To Ruin the Repairs: Milton,Allegory,Transitional Justice

I. The Mistress Rump Allegories and the Presbyterians

That allegorical figures could do such forceful political work economically – in a way, that is, that asked relatively little of readers’ time, money, or exegetical skills – was one of royalist satirists’ key discoveries of the civil wars. The Life and Death of Mris. Rump formed part of a trio of similar works published in the royalist resurgence of March and April 1660 that included Mris. Rump Brought to Bed of a MONSTER, with her terrible pangs, bitter Teming, hard Labour, and lamentable Travel from Portsmouth to Westminster, and the great misery she hath endured by this ugly, deformed, ill-shapen, base begotten Babe, or Monster of Reformation, with the great care of Nurse Haslerigg and Mris London the Midwife and the play-pamphlet The Tragedie of the Life and Death of Mris. Rump (with a similar extended title). ³⁵ These publications incorporated new developments such as the stalwart republican Arthur Hesilrige’s 1659 muster at Portsmouth (“Nurse Haslerigg”), but they mostly revived dialogues illegally published under the name of the popular newsbook Mercurius Melancholicus in another period of royalist optimism, this one briefer and ultimately disappointing, from the spring of 1648. ³⁶ The bulk of the text from the Restoration pieces Mris. Rump brought to Bed of a Monster and The Famous Tragedie of the Life and death of Mris. Rump was lifted from Mistres Parliament Brought to Bed of a Monstrous Childe of Reformation, which Thomason dated April 29, 1648. Perhaps the output of an inveterate duo of popular royalist printing, the journalist John Crouch and his relative, printer Edward Crouch, the 1660 texts recycled a great many aspects of the 1648 text even as “the characters were revised to fit a new political context.” ³⁷ The plot, in which an ailing Mistress Parliament (now “Rump”) vomits up disgusting acts and then gives birth to a deformed child with the assistance of complicit nurses like Mrs. London and Mrs. Sedition, is identical. Given how few alterations were made, the works printed and sold in 1660 have appeared to some as a way for royalists in the book industry who had been starved by Interregnum press controls to squeeze some additional profit from copy leftover from the civil wars. ³⁸ But resurrecting the Mistress Parliament allegories actually aimed toward the comic reconciliation of transitional justice. Changes that helped Presbyterians save face facilitated the critical rapprochement between royalists and Presbyterians in the spring of 1660, a reconciliation whose primary if indirect result was nothing less than the Restoration of Charles II.

Superficially, a benefit of reviving the allegories was to emphasize how little the constitutional maneuvers of the Interregnum had done to settle the nation. Anything that could be said of Parliament in 1648, they suggested, could be said of the Rump in 1660. Eleven years of Rump rule was no better than seven of civil war. Such at least was an argument underlying one of the changes that was made, whose subtlety is representative of other similar changes. In Mistress Parliament Brought to Bed of a Monstrous Childe, the protagonist vomits “Blood, innocent blood, that hath lain in clods congealed at my stomack this 7 years.” ³⁹ Instead of adding the Interregnum years to those of the civil war, however, the 1660 version Mris. Rump Brought to Bed substitutes them: “7” becomes “11,” and Rump rule is therefore equated with the horrors of civil war violence. Paradoxically, the illusion that nothing had changed could be accomplished nicely with the flexible genre of the allegorical play-pamphlet, whose dates and characters could be easily substituted.

Worth emphasizing, however, is what such a change communicated to Presbyterians. Politically, it helped to relocate the sinful cause of the monstrous birth in 1649 – and no earlier. Ignoring the 1640s constituted a major act of restitution for a Presbyterian coalition that had every reason to still feel aggrieved and incriminated by the royalist attacks in the 1648 allegories. Some Presbyterians probably had copies of the 1648 allegories on their shelves. George Thomason, the Presbyterian parliamentarian-turned-royalist, certainly did. But Presbyterians hardly needed to compare pamphlets to recall that they had been targets of royalists’ bitterest invectives. In Mistris Parliament Presented in her Bed, Mercurius Melancholicus introduces a character named “Mrs. Schisme,” who announces, “The Kingdomes mine … My name’s Tom. Prebyter.” She battles with “Mrs. Sedition,” a figure of Independency, for claim to the state. Readers soon learn, however, that the two characters have “one Progenitor, the Devill,” with presbytery coming from “the House of Incendiaries in the Church, which is a very ancient Family” and Independency hailing from the House of “incendiaries in the State, which preceeds in antiquity.” ⁴⁰ Mrs. Schisme declares, “Never did any State Incendiary bring the Designes of any Tyrant to such perfection in an age, as I have done Mrs. Parliaments in lesse then seven years, under the vizard of Religion.” ⁴¹ Mistress Parliament Brought to Bed of a Monstrous Childe of Reformation levels an attack against Presbyterians’ “sweet Babe of Reformation, that hath cost England so much money, blood and sweat.” ⁴² The 1648 dialogues contained strident criticisms of Presbyterians’ goals for church government, and merciless ascriptions of guilt. For royalists’ plans for a Restoration to work, they had to distinguish clearly between the 1640s and the 1650s.

