“Between Private Walls” 1645–1649stood as a binding contract to protect the king’s life and office, Milton repeats a
principle often used by Puritans to justify taking up arms and affirmed by him
earlier in the divorce tracts: covenants cannot bind against the laws of nature and
reason always implicit in them.
He then applies this theory to the people’s sovereign right to change any govern-
ment at will:
It follows lastly, that since the King or Magistrate holds his autoritie of the people...
then may the people as oft as they shall judge it for the best, either choose him or
reject him, retaine him or depose him though no Tyrant, meerly by the liberty and
right of free born Men, to be govern’d as seems to them best. (206)Indeed, any restraint of the citizens from choosing and changing governments is
itself tyranny, since if they are citizens and not slaves they – not the king, as in the
usual royalist analogy – have the power and rights of the master of a household:
Surely they that shall boast, as we doe, to be a free Nation, and not have in themselves
the power to remove, or abolish any governour supreme, or subordinat, with the
goverment it self upon urgent causes, may please thir fancy with a ridiculous and
painted freedom, fit to coz’n babies; but are indeed under tyranny and servitude; as
wanting that power, which is the root and sourse of all liberty, to dispose and oeconomize
in the Land which God hath giv’n them, as Maisters of Family in thir own house and
free inheritance. (236–7)Milton’s readiness to argue that, at least temporarily, the patently unrepresenta-
tive Commons and the army might act as and for the people arises in part from his
disgust with the Long Parliament, so vigorously expressed in the Digression to the
History of Britain. He also assumes the principle of Salus Populi as justifying these
extra-legal measures in times of emergency. But his explicit justification is the wor-
thiness of those who have stayed the course amid many backsliders, thereby prov-
ing themselves to be a natural aristocracy of worthies who, on Aristotelian principles,
ought to rule. The evidence of their goodness is not religious orthodoxy or signs of
Calvinist election, but manifest love of liberty – “none can love freedom heartilie
but good men” – and the battlefield victories that indicate God’s favor to them
(192). With Machiavelli in the background, Milton turns the royalist reading of
Romans 13:1 against the royalists, arguing that the powers to be obeyed now are
those who are presently in power: “If all human power to execute, not accidentally
but intendedly, the wrath of God upon evil doers without exception, be of God;
then that power, whether ordinary, or if that faile, extraordinary, so executing that
intent of God, is lawfull, and not to be resisted” (198).
Characteristically, Milton offers to show that scripture and reason perfectly agree
on principles of government, even as they do on divorce: “This, though it cannot
but stand with plain reason, shall be made good also by Scripture” (206). A version