“The So-called Council of State” 1649–1652But Milton tailors this quasi-official treatise to his own concerns, which are less
with the barbarous Irish than with Scottish influence on English politics. Repellent
as Milton’s comments about the Irish sometimes are, his tract does not, like much
other polemic of early 1649, call for their eradication, or accuse them of cannibal-
ism, or recount massacre horror stories to fuel the English appetite for revenge.^23
His emphases indicate his priorities. He gives only four-and-a-half pages of com-
ment to the thirty-three pages of Ormond’s Treaty of Peace with the Irish Rebels,
evidently expecting English Protestants of all stripes to agree readily that its gener-
ous terms constitute a traitorous sellout of the interests of the English state and
church in Ireland. He gives the same space to Ormond’s two-page letter attempting
to subvert Colonel Jones. But the four-and-a-half page Representation by the Ulster
Presbyters elicits thirteen pages of refutation, since its fierce denunciation of the
regicide and the English republic articulates views widely shared by English Presby-
terians. Milton’s tract contributes to his government’s effort to discredit the defiant
Presbyterian clergy at home while seeking the acquiescence of the people.^24 By
linking the royalist Ormond and the Ulster Presbyterian clerics with the rebel Irish
papists, he seeks to force a sharp division between that treasonous alliance and good
English Protestants.
Milton’s comments on the treaty redirect much of the English rage from the Irish
and toward King Charles and Ormond. In granting an Act of Oblivion for “all the
[Irish] Murders, Massacres, Treasons, Pyracies” from 1641 onward, the king has
“sold away that justice... due for the bloud of more than 200000, of his Subjects,
... assassinated and cut in pieces by those Irish Barbarians.”^25 The first article of the
treaty, which excuses the Irish from taking the Oath of Supremacy to the English
monarch as head of the church and substitutes a simple oath of allegiance, grants the
Irish “a Condition of freedome superior to what any English Protestant durst have
demanded” (CPW III, 302). The second and twelfth articles, which negate laws
requiring English approval of Irish parliaments and legislation, enable the Irish “to
throw off all subjection to this Realme” (303). The ninth allows them a militia, and
other articles grant them choice of magistrates and judges, repossession of lands, and
control of their own “Schools, Abbeyes, and Revenues, Garrisons, Fortresses,
Townes,” thereby committing “the whole managing both of peace and warre...
to Papists, and the chiefe Leaders of that Rebellion” (309, 305). The treaty traitor-
ously gives “to mortall Enemies” part of the English patrimony, acting to “disalliege
a whole Feudary Kingdome from the ancient Dominion of England” (307). In
Milton’s formulation, the feudal overlord is not the king but England itself, and
Milton cites several cases (as he does also in his Commonplace Book) that deny the
king’s right to alienate the nation’s patrimony for any cause.^26
On many issues Milton was able to think his way beyond received opinion and
prejudice, but not so in regard to England’s colonization of Ireland: that nation, he
thinks, belongs to England by conquest and in feudal vassalage. He sees no parallel
between the Irish struggle for independence and religious liberty and his own com-