Illegitimate monarchy and legally-sanctioned king-killing in Milton’s Tenure of Kings and Magistrates and Eikonoklastes

In Stuart England, there was no clear-cut legal precedent for deposing monarchs who abused their power. Little legitimate ground existed for disobeying kingly will. The spiritual consecration of kings, and incontestability of leadership, remained largely viable according to widely-accepted political theory advocated by absolutists. At the same time, the possibility of removing tyrannical leaders, as well as other subcategories of necessary martial strife, was in the process of acquiring precedence in political writings and modernizing the study of international law to such a degree that it served to entirely transform the discipline. Issues of rightful leadership fell increasingly under the rubric of legal inquiry. The transitional state of jus in bello during the seventeenth century – the absence of specifically juridical example which served to sanction the recourse to king-killing – heralds the occasion for Milton’s impassioned endorsement of resistance and right of rebellion in The Tenure of Kings and Magistrates and Eikonoklastes. In his examination of the relationship between sovereignty and the law, the poet advocates the possibility of resistance against a king who does not benefit the individuals over whom he rules, whose monarchical leadership attempts to surpass the legal limits of appropriation in its usurpation of selves and reason. “[L]ook how great a good and happiness a just king is, so great a mischeife is a Tyrant; as he the public father of his Countrie, so this the common enemie,” ¹ Milton observes. Driven by his selfish interests, such a king reigns for himself and his own agenda. He fails to acknowledge that he “holds his autoritie of the people, both originaly and naturally for their good in the first place, and not his own” (3: 206, italics mine). Throughout the ages, the poet seeks to demonstrate in The Tenure of Kings, Greeks and Romans, Jews and Christians alike responded to criminally-behaved sovereigns by putting them to death (3: 212–16).

In this article, I seek to explore how Milton’s pro-regicidal tracts support an evolutionary notion of kingship, and in doing so strive to shift the balance from a concept of monarchical rule in which the differentiation between adequate versus criminal leadership is largely inconsequential to one in which the quality of sovereign leadership matters. The language with which Milton radically re-envisions the relationship between power and the law is supported by leading organizing principles of the newly-evolving field of international law during the 1600s which accentuated the perpetuation of a societal organization consonant with the powers of human rationality, as well as man’s ability to comprehend that society’s well-being was contingent upon adherence to certain rules. His paradigm for rightful rulership is predicated on his optimism that battle kept within reasonable juridical limits could be used as a necessary tool for implementing political and social reform.

Most specifically, I wish to demonstrate, Milton’s adherence to the natural law-based theories of the Dutch scholar Hugo Grotius, popularly known as the father and founder of international law, is essential to understanding the poet’s representation of the relationship between monarchical rule and the law in The Tenure of Kings and Magistrates and Eikonoklastes. As a leading proponent of just/unjust martial theory during the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries, the Dutch scholar perceived lawful recourse to battle as an instrument of rational, civilized men, essential to protecting mortal society. Developing his notion of the state of nature from Aristotelian and Stoic models, Grotius maintained that individuals are motivated by the understanding that society functions in harmony with human nature. He sought to confirm that this position of sociability serves as the foundation of all law – natural law, deriving from God, and civil law, arising from man-made legislation – which originates from society. Seeking to prove that the separation between the law of nature and its materialization into positive law could remain exceedingly narrow, he demonstrated that humanly-derived law could elucidate the laws of nature – that legal positivism could promote a more genuine or “natural” natural law – more naturally progressing in association with mortal experience. In this way, the Dutch scholar concluded that ideal standards of justice could be integrated into the man-made laws by which individuals lived their lives.

The poet’s well-known encounter with Grotius occurred during his journey to Paris in 1638–9. Milton “ardently desired” (Second Defense, 4: 615) this meeting, as the Dutch scholar’s sociability theories were generating more and more notice in England at that time. Throughout this peaceful decade prior to the English Civil War, British interest in Grotius was swiftly augmenting. The Dutch scholar’s ideas were prioritized during the 1630s by a group of English poets and intellectuals who gathered at the Oxfordshire house of Lucius Cary, Second Viscount Falkland. The Great Tew Circle, as these scholars came to be named, provided a retreat from the conservatism of Laudian Oxford. Predating the English in their creation of a theological basis for toleration, Grotius provided a key model for those liberal British thinkers. Striving to reassociate the Church of England with the Arminian tradition from which, under the Laudians, it had wandered, they attempted to secure its intermediary position founded in human reason. Of all the philosophers who exhorted the supremacy of human rationality, “the greatest of all influences on the Great Tew group was that of Hugo Grotius, the Dutch scholar, statesman and philosopher.” ² Grotius, Trevor-Roper observes, “whether named or not, is everywhere at Great Tew. He was its immediate tutelary spirit, [its] father-figure.” ³

