“The So-called Council of State” 1649–1652“Law in a Free Nation hath bin ever public reason, the enacted reason of a Parlament”
(360). The king had no right to dismiss parliament or to exercise a negative vote
over its acts, since it is absurd “that the judgement of one man, not as a wise or good
man, but as a King, and oft times a wilfull, proud, and wicked King, should out-
weigh the prudence, and all the vertue of an elected Parlament” (409). Indeed,
“Laws are in the hands of Parlament to change or abrogate, as they shall see best for
the Common-wealth; eev’n to the taking away of King-ship it self” (458). The
king’s claim of conscience is specious for he has no right to impose his private
conscience regarding bishops and liturgy on the entire nation represented in parlia-
ment or on Christian individuals assured of liberty by Christ. Also, power over the
army belongs to parliament, not to the king: if the power of the sword is separated
from the power of law as seated in parliament, “then would that power of the
Sword be soon maister of the law, & being at one mans disposal, might, when he
pleas’d, controule the Law” (454). Milton may, like Marvell in “An Horatian Ode,”
recognize that this principle might come to be applicable to Cromwell, but this is
not the place to say so. At times Milton appeals explicitly to the principle of repre-
sentation, to equate parliament with the Commons. The king and the Lords repre-
sent only themselves but the Commons are the “whole Parlament, assembl’d by
election, and indu’d with the plenipotence of a free Nation, to make Laws” (410).
In fact, “the Commons are the whole Kingdom” (415): they “sit in that body, not
as his [the king’s] Subjects but as his Superiors, call’d, not by him but by the Law...
as oft as great affaires require, to be his Counselers and Dictators” (463). In affirming
these republican principles, Milton elides any question of the Rump’s legitimacy or
representativeness after Pride’s Purge, and also elides the role of the army.
Milton’s principal rhetorical challenge is to destroy the idol the king has made of
himself as martyr and saint, as a second David voicing psalmic prayers, and as a
second Christ in his sufferings and death. He counters those identifications by asso-
ciating Charles instead with an array of despots from biblical and ancient history:
Ahab, Herod, Saul, Nimrod, Nebuchadnezzar, Uzziah, Pharaoh, Rehoboam, Ahaz,
Caligula, Nero, and even Lucifer.^171 He also associates Charles’s tyranny with what
he sees as its natural psychological concomitant: servile subjection to his wife. His
letters at Naseby show him “govern’d by a Woman” (538) and his praises of her
“almost to Sonnetting” place him with other “effeminate and Uxorious Magis-
trates” who have brought danger and dishonor to nations (420–1).
In his prophetic role as iconoclast, Milton castigates Charles as a deceptive idol
and hypocritical actor. He is a masquer in his book as he was at court, devising
fictions and using disguises, cosmetics, and costumes. The frontispiece of Eikon
Basilike is “drawn out to the full measure of a Masking Scene,” but those “quaint
Emblems and devices begg’d from the old Pageantry of some Twelf-nights enter-
tainment at Whitehall” will not make a saint or martyr (342–3). In his dealings with
parliament Charles thrust out “on the Scene... an Antimasque of two bugbeares,
Noveltie and Perturbation” to frighten those attempting reformation (533). His sup-