SOURCE: "Great Acts and Great Eloquence: The Historical Imagination in the Later Revolutionary Prose," in Milton and the Drama of History: Historical Vision, Iconoclasm, and the Literary Imagination, Cambridge University Press, 1974, pp. 74-91.

Milton's self-consciousness about the drama of national historic destiny remains central to his later revolutionary prose works. Though they may seem diverse in context and purpose, the Defenses, the History of Britain, and the late pre-Restoration tracts are often mythopoetic in their presentation of and response to history. Milton's imaginative response, however, becomes problematic when he faces the dilemma of mediating between invention and truth in the History of Britain: investigating his nation's troubled past increases his sense of historical uncertainty, calling into question the power of his writing to operate as a creative, mythopoetic force in history. Like the History of Britain, his First and Second Defense of the English People at moments dramatize the conflicts and trials of history in epic terms, thereby expressing his poetic sensibility in prose and his imaginative engagement with the historical process. In the polemics of 1659-1660, Milton's sense of national historic destiny, still expressed mythopoetically, continues to conflict poignantly with his sense of historical mutability: these tracts reveal his conflicting responses, on the eve of the Restoration, between engagement with and detachment from the historical process—a complex reaction to the drama of history that would re-emerge in the major poems.

The Defenses and the Poetics Of History

The First and Second Defense show Milton once again highly self-conscious of his role as a revolutionary polemicist in the drama of history. But in these texts, in which he serves as historian of his own age, he emerges more distinctly as a poet historical writing in prose. As he would have known from Spenser, his "sage and serious" teacher,

the Methode of a Poet historical is not such, as of an Historiographer. For an Historiographer discourseth of affayres orderly as they were donne, accounting as well the times as the actions, but a Poet thrusteth into the middest, even where it most concerneth him, and there recoursing to the thinges forepaste, and divining of thinges to come, maketh a pleasing Analysis of all.¹

Aristotle had of course firmly distinguished the poet from the historian; yet according to Lucian, one of the classical authorities Milton recommended to Henry de Brass, the historian must possess not only rhetorical sophistication, but should "have a touch and share of poetry."² Quintilian, too, suggests the interconnection between poetic and historiographical discourse: he notes that history may employ the "use of figures" in order "to avoid monotony of narrative," and that it "has a certain affinity to poetry and may be regarded as a kind of prose poem … written for the purpose of narrative … to record events for the benefit of posterity and to win glory for its author."³ The First and the Second Defense are partly written in such an epic mode (though both works contain a great deal of abusive invective), and consequently their sense of history is often intensely imaginative and not concerned strictly with "affayres orderly as they were donne." Thus Marvell was struck by both the rhetorical and figurative power of the Second Defense: to him it seemed a work of "the most compendious Scale" reaching "the Height of the Roman eloquence" as "it turnes and rises with so many figures."⁴

Milton's First Defense, written in the same iconoclastic spirit of his regicide polemic, is a work of enormous virulency and rage aimed at demolishing Salmasius's Defensio Regia, pro Carolo I (1649), a book "full of virulency and bitternesse against this Commonwealth."⁵ Yet even Milton's vitriolic response, published in February 1651, rises at moments to epic heights, marking a transition between his fierce iconoclasm in 1649 and his poetics of history in the Second Defense (May 1654). In the First Defense we thus find Milton responding both iconoclastically and poetically to history. Opening with an epic invocation, the tract immediately suggests the interconnection between Milton's poetics and his prose discourse:⁶ in order to compose his "elevated and splendid discourse," Milton observes, he turns "to aid from on high." After presenting God as an iconoclast in history who destroys "haughty and unruly kings" "utterly with their whole house," Milton invokes His power to complete the historiography and iconoclasm of the First Defense: "I call on almighty God, giver of all gifts," Milton writes (using the verb "invocare" [CE VII, 8]), as he prepares both to create "a memorial which every nation and every age may perhaps read" (IV, 305) and to blast with iconoclastic fury the text of Salmasius's Defensio Regia. The epilogue of the First Defense again refers to Milton's prose discourse in terms that suggest he is engaged in writing a poetics of history: his work stands as a "memorial" which "will not easily perish," and which has been "undertaken and completed" with "divine inspiration" (IV, 536)—"non sine divino instinctu" (CE VII, 556). The work of history as a monument is a perfectly common notion in Milton's age,⁷ but in the Defenses he gives this claim an intensely poetic inflection.

The Second Defense aspires to even greater heights, as the poet historical writing in prose becomes thoroughly intoxicated with his rhetorical powers: "I can scarcely restrain myself from loftier and bolder flights," writes Milton as he prepares to take no middle flight and to "outstrip all the orators of every age in the grandeur of [his] subject and [his] theme" (IV, 554). In this polemic, Milton emerges as a kind of rhetor-historian whose text is a literary performance of epic magnitude:⁸ at the end, having presented the glorious events and figures of the nation's past and present history, he compares himself to the epic poet ("poeta is qui Epicus vocatur" [CE VIII, 252]) who celebrates "the exploits of Achilles at Troy … or the return of Ulysses, or the arrival of Aeneas in Italy" (IV, 685). His historical discourse, as this passage suggests, is often highly imaginative and mythopoetic. Elsewhere in the Second Defense he compares himself to Homer (IV, 608) and admires Ulysses, who "deserved as well as possible of [his] country" (IV, 595). Despite its scathing attack on the Regia Sanguinis Clamor by Peter du Moulin (Milton mistook the author of this anonymous 1652 pamphlet to be Alexander More), the Second Defense is often remarkably poetic in its dramatization of history and Milton's place in that dynamic process.⁹ His revolutionary text provides a particularly good example of what Hayden White has called the "conflation of mythic and historical consciousness."¹⁰

His self-dramatization is thus at times wholly imaginative, such as when he envisions himself, having won over the European nations to his cause, triumphantly leading liberty back to Europe:

Now, surrounded by such great throngs, from the Pillars of Hercules all the way to the farthest boundaries of Father Liber, I seem to be leading home again everywhere in the world, after a vast space of time, Liberty herself, so long expelled and exiled. And, like Triptolemus of old, I seem to introduce to the nations of the earth a product from my own country, but one far more excellent than that of Ceres. (IV, 555-56)

The comparisons with Triptolemus and his mother Ceres, figures from Ovidian myth (see Metamorphoses v.642ff.) whose fruitful powers Milton claims to exceed, heighten the imaginative element of his prose discourse with its power to effect cultural renewal. His Second Defense, at such moments, offers a poetics of history in which Milton draws upon his literary and dramatic skills as he self-consciously envisions his mythic role, along with that of the elect nation and its leaders, in the historical process. Indeed one contemporary critic of Milton's revolutionary polemic attempted to discredit his power as a historian by calling him "a fabulist and a mere poet."¹¹

Milton's historical consciousness is apparent, moreover, in his portrayal of himself as hermeneutic combatant energetically engaged in the drama of history. Born "at a time in the history of [his] country" when "the most heroic and exemplary achievements" have been accomplished, Milton undertook the most "arduous" task, that of defending the English people against Salmasius's Defensio Regia: "I so routed my audacious foe that he fled, broken in spirit and reputation" (IV, 548-49). Having borne off "the spoils of honor" in this polemical battle, Milton was neither "conquered," as some feared, not did he "leave the field with serious damage" to himself and his country's cause (IV, 556, 602-3). Indeed Milton considers a history or discourse, which recounts the martial deeds of revolutionary leaders, as nothing less than "a second battlefield, so to speak" (IV, 668).¹² These military tropes heighten his sense of himself as a combatant who considers his revolutionary polemics to be expressions of his full "active powers" (IV, 622)—"omne ingenium, omnes industriae vires" (CE VIII, 128). Such self-dramatization befits the imaginative nature of Milton's writing, reflecting his belief that his prose discourses participate aggressively in a dramatic historical process ("in hoc dramate," as Milton writes at one point [CE VIII, 90]). He continues to envision in the Defenses an active, dynamic interplay between his polemics and the historical process.