Similarly, Grotius’s ideas were essential to the formulation of Milton’s own tolerationist viewpoint. Integrating Grotius’s ideas into his work later than the Great Tew, the poet was in a more advantageous position to incorporate his liberal perspective. Milton’s acquaintance with Grotius occurred on the eve of his immersion in political life and scholarship – his anti-prelatical pamphlets advocating a more democratic church were composed in the immediate years which follow, at the start of the English Civil War. Consequently, it follows, the poet engages in Grotian subjects throughout his battle-related work – the social disposition of man, the moral foundations for pursuing rightful warfare to protect rights, interdiction against criminal property usurpation. These considerations, originating from classical models, were critical to Milton’s depiction of martial struggle and his faith in the possibility that just war could serve as a necessary tool to achieve social and political reformation. ⁴ J.M. Evans has noted that “In May or June of 1638 Milton visited the Great Dutchman in Paris on his way to Italy. Soon after his return to England he began work on the dramatic drafts of Paradise Lost, of which the four versions preserved in the Trinity MS. date roughly from 1639 to 1642.” ⁵ The poet makes reference to Grotius in passages of his works which advocate theories, derived from the laws of nature, regarding individual integrity and the supremacy of human rationality such as The Doctrine and Discipline of Divorce (1643), The Judgement of Martin Bucer (1644), and the conclusion of Tetrachordon (1645). Confirming his desire for access to Grotian philosophy and poetry, Milton’s personal library contained a vast collection of the Dutch scholar’s theoretical and creative works, including Adamus Exul, Ad Genesin, Annotationes Ad Veterum Testamentum, Annotationes in Libros Evangeliorum, Christus Patiens, De Veritate Religionis Christianae, and Poemata Collecta, in addition to his foremost De Jure Belli ac Pacis (On the Law of War and Peace). ⁶

In his treatise on legitimate versus criminal warfare, Grotius identified two foremost and mutually interactive arenas of justice which are based upon sociableness, founded upon man’s inherent predilection for common society – legal principles deriving from divine or eternal sources, and positive laws originating from man-made legislation. Since the former is imperceptible to mortal insight, a “bridge” between the two systems is established so that humanly-fabricated law may correlate to God’s law. In order to guarantee this association, sixteenth and seventeenth century jurists referred back to ancient models for their interpretation and representation of the laws of nature. Recognition of the vital link between divine equity and man’s perception was to be identified in the evolution from Socratic origins of natural law in fifth century B.C. to Aquinas’s incorporation of faith and reason eighteen centuries later.

Functioning as that aspect of divine law which man can perceive via the powers of his rational consciousness, natural law furnishes norms for justice, inspiring man to embrace virtue and avoid vice. As a determinative specifier for individual action, “[natural law acts as] a barometer by which people must adapt their worldly laws to come as close as possible in a fallen world to enacting and obeying divine law.” ⁷ It measures the extent to which man can recapture and behave in conformity with standards of prelapsarian ideals in his motives and actions. Confirming that the laws of nature and of nations continuously interact with one another – that positive, man-made law perpetually strives to pattern itself according to exemplary, divinely-derived natural law – Grotius demonstrated that humanly-fabricated law is informed by, and seeks to correspond with, natural law’s evaluative standards.

Significantly, Grotius’s contention that legal and ethical standards may coincide over an expansive terrain is inherent to his prioritization of the laws of nature. As Lloyd Weinreb notes:

The simplest deontological argument for natural law is based on the claim that, notwithstanding the examples of immoral laws, there is a correspondence between laws and morals. Law’s very nature, it is claimed, impresses on it a minimum moral content. There is a moral floor, below which nothing that is properly regarded as law falls. ⁸

Never forsaking its foundation in morality, natural law fulfills the distinctive claim that there are legitimate normative principles to which legal measures – if they are to remain valid and verifiable – ought to conform. Standards of conduct based on adequate ethical intention are thus, in theory, secured. In this way, natural law claims to be able to designate principles of practical right-mindedness, as well as conditions of consistency among men and in individual behavior.

