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.

This chapter explores the reception of the visible legacy of sixteenth-century image-breaking in the years surrounding the English Civil War. For all its violence, the iconoclasm of the early Reformation never succeeded in banishing all superstitious images from English churches and cathedrals. In many places of worship, reminders of the old religion survived into the seventeenth century in the form of defaced carvings, headless statuettes, damaged picture windows and partially razed memorial brasses. Rightly or wrongly, seventeenth-century observers came to associate Reformation iconoclasm with a strategy of instructive defacement, intended to preserve visible examples of Catholic superstition marked with the imprint of reforming zeal. The Laudian reornamentation of English churches in the 1620s and 1630s led many puritans to conclude that the strategy of defacement had been a failure, and to call for a new wave of more thorough-going iconoclasm. Yet others, including John Milton, continued to embrace selective defacement as a model for coping with both literary and material idols.