SOURCE: Bennett, Joan S. “Satan and King Charles: Milton's Royal Portraits.” In Reviving Liberty: Radical Christian Humanism in Milton's Great Poems, pp. 33-58. Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 1989.

[In this essay, Bennett contends that although Paradise Lost is not a true political allegory, a comparison between Milton's prose works on English history and his characterization of Satan reveals a strong connection between the tyranny of Charles I and the false freedom of the fallen angels.]

Milton's conception in Paradise Lost of the fall of Lucifer has always been recognized as political in nature. Because of the poet's twenty years' service to the English revolutionary cause, his readers have sought to understand what relation Milton saw between human and demonic revolution and rule. Romantic attempts to link his God with Charles I as monarchs and Satan with Cromwell and Milton as revolutionaries¹ are widely considered to have been mistaken, although Christopher Kendrick's recent effort to “read the epic Satan as the symbolic expression or fulfillment of Milton's revolutionary desire,” his “political libido,” assumes an “undoubtedly” established “analogy between God's monarchy and the [Stuart] absolutist monarchy.”² Merritt Hughes and Stevie Davies have pointed out the many allusions in the poem that associate Satan, not with revolutionaries, but with the notorious tyrannical rulers of human history.³ Hughes was wary of comparing King Charles with Satan because of the danger of turning Paradise Lost into a roman à clef. Although Paradise Lost is not a political allegory, Charles was the tyrant with whose ways Milton was most familiar, whose actions and motivations he had devoted crucial years to depicting and analyzing.

It is important to realize the extent to which the King Charles of the prose pamphlets was Milton's own literary creation. The tract in which Milton began Charles's character development in a sustained way is Eikonoklastes.⁴ It was his answer to the royalist Eikon Basilike, a publication appearing shortly after Charles's execution that attempted to picture him as a Christlike martyr-king. Concerned with counteracting the great popular impact of the Eikon, Milton recognized that what moved the people in the royalist work was not any power of logical argument or historical accuracy but a fictional character with an emotional rhetorical appeal. He suggests this when he pauses at one point in Eikonoklastes to respond to the Eikon's style: “The Simily wherwith he begins I was about to have found fault with, as in a garb somwhat more Poetical than for a Statist: but meeting with many straines of like dress in other of his Essaies, and hearing him reported a more diligent reader of Poets, than of Politicians, I begun to think that the whole Book might perhaps be intended a peece of Poetrie. The words are good, the fiction smooth and cleanly” ([Complete Prose Works of John Milton, ed. Don M. Wolfe et al. 8 vols. (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1953-82) hereinafter cited as] CPW 3:406). To answer the Eikon's interpretation of the king's role in the civil war, Milton drew his own character study of the king, based on this historical plot—not as a Christian martyr, but as a tyrant and usurper of divine authority. This task required that, unlike Eikon Alethine, the other well-known parliamentary answer to the King's Book,⁵ Milton's reply regard Charles as the Eikon's real author and that, unlike the parliamentary historians from whom he drew his factual information, he assign full responsibility for all the royalist actions to the king himself.

George W. Whiting notices the different stress in the treatments by Milton and the parliamentary historian Thomas May of responsibility for the events of the war. Typical are the contrasting discussions of the royalist plot to free the Earl of Strafford, condemned by Parliament for treason, from the Tower of London and then to invade England with a French and Irish army. Whereas May's History goes at length into the roles of all the conspirators, Milton's treats the plot as the king's. The king, he says, was “soon after found to have the chief hand in a most detested conspiracy against the Parlament and Kingdom … that his intention was to rescue the Earle of Strafford, by seizing on the Towre of London.” Compare May's description, which begins in the passive voice—“For to prevent the Earle of Straffords death, an escape for him out of the Tower was contrived. To further which … a great conspiracy was entred into by many Gentlemen of ranke and quality”—and which goes at length into all the conspirators' roles, saying of the king only that he was “privy to this conspiracy,” not that he directed it. May was writing a general history; Milton was exposing a central character.⁶ Thus, Milton explains in his Preface, “what is properly his own guilt, not imputed any more to his evil Counsellors, (a Ceremony us'd longer by the Parlament then he himself desir'd) shall be laid heer without circumlocutions at his own dore” (CPW 3:341).

Eikonoklastes, Milton's “Idol-breaker,” is a study of the true nature of a character already, in Milton's view, fictionalized, either by the king himself or by a royalist author, for the purpose of carrying on a real tyranny in life. But to tackle the problem in this way was to write another fiction; not, to be sure, to tell a lie—the “plot” in each account was literally true—but to reveal the leading character's nature in a depth that could be known only by his creator. Because Milton's treatment of Charles as a fictional character originates in the confines of pamphlet debates that require answering one's opponent point by point, it occurs in pieces as a sketch containing some direct dramatization and considerable abstract analysis. Though the character study is not sustainedly worked out, it achieves moments of depth, very valuable as answers to what was for Milton, if not for all of his political colleagues, a question at the core of the controversies: Who is a tyrant? What motivates him? confuses him? perverts him? strengthens him? gives him his power over others? Developed in Eikonoklastes, the sketch that answers these questions is extended in Milton's Defences of the English People, and these prose works provide an illuminating gloss on the role of Satan and of tyranny in Milton's poem.

The fundamental similarity between Charles and Satan can be understood by analyzing their claims to divine right to power. Whereas seventeenth-century royalists argued that the English king was a representative of God's power, Milton argued that the man Charles was, like Satan, a usurper of that power. The comparison occurs, for example, when Milton criticizes Charles's violations of religious liberty: “He [King Charles] calls the conscience Gods sovrantie, why then doth he contest with God about that supreme title? … usurping over spiritual things, as Lucifer beyond his sphere” (Eikonoklastes, CPW 3:501-02). Though Charles had not possessed the full strength of Satan, he had been, in Milton's view, a servant of the archrebel. When a state is governed tyrannically, “those in authority are both human and fiendish. … Thus, the fiend is termed prince of this world; and in Revelation 13 the Dragon gave the beast his own dominion and throne and mighty power” (A Defence, CPW 4, pt. 1:384). Although the beast was not equal to the Dragon in magnitude or complexity, the imitator shared traits with his model; and a tyrant like Charles was an imitator and servant of the devil. Accordingly, we should not be surprised to find parallels between Milton's prose treatment of Charles and his poetic portrait of Satan. Just as Milton turned the literal devil into a literary character, so also did he subject the historical king to the power of his artist's imagination. An understanding of the parallels between the tyrants of prose and poetry can sharpen our perception of the appropriateness of certain details in the poem—in imagery and in characterization—and it can further illuminate Milton's thematic conception of true political liberty in the archetypal revolutions that the poem dramatizes.

In his portraits of Satan and Charles, Milton uses imagery to reveal and comment on aspects of their characters. One such image, possessing complex and powerful associations for the character of a ruler, is the sun. The sun has a specific and controversial symbolism in seventeenth-century political writing. Believers in the divine right of kings argued by analogy from the chain of being that, as one God rules absolutely over heaven, one father over a family, and one sun over the planets, so one king should rule absolutely over England. Milton, however, explaining that the royalists were employing a false analogy, argued from the same chain of being, but by a more complex logic: The right to exercise power belongs to those whom nature has given power to exercise. God, since he created and sustains the universe, naturally has power over it; the sun by its nature imparts life-giving influence on the earth and so naturally controls her fertility; nature has given a father power to beget sons. But no one man can create or has been created as essential to the life of all other men; and a king does not have the power to create his subjects. In fact, just the opposite occurs. The people, by virtue of the power of self-government in creatures made rational in God's image, together create a governor whose power is lent him as custodian of the law, not inherent in his person or absolute, a governor who is the people's servant and natural inferior—natural according to the true operation of the chain of being.

