 as a foundational text of European expansion and colonialism in ‘Paradise Lost and the Colonial Imperative,’ Milton Studies 34 (1996), 3–21. Blackburn notes the peculiar importance of this verse to the English, whose planters, they believed, ‘were making better use of the land than native hunters-and-gatherers or colonial rivals, and thus enjoyed Divine sanction.’ See his Making of New World Slavery, 9, 88, note 80. 12 Antony Ascham, Of the Confusions and Revolutions of Governments (London, 1649), 80, 81. The subtitle is important to questions about the legitimacy of the new Commonwealth of England brought about by the execution of Charles I: ‘Wherein is examined, How farre a man may lawfully conforme to the Powers and Commands of those who with various successes hold Kingdomes divided by Civill or Forraigne Warrs.’ For a discussion of Ascham’s contribution to this controversy, see Quentin Skinner, ‘Conquest and Consent: Thomas Hobbes and the Engagement Controversy,’ in The Interregnum: The Quest for Settlement 1646–1660, ed. G.E. Aylmer (London: Macmillan, 1972), 87–95. 13 Steven Jablonski comments on the contrast being established here, as well as on Milton’s reassignment of Noah’s words, which Jablonski perceptively associates with antiabsolutist critique. Though Jablonski makes several important points, he mistakenly, in my view, believes Milton to be defending the naturalness of human bondage, and argues that Milton conceives ‘a whole spectrum of degrees of natural slavery which authorize progressively more severe responses.’ See ‘Ham’s Vicious Race: Slavery and John

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14 15

16

17

18

19

Milton,’ Studies in English Literature 37 (1997): 173–89. Maureen Quilligan discusses the Hamitic curse in the context of emergent mercantile capitalism and colonial slavery in ‘Freedom, Service, and the Trade in Slaves: The Problem of Labour in Paradise Lost,’ (1996), rpt. in Paradise Lost: Contemporary Critical Essays, ed. William Zunder (London: Macmillan, 1999), 170–94. In an extensive critique, Zwierlein, Majestick Milton, 355–68; 369, rejects Quilligan’s view that Paradise Lost registers a shift from warfare to trade in the means of acquiring slaves, arguing that racialized, commercialized readings of the curse are ‘imported’ into Milton’s text by eighteenthcentury commentators. Jablonski points out the absence of both proper names in ‘Ham’s Vicious Race,’ 181. William McKee Evans, ‘From the Land of Canaan to the Land of Guinea: The Strange Odyssey of the “Sons of Ham,”’ American Historical Review 85:1 (1980): 16–22. Evans, ‘From the Land of Canaan,’ 22, 33; Benjamin Braude, ‘The Sons of Noah and the Construction of Ethnic and Geographical Identities in the Medieval and Early Modern Periods,’ William and Mary Quarterly 54.1 (1997): 110, 133. See also Paul Stevens, ‘“Leviticus Thinking” and the Rhetoric of Early Modern Colonialism,’ Criticism 35.3 (1993): 441–61. In different ways, both Evans and Braude relate the development of a fixed association among the accursed ‘sons of Ham,’ Africans, and slavery to European exploration of western Africa, which begins only in the fifteenth century, and to the subsequent Atlantic slave trade. Prior to this time, Braude demonstrates, ethnic and geographic identities associated with Noah’s sons were extraordinarily variable. Blackburn, Making of New World Slavery, argues that the Hamitic curse was especially important in the period 1550–1750, during Atlantic slavery’s formative period, since it ‘added vital reinforcement to the argument from heathenism’ (73, see also 88–9). Cited by John McVeagh, who argues for Defoe’s authorship of the section on Africa, and who provides a clear, engaging analysis of Defoe’s attitudes towards Africa, Africans, and English colonialism in ‘“The Blasted Race of Old Cham”: Daniel Defoe and the African,’ Ibadan Studies in English 1 (1969): 85– 109. Though McVeagh’s study is not mentioned, questions of attribution are addressed in Appendix A of A Critical Bibliography of Daniel Defoe, ed. P.N. Furbank and W.R. Owens (London: Pickering and Chatto, 1998), 277–9. ‘On the level of abstract political philosophy, John Locke, a shareholder in the Royal African Company, was the last major thinker to seek justifications for enslaving foreign captives.’ See David B. Davis, Slavery and Human Progress (New York: Oxford University Press, 1984), 107–8.

Slavery, Resistance, and Nation in Milton and Locke 395 20 David Wootton goes on to say, ‘It seems to me clear that the argument of the Second Treatise made chattel slavery as it existed in the New World illegitimate, and clear too that Locke, who played a role in shaping England’s policy towards the colonies, did nothing about it.’ See his introduction to John Locke: Political Writings (1993; Indianapolis: Hackett, 2003), 117. Presumably, had Locke been sufficiently motivated or had slightly different priorities, he would have confronted this injustice. Wootton’s view is very similar to that of James Farr, who asserts that ‘Locke’s theory positively condemns seventeenth-century slave practices and any ongoing institution of slavery whatsoever.’ See Farr, ‘“So Vile and Miserable an Estate”: The Problem of Slavery in Locke’s Political Thought,’ Political Theory 14.2 (1986): 263–89. For another, inconclusive attempt to come to terms with the interplay of figurative and institutional registers in Locke’s Two Treatises, see Wayne Glausser, ‘Three Approaches to Locke and the Slave Trade,’ Journal of the History of Ideas 51.2 (1990): 199–216. Commentators on Two Treatises tend to either ignore or dismiss the reading of Locke’s discussion of slavery given by Davis (The Problem of Slavery in Western Culture, 118–21), which is in my view very cogent. It would seem that such ambiguity is fostered primarily within the academy. Commenting on the marginalization of issues relating to racism in Western liberal democracies, M. Nourbese Philip, for example, assumes the integrity of Locke’s views, asserting: ‘While John Locke argued for the freedom of man, he had no intellectual difficulty accepting that these freedoms could not and should not extend to African slaves.’ See Frontiers: Essays and Writings on Racism and Culture (Stratford, ON: Mercury, 1992), 271. 21 Laslett’s edition of Two Treatises, with its numerous references to Locke’s involvement in the business of Atlantic slavery, inspired the present study. For a succinct, comprehensive overview of Locke’s personal and administrative interest in the English colonies, see Anthony Pagden, ‘The Struggle for Legitimacy and the Image of Empire in the Atlantic to c. 1700,’ in The Oxford History of the British Empire, vol. 1, The Origins of Empire, ed. Nicholas Canny (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1998), 42. Like James Tully, on whose work he draws, Pagden is not at all interested in ‘Of Slavery’ but rather in how Locke’s ‘Of Property’ legitimates the expropriation of New World lands. In this essay he focuses on Locke’s development of the doctrine of res nullius which makes it ‘possible for Europeans to disregard all aboriginal forms of government, and consequently to deny them any status as “nations”’ (44). 22 See ‘Of a Lordly Monarchie, or of the sole government of one,’ chapter 2, book 2 of Jean Bodin’s The six bookes of a commonweale, trans. Richard Knolles

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23

24 25

26 27

(1606). Issues relating to despotism, including discussion of Locke’s conceptualization of despotic rule as it relates to that of Hobbes, are explored further in the book-length study which I am currently writing. See also my essay ‘Hobbes, Slavery, and Despotical Rule,’ forthcoming in Representations. Two Treatises, ed. Laslett, note on II. xv.169, page 380 and on par. 172, 9–19, page 382. Though I am indebted to Richard Ashcraft for my understanding of the centrality of Locke’s revolutionary conceptualization of resistance in Two Treatises, Ashcraft, too, conflates tyranny and despotism, as when he asserts, with reference to the discussion of ‘Despotical Power’ in par. 172, that the exercise of ‘despotical power’ makes one an ‘aggressor’ or a ‘wild beast, or noxious brute.’ See Revolutionary Politics and Locke’s Two Treatises of Government (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1986), 402; see also his Locke’s Two Treatises of Government (London: Allen and Unwin, 1987), 221. On the contrary, it is because the aggressor violates natural and civil bonds that, like a wild beast, he justly becomes subject to despotical power; that is, he becomes a slave. Exactly as theorized in ‘Of Slavery,’ despotical power, which is neither natural nor consensual, is ‘the effect only of Forfeiture, which the Aggressor makes of his own Life, when he puts himself into the state of War with another’ (par. 172). Ashcraft avoids discussion of actual colonial slavery in both Revolutionary Politics and Locke’s Two Treatises. Hilary Beckles, Freedoms Won: Caribbean Emancipations, Ethnicities, and Nationhoods (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2006). Commenting on the rebuttal of Filmer with which ‘Of Slavery’ opens, R.W.K. Hinton says, ‘It almost seems to be a literary device designed to give the chapter an independent standing, if not (as a suspicious reader might be inclined to think) an actual interpolation designed to lend an appearance of solidity to an argument which was really very weak and without some stiffening would have looked as weak as it was.’ See Hinton, ‘Husbands, Fathers and Conquerors: Patriarchalism in Hobbes and Locke,’ Political Studies 16.1 (1968): 63. Henry Hammond, The Works of the Reverend and Learned Henry Hammond (London, 1684). Hugo Grotius, De Jure Belli Ac Pacis, trans. Francis W. Kelsey (New York: Oceana, 1964), 2:3, 692. Locke would, I think, find nothing with which to disagree in Grotius’s claims regarding the slave-holder’s essentially extralegal privileges: ‘Moreover the effects of this law are unlimited, just as Seneca the Father said that there is nothing which a master is not permitted to do to his slave. There is no suffering which may not be inflicted with impunity upon such slaves, no action which they may not be ordered, or forced by torture, to do, in any way whatsoever; even brutality on the part

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28

29

30 31

32

of masters towards persons of servile status is unpunishable except in so far as municipal law sets a limit and a penalty for brutality’ (691). In ‘On the Roman Slave Supply and Slave-breeding,’ in Classical Slavery, ed. M.I. Finley (London: Cass, 1987), 42–64, K.R. Bradley argues that in republican and imperial Rome both slave-trading and slave-breeding were important means of acquiring slaves in addition to warfare; Richard Saller discusses the widespread practice of infant exposure, assumed to result in enslavement, in ‘Slavery and the Roman Family,’ Classical Slavery, 69–71. The concluding sentence of article 107 reads: ‘But yet no slave shall hereby be exempted from that civil dominion his master hath over him, but be in all other things in the same state and condition he was in before [my emphasis].’ See The Fundamental Constitutions of Carolina, in Political Writings, ed. Wootton, 230. See Orlando Patterson, Slavery and Social Death: A Comparative Study (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1982), 1–101. Lea Campos Boralevi investigates various sixteenth- and seventeenthcentury texts representing ancient Israel as an ideal res publica, and argues that Dutch identification with God’s republic became central to the formation of its national identity. See ‘Classical Foundational Myths of European Republicanism: The Jewish Commonwealth,’ in Republicanism: A Shared European Heritage, ed. Martin van Gelderen and Quentin Skinner (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2002), 247–61. See also Achsah Guibbory’s essay above. That this disjunction plays a particular, rhetorical role in ‘Of Slavery’ – that of encoding racialized national identities – is indicated by Locke’s willingness to treat ancient Hebrew slavery as indistinguishable from Caribbean in the First Treatise (par. 130, 131), where the patriarchal slaveholder’s ‘Dominion’ over property he has himself purchased is at issue, not despotic power.

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PART FIVE The Nationalization of Milton

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14 Milton: Nation and Reception nicholas von maltzahn

Blank verse is fundamental to John Milton’s English Christian poetics, but when his epic became a model for later poets its versification served the civil religion against which Milton had inveighed. Paradise Lost was increasingly harnessed for nationalist purposes, especially after the revolution of 1688/9. If Milton sought to recover ‘ancient liberty … to heroic poem from the troublesome and modern bondage of rhyming’ (PL, ‘The Verse’), other forms of modern bondage soon reimposed themselves, especially when Milton’s verse found imitation and adaptation. The civil religion for which Paradise Lost was enlisted might be of the direct political kind proposed by John Dennis (1658–1734) or the more indirect cultural kind so influentially promoted by Joseph Addison (1672–1719). In either case, nationalism adopted the much celebrated sublimity of Milton’s poetry. This applies to Whig writers from Dennis to the generation of James Thomson and David Mallet, as well as to the subsequent generations of Mark Akenside, of Anna Aikin (soon to be Barbauld), and even of William Wordsworth, for whom Milton has an import beyond the older Whig valuation, reassuring Wordsworth that his nation could participate in the revolutionary sublime and yet might still ‘the faith and morals hold / That Milton held’ without falling into French extremes.1 And it applies also to the many not quite mute but still inglorious Miltons, of whose number I shall here introduce the hitherto unknown Theophilus Metcalfe (c. 1690–1757). Their later nationalism, and the often reductive response to Paradise Lost that it fostered, invite comparison with Milton’s own changing commitments, and the profundity, subtlety, and power of his blank verse. In sum, Milton’s mid-seventeenth-century epistemology favoured his development of a poetics very different from the aesthetics resulting

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from later epistemologies. The instrumentalizing of epic I have described elsewhere with reference to the later fortunes of Milton’s War in Heaven.2 That famous episode in Paradise Lost played an important part in the Milton vogue of the 1690s and after, as evidenced by the nationalist poetry of the first decade of the 1700s when poets celebrated English military triumphs in the War of the Spanish Succession. Here the Platonism and apocalypticism that had so animated Milton’s godly poetics were increasingly overtaken by more mimetic and secular readings of the heroic. This meant a return to just the kind of heroic poetry that Milton had satirized in Paradise Lost. Such inconsistencies also inform my present exploration of Milton’s blank verse in relation to the ‘Miltonics’ of his imitators. Blank verse had come very soon to be seen as a distinctly Miltonic signature in non-dramatic poetry. This coloured the first responses to his epic when published in 1667 and continued to attract hostile but then also favourable comment and increasingly imitation. But here too the poetic technique Milton so much evolved was awkwardly applied to ends remote from his purpose. That medium was more inseparable from its message than subsequent tradition understood and, while it invited imitation by so many, proved inimitable. When poets of the skill of Thomson, Wordsworth, Keats, Shelley, or Tennyson adopted Miltonic blank verse for their purposes, imitation yielded to major adaptations of his achievement in versification. Milton’s choice of blank verse as the English measure for a national poem was not self-evident when he made it. That commitment will be revisited in the first section of the argument below, since it was fundamental to his reinvention of English verse, in which he further engaged himself to the emancipatory cultivation of language on which he long insisted.3 In adapting a measure that had been used chiefly in the theatre, he realized its extraordinary potential for narration and description, whether those proceed from a dramatized voice or from that of the narrator of the poem, a distinction he often collapses. The complex results of ‘the sense variously drawn out from one Verse into another’ (PL, ‘The Verse’) have long interested Miltonists.4 Attentive readers of Milton’s poetry need little persuading of its riches. Less familiar is Milton’s rejection of civil religion. That crucial episode in his career as a polemicist – one that coincides with his beginning Paradise Lost and likely interrupts his return to his long-promised epic – will require fuller review in the second section of this essay, where I shall for the time set aside formalist discussion so that Milton’s quarrel on this point with his contemporary James Harrington can

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then be more clearly set against the later Harringtonians’s embrace of Milton. The third and concluding section emphasizes the later Harringtonians’s role in his reception and renews the formalist argument. Intent on applying Paradise Lost to their own ends, they were not much deterred by its topicality, and instead generated strong readings of the poem, readings with lasting influence. The ingenuity of those applications will be traced into the early eighteenth century. This is that transformation in which Miltonic imitation becomes a hallmark of an ever more strongly nationalist poetry, from its informing the halting efforts of an influential figure like Wentworth Dillon, fourth earl of Roscommon (1637–85), to its becoming a means of fluent expression in the early decades of the 1700s, so much so that even an unsuccessful collegiate poet like Theophilus Metcalfe could better emulate Milton’s example. That Paradise Lost became a national poem, as it did in the century after its composition, followed not just from Milton’s intentions for his epic, considerate though he was in stating and restating those from early to late in his career. Authorial intention can be difficult to judge and part of what we value in great writers may be their capacity to record intentions of which they are only half aware or perhaps not at all aware. Hence the modern critical sense that, whatever Milton’s apparent disavowals of nation and empire in Paradise Lost, the epic includes deeper configurations that invite political or more widely ideological readings in which nation and empire are at issue.5 But it was as much Milton’s readers whose later and more reductive nationalism made Paradise Lost into the national epic that, in turn, invited its still later adoption as an imperial epic. It was no accident that the Glorious Revolution was heralded by a new and very successful edition of Paradise Lost.6 This was a nationalist revolution when England moved from being a kingdom to becoming a nation.7 Still less accidental is the determined effort by poets, conspicuously Whig poets, to find a means of then applying Milton’s epic poetry to present occasions in the 1690s and after. Their success with such topical applications took some time to achieve. It was then reproduced again and again in a more narrowly nationalist poetry, of which Miltonic blank verse became the signature. This was so much the case that when, after the Act of Union, a generation of Scots tried to learn how to be British they also turned to writing self-consciously Miltonic blank verse. That generation included David Mallet and James Thomson, and it was their Milton, ‘an ancestral blind seer prophesying in the grand style,’ who first sang ‘Rule Britannia.’8 So successful were they in thus learning how to be British that they

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soon found themselves teaching such Britishness to the English too. Even Alexander Pope might set aside his profound suspicion of Whig Miltonizing when, late in his life, lending his services to the Country party, he proposed to write his Brutus, a national epic about the legendary founder of Britain and a poem designed to celebrate civil and ecclesiastical government, in blank verse. In the course of his career Milton had variously represented his own nation: as elect in the great season of reforming hope in 1641 (Of Reformation) or again in 1644 (Areopagitica); as condemned by natural causes to civil and ecclesiastical misgovernment (History of Britain and its Digression); as heroic in its ‘Senatus pars potior, id est sanior,’ which had cast off the toils of that misgovernment in judging the tyrant Charles and founding the republic (Defensio);9 as making a mock of that promise in failing to govern itself (The Readie and Easie Way, especially in its second edition); or finally as a necessary bulwark against worse international oppressions (Of True Religion).10 Volatile as his relation with his nation was – he himself jokes about his close brush at the Restoration with some more final expatriation – he seems to have been unable to shake its hold over his self-conception as a poet. He had never expatriated himself. John Aubrey reports that Milton ‘was mightily importuned to goe into Fr[ance] and Italie’ and was ‘offerd great preferments’ abroad,11 but whether under the Protectorate or in the Restoration, Milton remained in England. ‘Patria est, ubicunque est bene’ he could propose from a seclusion so entire in the mid-1660s – his darkness ‘with dangers compassed round, /And solitude’ – that a continental correspondent presumed him dead.12 But what might that ‘bene’ entail? Liberty of conscience, certainly, lay at the heart of the good life in his Christian reconception of Aristotelian values. For the vernacular poet, however, this had long been allied to achieving full freedom of language, which, drawing as it did on the ethical ‘experience and practice of all that which is praise-worthy,’ was also meant to foster those.13 That fulfilment could not be achieved in a vacuum, or some autonomous realm of the aesthetic. It followed instead from long participation in a culture not private but societal. The mind may, as Satan proposes, ‘be its own place,’ but for that less ‘intuitive’ being, the ‘discursive’ human, especially after Babel, the benefits of the native tongue seemed to inhere especially in national community. So too for ‘Joannes Miltonius, Anglus.’14 It is first in this way that the universalizing impulse in Paradise Lost is nationally constrained. And it was as a national linguistic resource that Paradise Lost engrossed many of its first readers, and many more ever since.

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In this account of literary and intellectual history, in which many names and texts will be cited, the challenge lies in sustaining our response to the richness of Milton’s achievement in Paradise Lost, even as we historicize it with reference to the reception of that work. Some recollection of the origin and effect of Milton’s blank verse is needed before we encounter the later and often reductive versions of that poetic triumph. My argument therefore falls into three parts: first, a consideration of the origin and effect of Milton’s blank verse; second, an analysis of the degree to which Milton’s rejection of civil religion separates him from Harrington and those views that became central to Whig thought; and third, an investigation of how the nationalist adoption of his blank verse overran one of Milton’s most passionately held beliefs, the separation of church and state. Let me begin with his reinvention of blank verse. I Milton’s response to the revolutionary possibilities at the beginning of the 1640s has long been observed to resemble his response to the perceived political opportunities of 1658–60. With the stimulus of political change, a period of relative quiet on his part in each case yields to his rapid production of tracts on the government of church and state. In each case too he attempts new poetry, instanced in the former case by his exploration of biblical and historical subjects for drama, in the latter case by Paradise Lost. The kingdom in 1641 was very different from the nation of 1659. But at both times Milton attempted a literature of national instruction that broke with prevailing norms, especially in its description of the heroic. Early and late he contended with the expectation that literary sophistication should derive from social prestige and martial exploit even as it celebrated them. He sought to correct the view that ‘the most effectuall Schooles of Morality, are Courts and Camps.’15 By contrast, he saw epic as needing to escape the ‘long and tedious havoc’ customary in such literature; he famously proposes instead to explore ‘the better fortitude / Of patience and heroic martyrdom’ (PL 9:31–2). Milton’s break with contemporary English practice came first of all in his choice of subject, especially those godly themes in which his interest led him to produce fuller outlines of them in the Trinity Manuscript. Allied to this was his formal innovation in taking blank verse from the drama and making it the medium for epic poetry.

