Parliament’s New Model Army triumphs at the Battle of Naseby in June 1645, turning the tide against Royalist forces in the English Civil War. The Great Plague of 1665 killed approximately a quarter of London’s population, while the Great Fire of 1666 destroyed much of the original City-cataclysms whose portentousness could not have been lost on Milton. The years of the Restoration, in which Milton mainly composed Paradise Lost, however, were hardly an era of peace and reconciliation. The Protectorate fell apart upon Cromwell’s death in 1658 and the succession of his politically incompetent son Richard provided Charles II, the heir apparent to the throne who had been living in exile in the Netherlands, an opportunity to return. But by 1653 the government, while nominally a parliamentary republic, had named the former general Oliver Cromwell as Lord Protector, making it a de facto military autocracy. The English Civil War resulted in the execution of Charles and the installation of a new republican government, or Commonwealth, in 1649. When Charles refused to accept constitutional limits to his power, the country fell into open civil war. The so-called Short Parliament was quickly dissolved, but another Parliament convened in 1640 and soon acquired enough power to materially oppose Charles’s absolute rule. In order to raise funds, Charles convened Parliament for the first time in over ten years, but quickly found that the assembled gentlemen were more interested in discussing ten years’ worth of grievances against the absolutist monarch than in writing him checks to fund a war to solidify his own power. Charles attempted to impose Episcopalian hierarchy on the Scottish Presbyterians by force, but had insufficient resources to do so. Ecclesiastical power was vested in assemblies of "presbyters," or church elders, who were elected by their congregations rather than nominated by authorities from above. Laud’s reforms met a stubborn obstacle in the Church of Scotland, which in 1638 openly rejected episcopal authority and adopted a horizontal, non-hierarchal structure. Charles and Archbishop Laud began a series of reforms designed to consolidate ecclesiastical-and therefore royal-power, ruthlessly persecuting dissenting bishops, non-conforming ministers and Puritan dissenters (some of whom fled England for the Massachusetts colonies). The Anglican Church, like the Catholic Church, was an episcopal polity, i.e., a vertical hierarchy led by bishops and archbishops who ultimately answer to the sovereign. Those suspicions seemed to be confirmed by Charles’s appointment of William Laud as Archbishop of Canterbury in 1633. All this made him the target of suspicion and outrage among Puritan dissenters who felt that the Anglican Church was insufficiently reformed and was now backsliding into Catholic ritualism. While as the head of the Church of England Charles was nominally Protestant, he was accused of being insufficiently supportive of the Protestant cause and even of having Catholic sympathies himself (his wife Henrietta Maria was a Roman Catholic). Meanwhile, continental Europe was awash in blood from the religious and political conflicts known collectively as the Thirty Years War (1618-1648) and tensions between Catholics and Protestants were felt keenly across the channel in England. King Charles I, who had ascended to the throne in 1625, believed in the divine right of kings to rule by personal fiat and had effectively dissolved Parliament in 1629. Milton’s life and career coincide with one of the most revolutionary periods of English history. Illustration from The Temptation & Fall of Eve, from William Blake’s Milton, a Poem, 1808.
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