“The So-called Council of State” 1649–1652me chos’n or affected,” and was finished “leasurely” (339) amidst other duties. He
has, he assures his readers, “better and more certaine” means to attain fame than
engaging with kings, who are typically “weak at Arguments” (337). But this king
cannot claim the respectful silence normally accorded the faults of the dead, since
he has continued to argue his case to the world “as in his Book alive.”^165 So Milton,
like an epic hero or an Abdiel in prospect, takes on the role of designated champion
of the republic, ready to meet “the force of his [the king’s] reason in any field
whatsoever, the force and equipage of whose Armes they [the republic’s armies]
have so oft’n met victoriously.”^166 His book’s title, he explains, refers to the chosen
surname of many Greek emperors who “after long tradition of Idolatry in the
Church, took courage, and broke all superstitious Images to peeces” (343). Milton
Ikonoklastes undertakes a similar work: to destroy the idol many have made of the
king within the book and of the king’s book itself, “almost adoring it” and setting
it “next the Bible” (339–40). He hints that he too has seen through the pretence
about the king’s authorship: he plays on Gauden’s name, “the gaudy name of Maj-
esty” (338); he alludes to some “secret Coadjutor” whom some “stick not to name”
(346); and he speculates on stylistic grounds that the whole work shows the hand of
“som other Author”(393). But since the book has become an idol to the “blockish
vulgar” only because “a King is said to be the Author” (339), he engages it on those
terms. And as the king’s book presents him as the suffering hero of his own tragedy,
Milton undertakes to reassign its genre from tragedy to providential comedy.
The construction of audience creates special difficulties since Milton, prophet-
like, castigates the idolatrous populace as fiercely as the book-idol they worship. He
addresses his work chiefly to those “staid and well-principl’d men” who can be led
to see the falsehoods, pretence, and wicked principles writ large in the king’s book
and who will then extend their Puritan hatred of idolatry to that “civil kinde of
Idolatry” being invited by and offered to the king’s image.^167 He invites that regret-
tably small elite to separate itself sharply from the “mad multitude,” the “ingratefull
and pervers generation,” the “miserable, credulous, deluded thing that creature is,
which is call’d the Vulgar; who... will beleeve such vain-glories as these” (345–6,
426). As rhetoric, this language neatly reverses Eikon Basilike’s association of high
culture and gentility with the king’s supporters and vulgar barbarism with his oppo-
nents. But it also voices Milton’s profound disappointment with many of his coun-
trymen. Still, by locating the sources of their servility in courts and clerics, he holds
out hope that they may in due course be reformed by a republican ethos:
Now, with a besotted and degenerate baseness of spirit, except some few, who yet
retain in them the old English fortitude and love of Freedom, and have testifi’d it by
thir matchless deeds, the rest, imbastardiz’d from the ancient nobleness of thir Ances-
tors, are ready to fall flatt and give adoration to the Image and Memory of this Man,
who hath offer’d at more cunning fetches to undermine our Liberties, and putt Tyr-
anny into an Art, then any British King before him. Which low dejection and debase-