VII. Backcrounp or PoutticaL Tuoucur.

Before discussing the special sources of Milton's
political doctrines, it will be necessary to pass in
review several of the main ideas which he inherited
from the theorists of the sixteenth century, and which
had their roots in the writings of the Middle Ages.
The contractual origin of society and government,
the sovereignty of the people, the authority of reason,
the divine right of kings—all these topics had engaged
the argumentative powers of sixteenth century pam-
phleteers. Certain great movements of thought had
contributed to the furtherance of civil and religious
liberty in that age—(1) the struggle between the
papacy and the rising power of kings, (2) the Prote-
stant Reformation, with its appeal to the Bible and
reason as the sole authorities of life and conduct,

* See notes on 24,2, 24.8 and 24. 12.

* For examples of this humorous use of Scripture see Rem.
Def. (Bohn 3, 86); Zid, (Bohn 2, 74); Reas. Ch. Govt. against Prel,
(Bohn 2. 463); Fist Def. (Bohn 1, 41, 211), ete,

Ee NS A Oe ae

Background of Political Thought xxi

(8) the influence of the Renascence in resurrecting
the classics of Greece and Rome, with their republic-
anism, their passion for liberty, and their approval of
tyrannicide, (4) the increased study of Roman law,
and (5) the rise of the historical spirit, and of the
modern historical method. All these currents of thought
converge in The Tenure of Kings and Magistrates.

It is one of the remarkable facts of history that the
doctrine of the sovereignty of the people came from
the bosom of the Roman Catholic Church, the arch-
foe of modernism, and the determined obstructer of
civil and religious liberty. Upholders of this church,
however, both in the Middle Ages and in the sixteenth
century, emphasized the power of-the people, in order
to check the growing independence of the king.
They were not actuated by any desire to promote
democracy, but simply and solely to belittle the
dangerous rivals of the pope. ‘Civil power,’ so wrote
Pope Gregory VII to Bishop Hermann of Metz, ‘ was
the invention of worldly men, ignorant of God and
prompted by the devil; it needed not only the as-
sistance, but the authorization, of the church.’ In
conformity with this teaching, Marsiglius of Padua
declared that the king might be restrained or deposed
if he overpassed his prescribed bounds. In order to
exalt the church, this pioneer of political theory re-
cognized the people as the origin of all power in the
state.2 From the time of Augustine, the origin of
civil government had been ascribed to Adam’s fall,
and Cain and Nimrod were asserted to be its first
founders, ‘The church was therefore ready to admit
any form of civil government that wou!” listen to her

* Poole, (lust. Hist, Med. Thought, p. 229.
? Opera, ed. Goldast, 18, 185.

xxxii Introduction

claims. Theoretically she had no preference for mo-
narchical institutions; rather, it should seem, she was
inclined to promote a democratic sentiment.’! This
principle, then, that the people is supreme, so well-
known in the Middle Ages, was eagerly seized upon
by the opponents of the Reformation, which was
itself furthered and protected by the princes of Germany
and the kings of England and Sweden. A school of
Jesuit writers arose to battle for the theory that man-
kind is naturally at liberty to choose its form of
government. Towards the close of the sixteenth
century, they had even become defenders of tyran-
nicide, and argued that it was not a sin to depose
or put to death a heretical monarch—for the church
held that it was a fundamental law of all countries
that a sovereign must be a Roman Catholic. Mariana,
the Spanish Jesuit, openly approved the assassination
of Protestant rulers.2. In his able exposition of the
political teachings of the Jesuits, Figgis sums up this
doctrine as follows:—‘Power is in the people, for
nature made all men free and equal, and there is no
reason why one should have one jurisdiction rather
than another. The whole community, then, is the im-
mediate depositary of political power. But it cannot
exercise it directly. It must delegate its power to
a king or ruling body, under such conditions as shall
please it.’

In opposition to this purely utilitarian and secular
theory of the state advanced by the defenders of the
papacy, the early Protestant reformers set up the theory
of the divine right of kings. This also is one of the
anomalies of history, that those great religious leaders,

* Poole, {ustr. Hist. Med. Thought, p, 281.
* De Rege et Regis Institutione 1. 2,
* Trans. Royal Hist, Soc. 11.104,

Background of Political Thought Xxxiii

who put in motion all the forces of modern liberty.
should have been at the outset the upholders of
despotism. It was owing to the force of circumstances,
however, that Luther, Calvin, Bucer, and others became
supporters of the regal power. Kings were their sole
protectors against the persecuting rage of the papacy,
and it was but natu:al and reasonable that they should
magnify kingly authority, in order to combat the claims
of the church to absolute sovereignty. Luther, there-
fore, and his successors searched the Scriptures for
divine sanction to the rule and right of kings. As
we have seen, they found many texts to support
their views; hence the dogma, which was destined to
become such a weapon of tyranny in the hands of
the Stuarts, that the king is appointed directly by God,
that he is solutus legibus, that he is responsible to God
alone, and that the perpetual duty of the subject is
obedience. But Luther's followers, such men as Knox,
Gilby, and Poynet, learned that divine right was a
doctrine that could mean hindrance and oppression,
instead of progress and liberty, and that the Bible
also authorized resistance to idolaters and tyrants. In
the seventeenth century, Protestant teachers agreed
with the Jesuits in asserting the sovereignty of the
people. We should remember, however, that when
Milton says the power of kings is derivative and
transferred (12.8); when the author of the Case of
the Army Truly Stated (Oct. 15, 1647) says, ‘All power
is originally and essentially in the whole body of the
people of this nation’; or when, in January, 1649, the
committee of the House of Commons, ultra-Protestant
and Rome-hating as it was, voted ‘that the people,
under God, are the original of all just power; that
the Commons of England have the supreme authority
of this nation,’ they were each and all indebted to
d

Xxxiv Introduction

Hildebrand, and an army of Romanist writers, for
such a theory of civil liberty. We can understand,
therefore, that there was a substratum of truth in the
declarations of the Royalists that the revolutionary
opinions of Cromwell's soldiers were the result of the
propaganda of Jesuit priests, who entered the ranks
of the army on purpose to sow their anti-monarchical
opinions. The Jesuits were not there in the flesh, but
the writings of Molina, Mariana, and Bellarmine had
come to full flower in The Grand Army Remonstrance,
in the fierce democracy of the Levelers, and in The
Tenure of Kings and Magistrates.

The chief buttress of the theory of popular sov-
ereignty is the idea of the social contract, the conten-
tion that the origin of kingship is to be traced to
the remote occasion when the multitude, of their own
accord, transferred to one of their own number the
rights and powers of the magistrate. In this treatise,
Milton states this opinion, not as a theory, but as acom-
monly accepted fact (9.31). Although this notion of the
contractual origin of society and government was an
inheritance from Epicurus, Polybius, and others,’ it
was adopted by the medieval upholders of the papacy
as a valuable argument for their purposes. Manegold,
a priest of Lutterbach in Alsatia, who wrote in defence
of Hildebrand, clearly states the famous theory : ‘ Since
no one can create himself emperor or king, the people
elevates a certain one person over itself to this end
that he govern and rule it according to the principle
of righteous government; but if in any wise he trans-
gresses the contract by virtue of which he is chosen,
he absolves the people from the obligation of submis-
sion, because he has first broken faith with it’? This

1 See note on 9. 81.
* Poole, lust. Med. Thought, p. 282,

ceed Nake” fate

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Background of Political Thought XXXV

plain statement was accepted by almost all the political
theorists of the sixteenth century, but the defenders
of monarchy argued that by this agreement the people
surrendered their power to the ruler and his heirs.
Towards the close of the century, after the question
had become very thoroughly discussed, we find the
contractual idea imbedded in the maxims of the Three
Estates in 1684: ‘La royauté est un office, non un hér-
itage.—C’est le peuple souveiain qui dans I'origine créa
les rois.—L’Etat est la chose du peuple; la souverai-
neté n’appartient pas aux princes, qui n’existent que
par le peuple.—Un fait ne prend force de loi que par
la sanction des Etats, rien n’est saint ni solide sans
leur aveu.’! Milton is therefore following closely in
the footsteps of a long line of thinkers in founding
royalty on a primitive contract, the conditions of which
were dictated by the people. And, like others who
had gone before him, he finds a sanction for such a
league in the covenants of the chosen people, and, in
later history, in coronation oaths and pledges.?- On
this theory he bases his arguments (1) that titles of
‘Sovran Lord, natural Lord, and the like, are either
arrogancies or flatteries’ (12. 17), (2) that the king has
not a hereditary right to his crown and dignity (12. 27),
(8) that kings are accountable, not only to God, but
to the people (13, 11), (4) that the people may choose
or reject, retain or depose the king, as they see fit (15. 11).

Out of these doctrines proceeds his outspoken
declaration that the people may take up arms against
a tyrant, ‘as against a common pest, and destroyer
of mankind, that it is lawful and has been so through
all ages, for any who have the power to convict.
depose, and put him to death.’ Because this is his

* Baudrillart, . Bodin et Son Temps, p. 10.

* See notes on 9, 31; 12. 4.

d2

xxxvi Introduction

thesis, The Tenure of Kings and Magistrates occupies
a unique place in English literature, for it contains
the first attempt in our language to trace even partially
the history of tyrannicide, and it might also be added
that until the present no later writer in English has
supplemented the material gathered in this treatise
and in the First Defence of the English People. Although
Milton was indebted to Buchanan's dialogue, De Jure
Regni apud Scotos (1579), for some references on this
topic, and possibly to Bodin’s De Republica (1576), lhe
did research-work on his own account, and has cited
here, and elsewhere in his writings, principally in his
First Defence, many quotations from the ancients on
the subject of tyranny.

In this pamphlet, Milton pays most attention to
instances of tyrannicide from Jewish history, but he
draws one important quotation from Seneca (22. 17)
and aes a general statement concerning the practice
among the Greeks and Romans (20.10). His definition
of a tyrant shows his knowledge of Aristotle's opinions
on the subject (12.13). He also cites Euripides (14. 22),
Dio Cassius (14. 29), Livy (16. 20), and St. Basil (19. 27).
In the second edition he added a formidable array of
quotations from the Protestant theologians.

This pamphlet, however, was written hurriedly, and
he did not have time to make an exhaustive study of
the subject. In the days when he toiled over the
pages of the First Defence he was able to go into the
question more deeply, and perhaps nothing in Milton's
prose reveals the vast extent of his reading more than
his citations on this theme. He quotes Aristotle
(Bohn 1. 37, 38, 46), Sallust (ib. 1. 38, 38), Cicero
(ib. 1. 89), M. Aurelius (ib. 1. 49); he refers to Tiberius

1 For a review of the literature on the subject of tyrannicide
see the Appendix.

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Background of Political Thought XXxxvii

as ‘a very great tyrant’ (ib. 1.49); the senate and
people of Rome would have been justified in pro-
ceeding against Domitian ‘ according to the custom of
their ancestors,’ and in giving judgment of death
against him, as they did once against Nero’ (ib. 1.81);
he calls attention to Cicero's praise of Brutus as a
saviour and preserver of the Commonwealth (ib. 1.90).
‘All men’ he says, ‘blame Domitian, who put to
death Epaphroditus, because he had helped Nero to
kill himself’ (ib. 1.93). He points out that Valen-
tinian was slain by Maximus (ib. 1. 105), Avitus was
deposed by the Roman senate (ib.), Gratian was killed
by the soldiers (ib.). Diodorus and Herodotus are
quoted as authorities for the stories of the deposition
of Egyptian tyrants, and the former also yields exam-
ples from Persian and Ethiopian history (id. 1. 121 ff.).
Plato, Aristotle, Xenophon, Cicero, and Polybius are
all cited in rapid succession (ib, 1. 126). Of the poets,
he quotes Aéschylus (ib. 1, 126), Euripides, and Sophoc-
les (ib. 1. 127). In a review of the Roman historians,
he cites Sallust (ib.), Cicero, Livy, Tacitus, Dio Cas-
sius (ib. 1. 128), Pliny (i. 1. 181), and Capitolinus
(ib. 1. 188). After quoting Seneca, he continues: ‘By
what has been said it is evident, that the best of the
Romans did not only kill tyrants as oft as they could,
and howsoever they could; but that they thought it
a commendable and a praiseworthy action so to do,
as the Grecians had done before them’ (ib. 1. 132).
In the Second Defence he declares that the Greeks
and Romans ‘are the objects of our admiration be-
cause of their resistance to tyrants and their treat-
ment of tyrannicides, whose brows they bound with
wreaths of laurel and consigned their memories to im-
mortal fame’ (id, 1.217). The poets are also eulogized ;
for ‘I know that the most of them, from the earliest

xxxviii Introduction

times to those of Buchanan, have been the strenuous
enemies of despotism’ (id. 1. 241),

Although he uses Protestant opinions, he was ob-
liged to pass by the sixteenth century Roman Catho-
lic writers on this subject, for citations from their
pages would have been offensive to his readers. In-
deed, he takes care to abuse the Jesuit doctrine in
favor of tyrannicide, in these words: ‘And let him
ask the Jesuits about him [Ormond], whether it be
not their known doctrine and also practice, not by
fair and due process of justice to punish kings and
magistrates, which we disavow not, but to murder them
in the basest and most assassinous manner, if their
church interest so require.’! But this criticism of the
Jesuits comes with bad grace from the eulogist of Har-
modius, Brutus, and the other glorified assassins of
Greece and Rome.