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Milton must have been heartened by his success with blank verse in The Masque at Ludlow Castle. The Masque may seem in its accomplished verse forms no very surprising performance from him. That it features blank verse is not unexpected given other such drama from the 1630s – compare, for example, the contemporary Coelum Britannicum by Thomas Carew – and we know of Milton’s longer fascination with how Shakespeare’s ‘easie numbers flow.’16 It has long been observed that even some of his earliest writings reveal his feeling cramped by ‘certis pedibus ac syllabis’ or ‘modulis … arctis.’17 That the choice of verse form entailed no hollow formalism but rather ‘embodied sense’ seems peculiarly true of Milton.18 In the vernacular, escaping rhyme might seem part of the answer to achieving the ‘sweet Liberty’ of which Milton is such a precocious assertor (‘L’Allegro,’ 36). For this ambitious versification is from the outset allied to his committed patriotism, a patriotism that identified English liberties with support for international Protestantism.19 Laudian innovation and Caroline court culture generated a royalism not easily wed to the confessional nationalism prevailing in Milton’s London and beyond.20 That patriot ardour the course of the Thirty Years War seems to have intensified for Milton. Well before the fuller statement of poetic and patriotic purpose in ‘Lycidas,’ there is his disparagement of supine kings in ‘Ignavus satrapam …’ or the marginalia in the Milton family Bible identifying King James with problematic Old Testament kings,21 or the heartfelt concern about continental affairs and lament over the loss of Breda to the Spanish in ‘Elegia Tertia’ (1–12), or the scathing aside about the Ile de Ré fiasco in the sixth Prolusion.22 Especially revealing is the anxiety about the latest events of the Thirty Years War in ‘Elegia Quarta.’ In addressing the danger posed to his tutor Thomas Young, Milton breathes new life into the classical formulae he recycles. His emotion is conspicuous where he decries Young’s fate in being church-outed, or so is the implication, as if Young had been forced to depart his homeland with others of the true religion, with that patria construed not as Young’s native Scotland but rather as white-cliffed Albion (‘saxis saevior albis,’ ‘Elegia Quarta,’ 87 [71–104]). At the same time, however, Milton knew that the ‘patriam’ should be distinguished by eloquence and noble deeds. His own role was to supply the former, especially in a national historical poem.23 In the canzone-influenced verse paragraphs of ‘Lycidas,’ we find him answering this calling, while expanding the limits of rhymed iambic

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pentameter verse. If we read that elegy in its original context, as gathered at the very end of the Obsequies to the memorie of Mr Edward King appended to Justa Edouardo King naufrago (1638), the powerfully experimental quality of its English versification appears in relief. Thirty years later he still had a reputation for having written in what was then recalled as Pindaric style: ‘he was long agoe an excellent Pindariste: Good at all, but best at that straine.’24 But even as ‘Lycidas’ had ‘Numbers’ that might seem ‘loose and free,’ as if in ‘the impetuous Dithyrambique Tide’ of ‘the Pindarique way’ later extolled by Abraham Cowley, its ‘Matter’ was indeed ‘grave’ in expressing successively personal, national, and international concerns about religious vocation and election.25 Hence Milton’s insistence on the prophetic quality of this loosely rhymed, largely pentameter poem when he republished it in Poems (1645, or again in 1673), with the addition of the headnote explaining how the ‘Monody … by occasion foretels the ruine of our corrupted Clergy then in their height’ (57). If Milton’s choice of blank verse for his Masque is unexceptional, his next recorded use of it is rather more surprising. This comes in Of Reformation, when he translates Dante’s terza rima: Ah Constantine, of how much ill was cause Not thy Conversion, but those rich demaines That the first wealthy Pope receiv’d of thee.

(CPW 1:558)

In blank verse too is the translation of an antipapal passage from a Petrarchan sonnet that follows in Of Reformation (CPW 1:559).26 These examples of the form are more arresting because they are used not for dramatic but for narrative and lyric poetry. Milton’s choice of blank verse for such translations was conspicuous enough to find remark already in 1659, when the clever Henry Stubbe, in borrowing Dante’s lament against Constantine, quotes the passage ‘as the excellent Mr J. Milton doth render it in English blank verse.’27 Milton provided more of the same in subsequent prose works. In The Reason of Church-Government, he uses blank verse for another Greek tag (CPW 1:770); in The Apology for Smectymnuus he uses it to translate some Horatian hexameter and also Sophoclean iambic trimeter (CPW 1:904, 905). Horatian hexameter is again thus translated in a passage included in Tetrachordon, denouncing hypocritical honesty (CPW 3:639). When Milton translated Horace’s Odes 1.5 – the date is uncertain – he

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also reproduced the opening two lines of each of Horace’s successive Fourth Asclepiads as unrhymed English pentameter. In Areopagitica, the great trimeters of Euripides’ Theseus become blank verse too, yielding: This is true Liberty when free born men Having to advise the public may speak free, Which he who can, and will, deserv’s high praise, Who neither can nor will, may hold his peace; What can be juster in a State then this?

(CPW 2:485)

Likewise with a Senecan passage invoked from The Tenure of Kings and Magistrates, where the Latin iambic senarii (equivalent to the Greek iambic trimeter) again appear as blank verse: ‘There can be slaine / No sacrifice to God more acceptable / Then an unjust and wicked King’ (CPW 3:213). Moreover, some distichs from Geoffrey of Monmouth are beautifully translated into blank verse in Milton’s History of Britain, even as some half- and even one full-rhyme helps shape the passages (CPW 5:14). In the 1640s, then, Milton plainly saw the value of blank verse even for non-dramatic purposes. The ode addressed to John Rouse and the Psalm translations of 1653 show Milton’s lasting fascination with variety in prosody and rhyme, as does the irregularity within regularity of Paradise Lost and its distinct use of rhyme, if usually internal or partial rather than full. Samson Agonistes too includes a large proportion of blank verse, even though the example of ancient Greek dramatic poetry plainly encouraged innovation (‘Irrecoverably dark, total eclipse / Without all hope of day!’). That Milton should use the measure of modern English drama to reproduce those of classical drama seems no great leap. Renaissance criticism had gone some way to indicating some convergence between them – however discrepant the forms such drama took – and modern example was compelling enough to recommend itself despite even large discrepancies. It seems a more notable decision that Milton should go on to use the same measure to produce epic poetry. Fifty years ago F.T. Prince explained how Milton learned his blank verse from Italian examples of ‘magnificence’ in this vein.28 Tasso’s example in another creation poem must have been compelling and with Milton’s non-dramatic verse the argument has special weight. With Milton’s epic, however, Prince may have overstated his case, even with Milton’s stated regard for the example in this respect of ‘both Italian and Spanish Poets of prime note’ (Paradise Lost, ‘The

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Verse’). Given the antecedents in the English drama, moreover, Prince might have made more of how Paradise Lost grew out of Milton’s plans for tragedies, biblical and British-historical, outlined in the Trinity Manuscript. Famously the verse in ‘Satan’s exclamation to the sun’ at the beginning of Book 4 (lines 32–41) is reported by Edward Phillips as ‘intended for the Beginning of Tragoedie which [Milton] had designed but was diverted from it by other businesse.’29 That passage, if more end-stopped in Phillips’s presentation of it than in the first edition, still includes characteristically dynamic variation within the metre and is no less enjambed than the rest of Satan’s speech, or indeed much of the rest of the epic. Had we not Phillips’s report of its distinct composition, we would surely never notice it as an intrusion into the narration into which it, with many other speeches, is integrated. The translations in Milton’s prose suggest the choice of form was made after his trip to Italy, with the epic drawing both on the Italian epic directly and on an English dramatic legacy. To what end was this technique to be directed? Milton’s language of liberty found various expressions after his return in the summer of 1639 from his continental travels. But as his extraordinary compilation of outlines for tragedies makes plain, his ambitions to write the national poem were not soon realized. Notable in Milton’s outlines, of course, are their moral and political emphases. On the surface of it, there might seem to be a real difference between the biblical and national materials he lists, and especially the fuller treatments he sketches of some of his biblical subjects, first and foremost that of ‘Paradise lost’ or ‘Adam unparadiz’d.’ But many of these have in common the subject of errant kingship, especially of kings whose kingship suffers from the undue influence of their foreign wives.30 This plainly applies to Charles I’s relation to Henrietta Maria, and seems entirely appropriate to the date assigned to these outlines, namely the period after Milton’s return from Italy in 1639, when he might well have renewed the complaint in ‘Lycidas’ regarding the ‘nothing said,’ or ‘little,’ about Roman Catholic depredations around the royal household and beyond. There may seem to be a more dispassionate moral investigation underway in Milton’s biblical outlines, and a more specifically political one in the British-historical ones; as John Steadman observes, ‘A decided preference for “divine” arguments as against national themes is apparent, then, not only in the numerical preponderance of biblical entries but (more significantly) in Milton’s choice of subjects for further dramatic and thematic development … The secular list

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remains static while … the scriptural list undergoes a continuous process of growth and development, selection and elaboration’ (CPW 8:543). But the opposition here is too simple. The ‘divine’ arguments seem in themselves already ‘national themes.’31 To take just one example: a biblical topic that stirred Milton not just to list it but to come back to it and outline a likely treatment is his treatment of a proposed ‘Moabitides or Phineas.’ This centres in the episode from Numbers 25 where the priest Phinehas slays with a javelin an Israelite who has brought a Midianite woman into his family. In part this is to voice again the vocational concerns he had addressed in Ad Patrem and, more apocalyptically, in ‘Lycidas.’ But Phinehas is known for his violence in defending the Israelites’ worship of their Lord.32 The question whether Milton’s concerns here are confessional or national is easily answered: he proposes this problem play in order to speak to both. The grim wolf is clearly at work, as Milton had already lamented in ‘Lycidas,’ with Israelites worshipping Baalpeor instead of their own Lord. Confession and nation are alike in danger. Phinehas’s murder of the offending couple – the woman speared ‘through the belly’ – is completely justified by his God, who praises him directly (Num. 25:11), rewards him with a ‘covenant of peace’ (Num. 25:12), and confers on Phinehas and his descendants ‘the covenant of an everlasting priesthood’ (Num. 25:13; 1 Macc. 2:54). As a result of Phinehas’s action, moreover, God tempers his wrath and only 24,000 people die by the ensuing plague (another subject with apocalyptic meaning for an England that had been plague-struck in the later 1630s). Students of Milton’s radicalism may note that he saw in the story grounds for, as he put it, argument ‘about reformation and punishment illegal and as it were by tumult,’ that is about extralegal retribution, here to be dramatized as acceptable where moved by God. Finally he proposes for his play that ‘the word of the lord may be brought acquitting and approving Phineas.’ But this extraordinary revelation has operated through nation. How far these tragedies had been meant for the stage – and if so what stage? – or for the page remains uncertain. When he later prefaces Samson Agonistes with the claim that it ‘never was intended’ for the theatre, Milton’s ‘never’ still begs the question whether he had thus determined as long ago as his outlines for tragedies, or if he has belatedly reacted to his situation and that of the drama in the Restoration. In 1642 he still had hopes of his ‘Dramatick constitutions’ being found ‘doctrinal and exemplary to a Nation,’ perhaps ‘at set and solemn Paneguries, in Theaters, porches, or what other place, or way may win

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most upon the people to receiv at one both recreation, & instruction’ (CPW 1:814–15, 818–19). He seems already to have determined that, as he later puts it in the note on ‘The Verse’ added to Paradise Lost, the measure for the purpose would be ‘English Heroic Verse without Rime’ but with ‘apt Numbers, fit quantity of Syllables, and the sense variously drawn out from one Verse into another.’ But in moving from stage to page, his blank verse also moved further away from the selfstaging rhetoric of the declarative couplet, especially the closed couplet, and toward narration and description. The impulse shows in the successive drafts of ‘Adam unparadiz’d,’ in which the growing role of Moses in the prologue reveals the temptation of narration, which Milton can only resist in the last of the drafts by then distributing the narration between Gabriel and the Chorus. This blank verse came to be far removed from the workhorse of the theatres. Whether from the Masque or other experiments, Milton seems soon to have guessed at the extraordinary range this English metre might achieve. To cite even a few examples of the Grand Style may serve for present purposes. Most remarkable is how Milton varies the heard weight of the line, while sustaining metrical consistency through some famously varied passages, as in the lines leading up to and including: Rocks, caves, lakes, fens, bogs, dens, and shades of death, A universe of death, which God by curse Created evil, for evil only good …

(PL 2:621–3)

The English language proved to have extraordinary resources available for such variation and Milton revels in them. He now saw the way clear to achieving in blank verse the variety that had been effected in ‘Lycidas’ by the use of intermittent trimeter lines. This appears, for example, in Adam and Eve’s blissful bower, divinely contrived: each beauteous flower Iris all hues, roses, and jessamine Reared high their flourished heads between, and wrought Mosaic; underfoot the violet, Crocus, and hyacinth with rich inlay Broidered the ground, more coloured than with stone … (PL 4:697–702)33

Here the the third line is twice as long as the fourth, if theoretically in the same measure. The tour de force responds to Homer’s description

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of Zeus and Hera on Mount Ida (Iliad, 14:347–9) and recalls other bravura passages where Milton tries to outgo classical epic. The ‘trimeter’ effect has other uses too, however, as when Adam brings himself up short in self-debate in Book 10, where he begins to correct his impulse to blame God for his situation, imagining himself confronted by filial impudence: Wouldst thou admit for his contempt of thee That proud excuse? Yet him not thy election, But natural necessity begot.

(PL 10:763–5)

Milton’s skill in enjambment also defies brief description – take the effect of Raphael’s description of the angelic ‘union of pure with pure / Desiring’ (PL 8:627–8). It proves a most insistent as well as subtle feature of his Grand Style, taking what might seem constraints on word order in English and making them into a source of meaning.34 Something of the protections of nation, cultural and personal, must have remained valuable to an ambitious and blind poet, ‘writing’ in the native language he was now tuning to this pitch. We should recall that even the most personal descriptions of Milton’s agency in composing his epic evoke also his sense that something more impersonal worked through him. That something was not indifferent to nationality. Famously Milton wrote for a nation within the nation, his ‘fit audience though few.’ Other of his Restoration works, Samson Agonistes and Paradise Regain’d, show how he valued his ties to at least some of his fellow Dissenters, marked by church and state as a distinct societal culture within the larger kingdom.35 Nor should those ties be undervalued by us, persuaded though tradition has been of the apparent autonomy of this masterpiece, as if it had anticipated the Kantian sublime. It was not for nothing, then, that Urania spoke English. The ratio of musal inspiration to authorial perspiration may be unclear. But we can now resist the temptation just to collapse the muse into the poet, and allow more to her impersonality, which may stand for cultural effects not otherwise easy to summarize. The self-description in the invocations in Paradise Lost tallies with the reports of Milton’s first biographers, if some allowance be made for the ideal self-presentation natural to the high style. From the outset of the poem the heavenly muse whom the epic poet bids sing does so in cooperation with Milton’s own ‘adventurous song.’ He later describes his ‘celestial patroness,’ who visits ‘unimplored, / And dictates to me slumbering, or

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inspires / Easy my unpremeditated verse’ and ‘brings it nightly to my ear,’ but indicates that she is not alone the source of the resulting epic, since he himself has been ‘long choosing’ his subject and can be concerned about his natural limitations as a poet (PL 9:20–47). Moreover, the knowledgeable Edward Phillips and Cyriack Skinner agree on Milton’s having ‘had commonly a good Stock of Verses ready against [when] his Amanuensis came’ in the morning, while John Aubrey and Jonathan Richardson testify to more active work on Milton’s part in shaping these – ‘he would Dictate many, perhaps 40 Lines as it were in a Breath, and then reduce them to half the Number’ – with his common practice being to spend with his amanuensis about half the morning hours writing and half reading. Skinner also attests that Milton prepared for the night by ‘reading some choice Poets … to store his Fancy against Morning.’36 Milton’s terms can be mapped onto his theology and its emphases on the gift of justification and on the need to participate in sanctification. Late in his life he sees the nation as having a role in fostering this latter participation (Of True Religion, 1673), enabling its citizens to live in a tolerant polity supportive of individual sanctification. But even at this date, as Paul Stevens has argued, some atavistic sense of national election might still shape the categories and colour the distinctions made in Milton’s English biblical epic,37 as if justification unto salvation were not indifferent to nation. II In order to understand just what gets lost in the later adoption of Milton’s blank verse, we need to consider his evolving position on the relation between church and state, in particular his rejection of civil religion. This analysis will then allow a return to formalist considerations in the third and last section of this essay. At issue is Milton’s distinctive reaction against the Protectoral culture that increasingly favoured a religion of state that might stabilize a polity rent by religious division. Whig historiography later occluded his differences with his contemporary James Harrington, instead preferring to enlist Milton with other mid-century republicans in the Harringtonian canon published in the 1690s and republished thereafter. Some of the most influential Miltonists at the turn of the century – Toland and Dennis in particular – left a lasting legacy in which the Miltonic sublime became the handmaid of emerging nationhood. Milton, by contrast, reacted against civil religion with further proposals for the division of church

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and state: here he clashed directly with Harrington in a way that later Harringtonians readily overlooked. With further reforms in view, he sought to make the most of the revolutionary opportunities that seemed to present themselves anew after Cromwell’s death. Closer scrutiny of his clash with Protectoral court culture shows how different were Milton’s ambitions for religion and religious poetry. His emancipatory project was itself an assault on the ‘priestcraft’ that Harrington and Harringtonians so decried. But the strenuous and independent religious commitments on which Milton insisted, and the verse form in which he gave those fullest expression, were overwritten by later nationalism. By 1656 there had emerged something like a Cromwellian Restoration. Now the ancient constitution seemed capable of revival, as with the Humble Petition and Advice in February 1656/7. That led in MayJune 1657 to Cromwell’s reinstallation as Protector, with an upper and lower parliamentary house but with his powers increased, also by the dynastic concessions accorded him. Now too the new regime’s laureates had established themselves, and many royalist exiles, having returned to England earlier in the 1650s, found constitutional developments as well as their own compromises favourable to playing some part in a Protectoral court culture. Might the nation be reverting into a kingdom? Clashes between Protectoral and royal court cultures emerge in these years: Marvell and Waller’s rivalry, for example, shows Cromwellian clients offering competing versions of how the Protectorate should be celebrated.38 But those slower than Marvell and Waller to accommodate themselves to Cromwell’s government found it harder to wrest their poetry from an earlier idiom. In particular, among the émigrés who had returned from the continent were several who wrote heroic poetry or wrote about it, conspicuously Davenant, Denham, Cowley, and Hobbes. Davenant, Denham, and Cowley had earlier shared service in the Louvre household of Henrietta Maria (whom Davenant had served since the 1630s); Hobbes had in the 1640s also been in Paris and, if eventually estranged from that household in part owing to his anticlerical views,39 had near enough relations with his fellow exiles, especially Davenant, who addressed his preface to Gondibert to Hobbes, with Hobbes then supplying a commendatory ‘Answer’ to the same. Another royalist, who had remained at home in service to Charles I, was James Harrington, translator of the Aeneid (in part) and a political theorist who developed a complex relation to the Protectorate. Deprived of kingdom and of national church, they might only belatedly construe Cromwellian rule in monarchal terms and promote civil religion as an alternative to sectarian confusion.

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What profession of faith, governed by which sovereign, might reconcile national divisions was unclear, but clear was the determination that a sovereign needed the power to impose a state religion. Unhappy as these writers’ responses often were, they evince some desperation in coming to terms with what they saw as the destructive rather than saving force of their contemporaries’ religious commitments. The poets especially, not least in their only incomplete (in the case of Davenant and Cowley) or redirected (Denham) heroic poems, express a frustrated patriotism and a bitter sense that the excess of subjectivity in contemporary religion presented a challenge to poetry not soon overcome. The Davenant-Hobbes exchange especially shows how awkward was the legacy of Platonist poetics of yesteryear. Davenant fantasized about how poetry might harmonize the four elements of religion, arms, policy, and law. But religion he described in strangely pragmatic terms, while conceding that it ‘is universally rather inherited then taught,’ and inspiration now won from him chiefly suspicion.40 Confronted by Davenant’s confusions, Hobbes in response offered something of a jeu d’esprit, but in a key passage he soon shifts from modern poets – from whom he plainly expects little while he derides their love ‘to be thought to speake by Inspiration, like a Bagpipe’ – to ‘unskillful divines’ whose extravagance leads to such disastrous consequences.41 Against those Hobbes insisted on the need for the sovereign to determine matters of religion on a national basis. In the sharply polarized debate of the English Revolution, articulating a form of piety acceptable to most was an impossibility; there were too many who might disparage an only ‘moral and civil Religion,’ devalued in comparison to ‘the Power of Faith’ moving ‘the called, chosen, and faithfull One of Christ.’42 Nor, having lost a national church, was there yet a Machiavellian readiness to make a religion of nation. But an intermediate position began to emerge in the changing positions of Hobbes, who famously abandoned traditional views of ecclesiastical authority,43 and of Harrington, who, as so often, seeks to improve on Hobbes, not least in his interest in preserving a national church that was ‘wholly powerless,’ ‘with a salaried but impotent clergy’;44 it was ‘Harrington who first coined the word “priestcraft,” and who provided one of the best expressions of the view that the priest is the antinomy of the patriot, and that the Christian religion must, literally, be repatriated.’45 Theirs were proposals for the state religion to be effected under Cromwell, which, if without much present effect, proved especially influential in the 1690s and after. Alert to the dangers was Milton, who decried the ‘new foes … threatening to bind our souls with secular chains’ and who insisted on

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the division of ‘spiritual power and civil’ (Sonnet 17), thus speaking to national church settlement in sonnets from the early 1650s advising Cromwell and commending Sir Henry Vane.46 Milton was less befuddled by ‘Courts and Camps’ than royalist poets and his abundant sense of himself must have made him certain that he could excel where Davenant and Cowley had failed. He was not tender of Henrietta Maria’s honour (CPW 3:419) but her poets he could indulge. With Gondibert, which even Davenant’s friends might mock, he need not have been unduly concerned, even as he seems in the 1650s to have come to that imprisoned poet’s assistance.47 To Cowley’s Davideis he was more attentive, as the frequent troping on it in Paradise Lost attests, as well as Milton’s widow’s recollection.48 But both generally and locally, we can imagine a Miltonic reading of the Davideis in which its ineptitudes are all too apparent.49 This was in part a matter of poetics, but also of Protestant nationalism. Cowley’s generosity to the hospitable Moabites, or French as the case might be, allowed much to their king as a virtuous pagan, however misdirected his religious devotions.50 Milton early and late cast a colder eye on Moabites ancient and modern. Late in the Protectorate, moreover, Milton’s Protestant nationalism again becomes more embattled, even as he turns to writing Paradise Lost. It was likely at this date that he returned to the History of Britain, resuming the story with no flattering view of the warring kingdoms temporarily united under Egbert, even if ready to recall that as a season of hope.51 Now came his publication of the Raleighian CabinetCouncil, perhaps in May 1658, and his revised Defensio, that October. Martin Dzelzainis has argued that the works are a diptych of a kind, expressing republican complaint against Cromwellian tyranny, although his reading of the Cabinet-Council has been put very much into question, with the emphasis on that work not as dark comment on domestic politics but as an endorsement of Cromwellian foreign policy against Spain.52 It is just possible that it is both. Milton’s favoured printer Thomas Newcomb registered the Cabinet-Council with the Stationers on 4 May 1658, at which time Newcomb may well have also had from Milton, or at least contracted for, the revised copy of the Defensio that he was to publish in October, after Cromwell’s death.53 Comparison here can be made with the Cabinet-Council’s bookseller, Thomas Johnson, bringing out another comparable piece of court literature at this date, in which it is again ‘a pleasure to hear a Philosopher discourse of the Court,’ and this with Tacitean reflections on Vespasian’s succession after Nero, topical enough in view of the present