A letter from the royalist conspirator John Mordaunt sent to Charles II in Brussels and written the day of the readmission of the Presbyterians, articulated both the problem the royalists faced and a potential solution that might be enacted by delicate royalists. Royalists were in Sennett’s terms “too weak to dominate or just survive alone.” ⁴³ Ostentatiously forgetting Presbyterian “guilt,” as Mordaunt observed, promised a viable path forward for both groups. Mordaunt advised Charles, “There will yet remaine some thing, wherein your humble servants, and loyall subjects may worthily employ them selves[:] The satisfying those who perhaps have now some power, with some guilt, to persuade them to leave the former, and that your Ma^ty will forget the other.” ⁴⁴ The effort to “satisfy” the guilty yet powerful Presbyterians included a retelling of history through the revision of the Mistress Parliament allegories that was, at the same time, a gesture of solidarity and a promise of safety. As of the February 21 readmission of the excluded Presbyterians from the Long Parliament, Presbyterians were now to be courted rather than denounced. Originally, there was hope that the Long Parliament would invite Charles II back. Many, however, including Monck wanted dissolution and elections for a new, “free” Parliament. Since the voting qualifications agreed upon excluded “all who were in the War against the Parliament since 1641, or their Sons, unless they have since manifested their good Affection,” royalists’ best hope, aside from ignoring the voting qualifications (which they also did), was to encourage Presbyterians to be their proxies. ⁴⁵ An important part of this was mitigating Presbyterians’ rational fear that a return of the Stuarts would lead to their being punished for having supported Parliament in the 1640s. Many Presbyterians were in fact willing “to distinguish[…] between the crimes they tooke up at first, and of what they hold now of that perswasion,” but we must not overlook how critical it was that royalists publicly assented to the same distinction. ⁴⁶

Making Mistress Rump the protagonist was a meaningful step. Scholars sometimes assume that “Rump” was used to describe Parliament throughout the 1650s, but as Mark Jenner has shown, “it was only in 1659 that the term entered common parlance.” ⁴⁷ The notion of a “Rump” parliament had of course became ideologically available as soon as Thomas Pride prevented members from entering Parliament in 1649, but “Mistress Rump” emerged above all as an artifact of Royalist post-Protectorate coalitional needs. Instead of pinning the sin that fated a monstrous birth on the civil wars, as the 1648 dialogues did, the Restoration productions ignored the civil wars and located the sin at Pride’s Purge, when the Presbyterians made uneasy by radicals’ calls for the execution of Charles were excluded. Events of the 1640s barely found mention; the Presbyterian Mrs. Schism disappeared. The Secluded members are acknowledged as a brake on the Rump’s excesses and, in an appeal to Presbyterian Covenanters, Mistress Rump confesses she “break[s] Covenants.” ⁴⁸ Aside from “Mistress Parliament,” the most prominent features of the 1648 title pages had been “Childe of Reformation” and, satirically, “Childe of Deformation,” both of which appeared in large typeface. The Restoration editions now shifted the typographical emphasis to “Monster,” which in Mris. Rump Brought to Bed of a Monster is the only word of the title besides “Rump” to be entirely capitalized. “Monster” lacked the explicitly religious valance of “Childe of Reformation” – thus muting the attack on the Presbyterian “incendiaries in the Church” and amplifying the attack on the “incendiaries of the State,” Independents and Republicans.

Textual maneuvers like this were an appeal for trust from the Presbyterians, who needed to know that they faced no danger with a Restoration of Charles II. They could be seen as signals that royalists would willfully disregard the 1640s and limit their vengeance to the regicides and Rumpers. The allegories were built upon the conceit that sins committed on the way to power were inescapable and would always be manifested in attempts at reform, which were doomed to monstrosity. But which sins exactly fated the monstrous birth, as we have seen, could be altered with considerable ease.

