“I... Steer Right Onward” 1654–1658words with abundance of matter. De Brass evidently wrote back to question Milton’s
prohibition of maxims, citing Aristotle’s Rhetoric on the uses of aphorism. On De-
cember 16, after his usual apologies for tardiness, Milton replied a little brusquely
that Aristotle was talking about rhetoric, not history, and refers the young man to a
reading list – Polybius, Dionysius of Halicarnassus, Diodorus, Cicero, Lucian, and
others – whose precepts will help him understand what is suitable to a historian
(506–7). Milton’s own practice makes clear that he is objecting to the the interpo-
sition of sententiae, though obviously not to the pointing of moral lessons implicit in
the narrative itself.
Milton clearly has been thinking about writing history. He had laid his History of
Britain aside in 1649 when called to government service, turned back to it after
completing the Pro Se Defensio in 1655, and before or during 1657 likely completed
a draft of the remaining segment – the end of Book IV, and Books V and VI –
dealing with the internal wars of the Saxon kingdoms and the recurring Danish
invasions, from about 731 to the Norman Conquest in 1066.^118 His grand plan was
to bring his history down to his own day, but these last books reveal that he was
tiring of the project and the Norman Conquest made a suitable place to pause; they
also suggest that he meant to make the work available soon. He wants to piece
together a smooth, orderly account of his nation from the best sources available to
him, revealing moral and political lessons and providential patterns that may profit
the English in their present political crises.
Milton finds this new subject matter and the “monkish” historians that report it
wearisome – “so many bare and reasonless actions, so many names of Kings one
after another, acting little more then mute persons in a Scene.” To make it less so
he has “studiously omitted” ecclesiastical history – “the long Bead-roll of Archbish-
ops, Bishops, Abbots, Abesses, and thir doeings” – as well as the local history “bet-
ter harp’d at in Camden and other Chorographers.” In part this is an effort to separate
civic history from some allied kinds, but it also reflects Milton’s concern with nar-
rative style: he declines to “wrincle the smoothness of History with rugged names
of places unknown” (CPW V.1, 239). It registers as well his perspective as a radical
Independent. Saxon church history was a topic of considerable interest for Church
of England polemicists, who found precedents before the Conquest for a national
church largely free of Roman control.^119 But Milton found little to choose between
the English church before and after the Conquest. His history traces the steadily
increasing subordination of the Saxon church to Rome, as well as the subjection of
Saxon kings to monks and priests, who led them to build and enter monasteries to
indulge “religious Idleness” and “mistaken Chastitie,” or else to go on pilgrimage
when they should be defending England.^120
For his Saxon history Milton uses, among others, William of Malmesbury and
Abraham Wheloc’s translations of Bede’s Church History and the Anglo-Saxon Chroni-
cle.^121 And, as in the earlier books, he often invites the reader to share his intense
skepticism about such “monkish” sources. The story about a miraculous revelation