“I... Steer Right Onward” 1654–1658his renowne & learning, but not his conversation; for they doe not desire that he
should come to visit the daughters of condition, as he was used to do.”^18 Also,
Milton probably had reports of the politics at the Utrecht synod: More’s friends first
tried to stop the reading of the charges the Leyden consistory brought on Guerret’s
behalf and then defeated the motion to have More barred from Walloon pulpits.
More makes a point of that, but, as Milton observes, their bare failure to bar him
was hardly a rousing confirmation of innocence and Leyden (though not Amster-
dam as Milton had erroneously stated) did refuse More its pulpits.^19
Milton used this information in his Pro Se Defensio, sometimes as general back-
ground, sometimes by quoting letters from Dury, Spanheim, Oldenburg, and oth-
ers. This treatise is Milton’s least attractive work: it is a tissue of vituperation and a
strained defense of a serious error. But Milton’s identification of his country’s cause
with his own self-defense gives it a public dimension, and his struggle with the
issues posed by his mistake – proper standards of evidence, the uses of defamation,
the meaning of authorship – holds considerable biographical interest. He also de-
scribes some scenes as literary comedy: More desporting with Pelletta in a debased
Garden of Eden, and the mock-epic battle of More and Guerret, fought with slash-
ing fingernails. Pro Se Defensio follows More’s structure, answering first his unfin-
ished Fides Publica and then his Supplementum, taking up his several arguments and
pieces of evidence in turn. In the first part Milton deals summarily with the prefaces
by Crantz and Vlacq, then with More’s denial of authorship of the Clamor, then
with More’s licentious behavior with Pontia in The Hague and with Pelletta in
Geneva; and finally with More’s testimonial letters from Geneva. In the second part
he analyzes the letters More supplies in the Supplementum that purport to clear him
of wrongdoing.
In his exordium to the first part, Milton represents his polemic battle with More
as a continuation of his compatriots’ war. Theirs is now over but he must fight on
in his familiar role of epic hero engaged in single combat: “for me alone it remains
to fight the rest of this war... against me they direct their venom and their darts”
(CPW IV.2, 698–9). Like Scipio Africanus who had to turn from noble warfare
against Hannibal to far less worthy battles, yet remained true to himself, Milton
expects that “I who have not heretofore failed the people or the state shall not here
fail myself” (700). He recurs often to the twinned issues of praise and blame, here,
self-praise and the poetics of satire. He has not praised himself, he insists, but only
offered “a plain and simple narration of my affairs” to clear the good name of the
people’s defender (735). And, as in the antiprelatical tracts and Colasterion,^20 he justi-
fies his use of foul language in attacking More by the practice of Erasmus, Thomas
More, the Fathers of the church, and the biblical writers, in whom “words unchaste
and plain thrust out with indignation signify not obscenity, but the vehemence of
gravest censure.”^21 Also, classical rhetoricians and philosophers like Cicero, Plato,
and the Socratics approve “pleasantries intermixed and interspersed sometimes in the
gravest matters” (771). In the peroration to the first part – a passage that might more