“I... Steer Right Onward” 1654–1658force prevails” and he should learn rather to admire exemplars of “justice and mod-
eration.” Milton closes with “my fondest greetings to your companion, the distin-
guished Henry Oldenburg.” Five days later the Swiss minister John Zollikofer called
on Milton and asked for his autograph. Milton had an amanuensis write in Greek
the motto he had used before, from 2 Corinthians 12:9, “I am made perfect in
weakness.” He attempted a signature but his last name ran off the end of the page
and he completed it on the next line. Zollikofer wrote on this page, “The famous
blind Milton put this here.”^73
That summer Cromwell sent out writs for a new parliament. Elections and the
sitting of a new parliament gave rise to new republican treatises – necessarily some-
what covert – rising to a new opportunity to conform the state more closely to
republican principles. Milton might well have been given a copy of The Healing
Question, written by his old friend Henry Vane but published anonymously; it was
intended to reconcile parliamentary republicans and those in and out of the army
who were committed to a government of army patriots and sectarian saints.^74 Of
necessity, Vane makes some place for a “single person” and allows that for the
present, elections must be restricted to the “honest party,” but he holds firmly to
the sovereignty of parliament as the people’s representative and the right to elect
successive parliaments as the “proper root” of all civil liberty. He called for the
voluntary subordination of the army and Cromwell to parliament and implicitly
repudiates the Instrument of Government, proposing something like a constitutional
convention in which carefully chosen representatives would establish fundamen-
tals, including guarantees of religious and civil liberty.^75 It was not covert enough.
Vane was arrested, refused to put up £5,000 as security that he would do nothing
“to prejudice the present government,” and was remanded to house arrest at
Carisbrooke Castle in the Isle of Wight (where King Charles had been kept) from
August 21 until December 11.
Milton was likely given a copy of The Excellencie of a Free-State which his friend
Marchamont Nedham published in June without his name though hardly anony-
mously, since it contained a series of essays, somewhat revised, from 1651–2 issues
of Mercurius Politicus that Milton had licensed.^76 The work was registered with the
Stationers in November, 1655, then hurried into print when elections were called.
Ostensibly a defense of the Protectorate from royalists’ subversive advice to bypass
parliament and govern by force of arms – thereby making a Stuart restoration more
attractive – it in fact cleverly attacks Cromwell for doing just that. Nedham’s con-
stantly repeated thesis is that parliament as the people’s representative must exercise
sovereign power in the state: “the right, liberty, welfare, and safety of a people
consists in a due succession of their supreme Assemblies.”^77 He extrapolates from
Machiavelli and from the example of republics in Athens, Sparta, Rome, the United
Provinces, Venice, and Switzerland a long list of the advantages of a republic, and
he urges Cromwell to imitate those famous leaders who declined power for them-
selves and secured the people’s liberty in a free state.^78 While the conquered part