“The So-called Council of State” 1649–1652undertaketh to prove, That it is lawfull for any that have power to call to account,
Depose, and put to Death wicked Kings and Tyrants (after due conviction) if the
ordinary Magistrate neglect it.^51On December 16, 1649 Milton licensed a French translation of various documents,
speeches, and narratives pertaining to the trial and death of Charles I.^52 Milton was
to ascertain that this documentary collection was what it purported to be (it was),
and not disguised royalist propaganda.
During the summer and autumn of 1649 Milton concentrated on his answer to
Eikon Basilike: The Portraiture of his Sacred Majestie in his Solitudes and Sufferings, which
began to circulate immediately after the king’s execution.^53 That prodigiously popular
book, largely and perhaps entirely ghostwritten by a Presbyterian divine, John
Gauden,^54 but purporting to be the reflections and meditations of Charles I while
awaiting his trial and execution, was easily the most dangerous royalist polemic
challenge to the new government. It presents the dead king as a second Christ, a
second David, a martyr holding fast to his beliefs, and a well-meaning, gracious
monarch. Its several chapters purport to offer Charles’s version of the principal
events of the 1640s, from the calling of the Long Parliament to just before his
execution, each chapter ending with prayers; it concludes with a letter of “advice”
to the future Charles II. New material was added after March 15 to sound a yet
more personal tone: an account of the king’s last conversation with his children and
four “Divine Meditations,” conceived as preparations for death, which he was said
to have used in prison and then handed to Bishop Juxon on the scaffold.^55 The
whole was calculated to evoke a rush of sympathy for Charles and outrage against
his executioners. Within one year of its first appearance the king’s book went through
more than thirty-five editions in London and twenty-five more in Ireland and
abroad;^56 extracts from the prayers and meditations were also often reprinted.
Royalists and defenders of the regicide promptly joined in polemic battle over
the book and its authorship. Among the defenders, Clement Walker described it as
“full fraught with Wisdom Divine and Humane” and the anonymous author of The
Princely Pellican published segments from “his Majesties Divine Meditations,” insist-
ing vehemently on the king’s authorship.^57 Late in August the first full-scale answer
appeared: Eikon Alethine. The Portraiture of Truths most sacred Majesty.^58 It engages
with Eikon Basilike chapter by chapter, but its primary strategy is to portray the
book as a forgery whose style points to the author as “Some Prelaticall Levite gap-
ing after a Bishoprick, Deanery, or the like.”^59 The frontispiece engraving displays
a curtain pulled back to reveal the true author in academic/clerical robes (plate 9),
and the word-play on Gauden’s name – “gaudy phrase,” “gaudy outside,” “gaudily
drest” – indicates that that author’s identity was an open secret.^60 With considerable
rhetorical force the author of Eikon Alethine urges his countrymen not to be mes-
merized by this “Gorgon” because they think it to be the king’s book, and not to
betray mother England “now travailing with Liberty and ready to bring forth a