“The So-called Council of State” 1649–1652king as a plagiarist of others’ prayers, so deficient in piety that even when preparing
for death he cannot pray to God in his own words. Charles presents his prayers
throughout as “a kind of privat Psalter” (560), claiming as his own “many peniten-
tial verses out of Davids Psalmes” (553).^173 Much worse, he also plagiarized the
pagan Pamela’s prayer out of Sidney’s Arcadia. That prayer is the first of four prayers
at the end of Eikon Basilike, but Milton attaches his scathing denunciation of this
theft to his comments on the king’s first chapter, seeking thereby to undermine all
subsequent claims to truthful reporting by an author–king who plagiarizes, and all
claims to sanctity by a Christian king who prays pagan prayers:
[Other Christian kings] have still pray’d thir own, or at least borrow’d from fitt Au-
thors. But this King, not content... to attribute to his own making other mens
whole Prayers, hath as it were unhallow’d, and unchrist’nd the very duty of prayer it
self, by borrowing to a Christian use Prayers offer’d to a Heathen God... a Prayer
stol’n word for word from the mouth of a Heathen fiction praying to a heathen God;
& that in no serious Book, but the vain amatorious Poem of Sr Philip Sidneys Arcadia;
a Book in that kind full of worth and witt, but among religious thoughts, and duties
not worthy to be nam’d... much less in time of trouble and affliction to be a Chris-
tians Prayer-Book. (362–3)In the second edition Milton expanded this point, insisting that the plagiarism brings
disgrace to the king’s entire “Idoliz’d Book, and the whole rosarie of his Prayers.”^174
Also, more firmly than in Areopagitica, Milton defends authors’ property rights,
linking the affront to God from this plagiarized prayer first offered to idols with the
wrong done to Sidney, the human author, who has a right to his intellectual prop-
erty, and the wrong done to all Englishmen by Shipmoney and other illegal taxes
imposed by the king:
[He] thought no better of the living God then of a buzzard Idol, fit to be so servd and
worshipt in reversion with the polluted orts and refuse of Arcadia’s and Romances,
without being able to discern the affront rather then the worship of such an ethnic
Prayer. But leaving what might justly be offensive to God, it was a trespass also more
then usual against human right, which commands that every Author should have the
property of his own work reservd to him after death as well as living. Many Princes
have bin rigorous in laying taxes on thir Subjects by the head, but of any King heertofore
that made a levy upon thir witt, and seisd it as his own legitimat, I have not whom
beside to instance. (364–5)When Eikonoklastes concludes, Milton’s iconoclastic hammer has attacked not
only the idol–king and his book, but also rote prayers, liturgical forms, the Solemn
League and Covenant, kings, bishops, and the church of Rome – all idols, in that
they are material forms invested with divinity or sanctity, which demand to be
taken on implicit faith. In the final pages Milton constructs an allegory of Truth and