When the king claimed divine right, he was, in Milton's view, claiming absurdly to break the chain of being itself, to act as only one with divine perfection could, to think himself God. Thus, when the Eikon Basilike had Charles compare his royal prerogative to the sun's light, Milton drew the analogy out ad absurdum to point out the overwhelming egotism of the man whose reasoning about his prerogative could be led so far astray by his desire for power. If Charles were, as the Eikon claimed, the sun and father and if Parliament his co-ruler, were the earth receiving his influence, then this mixture of metaphors would have to be reconciled with Parliament's genuine role as the king's mother, since the people, whom she represents, out of their own inherent power of self-government create the king: “And if it hath bin anciently interpreted the presaging signe of a future Tyrant, but to dream of copulation with his Mother, what can it be less than actual Tyranny to affirme waking, that the Parlament, which is his Mother, can neither conceive or bring forth any autoritative Act without his Masculine coition: Nay that his reason is as Celestial and life-giving to the Parlament, as the Suns influence is to the Earth: What other notions but these, or such like, could swell up Caligula to think himself a God” (CPW 3:467).

In response to the king's attempted use of the royalist sun symbol to claim that there will follow for the people “much horror and bad influence after his [own] eclipse,” Milton assigns the sun a different meaning, one that removes from Charles's character a false symbolic prop and that judges him: “He speakes his wishes: But they who by weighing prudently things past, foresee things to come, the best Divination, may hope rather all good success and happiness by removing that darkness which the mistie cloud of his prerogative made between us and a peacefull Reformation, which is our true Sun light, and not he, though he would be tak'n for our sun it self” (CPW 3:455). And when the Eikon's Charles envisions his future glory, foreseeing “much honour and reputation that like the Sun shall rise and recover it self to such a Splendour,” Milton insists that “those black vailes of his own misdeeds” will “keep his face from shining” (CPW 3:502).

Holding in mind Milton's prose use of the sun's political significance to reveal the tyrannical character of Charles, his mania for power, and his warped analogical reasoning, we may turn to book 1 of Paradise Lost, where the fallen Satan is described as an eclipsed sun in a simile that refers us to the fate of earthly rulers. Satan stands before his troops, “As when the Sun … from behind the Moon / In dim Eclipse disastrous twilight sheds / On half the Nations, and with fear of change / Perplexes Monarchs” (594-99). Charles II's censor, presumably reading the poem with the royalist king/sun symbolism in mind, is said to have taken these lines as a threat to the new king, veiled in the traditional interpretation of an eclipse by monarchs who think of themselves as ruling on earth as the sun rules the heavens. However, the political references to the sun that Milton provides in the poem actually develop a concept of government's relation to the chain of being that is more literal and logical than the simple correspondence assumed by seventeenth-century royalists and by Milton's Charles and his Satan. In book 2, lines 488-95, Satan is again compared to the sun, this time the setting sun, which gives temporary, but “false presumptuous hope” (521). In book 3, after Satan has confirmed his intention never to submit to the rule of God, Milton abandons the traditional analogy and describes him as a spot or blemish on the surface of the literal sun (588-90). Thus, in the first three books, Milton leads us away from a false analogy between the physical power of the sun and the governing power of a rational creature. A false ruler, he implies, can be compared (like the Charles of Eikonoklastes) to a sun that fails to shine with the light given it. But a true ruler is genuinely comparable to the shining sun only if he does not claim absolute power (the claim of “prerogative” is what darkens the sun)—just as the literal sun has no absolute power over earth apart from its physical light. The ruler's “light,” like the sun's, comes from God, whose vehicle he is; and the light originates not in the personal character of the ruler but in God's law and spirit (in “a peacefull Reformation”). Once we are aware of the use Milton made of the controversial sun symbolism in his prose sketch of Charles, we can recognize an invitation from the poet for us to compare the fallen Satan's and the unfallen Adam's addresses to the sun in books 4 and 5.

As Lucifer in heaven, while he kept God's law, Satan had shone as the brightest star, crowned with “surpassing Glory.” When he defied divine law, which his personal abilities were created to execute, and claimed a right to “sole Dominion,” Satan removed the ground for a genuine sun/ruler analogy and substituted instead Charles's royalist basis for comparison, in which the ruler is like a god. In his confession of despair at the beginning of book 4, Satan cannot remove the royalist analogy from his tortured mind, even when he is forced by his defeat to recognize that he himself can no longer stand as the object of even this comparison:

O thou that with surpassing Glory crown'd,
Look'st from thy sole Dominion like the God
Of this new World; at whose sight all the Stars
Hide thir diminisht heads …
                                                                                … I hate thy beams
That bring to my remembrance from what state
I fell. …

(32-39)

By contrast, instead of attributing absolute power to the sun in its realm, “like the God” in his, and then claiming an analogous power for his human rule over earth, Adam's right reasoning about his own role as God's creature leads him to recognize the sun for what it literally is: the creation of a divine ruler, the vehicle for light created and given by God, who, as source of all, is the only holder of “sole Dominion”:

Thou Sun, of this great World both Eye and Soul,
Acknowledge him thy Greater, sound his praise
In thy eternal course, both when thou climb'st,
And when high Noon hast gain'd, and when thou fall'st.
                                                                                          … resound
His praise, who out of Darkness call'd up Light.

(5.171-79)

In this passage Adam's words “Acknowledge him thy Greater … when thou climb'st” as well as “when thou fall'st” may be read as the poem's actual political admonition, based on a true analogy between the sun and a human ruler. It is a comparison that fundamentally undermines, as the censor feared, the Stuart claim to rule by denying the validity of the doctrine of the divine right of kings.

Turning from metaphor to characterization, we may inquire what Milton saw in the makeup of a ruler that leads the ruler to claim the right to absolute power. In the portraits of both Charles and Satan, we may discover behind the false idea of a governor a corrupted idea of heroism. The power gotten by such a hero, who seeks personal glory rather than service to God, is employed, once it has been gained, in a wrong sort of rule over others. Four prose passages in which Milton exposes the false heroism of King Charles serve as commentary on this issue in Paradise Lost, where Satan's false heroism, rightly understood, is, like Charles's, criminality. What gives the appearance of courage is really a “hardened heart”; it is the despair resulting from a total commitment to ambition, from a perversion of God-given strength to self-service. Although deeds of great daring are undertaken, ambition and then despair, never courage, overcome the fear attending risk. The resulting appearance of heroism, however, can easily deceive an unwary judge of character, as in book 1 of Paradise Lost.

There, recognizing that Satan after his fall from heaven is in a state of spiritual death (see Milton's definition in the Christian Doctrine, CPW 4:393-98, of the first two degrees of death), we can sharpen our awareness of Satan's spiritual state by comparing his rousing of his troops, often admired by readers of Paradise Lost, with the following discussion of Charles's behavior, also admired, at his trial and execution. For both Satan and Charles, when they faced judgment and death at the hands of their enemies, a true courage should result in confession and repentance. What Milton portrays in each, however, is a false courage which results in the donning of a self-righteous dramatic mask. Milton interprets the psychology of the king's fake courage in this passage from A Defence: “Do not pay too much heed to that presence of mind so often manifested by the commonest criminals at their death; frequently desperation or a hardened heart gives, like a mask, an appearance of courage, as dullness does of peace. In death as in life, even the worst of men wish to seem good, fearless, innocent, or even holy, and, in the very hour of execution for their crimes, they will, for the last time, display as showily as possible their fraudulent pretence, and, like the most tasteless of writers or actors, strive madly for applause as the curtain falls” (CPW 4, pt. 1:508).⁷

Like this disguised desperation at judgment, such criminals' heroic mask in battle has been projected not by a true courage ready for self-sacrifice but by ambition's deluded hopes for personal glory. With this distinction between the appearance and the reality in mind, recall the “acts of oblivion” of God in the war in heaven by which feats of war performed by the rebel angels were not recorded; then consider the explanation that such acts were done “to give the World an example, that glorious deeds don to ambitious ends, find reward answerable, not to their outward seeming, but to thir inward ambition.” The latter judgment refers actually to the case of the Hothams (father and son), who, under great risk, betrayed the parliamentary cause to the king and were caught and executed by Parliament for treason (Eikonoklastes, CPW 3:429-30). But it applies readily to the ambitious angels; and in fact the issue comes full circle as the poem, speaking of Satan's bravery, refers us back to the world of men:

                              for neither do the Spirits damn'd
Lose all thir virtue; lest bad men should boast
Their specious deeds on earth, which glory excites,
Or close ambition varnisht o'er with zeal.