The new allegories complemented – but did not duplicate – explicit declarations pouring from the presses of England’s royalists in March and April. The declarations promised that royalists did “not cherish any violent Thoughts, or inclinations to revenge against those who have been any way Instrumental in” their “past Sufferings,” which, one declared, had in any case “proceed[ed] from the hand of God.” ⁴⁹ The royalist absolutions were far from categorical, however. The allegories and declarations that redrew royalist lines to include Presbyterians continued to exclude Independents and republicans, 33 of whom would indeed forfeit their lives to the royalist “appetite for retribution” with another 46 individuals suffering non-fatal penalties. ⁵⁰ The Royalists’ promises not to seek revenge against the 1640s Parliamentarians was made necessary, the declarations suggested, by the malicious imputations otherwise by “enemies of the Publick Peace” and “enemies of the Nations peace,” code for the putatively fanatical Independents – Rumpers. ⁵¹ The Mistress Rump play-pamphlets communicated something that the declarations could not, however: they signaled that even the fiercest of the popular press’s attack-dogs were willing to perform the volte-face.

It would be helpful though if the Mistress Rump dialogues did not look transparently like a volte-face, at least to anyone but the Presbyterians, it being preferable to suggest that royalists never had any ill will toward the Presbyterians in the first place. Ratcheting up the attack on republicans and Independents where the denunciations of Presbyterians had previously rung out served this purpose nicely. In The Tragedie of the Life and Death of Mris. Rump, republicans and Independent Army officers are the midwives to a child whose deformity has always already been determined. The dialogue has Mistress Rump dying in pain and the child she is delivering at risk. It then introduces “Gossip Nevil” – Harringtonian republican Henry Neville, a frequent target of royalist satire – who arrogantly announces, “I shall play the Oceano Dr. so well that my Eutopian Physick will bring the Brat to perfection, Tis nothing comes now but a Harp & Cross, it smells so strong of a Commonwealth it can never miscarry.” ⁵² The allegory derides the republican Neville’s unwarranted optimism that a permanent settlement scheme may be devised – not least because he and his sympathizers fail to recognize that the problem lies not with the child, but with the conceivers, whose past sins are written indelibly on the progeny. The gender politics of the allegory refuse Neville the power he seemed to be claiming to set things right. Midwives could do no such thing. Only virtuous mothers had such power, and their efficacy was bounded within the circumstances of conception. A formidable patriarchal political theory undergirds such language, yet insofar as conventional patriarchy must somehow become conventional, popular allegories were a major way in which this process transpired. ⁵³

Tactically, they could also offer furtive olive branches in order to form coalitions that would ultimately determine the political fate of the nation.

II. “Accounts and Reparations”: Allegory and the Agora in Paradise Lost

The potential impact of the royalist Mistress Rump was not lost on the republican poet and polemicist John Milton. ⁵⁴ Diane Purkiss and Shannon Miller have recently shown that Milton’s allegory of Sin and Death in book II of Paradise Lost “makes sense,” as Purkiss puts it “only in the context of the republication of some key Royalist texts which link the Parliaments of the republic with the mother giving birth to monsters.” ⁵⁵ For Miller, the royalist allegories themselves appropriated the gendered tropes of prophetic inspiration, with Milton’s own allegory then seeking to reclaim a “feminized prophetic voice” from royalist appropriation. ⁵⁶

That Milton had the 1660 allegories in mind when he composed his own in Paradise Lost is suggested not only by the shared allegorical mode but also by a shared mise-en-scene and a number of specific echoes. In Milton’s allegory, Satan meets Sin and Death at the gates of Hell on his way to tempt Adam and Eve in Eden. Though Satan does not remember, Sin narrates how she was born out of Satan’s head and subsequently impregnated by him, thereby conceiving Death, a “shadow” who wore the “likeness of a kingly crown” (2.669, 673). ⁵⁷ Upon his birth, “the monster” Death, for his part, “overtook his mother all dismay’d/And in embraces forcible and foul/Ingend’ring with [her], of that rape begot” the barking “Hell Hounds.” Nigel Smith has rightly read these events as Milton’s criticism of the Parliament-as-female-sexual partner trope, noting that for Milton “to think of a parliament as female (not male) is to think of oneself as a god, above the people.” ⁵⁸ The Mistress Rump allegories help complete the picture in several key respects, helping to connect Milton’s allegory to comments about the royalists and Presbyterians in the second edition of the Readie and Easy and Way and also, as we shall see, a certain ambivalence that attaches to Milton’s Sin.

