John Milton's Politics, Republicanism and the Terms of Liberty

Literature Compass 4/6 (2007): 1561–1576, 10.1111/j.1741-4113.2007.00494.x

© 2007 The AuthorJournal Compilation © 2007 Blackwell Publishing Ltd

John Milton’s Politics, Republicanism and the Terms of Liberty

Rosanna Cox*University of Kent

AbstractThroughout the tumultuous events of the English Civil War, Commonwealthand Restoration periods, John Milton wrote texts which attempted to shape andactivate the nation for their political destiny as free citizens in a nation of truebelievers. Milton’s texts from the early 1640s onwards exhibit the constantlyevolving nature of political dissent and the ways in which ‘republican specula-tions’ in the aftermath of the regicide are provisional, flexible and responsive tothe urgent exigencies of defining the new regime and its actions against CharlesI and his rule. Recent years have seen those working in intellectual history andthe history of ideas re-focus critical attention on Milton’s political thought, tracehis engagement with republican ideologies and discourses of the period, andexplore the complex interactions between contemporary and classical ideas ofstatecraft. Such work by Quentin Skinner, Martin Dzelzainis and others hasestablished the rich and diverse ideas and discourses which were made availableand accessed in the service of both political polemic and apologia. This articlewill consider how such approaches have influenced our understanding ofMilton’s texts and ideas, and reflect on what, for Milton and his contemporaries,constituted liberty and the terms on which it could exist. Meditating onforms of government, and the best way to ensure the health and glory of theEnglish nation, Milton’s texts exhibit his complex and detailed engagementswith classical authorities and neo-Roman conceptions and legal definitions oftyranny, liberty and servitude, alongside notions of civic identity and politicalsubjectivity.

But what more oft in nations grown corrupt,And by their vices brought to servitude,Than to love bondage more that liberty,Bondage with ease than strenuous liberty.

(Samson Agonistes lines 268–71)

In Samson Agonistes (1671), Milton rehearses his criticism of those‘backsliders’ who ‘fall back, or rather to creep back so poorly as it seemsthe multitude vvould, to thir once abjur’d and detested thraldom ofkingship’, abandoning their political principles to welcome back amonarchy which had, only ten years previously, been overthrown in a

1562 John Milton’s Politics, Republicanism and the Terms of Liberty

© 2007 The Author Literature Compass 4/6 (2007): 1561–1576, 10.1111/j.1741-4113.2007.00494.xJournal Compilation © 2007 Blackwell Publishing Ltd

blaze of political fervour (Complete Prose Works [hereafter CPW] 7:388,356–7). Meditating on the collapse of the republic and the culpability ofcitizens who failed to cast off forever the shackles of tyranny, Miltonexhibits his acute disappointment with the people of Britain, whoslavishly renounced their glorious and unprecedented opportunity toreclaim their freedom and preserve the commonwealth. In SamsonAgonistes Milton holds up a mirror to the nation and finds it wanting infortitude, virtue and political agency; which is particularly poignantconsidering his hopes and his committed endeavours to the task ofurging, cajoling and hectoring the nation to fitness for their politicaldestiny. By 1660, this political destiny was intimately linked with therepublic: without constitutional republicanism, the liberty of the peoplewas not just curtailed, but simply could not exist. The idea thatrepublican forms of government are the only means of safeguarding theliberty of the nation is one to which Milton is utterly committed by thetime of its downfall, but Milton was by no means a doctrinairerepublican from the outset. As Walter Lim describes, ‘Milton’s politicalexpressions underwent adjustments to plug into a powerful emergingculture of political dissent’ (13).

From the early 1640s onwards Milton wrote extensively and pole-mically for liberty, for civic activity, for an end to the tyranny of CharlesI’s autocratic personal rule, through a series of prose tracts which rangedin focus from ecclesiastical reform, divorce, education to censorship,culminating in his defence of the regicide in The Tenure of Kings andMagistrates and his role as the republic’s propagandist. Taking their placein a context of an increasingly radicalised political discourse, Milton’s textsdemonstrate the provisional, often haphazard ways in which writers inthis period attempted to make sense of their opposition to existing formsof government. This opposition was by no means organised, cohesive andsure of its aims or even of its ideology. Following the efforts of revisionisthistorians in the 1980s and 90s to reassess the role of radical politics inthe mid-seventeenth century, concepts of radical and radicalism alsoneeded to be rethought. As Glenn Burgess argues, any attempt at a historyof ‘radicalism’ over a period of time is likely to be a comparative historyof radical moments rather than the continuous history of a tradition(Burgess; see also McDowell; Condren; Davis). It is the vexed relationshipbetween ‘moments’ and ideology which Blair Worden describes inrelation to the regicide:

