“Our Expiring Libertie” 1658–1660to his lawyer friend Cyriack Skinner, who probably suggested that strategy, but he
lost the money anyway.^115
Milton stood in danger of losing not only his money but his life, as parliament set
about eagerly to determine the men to be excluded from the amnesty list. Throughout
the month of May, he followed the depressing course of events: the king pro-
claimed with full pageantry and fanfare on May 8, touching off a night of revelling;
the selection of seven regicides for immediate execution and continuing debates
over others to be punished; the king landing at Dover on May 25 and his triumphal
entry into London four days later. According to Phillips, Milton’s friends “that
wisht him well, and had a concern for his preservation,” urged him to give up the
Petty France residence and go into hiding until parliament decided whom it would
punish, after which he could determine “what farther course to take” (EL 74).
Grateful no doubt, but also dismayed that blindness forced him to depend entirely
upon others in this crisis, he accepted the invitation of an unidentified friend who,
at considerable risk, took the rebel polemicist into his home in Bartholomew Close
just off West Smithfield – perhaps at the end of May.^116 There, Milton could only
stand and wait.
“The Language of... the Good Old Cause”
Milton wrote his treatises of this period in close connection with the course of
events, adapting his proposals and arguments to changing circumstances and spe-
cific audiences. But he strives in them to define and promote what he sees as the
great goals of the Good Old Cause and the primary ends of government, religious
and civil liberty, with religious liberty the ultimate value. In Of Civil Power and its
companion discourse on church disestablishment, The Likeliest Means, Milton sets
forth, without compromise, his own radical vision of the Christian church and of
separation of church and state. In both treatises he takes up again the stance of
adviser to magistrates, claiming their attention on the basis of his former good
service. He wrote of civil liberty before, he reminds Richard’s parliament in Of
Civil Power, “by the appointment, and not without the approbation of civil power”;
now his “natural dutie and affection” have led him to offer this treatise on religious
liberty to them, though it pertains to all Christian magistrates and might have been
written in Latin (CPW VII, 239–40). In The Likeliest Means he reminds the Rump
Parliament of his notable defense of them and the English commonwealth against
Salmasius: they should not suppose his “reason and abilitie... grown less by more
maturitie and longer studie,” now that he writes what “may be of moment to the
freedom and better constituting of the church” (275).
These two treatises, and especially the first, are unusual among Milton’s pam-
phlets for succinctness, emotional restraint, relatively unadorned diction, and com-
paratively straightforward syntax. Critics have noted that Milton’s English tracts in