“The So-called Council of State” 1649–1652tive parliament, liberty of conscience, a free press, and the revival of army agitators.
On March 28, Milton attended the council to receive a commission relating to
Ireland, and so may have heard the Leveller authors – Lilburne, Walwyn, Overton,
and Thomas Prince – examined, charged with high treason, and sent to the Tower.
Lilburne later claimed that from outside the council door he overheard Cromwell
say, “I tell you Sir, you have no other way to deal with these men but to break
them in pieces.”^18 The council perceived Leveller opposition to the government
and also their democratic ideology and reform agenda to be dangerously destabilizing
in present circumstances. Leveller agitation promoted mutinies among the restive
and still unpaid troops, which Fairfax and Cromwell suppressed with considerable
violence and finally crushed at Burford on May 15.
Milton did not produce the requested “Observations” on the Leveller tract. No
doubt the council gave precedence to the Ireland commission, but Milton may
have demurred or at least waited the council out.^19 Though he nowhere mentions
the Levellers and generally supported government policy, Milton agreed with Lev-
eller demands for toleration, a free press, and abolition of tithes. Also, he probably
felt considerable affinity with Overton and Walwyn, whose writings had so often
been denounced in company with his own divorce tracts.^20 Lilburne and the other
three Levellers were acquitted of treason and released from the Tower on Novem-
ber 8, 1649, touching off wild celebrations in the City.
The council’s other charge to Milton was to “make some observations” on four
documents pertaining to Ireland.^21 The Catholic Confederacy in Ireland, which in
1641 began an armed revolt against English domination, was wooed by Charles I to
serve as a potential invasion force to put down the English rebellion. On January
17, 1649 the royalist lord lieutenant, James Butler, Earl of Ormond, signed a peace
treaty with the Irish Confederacy in the king’s name, offering them almost total
political independence and religious freedom in return for such military aid. That
offer was probably disingenuous and meant to be repudiated should Charles or his
son regain the throne, but the confederacy credited it and joined Ormond’s army
to secure Ireland for Charles II. Royalist forces were also gathering in Scotland, but
Ireland was thought to pose a more immediate threat. Milton was to comment on
these four documents: the Articles of Peace signed by Ormond; a letter of March 9
from Ormond urging Colonel Michael Jones, governor of Dublin and commander
of troops loyal to parliament, to defect to Charles II; Jones’s reply of March 14
denouncing the treaty as illegal and proclaiming his loyalty to parliament; and a
tract entitled A Necessary Representation of the Present Evills (February 15) by the
Presbytery at Belfast which denounced the regicide and the new republic. Milton’s
twenty-page Observations appeared around May 16 without his name attached but
with the notation, “Publisht by Autority”; he evidently regarded it as an official
document.^22 Its polemic plays skillfully on common English attitudes: disdain for
the “savage” Irish, revulsion over the bloody 1641 massacre of English residents in
Ireland, and Protestant hatred of popish idolatry.