‘In Every Instance the Popery of Government’
The Anti-Monarchism of Milton and Paine
Christopher Lacaria, Harvard Class of 2009, History Concentrator
Tempus: The Harvard College History Review, Vol. X, Issue 1, Summer 2009.
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I told him further, that his reason from the Old Testament was ridiculous, and I could
hardly think him sincere. At this he laughed, and said he had taken his ideas in that part
from Milton: and then expressed a contempt of the Old Testament and indeed of the
Bible at large, which surprised me. He saw that I did not relish this, and soon checked
himself, with these words ‘However I have some thoughts of publishing my thoughts on
religion, but I believe it will be best to postpone it, to the latter part of life.’1
—John Adams, 1802
In 1776, an obscure English émigré and Philadelphia newspaperman invoked the
judgment of John Milton in his attempt to persuade the colonists of British North America to
thrust off the yoke of the mother country. The depredations and injustices, he argued, visited by
Britain upon her American cousins—oppressive taxation, arbitrary decrees, and, by that time,
martial law in Boston—had driven a wedge so deeply between the two sides that a
rapprochement seemed not only practically impossible but politically tenuous. Wounded pride
and resentful memories would threaten to undo any settlement reconciling the colonies with
British suzerainty after such bitter struggles. At that juncture, only complete political separation
would prove prudent, “for, as Milton wisely expresses, ‘Never can true reconcilement grow
where wounds of deadly hate have pierced so deep.’”2
Thomas Paine’s Common Sense, by far the best-selling publication of early America had
included, among its very few references to other authors or sources, the arch-republican and
regicide poet John Milton, a man whose political principles—to say the least—had not earned at
that time general acclaim in the pamphleteer’s native England. Not only did Paine proudly
requisition Milton to his side of the dispute, however. He also had thrown his lot in with the
devil: for he did not cull his quotation from one of Milton’s anti-monarchical treatises, but rather
from Paradise Lost—from Satan’s speech in Book IV preaching to the demons against
1
John Adams, Diary and Autobiography of John Adams, ed. L. H. Butterfield (Cambridge, Mass.: The Belknap
Press of Harvard University Press, 1965), 3: 333.
2
Thomas Paine, “Common Sense,” in idem, Political Writings, ed. Bruce Kuklick (Cambridge: Cambridge
University Press, 2000), 22. The passage from Milton is Paradise Lost, IV.98 – 99.
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compromise with Heaven. A man of outspoken convictions and heterodox opinions, Tom Paine
was no one to shrink from controversy; and his most successful and famous work, Common
Sense, found common cause with Satan’s infernal rebellion as well as the reprobate political
principles of John Milton.
While scholars have disputed the extent of Milton’s influence upon Common Sense,
Paine himself supposedly admitted that the republican poet figured prominently in some of his
pamphlet’s most crucial arguments. John Adams, the second president of the United States and a
frequent critic of Paine’s political principles, recalled in his autobiography a conversation with
the author of Common Sense that had occurred thirty years earlier. In 1776, following the
publication of Paine’s pamphlet, Adams had also written a widely-circulated tract, Thoughts on
Government, which contradicted many of the former’s propositions. Adams recounted how Paine
had sought him out to dispute these questions in person:
Paine soon after the appearance of my pamphlet hurried away to my lodgings and
spent an evening with me. His business was to reprehend me for publishing my
pamphlet. Said he was afraid it would do hurt, and that it was repugnant to the plan he
had proposed in his Common Sense. I told him it was true it was repugnant and for
that reason, I had written it and consented to the publication of it: for I was as much
afraid of his work [as] he was of mine. . . . I told him further, that his reason from the
Old Testament was ridiculous, and I could hardly think him sincere. At this he
laughed, and said he had taken his ideas in that part from Milton: and then expressed
a contempt of the Old Testament and indeed of the Bible at large, which surprised
me. He saw that I did not relish this, and soon checked himself, with these words
“However I have some thoughts of publishing my thoughts on religion, but I believe
it will be best to postpone it, to the latter part of life.”3
As Adams remembered the exchange, Paine himself had claimed that he borrowed wholesale
from Milton’s anti-monarchical arguments—and not only from the resonant verse of Paradise
Lost. Scholars duly have considered this seemingly frank admission, but most abstain from
lending to it any credence. Adams composed these autobiographical recollections several
3
John Adams, Diary and Autobiography, 3: 333; also quoted, inter alia, in A. Owen Aldridge, Thomas Paine’s
American Ideology (Newark, Del.: University of Delaware Press, 1984), 203.
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decades after the events described took place, and apparently-contradictory statements and other
confirmed inaccuracies have further discredited the reliability of Adams’s retrospective account.4
Most of the detailed attempts to establish an intercourse between Milton and Paine, both
then and now, have focused particularly on their similar anti-monarchical interpretation of
Chapter 8 in the Old Testament’s First Book of Samuel. 5 Some modern scholars, rather
anomalously, have deemed this similarity a proof of correspondence; most others, however, have
judged such accounts ultimately unpersuasive. Despite the arguments on both sides, the literature
has mostly consigned the issue of Miltonic influence on Paine and Common Sense to footnotes
and passing mentions, denying the controversy the attention it deserves, especially in light of
more recent interpretive scholarship of the republican poet. Historians of political thought have
long acknowledged an anti-monarchical exegetical tradition of I Samuel, but its origin has been
traced definitively only in the last few years—with an emphasis on Milton’s decisive role. Given
these developments in our understanding of Milton’s political philosophy, we are now in a
position once again to consider the extent, if any, of his influence on Paine. In Common Sense
Paine distinguished himself as the only prominent political thinker since Milton to deny the
theoretical legitimacy of monarchical regimes. This fact as a result presents a prime opportunity
to prove the poet’s formative role in the development and transmission of republican thought into
the eighteenth century and beyond. John Adams, rather despondently, had remarked that his age
was the Age of Paine: if his judgment can be taken seriously—and the dangers of such a course
4
Ibid., 204.
Depending on the translation, the name for this book, alternatively called the First Book of Samuel or the First
Book of Kings, may differ. In some bibles, including the Authorized King James Version, the First and Second
Books of Kings are listed as the First and Second Books of Samuel, while the Third and Fourth Books of Kings are
listed as the First and Second, respectively.
5
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already have been indicated—then a solid connection between Milton and Paine would raise the
poet to a more exalted prominence within the Pantheon of republican theorists.6
While any claimed correspondence between Milton and Paine must remain tentative and
provisional, the argument in its favor draws generously upon the rich scholarship on Milton’s
political philosophy that has arrived in the interim. Most importantly, the extensive discourse in
Common Sense on I Samuel situates Paine within an interpretative tradition, barely a century old,
founded by the republican poet. In groundbreaking work, Eric M. Nelson recently identified
Milton’s reading of I Samuel 8 as a departure from previous political, even republican,
interpretations of the passage: he demonstrated how the poet relied heavily on newly-available
rabbinic commentaries from the Talmud and other sources.7 Earlier scholars variously had
doubted Milton’s interpretative innovation, his exclusive commitment to republican regimes, or
the extent to which his and Paine’s exegesis correspond. With the new research, however, those
first two doubts have been dispelled, and the third awaits only a detailed comparison between the
two authors’ positions. Thomas Paine no doubt moved within a dynamic and diverse intellectual
milieu—his political philosophy, in many respects, anticipated schools of thought that would be
at odds with the republicanism of John Milton.8 Yet for his anti-monarchical assertions, Thomas
Paine relied considerably on the interpretive and rhetorical example of John Milton.
A Vagabond Intellect: The Life of Thomas Paine
6
John Adams to Benjamin Waterhouse, 29 Oct. 1805, in Worthington Chauncey Ford, ed., Statesman and Friend:
Correspondence of John Adams with Benjamin Waterhouse, 1784 – 1822 (Boston, 1927), 31.
7
Eric M. Nelson, “‘Talmudical Commonswealthmen’ and the Rise of Republican Exclusivism,” The Historical
Journal, 50: 4 (2007), 809 – 835.
8
David, Introduction to Republicanism, Liberty, and Commercial Society, 1649 – 1776, ed. idem (Stanford, Calif.:
Stanford University Press, 1994), 1 – 41, at esp. 32 – 41, suggested, for one, that Paine belongs more properly in a
pre-utilitarian tradition, rather than a “republican” one.
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Befitting a man of such eccentric personality and politics, Thomas Paine’s life followed a
winding course through various professions, geographies, and personal circumstances.9 Born on
29 January 1737 in Thetford in Norfolk, England, to Joseph Paine, a maker of corsets, and
Frances Cocke, the daughter of the town clerk, Thomas Paine enjoyed a more or less
conventional upbringing. Due to his mother’s insistence he was baptized and raised in the
established Anglican Church, but his father—a member of the local sect of Quakers—would
prove the more decisive religious influence on his son. Although confirmed by the local bishop,
Paine, upon his father’s orders, refused to learn Latin at the local grammar school. As a young
man still, he enlisted as a seaman for various privateering expeditions, in the meanwhile also
working in his father’s profession. In 1759, he married Mary Lambert, who would die the
following year in childbirth. Widowed and childless, Paine left the stay-making business and
applied himself for a career as a collector of the excise, returning home to Norfolk while he
learned the trade, before eventually garnering appointments first in Lincolnshire and then in
Sussex. He remarried in 1771, to the daughter of a former business associate, but marital bliss
was short-lived if not entirely ethereal: when his business affairs collapsed a few years later,
separation from his wife soon ensued, an affair that later biographers, not initially well-disposed
to their subject, would submerge with scurrilous speculation.10 Penurious, humiliated, and fast
approaching middle-age, Thomas Paine in 1774 used the proceeds from the forced auction of his
household and personal effects to purchase a first-class passage across the Atlantic to the
colonies of North America.
9
For a biographical summary, see Mark Philp, “Paine, Thomas (1737–1809),” Oxford Dictionary of National
Biography (Oxford University Press, Sept 2004), online edn, May 2008
<http://www.oxforddnb.com/view/article/21133> (accessed 20 Jan 2009). For a valuable full-length scholarly
biography, see Aldridge, Man of Reason: The Life of Thomas Paine (Philadelphia: J. B. Lippincott Company, 1959).
10
Some early biographies, such as those by Francis Oldys [George Chalmers] and James Cheetham, often imputed
unethical and immoral practices to Paine’s early life, although not much in detail about his years in England can be
confirmed.
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In November 1774, Paine arrived in Philadelphia in miserable condition: crippled by
seasickness and fever, he had to disembark carried upon a stretcher. After a long recovery, Paine,
through the intervention of Benjamin Franklin, whom he had met in London, sought to become a
tutor and also entered the newspaper business, serving as editor of the nascent Pennsylvania
Magazine. As editor, Paine also contributed a number of his own essays—including ones on
slavery and British colonial policy—and his connections with Franklin and growing literary
reputation purchased him access into the Philadelphia circles of political power and influence.
Within a year after Paine arrived at the banks of the Delaware River, the growing tensions
between the colonies and the mother country over issues of taxation and, less proximately,
political authority and self-determination had erupted into armed rebellion. After the fabled
minuteman of Massachusetts provoked the counter-insurgency maneuvers of General Thomas
Gage’s garrison in Boston, the rest of the American colonies began hotly debating the prospects
for reconciliation with Britain and even considering the novel idea of declaring independence.
Encouraged by his friend, the future founding father Dr. Benjamin Rush, he dedicated his
intellectual efforts in late 1775 to a pamphlet that would make to the American public the case
for independence from Britain. Dr. Rush, as well as Samuel Adams and David Rittenhouse,
reviewed the finished product before publication, but the work was exclusively Paine’s. It
reached the presses in 1776, with the title, suggested by Dr. Rush, of Common Sense.
Out of Whole Cloth? The Beguiling Question of Paine’s Sources
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In Common Sense, Tom Paine quoted, or even directly referred to, only a handful of other
thinkers or writers to lend authority to his arguments. In addition to Milton, he sought support in
the Bible, repeated the constitutional observation of Sir William Meredith, and consulted the
political wisdom of one Hyacinth Dragonetti, a little-known Italian philosopher and disciple of
Caesar Beccaria.11 Despite the paucity of acknowledged sources, various accounts of Paine’s
political thought either have ignored or marginalized their importance to the intellectual context
of Common Sense. In discussing the nature of the English constitution, Paine claimed that Sir
William Meredith, a contemporary Whig member of Parliament, had called England a
“republic.” 12 Scholars, however, have not been able to locate such an opinion in any of
Meredith’s works, nor even to confirm that Paine had read him at all.13 Dragonetti’s connection
to Paine is even more obscure: intellectual historians today have not studied his writings in any
depth, and his treatises remain as rare to find in our bookstores as they were in the America of
the 1770s.14 The problem of unacknowledged sources is even more difficult to navigate, as Paine
11
Paine, “Common Sense,” 8 – 13; 15; 28.
Sir William Meredith, third bart., was an English politician and member, along with Edmund Burke, of the
“Rockingham Whigs,” who had supported the colonists in their grievances with Parliament. For a brief biographical
summary, see Patrick Woodland, “Meredith, Sir William, third baronet (bap. 1724, d. 1790),” Oxford Dictionary of
National Biography (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2004) <http://www.oxforddnb.com/view/article/18580>
(accessed 20 Jan 2009).
13
David Wootton claimed that he could not locate such a statement in any of the works of Meredith; but he
suggested the possibility of a “satirical reference” to the Letter to the Earl of Chatham on the Quebec Bill, “in which
Meredith claims that the Quebec bill, of which Paine most certainly disapproved, ‘is founded in that first principle of
all law, the concurrence and approbation of the people . . . its end is that for which all government ought to be
instituted, the happiness of the governed’”: see the Republicanism, Liberty, and Commercial Society, 28. The
Meredith quotation comes from Sir W[illiam] M[eredith], A Letter to the Earl of Chatham on the Quebec Bill
(London, 1774), 35 – 36; Wootton cited Paine’s disapproval of the Quebec Act in “A Dialogue between General
Wolfe and General Gage in a Wood near Boston,” in idem, The Writings of Thomas Paine, ed. Moncure Daniel
Conway (New York: G. P. Putnam’s Sons, 1894), I: 12.
14
Wootton claimed also that no previous Paine scholar had ever read Dragonetti, “yet they feel free to make the
most fanciful claims about him.” Wootton concluded that Paine must have read the obscure author—not only
because he used the same quotation twice, in Common Sense and in a later work, A Letter Addressed to the
Addressers on the Late Proclamation (1792); but also because Dragonetti was so obscure that Paine could not
conceivably have stumbled upon a quotation in another work.
The only English edition of Dragonetti that existed, and thus the only one to which Paine could have had
access, was Giacinto Dragonetti, A Treatise on Virtues and Rewards, trans. anon. (London: 1769). Analyzing this
text against the Italian original, and a French edition which the English translator apparently also consulted,
12
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himself boasted often of his originality of thought and his preference “scarcely ever [to] quote”
because instead he “always think[s].”15 Yet scholars have noticed and catalogued the similarities
between Paine’s arguments in Common Sense and those of diverse thinkers such as Harrington,
Locke, Rousseau, Priestley, and Beccaria, as well as decidedly minor Leveller tracts from the
Civil War era, like John Lilburne’s Regal Tyranny Discovered (London, 1647) and John Hall’s
Grounds and Reasons of Monarchy Considered (London, 1650). 16 Paine’s protestations of
intellectual originality indeed have frustrated many attempts to situate Common Sense within a
proper context. The newspaper and coffeehouse culture that would have circulated widely, and
Wootton claimed that the book Paine must have read was in fact substantially altered and cleansed of any apparently
monarchist sentiments. Paine’s quotation of Dragonetti, as far as Wootton could discern, was a liberal paraphrase of
the actual text with the reference to kings purged: Republicanism, Liberty, and Commercial Society, 36ff.
Wootton also cited the mistaken conceptions of other Paine scholars regarding Dragonetti. A. Owen
Aldridge—repeating Vittorio Gabrieli, “Thomas Paine fra l’America e l’Europa,” Studi Americani I (1955): 9 – 53,
at 14—claimed that Dragonetti “like Beccaria, is a very conservative author”: Aldridge, Thomas Paine’s American
Ideology, 71; yet, Franco Venturi, Italy and the Enlightenment: Studies in a Cosmopolitan Century, ed. Stuart Woolf
and trans. Susan Corsi ([London]: Longman, 1972), had catalogued the aristocratic outcry to Dragonetti’s treatise on
feudalism—hardly the pedigree of a “conservative” author. Nelson Adkins, in his edition of Paine—Common Sense
and Other Political Writings, ed. Nelson F. Adkins (New York: Liberal Arts Press, [1953]), 176—had erroneously
described Beccaria as a disciple of Dragonetti and not vice versa. Aldridge, Thomas Paine’s American Ideology, 71,
had also asserted that “it is not in the least degree likely that Paine had ever read any part of Dragonetti’s treatise or
that he had ever seen it.” All citations are from Wootton, Republicanism, Liberty, and Commercial Society, 36.
For a brief biographical account of Dragonetti, among the very few that exist, see Francesco Cavalli,
“Giacinto Dragonetti,” in La scienza politica in Italia (Venice: Antonelli, 1865), IV: 343, through the Archivo
Biografico Italiano, in World Biographical System Online <http://db.saur.de.ezpprod1.hul.harvard.edu/WBIS/biographicMicroficheDocument.jsf> (accessed 20 January 2009).
15
Paine, “The Forester’s Letters” in Writings of Thomas Paine, I: 149.
16
Wootton, in his discussion of Paine’s sources in Republicanism, Liberty, and Commercial Society, 26 – 41,
recounted the various attempts to link Paine with such intellectual forebears. Most conspicuously, perhaps, given
Locke’s alleged pre-eminence in the colonial intellectual landscape, Paine had denied that he ever bothered to read
an y of his writings: Aldridge, Thomas Paine’s American Ideology, 119f., as cited in Wootton, Republicanism,
Liberty, and Commercial Society, 27. Wootton remarked that Paine’s Old Testament arguments “echo a comparable
passage” of Lilburne’s work, although finally rejected the possibility of Paine’s encountering that rare and obscure
work: Ibid., 28.
Wootton, ibid., 31, would have the same judgment for Hall’s work, had not an edition—substantially
modified and updated—appeared bound with John Toland’s collection of Harrington’s works: see The Oceana of
James Harrington and Other Works, ed. John Toland (London, 1700) and subsequent versions and reissues.
Wootton credited David A. Wilson, Paine and Cobbett: The Transatlantic Connection (Montreal: McGill-Queen’s
University Press, 1988), 45ff, and Eric Foner, Tom Paine and Revolutionary America (New York: Oxford
University Press, 1976), 10, with recognizing that the Hall tract was published with the more widely-available
Harrington.
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often anonymously, the arguments from these various sources, only exacerbates the difficulty.17
As a result, most claims about Paine’s intellectual influences and philosophical lineage, and even
about the books he must have read, for good reason have remained provisional and speculative.18
Research into Paine’s relationship to Milton and his political principles likewise has
yielded little certainty. Successive editors of Common Sense until 1983 had not even identified
Paradise Lost as the source of the Milton quotation, instead presuming that the line must have
come from the poet’s prose.19 Although they often have overlooked this fact, many scholars—no
doubt allured by Paine’s open citation of Milton and the position both are often said to occupy
within the republican tradition in political thought—have considered to what extent Common
Sense relied on Milton’s infamous anti-monarchical enunciations of the previous century. Felix
Gilbert, earlier in the twentieth century, had detected that, in the biblical arguments of Common
Sense, “Paine reveals himself a true follower of the great republican tradition in English political
thought,” in the line of Milton and Algernon Sidney; decades later, David A. Wilson purported to
link Paine’s arguments to specific passages in Milton’s prose oeuvre.20 Others such as A. Owen
Aldridge, defying Adams’ memory, disputed the similarity between the two authors’ biblical
17
Wootton, Republicanism, Liberty, and the Commercial Society, 4, discussed the possible existence of a republican
subculture in England in the years between the Glorious Revolution and the American Revolution: as he concluded,
“if there was republican culture it was (thanks to the laws of seditious libel which were regularly used against those,
such as Wilkes and Paine, who questioned the status quo) oral, not written, private, not public.” Such an ideological
undercurrent presumably could have thrived in private associations, similar to the legendary Calf’s Head Club. No
doubt fragments from various famous authors, not necessarily republicans themselves, could receive the approbation
of, and subsequently be co-opted by, such circles.
18
Given Wootton’s meticulous account of Paine’s sources, ibid., 26 – 41, very little about such matters can be
concluded with certainty.
