“The So-called Council of State” 1649–1652with judgment and profit,” and has “never tasted a drop of honest scholarship”
(338). He is also given to self-contradictions and illogic. He claims that government
by one, by a few, or by many is equally “natural,” but then states that monarchy is
the “most natural” of the three (427).^181 He reads the Pauline text requiring obedi-
ence to the powers that be (Romans 13:1) as obligating Christians to submit even
to the ruling tyrant Nero, not recognizing that this argument also requires English
Christians to submit to the present government (382–5, 395). Also, he locates the
claims of English kings to absolute power in the right of ancient conquest, not
recognizing that this argument also sanctions the English government that con-
quered Charles (461).
Drawing on the widespread gossip that Salmasius was dominated by his wife,
Milton makes game of him as a “hen-pecked” husband (471). But he is quite seri-
ous in linking Salmasius’s slavery to an inferior with his readiness to defend a royal
absolutism that enslaves others: “You have at home a barking bitch who... con-
tradicts you shrilly; so naturally you want to force royal tyranny on others after
being used to suffer so slavishly a woman’s tyranny at home” (380); you are a “foul
Circean beast... well used to serving a woman in the lowest sort of slavery where
you never had the slightest taste of manly virtue or the freedom which springs from
it.”^182 Here (as to a lesser extent with King Charles in Eikon Basilike) Milton finds a
natural connection between a “slavish” personal life and a disposition to practice, or
submit to, political tyranny. It is an acute psychological observation, though based
on regrettable assumptions about gender hierarchy and couched in gender stere-
otypes.
At the level of argument, Milton insists that biblical and historical law and exam-
ple support a republican rather than a monarchical polity, and he cites several ex-
amples of tyrannicide approved by God or sanctioned by history. He turns against
Salmasius the biblical texts that he (like many others) had cited to support absolute
monarchy: Deuteronomy 17 and 1 Samuel 8. In a more detailed exegesis than in
Tenure, Milton finds in those texts evidence that God first gave the Israelites a
republican government, that he recognized their right to change forms of govern-
ment by granting their request for a king, but that he indicated his antipathy to
monarchy by warning them of the evils a king would do:
God himself bears witness to the right possessed by almost all peoples and nations of
enjoying whatever form of government they wish, or of changing from one to an-
other; this God asserts specifically of the Hebrews and does not deny of other nations.
A republican form of government, moreover, as being better adapted to our human
circumstances than monarchy, seemed to God more advantageous for his chosen peo-
ple; he set up a republic for them and granted their request for a monarchy only after
long reluctance.... God indeed gives evidence throughout of his great displeasure at
their request for a king – thus in [1 Samuel 8] verse 7: “They have not rejected thee,
but they have rejected me, that I should not reign over them.”... This evidence all
proves that the Israelites were given a king by God in his wrath. (344, 369–70).