(2.482-85)

The sin-based courage that supplies the strength for the aspiring tyrant's “specious deeds” in battle has a counterpart in his behavior in defeat. The coin of false heroism that has on the one side the indomitable warrior has on its other side the equally dangerous power-seeking image of the great sufferer. “The mind and spirit remains / Invincible” (1.139-40) was Beelzebub's response to Satan's vaunt “What though the field be lost? / All is not lost: the unconquerable Will, / And study of revenge, immortal hate, / And courage never to submit or yield” (1.105-08). The same had been boasted by the English royalists of their leader: “he had a soule invincible.” Milton retorted: “But he had a soule invincible. What praise is that? The stomach of a Child is ofttimes invincible to all correction. The unteachable man hath a soule to all reason and good advice invincible; and he who is intractable, he whom nothing can perswade, may boast himself invincible; whenas in some things to be overcome is more honest and laudable then to conquer” (Eikonoklastes, CPW 3:434). Charles was, according to Milton's portrait, the “unteachable man” and Satan the unteachable angel (see Paradise Lost 2.9). And when the king's defenders resorted to the other side of their hero's image to claim tragic stature for him, saying, “A glorious King he would be, though by his sufferings” (Eikonoklastes, CPW 3:435), Milton offered a counterinterpretation of Charles's sufferings, which applies equally to Satan, who claims his right to rule by his willingness to endure the “Greatest share / Of endless pain” (2.29-30) and who must win “the high repute” “through hazard huge” (2.472-73). The genuine glory of a tragic sacrifice, Milton argued against such claims, “can never be put to him whose sufferings are his own doings” (Eikonoklastes, CPW 3:435).

The point becomes even clearer when we see how each tyrant tries to use his own suffering, the very punishment for his crimes, as proof not only of greatness but of innocence. When Charles disclaimed guilt for the devastation wrought by the Irish rebellion “because he hath the greatest share of loss and dishonour by what is committed,” Milton treated that fact as an irony of the plot. Far from proving Charles's innocence, it proved only this about the nature of evil—that it cannot stop, though it knows it will suffer: “Who is there that offends God or his Neighbour, on whom the greatest share of loss and dishonour lights not in the end? But in the act of doing evil, men use not to consider the event of thir evil doing: or if they doe, have then no power to curb the sway of thir own wickedness. So that the greatest share of loss and dishonour to happ'n upon themselves, is no argument that they were not guilty” (Eikonoklastes, CPW 3:478). The same evaluation of the criminal's suffering underlies Gabriel's answer to Satan at the end of book 4, when the fallen angel, flaunting his suffering in an effort to belittle the “inexperience” of the loyal host, claims by having hazarded all, through ways of danger, to have been “a faithful leader”:

O sacred name of faithfulness profan'd!
Faithful to whom? to thy rebellious crew?
Army of Fiends, fit body to fit head;
Was this your discipline and faith ingag'd,
Your military obedience, to dissolve
Allegiance to th' acknowledg'd Power supreme?

(4.951-56)

For a historical case parallel to Charles's, Milton chose that, which he and other revolutionaries often repeated, of Pharaoh, who for the purported welfare of his people persecuted the Israelites, but in the end incurred for his people and himself the greatest suffering (Eikonoklastes, CPW 3:516). In the language of Scripture, Milton explained the psychology of sin: “But whom God hard'ns, them also he blinds.” That Satan, like Charles, calls down on himself his own suffering is implied by the simile in book 1 describing the fallen legions scattered on the burning lake, like sedge

Afloat, when with fierce Winds Orion arm'd
Hath vext the Red-Sea Coast, whose waves o'erthrew
Busiris and his Memphian Chivalry,
While with perfidious hatred they pursu'd
The Sojourners of Goshen, who beheld
From the safe shore thir floating Carcasses
And broken Chariot Wheels; so thick bestrown
Abject and lost lay these.

(1.305-12)

Seen with the eyes of truth, Satan and the fallen angels are abject and lost; but, guided by perfidious hatred of that truth, they seek in hell and the newly created world the mastery they could not gain in heaven.

The false core of both Milton's tyrants' seeming bravery in battle and defeat reveals itself also in the covert means each will use in his quest for power. This is the method of treachery and appears, like false valor in battle, disguised in a heroic mask as a kind of nobility designed to retain the loyalty and submission of the tyrant's followers. Satan and Charles move in their plan of attack “from violence to craft.” Satan, after his martial defeat in heaven, has Beelzebub propose the “easier enterprise” of corrupting the “puny habitants” of earth. Charles praised his own action in seeking negotiations after battle as “retiring from bestial force to human reason.” But Milton insisted, in interpreting the king's act and self-defense, that “men may Treat like Beasts as well as fight” and that false negotiating “hath no more commendation in it then from fighting to come to undermining, from violence to craft, and when they can no longer does as Lions, to doe as Foxes” (Eikonoklastes, CPW 3:520-21). Milton created a symbol from the imagery of the historical setting as he went on to point out, after Charles had promised for treaty's sake not to advance farther, “taking the advantage of a thick Mist, which fell that evening, weather that soon invited him to a designe no less treacherous and obscure; he follows at the heels of those Messengers of Peace with a traine of covert Warr” (Eikonoklastes, CPW 3:522). “That perfidious mist” (528), which in Milton's prose invited Charles to a scheme no less treacherous and obscure than its own physical nature, has the same appropriateness in its use for Satan's entry into the Garden of Eden. In book 9 we see him appear from the underground river “involv'd in rising Mist” (75) and watch him search for the serpent “through each Thicket Dank or Dry, / Like a black mist low creeping” (179-80). Mist in the poem is a symbolic and literal cover for hypocrisy, as Satan tries to hide from the guardian angels:

                                                            Of these the vigilance
I dread, and to elude, thus wrapt in mist
Of midnight vapor glide obscure.

(157-59)

Perhaps he, like Charles, “thought that mist could hide him from the eye of Heav'n as well as of Man” (Eikonoklastes, CPW 4:528).

Milton has the two tyrants further reveal the baseness and intensity of their real motive for seeking power as they willingly degrade themselves in order to defend their purported glory. Of Charles's abortive and humiliating attempt to surprise and arrest five members of the House of Commons, Milton explains, “it discover'd in him an excessive eagerness to be aveng'd on them that cross'd him; and that to have his will, he stood not to doe things never so much below him” (Eikonoklastes, CPW 3:379). Satan understands this aspect of his own psychology when he acknowledges the baseness of his attack on Adam and Eve: “But what will not Ambition and Revenge / Descend to?” (9.168-69).

Of very great importance to both of Milton's character portraits is the conclusion, in which the false core of all the bravery and eloquence of each of his subjects is revealed unequivocally to his audience as being not only terrible but laughable. In a concerted effort to counteract the martyr image of Charles projected by the Eikon, Milton urged that it could hardly “be thought upon (though how sad a thing) without som kind of laughter … that he who had trampl'd over us so stately and so tragically should leave the world at last so ridiculously in his exit, as to bequeath among his Deifying friends that stood about him such a pretious peece of mockery to be publisht by them, as must needs cover both his and their heads with shame and confusion” (Eikonoklastes, CPW 3:364). This is a reference to the plagiarized “Pamela prayer” of Eikon Basilike and reveals why Milton wanted to make such an issue of it.⁸ Evil in a character must eventually expose itself to ridicule, so that we finally see it for what it is and distance ourselves from its influence. But does not this passage sound like a paraphrase of the passage in book 10 of Paradise Lost where Satan returns victorious from a fallen Eden to his “Deifying friends” in hell? There the fallen angels gather with a great hunger for words of glory and fulfillment and are offered instead “Fruitage fair to sight, like that which grew / Near that bituminous Lake where Sodom flam'd” (561-62). The fruit replaces Satan's words, now hisses (“shame / Cast on themselves from thir own mouths” [546-47]), with their material equivalent: fruit beautiful in form, but rotten in substance. So too Milton describes Charles's fair-sounding words as resembling the apples of Sodom: “These pious flourishes and colours examin'd thoroughly, are like the Apples of Asphaltis, appearing goodly to the sudden eye, but look well upon them, or at least but touch them, and they turne into Cinders” (Eikonoklastes, CPW 3:552).⁹

Such resemblances in metaphor and characterization between Milton's portrayal of Charles and his portrayal of Satan suggest that the two characters' beliefs about the governing power they seek should be compared. What does Milton reveal to be the philosophical fault underlying this image of the invincible, suffering hero? “To be weak is miserable / Doing or Suffering,” Satan asserts; and the strength of the hero, “doing or suffering,” is what both sides of the false heroic image offer for admiration, even though, as Milton argues in his own voice, “in some things to be overcome is more honest and laudable then to conquer.” The rebel angels' strength-worship is pointed out by Christ when, entering the battle in heaven, he tells the loyal angels that though they have proved their moral virtue in battle, the Father has assigned the rebels' doom to him:

That they may have thir wish, to try with mee
In Battle which the stronger proves, they all,
Or I alone against them, since by strength
They measure all, of other excellence
Not emulous, nor care who them excels.

(6.818-22)

With this reference to an unnatural separation of “strength” from “other excelience” we are at what Milton reveals to be the heart of both rebellions against the power of God.

Milton held the divine right argument to be false not only when it compared rulers' natural rights to govern but also when it compared the way an absolute monarch may govern with the way God governs—which is not absolutely, by arbitrary will, but justly, by subjecting both himself and the governed to law. The royalists urged philosophical acceptance of a paradox whereby all men are created in God's image and yet one man with absolute power is set by God over the others as a king whose service, like God's, is “perfect freedom.”¹⁰ Milton believed, however, that such a “paradox” was simple injustice, impossible to believe of the Christian God, and was in fact to be resolved as follows: The mistake in the royalists' belief in the king's absolute power lay in assuming God's omnipotence to be his primary attribute, to which his justice must be mysteriously reconciled. Milton claimed, on the contrary, that God's primary attribute is goodness, which demands that all other attributes, including strength, be reconciled to it. Arguments from “divine” right in support of human tyranny, he said, revealed no Christian faith at their base, but a “barbarism” which worships “as gods malevolent demons whom they cannot exorcise” (Second Defence, CPW, 4, pt. 1:551). Such demonic powers would be fearful, but they would not be worthy of either obedience or emulation; and the superstitious acceptance by Charles's followers of God as such a deity is what enables them to make an idol in this world—as a third of heaven did once—of a being that seems to share the prized attribute of power. If people worship a God because of his omnipotence, they have no defense against human tyranny. If they worship God because of his justice, however, they have no excuse for accepting human tyranny.

In Paradise Lost we witness the original of this mistaken faith in sheer, undefined strength, first tested in Satan's fatal effort “to set himself in Glory above his Peers.” The false premises of Satan's strength-worship have misled critics of the poem in two ways. On the one hand, it has been said in attempted defense of Satan's morality that Milton showed him to have been right in attempting revolution because, until the war in heaven, God had unfairly kept his power hid: “till then as one secure / Sat on his Throne … but still his strength conceal'd, / Which tempted our attempt” (1.638-42). Others, reasoning that Satan must have known of God's omnipotence even without having seen it, have found Satan's original motivation to revolt implausible.

Although it is true that God had never, before Satan's revolt, revealed to the angels his power to destroy, it is not true that the angels had no evidence of God's greatest power, that which distinguishes him from any human or angelic ruler, the power to create. Satan himself, the angels, and heaven are all evidence of creation; and the rebels are trying to defend their moral as well as their military position when, during the course of their rebellion, they claim that they are “self-begot” (5.860) and that they will reascend “self-rais'd” (1.634) to heaven. Because they do not, however, feel the creative force within them, they find themselves positing an external, more powerful force at work, some “fatal course” (5.861), “Chance,” “Fate,” or even “Space” or the “Pit.”¹¹ But while the true creator is “stronger” than Satan, the point is not the sheer greatness, which he does not employ against the rebels, but the different quality of his strength. When Christ enters the war in heaven, there is no battle to provide a test of physical strength. The Creator, the source of their own strength and being, simply appears before the rebel angels, who “astonisht all resistance lost, / All courage; down thir idle weapons dropp'd” (6.838-39). A vision of divinity “wither'd all thir strength, / And of thir wonted vigor left them drain'd, / Exhausted, spiritless, afflicted, fall'n” (6.850-52). Though later in the poem, older in their spiritual decline, the angels slip back into admitting God as their creator, the hardness of their hearts blinds them more than before to the significance of that reality.¹² It would be impossible for them to admit that they were at war with the one above them in the chain of being and still remain in revolt; they must cling to the belief that their difference from their adversary is merely one of strength, that to be “weak,” not wrong, is miserable.

Since rightness, justice, is the essence of God's ordering power manifested in creation, only a betrayal of the laws of creation, a denial of the natural order, can justify revolution in heaven or on earth. It would follow that, if the governor of heaven were not the creator, were an impostor tyrant, or if the creator himself had abrogated his natural right to rule by abusing the law of creation, then, indeed, Satan should, like Milton, have fought whether he had the strength to win or not. A rational being should not worship a demon, however powerful. But if, on the contrary, Satan rebels against the creator out of jealousy and ambition, then the psychological truth for Milton is that he would rebel regardless of God's power; for “in the act of doing evil, men [or angels] use not to consider the event of thir evil doing: or if they doe, have then no power to curb the sway of thir own wickedness.” He would find a way to justify his rebellion.

Though it is not until book 5 that we are given Satan's arguments for rebellion as they were first presented, we may discern his original and continuing motivation in his self-justification after the Fall in book 1. “To bow and sue for grace / With suppliant knee, and deify his power / … that were low indeed.” These words might have come on the eve of the Stuart restoration from Milton himself, who would not deify anyone's sheer power. However, when we include the omitted phrase that modifies “his power”—“Who from the terror of this Arm so late / Doubted his Empire” (1.111-14)—Satan's intent is seen to be exactly opposite to Milton's. Satan's question is, “Whose power shall we deify, that of his arm or mine?” Its presupposition is, “The greatest strength merits worship.” On Satan's advice, the fallen angels accept their residence in hell by reasoning from the premise that strength can determine the use to which morality is put, that might makes right: “since he / Who now is Sovran can dispose and bid / What shall be right” (1.245-47).

