Notes to Chapter 1123, 276–7. The arguments of Doctrine and Discipline were attacked by Henry Hammond
in A Letter of Resolution (London, 1653 [1652], c. November 1).
102 John Rowland, Polemica (London, 1653). See chapter 8, pp. 258–9.
103 LR III, 374–5. The letter from Bramhall to his son (May 9/19, 1654) asserts that John
Phillips’s “lying abusive book was written by Milton himself.... If Salmasius his
friends knew as much of him as I, they would make him go near to hang himself. But
I desire not to wound the nation through his sides, yet I have written to him long since
about it roundly. It seems he desires not to touch upon that subject.”
104 At times his formulations recall other English psalm versions, especially the AV, the
Book of Common Prayer, and the verse translations of George Buchanan, George Sandys,
and Sir Philip Sidney.
105 The AV reads: “Mine eye is consumed because of grief: it waxeth old because of all
mine enemies.”
106 In the AV, Psalm 2:6 reads: “Yet have I set my king upon my holy hill of Zion”; Psalm
5:3 reads: “O Lord in the morning will I direct my prayer unto thee, and will look
up.” Other Miltonic augmentations include a generalization added to Psalm 7: “God
is a just Judge and severe” (l. 43), and to Psalm 8 a description of God’s enemy as one
“That bends his rage thy providence to oppose” (l. 8).
107 Cf. AV, Psalm 6:10: “Let all mine enemies be ashamed and sore vexed: let them return
and be ashamed suddenly.”
108 See chapter 7, pp. 213–14.
109 For Calvin’s psalter see William Hunter, “The Sources of Milton’s Prosody,” Philo-
logical Quarterly 28 (1949), 142. The Sidney–Pembroke psalms, though not published
until the twentieth century, circulated widely in manuscript and were well known.
110 For Psalm 1 Milton (like Sidney) used rhymed iambic pentameter couplets but with
the sense running on from line to line; for Psalm 2, terza rima, the verse form of
Dante’s Divine Comedy and Sidney’s Psalm 7; for Psalm 3 a stanza of six iambic lines of
varying length rhyming aabccb; for Psalm 4 a stanza of five iambic trimeter lines and
one pentameter rhyming abbacc; for Psalm 5 eight quatrains of alternating trimeter
and pentameter couplets rhyming abab; for Psalm 6, iambic pentameter quatrains rhym-
ing abba; for Psalm 7, ten stanzas of iambic tetrameter rhyming ababba and a final
quatrain rhyming aabb; and for Psalm 8, six quatrains of iambic pentameter rhyming
abab, with run-on stanzas as well as lines.
111 Roman Catholics and Irish rebels were excluded forever; royalist malignants for the
first four parliaments, unless they demonstrated a change of heart.
112 Cromwell could add up to six others with the council’s consent, and could make
replacements when needed from nominees proposed by parliament and the council.
113 LR III, 355–6. On the same day Cromwell signed a warrant for payment to the staff,
including Milton, of their back salary from July 4, 1653 to January 1, 1654.
114 [Marchamont Nedham], A True State of the Case of the Commonwealth (London, 1654).
Nedham claims that the principle of the people’s sovereignty is preserved in the new
parliamentary structure and the provision (hereafter) for an elective Protector. Nedham
did not sign his name, probably because the work might have more effect if not iden-
tified with a known government propagandist.
115 Fallon points out (Milton in Government, 121–39) that the Council Record Books no
longer provide a good record of Milton’s activities, since Cromwell took foreign af-
Notes to Chapter 9