Clay Daniel
Restoration Lost: Milton’s Epic Pre-emption
1> An often
overlooked question about Paradise Lost concerns the
non-impact on the poem of the monarchical restoration.[1] Few readers, not knowing the poem's historical context or the few confessional
lines at the start of Book Seven, would discern the poem’s traumatic political contexts,
the final collapse of a Cause and the imprisonment and near execution of its
most eloquent defender, John Milton. There is no radical disjuncture between
the books written before and after the monarchy’s restoration. Furthermore, no
substantial evidence suggests that the poet revised his “easy . . .
unpremeditated Verse” (9.24) which he believed to be given to him by the Holy
Spirit. Even after his narrow escape, he sang, or was milked, "unchanged"
(Paradise Lost 7.24).[2] Yet, in light of a revolution that would seem to have indicated a profound misreading
of the divine agenda, this refusal to change one’s mind would appear to have
been a profound error. Why wasn’t it? The old standard answer, the poem if not
the Restoration Milton is apolitical, clearly is wrong. Many of the scholars
who have established the poem’s political contexts have also pointed out that
“long before 1660 Milton had to face the fact that God’s kingdom was not to be
established in England yet” (Hill, Milton
and the English Revolution 347). Hill locates political disaster in the
1650s, contrasting this period with “the heights of 1644 and 1649-50” (Milton and the English Revolution 390).
Others, citing the History of Britain and its MS Digression, have argued that Milton’s intense political
skepticism had certainly developed by the late 1640s (von Maltzahn). And for
still others, his “interest in probing history to reveal the causes of national
and ecclesiastical failure was . . . already manifested in his first polemical
work” (Loewenstein 94).
2> Milton’s
skepticism points to one answer to why the monarchical restoration did not
substantively change Paradise Lost. The
poem does not have to react to the monarchical restoration because the poet
anticipates and even creates it in his epic. An urgent, contemporary political
message coheres in the poem’s biblical-epic narrative.[3] Courtly and often regal devils, the leaders of a military force
that could only have been defeated by God in a celestial civil war,
successfully plot to establish a monarchy by subverting a “happy state” (5.536)
that had been newly created in the wake of their fall for those “less / In
power and excellence but favoured more” by God (2.349-50). The broad message of
this epic sequence is that just as the devils must escape from hell and
reestablish a monarchy on earth, so the British royalists, vanquished by God
and his faithful, will return to reestablish the monarchy in England. A
monarchical restoration, then, is a predetermined event within the epic’s
narrative of the fall of man and its consequences, a post-lapsarian world where
it is human nature to lose paradise, whatever shape that paradise attempts to
take. But the epic not only foretells the restoration of a monarchy because of
the sinfulness of generic man. It suggests the imminent restoration of the
British monarchies because of the national vice(s) that Milton had cited in his
political tracts: an appetite for “luxury” that can be acquired through the
violence of empire. This is most evident in Books One and Two (composed before
the Restoration) and Books Eleven and Twelve (composed after), which advance
mutually confirming political arguments that tend to recast the warnings of
monarchical restoration that appear in Milton’s polemics of the 1650s. The
intervening books too anticipate Restoration cultural configurations---and of
course those of the long eighteenth-century, the Romantic rebellions, and
Victorianism, as Milton writes the most influential poem of the next 250 years.
I will look at these books as reinforcing Milton’s preemptive attack on the
Restoration’s courtly sexual ethic. Finally, as I examine the poem’s
contemporary political messages, I will attempt to explain why, whatever their
tensions and conflicts, they appear with the tranquil sublimity that for
centuries has deluded readers into thinking that Milton’s justification of
God’s ways lacked any connection with the tumultuous political world of 1640-1660/66.
A
Brief Context
3>
A very possible consequence of Milton’s well-documented political skepticism has
not been recognized: his long awareness of a probable if not inevitable
monarchical restoration and its impact on his epic. As early as February 1649
he had publicly warned against “doubling divines” and the rest of those “who of
late so much blame Deposing [Charles I] . . . the Men that did it themselves.”
Milton alerts his readers to “an old and perfet enemy” who will execute his
“destind revenge upon them, when they have servd his purposes”: “Let them,
feare therefore if they be wise . . . and be warn’d in time they put no
confidence in Princes whom they have provok’d, lest they be added to the
example of those that miserably have tasted the event” (Tenure of Kings and
Magistrates, 3: 189, 198, 238-39).[4] Even Milton’s triumphant Defenses
hammer away at this theme. Milton “farr from being concern’d in the corrupt
designs of his Masters . . . in very solemn Perorations at the close of those
Books [the Defenses] . . . little
less than Prophetically, denounc’d the Punishments due to the abusers of that
Specious name” of “Liberty” (Darbishire 30). This is from the anonymous
biography of Milton that was probably written by John Phillips. If so,
Phillips’ insistence that Milton prophesies (a strong word) a republican
collapse was perhaps based not only on expedient hindsight but on a close
knowledge of his uncle’s private political assessments.
4>
Whether or not his Defenses actually
prophesy a restoration, these works clearly reveal Milton’s skepticism about
establishing a republic in a land of saints whose beckoning idols are “self-seeking,
greed, luxury, and the seductions of success” (First Defense [February 1651] 4.1: 535) and “avarice, ambition, and
luxury” (Second Defense [March 1654]
4.1: 684). Warning the mercenary English “there will not be lacking one who
will shortly wrench from you, even without weapons, that liberty” won on the
battlefield, Milton explains,
Unless
you be victors here [in the virtues of peace], that enemy and tyrant whom you
have just now defeated in the field has either not been conquered at all or has
been conquered in vain. For if the ability to devise the cleverest means of
putting vast sums of money into the treasury, the power readily to equip land
and sea forces, to deal shrewdly with ambassadors from abroad, and to contract
judicious alliances and treaties has seemed to any of you greater, wiser, and
more useful to the state than to administer incorrupt justice to the people, to
help those cruelly harassed and oppressed, and to render every man promptly his
own deserts, too late will you discover how mistaken you have been, when those
great affairs have suddenly betrayed you . . . .” (Second Defense 4.1: 680-81).[5]
5> The dim hopes here that the English will retain their republic is apparent in Milton’s address to England’s liberators. These no longer include those whom Milton previously had credited with having performed “it themselves,” the numerous and influential Presbyterians and their affiliates, whose political turbulence, in England and Scotland, had been essential to the political reforms that had occurred in 1640-42 and did not occur in 1642-60.[6] Where the First Defense shifts its praise from the English people to the English republicans, the praise in the Second Defense seemingly dwindles from republicans to republican or at least quasi/anti-republican: “Cromwell, we are deserted! You alone remain. On you has fallen the whole burden of our affairs. On you alone they depend” (Second Defense, 4.1:674-78, 671). For Milton, Cromwell’s dismissal of the Rump and his movements toward creating a Protectorate seem to have been more than compensated by his status as God’s Englishman. The invincible general represented the best hope that the English would have the opportunity to develop a republic under divine sponsorship (Second Defense, 4.1:536, 550, 557-58). And his death in September 1658, perhaps, prompts Milton, his life’s political wisdom having taken a definitive shape, to write his epic before it was too late.[7] But no single person ---“not even Cromwell himself, nor a whole tribe of liberating Brutuses” (4.1: 682)---can successfully establish a republic. A republic must be created by a sufficient number of virtuous citizens. Consequently, Milton lectures on the political consequences of self-enslavement, especially to the vice of “luxury”: “Unless you expel avarice, ambition, and luxury from your minds, yes, and extravagance from your families as well, you will find at home and within that tyrant who, you believed, was to be sought abroad in the field---now even more stubborn” (Second Defense, 4.1: 680; 684).
