Abstract
In a prose work, The Tenure of Kings and Magistrates, written during the trial of Charles I in January 1649 and published within a fortnight of his execution, John Milton (1608–1674) wrote: ‘No man who knows ought, can be so stupid to deny that all men naturally were borne free, being the image and resemblance of God himself, and were by privilege above all the creatures, born to command and not to obey: and that they liv’d so.’1 This is the first of several ringing declarations of individual liberty which bejewel the Tenure: the statement may have influenced Thomas Jefferson in composing the most famous lines of the Declaration of Independence.2 The next prose piece by Milton to appear in print, Observations upon the Articles of Peace with the Irish Rebels, attacked the Irish for displaying
a disposition not only sottish but inducible and averse from all Civility and amendment, and what hopes they give for the future, who rejecting the ingenuity of all other Nations to improve and waxe more civill by a civilizing Conquest, though all these many years better taught and shown, preferre their own absurd and savage Customes before the most convincing evidence of reason and demonstration: a testimony of their true Barbarisme[.]3
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Notes
John Tanner and Justin Collings, ‘How Adams and Jefferson Read Milton and Milton Read Them’, Milton Quarterly, 40, 3 (2006), 207–19 (p. 214).
Micheál Ó Siochrú, God’s Executioner: Oliver Cromwell and the Conquest of Ireland (London: Faber and Faber, 2008), 1.
Tony Davies, ‘Borrowed Language: Milton, Jefferson, Mirabeau’, in ed. David Armitage, Armand Himy and Quentin Skinner, Milton and Republicanism (Cambridge: Cambridge, 1995), 254–71.
See also Annabel Patterson, Early Modern Liberalism (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1997), Chapter 8;
Christophe Tournu and Neil Forsyth, eds, Milton, Rights and Liberties (Bern: Peter Lang, 2007).
Stanley Fish, ‘Why Milton Matters; Or, Against Historicism’, Milton Studies 44 (2005), 1–12.
Nigel Smith, Is Milton Better than Shakespeare? (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2008), 4.
David Quint, ‘Recent Studies in the Renaissance’, Studies in English Literature, 1500–1900, 38 (1998), 173–205 (p. 186).
Joan Wallach Scott, The Politics of the Veil (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 2010).
J. C. Beckett, ‘The Seventeenth Century’, in ed. J. C. Beckett and R. E. Glassock, Belfast: The Origin and Growth of an Industrial City (London: W. & J. Mackay & Co., 1967), 26–39 (p. 30).
On Milton and slavery, see essays by Martin Dzelzainis, ‘Conquest and Slavery in Milton’s History of Britain’ and ‘The Politics of Paradise Lost’, in ed. Nicholas McDowell and Nigel Smith, The Oxford Handbook of Milton (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2009), 547–68, 407–23. On the common imagery applied by the English to the Irish and other races supposedly open to conquest and enslavement due to their natural incapacity to rule themselves, see, for example, Nicholas Canny, ‘The Ideology of English Colonization: From Ireland to America’, William and Mary Quarterly, 30 (1973), 575–98.
Joad Raymond, ‘Complications of Interest: Milton, Scotland, Ireland, and National Identity in 1649’, Review of English Studies, 55 (2004), 315–45 (p. 316).
Elizabeth Sauer and Sharon Achinstein, ‘Introduction’; Elizabeth Sauer, ‘Toleration and Nationhood in the 1650s: “Sonnet XV” and the Case of Ireland’, in ed. Sharon Achinstein and Elizabeth Sauer, Milton and Toleration (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2007), 1–19 (p. 2); pp. 203–23 (p. 211).
This point is well made by N. H. Keeble, ‘The Christian Temper of John Milton’, in ed. Paul Hammond and Blair Worden, John Milton: Life, Writing, Reputation (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2010), 107–24; see also Andrew Hadfield, ‘Milton and Catholicism’, in ed. Achinstein and Sauer, Milton and Toleration, 186–99.
Jonathan Israel, Radical Enlightenment: Philosophy and the Making of Modernity 1650–1750 (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2001), 609–14;
see also Justin Champion, Republican Learning. John Toland and the Crisis of Christian Culture, 1696–1722 (Manchester: Manchester University Press, 2003);
John Toland, ‘Life of John Milton’, in The Early Lives of John Milton, ed. Helen Darbishire (London: Constable and Co., 1932), 167.
Clement Fatovic, ‘The Anti-Catholic Roots of Liberal and Republican Conceptions of Freedom in English Political Thought’, Journal of the History of Ideas, 66, 1 (2005), 37–58 (p. 38).
See, for example, Gordon J. Schochet, ‘John Locke and Religious Toleration’, in ed. Los G. Schwoerer, The Revolution of 1688–1689: Changing Perspectives (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1992); Darbishire (ed.), Early Lives of John Milton, 192.
See the fuller discussion of this issue in Nicholas McDowell, ‘“The Scottish inhabitants of that Province are actually revolted”: John Milton on the Failure of the Ulster Plantation’, in ed. Éamonn Ó Ciardha and Michaél Ó Siochrú. The Plantation of Ulster: Ideology and Practice (Manchester: Manchester University Press, 2012), 238–53.
Don M. Wolfe, ‘Limits of Miltonic Toleration’, Journal of English and Germanic Philology, 60, 4 (1961), 834–46.
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© 2014 Nicholas McDowell
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McDowell, N. (2014). John Milton and Religious Tolerance: The Origins and Contradictions of the Western Tradition. In: Glaser, E. (eds) Religious Tolerance in the Atlantic World. Palgrave Macmillan, London. https://doi.org/10.1057/9781137028044_6
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