19
Aldridge, Thomas Paine’s American Ideology, 67, claimed to make the singular discovery: cited also in Wootton,
Republicanism, Liberty, and Commercial Society, 29f. Caroline Robbins, “The Lifelong Education of Thomas Paine
(1737 – 1809): Some Reflections upon His Acquaintance among Books,” Proceedings of the American
Philosophical Society, 127: 3 (16 Jun 1983), 135 – 142, at 135, suggested the quotation “drew on the work of the
rebel rather than the bard.” Wootton, Republicanism, Liberty, and Commercial Society, 29, and Aldridge, Thomas
Paine’s American Ideology, 67, deemed Robbins’s assumption to be typical.
20
Felix Gilbert, “The English Background of American Isolationism in the Eighteenth Century,” The William and
Mary Quarterly, Third Series, 1: 2 (April, 1944), 138 – 160, at 156; Wilson, Paine and Cobbett, 47: cited in
Wootton, Republicanism, Liberty, and Commercial Society, 28.
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exegeses and doubted whether “Paine was at all indebted to Milton for his political notions”—a
suspicion shared by David Wootton, who, in a helpful essay, succinctly yet carefully spelled out
the problem of Paine’s sources and attempted an answer.21 Other contemporaries of Paine,
however, had sensed the spectre of Milton lurking in the background of his arguments—whether
with specific passages from the poet’s anti-monarchical tracts in mind, or simply based on his
incendiary political reputation. Unfortunately such observations typically also lumped Paine in
with other, often mutually-incompatible prominent thinkers.22
Although he had commended the insight of Milton’s Satan, Paine did not once cite the
poet’s political treatises, which, while responsible for a crucial aspect of Milton’s contemporary
reputation, nevertheless would have circulated not nearly as widely among the literate public as
the more famous Paradise Lost. Certainly the complete collections of Milton’s prose, edited by
Richard Baron and financed by the “indefatigable Thomas Hollis”—“that extraordinary one-man
propaganda machine in the cause of liberty”—had reposed in several colonial libraries; but
whether or not Paine had direct access to these works, or was familiar with their arguments,
cannot be confirmed definitively.23 Paine’s supposed claim to the contrary notwithstanding, the
secondary literature—when it pauses to consider the possibility—generally has denied any
decisive influence of Milton on Paine’s political thought.
21
Aldridge, Thomas Paine’s American Ideology, 98; Wootton, Republicanism, Liberty, and Commercial Society,
28ff.
22
Bernard Bailyn, in The Ideological Origins of the American Revolution (Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University
Press, 1967), 34f., had commented on the wide influence republican thinkers, especially Milton, had wielded over
the thought of early America. In ibid., 45f., Bailyn also recorded the opinions of Jonathan Mayhew and John Adams
that Milton, among other “republicans,” were the accepted authorities at the time on the questions of government.
Caroline Robbins, in her magisterial The Eighteenth-Century Commonwealthmen: Studies in the
Transmission, Development, and Circumstance of English Liberal Thought from the Restoration of Charles II until
the War with the Thirteen Colonies (Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 1959), 322, noted the opinion of
Henry Yorke, who “in a letter to John Frost (1750 – 1842), was ready to prove that, even in the celebrated writings
of Thomas Paine, there is not a political maxim which is not to be found in the writings of Sidney, Harrington,
Milton, and Buchanan.”
23
Bailyn, Ideological Origins, 40.
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The response to Common Sense furthermore confirmed that contemporaries deemed
Paine’s republican arguments from the Old Testament strange and peculiar.24 More familiar
political readings of the ancient Israelite constitution—the “Hebrew republic”—had supported
the principle of “constitutional monarchy” that the Whig tradition after 1688 popularly
invoked.25 Alone among acknowledged sources of a republican biblical exegesis, aside from
Milton, is Algernon Sidney: in the Discourses concerning Government, he had considered the
Hebrew republic as proof of the divine injunction against monarchy.26 Yet, Sidney, to whom
many Whigs in England and America did not demur from appealing, by then had his reputation
rehabilitated. His fervent anti-monarchical sentiment, intentionally or not, expunged, he became
known as an advocate of and ultimately a martyr for the Whig principle of measured or mixed
monarchy. At the same time, however, his biblical analysis—for which his debt to Milton is
clear—fell into desuetude. 27 Accordingly, the several prominent pamphlet and newspaper
ripostes to Common Sense spent a disproportionate amount of intellectual energy on defusing
Paine’s Old Testament readings. While none of these appears to suspect a reliance on either
Milton or Sidney, they nevertheless suggest that Paine had not marshaled a commonplace in
religious and political discourse.28 If these counterarguments to Common Sense had judged
24
I am grateful to Mr. Nathan R. Perl-Rosenthal for permitting me to review his draft, “‘The Divine Right of
Republics’: Hebraic Republicanism and the Debate over Kingless Government in Revolutionary America,” The
William and Mary Quarterly 66: 3 (July 2009), forthcoming.
25
Cf. Charles Chauncy, Civil Magistrates Must Be Just, Ruling in the Fear of God (Boston, 1747); Samuel
Langdon, Joy and Gratitude to God for the Long Life of a Good King, and the Conquest of Quebec (Portsmouth, N.
H., 1760); both cited in Perl-Rosenthal, “‘The Divine Right of Republics.’”
26
See, especially, Algernon Sidney, Discourses concerning Government (London, 1698) 264ff, the chapter entitled
“Samuel did not describe to the Israelites the glory of a free monarchy; but the evils the people should suffer, that he
might divert them from desiring a king.” Sir Algernon Sidney (1623 – 1683) was a republican political thinker and
theorist, of noble birth, who was executed in 1683 for his putative connection with the “Rye House Plot” to kill the
king: for a biographical summary, see Jonathan Scott, “Sidney, Algernon (1623–1683),” Oxford Dictionary of
National Biography (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2004) online edn, Jan 2008
<http://www.oxforddnb.com/view/article/25519> (accessed 12 March 2009).
27
See especially section three of Perl-Rosenthal, “‘The Divine Right of Republics.’”
28
Cf. [Anon.], “Rationalis,” in Candidus [James Chalmers], Plain Truth, Addressed to the Inhabitants of America,
Containing Remarks on a Late Pamphlet Entitled Common Sense (Philadelphia, 1776), 67 – 78; [Charles Inglis],
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competently, there existed no notable contemporary exponent of this scriptural reading of
Samuel: as a result, Milton, the pioneer of this exegesis, more persuasively presents himself as
Paine’s ultimate source.
Thomas Paine prided himself on his original thinking, and Common Sense was
remarkable, in an age of promiscuous citation, for self-consciously avoiding arguments from
authority. Historians, however, would be remiss to take for granted Paine’s claims to originality.