Thus if God alters the times, and assigns and takes away kingdoms, He nevertheless does so, Milton notes in the First Defense, "through the agency of men"—"per homines tamen" (IV, 394-95; CE VII, 198)—Milton's telling addition to his biblical authority, Daniel 2:21. Exercising all his "active powers" in the historical moment means, in Milton's case, writing prose whose rhetoric and vision are energetic, passionate, and imaginative, "a proper history," for example, capable of expressing "the great deeds" accomplished by "our foremost men" and "this wondrous course of events" accomplished by "almighty God himself" (IV, 512). Salmasius's discourse, by contrast, is written by a "pseudopropheta" and "Pseudoplutarche" (CE VII, 230, 236): his text, according to Milton, misrepresents past, present, and future history through pedantic sophism, "barbarous" rhetoric (IV, 306), and "countless lying fictions" (IV, 406). Milton attacks the Defensio Regia as having no basis whatsoever in historical truth and as often "contradicting the word of all historians" (IV, 435): by contrast, Milton implies that his own polemical discourse participates creatively in the historical process, while not violating its truth. The relation between imaginative expression and truth in historical discourse, however, while raised in the First Defense, becomes considerably more problematic, we shall see, in the History of Britain.

In the Second Defense Milton's historical consciousness manifests itself especially in his sense of history as trial: the polemicist, his elect nation, and its revolutionary leaders are all tried by the historical process. Not only had Milton, who boldly appended the epithet "Englishman" to his name on the title pages of all three Defenses, been viciously attacked by the tract Regia Sanguinis Clamor, but "the whole Commonwealth of England" had been "[torn] open and dilacerated" (Defense of Himself, IV, 707). The revolutionary English, in their fierce opposition to monarchy, have endured a "glorious trial of virtue" "against all terrors alike" (IV, 550), just as their polemicist has been "neither cast down in spirit nor unduly fearful of envy or death itself" in his own "time of trial" (IV, 553).¹³ The dramas of nation and self are thus never far apart in Milton's polemic. Like Milton, Cromwell appears in the Second Defense as a figure of trial in the drama of history: "These trials will buffet you and shake you; they require a man supported by divine help, advised and instructed by all-but-divine inspiration" (IV, 674). Because both Milton and Cromwell have endured the sting of slanderous accusations, they share a similar infamy—"eadem infamia" (CE VIII, 212)—and both have encountered numerous perils and personal dangers (IV, 552, 673): Milton stresses these latter topics, considered by Cicero especially fertile for panegyric,¹⁴ so as to highlight his vision of the just man in the midst of historical crisis. History conceived as a process of tribulation for the just few, already well articulated in the Second Defense, looks forward to the major poems, with their dramatization of the righteous man struggling in a world perverse where he finds himself "fully tried"—as Milton's Christ is—by the temptations of history (Paradise Regained, 1.4).

Moreover, the passages of impassioned self-justification, especially those in which Milton places himself among the eminent blind men of history (IV, 584-87), enable the poet-polemicist to dramatize his personal theme of strength made perfect in weakness (II Corinthians 12:9) in the larger perspective of history:¹⁵ "For then I shall be at once the weakest and the strongest, at the same time blind and most keen in vision. By this infirmity may I be perfected, by this completed" (IV, 590). The autobiographical passages portraying Milton's life and career as "pure and honorable" (IV, 611) explicitly link his tribulations with those of the English people, who manifest a "purity of life" and "blameless character" (IV, 552): as an aspiring poet in Elegy VI (lines 55-64), we may recall, Milton considered purity of the self among the essential criteria for writing heroic poetry and for transforming his own career into "a true Poem" (An Apology, I, 890). The trials of personal and public history intersect in the Second Defense, heightening the interconnection there between Milton's personal ideals and poetic vision, his self-dramatization and his heroic discourse.¹⁶

If purity of self and nation are equally central to the vision of the Second Defense, then Milton's aggressive polemic is intended to expunge those impure elements which defile the poetic polemicist, the Protectoral regime, and its elective leaders. In the Second Defense he attacks Alexander More for being "unclean" (IV, 599), just as he viciously attacked Salmasius in the First Defense for being "a foul Circean beast" (IV, 518). Employing "a most just vituperation" against "an execrable man … a preacher impure in sacred matters," Milton explains in his Defense of Himself, is "an office neither displeasing to God, unsalutary to the church, nor unuseful to the state" (IV, 796). His most venomous passage in the Second Defense occurs in response to the slandering of John Bradshaw: Milton at this point depicts his polemical antagonist as "unmixed filth," "a callus," "a defiler of holy things, a brute towards man, and the slanderer of all who are excellent" (IV, 637). Milton depicts Bradshaw, by contrast, as the very image of purity itself: sprung from "a noble line," he possesses "a lofty spirit, and pure morals," so that in executing his office as head of the Parliamentarian High Court, he seemed "to have been created and destined by divinity itself for this very task." This vacillation between vitriolic abuse and intense praise recalls the powerful dialectics of response in the antiprelatical polemics. By viciously diminishing the moral stature and authority of his polemical opponent, Milton elevates his own historical vision, in which he imagines Bradshaw as one of the just few performing a task "greater and more terrible [formidabilius] than almost any other in history" (IV, 638; CE VIII, 156).

By the time Milton presents Cromwell, he has shifted away from caustic satire (it precedes Cromwell's portrait as if to expunge impure elements) and is emplotting the recent events of history in the epic mode.¹⁷ Cromwell's deeds require "the grand work of a proper history"—"justae … historiae grande opus" (CE VIII, 214)—so that Milton eulogizes him as a figure of almost mythic stature, in whom individual and historic destiny fuse, outstripping "the legends [fabulas] of our heroes" (IV, 672; CE VIII, 224). Cromwell, in effect, deserves an epic: Milton's prose panegyric functions as a kind of poetics of history, in which he depicts the revolutionary leader of the Protectorate as the just man in the midst of historic trials, much like the controversial polemicist himself.

Milton's Cromwell combines features of the classical hero and the Puritan saint. Like Sallust's Cato, he appears upright, austere, self-controlled, and a man of towering merit who wages war with mighty kings;¹⁸ like a Camillus or Cyrus or Epaminondas, he has achieved the stature of a classical general (IV, 665, 668). In addition, like a latter-day Aeneas, he takes upon himself the heaviest burden—"onus … gravissimum" (CE VIII, 226)—of his nation's future and thus emerges as pater patriae.¹⁹ That Milton conceives of his own "elevated and splendid discourse" as a special "burden" (IV, 305; cf. CE VII, 6), further links his mythopoetic discourse with Cromwell's revolutionary deeds: both kinds of performance demand epic vision; both are subjects of Milton's poetics of history.

Milton simultaneously envisions Cromwell as God's Puritan saint combining "religion and piety" (IV, 668) with an intense sense of historic mission. His portrait here reflects something of the Puritan notion that public and private struggles are interconnected: if "you begin with a personal reformation," one Puritan divine observed, "then shall you be better able to carry on and advance the great work of reformation of others."²⁰ Thus for a moment Milton allows us to glimpse the personal man who has struggled within himself—a man "devoted to the Puritan religion and the upright life" who, as he was growing up, wrestled with such internal enemies as "vain hopes, fears, desires" (IV, 666-67).²' We may recall Marvell here who, in the midst of portraying Cromwell as a historical force, gives us a glimpse of his personal and human qualities, observing that "He liv'd reserved and austere" in "his private Gardens."²² The difference is that Milton has placed greater emphasis on Cromwell's internal conflicts and their relation to his larger performance in history. As "victor over himself," Cromwell was better prepared to face his "external foe" (IV, 668): he therefore embodies the saint as military strategist negotiating battles within and without.²³ Remaining "in the seclusion of his own home," until reaching "an age mature and settled" (IV, 666), Cromwell, like Milton, reserved his talents for great things to come; like Milton, he emerges as a compelling example of the intersection of the individual and his historic role.

No doubt, too, the activist in Cromwell appealed to the poet-polemicist who was particularly sensitive to his texts as expressions of "active powers" and to the imaginative shape of history. Cromwell himself, it seems, possessed some sense of the dramatic nature of millennial history: a student of Thomas Beard, author of the immensely influential Theatre of God's Judgements (1597), he described God to Parliament in January 1655 as a supreme dramatist "whose appearances and providences amongst us are not to be outmatched by any story."²⁴ But while history might be considered God's drama, the man who "rear'd God's Trophies and his works pursu'd,"²⁵ envisioned himself and his saints as ultimately playing an active role in that performance: "You have been passive in coming hither; being called," Cromwell told the Barebones Parliament on the day of its opening (July 4, 1653), "a day of the power of Christ," "and that's an active work."²⁶ Marveil's Cromwell confirms this assertion: his political poems portray a man who "does both act and know" as he participates in the process of "pulling down, and … erecting New" the edifice of the state.²⁷ As Leopold Damrosch observes, one paradox of Puritan writing is that while we get "a picture of profound spiritual isolation … if we consider the political scene we get a picture of highly efficient activists, brilliant and ruthless agents of change."²⁸ Though Cromwell had experienced spiritual anxiety and isolation, as Milton's portrait itself suggests, he was indeed, according to both himself and his observers, such a Puritan activist in the drama of history. In the Second Defense, his "active work" should be seen as the counterpart to Milton's "active powers"—those powers which enable the controversial polemicist, through imaginative discourse, to operate dynamically in the revolutionary historical process.