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succession after Oliver Cromwell, and with much about ‘Subtilty,’ favourites, ministers of state, and the ill-advisedness of too much probity under the circumstances.54 Against Cromwellian rule, other proponents of the ancient constitution might also find Raleigh useful. A topical publication of Raleigh’s description of Athenian tyranny was now proposed for the press by George Thomason (1658, perhaps May), though ‘noe Printer then durst venture upon it’; Thomason paired his list of ‘the 30 Tyrants of Athens’ with a list of the regicides, which ended with a prominent ‘&c.’55 This was too direct, but in Parliament in February 1658/9, debating the recognition of Richard Cromwell as Protector, the Presbyterian historian of English liberties Nathaniel Bacon could offer to tell ‘current stories of the tyranny of a Commonwealth. Look into Carthage; Athens. See Sir Walter Raleigh.’56 Soon after in 1658, Milton revised his Defensio as if it were still topical. But the ‘publick cause of the commonwealth’ that he had professed had not fared well. Revising his Defensio for the new edition of 1658, Milton could by way of conclusion draw a line under the main body of that text, and famously add a final consecration of himself to ‘still greater things, if these be possible for me, as with God’s help they will.’57 This is much the most striking of the additions to that text. Where the earlier editions had closed on his warning against English apostasy, the present edition makes the contrast plainer between the national apostasy and Milton’s abiding profession of his republican ideals, his own heroism in defending the res publica. In so doing he offered a final self-dedication to higher ends, of a kind familiar from earlier stages in his career. But never had he made such an offer with such emphasis. The revised Defensio, with its ringing humanist finale celebrating Milton’s Ciceronian services to the Commonwealth, was now also to mark a period in his career. Having won the approval of ‘the best citizens of my own and of foreign lands’ for such humanist work, the highest of rewards in this life [‘fructu summo studiorum meorum … in hac vita’], Milton proposes some more plainly Christian and universalist tasks to follow.58 Milton’s dedication of himself to these Christian and universalist tasks is consistent with his returning to Paradise Lost at this date, but also to his renewed voice in politics, especially of church and state, in 1659. An acceptable religious settlement is plainly uppermost in Milton’s mind once the obstacle of Cromwell has been removed by the Protector’s death. But whereas a republican like Harrington renewed his call for civil religion, Milton argued for a very different policy. His

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lasting hostility to any ‘state-tyranie over the church,’ as he termed it in A Treatise of Civil Power, left him recalling the Commonwealth before the Cromwellian usurpation, which earlier Council of State might now be commended for ‘so well joining religion with civil prudence, and yet so well distinguishing the different power of either.’59 What nation might endanger, nation might also safeguard. Conspicuous now is Milton’s fresh relation to the circle of Sir Henry Vane. Some connection appears already in his earlier sonnet to Vane, which ardent tribute had been sent to that great man, styled religion’s ‘eldest son,’ at the time of the Humble Proposals in 1652.60 In 1659, their association follows from the convergence in their political recommendations and allegiances, where Vane seems to have prepared the path for Milton’s unpublished political positions late in 1659, as well as in the successive editions of The Readie and Easie Way (1660). Evidence of the rapprochement appears on several fronts. In a letter to Milton from a most loyal supporter of Vane, Moses Wall, there is evidence of Milton’s courting such a coreligionist by sending him a copy of A Treatise of Civil Power. Wall’s anti-Protectoral feeling shows in his letters to Samuel Hartlib, which record his hatred of ‘the unhappy grasping of power into the hands of the late Usurper,’ when ‘god withdrew, and hid himself, and the body of the Nation proved apostaticall.’61 Cromwell’s jailing of Vane – ‘whose name will live in honour, when the memory of that great Persecutor shall rott’ – aggravated Wall’s suspicion of anyone associated with the Cromwellian court, but now he was readier to overlook Milton’s previous ‘Relation to the Court’ and to believe ‘a Commonwealth more friendly to you than a Court.’62 The convergence is signalled also by Milton’s now beginning to publish for the first time with the Vane party’s bookseller, Livewell Chapman, to whom Harrington too had turned with anti-Cromwellian materials, especially when venturing Oceana to the press in 1656.63 In going from Newcomb to Chapman, Milton went from a preeminent CommonwealthProtectorate printer to a bookseller whose allegiances lay with the ‘saints and their prophecies,’ in a way that, as has been said of the combination of John Streater and Chapman in the earlier publication of Harrington’s Oceana, brought ‘together two principal modes, the classical and the apocalyptic, of expressing opposition to the Protectorate.’64 Newcomb does not seem to have cooperated with Chapman before or after the joint venture with Milton’s tracts on the eve of the Restoration. Their present cooperation symbolizes Milton’s embodiment of a new revolutionary stance, as well as Chapman’s earlier parting of ways with the more violent anti-Protectoral activists.

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Moreover, just as Milton had praised Vane, so now other of Vane’s friends were prepared to praise Milton. Notably, Vane’s protégé Henry Stubbe read Milton’s works with attention, to which he testifies with public commendation of Milton, as well as with more intimate tribute. Politically, the issue was Vane’s promotion of a godly senate, variously controverted, not least by Harrington, but along which lines Milton’s own belated constitutional proposals would proceed. Personally, Stubbe seems to have wished to catch Milton’s eye, perhaps with a view to promotion to a government position in London.65 Both saw a season of opportunity in 1658–60. Where Milton, looking back on the Protectorate, excoriates that ‘short but scandalous night of interruption,’ Stubbe deplores ‘the late accursed apostacy’ and any who had ‘bow[ed] down before that Court Idol (which was erected by a few factious self-interessed persons).’66 He seems readier than Moses Wall, however, to exempt Milton from such condemnation. In part this was owing to the renewal of the tithes controversy, to which Milton contributed Hirelings, when a younger generation might go to school in reading Of Reformation, Of Prelatical Episcopacy, and Animadversions, again advertised for sale in 1657 and 1658.67 These presented an antiepiscopal orthodoxy that might now be applied to a further task of reformation, and at Christ Church Stubbe pursued this interest with the likes of John Locke.68 Milton’s convergence with the Vane-ists in 1659 appears in the second edition of Stubbe’s major tract against tithes, which now cites ‘the excellent Mr. J. Milton’ as an authority for the antiepiscopal tradition, quoting appreciatively from Milton, with and without acknowledgment.69 Stubbe was trying to be inclusive in hastily forging alliances, for example praising Harrington even as he disagreed with him. He plainly thought Milton too needed enlisting on behalf of the good old cause, of ‘Liberty, civill and spiritual.’70 Harrington, at least, was not so easily taken in. Harrington, Vane, and Marchamont Nedham had all published in an anti-Protectoral key in 1656, and, after the Humble Petition and Advice, Harrington and Vane (seconded especially by Stubbe) disputed the central problem of the senate intermittently until the Restoration.71 Milton did not soon join in this constitutional debate; his first contribution, the unpublished ‘A Letter to a Friend’ produced as if bidden, was as late as 20 October 1659. When he did join in, it was with Vane-like emphasis on the division of church and state that he made his recommendations. His ‘Letter,’ together with his ‘Proposalls of certaine expedients,’ shows his interest in a godly senate, or grand council along Vane’s lines. The issue had been joined by Vane’s notably controversial

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Healing Question (1656); this had already claimed some such authority for the saints, which ‘standing aristocracy’ was foreign to Harrington or Nedham’s prescriptions. Harrington had given these expression in Oceana and The Prerogative of Popular Government (1658); Vane had, in his Needful Corrective (c. May 1659), developed his senatorial response to Harrington’s position, and insisted that ‘Government was of the spirit, not the law … Israel … the work of God through Moses, not Jethro.’72 To this threat of a godly oligarchy Harrington responded in turn, publishing prolifically in the new season of apparent political opportunity in 1659. Undazzled by Stubbe’s good will, Harrington saw clearly the distinction between his own and the Vane-ists’ position, and further the distinction between his and their positions and that of Milton. In Aphorisms Political, he responds first to the millenarian claims and then, perhaps belatedly, to Milton’s newly published Hirelings.73 Harrington’s response insisted on national religion. His comment on Hirelings runs through eighteen aphorisms (21–38 in the first edition). Of these, the main issue in Aphorism 21 is adumbrated in Aphorisms 31–8, with the intervening Aphorisms 22–30 presenting by axiom and deduction an argument from which Milton’s position can then be addressed more effectively. In Pocock’s summary: Harrington proceeds to argue that since ‘Nature is of God’ [Aph. 22] and the contemplation of nature the beginnings of religion, it is an error to hold (as Vane had done) that a religious commonwealth must be founded upon supernatural principles [Aph. 19–20] or (as Milton was arguing) that religion must be founded on principles other than those purely natural on which the commonwealth was based [Aph. 21, 31–8]. Since religion is a public act, the majority desire a publicly endowed religion, and to deprive them of it, by removing its endowments at the demand of a minority of saints, is to deprive them of their liberty of conscience.74

In this sequence Harrington’s concluding aphorisms (37–8) – ‘That there may be Liberty of Conscience, there must be a National Religion,’ and ‘That there may be a National Religion, there must be an endowed Clergie’ – restate his basic difference with Milton. Moreover he does so in characteristically vigorous terms, although there are signs elsewhere of Harrington’s asking more for minority needs in ‘Liberty of Conscience,’ perhaps especially after the Restoration.75 Milton did not respond to this directly, nor did Harrington again respond visibly to Milton. But Harrington’s debate with Vane-ist writings,

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especially from Stubbe, continued, also in the setting of the Rota Club, and at issue still was ‘Vane’s argument for a senate of saints and Army men,’ to which Harrington responded in an appendix to Valerius and Publicola, with Stubbe then again renewing the issue and Harrington responding still again as late as March 1660.76 In Harrington’s view, the senate of saints just represented ‘the old spirit of chirothesia [ordination by the laying on of hands] and presbytery come again,’ which oligarchic turn his own constitutional proposals might forestall.77 In this debate Milton sought to be included: his Readie and Easie Way to Establish a Free Commonwealth (c. 23–9 Feb., 1659/60) responds in part, not least in its title, to Harrington’s The Ways and Means whereby an Equal and Lasting Commonwealth may be Suddenly Introduced (c. 6 Feb. 1660). Milton’s republican tract was again printed by Newcomb and sold by Livewell Chapman, as Hirelings had been, and in its second edition responded to Harrington still more specifically.78 Milton’s advocacy of a ‘select senate’ was answered by no publication from Harrington, although in the discussions of the Harringtonians’ Rota, the ‘Pride of Senators-for-life’ was scourged.79 The mutability of events in the winter of 1660 made it difficult to conduct any more deliberate debate in print, although Milton especially persisted in the attempt. Milton’s profound disagreement with Harrington, although it might be disparaged by contemporaries as just faction within faction,80 was sustained in the argument of Paradise Lost. Almost the last word in the epic is devoted to Milton’s view of liberty of conscience, as he concludes his exposition of human history in the final book. His contemporaries felt the edge of his more topical comment here: Adam’s patriarchal denunciation of Nimrod’s tyranny, for example, led an early reader to complain that Milton’s ‘old Principle’ was alive and well in the epic.81 Pride of place in the last book goes to Michael’s final story of how the evangelizing of nations will encounter the oppression of ‘wolves’ joining ‘secular power’ to ‘spiritual,’ who from that pretence, Spiritual laws by carnal power shall force On every conscience.

(12:517–22)

As with the sonnet to Vane, Sonnet 17, published in 1662 in George Sikes’s memorial biography after the judicial murder of that saint, the issue is ‘to know / Both spiritual power and civil, what each means, / What severs each.’ And it was in part as a compelling corrective to Restoration churchmanship that Milton belatedly brought Paradise Lost to

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the press, and that it found publication in October 1667, just as the questions of a comprehensive national church or of a wider toleration were again debated in earnest for the first time since the Restoration church settlement.82 But the specificity of Milton’s intervention was lost in the extraordinary success of his great poem’s blank verse. III The blank verse of Paradise Lost attracted comment as soon as the poem was published. In his added note, ‘The Verse,’ Milton soon took advantage of the debate by joining precept to example in discoursing ‘of ancient liberty recover’d to Heroic Poem from the troublesom and modern bondage of Rimeing.’ There was no sudden consensus that Milton had indeed ‘reviv’d the Majesty and true Decorum of Heroic Poesy,’ though the epic seems thus to have impressed some of its first readers.83 Nor did his versification find immediate imitation: even Dryden, having recently rewritten Paradise Lost as The State of Innocence, then rightly acknowledged ‘Shakespeare’s Stile’ as the model for the blank verse of All for Love (1678). The as yet limited influence of Miltonic blank verse may be traced in brief in the first poet to imitate it directly and avowedly. This is Wentworth Dillon, earl of Roscommon. His was no dynamic example. As Edmund Waller suggests, Roscommon’s Horatian prescriptions for poetry, embodied in his ‘Academy,’ aimed to constrain ‘Inspiration’ or ‘Rage ill-govern’d.’ Rather than the language of God, the ‘Language of the Gods’ was here to move ‘Heroick thoughts, and vertue.’ It is ‘in Counsel or in Fight’ of a distinctly secular kind that the ‘Countrey’s Honour’ is to be sought, when ‘civil Life’ is ‘by the Muses taught.’84 Loyal to the English via media between Rome and the ‘Fanaticks,’ Roscommon takes for granted a national church; in his aristocratic service to kingdom, however, he does not contemplate state religion celebrating some more disembodied nation.85 Three main currents in later Miltonic verse may be discovered already in Roscommon’s work of the 1680s. First is the temptation to pastiche. With Roscommon, this emerges in the cento of Miltonic phrases that appears in his ‘Essay on blanc verse drawn out of the 6th. book of Paradise Lost,’ which Roscommon added to the second edition of his Essay on Translated Verse (London, 1685). The interpolation anticipates the admiring but also the mock-heroic strain of Miltonic imitation in later years, in which the key figure is John Philips, who first imitated Milton in jest in his Splendid Shilling (1701) and then in earnest

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in Bleinheim (1705) and in Cyder (1708).86 Philips came out of a Christ Church circle that was Tory to the bone, but in which Paradise Lost enjoyed a vogue in the 1680s, 1690s, and after. In the eighteenth century it is with the Tory side of Country opposition poetry that we can associate Philips’s and other such pastiches, of which a characteristic example is William King’s Milton’s Epistle to Pollio (1740). What distinguishes these productions from the Whig side of Country opposition poetry is that the use of Milton is more inflected and even satirical, whereas Whigs like James Thomson imitate him more directly in sincere homage, in what may be styled a more aspirational way. Roscommon’s pastiche does have a point: to show the sublime effects possible in blank verse. But his ‘essay’ shows the superficiality endemic in such work. By turning to literary effect what had been a prophetic revelation, Roscommon was aestheticizing the epic. The second way in which Roscommon prepared for future adaptations and appropriations of Paradise Lost is his celebration of the War in Heaven as the height of a sublime poetry designed to foster military glory. Roscommon maintains that developing some less constrained verse form along the lines of Paradise Lost will prove for England a means of recovering ‘Roman Majesty,’ as he terms it. But Roscommon’s is a reductive reading of Paradise Lost, since he obscures its theology and reads the War in Heaven as if it were simply a martial episode. He gets Book 6 revealingly wrong. Milton’s point had been to improve on the story in his sources – sources where Michael had been paramount – by having the angels loyal and rebellious fight to something nearer a draw in order only then to have the supervention of the Messiah end the War in Heaven. In Roscommon’s version, the story reverts to the norm: it is again Michael who vanquishes the rebel angels, who are weakened by sin and can soon only blaspheme where they lie wriggling about. This is to adapt Milton’s work for something nearer traditional heroic poetry, or worse. And Roscommon – himself a military man – plainly hoped sublime poetry would contribute to the recovery of that Roman glory he so prized. By contrast, we know that Milton took a dim view of such readings of Paradise Lost from the corrective to them he offers already in Paradise Regain’d. The third way that Roscommon prefigures the later reception of Paradise Lost is his simplistic reading of blank verse as unrhymed English iambic pentameter. He reproduces Milton’s blank verse as if it had been written systematically as ten-syllable lines with the stresses consistently on the even syllables. This reductive reading of Milton’s

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versification appears soon enough where Roscommon and his successors imitate the example of Paradise Lost. Roscommon’s blank verse in his translation of Horace’s Art of Poetry (1680) shows by its iambic regularity and its only rare enjambment how little he learned from Milton’s example. Moreover to apply Milton to this purpose indicates Roscommon’s need to subdue Milton and to bring him within the confines of mere technique rather than the more revolutionary purpose of the epic, not least its proposing a Christian end to militarism or ‘carnal power.’ Five years later, the versification of Roscommon’s ‘Essay on blanc verse drawn out of the 6th. book of Paradise Lost’ only improves in its more frequent trochaic inversion of the first foot in the line. Roscommon provides a painful reminder that Milton did not write Paradise Lost by counting syllables. The fusion of Milton’s example in Paradise Lost with the nationalist poetry of the ensuing decades had yet to be achieved. How then did Miltonic poetry so rapidly become the model for occasional verse in the later 1690s and especially the first decades of the 1700s? There had been some intermittent praises for Milton’s poetry, some of them exalted (like Dryden’s) and some just heartfelt (the young Charles Goodall’s ‘Propiatory Sacrifice, To the Ghost of J—M— by way of Pastoral’).87 But the key figure was John Dennis (1658–1734), who already in the mid-1690s saw how Milton’s style might animate occasional poetry. At first he sought to marry it with the Pindaric style, which had been a prevailing form of occasional poetry, whether celebratory, encomiastic, or elegiac, since Cowley’s very influential Pindarics heralding the Restoration in 1660. In Dennis’s memorial for the late Queen Mary, we find him trying to have things both ways: ‘in the writing these Pindarick Verses, I had still Milton in my Eye, and was resolv’d to imitate him as far as it could be done without receeding from Pindar’s manner.’88 A few years later he was writing in a blank verse invoking Milton’s example. And others might soon steal Dennis’s Miltonic thunder. Between 1695 and 1706, what had been a trickle of Miltonic poetry soon became a flood. As much as Congreve’s disparaging view of loose Pindarics, this spelt the decline of Pindaric as an occasional verse form, even as the rhapsodic quality of Pindarics was retained in the nationalist excitements that animated later Whig blank verse. The poets apostrophized Marlborough most of all, whose triumphs in the War of the Spanish Succession yielded laureate opportunities that Dennis and others were glad to honour in Miltonic verse. Dennis’s patriotic poetry was augmented by essays in which he theorized ‘enthusiasm’ in terms that adapted the growing vogue for the

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Longinian sublime to nationalist ends. ‘Enthusiasm’ had in Restoration usage been coupled with ‘fanatick’ in decrying sectarian religion. Dennis’s rehabilitation of it fostered patriotic ends.89 His hostility to ‘priestcraft’ was Harringtonian in two senses, one narrow, one broad. First, the transformation in Dennis’s aesthetics between his Usefulness of the Stage (1698) and his Advancement and Reformation of Modern Poetry (1701) seems in part owing to his encounter with Milton and Harrington’s works as republished in the last years of the 1690s as part of a radical campaign to renew Whig political thinking. Dennis’s first such reflections had been stimulated by Jeremy Collier’s attack on the stage but they were simplistic compared with the richer conception he now developed of the role of religious poetry in fostering true religion.90 Whatever his disavowals of natural religion or deism, this later position has rightly been described as one given to ‘enthusiastic rationalism,’ with an entirely psychological rather than eschatological focus. Dennis is glad to invoke Harrington now and, as with his regard also for Milton’s prose, he is wholly unapologetic in his praises for ‘our British Politician Harrington’ among ‘the Great Men who have writ of the Art of Government,’ along with Plato among the ancients and Machiavelli among the moderns.91 He was delighted that Harrington had promoted the state regulation of the theatres, which government by well-rewarded ‘prelates’ of the buskin and the sock perhaps invited the never rich Dennis to imagine himself in a like role.92 In a second sense, Dennis shared in a much broader Harringtonian legacy when he inveighed against priestcraft, which resentment came much to inform his defence of the role of poetry in fostering patriotic religion. Dennis later wrote a tract entitled Priestcraft not Christianity (1715) but the same distinction already informs much of his writing after 1700. The longer influence of Hobbes and Harrington’s anticlerical writings – which colours, for example, the libertine pose struck by Dryden in mocking ‘priestcraft’ at the beginning of Absalom and Achitophel – should really have been at odds with Milton’s legacy. But when Toland supplied the life of Milton by way of introduction to the 1698 edition of A Complete Collection of the … Works of John Milton (1698), the Erastian prescriptions of Harringtonian tradition led Toland to scant the separation of church and state insisted upon in Milton’s Treatise of Civil Power, instead describing that work as setting most value on ‘the Foundations of Civil Society’ while lamenting ‘Popery.’ Toland foregrounds Milton’s anticlerical views in Hirelings and commends the ecumenical impulse he detects in Of True Religion, however exclusive (and again rightly so) of ‘Popery.’93 A Harringtonian bias informs even

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more incidental points in Toland’s ‘Life of Milton’: for example, Toland strangely dwells on one of Milton’s less-winning Latin epigrams, that mocking Salmasius’s misunderstanding of the English institution ‘of the Country Court, and Hundred.’ Why, with all of Milton’s Defensio pro populo anglicano to hand, and Paradise Lost, spend the time quoting and translating ‘Quis expedivit Salmasio suam Hundredam? / Picamque docuit verba nostra conari … ’?94 The very same year, Toland proposes in Harringtonian fashion that regional government now be reorganized around the parish ‘hundreds’ described in his militia program, a clear recollection of Harrington’s emphasis on a like decimal organization of church and state.95 Such parochial constraints were exactly what Milton had so long resented, preferring the gathered churches’ ‘purpose of promoting mutual edification and the communion of the saints’ (CPW 6:593). Where Toland expresses his motives, as in the clumsy poetry of his Clito (1700), the influence of Hobbes and Harrington shows, even as Toland evokes his rather different fascination with moving the passions in the way of Dennis’s aesthetics. He fervently desires to ‘Make all Ideas with their Signs agree’ – this was perhaps meant to be Lockean, but has none of Locke’s emphasis on the collective determination of meaning – and with ‘Artful Numbers’ to ‘lay or raise’ the passions, in a fantasy of eloquence as at once an instrumental source of power and a less trammelled furor poeticus.96 The vengeance Toland promises against ‘all Holy Cheats / Of all Religions’ is restrained only insofar as he also promises that ‘Religion’s safe, with priestcraft is the War’ (12–13). But the animus against ‘crafty Priests’ is no narrow one. For Toland as for Dennis, it seemed natural enough that ‘the key to English national success is to cultivate an affective poetic synthesis of religious belief that would reform the moral and civic virtue of the nation’; as Mark Goldie, observes, ‘for Harrington, and his Augustan Whig successors, “true religion” remained a business of state.’97 The national sublime that was being espoused might find different expression when the French threat seemed, for a while, to recede. From an arms race the two nations might move to an arts race, or so some English commentators ventured. The cohesiveness of civil religion might then yield to a still wider shared culture, further subordinating the more divisive questions of religion. Younger than Dennis and more skilful in this neutralization of Whig and Tory partisanship was Joseph Addison, whose version of the sublime much pacified the passionate emphasis of Dennis’s aesthetics. Addison emphasized the pleasures of

