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John Milton (1608–1674) is considered one of the great poets of the English-speaking world and was a prominent statesman during the English Civil Wars (1642–1651) and their aftermath.

Milton studied at Christ’s College, Cambridge, intent on entering the Protestant clergy. However, he began publishing poetry, and, after finishing his studies, began a period of solitary study followed by a tour of Italy and France. His travels cemented his distaste for Roman Catholicism, and when he returned to England he began writing in support of the Puritan cause. His earliest tracts concerned issues of religious doctrine, and his defense of liberty of conscience would ground his justifications for liberty in later political tracts. All these works demonstrated elegance and learnedness, qualities that, when applied to his pamphlets on English politics, made Milton one of the most formidable spokesmen for the English republican cause.

Milton’s first, and perhaps best-known, major political work was Areopagitica, which appeared in 1644. The treatise denounced a Parliamentary decree that required printers be licensed. Citing each man’s right “to exercise his owne leading capacity,” Milton argued against censorship of the press and expressed a concern about the effect that it would have on the acquisition of wisdom.

As secretary of foreign tongues, Milton was commissioned to write a Latin response to Claudius Salmasius’s defense of the divine right of monarchy and attack on the English Commonwealth. Milton’s response, the First Defense, is an extremely learned chapter-by-chapter rebuttal that demonstrated his erudition and scathing wit. In this work, Milton argues that regicide could be justified through English law, which acknowledges that “there are situations in which the law itself arms the vassal against the lord, and delivers the lord over to be killed.” He also argues for the primacy of the citizens acting through Parliament, whose power he deems the “highest in the land.” That Parliament, and the citizens who elect it, should have such political liberty is justified by the fact that all people have human reason and the ability to acquire wisdom. Other well-known works by Milton include The Tenure of Kings and Magistrates (1649), Eikonoklastes (1649), and Defensio Secunda (Second Defense, 1654)

Later in his life Milton dedicated himself to the composition of the poems for which he is most famous. His deep and foreboding poetical engagement with evil and the lesser side of human nature received some political expression via the polemic The Ready and Easy Way (1660). In this work, he ruthlessly chastised the English people for abandoning “a just and noble cause for the mixture of bad men who have ill manag’d and abus’d it” and laid out a case for maintaining a popular government instead of reverting to monarchy.

While Milton’s poetry can be seen as a return to the religious concerns that dominated his early life and writings, these works are also rife with commentary on the politics of his time. Scholars have focused on the odd inversion in Paradise Lost (1667), in which Heaven appears monarchical and Hell republican, and questioned Milton’s dedication to republican principles in his later years. However, author Armand Himy argues in Milton and Republicanism (1995) that Milton ultimately concludes that “Christian liberty and republicanism cannot be separated,” for Milton believed that the individual right to follow a well-developed conscience could only reach its fullest expression in a republican commonwealth.

Bibliography:

Armitage, David, Armand Himy, and Quentin Skinner, eds. Milton and Republicanism. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1995.
Milton, John. Areopagitica and other Political Writings of John Milton. Edited and with an introduction by John Alvis. Indianapolis, Ind.: Liberty Fund, 1999.
Zagorin, Perez. Milton: Aristocrat and Rebel: The Poet and His Politics. New York: D. S. Brewer, 1992.

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