Milton and the Protectorate in 1658

Abstract

Towards the end of Hobbes's Behemoth, or The Long Parliament , speaker B in the dialogue, the pupil, obligingly poses a question: ‘Seeing that there had been so many shiftings of the supreme authority, I pray you, for memory's sake, repeat them briefly in times and order.’ This is the cue for a brisk resumé by speaker A, the master: the Long Parliament, he says, gave way to the Rump, followed in turn by Cromwell's Council of State and the so-called Barebone's Parliament. ‘Fifthly’, A continues, from December the 12th 1653 to September the 3rd 1658, it was in the hands of Oliver Cromwell, with the title of Protector. Sixthly, from September the 3rd 1658 to April the 25th 1659, Richard Cromwell had it as successor to his father. Seventhly, from April the 25th 1659 to May the 7th of the same year, it was nowhere. Eighthly, from May the 7th 1659, the Rump, which was turned out of doors in 1653, recovered it again; and shall lose it again to a committee of safety, and again recover it, and again lose it to the right owner. The manner in which the story is told suffices to make Hobbes's feelings plain. A note of disdain is audible in the studied precision with which the succession of regimes is recorded, changing to one of derision as numbers and dates are abandoned for the final, headlong descent into anarchy. Of course, Hobbes, an avowed enemy of republicanism, could afford to be ironic about a sequence of events which he saw as a vindication of his political philosophy.

Cite this work

No public copy is stored for this record, so only the metadata is cited.

Stored only when both papers are in the corpus — 56 citations exist upstream.