“Higher Argument”: Paradise Lost 1665–1669the spread eagle and witnessed by one “Benjamin Greene servant to Mr. Milton.”
Milton assigned rights to the work to Simmons for sums that seem roughly consist-
ent with contemporary levels of payment to writers:^66 £5 to be paid immediately
and additional £5 payments when each of the first three editions were sold. These
editions were to be capped at 1,500 copies, and Milton was to receive his payment
when 1,300 copies were sold from each edition; he could ask for an accounting of
sales at reasonable intervals. For any editions beyond the third, Simmons would not
owe Milton any further compensation.^67
As required by the Press Act of May, 1662,^68 the manuscript of Paradise Lost had
to be licensed as well as registered with the Stationers. Milton’s old enemy, Roger
L’Estrange, was still very active as licenser in 1667, but Milton by chance or design
avoided him. Paradise Lost came into the hands of 28-year-old Thomas Tomkyns,
rector of St Mary Aldermary and domestic chaplain to the Archbishop of Canter-
bury, Gilbert Sheldon. Tomkyns’s publications mark him as a zealous royalist and
high churchman: shortly after he dealt with Milton’s poem he published a tractate
urging enforced uniformity in religion and strict control of dissenters, to obviate
the dangers toleration would pose to political stability.^69 While Milton’s manuscript
evidently bore only the initials J. M.,^70 the author was surely known to be the
notorious Milton, whose regicide and divorce treatises were still being cited and
denounced in the press in the mid-1660s.^71 Toland reports that Tomkyns at first
denied a license, objecting especially to a passage in Book I:
I must not forget that we had like to be eternally depriv’d of this Treasure by the
Ignorance or Malice of the Licenser; who, among other frivolous Exceptions, would
needs suppress the whole Poem for imaginary Treason in the following lines.—— As, when the Sun new risen
Looks thro the Horizontal misty Air
Shorn of his Beams, or from behind the Moon
In dim Eclipse disastrous Twilight sheds
On half the Nations, and with fear of change
Perplexes Monarchs. (PL I.594–9; EL 180)At first blush it seems odd that Tomkyns singled out these lines rather than, say, the
overt republicanism of the Nimrod passage in Michael’s prophecy (12.24–71). But
the recent English calamities were being read as God’s punishment for the nation’s
sins, and they had given rise to a spate of dire predictions and forebodings attaching
to comets and to the recent solar eclipse (June 22, 1666) which church and govern-
ment were eager to suppress. As one tract put it, eclipses are always attended by
astounding effects such as “the death of Kings and Great persons, alterations of
Governments, change of Laws.”^72 However, Tomkyns probably thought this com-
plex poem posed little danger to the masses by comparison with more overt subver-
sion in dissenters’ sermons and treatises, and so was prevailed upon to give it his