Satan’s Pardon: The Forms of Judicial Mercy in Paradise Lost

God’s willingness to pardon is a mainspring of Paradise Lost, one that transforms the epic from bleak to hopeful. The opening lines express John Milton’s trust that the Son — the “greater Man” — will one day “Restore” fallen men and women, and the merciful restoration planned in God the Father and the Son’s conversation in book 3 is initiated in book 10 when Adam and Eve, their hearts softened, fall prostrate and beg pardon in “sorrow unfeign’d and humiliation meek.”¹ Milton also gives a surprising amount of attention to the possibility of Satan’s pardon. Chronologically speaking, the earliest reference appears in book 5 when Abdiel urges Satan to “hast’n to appease / Th’incensed Father, and th’incensed Son, / While Pardon may be found in time besought” (5.846–48). In book 1, Satan entertains the hypothetical idea of mercy even as he refuses “To bow and sue for grace / With suppliant knee” (1.111–12), and Mammon revisits this subject during the epic debate when he allows that even if God were to “relent / And publish Grace to all, on promise made / Of new Subjection” (2.237–39), the fallen angels would refuse to rejoin heaven’s polity. In book 3, we see this issue from heaven’s point of view, for God proclaims that the fallen angels are not eligible for mercy because they are “Self-tempted, self-deprav’d” (3.130). Finally, the idea of pardon centrally occupies Satan during his soliloquy at the beginning of book 4. Reflecting on his own rebellion and punishment, he asks, “is there no place / Left for Repentance, none for Pardon left?” (4.79–80), and he wonders whether he “could repent and could obtaine / By Act of Grace my former state” (4.93–94).

Milton scholars have thoroughly examined the theological dimensions of Adam and Eve’s pardon, showing how Milton’s treatment of mercy reflects his broadly Protestant and specifically Arminian view of salvation.² Satan’s pardon has received similarly theological treatment. Harry F. Robins and C. A. Patrides both discuss it in relationship to the doctrine of apocatastasis, or universal salvation, widely credited to Origen of Alexandria, and Patrides concludes that while apocatastasis interested Milton for its dramatic possibilities, it was not a position he ultimately endorsed.³ While illuminating on their own terms, such theological examinations capture only part of how Milton depicts pardons in Paradise Lost. Specifically, the use of juridical pardons was soaring in the seventeenth century. As England’s Bloody Code got bloodier, as measured by the rising number of capital statutes, more and more pardons were issued by the crown to avoid overusing the scaffold.⁴ Given the early modern period’s religious and political tumults, an increasing number of men and women had had a brush with the law, and, as social historians such as Krista Kesselring and Natalie Zemon Davis show, they were remarkably well versed in pardoning procedures and protocols.⁵

Pardons acquired a further visibility during the second half of the seventeenth century. Although in theory mercy was the sole prerogative of the monarch, Parliament increasingly claimed the right to determine who should and should not receive mercy, and by the late 1670s pardons had become a politically supercharged symbol of the struggle over executive privilege.⁶ Milton indisputably knew the contested nature of the monarch’s right to pardon, for he writes about it in both Eikonoklastes and Observations upon the Articles of Peace. And he had a personal familiarity with the workings of judicial mercy, having received two separate pardons in the months following the Restoration.

In this essay, I argue that when he describes pardons, Milton is not only thinking theologically; he is also thinking judicially, socially, and politically, and the scenes of pardon in Paradise Lost are as much influenced by the forms of mercy he saw around him as by the writings of Saint Paul, Saint Augustine, and John Calvin.⁷ As an essentially extralegal phenomenon that occurred after the law had done its work, pardons have very...