“For the Sake of Liberty” 1652–1654Milton to exercise more caution in attributing the Clamor to More, but it did not.
Milton of course heard about Salmasius’s death on September 3, but he still ex-
pected that his attack – long reported as nearly finished – would soon be published
posthumously.
These psalm translations are more faithful to the Hebrew than Milton’s psalms of
1648, so his additions are striking, though he does not italicize them as before.^104 To
the psalmist’s description of his grief in Psalm 6:7 Milton adds the word “dark” –
“mine Eie / Through grief consumes, is waxen old and dark” – as well as the fact
that his enemies “mark” his condition.^105 In these psalms Milton finds comfort in
millenarian expectation, but he refocuses the contemporary millenarian fervor at-
tending the Barebones Parliament. To Psalm 2, God begetting his Son and setting
him above the Kings of the Earth, Milton adds language assuring those rebel kings
and princes of ultimate defeat: “but I, saith hee / anointed have my King (though
ye rebell)”; in Psalm 5 he adds a phrase to the speaker’s prayers, “and watch till thou
appear.”^106 To Psalm 4:3, “the Lord hath set apart him that is godly for himself”
(AV), Milton makes a significant substitution (ll. 13–16), identifying God’s chosen
not as the “godly” predestinated elect but as the virtuous foreknown by God as
such: “Yet know the Lord hath chose / Chose to himelf a part / The good and
meek of heart / (For whom to chuse he knows).” By this insistence on God’s
foreknowledge rather than predestination, Milton distinguishes himself, in terms he
will elaborate in De Doctrina Christiana, from most of his Calvinist contemporaries
and from the millenarian Saints of the Barebones Parliament ready now to rule for
and with Christ. Some formulations seem to speak of Milton’s own hopes and fears:
“The Lord will own, and have me in his keeping. / Mine enemies shall all be blank
and dash’t / With much confusion; then grow red with shame.”^107
In these psalm versions Milton undertook a series of metrical experiments. His
1648 psalms were in common meter, the standard verse form for psalms used in
congregational prayer or song;^108 these eight psalms are in eight different metrical
forms, inspired perhaps by the metrical variety in Calvin’s Geneva Psalter or by the
astonishing experiments with metrical and stanzaic forms in the versions by Sir
Philip Sidney and the Countess of Pembroke.^109 Milton’s verse forms range from
rhymed iambic pentameter couplets to terza rima, to elaborate stanzaic patterns,^110
but all of them are characterized by run-on lines and stanzas, pauses within rather
than at the ends of lines, and reversed feet. In them Milton continues to experiment
with techniques he often used in sonnets, leading toward the flowing verse para-
graph of the epics.
The Barebones Parliament self-destructed over the issues of law reform and tithes.
The radicals in that body proposed to abolish the Court of Chancery, to reduce the
whole structure of English law into a single volume, and to abolish the rights of
patrons to present clergymen to livings; on December 10 they carried – by two
votes – an act to abolish tithes and all state maintenance for the church. Moderates,
believing that chaos threatened if the legal and church establishments were disman-