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143 Chapter  History and Natural Law in The Tenure of Kings and Magistrates He beareth not a sword for nought: but he is the minister of God, to take vengeance on them that do evil. Wherefore ye must needs obey. Romans 13 Take this drawn sword, saith [Trajan], to use for me, if I reigne well, if not, to use against me. Milton, The Tenure of Kings and Magistrates At the end of Marvell’s “Horatian Ode upon Cromwell’s Return from Ireland,” written in the late spring of 1650, Marvell bids Cromwell to keep his “sword erect,” not only because the gesture has, according to myth, the power to ward off evil spirits, but also because the sword has become necessary to maintain the state: “The same arts that did gain / A pow’r must it maintain.” Evocative of the stark realism of Machiavelli, the lines are often seen to suggest that seventeenth-century England has entered into a new way of legitimating power, marked by the execution of the king. Milton ’s Tenure of Kings and Magistrates, written on just the other side of this historical divide, refers nonetheless to the image of the magistrate’s “sword” some fourteen times, and in ways that show that this new political language may derive as much from the “purge” of Parliament that preceded the execution , when the sword was used as a threat to prune the Long Parliament of all members who might obstruct the deposition. That Milton’s reentry into the public arena occurred in reaction to Pride’s Purge as well as to its consequence helps to explain his tract’s remarkable title: not The Tenure of Kings, which would involve only an inquiry into the theory of monarchy, but The Tenure of Kings and Magistrates, which involves as well the bonds of obligation to Parliament—and enormously complicates the argument. After the protracted political stalemate that had occasioned the “Digression ,” English political history underwent a tumultuous succession of events 144 Chapter 5 in late 1648 and early 1649: the forceful exclusion by the army of the majority of Parliament (December 6), the decision by the new “Rump” Parliament to put the king on trial a month later (January 6), and the condemnation and execution of the king (January 26–30). The occasion of Pride’s Purge and the subsequent decision to put the king on trial brought Milton back into the theater of polemic, with an unforeseen opportunity to make use of his work on history and his extensive notes in the Political Index of the Commonplace Book. While all three events were to some extent conflated in the public eye as having a single objective, culminating in the irrevocable but not inevitable event of the king’s death, Pride’s Purge was in many ways not only the decisive event transforming England’s political body, but also an event that required at least as much justification as the execution itself. For in order for the trial and execution to have in the eyes of contemporaries even a shred of legitimacy, it would need to be conducted by a legitimate constitutional body. In many ways the Purge had every appearance of being a military coup d’état, a political body created merely by the sword: Colonel Thomas Pride with a group of armed soldiers blocked the door to the House of Parliament and excluded or arrested members who were not in favor of deposing the king. As Blair Worden relates, “Of the 470 or so M.P.s qualified to sit at the beginning of December 1648, the purge permanently removed about 270. Temporarily it removed nearly 100 more, who stayed away from Parliament in the weeks between the purge and the king’s execution and who returned to join the Rump only in or after February 1649.” In short, only about 100 representatives were left at the time of the composition of The Tenure. This process of selection and exclusion remains one of the central questions behind the nature and origins of the English Civil War: Was this exclusion, which enabled the deposition, the outcome of two factions of Puritanism, the Independents ousting the Presbyterians? And if the factions could be thus identified, was the split driven by a spirit of godly reformation, or by political motives? If the latter, were the motives entirely contingent—a defensive reaction against Charles I—or were they inflected with political theory , such as republicanism...

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