The important point to be made is that the laws of nature can be used to add ethical dimension to positive law. They furnish an “evaluative criterion” for legal positivism by providing “a standard of identity, justification, and evaluation for positive law.” ⁹ The more significantly the two domains of juridical reckoning resemble one other – the more positive law conforms with exemplary standards of justice – so any discrepancy between them lessens. Significantly, Thomas Aquinas refers to this comparative method as early as the 1200s – “[I]f a human law is at variance in any particular with the Natural Law,” he warns – “it is no longer legal, but rather a corruption of law.” ¹⁰ Among the most compelling aspects of the interaction between the natural and voluntary law, which as we will consider arises from Milton’s efforts to reconceptualize the relationship of sovereign leadership to the law in The Tenure and Eikonoklastes, is its essential involvement in the process of legal development. One of the primary objectives of Grotius’s expansive notion of civilization as a voluntarily-willed association in De Jure Belli ac Pacis was to exceed the medieval concept of society as a fixed or static covenant prescribed by divine decree. As a reflection of society’s dynamic nature, law engages in a constant process of renovation and refinement. E. Jimenez de Arechaga observes that “No legal order, internal or international, is satisfied with being valid only for today; it aspires to continue in force and this cannot be achieved except by introducing into the system increasing doses of justice.” ¹¹ With this goal as a priority, Grotius’s volume on the international laws of war and issues of peace and justice played an essential role in updating law to be perceived as expansive – not merely comprised of rules which are in force in a given instant, but simultaneously engaged in the development of emergent standards.

In conjunction with these progressive ideals, military strife existed as a fundamental element of state formation in sixteenth and seventeenth century Europe, and was inherent to its very structure. The legal organization of society raised the state to the highest level in the graduations of authority. And, in keeping with this expansive notion of community, conversely, the people themselves were perceived as ethically upstanding individuals whose association was safeguarded by means of the established institutional order. Restricted modes of battle were thus accepted as necessary means to the creation and perpetuation of an orderly and organized society, which more and more responded to misuses of sovereign authority by supporting the individual’s right to resist and expel a bad king. When contradictions to common interests and values arose, defense of them – sometimes involving war – became essential. The association of martial struggle with fighting for the public good, and against corrupt monarchy, became intrinsic to the maintenance and development of an international society. ¹²

If we now take a closer look at The Tenure of Kings and Magistrates and Eikonoklastes, written in January and October of 1649, we can see how Milton follows Grotius in portraying battle as an essential tool for promoting and safeguarding personal liberty as part of an individual’s property. The trial and execution of King Charles I represented the culminating moment of the English Civil War. By the end of 1648, the King’s royalist troops had been entirely overpowered by the Parliamentary Army commanded by Generals Thomas Fairfax and Oliver Cromwell. Despite accusation of King Charles’ despotism – the details of which we will consider shortly – and in conjunction with failed efforts to deal with what Parliamentarians perceived as his misgovernment through less war-like measures such as negotiation, many who had championed the rights of resistance against their sovereign for nearly a decade nevertheless objected to the notion of king-killing.

The state of political emergency brought on by Charles’s abuse of power, on the other hand, served to inspire Milton’s impassioned and audacious defenses of regicide. Appearing thirteen days after the execution of Charles I, the Tenure of Kings and Magistrates is one of Milton’s most controversial statements. This tract derives, as his earlier Areopagitica does, from the premise that men are naturally liberated in nature: “No man who knows ought, can be so stupid to deny that all men naturally were borne free” (3: 198), the poet states. This freedom, significantly, is based upon and perpetuated by the powers of rational consciousness. The need to exercise that “freedom” under the rubric of a common authority, furthermore, leads men to unite themselves together in interests of collective preservation or to protect themselves against myriad forms of injury. There must not be discord between the individual and the state, if state formation should serve the people “for common peace and preservation” (3: 209).

Milton maintains that each individual and the use of his possessions are made subject not to another’s will but to his own. He echoes Grotius’s conviction that men are essentially free by nature, and that their inherent sociability is vital to preserving and prioritizing individual rights. As the Dutch scholar confirms his De Jure Belli ac Pacis, “Right reason . . . and the nature of society . . . ha[ve] in view . . . that through community of resource and effort each individual be safeguarded in the possession of what belongs to him” (DJBP, I, II, V 53). The foundation of a law natural to human beings, Grotius explicitly points out in his introduction to De Jure Belli ac Pacis, is a fundamental requirement for an organized social life.

