“Our Expiring Libertie” 1658–1660ness, including supplies and pay to the discontented soldiers. Milton was no doubt
pleased when parliament took up the cause of Oliver’s political prisoners, among
them his friend Major-General Robert Overton, whom he had so warmly praised
to Cromwell in the Defensio Secunda.^18 Brought back on March 9 from his confine-
ment in Jersey, Overton was welcomed with laurel branches by some fifteen hun-
dred people, and escorted in a triumphal procession to Westminster. He was released
a few days later despite efforts by the government to justify his imprisonment and
bring him to trial.
At the end of March Moses Wall, a member of the Hartlib circle, answered a
letter from Milton (now lost), evidently accompanied by Of Civil Power. Wall’s
letter offers a revealing insight into how a contemporary who knew Milton’s work
well understood the politics of his tolerationist treatise.^19 Wall thinks of Milton, he
says, “with much Respect, for your Friendliness to Truth in your early Years and in
bad Times,” but he has wondered about Milton’s association with the Protectorate:
“I was uncerten whether your Relation to the Court, (though I think a Common-
wealth was more friendly to you than a Court) had not clouded your former Light,
but your last Book resolved that Doubt” (CPW VII, 510–11). The parenthetical
clause may mean that Milton fared better under a Commonwealth than under the
Protectorate court, or that Milton himself was more “friendly” to the Common-
wealth. Wall agrees with Milton about the nation’s “retrograde Motion of late, in
Liberty and Spiritual Truths,” but advises pity to the people’s human frailty, since
their trusted leaders “betray this good Thing committed to them, and lead us back
to egypt” (511). He also invites Milton to consider something he usually ignores,
the economic grounds for the people’s servility: feudal tenures of lands, lack of an
assured comfortable subsistence, and “that cursed yoak of Tythes,” which he is
happy to see Milton proposing to treat (511). Milton may have been chagrined that
his associations with the Protectorate had raised doubts about his principles, but he
was surely pleased to receive this encouragement from a kindred spirit and to find
that the republican politics implicit in Of Civil Power had been rightly read.
April produced a crisis. A General Council of Army Officers called for freedom
of worship, provision for the army’s material needs and arrears, and its own inde-
pendent commander-in-chief (Charles Fleetwood). Exacerbating the army’s anxie-
ties, parliament called for a fast day to repent the “many Blasphemies and damnable
Heresies” rife in the land, ordered that the Westminster Assembly’s confession of
faith be “held forth as the public profession of the nation,” and moved to put the
armed forces under the joint control of the Protector and parliament.^20 On April 22
the officers forced Richard to dissolve parliament and a Council of Officers as-
sumed de facto authority. Some sought rather to control Richard than to depose him
but could not stem the anti-Protectorate tide, swelled by the quasi-monarchical
trappings of the Protectorate court, the diminution of the army’s role, fears that
Richard was under the control of crypto-royalists, and perceived threats to liberty
of conscience. An avalanche of pamphlets mixing the language of republicanism