5> The dim hopes here that the English will retain their republic is apparent in Milton’s address to England’s liberators. These no longer include those whom Milton previously had credited with having performed “it themselves,” the numerous and influential Presbyterians and their affiliates, whose political turbulence, in England and Scotland, had been essential to the political reforms that had occurred in 1640-42 and did not occur in 1642-60.[6] Where the First Defense shifts its praise from the English people to the English republicans, the praise in the Second Defense seemingly dwindles from republicans to republican or at least quasi/anti-republican: “Cromwell, we are deserted! You alone remain. On you has fallen the whole burden of our affairs. On you alone they depend” (Second Defense, 4.1:674-78, 671). For Milton, Cromwell’s dismissal of the Rump and his movements toward creating a Protectorate seem to have been more than compensated by his status as God’s Englishman. The invincible general represented the best hope that the English would have the opportunity to develop a republic under divine sponsorship (Second Defense, 4.1:536, 550, 557-58). And his death in September 1658, perhaps, prompts Milton, his life’s political wisdom having taken a definitive shape, to write his epic before it was too late.[7] But no single person ---“not even Cromwell himself, nor a whole tribe of liberating Brutuses” (4.1: 682)---can successfully establish a republic. A republic must be created by a sufficient number of virtuous citizens. Consequently, Milton lectures on the political consequences of self-enslavement, especially to the vice of “luxury”: “Unless you expel avarice, ambition, and luxury from your minds, yes, and extravagance from your families as well, you will find at home and within that tyrant who, you believed, was to be sought abroad in the field---now even more stubborn” (Second Defense, 4.1: 680; 684).
6>
This insistence that political liberty depends upon spiritual liberty explains
Milton’s last, final hope that his Cause would survive and eventually prosper:
Milton himself. Englishmen make good soldiers, but Milton apparently saw no one
in whom he could recognize a worthy comrade in the pre-determining spiritual
wars. Even before the Second Defense
had been published, Milton had failed “to support . . . the Saints in their
stand for those state principles he believed in most passionately” (4.1: 242).
Milton’s cultural isolation is explicitly announced in the Defensio Pro Se (August 1655). Disregarding several defenses of the
commonwealth (4.2: 698n), Milton declares, “. . . for me, it appears, for me
alone, it remains to fight the rest of this war” (4.2: 698). Anticipating the
comments in the anonymous biography, Milton writes, “I foresaw even then
[1649], Englishmen, that your war with the enemy would not be long, but that
mine with the fugitives and their hirelings would be almost endless” (4.2: 698).
The acerbity of this comment is disguised by the implication that “Englishmen”
refers to those who had physically resisted the King, and that Milton now
engages against royalism in a different, intellectual and spiritual, warfare.
Yet it remains a deeply pessimistic comment on a people that, according to
Milton, lacked the ability “to govern justlie and prudently in peace” (MS
Digression, 5: 451).
7>
And then there were none. After announcing his role as his republic’s chief
hope, Milton’s public activity apparently ceases for nearly three years. By
1657, Milton was maintaining “very few intimacies with the men in favor, since”
he remained “at home most of the time, and by choice” (“Letter to Peter
Heimbach” French 4: 89-90). In
October 1658, he republishes his Defensio,
adding the concluding claim that, like Cicero, he too could swear “that by
his efforts alone he had saved the city and the state [presumably from
monarchical restoration]” (4.1: 536). But a year later (October 1659), he
writes that his support for the commonwealth had been reduced to his “prayers
for them that govern” since neither “God or the publick required” his services
(7: 324).[8] And, in this same “Letter to a Friend,” Milton observes that the restitution of
the “not blameless” Rump Parliament required divine aid “when so great a part
of the nation were desperately conspir’d to call back again the Egyptian
bondage” (7: 325), which echoes the solemn warning that concludes his Likeliest Means (7: 320-21).[9]
8> Though he had published his Treatise on Civil Power in February 1659, and his Likeliest Means in August 1659, it was not until February 1660 with his Ready and Easie Way that Milton resumed the battle against a monarchical restoration that was then imminent. This work appears to many readers to have been composed by someone who was blind to political reality. Nevertheless, the tract, for other readers, seems to be written by one who was fully aware that if a republic had not been established in 1649, or 1653, or 1655, or 1658, it certainly was not going suddenly to materialize in 1660. Milton earlier had failed to contribute to, or to create, a public discussion on establishing a permanent basis for an enduring commonwealth because, I suggest, he had long recognized that such an establishment was highly improbable. And the Ready and Easie Way, rather than a hopeful blueprint for a flourishing commonwealth, is a “self conscious performance” (Knoppers, “Milton’s The Readie and Easie Way 224). The tract not only acts as a literary monument to the already cold corpse of the English republic but, more importantly, is an early and deft configuration of the imminent new monarchy. And this rhetoric recurs in his Brief Notes (March 1660):
8> Though he had published his Treatise on Civil Power in February 1659, and his Likeliest Means in August 1659, it was not until February 1660 with his Ready and Easie Way that Milton resumed the battle against a monarchical restoration that was then imminent. This work appears to many readers to have been composed by someone who was blind to political reality. Nevertheless, the tract, for other readers, seems to be written by one who was fully aware that if a republic had not been established in 1649, or 1653, or 1655, or 1658, it certainly was not going suddenly to materialize in 1660. Milton earlier had failed to contribute to, or to create, a public discussion on establishing a permanent basis for an enduring commonwealth because, I suggest, he had long recognized that such an establishment was highly improbable. And the Ready and Easie Way, rather than a hopeful blueprint for a flourishing commonwealth, is a “self conscious performance” (Knoppers, “Milton’s The Readie and Easie Way 224). The tract not only acts as a literary monument to the already cold corpse of the English republic but, more importantly, is an early and deft configuration of the imminent new monarchy. And this rhetoric recurs in his Brief Notes (March 1660):
But
that a victorious people should give themselves again to the vanquishd, was
never yet heard of; seems rather void of all reason and good policie, and will
in all probabilitie subject the subduers to the subdu'd, will expose to
revenge, to beggarie, to ruin and perpetual bondage the victors under the
vanquishd: then which what can be more unworthie?" (Brief Notes upon a
Late Sermon 7: 482).
9>
This "most surprising” passage (7:482n), at odds with Milton’s arguments
that “Regal prodigalite” creates a “people, wealthy indeed perhaps and
wel-fleec’t” (Readie and Easie Way, 7:384), nevertheless nicely summarizes
his epic that he was then writing.[10]
Books
One and Two & Eleven and Twelve
10>
As the poem begins, the throngs that heed Satan’s call to restoration reveal
why the devils, like British royalists, are “not lost / In loss itself” (1.525-26).
Out of the thick, fast complexities of Hell’s royal images, at least one lean,
clear political message coheres: losers to God repeatedly subvert God’s people
by manipulating the epic activities of love and war---“lust hard by hate”
(1.417). Not a devil marches out of the rich, complex tradition of Christian
demonology but is identified either with the appetite for luxury that motivates
the acquisition of empire or with the violence that actually acquires it. And
these devils, sometimes tediously and often singularly, are consistently
defined within political/imperial contexts that represent them as adept at
incorporating God’s people into this scheme.[11] Additionally, unlike with its biblical antecedents, this scheme accords with
Milton’s anti-monarchical arguments that the loss of liberty will generate
immense wealth for the seduced nation, as it indeed will for a Britain set to burgeon
into an empire.
11>
Moloch, literally “king,” leads the procession of devils, a “horrid king
besmeared with blood” (1.392) whose villainy is disguised by “the noise of
drums” (1.394). “First Moloch” (1.392) evokes Charles the First in his guise as
the Man of Blood, source of the war in which England devoured her own children
and yet the idol that even in the 1650s was often seen as leading the
procession back to Egypt (Potter 243). “First Moloch” also suggests an
inevitable “Second Moloch,” the man of flesh who was being identified in the
late 1650s as the essential player in the scheme for an imperial “government of
and for trade” (Hoxby 91; Chapter 3,
“The King of Trade”). Moloch’s mighty empire is defeated by David (1.397-99n),
but the defeated devil will seduce the perennial embodiment of kingly wisdom
Solomon (1.401-02). A violent King (Moloch), defeated by violence, is restored
by his exploiting the vice of luxury to corrupt his victors---an interesting
message indeed in 1658. Ironically (especially from Milton’s perspective), when
Charles II could be legally celebrated in 1660, Solomon was frequently cited by
“mercantile writers” as “a biblical exemplar of the sort of king they wished
Charles II to become” (Hoxby 165). The Second Triumphal Arch, through which
Charles II passed in his coronation procession, hailed him as a Solomon for his
commitment to imperial trade (99). And royalist panegyrists were soon to
consolidate this identification because of the new king’s many mistresses.
Milton uncannily anticipates, and attempts to subvert, this identification.