To this sphere of law belong the abstaining from that which is another’s, the restoration to another of anything of his which we may have, together with any gain which we may have received from it; the obligation to fulfil promises, the making good of a loss incurred through our fault, and the inflicting of penalties upon men according to their deserts. (Prolegomena 12–13)

Because sociableness is the basis of human social organization, the impelling desire for such organization is itself the source of rightful rulership. The leader of men, as a corporeal embodiment of common authority, has “disposition to do good to others” (Prolegomena 12) by perpetuating and safeguarding the public welfare. Earlier still, in his opening to De Jure Praedae or “The Commentary on the Law of Prize” of 1604, ¹³ a work of advocacy which represents Grotius’s first effort to formally set forth his ideas regarding the lawful order of an international society, and which developed naturally into and augmented his mature and systematic De Jure Belli ac Pacis, he states

For God created man . . . “free and sui iuris,” so that the actions of each individual and the use of his possessions were made subject not to another’s will but to his own. For what is that well-known concept, “natural liberty,” other than the power of the individual to act in accordance with his own will. ¹⁴

Strikingly, both men’s theories of “statehood” seek to protect the uniqueness and self-sufficiency of the individual. Like Milton, the Dutch scholar believes that there should not be a discontinuity of interests between the individual and the state, if the state is to safeguard personal welfare. As Richard Tuck observes, “Grotius . . . made the claim that an individual in nature (before transferring any rights to a civil society) was morally identical to a state, and that there were no powers possessed by a state which an individual could not possess in nature.” Under natural law, the individual was, ethically speaking, a “miniature sovereign state,” about whom the language of freedom and rulership could be employed. ¹⁵ The fact that states held no privileges which the individuals within them had not previously held, in their respective minds, served to restrict monarchical power.

In keeping with Grotius’s appeal to the individual’s rights to self-preservation and fulfillment of natural aims as social beings, Milton informs us that the power of kings and magistrates – the corporeal embodiment, so to speak, of “common authority” – is derivative, posited in association with the peoples’ belief that this arrangement will mutually benefit all parties. “The power of Kings and Magistrates is nothing else, but what is only derivative, transferr’d and committed to them in trust from the People, to the Common good of them all” (3: 202). Legitimate kingship thus remains conditional upon its ability to perpetuate this foundational state of human liberty. In all circumstances, a monarch must proceed in accordance with what his subjects have rationally determined to be “in service” to the public benefit.

According to Grotian standards of justice and injustice, Milton argues that the ability to eliminate a king who does not work to the ends of the common good – who retards or contradicts community interests ¹⁶ – emerges as an inevitable and natural right. A ruler’s sustained authority, Grotius maintains, remains contingent upon its benefit to society, “draw(s) its validity from the will of those who associate themselves together in the first place to form a civil society; from the same source, furthermore, derives the right which passes into the hands of those who govern” (DJBP, I, IV, II 149). He sanctions active resistance against a leader who “transgress(es) against the laws and the state . . . not only can they be resisted by force, but, in case of necessity, they can be punished with death” (DJBP, I, IV, VIII 156). Similarly, Milton in his Tenure of Kings and Magistrates seeks to demonstrate that the peoples’ relation to their ruler is one of voluntary contract which may be terminated at will. ¹⁷ A leader thus derives his power from the people by contract – a quasi-legal understanding – and they consequently have the privilege to revoke his authority if he abuses it – “either choose him or reject him, retaine him or depose him . . . to be govern’d as seems to them best” (3: 206).

The poet refers to resort to battle in this treatise in regard to the necessary removal of a tyrannical king who does not respect the law or the common good, observing that “For lawfull warr is but the execution of justice against them who refuse Law” (3: 254), and more specifically,

That it is Lawfull, and hath been held so through all Ages, for any who have the Power, to call to account a Tyrant, or wicked KING, and after due conviction, to despose and put him to death.

