For nearly twenty years of his career, during the 'tumultuous times' of the English Revolution (CPW, I:807), Milton invested his exceptional literary talents in polemical prose as he struggled with urgent issues of ecclesiastical, civic and domestic liberty. Scholars have sometimes divorced the writer of occasional, fiercely polemical tracts during the Revolution from the visionary author of sublime, lofty poetry. The two, poet and revolutionary polemicist, were, however, closely connected. Milton contributed actively - and imaginatively - to the vital textual dimension of the English Revolution and its crises: as he put it in his Defensio Secunda (Second Defence of the English People; 1654), at the beginning of a retrospective account of his revolutionary writings, he would 'devote to this conflict all [his] talents and all [his] active powers' (iv:622).

Antiprelatical polemic and religious conflict

Milton’s zealous prose in the early 1640s was stimulated by the collapse of the Church of England. Religious and political tensions were fuelled during this period by a series of major religious factors and events: these included godly fears of increased popery within the established episcopal church and at court; the Root and Branch Petition to abolish episcopacy (supported by 15,000 citizens); the assault on the ecclesiastical order and Archbishop Laud (impeached in December 1640); the outbreak of the Irish Rebellion in October 1641; the Grand Remonstrance (an apocalyptic manifesto defining Parliament’s grievances against King Charles I and his ministers); debates about matters of church government and liturgy; the increase of Puritan militancy and the desire for godly reformation; and the escalation of apocalyptic rhetoric stimulated by the political/religious crisis. In the midst of these heated developments, and on the threshold of civil war, Milton produced his combative antiprelatical tracts (1641–2), culminating with The Reason of Church-Government and An Apology against a Pamphlet.