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the imagination as a chiefly visual exercise, in keeping with his detached and polite Spectator, and peculiarly congenial to a commercial society in which speculation was to be encouraged. The politics here work by indirection, in the way of ideology, and the theology is insistently bland. The consequences for Addison’s reading of Paradise Lost are profound, and the more profound because of the huge success of these Spectator essays. They had a formative effect on the subsequent eighteenth-century reception of Milton’s epic; indeed, in their aestheticizing of that work may be said to have profoundly influenced its reception to our own day. Earlier the young Addison, who could with his Oxford peers admire Paradise Lost, recognizing its verse as ‘Bold, and sublime,’ could also cite the merits of Milton’s Latin prose even as he disavowed its subject, admiring ‘the clean Current [which], tho’ serene and bright, / Betray’s a bottom odious to the sight’ (‘An Account of the Greatest English Poets,’ 1694). The Defensio might now be just a mine of ‘beauties’ for some students, a stark contrast between Good Old Cause and present literary effect. But the result was not so very different when Addison found in Paradise Lost a still greater mine of ‘beauties.’ His apparent kindness to Milton’s epic should not conceal how devastating of its ‘great argument’ his Longinian commendations of it proved or how influential his celebration of its classical features rather than its prophetic claims. The assumptions at work are more crudely on display in the halting blank verse of Addison’s ‘Milton’s Stile imitated, in a Translation of Story out of the Third Aeneid’; even as a translator, Addison is no great friend to enjambment and his verse remains dutifully iambic.98 Responding to Virgil’s description of Etna, Addison recognizes this as a source for the geological sublime in Milton’s description of Hell. But in choosing to imitate Milton through the Polyphemus passage, Addison seems to associate Milton with that blind and violent monster, as others had been glad to do when reviling Milton as ‘monstrum horrendum, informe, ingens, cui lumen ademptum.’99 That same year Addison uses heroic couplets for the more declamatory rhetoric of ‘The Campaign,’ celebrating Marlborough’s triumphs, although there are Miltonic notes, especially in the famous simile where Marlborough in the climactic battle at Blenheim is compared to an angel who ‘pleas’d th’Almighty’s orders to perform, / Rides in the Whirl-wind, and directs the Storm.’ Serenely controlled in the midst of fury, the angel has been understood as Addison’s self-representation in his own ‘ambitious verse.’100 It was Addison’s capacity thus to coerce all parties – we may think of the Cato

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episode, with the Patriot emphasis on ‘his Country’s Cause,’ as Pope put it, or Pope’s exasperation with this skilful Atticus, who could ‘Just hint the Fault, and hesitate Dislike’101 – that made him such an effective exponent of the Whigs’ civil religion. Addison maintains that the ‘Pomp of Sound, and Energy of Expression’ must ‘support the Stile’ of blank verse if it is to rise above the flatness of prose.102 For the ‘Miltonics’ celebrating victories in the War of the Spanish Succession – the ‘Battle Hymns of the Junto Whigs’ as David Womersley has termed them – this afflatus followed readily from descriptions of the battlefield, and might lead to the self-conscious sublime in which a poem’s ‘enthusiastic moment of inspiration’ becomes its own subject.103 I have elsewhere charted how rapidly Milton’s influence came to prevail in such productions in the first decade of the 1700s.104 As telling, however, are the fortunes of Milton’s example when, with the Peace of Utrecht (1713), public poetry needed to celebrate not war but peace. That Milton’s example was associated with the now unfashionably warlike stance of earlier Whig poetry appears from the wide abandonment at this date of blank verse in occasional poetry.105 In the poetry celebrating the Peace, Milton’s influence shows in other ways, but conspicuously in how poets now seek to contain his legacy. The Tory Joseph Trapp knew that to describe earlier victories with a Miltonic note was only to observe their high cost; he then supplies a Miltonic description of the hellish powers that had too long delayed the peace, with that peace rescued by a more chivalric Spenserian idiom.106 Addison’s acolyte Thomas Tickell also revives Spenser for a like purpose, and rewrites the warlike Miltonic angel of Addison’s Campaign into a more benign retirement; moreover, Milton is conspicuously absent in the proposal for the renewal of the arts that Tickell presents to his patrons, Harley and Harcourt.107 Comparably subordinating its Miltonic features is Anna Triumphans. A Congratulatory Poem on the Peace (London, 1713), and Milton’s description of Satanic pride and the War in Heaven help colour the militarism condemned in a North-Briton’s Triumph of Virtue: A Poem upon the Peace. But in this last poem, other Miltonic machinery is enlisted by the author as useful to his poetry, however antagonistic it remains to ‘former Times, When Sectaries engross’d the Nation’s Crimes’ directly associated with Whigs discontented with the present peace.108 Alexander Pope’s Windsor-Forest (London, 1713) is only the most elaborate of such responses to the Peace and it too combines a complex appropriation of Milton with Pope’s characteristically hostile perception of the Miltonic contribution to Whig poetics.

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But the lasting popularity of unrhymed iambic pentameter, or Miltonics as such lines might be known, appears in the frequent recourse to it in subsequent poetry in the 1710s, especially in translations from classical, not least epic, poetry.109 When poets aimed at the sublime, they frequently did so in blank verse, which thus became the Patriot signature of Country Whig poets in the later 1720s and 1730s. The widespread literary phenomenon may for present purposes be illustrated by an unsung early eighteenth-century poet, who tries to write a biblical epic with reference to classical example and uses Milton for his guide. This is one Theophilus Metcalfe, born at the Glorious Revolution and an adolescent student at Oxford in the years of Marlborough’s triumphs, which he was glad to applaud; he later became a Whig doctor.110 His notebook of verses begins with Latin poetry in his youth but then soon is given over to lengthy jottings and literary analyses as part of his run-up to attempting an epic. 111 His story is that of Moses in Moab. Unlike Milton’s plan for a ‘Moabitides’ in his Outlines for Tragedies, however, Metcalfe only touches on Phinehas, whose story he plainly finds difficult to tell. Instead his subject is very much the progress of a nation, the Whig progress of a nation, set against the corruptions of a neighbouring kingdom. Here the Egyptian bondage is at once French and Stuart; the Moses is at once William and the Hanoverian succession. The epic begins – and this is the fullest passage of this poem-in-outline – as follows: The Man of God, who brought the chosen seed Of Israel from Egyptian bondage vile, And led them Joyful to the promis’d land Of happy Canaan, blissfull Seat, I sing Adventrous, so presuming to essay If ought of me proceeding may reflect Glory to God our Maker, and proclaim His mercy and Goodness to the Sons of man. Nor Thou, great Paraclete, that hear’st the pray’r Ineffable, all-gracious, turn thine ear From this petition; thou, whose spirit infus’d Throughout the boundless space, deep searching worlds Each secret form of substance and endues The shapeless Mass, with a strong vigour, full Of animated life, from thee deriv’d Soul of the Universe, aeternal Mind.

430 Nicholas von Maltzahn Oh! may thy heav’nly beams illuminate My inward pow’rs, from every dark recess The black Cimmerian shades at once disperse …

The attention to Paradise Lost in these lines has none of the parodic or partisan turn of John Philips’s pastiche. As Metcalfe has it, the Israelites achieve nationhood in their move from Egyptian bondage to Canaan. There is no lament for those displaced by their triumph; the ‘exclusive universalism’ of ‘Leviticus thinking’ applies.112 Moses’ Pisgah sight concludes the projected poem (fol. 10r) but the Exodus and that vision seem to require no typological reading in terms of personal Christian redemption. Metcalfe, judging by this and some other of his writings, was not undevout, but for him poetry needed no reinvention to serve his purposes. Milton had already done that and shown the way to Christianize classical epic. Metcalfe carefully recorded the length of each book in Paradise Lost, estimating the ratio between blank verse and Latin hexameter. The poetry of nation needed only follow Milton’s example, with blank verse as its medium. The redemption song was one of national self-determination, to which the personal was entirely subordinated. Salvation is being worked out among the nations, not against them. A later attempt by Metcalfe at a poem about Christ shows Milton’s presence more plainly still, in subject and theme.113 The explicit violence of an earlier nationalism was being insistently rewritten into an idiom that, still Miltonic, professed abhorrence at the harsh antagonisms of yesteryear. But the poetry resulting need be no less nationalist for that. Even Alexander Pope, who had in earlier years been so attuned to the failings of the Whig Miltonists, and gave them so central a place in the Scriblerian pandemonium, might now respond to this pressure to generate a Miltonic national poem hostile to priestcraft and friendly to a state religion.114 In his plans for his ‘Brutus,’ an epic about the legendary founder of Britain rather than about the republican tyrannicide, Pope proposed to celebrate ideals of ‘civil and ecclesiastical government’ in a blank-verse narrative richly informed by Virgilian and Miltonic example.115 In this project, Miltonic poetics were to describe a beneficent imperial mission, and thus to rewrite the complexities of Paradise Lost into a Patriot narrative of virtuous expansionism. The discourse of the elect nation joins with that of the brotherhood of man: Brutus is to ‘redeem the Remains of his Countrymen (the descend[an]ts from Troy) now captives’ and with them to embark on a

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larger civilizing mission, where, as Spence reports, ‘The plan of government is much like our old original plan, supposed so much earlier, and the religion introduced by him is the belief in one God and the doctrines of morality.’116 The point here bears emphasis: state religion was vital to the inception of true nation. The ancient constitution was not just a natural growth of time immemorial, but, as in Harringtonian thought, required the intercession of a public-spirited benefactor for its inception, from which an enduring ‘Love of Liberty’ would ensue, that would only need to be ‘Repolishd’ in future, by Caesar under the Roman empire, for instance, or some latter-day reformer. Pope’s hero was to embody the ‘Benevolence’ that defines ‘the Character of a Legislator,’ the benefits of whose disinterested intervention are stated in the opening lines of the epic: The Patient Chief, who lab’ring long, arriv’d On Britains Shore and brought with fav’ring Gods Arts Arms and Honour to her Ancient Sons …

State religion was vital to Brutus’s colonial aim ‘not to Conquer & destroy the natives, but polish the People … yet uncorrupted in their manners, & only wanting Arts & Governmt, worthy to be made happy.’ There was ‘no prospect of introducing pure manners in the then known mediterranean world’; nor were these voyagers to be satisfied only with populating an uninhabited island in the Atlantic. The errand of these ‘Resolute Men’ lay finally with ‘Extending Benevolence, & polishing & teaching Nations,’ and once arrived in Britain their adventures continue as they ‘disperse Tyrrany & Error & spread Truth & good Governmt.’117 Pope’s repetition of the word ‘polish’ reveals much about him and also his view of the civilizing influence of imperialism of this liberty-loving kind. As he declares himself ‘My Countrys Poet,’ he aims to celebrate the ‘Great Grandson of Aeneas’ as a generous protector of the oppressed. In undertaking such a British subject for a national epic, Pope was of course returning to the very theme that had so engrossed the young Milton’s self-conception as an epic poet. As early as the ‘Vacation Exercise,’ he had ‘professed his hope to write “of kings and queens and heroes old.”’118 His vernacular and national orientation is plain when he writes, as in Mansus and Epitaphium Damonis, in Latin with a continental readership in view, and shows a like preoccupation with his British subject, as he does privately in his manuscript outlines for British

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tragedies. But Milton then in 1641 also expected God, ‘the Eternall and shortly-expected King,’ soon to ‘open the Clouds to judge the severall Kingdomes of the World, and distribut[e] Nationall Honours and Rewards to Religious and just Common-wealths … proclaiming [His] universal and milde Monarchy through Heaven and Earth’ (CPW 1:616). That apocalypse is long to be deferred in the Whig national poetry in the early eighteenth century. And yet it is strangely imminent too: at issue is the force and sublimity that critics had known to praise in Paradise Lost, not least with the growth of a Longinian language of wonder. By the 1690s this had become commonplace in discussion of the poem, not least by the likes of Dennis and Toland. But their older Whig stance was about to be corrected by that milder delight in the sublime that finds its most influential expression in Addison’s Spectator essays. In this view the judgment that Milton had seen in millenarian terms was already manifesting itself in the present prosperity of England at home and abroad. When continental wars seemed too costly, the Whig battle hymns could modulate into the detached essayist’s regard for a polite and commercial people and the pleasures of imagination available to them. The nation is everywhere in Addison and his fellows, with Paradise Lost the preeminent national poem. What is proclaimed here is not the reign of Christ, however, but ‘of market economies and sovereign politics,’119 where nation vies with nation.

NOTES 1 Aikin’s Miltonic ‘Corsica’ (London, 1769) is the first and defining work in her Poems (London, 1773); Wordsworth, ‘London, 1802.’ 2 Nicholas von Maltzahn, ‘The War in Heaven and the Miltonic Sublime,’ in A Nation Transformed: England after the Restoration, ed. Alan Houston and Steven Pincus (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2001), 154–79. 3 See especially his letters to Benedetto Buonmattei, 31 Aug. / 10 Sept. 1638 (CPW 1:330) and to Leonard Philaras, June 1652 (CPW 4:853), but a humanist preoccupation with improving the standards of Latin and the vernacular appears throughout his works. Milton’s prose is quoted from The Complete Prose Works of John Milton, gen. ed. Don M. Wolfe, 8 vols (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1953–82), hereafter cited parenthetically in the text as CPW. 4 Enviably durable is the perceptive discussion of these and related effects in Christopher Ricks, Milton’s Grand Style (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1963).

Milton: Nation and Reception 433 5 See especially Paul Stevens, ‘Paradise Lost and the Colonial Imperative,’ Milton Studies 34 (1996): 3–21, and the essays gathered in Milton and the Imperial Vision, ed. Balachandra Rajan and Elizabeth Sauer (Pittsburgh: Duquesne University Press, 1999). 6 Nicholas von Maltzahn, ‘Wood, Allam, and the Oxford Milton,’ Milton Studies 31 (1994): 164–70. 7 I am grateful to Steven Pincus for sharing work in progress on the subject, of which an early version appears in ‘“To protect English liberties”: The English Nationalist Revolution of 1688–1689,’ in Protestantism and National Identity: Britain and Ireland, c. 1650–c.1850, ed. Tony Claydon and Ian McBride (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1998), 75–104; see also Pincus, England’s Glorious Revolution 1688–1689: A Brief History with Documents (Boston: Palgrave Macmillan, 2006). 8 Nicholas von Maltzahn, ‘Acts of Kind Service: Milton and the Patriot Literature of Empire,’ in Milton and the Imperial Vision, 243–53. 9 Works of John Milton, gen. ed. F.A. Patterson, 18 vols (New York, 1931–8), 7:356. Hereafter cited as CW in the text. See CPW 4:457: ‘the better, the sound[er] part of the Parliament.’ 10 See Elizabeth Sauer, ‘Milton’s Of True Religion, Protestant Nationhood, and the Negotiation of Liberty,’ Milton Quarterly 40 (2006): 1–19; and Paul Stevens’s essay above. 11 Helen Darbishire, ed., Early Lives of Milton (London: Constable, 1932), 7. 12 Letter to Peter Heimbach, Joannis Miltoni Angli, Epistolarum Familiarium Liber Unus (London, 1674), 65–6: ‘His homeland is wherever it is well with him’; CPW 8:3–4. 13 Milton generates like formulations throughout his career; this one follows from the famous recommendation that a poet ‘ought him selfe to be a true Poem’ in An Apology Against a Pamphlet (CPW 1:890). 14 Paradise Lost, 1:254; 5:488–9; 12:38–62, hereafter cited as PL, giving book and lines, in the text; quoted from The Poems of John Milton, ed. John Carey and Alastair Fowler (London: Longman, 1968). Paul Stevens, ‘Milton’s Janus-faced Nationalism: Soliloquy, Subject, and the Modern Nation State,’ Journal of English and Germanic Philology 100 (2001): 255, quoting the Cardoini album. 15 William Davenant, Gondibert, ed. David F. Gladish (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1971), 12. 16 ‘On Shakespear. 1630’; see also Paul Stevens, Imagination and the Presence of Shakespeare in Paradise Lost (Madison: University of Wisconsin Press, 1985). 17 Quoted from his letter to Thomas Young and from ‘Elegia Sexta’ in Samuel Ernest Sprott, Milton’s Art of Prosody (Oxford: Basil Blackwell, 1953), 33.

434 Nicholas von Maltzahn 18 The point is developed in John Creaser, ‘Prosodic Style and Conceptions of Liberty in Milton and Marvell,’ Milton Quarterly 34 (2000): 1–5. 19 Observe also the note of self-correction in Milton’s commonplace-book entry: ‘From a league with just any Protestants, no matter which ones, not all things are to be hoped for’ (CPW 1:502). 20 For a revealing instance of the former, see David R. Como, ‘Predestination and Political Conflict in Laud’s London,’ Historical Journal 46 (2003): 263–94, esp. 267–72. The background is usefully summarized in Johann P. Somerville, ‘Literature and National Identity’ [Early Stuart], in The Cambridge History of Early Modern English Literature, ed. David Loewenstein and Janel Mueller (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2002), 459–86, and see also the earlier chapter, Claire McEachern, ‘Literature and National Identity’ [Elizabethan], 313–42. 21 British Library, Add. MS 32310; and Cedric Brown, ‘A King James Bible, Protestant Nationalism, and Boy Milton,’ in Form and Reform in Renaissance England: Essays in Honor of Barbara Kiefer Lewalski, ed. Amy Boesky and Mary Thomas Crane (1999; rpt. Newark, DE: University of Delaware Press, 2000), 271–87. 22 Epistolarum Familiarium, 133; CPW 1:285. 23 ‘vel praeclare dicendo, vel fortiter agendo’: Epistolarum Familiarium (1674), 93 (CPW 1:246); see also Nicholas von Maltzahn, Milton’s History of Britain: Republican Historiography in the English Revolution (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1991), 60–9. 24 John Beale to John Evelyn, 31 August 1667, British Library, Add. MS 78312, letter 63. 25 Abraham Cowley, Poems (1656), 2nd pagination, 18; Creaser, ‘Prosodic Style,’ 1; and Lawrence Lipking, ‘The Genius of the Shore: Lycidas, Adamastor, and the Poetics of Nationalism,’ PMLA 111 (1996): 205–21. 26 Elsewhere in the same work the brief passages from Ariosto feature final couplets in keeping with Harington’s example in translating ottava rima; see Ludovico Ariosto, Orlando Furioso in English Heroical Verse, trans. John Harington (London, 1591), XXXIV, lxxiii and lxxx (the first passage in Of Reformation follows Harington’s translation closely, the second almost not at all). 27 Henry Stubbe, A Light Shining out of Darknes, 2nd ed. (London, 1659), 174–5. 28 Frank T. Prince, The Italian Element in Milton’s Verse (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1954), 108–44. 29 Darbishire, Early Lives of Milton, 13, 72–3 – although what authority to accord to the particulars of Phillips’s version of the passage remains uncertain. A date c. 1642 may follow from Milton’s appearing to rededicate

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30 31 32

33

34 35

36 37

38

himself to a public role as poet in The Reason of Church-Government and his Apology; also if Phillips reports truly in telling Aubrey that this speech was composed ‘15 or 16 yeares before the Poem was thought of’ (Early Lives, 13, rather than ‘several Years before the Poem was begun,’ 72), and if 1658 was indeed when he determined on an epic Paradise Lost. For a fuller exploration, see Cedric Brown, ‘Milton and the Idolatrous Consort,’ Criticism 35 (1993): 419–39 (esp. 429–30). See Paul Stevens, ‘“Leviticus Thinking” and the Rhetoric of Early Modern Colonialism,’ Criticism 35 (1993): 441–61. Milton’s Phinehas is suggestively cited in Feisal Mohamed, ‘Confronting Religious Violence: Milton’s Samson Agonistes,’ PMLA 120 (2005): 335, with reference also to Norman T. Burns, ‘“Then Up Stood Phinehas”: Milton’s Antinomianism, and Samson’s,’ Milton Studies 33 (1996): 27–46; for Cromwell’s self-description as such a Phinehas in Ireland, see Stevens, ‘“Leviticus Thinking,”’ 457. The effect of these huge differences in line length is obscured in the pages of the first edition (here sig. O2r), owing to its wrapping overlength lines onto preceding or succeeding lines. But this printing practice helps reveal Milton’s conservation of his metrical norm, since it is made possible by the shorter adjacent lines with which he usually compensates for his longest ones, and which yield an average of four heard stresses in the ‘iambic pentameter’ line. For a fuller discussion of such ‘enhancing suggestions,’ see Ricks, Milton’s Grand Style. See Neil H. Keeble, The Literary Culture of Nonconformity in Later SeventeenthCentury England (Leicester: Leicester University Press, 1987); and Sharon Achinstein, Literature and Dissent in Milton’s England (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2003), esp. 115–53. Phillips and Skinner, Aubrey and Richardson, cited in Darbishire, Early Lives, 73, 178, 33, 291, 6. Stevens, ‘Milton’s Janus-faced Nationalism,’ 247–68; ‘Paradise Lost and the Colonial Imperative,’ 3–21; and ‘Intolerance and the Virtues of Sacred Vehemence,’ in Milton and Toleration, ed. Sharon Achinstein and Elizabeth Sauer (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2007), 243–67. The rivalry at this time has been well described by Timothy Raylor in ‘Marvell, Waller, and Cromwell,’ a paper delivered at The Marvell Conference (Oxford University, 8 November 2003); see also Raylor, ‘Waller’s Machiavellian Cromwell: The Imperial Argument of A Panegyrick to my Lord Protector,’ Review of English Studies 56 (2005): 386–411; and Edward Holberton, ‘“So Honny from the Lyon came”: The 1657 Wedding Masques for the

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39 40 41 42 43

44

45 46

47 48 49

Protector’s Daughters,’ The Seventeenth Century 20 (2005): 101, 103–9; as well as the unusually constitutionalist reading of Marvell’s First Anniversary by Joad Raymond, ‘Framing Liberty: Marvell’s First Anniversary and the Instrument of Government,’ Huntington Library Quarterly 62 (2001): 313–50. Noel Malcolm, Aspects of Hobbes (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 2002), 20. Davenant, Gondibert, ed. Gladish, 12, 22, 28–39 (he alludes bitterly to Phinehas, 30). Hobbes’s ‘Answer’ is printed in Davenant, Gondibert, ed. Gladish, 48–9. William Dell, A Plain and Necessary Confutation (London, 1654), 48. His steps leading towards this determination are described in Richard Tuck, ‘The Civil Religion of Thomas Hobbes,’ in Political Discourse in Early Modern Britain, ed. Nicholas Phillipson and Quentin Skinner (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1993), 120–38. For Harrington writing in response to Hobbes, see Arihiro Fukuda, Sovereignty and the Sword: Harrington, Hobbes, and Mixed Government in the English Civil Wars (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1997); for the churchmanship central to his position, see Alan Cromartie, ‘Harringtonian Virtue: Harrrington, Machiavelli, and the Method of the Moment,’ Historical Journal 41 (1998): 987–1009, esp. 987, 998; and Mark Goldie, ‘The Civil Religion of James Harrington,’ in Languages of Political Theory in Early Modern Europe, ed. Anthony Pagden (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1987), 197–222. Goldie, ‘Civil Religion of James Harrington,’ 202. Blair Worden, ‘John Milton and Oliver Cromwell,’ Soldiers, Writers and Statesmen of the English Revolution, ed. Ian Gentles, John Morrill, and Blair Worden (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1998), 243–64. William Riley Parker, Milton: A Biography, 2 vols, 2nd ed. (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1996), 2:1017. Parker, Milton 1:584. For a general example, take the praises of David’s triumph over Goliath, none of which exalt God (Davideis, in Poems, London, 1656, 97–102); or more locally, the potential for misreading just which cattle are to be sacrificed when: At the third hour Saul to the hallowed Tent Midst a large train of Priests and Courtiers went; The sacred Herd marcht proud and softly by; Too fat and gay to think their deaths so nigh.

