“The So-called Council of State” 1649–1652church’s decline (309–10). Milton used his first assignment for the new govern-
ment to urge them a good deal further along the path to religious toleration than
most were prepared to travel.
When he wrote his Observations Milton could not have foreseen what havoc
Cromwell’s army was soon to wreak in Ireland but, given his characterization of
the Irish, he probably accepted it as necessary. Most Englishmen did. Over the next
several months, in a series of fierce and bloody battles – Dublin, Drogheda, Wex-
ford, Kilkenny – Cromwell’s army slaughtered and butchered the native Irish with-
out quarter in a frenzy of religious hatred and revenge.^32
During 1649 Milton had little diplomatic correspondence and the council gave
him other duties. He was asked to survey the papers of persons suspected of treason-
ous or illegal acts: on April 20, the letters of one Mr Watkins, to look for evidence
“concerning the exportacion of any prohibited goods”; and later the papers of John
Lee (May 30) and Mr Small (June 11).^33 On July 16 he was given some kind of
supervision over materials in the State Paper Office.^34 On November 21 he was charged
to complete an examination of Lady Killigrew’s papers, seized in May on suspicion
that she was plotting with the enemy; he evidently cleared her, since three days later
she had the pass she needed to go abroad (LR II, 274). Soon, though, the council
recognized that it needed Milton to answer the most important polemic challenge
facing the new state, the enormously popular book attributed to the late king, Eikon
Basilike.^35 It appointed John Hall to deal with less threatening polemic attacks.^36
Milton soon moved from Holborn to lodgings more convenient to the council’s
meeting place at Whitehall. His new dwelling, Edward Phillips states, was “at one
Thomson’s next door to the Bull-head Tavern at Charing Cross, opening into the
Spring Garden”^37 – near what would now be 49, Charing Cross Road. Thomson is
unknown, though the name may indicate some connection with Milton’s friend,
the bookseller George Thomason. Milton’s activities now settled into a regular
pattern: on some days, walking a few blocks to Whitehall to attend the council
when summoned for correspondence, or to follow the course of some negotiations,
or for other duties; otherwise, working at home on the treatise he was assigned to
write, perhaps assisted by his younger nephew John Phillips, as scribe.
As Milton labored on his answer to the king’s book, his divorce tracts continued
to draw fire from, among others, his old antagonist Joseph Hall, who denounced
his “licentious” encouragement to arbitrary divorces, exclaiming piously, “Wo is
me; To what a passe is the world come that a Christian pretending to Reformation
should dare to tender so loose a project to the publique.”^38 But the Tenure was
proving useful to other supporters of the republic. In a tract of May 30, the radical
Independent minister of Coleman Street, John Goodwin, quoted extensively from
Milton’s biblical and historical precedents for tyrannicide and for armed defenses of
Protestant religion, and also paraphrased some Miltonic generalizations, e.g. “Ty-
rants by a kind of naturall instinct both hate and fear none more than the true
Church and Saints of God.”^39