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A strictly constitutional government of King, Lords, and Commons, with a large increase of the power of the Commons, guaranteed Biennial Parliaments, and a thoroughly Reformed System of Representation such had been the ideal of the Army-chiefs in their Heads of Proposals of August 1647; the Levellers had gone a good deal farther in their Agreement of the People in Nov. 1647, and had proposed the abolition of hereditary privileges, and the concentration of supreme power in a single Representative House; but in both documents alike Liberty of Conscience and Worship was laid down as axiomatic, with a demand that it should be so recognised in the future law of England, for the benefit of Episcopalian and Papist no less than of Presbyterian, Independent, and Sectary.
The Army Proposals, or the main substance of them, had been the subject of conversations between Charles and the Army-chiefs, and even of a formal conference between him and them, on or about July 24, when he was at Woburn.
Then, I conceive, Milton's mood changed, in exact unison with the change of mood at the same time among the Army-chiefs and other leading Independents. For a month or two, indeed, there may have been some interest, some faint prolongation of hope, in attending to the proceedings of Parliament in pursuit of the King, and their attempt to obtain his assent to the Four Bills.
The King, on his side, showed them every attention, and would be "sometimes very pleasant in his discourse with them." The meetings of the Army-chiefs with Charles were not purposeless.
They had all, in their silent review of the past, fastened on one and the same point, as that at which their departure from the straight path of truth and simplicity had begun. It was a point beyond their Concordat with the Parliament, and lay among those prior negotiations of the Army-chiefs with the King personally out of which the Concordat had seemed a natural escape.
They are so generous that we can account for them only by supposing that the Army-chiefs were really prepared for a fresh trial of government by King, Lords, and Commons, with the security against renewed despotism furnished by the Article about the Militia, combined with the Article for a succession of Biennial Parliaments. Two things are to be observed, however.
Through the later months of 1648 Milton's heart must have been wholly with Fairfax and the other Army-chiefs, as he saw them driving things, cautiously at first, but more and more boldly by degrees, into the exact course marked out by this Sonnet.
Hence, while the King was at Hampton Court, and the Army-chiefs, with Cromwell most prominent among them, were plying his royal mind with arguments to bring him round, there can have been no private person more interested in their endeavours, more willing to believe them in the right, than Milton.
James's there were lying on Milton's writing- table in his house in High Holborn at least the beginnings of a pamphlet on which he had been engaged during the King's Trial, and in which, in vehement answer to the outcry of the Presbyterians generally, but with particular references also to the printed protests of Prynne, the appeals of the Prelatists Hammond and Gauden, and the interferences of the Scots and the Dutch, he was to defend all the recent acts of the Army, Pride's Purge included, justify the existing government of the Army-chiefs and the fragment of Parliament that assisted them, inculcate Republican beliefs on his countrymen, and prove to them above all this proposition: "That it is lawful, and hath been held so through all ages, for any who have the power, to call to account a Tyrant, or wicked King, and, after due conviction, to depose and put him to death, if the ordinary Magistrate have neglected or denied to do it!"
It was the agreement of the Army-chiefs, in Nov. 1647, to suppress for the time the democratic manifestations of the Army and its pretensions to political dictation, leaving the conduct of affairs wholly to Parliament. This Concordat, as we saw, though it saved the country from the peril of an immediate democratic revolution, was theoretically a clumsy one.
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