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115 Chapter  “The Digression” and Milton’s Return to Polemics Spite and favour determin’d all: hence faction, then treacherie both at home & in the field, ev’ry where wrong & oppression, foule and dishonest things committed daylie. Milton, “The Digression” in The History of Britain In early 1649 Milton revisited the polemical battlefield after a long and mysterious absence from public debate. Rushed into print within two weeks after the king’s execution, The Tenure of Kings and Magistrates marks a return after a hiatus of almost four years—the last two divorce tracts having appeared in March 1645. Milton’s only other print publication during this period was an elegant volume of poetry published early in 1646 by Humphrey Moseley, a publisher determined not to get involved in ideological warfare, and bent on emphasizing the courtly connections of Milton’s art. Moseley writes in his preface to the volume that “the slightest Pamphlet is now adayes more vendible then the Works of learnedest men,” suggesting that the proliferation of pamphlets had debased learning, and even the English language: “It is the love I have to our own Language that hath made me diligent to collect, and set forth such Peeces,” as would “renew the wonted honour and esteem of our English tongue.” While these are not Milton’s words, the poet’s own retreat may have been partially motivated by a similar set of values. As Milton laments in a sonnet written during this hiatus, his age hates “Learning worse than Toad or Asp” (CSP 309). In the sequel sonnet, he writes of the “barbarous noise” that surrounded him after he had prompted the “age to quit their clogs.” This imagined transformation had become instead a prolonged “brawl for freedom” in “a senseless mood,” a “waste of wealth and loss of blood” (CSP 297). When viewed in the context of his assertions of unwavering devotion to public affairs and his relatively constant output of polemical prose before 1645 (eleven tracts in the previous four years), Milton’s silence in these four years seems a withdrawal from public debate, if not even a retirement. He 116 Chapter 4 later insists, in Pro Populo Anglicano Defensio Secunda (1654), that he devoted “to this conflict all my talents and all my active powers” (CPW 4:622), but this amends a far more conflicted history. In the Defensio Secunda he also suggests a teleological design to his political work in the 1640s, culminating in the treatises on civil liberty. In a basic sense, this seems quite plausible: there remained a major arsenal of unused political arguments in the Commonplace Book, waiting for some kind of application. His poetry suggests that he already harbors a sense that the Presbyterians and others had not carried the revolution far enough; as John Leonard shows, in Sonnet 12 Milton accuses the “revolting” Presbyterians of backsliding, a theme he takes up in full force in The Tenure. Yet he chose no other venue than this semiprivate mode of expression to work toward reform—if these poems were circulated in manuscript, and it seems likely that some of them were, they probably would have enjoyed only a limited readership. In Areopagitica Milton had glorified London as “a shop of war” that “hath not there more anvils and hammers waking, to fashion out the plates and instruments of armed justice in defense of beleaguered Truth, than there be pens and heads there, . . . musing, searching, revolving new notions and ideas wherewith to present,” while others “as fast reading, trying all things, assenting to the force of reason and convincement” (CPW 2:554). But five months later, Milton himself had ceased to “present” new notions on England’s reformation, and his work during this interim suggests a profound disillusionment, if not also the desire to engage different audiences in very different circumstances. As Annabel Patterson has shown, a Latin verse letter to the Oxford librarian John Rouse that accompanied a gift of his Poems in 1647 is particularly suggestive, not only in the expressed desire to “follow” again, as he had in the poems, “his own devious [devius] ways aloof from the people,” but also in its lament over the present state of affairs. This scribal verse letter is the only evidence we have of Milton’s friendship with Rouse, and presumably his familiarity with the Bodleian itself. Rouse’s commitments remain unknown, although there is something suggestive in his purchase of revolutionary pamphlets in...

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