“Our Expiring Libertie” 1658–1660their system into his: partial rotation in the permanent Grand Council, a process for
refining electors and electees to that Grand Council, and a plan for subjecting laws
passed in the Grand Council to the votes of a more popular body – in Milton’s
scheme, the local councils would substitute for Harrington’s 1,000-man popular
assembly. But Milton was not suddenly converted to Harringtonian republicanism.
Harrington’s popular assembly would only give its aye or nay to what the senate
proposes without debate, but Milton would have his local assemblies vote only after
they “deliberate on all things fully” (394): he cannot imagine any meaningful vote
without full and free discussion. If the local officials Monk convenes refuse this plan,
Milton urges him to seek out others, or impose the settlement by force, “having a
faithful Veteran Army, so ready, and glad to assist you in the prosecution therof”
(395). But what is fundamental in all this is that Monk – by force if necessary –
impose a process to restrict elections to the new parliament to those “firm” for a free
commonwealth, and that that legislature be made perpetual.
Milton’s Readie & Easie Way was often attacked during March, bringing home to
him, if he was not fully aware of it already, how vulnerable he was making himself
to royalist revenge and punishment in the ever-more-likely Restoration. By again
becoming such a visible participant in the public discourse, he kept reminding his
enemies of his status as the most illustrious defender of the regicide and the Com-
monwealth. A tract by Roger L’Estrange (published anonymously) mocks Milton’s
project for perpetuating the Rump. Those MPs are, notoriously, not the men of
“Abilities and Honesty” called for by his argument, and in any case Monk has now
scuttled his scheme:
I could only wish his Excellency [Monk] had been a little civiler to Mr. Milton, for just
as he had finished his Model of a Commonwealth, directing in these very terms the choyce
of men not addicted to a Single Person, or House of Lords... In come the Secluded
Members and spoyl his Project.^91Another witty invective places Milton alongside Nedham and the most notorious
regicide traitors who may expect death at Tyburn – Milton because his writing
spawned the Commonwealth:
John Milton is their [the Rump’s] goos-quil Champion... an old Heretick both in
Religion and Manners, that by his will would shake off his Governours as he does his
Wives, four in a Fourt night, the Sun beams of his scandalous papers against the late
Kings book, is the Parent that begot the late Commonwealth.... He is so much an
enemy to usual practices that I believe when he is condemned to travel to Tyburn in a
Cart, he will petition for the favor to be the first man that ever was driven thither in
a Wheel-borrow.^92In his 248-page volume The Dignity of Kingship Asserted, George Starkey takes vio-
lent issue with Milton’s concept of liberty of conscience, his scurrilous attacks on