“Our Expiring Libertie” 1658–1660the supreme council holds is “not transferrd, but delegated only” (432). It must
control the armed forces and the public revenue, but most of its business, he now
specifies, will be in foreign rather than domestic affairs (433, 443). He also incorpo-
rates more Harringtonian features into his model: it was no time for common-
wealth supporters to quibble over details. To satisfy the “ambition” of those who
will not wait their turn to participate in government he grudgingly allows, as he did
in the Letter to Monk, a Harringtonian “partial rotation” – here, a third of the
members, at annual or longer intervals. He will not forejudge “any probable expe-
dient,” though he thinks such rotation has “too much affinitie with the wheel of
fortune” (435–6), and though he still thinks it safest “to deferr the changing or
circumscribing of our Senat, more then may be done with ease, till the Common-
wealth be throughly setl’d in peace and safetie, and they themselves give us the
occasion” (441–2). That phrase suggests, however, that he foresees future “occa-
sion” for such changes. He knows that the army sectaries – and he himself – would
not long endure what will at best be a heavily Presbyterian parliament, and so hints
broadly that the people’s army could expel this parliament if they prove intolerant
and repressive: “Neither do I think a perpetual Senat... much in this land to be
feard, where the well-affected either in a standing armie, or in a setled militia have
thir arms in thir own hands” (435). He also works out in more detail his Harringtonian
proposal in the Letter to Monk for the progressive refinement of nominators and
electors to the Grand Council.^132
He flatly refuses, however, to accommodate other aspects of the Harringtonian
model, which he thinks unwieldy, exotic, and mechanistic, offering to “manacle
the native liberty of mankinde; turning all vertue into prescription, servitude, and
necessitie, to the great impairing of Christian libertie” (445). Harrington’s Agrarian
Law will not be needed to control threats to liberty from the acquisition of great
wealth if prelates and lords are removed (445–6). Harrington’s 1,000-member popular
assembly, designed to vote without debate, is not only “troublesom and charge-
able” and “unweildie with thir own bulk” but also an insult to reasonable men,
allowed “only now and then to hold up a forrest of fingers, or to convey each man
his bean or ballot into the box, without reason shewn or common deliberation”
(441). Harrington’s republic rests on the theory that good government structures
will create good citizens and secure the republic; Milton’s on the theory that only
good (that is, liberty-loving) citizens can sustain a free commonwealth.
In the second edition Milton elaborates upon and reserves still more powers to
the counties^133 as an alternative to successive parliaments or to Harrington’s rota-
tion. He hopes by this plan to deflect criticisms of permanent council and to satisfy
the county elites accustomed to exercise political power. But more than that, he has
also come to believe in the division of powers in a federal structure as a hedge
against tyranny, as a means to promote educational and judicial reform and make
government more representative, and as a means to shape a republican culture.
Milton claims that his is a sounder federal model than that of the United Provinces: