“Between Private Walls” 1645–1649others’ wills. These provisions were codified into the first version of an Agreement of
the People, the nucleus of a written republican constitution, which was to guarantee
the fundamentals of government and the people’s rights. Both documents pro-
claimed that “all power is originally and essentially in the whole body of the peo-
ple”; that the Laws of Reason and of Nature take precedence over civil and common
law; that the Civil War had returned the country to a state of nature where the
truncated Commons, or the army, or others might act to secure the common inter-
est; but that only a new constitution subscribed by the whole population could re-
found civil society and government.^88 The Agreement was debated at Putney from
October 28 to November 1, but rifts widened as the high officers, especially
Cromwell and Henry Ireton, held out for a property qualification for suffrage and
sought to retain some role for the king and a House of Lords.^89 The king’s escape to
the Isle of Wight on November 11 forced an uneasy rapprochement between officers
and troops, and between the army and parliament. In early January, 1648, parlia-
ment, infuriated by the king’s continued stalling, passed a resolution of “No Fur-
ther Addresses” to the king, but he had concluded a secret agreement with the
Scots, trading the establishment of Presbyterianism in England for three years for a
Scottish invasion to restore him to the throne. In April and May, royalist uprisings
in Wales, Cornwall, Devonshire, and the North launched the Second Civil War.
That April Milton voiced his mounting anxiety over these events by translating
Psalms 80–8.^90 He used the common meter (alternating lines of eight and six sylla-
bles) employed in most psalters, perhaps with a view to offering these psalms to the
commission charged to revise the psalter, but in any case because that meter al-
lowed for some approximation to Hebraic psalmic parallelism.^91 Their themes –
God’s displeasure with his chosen people and prayers for divine guidance for a
nation racked with conspiracies and surrounded by enemies – resonate with the
worrying turn of events. Fusing his voice with that of the psalmist, Milton cries out
to God to save a new Israel and a new prophet beleagured by enemies on all sides
and threatened by the treachery of friends – with allusion to the Scots (and some
English) Presbyterians who now support the king.^92 Milton’s additions to the He-
braic texts, usually italicized, show him applying the psalmist’s laments and the
divine denunciations to dangers from present foes, e.g. both “Kings and lordly States”
(parliament leaders):
God in the great assembly stands
Of Kings and lordly States,
Amongst the gods on both his hands
He judges and debates.
How long will ye pervert the right
With judgment false and wrong
Favoring the wicked by your might,
Who thence grow bold and strong?^93