(3: 189, title-page to the first ed. of Tenure, 1649)

In his delineation of the qualities which define a tyrant, James Holly Hanford points out, Milton makes no specific indictment of Charles. ¹⁸ He does not mention him by name or refer specifically to those of His Majesty’s practices he deems objectionable. Defending against the imposition of tyranny in general is the focus, supportive of potential action leading to reformation. Seeking to justify the trial of Charles I, the poet argues that “Justice is the onely true sovran and supreme Majesty upon earth” (3: 237). In keeping with Grotian notions of individual freedom, he equates worthwhile rulership with leaders who remain voluntarily accountable to the law, who thereby remain deserving of their subjects’ commendation, unlike despots – their “will(s) boundless and exorbitant” (3: 212) – who exercise their power capriciously and immoderately. In this way, rational government becomes the primary criterion for political legitimacy. ¹⁹

In Eikonoklastes, Milton again sets out to confidently de-mythologize the untouchable sanctity of kings. Composed as a confutation of a work known as the Eikon basilike (“the King’s Image”) which was circulated immediately following Charles I’s death, Eikonoklastes (or “Image-breaker”) aims to deconstruct what Milton perceived as the faulty alignment of the sovereign with martyrdom perpetuated in the earlier tract. Though much controversy surrounds the actual authorship of Eikon basilike, it is generally believed to have been based on Charles’ own notes, expanded upon by his chaplain prior to his execution. Charles’ refutation of ill-conduct, informed by his imminent demise, thus takes on a personally-constituted and heart-felt air.

Compared to Tenure of Kings and Magistrates, Milton gets much more personal about Charles in Eikonoklastes. He attaches his objection to tyranny to a face, to specific criminal practices. By the time we arrive at this work, it is significant to note, the optimism for liberty of the sort we saw in his impassioned opposition to licensing and right to freedom of expression in Areopagitica (1644) has been utterly devastated. If we look back to the previous tract as a means of surveying the evolution of the poet’s revolutionary stance, we may perceive a much more fanciful work, punctuated by conjecture. Predicated on his confident belief that his countrymen would richly benefit from an open market in ideas, Milton’s Areopagitica seeks to predict what might occur if external constraint were imposed. He hypothesizes what if literature were censored. ²⁰ By 1649, obstruction to liberty had manifested itself concretely, an invasive malignancy identified as Charles I which required immediate and total extraction. The point-by-point deconstruction of the King included in Eikonoklastes reflects the fruition of Milton’s revolutionary imperative which had fermented during the mid 1640s. At the end of this decade, with revolutionary sentiment affixed dramatically and unapologetically behind him, his indictment had become pointed. His Majesty served as an absolute paradigm of bad government for Milton. The King was, in short, a materialization of the external constraint on freedom and hindrance of rationality most feared in Areopagitica.

Inspiring Milton’s ground-breaking and (by the time of Eikonoklastes) personal responses were what he perceived as the dramatic quality of Charles Stuart’s offenses. Over the last two decades, dominant historiographical accounts of the king’s rule have sought to confirm that he was more withdrawn than any other English monarch had been for generations, and widely perceived as a tyrant and abuser of justice. More recent judgements of the king, by contrast, warn against exaggerating his failings or dismissing him as wholly “unpolitical” and unwilling to engage in political calculation. As Richard Cust in his recent Charles I: A Political Life maintains, “the spectacular nature of his downfall should not obscure the qualities that he brought to the role.” ²¹ As the sole English monarch to be executed, following a trial, by beheading, the challenge the regicides confronted was indeed unprecedented.

One of the most important questions here is whether Charles failed because he was less competent than those who ruled before him or because, perhaps even more significantly, he was operating within a “culture of the demystification of authority” ²² in which nobility was increasingly, at this point in British history, divested of its political role. Losses at Marston Moor and Naseby, the capture of incriminating correspondence, escalating contention against his potentially illegal tariffs and taxations all drastically diminished his authority and confirmed his inability to maintain the allegiance of his followers. It seems essential to consider that “perhaps no monarch had or could in [this] divided and increasingly polarizing religious and political culture.” ²³ In Image Wars: Promoting Kings and Commonwealths in England, 1603–1660, accordingly, Kevin Sharpe points to the possibility that “some of [Charles’s] speeches, intended to foster co-operation and mutual understanding, were inflected with an authoritarian tone – though perhaps no more so than Elizabeth’s or James I’s.” ²⁴ In his trial, composition of Eikon basilike, and at the execution itself, the king simultaneously responded to the narrative of opposition against his perceived shortcomings, and mounting opposition against the sanctity of sovereign authority generally.

