“I... Steer Right Onward” 1654–1658opposition from all levels of the army.^91 As enacted, the new constitution, The
Humble Petition and Advice and its Supplement, confirmed Cromwell as Protector and
empowered him to choose his successor, making the office quasi-hereditary; a sec-
ond legislative body known officially as the “Other House” but familiarly as the
House of Lords was to contain some forty to seventy persons with life tenure,
nominated by the Protector and approved by the Commons; and the Council of
State was redefined as a privy council with permanent membership. It determined
strict qualifications for voting and eligibility for office, but left parliament as judge
of members’ qualifications,^92 and required that the Protector’s council and great
officers be approved by both houses. It also mandated an established church and
required all ministers on public maintenance to subscribe to a Confession of Faith –
to be agreed by the Protector and the parliament. Toleration was accorded most
Protestants, but with more exclusions than in the Instrument: Catholics, Laudian
Anglicans, anti-Trinitarians, blasphemers, and those who practice profaneness (Rant-
ers) or revile ministers (Quakers).^93
Milton left no record of his opinion about the change of government but some
constants in his thought afford a basis for judgment. He believed, with Aristotle and
Machiavelli, that forms of government must respond to historical circumstances
and correspond to the nature of the people; and he had seen no reason to revise his
conclusion in the Defensio Secunda that the English people are as yet wanting in
republican civic virtue, making some kind of Protectorate necessary. But he could
not have approved of the Petition and Advice, whose provisions depart much farther
than the Instrument from republican forms and from his own primary desiderata:
broad religious liberty, church disestablishment, and an uncensored press. He would
have been pleased that Cromwell refused the crown, having warned him in the
Defensio Secunda that to become a king would be a species of idolatry. And he was
perhaps reassured by the fact that Cromwell’s personal style remained plain and
non-regal.^94 But he surely found idolatry enough in the trappings of monarchy
associated with Cromwell’s elaborate inauguration: the purple velvet robe with
ermine, the richly gilt Bible, the sword of state, the massy gold scepter, the trumpet
blasts, the cries of “God save the Lord Protector.” Yet Milton did not align himself
with the Protectorate’s hardcore republican enemies and would have been dis-
mayed if he learned that his Tenure of Kings and Magistrates was cited by Edward
Sexby in Killing Noe Murder to support a call for Cromwell’s assassination as a ty-
rant.^95 But he would have enjoyed the trenchant irony in the series of witty articles
by his friend Nedham in Mercurius Politicus. Playing off Harrington’s fiction, Nedham
constructs a story of visitors from Oceana, along with their Archon and “that won-
drous wise Republican called Mercurius Politicus” landing in Utopia, “where the
world has run madding here in disputations about Government” and the wits are
afflicted with much scribbling about its forms. The senators have decided that they
were wrong about liberty and the principles of natural right and freedom; recogniz-
ing now that forms of government are indifferently good, they are turning from a