“For the Sake of Liberty” 1652–1654[It is] most important, that someone should stir and ignite the ancient courage, dili-
gence, and endurance in the souls of the Greeks by singing of that byegone zeal. If
anyone could accomplish this – which we should expect from none more than you,
because of your eminent patriotism... [and] powerful passion for recovering former
political liberty – I am confident that neither would the Greeks fail themselves, nor
any nation fail the Greeks. (CPW IV.2, 853)That July Milton supported the royalist cleric Brian Walton, former chaplain to the
king and also former curate to Richard Stock at Milton’s boyhood parish of
Allhallows, Bread Street, in his petition for government assistance in preparing a
polyglot Bible. A year later he wrote to support Walton’s request to import paper
for that purpose free of excise taxes.^52 Milton could usually set politics aside when
scholarship, family ties, and friendship were involved. At some point in 1651 or
1652 he helped obtain the release of the poet Sir William Davenant, who was
awaiting execution in the Tower as a royalist conspirator.^53
In August, 1652 the Regii Sanguinis Clamor ad Coelum Adversus Parricidas Anglicanos
(The Cry of the Royal Blood to Heaven Against the English Parricides) was pub-
lished anonymously in the Hague.^54 In an earlier response to Milton’s Defensio (c.
February 18), Robert Filmer attacked that work as well as Hobbes’s Leviathan and
Grotius’s De Juri Belli, scoffing that Milton’s contract theory defends “a miserable
liberty, which is only to choose to whom we will give our liberty, which we may
not keep.”^55 But it was the Clamor that prodded Milton to answer. That very effec-
tive polemic was generally attributed to Alexander More, pastor of the Walloon
church and professor of church history in Amsterdam; he was a friend of Salmasius
and his houseguest at Leyden in 1652, where he saw this work through the press
and contributed the prefatory epistle addressed to Charles II. The true author was
an English royalist, Pierre Du Moulin, who remained unknown until after the
Restoration, when he gave his own account of the publication, registering a sadistic
pleasure in Milton’s bafflement:
I had sent my manuscript sheets to the great Salmasius, who entrusted them to the
care of that most learned man, Alexander Morus. This Morus delivered them to the
printer, and prefixed to them an Epistle to the King, in the Printer’s name, exceed-
ingly eloquent and full of good matter. When that care of Morus over the business of
printing the book had become known to Milton through the spies of the Regicides in
Holland, Milton held it as an ascertained fact that Morus was the author of the Clamor;... meanwhile I looked on in silence, and not without a soft chuckle, at seeing my
bantling laid at another man’s door, and the blind and furious Milton fighting and
slashing the air, like the hoodwinked horse-combatants in the old circus, not know-
ing by whom he was struck and whom he struck in return.^56
The printer Adriaan Vlacq, eager to promote a profitable controversy, sent the
unbound sheets to Samuel Hartlib as they came off the press in July or early August,