No matter how eccentric and insightful Paine’s intellect might be, his thinking did not occur in a
vacuum, and to have any resonance with contemporary readers he necessarily had to engage to
some degree with his intellectual antecedents and the venerated authorities of the day. The fact
that Paine cited by name, among few others, Milton—at the time reputed among the most
notorious advocates of republican government—ought to give historians pause when considering
the relationship between the two thinkers. It nevertheless does provide sufficient evidence that
Paine engaged with the poet’s political philosophy, or even read any of his anti-monarchical
treatises. Previous scholars already have considered carefully the pamphleteer’s reading activity,
and have not decided the issue one way or the other.29 Lacking explicit citation and direct
paraphrase, Common Sense cannot in itself prove Paine’s conscious reliance on the political
arguments of Milton. Yet he did not even have to read the various works themselves to become
familiar with their important content—indeed, the existence of an informal republican culture at
the time would suggest that much could have been transmitted orally.
The True Interest of America Impartially Stated, in Certain Strictures on a Pamphlet Entitled Common Sense
(Philadelphia, 1776); the letters of “Cato,” i.e., Rev. William Smith, former president of the University of
Pennsylvania, as quoted in Perl-Rosenthal, passim.
29
See Robbins, “The Lifelong Education of Thomas Paine (1737 – 1809).”
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Argumentum ad Scripturam: The Republicanism of Samuel
In a 2007 essay, “‘Talmudical Commonwealthsmen’ and the Rise of Republican Exclusivism,”
Eric M. Nelson demonstrated how John Milton relied much on rabbinic commentaries for his
anti-monarchical interpretation of Chapter 8 of I Samuel. According to Nelson, Milton was the
first Christian thinker to make use of the interpretation of an alternate Hebrew authority, the
Midrashim; and as a result, he initiated a new branch of republican thought, where nonmonarchical regimes not only ranked superior to kingdoms, but furthermore represented the only
truly legitimate form of government. 30 The view of Milton as a republican “exclusivist,”
undoubtedly, has not carried the field: and Nelson also took account of Milton’s shifting position
on this issue. In his earliest political tracts, the poet freely admitted the possibility of a justlyruled monarchy—but as political circumstances reached a crescendo with the Civil War and the
regicide, Milton revised this previous concession and rejected monarchy not only on the grounds
of prudence, but also especially because of the biblical injunction he read in I Samuel.31 This
passage of the Old Testament recounts how the Israelites demanded that the prophet Samuel,
whom God Himself had raised to the premiership of His chosen people, make for them a king,
“like all nations . . . that . . . may judge [them], and go out before [them], and fight [their]
battles.”32 Prior to this petition, the people of Israel had lived under a theocracy in the strictest
sense of the word: God Himself ruled as king, through deputies and judges He Himself had
appointed and according to laws that He Himself had promulgated. In requesting a king, the
Israelites conspired to depose God from His regal dominion over them. So much did He say to
30
Nelson, “‘Talmudical Commonswealthmen,’” 830. Nelson suggested, as the closest Christian precursor to
Milton’s interpretation was Lilburne’s Regal Tyranny Discovered, or John Goodwin, Anti-Cavalierism (1642).
31
Ibid., 823ff.
32
I Samuel [Kings] 8: 20. The translation is according to the Authorized King James Version.
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Samuel, that “they have not rejected thee, but . . . Me, that I should not reign over them.”33
Nevertheless God ordered Samuel to accede to the people’s ill-guided demands, but only after
first detailing to them “the manner of the king that shall reign over them.”34 Samuel accordingly
assembled the people and enumerated the onerous obligations that the king will impose upon
them: the seizure of their finest lands, the tithe of their harvest, the impressment of their sons for
war and daughters for domestic service—in short, they inevitably must be the king’s
“servants.”35 The chapter, in summary, treated the origin of the Old Testament monarchy, and
God’s apparently ill disposition toward the reason for its first establishment.
Presumably this chapter—accounting for the foundation of the biblical kings and the
divine judgment of such a government—would not have escaped the attention of Christian
political thinkers in previous centuries; and indeed, it was an important text for those who
favored monarchy and republican government alike. In making sense of this chapter, Christian
exegetes often compared it to a foregoing passage in Chapter 17 of Deuteronomy, in which
Moses prophesied that when the Israelites come into the promised land, they, “like as all the
nations,” shall set over themselves a king, who in turn shall not live extravagantly or
licentiously.36 Moses’s words in Deuteronomy seemed to suggest that God approved of, or at
least accepted without apparent displeasure, the future monarchy that the Israelites established,
on the condition that the king was upright and just. Before Milton, Christian interpretation
pursued one of two “strategies of harmonization,” as Nelson explained.37 One school of thought
considered the anger of God in I Samuel as directed toward the manner of king that the Israelites
sought to ordain, inconsistent with the moral conditions outlined in the passage of Deuteronomy.
33
I Samuel 8: 7.
I Samuel 8: 9.
35
I Samuel 8: 11 – 17.
36
Deuteronomy 17: 14 – 20.
37
Nelson, “‘Talmudical Commonswealthmen,’” 814.
34
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Nelson cited within this paradigm the canonical account of the Glossa Ordinaria, as well as John
of Salisbury, St. Thomas Aquinas, in the initial sections of De Regimine Principum that he had
authored, and Erasmus.38 The other interpretative option was to claim that the Israelites’ request
for a king per se did not displease God, but rather did their impudent rebellion against the order
and the vicegerents that He Himself had consecrated over them. Thinkers as diverse as
Bartholomew of Lucca, who completed St. Thomas’s De Regimine, John Bodin, and Theodore
Beza had subscribed to this line of argument.39 But after the déluge of Hebrew scholarship in the
late sixteenth and early seventeenth century, European thinkers had access to the rabbinic
commentaries of the Talmud, whose authoritative interpretation of the passage in I Samuel
provided an alternative perspective. The Israelites sinned—according to this new view
subscribed to by most Hebraists and influential scholars like Claudius Salmasius, Milton’s
famous sparring partner—not in asking for a king, but in asking for a king “like all the other
nations.” The desire not to establish monarchical order, but to imitate the customs of the
heathens, offended God and inspired his wrath.40
John Milton, drawing on the same sources as the Hebraists who had formulated this new
standard interpretation of I Samuel, nevertheless seized upon other classical rabbinic arguments.
The dominant Talmudic exegesis depicted the relevant passage in Deuteronomy 17 as not only a
prophecy, but a command; however, an alternate view in the Midrashim proposed that God
forecasted monarchy for the Israelites only as a punishment for their sinfulness.41 Sixteenth and
seventeenth-century scholars that had investigated accounts of the ancient Hebrew monarchy—
such as William Sichard, upon whose influential treatise both Milton and his opponent Salmasius
38
Ibid., 814.
Ibid., 815 – 817.
40
Ibid., 817 – 823.
41
Ibid., 821ff.
39
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heavily relied—not only were aware of the opinion of the Midrash, but also had engaged with its
arguments. However, according to Nelson, Milton’s position marked the first Christian
expression of this Midrashic line of interpretation.42 In his response to Salmasius, Defensio pro
populo Anglicano, Milton disputed the canonical Talmudic interpretation of I Samuel and
aligned himself with the judgment of the Midrashim.
