The Arms of the Family by Shawcross John T.;

Author:Shawcross, John T.; [Shawcross, John T.]
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: University Press of Kentucky
Published: 2021-08-15T00:00:00+00:00

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The evidence of Tenure and Eikonoklastes in 1649 has not always been recognized: Milton argues against what he and others classified as tyranny and thus against Charles I’s misuse of power. Tenure discusses kings AND magistrates, and Eikonoklastes is aimed at refuting Eikon Basilike and the idolatry for Charles, not Charles per se. As cited above, he admonished Cromwell that “Certainly you yourself cannot be free without us” and that there was need to admit others “to the first share in your counsels.” He does not argue against kingship (or the latter-day Protectorate), nor against kings: he argues against tyranny, which a Protector could exhibit as much as any king. Norbrook’s reminder is most important for us to understand: “Milton’s God, then, is a king with distinct overtones of a republican founding legislator. He is a king nevertheless” ( Writing the English Republic, 477).46 Even Algernon Sidney, who ran afoul of Cromwell because of his strong republican demands, and who was executed in 1683 for his part in the Rye House Plot, maintained that “Nothing is farther from my intention than to speak irreverently of kings,” and he quoted sentences from Milton’s Tenure in his Very Copy of a Paper Delivered to the Sheriffs upon the scaffold on Tower Hill.

While Milton’s argument in Tenure often finds substance in Aristotle’s Ethics, Book VIII, and Politics, Books III-V, there seems to be no specific influence from Machiavelli’s Art of War or the Discorsi.47 Between 1640 and 1642, he is struck by Machiavelli’s preference of a commonwealth to a monarchy and observation that “kingdoms that have good rule do not give their kings absolute power”—ideas consonant with this earlier political tract. During the years 1651–1652, after there has been some experience with the Commonwealth but before the troubles associated with the Protectorate, he records, among other items, that Machiavelli prefers a republican form of government since it makes fewer mistakes than a prince does in choosing its magistrates or councillors, since a republic may enact good laws and reduce magistrates to the ranks of ordinary citizens, and since controls are restored to the people (CPB, 198). Yet Milton did not actively seek “to argue for the English republic in terms derived either from classical models or from Machiavellian political theory.”48 Quentin Skinner’s examination of the question concludes that other writers—and this is not in opposition to Corns’s statement concerning Milton just given—attest that “the best form of constitution for a commune or civitas must be of an elective as opposed to a monarchical character” and that “government by hereditary princes or Signori must at all costs be avoided; some form of elective and self-governing system must always be maintained.”49 These views of the meanings derived from Machiavelli’s work and of Milton’s position do not remove single person rule from acceptance, and thus we can understand his acceptance of the Protectorate in 1653, and the continued possibility of a monarch governing in the public interest in the first edition of The Ready and Easy Way (compare Corns).

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