This is the argument for the divine right of kings: that a king or tyrant, whoever currently holds power over a people, whether just or unjust according to any heretofore accepted national or natural law, can rightly by virtue of his strength control his subjects' behavior. This royalist belief presupposes such a God as Satan here describes. While the ambition of both Satan and Charles, in Milton's view, leads them to presuppose the same idea of God's nature, Satan, unlike Charles, openly rebels against that God. But that is a small difference. Charles, in Milton's depiction, holds that if God rules thus in his absolute power over all creation, he, being great in power, can rule thus over England. Satan holds first that if God can rule heaven thus, he, if he gathers enough strength, can rule heaven thus. This belief changes only in scope after the war in heaven. Satan holds that if God can rule heaven thus, he, being only slightly weaker than God and yet stronger than his followers and humans, can rule hell and the new world thus—can break the chain of being and hold divided empire.

What matter where, if I be still the same,
And what I should be, all but less than hee
Whom Thunder hath made greater? Here at least
We shall be free.

(1.256-59)

That Satan's rebellion against fundamental law entails the corruption and extinction of true liberty in himself and his followers has been recognized by many critics of Paradise Lost. There remains, however, a lively movement among contemporary critics for contrary readings; and the basis for such readings can be traced to a mistaken impression of Milton's own historical role as a revolutionary. A study of the relation between law and liberty, which Milton argued in his prose works and to which he gave dramatic focus in his accounts of Charles and Satan and their followers, not only corrects misleading historical assumptions but also sharpens our awareness of the political dynamics of the poem, among the fallen angels and within the mind of Satan. The meaning of freedom embodied in Milton's account of Charles and his followers, particularly in the Defences, directly informs the poet's picture of Satan's career and is there given the dramatic scope that could not be fully worked out within the constraints of the political debate.

When Satan reasons that the fallen angels will finally be “free” in hell simply because “th' Almighty … will not drive us thence” (1.259-60), he is shown to be deceiving himself both about the angels' civil liberties and about the philosophical basis of political liberty in general. For while the rebels' claim to have “endanger'd Heav'n's perpetual King” is literally untrue and they reside in hell at God's sufferance, their more important claim to have sought liberty by putting “to proof his high Supremacy, / Whether upheld by strength, or Chance, or Fate” (1.131-33) is a more fundamental falsehood because it reveals that their revolution was not a valid test of God's supremacy and hence had no justification. A true revolution, like that against Charles I in England, challenges, not the force that upholds the ruling power, but the right. Valid revolution tests whether supremacy is accountable to law, which alone has the power to liberate and which Satan's rebellion defies. Like King Charles, Satan has become fatally confused about the nature of liberty. “As for the Philosophical Libertie which in vaine he talks of,” as Milton said of Charles in Eikonoklastes (CPW 3:501), “we may conclude him very ill train'd up in those free notions, who to civil Libertie was so injurious.”

Milton's analysis of Charles's claim in the Eikon that he had been a defender of the people's liberties is paralleled in his portrayal of Satan's claim that he revolted against God in order to gain freedom for his angel followers, and it shows the relation between civil and philosophical liberty. Evidence in Charles's case had been his calling the Long Parliament. But far from seeking the welfare of the people whom Parliament represented, Milton pointed out, Charles had wanted only to use the people's resources for his own cause; he needed tax money to carry out his war to subjugate Scotland. When civil war began in the wake of Parliament's refusal, it was the English king, Milton claimed, who was in rebellion against Parliament, and not the other way around. The king had found the laws enforced by Parliament in behalf of the people hindrances to his own ambitions (see Eikonoklastes, CPW 3:350-60). So Parliament justly opposed the king as “a rebell to Law, and enemie to the State” (Tenure of Kings and Magistrates, CPW, 3:230; cf. Eikonoklastes, CPW 3:529).

The same is Christ's judgment upon Satan, “Rebel to all Law” (10.83). Satan too at the beginning of his bid for power calls an assembly of the angels who are his subjects under God as England was Charles's subject. At each assembly, historical and poetical, two wrongs are committed by each ruler. The first in each case involves merely a factual lie: Charles argued falsely to Parliament that his Scottish war was the most pressing threat to the nation, and Satan falsely informs the angels that Christ has commanded them to prepare an unjustified tribute. But the second wrong is the attempt by each to use the factual lies to do away entirely with the existing order of things, which is the only legitimate source of all particular laws and which stands in the way of his ambition. The great importance of Charles's coronation oath lay, for Milton, in its protection against this ultimate abuse of liberty. Charles had sworn, as had every English monarch, to “grant those just laws which the people shall choose” (A Defence, CPW, 4, pt. 1:482; cf. Eikonoklastes, CPW 3:530, 592-93). When Parliament's laws on such matters as just taxation did not fulfill his wishes, he tried to reinterpret his oath so that it would fit into his idea of his divine right to rule “above” those laws he did not like. “Which is the greater criminal,” Milton demanded in the face of this abuse, “he who sins against the law or he who attempts to make the law itself his accomplice in crime, and even does away with the law to avoid the appearance of crime?” (A Defence, CPW 4, pt. 1:529). The tyrant, who denies the law, is far worse than the criminal who simply breaks the law.

Satan, like Charles, seeks to do “away with the law to avoid the appearance of crime.” The obvious falsehood in his speech before the assembled hosts is that God intends to “introduce / Law and Edict on us”; but the falsehood that Abdiel identifies as “blasphemous” is contained in the words “on us, who without law / Err not” (5.797-99), which deny that there ever was a law. Before the fall of Lucifer, there had been of course no need for a “positive” law such as church and state had afterward on earth; but the reason that there was none was that all prelapsarian life was a natural enactment of the law of unfallen reason. This is why Milton could define fallen human law as “reason abstracted as much as might be from personal errors” (Tenure of Kings and Magistrates, CPW, 3:200) and why, when Charles tried to claim legal precedents for his “breaking” parliaments, Milton insisted that such trumped up laws could not uphold an indefensible practice: “I hold reason to be the best Arbitrator, and the Law of Law it self” (Eikonoklastes, CPW 3:403). That, he repeated in his Defence, is the “basic precept of our law … by which nothing contrary to the laws of God or to reason can be considered law, any more than a tyrant can be considered a king, or a servant of the Devil a servant of God” (CPW, 4, pt. 1:492).

The tyrant's goal is to replace government by national law with government by arbitrary power, and, unlike the ordinary criminal, the tyrant seeks not obscurity, which could hide his crime, but fame. A successful tyrant must therefore, Milton knew, be a master of rhetoric; for rhetoric is the tool he can employ against the reason of the law to disguise his crime. When Charles wrote in the Eikon Basilike of “the rationall soverantie of his soule, and liberty of his will,” Milton warned the people against such rhetoric, “Which words, of themselves, as farr as they are sense, good and Philosophical, yet in the mouth of him who to engross this common libertie to himself, would tred down all other men into the condition of Slaves and beasts, they quite loose their commendation” (Eikonoklastes, CPW 3:412). Furthermore, there is often in such language the appearance rather than the substance of right reason, as when the king “insists upon the old Plea of his Conscience, honour and Reason; using the plausibility of large and indefinite words, to defend himself at such a distance as may hinder the eye of common judgment from all distinct view & examination of his reasoning” (Eikonoklastes, CPW 3:456-57).

Like the angels Abdiel and Gabriel, a reader of Paradise Lost should approach the rhetoric of Satan with “all distinct view and examination of his reasoning.” We should examine Satan's reasoning about what he offers the angels in place of law as the basis for their freedom: “those Imperial Titles which assert / Our being ordain'd to govern, not to serve” (5.801-02). We must demand, like Gabriel: “ordain'd by whom? to govern whom? serve whom?” But the answers are implicit in the questions once they are raised: ordain'd by the law of their creator, God, to govern by the law themselves and their fellow angels, to serve God and fellow angels by the same law. Obedience to the law of right reason is the condition for holding the titles that God decreed.

