“The So-called Council of State” 1649–1652cepted as necessary. Early in 1650 there were proposals for elections to fill up par-
liament to the number of 400, but the sitting members determined that the infant
Commonwealth, like the infant Moses, could best be nursed by its own mother –
the Rump. That issue was often revisited but always reached the same impasse,
given the very real danger that a more representative body would restore the king.
In May and June parliament acceded to Presbyterian demands for regulation of
public morality, passing laws to make incest and adultery punishable by death, for-
nication by three months’ imprisonment, and Sabbath-breaking and profane oaths
by fines. On August 9 it enacted a Blasphemy Act, chiefly targeting the Ranters. It
provided six months’ imprisonment for a first offense and banishment on pain of
death for a second, but effectively restricted blasphemy to two cases: claiming that
any human person was God or a manifestation of God; and affirming that acts of
gross immorality (e.g. swearing, promiscuous sexual behavior, group sex) are not
sinful or are in fact religious practices. Milton saw this Act as a distinct improve-
ment over the ordinance of 1648, which had specified the death penalty for a wide
range of theological opinions.^77 This new Act, he later declared, defined blasphemy
“so far as it is a crime belonging to civil judicature... in plane English more warily,
more judiciously, more orthodoxally then twice thir number of divines have don in
many a prolix volume.”^78 He did not comment on the prescribed punishments.
Throughout 1650 Milton gave primary attention to his Latin answer to Salmasius,
which was delayed, he explained in his preface, by “precarious health” that re-
quired him to “work at intervals and hardly for an hour at a time, though the task
calls for continuous study and composition” (CPW IV.1, 307). Four years later, he
portrayed his decision to answer Salmasius as a kind of Hercules’ choice, in which
he followed a heroic path of duty even though he believed it would hasten the
onset of total blindness:
When the business of replying to the royal defense had been officially assigned to
me, and at the same time I was afflicted at once by ill health and the virtual loss of
my remaining eye, and the doctors were making learned predictions that if I should
undertake this task, I would shortly lose both eyes, I was not in the least deterred by
the warning. I seemed to hear, not the voice of the doctor (even that of Aesculapius,
issuing from the shrine at Epidaurus), but the sound of a certain more divine moni-
tor within. And I thought that two lots had now been set before me by a certain
command of fate: the one blindness, the other, duty. Either I must necessarily en-
dure the loss of my eyes, or I must abandon my most solemn duty.... Then I
reflected that many men have bought with greater evil smaller good; with death,
glory. To me, on the contrary, was offered a greater good at the price of a smaller
evil: that I could at the cost of blindness alone fulfill the most honorable requirement
of my duty. As duty is of itself more substantial than glory, so it ought to be for every
man more desirable and illustrious. I resolved therefore that I must employ this brief
use of my eyes while yet I could for the greatest possible benefit to the state. (CPW
IV.1, 587–8)