Alluding to the royalist celebrations of February 11, 1660, the prologue to The Famous Tragedie Of … Mris. Rump observes:

’Tis strange a Rump that’s roasted, boyld’d and broyl’d.

Should after death bring forth a monstrous Child.

Got by some Pettyfogging Knight o’the post

Who in her Womb did leave his horrid Ghost,

To vex the honest people of this Nation

By her Base Brat pretending Reformation. ⁵⁹

The “horrid Ghost” is of course a “horrid Ghost” precisely because he was “Got by some Pettyfogging Knight,” a Cromwellian trickster, and not, by implication, by the King. For Milton, conversely, the kingly seed is the cause of monstrosity, not its remedy. When Milton’s answer to Mistress Rump, Sin, falls prey to Satan’s tyrannous, incestuous desire, the “horrid Ghost” that results is Death, a monstrous hybrid who inherits features of both parents.

But Sin’s intertextual relationship with popular representations of the Rump Parliament helps explain some seeming oddities about her institutional role in the poem. Sin’s institutional job, literally divinely ordained, is to prevent the spread of monarchical tyranny by keeping hell’s gates closed. As Sin explains, “into my hand was giv’n, with charge to keep/These Gates for ever shut” (2.775–6). “From the summer of 1659 forward,” Milton had seen the Rump Parliament “as his best bet for maximal religious freedom.” ⁶⁰ While it is true that Sin ultimately – sinfully – permits Satan’s progress, she is not the whore of Babylon that the Rump is in the royalist allegories. ⁶¹ Rather, Milton reverses the moral valance to make both Satan, Sin’s father, and Death, her son, gruesomely rape her. Further ambivalence can seen in Sin’s birth from the devil’s head – not exactly ordinary but, in its allusion to the birth of Athena, a considerable improvement upon “the Devil’s Arse,” Mistress Rump’s “Mother from whence [she] had [her] first Birth” in The Life and Death. ⁶² It is salutary to observe that the binary decision Sin faces – to open the gates or to keep them closed – accords well with Milton’s republican commitments. Though the decision Sin makes is ultimately flawed, the decision she faces is the one Milton consistently argues is a natural right of the people. ⁶³

Following through on the logic of Milton’s allusions, we can say that Satan’s eventual journey to the new world hinges on Parliament playing the role of Mistress Parliament set for it by the royalist allegorists. Milton invests Sin with the agency to write her own narrative, but the narrative she adopts is that of daughterhood, a stance that ultimately enables Satan’s march. The “Dear Daughter” address that Milton includes was already a noticeable marker of the royalist allegories, typically directed toward Mistress Parliament or Mistress Rump. ⁶⁴ Milton deploys the convention to interesting effect in Paradise Lost. It is Satan who addresses his “Dear Daughter” Sin in the poem and the genealogical address – a recognizable allusion to royalist allegories’ addresses to a feminized Parliament – has profound implications for the coming narrative (2.817). A potentially tense confrontation between Sin and Satan, then, becomes the occasion for Milton to deftly satirize the authority of genealogical claims when Sin abandons God’s “charge” to corral tyranny in favor of Satan’s patriachical appeal. Satan wins passage into Chaos on his Virgilian journey toward the new world by exploiting Sin’s narrative. “Thou art my Father,” Sin ultimately reasons, “whom should I obey/But thee, whom follow?” (2.864–6). Nevertheless, Milton’s narrative voice emphasizes the mere opportunism at the heart of Satan’s appeal to genealogy: “Dear Daughter,” Satan begins, “since thou claim’st me for thy Sire” (2.817; italics mine). If in The Readie and Easie Way, monarchy entails the “endless tugging between right of subject and royal prerogative,” the encounter in Paradise Lost by which Satan gains passage is even worse. ⁶⁵ Here the politics of allegorical progeny are the condition of possibility for Satanic manipulation: very little tugging takes place at all. As Sin abdicates her godly civic duty, submitting instead to Satan’s hereditary claim, she illustrates one path for monarchical ideology.

