“Against... the Bishops” 1639–1642differences. The army remained the chief sticking point. Many peers and several
members of the Commons gravitated to the king. Most disconcerting was the flight
on May 21 of Lord Keeper Littleton with the Great Seal, which removed that
symbol of legitimacy from Westminster and vacated the woolsack (the chair) of the
House of Lords. The king was purchasing arms from the sale of the crown jewels
and sending out requisitions for money; parliament was also raising contributions
from sympathetic noblemen and from the City; both sides were casting about for
troops and wooing the Scots. On July 12 parliament voted to raise an army, naming
the Earl of Essex commander-in-chief. On August 22, 1642 the king, along with
Charles, Prince of Wales, stood before a force of some 2,000 horse and foot gath-
ered in Nottingham, unfurled his royal standard, and summoned all liegemen to his
aid. That act officially launched the Civil War.
“Transported with the Zeale of Truth to a
Well Heated Fervencie”
Three of Milton’s antiprelatical tracts answer specific treatises and satirize their au-
thors, but Of Reformation and The Reason of Church-governement treat the issues of
ecclesiastical reform in broader terms and with more conscious art. They share
certain stylistic qualities: long, elaborate sentences with multiple clauses, sometimes
ordered in balanced Ciceronian periods and more often in a loosely associative,
interwoven structure projecting energy, vitality, and zealous fervor.^88 But they are
couched in two distinct polemic modes and are quite different in stance and tone.
Of Reformation employs a brilliantly inventive, luxuriant, eloquent, vividly imagistic
prose, rich in lexical variety, elaborate metaphor, epithets, descriptive terms, alle-
gory, and graphic imagery. By contrast, The Reason of Church-governement claims to
be, and for the most part is, a “well-temper’d discourse” (CPW I, 746) of reasoned
argument, though enlivened with biblical allusion, metaphor, allegory, and some
invective. The dense poetic texture and complex syntax of these treatises have
seemed to some critics to limit their effectiveness,^89 but that language, here and
elsewhere, makes its own extra-rational appeal to the senses and the emotions.
When he turned to polemic, Milton brought with him the linguistic sensibilities
and the self-image of a poet.
Of Reformation, conceived as a Letter to a Friend, develops its argument in two
loosely organized books. A long exordium introduces the pervasive body imagery
as well as a historical narrative tracing the corruption of the church under Constantine
and the popes and the glorious Reformation begun under Wyclif, but now partly
frustrated by the bishops’ continued “popish” practices. Milton portrays England as
an elect but backsliding nation, now poised to respond to an apocalyptic moment.
The proposition offers to “declare those Causes that hinder the forwarding of true
Discipline” (CPW I, 528), and then personalizes those causes as Antiquarians, Liber-