History and imaginative discourse merge most completely in the peroration to the Second Defense here, where historic and mythopoetic visions fuse, we see Milton as the poet historical "divining," in the words of Spenser, "of thinges to come." Milton, to be sure, ends with a note of caution for Cromwell and his countrymen: the trials which have so far been met and overcome by Cromwell, Milton himself, and the nation at large are a prelude to further ones. History is a process of ongoing trial and conflict—both external and internal—and Milton's revolutionary compatriots, facing temptations of wealth and power under the new Protectoral regime, must continue to fight the better fight in "the warfare of peace" against those tyrants ready to hatch inwardly (IV, 680-81).²⁹ We should note how Milton's words of counsel intersect here with his claims as epic historiographer. By comparing his work to that of the epic poet who extols the exploits of Achilles, Ulysses, and Aeneas, Milton reminds his audience precisely how important the aesthetic and mythopoetic are to his discourse of history: they enable him to respond imaginatively but no less compellingly to the historical process. Configuring history in epic terms may serve as an essential means to "counsel, encourage, and inspire" (IV, 685) his elective countrymen. Milton is thus particularly conscious of how his text is engaged in giving the historical process a shape, in giving its events a structure that is figurative and poetic. The aesthetic and the sociopolitical are deeply interconnected in his prose discourse; the history he constructs and the great events he records become inseparable.³⁰ Responding poetically to history in his Second Defense, Milton not only considered his writing itself a powerful mode of action, but perceived, in his own terms, what we would call today the "textuality of history."³¹

The History of Britain

If the Defenses show Milton writing a poetics of history, his aborted History of Britain reveals a more pronounced tension between invention and truth-telling in historical narrative, as Milton explores the dark, convoluted course of his nation's past up until the Norman Conquest (he had originally intended to extend the account up to his own day). Because the writing of the History occurred over a number of years—the first stage before March 1649 and the second probably after 1655—I have chosen to examine it among the later revolutionary works:³² its concern with the mythopoetic in historical narrative, in particular, aligns it with the Defenses. In effect, this massive enterprise of charting his nation's distant past—a fullscale history in its own right—raised for Milton the problem of an imaginative and creative response to the historical process, a problem he chose to struggle with directly in his work. His commitment to take part in the nation's present and future history, "to be an interpreter & relater of the best and sagest things among mine own Citizens throughout this Iland" (I, 811-12), resulted in his commitment to uncover the truth, however troubling, about his nation's past history and to consider the best means of presenting it.³³ In his historical text, Milton insists that he will "represent" that "truth naked, though as lean as a plain Journal" (V, 230). The History of Britain thus reveals Milton, I suggest, divided between presenting an objective, factual response to history and presenting a more literary and mythopoetic one.³⁴

In this context, it is helpful to recall several of Milton's earlier statements about the writing of history. In one of his Cambridge exercises, Prolusion III, Milton describes the effect of historical narrative in terms resembling his famous definition of poetry in Of Education as "simple, sensuous, and passionate." Having just praised the power of divine poetry and rhetoric, Milton observes: "History, skilfully narrated, now calms and soothes the restless and troubled mind, now fills it with delight, and now brings tears to the eyes"; and in the same exercise he claims that "eloquent speech and noble action" most enrich a country (1, 244, 246).³⁵ Milton is remarkably sensitive not only to the effect of rhetoric and embellishment in historical narrative, but to its poetic and emotive power—especially when it is well narrated. Of Education itself stresses a close relation between history and poetry: it even begins, we may recall, with Milton conducting Hartlib "to a hill side" (II, 376), just as Michael accompanies Adam up the hill of history. In this often poetic treatise, in which Milton imagines the education best suited to prepare his select countrymen for their revolutionary and reformist leadership, he significantly aligns the study of "the choise Histories," with the study of "heroic poems, and Attic tragedies of statliest, and most regal argument" (11, 400-1).³⁶ By juxtaposing historical narratives with poetic and tragic texts, Milton stresses the interconnection among these kinds of writing and suggests much about his own imaginative priorities; the knowledge of poetry, after all, emerges as the climax of his educational scheme. The final books of Paradise Lost would of course integrate history, epic, and tragedy; but in its own way so does the History of Britain, which begins, like an epic story, with the myth of Brutus and then charts a tragic pattern of failed deliverances in national history, with numerous references made to the troubles of Milton's own age.

In later statements, especially his 1657 letters to Henry de Brass, Milton seems less enthusiastic about integrating the historical and the imaginative in the writing of history. Milton's remark in the first letter that "he who would write worthily of worthy deeds ought to write with no less largeness of spirit and experience of the world than he who did them" is the statement of a writer who not only believes, like Sallust, that "the style must be equal to the deeds" (VII, 501), but who believes, like Nietzsche, that "history is to be written by the man of experience and character": "He who has not lived through something greater and nobler than others will not be able to explain anything great and noble in the past."³⁷ Yet Milton goes on in the same letter to say that this historiographer should not rely "on ornate language"; Milton asks "for a historian not an orator." The historian should not interject "frequent maxims or judgments on historical events," thereby "breaking the chain of events" and invading "the province of the political writer" (a statement that helps to explain why Milton decided not to keep the Digression within his History); and he must follow "to the best of his ability not his own invention or conjecture but the truth" (VII, 501). The subsequent letter to de Brass again stresses that the rhetorician and historian function differently because "the arts themselves are different from each other" (VII, 506). Although such statements contradict the spirit of earlier remarks, which align historical writing with rhetoric and invention, they are offered as practical advice to a foreign acquaintance about the writing of history. They may also reflect Milton's own consideration of the art of writing historical narrative in his History. But they need not be taken as his final view on the subject of historical narrative: when we consider these remarks along with Milton's other statements, his Defenses, and his History, we may conclude that his responses were more divided and contradictory than the letters by themselves would suggest. In practice, Milton writes mythopoetically, even as he appears to eschew the fabulous and imaginary.

The History is full of statements criticizing the use of fable and invention in historiography.³⁸ Lamenting at the opening of his work history "obscur'd and blemisht with Fables" (V, I), Milton observes in another passage:

But either the inbred vanity of some, in that respect unworthily call'd Historians, or the fond zeal of praising thir Nations above truth hath so far transported them, that where they find nothing faithfully to relate, they fall confidently to invent what they think may either best set off thir Historie, or magnifie thir Countrie. (V, 134)

Such an observation seems to clash with Milton's mythopoetic vision in the Defenses. In one respect, Milton is hardly alone in mistrusting the use of invention in historical writing: among his favored classical historians, Polybius insists on adhering to the truth of the facts and not operating like the tragic poet who imagines the probable utterances of his characters; even Lucian, who seems particularly sensitive to the poetics of historiography, concludes his treatise by maintaining the importance of adhering to impartial history.³⁹ In the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries numerous commentators on historical writing stressed the importance of remaining impartial and steering away from the imaginative: Jean Bodin is troubled by historians who praise or vituperate when "they should leave to the reader the formation of an unbiased opinion"; Thomas Blundeville insists that "the hystoriographers ought not to fayne anye Orations nor any other thing, but truely to reporte every such speach, and deede, even as it was spoken, or done"; Edmund Bolton stresses that the historical writer should avoid "Oratorial or Poetical Notions," while William Camden insists on "writing with an impartiall minde" and not presenting "fained" materials.⁴⁰

Among Milton's nearer contemporaries, Joshua Sprigge is suspicious of rhetoric and invention in historical narratives and therefore eschews those histories "adorned with such Artificial stuffe of feigned speeches."⁴¹ Even those writers who are obviously ideologically biased insist upon the truth and impartiality of their historical discourse, although one could argue that such assertions themselves become a rhetorical convention or ploy.⁴² Thus the royalist historiographer Clarendon claims that his history is "very free from any of those passions which naturally transport men with prejudice," while the author of Respublica Anglicana or the Historie of the Parliament in their Late Proceedings (1650) maintains that "of all things pas sion and affection should not be discovered in an Historian, who must appear impartial in … his writing."⁴³ Similarly, John Rushworth, who documented Parliament's debates and transactions during the Civil War, insists on the emotional impartiality of his history of the English Revolution: he injects "neither Vinegar nor Gall into [his] Ink."⁴⁴ This apparent uneasiness towards invention, rhetoric, and emotion in the historiographical discourse of Milton's age no doubt reflects a shift away from the imaginative to the factual and empirical in the practice and writing of history.⁴⁵ But in the case of Milton's History, the tension between historiography as mythopoetic and rhetorical and historiography as truthful and scientific is by no means neatly resolved.