Considering Sin’s roots in contemporaneous allegorical representations of Parliament – and more specifically representations of the pared-down House of Commons – suggests that Milton’s Death should probably not be taken as a simple figure for kingship despite his “likeness of a kingly crown.” While scholars including Norbrook and Quint have taken such a view, Purkiss may err in the opposite direction when she concludes that “direct political interpretation or equation of the figures with topical institutions or persons is inappropriate.” ⁶⁶

With the character of Sin deriving partly from the royalist figures of Mistress Rump, it remains significant that Milton calls Death “the other shape” (666). The 1657 Humble Petition and Advice in which Cromwell was offered the Crown and was granted the right to choose his successor also created a companion body to the House of Commons, the “Other House.” Republicans complained it varied little from the House of Lords that they had abolished eight years earlier largely on the grounds of its hereditary titles smacking of monarchy. Sin’s comment that “long I sat not” before giving birth to this “odious offspring” could in fact refer to the Humble Petition (2.777, 280). Just as Death in Paradise Lost is a “Phantasm” and a “shadow,” in Milton’s A Defense, lords “appointed by the king … [are] his companions, his domestics, as it were, his shadows” (2.742). ⁶⁷ The implicit argument of the allegory is that whether it is called a House of Lords or an “other House,” this “other shape” is the monstrous child that comes from the scandal of a representative parliament defiled by monarchy. The “likeness of a kingly crown,” in other words, is the mark of Death’s patrilineal inheritance. This was a salient point in March 1660 as the readmitted members considered whether to reinstitute a House of Lords, and in early April, as voters considered whether or not to elect Lords supporters to the Convention Parliament. ⁶⁸

Milton’s critique of monarchical ideology certainly deploys the tropes of sexual perversions often present in the royalist allegories, but it also includes a critique of allegory itself, specifically insofar as allegory’s most prominent use on the eve of the Restoration was as a system of signification underpinning politicized narratives of monstrous birth. His own allegory arrests the persistent implication of the royalist dialogues that Parliamentary Reformation is a ghostly “Base Brat” with the contrary suggestion that monstrous kingship is what truly “vex[es] the honest people of this Nation.”

While Milton had long been skeptical of royalist feminization of parliament, the transitional period of late March–early April 1660 seems in particular to have left a lasting imprint on Paradise Lost’s Sin and Death allegory. The appearance of Mris. Rump Brought to Bed around March 23, Samuel Butler’s The Censure of the Rota around March 25, and The Life and Death of Mris. Rump around the same time (Thomason dated his April 2 but Wood wrote “March” on his) gave Milton plenty of fodder during the period during which he was also revising The Readie and Easie Way. ⁶⁹ As Campbell and Corns note, the second edition of the Readie and Easie Way, published in early April, “address[es] with some precision a new target readership, the newly royalist Presbyterians, who could confidently be expected to control the Parliament that would assemble on 25 April.” ⁷⁰ And it was in that second edition, quoted in the epigraph to this article, that Milton’s imagery came closest to the imagery around Sin and Death, particularly of their inbred offspring of “hell hounds,” who “never ceasing barked / With wide Cerberean mouths full loud, and rung / a hideous peal …” (2.654–6). In the second edition of The Readie and Easie Way, composed when Milton’s republicanism was so fervent that it has been described by Joad Raymond as “reckless,” Milton urged the “new royaliz’d Presbyterians” to be wary of “diabolical … libells” and “infernal pamphlets” spewed by anonymous “enemies crept lately out of thir holes, thir hell.” ⁷¹ The anonymous royalist attack dogs who in Readie and Easy Way have “crept lately out of thir holes” figure in the similar imagery of Paradise Lost as “yelling monsters that with ceaseless cry,” “yet when they list, they would creep / … into [Sin’s] womb, / And kennel there, yet there still barked and howled” (2.795, 2.656–8). ⁷² The imagery of an inbred ideological sphere that emerges in both works hints at Milton’s critique of the royalist allegories and their underlying project of transitional justice. Milton posits instead a many-headed ideological network of monarchy, press, and legal institutions, nominally distinct from one another and superficially invested in comic reconciliation yet, in fact, jointly hell-bent on retribution. Milton warns his Presbyterian readers to look out “not only [for] the chief person, but [for] all his adherents” inevitably seeking “accounts and reparations”: “What will then be the revenges and offences rememberd and returnd … accounts and reparatations that will be requir’d, suites, inditements, inquiries, discoveries, complaints, informations, … if not to utmost infliction, yet to imprisonment, fines, banishment, or molestation; if not these, yet disfavor, discountenance, disregard and comtempt on all but the known royalist.”

