IV. Leavin IpEas,

When we attempt to analyze the ideas set forth in
this treatise, and now for the first time applied with
astonishing vigor and frankness to a great political

* Collections for Life of Milton, app. to Lives of Edw, and John
Philips, ed. Godwin, p. 341,

Leading Ideas xv

crisis in English history, we find that Milton is devel-
oping his philosophy of freedom. In his previous
writings, all oi them timely performances, he had
contended for religious and domestic freedom, for a
free interpretation of the Bible, for free education,
for liberty of investigation, of speech, of the press; +
in The Tenure of Kings and Magistrates he was to re-
emphasize most of these ideas, and to make his first
plea for civil liberty, to anticipate modern thought in
the statement and defence of great and generous
principles. In the compact and weighty pages of this
pamphlet, he presents the following leading ideas,
which were to command such attention from the
whole «tf Europe in their elaborated form, in the Lat-
in pei.ds of the replies to Salmasius and Morus :—
(1) All men naturally were born free (9. 24); (2) asa
result of a voluntary compact, kings and magistrates
were appointed by the people as deputies and com-
missioners, repositories of communicated and en-
trusted power (9. 31ff.); (8) laws were invented by
the people as checks to confine and limit the author-
ity of magistrates (10. 21ff.); (4) bonds or covenants
were also imposed upon rulers to compel them to
observe the laws which the people had made (11.
9ff.); (5) the power of kings and magistrates re-
mains fundamentally in the people as their natura’
birthright (11. 7 f.); (6) the king or magistrate may
be chosen or rejected, retained or deposed by the
people (15. 11 ff.); (7) men should be governed by the
authority of reason (1. 1, et passim). Commenting on
these political maxims for a new society, Geffroy
says: ‘Milton was not a practical statesman, and his
plans for a future social fabric were too often pure

* See his own statement in Sec. Def. (Bohn 1. 257 ff.),

xvi Introduction

Utopias, but he loved liberty passionately, he conse-
crated to her defence his entire life, with an elevation
of spirit, a generosity of soul, which distinguished him
from all his compatriots and all his contemporaries.
He is worthy of being numbered with the precursors
of our eighteenth century, aud his writings offer to the
historian and the philosopher the curious and sublime
spectacle of a new society commencing to be born.’!

But if Milton’s main purpose in writing this attack
on tyranny was to lay down the program of consti-
tutionai liberty, his secondary aim was to chastise
his former friends the Presbyterians, and to pour out
the bitterest vials of his wrath upon their inconsistent
divines. The controversial character of his treatise
is indeed very marked. Stern calls the acrimonious
attack on the Presbyterians the shell of the pamphlet.
of which the abstract argument on the origin of govern-
ment, and the right to depose and punish a tyrant, is
the kernel.? According to the Second Defence (Bohn
1.260), it was the inconsistent conduct of the ministers
which impelled Milton to write this exposure of their
inconstancy and effrontery. Not only as the greatest
opponents of his goddess, Liberty, but as his own
personal foes, did Milton eagerly embrace the oppor-
tunity to reveal their various shortcomings of thought
and life. In a sermon preached before the Houses
of Parliament in 1644 by the Rev. Herbert Palmer,
Milton's tractate on divorce had been openly called
‘a wicked booke which deserves to be burnt.’* The
Westminster Assembly, displeased from the same

' Etude sur les samphiets Politiques et Religieux de Milton,
pp. 224, 225.

2 Milton und seine Zeit 1, 441,

3 The Glasse of God’s Providence towards his Faithfull Ones, A
Sermon preached before the Houses of Parlt., Aug. 18, 1644.

onse-
ation
1 him
aries.
rSOrs
o the
olime
orn,’?
ttack
onsti-
stise
r out
stent
aiise
rious
yhlet.
vern-
nt, is
30hn
isters
their
atest
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imer,
alled
The
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filton,

Leading Ideas xvii

cause, had the ‘libertine’! summoned before the
House of Lords. It was not the nature of the poet

* to accept these strictures in a spirit of Christian for-
» giveness: from the date of the publication of his Colas-

terion, references to the Presbyterians in Milton's prose

» and verse are bitter in tone. ‘From that time,’ says

Orme, ‘he never failed to abuse the Presbyterians
and the Assembly. It is painful to detract from the
fair fame of Milton, but even he is not entitled to
vilify the character of a large and respectable body
of men, to avenge his private quarrel’? Whether he
was actuated by personal reasons or not, whether he
loved himself rather than truth, in thus turning upon
his former party. as Doctor Johnson avers,*® it was
not necessary for the author of The Tenure of Kings
and Magistrates to invent charges against the Presby-
terian preachers and writers. No party ever laid it-

- self more helplessly open to attack. And no contro-

versialist ever fell more mercilessly upon a vulnerable

4 enemy than Milton upon the men who were preach-

ing and writing in a vain effort to save ‘the Lord's

anointed,’ ¢

In addition to their sermons in the pulpits of London,
the Presbyterian divines expressed their new-found
loyalty to the king by sending out two tracts from
Sion College. The first, which we have already men-
tioned, was signed by 47 ministers, including Case,
Gataker, Gower, Rowborough, and Wallis of the West-
minster Assembly, and was addressed to Lord Fair-

* Clement Walker calls Milton ‘a libertine that thinketh his
wife a Manacle,’ Hist. of Indep., pt. 2. 199,

* Life and Times of Rich, Baxter 1. 70.

* Life of Milton, in Works, ed. Hawkins 2. 101.

“For a full discussion of Milton’s relations with the Pres-
byterians, see Masson, Zi of Milton 2.877 and 8. 468 ff.

c

xviii Introduction

fax and the Council of War, Jan. 18, 1649. A few
days later, another pamphlet was issued as a defence
against charges of inconsistency. It was entitlea,
A Vindication of the London Ministers from the unjust
Aspersions upon their former Actings for the Parliament,
and was signed by 57 ministers. Still a third deliv-
erance came from the Presbyterian ministers of Lan-
cashire, entitled, The Paper called the Agreement of
the People taken into Consideration. William Prynne
and Clemen. Walker, for the laymen, issued a Decla-
ration and Protestation, and .ae former made a very
long speech in Parliament on Dec. 4, 1648, and now
returned to the subject in his Briefe Memento. In all
these writings, the Presbyterians used the most force-
ful language in denouncing the course of the Army
and Independents as utterly opposed to the Solemn
League and Covenant, that to depose or to put to
death the king would be contrary to all legal prece-
dent, to Scripture, and to the Oaths of Supremacy
and Allegiance. It was easy for Milton to throw
himself upon this literature, and to compare the senti-
ments of the present with those of the past, to show
that these very men, in sermon and in pamphlet,
had formerly cursed the king as a tyrant, as one
worse than Nero (5.25; 8.7; 38. 10ff.); that they had
commended the war against the king (7. 27ff.); that
they themselves had broken the Oaths of Supremacy
and Allegiance (32. 26 ff.), and by making war on the
king and denying his authority had absolutely deposed
him (82.34 ff.) ; and that they had broken the Covenant
(84. 30 ff.), and had really taken the life of the king
by robbing him of his office and uignity (36. 25 ff.).

The Covenant