“Our Expiring Libertie” 1658–1660Neither did they measure votes and counsels by the intentions of them that voted;
knowing that intentions either are but guessd at, or not soon anough known....
Safer they therefor judgd what they thought the better counsels, though carried on by
some perhaps to bad ends, then the wors, by others, though endevord with best
intentions... judging that most voices ought not alwaies to prevail where main
matters are in question. (414–15)This passsage indicates how Milton could support parliaments, army officers, and
leaders – including Cromwell – that he and others criticized severely. It also shows
that he did not equate “worthy” citizens with the Saints or the Elect as Vane and
many sectaries did. And it prepares for his later argument that an even smaller
minority might properly defy an even larger majority.
Much of the treatise addresses Presbyterians in and out of parliament. Milton
omits a lengthy section on separation of church and state that would inflame them
and adds passages to whip up their moral revulsion for the vices and corruptions of
the court they seek to restore, in language that also reveals his visceral disgust for
monarchy and for the servility, effeminacy, and civic idolatry it promotes.^128 Mon-
archy cheats and debases the populace by its dissolute practices, its vast expense, and
its invitation to idolatry:
A king must be ador’d like a Demigod, with a dissolute and haughtie court about
him, of vast expence and luxurie, masks and revels, to the debaushing of our prime
gentry both male and female;... to the multiplying of a servile crew, not of
servants only, but of nobility and gentry, bred up then to the hopes not of public,
but of court offices, to be stewards, chamberlains, ushers, grooms, even of the
close-stool.... a single person... will have little els to do, but to bestow the eating
and drinking of excessive dainties, to set a pompous face upon the superficial actings
of State, to pageant himself up and down in progress among the perpetual bowings
and cringings of an abject people, on either side deifying and adoring him. (425–6)Monarchs aim “to make the people, wealthie indeed perhaps and well-fleec’t, for
thir own shearing... but otherwise softest, basest, vitiousest, servilest, easiest to be
kept under” (460). It renders servile and unmanly men who ought to practice
vigorous republican virtue and claim their freedom:
And what madness is it, for them who might manage nobly their own affairs them-
selves, sluggishly and we[a]kly to devolve all on a single person; and more like boyes
under age then men, to committ all to his patronage and disposal... how unmanly
must it needs be, to count such a one the breath of our nostrils, to hang all our felicitie
on him, all our safetie, our well-being, for which if we were aught els but sluggards or
babies, we need depend on none but God and our own counsels, our own active
vertue and industrie. (427)