III. Purpose,

The main purpose of The Tenure of Kings and Mag-
istrates is therefore very plain. It is a justification of
the thoughts and intents of all those in England who
hated tyranny, and who held it to be simple justice
that a perfidious monarch should, after fair trial, re-
ceive due punishment for high crimes and misdemea-
nors. The long title of this treatise lays down Mil-
ton’s thesis ‘that it is lawfull to call to account a
Tyrant or wicked King and after due conviction to
depose, and put him to death.’ It was not the in-
tention of Milton to disparage monarchy, however,
although he combats the theory of divine right, and
maintains that the original of power is in the people.
He puts the case of the people against a wicked king,
with special reference to Charles I, and gives illus-

Purpose xiii

trations from past ages of the overthrow and deposit-
ion of tyrants, Brt his purpose was not to glorify
the republican form of government, nor tc derogate
from the fair fame of good kings. In his reference.
in the Second Defence, to his motives in writing this
treatise, he says, ‘Without any immediate or special
application to Charles, I shewed in an abstract con-
sideration of the question, what might lawfully be
done against tyrants’ (Bchn I. 260). While this state-
ment must be discounted, for Milton did make imme-
diate and special application to Charles, as we have
already pointed out, still it remains true that he had
no quarrel with the monarchic principle itself. In
later years he was delighted because Queen Christina
of Sweden praised his reply to Salmasius. In his
panegyric of the Queen of Sheba of the North, he says:
‘When the critical exigencies of my country de-
manded that I should undertake the arduous and in-
vidious task of impugning the rights of kings, how
happy am I that I should meet with so illustrious, so
truly a royal evidence to my integrity, and to this
truth, that I had not written a word against kings,
but only against tyrants, the spots and pests of roy-
alty’ (Bohn 1. 249). Whatever Milton’s honest pur-
pose may have been, his contentiou that ‘all men
naturally are born free,’ his theory of the contractual
origin of society and government, his enunciation of
the doctrine of the sovereignty of the people, of the
derivative character of all kingly rule, of the equality
of all persons before the law, and his declaration of
the right of ‘any who have the power’ to depose or
put to death a wicked king, give the general reader
the impression that he was a republican of the most
thorough-going kind, Aubrey, one of his earliest bi-
ographers, so understood him: ‘Whatever he wrote

xiv Introduction

against monarchie was out of no animositie to the
king’s person, or out of any faction or interest, but
out of a pure zeale to the Liberty of Mankind, which
he thought would be greater under a free state than
under a monarchiall government. His being so con-
versant in Livy and the Roman authors, and the great-
nes he saw donne by the Roman commonwealth, and
the vertue of their great commanders [captaines] in-
duc’t him to it’! When he wrote this treatise Milton
seems to have been indifferent to the form of govern-
ment, so long as liberty was insured to the subject.
If he welcomed the republic, he did so because it
meant to him the dawn of a new day of political and
individual freedom in England. In his former writ-
ings he had not used a single expression against
royalty; on the contrary, he had defended the rights
of the crown against the pretensions of the Anglican
prelates. In proposing a plan for the reform of the
church, his model had been monarchical government.
The Tenure of Kings and Magistrates was written, there-
fore, not as a protest against the institution of roy-
alty, but as a protest against a wicked king and as
a defence of resolute upholders of human liberty, not
because they were democrats and republicans, but
because they were earnest and vigorous in the put-
ting down of tyranny, and in the setting up of a
righteous rule in England.