It took a political revolution to create outward and partisan republicanism inEngland . . . the regicide was not the fruit of republican theory. Most of itsorganisers were concerned to remove a particular king, not kingship. Theycut off King Charles’ head and wondered what to do next. In that quandarythey saw no practicable alternative to the abolition of monarchy. It was notthe victory of the regicides but their failures which encouraged speculation.(‘Milton’s Republicanism’ 225–6)


John Milton’s Politics, Republicanism and the Terms of Liberty 1563

Accessing classical republican thought, contemporary radical politicaldiscourse and radical Protestant theology, Milton’s texts exhibit theconstantly evolving nature of political dissent and the ways in which thefreedom of the presses was accompanied by ideological fluidity andresponsiveness. In other words, just as dissent was characterised by itsheterogeneity, so were its discourses and all were up for grabs for writersto use at will and in different contexts. Political languages were, perhapsmore than ever before, both reflecting and provoking a change in the waythat people saw their subjectivity in civil society, and what rights in turn,they could and should expect. Surveying recent work in Milton Studies,I will assess the ideas which influenced Milton’s politics, demonstratingthe ways in which the diversity of dissenting voices combined to produceresponses to authority which were constantly shifting and in the processof definition. As I will demonstrate, the field has been enriched in recentyears by the works of Quentin Skinner, Martin Dzelzainis and otherswho have attempted to reconstruct the intellectual and political discoursesof the period through a reassessment of mid-seventeenth-centuryconceptions of liberty. Focussing in particular on Milton’s republicanism,I will consider the ways in which neo-roman ideas of liberty were seizedupon by Milton and his contemporaries in the process of articulatingthe relationship between the state and its people and in response tounprecedented challenges to individual liberties from the early 1630sonwards.

‘Chief Militant Republican’?

And whereas it is and hath been found by experience, that the Office of aKing in this Nation and Ireland, and to have the power thereof in any singleperson, is unnecessary, burthensom and dangerous to the liberty, safety andpublique interest of the people, and that for the most part, use hath beenmade of the Regal power and prerogative, to oppress, and impoverish andenslave the Subject . . . the Office of a King in this Nation, shall not hence-forth reside in, or be exercised by any one single person; and that no oneperson whatsoever, shall or may have, or hold the Office, Stile, Dignity,Power or Authority of King of the said Kingdoms and Dominions. (Frith andRait 19)

In the ordinance passed by the House of Commons on 17 March 1649,England became a republic for the first time in its history; having executedthe king in what was ostensibly an act of bravura political boldness, theordinance abolished the office of kingship itself, thereby positioningthe regicide as the culmination of sweeping political reform, and not asthe hurried and unpopular execution of a particular tyrannical king. Theregicide was not, as J. G. A. Pocock, Perez Zagorin, Blair Worden andMartin Dzelzainis have shown, the apotheosis of republican ideology;rather republicanism was ‘shaped by events more than it shaped them’,



improvised as a response to the political vacuum left by the removal ofthe King (Dzelzainis, ‘Republicanism’ 295). According to Pocock,

There is a level at which it is true that the King was put to death by men whostill believed in the kingly office, but it was an appalling paradox that, forthis reason, they could not judge the man without abolishing the office. (vii)

As Perez Zagorin has suggested, if republicanism is defined in terms of adoctrinaire opposition to all forms of kingship, then those ‘who createdthe revolutionary government were not, for the most part, republicans’(146–8). In fact, it was only in opposition to the constitutional design ofthe commonwealth, and to Cromwell in particular, in the 1650s that‘republican speculation’ was anything more than haphazard and makeshift,culminating in James Harrington’s The Commonwealth of Oceana of 1656,what many have argued to be the first key, overtly republican text of theperiod (see Dzelzainis, ‘Republicanism’ 296).1 Like Harrington, Miltonsaw the events of 1649 as a missed opportunity for republican constitutionaldesign. In The Readie and Easie Way, in 1660, he considers what couldhave been, had the Commonwealth been united in the same goals:

I doubt not but all ingenuous and knowing men will easily agree with me,that free Commonwealth without single person or house of lords, is by far thebest government, if it can be had; but we have all this while, say they, binexpecting it, and cannot yet attain it. (CPW 7:429)

