Introduction

tyrants are not off defended

nor stand much in doubt of bad men

as being all naturally servile,

but in whom virtue and true worth most is eminent. Then they fear in earnest,

as by right their masters

against them lies all their hatred and suspicion.

Consequently,

neither do bad men hate tyrants

but have been always readiest with the falsified names of loyalty and obedience

to colour. Over their basic compliance is

thus wrote John Milton in the Tenure of Kings and Magistrates.

And this is one of the many prose passages in which Milton

comments on one of the great dilemmas of his own times.

That dilemma was,

How is it possible for ordinary people to control and manage

the rule of a tyrant without entering into armed conflict?

I want to begin Contextualising Milton's great poetic works

in terms of the enormous military and political conflicts of his day,

by thinking about a figure that Milton would himself have identified as a tyrant,

and that is King Charles. The first

Charles The first is a figure an English king

that not many people know a great deal about,

and so I'm going to be doing some quite basic history in this lecture

in order to bring you up to speed with

what everyone in Milton's time would have known.

But then I'm going to be trying to explain how it came about that an

ordinary Stuart King whose reign was not really

very different from that of his father,

James.

The first came to be understood by a significant fractal of the nation

as a malicious tyrant who simply had to be controlled and restrained.

I want to begin, then with a couple of caveats.

First, this is a lecture about the way Milton viewed Charles the first,

and so it's a little skewed as a history of Charles himself. Second caveat.

Um,

I think it's really important that we think about

Charles the first as a person as a man.

That's not how Milton tended to see him.

Milton tended to see him as a political opponent of all that he Milton held good,

So we need to understand the interaction between the human man, Charles,

the first and this figure of over mighty cruel tyranny that

Milton set up in his poems and in his prose text