Within a political context, the lusts of the flesh (concupiscence) and of the
eye (“vanity”) were commonly seen as pillars of the luxury that perverts public
virtue, a truism embodied in contemporary accounts of ancient Rome, such as in the
Second Defense (4.1: 583). In the
epic “the wisest heart / Of Solomon”---“beguiled by fair idolatresses”---is
“led by fraud” to embrace the violence of Moloch, transforming “the pleasant
valley of Hinnom” into a “type of hell” (1.400-05, 445).
12>
Lust, violence, and a luxury-intent people beguiled by conquering losers also
inform the account of the other devils. The violent Moloch is again explicitly
linked with luxury as he is followed by “Chemos, the obscene dread” (1.406) of
the proverbially proud, prosperous Moabites. Chemos is a rather minor devil,
and his presence here reveals much about Milton’s political purposes. Another losing,
lascivious devil subverts God’s people, again embodied in Solomon, king of
“that hill of scandal”: “His lustful orgies he enlarged / Even to that hill of
scandal, by the grove / Of Moloch homicide, lust hard by hate” (1.415-17;
Fowler 85-86n). Solomon’s identification with Charles II is further suggested here
by the reference to “the good Josiah” (1.418), a favorite role-model for Puritan
reformers since the earlier 1640s. Josiah here does not destroy these idols, as
he does in scripture, but drives them into the exile hell.
13>
Nevertheless, in 1658, Moloch and Chemos were on the march, as we learn in the
immediate next lines that “with these came” (1.419) Baalim and Ashtaroth,
devils that are defined by their androgyny/bisexuality. These gender issues were
far from central to contemporary theological or even cultural debate, and it is
doubtful that the Lady Milton was homophobic. But Milton often identified
androgyny and bisexuality with the supposedly effete Stuart court(s): “for
those the race of Israel oft forsook / Their living strength, and . . . sunk
before the spear / Of despicable foes” (1.432-37). Victory on the battlefield
is forfeited, rather than lost, because demonic sexuality is irresistible to
those who have already surrendered to their own lusts. With amazing prescience,
Milton images the almost bloodless monarchical restoration, as the New Model
Army self-destructs and a riotous sensuality sweeps a country more interested
in a return to the active bedroom and busy shop than to the bloody battlefield.
14>
And the theme of conquering losers continues, as Milton attempts to undermine a
looming Cavalier sexual ethic that will soon take center stage. The irony of
the defeated devils embodying triumphant imperial militarism is seconded by a
catalogue of fertility deities who have been sexually incapacitated: “. . . the
price of warring against omnipotence is impotence” (Kermode 114). Astoreth and
Thammuz are gods of the rich and imperial Phoenicians, who nevertheless lament
Thammuz’s “annual wound” (1.447) if not his “annual humbling” (10.576). These
devils generate a blood-soaked “love-tale” that “infected Sion’s daughters with
like heat,” producing “the dark idolatries / Of alienated” and soon to be
conquered “Judah” (1.452-57). And “maimed,” mutilated Dagon, whose Philistian
empire is “dreaded through the coast / Of Palestine,” seduces “his sottish
conqueror . . . to adore the gods whom he had vanquished” (1.459, 464-65, 472-76).
Milton does not elaborate the violence-lust-empire dialectic of “Osiris, Isis,
Orus and their train” since they were so closely identified with an archetype
of this configuration, “fanatic Egypt and her priests” (1.478, 480). In Egypt,
as in contemporary England, “borrowed gold” and a “rebel king” will seduce a people
into forsaking God for pusillanimous idols, “wandering” and “bleating gods” (1.483-84,
481, 489).
15>
“Belial came last” (1.490), a conclusive statement of imminent restoration.
Even in 1658 the intensely sexual Belial was a popular embodiment of the cavalier
(Fowler 90-91n).[12] The insistence here on an itinerant devil glances specifically at the
idol(atrous) king in exile. : “. . . to him no temple stood / Or altar smoked”
(1.492-93). Even his thoughts, according to report like the exiled King’s, are
defined by wandering (2.148). But he works his powerful magic from a distance,
indirectly, unofficially: “yet who more oft than he / In temples and at altars,
when the priest / Turns atheist” (1.493-95), as many Puritans apparently were
turning in the late 1650s. Though Temples and altars were officially scarce in
1658, as were the “courts and palaces” where “he also reigns” (1.497), Milton
deftly suggests an ominous turn of political events with his enjambment of
“reigns” with “and in luxurious cities” (1.498). London, rich and Puritan, was
intent on becoming even richer, abandoning their God-given republic to welcome
home a wandering king and his lusty courtiers who would lead them in their own,
more purposeful, ventures abroad. In the darkness that accompanies a restored
reign of the sons of Belial, another wandering will commence through the
streets of London, characterized by the vices of luxury, “lust and violence” (1.496).
The latter vice, not a usual attribute of Belial, nevertheless restates
Milton’s imperial dialectic as it anticipates the brutality of the Restoration
rake.[13]
16> In Book Two, Satan, loser to the forces of God, plots to regain through subversion what he had lost through military weakness. Not surprisingly, he summons a Parliament, and “high on a throne of royal state” (2.1) functions not as Charles I during the years of personal rule, but as King-in-Parliament, an enormously popular concept in the England of the late 1650s. Hell in 1658 is “a monarchy in the making, with royalist politics, perverted language, perverse rhetoric, political manipulation, and demagoguery” (Lewalski 51). “Princes, potentates, / Warriors, the flower of heaven” (1.315-16) convene “the infernal court” which strongly resembles “a House of Lords controlled by a monarch” (Lewalski 152). In images that recall “the unholy glitter of Stuart finery,” every devil seems to be an exiled king, or sultan, or emperor, one of Satan’s “throned powers” (1.128; 360) (Davies 12). With these defeated, exiled princes “peace / And rest can never dwell” until they regain their “happy state” (1.65-66, 141). Yet, ringing with fine political rhetoric, the demonic council also clearly is characterized by the vices that Milton and others frequently attributed to the Long Parliament, the Commonwealth, and the Protectorate. Indeed, Satan and his peers encompass all those, Royalist and Parliamentarian, who, having destroyed the opportunity to establish a republic, were set to restore King-in-Parliament (Hill, Milton and the English Revolution 366-75).
16> In Book Two, Satan, loser to the forces of God, plots to regain through subversion what he had lost through military weakness. Not surprisingly, he summons a Parliament, and “high on a throne of royal state” (2.1) functions not as Charles I during the years of personal rule, but as King-in-Parliament, an enormously popular concept in the England of the late 1650s. Hell in 1658 is “a monarchy in the making, with royalist politics, perverted language, perverse rhetoric, political manipulation, and demagoguery” (Lewalski 51). “Princes, potentates, / Warriors, the flower of heaven” (1.315-16) convene “the infernal court” which strongly resembles “a House of Lords controlled by a monarch” (Lewalski 152). In images that recall “the unholy glitter of Stuart finery,” every devil seems to be an exiled king, or sultan, or emperor, one of Satan’s “throned powers” (1.128; 360) (Davies 12). With these defeated, exiled princes “peace / And rest can never dwell” until they regain their “happy state” (1.65-66, 141). Yet, ringing with fine political rhetoric, the demonic council also clearly is characterized by the vices that Milton and others frequently attributed to the Long Parliament, the Commonwealth, and the Protectorate. Indeed, Satan and his peers encompass all those, Royalist and Parliamentarian, who, having destroyed the opportunity to establish a republic, were set to restore King-in-Parliament (Hill, Milton and the English Revolution 366-75).
17>
To explain this restoration, Book Two restates the imperial dialectic of Book
One. Satan, an embodiment of imperial violence and luxury/wealth (2.1-5),
summons counselors of violence, lust-luxury, and wealth. These counselors not
only restate the motives for monarchical restoration, but they summarize the
progressive phases that have culminated in the explosive political situation of 1658-60. “Moloch, sceptred king”
(2.43) recalls the last monarch actually to reign in England. Speaking for a
military force that could have been defeated only through God’s intervention,
he again evokes Charles I, whose claims to divine right had transformed him,
for Milton, into the Man of Blood (1.392, 2.46-52). And his stirring account of
his sufferings and imprisonments recalls contemporary accounts of the captivity
of Charles I. His plan, too, advocates the tactics of a King who, as long as he
lived, would create continual conflict until he re-attained, through a lucky
combination of military forces, his throne: “Millions that stand in Arms, and
longing wait / The signal to ascend, sit lingering here / Heaven's fugitives” (2.55-57). Yet
these lines also point out the immediate threat of 1658-60, often fueled by the
image of the defeated martyr king. “Millions” glances at the anxious British
nations, who were indeed watchful for a “signal” that royal fugitives were
prepared to reestablish the monarchy.