Milton, in effect, faces the dilemma of the historiographer who simultaneously perceives himself a poet. In undertaking the History of Britain he did not simply progress from a mythopoetic to an empiricist view of history. Milton's experience in reading widely in medieval historiography—where he believes invention is often abused and not distinguished from true history⁴⁶—does indeed challenge the importance he would attribute to the imagination in historical narrative. Nevertheless, Milton also refuses to abandon the rhetorical and imaginative side of history writing. He remains sensitive to the power of the rhetor-historian who possesses "the aid of Eloquence" (V, 40) and cannot completely reject the mythopoetic in his own historical narrative.⁴⁷ It is revealing that, at the beginning of his work, Milton refers to "our English Poets, and Rhetoricians, who by thir Art will know, how to use … judiciously" fabulous history (he has in mind writers like Spenser and Drayton) and to such historiographers as Diodorus Siculus, Livy, and Polydore Vergil, who also draw upon legendary history (V, 3-4).

By far the most telling example is Milton's inclusion of the myth of Brutus, which he notes "cannot so easily be discharg'd" since it has been "defended by many, deny'd utterly by few" (V, 8). In fact, by Milton's time most writers had skeptically concluded that "the whole narration of Brute" is "rather Poeticall, then Historicall."⁴⁸ Yet despite some lingering skepticism, Milton nevertheless proceeds, as though he were beginning an epic poem, to devote considerable space and detail to this ancient hero's Trojan genealogy and story (V, 8-17): Milton describes how the grandson of Aeneas was destined to be (according to the magicians of Ascanius) "the death of both his Parents"; how he thrived "in vertue and in Arms" among the servile Trojans of King Priam's son Helenus in Greece and became their daring leader; how Odysseus-like he guided the Trojan fleet westward "past the Herculean Pillars"; how he founded the city of Tours; and how he divided Britain among his people (once he had killed off the giants) and built the city of London. Milton not only gives us epic matter here, but includes a poetic translation of Diana's oracle and then, a few pages after finishing his account of Brutus (V, 20), cites most of a stanza from the Faerie Queene's version of legendary history (11.2.24), which describes the battle between Brutus Greenshield, descendant of the ancient Trojan hero, and Brunchildis, Prince of Hainaut. While he may dismiss Arthur (whose legend, of course, had become associated with royalist ideology) as "more renown'd in Songs and Romances, then in true stories" (V, 156), Milton will not give up so easily the imaginative element of historical discourse. His is the complex response of a poet writing historiography, fully aware of but not fully committed to the conventions of historical narrative in his age.⁴⁹

Despite his insistence on presenting historical discourse "as lean as a plain Journal," Milton sometimes writes of the rhetorical character of historiography in a spirit that resembles his poetics of history in the Defenses: "For worthy deeds are not often destitute of worthy relaters: as by a certain Fate great Acts and great Eloquence have most commonly gon hand in hand, equalling and honouring each other in the same Ages" (V, 39-40). An enormously ambitious, though aborted text, the History represents Milton's attempt, through imaginative historiography, to triumph over "Envy, Death, and Time," to make deeds "which else were transitory … fixt and durable against the force of Yeares and Generations" (V, 40).⁵⁰ Elsewhere Milton reinforces the close relation between rhetoric and history when he observes that "Learning, Valour, Eloquence, History, Civility, and eev'n Language it self" (V, 127) declined together at the fall of the Roman Empire. Once again, Milton seems divided about the art of historical writing: it is not enough to conclude that he prefers the factual, unrhetorical discourse recommended not only by Polybius but by the writers of his own age; at moments in the History of Britain, he also finds himself deeply engaged by the rhetoric and poetics of history.

Indeed, signs of strain and weariness in Milton's historical narrative suggest his uneasiness with this tension. Most of his work, after all, consists of lengthy descriptions of the struggles between the Britons and the Romans, the brutal invasions of the Saxons, Picts, and Scots, the increasing influence and power of the Saxons, the terrible devastation and butchery caused by the Danes who glut themselves "like wild Beasts" (V, 345), and so on until Milton comes to the invasion of the Normans.⁵¹ To be sure, Milton's view of these various peoples is by no means uniform: at times he finds the Britons courageous and heroic (against the Romans), at other times weak and vulnerable (against the Scots, Picts, and Saxons); at times he finds the Saxons "a barbarous and heathen Nation" (V, 142), at other times enlightened and well governed—especially under Alfred about whom Milton once considered writing "A Heroicall Poem" (VIII, 571). Nevertheless, Milton is aware of the bleakness of much of his historical narrative, which reads too much like a failed national saga, and he thus finds himself confronted with the problem of presenting history unworthy of recording. In one of his most remarkable insertions Milton pauses during his account of eighth-century Saxon England, a period marked by endless petty wars, to commiserate with his reader:

I am sensible how wearisom it may likely be to read of so many bare and reasonless Actions, so many names of Kings one after another, acting little more then mute persons in a Scene: what would it be to have inserted the long Bead-roll of Archbishops, Bishops, Abbots, Abbesses, and thir doeings, neither to Religion profitable nor to morality, swelling my Authors each to a voluminous body, by me studiously omitted. (V, 239)

Although he has compressed much in his authorities, he is complaining about his failure to render history imaginatively and dramatically. His History resembles a dumb-show—in which its historical characters act "little more then mute persons in a Scene"—rather than an account presenting a dramatic historical process in which Milton himself performs dynamically. Here Milton laments that he is no more than a recorder of "bare and reasonless" history, of "truth naked" and "as lean as a plain Journal":⁵² there is no opportunity to write a poetics of history or to conceive of his historical discourse as a creative force in that process.

We have seen Milton in other prose works—in the antiprelatical tracts, Areopagitica, Eikonoklastes, the Defenses—engaged actively and dramatically with the historical moment, which he sees as dynamic rather than static. That is not to say, of course, that all these prose works are free of historical disillusionment: the History of Britain revealed to Milton that the "darknes and crookednesse" of history which he had traced from the time of Wyclif to his own age in Of Reformation could now be traced all the way back to the earliest periods of his nation's past. But the History of Britain seems not to offer a way out of the labyrinth of history: there is no iconoclastic gesture which breaks its cyclical pattern, that transforms history dramatically. Rather its story of failed historical promise reinforces a sense of historical repetition: "The Saxons were now full as wicked as the Britans were at their arrival, brok'n with luxurie and sloth, either secular or superstitious" (V, 259). Milton's Digression, originally intended for the beginning of Book III, but not published until 1681 as the Character of the Long Parliament and Assembly of Divines, emphasizes the continuity of this cyclical pattern:⁵³ "that confused Anarchy" of the Britons following the Roman departure may be compared to "the late commotions" of the 1640s (V, 129, 441), when the pursuit of monopolies was rife, when men of no merit often sat in Long Parliament, when members of the Assembly of Divines preached with "great shew" against prelatical avarice while simultaneously pursuing their own "secular power" (V, 447), and so on. Milton's warning that his "unteachable" countrymen may sink "as those unfortunate Britans before them" (V, 451), may reflect his frustration over the dissensions among the Army and Parliament following the first Civil War, as French Fogle has argued.⁵⁴ But I would stress that this sense of history fraught with tragic conflict and confusion is by no means unique to this excursus or the final revolutionary tracts; it emerges even in the controversial polemics of the early 1640s, as we saw in chapter 1. We should, in other words, be wary of assuming that Milton's sense of history evolves in a completely consistent manner, that it develops in a predictable fashion from energetic optimism to profound disillusionment as we move from the early to the later revolutionary prose.

Milton's work offers no easy resolution to this dilemma of how to represent the weary pattern of history he finds. Even the hortatory tone of the Digression, noted by Fogle,⁵⁵ suggests that Milton has trouble steering away from a rhetorical response to history, however much he wishes to present it "as lean as a plain Journal." This tension between presenting history-mythopoetically and presenting it unrhetorically reflects his difficulty in maintaining a disengaged, impartial role as he records his nation's turbulent history with its "remarkable turns of State" (V, 130). By breaking off suddenly at the Norman Conquest, Milton leaves us with a haunting sense of incompleteness.⁵⁶ Nothing more poignantly highlights the sense of artistic strain and exhaustion of this massive enterprise.⁵⁷ Its incompleteness, perhaps more than any other detail, expresses the unresolved dilemma of Milton as mythopoetic historiographer—divided between the urge to shape the process of history through imaginative and rhetorical discourse and the commitment to represent its "truth naked," with its "bare and reasonless Actions."