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Milton: Nation and Reception 437 50 Cowley, Davideis, in Poems (1656), esp. 88. 51 CPW 5:259–61; von Maltzahn, Milton’s History, 168–74. 52 Martin Dzelzainis, ‘Milton and the Protectorate in 1658,’ in Milton and Republicanism, ed. David Armitage, Quentin Skinner, and Armand Himy (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1995), 181–205, rebutted by Paul Stevens, ‘Milton’s “Renunciation” of Cromwell: The Problem of Raleigh’s Cabinet-Council,’ Modern Philology 98 (2001): 363–92. 53 Newcomb had printed the Defensio secunda and Defensio pro se, and Milton would call on him again in connection with the Treatise of Civil Power and Hirelings the next year, and with The Readie and Easie Way the year after (1660). The scale of Newcomb’s production makes it difficult to estimate quite when the second edition of the Defensio was brought to the press; the English Cabinet-Council, although set from manuscript instead of type, is likely to have been quicker in production than the more painstaking work required for Milton’s Latin Defensio. 54 This is a translation of the self-consciously Machiavellian ‘Prince’ of Jean Louis Guez, sieur de Balzac, Aristippus, Or, Monsr. de Balsac’s masterpiece. Being a Discourse Concerning the Court, trans. R.W. (London, 1659), sig. A4v, 5–6, 87–111 – entered for publication by Newcomb 25 June 1658. Thomas Johnson had long before been the bookseller for Of Education (London, 1644); Johnson’s cooperation with Newcomb included selling a number of Newcomb’s other publications, and Johnson in 1663 again advertises the Cabinet-Council, which he had reissued in 1661 (removing Milton’s name from the title, and his signed preface), qv. Joshua Poole, Practical Rhetorick (London, 1663), sig. O8r. 55 Thomason, ‘Thirtie Tyrants,’ MS in Thomason Tracts E.945 (6), 1, 6, 7, 9, [13]. 56 J.T. Rutt, ed., Diary of Thomas Burton, 4 vols (London, 1828), 3:122. 57 In supplying this postscript, modern editions have not followed the second edition (1658, p. 169) in also providing the line that sets it off (CPW 4:537). [CW 7:558: ‘majora his quidem si possum assequi, potero autem si Deus dederit, eorum causa me cupere quidem interea ac meditari.’] 58 CPW 7:536–7 [CW 7:556–8: ‘meam hanc persuasionem non meorum modo civium, sed exterorum etiam hominum quosque optimos haud tacita ubique gentium voce comprobare jamdudum intelligo.’] 59 CPW 7:252, 240. 60 George Sikes, The Life and Death of Sir Henry Vane ([London], 1662), 93–4. Sikes’s date, ‘July 3. 1652,’ argues Milton’s favourable response to Vane’s recent Zeal Examin’d (which Thomason dates 15 June 1652). See also Carolyn

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62 63

64

65

66

67 68

Pollizzotto, ‘The Campaign against The Humble Proposals of 1652,’ Journal of Ecclesiastical History 38 (1987):569–81, esp. 571–2, 578–9. Wall – Hartlib, 22 Jan. 1658/9 (Sheffield University Library, Hartlib MSS 34/4/21A). Wall’s identity, which has puzzled Miltonists, finds fuller discussion in my ‘Making Use of the Jews: Milton and Philosemitism,’ presented in brief at the International Milton Symposium, Grenoble, 2005, and in full in Milton and the Jews, ed. Douglas Brooks (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2008), 57–82. Wall – Hartlib, 4 Jan. and 9 Jan. 1658/9 (Sheffield University Library, Hartlib MSS 34/4/17A, 19A); CPW 7:513. Masson unpersuasively proposed Vane as the possible friend of ‘A Letter to a Friend.’ See David Masson, Life of John Milton, 7 vols (London, 1859–94), 5:618; cf. CPW 7:120. The Political Works of James Harrington, ed. J.G.A. Pocock (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1977), 10, 14; Leona Rostenberg, ‘Sectarianism and Revolt: Livewell Chapman, Publisher to the Fifth Monarchy,’ in Literary, Political, Scientific, Religious & Legal Publishing, Printing & Bookselling in England, 1551–1700 (New York: Burt Franklin, 1965), 222–4. This he had been doing since his Clamor, Rixa, Joci, Mendacia Furta, Cachini, or, a Severe Enquiry into the Late Oneirocritica (London, 1657), 13, 16,19, 45; see J.M. French, The Life Records of John Milton, 5 vols (New Brunswick, NJ: Rutgers University Press, 1949–58), 5:450. [Henry Stubbe], Sundry Things from Severall hands Concerning the University of Oxford (London, 1659), 1, 2. Debate continues whether the phrase ‘short but scandalous night of interruption’ applies to the Protectorate as a whole or to the fortnight between the dissolution of Richard Cromwell’s parliament and the restoration of the Rump (22 April to 7 May 1659): I am persuaded of the former by Austin Woolrych’s arguments, including reference to a contemporary tract thus referring to the Protectorate as ‘a Short, but a Sharp Night of Tyranny and Oppression.’ See ‘Milton and Cromwell: “A Short but Scandalous Night of Interruption”?’ in Achievements of the Left Hand, ed. Michael Lieb and John Shawcross (Amherst: University of Massachussetts Press, 1974), 200–2; but compare Robert Fallon, Milton in Government (University Park: Pennsylvania State University Press, 1993), 183–5; and Thomas N. Corns, Uncloistered Virtue: English Political Literature (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1992), 274. Catalogue[s] of the Most Vendible Books (London, 1657, 1658). Bodlian Library, Locke MS d. 10, Lemmata Ethica Argumenta et Authores 1659, 93: ‘Episcopus Bishops primitively were chosen by the people. Milton Reformat: p. 17’ (the dating of this entry remains uncertain).

Milton: Nation and Reception 439 69 Stubbe, A Light Shining out of Darknes, 174–6. Thomason dates the second edition 8 November 1659, the first 17 June 1659; CPW 1:558, 579, 723. Many more of Stubbe’s allusions to Milton might be cited. 70 Stubbe, An Essay in Defence of the Good Old Cause, (London, 1659 [Thomason, 4 July]), sig. *2r–v, *4v, **2v–3r, **7v; and the appended Malice Rebuked (1659), 5, which shows a regard more Harringtonian than Miltonic for ‘the customes of Nations (the only interpreter of Nature).’ 71 Political Works of James Harrington, ed. Pocock, 38–41, 104–18. 72 Austin Woolrych, ‘The Good Old Cause and the Fall of the Protectorate,’ in Cambridge Historical Journal 13 (1957): 154–5; and Political Works of James Harrington, ed. Pocock, 40, 109. 73 C. August 1659. CPW 7:84, 518–21; and Political Works of James Harrington, ed. Pocock, 111–13. 74 Political Works of James Harrington, ed. Pocock, 112–13. The second and augmented edition of Aphorisms appeared a fortnight after the first, with the aphorisms cited above being renumbered [add 8 for the new number]; the few textual variants show no alteration in Harrington’s position regarding Hirelings. 75 Ibid., 113, 844–6 [A System of Politics, esp. 6:4 ‘Where the form admits not of the free exercise of any other religion except that only which is national, there is no liberty of conscience’]. 76 Ibid., 116–18. 77 Ibid., 109. 78 CPW 7:205, 210–11; 440–1, 445–6. 79 CPW 7:130. 80 [Samuel Butler,] The Censure of the Rota (London, 1660). 81 John Beale to John Evelyn, 18 December 1669, British Library, Add. MS 78312, letter 93. 82 Nicholas von Maltzahn, ‘The First Reception of Paradise Lost (1667),’ Review of English Studies 47 (1996): 479–99. 83 Edward Phillips, ‘The Modern Poets,’ in Theatrum Poetarum (London, 1675), 113–14. 84 Roscommon, Horace’s Art of Poetry. Made English (London, 1680), sigs A3v-4v. 85 Roscommon, ‘On Mr. Dryden’s Religio Laici,’ in Miscellany Poems, ed. John Dryden (London, 1684), 190–3. 86 See Juan Christian Pellicer, ‘John Philips (1676–1709): Life, Works, and Reception,’ PhD dissertation, University of Oslo (Oslo, 2002). 87 Nicholas von Maltzahn, ‘Dryden’s Milton and the Theatre of Imagination,’ in John Dryden: Tercentenary Essays, ed. Paul Hammond and David Hopkins

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90

91 92 93 94 95 96

97 98 99

100

(Oxford: Clarendon Press, 2000), 32–56; and Charles Goodall, Poems and Translations (London, 1689), 110–17. John Dennis, The Court of Death (London, 1695), sig. a2r. The publication of only Dennis’s critical works in Edward Niles Hooker’s magisterial edition has had the unlucky consequence of obscuring Dennis’s Country Whig contributions to other related causes. See The Critical Works of John Dennis, ed. Edward N. Hooker, 2 vols (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins Press, 1939–43). The sophistication of Dennis’s later conception and its skewed reading of Longinus are described in Phillip J. Donnelly, ‘Enthusiastic Poetry and Rationalized Christianity: The Poetic Theory of John Dennis,’ Christianity and Literature 54 (2005): 235–64. I am grateful to the author for sharing this work with me before publication. Dennis, Critical Works, ed. Hooker, 1:244, 382, 398; 2:2. Dennis, Critical Works, ed. Hooker, 1:382; Political Works of James Harrington, ed. Pocock, 354–5. Toland, ‘Life,’ in A Complete Collection of the … Works of John Milton, 3 vols (London, 1698), 1:36–7, 44–5. ‘Who taught Salmasius, that French chattring Py, / To aim at English, and Hundreda cry?’ Complete Collection, 1:31. Toland, Militia Reform’d (London, 1698), 32–6; Political Works of James Harrington, ed. Pocock, 214–26. John Toland, Clito (London, 1700), 6–8; cf. John Locke, An Essay concerning Human Understanding [1690], ed. Peter H. Nidditch (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1975), esp. III.i.–ii (402–8). Donnelly, ‘Enthusiastic Poetry,’ 235, and passim; and Goldie, ‘Civil Religion of James Harrington,’ 207. The Works of the Right Honourable Joseph Addison, Esq; in Four Volumes, ed. Thomas Tickell (London, 1721), 1:56–61. Aeneid, 3:658 (a hair-raising monster: deformed, huge, and bereft of light). See Peter Du Moulin and Alexander More, Regii Sanguinis Clamor ad Coelum (The Hague, 1652), sig. A8v, or later the flyleaf of (Bishop) William Wake’s copy of Eikonoklastes (1649), Oxford, Christ Church Library, MS W.c.7.28; Milton defends himself against the imputation in Defensio secunda, CPW 4:559, 582–4. See also Richard Bentley’s preface to his Milton’s Paradise Lost: A New Edition (London, 1732), sig. a1r–v, which soon turns to this famous Virgilian verse in a way that seems not entirely innocent given Bentley’s editorial argument. The Works of … Addison, ed. Tickell, 1:63–82; see Abigail Williams, Poetry and the Creation of a Whig Literary Culture 1681–1714 (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2005), 192–3.

Milton: Nation and Reception 441 101 ‘Atticus’ (c. 1715), l. 18; ‘An Epistle to Dr. Arbuthnot,’ l. 204, in The Poems of Alexander Pope, ed. John Butt (London: Methuen, 1963). 102 Spectator 285, 26 January 1712. 103 David Womersley, ed., Augustan Critical Writing (Harmondsworth: Penguin, 1997), xxiii, xxvi; Womersley’s argument finds rich elaboration in Williams, Poetry and the Creation of a Whig Literary Culture 1681–1714. 104 Von Maltzahn, ‘The War in Heaven,’ 170–9; see also the listings in Robert D. Horn, Marlborough, A Survey: Panegyrics, Satires, and Biographical Writings, 1688–1788 (Folkestone: Dawsons, 1975); and David Foxon, English Verse 1701–1750, 2 vols (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1975). 105 The exception proves the rule, where A Poem on the memorable Fall of Chloe’s P—s Pot, Attempted in Blank Verse (London, 1713) follows John Philips’s example in Miltonic pastiche, esp. 4. 106 Joseph Trapp, Peace. A Poem inscribed to the Right Honourable The Lord Viscount Bolingbroke (two London editions and one Dublin, 1713), 4, 6–7 (Dublin ed.). 107 Thomas Tickell, A Poem, To His Excellency The Lord Privy-Seal, On the Prospect of Peace (London, 1713), 3–4, 18–19. 108 Triumph of Virtue: A Poem upon the Peace (London, 1713), 1, 4, 6–7, 8, 10. 109 An early example is the 1712 translation into English of Mme Dacier’s prose translation of the Iliad by William Broome and others, which, while it professes to correct that French example with reference to the original Greek, instead proves to do so with reference to Paradise Lost. See John R. Mason, ‘To Milton through Dryden and Pope,’ PhD dissertation, University of Cambridge (1987), 110, 112–17. 110 Joseph Foster, Alumni Oxonienses … 1500–1714, 4 vols (Oxford: James Parker, 1891); Mary Clapinson, ‘Catalogue of Metcalfe MSS’ http://www .queens.ox.ac.uk/library/wellcometrust/docs/metcalfe-ms.html); and Jonathan Bengtson, ‘Studium medicinae: Queen’s College and the Collections of Sir John Floyer and Theophilus Metcalfe’ (www.queens.ox.ac.uk/ library/wellcometrust/docs/bengtson.doc). 111 Oxford, Queen’s College, MS 433 [sporadically paginated]. The main run of dates in the volume is 1704–17. 112 See Stevens, ‘“Leviticus Thinking.”’ 113 Oxford, Queen’s College, MS 433 [sporadically unpaginated]. Metcalfe now recalls different passages from Paradise Lost – not least the invocations to Books 3 and 7, and the praise of paradisal sexuality in ‘Hail wedded love’ (4:750–75) – in celebrating Love over Faith and Hope in terms taken from I Cor. 13. 114 Best on the climactic expression of this long disdain is Valerie Rumbold, ‘Milton’s Epic and Pope’s Satyr Play: Paradise Lost in The Dunciad in Four

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Books,’ Milton Quarterly 38 (2004): 138–62; and also Alexander Pope, The Dunciad in Four Books, ed. Valerie Rumbold (Harlow: Longman, 1999); for the political context, especially of Pope’s Patriot ‘Brutus,’ see Christine Gerrard, The Patriot Opposition to Walpole: Politics, Poetry, and National Myth, 1725–1742 (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1994), 143–4 and passim. Selected Prose of Alexander Pope, ed. Paul Hammond (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1987), 290–6; The Poems of Alexander Pope, ed. John Butt et al., 11 vols (London: Methuen, 1938–68), 6:404–5. Selected Prose of Alexander Pope, ed. Hammond, 290, 292. Ibid., 293–4. Von Maltzahn, Milton’s History, 60–5. John Milbank, Theology and Social Theory: Beyond Secular Reason (Oxford: Basil Blackwell, 1990), 5.

Contributors

Warren Chernaik is Emeritus Professor of English, University of London, Visiting Professor at King’s College London, and the author of The Cambridge Introduction to Shakespeare’s History Plays (2007), Sexual Freedom in Restoration Literature (1995), The Poet’s Time: Politics and Religion in the Work of Andrew Marvell (1983), a study of The Merchant of Venice in the Writers and their Work series (2005), and essays on Marvell, Milton, Rochester, Behn, Waller, Herbert, and other seventeenth-century writers. He is coeditor of Marvell and Liberty (1999), The Art of Detective Fiction (2000), and several other collections of essays. Thomas N. Corns is Professor of English at Bangor University, Wales. His work on Milton includes The Development of Milton’s Prose Style (1982), Milton’s Language (1990), Uncloistered Virtue (1992), Regaining ‘Paradise Lost’ (1994), and John Milton: The Prose Works (1998). His most recent publication is A History of Seventeenth-Century English Literature (2006). He is the editor of the prize-winning A Companion to Milton (2001) and coauthor, with Gordon Campbell, of John Milton: Life, Work and Thought (2008). He is also General Editor, with Gordon Campbell, of The Complete Works of John Milton (forthcoming). Andrew Escobedo is Associate Professor in the Department of English at Ohio University, and the author of Nationalism and Historical Loss in Renaissance England: Foxe, Dee, Spenser, Milton (2004). His current project examines literary representations of the will and its relation to personification.

444 Contributors

Achsah Guibbory is Professor of English at Barnard College, Columbia University. She has published widely on seventeenth-century literature and culture and has served as President of the Milton Society of America and the John Donne Society. She is the author of The Map of Time: Seventeenth-Century English Literature and Ideas of Pattern in History (1986), Ceremony and Community from Herbert to Milton: Literature, Religion, and Cultural Conflict in Seventeenth-Century England (1998), and editor of The Cambridge Companion to John Donne (2006). Her current project is Imagined Identities: The Uses of Judaism in SeventeenthCentury England. Andrew Hadfield is Professor of English at the University of Sussex and Director of the Centre for Early Modern Studies. He is the author of Literature, Politics and National Identity: Reformation to Renaissance (1994), Edmund Spenser’s Irish Experience: Wilde Fruyt and Salvage Soyl (1997), and Shakespeare and Republicanism (2005), which was awarded the 2006 Roland H. Bainton Prize for Literature by the SixteenthCentury Society Conference. He has coedited The Oxford History of the Irish Book, vol. 3: The Irish Book in English, 1550–1800 (2006). He is currently working on a biography of Edmund Spenser. Victoria Kahn is Professor of English and Comparative Literature at the University of California, Berkeley. She is the author of Rhetoric, Prudence, and Skepticism in the Renaissance (1985), Machiavellian Rhetoric: From the Counter-Reformation to Milton (1994), and Wayward Contracts: The Crisis of Political Obligation in England, 1640–1674 (2004), and coeditor of Machiavelli and the Discourse of Literature (1993), Rhetoric and Law in Early Modern Europe (2001), and Politics and the Passions, 1500– 1850 (2006). John Kerrigan is Professor of English at the University of Cambridge and a Fellow of St John’s College. He has published and lectured internationally on early modern writing and on British and Irish poetry since Wordsworth. Among his books are an influential edition of Shakespeare’s Sonnets and A Lover’s Complaint (1986), a study in comparative literature, Revenge Tragedy: Aeschylus to Armageddon (1996), which won the Truman Capote Award for Literary Criticism, On Shakespeare and Early Modern Literature: Essays (2001) and Archipelagic English: Literature, History, and Politics 1603–1707 (2008).

Contributors 445

Laura Lunger Knoppers is Professor of English at Pennsylvania State University. She is the author of Historicizing Milton: Spectacle, Power, and Poetry in Restoration England (1994) and Constructing Cromwell: Ceremony, Portrait, and Print, 1645–1661 (2000). She has edited Puritanism and Its Discontents (2003), and coedited Monstrous Bodies / Political Monstrosities in Early Modern Europe (2004) and Milton in Popular Culture (2006). Currently, she is completing a scholarly edition of Milton’s 1671 poems for Oxford University Press and editing The Cambridge Companion to Early Modern Women’s Writing. David Loewenstein is Marjorie and Lorin Tiefenthaler Professor of English at the University of Wisconsin-Madison. He is the author of Milton and the Drama of History: Historical Vision, Iconoclasm, and the Literary Imagination (1990) and Representing Revolution in Milton and His Contemporaries: Religion, Politics, and Polemics in Radical Puritanism (2001), winner of the Milton Society of America’s James Holly Hanford Award for Distinguished Book, and coeditor of The Cambridge History of Early Modern English Literature (2002) and Heresy, Literature, and Politics in Early Modern English Culture (2006). He is completing a book entitled Heresy, Persecution, and Fear in Early Modern English Literature and Culture. Willy Maley is Professor of Renaissance Studies at the University of Glasgow and a Fellow of the English Association (FEA). He is the author of A Spenser Chronology (1994), Salvaging Spenser: Colonialism, Culture and Identity (1997), and Nation, State and Empire in English Renaissance Literature: Shakespeare to Milton (2003). He has coedited Edmund Spenser’s A View of the Present State of Ireland: From the First Published Edition (1633) (1997), Representing Ireland: Literature and the Origins of Conflict, 1534–1660 (1993), Postcolonial Criticism (1997), British Identities and English Renaissance Literature (2002), Shakespeare and Scotland (2004), and Spheres of Influence: Intellectual and Cultural Publics from Shakespeare to Habermas (2007). Mary Nyquist is Associate Professor in the Department of English and Literary Studies Program at the University of Toronto. She has published a number of articles on Milton and on a variety of Renaissance, Enlightenment, and contemporary writers, and coedited Re-Membering Milton: New Essays on the Texts and Traditions (1987) and Milton and Canadian Historicisms (forthcoming). At present, she is completing a study

446 Contributors

tentatively entitled Arbitrary Rule: Slavery, Tyranny and Resistance, which will include a longer study of Locke’s ‘Of Slavery,’ and KneeTribute and Harlot-Laps: Milton, Masculinism, and Servility, a collection of essays on Milton. Joad Raymond is Professor of English Literature at the University of East Anglia. He is the author of The Invention of the Newspaper (1996), Pamphlets and Pamphleteering in Early Modern Britain (2003) and numerous articles on literature, news, and political culture, and the editor of books on newspaper history and Milton. He is presently writing a book entitled Milton’s Angels: The Early-Modern Imagination, editing The Oxford History of Popular Print Culture, vol. 1, Beginnings to 1660, and editing Milton’s Latin prose defences for the forthcoming Complete Works of John Milton. Paul Stevens is Professor and Canada Research Chair in English Literature at the University of Toronto. His publications include Milton in America (coeditor, special issue of University of Toronto Quarterly, forthcoming), When Is a Public Sphere? (coeditor, special issue of Criticism, 2004), Discontinuities: New Essays on Renaissance Literature and Criticism (coeditor, 1998), and Imagination and the Presence of Shakespeare in ‘Paradise Lost’ (1985). He is former President of the Milton Society of America and Visiting Fellow at All Souls College, Oxford. He is working on a book provisionally entitled Milton and the English Nation. Nicholas von Maltzahn, Professor of English at the University of Ottawa, has published widely on the literary and political careers of John Milton and Andrew Marvell. His subject has often been their lives and afterlives, and especially what happens when baroque poetics encounter Enlightenment aesthetics. He is the author of Milton’s History of Britain: Republican Historiography in the English Revolution (1991) and An Andrew Marvell Chronology (2005), and has edited Andrew Marvell’s Account of the Growth of Popery and Arbitrary Government for The Prose Works of Andrew Marvell (2003). He is now editing Milton’s tracts on religious liberty for the Complete Works of John Milton. His current research centres on the status of literature in the development of toleration and multiculturalism.