When we see the angels accept Satan's irrational argument that “Titles,” rather than laws, assert their right to govern, we are witnessing the first and archetypal instance of the necessary separation, by law, of power from the persons who hold it. That “Majesty is inseparable from the person,”¹³ that a “title” asserts not an office but a being, was at the heart of the royalist argument for divine right. It was the position held by Charles in the Eikon where, in refusing to obey the laws of Parliament, he argues that he will not “part with … his honour as a King.” Milton exposes the conflict between Charles's rhetorical use of a royal title and his actual abuse of a royal oath to uphold the law, explaining that “when a King setts himself … against the … residence of all his Regal power, he then, in the single person of a Man, fights against his own Majesty and Kingship, and then indeed sets the first hand to his own deposing” (Eikonoklastes, CPW 3:524-25). Likewise, the “residence” of all the rebel angels' “Regal power” is in the law of God, which they have denied.

Satan's argument for the angels' right from title and against law resulted, as did the historical argument for the divine right of kings, in a vast false analogy between the government of heaven and that of a fallen world. Satan's rival kingdom in hell, which parodies God's kingdom, is the archetypal acting out of the royalists' false analogy. We meet the parody again in book 12 as the tyranny of Nimrod “from Heav'n claiming second Sovranty” (35), or divine right.

Though a tyrant will try to look like a true king, Milton said in answer to Salmasius, we must distinguish the person from his title; for “a tyrant, like a king upon the stage, is but a ghost or mask of a king, and not a true king” (A Defence, CPW 4, pt. 1:310). The glory of the true King, Christ, as he appears before the angels, is an external manifestation of the spiritual essence of the Father, who is too radiant for angels' eyes to behold; the purpose of the Son's “great Vice-gerent Reign” (5.609) is to make the unapproachable radiance of divinity more accessible to finite creatures: “in him all his Father shone / Substantially express'd” (3.139-40). But Satan, not content with the glory that is rightfully his under the vice-gerency of Christ, turns true glory into mockery. His royal seat in heaven, whose splendor had of itself been sufficient to stand for the greatness of his rule, Satan tries to make hold greater significance than his reality can sustain. The result is to turn a great seat of power into a hollow stage property, “in imitation of that Mount whereon / Messiah was declar'd in sight of Heav'n” (5.764-65). Though the fallen Satan continues to maintain himself as king of hell in “God-like imitated State” (2.511), the essence of his ability to rule is gone, and the title of “king” is empty. When he abandoned the law to seek power, he gave up forever his ability to preserve his own liberty or that of his subjects. Like Charles, he set himself “against the … residence of all his Regal power” and fought “against his own Majesty and Kingship.”

Having led his followers to defeat in the war in heaven, Satan retains his tyranny over them by means of his rhetorically effective, but false, reasoning about liberty. Even though he has assumed absolute dictatorship over them in hell, he convinces his subject angels that they will find their liberty in turn as possessors of human subjects on earth:

Thrones, Dominations, Princedoms, Virtues, Powers,
For in possession such, not only of right,
I call ye and declare ye now …
                                                            … Now possess,
As Lords, a spacious World, to our native Heaven
Little inferior, by my adventure hard
With peril great achiev'd.

(10.460-69)

Humankind, as Satan has his followers view them, are the spoils of a dynastic war; they are the objects won and ruled. Of course when rational beings are changed from subjects to objects of government, to “possessions,” then they have become slaves. As the idea of a people's slavery is not an unacceptable means to Satan for achieving his own “right,” so it was also taught in Milton's day as part of the doctrine of divine right to be acceptable, if the enslavement was to one high enough. Thus it was Salmasius' argument against a people's right to revolt that a people had sold themselves to their king as men used to sell themselves as slaves (A Defence, CPW 4, pt. 1:461). Their “freedom” consisted in the king's freedom to exercise his will for them, just as all men's freedom ultimately consisted in their submission to God's will. Milton's answer to Salmasius was that even God does not remove his subjects' ability to will their own actions and obedience, that their freedom consists in their ability to obey or disobey his law.

Milton's answer went further than the assertion that liberty is impossible to one enslaved: the devils' belief, like Salmasius', in the liberty of the enslaver is also a delusion. As Milton admonished even Cromwell, “it has so been arranged by nature that he who attacks the liberty of others is himself the first of all to lose his own liberty and learns that he is the first of all to become a slave” (Second Defence, CPW 4, pt. 1:673).

That the fallen angels will retain no liberty—neither true liberty based in law nor false liberty based in power—in the exercise of their titular “rights” can be predicted from the illogic of the political argument Satan offers urging rebellion and from the argument he uses to retain his power over them once fallen. The first, as is his later temptation of Eve, is based on a self-contradictory argument for proportion. The angels are, he says,

                              not equal all, yet free,
Equally free; for Orders and Degrees
Jar not with liberty, but well consist.

(5.791-93)

For orders and degrees to consist well with liberty, however, they must receive their definition in relation to a freedom-giving, absolute source of power; and what the angels' titles measure is the degree of their likeness to God. But, because Satan wants to retain his position of command, he urges the angels to believe that there can be a chain of being that will not fall though it hang from nothing. The basis for his argument is the same lie that denies the Creator.

True proportion forms the basis of the judgment of Satan by Abdiel, the only angel originally under Satan's command to revolt against the incipient tyranny of the archangel, the true Miltonic revolutionary, prototype for “the people [who] with God's approval judge their guilty rulers” (A Defence, CPW 4, pt. 1:359). His argument is from the chain of being, the foremost law of both God and Nature:

                                        This is servitude,
To serve th' unwise, or him who hath rebell'd
Against his worthier, as thine now serve thee,
Thyself not free, but to thyself enthrall'd.

(6.178-81)

The angels who capitulate to Satan's argument, on the other hand, are Milton's poetical archetypes of that effeminacy of a people that he feared and finally came to witness in England: “Unless you expel avarice, ambition, and luxury from your minds … you will find at home and within that tyrant who, you believed, was to be sought abroad and in the field—now even more stubborn. In fact, many tyrants, impossible to endure, will from day to day hatch out from your very vitals” (Second Defence, CPW, 4, pt. 1:680-81). Nisroch is his example in the war in heaven. He finds newly experienced pain “hard / For Gods” who follow Satan's ambition for freedom to enjoy their divine rights. Pain, once Nisroch discovers it, becomes “the worst / Of evils”—worse even than the tyranny that Satan had convinced him was held by God (6:451-68).

Book 6 reveals a less attractive view of the fallen angels, which is withheld from readers of the poem until well after the powerful opening books have had their effect. However, the description even in books 1 and 2, if we read them as critically as a militant Gabriel would, “argues no Leader, but a Liar trac't / Satan.” Gabriel's argument had been that once Satan had broken his loyalty to God, he had simultaneously broken faith with his subjects; and that they, by allowing themselves to be used in the rebellion, became nothing more than an “Army of Fiends.” And, indeed, the emotions the rebel angels show toward one another involve not respect but, on the one side, pride and, on the other, fear.

The first reaction of the angels to their commander after their fall is a fear that elicits unquestioning obedience. When Satan summoned them from the burning lake,

They heard, and were abasht, and up they sprung
Upon the wing; as when men wont to watch
On duty, sleeping found by whom they dread,
Rouse and bestir themselves ere well awake.

