“Our Expiring Libertie” 1658–1660Charles the martyr, and his proposed commonwealth. But, in an effort to exalt his
own service to the royalist cause, he pays high tribute to the rhetorical power of
Milton’s Readie & Easie Way to “move the affections,” declaring that Milton is
“universally owned a learned man” with a command of “ready invention,” “ex-
pressions pathetical,” “smooth and tempting” language, and “a fluent, elegant style.”^93
Much the cleverest of these royalist tracts, The Censure of the Rota, satirizes both
Harrington and Milton. Written as if by Harrington, it describes the Rota Club
discussing and voting on Milton’s model, using the complex apparatus of Harrington’s
balloting procedures. One member comments that Milton has “achieved the hon-
our to be Styld the Founder of a Sect” for his theory of divorce and practice of it in
his life, and that this is the liberty of conscience his Commonwealth would pro-
tect.^94 Another member offered Milton meanspirited advice to give over writing,
“since you have always done it to little or no purpose... though you have scrib-
bled your eyes out.” Another pointed perceptively to Milton’s “stiff formall Elo-
quence” and his disposition to deal in universals. Still another ridiculed his assertion
that Christ favored a commonwealth, “notwithstanding the Scripture everywhere
calls his Government the Kingdom of Heaven, it ought to be Corrected, and Ren-
dered, the Common-wealth of Heaven, or rather, the Common-wealth of this
world.”^95
Probably soon after March 16, when the Long Parliament dissolved and election
writs went forth, Milton began revising his Readie & Easie Way, almost doubling its
size. But before finishing it, I think, he rose to a polemic target that allowed for a
quick and effective strike against the royalists.^96 On March 25 Matthew Griffith,
former chaplain to Charles I and then minister to several clandestine royalist con-
gregations, preached a highly inflammatory sermon in the Mercers’ Chapel on the
text, “My son, feare God and the King, and meddle not with them that be sedi-
tious, or desirous of change.” Royalist sermons thundered forth from numerous
pulpits during March and April, but Griffith’s vengeful tone was especially embar-
rassing to the court in exile and to many royalists at home who were wooing
Presbyterian cooperation in a Restoration with hollow promises of forgiveness and
a liberal settlement of religious differences.^97 Griffith portrayed Charles II as an
avenging Samson about to wreak sudden destruction on everyone – Presbyterians
as well as Independents and sectarian radicals – who had been guilty of sedition
against the Lord’s anointed. Blatantly asserting regal absolutism and divine right,
Griffith virtually made the king a lesser deity by such phrases as “God is an heavenly
King, and eternal... but the King is an earthly, and dying God.... And yet in a
qualified sence, they are both Gods, and both Kings.”^98 He published the sermon
almost immediately,^99 prefacing it with a fulsome dedication to Monk that urged
him to carry on “what you have already so happily begun in the name and cause of
God and his Anointed, till you have finish’d this great, and good work.” Monk, still
declaring for a commonwealth in order to keep the suspicious army and sectaries
quiet, was outraged, and on April 5 Griffith was committed to Newgate prison.^100