“The So-called Council of State” 1649–1652man-child.”^61 A few days later, Eikon Episte or, the faithful Portraiture of a Loyall
Subject answered Eikon Alethine, following that text and Eikon Basilike chapter by
chapter and offering “to handle all the controverted points relating to these times.”
Imploring Englishmen not to murder the issue of the king’s brain as they did him,
this author gives insistent personal testimony to the king’s authorship: “I take it to
be the Kings Book. I am sure of it; I know his hand; I have seen the manuscript; I
have heard him own it; the world believes it.”^62
Though he knew better, Milton dealt with the book as the king’s, believing that
he had especially to deal with the “idolatrous” image of the king in that book,
whoever constructed it. In October or possibly early November “The Author J.
M.” published Eikonoklastes, in Answer to a Book Intitl’d Eikon Basilike. The Portrature
of his Sacred Majesty in his Solitudes and Sufferings.^63 Like Eikon Alethine, it also fol-
lowed Eikon Basilike chapter by chapter, charging that the king’s interpretations of
his actions and intentions are in every case false and dishonest and that his carefully
crafted self-portrait as sainted martyr and second Christ is sheer hypocrisy, espe-
cially in light of his appropriation of Pamela’s prayer from Sidney’s Arcadia as his
own prayer. Milton was very proud of this treatise, later casting himself as the
solitary hero who managed to slay the resurrected king for good: “I alone, when
the king rose again as it were from the dead and in his posthumous volume
commended himself to the people by new slyness and meretricious arguments, did
recently overcome and do away with him” (CPW IV.1, 306). Milton’s answer to
the king’s book with its powerful rhetorical challenge is analyzed on pages 264–71.
On November 19 the council recognized the value of Milton’s services in prac-
tical terms, granting him lodgings in Whitehall, at the Scotland Yard end.^64 He
probably moved soon; such quarters were in great demand and his daily life was
surely eased by living so close to the council’s meeting rooms.
On January 8, 1650, the council ordered Milton to “prepare something in an-
swer to the Booke of Saltmasius, and when hee hath done itt bring itt to the Councell”
(LR II, 286), a task he later described as that of “publicly defending... the cause of
the English people and thus of Liberty herself.”^65 Salmasius’s Defensio Regia pro
Carolo I, dedicated to Charles II, was in print in Europe by November, 1649, and
said to be on its way to England.^66 Salmasius, a professor at the University of Leyden,
had an impressive scholarly reputation on the Continent as a commentator on clas-
sical and patristic texts (Solinus, Epictetus, Tertullian, the Tabula Cebetis) and as the
author of some thirty books, including studies of usury, of the Greek tongue, and of
Greek and Roman law. Praised by Richelieu as one of the three consummate
scholars of the age,^67 he was offered many inducements to honor France, Holland,
and Sweden with his presence. When he wrote Defensio Regia and when Milton’s
reply appeared he was scholar-in-residence at the court of Queen Christina of
Sweden. Since Salmasius was a Protestant who had written against the pope and
episcopacy, his attack on the English rebels and regicides was all the more formida-
ble. The Defensio Regia sounded a clarion call to the kings of Europe, and to royal-