“Our Expiring Libertie” 1658–1660ment to a commonwealth and to toleration so as to keep the army under control,
had the members secluded in Pride’s Purge returned to parliament on February 21,
an action he surely knew would lead to the king’s restoration.^78 Again the City of
London, reading the signs aright, lit bonfires and rang bells all night in celebration.
At this juncture some republican pamphleteers buried their animosity toward the
secluded members and urged that the Long Parliament remain in power, one de-
claring that “it can by no means be accounted either honorable, or just, or safe, or
prudent for the present Parliament to dissolve themselves, till first they have fully
asserted and vindicated their own just undertaking and the faithful adherents to it
and them.”^79 Milton’s preface and revised plan are devised to persuade the restored
Long Parliament to make itself into his perpetual Grand Council: with evident
strain he declares that his plan might succeed better now that the parliament is
sitting “more full and frequent.” He refers hopefully to the resolutions “of all those
who are now in power” calling for a free Commonwealth, and studiously omits
any reference to the already-voted resolution calling a new parliament for April 25,
implicitly inviting them to rescind that order (354–5).
Clearly there is nothing of utopia in this tract, but equally clearly it runs counter
to political reality, given the vociferous demand of the English people to be rid of
the all-too-permanent Long Parliament and its Rump. Milton of course knew this:
in calling his tract The Readie & Easie Way he means to point to the simplicity of his
plan: just attend to “main matters” and hold to the status quo in place at the na-
tional level. He still has some hope that all is not lost, basing that hope on the fact
that “God hath yet his remnant, and hath not yet quenchd the spirit of libertie
among us” (363–4). He speaks of his sense of duty “with all hazard... to forwarn
my country in time,” and his confidence that there are “many wise men in all places
and degrees” who might put “a few main matters... speedily into execution”
(387). Applying to Charles II Jeremiah’s prophecy about God casting out “Coniah
and his seed forever” (Jeremiah 22:24–9), he finds some slim basis for supposing
that God might yet enable English lovers of liberty somehow to counter “this
general defection of the misguided and abus’d multitude” (388). The tract appeared
on or shortly before March 3, printed for the Fifth Monarchist bookseller Livewell
Chapman, the most active publisher of repulican and radical tracts in 1659–60.^80
Now that the Presbyterians were in a position of nominal leadership for the first
time since Pride’s Purge, they tried to impose their own settlement on the nation.
Milton surely found most of this dismaying: they reinstituted the Solemn League
and Covenant and the Westminster Confession, moved forward in settling Presby-
terian ministers and organization in the church, confirmed the right of the clergy to
tithes, and annulled the Engagement of 1650 promising fidelity to the Common-
wealth “as now established, without a King or House of Lords.”^81 They set March
15 as a date to dissolve, but some made a last-ditch effort to continue their session
and set their own conditions for a Restoration: Prynne urged that “if the King must
come in, it was safest for them that he should come in by their Votes” rather than