“Our Expiring Libertie” 1658–1660L’Estrange’s insight points to what is probably Milton’s unspoken assumption, that
his Grand Council would be “permanent” only until a free people determine to
change it. We can well imagine that Milton himself would demand representative
and successive Grand Councils to replace the far from worthy legislatures he has
proposed at various times to make permanent, once the threat of a Stuart restora-
tion had passed. L’Estrange also invites a horrified response to Milton’s previous
treatises: in his divorce tracts Milton proved that devils may take human shapes,
showing himself an Incubus “even to your own Wife”; in his answer to Salmasius
he disgraced the English nation abroad, giving every man “a Horrour for Mankind,
when he Considers, You are of the Race”; and his wickedness in Eikonoklastes ex-
ceeded even those examples.^105
As elections went forward in late March and April, there was widespread suspi-
cion that Monk was in negotiation with Charles; the votes were tending, as ex-
pected, to a Cavalier interest; royalist pamphleteers were heaping ridicule on all the
Puritan leaders, placing Milton prominently among them; and the royalists were
winning Presbyterian cooperation in plans to restore Charles II.^106 Some royalist
pamphlets advised the electorate to ignore the “new pretended Qualifications” and
choose knights and burgesses according to the old ways.^107 Many commonwealthsmen
gave over the polemic struggle and went into hiding – Harrington was one – or else
stood for election to the new parliament. But a small, now-desperate republican–
radical coalition sought to provoke an army uprising by publishing inflammatory
tracts predicting loss of pay, corporal punishment, and loss of religious liberty for
the soldiers if Charles returned. An Alarum to the Officers and Souldiers appeals, as
from one soldier to his brothers, for the army again to save themselves and the
Commonwealth from extreme peril, since Monk’s recent actions show that he
cannot be trusted: “there is no other Bulwork of defense against the return of
Monarchy but the Army... Men armed are seldom harmed.”^108 L’Estrange erro-
neously thought that Milton wrote part or all of that tract as well as Plaine English
and Eye-Salve for the English Army, the last of which he termed “a medicine of the
same Composition, which (by general report) strook Milton Blind.”^109 L’Estrange’s
readiness to father all of them on Milton shows his continued notoriety as the
Commonwealth’s premier polemicist, but also that Milton’s tactics in his last tracts
offer some basis for the assumption that he was associating himself with a radical
coalition launching a last-ditch polemic effort.^110 The calls for the army to act bore
fruit in a short-lived uprising led by Major-General Lambert, who escaped from the
Tower on April 10 and marshaled a small contingent of sectarian and Fifth Monar-
chist soldiers at Edgehill; they were defeated and dispersed on April 22.
Milton’s revised edition of the Readie & Easie Way was virtually the last piece of
Commonwealth polemic to appear. The fact that L’Estrange, who answered virtu-
ally every tract by or supposedly by Milton as soon as it appeared, referred only to
the first edition in his April 20 answer to Brief Notes may suggest publication some-
time after mid-April.^111 Milton had to find a clandestine printer and bear all the