To Repair the Ruins: Reading Milton

8. David and Charles, Laud and Satan: The Two-Handed Engine of 1 Chronicles 21

217 8 David and Charles, Laud and Satan The Two-Handed Engine of 1 Chronicles 21 Carter Revard When Milton was composing Lycidas in the autumn of 1637, the sensational trial and public punishment of the arch-Puritans Dr. John Bastwick, the Reverend Henry Burton, and Mr. William Prynne had lately taken place in London. On June 14, 1637, they were brought into the Star Chamber, grilled about the sermons and pamphlets they had been publishing, convicted of seditious libel, and sentenced to public punishment, fines, and imprisonment .1 On June 30, the punishment was duly executed before a huge and deeply moved crowd of spectators in the Palace Yard at Westminster. Their ears were cut off, Prynne’s for a second time: it was a warning, to those speaking out against the Laudian and the royal programs, that to speak openly could subject even a doctor (Bastwick), a minister (Burton), or a lawyer and scholar (Prynne) to public humiliation and torture, confiscation of estate and heavy fines, and imprisonment. In August 1637, Archbishop Laud’s speech against the three men, with detailed rebuttal of 218 Carter Revard their claims against him and the bishops, was published—but so, also, was a pamphlet by the men themselves with their own reports of the trial, the speeches they gave, and a detailed account of their punishment.2 The pamphlet presented them as martyrs. They were at first imprisoned “in three remote places of the Kingdome, namely, the Castles of Carnaruan, Cornwall, and Lancaster,” but in October and November, when popular support for them proved too great, they were removed further—to the Scilly Isles, to Jersey, and to Guernsey.3 Their punishment for speaking out must therefore have been still on people’s minds when Milton that November was composing Lycidas.4 Yet Milton seems not have heeded the warning and in Lycidas spoke no less powerfully and clearly than these men did against the “corrupt clergy,” but he did it in such a way that he was not martyred like the others. The best example of how he managed this comes in the famous lines, “But that two-handed engine at the door, / Stands ready to smite once, and smite no more.”5 These lines make covert reference to 1 Chronicles 21, a damning biblical text that Prynne had overtly cited in one of the pamphlets for which he was punished, his 1636 A Looking-Glasse for All Lordly Prelates. 1 Chronicles 21 tells how Satan incited David to conduct a census,6 describes the wrathful punishment with which the angel of the Lord smote Israel as retribution for this, and shows that by repentance David escaped worse destruction , so that the angel put the sword back into its sheath and smote no more. Here is what Prynne wrote: The divell stirreth up Kings to offend God, to the destruction and prejudice of their subjects I Chron. 21.1. and rayseth discordes and dissentions and disaffections betweene Kings and their subjects Iudges 9.23. And haue not Lordly Prelates aunciently , yea lately done, or endeavoured at least to doe the like in Germany, France, that I say not in England too? Their chief practise having allwayes beene to alienate subjects affections from their Kings, by putting them upon unjust taxes, exactions, Projects, Monopolies, oppressions, Innovations; by giving them evill counsel, by stopping the course of lawes, of David and Charles, Laud and Satan 219 common Right and Iustice, of the preaching power and progress of the Gospell, by advancing Idolatry, Popery, Superstition, with their owne intolerable Hierarchie and Lordly iurisdiction , by fathering all their unjust proceedings upon Kings, &c. and on the contrarie to estrange the Kings hearts from their Subjects, by false Calumnies, by seditious Court-Sermons and by infusing jealousies and discontents into their heads and hearts against their best and loyallest Subjects without a cause: A divellish practise never more used then in these our dayes.7 As both Prynne and Milton would have known, the Geneva Bible’s marginal glosses for 1 Chronicles 21 assert that David (tempted by Satan) had sinned in pride, glorying in his royal power by numbering his troops. So we see just how powerfully subversive Prynne’s citation of this story stands as a parallel to what King Charles, tempted by Archbishop Laud, was doing in the England of 1636. Here is how the episode gets narrated and glossed in the...