We might say that Milton in such passages seeks to create a counter-transitional affect of danger meant to forestall comic reconciliation. The parodic references to the Mistress Rump pamphlets, meanwhile, help bolster Milton’s republican view that Parliament under a monarchy becomes yet another branch for exacting recompense. As discussed, royalist publications in the spring of 1660 gave Presbyterians a strategic pass on the 1640s, in part to assure Presbyterians anxious about their culpability that they would not be punished in a potential Restoration. Like other projects of the republican press, ⁷³ Milton’s allegory takes the reverse strategy, which involves a heavy dose of self-incrimination. The emphasis on the devils’ “bold conspiracy against Heav’n’s King” is an attempt to deter Presbyterians’ total defection by linking their fates with those of the (unquestionably endangered) Independents and republicans like himself (2.751). If this tack seems perverse, it should be noted that Milton takes it explicitly in the second edition of Readie and Easie Way, where he advises “the new royaliz’d Presbyterians” not to “persuade themselves that thir old doings, though now recanted, will be forgotten.” ⁷⁴ As we have seen, Milton illustrates the point by drawing attention to the very publications his allegory satirizes and even speculates strategically that the Presbyterians might be “prosecuted for old traytors; the first inciters, beginners, and more then to the third part actors of all that followd.” ⁷⁵ It could not have been lost on Milton that suggesting such an outcome could be a self-fulfilling prophesy. This, of course, was part of the strategy. A public reminder of the Presbyterians’ complicity in the civil wars would make it harder for them to find rapprochement with the royalists, and therefore make them more likely to side with the Independents and Republicans.

Milton was prepared to think like the Royalists do if the Presbyterians would not. Granting for such purposes the royalist premise that the rebellion of the 1640s was sinful (and therefore deserving of punishment), Milton completes the syllogism: the Presbyterians were rebels; therefore, the Presbyterians are sinful and should be punished. However simple that conclusion, Milton observed royalists shrinking from it, and this made it all the more necessary to bring to the attention of Presbyterians. In the context of the new royalist history, simply alluding to the 1640s was itself an oppositional act. This may have been the point of locating Sin’s monstrous birth “at th’ Assembly” (a possible allusion to the 1643 Westminster Assembly of Divines) in which Satan rebelled against God “in sight/Of all the Seraphim with [Satan] combin’d” (2.748–9). Sin’s “dalliance” with Satan, similarly, was “Then sweet, now sad to mention”: however much the 1660 allegories might look away, the Presbyterians’ complicity with Parliament in the 1640s was too evident for a restored monarchy to ignore, Milton argued, so Presbyterians’ calling for monarchy in the spring of 1660 was recklessly self-endangering (2.819, 820). And if it wasn’t already, Milton hoped to make it so.

III. Conclusion

Using the framework of transitional justice, the foregoing has argued that popular allegories during the spring of 1660 can be seen as a significant battleground over which contests over political theory and history were pitched. At stake was the loyalty of the Presbyterians, who, between their reintroduction on February 21 and the sitting of the Convention Parliament on April 25, were the group most responsible for the religious and political fate of the nation. For the publishers of the Mistress Rump allegories, it was critical to demonstrate that Presbyterians could be safe bringing back the monarchy, that royalists would forget the 1640s, or at least willfully, publicly misremember. The Mistress Rump allegories were also, in an idiosyncratic way, an apology to Presbyterians. The 1648 Mistress Parliament dialogues criticized Presbyterians brutally. Republishing them with Mistress Rump in Mistress Parliament’s place meant publicly absolving the Presbyterians, who were now cast as the victims of the perpetrators’ exclusion – not perpetrators themselves. For a republican independent like Milton observing these gestures, it was vital to demonstrate that the Presbyterians could not trust the promises of safety implied by the royalist allegories. Indeed, it was part of his project to make sure they would not. In Readie and Easie Way, he brought up Charles’ reneging on his treaty with the Scots at the end of the first Bishops’ War as an example of royal duplicity. ⁷⁶ In the allegory of Sin and Death, Satan “answer[s] smooth” in the face of opposition, saying just what he needs in order to guarantee his passage (2.816). Why should Presbyterians negotiating the king’s return consider themselves safe?