To what then, specifically, might we attribute the collapse of Charles’s political authority? During the incipient stages of his reign, ²⁵ the king established himself as a ruler who communicated with his subjects and used to law to secure his reputation as a just king. Nevertheless, this “honeymoon” interlude was brought to a hasty conclusion by the divisions of the 1625 parliament, which signaled his trend toward a rigid absolutism, as well as his more and more perceiving counsel as valuable to him only insofar as it bolstered his own will. Sharpe states that “(d)uring the 1630’s, Charles abandoned address to his people. At a time when unusual (if not illegal) levies – the revival of knighthood and forest fines or ship money, for example – might have drawn less criticism had they been justified by declarations, Charles issued commands.” ²⁶ It follows that by the late 1630s, a significant number of his fellow countrymen openly accused him of pursuing an absolute prerogative, of using “powers which he possessed pro bono publico, for the public welfare, pro bono suo, for his own benefit.” ²⁷ Charles was criticized for increasing emergency taxation in non-crisis situations, for permitting private individuals to benefit from an exercise of authority intended only for the monarch himself, and for general obstruction of justice. In response to the case of ship money, John Morrill has observed that

Charles maintained that he could raise money without formal consent for naval defense in a national emergency, that he was sole judge of what constituted an emergency, and that there was in fact a sustained state of emergency. ²⁸

Disregarding the need to make a case to his subjects which demonstrated the need for this unconventional taxation – leaving the people to non-official explanations of government actions and intentions ²⁹ – Charles’s royal authority was significantly compromised.

Suspicions regarding Charles’s wrong-doing were increased when a cabinet containing the king’s private correspondence was captured at Naseby in June of 1645. According to Joad Raymond, these documents advertised the king’s predilection for autocratic command. Parliamentarians exploited the propaganda value of the papers, and guaranteed their widespread distribution by publishing them as The Kings Cabinet Opened. Supporters of the King objected to his being unmasked in this manner, thus securing a popular audience for Eikon basilike. Other Royalists attempted to present the letters as testament to Charles’s superlative writing ability. But even more extensively, this episode encouraged popular antipathy to the sovereign. ³⁰ Rather than directly respond to these mounting assailments upon his authority as king, Charles largely ignored the need to defend his decisions and engage with his subjects, and instead attempted to posit himself above contestation to his rule, “position . . . the monarchy and himself on a superior plane: as a moral arbiter/rather than participator in political contest.” ³¹ These grave miscalculations dramatically accelerated the breakdown of his leadership.

The opening day of the trial at Westminster Hall in January, 1649, marked Charles’s permanent withdrawal from real politik ³² by providing him with an official platform upon which to transcend the negotiation and debate of political contest. Sharpe notes that “From the first day of the hearings, far from being a showcase for parliamentary justice and supremacy, the trial was taken over by the king . . . for a remarkable performance of majesty.” ³³ In declining to submit a defense that would allow the court to proceed to official prosecution, for instance – and by laughing when the clerk impeached him as “tyrant and traitor” during his summation – Charles strove to delegitimize the proceedings and thus preserve the incontestability of his kingly prerogative. The high-minded austerity that characterized much of Charles’s thinking became much more conspicuous during this period, to the extent that he began to enact the possibility of his own martyrdom. ³⁴ His appropriation of the Christic both at the trial and in the Eikon basilike enabled him to assert his own authority as not only legal but sacred – to insist upon himself as a godly martyr for the laws and liberties of the people.

In defense of Charles, Royalists decreed that the sanctified nature of the king simply prevented him from being challenged or removed from service. Supporters of the monarch cited Biblical passages, especially Romans 13 and I Peter 2, as proof that war against reigning sovereigns and magistrates – not just magistrates of whom the majority approved – was officially prohibited. Regal authority, they maintained, was not an aggregate of human authority shared among the masses and assembled under a single leader; rather, it occasioned a participation in divine omnipotency. In this way, it follows, those supporting Charles argued that those who resisted the King resisted God. The king, they contended, existed as a manifestation of God on Earth.

Whereas the pro-Stuart regime advocated peace and nonresistance based on obligatory honor and exoneration of the King, the Parliamentarian enterprise challenged the status quo by initiating “a rational cultural revolution against the Royalist appeal to the primitive magic of kingship.” ³⁵ They attempted to dismantle the “static” nature of law under monarchical rule by emphasizing the supremacy of human reason. These assertions, conforming to Grotian standards of rightful warfare, were founded on natural law, on the premise that men are empowered to discern universally binding decrees of right conduct. In keeping with his adherence to the Dutch scholar, Milton believed that the conflict between Royalists and Parliamentarians divided along the Grotian distinction between just and criminal battle. Whereas the Parliamentarian rebellion coincided with Milton’s Grotian conviction that the boundaries for legitimate war must be drawn in relation to the laws of nature, those “first principles of nature” (DJBP, I, II, IV 52), ³⁶ the Royalist point of view contradicted these standards of justice.

