“The So-called Council of State” 1649–1652ers and booksellers in their publication decisions. He probably wasted few tears on
the ephemeral newsbooks swept away by the ordinance, but supposed the Act
might later be modified when the republic was more secure.
Sometime before September 30, the second edition of Milton’s Tenure was pub-
lished. Its twelve added pages bolster Milton’s argument against the Presbyterian
clergy, who are still vehemently denouncing the regicide and the Commonwealth
government in pulpits and pamphlets.^49 To discredit their claim that “the disposing
or punishing of a King or Tyrant is against the constant Judgement of all Protestant
Divines” (CPW III, 257), Milton marshals extracts from Luther, Zwingli, Calvin,
Bucer, Paraeus, Knox, Cartwright, Christopher Goodman, and others, affirming
the right to resist, depose, and sometimes kill a monarch who is a tyrant or enemy
of God. His strategy is to distinguish that central tradition – “our fathers in the
faith” – from the new Presbyterian divines who are now “gorging themselves like
Harpy’s on those simonious places and preferments of thir outed predecessors” and
who, like those deposed prelates, seek to tyrannize over conscience (251–2). Also,
quoting from a Presbyterian pamphlet of 1643, Scripture and Reason Pleaded for De-
fensive Arms, he shows that their own arguments for armed resistance to the king
allow by logical extension for trying and executing him. At one point Milton’s
prophetic voice breaks through the polemic, interpreting the regicide and the found-
ing of a republic as auguries of the Millennium. Then there will be no more earthly
kings, only Christ,
who is our only King, the root of David, and whose Kingdom is eternal righteousness,
with all those that Warr under him, whose happiness and final hopes are laid up in that
only just & rightful kingdom (which we pray incessantly may com soon, and in so
praying wish hasty ruin and destruction to all Tyrants), eev’n he our immortal King,
and all that love him, must of necessity have in abomination these blind and lame
Defenders. (256)But Milton invokes this millennial expectation chiefly as an argument pertaining to
government in the interim. A republican commonwealth, Milton implies, is the
only political structure that allows Christ his place now as the only rightful king,
and by overturning tyrants begins properly to prepare for that millennial rule.
On October 24 the council charged Milton and/or the sergeant at arms to evalu-
ate the writings of a notorious ex-parliament member, Clement Walker, who fell
foul of the Act by publishing fierce denunciations of the regicide, the Independ-
ents, and the Rump Parliament, in support of Charles II.^50 If Milton performed this
task he would have found his own Tenure, and himself, tarred with the pitch attach-
ing to his divorce argument:
There is lately come forth a book of John Melton’s (a Libertine, that thinketh his Wife
a Manacle, and his very Garters to be Shackles and Fetters to him; one that (after the
Independent fashion) will be tied by no obligation to God or Man), wherein he