Oliver Cromwell, Father Murderer

And John Milton, who wrote the defense

On 30 January 1649 the king of England was beheaded outside the Banqueting House at Whitehall by order of a court that claimed to act in the name of the people, and Oliver Cromwell had signed the death warrant third. Less than two weeks later John Milton published the argument that any who have the power may call a king to account and put him to death. In September Cromwell’s army stormed Drogheda, killed men who had surrendered, killed the friars, and put nearly a thousand men to the sword in a church, and Cromwell called it the righteous judgment of God. This paper argues that the regicide broke the Fifth Commandment where the Protestant confessions apply it to rulers, that Cromwell killed Christians and set God’s name to the killing, and that Milton supplied the principle under which both were done.

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The question

Outside Westminster Hall, where Charles I was tried, stands Hamo Thornycroft’s bronze Oliver Cromwell, a sword in one hand and a Bible in the other. In 1845 Thomas Carlyle published Cromwell’s letters and speeches to prove him a sincere man of God rather than a hypocrite. John Milton stands higher still in Protestant memory, and Wordsworth called on him by name in 1802: “Milton! thou should’st be living at this hour: England hath need of thee.” The two men were partners. Cromwell signed the king’s death warrant, Milton published the defense of the killing within two weeks, and in March the new Council of State made Milton its Secretary for Foreign Tongues. In 1652 Milton addressed a sonnet to Cromwell, “our chief of men,” that praised the battles in which Cromwell had killed the Scots.

We ask three questions of every idea: where it came from, what truth has been twisted to produce it, and where it leads. The idea at work in 1649 is that subjects may sit in judgment on their king and put him to death, and that whoever holds the power may do it in God’s name. This paper brings two charges against Cromwell and one against Milton.

The first charge is the first phrase of the title. The old word for killing one’s father is parricide, and the Protestant confessions place the king inside the commandment about fathers (section 02). Cromwell helped try, condemn, and kill a king who was disarmed and in custody, which is that commandment broken against the highest father in the commonwealth.

The second charge needs care, because every army in a war between Christians kills Christians, the king’s army included. We do not rest it on battle. We rest it on what Cromwell reported in his own hand: men killed after they surrendered, friars killed as friars, and nearly a thousand men put to the sword in a church where they had fled, all of it called the righteous judgment of God, and in Scotland an army he called God’s people, killed and taken prisoner by the thousand (section 05).

Milton killed no one. The charge against him is the one Paul brought against himself for the death of Stephen, that he stood by “consenting unto his death, and kept the raiment of them that slew him” (Acts 22:20). Milton did more than hold the coats. He wrote the defense in English for England, and then in Latin for Europe as an officer of the government that did the killing (section 06).

Whether Parliament could lawfully take up arms against the king in 1642 is a question this paper does not need to settle. The charges concern what was done after the war was won, to a king in custody and to Christians who had laid down their arms or fled into a church.

The father

The commandment that governs every human superior is addressed to children: “Honour thy father and thy mother, that it may be well with thee, and that thou mayest live long on the good land, which the Lord thy God gives to thee” (Exod. 20:12). Paul calls it “the first commandment with promise” (Eph. 6:2).

The Westminster Assembly, which the Parliament called in 1643 and protected through the war, gave the Reformed reading of that commandment in the Larger Catechism. By father and mother “are meant, not only natural parents, but all superiors in age and gifts; and especially such as, by God’s ordinance, are over us in place of authority, whether in family, church, or commonwealth” (Q. 124). The honor owed them includes “fidelity to, defense, and maintenance of their persons and authority,” and “bearing with their infirmities, and covering them in love” (Q. 127). Among the sins against them the catechism names “rebellion against their persons and places” (Q. 128). The Assembly finished the catechism in 1647. Within two years the remnant of the Parliament that had called the Assembly tried the king and cut off his head.

