“I... Steer Right Onward” 1654–1658after a civil war cannot immediately share in government, he insists that the well-
affected must be allowed their right to elect and be elected to the representative
assembly: “however they may abuse it, it is their right to have it.”^79 Nedham got
away with this bold gesture and remained editor of the Politicus. No doubt the
government saw the wisdom of keeping this keenly intelligent polemicist, with his
serviceable pen and very flexible principles, from moving into overt opposition.
Through Cyriack Skinner Milton probably obtained a copy of the important
republican manifesto, The Common-Wealth of Oceana, which James Harrington rushed
into print in October, 1656 and dedicated to the Lord Protector.^80 If it had not
been temporarily confiscated, it would have been out by the opening of parlia-
ment.^81 Under the guise of a utopia, Harrington represents Cromwell as the Archon
Olphaeus Megaletor (Oliver the great-hearted) who, like a Moses or a Lycurgus,
founded a state on “scientific” principles that ensure its permanence: an agrarian
law to ensure widespread distribution of property, and a two-house legislature,
comprised of a senate to discuss and propose laws, and a 1,050-man assembly to
vote on them as the people’s representative. The Archon also established complex
institutions modeled in some respects on Venice: elaborate systems of elections and
voting to produce ever more refined choices of representatives; legislatures, na-
tional and local, balanced between permanence and rotation; and annually elected
magistrates. Central to Harrington’s republicanism is the principle that good insti-
tutions will automatically produce good men. Most Puritans, including Cromwell
and Milton, held the opposite principle: that only good men, variously defined,
could produce a good government. Cromwell, ostensibly cast as the hero of this
work, was in fact its antihero.^82 He could hardly miss the lesson at the end of the
tale, when Olphaeus Megaletor solemnly resigns his power to parliament and re-
tires to private life, after which he is called back by a grateful government to head
the army and accepts that office from the legislature as one subordinate to it.^83
In the weeks just before and after parliament convened on September 17, 1656,
several noted republicans and royalists were incarcerated or forced to give security
for loyalty to the Protectorate. Among those elected, about ninety-three republi-
cans and other known opponents of the Protectorate were excluded, though some
were later admitted. This parliament voted money for the war with Spain and
mostly supported Cromwell’s policies on the church, though they were less dis-
posed than he to tolerate the more extreme sects. The cause célèbre of that autumn
was an act of apparent blasphemy by the Quaker James Nayler, that forced the
constitutional issue of parliament’s right to determine religious matters without the
Protector’s assent. On October 24, Nayler enacted a symbolic performance at Bris-
tol of Christ’s entry into Jerusalem on Palm Sunday, accompanied by a few women
singing “Hosanna in the Highest.”^84 He was arrested and sent to London; a ten-day
debate by the entire parliament ended in his conviction for the “horrid blasphemy”
of claiming, so his accusers maintained, to be the divine Christ. The Blasphemy Act
of August 9, 1650 called for six months’ imprisonment for a first offense of “atheis-