History and the Relapsing Nation: The Final Revolutionary Tracts

The problem of imaginative engagement in relation to the historical process continues to concern Milton in the late pre-Restoration polemics. J. G. A. Pocock has suggested that "the English saint was not radically alienated from the secular order, but on the contrary radically involved in it."⁵⁸ In Milton's late pre-Restoration tracts, I would argue, we see a tension between Milton the polemicist radically alienated from and radically involved in the historic moment in which he finds his relapsing nation. As he expresses his divided responses to history, especially between engagement and withdrawal, Milton demonstrates the power of this polemical discourse to respond creatively, even mythopoetically, to the historical drama. Furthermore, the tension between withdrawing inwardly and maintaining an active polemical stance makes the late controversial tracts important transitional works between the revolutionary prose and the major poems.

Already in the Second Defense we see evidence of this tension between withdrawal and activism in history: Milton's eulogy of Fairfax, introduced in the midst of his mythopoetic vision of Cromwell as activist in history, highlights the attraction of a "glorious retirement … the end of all labors and human action, even the greatest" (IV, 669).⁵⁹ In the final revolutionary tracts that alternative of withdrawal as a response to history is expressed in Milton's Pauline vision of "the inward man and his actions" (A Treatise of Civil Power, VII, 255); God's power is now compelling through "the inward perswasive motions of his spirit" (VII, 261). Yet both outward activism and inward withdrawal emerge as possible responses to history in these late controversial works: in the same tract in which he explains God's inward power, Milton cannot resist citing yet once more II Corinthians 10:4-6, that favorite passage of his describing the saint's readiness to cast down imaginations and "aveng all disobedience" (VII, 257). Milton is already looking forward to the combination of inward withdrawal and active iconoclasm that characterizes the heroic figures of his great poems—the just few in Paradise Lost who possess the "Spirit within them" and "utter odious Truth" (XII.488, XI.704), "the inner man" of Paradise Regained whose power "shall to pieces dash / All Monarchies … throughout the world" (II. 477, IV. 149-50), the militant Samson who casts down the temple and image of Dagon "With inward eyes illuminated" (Samson Agonistes, line 1689). The regenerate remnant of the Treatise of Civil Power recognize inwardly the presence of God's forceful, radical power in history, even as they combat outwardly "everie high thing that exalts it self against the knowledge of God" (VII, 257).

The Readie and Easie Way to Establish a Free Commonwealth, especially, reveals Milton vacillating in his own polemical stance between detaching himself from the drama of history and engaging with it actively. Milton presents himself as one of the inwardly regenerate few who can see clearly "in these most difficult times" (VII, 462) when most men waver and seem uncertain about their direction. He thus attempts to immerse himself in the critical historical drama while preparing to detach himself from its political consequences if the Commonwealth sells itself into Babylonian captivity. But this, Milton finds, is by no means an easy position to maintain: he desperately urges reform—his sympathy lies with the Commonwealth under the leadership of the perpetual Senate—even as he assumes a tone of righteous vehemence and reproach. His vacillation between involvement in and detachment from the historical moment is the tract's most poignant tension.

Because Milton first wrote the polemic hastily in late February of 1660, when the Rump was still sitting, but published it when the Rump was dissolved, he rewrote the work in late March to accommodate the increasingly worsening political situation.⁶⁰ Yet Milton, despite what must have seemed more and more like a backsliding historical process, genuinely wanted to believe that the nation could still renew itself "now" in this "very season" (VII, 430). Thus he reminds his countrymen of the idea of an "immortal" commonwealth (VII, 436-38), with its republican precedents in the Jewish Sanhedrin, the Athenian Areopagus, the thirty Ancients of Sparta, the Roman Senate, and the Senate of the Venetian Republic.⁶¹ A perpetual Senate consisting of the ablest leaders, the regenerate few, could unite the Commonwealth, making the nation more "industrious," "potent," and "flourishing" (VII, 460). The English would again become God's "peculiar people" and "a glorious rising Commonwealth" (VII, 449, 420).

But Milton's intense yearning for last-minute historical reformation is sharply set against his frustration at the relapsing nation. In a passage expanded in the second version of The Readie and Easie Way, Milton rebukes the elect nation which verges on "relapsing" after nearly fulfilling its "heroic cause" (VII, 422, 420) in the revolution. He recoils at the thought of other nations responding with "scorn and derision" (VII, 422), a fear compounded by a sense of shame and humiliation at the very idea of slavery—a complex response to the politics of history which, we shall see in chapter 6, deeply reverberates in the historical drama of Samson Agonistes. The wheel of Fortune appears as a key image at several points in the tract: Milton is not merely punning cleverly on the idea of "rotation" within the Senate (VII, 434-35), a political solution proposed by James Harrington which he rejects,⁶² but presenting a potent image of the mutable process of history. For that is precisely what the historical process now threatens to become—unstable, uncertain, and regressive.⁶³

Stylistically, rhetorically, and figuratively Milton's prose expresses his complex response to the historical moment, as he vacillates between expressions of hope, frustration, and reproach. Consider the sense of historical drama in the following dense passage constructed around the condition of bondage:

if we returne to Kingship, and soon repent, as undoubtedly we shall, when we begin to finde the old encroachments coming on by little and little upon our consciences, which must necessarily proceed from king and bishop united inseparably in one interest, we may be forc'd perhaps to fight over again all that we have fought, and spend over again all that we have spent, but are never like to attain thus far as we are now advanc'd to the recoverie of our freedom, never to have it in possession as we now have it, never to be voutsaf'd heerafter the like mercies and signal assistances from heaven in our cause, if by our ingratefull backsliding we make these fruitless … (VII, 423; emphasis added)

The "if" of returning to bondage leads to the certainty of "undoubtedly we shall" repent, which raises the possibility that "we may be forc'd" to struggle all over again, causing Milton to meditate on the inevitable, haunting consequences of tyranny (the fact that we shall "never" again enjoy freedom or heaven's mercies) before concluding the passage on the original conditional note, the "if" which reminds his countrymen that the terrible choice has not yet been made. Nor does the sentence I have quoted end there: emphasizing a greater sense of loss in the second edition, it continues to build in emotional pressure for almost another page as Milton conveys his vehemence and frustration at the thought of "treading back again with lost labour all our happie steps in the progress of reformation" (VII, 424).

These radical shifts in tone and response towards the historical moment convey Milton's extreme uneasiness as he attempts to mediate in his polemical stance between the conflicting responses of historical engagement and detachment. His sense of irony over the fact that kings must be adored like demigods and at the thought of the perverse influence of the French Catholic court's "vast expence and luxurie, masks and revels" (VII, 425), recalls his trenchant critique of Eikon Basilike, with its powerful deflation of courtly theatricality and self-fashioning: thus the new player-king, carrying out "the superficial actings of State" would "pageant himself up and down in progress among the perpetual bowings and cringings of an abject people" (VII, 426). Such a response registers Milton's desire to detach himself from a potentially disastrous historical outcome.

But Milton's most imaginative and visionary response to the tense historical moment occurs in the powerful jeremiad which brings The Readie and Easie Way to a close:

What I have spoken, is the language of that which is not call'd amiss the good Old Cause: if it seem strange to any, it will not seem more strange, I hope, then convincing to backsliders. Thus much I should perhaps have said though I were sure I should have spoken only to trees and stones; and had none to cry to, but with the prophet, O earth, earth, earth! to tell the very soil it self, what her perverse inhabitants are deaf to. Nay though what I have spoke, should happ'n (which Thou suffer not, who didst create mankinde free; nor Thou next, who didst redeem us from being servants of men!) to be the last words of our expiring libertie. But I trust I shall have spoken perswasion to abundance of sensible and ingenuous men: to som perhaps whom God may raise of these stones to become children of reviving libertie; and may reclaim, though they seem now chusing them a captain back for Egypt, to bethink themselves a little and consider whether they are rushing. (VII, 462-63)

More poignantly than any other passage in the late controversial tracts, this plea expresses the unresolved, troubling tension that deeply informs Milton's mytho-poetic vision at this critical juncture in history: his prophetic cry from the wilderness rebuking a deaf, perverse people who have wilfully ignored the signs of God's workings in history is set against his urgent hope that the regenerate few might finally listen to his admonishing voice and that the power of God's spirit—perhaps inwardly as Milton's Treatise of Civil Power suggests—might as last be realized. Assuming the voice and vision of the prophet Jeremiah here, Milton concludes his tract by giving a more cosmic, imaginative, and allegorical dimension to the drama of his national community at this terrible moment in history, a dimension which aligns the historical crisis of his own age with the historical crisis of Jeremiah's age of apostasy.⁶⁴ But what remains uncertain in Milton's historical vision is whether God will make an inward covenant with this elect community as He had done, say, with Israel in Jeremiah's prophecy: "But this shall be the covenant that I will make with the house of Israel … I will put my law in their inward parts, and write it in their hearts; and will be their God, and they shall be my people" (31:33).

