11
“The Last Words of Our Expiring
Libertie” 1658–1660
In the twenty months from Oliver Cromwell’s death on September 3, 1658 to the
restoration of Charles II in May 1660, the government of England changed six
times, economic conditions steadily worsened, the English people showed increas-
ing dissatisfaction with Puritan rule, and the royalists gained strength. The uneasy
peace Cromwell had imposed on the Puritan coalition rapidly collapsed, as
Cromwellians, army officers, republicans of various stripes, sectaries, rank and file
soldiers, conservative Presbyterians, moderate Independents, Fifth Monarchists, and
others urged their various principles and models of church and state. For the first
several months Milton continued to write state letters for the new Protector Rich-
ard Cromwell and then for the restored Rump Parliament, and found some time to
work on De Doctrina Christiana and Paradise Lost. But after Oliver Cromwell’s death
he urged a return to the more radical ideals of the Commonwealth: he published a
new edition of his Defensio with its republican theory, and two treatises that argued,
respectively, for religious liberty for all Protestants and for church disestablishment.
These writings of 1658–9 restate his idea of the Good Old Cause.
For Milton, the value to be preserved above all else – the primary good for
government to promote – is religious liberty; reprising Areopagitica, he again insists
that only an environment of religious freedom can allow good men to serve God
conscientiously and develop in virtue. He sees the strict separation of church and
state as a corollary to that liberty: like many radical sectaries he would have no
church establishment, no tithes, and no government involvement in the choice or
support of ministers. Milton did not break with Cromwell over the issue of
disestablishment (toleration was always more important), but he urged it again,
strongly, when he thought he might find a more receptive audience in the restored
Rump Parliament. His treatises, Of Civil Power and The Likeliest Means to Remove
Hirelings, respond to immediate political circumstances but are conceived as a two-
part argument outlining his deepest convictions about church–state relations, set