“The So-called Council of State” 1649–1652
monarchy has been nearly universal by pointing to the United Provinces as a flour-
ishing contemporary republic and by recounting stories of nations – Greeks, Ro-
mans, Italians, Carthaginians, and many more – who in their best days chose
republican forms: “surely these nations were more important than all the rest”
(432). He meets Salmasius’s citations from political philosophers and classical poets
by offering countertexts from Aristotle, Plato, Cicero, Sallust, Polybius, Homer,
Aeschylus, Euripides, Buchanan, and Hotman to indicate that in fact they denounce
tyranny and absolute monarchy, place rulers under the law, and allow to the people
the right to overthrow despots and share political power. In Aristotle’s Politics he
finds precepts that equate monarchy itself with tyranny: “It is neither expedient nor
just that one be master of all when men are similar or equal.... One whom the
people does not wish becomes immediately not king but a tyrant” (438). As he does
in Eikonoklastes, Milton marshals evidence that English kings were always limited
by contract, that parliaments or councils superior to kings always existed in fact, and
that by English law the Commons alone are supreme “and have power to judge the
king” (494). Persuading himself of the English state’s republican essence through-
out its history, he exults: “I cannot fail to voice my pride in our fathers who, in
establishing this state, displayed a wisdom and a sense of freedom equal to that of
the ancient Romans or the most illustrious Greeks” (495).
Nonetheless, Salmasius’s taunts about the “unrepresentative” English govern-
ment – the “forty tyrants” of the Council of State, the parliament purged of bish-
ops, lords, and many commoners, the power of the army over the legislature –
forced Milton to work through how such a government can sort with the republi-
can ideal preferred by God, nature, and history. Challenged to define who the
“people” are that have political rights in the new republic, Milton claims that “all
citizens of every degree” are represented in the supremacy of the Commons, in
which all, including the nobles, are comprehended. But he accepts limitations on
actual representation. He probably approved of the existing property qualification
for citizens allowed to vote and hold office, and he argues that, in the present
circumstances, the exercise of citizenship must be further restricted:
Our form of government is such as our circumstances and schisms permit: it is not the
most desirable, but only as good as the stubborn struggles of the wicked citizens allow
it to be. If, however, a country harassed by faction and protecting herself by arms
regards only the sound and upright side, passing over or shutting out the others,
whether commons or nobles, she maintains justice well enough. (316–17)
He does not equate the “sound and upright” with religion, nor yet with class: some
are nobles and “others are self-made men who follow the course of true nobility
through toil and rectitude” (319). But nor are they strictly “of every degree”: most
are not from the “dregs of the populace” who because of poverty or because they
are in service to others cannot fulfill citizenship responsibilities, nor from the nobil-