“Domestic or Personal Liberty” 1642–1645The long poetic peroration appeals in rousing terms to the patriotism and re-
formist goals of the “Lords and Commons of England,” who ought to recognize
and nurture an English citizenry that is politically aware and active, not a slavish,
conformist rabble as in the Catholic nations: “consider what Nation it is whereof
ye are, and whereof ye are the governours: a Nation not slow and dull, but of a
quick, ingenious, and piercing spirit, acute to invent, subtle and sinewy to dis-
course, not beneath the reach of any point the highest that human capacity can
soar to” (551). Milton sketches a history in which God’s calls to reformation have
regularly come “first to his English-men” (553), and he claims that now, “by all
concurrence of signs,” England is at another such climactic moment, with parlia-
ment as the agency by which the elect nation can advance its hitherto “slow-
moving” Reformation (565) and fulfill its destiny. They must recognize that conflict
and seeming schism may have regenerative, not tragic, consequences: “Where
there is much desire to learn, there of necessity will be much arguing, much writ-
ing, many opinions; for opinion in good men is but knowledge in the making”
(554). In this hopeful peroration Truth is also refigured, with Spenser again pro-
viding some terms. Truth is not now a dismembered virgin but an unconquerable
Amazon, a Britomart:
Though all the windes of doctrin were let loose to play upon the earth, so Truth be in
the field, we do injuriously by licensing and prohibiting to misdoubt her strength. Let
her and Falshood grapple; who ever knew Truth put to the wors, in a free and open
encounter.... Who knows not that Truth is strong next to the Almighty; she needs
no policies, nor stratagems, nor licencings to make her victorious, those are the shifts
and defences that error uses against her power. (561–3)If bound by licensers she may, like Proteus, turn herself into false shapes, yet her
own nature has something of Proteus in it, since “She may have more shapes then
one.”^131
At this auspicious, reforming moment Milton again claims the role of prophet:
“When God shakes a Kingdome with strong and healthfull commotions to a generall
reforming,” he calls “men of rare abilities,” like Milton, to discover new truths
(566). Now, however, Milton does not see himself as a solitary voice crying in the
wilderness as in the divorce tracts, but as a participant in a lively, though widely
dispersed, scholarly community. Even when London was under siege such men –
including, he implies, himself – were “disputing, reasoning, reading, inventing,
discoursing, ev’n to a rarity, and admiration, things not before discourst or writt’n
of” (557). London is also a prophetic milieu: Milton portrays it as a City of Refuge
(Numbers 35:11–24) in an England that is becoming a Nation of Prophets (Num-
bers 11:29), thereby fulfilling Moses’ desire that “not only our sev’nty Elders, but
all the Lords people are become Prophets” (555–6). These texts may carry millenarian
overtones, but Milton no longer seems to think that Christ’s Second Coming is