“Our Expiring Libertie” 1658–1660forth largely in a plain style that differs markedly from his earlier polemic modes.
These proposals move so far beyond mainstream seventeenth-century assumptions
as to seem a wildly impractical retreat from the political sphere. But he could rea-
sonably suppose that religious liberty and church disestablishment would help nur-
ture a republican ethos, and might resolve the fierce disputes about doctrine and
church order that had been flashpoints of controversy and unrest for twenty years.
More than a century later, the constitution of the fledgling United States republic
would establish both principles as the basis for civil peace. On these matters, as on
divorce, companionate marriage, and a free press, Milton was ahead of his time, as
he seems to realize in the final sentence of The Likeliest Means: “If I be not heard nor
beleevd, the event will bear me witnes to have spoken truth: and I in the mean
while have borne my witnes not out of season to the church and to my countrey”
(CPW VII, 321).
After May, 1659 Milton was no longer part of the Secretariat, but he remained
well informed about the shifts of power and personnel and on five different occa-
sions offered his advice about settling the government to whoever might listen.
These proposals were not ideal models but expedients geared to the rapidly chang-
ing circumstances, addressed rhetorically to specific audiences, and concerned above
all else to stave off a Stuart Restoration. Milton’s certainty that the Stuarts would
deny religious liberty to dissenters of all stripes, together with his visceral disgust for
Stuart court culture, prompted his relentless opposition to the restoration of Charles
II. His several tracts also register his profound belief that papal and Stuart absolut-
ism, as well as the idolatry invited by Roman Catholic and Laudian worship and by
the icons of monarchy, promote servility and intellectual bondage in the citizens.
In these last tracts Milton again insists that a republic is the best government for
a virtuous and liberty-loving people, but he found himself having to provide mod-
els for a republic without large numbers of such citizens. So, more insistently than
before, he justifies restricting suffrage and participation in government to the wor-
thy, who are still defined, as in Tenure and Eikonoklastes, as those who love and
support liberty, especially religious liberty. He welcomed the return of the Rump
Parliament, imperfect as he thought it to be, as an opportunity to reinstate the
republican model put in place in 1649, “without King, Single Person, or House of
Lords” and with sovereignty vested in a legislature having at least some claim to be
the people’s elected representative. During the final months of the Interregnum, in
a series of short tracts and two versions of The Readie & Easie Way, Milton proposed
to perpetuate whatever legislature or council was in place, however faulty he thought
them, as an effort to prevent the Restoration and its threat to Puritan religious
liberty. He read the English people’s desire to recall the king as clear evidence of
their degeneracy: they were displaying again the national defects of servility and
political ineptitude he had traced in the History of Britain, and were reprising the
backsliding Israelites in the wilderness who wanted to turn back to Egypt. Milton’s
models of government in these months are makeshift, provisional, temporary, and