400 years of John Milton (1608-1674)

...he was a true Poet, and of the Devil's party without knowing it.
- William Blake on Milton's Paradise Lost.

John Milton was born 400 years ago today, on December 9, 1608. If Oliver Cromwell is English history's most famous republican, John Milton must be regarded as England's most famous republican poet. Samuel Johnson called him that "acrimonious and surly republican" for his dangerous commitment to the English Revolution and his continuing unpopular attacks against Royalists right up to the time of the Restoration. Milton was very much a political, social and religious radical for his time, who fought for oligarchical government over absolute monarchy, who supported legal measures for divorce and polygamy, who rejected the Holy Trinity of the Bible and believed in mortalism over the divinity of Christ. He forthrightly hated the High Church, he hated the Lords and he hated the natural power of Kings. He was the very opposite of a Cavalier Poet.

Two weeks after the execution of Charles I in 1649, Milton committed himself to the Republican side by publishing The Tenure of Kings and Magistrates in support of the regicide. His argument (which runs in direct opposition to Hobbes' Leviathan published in 1651), was that a monarch's power is not absolute, but derived from the people he rules and held in accordance with a social contract. If a monarch breaks this contract by abusing his position, the people have the right to remove him from power. Not exactly radical stuff by the standards of today.

Milton joins hands with John Locke as an early apostle of liberalism who fought against the absolutist monarchist writings of Robert Filmer and Thomas Hobbes. His last major pamplet published in 1660 was an anti-monarchical protest in the face of the coming Restoration, which expresses a feeling of despair at seeing his countrymen so eager to run back to servitude. Milton seemed to think that it was better to reign in Hell than serve in Heaven, but there is also a real sense of the man as a lone but stalwart adherent to a greater truth rebelling against a false authority. "The work is an impassioned, bitter, and futile jeremiad damning the English people for backsliding from the cause of liberty and advocating the establishment of an authoritarian rule by an elitist, unelected parliament." Perhaps fearing the tyranny of the many in addition to the tyranny of the one, he favoured not a democratic solution but a perpetual Rump Parliament, a kind of governing council with a permanent ruling membership. Unfortunately the modern word Politburo comes to mind, but to Milton this was The Ready and Easy Way to Establish a Free Commonwealth.

Milton's view of monarchy and the decadence of monarchy is a theme later emphasized in Paradise Lost. Within this epic, Milton's magnus opus, Satan is directly linked to monarchical rule. The tone of the piece is to ensure that the citizenry would not backslide into their old monarchical ways. In particularly, Milton relied on predictions of the future combined with biblical analogies to ensure that people knew the dangers inherent in such a governmental system. In particular, Milton argued that it would be a sin against God to bring back the monarchy and warned against the lack of freedom and virtue that would correspond with a king.

How stunned Milton would be 400 years after his birth to learn that freedom and virtue wear a Crown.