18>
Belial, again, even in 1658 was a by-word for a Cavalier, especially the exiled
Cavaliers. And Milton characterizes this devil in terms that echo his own
assessments of “the younger Charles and his damned crew of emigrant courtiers”
(First Defense 4.1: 534), a
supposedly lazy and licentious court that had abandoned hope of a military
re-conquest of Great Britain. “. . . his thoughts were low; / To vice
industrious, but to nobler deeds / Timorous and slothful” (2.115-17). Impregnable
Heaven, “scorning surprise” (1.134) with its perpetual “armѐd watch” (1.130) and scouts
resembles the England of Cromwell and Thurloe. But Cromwell in October 1658 was
dead; and Milton, like the rest of the country, recognized that the royalists’
“change / Worth waiting” for had occurred (2.222-23). Yet Milton also believed
that many of the king’s courtiers were lazy if not cowardly and that they would
“perplex and dash / Maturest counsels,” delaying but not averting a restoration
(2.114-15).
19>
Mammon is only briefly mentioned in Book One. Perhaps as “the least erected
spirit” (1.679), he would have been as out of place in the catalogue of
fertility deities as many Presbyterians were among the graceful sons of Belial.
More important, he resonates not with the defeated, exiled Cavaliers but with
the London, often Puritan, merchants. He embodies Milton’s view of why England,
clearly unfit for the republic that they did not want, nevertheless still
remained without a monarchy in 1658. Yet, with Cromwell dead, Milton sensed an
imminent change; and Mammon represents the final phase (“led them on” [1.678])
of a political cause that was ripe for success. King Charles I was dead, and
Charles II was in shabby exile. But mercenary City Presbyterians were powerful
political figures still in an England that was experiencing a severe economic
depression which they believed could be dispelled by “nothing but kingship” as
Milton states in the tract that he composed as he was writing his epic (Readie and Easie Way 7:385). In the
peroration to Readie and Easie Way,
Milton argues this to be the primary motivation for the “return back to Egypt” and “those calamities which
attend alwais and unavoidably on luxurie” (7: 387).[14] Whatever their religious noise, “even in heaven” (1639/40?) their “thoughts /
Were always downward bent, admiring more / The riches of heaven’s pavement,
trodden gold, / Than aught divine” (1.680-83). Yet this love of wealth has
prevented them from too zealously opposing the Cromwellian state. Riches grow
in hell too; and London, even without a monarch, “wants not her hidden lustre,
gems and gold” (2.271) as her merchants reaped the limited rewards of
Cromwell’s commercial expansionism. On the other hand, any attempt to change
“the settled state” (2.279) is dangerous if it fails and perhaps even more
dangerous if it succeeds. Mammon registers the political paranoia that will
seethe beneath the Restoration celebrations, despite the Declaration of Breda,
and anticipates the political divisions that eventually will emerge in 1665-66
and more dramatically in the Exclusion Crisis. Evoking the more unpleasant
memories of Personal Rule, Mammon frets,
Suppose he should relent
And
publish grace to all, on promise made
Of
new subjection; with what eyes could we
Stand
in his presence humble, and receive
Strict
laws imposed, to celebrate his throne
With
warbled hymns, and to his Godhead sing
Forced
alleluias; while he lordly sits
Our
envied sovereign, and his altar breathes
Ambrosial
odours and ambrosial flowers
Our
servile offerings? (2.237-46)
20>
“Worship paid” (2.248) in standing, singing (even hymns and allelujah), altars,
incense, and offerings---not for these Presbyterians, not even in Hell. A
“nether[lands?] empire” (2.296) is better than no empire. Mammon, then, with
much applause states the prevailing wisdom for generations in the City:
anything but another civil war. “Such another field” the devils “dreaded worse
than Hell” (2.292-93). Instead, Mammon counsels a mercantile culture based upon
Puritan perversions that are at odds with Milton’s own beliefs that work and liberty
are sources of productive joy. Mammon advocates making “great things of small” (2.258)
through “hard liberty” (2.256; Milton probably winced at the words), advancing
a belief that work is fundamentally painful, to be endured until one is at ease
in one’s own shop (2.261).
21>
The demons conflict with one another because they have advised how directly to
respond to God and regain Heaven, which according to the poem’s political narrative
correlates to the restoration of Caroline divine right monarchy through
vanquishing the New Model Army. In 1658, with Charles I and Oliver Cromwell
dead, this contingency was rapidly becoming irrelevant. And in the poem, the
primary political context radically shifts with the counsel of Beelzebub, the
only devil that is not satirized. This devil, using a mercantile, “royalist
vocabulary of praise” (Hoxby 152), refocuses from the God who has dethroned the
devils to the humans who will restore them. He points out that the devils in
hell are not secure from God’s power, no more perhaps than the court-in-exile,
as it wandered out of France, had been beyond Cromwell’s reach. He then rejects
the “vain empires” (2.378) to be expected from an exiled court’s projected
military restoration of monarchy, or from a Cavalier idleness, or even from a
City-man’s “Republic of Hell.” Beelzebub fuses the demonic factions into a
single super-plan distinguished by a Cavalier pursuit of “glory” as well as a
by a Puritan’s “close ambition varnished over with zeal” (2.484-85). Rejecting
the patriarchal and divine arguments that had celebrated Personal Rule,
Beelzebub embraces the shrewd political pragmatism that will characterize
Charles II. He seeks a monarchy based upon human “weakness” (2.357), a weakness
that is directly connected with an economic, military imperialism. The devils
will either violently “drive” or “seduce” the “puny inhabitants” of a “new
world” (2.367-68, 403): those “like to us, though less / In power and
excellence” (2.349-50). Puny Englishmen, seduced by puny and defeated devil-idols,
will in turn despoil those even punier as they extend their power to another
new world. Hearing this scheme, “devil with devil damned / Firm concord holds”
(2.496-97), as firm perhaps as the concord that was soon to form between the
Monck-led army, the purportedly dissolute and lazy court-in-exile, and the
mercantile Presbyterian (not “the first / That practiced falsehood under
saintly show” [4.121-22]), as they restore an “imperial sovereignty” that will
provide their “happy isle” with the wealth/luxury of an empire on which the
sun, eventually, will never set (2.446, 410). Sadly, republican and free “men
only disagree” (2.497).
22>
Books One and Two were completed before the English people had exchanged their
nascent, godly, smaller government for a monarch who, while he was not merrily
encouraging the sons of Belial, was luxuriously presiding over the initial
great expansion of the British Empire. The political-ideological structures of
these books are spectacularly validated rather than tragically questioned by
the events of 1660. In Lycidas, Milton
had asserted providence by foretelling the destruction of God’s enemies. In Paradise Lost, he asserts it by
foreseeing their success. The inevitability of the monarchical restoration
indicates that it accords with, and is structured by, the divine laws of
Milton’s political theology. Milton, by foreseeing these events, is triumphant
in the vindication of this foresight, even his foreseeing the collapse of his political
cause. Indeed, it is surprising that Milton did not place a headnote to his
epic or at least to the first six books: "In this epic the author narrates
Satan's conquest of paradise. And by occasion foretells the restoration of the
King and his court, then in their exile."
23>
He does, however, approximate this brashness in the last two books, which often
function politically as an “I told you so.” Adam, like many an Englishman in
1660-65, is “from Death released” but is anxious about “new laws to be
observed” (and obeyed?), an alarm caused by the arrival of the warrior angel
Michael of “the thrones” (11.296) in a “military vest of [royal] purple” (11.197,
228, 296, 241). Adam’s fall, like the English republic’s, is a providential
development that is supervised by the only justified monarchy, God’s. Adam
demands to know “how could this have happened?” as he beholds the events that
swirl around the Flood (an event often cited when characterizing Milton’s
perspective on 1660). Michael then verbalizes, as prosaic divine wisdom, the
pattern that was dramatically enacted in the procession of devils in the pre-1660
books. Indeed, “commentators have quite rightly noted similarities between the
unhappy world of Michael’s history and the opening books of the epic” (Loewenstein
99). In Book Eleven, especially, “Milton’s whole sequence . . . seems to
parallel the sequence in the procession of fallen angels in Book 1” (Fixler
172). These well-documented parallels are the dialectic of violence and
lust-luxury. The violent Cain produces incarnations of lust-luxury who seduce
those “whose lives / Religious titled them the sons of God” (11.621-22). The
resulting race of “great conquerors” (11.695) generates scenes of “jollity and
game / . . . luxury and riot, feast and dance” (11.714-15). Michael, explaining
the connection between violence and luxury (11.787-95), tells us that an
extremely content people because of “piety feigned” (11.595) have lost their
virtuous freedom. “Cooled in zeal,” these citizens “practise how to live
secure, / . . . on what their lords / Shall leave them to enjoy; for the earth
shall bear / More than enough” (11.801-05).