The Readie and Easie Way thus reveals an important characteristic of Milton's historical consciousness throughout this trying pre-Restoration period: Milton continued to struggle imaginatively with the uneven process of history as his reformist vision often conflicted poignantly with his vision of historical mutability. The fact that Milton was so active in polemical writing during this unsettling period suggests that, beyond his desire to find a genuine political solution to the historical crisis, the prose tract continued to offer him—right up until the Restoration—a vital and creative means of confronting the complexities and contradictions of history. As we shall see in subsequent chapters, the major poems would continue to confront, rather than simply transcend or turn away from, the drama of history articulated not only in these late tracts, but throughout the twenty turbulent years of Milton's controversial prose writing.

Notes

¹ See the letter to Ralegh in Spenser: Poetical Works, ed. J. C. Smith and E. de Selincourt (1912; rpt. Oxford, 1977), p. 408. Cf. George Puttenham's defense of feigned history in The Arte of English Poesie, ed. Gladys D. Willcock and Alice Walker (Cambridge, 1936), pp. 39-42. For discussion of the poet historical in Renaissance England, see Arthur B. Ferguson, Clio Unbound: Perception of the Social and Cultural Past in Renaissance England (Durham, NC, 1979), pp. 32-33.

² Aristotle, Poetics, IX. Lucian, however, also cautions that the historian should not be "swept down into poetry's wild enthusiasm": see "How to Write History" in Lucian, trans. K. Kilburn, VI (Cambridge, Mass., 1959), sec. 45 (cf. sec. 8); on the historian's rhetorical powers, see sees. 34 and 58. For Milton's letter to de Brass, dated December 16, 1657, see VII, 506-7. Although Milton there notes that the functions of the rhetorician and historian differ, in practice he himself often merges the two arts.

³Institutio Oratoria, x.i.31, trans. H. E. Butler (London and New York, 1922), IV, p. 21. For remarks on the relation between history and epic, see Lionel Gossman, "History and Literature: Reproduction or Signification," in The Writing of History: Literary Form and Historical Understanding, ed. Robert H. Canary and Henry Kozicki (Madison, 1978), esp. pp. 3, 13. In The English Epic and Its Background (1954; rpt. New York, 1966), E. M. W. Tillyard notes that "some history may rise to the status of epic" (p. 205; cf. p. 366), but does not mention Milton's Defenses or History of Britain in his chapter on "The Historians" (pp. 361-66).

⁴The Poems and Letters of Andrew Marvell, ed. H. M. Margoliouth, rev. Pierre Legouis and E. E. Duncan-Jones, 3rd ed. (Oxford, 1971), II, p. 306. Cf. John Toland's view that "for stile and disposition" the First Defense was "the most eloquent and elaborat" of Milton's prose works, "equalling the old Romans in the purity of their own Language" (The Early Lives of Milton, ed. Helen Darbishire [London, 1932], p. 153.)

⁵ With this observation, made in a letter dated February 18, 1649, the Council of State ordered Salmasius's Defensio confiscated: see J. Milton French, ed., The Life Records of John Milton, II (New Brunswick, 1950), p. 299. Because of the First Defense's intense virulency (and despite the fact that it catapulted Milton's international reputation as Commonwealth spokesman), the tract has received relatively little praise from modern commentators: see e.g. Parker's unsympathetic assessment in Milton: A Biography (Oxford, 1968), I, p. 383; Don M. Wolfe's criticisms in his introduction to the Yale edition: IV, 112, 114-15; and Robin A. Bowers's remarks on Milton's rhetorical insecurity in "Milton and Salmasius: The Rhetorical Imperatives," Philological Quarterly, 52 (1973), 67.

⁶ Hayden White has criticized, in terms I find suggestive for Milton, the distinction conventionally made between poetic and prose discourse in historiography: see Tropics of Discourse: Essays in Cultural Criticism (Baltimore, 1978), p. 97.

⁷ For examples see E. Howes's "Historicall Preface" to John Stow's Annales or Generali Chronicle of England (London, 1615), and John Speed's "Proeme" to The History of Great Britaine (London, 1611), p. 152.

⁸ On the rhetor-historian in the Renaissance, see Nancy S. Struever, The Language of History in the Renaissance: Rhetoric and Historical Consciousness in Florentine Humanism (Princeton, 1970), esp. pp. 87-90. See also Eric Cochrane, Historians and Historiography in the Italian Renaissance (Chicago, 1981), p. 493, and Peter Burke, The Renaissance Sense of the Past (New York, 1969), pp. 105-6.

⁹ For a fuller discussion of the intersection of poetics and polemics in the Second Defense, see my "Milton and the Poetics of Defense," in Politics, Poetics, and Hermeneutics in Milton's Prose, ed. David Loewenstein and James Grantham Turner (Cambridge, 1990), ch. 9.

¹⁰ "The Historical Text as Literary Artifact," in Tropics of Discourse, p. 82; see also The Content of the Form: Narrative Discourse and Historical Representation (Baltimore, 1987), pp. 44-45.

¹¹ See George Crantz's address to the reader in the preface to the Hague edition of Milton's tract (1654): "Cave credas hunc Historicum esse. Fabulator est & merus Poeta" (French, ed., Life Records, III [1954], p. 422). See also Alexander More's response: Complete Prose Works, IV, 1109.

¹² By the time Milton writes his Defense of Himself (1655), however, he is considerably less certain whether this drama of polemical warfare, aimed at demolishing the scurrilous career of Alexander More, will conclude heroically or in the foreseeable future: there Milton fears that, while his countrymen have concluded their battles, his own warfare might become "almost endless" (IV, 698); no longer a heroic task, Milton's polemical warfare has now become a terrible "burden" (IV, 700). The Second Defense succeeds brilliantly because it effectively merges personal drama with its epic vision of history; but the Defense of Himself never successfully reconciles the two modes of writing, as Milton's reformist aspirations, expressed in relating "matters great and glorious," are continuously undercut by "darksome" matters (IV, 699) related in a purely abusive, mock-heroic fashion.

¹³ In recent years, Milton had felt challenged his deep attachments to nation, family, and God, having endured, as he puts it in his last Defense, nothing less than "infirm health, distress over two deaths in [his] family, and the complete failure of [his] sight" (IV, 703).

¹⁴ See De Oratore, II.lxxxiv.346. Richard L. Hoffman, "The Rhetorical Structure of Milton's Second Defense," Studia Neophilologica, 43 (1971), 227-45, notes Milton's indebtedness to classical rhetoricians, but tends to flatten out any distinctiveness or originality in Milton's polemic.

¹⁵ Milton used the motto from Corinthians when signing autograph albums in the 1650s: see Parker, I, pp. 389, 479, and French, ed., Life Records, III (1954), pp. 104-5; IV (1956), pp. 118-19.

¹⁶ For suggestive comments on personal and public crises in Milton's career, see Frank Kermode, "Milton's Crises," The Listener, December 19, 1968, pp. 829-31; see also Annabel Patterson, "The Civic Hero in Milton's Prose," Milton Studies, 8 (1975), 90-92.

¹⁷ On emplotment, see Hayden White, Metahistory: The Historical Imagination in Nineteenth-Century Europe (Baltimore, 1973), pp. 7-11.

¹⁸ For Milton's admiration of Sallust, his favorite classical historian, see the letter to Henry de Brass, dated July 15, 1657 (VII, 500-1), as well as the subsequent one dated December 16. For passages in The War of Catiline which describe Cato in terms that resemble Milton's Cromwell, see LIII.2-6 and LIV.5-6.

¹⁹ Livy had called Marcus Furius Camillus "parens patriae" after his triumph over the Gauls (Book v.xlix.7). See also S. Carrington, The History of the Life and Death of His Most Serene Highness, Oliver, Late Lord Protector (London, 1659), p. 262, for a panegyrical comparison of Cromwell's virtues with those of the first Roman founders.

²⁰ Cornelius Burges, Two Sermons (1645), cited in J. Sears McGee, The Godly Man in Stuart England: Anglicans, Puritans, and the Two Tables, 1620-1670 (New Haven, 1976), p. 29.

²¹ Cf. Austin Woolrych, "Milton and Cromwell: 'A Short But Scandalous Night of Interruption'?" in Achievements of the Left Hand: Essays on the Prose of John Milton, ed. Michael Lieb and John T. Shawcross (Amherst, 1974), p. 192, who finds Milton's portrait in the Second Defense more uniformly impersonal and distant; see also Ruth Nevo's remarks in The Dial of Virtue: A Study of Poems on Affairs of State in the Seventeenth Century (Princeton, 1963), pp. 88-92.

²² "An Horatian Ode upon Cromwel's Return from Ireland," in Margoliouth, I, lines 29-30.

²³ See Michael Walzer, The Revolution of the Saints: A Study in the Origins of Radical Politics (Cambridge, Mass., 1965), pp. 277-99, on notions of warfare in Puritan radicalism.

²⁴The Writings and Speeches of Oliver Cromwell, ed. Wilbur C. Abbott (Cambridge, Mass., 1945), III, p. 579. On Cromwell's millenarianism, see Austin Woolrych, Commonwealth to Protectorate (Oxford, 1982), pp. 12-17, 74-78, 147-50; on Beard's influence on Cromwell, see Robert S. Paul, The Lord Protector: Religion and Politics in the Life of Oliver Cromwell (London, 1955), pp. 24-32.

²⁵ See Milton's sonnet, "To the Lord General Cromwell," line 6.

²⁶ Abbott, III, p. 63. On Puritan activism, cf. Christopher Hill, God's Englishman: Oliver Cromwell and the English Revolution (1970; rpt. Harmondsworth, 1972), pp. 214, 217-19.

²⁷ "An Horatian Ode," line 77, and The First Anniversary of the Government under His Highness the Lord Protector, line 247, the latter poem written at the end of the same year in which Milton published his Second Defense.

²⁸God's Plot and Man's Stories: Studies in the Fictional Imagination from Milton to Fielding (Chicago, 1985), p. 19.

²⁹ For discussion of Milton's political realism in relation to the new social order represented by the Cromwellian Protectorate, see my "Milton and the Poetics of Defense."

³⁰ Paul Ricoeur has commented well on the way the "game of telling" in historical writing is "included in the reality told": see Hermeneutics and the Human Sciences: Essays on Language, Action and Interpretation, ed. and trans. John B. Thompson (Cambridge, 1981), pp. 288, 293-94.

³¹ For remarks on the "textuality of history," see Louis Montrose, "Renaissance Literary Studies and the Subject of History," English Literary Renaissance, 16 (1986), 5-12.

³² Milton probably began writing the History between 1645 and 1647, and presumably worked on it after writing the Defenses; he may have continued to revise the work until its publication in 1670. See French Fogle's discussion of the dating in the introduction to his edition: v, pp. xxxvii-xliii.

³³ On the importance of historical truth in Milton's age and writings, see Earl Miner, "Milton and the Histories," in Politics of Discourse: The Literature and History of Seventeenth-Century England, ed. Kevin Sharpe and Steven N. Zwicker (Berkeley, 1987), pp. 183-85, 193-95, 198-203.

³⁴ Most treatments of the History tend not to address imaginative problems of Milton's historiography, the focus of my discussion in this section. Some valuable studies of Milton's work include: Sir Charles Firth, "Milton as an Historian," in Essays Historical and Literary (Oxford, 1938), pp. 61-102; French R. Fogle, "Milton as Historian," in Fogle and H. R. Trevor-Roper, Milton and Clarendon (Los Angeles, 1965), pp. 1-20; Joseph Allen Bryant, Jr., "The Evolution of Milton's Conception of History" (Ph.D. diss., Yale Univ., 1948); Sergio Bertelli, Ribelli, libertini e ortodossi nella storiografia barocca (Florence, 1973), pp. 264-67. In an important recent study of the relation between history and ideology, "The Ideological Context of John Milton's History of Britain" (Ph.D. diss., Cambridge Univ., 1983), Martin Dzelzainis argues for the heterodox and radical nature of Milton's work, especially in its avoidance of the doctrine of the ancient constitution.

³⁵ Cf. An Apology where Milton describes how he loved the "matter" of "grave Orators & Historians" (I, 889).

³⁶ Cf. Prolusion VII where Milton suggests that the poet's knowledge must include history, rhetoric, and philosophy, as well as the sciences. In a letter addressed to Charles Diodati in 1637, Milton describes his reading in Greek and Italian history just after speaking of his poetic ambitions ("my Pegasus still raises himself on very tender wings"): see I, 327-28. For the integration of history and the poetic in Milton's early writings, see also the references to Clio in Elegy IV (line 31), Ad Patrem (line 14), and Mansus (line 24), as well as Epitaphium Damonis (lines 161-78) and Mansus (lines 80-84), where he expresses his plans to sing of legendary British history.

³⁷ Friedrich Nietzsche, The Use and Abuse of History, trans. Adrian Collins (Indianapolis, 1957), p. 41.

³⁸ Cf. Milton's preface to A Brief History of Moscovia, where he complains about writers of geography who embellish their accounts, especially those who "tell long Stories of absurd Superstitions, Ceremonies, quaint Habits, and other petty Circumstances little to the purpose" (VIII, 474). This work was compiled before 1652, though Milton added the preface in the early 1670s.

³⁹ Polybius, The Histories, II.56.10-12; Lucian, "How to Write History," sec. 63. See also Joseph Allen Bryant, Jr., "Milton and the Art of History: A Study of Two Influences on A Brief History of Moscovia," Philological Quarterly, 29 (1950), 15-30, who overstates the case for Milton's indebtedness to Polybius's view that the historian should relate only facts.

⁴⁰ Bodin, Method for the Easy Comprehension of History, trans. Beatrice Reynolds (New York, 1945), p. 51 (cf. p. 45); Blundeville, The True Order and Methode of Wryting and Reading Hystories (1574), ed. H. G. Dick, The Huntington Library Quarterly, 3 (1940), 164; Bolton, Hypercritica, or A Rule of Judgment for the Writing or Reading our Histories (1618?), in Critical Essays of the Seventeenth Century, ed. J. E. Spingarn (Oxford, 1908), I, p. 107; Camden, Annales: The True and Royall History of the famous Empresse Elizabeth (London, 1625), "The Author to the Reader." See also André Du Chesne, one of the French historians Milton cites in his Commonplace Book (I, 399, 483): 'Mes narrations sont par tout sans parade, mon style sans artifice, sans embellissement ou pompe de langage" (Histoire D'Angleterre, D'Escosse, et D'Irlande [Paris, 1634], "Dessein de l'Histoire"). Another French historian Milton frequently cited in the Commonplace Book, Jacques Auguste de Thou (or Thuanus), likewise stresses the naked and unadorned quality of his own historical writing, a style he characterizes as free from rhetorical coloring and ostentation: "denique genus scribendi consectatus sum nudum ac simplex, ut vel stilo ipso me sicuti ab omni fuco & ostentatone" (Historiarum sui Temporis [Paris, 1606], sig. a2^v. Cf. John Clapham, The Historie of England (London, 1602), sigs. A3^r, A4^r, B^r; William Winstanley, Englands Worthies (London, 1660), sigs. a4^v, a6^r.

⁴¹Anglia Rediviva; Englands Recovery (London, 1647), sig. *B4^r; cf. Hobbes, Leviathan, ed. C. B. Macpherson (1968; rpt. Harmondsworth, 1981): in a good history, "Fancy has no place, but onely in adorning the stile" (p. 136).

⁴² On the rhetoric of antirhetoric in historical discourse, see Hayden White, "Rhetoric and History," in Theories of History (Los Angeles, 1978), p. 16.

⁴³ Edward Hyde, First Earl of Clarendon, Selections from Clarendon, ed. G. Huehns (Oxford, 1978), p. 5; Respublica Anglicana (the work is attributed to George Wither), p. 2. Cf. Thomas May, The History of the Parliament of England (London, 1647): concerned that he not dress "Truth in … improper Vestments" (sig. A3^r), May does not begin his "Story from times of any great distance" (sig. B2^V) but from the age of Elizabeth; however, we should recall that in Marvell's "Tom May's Death," the shade of Ben Jonson dismisses May as "'Malignant Poet and Historian both'" (line 42). Marvell condemns the self-serving May precisely because he has not remained impartial or above faction—unlike the poet of "An Horatian Ode."