The lessons here do not end with the particularities of the English Restoration. Milton in the end leaves contemporary scholars with a perspective useful for complicating overly-rosy accounts of transitional justice. Milton would have been one of the first to insist that transitional justice need not always be seen as an “achievement,” as it is in the recent United Nations report. “The state’s desire to build a new post-conflict society often means sloughing off the past too easily,” subordinating participants’ needs to the “political expediency of national unity” while rejecting the fundamentally political nature of historical memory. ⁷⁷ Not only can “nationally defined prerogatives of remembering and forgetting” “homogenize disparate individual memories,” so too can they short-circuit the political contests over history constitutive of a participatory political community. ⁷⁸ As Jill Stauffer has written, “We edge up against the real limits of reconciliation most often when reconciliation is conceived as forgiveness and forgiveness is linked to amnesty or amnesia with regard to the past.” ⁷⁹ Milton’s need to contest the past (as opposed to forgetting or sanitizing it) bespeaks an orientation toward public deliberation that later republicans such as Hannah Arendt and Jürgen Habermas would likewise share. In an important sense, Milton’s writings contain useful seeds for a critical history of transitional justice founded in the anti-monarchical tradition.

Finally, Milton and his contemporaries illustrate why we need to pay attention to the literary texture of transitional justice. Literary works, it has been observed, can make good on “the commitment to speak about individual experience” rather to subordinate all such experience to a national narrative. ⁸⁰ They also “create new constellations between the present and the past and make visible continuities and discontinuities, recognitions and misrecognitions.” ⁸¹ Hegemonic pressure for truth and reconciliation certainly convinces some people in post-conflict societies to enter into the juridical modes of testimony and memorial but it also can force grievances into genres including fiction, poetry, allegory, and satire that often withhold unambiguous truth-claims, or at least keep such claims closer to the vest. The very reticence of such genres can aid in “denaturalizing the positive oversignification of … transitional justice.” ⁸²

Yet Milton’s use of allegory gets at a larger point about the range of non-judicial cultural practices, processes, and mechanisms that structure and organize dialogue and which are therefore relevant to moments of transitional justice. Genre is one. Popular allegories have rarely been the place scholars have turned to see history’s negotiations and conciliatory gestures, but that has followed in part from a widespread inattention to the rhetorical moves and affective work made possible within the conventions of a literary genre. “Some publics,” as Michael Warner has observed, “are more likely than others to stand in for the public, to frame their address as the universal discussion of the people.” ⁸³ Allegory’s public as has been difficult to square with a transitional justice that relies on “propositionally summarizable” documents and affectively-oriented speech-acts such as inviting, promising, forgiving, and apologizing while seeking to limit seemingly counter-productive speech-acts such as inculpations, warnings, and threats. ⁸⁴ It is often assumed that creators of allegories and other literary texts have had quite different aims, either because literary language is assumed to be too complex for such simpleminded descriptions of its functions or because literary texts are in fact too multifarious, heterogeneous, ambiguous, and self-contradictory to accomplish such richly communicative speech-acts. In the case of Milton and popular allegory on the eve of the Restoration, however, the norms of the genre offer a way into the constitutive speech-acts of transitional justice. For those interested in transitional justice, it is important to recognize that generic conventions constrain and organize discourse in such a way that individual literary works are indeed capable of deeply expressive, potentially reparative speech-acts such as apology and forgiveness and also equally expressive, more ruinous ones such as warning and threat. ⁸⁵

Crude, vicious, and scornful, the Mistress Rump allegories appear at first the furthest thing possible from exercises in forgiveness. But they were nearly as important in what they took back as in what they said. While continuing to demonize Independents and republicans, they served a critical function in brokering a necessary trust between the royalists and the Presbyterians that would allow the Presbyterians to assent to a Restoration. This is a potentiality of literature all too often overlooked.

Milton recognized, as many modern scholars have not, the powerful gestures such works could make. He tried desperately to fracture the fragile trust with all the force of his poetry and prose, but to no avail. Apologizing, in however complicated a manner, was all royalists apparently needed to do. Allegory on the eve of the Restoration, then, ultimately asks us to redress tendencies toward “ahistorical abstraction” in transitional justice while ensuring that our focus on historical particularities remains “linked … robustly with human rights and justice both discursively and practically to prevent memory, especially traumatic memory, from becoming a vacuous exercise feeding parasitically on itself.” ⁸⁶