Days after the execution of Charles I, Eikon Basilike, a book purported to be written by the king, was published posthumously. Parliament commissioned Milton to write a response. With chapters on Wentworth’s execution and the Irish Rising of the early 1640s, Ireland is threaded throughout Charles’ Eikon Basilike and Milton’s response, Eikonoklastes. When Milton began writing Eikonoklastes, Cromwell was preparing to invade Ireland. By the time Eikonoklastes was published, in October of 1649, Cromwell’s invasion of Ireland had been underway for two months. Its most infamous battles, the siege of Drogheda had already taken place. In 1650, Milton publishes a revised second edition of Eikonoklastes, in which he hits upon the term “pluralist,” and invokes it scornfully against his opponents in Ireland. Milton is now up against a principle: pluralism, which Milton implies is built into the cultural and political map of Ireland. As Milton confronts in Ireland a different way of thinking about government, administration, and policy, the Stuart idea of Great Britain must be defeated in Ireland, because it threatens a century-old project of centralization.

Milton's divorce tracts create a political ideology of marriage and husbands which increasingly sees wives as the problem for male citizens. Like Habermas in creating a fantasy of the public sphere that excludes women, and like Charles I in Eikon Basilike, Milton in the Doctrine and Discipline of Divorce, Tetrachordon, Colasterion, and Martin Bucer tracts imagines a hapless husband who needs to be freed from both paternal oversight and wifely constraints if he is to be a public authority in England. Inviting Parliament to see divorce itself as not just an analogy for anti-monarchy movements but as itself a key linchpin in the new commonwealth, Milton, in the divorce tracts, creates the perfect male citizen as the man who can repudiate his wife.