24>
As this comments on circumstances before the Flood, it points to the
pre-Restoration scene. Milton, in the peroration of the Second Defense, had
declared that if Englishmen become “corrupted and dissipated by luxury”---and he
strongly suggests they already “had been so easily corrupted”---they were best
ruled by a king: “It is not fitting, it is not meet, for such men to be free” (Second Defense, 4.1: 682-83). Englishmen had been as unfit to participate in a
Milton’s republic as Adam and Eve had been to remain in Eden. And it is better
that they, like Adam and Eve, have been relocated to the satanic world of
conflict, struggle, and opposition by which they can make themselves fit to be
free. Indeed, the first event of the post-Flood narrative, as in the
Restoration, is the institution of monarchy by Nimrod, frequently identified
with Charles II and Charles I. One would expect a dismal narrative to ensue.
But where Book Eleven represents man’s corruptions before the Flood
(politically, republican failures), Book Twelve represents man’s, or at least
one just man’s, triumphs after the Flood (politically, monarchical failures). Adding
to this optimism, in the pre-Restoration books, the devils’ impressive revival
is tainted by the foreshadowing of their future political troubles. Book Twelve
represents these woes, often inflicted by one just man who reverses the demonic
order, reducing Pandemonium to pandemonium.
25>
Milton argued a similar role for the new intellectual, and he happily assigns
himself a place in the iconoclastic procession when God humiliates an imperial
Nimrod. The poet and polemicist, not the theologian, identifies Nimrod with
Babel as he states that Nimrod “from rebellion shall derive his name / Though
of rebellion others he accuse” (12.36-37). Nimrod’s humiliation is emphatically
linguistic-literary: “the jangling noise of words unknown” (12.55) sneers at a
rhyming court. The “great laughter . . . in Heaven” (12.59) (and presumably in
Milton’s house) at the post-Flood cultural scene echoes throughout Michael’s
narrative of just one man’s reducing Pandemonium to cultural chaos. Hearing the
consequences of Satan’s restoration, culminating in God becoming a man, Adam
wants to “rejoice” rather than “repent” (12.474-75). And perhaps Milton felt
similarly as he viewed the Restoration political settlement, founded on the
ruins of sectarian and Caroline paradises, that would force men and women to
abandon attempts to construct a political Eden without and to begin to create a
paradise within, and within a cynical political culture that had ceased to make
any grand claims for itself. Republican collapse yields to the raucous, raunchy
court culture of the “merry monarch,” the explosive emergence of a new public
sphere, the modern political party system, and many other modernisms that will
enable the conflict by which the English people can make themselves fit, even
as they read Paradise Lost, to be free of monarchy.
26>
And this leads to the sublime calm of the poem’s perhaps primary political
message: the appropriate nature of the restored kingship. The definitive fact
about the royal winners, King and devil, is not that they are resurgent, but
that they have to revive at all and then to assume a status that falls far
short of their former glories. Had there been no monarchical restoration of
Charles II, the golden age of Charles I, the legend of the martyr-king as
gloriously represented in Eikon Basilike, would have remained the triumphant myth
of English monarchy. The powerful influence of these myths had aroused the
English to appropriate them, against all evidence, for the rush to restoration
in Spring 1660 and even to project them into the coronation festivities of the
following year, by which time it was clear that the monarchical restoration
hardly signaled a return of Caroline cultural politics.
27>
Satan’s well-charted disintegration vividly enacts the argument that the
restoration of Charles II would institutionalize the death of divine right
monarchy that had occurred during the civil wars. Satan, rejecting the grander tragedies
of Hell, commits himself to a sordid restoration that is based upon the
exploitation of human weakness. False, degraded restoration climaxes in his
final appearance in the poem. Satan is defined as an imperialist, returning as
a “great adventurer from the search / Of foreign worlds” (10.439-40). The
awaiting devils “appear like merchants or investors” intent on receiving a
report on their foreign investment (Hoxby 153). He at first appears as the
“plebian angel militant” (10.442) recalling Charles II and his ragged army’s
service to the Spanish, 1656-1660. Now, as a king should, Satan reappears on
his “high throne . . . in regal lustre” as a sun emerging from an eclipse,
though now reduced to a “permissive glory” (10.445-451). He informs his “great
consulting peers” that the success of his monarchical restoration, like all
monarchical restorations, can be traced to an “apple” (10.456, 487). They now
will “rule, as over all he [Adam] should have ruled” (10.492-93). He concludes
by asserting the imperial imperative in peculiarly mercantile terms: “A world
who would not purchase with a bruise, / Or much more grievous pain? . . . what
remains ye gods, / But up and enter now into full bliss” (10.500-03).
28>
“Full bliss,” however, is what neither King nor devil will ever regain. Their
restorations are dead sea fruit. The political context is evident in Milton’s
satirizing the most famous tree-climbing incident in British history. Charles
II, as something like a “plebian angel militant,” famously ascended Royal Oak
after the Battle of Worcester: “The six weeks during which Charles II was on
the run were as important to his view of himself as the masques of Ben Jonson
and Inigo Jones had been to his father” (Ollard, Image 85). Royal Oak was a prominent motif of the coronation
festivities, the symbolic climax of the King’s restoration and “visible sign of
the failure of the parliamentary forces” (Backscheider 17). The Royal Oak
backgrounded the figure of Charles II atop the eighty-foot First Triumphal
Arch, inscribed with the Adventus Augusti
of Virgil, inviting comparisons with “Octavius’s return to Rome after the
civil wars of the triumvirate” (Ogilby 18, 21). Imitating the Roman tradition of hanging “the Arms of the
Conquered Enemy” in a tree, the Royal Oak bore “Crowns, and Scepters, instead
of Acorns” ( 22, 37). Nor were absent representations of the
“Commonwealth-men.” “Rebellion” announced herself as “Hell’s Daughter, Satan’s Eldest
Child,” who hangs “men in their Beds, / With Common-wealths, and Rotas fill
their Heads”:
On
the North-side, on a Pedestal before the Arch, was a Woman personating
REBELLION, mounted on an Hydra, in a Crimson Robe, torn, Snakes crawling on her
Habit, and begirt with serpents, her Hair snaky, a Crown of Fire on her Head, a
bloody Sword in one Hand, a charming Rod in the other. (47, 13)
29>
Milton appropriates these images to rewrite the imperial celebration of “an economic
paradise expressed in terms of the traditional golden age” (39). His emphasis
on a flaming Sodom (10.562) recapitulates the poem’s sexual arguments as it
again glances at purported court sexuality and its identification with the
appetite for luxury that fuels the pursuit of lucrative empire. The imperial
“world” is a “purchase” for those rich as “Lords” to “possess” (10.500,
466-67). Yet the purchase is a bad bargain, in sexual as well as economic and
political terms. Reduced to phallic symbols, the devils consume dead sea fruit.
The ensuing “soot and cinders” and sputtering serpents sneers not only at the
fugitive king’s disguise in the tree (Ollard, The Escape of Charles II 27), but at the flaming city that the king
eventually possesses, or is “plagued” with, literally and metaphorically
(10.570-72). The satanic restoration has generated lush phantoms of courtly
eroticism, venereal sterility, disease, loveless and meaningless sex, sodomy. and/or
disappearance of an authentic feminine. And, in political terms, the old
cavaliers had seen their triumph turn to shame as they “chewed bitter ashes”
(10.566), watching the fruits of victory distributed to those who had
negotiated the monarchical restoration: former Cromwellians, powerful
Presbyterians, former Parliamentarians, and City-men. Even the King was among
those who discovered that “not the touch, but taste / deceived” as they
attempted “to allay / Their appetite with gust” (10. 563-65). Charles II, too,
annually observed his humbling, which was commemorated as Oakapple Day. But his
cherished design “to found a new order of knighthood, the Royal Oak, for the
most distinguished of the King’s old adherents was mysteriously dropped,
presumably to avoid offence to former parliamentarians” (Hutton, King Charles the Second 145).