(1.331-34)

They are a defeated army. That they have been led not to victory but to great suffering should raise doubt in their minds about the tenability of their original cause for following Satan in rebellion. Satan had argued that God's apparent power would not prove superior to their own and that it merited challenging. This promise has proved false. At this point the remainder of Satan's earlier arguments for revolution, lodged in the memories of the angels he led to war, should reasonably be turned against him. “Who,” he had challenged, “can in reason then or right assume / Monarchy over such as live by right / His equals, if in power and splendor less, / In freedom equal?” (5.794-97). Though Satan's challenge to Christ's monarchical power could not apply to the rule of unfallen heaven, its message is very true in a fallen context where the only difference between the fallen angels is in “power and splendor.” In book 11 in fact, after the fall of man, the archangel Michael repeats the essence of Satan's egalitarian statement to Adam. Echoing Raphael's hint in book 5 that God might gradually have raised humans, “found obedient,” to a higher state, he explains the postlapsarian impossibility of a “patriarchal” government by divine right:

                                                                      Eden … had been
Perhaps thy Capital Seat, from whence had spread
All generations, and had hither come
From all ends of th' Earth, to celebrate
And reverence thee thir great Progenitor.
But this preeminence thou hast lost, brought down
To dwell on even ground now with thy Sons.

(11.341-47)

That preeminence was lost by Satan in his fall as well. Yet now, as the fallen angels are led into another audience before Satan, they have not the freedom of mind to conquer their mental and emotional torment—“anguish and doubt and fear”—by facing its cause. Instead they succumb to the effects of the Dorian war music offered them, which

                                                                      instead of rage
Deliberate valor breath'd, firm and unmov'd
With dread of death to flight or foul retreat,
Not wanting power to mitigate and swage
With solemn touches, troubl'd thoughts, and chase
Anguish and doubt and fear and sorrow and pain
From mortal or immortal minds.

(1.553-59)

We may read the following description of the assembled hosts from two points of view—that of the tyrant Satan and that of the revolutionary Milton. We look at Satan's face:

                                                  cruel his eye, but cast
Signs of remorse and passion to behold
The fellows of his crime, the followers rather
(Far other once beheld in bliss) condemn'd
For ever now to have thir lot in pain,
Millions of Spirits for his fault amerc't
Of Heav'n, and from Eternal Splendors flung
For his revolt, yet faithful how they stood,
Thir Glory wither'd.

(1.604-23; emphasis added)

The tone in these lines is, from Satan's point of view, a kind of gratification; from Milton's point of view, it is that scorn in which servility deserves to be held. The angels' governor has led them, “followers,” into “crime,” for which they now suffer terrible punishment as his fellows. They are now truly “his Peers” (1.618), his equals. If they had been deceived by his arguments for liberty before the Fall, they can be so no longer. Now, in order to prove themselves worthy of any chance for liberty that might remain to them, they must rise in revolution against the leader who has betrayed them: “The people … do with God's approval judge their guilty rulers”—“yet faithful how they stood.”

The very nature of the appeal to the angels of Satan's speech in which he lays claim to the throne of hell reveals their servility. He gives a factual account of their condition; those facts clearly betray the wrong of their position and his falseness to them; and yet they passively accept Satan and his claim. When he persuaded the angels to rebel, Satan had convinced them that they had been living “without Law”; now he says truthfully that “Mee … just right and the fixt Laws of Heav'n / Did first create your Leader” (2.18-19). A subject whose will and reason retained any spark of freedom would have to realize that laws that are right and fixed would now have to banish the individual from the office he betrayed. But they do not question his argument. “Next,” Satan reminds them, they followed him out of their own “free choice.” This again is true; and this again, after what they have witnessed of his false “merit” “in council or in flight,” is the point at which their mistaken consent should be withdrawn. Yet now Satan is right when he announces that they have again “yielded with full consent” to his leadership. We have been watching the process of their final yielding: how “troubled thoughts” were mitigated and swaged into “fixed thought,” how “for his fault” “yet faithful … they stood.” Their consent was fully, but not freely, given; they were already slaves of their own fear and cowardice. Satan assures their continued loyalty by reminding them of what has made them cowards:

                                                                      but who here
Will envy whom the highest place exposes
Foremost to stand against the Thunderer's aim
Your bulwark, and condemns to greatest share
Of Endless pain?

(2.26-30)

Now, at the last moment in which a moral decision might be possible, Satan takes care to remove forever the chance of a moral “Faction” by removing the concept of morality. Nisroch's discovery in war that pain was for him the “greatest evil” is solidified into demonic policy. “Good” means not righteousness but pleasure; “evil” is not lawlessness but pain:

                                        where there is then no good
For which to strive, no strife can grow up there
From Faction; for none sure will claim in Hell
Precedence, none, whose portion is so small
Of present pain, that with ambitious mind
Will covet more.

(2.30-35)

In this speech Satan removes at one stroke the possibility for moral or immoral revolution among the angels in hell.

The officers whose advice is allegedly sought are no less slaves than the masses. They are finally manipulated by Satan and his spokesman Beelzebub to agree to Satan's plan, but first, by their own counsel, they reveal their 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. Salmasius' “bravely spirited,” who, like Moloch, “burned with such a flame of indignation that they could scarce control themselves,” Milton had labeled “madmen” whose threats are easily “put to flight with that true courage which is master of itself.” Among Salmasius' second type Milton had included Salmasius himself: “little women of the court … or some others yet more effeminate” attempting, like Belial, “to draw the strength from manly hearts” (A Defence, CPW, 4, pt. 1:312-13).

Satan in his role in the council displays the tyrant's full awareness of his subjects' servile character. His suspicion that some one of his followers might fake an offer to explore the way to the new world, thus “winning cheap the high repute / Which he through hazard huge must earn” (2.472-73), has a parallel in Milton's explanation of the behavior of the lesser tyrant Charles, who, when accused of fomenting the Irish rebellion, had tried to defend his integrity by stressing that “he offer'd to goe himself in person upon that expedition [against the rebels].” The fact was, Milton pointed out, that Charles knew his offer would not be accepted: “But [he] mentions not that by his underdealing … he had brought the Parlament into so just a diffidence of him, as that they dust not leave the Public Armes to his disposal, much less an army to his conduct” (Eikonoklastes, CPW 3:480-81).

Although Charles was a lesser tyrant than Satan, he shared, in Milton's portrait, that fundamental element of tyranny which is self-enslavement. “Every bad man is a tyrant,” Milton said, explaining Charles's position, “each in his own degree.” And “to the degree that he is the greatest of all tyrants, to that same degree is he the meanest of all and most a slave.” This is because the evil man in public power is a slave not only to his own ambition and despair but to his followers' as well: “Other men willingly serve only their own vices; he is forced, even against his will, to be a slave, not only to his own crimes, but also to the most grievous crimes of his servants and attendants, and he must yield a certain share of his despotism to all his most abandoned followers. Tyrants then are the meanest of slaves; they are slaves even to their own slaves” (Second Defence, CPW, 4, pt. 1:562-63). This message is embodied in the confrontation in book 2 between Satan and his allegorical offspring Death, who belies the tyrant's claim to control hell, “where,” as Death rightly claims, “I reign King, and to enrage thee more, / Thy King and Lord” (2.698-99). The “execrable shape” must be called “my fair son” and promised food so that its power will bend to Satan's goal.

The poet then dramatizes the same message in Satan's journey to the new world. As Milton had shown Charles giving his followers bishoprics and lands so that to keep their rewards they “knew it thir best cours to have dependence onely upon him” (Eikonoklastes, CPW 3:511), so he shows Satan forced to seek in Eden “a spacious World” for his followers to “possess / As Lords” (10.460-67) so that their titles can believably stand for something. But in order for Satan to get possession and for Charles to keep bishoprics, innocent people had to suffer. With Charles this suffering had come in the form of religious persecution: “Thus when both Interests of Tyrannie and Episcopacie were incorprat into each other, the King [was] … fatally driv'n on” to “extirpating” innocent protestants (Eikonoklastes, CPW 3:511).

