“I... Steer Right Onward” 1654–1658Milton treats at some length two superlative rulers, implicitly inviting some com-
parison with Cromwell. Egbert was “one of the worthiest:” his martial exploits
united most of England, giving reason to expect “peace and plenty, greatness, and
the flourishing of all Estates and Degrees.” But then came the Danes, bringing
“Invasion, Spoil, Desolation, slaughter of many, slavery of the rest” (257). King
Alfred in fierce wars drove out the Danes and then enjoyed three years of peace,
which he spent “in all vertuous enploiments both of mind and body” – thirsting
after learning, building schools, translating books out of Latin, providing good laws,
enacting stern justice, erecting elegant buildings, relieving foreign churches, and
frugally managing his revenues (276–92). Milton had earlier thought of him as a
possible epic hero.^126 But his achievements give way to internal strife, degeneration
in the populace, and new Danish invasions. Milton concludes that the greatest
political achievements of these best kings may in fact have been counterproductive,
since local sovereignty (as in the United Provinces or the Swiss cantons) might
better have preserved English liberty: had the heptarchy continued and the nation
not been united, the invaders might have been better resisted, “while each Prince
and people, excited by thir neerest concernments, had more industriously defended
thir own bounds” (258). That lesson no doubt underlies his focus on federalism in
The Readie & Easie Way (1660). He also reports, wryly, the story of King Canute
commanding the sea to recede before him and when it would not, recognizing the
folly of human beings claiming kingly power:
Whereat the King quickly riseing, wish’d all about him to behold and consider the
weak and frivolous power of a King, and that none indeed deserv’d the name of a
King, but he whose Eternal Laws both Heav’n, Earth, and Sea obey. A truth so
evident of it self, as I said before, that unless to shame his Court Flatterers who would
not else be convinc’t, Canute needed not to have gone wet-shod home. The best is,
from that time forth he never would wear a Crown, esteeming Earthly Royalty con-
temptible and vain. (366)Milton’s history argues, subtly, against Cromwell’s movement toward centraliza-
tion of power and quasi-monarchical forms.
Milton intended this segment of his history to help rekindle the civic virtue upon
which any republican government must rest, by underscoring again the disturbing
continuities throughout English history and in the English character.^127 The
overarching cause is always the same: the degeneration of the people into vice and
its inevitable concomitant, servility of mind: “when God hath decreed servitude on
a sinful Nation, fitted by thir own vices for no condition but servile, all Estates of
Government are alike unable to avoid it” (259). The Danish invasions were God’s
punishment on the Saxons who, though now Christian, become fully as wicked
and slothful as the Britons were at their arrival, especially in their debased religion –
“Ceremonies, Reliques, Monasteries, Masses, Idols, add to these ostentation of