Waiting
for the Fall
30>
The political arguments of the opening and closing books are clearly heard in
Eden’s subtle and compelling sexual fictions. Milton’s political argument might
explain his daring even to construct an active paradisal sexuality between Adam
and Eve, “unique and isolated in this respect,” working against not only
Puritan tradition but his own divorce tracts (Turner, One Flesh 79). Milton, here as elsewhere in the poem, is lowly and
highly wise. Paradise Lost’s intense and wholesome eroticism, with
its illustrators, was a powerful factor in the poem’s attaining a long national
popularity. Not, of course, that Milton was interested in titillating the many
and unfit readers. But erotic-minded readers would also have been opening
themselves to the unperceived influences of the poem’s political arguments,
especially those concerning the relationships between luxury and the evils of
monarchical restoration. Indeed, Milton’s keen eye for sexual behavior would
have alerted him to the powerful political attractions of a more open,
permissive, and robust sexual ethic that even in 1658 was widely connected to
Charles II. Milton’s constructions of the politics of sex so powerfully
anticipate the triumph of this ethic that for many readers they appear to
“constitute personal reminiscence of Milton’s situation after the Restoration”
when “the first conspicuous results of the collapse of moral Puritanism” was
the collective “release of the libido” (Le Comte 83, Stone 530). This release,
like the sexual politics of Milton’s poem, is almost always seen as a
consequence rather than as a cause of the Restoration. But Milton, if Books One
and Two are a reliable indication, seems to have believed that this sexual
ethic, especially as seen within the context of “luxury,” was a potent source
for the Restoration. The poet intended
to blunt the force of the foreseen success of this ethic through pre-emptive,
prophetic, shaming, epic representation.[15]
31> These purposes are sounded in the poem’s opening lines. “Who first seduced them to that foul revolt?” (1.33): “first” implies subsequent endemic seductions of urgent contemporary importance; “them” indicates the community of these seductions; “that foul revolt” tends to distinguish the imminent and foul overthrow of the remnant commonwealth from the divinely inspired revolt against the Caroline monarchy; and seduction, repeatedly asserted throughout the poem, has obvious political-sexual implications that Milton exploits and complicates. As Adam tells Eve when discussing his wish to preserve this “happy state,” Satan’s “sly assault” will “withdraw / Our fealty to God” by targeting their “conjugal love, than which perhaps no bliss /Enjoyed by us excites his envy more” (9.256, 262-64). Sexuality is not simply an accessory to power (especially political); it is power. Milton again makes explicit these political implications in the hymn to “wedded love, mysterious law, true source / Of human offspring sole propriety, / In Paradise of all things common else” (4.750-52). This is the climax, especially as prophecy, of Book Four (Martz 14). And it tends to sneer at Englishmen whose ideas on sexual relations and property, especially sexual relations as a kind property-power transaction, made them vulnerable to royalist seductions. Milton uses the ready images of Caroline debauchery to represent the looming and unexperienced-undefined onslaught of Restoration court sexuality---ruthlessly, cynically, carnally, and often brutally public---on Milton’s Puritan, gentle middle-class concept of love, sex, spirituality, and the private bedroom. Restoration Court sexuality will tend to erase private sexuality by providing a model of powerful, glamorous encounters in the public bedroom (and streets). Milton works in reverse, enlarging the private bedroom to facilitate a more intimate, gentler public sphere. This tender happy state, in which men and women make love and work together naked, is “secure from outward force” (9.348) but vulnerable to a lapse in the spiritual quality of its inhabitants, especially those who would desert the private and holy marriage bed for the public transactions of satanic erotics.
31> These purposes are sounded in the poem’s opening lines. “Who first seduced them to that foul revolt?” (1.33): “first” implies subsequent endemic seductions of urgent contemporary importance; “them” indicates the community of these seductions; “that foul revolt” tends to distinguish the imminent and foul overthrow of the remnant commonwealth from the divinely inspired revolt against the Caroline monarchy; and seduction, repeatedly asserted throughout the poem, has obvious political-sexual implications that Milton exploits and complicates. As Adam tells Eve when discussing his wish to preserve this “happy state,” Satan’s “sly assault” will “withdraw / Our fealty to God” by targeting their “conjugal love, than which perhaps no bliss /Enjoyed by us excites his envy more” (9.256, 262-64). Sexuality is not simply an accessory to power (especially political); it is power. Milton again makes explicit these political implications in the hymn to “wedded love, mysterious law, true source / Of human offspring sole propriety, / In Paradise of all things common else” (4.750-52). This is the climax, especially as prophecy, of Book Four (Martz 14). And it tends to sneer at Englishmen whose ideas on sexual relations and property, especially sexual relations as a kind property-power transaction, made them vulnerable to royalist seductions. Milton uses the ready images of Caroline debauchery to represent the looming and unexperienced-undefined onslaught of Restoration court sexuality---ruthlessly, cynically, carnally, and often brutally public---on Milton’s Puritan, gentle middle-class concept of love, sex, spirituality, and the private bedroom. Restoration Court sexuality will tend to erase private sexuality by providing a model of powerful, glamorous encounters in the public bedroom (and streets). Milton works in reverse, enlarging the private bedroom to facilitate a more intimate, gentler public sphere. This tender happy state, in which men and women make love and work together naked, is “secure from outward force” (9.348) but vulnerable to a lapse in the spiritual quality of its inhabitants, especially those who would desert the private and holy marriage bed for the public transactions of satanic erotics.
32>
Resonant with politics, spirituality, and sexuality, Milton’s astonishing
warning voice anticipates, and in Book Nine comments upon, the royalist
celebration of the restored King to the bed of his wife country. According to
Restoration panegyrists, the interregnum nation, acting as Tarquin, had
ravished the body politic, sending its husband-ruler into exile. And “in 1660 .
. . when political subjects celebrated their ‘marriage’ to the returning king,
it was the kingdom that was being lifted from the iniquity of licentious
liberty and tyranny” (Peters 191). This marriage was often celebrated with a
revival of images from the Caroline mask, celebrating the neo-platonic
radiations that royally spiritualize a nation. This divine aura, under the
political and cultural pressures of the civil wars, had intensified rather than
dissipated. The long trek of the martyr King had ended precisely where Milton
had predicted, as the powerful cultural myths of the spiritual Charles I were
projected into his carnal son: sacred king, pater
patriae, neoplatonic light, second Augustus, second Charles, second Christ.
33>
To expose these misappropriations, Milton launches his epic assault, with a vigor
in Book Nine that had been enabled by recent public experience of Restoration
sexual culture. To seduce his new political world, the devil accepts an epic
degradation that is represented in startlingly sexual terms that discredit any
neo-platonic motivations for monarchical restoration. Charles II’s cynical,
pragmatic, carnal politics were often shaped, if not determined, by his
experience of the pitiless destruction of the lofty ideals of his father’s divine
right monarchy. The defeated, embittered Satan, too, rejects spiritual, chaste,
neo-platonic court culture as a platform (though not as a brief disguise for
his platform) to obtain “ambition and revenge” (9.168). He hatefully derides the
preeminent symbol of divine kingship, the sun. “With surpassing glory crowned,”
the sun reminds Satan “from what state” he fell because his “pride and worse
ambition” had provoked divine punishment (4.32, 38-40).[16] The “exiled” Satan, reduced to “the throne of hell,” disdains to “obtain / By
act of grace” his “former state” because he soon “would recant / Vows made in
pain, as violent and void” (4.106, 89, 94-97), as Milton expected that the
uncompromising Charles I would have done if he had been restored through
negotiations. Echoing Beelzebub’s words
on puny victims, Satan rejects Caroline court culture, scorning the celestial
virtues that purportedly had authorized the autocracy of Charles I and the
“remarkable Renaissance” of Caroline court culture that had promoted the idea
that “Kingship, the rule of the soul over the body politic, might lead man back
to his earthly paradise” (Strong 213). “Myself am hell” (4.75), the fallen
Satan, embodiment of the new monarchy, abandons his angelic poses and pretensions
to embrace a shabby political expediency that will gain him a throne that is
based upon, not a father supervising his children, but a ruthless politico
exploiting a “frail” humanity (4.11).