The same Parliament had sworn an oath to God. The Solemn League and Covenant of 1643 bound those who took it “to preserve and defend the King’s Majesty’s person and authority, in the preservation and defence of the true religion and liberties of the kingdoms,” and to show the world “that we have no thoughts or intentions to diminish His Majesty’s just power and greatness.” When the Presbyterians appealed to that oath against the trial, Milton mocked them for “insisting with much niceness on the unnecessariest clause of their Covenant wrested.” He read the clause as conditional. The words about religion and liberty state what the defense of the king’s person was for. They do not license the men who swore it to kill him once they judge the purpose has failed.

Milton did not deny that a king stands in a father’s place. He granted it of a good king and denied it of a bad one: “as he the public father of his country, so this the common enemy.” On that reading a son’s honor depends on his father’s goodness, and a son who judges his father wicked is released from it. The commandment contains no such condition, and the catechism excludes one, since “bearing with their infirmities” assumes the superior has them. Peter applied the rule to the household: “Servants, be subject to your masters with all fear; not only to the good and gentle, but also to the froward” (1 Pet. 2:18). Where a superior commands sin, the inferior must “obey God rather than men” (Acts 5:29). That permits him to refuse the command. It does not make him his superior’s judge.

Charles I stood in that place by the catechism’s own definition, and his faults were real. A court of his subjects tried him, condemned him, and killed him. That is the commandment broken against the highest father in the land, and the old name for it is parricide. From 1662 until 1859 the Book of Common Prayer appointed a service for 30 January as the day of his martyrdom.

The court

No English king had ever been put on trial. To try one, the army first had to make a court, and to make a court it first had to choose the Parliament.

On 25 November 1648 Cromwell wrote to his friend Colonel Robert Hammond, the king’s keeper on the Isle of Wight. Hammond was troubled by officers who held “that it is lawful for a lesser part, if in the right, to force” the rest. Cromwell answered with questions of his own, among them “whether this Army be not a lawful power, called by God to oppose and fight against the King upon some stated grounds.” Then he gave his evidence: “let us look into providences; surely they mean somewhat. They hang so together; have been so constant, so clear, unclouded.” The army’s victories were its warrant.

On 6 December soldiers under Colonel Thomas Pride stood at the door of the House of Commons and turned away or arrested the members the army would not accept. On 4 January 1649 the members who remained declared “that the people are, under God, the original of all just power,” that the Commons “have the supreme power in this nation,” and that their acts bound the nation without “the consent and concurrence of King, or House of Peers.” The House of Lords had rejected the ordinance for a trial, and on 6 January the Commons created the court alone.

The court sat in Westminster Hall on 20 January. Charles refused to plead and asked the question the whole proceeding could not answer: “I would know by what power I am called hither.” John Bradshaw, the court’s president, told him its authority required him to answer “in the name of the people of England, of which you are elected king.” Charles replied:

That exchange is the subject of our companion paper, None Gives What He Has Not. The court claimed an authority from the people, and the people had none to give, because authority descends from God and no one gives what he does not have. Even on the court’s own theory, the people it spoke for were the members soldiers had let through a door. Thomas Fairfax, the army’s commander-in-chief, was named to the court and would not sit. Fifty-nine commissioners signed the death warrant, dated 29 January, and Cromwell’s name stands third.

On 30 January Charles stepped out of the Banqueting House at Whitehall onto a scaffold built against its wall. He told the men around him that he had “forgiven all the world, and even those in particular that have been the chief causes of my death,” and added, “I pray God, with St. Stephen, that this be not laid to their charge.” Stephen had prayed, “Lord, lay not this sin to their charge” (Acts 7:60). Then the king said, “I die a Christian, according to the profession of the Church of England, as I found it left me by my father,” and laid his head on the block.

The anointed

The case for the court rested on one claim, that a king who sheds innocent blood may be judged by his subjects. Scripture tests that claim in the life of Israel’s first king.