He ascribes the ‘mischief ’ of this missed opportunity to the process ofexchanging the old government for the new, but nevertheless holds outhope: ‘Now is the opportunitie, now the very season wherein we mayobtain a free Commonwealth and establish it forever in the land’ (CPW7:430). It is statements such as these, which offer an apparently clearavowal of Milton’s political principles which led Masson to exclaim in hisLife of Milton, ‘How notoriously Milton had flashed forth as the chiefmilitant Republican of the crisis’ (5:663). But this idea of Milton at thevanguard of republican political ideology and rhetoric is problematic forseveral reasons. First, even when it seems clear that Milton is espousingovertly doctrinaire republican views in the 1650s and 1660s, he is tentative;although he advocates a republican constitution by this stage, this isregularly tempered by a suspicion that such a form of government cannotbe achieved in practice because the people fail to moderate theirbehaviour, their passions and do not uphold principles of virtue andreason which would allow political reformation to be pushed as far as itcould and should go. As the people show themselves wanting in civicvirtue, government is required to act to restrain the populace from theexploitation of their new found freedoms, explaining Milton’s famousdistinction between ‘license’ and ‘liberty’ and the people’s inability tomake the same distinction until they are first made fit for their hard wonfreedoms (Sonnet XII line 11). At the same time, Milton criticises the



people for a lack of fortitude, an inherent weakness which causes anunwarranted adherence to custom. As he writes in The Tenure of Kings andMagistrates in 1649,

It is true, that most men are apt enough to civil wars and commotions as anovelty, and for a flash, hot and active; but through sloth or inconstancy, andweakness of spirit either fainting find themselves destroying the cause towhich they had hitherto been committed. (CPW 3:192)

Milton considers the character, virtue and fortitude of the English peopleto be a barrier to complete political reform, demonstrating that whilstrepublican forms of government might be the ideal, they are notnecessarily the most effective in the circumstances. In the Defensio, a workproduced on behalf of the commonwealth, Milton admits that the present

form of government is such as our circumstances and schisms permit; it is notthe most desirable, but only as good as the stubborn struggles of the wickedcitizens allow it to be. (CPW 5:316–17)

Despite his ‘tireless’ work on behalf of the Commonwealth (as LatinSecretary, or Secretary for Foreign Tongues), translating diplomaticcorrespondence in the office of John Thurloe, and his role as literaryrepresentative of the new regime, Milton is ambivalent about its politicaldirections and its constitution (CPW 4:491).2 We should not necessarilysee a contradiction in his role as a paid civil servant within government –he continued to receive a salary until late 1659 (Corns 36) – and hislimited endorsement of that same government, for such ambivalence wasby no means unusual. Like those of his fellow polemicist and defender ofthe regicide Marchamont Nedham, Milton’s texts ‘contrive to championthe regime explicitly and to criticize it implicitly’ (Worden, ‘Miltonand Marchamont Nedham’ 170; Creaser 2002, 47–8). What concernsMilton is not the everyday business of the government – to which he iskeen to contribute as an active political citizen – but the best ways toensure that the unprecedented opportunity granted to the nation in 1649is not lost. Nevertheless, despite his belief that the regime was failing to offera constitutional model to replace that which it had succeeded, Miltonnever delivers an unreserved endorsement of republicanism, even as late as1660, but his equivocations in the 1640s and 1650s exemplify how guardedand tentative were his republican responses (Scott, ‘Commonwealth Prin-ciples’ 37, 40). Between 1649 and 1654, as the official propagandist of thenew regime, Milton employs a rhetorical approach in his tracts which, ratherthan outlining a coherent ideological programme are polemical ad hocresponses in defence of a regime with ‘a palpable uncertainty about wherethe constitutional changes would come to rest’ (Corns 29). In this sense,he argues that the removal of Charles I and the subsequent republicangovernment are what is best for nation in the current circumstances, ratherthan what is best in all circumstances. As Martin Dzelzainis and othershave convincingly argued, Milton’s position in the 1640s and 1650s was not



an opposition to kingship, but an opposition to tyranny. Whilst the ruleof a king as a single person may be more likely to result in tyranny, ‘Nordoes it follow directly that all kings are tyrants’, leaving open the possi-bility for non-tyrannical kingship (Worden, ‘Milton’s Republicanism’ 228;Corns 33; Dzelzainis, ‘Milton’s Classical Republicanism’ 6). In DefensioSecunda of 1654, Milton attempts to clear up any apparent confusion;although in his previous works he may have ‘seemed to attack the wholeright of kings’, he claims that he had ‘uttered no word against kings, butonly against tyrants’ (CPW IV:604). Even in his works written on his owninitiative between October 1659 and April 1660, in which we might hopefor a more personal and hence radical outline of his views on forms ofgovernment, he is still allowing for the (slim) possibility of kingship as anacceptable form of government:

I denie not that ther may be such a king, who may regard the common goodbefore their own, may have no vitious favourite, may hearken only to thewisest and incorruptest of his Parlament. (CPW 7:447–8)

There is space left for monarchial rule, provided the particular monarchundertakes to satisfy the conditions of his covenant with the people, rulesin close association with parliament and, therefore does not possess anegative voice. In the 1640s in particular, Milton frequently concedes thebenefits of ‘regulated’, ‘mixed’, ‘limited’ kingship, in which governmentis balanced between monarchy, aristocracy and democracy (CPW 1:559;3:453; 7:213–15). The idea of the ‘golden balance’ between monarch,lords and bishops and the commons, or the three estates, is one which,according to Zera S. Fink, dominated Milton’s political ideology of thebest form of government ‘throughout the whole period from 1640–1660’and was his ‘guiding principle’ (103–4). Such an understanding ofMilton’s adherence to a particular political model is useful since it canhelp us to understand his reluctance to jettison completely the possibilityof monarchy, even as late as 1660. It also helps explain Milton’s unwaveringadmiration for the Venetian model, ‘the greatest and noblest common-wealth’ (CPW 7:370–1). If the balance inherent in a mixed constitutionis the best means of ensuring that the interests of the people arerepresented whilst controlling their baser tendencies, then individualrepresentatives who fail to govern in these interests can be removed,without threatening the basis of the system. In this way Fink is able toargue that even at the point at which Milton is advocating republicanism,it is only because he believes that it is ‘superior to a monarchy as a meansof realizing the ideal of a mixed state’ (103).

However, as Martin Dzelzainis has demonstrated, Fink’s thesis is flawedin a number of ways:

To insist on the theoretical primacy at all times of the mixed state in Milton’sthinking is also to obscure the direct nature of his engagement with the failingsof monarchy and the merits of a republic. (‘Milton’s Classical Republicanism’ 8)



Rather than seeing Milton’s refusal until 1660 to utterly reject monarchialforms as a commitment to a mixed constitution, I think it is moreaccurate to attribute this to his constitutional and rhetorical flexibility.Milton’s interest lies not in constitutional forms, but in the virtue andliberty of the people and the best way to ensure the conditions in whichthey may flourish. To this end, ‘Monarchy and republicanism are twopossibilities’ to be left on the table, ‘their advantages and disadvantagesmay be evaluated differently . . . and preferences may change in time’(Corns 33). This is perhaps why critics have failed to pin down Miltonas an adherent to a doctrinaire ideology; his interests lie not in elucidatingand adhering to a complete and convincing political party-line, but infinding and articulating the most effective way of ensuring liberty andcivic virtue. For him ‘forms count for much less than spirit’ (Worden,‘Milton and Marchamont Nedham’ 170; see also Dzelzainis, ‘Milton’sClassical Republicanism’ 19). Alongside such recognition of Milton’scommitment to the spirit rather than the letter of political reform is anaccompanying awareness that the terms we apply to Milton’s politicalthought do not necessarily fit. Attempts to shoehorn Milton into thehistory of republican political thought are bound to be problematic,simply because as Blair Worden points out in a recent paper:

The history of political thought, as the subject has emerged since Milton’stime, was very far from his mind. He was not bidding for inclusion in asyllabus. If we want to recover the premises of Milton’s attitude to the rule ofkings, we may do better to set the words republican and republicanism aside.(‘Milton and Republicanism’)

The most recent and fruitful engagements with Milton’s politics havediscarded attempts to place Milton in a particular political camp, insteadfocussing on the qualities, rather than the forms of government, whichMilton considered integral to the proper functioning of the common-wealth and how and why they should be preserved. The most importantand influential understanding of Milton’s political thought has emergedthrough a consideration of the ways in which he and many of hiscontemporaries plundered classical discourses of freedom and unfreedomin order to demonstrate the effects of tyrannous rule upon the people andthe consequences for the nation.