34>
And, again, this frailty was often emphatically, publicly, sexual. Hell, in relation
to this frailty, resembles not only the court-in-exile with no country to
debauch, but the country itself attempting to abide by the more restrictive codes
of the gloomier Saints. Satan laments that in Hell there is “neither joy nor
love, but fierce desire / Among our other torments not the least, / Still unfulfilled
with pain of longing pines” (4.509-11). Burning on “that fiery couch” (1.377), the
devils seethe with sexual frustration in the new environment created for them
by God (Daniel, Death in Milton’s Poetry 26-33).
These frustrations can be assuaged not through airy Caroline sublimations in a
sterile Hell, but through corrupt seductions, and seducers, of vulnerable
humans. At midnight, in search of sex and power, and power through sex, Satan
commits himself to the libertine’s body (“a beast, and mixed with bestial
slime”) rather than to the neo-platonist’s spirit (“that to the height of deity
aspired”), reducing himself to the phallic (9.165, 167). And it is in this that
Satan commits the central act of the poem, restoring himself to a comfortable throne.
35>
Yet welcoming home their beloved King, the English people, led by Puritan
merchant-hypocrite and cynical courtier, insisted on loftier public images with
which to celebrate, images that evoked the chaste golden age ideology of
Personal Rule. This evokes the bogus rhetoric with which Satan disguises his
corruption of Eve. Initiating the seduction, Satan momentarily hesitates in a
“mid-heaven” of neo-platonic admiration before Eve, an inadequacy indicated in
his being “stupidly good” (9. 468, 465). Then becoming “erect” the “spirited
sly snake” astonishes Eve with the rhetoric of the Caroline mask (“a goddess
among gods” “Wonder not, sovereign mistress”) to relate his acquisition of the
ability to perceive “the heavenly ray” of Eve’s “divine / Semblance” (9. 501,
613, 532, 547-48. 606-07). This epitomizes Milton’s view of the Caroline court
mask as generated by libidinous, poetasters: empty neo-platonic praise is
recited by the phallic in pursuit of power. In “perhaps the first use of sex =
sexual intercourse, gratification,” the serpent claims that he “nor aught but
food discerned / Or sex” until he ate the fruit that provided him with the
intellect/spirit to value the beauty of the “Sovereign of creatures, universal
dame” (9.573-74n, 612). Significantly, Satan, after bringing Eve to the tree,
is compared to “some orator renowned / In Athens or free Rome” (9.670-71), and
a subversion of a republic would seem imminent, especially in a republic where
(with at least one spectacular and modest exception) eloquence purportedly had
been “mute” (9.672). Satan constructs his violation of God’s law within the
context of a heroic/neo-platonic romance, a context commonly used by Stuart
ideologues to celebrate Personal Rule and the monarchical restoration. The
“Empress of this fair world” (9.568) then attempts to assume the status of a
“Goddess humane” (9.732)?[17]
36> Defying the God of their little Eden, Eve and then Adam quickly engage with this construct of power that is attained through assertion of one’s divinity rather than through submission to God (9.936-37, 961-62, 967, 975).Yet their divine pretensions last no longer than the lofty, golden age images in 1640 and 1660, which vanished first before Parliamentarian zeal and then before Restoration court bawdy. The climactic, compulsive transformation of the devils into snakes tends to indicate that, whatever their pretenses to epic glory, their satanic success is based on a chaotic sexual dynamic. And the idolatrous worshippers of the King’s image, whatever their lofty declarations, soon revealed that they were motivated by a very different love as they surged toward Restoration. Adam and Eve’s first fallen act is an earthy release of the libido:
36> Defying the God of their little Eden, Eve and then Adam quickly engage with this construct of power that is attained through assertion of one’s divinity rather than through submission to God (9.936-37, 961-62, 967, 975).Yet their divine pretensions last no longer than the lofty, golden age images in 1640 and 1660, which vanished first before Parliamentarian zeal and then before Restoration court bawdy. The climactic, compulsive transformation of the devils into snakes tends to indicate that, whatever their pretenses to epic glory, their satanic success is based on a chaotic sexual dynamic. And the idolatrous worshippers of the King’s image, whatever their lofty declarations, soon revealed that they were motivated by a very different love as they surged toward Restoration. Adam and Eve’s first fallen act is an earthy release of the libido:
As
with new wine intoxicated both
They swim in mirth, and fancy
that they feel
Divinity within them breeding
wings
Wherewith to scorn the earth.
(9.1008-11)[18]
37> Eve and Adam’s pursuit of neo-platonic divinity and heavenly luxury, and their rejection of healthy work in an earthly Eden, has ended in a rough bout of too-earthly sex. They awaken from their subsequent sleep angry, darkened, shamed, cheated, fleeced. And so did, though perhaps not so quickly, Restoration England. In Readie and Easie Way Milton had urged his countrymen to retain the simpler, solider prosperity of a republic. They instead had pursued the fabulous imperial way, which in the long run produces dividends indeed for Britons. But in 1667, when Milton publishes his poem, the euphoria of 1660 had yielded to national indignation at the sexual, political, and cultural chaos caused by a libertine court and the disasters caused by the mercantile-based war with the Dutch. Milton, in 1667, probably rejoiced, as a prophet probably should who lives to see his prophecy consummated.
37> Eve and Adam’s pursuit of neo-platonic divinity and heavenly luxury, and their rejection of healthy work in an earthly Eden, has ended in a rough bout of too-earthly sex. They awaken from their subsequent sleep angry, darkened, shamed, cheated, fleeced. And so did, though perhaps not so quickly, Restoration England. In Readie and Easie Way Milton had urged his countrymen to retain the simpler, solider prosperity of a republic. They instead had pursued the fabulous imperial way, which in the long run produces dividends indeed for Britons. But in 1667, when Milton publishes his poem, the euphoria of 1660 had yielded to national indignation at the sexual, political, and cultural chaos caused by a libertine court and the disasters caused by the mercantile-based war with the Dutch. Milton, in 1667, probably rejoiced, as a prophet probably should who lives to see his prophecy consummated.
CONCLUSIONS
38>
In the beginning of Book Four, the poet futilely seeks a “warning voice,”
seeming “to throw his theology to the winds” as the epic voice appears to fault
providence, even possibly implying that an angelic warning to Adam and Eve
could have averted the Fall (Martz 13). Yet a warning voice is provided in
Books Five through Eight, where it is clearly indicated that it will not avert
a Fall that Adam and Eve freely choose to incur. This futile search for a
warning voice assumes an urgent coherence within a contemporary political
context. With the repeated (six times), tortured urgency of now, Milton assumes the role, as he will
(or perhaps had) in Readie and Easie Way,
of one just man to explain the origin of evils that have created the
inevitability of the imminent monarchical restoration of the “secret foe . . .
far off and fearless, nor with cause to boast,” identified with military
defeat, with “loss / Of that first battle” and “second rout” [Worcester?] and
“not rejoicing” in the “speed” of a success that had been expected since,
arguably, Fall 1642 (4.3, 7, 11-14). Ironically, Milton’s success as a
prophet-poet will confirm that Milton as a poet-educator has lacked the skills
that could have created a populace with the ability effectively to heed the
warning voice. But even the angels lack a pedagogy to avoid such catastrophes,
and Milton places himself, and justifies himself in the placement, in the
futile company of St. John the Divine and the Angel of Revelation---and Raphael,
Abdiel, and Uriel (whom Milton connects with the angels of Revelation) in his
own poem.