Saul hunted David for years, and in the middle of the hunt he committed the worst crime recorded of him. When the priests at Nob sheltered David, Saul ordered his guards to kill them, “but the servants of the king would not lift their hands to fall upon the priests of the Lord.” Doeg the Syrian did it. He “slew the priests of the Lord in that day,” and put their city to the sword, “both man and woman, infant and suckling” (1 Kgdms. 22:17–19).

Twice after that, Saul fell into David’s hands. In a cave in the wilderness of Engaddi, David’s men read the moment as God’s verdict: “Behold, this is the day of which the Lord spoke to thee, that he would deliver thine enemy into thy hands” (1 Kgdms. 24:5). David refused: “The Lord forbid it me, that I should do this thing to my lord the anointed of the Lord, to lift my hand against him; for he is the anointed of the Lord” (24:7). In Saul’s camp, with the king asleep before him, he refused again, “for who shall lift up his hand against the anointed of the Lord, and be guiltless?” and he left Saul’s end to the Lord, to strike him, or his day to come, or a battle to take him (26:9–10). When a man came to David claiming he had killed Saul at Saul’s own request, David had him put to death: “How was it thou wast not afraid to lift thy hand to destroy the anointed of the Lord?” (2 Kgdms. 1:14).

Milton knew these texts and answered them in the Tenure. “If David refused to lift his hand against the Lord’s anointed,” he wrote, “the matter between them was not tyranny, but private enmity, and David as a private person had been his own revenger.” Then he set a condition: “when any tyrant at this day can show to be the Lord’s anointed, the only mentioned reason why David withheld his hand, he may then but not till then presume on the same privilege.”

Both answers fail on the page. The matter between Saul and David was tyranny. Saul had already murdered the priests of the Lord and destroyed their city when David spared him in the cave and again in the camp, and Scripture sets the massacre two chapters before the cave. If a king who destroyed a city of priests was still the Lord’s anointed to David, then shed blood does not hand a king over to his subjects’ judgment.

Milton’s condition fails because the apostles never imposed it. Paul wrote that “the powers that be are ordained of God” and “whosoever therefore resisteth the power, resisteth the ordinance of God” (Rom. 13:1–2) while Nero reigned, and no prophet had poured oil on Nero. Peter commanded submission “to the king, as supreme,” and closed with “Fear God. Honour the king” (1 Pet. 2:13, 17). The duty runs to the office God ordained. It does not wait on a proof of anointing that the subject is left to demand.

What truth it twists. The truth behind Cromwell’s letter to Hammond is that God governs the world and nothing happens apart from his providence. David’s men held that truth in the cave and drew Cromwell’s conclusion from it: God had delivered the king into their hands, so God meant them to use the opening. David held the same truth and drew the opposite conclusion. A king delivered into his hands was a test of whether he would keep God’s law when breaking it was easy. Providence shows what God has permitted. It does not show what God has commanded. Scripture’s plainest case is Assyria, which God used as the rod of his anger against Israel and then punished for the pride with which it swung (Isa. 10).

Charles drew the same distinction on the scaffold, with the axe in view: “God forbid that I should be so ill a Christian as not to say that God’s judgments are just upon me. Many times he does pay justice by an unjust sentence, that is ordinary.” He accepted God’s judgment and denied the court’s. Cromwell could not hold the two apart, because he read every victory as a verdict.

We do not argue from 1660. The Restoration brought back the king’s son, and on 30 January 1661, the twelfth anniversary of the execution, Cromwell’s body was taken out of Westminster Abbey and hanged at Tyburn. A reader who reasoned as Cromwell reasoned would call that the verdict of providence. We do not reason that way. We note only that Cromwell’s rule, applied to his own corpse, condemns him.

