“The So-called Council of State” 1649–1652ment of mind in the people I must confess I cannot willingly ascribe to the natural
disposition of an Englishman, but rather to two other causes. First, to the Prelats and
thir fellow-teachers, though of another Name and Sect [the Presbyterians], whose
Pulpit stuff, both first and last, hath bin the Doctrin and perpetual infusion of sevility
and wretchedness to all thir hearers. (344)More rigorously than he did in Animadversions and Colasterion, Milton follows his
opponent’s structure chapter by chapter, quoting and then refuting his propositions
and his arguments. Against the king’s royalist rewriting of recent history, Milton
sets his republican versions, drawing largely on Thomas May’s History of Parliament.
Some examples: the king claims that he willingly convoked the Long Parliament,
but in fact he always hated parliaments and called this one only to fund his Scots
war, “condemn’d and abominated by the whole Kingdom” (354). The king de-
nounces the Irish rebels, but from start to finish was “ever friendly to the Irish
Papists” and in “secret intercours” with them to invade England.^168 The king rails
against unlawful popular tumults, but those tumults hastened much needed reform:
If there were a man of iron, such as Talus, by our Poet Spencer, is fain’d to be the page
of Justice, who with his iron flaile could doe all this, and expeditiously, without those
deceitfull formes and circumstances of Law, worse then ceremonies in Religion; I say
God send it don, whether by one Talus, or by a thousand.... This iron flaile the
People... drove the Bishops out of thir Baronies, out of thir Cathedrals, out the
Lords House... threw down the High Commission and Star-chamber, [and] gave us
a Triennial Parlament. (390–1)Moreover, the king’s negotiations with parliament were duplicitous, his counsels of
patience and forgiveness to his son are not to be trusted, and his claims of inviolabil-
ity as the “Lords Anointed” are contradicted by justifications of tyrannicide from
the Bible, history, and Natural Law.^169 By such analysis Milton sought to teach his
audience how to read as free citizens of a republic: to weigh fine-sounding words
against actions, and to recognize propaganda that plays with emotions and senti-
ment.^170
Milton also requires his readers to choose between two versions of the state.
Charles’s model produces tyranny and servility: the king wields supreme power,
controlling the army, governing the church, calling and dismissing parliament, and
retaining a negative voice over legislation. In Milton’s republican model parlia-
ment, as the people’s representative, is supreme in all these areas, and it was the
king’s persistent refusal to recognize this fact that caused the civil war and the
regicide. Milton’s argument presumes, with classical notions of monarchy as slavery
in the background, that a nascent republicanism was implied by England’s very
nature as a free people. If they have to depend on a king’s assent for any needful
thing, they are not free “but a multitude of Vassalls in the Possession and domaine
of one absolute Lord” (458). The king had no right to govern except by law and