“Between Private Walls” 1645–1649began, only because (Milton unfairly charges) affairs are not being managed “to the
intire advantages of thir own Faction” (191). He also attacks the host of “Vulgar
and irrational men” (peers, lawyers), whose opposition derives from slavish adher-
ence to the ancient constitution: “Some contesting for privileges, customs, forms,
and that old entanglement of Iniquity, thir gibrish Lawes, though the badge of thir
ancient slavery” (192–3). This is an allusion to the so called “Norman Yoke” of
oppressive laws which, one resistance theory claimed, had been foisted on the Eng-
lish at the Norman Conquest. Others who plead for mercy for Charles do so out of
“levitie and shallowness of minde,” or a “seditious pity” that would endanger the
entire nation (193).
Milton reaches out, however, to those who have heretofore dared to act or at
least approve actions “above the form of Law and Custom” but who now “begin to
swerve, and almost shiver at the Majesty and grandeur of som noble deed...
disputing presidents, forms, and circumstances, while the Common-wealth nigh
perishes” (194). That category could include Fairfax and the other commissioners
who absented themselves from the trial, the MPs who voluntarily left the House,
and Levellers who oppose action against the king until an Agreement of the People
is in place. To these he wishes “better instruction, and vertue equal to thir calling,”
offering “as my dutie is” to bestow the former on them. In the last portion of the
tract, he analyzes biblical texts and marshals a host of examples from biblical, classi-
cal, and modern European and English history as precedents and justification for
deposing or executing tyrants.
But he first develops a much more sweeping republican argument that echoes
Leveller theories of popular sovereignty in vesting the power to choose and change
governments and governors in the people generally, not in inferior magistrates as
Calvinist resistance theory had it. Also, Milton’s title, The Tenure of Kings and Mag-
istrates, extends the people’s right to change their government at will not only to
King Charles but also to those other magistrates, the Long Parliament. But unlike
the Levellers, Milton adapts his republican theory to the exigencies of the time as
well as to his underlying assumptions about slavishness and citizenship, arguing that
good men who love liberty (e.g. the truncated Commons, the army, and the com-
missioners) may rightfully act as “the people” in these extraordinary circumstances.
Milton’s argument for popular sovereignty builds on traditional political theory
that derives legitimate government from the consent of the governed, tendered
through an originary contract or covenant, mythic or actual. Elements of that theory
- drawn from Aristotle, Augustine, Aquinas, Richard Hooker, and other classical,
medieval, and early modern sources – had been invoked by recent theorists of
resistance to argue that kings are accountable to their people to abide by the terms
of that contract, e.g. George Buchanan’s De Juri Regni apud Scotos (1597), the Vindiciae
Contra Tyrannos, Henry Parker’s Jus Populi (1644), and Samuel Rutherford’s Lex,
Rex: The Law and the Prince (1644). During the previous decade such theory had
become a starting point for Puritan political discourse, reinforced by theological