The Christians

In August 1649 Cromwell landed in Ireland as Lord Lieutenant, and on 11 September his army stormed Drogheda. The town was held for Charles II by a royalist garrison of English and Irish soldiers under an English commander, Sir Arthur Aston. The evidence is Cromwell’s report to William Lenthall, the Speaker of the Parliament, dated 17 September, and everything quoted here about Drogheda is in Cromwell’s own words.

When his men reached the Mill Mount, where Aston and his officers had retreated, they “were ordered by me,” Cromwell wrote, “to put them all to the sword,” and he added, “being in the heat of action, I forbade them to spare any that were in arms in the town.” About a hundred men held the steeple of St. Peter’s Church and refused to yield, and Cromwell “ordered the steeple of St. Peter’s Church to be fired.” The men in one of the town’s towers, who had killed some of his soldiers from it, held out until hunger brought them down, and “when they submitted, their officers were knocked on the head, and every tenth man of the soldiers killed, and the rest shipped for the Barbadoes.”

In St. Peter’s itself, where by Cromwell’s account the Protestants had been turned out and Mass said the Sunday before, “near one thousand of them were put to the sword, flying thither for safety.” Then the clergy: “I believe all their friars were knocked on the head promiscuously but two.” The soldiers took the first of the two, Father Peter Taaffe, the next day “and made an end of” him. The second had been captured in a tower passing as a lieutenant, and “when he understood that the officers in that tower had no quarter, he confessed he was a friar, but that did not save him.” Cromwell’s verdict followed:

Three things in that sentence carry the charge. The first is the admission. Cromwell knew such actions would work remorse and regret unless something justified them. The second is the justification, which fails on its own terms. The innocent blood he meant was the blood of Protestants killed in the Irish rising of 1641, and those killings were real. But the rebels of 1641 had besieged Drogheda for months and withdrawn in the spring of 1642 without taking it. Cromwell’s vengeance fell on a town that had resisted the rebels he was avenging, and on a garrison he never showed had any part in their crimes. The law forbids even a lawful judge to punish one man for another’s sin: “every one shall be put to death for his own sin” (Deut. 24:16). The third is the name. Cromwell did not call Drogheda a hard necessity of war. He called it a righteous judgment of God, and the commandment “Thou shalt not take the name of the Lord thy God in vain” (Exod. 20:7) falls hardest on a man who signs God’s name to his own work.

A month later at Wexford, where his soldiers broke into the town while its surrender was still being negotiated, Cromwell counted “not many less than two thousand” enemy dead and wrote that God, “by an unexpected providence, in his righteous justice, brought a just judgment upon them.” Eight days after that he set out his terms for Christians of the other confession. When the governor of New Ross asked for liberty of conscience as a condition of surrender, Cromwell answered: “I meddle not with any man’s conscience; but if by liberty of conscience you mean a liberty to exercise the Mass, I judge it best to use plain dealing, and to let you know, where the Parliament of England have power, that will not be allowed of.” The constitution of his Protectorate wrote the same exception into law. The Instrument of Government of 1653 protected “such as profess faith in God by Jesus Christ,” “provided this liberty be not extended to Popery or Prelacy.” Prelacy meant the Church of England under its bishops, the church in whose profession the king had died.

In Scotland the Christians on the other side were Presbyterians who had sworn the same Covenant as the English Parliament. On 3 August 1650 Cromwell wrote to the General Assembly of the Church of Scotland, “I beseech you, in the bowels of Christ, think it possible you may be mistaken.” A month later, on 3 September, he destroyed their army at Dunbar. He reported to the Speaker, “We killed (as most think) three thousand; took near ten thousand prisoners,” and in the same letter wrote that his army had longed “to have avoided blood in this business; by reason that God hath a people here fearing His name, though deceived.” Several thousand of the prisoners were marched south to Durham and held in the cathedral and the castle. Archaeologists of Durham University, who identified mass graves of these men in 2015, estimate that about 1,700 of them died there.