Index

John Milton’s name has been abbreviated to ‘JM’ absolute power and absolutism, 375, 377, 379; as dominion, 362; Filmer on, 356, 363; Grotius on, 256–7; JM’s view of, 253, 257, 269n11, 362; marriage as analogy for, 257–8; of monarchy, 356–7, 372, 374, 384; power over life and death, 362–3, 375–7, 379, 381–5, 389–91; as tyranny, 359, 366–7, 375; as usurping God’s power, 362; voluntary enslavement to, 258, 261; vs arbitrary rule, 380–1; vs common law, 252. See also monarchy Achinstein, Sharon, 8, 193, 272n31, 307 Act in Restraint of Appeals (1533), 284 Act of Union (1707), 17n15 Addison, Joseph, 6, 401, 426–8, 432; ‘An Account of the Greatest English Poets,’ 427; ‘The Campaign,’ 427, 428; ‘Milton’s Stile imitated …,’ 427; Spectator essays, 427, 432 Africa and black Africans, 358, 370– 3, 391 Agricola, 76, 342 Agrippina (wife of Claudius), 311, 312 Aikin, Anna (later Barbauld), 401

Akenside, Mark, 403 Alexander the Great, 82 Alfred (king of Wessex), 309, 324, 326 Alter, Peter, 275–6 Ames, William, 148, 178–81, 182, 183, 197n18; Medulla S.S. Theologiae, 178 Anderson, Benedict, 154; on nationalism as a modern phenomenon, 7, 10, 251–2, 267n5; on nation as an imagined community (Imagined Communities), 9, 39, 156–7, 174–5, 193, 276, 332; nations as ‘artificial constructs,’ 17n14 angel(s) and angel theology, 139–42; and astrology, 144; Cromwell as, 151; and deities of classical literature, 162; and early modern national identity, 154–7, 160–3; in Genesis, 143, 148; guardians of individuals, 145–6; guardians of local places, 142, 160–1; guardians of states or countries, 146–8; hierarchy of, 142; JM’s view of, 148–9; in ‘Lycidas,’ 140–2, 149, 151, 152, 153, 160–2, 181; Protestant views of, 142–8, 162; tutelar, 144–5, 148–9, 167n52

448 Index Anglia Liberata, 230 Anglican church. See Church of England Anglo-Dutch wars, 207, 219, 230, 231, 233, 237–8 Anglo-Saxons, 155, 158 Anglo-Scoto-Dutch triangle, 219–40 apocalypticism, 30, 268n9 arbitrary rule, 380–1 Aristotle, 77, 88, 362, 374; Politics, 359; on slavery, 359–60, 361–2 Armitage, David, 8, 92, 284 Armstrong, Archie, 222 Arthur, king, 158 Ascham, Antony, 254, 366–7; Of the Confusions and Revolutions of Government, 367, 370, 393n12 Ash, Simeon, 124 Ashcraft, Richard, 396n23 Ashley, Maurice: John Wildman, Plotter and Postmaster, 108n47 Aubrey, John, 404, 413, 435n29 Augustine, St (archbishop of Canterbury), 212 Augustine of Hippo, St, 145 Austin, William, 147; ‘Tutelar angels,’ 144 Babington, Gervase, 143 Babylon, 120–2, 127, 128, 367 Bacon, Francis, 213 Bacon, Nathaniel, 417 Baillie, Robert, 185, 187, 200n53, 221, 244n44 Baker, David, 8, 27 Bale, John, 212, 254 Balzac, Jean-Louis Guez, seigneur de: Aristippus, 437n54 Barbauld, Anna (née Aikin), 401 Barker, Arthur, 6

Baroni, Leonora, 149 Barrow, Samuel, 274 Bartlet, William, 185, 187, 188, 189, 190; Model of the Primitive Congregational Way, 184 Basilikon Doron (James I and VI), 53, 58, 221 Baskerville, Stephen, 118 Baylie, Robert, 126 Bayly, John, 145 Bayly, Lewis: Practice of Piety, 241n19 Beale, John, 6, 392n5, 393n7 Beckles, Hilary, 377 Bede, 212 Belfast Presbytery (Ulster Presbyterians), 208, 227–8, 306 Bible. See New Testament; Old Testament Bion of Smyrna: Lamentation for Adonis, 139 Bishops’ Wars, 225, 231 Blackburn, Robin, 358, 393n11, 394n17 Blair, Tony, 281, 294 Blake, William: ‘The History of England,’ 313–14 blank verse, 401–13, 422–4, 427–8, 429, 430; for celebration of warfare, 423; for drama, 405–6, 408–9; for epic poetry, 405; Italian influence on, 408–9; JM’s development of, 402, 407–12; metrical subtleties of, 407–8, 411–12, 423–4; as Miltonic, 402, 403–4, 422–32; for national poetry, 402, 403–4; for occasional poetry, 424–5; pastiches of, 422–3; for translations, 407–8, 429 Blasphemy Act (1650), 47n27 Boadicea, 307–8, 313–23, 326–7; as Britannia, 314; early modern

Index 449 accounts of, 313–14; as English or European, 326–7, 330n30; JM’s portrayal of, 14, 307–8, 313, 314–15, 317–21, 326–7 Bodin, Jean, 144, 375 Boehme, Jacob, 143 Bond, John, 124, 132–3 books, publishing, and the reading culture: book burning, 50n48; Dutch translations of English literature, 221; in Eikonoklastes, 56–7; English literature in Europe, 213– 14; English publishing, 17n12, 36, 46–7n22; during the English Revolution, 36, 46–7n22; fast sermons, 118; JM’s publishers, 416–17; licensing of, 192, 193, 194; print capitalism, 251–2; printed in United Provinces, 221, 230; private libraries of intellectuals, 214 Bradley, K.R., 397n28 Bradshaw, John, 39, 99, 223 Braude, Benjamin, 394n17 Breuilly, John, 275, 276 Bridge, William, 123, 125 Britain. See England / Britain Britons, 75–7, 158, 211–12, 305–6, 310, 320 Brutus, 140, 158, 430–1 Buchanan, George, 68; History of Scotland, 58–9 Bullinger, Heinrich, 145 Bunyan, John, 270n24; Pilgrim’s Progress, 263 Buonmattei, Benedetto, 432n3 Burges, Cornelius, 121–2 Burns, Norman T., 270n23 Burroughs, Jeremiah, 129–30, 131, 183, 185, 188, 193 Burton, Robert, 214

Bush, Douglas, 6 Butler, Samuel: The Transproser Rehears’d, 243n31 Caesar, Julius, 55, 67, 81, 82, 106n33 Calamy, Edmund, 46n19, 47n24, 122 Caligula, 55, 334, 343 Callinicos, Alex: Against the Third Way, 281 Calvin, John, and Calvinism, 119, 143, 144, 145, 147; Institutio, 144 Camden, William: Britannia, 141 Campanella, Tomasso: Discourse Touching the Spanish Monarchy, 150 Campos Boralevi, Lea, 397n31 capital punishment, 383–5, 388, 390 Caractacus, 311–12, 315, 319, 321 Cardano, Girolamo, 144 Carew, Thomas: Coelum Britannicum, 406 Carey, John, 152, 167n52, 225, 279 Cartismandua, queen of the Brigantes, 311–12, 323–4 Cassius Dion, 320, 321 Catiline, 54–5, 56, 82 Cats, Jacob, 246n66 Cawdrey, Daniel, 184, 187 Celestial Harmony, The, 146 Changeable Covenant, The, 229 Chapman, Livewell, 418, 421 Charles I: and architecture, 62; compared to Caesar and Nero, 55; court of, 336–7; and divine right of monarchs, 53; and Eikon Basilike, 36, 37; English church under, 117; Heads of Proposals terms for, 27; and Henrietta Maria, 409, 414; portrayed in Defences, 55, 336–7; portrayed in Eikonoklastes, 36–7, 51–2, 231, 270n18, 362; portrayed in

450 Index Tenure, 87–8, 156; as Satan in Paradise Lost, 223, 226; and Scotland, 54, 206, 220, 225, 231; as a second Christ, 59; trial and execution, 36–7, 99, 217, 232 Charles II: coronation of, 220, 228–9; court of, 331, 340, 345; Declaration of Indulgence, 287; as Prince of Wales, 217–18, 225, 226, 228. See also Restoration Cheney, Patrick, 8 Cherniak, Warren, 11, 73–103 Cheynell, Frances, 127 Christian pastoral, 152 church government, 12, 182, 187 Church of England: ceremonialism of, 117, 125; Clarendon Code, 283; identified with Babylon, 127; Parliament dismantling of, 117, 126; Parliament reformation of, 123–5; Puritan opposition to, 177–8, 179; separation from Rome, 284; as temple of Jerusalem, 116–17, 120–1, 285; as visible, 181. See also national church Cicero, 55, 56, 77, 359; Tusculanarum Disputationum, 159 civic or positive nationalism, 14, 277, 282, 289, 293, 295 civilizing conquest, ideology of, 74–5, 305, 310, 311, 313 civil religion, 401, 402–3, 413–14, 415–16, 426, 428 Civil Wars. See English Revolution and Civil Wars Clarendon Code, 283 Claudius, 311–12 Cleland, William, 239 Cleveland, John, 205, 206–7, 208; ‘The Rebel Scot,’ 206

Colley, Linda, 32; Britons, 17nn14– 15 Collier, Jeremy, 425 Collinson, Patrick, 115 colonialism and imperialism, 154–5; as civilizing, 74–5, 305, 310, 311, 313; and formation of nations, 156; as gendered, 310; and slavery, 327, 358, 369, 374 Committee for the Propagation of the Gospel, 233 Commonwealth: acts establishing, 27; Council of State, 48n29, 51, 219, 230, 418; failure and collapse of, 41–3, 60–1, 68, 264, 266, 270n25, 283. See also Protectorate community: liberty of conscience within, 291; nation as, 9, 39, 156–7, 174–5, 193, 276, 332; Protestant emphasis on, 290–1; and sense of place, 139 Como, David, 128 Congregationalists, 178–9, 181–93; French church in London, 188; influence of William Ames on, 178; intimacy of fellowship, 185, 190; JM’s view of, 187–90, 200n53; on national church, nation, and state, 176, 186–7; political views of, 183; purity of the congregation, 190; self-governing voluntary local churches, 178, 182, 183, 185–6, 187; universal church, 183–6; visible and invisible church, 12, 181–7, 190 Congreve, William, 214, 424 consent, theory of, 255–6, 265–6, 292–3 Conventical Act (1670), 286 Convention Parliament, 42 Cordelia, 308–9

Index 451 Corns, Thomas N., 8, 13, 92, 205–15, 287 Cotton, John, 199n34; The True Constitution of a Particular Visible Church, 182 Council of State, 219, 418; JM commissions and writing for, 48n29, 51, 54, 230; members of, 99, 145, 214, 232 Council of Trent, 131 Country party, 207, 404, 423, 426, 429, 440n89 Covell, William, 182; A Just and Temperate Defense of the Five Books of Ecclesiastical Polity by R. Hooker, 177–8 Covenanters. See Solemn League and Covenant Cowley, Abraham, 6, 414, 415, 416, 424; Davideis, 416, 436n49 Cowper, William, 314 Crawford, Julie, 330n21 Cressy, David, 30 Cromwell, Oliver: accident of, 150; as an angel, 151; campaigns in Scotland, 74–5, 78, 229, 230, 232–3, 275; death of, 414, 417; dissolution of Parliament, 39, 93–4; as a godly warrior, 73–4, 91; JM’s sonnet to, 73, 74, 79, 98, 219, 232–3, 416; JM’s warnings and admonitions to, 97– 103, 337; justification for assassination of, 90; Marvell’s ode to, 73–4, 79, 80–1, 97, 214, 219, 223, 229–30; portrayed in Second Defence, 40, 73–4, 91–103; as Protector, 60, 81– 2, 95, 413–14; on religious sects, 35; republican portrayals of, 11, 73–5, 80–91; as Satan in Paradise Lost, 60; speech to Parliament (1654), 25, 87

Cromwell, Richard, 59, 92, 417, 438n66 Cromwell, Thomas, 284 Cry of the Royal Blood to Heaven, 91 Cymbeline, 311 Dante Alighieri, 214, 407 Davenant, William, 414–16; Gondibert, 414 Davies, Tony, 300n59 Davis, David Brion, 373, 392n5, 395n20 Davis, Natalie Zemon, 278 Declaration against the Dutch, 233 Dee, John, 144 Defoe, Daniel, 394n18 Dell, William, 130 Denham, John, 414, 415 Denmark and the Danes, 287, 305, 309, 324, 377 Dennis, John, 401, 413, 424–6, 432, 440n89; Advancement and Reformation of Modern Poetry, 425; Priestcraft not Christianity, 425; Usefulness of the Stage, 425 Dershowitz, Alan, 294 despotical rule, 375–7, 378, 379, 389– 90 Diggers, 36 Dingley, Robert, 145, 147 Directory for Public Worship, 129 dominion, 359–64; of deity over creation, 361–2, 384; over life and death, 362–3 Donne, John, 222, 243n31 Donnelly, Phillip J., 440n90 Dorislaus, Isaac, 217, 231 Douglas, Archibald, 207 Drayton, Michael: Poly-Olbion, 205, 268n10

452 Index Dryden, John, 150, 280, 424; Absalom and Achitophel, 6, 425; All for Love, 422; Annus Mirabilis, 283, 291–2; The State of Innocence, 424 Du Moulin, Peter, 243n29; Regii sanguinus clamor, 246n69 Dury, John, 125–6 Dutch-mens Pedigree, The, 235 dynastic nationalism, 252, 268n7 Dzelzainis, Martin, 105n17, 109n59, 300n56, 416 East Anglia, 219, 220, 221 Edwards, Thomas: Gangraena, 185 Ehud, 90 Eikon Basilike, 11, 36, 37, 51–60, 68, 125–6 Elfled, 324 Eliot, T.S., 6 Elizabeth I and Elizabethan England, 7, 16n5, 27, 116, 121, 217, 274 Elmer (monk), 325–6 Elton, G.R., 252 Empson, William, 267n2 England / Britain: analogies with Israel, 12, 115–33, 286; analogies with Rome, 54–5, 338–9; Atlantic slave trade, 357–8, 388–9, 392n5; as barbarian, 75–6, 210; as chosen nation, 115–16, 118, 132, 158–9, 209, 212, 250, 273–4, 285; colonization of, 305–6, 327; and continental Europe, 213–14, 221; early modern national identity of, 154–7, 205; as an empire, 154–5, 253, 254, 284; exceptionalism of, 4, 29, 284–5, 288; explicit character of, 275; factions within, 207; hostilities with other states, 206, 207; JM’s doubts about, 283–9; JM’s identification with, 6,

158; JM’s republican conception of, 55, 253–4; as light to other nations, 125, 159; Michael as guardian of, 141, 149, 161; post-dynastic nationalism in, 252; as a Protestant nation, 4, 284; relapse into servility, 29; Roman conquest of, 75–7, 158, 211, 305, 310; sectarianism, 116–17, 207; sinfulness of, 126–7; sovereignty of, 284, 287; Stuart era, 27, 58–9, 62, 134n3, 162, 206, 238–9; as two nations, 127; union with Ireland, 241n12, 275; union with Scotland, 220, 238, 241n12, 275; union with United Provinces (proposed), 219, 221–2, 230, 231, 237–40, 275; union with Wales, 17n15, 155 England’s New Chains Discovered, 34, 47n28 English language: Dutch elements in, 222, 236; Scottish elements in, 224– 5; use in continental Europe, 213, 221 English literature: Dutch translations of, 221; in Eikonoklastes, 56–8; status of in Europe, 213–14; stereotyping of ‘other’ in, 205 English Revolution and Civil Wars, 30, 34–41; and divine election, 285; failure of the Commonwealth, 68, 264, 266, 270n25, 283; ‘the good old cause,’ 38, 41, 48n37, 54, 60, 273, 419, 427; national dimensions of, 175; New Model Army, 86, 88–9, 90–1, 97, 99, 225, 295n5; publishing during, 36, 46–7n22; as a war of truth, 250. See also warfare Escobedo, Andrew, 12, 173–96 ethnic identity and race, 157, 276, 293, 371, 391

Index 453 ethnic stereotypes, 205, 206–9, 219, 370–1 Evans, Arise, 150 Evans, William McKee, 394n17 Evelyn, John, 331, 350n5 Fairfax, Sir Thomas, 39, 95, 229; JM’s sonnet to, 79, 225–6 Fallon, Robert Thomas, 92, 99 False Brother, The, 229 Farr, James, 395n20 fast sermons, 12, 31, 115, 117–28; antiJewish sentiment in, 124–5; enemy defined in, 126–7; incitements to war in, 118, 123–4; as political instruments, 118, 122; structure and texts for, 118 fast sermons, preachers of: Simeon Ash, 124; Robert Baylie, 126; John Bond, 124, 132–3; William Bridge, 123, 125; Cornelius Burgess, 121–2; Jeremiah Burroughs, 129–30; Edmund Calamy, 46n19, 47n24, 122; Francis Cheynell, 126; William Dell, 130; John Dury, 125–6; Thomas Goodwin, 123, 126, 129; John Greene, 124, 127; Alexander Henderson, 123– 4; William Jenkyns, 130; John Lightfoot, 124–5; Stephen Marshall, 46n19, 119–20, 122; Henry Scudder, 126; Obadiah Sedgwicke, 126; Edmund Staunton, 124; John Whincop, 126; John White, 123; Henry Wilkinson, 125; Thomas Wilson, 124 Felltham, Owen, 236; Brief Character of the Low-Countries under the States, 220–1, 235 Fifth Monarchists, 38, 44n5, 85, 285; The Protector (So called,) In Part Unvailed, 87, 245n61

Filmer, Robert, 254–60, 262, 265, 293, 356, 363; on Hobbes, 255–6, 271n29; on JM, 250, 259–60, 293; Locke’s rebuttal of, 363, 379, 396n25; The Originall of Government, 250, 254–60, 271n30 Firth, Charles, 308, 314 Firth, Katharine, 268n9 Fish, Stanley, 277–8, 289, 296n10, 300n53 Fisher, Payne, 78, 103–4n4, 105n20, 246n64 Fixler, Michael, 115 Fleetwood, Charles, 99 Fletcher, John, 317; Bonduca, 313, 316 Fogle, French, 306, 309, 320, 328n2 Fowler, Alastair, 214 Foxe, John, 212, 252–3, 266, 268n9, 285; Acts and Monuments, 115, 177 France and the French, 150, 155, 207, 208, 426; French church in London, 188; Louis XIV, 274, 339 franchise, 101, 111n10 freedom. See liberty or freedom free will, 65–6, 102 Fuller, Thomas: Pisgah-sight of Palestine, 117, 134n6 Gellner, Ernest, 7, 10, 251, 252, 255, 276 gender and gendered issues: and colonization, 310; imagery of Parliament, 53; JM as gender-blind, 307– 8; with luxury, 338; patriarchalism, 254–60, 262, 378; with republicanism, 326–7; sexuality and civility, 311; with slavery vs liberty, 258, 318; with victors and vanquished, 316–17, 328n1. See also women Geneva Bible, 209

454 Index Geneva Convention, 250, 267n3 Geoffrey of Monmouth, 140, 408 Giddens, Anthony, 281–2 Gildas: De Excidio, 284 Gillespie, George, 221, 224 Glimpse of Sion’s Glory, A, 185 globalization and global economy, 278–82, 294–5; knowledge economy, 281; link with grace, 279–82; in the sixteenth century, 279–80 Glorious Revolution (1688–9), 401, 403, 429 Godiva, 308, 324 Goodall, George: ‘Propiatory Sacrifice …,’ 424 ‘good old cause,’ the, 38, 41, 48n37, 54, 60, 273, 419, 427 Goodwin, John, 50n48, 187 Goodwin, Thomas, 123, 126, 129, 185, 187, 188 Gouge, William, 123 government: church, 12, 182, 187; marital or patriarchal analogies for, 254, 257–8, 260; state as, 260–1; vs nation, 255, 291 grace, global capitalism and, 280–2, 292 Grandees, 108n44 Grand Style, 403, 411, 412 Greenblatt, Stephen, 8 Greene, John, 124, 127 Greenfeld, Liah, 32, 255; Nationalism, 26–7, 269n12 Gregerson, Linda, 70n28 Grotius, Hugo, 243n29, 262, 265, 269– 70n16, 289, 293; ‘De jure belli ac pacis,’ 255, 257–8; and Filmer, 250, 255–9; on slavery, 388, 396n27 Guibbory, Achsah, 12, 115–33, 291

Guicciardini, Francesco, 212 Gumbleden, John, 144 Hadfield, Andrew, 11, 27, 51–72 Hall, John, 49n42; A Letter … on the Dissolution of the Late Parliament, 110n66 Haller, William, 115, 134n1, 268n9 Hammond, Henry, 384–5 Hanford, James Holly, 152; John Milton, Englishman, 20n23 Harcourt (patron of Tickell), 428 Hardt, Michael, 294 Harley (patron of Tickell), 428 Harrington, James, 84, 86, 103, 275; on civil religion, 402, 405, 413–15, 417, 419–21; on Cromwell, 11, 80–1; on heroism, 82–3; and JM, 402–3, 405, 413, 419; and Toland, 425–6, 431; works: Aphorisms Political, 420; The Commonwealth of Oceana, 81, 104n12, 106n33, 418; The Prerogative of Popular Government, 420; Valerius and Publicola, 421; The Ways and Means whereby an Equal and Lasting Commonwealth may be Suddenly Introduced, 421 Hartlib, Samuel, 418 Heads of Proposals (1647), 27 Hebrew law, 280–2 Heimbach, Peter, 3, 159, 160, 215, 282 Helgerson, Richard, 7, 8, 27, 270, 284, 332; Forms of Nationhood, 16n5, 252– 4, 266, 268–9nn10–11 Henderson, Alexander, 123–4 Henrietta Maria, queen, 409, 414, 416 Henry VIII, 253, 273, 284 heroic poetry, 401–2, 405, 414–15, 422–3

Index 455 Herzfeld, Michael, 175, 176, 186, 192, 193 Heywood, Thomas: Hierarchie of the Blessed Angels, 146 hierarchies: of angels, 142; of gender, 259, 260; of Presbyterianism, 183, 187; of servitude, 360, 364–73, 382 Hill, Christopher, 8, 115, 118, 306 Hinton, R.W.K., 396n25 Hiscock, Andrew, 271n25 Hobbes, Thomas: anticlerical views, 414, 415, 425; on consent and voluntarism, 255–6, 265, 272n30; on dominion and power, 376, 378, 383; Leviathan, 252–3, 255, 264–5; on nation vs state, 252–3, 254, 255– 6, 293 Hobsbawm, E.J., 7, 252, 255; Nations and Nationalism since 1780, 251 Holinshed, Raphael, 308, 314; Chronicles, 314 Holland. See United Provinces of the Netherlands Honeygosky, Stephen R., 181 Hooker, Edward Niles, 440n89 Hooker, Richard, 177, 252–3, 266, 268n10; Lawes of Ecclesiasticall Politie, 117 Horace, 333, 334, 407–8, 424 Howard, Jean, 8 Hudson, Samuel, 182, 183, 187, 189 Hughes, George: Analytical Exposition of Genesis, 148 Humble Petition and Advice, 145, 414, 419 Humble Proposals, 418 Hutchinson, John, 273 Hutchinson, Lucy, 273–4, 275, 276, 282