Milton’s effort to define the association between sovereign leadership and the law in the Tenure of Kings and Eikonoklastes is especially pertinent to Milton’s Grotian emphasis. The poet’s task involves naturalizing the possibility of revolt against a leader who does not serve the people advantageously – of condoning war itself in instances where tyranny is apparent. In this sense Eikonoklastes reads as an exercise in how to recognize, object to, and rebel against a leader who betrays his power – an authority given to him in the first place by the people themselves.

Accordingly, in the Tenure of Kings Milton maintains that transfer of loyalty to a ruler remains in a state of perpetual re-evaluation: “the right of choosing, yea of changing thir own Goverment is by the grant of God himself in the People” (3: 207). Contravening this contractual theory of law which seeks to safeguard the benefits of leadership for all individuals, Charles acts in an irrefutably “lawless” (3: 257) manner. He shirks his legal obligation to the people in favor of his personal brand of rule which benefits himself. In what we can recognize as a trangression distinctively Grotian in nature, in “attempt(ing) to usurp that part of the sovereign power which does not belong to him” (DJBP, I, IV, XIII 158), the poet associates the King’s arbitrary government with his attempt to substitute the peoples’ natural endowment and exercise of right reason with his own. Dislike of the King, Milton assures his readers in Eikonoklastes, was widespread:

All men inveigh’d against him; all men, except Court-vassals, oppos’d him and his tyrannical proceedings; the cry was universal; and this full Parlament was at first unanimous in thir dislike and Protestation against his evil Goverment. (3: 344)

He questions

Did wee therfore not permit him to use his reason or his conscience, not permitting him to bereave us the use of ours? And might not he have enjoy’d both, as a King, governing us as Free men by what Laws we our selves would be govern’d? It was not the inward use of his reason and of his conscience that would content him, but to use them both as a Law over all his Subjects, in whatever he declar’d as a King to like or dislike. (3: 412)

In a mockery of justice predicated upon his wayward predilections, Charles endeavored to replace community interests and social obligation of his rulership – “to kick down all Law, Government, and bond of Oath” (3: 414) – with personal advantage and private interest.

In contrast to Charles’s indifference to legality, Milton argues that Parliamentarian resistance embraced the law rather than attempted to redefine it, as Charles did, in the manner of God himself. In keeping with the Dutch scholar, the republican revolution derived from natural law as a tool for measurement and analysis, adhered to the notion that ethical and legal standards must coincide over a vast terrain. It associated the commonwealth ideal of government with freedom of conscience and growth of human liberty. The Royalist agenda, by contrast, appears motivated by a cavernous breach between natural law and positive law, seems ultimately supportive of a tyranny that only pretends to be grounded in the law. Usurping established right away from individual reason – having “renounced his governmental authority, or manifestly . . . abandoned it” (DJBP, I, IV, IX 157), as the Dutch scholar would regard it – Charles attempted to assume an unnatural status with regards to law. His abuse of state became a dire affliction stemming from a distortion of natural justice.

In a Grotian manner, war for the anti-Stuart contingency proceeded as a social effort used to combat unsociability. Unlike the Royalist defenders, the Republican initiative expanded its interests toward the public well-being – in service, as Milton identifies in The Tenure of Kings and Magistrates – to that rulership which is “most conducing to the public good” (3: 212). In contrast to Charles’s emphasis upon obedience and reverence due to the sovereign authority, Parliamentarians designated themselves as subjects unified and joined in the representative body of the kingdom, taking up arms as an extension of their desire to preserve community interests from a despot. Accordingly, Corinne Comstock Weston uses the phrase “community-centered view of government” to describe the prominent Parliamentarian attitude. From their point of view, the people rather than the monarchical head encompassed the human basis of law and political power, and consequently, “sovereignty was seen as shared.” ³⁷

In response to Charles’s inability to “think the Majestie of the Crowne of England [may be] bound by any Coronation Oath in a blind and brutish formalitie” (3: 415) in Eikonoklastes, the poet contends

But if it neither doe enjoyn, nor mention to him, as a part of his duty, the making or the marring of any Law or scrap of Law, but requires only his assent to those Laws which the people have already chos’n, or shall choose . . . to deny the passing of any Law which the Commons choose, is both against the Oath of his Coronation, and his Kingly Office. (3: 414)