Though he did not live to see the effects of his intended extirpation of his religious enemies, Charles took the occasion in Eikon Basilike to imagine their suffering and claim that he “cannot but observe this … yet with sorrow and pitty” (Eikonoklastes, CPW 3:567). Satan too at first feels himself to be “loath to this revenge / On you who wrong me not” and to “melt” “at your harmless innocence” (4.386-89). He finds, however, that beyond his own wish for vengeance, his “dread of shame / Among the Spirits beneath” (4.82-83) drives him fatally on. And he lulls to impotence his last spark of genuine freedom of conscience, revealed by his revulsion from his own intended action, with the Dorian war music of his own rhetoric:

                                                            yet public reason just,
Honor and Empire with revenge enlarg'd,
By conquering this new World, compels me now
To do what else though damn'd I should abhor.

(4.389-92)

Satan and Charles, in Milton's two portraits of the tyrant, enslave their followers and themselves in a “mistie cloud” of rhetoric that substitutes “prerogative” for the sunlight of God's law, the only basis for a portrait of genuine royalty. In his version of the story of King Charles, a drama not of Christian martyrdom but of tyrannous rebellion, Milton's left hand worked out, though in fragmentary form, fundamental elements of the character, action, underlying philosophy and influence of this minor tyrant, elements that find full dramatization in his right hand's portrait of Satan's epic struggle for power.

Notes

1. For full statements of such an attempt, see S. B. Liljegren, Studies in Milton (1918; rpt. New York: Haskell House, 1969) and [Paul Phelps] Morand, De Comus à Satan [Paris: Didier 1939] and [The Effects of this Political Life Upon John Milton (Paris: Didier 1939)].

2. [Christopher] Kendrick, Milton [: A Study in Ideology and Form (London: Methuen, 1986)], pp. 151, 93.

3. Merritt Y. Hughes, “Satan and the ‘Myth’ of the Tyrant,” in Essays in English Literature from the Renaissance to the Victorian Age Presented to A. S. P. Woodhouse, ed. Millar MacLure and F. W. Watt (Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 1964), pp. 125-48. Stevie Davies, Images of Kingship in Paradise Lost: Milton's Politics and Christian Liberty (Columbia: University of Missouri Press, 1983), pp. 3-88. See also [Michael] Wilding, Dragons Teeth [Oxford, 1987], pp. 226-31.

4. Hughes considered Eikonoklastes as a source for Milton's Satan, but concluded: “The experience of writing Eikonoklastes could contribute but little to the creation of Milton's Satanic eikon basilike” (“Milton's Eikon Basilike,” in Calm of Mind: Tercentenary Essays on Paradise Regained and Samson Agonistes in Honor of John S. Diekhoff, ed. Joseph A. Wittreich, Jr. [Cleveland: Case Western Reserve University Press, 1971], p. 1). Although it is not necessary to argue that Milton turned back to Eikonoklastes or the Defences as a literal source for his Satan, it is important to realize that the political experience and vision informing the prose and the poetry are the same.

5. The anonymous author of Eikon Alethine (London, 1649) sought to discredit Eikon Basilike by calling it a forgery. He claimed that his purpose, besides vindicating the parliamentary cause, was to protect the memory of the king from the charge of damnable hypocrisy that he would deserve if the book were really his: “it is not infamy to say a man hath erred, obstinacy therein onely brands him: It is not I then that reproach the late king by enumerating some of his late errors; but he [the forger of Eikon Basilike] that makes the late king justifie himselfe in them, adding impenitency and obstinacy to make them Heresies and Crimes” (Folger Library copy, pp. 1-2).

6. George W. Whiting, Milton's Literary Milieu (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 1939), pp. 336-37. Also revealing of Milton's purpose is a comparison of Eikon Alethine's view of this issue with Eikonoklastes'. The Eikon Basilike portrays Charles as repenting that he had, under pressure from Parliament, agreed to Strafford's execution. The Eikon Alethine solves (albeit unconvincingly) the contradiction between the king's attitude at Strafford's trial and that in the book by claiming that although Charles had been sincere in condemning the guilty Strafford, thus performing a righteous act, the “forger” of the Eikon was villainously laying “innocent blood” on the king's head by saying that the king had thought Strafford innocent (p. 11). Milton, on the contrary, accepts both attitudes as the king's and views the contradiction as revealing of his character and dilemma as a tyrant: “No marvel then, if being as deeply criminous as the Earle himself, it stung his conscience to adjudge to death those misdeeds whereof himself had bin the chiefe Author. … That mind must needs be irrecoverably deprav'd, which either by chance or importunity tasting but once of one just deed, spatters at it, and abhorrs the relish ever after” ([Complete Prose Works ed. Don M. Wolfe et al. (Yale, 1953-82)] 3:372-74).

7. Herman Rapaport thinks that this passage in the Defence reveals a “death squad” mentality in Milton, in which “mercy plays no role.” In this passage, he says, “someone is about to be killed and this someone cries out for mercy” (Milton and the Postmodern [Lincoln: University of Nebraska Press, 1983], p. 177). Rapaport thus aligns himself with Salmasius' view of the king's trial and execution (a view that, according to Milton, carried “the cunning drift of a factious and defeated Party” intending “not so much the defense of [the king's] former actions, as the promoting of their own future designs” [CPW 3:338]). Actually, Charles did not either “plead for his life” (Salmasius [quoted in CPW 4, pt. 1:508]) or “cry out for mercy” (Rapaport). What Milton seeks to counter for readers of the Defence is a possible false interpretation of the fact that the king failed to ask for mercy, to repent, or to engage in any way with his accusers. Such immovability, Milton says, does not require courage when its real source is despair; “the commonest criminals,” having rationalized their crimes, will reiterate that rationalization to the end. Do not be surprised by the “presence of mind” displayed in the final recitation of this rationalization, but analyze what is being said for it displays the absence of mind and moral will, the presence of “a hardened heart.” Milton advises Salmasius to reconsider his interpretation of Charles's self-defense: “If you care to read his whole defence accurately rendered into French, you may change your mind” (p. 508). It would be helpful if Rapaport's attempt to link Milton to “a thanatopraxie of the state” were more responsive to the accounts we have of Charles's trial and execution, as in David Masson, The Life of John Milton (1896; Gloucester, Mass.: Peter Smith, 1965), III, 692-729.

8. For a discussion of the “Pamela prayer” controversy, see Merritt Hughes's chapter on the “Date, Occasion, and Method of Eikonoklastes” in CPW 3:150-61.

9. Cf. Eikon Alethine's urging the people to distrust the rhetoric of the king's book: “Bee not cheated out of your innocency by this subtill Serpent with an Apple of Sodom, which at the touch of truth will fall to ashes” (“The Epistle to the Reader: To the Seduced people of England”).

10. Modeling his statement about the king after the Prayer Book invocation of a God “whose service is perfect freedom,” Robert Filmer had claimed, by means of what Milton considered a false analogy: “The greatest liberty in the world (if it be duly considered) is for a people to live under a monarch” (Patriarcha, ed. T. P. R. Laslett, [Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1949], p. 55). King Charles's version of this claim is reprinted in Masson 3:725.

11. “Space [instead of God] may produce new Worlds” (1.650); “this infernal Pit [instead of God] shall never hold / Celestial Spirits” (1.657-58).

12. Satan speculates on the creation of human beings: “Whether such virtue spent of old now fail'd / More Angels to Create, if they at least / Are his Created” (9.145-47).

13. Salmasius, Defensio Regia, quoted in CPW 4, pt. 1:310, n. 23. Cf. Milton's peroration to Of Reformation in which those damned in hell, “in the anguish of their torture … have no other ease then to exercise a Raving and Bestial Tyranny over” those most recently cast into hell “as their slaves” (CPW 1:617).