Huygens, Constantijn: ‘De uijtlandighe herder,’ 235; epitaph for Welwood, 222, 236; Korenbloemen, 243n31 Ignatieff, Michael, 295; Blood and Belonging, 271n26 implicit faith, 289–90 Independents, 38, 118, 128–31, 183, 187, 226, 230, 233 individual(s): despotical or slave– master relationships, 289–90, 376–7; and globalization, 282, 294; guardian angels of, 145–6; humans vs animals, 360, 362–3; individual change vs political change, 60–1; liberty and justice for, 102–3; liberty within, 99–100; luxury and intemperance of, 332, 344, 350; power over own life and death, 383–4; and the public good, 290–1; rights of, 256; self-mastery, 77–8; tyrants’ hunting of humans, 359– 60; vs groups, 378–9; vs nation, 77–9. See also people, the international law: consent as basis for, 292–3; and globalization, 294; and nationalism, 249–51, 260–6, 293; and voluntarism, 256–7 international perspective (of JM), 39– 40, 158–9, 194–5, 209–10, 213–14 international Protestantism, 13, 115, 119, 209–10, 222, 406 invisible church, 176–7, 181, 285, 286; intimacy of, 185, 187, 191. See also visible church invisible nation, 187–96 Ireland and the Irish: Britons compared to, 306; and Catholicism,

456 Index 161, 208; English colonization of, 155; as ‘other,’ 154–5; portrayed in Eikonoklastes, 154, 288; portrayed in Observations, 74–5, 154–6, 161, 208, 223, 227, 283, 306; portrayed in Tenure, 155; Rebellion (1641), 53–4, 74–5, 223, 226, 227–8, 288; stereotypes of, 208, 211; Ulster Presbyterians (Belfast Presbytery), 208, 227–8, 306; union with England, 241n12, 275 Ireton, Henry, 85, 108n43, 176 Italy, 149, 209, 409 Jablonski, Steven, 393n13 James I and VI, 8, 53, 62, 116, 222, 406; Basilikon Doron, 53, 58, 221 James II and VII, 217, 376 Jefferson, Thomas: Declaration of Independence, 300n59 Jenkyns, William, 130 Jerome, St, 145 Jews and Judaism: and archangel Michael, 146, 148, 149–50, 161; Babylonian exile, 120–2, 367; as chosen nation, 116, 391; in England, 116, 134n3; and English church, 117, 125; enslavement of, 391, 397n32, 429–30; Hebrew law, 280–2; as a ‘national church,’ 178, 188, 197n18; and national luxury, 339; and Old Testament history, 118–19, 120–1; as ‘other,’ 118, 125; portrayed in fast sermons, 124–5; portrayed in Merchant of Venice, 280–2; portrayed in ‘New Forcers of Conscience,’ 131; Protestant views of, 119. See also Old Testament Johnson, Samuel, 151–2, 172n99; Life of Milton, 266

Johnson, Thomas, 416, 437n54 Jones, Inigo, 62 Jonson, Ben, 62, 214; Catiline, His Conspiracy, 56 Joyce, James: Ulysses, 322 Julia, Roman empress, 323 Juvenal, 333, 334, 343, 345, 352n25 Kahn, Coppélia: Roman Shakespeare, 321 Kahn, Victoria, 8, 13, 118, 122, 249– 66, 292 Keats, John, 402 Kelsey, Sean, 271n26 Kerrigan, John, 13, 217–40 Kidd, Colin, 44n7, 204–6, 274–6; British Identities before Nationalism, 268n7 King, Edward, 139–40, 180, 240n7, 407 King, William: Milton’s Epistle to Pollio, 423 Kircher, Athanasius, 144 Kirk party, 217–18, 224, 226 Knapp, Charles, 167n52 Knight, G. Wilson, 6 Knoppers, Laura Lunger, 14–15, 91, 98, 331–50; Constructing Cromwell, 103–4n4 knowledge economy, 281 Knox, John, 308, 315 Kohn, Hans, 158 Kumar, Krishan, 268n7 Labadie, Jean de, 188 Lake, Peter, 128 Lambert, John, 39, 92, 99 Laslett, Peter, 374, 375–6, 395n21 Laud, Archbishop William, and the Laudian church: and angel theology,

Index 457 143; attacked in Of Reformation, 21n31, 28–30, 32, 335, 337; and ceremonialism, 117, 125; identified with Babylon, 120, 127; identified with Samaritans, 126; link with Presbyterians, 131; temple rebuilding trope, 128; visible church, 182 law: common, 252; consent issues with, 292–3; and globalization, 294–5; Hebrew, 280–2; international, 249–51, 256–7, 260–6, 292–3, 294; of nations, 292–3; of nature (natural law), 256–7, 259, 362, 364, 383, 384, 389–90; of reason, 256–7; regarding slavery, 362, 364, 374, 377–8, 387–90; tyranny as violation of, 374; vs justice, 294 Lawrence, Edward, 145 Lawrence, Henry, 147; Of Our Communion and Warre with Angels, 145 Leadbeater, Charles, 281 Leavis, F.R., 6 Le Comte, Edward, 315 Leigh, Richard: The Transproser Rehears’d, 243n31 Levellers, 34–5, 47n28, 91, 183, 259; and Cromwell, 11, 44n5, 85, 88 Lewalski, Barbara Kiefer, 8, 59, 272n32 liberty or freedom: civil, 378–9; community as, 291; conceptions of in Paradise Lost, 63–7; conceptions of in Readie and Easie Way, 10, 78–80, 99–100, 101–2; of conscience, 291, 404, 420, 421–2; and consent, 265–6; defence of, 83, 98; and franchise, 101; free will, 65–6, 102; inner or inward, 84, 99–100; inviolability of, 361; inward, 365–6, 368–9; JM’s language of, 409; of language, 404;

Locke’s concept of, 378–9; loss of as God’s judgment, 102; loss of with the Fall, 364–5, 369; moral redefinition of, 100–1; in nationalist discourse, 358; of nations, 84; outward, 365–6, 368, 370; religious freedom, 30, 129–33, 156, 210, 233–4; responsibilities of, 76–8; of speech, 33; violence as expression of, 90; vs selfish ambition, 83; vs slavery, 77–8, 96–7, 99–101, 318, 374, 380–1 Licensing Order (1643), 138n43 Lieb, Michael, 288 Lightfoot, John, 124–5 Lilburne, John, 35, 47n28, 48n30, 108n44 Lilly, William, 147 Lipking, Lawrence, 9, 12, 154, 180–1 literary criticism, relevance of, 27, 277–9, 293, 294 Livy, 333, 334 Locke, John, 214, 239, 419, 425; defence of slavery, 373–91; on Filmer, 363, 379, 396n25; interpreting language of, 376, 378; on political or figurative slavery, 356, 358, 380–1; Two Treatises of Government, 15, 356, 363, 373–91 Loewenstein, David, 8, 10–11, 16n4, 25–43, 98, 108n44, 136n20, 188, 285 Lom, Iain, 217–18 Long Parliament. See Parliament Louis XIV, 274, 339 Love, Christopher, 143 Lucan: Pharsalia, 75, 139–40 Luther, Martin, 143, 178 Luxon, Thomas, 135n11 luxury and intemperance, 331–2; consuming and consumed nation,

458 Index 331, 344, 349; and corruption or weakness, 100, 335–6, 350; extravagant banquets, 333–4, 335–7, 340, 341–4, 345–6; as foreign, 335; gender issues with, 338; of individuals, 332, 350; of nations, 332, 340, 349–50; and slavery, 347–9; trade and consumer economy, 332, 350 Mac Colla, Alasdair, 217, 224 Machiavelli, Niccolò, 88, 106n33, 212, 425; Discourses, 84 ‘majesty of a free people,’ 10, 52, 78, 287 Maley, Willy, 14, 305–27 Mallet, David, 401, 403 Mandeville, Bernard, 350 Manley, Thomas: Veni; Vidi; Vici, 104n4, 246n64 Marlborough, first duke of, John Churchill, 424, 427, 429 marriage, 257–8, 260–6, 313 Marshall, Stephen, 46n19, 119–20, 122 Martin, Catherine Gimelli, 199n31, 271n29 Martyr, Peter, 147 Marvell, Andrew, 11, 49n42, 207–8, 231, 235, 243n29, 414; Account of the Growth of Popery, and Arbitrary Government, 221, 239; ‘The Character of Holland,’ 75, 207, 219, 223, 234–8; The First Anniversary of the Government, 81–2, 83, 91, 95, 103, 150–1, 245n61; ‘An Horation Ode upon Cromwell’s Return from Ireland,’ 73–4, 79, 80–1, 97, 214, 219, 223, 229–30; ‘In Legationem Domini Olivieri St John ad Provincias Foederatus,’ 231; ‘The Last Instructions to

a Painter’ (attrib.), 207; ‘The Loyal Scot,’ 207, 223, 229; ‘Upon Appleton House,’ 95 Mary, queen of England, 424 mass media, 27, 278 Masson, David, 289, 438n63 McEachern, Claire, 8, 27 Mercurius Politicus, 106n29, 207, 220, 228, 236 Metcalfe, Theophilus, 401, 403, 429– 30, 441n113 Michael, St, the archangel: guardian of Britain, 141, 149, 161; guardian of Christian church, 149–50, 153; and the Jews, 146, 148, 149–50, 161; in ‘Lycidas,’ 140–2, 149, 153, 160–2, 181; in Paradise Lost, 82, 102, 344, 361; in Paradise Regained, 148 Middleton, Sir Thomas, 247n83 Middleton, Thomas (1580–1627), 205 Mikalachki, Jodi, 308, 314, 320; The Legacy of Boadicea, 313 Milner, Andrew, 8 Milton, John: as an expatriot, 43, 282–3, 286, 404; conception of patria, 15, 43, 159, 215, 282, 404; as a controversialist, 5, 6, 8, 10, 14, 26, 35, 41; diplomatic work, 230–1; education, 223; elitism, 259–60; as a humanist intellectual, 213–14, 225, 417, 432n3; imprisonment, 50n48; international perspective, 39–40, 158–9, 194–5, 209–10, 213–14; millenarianism, 28–9, 283–5, 288–9; patriotism, 158–9, 163, 222, 282–9, 406; republicanism, 11, 55, 60–8, 253–4, 291; translations by: Council of State documents, 230; Horace, 407–8; Letters Patents (1674), 299n45; psalms, 225, 408; in verse,

Index 459 407–8; as a writer: biblical and national outlines, 409–10; dramatic works, 410–11; for the nation within the nation, 412; for the personal and public, 278; poetry vs political prose, 277–9 Milton, John, works: – ‘Ad Leonoram,’ 149 – Ad Patrem, 410 – ‘L’Allegro,’ 406 – Animadversions, 285, 286, 419 – The Apology for Smectymnuus, 407 – Areopagitica: blank verse translations in, 408; Catholic stereotypes in, 209; on church congregations, 190; compared with Of True Religion, 290–1; concept of nation in, 6, 30–3, 155, 192–4, 253–4, 263, 286, 404; in context of fast sermons, 132; Dryden’s image from, 291–2; on free speech, 33; patriotism in, 158– 9, 222; and reading culture, 36; on religious liberty, 131–3, 156, 210; temple rebuilding trope in, 31–3, 117, 131–3; ‘unity of spirit,’ 12–13, 26, 190–1 – ‘A Book was writ,’ 224–5, 234 – Cabinet-Council, 416, 437n16 – Christian Doctrine (De Doctrina Christiana), 142, 148–9, 187, 188, 190, 191 – Comus (A Masque Presented at Ludlow Castle), 37, 62–3, 99, 233, 335, 345, 350; blank verse in, 406, 407, 411 – Defence of the English People (Defensio Prima): Addison on, 427; burning of, 50n48; Charles I portrayed in, 336–7, 404; Dutch context for, 231; Dutch translation, 231; Filmer

–

– –

– – – –

–

on, 255, 259; JM’s English identification in, 214, 243n29; on luxury, 336–7; on power of the people, 35, 372; publication and revisions of, 416–17; on resistance to tyranny, 257, 367; on slavery, 356–7, 371–2 (see also Second Defence of the English People) ‘Digression’ (Character of the Long Parliament), 76, 93, 100, 104n10, 105n14, 111n90, 298n31, 306 The Doctrine and Discipline of Divorce, 132, 209, 221, 257, 262, 313 Eikonoklastes, 11, 51–68, 125, 253; burning of, 50n48; Charles I portrayed in, 36–7, 51–2, 231, 270n18, 362; commission for, 51; Irish portrayed in, 154, 288; links with Paradise Lost, 60–8; literary citations in, 56–7 Elegy 3 (Elegia Tertia), 406 Elegy 4 (Elegia Quarta). ‘To His Tutor, Thomas Young,’ 223, 406 ‘Epitaphium Damonis,’ 198n22, 431 Hirelings (Considerations touching the Likeliest Means to Remove Hirelings out of the Church), 92, 188, 419, 420–1, 421, 425, 437 History of Britain, 305–27, 404, 416; Anglo-Saxons portrayed in, 158, 211–12, 307; banquet in, 342; blank verse translations in, 408; on Boadicea, 14, 307; on Britons, 75–7, 158, 211–12, 305, 310, 320; on Brutus, 140, 158, 430–1; compared to Defences, 306–7; compared to Observations, 306; compared to Paradise Lost, 307, 310; ‘Digression,’ 76, 93, 100, 104n10, 105n14, 111n90,

460 Index

– – – – – –

–

– – –

298n31, 306; JM’s anxieties about England in, 37–8, 283, 306–7; JM’s view of history, 13, 80, 211–13; Norman Conquest ending, 30, 53, 306, 324, 327; as post-colonial, 327; as response to English Revolution, 38; on Roman conquest, 75–7, 305; studies of, 306–7; women in, 14, 307–12, 323–5 Ignavus satrapam, 406 ‘Lawrence of virtuous father virtuous son,’ 145 A Letter from Amsterdam, to a Friend in England, 239–40, 419 Letter to Carlo Dati, 293–4 Letter to John Baptista Manso (Mansus), 158, 198n22, 431 ‘Lycidas,’ 9, 139–42, 409, 410; angel(s) in, 140–2, 149, 151, 152, 153, 160–2, 181; anticlericalism, 12, 179– 81; Christian vs classical imagery, 151–2; corrections on draft for, 139, 161; interpretation of, 140, 163n4; landscape, 161–2, 223; St Peter’s role in, 162, 180; Samuel Johnson’s critique of, 151–2; state-nation implications in, 180, 194; versification, 406–7, 412 The Observations upon the Articles of the Peace, 54, 227–8, 229, 314; Irish portrayed in, 74–5, 154–6, 161, 208, 223, 227, 283, 306 Ode to John Rouse (Ad Joannem Rousium), 408 Of Prelatical Episcopacy, 419 Of Reformation Touching ChurchDiscipline in England, 404, 419; Anglo-Scoto-Dutch context for, 223, 231, 239–40; anti-Laudianism in, 21n31, 28–30, 32, 335, 337; blank

–

– –

–

verse translation in, 407; contradictions in, 28–30; England portrayed in, 4, 35, 286, 287; on luxury, 335–6; as millenarian, 188, 285; on slavery, 372–3 Of True Religion, 15, 249, 287, 293, 332, 404, 413; on Catholicism, 263, 289–91, 293, 425 ‘On the Lord General Fairfax and the Siege of Colchester,’ 79, 225–6 ‘On the New Forcers of Conscience under the Long Parliament,’ 105n14, 117, 130–1 Paradise Lost: banquets in, 333, 340, 341–4; Barrow’s poem in praise of, 274; compared with History of Britain, 307, 310; conceptions of liberty in, 63–7, 78, 421–2; on dominion, 362–3; election through merit, 65– 6, 260; Fall of Adam and Eve, 333, 340, 341–3, 362–3; links with Eikonoklastes, 60–8; Michael’s role in, 82, 102, 344, 361; on military conquerors, 82; nakedness of Adam and Eve, 310, 341; as a nationalist poem, 6, 15, 401, 403; Nimrod’s tyranny, 358–61, 362, 364, 366, 367, 369, 421; Noah’s curse on Canaan (descendents of Ham), 361–2, 364, 368–9, 370, 388, 391; Pandemonium and the fallen angels, 61–5; preechoes of in earlier works, 226; publication of, 283, 421–2; readings of: by Addison, 427; by Johnson, 151; by Roscommon, 423; on resistance to subjection, 360; Satan as Charles I, 223, 226; Satan as Cromwellian, 60; Satan as Richard III, 64; servitude hierarchy in, 360, 364–73, 382; Son as hero, 65–7; sublimity

Index 461

–

– –

– –

–

of, 6, 15, 401, 432; tropes of Cowley’s Davideis in, 416; ‘The Verse,’ 401, 402, 411–12, 422; versification of, 408–9, 411–12, 422, 423–4; on visual vs verbal arts, 62–3, 67 Paradise Regained: angel theology in, 142, 148; on military conquerors, 82–3, 412; millenarian visions in, 284; Satan’s temptation of the Son, 66–7, 83, 345–6; Son as republican hero, 65–7 ‘Quid expedivit Salmasio,’ 426 The Readie and Easie Way to Establish a Free Commonwealth, 41–3, 210, 404; and ‘Digression,’ 105n14; on liberty, 10, 78–80, 99–100, 101–2; on luxury, 15, 338–9, 340; on majority vs minority rule, 42–3, 78, 101–2, 107n35, 259–61; as response to Harrington, 421; on Rump Parliament, 92–3, 238; Scoto-Dutch context for, 78, 238; Vane’s role in, 418 The Reason of Church-Government, 4, 125, 214, 223–4, 340, 407, 435n29 Samson Agonistes, 13, 249–50, 260– 6, 412; on liberty, 89, 100; on luxury, 347–9; on nation, 257, 260–6; not intended for theatre, 410; relativism in, 263, 272n33; versification of, 408; on wisdom, 79 Second Defence of the English People (Pro Populo Anglicano Defensio Secunda): biblical citations in, 80; Charles I portrayed in, 55; Cromwell portrayed in, 40, 49n42, 73–4, 91–103; Dutch context for, 231–2; on free minority vs unfree majority, 42–3; on individual justice and liberty, 102–3; JM on his writing in,

39, 266; Lawrence and Montague praised in, 145; on luxury, 336, 337–8; Protectorate portrayed in, 39–40, 94, 95–6; on self-mastery, 77–8; vision of England in, 38–40, 286 (see also Defence of the English People) – ‘Sixth Prolusion,’ 406 – The Tenure of Kings and Magistrates: blank verse translations in, 408; on bloodshed and war, 35, 264; Charles I portrayed in, 87–8, 156; on consent, 292; on national intimacy, 194–5; national stereotypes in, 155, 287; on power of rulers, 97, 257; on Presbyterians, 35, 120, 212, 226–7; on resistance, 257; on slavery vs freedom, 77 – Tetrachordon, 407 – ‘To Sir Henry Vane the Younger,’ 79, 219, 233–4, 416 – ‘To the Lord General Cromwell,’ 73, 74, 79, 98, 219, 232–3, 416 – A Treatise of Civil Power, 89, 188, 189, 418, 425, 437n52 minority: free, vs unfree majority, 42, 261; God’s people as, 127–8; vs majority rights, 42–3, 60, 68, 259–60 Mollenkott, Virginia R., 272n32 monarchy: banquet as critique of, 335–6; divine right, 53, 254, 358, 359; elective, 298n31; female rulers, 307, 320; and idolatry, 96; nation as jurisdiction of, 51–9, 162; regicide, 35–6, 90. See also absolute power and absolutism Monck, General George, 49–50n44, 295n5 monks, 325–6

462 Index Montagu, Richard, 143 Montague, Edward, 145 Montrose, earl of, James Graham, 207, 217–19, 223, 224, 226, 228, 229 More, Alexander (Morus), 231 Morgan, Edmund S., 392n5 Morley, Thomas: Remonstrance of the Barbarous Cruelties and Bloudy Murders Committed by the Irish Rebels, 208 Morrill, John, 108n47, 307 multiculturalism, 293 Muslims, 116, 370 Mylius, Herman, 214 Nashe, Thomas, 205 nation(s): category for literary analysis, 7–10, 277–9; as community, 5, 7, 12–13, 156–7, 174–5, 290–1, 332; Congregationalists’ conception of, 176, 186–7; as cultural construct vs institution, 174–5; despotical rule over, 376–7; dialogic, 292–3, 295; eighteenth-century concept of, 251; as ethnicity, 276; as gendered, 14–15, 253, 307; guardian angels of, 147; hostility toward aliens, 156; inner freedom of, 84; internal vs external, 174–5; intimacy of, 175, 192, 194–6; invisible, 187–96; JM’s conception of, 20n28, 176, 192–6, 250, 260–1, 373–91; as king’s jurisdiction, 51–9, 162; language associated with, 27–8; and luxury, 331, 332, 337–9, 340, 344, 349–50; as mediator between universal and parish church, 185; and neighbourliness, 155–6; as a polity, 276; portrayed in Eikonoklastes and Eikon Basilike, 51–3; power of the people

in, 10, 30, 35, 52, 78, 287; racialized meanings of, 371; relationship to the state, 260–2; role of the people (citizens), 51–9, 162, 260–1, 344; slavery of, 366–7, 369–73; as a sovereign people, 255; as the state, 5, 197n9; visible, 173–4, 195–6; vs governments, 291; vs individuals, 77–9; vs kingdom or realm, 20n28, 239, 291 national church: as anti-Reformation, 184; civil religion, 401, 402–3, 413– 14, 415–16, 426, 428; Congregationalist view of, 176, 186–7; as England’s temple, 128–9; government of, 187; individual responsibility for, 290; JM’s view of, 188, 413–14, 419, 421; Judaism as, 178, 188, 197n18; and monarchy, 414–15, 415; in post-Reformation England, 116–17; as temple of Jerusalem, 128–9; tithes, 36, 47n27, 233, 419; and universal church, 183–4, 185; visible church as, 177–8, 285. See also Church of England national consciousness, 268n7 national identity: and angel theology, 154–7, 163; citizen’s right to articulate, 52; implied by natural law, 259; and legitimacy of institutions, 206; and the ‘other,’ 154–7, 160; and religion, 11–12, 25; role of public debate in, 205–6; vs patriotism, 157 national intimacy, 194–6 nationalism: definitions of, 26, 251, 275–6; antinomy of, 251, 260–6; category for literary analysis, 7–10, 252–4, 277–9; civic or positive, 14, 277, 282, 289, 293, 295; dynastic,

Index 463 268n7; as an early modern phenomenon, 7, 27, 44n7, 154–7, 160, 205, 252, 276; ethnic, 157; failure of, 264; and international law, 249–51, 260–6, 292–3; as a modern phenomenon, 7, 17n15, 251; as a New World phenomenon, 252; positive or civic, 14, 282, 293, 295; postdynastic, 252; priority of nation’s interests and values, 275–6; Protestant, 17n15, 26, 27–8, 251–2, 284, 289, 291, 416 nationalism of JM, 1–5; as anguished or disappointed, 29, 250, 266; changes in, 50n50, 158, 222, 282–9, 404; contexts of, 156–7; critical discussions of, 9–10; dynamic, 40–1; explicit vs implicit, 286; Janus-faced, 9, 156–7, 287–8, 332; masculine, 307 nationalist poetry, 403 national spirit, 181 nation-state: based on power of the people, 259–60; JM’s hybrid conception of, 252–4, 253; use of term, 174, 175–6, 197n9; vs dynastic kingdom, 251–2; vs globalization, 279. See also state natural law. See law Necessary Representation, 227 Nedham, Marchamont, 11, 49n42, 106n29, 205, 207, 419, 420; The Excellence of a Free-State, 80, 84–5, 100, 106nn29, 33; A True State of the Case of the Commonwealth, 81, 93–4, 96 Negri, Antonio, 294 Nero, 55, 312, 321, 416; extravagant court of, 334, 336, 340, 342, 343, 345, 353n32 Netherlands. See United Provinces of the Netherlands

Newcomb, Thomas, 416, 418, 421, 437n54 new historicism, 8, 279 New Model Army, 86, 88–9, 90–1, 97, 99, 225, 295n5 New Testament, 118, 264, 280–2 Nicholas, Constance, 309, 320 Norbrook, David, 7–8, 277, 307 Norman Conquest, 53, 267n2, 305, 307; History of Britain ending with, 306, 324, 327 Nuttall, Geoffrey F., 187 Nyquist, Mary, 15, 21n31, 270n19, 326–7, 355n50, 356–91 Old Testament: ethic of violence and retribution, 264, 288; fast sermon texts from, 118; Hebrew law, 280–2; historical content of, 118–19, 120–1; Israel/England analogies, 12, 115–33, 286. See also Jews and Judaism – Daniel, 142, 147, 148, 284, 285 – Ezra, 121, 122, 123, 124 – Genesis: angels, 143, 148; Nimrod, 358–61, 362, 364, 366, 367, 369, 421; Noah’s curse on Canaan (descendents of Ham), 361–2, 364, 368–9, 370, 388, 391 – Haggai, 120 – Isaiah, 116, 124, 125, 126, 128, 226 – Judges: Gibeah and the Levite’s concubine, 288, 340; Jael and Sisera, 263 – Nehemiah, 120, 121, 122, 123–4, 125, 126, 129 – Numbers: Moabitides or Pheneas, 410, 429 – Solomon, 116, 119, 120 – Zechariah, 120, 123, 124, 125, 127

464 Index O’Neill, Owen Roe, 228 Orange, Willem van, and the Orangeists, 217, 220, 230, 247n83 ‘other,’ the: Jews as, 118, 125; JM’s concept of, 154; and national identity, 154–7, 160, 206; state as, 176, 186; stereotyping of, 205 Overton, Richard, 47n28, 86, 99, 108n43; An Arrow against All Tyrants, 90; The Hunting of Foxes, 85, 86, 108n44 Overton, Robert, 39 Owen, John, 159, 183, 184, 185–6, 187, 188, 189, 193 Pacuvius, 159 Pagden, Anthony, 395n21 Palmer, Herbert, 132 Parliament: dissolutions of, 39, 42, 49n44, 92–4; fast sermons for, 12, 31, 115, 117–28, 132; Long, 42, 111n90, 209; Nominated, 93–4, 97; political ambiguities of, 35–6; as power of the people, 52–3; Pride’s Purge, 34, 35, 47n26; religious obligations of, 122; restoration of (1659), 91–4, 238, 438n66; Rump, 34–6, 47n27, 91–4, 97, 241n12, 259; and sectarianism, 47n27 Pateman, Carole, 270n19 patria (JM’s conception of), 15, 43, 159, 215, 282, 404 patriarchalism, 254–60, 262, 378 Patrick, John: Reflexions Upon the Devotions of the Roman Church, 148 patriotism: biblical inspiration of, 273–4; of JM, 158–9, 163, 222, 282– 9, 406; vs national identity, 157 Patterson, Annabel, 247n80 Patterson, W.B., 134n6

Pauw, Adrian, 231 peace: of Utrecht, 428; ‘warfare of,’ 103 penal servitude, 366, 374, 382–3 people, the: ‘majesty of a free people,’ 10, 52, 78, 287; and national luxury, 337–9; nation as, 51–9, 260– 1; power of, 30, 35, 52–3, 259–60; right of resistance and self-determination, 253, 256–7, 259, 375, 391; sovereignty of, 287, 289, 372. See also individual(s) Petrarch (Francesco Petrarca), 152 Petronius, 334, 336, 340, 342; Satyricon, 333 Philaras, Leonard, 432n3 Philip, M. Nourbese, 395n20 Phillips, Edward, 409, 413, 434–5n29 Phillips, John, 240n6, 422–3, 430; Blenheim, 422; Cyder, 422; Splendid Shilling, 422 Pigman, G.W., III, 163n4 Pincus, Steven, 433n7 Pindaric style, 407, 424 Pitt, William ‘the Younger,’ 295 Pocock, J.G.A., 420 Poland, 298n31 political criticism, 277–9 political power, 377–8, 379 political prose, vs poetry, 277–9 polytheism, 260, 263, 265 Pope, Alexander: Brutus, 404, 428, 430–1; Windsor-Forest, 428 Pordage, John, 143 power: of conquerors and slavemasters, 378; over life and death, 362–3, 375–7, 381–5, 389–91; of the people, 30, 35, 52–3, 259–60; private or familial, 378, 379, 389–90 Presbyterians: fast sermons by, 126, 128; hierarchy of, 183, 187; JM

Index 465 influenced by, 223–5; JM’s views of, 35, 208; and Laudian church, 131; and Orangeists, 230; publishing in United Provinces, 221; and sectarianism, 30, 129, 133; temple rebuilding trope, 30, 123, 128; in Ulster (Belfast Presbytery ), 208, 227–8, 306; universal church, 184–5; visible church, 181; in Westminster Assembly, 118 Pride’s Purge, 34, 35, 47n26 priestcraft, 414, 415, 425, 430 Prince, F.T., 408–9 Prince, Thomas, 47n28 print capitalism, 251–2 Protectorate: Cromwell’s role in, 60, 81–2, 95, 413–14; portrayed in Second Defence, 39–40, 94, 95–6; Protectoral culture, 413–14; sectarian challenges to, 25; ‘short but scandalous night of interruption,’ 92, 419, 438, 438n66. See also Commonwealth Protector (So called,) In Part Unvailed, The, 87, 88 Protestantism: angel theology, 142–8, 162; and Anglo-Dutch union, 222; authentic unity of, 176–7; church membership, 177; Geneva Bible, 209; in History of Britain, 212; as international, 13, 115, 119, 209–10, 222, 406; respectability of, 207; role of community, 290–1; sectarianism, 25–6, 30, 33, 116–17, 129–31, 133, 207, 413; and topos of tyranny and slavery, 357; visible and invisible church, 176–7; vs Roman Catholicism, 290–1. See also specific denominations (Congregationalists, Puritans, etc.)

pseudo-Dionysius, 149; The Celestial Harmony, 146 Puritans: and Church of England, 177–8, 179; and church reformation, 124; divisions among, 128, 129–30; exile of, 122; fast sermons by, 119, 124, 126, 128; stereotypes of, 206; visible and invisible church, 181 Putney debates, 86, 101 Quakers, 38, 44n5, 207, 354n48 Quilligan, Maureen, 394n13 Quint, David: Epic and Empire, 75 Rackin, Phyllis, 8 Radzinowicz, Mary Ann, 271n25 Rainsborough, Thomas, 101 Raleigh, Walter, 416, 417 Ralston Saul, John, 279, 282, 287–8, 291, 293, 295, 297n5 Ranters, 44n5, 207 Raymond, Joad, 12, 139–63 realm, 20n28, 27, 287, 291 Reformation, 123, 131, 150; and angel theology, 142; English, 184, 209, 210 regicide or tyrannicide, 35–6, 90 relativism, cultural, 263, 272n33, 293–4 religious freedom, 30, 129–33, 156, 210, 233–4 Renan, Ernest, 276 resistance: right of, 256–7, 259, 367, 375, 391; and slavery, 356–8, 369, 377–8; theorists of, 58, 357, 377, 383, 384, 391 Restoration: JM’s views of, 9–10, 41–3, 59–60, 158, 265–6, 283–5; JM’s writing during, 43, 60, 84, 160, 213,

466 Index 266, 285; as a majority decision, 42–3, 60, 68. See also Charles II Richardson, Jonathan, 412 right(s): divine, of monarchy, 53, 254, 358, 359; of individuals, 256; minority vs majority, 42–3, 60, 68, 259–60; of resistance and selfdetermination, 253, 256–7, 259, 375, 391; of self-preservation, 265, 381, 383 Roman Catholic church: angel theology, 142, 144, 146, 148; Declaration of Indulgence, 287; in England, 116, 293; England’s separation from, 284–5, 287, 289–91; in Ireland, 161, 208; monks, 325–6; stereotypes of, 208–9; as visible church, 177–8; vs Protestantism, 290–1 Romans and Roman rule: as analogy for England, 338–9; banquets and extravagance, 332–4, 335–7, 341, 342–3, 345–6, 347–8; Boadicea’s victory over, 316; as civilized, 311; collapse of republic, 332, 335–7; conquest of Britain, 75–7, 158, 211, 305, 310; republic vs Imperial Rome, 54–5, 67–8, 80, 82, 84, 100; slavery in, 371, 397n28 Rosacrucians, 144 Roscommon, fourth earl of, Wentworth Dillon, 403, 422–4; ‘Essay on blanc verse … ,’ 424; Essay on Translated Verse, 422; Horaces’s Art of Poetry (trans.), 424 Rosenblatt, Jason, 131, 137–8n34 Rouse, John, 408 Rowland, John, 231 ‘Rule Britannia,’ 322, 403 Rump Parliament. See Parliament

Sadducism, 143 Said, Edward, 154 St John, Oliver, 231, 233, 234 St Michael’s Mount (Land’s End), 141, 148, 149, 180 Salkeld, John, 145; A Treatise of Angels, 144 Salmasius, Claudius, 55, 231, 336–7, 356–7, 367, 371–2, 426 Sandelands, Andrew, 218–19, 223, 236, 240nn6–7 Sannazaro, Jacopo, 153 Sauer, Elizabeth, 20n22, 300n56, 433n10 Saxons, 158, 211, 305, 306–7, 307, 325 Scotland, 223–8; Anglo-Scoto-Dutch triangle, 219–40; British nationalistic poetry by Scots, 403–4; and Charles I, 54, 206, 220, 225, 231; colonization of, 155, 305; coronation of Charles II in, 228–9; Cromwell’s campaigns in, 74–5, 78, 229, 230, 232–3, 275; as factionalized, 207, 219; as a foreign country, 275; JM’s view of, 54, 74–5, 223–8; links with United Provinces, 221, 230; and Marvell’s ‘Horation Ode,’ 229–30; Mary Stuart, 57–8; Montrose’s campaign in, 217–18; role in English Civil Wars, 206, 207, 229; Scottish elements in English language, 224–5; Scottish influences on JM, 223–5; stereotypes of, 206, 211, 225, 230, 328n1; union with England, 220, 238, 241n12, 275 Scott, Jonathan, 175–6 Scott, Thomas, 242n23 Scottish Covenant. See Solemn League and Covenant Scudder, Henry, 126

Index 467 Second Part of England’s New-Chaines Discovered, The, 34, 47n28, 48n29 sectarianism, 25–6, 30, 33, 116–17, 129–31, 133, 207, 413 Sedgwicke, Obadiah, 126 Selden, John, 250, 289 Seneca, 341, 396n27, 408 servitude: bodily, 367–71; ethicospiritual, 365, 369–70; hierarchies of, 360, 364–73, 382; of nations, 366–7, 369–70; and original sin, 364–8; penal, 366, 374, 382–3; tyranny as, 365–7. See also slavery Sexburga, 323 Sexby, Edward, 86, 87–90; Killing Noe Murder, 87 Shaftesbury, first earl of, Anthony Ashley Cooper, 6 Shakespeare, William, 134n3, 213, 268n10, 273, 275, 294; blank verse, 406, 422; Coriolanus, 316; The Merchant of Venice, 280–2; Richard II, 27; Richard III, 56, 64; Taming of the Shrew, 213 Shapiro, James, 125, 134n3 Shelley, Percy Bysshe, 402 Shoulson, Jeffrey S., 135n11 Shuger, Deborah K., 135n11 Sidney, Philip, 57 Sikes, George, 421, 437n60 Skinner, Cyriack, 413 Skinner, Quentin, 50n46 slavery, 15, 356–91, 367–71; Aristotle’s defence of, 359–60, 361–2; Atlantic slave trade, 357–8, 388–9, 392n5; chattel, 356, 357–62; and colonialism, 327, 358, 369, 374; and despotical power, 375–7, 379; figurative or political, 356–8, 357, 360, 364, 380–1, 392n4; gendered issues

with, 258, 318; institutional, 361, 369–70, 372, 373, 386, 389; JM’s views of, 77–8, 356–7, 360, 368, 371–3; legislation regarding, 362, 364, 374, 377–8, 387–90; link with luxury and intemperance, 347–9; link with shame or insult, 371; link with sin, 322; link with suicide or capital punishment, 383–5, 388, 390; link with unspecified offence, 385, 387–9; link with warfare or conquest, 360, 377, 378, 386, 388–9; Locke’s defence of, 373–91; of nations, 366–7, 369–73; natural, 361–2; and natural law, 362, 364, 389–90; as non-political, 377–8; as a penal condition, 374, 382–3, 386; and power over life and death, 381–5, 389–91; racialization of, 358, 370–3, 391; resistance to, 356–8, 369, 377–8; topos of tyranny and slavery, 356–9, 364, 366, 368, 373, 374, 381–2; as unnatural, 360; voluntarist and consent issues, 258, 261, 381–2, 383–4; vs liberty of freeborn citizens, 77–8, 84, 374. See also servitude Smectymnuus, 224 Smith, Nigel, 8, 191, 200n19 Sobieski, John, 298n31 social contract theory, 269n11 Solemn League and Covenant, 198n20, 217, 220, 223, 224, 226, 229, 236, 240; Ulster Covenanters, 227 Spain, 161, 238, 416; Armada, 116, 285 Spanish Succession, War of the, 402, 424, 428 Spartacus, 377 speech acts, 277, 285, 290

468 Index Spence, Joseph, 431 Spenser, Edmund, 57–8, 152, 214, 428; The Faerie Queene, 313; The Ruines of Time, 313 Star Chamber, 122, 198n20 Starkey, George: The Dignity of Kingship Asserted, 238 state: and the church, 188, 189–90, 191–2, 413–14, 425; as gendered, 253, 262, 270n17; as government, 260–1; JM’s conception of, 260–1; marriage as analogy for, 313; as ‘other,’ 176, 186; seventeenthcentury term, 175–6; sixteenthcentury creation of, 252; vs nation, 188, 192, 252–3, 254, 255–6, 260–2, 293. See also nation-state Staunton, Edmond, 124 Steadman, John, 409 stereotypes: denominational, 208–9; ethnic, 205, 206–9, 219, 370–1 Stevens, Paul, 13–14, 29, 45n10, 71n36, 92, 196, 273–95, 354n38, 393n11, 413; on JM’s Janusfaced nationalism, 9, 156–7, 287–8, 332 Stewart, James, 239 Strafford, 1st earl of, Thomas Wentworth, 30, 55 Streater, John, 418 Stuart, Mary (Queen of Scots), 57–8, 227 Stuart England, 27, 58–9, 62, 134n3, 162, 206, 238–9 Stubbe, Henry, 407, 419–21 sublimity, 413, 423, 425–7; of blank verse, 401, 429; of Paradise Lost, 6, 15, 401, 432 Suetonius (Gaius Suetonius Paulinus), 313, 314, 320, 321

Suetonius (Gaius Suetonius Tranquillus): Lives of the Caesars, 334, 342 suicide, 383–5 Tacitus, 88, 311, 320, 321, 334, 340 Tawney, R.H., 281 Taylor, Charles, 267n5, 269n11, 276 temperance, 332, 344, 350 Temperley, Howard, 392n1 temple (of Jerusalem), rebuilding trope, 12; in Areopagitica, 31–3, 117, 131–3; Church of England as, 116– 17, 120–1, 285; in fast sermons, 31, 116–28; national church as, 128–9; and sectarianism, 133; spritualized vs literalized, 132 Tennyson, Alfred, 314 Theocritus, 139, 152 Thirty Years War, 406 Thomason, George, 17n12, 110n66, 417, 437n60, 439n69 Thomson, James, 401, 402, 403, 423; ‘Rule Brittannia,’ 322, 403 Thurloe, John, 232, 240n6 Tiberius, 55, 284, 334, 353n32 Tickell, Thomas, 428; Anna Triumphans. A Congratulatory Poem on the Peace, 428 tithes, 36, 47n27, 233, 419 Toland, John, 413, 432; Clito, 425; ‘Life of Milton,’ 425–6 Trapp, Joseph, 428 Trinity Manuscript, 405, 409 Triumph of Virtue: A Poem upon the Peace, 428 Trouillot, Michel-Rolph, 392n5 Trubowitz, Rachel, 20n22 Tudors and Tudor England, 134n3, 162, 209, 269n12; Elizabeth I, 116,

Index 469 121, 217, 274; Henry VIII, 253, 273, 284; Mary, 424 tyranny: as absolute monarchy, 359, 366–7, 375; as dominion, 376; as just judgment, 366–7; Locke on, 374–5; of Nimrod, 358–61, 362, 364, 366, 367, 369, 421; resistance to, 367, 375; servitude as, 365–7; topos of tyranny and slavery, 356–9, 364, 366, 368, 373, 374, 381–2; as a violation of law, 374; vs despotical rule, 374–6 Ulster Presbyterians (Belfast Presbytery), 208, 227–8, 306 Underdown, David, 307, 308 United Provinces of the Netherlands: Anglo-Dutch wars, 207, 219, 230, 231, 233, 237–8; Anglo-Scoto-Dutch triangle, 219–40; cultural and political links with England, 219–23, 230–40; English books printed in, 221, 230; factions within, 207, 219; proposed union with Commonwealth England, 219, 221–2, 230, 231, 237–40, 275; royalist exiles in, 217; stereotypes of, 207, 230, 235, 238 United States of America, 250–1, 267n3, 278 ‘unity of spirit’ (JM’s vision of), 12–13, 26, 32, 190–1, 194 Vane, Henry, 234, 238, 416, 418–21; Healing Question, 420; JM’s sonnet to, 79, 219, 233–4, 416, 418, 421; and ‘Letter to a Friend,’ 419, 439n63; A Needful Corrective or Ballance in Popular Government, 101, 111n91, 420; Zeal Examin’d, 437n60

venture capitalism, 280–1 Venutius, 312, 313 Virgil, 139, 152–3, 427; Aeneid, 283, 414, 427 Virgil, Polydore, 284 visibility, diffuse, 173, 178, 179, 195 visible church: analogy with state, 189–90, 191–2; as local, 198n18; national church as, 177–8, 285; perfection of, 181–2; purity of congregation, 190. See also invisible church visible nation, 173–4, 195–6 Vitellius, 334, 342, 343 voluntarism, 256–9, 260, 272n31; and marriage, 256–7; voluntary enslavement, 258, 261 von Maltzahn, Nicholas, 8, 15, 48n35, 308, 393n7, 401–32; Milton’s History of Britain, 105n14 Wales, 17n15, 155, 205, 211, 335; portrayed in History of Britain, 158, 211, 223; portrayed in ‘Lycidas,’ 161, 223 Wall, Moses, 50n47, 418, 419, 438n61 Waller, Edmund, 414, 422; Panegyrick to my Lord Protector, 75, 78, 94–5, 110n69 Wallerstein, Immanuel, 279 Walwyn, William, 47n28, 108n43; The Bloody Project, 85–6 warfare: Anglo-Dutch wars, 207, 219, 230, 231, 233, 237–8; blank verse celebrations of, 423; incitement to in fast sermons, 118, 123–4; JM’s poetry associated with, 428; JM’s views of, 264, 288; just vs unjust, 360, 378, 386, 388; ‘of peace,’ 103; and slavery, 360, 386, 388–9; and

470 Index sublimity, 423; Thirty Years War, 406; of truth, 250; War of the Spanish Succession, 402, 424, 428. See also English Revolution and Civil Wars Warner, Marina: Monument and Maidens, 314, 322 Weber, Max, 281 Weldon, Antony: ‘Perfect Description of the People and Country of Scotland,’ 221 Welsh, Irvine: Trainspotting, 305, 327, 328n1 Welwood, William, 222, 236 Westminster Assembly, 122, 128, 148, 209, 210; Annotations, 143, 148; members of, 118, 125, 224 Whig(s): historiographers, 307, 413; proto-Whigs, 207; views of JM, 223, 405; writers, 401, 403, 423–6, 428–30 Whincop, John, 126 Whitaker, Jeremiah, 123 White, John, 123 Whitelock, Bulstrode, 39 Wilding, Michael, 8 Wildman, John, 101, 108n47; A Call to all the Souldiers of the Armie, 85; A Declaration of the Free-borne People of England, 86–7 Wilkinson, Henry, 125 Willet, Andrew, 143, 145; Synopsis Papismi, That is, A General Viewe of Papistry, 142

William of Malmesbury, 212 Wilson, John F., 118, 119 Wilson, Thomas, 124 Winstanley, Gerrard, 36 Wither, George, 221 Wittreich, Joseph, 271n26 Wollebius, John, 148; Medulla, 143 women: on the battlefield, 318–19; as inferior, 256; and marriage, 257–8, 260–6, 313; portrayed in History of Britain, 14, 307–12, 323– 5; as rulers, 14, 307, 313, 319, 321, 323–5. See also gender and gendered issues Womersley, David, 428 Wood, Derek N.C., 270n24, 271n25 Woodhouse, A.S.P., 6 Woolrych, Austin, 49n44, 91, 99, 105n14, 438n66 Wootton, David, 374, 395n20 Worden, Blair, 8, 48n34, 92, 99, 106n29 Wordsworth, William, 6, 401, 402 Wycliff, 159, 273 Xenophon: Anabasis, 274 Young, Thomas, 223, 224, 406 Zanchius, Hieronymus, 145 Žižek, Slavoj, 196n3, 288 Zwierlein, Anne-Julia, 392n4, 394n13