‘Neo-Roman Liberty’

The ‘neo-roman’ understanding of civil liberty is a term coined by QuentinSkinner ten years ago as part of an attempt to understand the transitionfrom whiggery to liberalism in the nineteenth century. Questioning whathe termed the ‘liberal hegemony’ and the ‘ideological triumph’ of aversion of liberty derived from classical liberalism, Skinner aimed tounderstand how a rival discourse of liberty – the ‘neo-roman’ – which



rose to prominence in the civil war and commonwealth period only tobe discarded, might make us question our ‘political allegiances’ (Libertybefore Liberalism ix–x). Rejecting a historical modus operandi which looksto extract political thought from a series of canonical texts, the intellectualhistorian is concerned to place texts and their ideas within broadertraditions and frameworks of thought:

Equipped with a broader sense of possibility, we can stand back from theintellectual commitments we have inherited and ask ourselves in a new spiritof enquiry what we should think of them. (Liberty before Liberalism 117)

Skinner’s work has been immensely influential in re-imagining theintellectual and political circumstances and discourses which informedresistance to the authority of existing forms of rule and government andattempts to define ideas of free states in the period (see for example,Creaser; Dzelzainis, ‘Liberty and the Law’). Such an understanding ofhow dissent was constructed is important precisely because it demonstratesthe ways in which available terms and vocabularies of liberty were beingpressed into use in increasingly urgent and provisional ways. Neo-romanideas of liberty were formed in part in response to royalist and patriar-chalist arguments which insisted in a negative concept of liberty. Findingits most clear statement in the works of Thomas Hobbes in the 1650s,such a version of liberty insists that an individual is free provided he isnot impeded by an external force which physically curtails his ability toact: ‘LIBERTY, or FREEDOME, signifieth (properly) the absence ofopposition’ (Hobbes 145). In civil society we all agree to be bound bylaws which protect our rights of action. Aside from the coercive powersof the law to which we agree to be subject, we are free, provided we arecapable of exercising our powers at will. Even if we refrain from actingdue to fear, this is still a willed forbearance and therefore still falls withinthe scope of our liberty. So fear of the consequences of our actions is nota legitimate impediment to action since it is not an external impedimentto action. This doctrine was essentially that of those royalists who counteredclaims that Charles I’s rule had compromised the liberty of his subjects bypointing out (amongst other arguments) that this could only be true ifhis subjects had been legally or physically coerced into obedience. Thesovereign acts as representative of the body of the state and is authorisedto act on the state’s behalf by the agreement of the people. Such anagreement is willed by the people and is therefore not coercive.

In contrast, the positive understanding of liberty assigns to it a valuewhich is not predicated upon what is not, but what is. In other words,positive liberty is the freedom to act, to manage and take control ofyour own life, to set the boundaries of your own experience, often as acollective or community. But in addition to the positive and negativeunderstanding of liberty, Skinner proposed a third: neo-roman liberty,which depends upon being independent from the arbitrary rule of a



master. According to the theory of free states, first elaborated by theRoman jurists Justinian and Gaius and historians of the Roman republicincluding Sallust, Livy and Tacitus and re-invigorated by Machiavelli inhis Discoursi, liberty lies in self-governance without constraint, subjectonly to the authority of its community, ‘at once governed themselves bytheir own judgement’ (Machiavelli 1:195). Considering the relationshipbetween the freedoms of the people and the power of the state, theneo-roman theorists consider that in a civil society (as opposed to in thestate of nature), a free state is governed by its community and on behalfof its community, thus preserving the rights of the individual liber homo.As the Parliamentarian pamphleteer, Henry Parker puts it as early as 1642,political authority ‘is originally inherent in the people, and is nothing elsebut that might and vigour which such or such a society of men containsin itself ’ (Parker, Observations 1). In tandem with common-law argumentswhich insisted on the fundamental liberties of free subjects as enshrinedin the Magna Carta, the neo-roman theory of free states proved extremelyuseful to those wishing to protest against the use of the prerogative tocollect taxes without the assent of parliament, and eventually to argue forthe deposing of the monarch on the grounds that, as a representative ofthe people, he was subject to the laws of natural justice and not ‘politicallysacrosanct’ (Lovett 467). As Milton argues in The Tenure of Kings andMagistrates:

the power of Kings and Magistrates is nothing else, but that what is onlyderivative, transferr’d and committed to them in trust from the People, to thecommon 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.(CPW 3:202)

So this version of liberty is predicated upon the idea that liberty isfundamental. As Milton writes in The Tenure:

No man who knows ought, can be so stupid to deny that all men naturallywere borne free . . . and were by privilege above all the creatures, born tocommand and not to obey: and that they liv’d so. (CPW 3:198)

