Milton Marched

It was when the crisis broke over the King's suddenly revoking all the Long Parliament's long-awaited reforms, and thus exposing himself in all his stubornness, egotism and deceit, that Milton took the plunge into action. First, oddly enough, he is seen appending his signature to a Citizens' Petition giving moral support to Parliament in the struggle, and heading a demonstration through the streets of London to present it.

He felt that he could not stand aside now, and watch the fight from his ivory tower. If reaction should conquer, he would all his life long "hear within himself stories of discourage and reproach.... Thou hadst the diligence, the parts, the language . . . but when the cause of God and Man was to be pleaded. God listened if He could hear thy voice . . . but thou wert dumb.'" So in he jumped, boots and all.

His first literary assault was on the episcopacy. In attacking the accidents of the religions of feudalism, he was, in reality, attacking the remnants of the dead social system itself; and in putting forth his advanced Presbyterianism the religion of nascent capitalism, he was in reality defending the rising social system itself. From this position he took up one fight after another, finally, in the very year 1649. :n his "Tenure of Kings and Magistrates." by "proving that it is lawful, and hath been held so throughout all ages ... to call to account a tyrant, or wicked king, and after due conviction, to depose him and put him to death." Or, as he put it simply elsewhere. "I only preferred Queen Truth to King Charles."

He scorned the idea of meting out mercy to one who was guilty of holding the whole nation to ransom. "Mercy—to a tyrant—(guilty of) the spilling of more innocent blood by far than ever Nero did . . . (would be) hazarding the welfare of a whole nation, to have saved one, and vilifying the blood of many Jonathans, that saved Israel." The old revolutionary in "Les Miserables" was far more kindly in his judgment on the parallel execution of the infant Louis Louis Dauphin: "You have named [unclear: Louis] XVII. Let us understand each other. Shall we weep for all the innocents, for all martyrs, for all children of the lowest as of the highest rank? I am with you there. But, in that case we must go back beyond '93. and begin our tears before Louis XVII. I will weep over the children of kings with you, provided that you weep with me over the children of the people."

Beside that, Milton was savage. There is a lesson in that, too. The greatest epic poet of England was not too proud to identify himself with a cause "with which all Europe rings from side to side." He even "stooped" to accept the Foreign Secretaryship in a revolutionary government. What price "academic dignity?"

"Milton, thou shouldst be living at this hour, England hath need of thee."

—Partisan.