Notes to Chapter 1141 See Douglas Stewart, “Speaking to the World: The Ad Hominem Logic of Milton’s
Polemics,” The Seventeenth Century 11 (1996), 47–57; and Lieb, Milton and the Culture
of Violence, 181–225.
142 Page 554. See chapter 5, p. 150 for his similar statement in Reason of Church-governement.
143 See p. 289 and note 54.
144 Milton calls her Claudia Pelletta in his Pro Se Defensio.
145 The documents are still there. See Kester Svendsen, “Milton and Alexander More:
New Documents,” Journal of English and Germanic Philology 60 (1961), 799–806, and
CPW IV.2, 687–93.
146 See pp. 294–5 and note 75. Milton claimed that More undertook to defend Salmasius
who in return promised him the chair of theology at Middelburg but, as Paul Sellin
shows in “Alexander Morus before the Hof van Holland,” 1–11, More received that
call in 1649. Since Milton’s Defensio only appeared in 1651, the Salmasius–More col-
laboration on the response to it, and therefore the More–Pontia affair, had to occur in
- Sellin also shows that the court case turned entirely on the issue of breach of
promise, not the facts of the case. See chapter 10.
147 Page 660. There were questions raised about More’s orthodoxy and licentiousness at
Middelburg, but as Paul Sellin notes, “Alexander Morus before the Synod of Utrecht,”
239–49, More left Middelburg at his own volition, to accept the post at Amsterdam.
See chapter 10, pp. 322–4.
148 See p. 292.
149 Pages 569–71. At times the language hints at sodomy (579, 630). Milton also visits on
More versions of charges leveled against himself: More has procured “the most brutal
of all divorces” in seducing Pontia under cover of an engagement; she was the “royal
property” of Salmasius and he has turned her into a republic (610).
150 Loewenstein, “Defense,” in Loewenstein and Turner, eds, Politics, Poetics, and
Hermeneutics, 187–8.
151 CPW IV.1, 553–6. He responds to charges that he is a mere unknown by insisting that
he has not rushed into print and that at one point in their lives Homer and Demosthenes
were also unknown. He makes an ambiguous reference to a work long withheld from
publication (the long-considered epic?), which would have brought fame; and he
comments even more ambiguously that he would not have published “even this, un-
less a fitting opportunity presented itself” (607–8).
152 Pages 589–90. The first sentence quotes Hebrews 11:34, the text Milton has used as
his motto for some time; see chapter 8, p. 257.
153 Pages 605–6. The assertion that wisdom is not gained through books, and that the
highest magnanimity is the renunciation of kingship, are later articulated by Christ
in Paradise Regained 4. 321–30; 2. 481–3 – further evidence of the ideality of this
portrait.
154 See chapter 6, p. 190.
Chapter 10 “I... Still Bear Up and Steer Right Onward” 1654–16581 A satirical poem found in his possession though perhaps not by him denounced Cromwell
as the “ape of a King / A tragical Caesar acted by a clown.” Overton denied theNotes to Chapter 9–10