This he makes central to his claim that it is indispensable that we shouldlive in ‘free states’. To be free, according to Milton and following Romanlaw, is essentially to be independent, not to be subject to, or dependentupon the arbitrary will of anyone else.3 It is thus to be in a position toact in one’s own right, and not to be the dependent, servant or creatureof anyone else. Tyranny, as Milton describes in the Tenure, need not beconstantly invoked, practised or enacted:

for the right of birth or succession can be no privilege in nature to let a Tyrantsit irremovable over a Nation free born, without transforming that Nationfrom the nature and condition of men born free, into natural, hereditary, andsuccessive slaves. (CPW 3:244)



Whether or not a tyrant actively interferes with the rights and duties ofthe people or simply ‘sits irremovable’ is immaterial, it is nevertheless adomination which proscribes liberty:

One person is dominated by another . . . to the extent that the other personhas the capacity to interfere in their affairs, in particular the capacity tointerfere in their affairs on an arbitrary basis. (Pettit 165)

In fact, Milton’s view of liberty goes even further than this; he insists thatthe liberty of the people is not merely threatened by the arbitrary powerof rulers – whether or not they exercise it – but the existence of suchpowers is inimical to liberty. The people are either free or they are slaves,and this slavery is not simply engendered through the active impositionof physical bonds, or impediments to action, but through the capacity orthreat of interference (see Skinner, ‘John Milton’). In his possession ofprerogative powers and the negative voice, the King is a de facto tyrant andthe people are his slaves. As Henry Parker puts it in The Case of ShipmonyBriefly Discoursed in 1640, ‘Where the meere will of the Prince isLaw . . . it is enough that we all, and all we have are at his discretion’, forin the case that law is ‘subjecte to the King’s mere discretion . . . all libertyis overthrowne’ (98, 110, 112).

These discourses of tyranny and slavery come to the fore in the par-liamentary debates of 1642 in response to the King’s use of the negativevoice in vetoing the Militia Ordinance in February 1642. The notion ofthe ‘negative voice’ which allowed the King to determine whether or notlegislation could be passed at his discretion, what Milton terms ‘the singlewhiff of a negative, from the mouth of one wilful man’, is precisely thekind of arbitrary power against which neo-roman arguments on libertycould be marshalled and upon which a case could be made that thepeople were living in servitude under tyranny, ‘fetter’d with a presumptousnegative voice’ (CPW 3:579, 492). If, as Milton describes in Eikonoklastes,a commonwealth is defined as a society to which all laws and activity aredirected to ‘commodious life’, then any dependence on the ‘gift andfavour’ of a single person means that it can no longer be considered‘sufficient of itself, and by consequence no commonwealth, nor free; buta multitude of vassals in the possession and dominion of one absolute lord’(CPW 3:498). The result of such tyranny has enormous ramificationsfor the people of the nation, ‘begott’n to servility’, whose enslavementproduces an extreme civic torpor (CPW 3:601).The absence of libertyengenders the erosion of the virtues through which liberty is realised;such that the nation is both made weak and is complicit in thecontinuation of its weak state:

Like a credulous and hapless herd, begott’n to servility, and inchanted withthese popular institutes of Tyranny . . . hold out both thir eares with suchdelight and ravishment to be stigmatiz’d and board through in witness ofthir own voluntary and beloved baseness. (CPW 3:601)



What transforms the character and the civic potential, of citizens is thethreat of interference. As the crown is passed from father to son, soservitude is inherited by successive generations of the people, andbecomes constitutionally enshrined. As Skinner points out, ‘the outcomeis a servile society in which flatterers and time-servers flourish unopposed’(‘John Milton’ 4–5).

It was not just the parliamentary cause which turned to these neo-romanideas of liberty to articulate opposition to the King’s discretionary powers.More radical dissenting voices, such as those of the Levellers, turned tothe discourse of tyranny and slavery to suggest the effect of the negativevoice upon the people.4 In the Remonstrance of Many Thousands Citizens(1646), Overton and Walwyn reasoned that parliament should

free us from these abuses and their negative voices, or else tell us that it isreasonable that we should be slaves . . . We must therefore pray you to make alaw against all kinds of arbitrary government as the highest capital offenceagainst the commonwealth. (Sharp 38)