The pen

Milton published The Tenure of Kings and Magistrates less than two weeks after the execution. Its title stated the thesis: that “it is lawful, 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 depose, and put him to death.” In March the Council of State made him its Secretary for Foreign Tongues. In October 1649, at the Council’s commission, he answered Eikon Basilike, the book of the king’s prayers and meditations then running through edition after edition, with Eikonoklastes, “the image-breaker.” In 1651 he defended the killing before the learned world in Latin, in A Defence of the People of England. His sight was failing as he wrote it, and by 1652 he was blind. He wrote later that his physicians had warned him the work would cost him his eyes, and that he chose to write. We do not doubt his sincerity. Sincerity is not the question.

Men later bound themselves under kings and magistrates by agreement, Milton continued, and so “the power of kings and magistrates is nothing else, but what is only derivative, transferred and committed to them in trust from the people, to the common good of them all, in whom the power yet remains fundamentally.” From that premise he drew the conclusion that matters most: “then may the people as oft as they shall judge it for the best, either choose him or reject him, retain him or depose him though no tyrant, merely by the liberty and right of free born men, to be governed as seems to them best.”

Where it came from. This is the doctrine the Commons declared on 4 January, that the people are under God the original of all just power, set down by Milton with its consequences drawn. The consequence he named reaches past regicide. A people that holds power fundamentally may remove a ruler who has done no wrong, as often as it judges removal best. Our companion paper describes that right put on a calendar, which is an election.

What truth it twists. Man was made in God’s image and given dominion over the creatures (Gen. 1:26–28). Milton turned dominion over creatures into freedom from obedience, “born to command and not to obey.” The account of Eden says the opposite. God’s first words to the man and woman he had made were commands, and in the garden the first word to Adam was a charge: “And the Lord God gave a charge to Adam” (Gen. 2:16). The fall came by refusing it. Sir Robert Filmer, who answered Milton’s Defence in print in 1652, had already put the reply in a sentence: “the desire of liberty was the first cause of the fall of Adam.”

Milton carried the doctrine into Paradise Lost. In the twelfth book the archangel Michael shows Adam the first king after the flood, and Adam, “fatherly displeased,” cries out against him, “O execrable son so to aspire / Above his brethren,” and then speaks Milton’s politics:

Milton gave the first father of mankind a speech denying that any man is lord over men, though Adam held over his own children the one authority no child consents to, the authority the Fifth Commandment protects.

The pen and the sword. The Tenure’s title gives the right to judge a king to “any, who have the power.” In the winter of 1649 the power belonged to the army, and Milton’s principle and Cromwell’s providences arrive at one place: whoever can do it may do it, and success shows that God approves. Milton aimed the argument at the Presbyterians, who had made war on the king and now protested his trial: “If in these proceedings against their king they may not finish by the usual course of justice what they have begun, they could not lawfully begin at all.” The argument assumes that whatever an army may do in the field, a court may do in a hall. A war, if lawful, may kill a king who rides at the head of his army. A court that tries him needs jurisdiction, which is authority over the one it judges. Grant for argument’s sake that a son may bar the door against a father who comes at him with a knife. It does not follow that the next morning his brothers may try the father and hang him. Milton supplied the jurisdiction the only way it could be supplied, by placing the power “fundamentally” in the people, and section 03 and our companion paper answer that premise.

Milton claimed the Reformers for this argument and cited John Knox and Christopher Goodman among others. The Church of Scotland did not accept the claim. Its commissioners protested against putting the king to death as contrary to the Covenant.

Milton’s people had a further limit. When the people mourned the king and bought his book of prayers, Milton called them “an inconstant, irrational, and image-doting rabble; that like a credulous and hapless herd, begotten to servility,” and said they held out their ears to be “bored through in witness of their own voluntary and beloved baseness,” as a servant who chooses to stay a slave has his ear bored (Exod. 21:6). The people in whose name the king was killed became a rabble when they mourned him.

