In his Tenure of Kings and Magistrates, published a fortnight after
the king’s execution, John Milton asserted that the king had been found
by his own subjects ‘an alien, a rebel to Law, and enemy to the State’;
since 1581, when ‘the States of Holland’ had abjured obedience to the
tyrannous king of Spain, ‘no State or Kingdom in the world hath equally
prospered’; a ‘Protestant State’ should now be proud of having
destroyed a wicked prince who had threatened its laws and its religion.
In another few weeks the Commons made the resounding declaration
that ‘the people of England, and of all the dominions and territories
thereunto belonging’, constituted a ‘Commonwealth and Free State’,
which should ‘from henceforth be governed as a Commonwealth and
Free State by the supreme authority of this nation, the representatives of
the people in Parliament’—a parliament which with the destruction of
the estates of king and lords had itself been reduced to one estate.^84
The English ‘commonwealth and free state’ 335Politics (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1979), 93, 370, and Cromartie, ‘The Constitutionalist
Revolution’, 96–7, 111; Constitutional Documents of the Puritan Revolution, ed. Gardiner,
380–8.
(^84) John Milton, Political Writings, ed. M. Dzelzainis (Cambridge UP, 1991), 26, 28, 33, 45;
Constitutional Documents of the Puritan Revolution, 388.