¹ For a full statement of such an attempt, see S. B. Liljegren, Studies in Milton (1918; rpt. New York: Haskell House, 1969) and two books by Paul Phelps-Morand, De Comus à Satan: L'Œuvre poétique de John Milton expliquée par sa vie (Paris: Didier, 1939) and The Effects of His Political Life upon John Milton (Paris: Didier, 1939).

² In Essays in English Literature from the Renaissance to the Victorian Age Presented to A. S. P. Woodhouse, ed. Millar MacLure and F. W. Watt (Toronto: Univ. of Toronto Press, 1964), pp. 125-48.

³ Hughes considered Eikonoklastes as a source for Milton's Satan, but concluded: “The experience of writing Eikonoklastes could contribute but little to the creation of Milton's Satanic eikon basilike” (“Milton's Eikon Basilike” in Calm of Mind: Tercentenary Essays on Paradise Regained and Samson Agonistes in Honor of John S. Diekhoff, ed. Joseph A. Wittreich, Jr., Cleveland: Case Western Reserve Univ. Press, 1971, p. 1). While I do not think it necessary to argue that Milton turned back to Eikonoklastes or the Defences as a literal source for his Satan, I believe it important for us to realize that the political experience and vision informing the prose and the poetry are the same.

⁴ Complete Prose Works of John Milton, ed. Don M. Wolfe (New Haven: Yale Univ. Press, 1958), iii, 406; Merritt Y. Hughes edited this volume. This work is hereafter cited as CPW. All page references to Eikonoklastes are from this edition.

⁵ The anonymous author of Eikon Ale thine (1649) sought to discredit Eikon Basilike by calling it a forgery; and he claimed that his purpose, besides vindicating the parliamentary cause, was to protect the memory of the king from the charge of damnable hypocrisy that would be due him if the book were really his: “it is not infamy to say a man hath erred, obstinacy therein onely brands him: It is not I then that reproach the late King by enumerating some of his late errors; but he [the forger of Eikon Basilike] that makes the late King justifie himselfe in them, adding impenitency and obstinacy to make them Heresies and Crimes” (Folger Library copy, Cat. No. E267, pp. 1-2).

⁶ Milton's Literary Milieu (Chapel Hill: Univ. of North Carolina Press, 1939), Ch. xiii, “The Writing of Eikonoklastes,” pp. 336-37. Also revealing of Milton's purpose is a comparison of Eikon Alethine's view of this issue with Eikonoklastes'. The Eikon Basilike portrays Charles as repenting that he had, under pressure from Parliament, agreed to Strafford's execution. The Eikon Alethine solves (albeit unconvincingly) the contradiction between the king's attitude at Strafford's trial and that in the Book by claiming that while Charles had been sincere in condemning the guilty Strafford, thus performing a righteous act, the “forger” of the Eikon was villainously laying “innocent blood” on the king's head by saying the king had thought Strafford innocent (p. 11). Milton, on the contrary, accepts both attitudes as the king's and views the contradiction as revealing of his character and dilemma as a tyrant:

No marvel then, if being as deeply criminous as the Earle himself, it stung his. conscience to adjudge to death those misdeeds whereof himself had bin the chiefe Author…. That mind must needs be irrecoverably deprav'd, which either by chance or importunity tasting but once of one just deed, spatters at it, and abhorrs the relish ever after. (pp. 372-74)

⁷ For a representative statement of this view see Robert Weldon, The Doctrine of the Scriptures concerning the Originals of Dominion (1648).

⁸ William J. Grace, in his “Preface to A Defence of the People of England,” CPW, iv, Pt. I, 287, fails to understand how Milton's argument at this point is based upon a logical interpretation of the chain of being and thus finds his view of Old Testament politics “narrow, private, or quaint.” Grace is assuming the royalist principle of correspondences when he finds irony in Milton's interpretation of the Book of Samuel: “Amusingly enough,” he says, “God in support of Israel's republican principles appears rather royalistic and absolute.” “Republican principles,” however, are not held by Milton in the abstract for their own sake, but for the sake of the higher religious principles discussed here; and there is no inconsistency involved.

⁹ For a discussion of the “Pamela prayer” controversy, see Merritt Hughes's chapter on the “Date, Occasion, and Method of Eikonoklastes” in CPW, iii, 150-61.

¹⁰ Cf. Eikon Alethine's urging the people to distrust the rhetoric of the King's Book: “Bee not cheated out of your innocency by this subtill Serpent with an Apple of Sodom, which at the touch of truth will fall to ashes” (“The Epistle to the Reader: To the Seduced People of England”).

¹¹ Modeling his statement about the king after the Prayer Book invocation of a God “whose service is perfect freedom,” Sir Robert Filmer had claimed: “The greatest liberty in the world (if it be duly considered) is for a people to live under a monarch” (Patriarcha: A Defense of the Natural Power of Kings against the Unnatural Liberty of the People [1680], ed. T. P. R. Laslett, Oxford Univ. Press, 1949, p. 55).

¹² “Space [instead of God] may produce new Worlds” (i.650); “this infernal Pit [instead of God] shall never hold / Celestial Spirits” (i.657-58).

¹³ Satan speculates on the creation of man: “Whether such virtue spent of old now fail'd / More Angels to Create, if they at least / Are his Created” (ix.145-47).

¹⁴ Claudius Salmasius, Defensio Regia, Pro Carolo ii (1649), quoted in CPW, iv, Pt. i, 310, n. 23.