“Between Private Walls” 1645–1649confused Anarchy with this intereign, we may be able from two such remarkable
turns of State, producing like events among us, to raise a knowledg of our selves both
great and weighty, by judging hence what kind of men the Britans generally are in
matters of so high enterprise... [rather than] for want of self-knowledge, to enter-
prise rashly and come off miserably in great undertakings. (129–30)That suggests recent final closure to the wars. The power struggles among the now
twice-defeated and imprisoned king, the parliament, the army, and the Scots, ex-
tending into December after Pride’s Purge, are better termed an anarchic “interr-
eign” than are the weeks after the king’s execution when a Commonwealth was
being instituted. Most of the so called Digression seems also to date from this time.^109
In Milton’s reading, the ancient Britons could not take advantage of fair oppor-
tunities for self-government, having by long subjection been made “servile in mind,
sloathful of body” (130). Also, they were badly served by their ambitious, tyran-
nous, dissolute, and corrupt leaders and clergy, so they lacked “the wisdom, the
virtue, the labour, to use and maintain true libertie” and govern themselves well.
Plagued by marauding Picts and Scots, they did not defend “what was to be dearer
than life, thir liberty, against an Enemy not stronger than themselves” (131–2) and
instead sought protection from foreign (Saxon) kings. For his perspective in Book
III, Milton relies heavily on the sixth-century monk Gildas’s De Excidio et Conquestu
Britanniae, echoing his dark version of the post-Roman age in which the downfall
of the Britons, by analogy with the ancient Israelites, is linked to their corruption
and perversity.^110 In the long Digression intended for insertion at this point, Milton
asserts that the English in the “late commotions” have been placed in a parallel
situation and seem all too likely to display the same character flaw, giving over the
opportunity for self-government and re-establishing monarchical rule:
It may withal bee enquir’d... why they who had the chiefe management therin
having attain’d, though not so easilie, to a condition which had set before them civil
government in all her formes, and giv’n them to bee masters of thir own choise, were
not found able after so many years doeing and undoeing to hitt so much as into any
good and laudable way that might shew us hopes of a just and well amended com-
mon-wealth to come. (441)The Digression explicitly compares the chaos and rampant vice in Britain after
the departure of the Romans to the manifold evils and corruptions in England. In
the prophetic mode of Gildas’s jeremiad, Milton denounces the Presbyterian Long
Parliament for misuse of power in the service of their own “profit and ambition,”
thereby sabotaging the great opportunity won on the battlefield to settle a free
commonwealth:
For a parlament being calld and as was thought many things to redress... [but] straite
every one betooke himself, setting the common-wealth behinde and his private ends