Notes to Chapter 1Armies to a coalition of republicans and radicals including Sir Henry Vane, Thomas
Scot, Major Salloway, Marchamont Nedham, Praisegod Barebone, and the printer,
Livewell Chapman.
111 See notes 102, 109.
112 J. M., The Readie & Easie Way to establish a free Commonwealth; and the excellence therof
compar’d with the inconveniences and dangers of readmitting Kingship in this Nation. The
second edition revised and augmented (London, 1660). No printer’s or bookseller’s
name appears.
113 Wing lists three copies.
114 See Stanley Stewart, “Milton Revises The Readie and Easie Way,” MS 20 (1984), 105–
24.
115 The transfer was witnessed by his amanuensis Jeremy Picard and by one Elizabeth
Wightman, who has not been identified. On May 13 the endorsement to Skinner was
recorded in the Registrar’s Office (LR IV, 291, 317–18). Skinner’s Life of Milton
states that the £2,000 came from his secretary’s salary and Edward Phillips reports that
he placed it “into the Excise Office, but neglecting to recal it in time, could never after
get it out, with all the power and interest he had in the great ones of those times” (EL
32, 78). Skinner collected interest on June 5, but that was the last interest ever paid
(Parker, I, 562–3; II, 1,075–6).
116 Skinner’s Life says he retired “at the first return of the Court,” which literally would
mean the very end of May, 1660; Toland assigns a somewhat earlier date, “The King
being ready to land” (EL 32, 175). Cf. Godfrey Davies, “Milton in 1660,” Huntington
Library Quarterly 18 (1955), 353.
117 Thomas Corns, The Development of Milton’s Prose Style (Oxford, 1982), 60–5; and
James Egan, “Milton’s Aesthetics of Plainness, 1659–1673,” The Seventeenth Century
12 (1997), 57–80.
118 Susanne Woods, “Elective Poetics and Milton’s Prose: A Treatise of Civil Power and
Considerations Touching the Likeliest Means to Remove Hirelings out of the Church,” in
Loewenstein and Turner, eds, Politics, Poetics, and Hermeneutics, 200.
119 Page 271. He promises for “some other time” a full examination of the question
whether Christians are bound to the Decalogue at all, considered as “two legal tables”
- another reference to his ongoing work on De Doctrina Christiana, where he considers
this matter at length.
120 For the comparable positions of Thomas Collier and Henry Stubbe articulated a few
months later, see note 15. Milton may also rely on John Selden’s exposition of the laws
given to Adam and Noah (the Noachide laws, including prohibitions of blasphemy
and idolatry) as a biblical formulation of natural law in De Jure Naturali et Gentium. See
Jason P. Rosenblatt, Torah and Law in Paradise Lost (Princeton, NJ, 1994), 126–7.
121 CM XVII. 345. In The Ancient Bounds; or, Liberty of Conscience asserted and vindicated
(London, 1645), Joshua Sprigge insisted that idolatry, such as the worship of images
and the “breaden-god,” were matters “which a Heathens light should not tolerate,
Nature carrying so far” (7). This notion of the basis in natural reason for some under-
standing of God and his worship derives from Scholastic tradition. Also see note 120.
122 His analysis of British history takes issue with a favorite authority of the tithe support-
ers, Henry Spelman’s Concilia, Decreta, Leges, Constitutiones... in Re Ecclesiarum Orbis
Britannici (London, 1639). See note 39.
Notes to Chapter 11