“The So-called Council of State” 1649–1652also to strengthen the navy. Rising excise taxes, large assessments on property, loans
guaranteed by the increasingly suspect “public faith,” and the free quartering of
unpaid soldiers strained the loyalty even of the regime’s supporters.^9 Milton was
sometimes in the council as it considered these problems; it met every day except
Sunday and often in late evening sessions. From early 1651 onward, however, it
seems that he did not attend council meetings unless specifically requested, but did
meet often with its Committee on Foreign Affairs.^10
At first Milton had little foreign correspondence. The initial efforts of the new
republic to establish formal diplomatic relationships with European states were sabo-
taged by royalist exiles in the various European capitals, who undermined, threatened,
attacked, and sometimes murdered England’s envoys. During 1649 Milton wrote three
letters and perhaps more to the Senate of the City of Hamburg, traditionally a close
trading partner of England.^11 He turned into sometimes eloquent Latin the English
drafts prepared by members of the council, and then made the changes required by
the council and by parliament. This was the usual procedure, though Milton was
sometimes instructed to compose letters himself with only general directives as to
substance, and then submit them for approval.^12 On March 22, 1649 he was ordered
to produce Latin versions of two letters protesting attacks by exiled royalists on mem-
bers of the Merchant Adventurers Trading Company, which had a permanent colony
in Hamburg.^13 The first letter eloquently justifies England’s decision to “convert the
haughty tyranny of royal power into the form of a free state,” and formally requests
that extant treaties for the protection of English merchants in Hamburg be respected.^14
The second complains more forcefully, and demands prompt punishment for an as-
sault set on by Charles II’s agent in Hamburg against the company’s chaplain, who
barely escaped with his life. The Hamburg Senate responded in a letter dated June 15/
25 which Milton probably translated, professing friendship but complaining of shoddy
wares and dishonesty from the English traders. Parliament sent out Milton’s Latin
reply on August 10, promising to correct such abuses but again insisting that Hamburg
restrain and punish attacks on the merchants (CPW V.2, 489–95). Milton only had a
few other incoming letters to translate, chiefly from the United Provinces expressing
profound regret over the murder by royalist exiles of England’s first envoy to The
Hague, Isaac Dorislaus – the same man who had given the aborted history lectures in
Cambridge during Milton’s undergraduate days.^15 He was murdered by royalist exiles
in May, soon after his arrival in The Hague.^16
The council called soon on Milton’s polemical skills. On March 26 he was asked
to “make some observations upon a paper lately printed called old & new Chaines”
(LR 2, 239), a tract by John Lilburne and other Levellers called The Second Part of
England’s New Chains Discovered. More inflammatory than its predecessor,^17 this
tract denounced the regicide, opposed the projected invasion of Ireland, blasted the
Council of State and the army grandees as ambitious, power-hungry usurpers, claimed
that the new government had overturned the English constitution and laws and was
oppressing the common soldiers and the people, and called for a new, representa-