“The So-called Council of State” 1649–1652Justice with prophetic, apocalyptic resonance.^175 Linking the justice realized in the
regicide with the honor accorded the saints in Psalm 149:8, “To bind thir Kings in
Chaines, and thir Nobles with links of Iron,” he intimates that the English republic
may have begun to realize “in these latter days” the millennial “doom” (Revelation
19) to be visited on kings by the King of Kings (598–9). But his concern is still with
how to sustain republican government in the meantime. He makes a sharp division
among three categories of Englishmen: the wise, whose “constancie and solid firm-
ness” the king cannot hope to unsettle; the “inconstant, irrational, and Image-
doting rabble” who are incorrigible idolaters, mesmerized by the king’s Circean
cup of servitude;^176 and the rest, whom his guidance might reclaim. He elaborates
that Circe allusion in the second edition:
[They] like a credulous and hapless herd, begott’n to servility, and inchanted with
these popular institutes of Tyranny, subscrib’d with a new device of the Kings Picture
at his praiers, hold out both thir eares with such delight and ravishment to be stigmatiz’d
and board through in witness of thir own voluntary and beloved baseness. The rest,
whom perhaps ignorance without malice, or some error, less then fatal, hath for the
time misledd, on this side Sorcery or obduration, may find the grace and good guid-
ance to bethink themselves, and recover. (601)These lines reveal Milton’s profound chagrin and frustration that, after the first
edition, so many of his idolatrous countrymen remain “a hapless herd,” unrespon-
sive to the best efforts of Milton Ikonoklastes to break the Circean spell.
Salmasius’s Defensio Regia posed a very different challenge. That ponderous Latin
treatise, combining serious argument with fierce denunciation, was the work of a
reformed Protestant with a distinguished international reputation as Latinist and
scholar. Exuding shock and horror over the regicide and the crimes of the “illegal”
Commonwealth government and the army, Salmasius marshals scripture texts sup-
porting the divine right of kings and even of tyrants, analyzes ancient and modern
political theory and history to argue the superiority and continuity of monarchical
government, and draws the same conclusion from English laws and English history.
Milton gladly took up the challenge to match and overpass Salmasius in sound Latinity
as well as in political philosophy and historical scholarship, eager to demonstrate that
the infant English republic was not the cultural wasteland its enemies claimed, but
had reclaimed the noblest traditions of humanist learning. Though the organization
of Milton’s long treatise is dictated by the need to answer Salmasius point by point,
he also expands upon his conception of republican polity and culture.
This work is a prime example of what David Norbrook terms the republic’s
developing aesthetics of sublimity, set over against the more limited courtly aes-
thetics of elegance and beauty.^177 In his preface Milton presents the Defensio as a
prose epic whose theme is the heroic action of his countrymen in defeating, judg-
ing, and executing their tyrant king, with God “as our leader”: