22. English Civil War

Chosen by:
Professor Andrew Milner,
Centre for Comparative Literature & Cultural Studies

Ioannis Miltoni Angli Pro popvlo Anglicano defensio : contra Clavdii anonymi, alias Salmasii, Defensionem regiam. (Londini : Typis Dv Gardianis ..., 1651)

John Milton is best known for his great poems, especially Paradise Lost and Samson Agonistes. But he was also a prominent republican intellectual during the English revolutionary crisis of the 1640s and 1650s. On 16th December 1648, the Army Council of the newly victorious New Model Army ordered the captive King Charles I to be brought to Windsor. Four days later the House of Commons authorised a trial of the King, which opened in Westminster on 20th January 1649. Charles was found guilty of high treason and other offences -tyranny, murder and war crimes - on 27th, sentenced to death and executed on 30th. The monarchy was formally abolished by Act of Parliament on 17th March, the House of Lords two days later. On 19th May a further Act declared England a republic or ‘Commonwealth’.

Acting on his own initiative, Milton published The Tenure of Kings and Magistrates, a justification for republicanism and regicide, on 13th February 1649, only two weeks after the execution. The republican ‘Council of State’ appointed him ‘Secretary for Foreign Tongues’ the following month. His Eikonoklastes, an officially-commissioned reply to the Royalist Eikon Basilike, was published on 6th October. In November the leading French classical scholar, Claude Saumaise, writing as ‘Salmasius’, published his Defensio regia pro Carolo I, a sustained attack on the legitimacy of the new republic. In 1650 the Council of State commissioned Milton to write a reply. The result was Pro Populo Anglicano Defensio, published on 24th February 1651. The two books were each aimed at an international audience and therefore written in Latin.

Pro Populo Anglicano Defensio was a spectacular success in turning the tide of intellectual debate against the exiled Royalists. As Christopher Hill, a leading twentieth-century English historian, observed: ‘Salmasius was held to be Europe’s greatest scholar; Milton was unknown outside his own country. Yet by general consent David beat Goliath’. This was Milton’s own judgement, aired in response to the failure of his sight later in 1652. ‘What supports me?’ the poet asked in his 1655 sonnet on this blindness:

The conscience, friend, to have lost them overplied
In liberty’s defense, my noble task,
Of which all Europe talks from side to side.

The monarchy was restored in May 1660 and Pro Populo Anglicano Defensio banned by royal proclamation of Charles II on 13th August 1660. Most copies were burnt, so the edition held by the Matheson Library is indeed a rare book. A first English translation appeared in Amsterdam in 1692, four years after the Glorious Revolution had finally dispensed with the Stuart monarchy, and was reprinted in 1695 in London, but no further translations were produced until the nineteenth century.