“For the Sake of Liberty” 1652–1654breach of promise was not proved.^146 The last installment of More’s story is the
most inaccurate, and admittedly based on rumor. “I have recently heard,” Milton
claims, that the church at Middelburg expelled More, and that the magistrates at
Amsterdam barred him from the pulpit.^147 By contrast, Milton takes pains to prove
himself a careful investigator when challenging Clamor’s version of some recent
English events. He found out from the officer in charge of the guards at Charles’s
execution that the story about a man being murdered there for begging God’s
mercy on the king was “absolutely false” (644–5). Similarly, he sought out the
facts about the king’s escape to the Isle of Wight “from those who had the best
possible opportunity to become acquainted with the whole story,” and on that
basis denies Cromwell’s complicity in it (663–4). But he felt no need to expend
such diligence on the rascal More.
Milton peppers his narrative about More with harsh epithets: More is “faithless,
treacherous, ungrateful, foulmouthed, a consistent slanderer of men and of women,”
a “gallows-bird,” “the rankest goat of all,” the creator, not of a royal tragedy as he
thinks, but a satyr play about himself (564, 660). Gleefully transcribing the much-
cited epigram from Leyden,^148 Milton continues with such witty word-play
throughout, much of it lost in English translation: on More’s name (fool), on the
bawdy suggestions prompted by his first adultery in the Geneva garden (grafting,
treading, fig), on associations invited by changing Guerret’s nickname Bontia to
Pontia (Pontia Pilata, Pontia the Roman infanticide, Pontifex Maximus). The
rumors of pregnancy unleash an outpouring of salacious wit constructing More as
bisexual, a hermaphrodite who both begets and conceives. Pontia conceived a
little More while More and Salmasius (in a homosexual coupling) conceived an
“empty wind-egg,” the swollen Clamor; also, Salmasius was the midwife who
brought forth praises of himself out of a (now female) More.^149 Milton also in-
cludes a witty ten-line Latin epigram he probably wrote in 1652 in preparation
for Salmasius’s long-expected reply; its point is the use of Salmasius’s worthless
writings as wrappings for fish (580). By contrast Milton invites sympathy for the
despised and deceived Pontia whose complaints to synod and magistrate were
denied: “the Cry of the Royal Blood has easily drowned out the cry of violated
honor” and the cries of “the tiny baby whom you [More] begot in shame and
then abandoned” (570, 575).
Alongside the invective, much of the Defensio Secunda is in the high heroic
mode. Milton links it with the Defensio as the second part of a prose epic, and sees
both these works as fulfilling in some measure his long-planned national epic cel-
ebrating the noblest deeds of his countrymen. Like the illustrious Greeks and Ro-
mans, the English “Liberators” expelled a tyrant in a “fair and glorious trial of
virtue” (550), and Milton’s role is to praise and extol those “heroes victorious in
battle” (553). In his peroration Milton makes the genre claim explicit, describing
his work as an eternizing monument to glorious deeds, and pointing to its epic
analogues and structure: