“The So-called Council of State” 1649–1652age.^156 The next day he wrote his “most esteemed Herman” that he did not know
the result since rain kept him from the council meeting; he had now to walk in
from Petty France. This letter and that to Whitelocke are in the hand of Edward
Phillips, who was evidently serving as occasional scribe for his uncle.^157 On Febru-
ary 17 parliament passed the Latin Safeguard as prepared by Milton but without the
language about successors. Milton’s autograph signature guaranteed its exact con-
formity to the English original. At a casual meeting in the park Mylius heard from
Milton that the succession language had been refused.^158 On March 2 the council,
with Milton present, formally presented Mylius with the document, tendering their
“friendship and service” to his Lord and himself (LR III, 204). His diary entry of
March 6 records his farewell to Milton the previous day, “with thanks in deeds and
in words” – the deed being a cash gift equal to £25. Milton reciprocated with an
affirmation of friendship “in the most lavish terms,” and with two copies of the
Safeguard in English as well as the Latin original, all “signed by his own hand.” As
most of us can, Milton could sign his name without looking, but he was now totally
blind. Mylius commented on this date, with some sense of pathos, that Milton is
“wholly deprived of his sight in his forty-second year and so in the flower and
prime of his age.”^159
“To Meet the Force of [their] Reason in Any
Field Whatsoever”
With his major tracts of 1649–51, Milton saw himself meeting formidable polemic
challenges – the king’s book and Salmasius’s Defensio Regia – and offering his most
important service yet to God and country. For later readers these are not his most
attractive prose works: their organization and style are governed by the works he is
answering rather than, as in Areopagitica, by his own self-contained argument. Yet
they show Milton developing impressive rhetorical strategies to challenge the repub-
lic’s enemies, and also engaging issues long important to him and now at the center of
his thought: liberty, toleration, republican government, the sway of idolatry over the
populace, and the role and rights of good men who love liberty. He was persuaded
by Aristotle, Machiavelli, and the classical republican theorists that governments en-
dure or change according to the nature of their people, and that republics require a
virtuous, liberty-loving citizenry. So he was distressed about what the widespread
popular disaffection might portend for the new English republic. He also feared that
the English would continue to exhibit the basic character he ascribed to them in the
History of Britain: brave and noble in battle but unskilled in the political virtues needed
to govern. These works struggle with urgent questions: How can a populace de-
formed by a servile, monarchical culture be transformed into the citizenry a republic
needs? And how can it find worthy leaders who will preserve it? Milton’s task, he
supposes, is to influence those leaders and educate that populace.