Liberty had the same limit in Milton as in Cromwell. Areopagitica (1644), Milton’s case against licensing the press, asks that “many be tolerated, rather than all compelled,” and then names the exception: “I mean not tolerated Popery, and open superstition, which as it extirpates all religions and civil supremacies, so itself should be extirpate.” Cromwell at Ross and the Instrument of Government drew the line in the same place. We do not hold liberty of conscience as a political principle, and we do not fault either man for refusing it to everyone. We note that both called their arrangement liberty, when it was an establishment of their own party with its exceptions decided by the party in power.

Milton also held that books act. “Books are not absolutely dead things,” he wrote in Areopagitica, “but do contain a potency of life in them to be as active as that soul was whose progeny they are.” The Tenure was active in that sense, and so was the sonnet he addressed to Cromwell in May 1652. It hails “Cromwell, our chief of men,” who had reared God’s trophies “While Darwen stream with blood of Scots imbrued, / And Dunbar field resounds thy praises loud.” The Darwen runs into the Ribble beside Preston, where Cromwell broke a Scottish army in 1648. The sonnet closes with a prayer: “Help us to save free conscience from the paw / Of hireling wolves whose gospel is their maw.” Milton set the blood of Presbyterian Scots and the freedom of conscience in the same fourteen lines and saw no strain between them.

In 1660 the restored king ordered Eikonoklastes and the Defence burned, and the common hangman burned them. Milton was arrested and briefly imprisoned. The men who restored the throne agreed with him about what books do.

Where it leads

In March 1649 the Rump abolished the office of king and declared that “the office of a King in this nation and Ireland, and to have the power thereof in any single person, is unnecessary, burdensome, and dangerous to the liberty, safety, and public interest of the people.” In April 1653 Cromwell brought musketeers into the House and dissolved the Rump itself, the body that had tried the king in the people’s name. In December the Instrument of Government placed the supreme legislative authority in “one person, and the people assembled in Parliament,” and named the person Lord Protector. In 1657 Cromwell was installed again in Westminster Hall, the room where the king had been tried, seated in the Coronation Chair, which was brought out of Westminster Abbey for the purpose. The power too dangerous for any single person had returned to a single person, who had taken it rather than received it.

Authority that is taken lasts as long as the hand that holds it. Cromwell died in September 1658 and his son Richard succeeded him. The army turned against Richard, his Protectorate ended in May 1659, and in May 1660 Charles II came home. The Protectorate, the first English government to write liberty for all who professed faith in Christ into a constitution, did not outlast its founder by two years. “All they that take the sword shall perish with the sword” (Matt. 26:52).

The idea outlived the government. Milton’s claim that a people may depose a ruler “as oft as they shall judge it for the best” stands again in Locke’s “supreme power to remove or alter the legislative” (1689) and in the Declaration’s “Right of the People to alter or to abolish” (1776), and our companion paper follows that line. One link the American founders documented themselves. In December 1775 a Philadelphia newspaper printed what it presented as the epitaph of John Bradshaw, the president of the court that condemned Charles I, ending with the line “Rebellion to tyrants is obedience to God.” The epitaph was a hoax, and Jefferson believed Franklin had written it. In August 1776 Franklin proposed a seal for the United States showing Pharaoh, crowned and sword in hand, overwhelmed by the sea, with that line as its motto. Congress did not adopt it, and Jefferson put the line on his personal seal.