39>
Speculating on a more specific cause for Milton’s sense of failure as public
intellectual/educator provides a fresh perspective on one of the oldest, most
vexed questions about Milton’s epic. Why does Satan, if negatively conceived,
appear to be a character with which Milton sympathized, often defying God by
echoing Milton’s own political rhetoric? Certainly Milton would have recognized
the articulation of his own political views, such as in 5.772-802, and so
Satan’s republican rhetoric is deliberately included. Yet, Satan is not a
republican with whom Milton’s sympathizes. On the contrary, he is a republican
(and a Royalist and Presbyterian and Major-General among many other things)[19] to whom Milton objects most vehemently because his views diabolically
counterfeit Milton’s own arguments. Few circumstances could reveal as clearly
why Milton, after announcing his role as his republic’s chief hope in the Defensio Pro Se in August 1655 (4.2: 698)
apparently withdraws from public life until 1659-60. Milton recognized that his
authentic revolutionary voice had been, and would be, coopted and perverted by
public discourse: the devil, and the army men, and the Commonwealthmen, and the
Rumpers, and the Parliamentarians, could, like the King in Eikon Bailike (Daniel, “Eikonoklastes
and the Miltonic King”), voice Miltonic views as they harmonized in the
political processes that would soon restore, and not too soon destroy,
monarchy. It was subversion then, rather than opposition and suppression, to
which the post-1655 Milton was most sensitive.
40>
“Fear to Transgress” (6.912): Milton, with Griffith’s sermon perhaps still ringing
in his memory, makes this the poem’s last line before the Restoration. The
divine and human warning voices combine in apparent futility. Raphael, like the
epic’s poet, fails to avert the restoration of satanic monarchy, which is
predetermined to succeed at the time his warning voice is heard. Adam and Eve,
like the English people, will choose not to fear God, a choice that produces an
unhappy state in which kings are to be feared. Yet Raphael’s account of Satan’s
defeat in his war against God predetermines the shabby nature of Satan’s
restoration. Similarly, Milton’s epic (like The Readie and Easie Way)
does not attempt to avert a monarchical restoration, but rather to subvert
it by anticipating and indeed even creating it according to Milton’s own keenly
republican, skeptical, sensibility.[20] If Paradise Lost is the weapon, or
ark, that the solitary Milton chose, in 1655/58, to forward his Cause, and to
wage war against the divine right monarchy as embodied in Charles I, he chose
wisely. Far from becoming either a majestic relic of the Renaissance or the
disappearing paradise created by a defeated Saint, the intensely contemporary
poem immediately exerts its enormous force on English culture, shaping, and
being shaped by, a larger cultural matrix of contexts, crises, currents and
(ex)changes that had caused the monarchical restoration itself. The monarchy,
as embodied in Charles I, had not been restored. The monarchy that is restored soon
will be reduced to the Hanoverian succession; and its Restoration rakes will rapidly
fade into a period cliché. But Milton's epic emerges, and rather quickly too, as
England’s most influential poem as the country moves much closer to Milton’s
cultural ideals than the poet probably ever would have expected.
Notes:
[1] I would like to thank editors Michael Nagy and Bruce Brandt for their help with a an earlier version of this essay that appeared in Proceedings of the 14th Annual Northern Plains Conference on Earlier British Literature (2007).
[1] I would like to thank editors Michael Nagy and Bruce Brandt for their help with a an earlier version of this essay that appeared in Proceedings of the 14th Annual Northern Plains Conference on Earlier British Literature (2007).
[2] Citations to
Milton's poetry, cited parenthetically within the text, will refer to Fowler. “About the order of writing we know
almost nothing” (Fowler 4). Alan Gilbert provides the most cogent arguments for
revision.
[3] Many contemporary
observers, including Andrew Marvell, expected that the poet would use his religious
epic as a platform to articulate his politics (Hill, “Milton and Marvell” 22-23).
Of course, he did. That Milton’s contemporaries, searching for the alien and
discredited, failed to notice the poem’s intense political engagements suggests
that Milton’s ideology was emphatically of the present (and future) and not of
the past. And the definitive political fact, for Milton, was not the failure to
establish a successful republic but the destruction of the Caroline monarchy.
As the monarchy of Charles II rapidly took shape, Milton, happily, recognized
that he was, after all, on the winning side (Daniel, “Milton and the
Restoration”).
[4] Citations to
Milton's prose, cited parenthetically within the text, unless otherwise noted will
refer to The Complete Prose Works of John
Milton.
[5] Hill links the republican failure with the fact that “the men of property
refused to advance money to any government they did not control” (God’s Englishman 253).
[6] The MS Digression
clearly attributes, as L’Estrange perceived, the failure of the republic
neither to the Rump nor to the Major-Generals, but to the Long Parliament,
especially in the years 1641-46. This could be explained by the date of
composition, the late 1640s, but the date of publication (1670) would have
allowed Milton to revise this important statement, if he had changed his mind.
[7] Royalists’
prospects at Cromwell’s death “exceeded expectation . . . . A more favorable
conjunction for the Stuarts could hardly be imagined” (Ollard, Image 111). A standard university
textbook from the late 1960s states that “when the death of Cromwell left the
Protectorate to his feeble son, the nation was very nearly unanimous in the
opinion that only one course lay before it---to restore the monarchy in the
person of Charles II” (Ferguson and Bruun 424). In the 1960s, Milton was often represented
as having been blind to this political reality because of his idealism. Since
then, a much shrewder Milton has tended to emerge.
[8] This distance
might partially explain why Milton was asked, around 1661, to join the restored
court. Those who could have extended this invitation are as numerous as the
powerful Restoration figures who could have saved Milton from execution.
[9] Parker calls this
warning a “prophecy”: “ ‘Infinite disturbances in the state’ came so quickly
after the publication of Milton’s prophecy that he himself was profoundly
shocked” (534). I do not think, however that Milton was shocked or
“disillusioned, and also frightened” (535) at hearing of his prophecy
vindicated.
[10] Milton’s
inability to understand political reality is supposedly indicated by his
mishandling of his large investment in the Excise bank. Milton, “neglecting to
recall it in time, could never after get it out, with all the Power and the
Interest he had in the Great ones of those times” (Edward Phillips, in
Darbishire 78). Yet, “times” and “never after” would seem to suggest a Restoration
context. More important, Milton would have been the more reluctant to salvage
his investment, the more he recognized the futility of the political situation
or, perhaps, his impending execution. Certainly, Milton would not have approved
of a preoccupation with personal finances at a time when the nation was, one
last time, rejecting God’s homely plan for one that advanced lucrative imperial
expansion. He certainly did not approve of it in those who sought to “huckster
the common-wealth” in 1641 (MS Digression, CPW
5:445).
[11] For the poem’s critique of the monarchical restoration in general, see
especially Davies; Achinstein; and Knoppers,
Historicizing Milton.
[12] Embodiments of self-enslavement, “Moloch and Belial are complex developments of
the two royalist types that Salmasius had held up for admiration because of
their reaction to Charles’s fall” (Bennett 56).
[13] Turner examines
how “the ‘high’ libertinism of the Restoration aristocracy deliberately
simulates the sexuality and violence of the streets” (Libertines and Radicals 156; 156-63).
[14] Hill links the
republican failure with the fact that “the men of property refused to advance
money to any government they did not control” (God’s Englishman 253).
[15] As Hutton
points out, “It must be stressed that Interregnum England was far from sober
and virtuous” (The Restoration 185).
Yet Milton’s “hypocrites” (4.744), whatever they did in private, insisted on an
austere public code of morality that has been enshrined in public memory, with
much good reason, as “Puritanism.” And sexual puritanism was often directly
linked with political puritanism: “If the Restoration culture of priapism had
any obvious purpose, it was to legitimize the new regime by contrast with the
repressive Cromwellian period” (Turner, Libertines
and Radicals 171). Turner adds that “frenetic hedonism became a badge of
anti-Puritan loyalty.”
[16] These lines
were probably written while Milton was also writing the divorce tracts.
[17] “Kings are not
onely Gods Lieutenants upon earth, and sit upon gods throne, but even by God
himselfe they are called Gods” (James I 307). Contemporary documentation is, of
course, extensive.
[18] This passage
alludes to “the allegory in Phaedrus
of the winged soul” (Samuel 166).
[19] Hill, Milton and the English Revolution 366-75.
[20] See Knoppers’ essay
for how The Readie and Easie Way, rather than written to avert a
monarchical restoration, has “a distinctively literary aim, to provide a myth
of the nation” (224).
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_____
Clay Daniel is an Associate Professor of English at the University
of Texas—Pan American. His research on Milton has appeared in such journals as Milton Quarterly, Milton Studies, and, most recently, in Quidditas. He’s especially interested in Milton’s relation to the
Restoration.
_____
APPOSITIONS: Studies in
Renaissance / Early Modern Literature and Culture, http://appositions.blogspot.com/, ISSN: 1946-1992, Volume Six (2013): Editions & Editing
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