⁴⁴ See the preface to his Historical Collections (London, 1659), I, sig. b3^v. On impartiality in the histories of the mid-seventeenth century, see Royce Macgillivray, Restoration Historians and the English Civil War (The Hague, 1974), pp. 7-8.

⁴⁵ For discussion of this phenomenon, see F. Smith Fussner, The Historical Revolution: English Historical Writing and Thought, 1580-1640 (London, 1962), esp. pp. 32-35, 102, 189, 263, 306, 315; C. A. Patrides, The Grand Design of God: The Literary Form of the Christian View of History (London, 1972), pp. 102-8; D. R. Woolf, "Erudition and the Idea of History in Renaissance England," Renaissance Quarterly, 40 (1987), 11-48; Barbara Shapiro, Probability and Certainty in Seventeenth-Century England: A Study of the Relationships Between Natural Science, Religion, History, Law, and Literature (Princeton, 1983), pp. 119-62. Martine Watson Brownley, Clarendon and the Rhetoric of Historical Form (Philadelphia, 1985), pp. 2-17, stresses the narrowing of historical writing as historians of the age separated it from literary art.

⁴⁶ See e.g. Milton's criticisms of monkish chroniclers in Church-Government (I, 812) and similarly skeptical remarks about medieval historiographers in the History: V, 67, 127, 162-63, 230, 234. On the mixture of history and invention in medieval historiography, see Joseph M. Levine, Humanism and History: Origins of Modern English Historiography (Ithaca, 1987), ch. I.

⁴⁷ Indeed one of the early editors of Milton's work, John Hughes, suggested in his prefatory remarks the interconnection between the History and Milton's poetic achievements: "Mr. Milton's History, as well as his Poetical works, proves this; where, in his Thoughts and Language, he appears with the Majestick Air of old Greece or Rome" (A Complete History of England [London, 1706], I, n. pag.); Milton's work appears in I, pp. 1-82.

⁴⁸ George Hakewill, An Apologie or Declaration of the Power and Providence of God in the Government of the World, 2nd. ed. (London, 1630), p. 9; cf. John Selden, The Reverse or Back-Face of the English Janus, trans. R. Westcot (London, 1682), pp. 8-10. See also Patrides, The Grand Design of God, pp. 105-6. The fact that Milton does recount the myth of Brutus suggests that he is more divided over his commitment to truth-telling in historiography than Patrides's comments indicate: see p. 108.

⁴⁹ For another telling example, see Caractacus's invented speech which Milton takes from Tacitus (Annals Xll.xxxvii) and inserts into his own account: here again Milton abandons historical accuracy, which he often claims to adhere to, for dramatic effect; see Fogle's remarks, V, pp. 71-72, n. 25.

⁵⁰ On history as a refuge from devouring time, see Herschel Baker, The Race of Time: Three Lectures on Renaissance Historiography (Toronto, 1967), p. 52; see also Ricardo J. Quinones, The Renaissance Discovery of Time (Cambridge, Mass., 1972).

⁵¹ Cf. the fourth chapter of Moscovia, the historical section of Milton's geographical treatise, which traces the often turbulent and violent course of Russian dynastic history from the year 573 to 1613 (VIII, 511-23).

⁵² "What more worth is it," Milton reflects a few pages later, "then to Chronicle the Wars of Kites, or Crows, flocking and fighting in the Air?" (V, 249).

⁵³ As Frank E. Manuel points out, the cyclical theory was the major expression of philosophical history in the Renaissance: "Discovery of a pattern of similarities in the chaotic experience of states and empires throughout all time became a prime concern of both political theory and philosophical history." See Shapes of Philosophical History (Stanford, 1965), p. 49; but his whole chapter, "Ixion's Wheel: The Renaissance Ponders the Vicissitudes," pp. 46-49, is relevant here. See also Burke, The Renaissance Sense of the Past, pp. 87-89.

⁵⁴ In his preface to the Digression, Fogle suggests its date falls between December 1647 and April 1648, and probably towards the end of that period (see V, 426-35); he believes it represents "a momentary response to a depressing moment in English history" (V, 425), and that its gloomy spirit is inconsistent with Milton's "more settled views of England and her role in history" in the 1640s (V, 435). Stressing its tone of defeat, Austin Woolrych has recently argued for a date around 1660: see "The Date of the Digression in Milton's History of Britain," in For Veronica Wedgwood These: Studies in Seventeenth-Century History, ed. Richard Ollard and Pamela Tudor-Craig (London, 1986), pp. 217-46. Achsah Guibbory suggests that Milton worked on the Digression "later than 1648 and that, consequently, it also reflects the disillusion of his later years" (The Map of Time: Seventeenth-Century English Literature and Ideas of Pattern in History [Urbana, 1986], p. 210, n. 40). My point is that the question of dating cannot be firmly settled simply by noting parallel moments of disillusionment in Milton's other writings.

⁵⁵ V, 425.

⁵⁶ One of course thinks of Ralegh's ambitious, fragmented History of the World (1614). On the overreaching ambition of Renaissance writers who planned enormous works they never completed, see William Kerrigan, "The Articulation of the Ego in the English Renaissance," in The Literary Freud: Mechanisms of Defense and the Poetic Will, ed. Joseph H. Smith (New Haven, 1980), pp. 275-76.

⁵⁷ The History could be seen, along with the Defenses, as the displacement and fragmentation (rather than the fulfillment) of Milton's ambitious aim to compose a national epic; for a contrary view, see Lawrence Sasek, "Milton's Patriotic Epic," Huntington Library Quarterly, 20 (1956), 1-14. Cf. Thomas N. Corns, The Development of Milton's Prose Style (Oxford, 1982), who notes (though without examining the History) that in his later prose Milton "appears to recognize the relative powerlessness of the creative writer to influence events through the application of his art" (p. 103).

⁵⁸The Machiavellian Moment: Florentine Political Thought and the Atlantic Republican Tradition (Princeton, 1975), p. 346; Pocock is qualifying Walzer's argument in The Revolution of the Saints.

⁵⁹ Cf. Milton's letter to Henry Oldenburg (July 6, 1654): "Idle liesure" ("iners otium"), he writes, had never pleased him though his duties as Commonwealth polemicist have "snatched [him] unwilling from studies far different and altogether more delightful" (IV, 866; CE XII, 64). Still, Milton considers his polemical activities far from inconsequential.

⁶⁰ See the discussions by Austin Woolrych (VII, 204-14) and Robert W. Ayers (VII, 396-401) for particulars; for a study of Milton's two editions, see Stanley Stewart, "Milton Revises The Readie and Easie Way, " Milton Studies, 20 (1984), 205-24. His discussion of the way Milton moves, in revising his tract, from political or topical particulars to metaphorical concerns complements my emphasis on Milton's imaginative response to history.

⁶¹ Yet as Barbara K. Lewalski has argued, Milton is no Utopian in his late tracts; rather he proves himself an able and realistic polemicist: see "Milton: Political Beliefs and Polemical Methods, 1659-60," PMLA, 74 (1959), 191-202. But see the satirical contemporary critique of Milton's visionary politics in The Censure of the Rota Upon Mr Miltons Book, Entituled, The Ready and Easie Way to Establish A Free Common-Wealth (1660), pp. 6-7, 13, in William Riley Parker, Milton's Contemporary Reputation (Columbus, 1940).

⁶² On Milton's differences with Harrington, see Arthur E. Barker, Milton and the Puritan Dilemma, 1641-1660 (Toronto, 1942), pp. 266-68, and Stewart, pp. 206-8.

⁶³ On Fortune as symbolic of irrationality in history, see Pocock, The Machiavellian Moment, pp. 47-48.

⁶⁴ On the drama of history in Jeremiah, see James Muilenberg, "The Faith of Ancient Israel," in The Vitality of the Christian Tradition, ed. George F. Thomas (New York, 1944), p. 10, and Tom F. Driver, The Sense of History in Greek and Shakespearean Drama (New York, 1960), p. 51.

A Note on the Texts

In quoting from Milton's prose, I have generally used the Complete Prose Works of John Milton, gen. ed. Don M. Wolfe, 8 vols. (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1953-82). Where I quote from Milton's Latin prose, I refer to the Columbia edition of The Works of John Milton, gen. ed. Frank Allen Patterson, 18 vols. (New York: Columbia University Press, 1931-38), abbreviated parenthetically as CE. All citations of Milton's poetry are from John Milton: Complete Poetry and Major Prose, ed. Merritt Y. Hughes (Indianapolis, 1957). Biblical citations are from the Authorized (King James) Version.

In quotations from older texts, I have modernized i's, j's, u's, and v's, but left the spelling and punctuation unchanged.