Six objections

“Charles was a man of blood.” The army’s officers, meeting at Windsor in 1648, resolved to call him to account as “that man of blood,” and the law of Numbers seemed to require it: “the land shall not be purged from the blood shed upon it, but by the blood of him that shed it” (Num. 35:33). Milton reminded the Presbyterians that their own pulpits had called the king “laden with all the innocent blood spilt in three kingdoms.” Charles did shed blood, and in December 1647, while he was negotiating with Parliament, he signed a secret engagement with the Scots to invade England on his behalf, which brought the second war of 1648. We grant all of it. Numbers 35 governs a murderer among the people and gives subjects no commission against their king. Scripture’s man of blood on the throne was Saul, who murdered the priests of the Lord, and David answered that case: “who shall lift up his hand against the anointed of the Lord, and be guiltless?” In David’s own history the charge is made by Shimei, cursing the king as he fled from Absalom, “Go out, go out, thou bloody man, and man of sin” (2 Kgdms. 16:7), and Shimei read Absalom’s success the way Cromwell read his victories: “the Lord has given the kingdom into the hand of Abessalom thy son… because thou art a bloody man” (16:8). When David returned, Shimei met him at the Jordan and said, “thy servant knows that I have sinned” (19:21).

“Ehud and Jehu killed kings.” Milton raised Ehud himself and conceded that “he was raised by God to be a deliverer.” That is the warrant. The Lord “raised up to them a saviour” (Judg. 3:15), and Eglon was a foreign conqueror. Jehu was anointed by a prophet sent with a command: “I have anointed thee to be king over the people of the Lord… And thou shalt utterly destroy the house of Achaab thy master” (4 Kgdms. 9:6–7). Cromwell had no prophet and no command. He had victories, and he read them as both.

“Drogheda was within the customs of war.” Tom Reilly argued in Cromwell: An Honourable Enemy (1999) that the dead at Drogheda were soldiers rather than townspeople, and that a garrison which refused a summons and was taken by storm could be denied quarter under the customs of the time. Micheál Ó Siochrú’s God’s Executioner (2008) gives the opposite reading. This paper does not need to settle the count of civilians or the customs of seventeenth-century sieges. Its charge rests on what Cromwell reported: men killed after they submitted, a friar killed after he declared himself a friar, nearly a thousand men killed in a church where they had fled, and the whole called God’s judgment. The customs of war are not the law of God, and a Christian army answers to the second.

“Cromwell gave England liberty of conscience.” He gave it to the parties he approved. The Mass would “not be allowed of” where Parliament had power, and the Instrument of Government withheld liberty from “Popery or Prelacy,” which meant the Roman Catholic Church and the Church of England as it had stood under its bishops. Every settlement establishes something. Cromwell’s established his own party and called the arrangement liberty.

“Milton was a poet. He killed no one.” The charge says so. Paul killed no one at Stephen’s death either, and counted himself guilty for “consenting unto his death” and keeping the coats (Acts 22:20). Milton wrote the defense as an officer of the government that did the killing and praised its war on the Scots in verse. He believed books act, and the men who restored the king believed it too, and burned his.

“Paradise Lost is a Christian masterpiece.” This paper judges Milton’s politics, not his verse. It quotes the poem where the poem states the politics, in Adam’s speech against the first king, and that speech denies the authority the Fifth Commandment protects. A reader can admire the poem and still see what Milton made the first father say.

Where the argument stops

The limits of the argument should be as plain as its charges.

It does not settle 1642. Whether Parliament could lawfully take up arms against the king is left to another paper, and nothing here depends on it.

It does not make Charles a good king. His dealings in 1647 and 1648 were double, and on the scaffold he confessed that “an unjust sentence that I suffered for to take effect,” the condemnation of the Earl of Strafford in 1641, “is punished now by an unjust sentence upon me.” By the standard this paper applies to Milton, Charles bore guilt for Strafford’s death, and he said so himself.

It does not judge the souls of either man. Cromwell and Milton died professing Christ, and their end belongs to God.

It does not tell anyone to stop reading Milton. It asks that his politics be read as politics.

The two charges against Cromwell stand apart. If the people held the power fundamentally, as Milton taught, the court had jurisdiction and the warrant was a sentence rather than a parricide, and the first charge fails there. Section 03 and None Gives What He Has Not answer that premise, and a reader who rejects the first charge should reject it there. The second charge does not depend on the first. A reader who thinks the king deserved his sentence still has to account for Drogheda in Cromwell’s own words.

