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Updated: June 1, 2025
Milton's Defensio was not calculated to advance the cause of the Parliament, and there is no evidence that it produced any effect upon the public, beyond that of raising Milton's personal credit.
When Dom. Syndicus had read his defensio, my daughter was so rejoiced thereat that she would have kissed his hand, but he snatched it from her and breathed upon it thrice, whereby we could easily see that he himself was nowise in earnest with his defensio.
In the Defensio Secunda he defends himself against the charge not of over activity but of inaction. "I can easily repel," he says, "any imputation of want of courage or of want of zeal.
He could not foresee that, in less than ten years, the great work would he totally annihilated, his pamphlet would he merged in the obsolete mass of civil war tracts, and the Defensio, on which he had expended his last year of eyesight, only mentioned because it had been written by the author of Paradise Lost.
It is not for this we still reverence the Defensio; but for its political force, and its occasional splendid passages. Two samples must suffice: "Be this right of kings whatever it will, the right of the people is as much from God as it.
Thou couldst, therefore, gain no belief even if thou didst confirm the charge on the rack, wherefrom, moreover, I am come hither to save thee by my defensio." These reasons seemed sufficient to us both, and we resolved to leave vengeance to Almighty God, who seeth in secret, and to complain of our wrongs to him, as we might not complain to men.
Paradise Lost was not as yet, and to the Council of State Milton was, what he was to Whitelocke, "a blind man who wrote Latin." But these paragraphs, in which he talks of himself, are to us the only living fragments out of many hundred worthless pages. To the Defensio Secunda there was of course a reply by Morus.
The conclusion of Milton's Defensio is not more remarkable for its eloquence than it is for its closing paragraph. Addressing his countrymen in an exhortation that reminds one of the speeches of Pericles to the Athenians, he proceeds:
Salmasius undertook his task as a professional advocate, though without pay, and Milton accepted the duty of replying as advocate for the Parliament, also without reward; he was fighting for a cause which was not another's but his own. Salmasius' Defensio regia that was the title of his book reached this country before the end of 1649.
About the same time, Milton's Pro Populo Anglicano Defensio, not to be burnt in England till the Restoration, had a foretaste in Paris of its ultimate fate. Eustache le Noble's satire against the Dutch, Dialogue d'Esope et de Mercure, and burnt by the executioner at Amsterdam, may complete the list of political works that paid for their offences by fire in the seventeenth century.
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