A petition to Fairfax from the Northumberland Levellers claimed that theKing had ‘subdued the law-giving power of the free people of Englandin their parliament, to the negative voice of himself and posterity . . . asif ourselves were naturally born slaves’ (‘To Lord Thomas Fairfax’ 2). Sowhilst neo-roman ideas of negative liberty were certainly accessed by theclassical republicans looking to the authority of the Roman jurists andthe classical historians of the Roman republic, such ideas and theiraccompanying vocabularies were nevertheless pressed into use as part ofpopular protest, reflecting the ways in which the language of dissent wascut free of its moorings in an increasingly widening political sphere (seeAchinstein). In fact, neo-roman ideas of liberty had been a significant partof political discourse for some time, which explains the ease with whichthey were taken up in this period by a variety of dissenting voices, fromthe elite to the plebeian. As Quentin Skinner, Patrick Collinson andMarkku Peltonen have shown, ‘this neo-roman theory had already strucksome deep and ramifying roots’ (Skinner, Liberty before Liberalism 11).From the latter part of the reign of Elizabeth I, quasi-republican ideas hadbegun to seep into political and literary culture (Skinner, Liberty beforeLiberalism 11; Collinson; Peltonen). By the early 1640s, they were ripe tobe plundered, re-invigorated and moulded to the aims of different groupsand in pursuit of shifting goals.

Conclusions: The Terms of Liberty

The neo-roman theory of liberty as advocated by Skinner and Pettit hasnot been universally accepted. Graham Maddox has suggested that:

The reduction of republicanism to one of its elements is of course anabstraction. To characterise republicanism as non-domination is to suggest



that its invention as a form of government may be overlooked. It is not as thoughPetitt is neglectful of the institutions of government, which he is careful todescribe and defend. Yet a clearer picture of republicanism will emergeonce it is established that it was devised to replace the institution of kingship.(419–20)

I would take issue with Maddox’s understanding of republicanism.Republicanism was not, as we have seen, an ideological behemoth, ahegemonic and readily defined opposition to monarchy in this period, ratherit was as David Norbrook puts it, ‘a series of experiments in freedom’(490). Nor was republicanism invented as a ‘form of government’. In thewake of the regicide, even the most radical instigators of the new regime:

Blundered into the foundation of the republic, without a constitutional theory,without a sustained critique of other models (of course, specifically monarchy),without a vision or an image of a state they were founding, and even withoutan appropriate political vocabulary (Corns 26).

It is precisely this understanding of the ways in which politics in thisperiod, and indeed Milton’s politics, were shaped by competing responsesto the experience of living under dominion that should make us questionhow far the practice of imposing definitions upon political vocabulariescan help us understand their use in this period. Milton’s political thoughtwas not circumscribed by forms of government or constitution, buttranscended and exceeded them to consider the ways in which the nationcould achieve greatness. This means that, as Frank Lovett points out,Milton is committed to the principle of liberty, but not necessarily to thatof democracy (476). In The Readie and Easie Way Milton warns againstthe ‘licentious and unbridled democracy’ and the ‘noise and shouting ofa rude multitude’ which would result from parliamentary elections (CPW7:438, 442). Lovett’s distinction points to the ways in which our readingsof political ideas need to take into account how the terms of liberty inthe mid-to-late seventeenth century are proscribed. Whilst liberty is acondition most often contrasted to servitude, its terms are not necessarilydependent on an increasing deliverance from political constraint; rather itdemands that a constitutional framework which can best preserve rightsand liberties for the common good and for the health of the nation. It isthis idea of liberty which governs Marchamont Nedham’s vision of theCommonwealth as ‘the only bank which preserves us from the innundationof tyranny on the one side, and confusion on the other’ (Nedham 87–8).As Jonathan Scott puts it, ‘For their political realisation liberty and virtuerequired a constitutional framework. The historiography of English repub-licanism has been dominated by constitutional analysis’ (CommonwealthPrinciples 5). However, for Milton, as we have seen, constitutional designwas never as integral to the health of the nation as was its civic virtue:

It is therefore a task for men of the utmost wisdom to discover what may bemost suitable and advantageous for a people; certainly the same government is



fitting neither for all peoples nor for one people at all times; now one formis better, now another, as the courage and industry of the citizens waxes orwanes. (CPW IV:392)

His politics therefore demonstrate a concern at first principles with the ‘fitness’or otherwise of the people. Exhorting his fellow citizens to strive for their‘strenuous liberty’ throughout his texts, and to activate themselves for citizen-ship, Milton demands that the constitution act to promote the same goals.

By the time of the crisis of 1660, when hopes for the preservation ofthe commonwealth were finally at an end and the Restoration inevitableand imminent, ‘Milton and Nedham were almost alone in pleadingagainst the royalist reaction and warning of the evils of a restoredmonarchy’ (Worden, ‘Milton and Marchamont Nedham’ 179). In fact,Milton became increasingly isolated, aware of the death-throes of ‘expiringlibertie’ as his contemporaries failed to speak up for the ‘the good OldCause’, imprisoned, executed or silenced through fear, hopelessness and aneed for self-preservation (CPW 7:462–3).5 Milton was himself houndedby the authorities, his works suppressed and even burned (see Corns 42;Hill 207–8; 229–30). In his great poems written after the Restoration,Milton attempts to make sense of the ethical failures of the nation,dramatising the choices, the moments, upon which liberty hinges. Yet, hereas elsewhere, Milton’s poems are, as Nigel Smith argues of Paradise Lost,‘complex, contradictory even, in the way that it voice[s] its affiliations’ (253).Annabel Patterson goes so far as to say that ‘Milton avoided writing poetrythat could be definitively aligned with the political positions he tookduring the revolutionary era’ (202). But it is the sheer range of forms,genres, perspectives and discourses up for grabs in Milton’s post-Restoration poems which testify to his commitment to make thepeople work to become fit for their political destiny, fit for the experienceof making the right choices and at the right moments; to ‘reject bondagewith ease’ in favour of ‘strenuous liberty’ (Samson Agonistes line 271).In this sense these poems, unmoored from uncomplicated politicalallegiances and values, represent a more authentic depiction of theexperience of politics, of political consciousness, than is at first apparent.As this article has shown, Milton’s politics are influenced by a variety ofdiscourses and ideas, informed by circumstance and flexible in what theyappropriate and how. Nevertheless, if we wish to look for a guidingprinciple, we will not find it manifested in a ‘republican’ ideology.Discarding such terms, we should instead strive to discover what, forMilton, constituted civic greatness, the pivot upon which his politics turns.

Short Biography

Rosanna Cox’s research is focussed on the vital connections betweenpolitical thought, rhetoric and literature in the early modern period.



Within this she is interested in ideas of political and civic identity inthe thought and texts of the mid-to-late seventeenth century and, inparticular, in the works of John Milton. Her Ph.D. thesis was entitled‘John Milton and Reading like a Man’ in which she explored Milton’sattempts to form ‘fit’ readers in his prose texts of the mid-1640s. She iscurrently working on her monograph on Milton and citizenship whichtraces the relationship between political and civic identity, ideas ofreading and interpretation and notions of gender. She has producedarticles on Milton’s education and Samson Agonistes and Roman lawand has begun working on ideas of statecraft and diplomacy in thecommonwealth period. Her first post was as a Lecturer in RenaissanceLiterature at Queen Mary, University of London in 2006–07 and shewill take up a post as permanent Lecturer in Early Modern Literaturein the School of English at the University of Kent in September2007. She is also a visiting tutor and member of the podcasting teamat the Centre for Editing Lives and Letters (CELL), Queen Mary, Universityof London. Cox holds a Ph.D. and M.A. from Queen Mary, University ofLondon, and a B.A. (Hons) from Fitzwilliam College, University ofCambridge.

Notes

* Correspondence address: School of English, University of Kent, Canterbury, Kent, UnitedKingdom, CT2 7NZ. E-mail: [email protected].

1 For an alternative view see Scott who argues that Harrington’s republicanism was ‘atypical’(‘What were Commonwealth Principles?’ 1).2 For more on Milton’s role in the new regime and the nature of his work in Thurloe’s officeand for the Council of State, see Fallon 124–30; Miller.3 For Roman law, the primary sources are, above all, the writings of the early imperial jurists,dating from approximately 31 bc to ad 235. The most important texts, and those referred toby Milton are Justinian’s Digest (a collection of edited excerpts from other legal writings), andInstitutiones (and elementary text book) and Codex (a collection of rescripts) along with Gaius’sInstitutiones: ‘Summa itaque diuisio de iure personarum haec est, quod omnes homines aut liberisunt aut servi . . . Et libertas quidem est, ex qua etiam liberi vocantur, naturalis facultas eiusquod cuique facere libet, nisi si quid aut vi aut iure prohebitur’. (Mommsen and KruegerVol I, p. 15).4 Jonathan Scott has suggested the striking similarity between the Levellers and the classicalrepublicans in their understanding of these issues; see Scott, ‘What were CommonwealthPrinciples?’ 595.5 See Hill 199.

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John Milton's Politics, Republicanism and the Terms of Liberty