Texts and editions

SCRIPTURE

The Septuagint Version of the Old Testament, trans. Sir Lancelot C. L. Brenton (London, 1844). 1 and 2 Kingdoms are 1 and 2 Samuel in English Bibles, and 4 Kingdoms is 2 Kings.

The Holy Bible, King James Version (1611), New Testament.

PRIMARY

The Solemn League and Covenant (1643), art. III, in S. R. Gardiner, ed., The Constitutional Documents of the Puritan Revolution, 3rd ed. (Oxford, 1906).

John Milton, Areopagitica (London, 1644).

The Westminster Larger Catechism (1648), Q. 124, 127, 128.

Oliver Cromwell to Robert Hammond, 25 November 1648; to William Lenthall, 17 September 1649 (Drogheda) and 14 October 1649 (Wexford); to the Governor of Ross, 19 October 1649; to the General Assembly of the Kirk of Scotland, 3 August 1650; to William Lenthall, 4 September 1650 (Dunbar). In Thomas Carlyle, ed., Oliver Cromwell’s Letters and Speeches (London, 1845; 2nd ed. 1849), and in their 1649 printings.

William Allen, A Faithful Memorial of That Remarkable Meeting of Many Officers of the Army in England at Windsor Castle, in the Year 1648 (London, 1659).

Journal of the House of Commons, vol. 6, 4 January 1649.

A Perfect Narrative of the Whole Proceedings of the High Court of Justice in the Trial of the King (London, 1649).

King Charles His Speech Made upon the Scaffold at Whitehall-Gate (London, 1649).

Warrant for the execution of Charles I, 29 January 1649. Parliamentary Archives, HL/PO/JO/10/1/297A.

John Milton, The Tenure of Kings and Magistrates (London, 1649); Eikonoklastes (London, 1649); Pro Populo Anglicano Defensio (London, 1651); Sonnet XVI, “To the Lord General Cromwell” (May 1652; first printed 1694); Paradise Lost (London, 1667), XII.63–71.

Act abolishing the office of King (17 March 1649); The Instrument of Government (16 December 1653), arts. I, XXXVII. In Gardiner, Constitutional Documents.

Robert Filmer, Patriarcha (written 1630s–1640s; printed 1680), ch. 1; Observations Concerning the Original of Government (London, 1652).

John Locke, Two Treatises of Government (1689), Second Treatise §149. Declaration of Independence (1776).

Daniel Neal, The History of the Puritans, 2 vols. (London, 1754), vol. 2.

William Wordsworth, “London, 1802,” in Poems, in Two Volumes (London, 1807).

“Bradshaw’s Epitaph,” Pennsylvania Evening Post, 14 December 1775, and Benjamin Franklin, proposal for the Great Seal of the United States [before 14 August 1776], in The Papers of Benjamin Franklin, vol. 22. Thomas Jefferson Foundation, “Personal Seal.”

The Book of Common Prayer (1662), service for 30 January (withdrawn 1859).

SECONDARY

Tom Reilly, Cromwell: An Honourable Enemy (Dingle, 1999).

Micheál Ó Siochrú, God’s Executioner: Oliver Cromwell and the Conquest of Ireland (London, 2008).

Durham University, Scottish Soldiers Project, findings on the Dunbar prisoners at Durham (2015 onward).

Encyclopædia Britannica, “Sir Phelim O’Neill,” on the siege of Drogheda, 1641–1642.

Hamo Thornycroft, statue of Oliver Cromwell, Westminster (1899).

Published by Beyond Left and Right. Old Testament quotations follow Brenton’s translation of the Septuagint, cited by its book names and numbering; New Testament quotations follow the King James Version. Milton, Cromwell, Charles I, and the parliamentary documents are quoted in modernized spelling. Correspondence: contact@beyondleftandright.com