“Between Private Walls” 1645–164925th on the fast day in the morning about 6 a clock 1648.”^98 She was baptized on
November 7 at St Giles in the Fields.^99
On November 20 the army presented its “Grand Remonstrance” to a fearful
parliament. Penned chiefly by Ireton, it urged much of the familiar army–Leveller
program, including an Agreement of the People and a demand that the king be
brought to justice for the “treason, blood and mischief he is therein guilty of.”^100
On November 28 the Treaty of Newport collapsed over Charles’s insistence on
preserving bishops. Out of patience, on December 1 the army seized the king and
conveyed him to Hurst Castle in Hampshire. When parliament denounced that
action and insisted on renewing negotiations with him, the army’s response was
Pride’s Purge. On December 6 and during the next few days, soldiers under Colo-
nel Pride excluded or arrested well over two hundred parliament members; others,
staggered by the affront to parliamentary authority, withdrew voluntarily, leaving
in place the so called Rump Parliament of about eighty Commons who were joined
by five or six Lords.^101
Milton probably began the History of Britain in tandem with or soon after he
finished the draft of Moscovia (perhaps in late 1647), and was at work on it in the
months of crisis during and after the Second Civil War. His comment in the Defensio
Secunda is, I think, misleading in seeming to indicate that he wrote all of the first
four books in the five or six weeks after completing his Tenure of Kings and Magis-
trates in early February, 1649 and before receiving an appointment from the Com-
monwealth government in mid-March.^102 Milton probably could have written that
much that fast but this scenario is unlikely. In July, 1648 Hartlib knew Milton was
at work on this project, and Milton’s imprecision about dating is indicated by the
fact that he could not have completed Book IV in 1649 since he relies for some part
of it on a book published in 1652.^103 I suspect he wrote Book I just after completing
Moscovia; it has the manner and tone of a rather detached scholarly endeavor. But
Books II and III, and the “Digression” on the Long Parliament, resonate with the
course of contemporary events and Milton’s anxieties during and after the Second
Civil War in 1648. Milton probably drafted them then, and after finishing Tenure
turned back to revise them and write the first part of Book IV, breaking off where
Bede’s account ends, in the year 731. If that is so, his statement in the Defensio
Secunda would refer to the period when he revised and finished this part of his
project.
When Milton decided to write the history of his nation from earliest times to the
present, he rose to a call by Henry Saville, John Haywood, Samuel Daniel, and
Francis Bacon, among others, for a history that would break free of the ponderous
chronicle format. However, he chose not to follow some other models available –
William Camden’s “antiquitarian” chorography (he had termed such books “rakeing
in the Foundations of old Abbies and Cathedrals”), or John Selden’s elaborate schol-
arly analyses of particular institutions (e.g. tithes), or Thomas May’s republican
history of the English parliament which focused on the triumphs of liberty during