"Paradise Lost: A Poem Written in Ten Books": Essays on the 1667 First Edition

5. The Emperor’s New Clothes: The Royal Fashion of Satan and Charles II

5 The Emperor’s New Clothes The Royal Fashion of Satan and Charles II RICHARD J. DUROCHER Lear. [To Edgar, dressed as Poor Tom] You, sir, I entertain for one of my hundred; only I do not like the fashion of your garments . You will say they are Persian; but let them be chang’d. —King Lear, 3.6.77–80 An anecdote, probably apocryphal but repeated in several eighteenth century sources and included in J. Milton French’s Life Records of John Milton, recounts a spirited exchange between King Charles II and Milton during the early Restoration. According to the Gospel Magazine; or, Treasury of Divine Knowledge for October 1776, Charles verbally accosted the blind poet upon their chance meeting in St. James Park. But Milton gave the king a sharp retort. The anecdote, recounted in a brief article entitled “Bon Mot of Mr. John Milton,” goes as follows: King Charles II once said to this great man, “Milton, don’t you think that your blindness is a judgment upon you, for having written in defense of my father’s murder?”—“Sir,” answer’d the poet, “’tis true, I have lost my EYES: but, if all calamitous Providences are to be consider’d as Judgments, your Majesty should remember that your royal father lost his HEAD.”1 The origin of the anecdote—unless the encounter actually took place—probably lies in the autobiographical passages of the Defensio 97 98 Richard J. DuRocher Secunda, or Second Defense, in which Milton denies that his blindness resulted from divine punishment for any wrongdoings, as Salmasius had charged.2 In that tract, the monarch whom Milton was disputing was the previous King Charles, and contrary to the anecdote , the dispute—at least in Milton’s mind—was not personal but principled. His aim was not to slander Charles but to oppose tyranny. As Milton insisted: “Iconi Iconoclasten opposui; non regiis minibus insultans, ut insimulor, sed reginam veritatem regi Carolo anteponendam arbitratus” (“I opposed to the Eikon [Basilike] the Eikonoklastes , not, as I am falsely charged, ‘insulting the departed spirit of the king,’ but thinking that Queen Truth should be preferred to King Charles”). Robert Fellowes best captures the tone of Milton’s Latin retort in his translation, first published in Symmons’s edition of Milton’s prose in 1806: “I did not insult over fallen majesty, as is pretended ; I only preferred queen Truth to king Charles.”3 In recounting this supposed encounter between Milton and Charles II in Restoration London, I am not arguing for its strict historical veracity but suggesting the likelihood of a relationship between the two men. As the anecdote indicates, this relationship was antagonistic and sustained by verbal means. In his prose tracts, Milton refers repeatedly and scornfully to the younger Charles. My chief concern in this essay is to explore the possibility that Milton composed a subtle yet scathing representation of Charles II in Paradise Lost. A variety of evidence—historical, visual, and literary—indicates that the portrait of Satan in Paradise Lost displays a number of striking similarities to King Charles II, as he was known to appear in person and as he was represented in several media during the early Restoration. Charles II was known among his contemporaries as the “Black Man,” chiefly for his dark hair and eyes, though this was also a nickname for the devil.4 The portrait of Charles II painted circa 1665 by an unknown artist, National Portrait Gallery no. 1313, illustrates these dark features (fig. 1). In general terms, Satan is cast as a tyrant in Paradise Lost, and his rule reflects aspects of Charles’s reign. Because accusations of tyranny both in the poem and in the day were widespread , however, with Oliver Cromwell and God the Father receiving the same label, I will also present more detailed contextual evidence associating Charles II with Milton’s Satan. Fig. 1. King Charles II, ca. 1665, artist unknown. Courtesy of National Portrait Gallery, London. 100 Richard J. DuRocher Perhaps the most specific links between Satan and Charles II arise from their shared mode of dress and imperial styles. In particular, as I will show, Milton’s references to Satan as a “great Sultan,” or Muslim tyrant, ominously reflect the king’s chosen style of dress between 1666 and 1670–72, specifically his brief adoption of the socalled Persian vest as a distinguishing feature of his court. Thanks to...