“The So-called Council of State” 1649–1652- the author of Areopagitica may have found distasteful though necessary; apparently
he did not deny any licenses. As an officer in the new government he had to come
to terms with the compromises attendant upon power and to accept some prag-
matic modifications of his tolerationist and republican ideals. His chief responsibil-
ity was to put into good Latin official letters to foreign states, treaty negotiations,
and various diplomatic exchanges. He also translated letters from foreign govern-
ments into English and attended the Council of State or one of its committees as
required, usually to translate at meetings with foreign envoys. Though Milton was
not in a policy-making position, he regularly encountered and surely hoped to
influence the men who sat at the helm of state, among them Cromwell, Fairfax,
John Bradshaw (the council president), Henry Vane, and Bulstrode Whitelocke.
Bradshaw and Vane he counted as friends.
During these three years Milton was already blind in one eye, and the other was
failing “slowly and gradually” (CPW IV.2, 869). The process was accelerated, he
believed, by the demands of his long Latin answer to Salmasius. The government
continued to need his services, but he had to cope with the restrictions imposed by
his worsening vision, and with mounting fears of becoming totally blind. His writ-
ings of this period sound two major and related themes. One is a fierce attack on
idolatry, which, in the very broad definition he develops, is not simply devotion
paid to pagan deities or to the images and ritual of Roman Catholicism but, rather,
the disposition to attach divinity or special sanctity to any person – pope or king or
prelate, or any human institution or material form. So Miltonic iconoclasm is not
smashing religious art or suppressing church music but, rather, a relentless effort to
disabuse the populace of that disposition, which he sees as predisposing them to
slavishness. The other theme is the defense of republicanism on classical and biblical
grounds as the government best suited to free, mature, and self-reliant citizens.
Invoking the classical idea that the best government is aristocracy, rule by the wor-
thiest citizens, Milton can proclaim England a republic (despite its unrepresentative
parliament) by defining its worthiest citizens as those who love and defend liberty.
Baffled and dismayed that so many remain disaffected from the English republic, he
is willing to make pragmatic compromises to preserve it while (he hopes) the popu-
lace can learn better republican values. Apparently he found no time to write po-
etry and must have wondered if he would ever again do so.
“I Take it on Me as a Work Assign’d”
The recommendation of Milton as Secretary for Foreign Languages may have come
from the president of the council John Bradshaw, who had been Milton’s attorney
in 1647 in the Powell affair,^2 or from Luke Robinson, formerly his fellow student at
Christ’s College. Edward Phillips explains his alternative title, “Latin Secretary,” by
referring to a council resolution to use only Latin in diplomatic exchanges, as being