From this perspective, Charles is not above the law, or beyond it. He is both accountable to law and its foremost administrator. He is, in fact, the opposite of the immune and inalienable entity his Royalist defenders make of him – he is the law’s servant. It is noteworthy that Milton reduced the King’s legitimate role in politics to that of “chief executive,” enlisted to do little else than execute the decisions of Parliament in a timely manner. ³⁸

Milton’s justification for defensive resistance against this avoidance and deformity of law is distinctively Grotian. “Most true is the saying,” the Dutch scholar had cautioned in his Prolegomena to De Jure Belli ac Pacis, “that all things are uncertain the moment men depart from the Law” (17). ³⁹ Employing the language of justice and reason of state, the poet appeals to his conviction that “the Law of nature justifies any man to defend himself, eev’n against the King in Person” (3: 254) in reference to necessary preservation of the commonwealth. This is the point at which battle commences for Milton – the critical point, emphasized by Grotius – in which justice has formally broken down. Peaceful means of adjudicating Charles’s wrongs have proven ineffective. For Milton, as for Grotius in De Jure Belli ac Pacis, “where judicial settlement fails, war begins” (DJBP, II, I, II 171).

Most extensively, it seems to me, Milton’s apology for king-killing is indebted to Grotian principles of sociability. Most reprehensible of all to the poet is the manner in which Charles’s misgovernment assails his subjects personally and individually. If we reconsider those tenets of sociableness which Grotius prioritized in De Jure Belli ac Pacis, we may see that his derivation avoids merging all individuals into an undifferentiated social whole, but rather strives to preserve the original distinctness of persons – “that which existed as their subjects’ suum” (DJBP I, I, V 35). Stephen Buckle clarifies that according to the Dutch scholar

What belongs to a person is what is one’s own – in Latin, suum. The notion of the suum is pre-legal (that is, prior to positive laws) . . . What belongs to a person is prior to private ownership according to positive law. Essentially it includes a person’s life, limbs, and liberty. The suum is . . . what naturally belongs to a person because none of these things can be taken away without injustice. Reason and the nature of society thus dictate that the life, limbs, and liberty of individuals be protected. The law of nature is, in other words, ineluctably committed to the defence of the suum. ⁴⁰

In violation of this aspect of sociability, Milton believes, Charles strove to perpetuate an amorphous social whole subjected to his convoluted rationality. The King’s measures to usurp the essential selves of his subjects – to appropriate that which existed as their subjects’ “legal right[s] . . . to own[ership] . . . over [themselves], which is called freedom” (DJBP, I, I, V 35) – directly challenges the integrity of their identities based on natural law. In Eikonoklastes, the poet alleges

[Charles] confesses a rational sovrantie of soule, and freedom of will in every man, and yet with an implicit repugnancy would have his reason the sovran of that sovranty, and would captivate and make useless that natural freedom of will in all other men but himself. (3: 412)

Milton’s outstandingly impassioned indictment in Tenure of Kings and Eikonoklastes may be seen as a reaction to individual liberty dismantled on this minute and devastating scale. Organized resistance may be seen as a response to this exceedingly personal invasion. In a Grotian manner, the poet identifies the point at which Charles commits criminal behavior as the point at which – to extend Buckle’s argument – he encroaches upon “[n]one of the . . . things [that] can be taken away without injustice.” In invading that space, in trespassing that intimately upon his subjects, Milton suggests, Charles is ultimately accountable with his own life.

With no clear-cut legal precedent for the necessary execution of tyrannical kings, Milton looks beyond humanly-fabricated positive law to the eternal, divinely-derived laws of nature in his demand for legitimate leadership. Believing, in keeping with Grotius, that each individual and the use of his possessions are governed by his own will rather than another’s, the poet urges there should not be an incompatibility of interests between the individual and state if the state is to protect individual well-being. Placing self-interest above national interest in his vie for absolute authority, Charles’s illicit sovereignty collapses through the moral floor insisted upon by natural law’s ethical imperative. The site of King Charles I’s decapitation outside the Banqueting House at Whitehall on the cold, blustery afternoon of January 30, 1649 signals an optimism that legal evolution may proceed in conjunction with the progressive priorities of the emergent nation-state. The resort to king-killing serves as a bold attempt to get the law moving again in terms of ethics, predicated upon a moral expectation which at its most ambitious approaches prelapsarian standards of community embraced under an uncontested and absolute justice.