“For the Sake of Liberty” 1652–1654them. They surpass him in style and eloquence as he is writing in a foreign tongue,
but “I [shall] outstrip all the orators of every age in the grandeur of my subject and
my theme.”^142 That subject is liberty and the heroic English liberators of their country.
And his audience is not a few Romans in the Forum but “the entire assembly and
council of all the most influential men, cities, and nations everywhere.” As orator–
teacher, Milton sees himself “leading home again everywhere in the world...
Liberty herself, so long expelled and exiled” and, like a better trader, introducing to
all nations the most excellent of English products, “the renewed cultivation of
freedom and civic life” (554–6). But in addition to that conscious self-characteriza-
tion as rhetor, Milton’s new situation as a blind man surely contributes to his choice
of the oral mode, cut off as he now is from the direct assessment of an opponent’s
written text or from direct control of his own written text. Now more than ever he
insists that the author’s life and character must be the guarantor of the truth and
value of his text.
Milton attacks Alexander More with witty scorn and fierce invective, taking
him to be the author of the entire Clamor, not only (as he was) of the epistle to
Charles II, signed by Vlacq.^143 Milton’s core assumption about the relation of writ-
ing to life helps explain his attitude: as the good orator must be a good man who
loves liberty (a Cicero), so the defender of tyranny must be a bad man and a slave
to his passions, as More patently is. He therefore deserves every insult, and Milton
sees no need to be scrupulous about confirming all the information in the narrative
he strings together about More’s various misdeeds. More was, Milton reports,
condemned by the Church Elders at Geneva “for many deviations from the ortho-
dox faith... which he basely recanted and yet impiously retained after recanting”
(564–5), and then for adultery with a former maidservant, this one named Nicolarde
Pelet.^144 Through Salmasius’s influence he received a call from the Walloon church
at Middelburg, Holland, and with difficulty obtained “rather cool” letters of rec-
ommendation, which Geneva supplied only to get rid of him. Milton’s informa-
tion here is mostly accurate and he cites his authoritative source, records in the
public library at Geneva which someone evidently consulted for him.^145 Milton’s
other information about More is based on rumor not records, but he gleefully
makes the worst of what he has heard, presenting More as a satyr, always into and
out of some servant’s bed. He reports that More visited Salmasius when he first
arrived in Holland and cast lustful eyes on Pontia (Elizabeth Guerret), maidservant
to Salmasius’s wife, “for this creature’s desires always light on servant girls” (568).
Frequenting Salmasius’s house to collaborate on an answer to Milton’s Defensio he
carried on a liaison with Pontia, seduced her under the promise of marriage, im-
pregnated her, and then abandoned her – violating not only God’s law and his
ministry but also the obligations of guest to host. The seduction and desertion
were true, and also More’s falling out with Salmasius and especially with Mrs
Salmasius over this business. But the time sequence is confused, the girl was a
gentlewoman-attendant, there was no pregnancy, and the civil court held that the