While Salmasius and others had construed Samuel’s dire prediction of kingly government
as enumerating the royal prerogatives, Milton, on the contrary, had proposed that this simply
outlined the punishment for the Israelites’ impious lust for a king. Milton deemed it “manifest
that that chapter concerning the king, in which Rabbi Joses affirmed the right of kings is
contained, is in [the book] of Deuteronomy, and not of Samuel” since “rabbi Judas says very
rightly . . . that [the speech] of Samuel’s conduced for the purpose of imposing fear among the
people.”43 No one, Milton judged, could have a right to do that “which clearly is injustice”; and
as proof that Samuel only purposed to frighten the people “extends the 18th verse, ‘And ye shall
cry out in that day, because of your king, which ye shall have chosen you, and the Lord will not
hear you in that day.’”44 This unhappy lot under a ravenous tyrant was to be “that punishment
[which] was destined for those obstinate men” who, “desired to be given a king, against the will
of God.”45 But lest Milton retreat into a more traditional Christian reading that tyranny is
42
William Sichard (alt. Wilhelm Schickard, l. 1592 – 1635) was a German Lutheran, professor of Hebrew at
Tubingen University, and published the important treatise Mishpat ha-melekh, Jus regium hebraeorum, in 1625,
which provided and interpreted the biblical commentaries of rabbinic sources such as the Talmud. Both Milton and
Salmasius referred, either explicitly or implicitly, to it, in their arguments about these passages from Scripture: Ibid.,
826.
43
John Milton, Joannis Miltoni Angli Pro populo anglicano defensio contra Claudii anonymi, alias Salmasii,
Defensionem regiam (London, 1651), 50: “Descendis ad rabbinos, duosque adducis eadem, qua prius, infelicitate:
nam caput illud de rege, in que R. Joses jus regium aiebat contineri, Deuteronomii esse, non Samuelis, manifestum
est. Samuelis enim ad terrorem duataxat populo injiciendum pertinere rectissime quidem et contra te dixit R. Judas.”
Also cited in Nelson, “‘Talmudical Commonwealthsmen,’” 826.
44
Milton, Defensio, 50f.: “Perniciosum enim est id jus nominari atque doceri, quod injustitia plane est, nisi abusive
forsitan jus nominetur. Quo etian pertinent versus 18. Et exclamabitis die illa propter regem vestrum, sed non
exaudiet vos Jehovah.”
45
Ibid., 51: “obstinatos nimirum ista poena manebat, qui regem nolente Deo dari sibi voluerent.”
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approved by God as vengeance for an iniquitous people, he subsequently affirmed that “if it is
permitted to the people to cry to God against [their] king, without doubt it is permitted to engage
in even any honest course for liberating themselves from tyranny.”46 God’s judgment against the
sinful Israelites, i.e., the establishment of a tyrannous kingship nevertheless, according to Milton,
did not deprive them of their inherent right to improve their condition. For he claimed that no
man “when he is pressed by whatever evil, thus [ought to] cry to God, so that he may neglect all
other things which belong to his own office, bowed down attending to his lazy prayers.”47 The
English people, unlike the Israelites, did not offend the Almighty or act impiously when they
“constituted according to . . . [their] laws, neither by the command nor against the prohibition of
God but by the right of nations, a king who [they] never sought for against God’s will nor
accepted as a gift from God.”48 And yet, while the original English constitution of monarchy did
not contradict the will of God, nevertheless he saw no reason “why [the people] should not be
conceded praise and excellence for deposing the king; since indeed it is a crime of the Israelites
to have asked that a king be given them.”49 Milton, referring directly to the rabbinic glosses, had
overturned the standard account of monarchy as a positive command of God, or even an
approved constitutional form. Invoking this passage in I Samuel, he concluded that any people,
and not just the ancient Israelites who enjoyed direct theocracy acted justly and pleased God by
overthrowing their king.
46
Ibid., 51: “Quanquam ista verba non prohibent, quo minus et vota et quidvis aliud tentare potuerint. Si enim
clamare ad Deum contra regem populo licebat, licebat proculdubio omnem etiam aliam inire rationem honestam
sese a tyrannide expediendi.”
47
Ibid., 51: “Quis enim quovis malo cum premitur, sic ad Deum clamat ut coetera omnia quae officii sunt sui
negligat, ad otiosas tantum preces devolutus?”
48
Ibid., 51: “Verum utcunque sit, quid hoc ad jus regium, quid ad jus nostrum? Qui regem nec invite Deo unquam
perivimus, nec ipso dante accepimus, sed jure gentium usi, nec jubente Deo nec vetante, nostris legibus
constituimus.”
49
Ibid., 51: “Quae cum ita se habeant, non video quamobrem nobis laudi atque virtuti tribuendum non sit, regem
abjecisse; quandoquidem Israelitis crimini est datum regem petisse.”
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Later in the Defensio, as Nelson assiduously highlighted, Milton explicitly claimed to
subscribe to the Mishradic account of the events in I Samuel. Even Salmasius, Milton cited,
admitted that some of the rabbinical authorities deemed the royal dignity to be reserved for God
Himself alone and that He permitted other kings only as fitting punishment.50 These Jewish
commentators, pace the Talmudists who had classified monarchy a divine injunction, considered
it improper that a holy people accord to anyone but God the dignity and eminence proper to a
king. The only reason that God could countenance a kingly regime over the Israelites was as a
visitation for their iniquities.51 Monarchy originally was a punishment, and in later times it would
without exception prove similar; it behooves the people always to be released from the
debilitating suzerainty of kings, whose rule per se could never correspond with God’s original
intention for human government. Milton’s reading of I Samuel, based on the Mishradic
commentaries, signaled a departure not only from the authoritative Jewish exegetical tradition,
but most importantly from the dominant account of Christian Hebraists and the previous
interpretative paradigms that had never presumed the passage to call into question God’s
sanction of monarchy as a legitimate constitution.52 It is “according to the sentence of those
men”—the rabbis of the Mishradim—that Milton in his Defensio had declared that he would
“march on foot.”53
‘The Sin of the Jews’: Paine and Kingship
In Common Sense, Tom Paine did not intimate his familiarity with competing rabbinic exegeses
of the Old Testament; and no scholar yet has suggested the possibility of Talmudic sources
50
Ibid., 62.
Nelson, “‘Talmudical Commonwealthsmen,’” 821ff.
52
Nelson, “‘Talmudical Commonwealthsmen,’” 825 – 831.
53
Milton, Defensio, 62: “Quorum ego in sententiam pedibus eo.”
51
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among his intellectual influences. Yet in the second chapter of the pamphlet, ordered under the
heading “Of Monarchy and Hereditary Succession,” Paine delved into the Old Testament for
further proof against the legitimacy of monarchical governments.54 Monarchy entails “exalting
one man so greatly above the rest,” which “cannot be justified on the equal rights of nature,” and
“so neither can it be defended on the authority of Scripture,” as Paine argued in Common
Sense.55 “The will of the Almighty, as declared by Gideon and the prophet Samuel, expressly
disapproves of government by kings”; and even though “all anti-monarchical parts of Scripture
have been very smoothly glossed over in monarchical governments,” these passages
“undoubtedly merit the attention of countries which have their governments yet to form.”56
Following Milton’s example, Paine had consulted the Old Testament for divine antipathy toward
kings: the fruits of this research asserted unambiguously that “monarchy is ranked in scripture as
one of the sins of the Jews.”57 In the Book of Judges, as Paine related, the Israelites had offered
the regal dignity to their conquering general Gideon, who declined the honor saying that only
God should rule over them.58 Milton, too, had referenced briefly this example in his Defensio as
further biblical proof against the legitimacy of kings.59 Yet far more interesting for the link
between the two authors is the following section, where Paine commented extensively not only
on the very same excerpt of I Samuel 8, but also on precisely the same issues that Milton had
disputed with the Hebraists.
In this section, Paine quoted verbatim from I Samuel 8 nearly the entire chapter,
interspersed throughout with parenthetical clarifying comments. He introduced the biblical
54
Paine, “Common Sense,” 8 – 15.
Ibid., 9.
56
Ibid.
57
Ibid.
58
Ibid., 9f.; the biblical account of Gideon is found in the sixth through eighth chapters of the Book of Judges.
59
Milton, Defensio, 67: “Hinc Gedeon ille Heros rege major, Non dominabor in vos, neque filius meus in vos
deminabitur, sed dominabitur in vos Jehova. Jud. 8. plane ac si simul docuisset, non hominis esse dominari in
hominess, sed solius Dei.”
55
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passage with a remark in seeming conformity with the authoritative Talmudic interpretation
embraced by Salmasius and contradicted by Milton. The Israelites had petitioned Samuel for a
king to judge them “like all the other nations,” but this ostensible justification, in Paine’s
opinion, confirmed that their “motives were bad, viz. that they might be like unto other nations,
i.e. the heathens, whereas their true glory lay in being as much unlike them as possible.”60 Milton
had denied that in this chapter God had directed His anger with the Israelites merely against the
manner in which they requested a king, but rather affirmed that the very request itself had
provoked Him. Yet Paine did not leave his interpretation at that. Paine considered Samuel’s
catalogue of the feudal duties imposed by a king not merely a prophecy or a warning, but rather a
fitting description “not of any particular king, but the general manner of the kings of the earth
whom Israel was so eagerly copying after,” for “notwithstanding the great distance of time and
difference of manners, the character is still in fashion.”61 Kings always and everywhere conform
to a similarly unjust “mode of impressing men” into their service, live with great “expense and
luxury as well as . . . oppression,” and consistently practice the “standing virtues of kings” such
as “bribery, corruption, and favoritism.”62 The extensive servitude that Samuel had foretold
under the rule of kings did not, to Paine, refer only to the heathen tyrants that the Israelites hoped
their government would emulate, or to the seemingly greater potential for monarchy to
degenerate into despotism. Nay rather, the royal nature bore the indelible stamp of rapine and
oppression. Fittingly Paine reserved his most pointed commentary for Samuel’s gravest warning,
that, due to their insistent lust after an earthly king, the Israelites ought not to supplicate God for
relief from the harsh oppression that can expect under the monarchy, for “THE LORD WILL NOT
60
Paine, “Common Sense,” 10.
Ibid.
62
Ibid., 11.
61
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21
63
God has permitted “the continuation of monarchy,” Paine surmised,
as a persistent punishment for a blind and stubborn people, despite the Christian fact of
redemption that had occurred in the interim between ancient Israel and 1776.64 But despite the
incidence of “a few good kings who have lived since,” those exceptions do not “either sanctify
the title, or blot out the sinfulness of the origin; the high encomium given of David takes no
notice of him officially as king, but only as a man after God’s own heart.”65 In his strongest
language, Paine proved the rule by its exception. Monarchy always arose unjustly and impiously,
and the odd cases of an upright man who was also king have done nothing to redeem the regime;
these “just” kings have received accolades only for their personal righteousness and not for their
royal service. While advocates of kingly government had claimed support in the Gospel precept
to “render unto Caesar the things which are Caesar’s”—that “scripture doctrine of courts”—
Paine found instead in the Old Testament the uncompromising judgment of God against
monarchy.66
The Miltonic Republican Discourse: Monarchy, Idolatry, Slavery
Thomas Paine, an acknowledged deist and suspected agnostic, dedicated the greater part of his
inquiry in Common Sense into the origin “of Monarchy and Hereditary Succession” to scriptural
accounts and arguments. In his disputes with Salmasius, Milton too, having analyzed extensively
the foundation of the ancient Hebrew kingdom, determined that God had prohibited such a
government. In so doing, he specifically engaged with and ultimately rejected the Talmudic
interpretative tradition embraced by many contemporary commentators and instead resuscitated
63
Ibid.. The formatting is originally Paine’s.
Ibid.
65
Ibid. The emphasis is Paine’s.
66
Ibid., 9.
64
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the authority of the Mishradic reading. No doubt the rhetorical force of arguments ad scripturam
would prove powerful in Paine and Milton’s respective societies of biblical Protestants. That
they could construe from the Old Testament a clear sanction against monarchy would represent a
trump for their side of the polemics. Both Milton and Paine subscribed to a reading of I Samuel 8
that depicted God’s displeasure with the establishment of monarchy; but more importantly,
perhaps, both did not thereupon conclude their biblical analysis, but rather drew further similar
inferences from this lesson against kings. The rabbinic account that provided the fertile source
for Milton’s exegesis had claimed that the impiety of monarchy arose from its inherent
usurpation of the honor and duty owed to God alone. In his essay on the subject, Eric M. Nelson
meticulously outlined the arguments of the Hebrew exegetes that had classified monarchy as a
sort of civil idolatry. The influential Sichard hinted at this view in his summary of the
Midrashim, and Milton nevertheless would have had access to its entire content in a number of
other sources. 67 This conclusion certainly would have attracted Milton’s attention, for, as
Barbara Lewalski has shown, idolatry was an important theme and concern throughout his
writings.68 Surprisingly the more rationalistic and skeptical Paine also emphasized the idolatrous
character of earthly monarchy. Whether or not he actually worried about offending a jealous
Deity, he certainly viewed the worship of idols as a manifestation of superstition and ignorance,
among the more insuperable barriers to a sound politics. In their corresponding accounts of I
Samuel 8, Milton and Paine had discovered the divine disgust with monarchical government for
exalting a man beyond his proper order, in competition with God.
In his treatise against ecclesiastical usurpation of political authority, Of Civil Power
(1658), Milton considered the various theological crimes over which hierarchs had long claimed
67
Nelson, “‘Talmudical Commonwealthsmen,’” 826 – 832.
Barbara K. Lewalksi, “Milton and Idolatry,” Studies in English Literature, 1500 – 1900, 43: 1, “The English
Renaissance” (Winter, 2003), 213 – 232.
68
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jurisdiction and yet which they also expected to be censured by the state. Blasphemy—impious
speech against God’s majesty—Milton defined from the Greek as “a most usual and common
word in that language to signify any slander, any malicious or evil speaking, whether against
God or man, or anything to good belonging” and thus fell under the purview of the civil
magistrate.69 With the charge of heresy likewise “a Greek apparition stands in our way,” since it
“signifies . . . no word of evil note, meaning only the choice or following of any opinion good or
bad in religion, or any other learning.”70 In this way, Milton disposed of the religious offenses,
through the prosecution of which clerics had insinuated themselves in the secular government.
But the crime of idolatry merited special treatment: it is “evidently against all Scripture, both of
the Old and New Testament,” a “true heresy, or rather an impiety,” and the “works thereof are
manifest, that a magistrate can hardly err in prohibiting and quite removing at least the public
and scandalous use thereof.”71 Unlike other exercises of conscience, of which Milton remained a
strident protector, idolatry was self-evidently unconscionable—perhaps a conclusion he drew
from its prohibition in the Noahide Laws, which according to Hebrew tradition are binding not
only on the Jews but on mankind in general.72
In his Defensio, the response to Salmasius, and throughout other political tracts, Milton
indeed explicitly had drawn the connection between monarchy and idolatry. God had assured
Samuel that, in demanding a king, the Israelites “[had] not rejected thee, but . . . Me, that I
should not reign over them”—“as if,” according to Milton “it seemed a certain kind of idolatry to
ask for a king that would demand that he be adored and conceded honors that are almost divine.”
For they “that impose upon themselves an earthly master, above all laws, are nigh to establishing
69
Milton, Of Civil Power in Ecclesiastical Causes Showing That It Is Not Lawful for Any Power on Earth To
Compel in Matters of Religion (London, 1658), 16.
70
Ibid., 18.
71
Ibid., 36.
72
I am grateful to Prof. Nelson for the suggestion about Milton’s deference to the Noahide Laws.
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for themselves a strange god: and often by no means a reasonable god, but more often for the
sake of profligacy, a brutish and bestial.”73 Such servile subjection to an earthly ruler, as Milton
read Scripture, infringed upon the glory especially reserved to God. In Eikonoklastes (1649), his
broadsides against the widely popular Eikon Basilike, a putatively autobiographical account of
King Charles’s sufferings in prison, Milton explained the title of the work. He strove therein to
imitate those “Greek emperors, who in their zeal to the command of God, after long tradition of
idolatry in the church, took courage and broke all superstitious images to pieces,” a step
necessitated because the “people, exorbitant and excessive in all their motions, are prone ofttimes not to a religious only, but to a civil kind of idolatry, in idolizing their kings.”74 Milton’s
final political treatise, The Ready and Easy Way (1660)—pleading at the eve of the Restoration
against welcoming back monarchical rule—drew similar comparisons between the worship of
idols and the deference to kings. A “free commonwealth” demands that “they who are the
greatest [be] perpetual servants and drudges to the public at their own cost and charges, neglect
their own affairs, yet are not elevated over their brethren; live soberly in their families, walk the
street as other men . . . spoken to freely, familiarly, friendly, without adoration.” In a monarchy,
on the contrary, the “king must be adored like a demigod, with a dissolute and haughty court
about him, of vast expense and luxury.”75 Monarchy, as a political iteration of idolatry, that most
deplorable lèse-majesté against God, was an infernal government—the regime of the damned,
not of goodly Christian men.
73
Milton, Defensio, 66: “Passim enim testator Deus valde sibi displicuisse quod regem petissent, ver. 7. Non te sed
me speverunt ne regnem super ipsos, secundum illa facta quibus dereliquerunt me et coluerunt Deos alienos: ac si
species quaedam idololatriae videretur regem petere, qui adorari se, et honores prope divines tribui sibi postulat.
Sane qui supra omnes leges terrenum sibi dominum imponit, prope est ut sibi Deum statuat alienum; Deum utique
haud saepe rationabilem, sed profligata saepius ratione brutum et belluinum.” Also cited in Nelson, “‘Talmudical
Commonwealthsmen,’” 830.
74
Idem, Eikonoklastes in Answer to a Book Entitled Eikon Basilike (London, 1649), [vi]
75
Idem, The Ready and Easy Way to Establish a Free Commonwealth and the Excellence Thereof Compared with
the Inconveniences and Dangers of Readmitting Kingship in This Nation (London, 1660), 28.
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In Common Sense, Paine too had alluded to the idolatrous nature of human monarchy as
further testament to its violation of divine precepts as well as natural law of reason. Monarchy
has its origin in pagan society, “first introduced into the world by the heathens, from whom the
children of Israel copied the custom.”76 Yet even from its very beginnings, “it was the most
prosperous invention the Devil ever set on foot for the promotion of idolatry.” In accord with
their superstitious cults, “the heathens paid divine honors to their deceased kings,” but, due no
doubt to diabolical influence and impiety latent in the monarchical constitution, “the Christian
world has improved on the plan by doing the same to their living ones,” applying “the title of
sacred Majesty . . . to a worm, who in the midst of his splendor is crumbling into dust.”77 The
trappings of monarchy—the extravagance and luxury, the obligatory courtesies, the whim and
fancy capable alone of promulgating the law—not only breach the “equal rights of nature,” but
symbolically elevate a man, a mere mortal, to the level of the divine.78 The Jewish request for a
king was a “national delusion,” according to Paine, and the most clear-thinking of God’s chosen
people deemed it “sinful to acknowledge any being under that title [of king] but the Lord of
Hosts.”79 Kings must be paid “idolatrous homage,” which clearly offends the “Almighty, ever
jealous of his honor,” who naturally “disapprove[s] a form of government which so impiously
invades the prerogative of heaven.”80 To Paine, a king, no matter how just and pious, no matter
how much a man after God’s own heart, cannot but claim for himself the rights and the dignity
that no mere human legitimately can enjoy, let alone deserve. As the coup de grâce, Paine
compared the idolatrous regime of kings to the much-maligned Catholic Church. Since the Bible
is so arrayed against monarchy, “a man hath good reason to believe that there is as much of
76
Paine, “Common Sense,” 8.
Ibid., 8f.
78
Ibid., 9.
79
Ibid.
80
Ibid; also cited in Nelson, “‘Talmudical Commonwealthsmen,’” 834f.
77
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kingcraft as priestcraft in withholding the scripture from the public in popish countries”; no
wonder then that “monarchy in every instance is the popery of government.”81 God could not
approve positively of any monarchical regime for the simple reason that it promotes heathenish
superstitions and effectively amounts to the grave sin of idolatry—a practice indeed reprobate in
Christian society, but one condemned by reason as well.
For Milton and Paine to prove that God not only disapproved of monarchy, but
considered such a government tantamount to idolatry—proscribed both in the Noahide Laws and
the first commandment of the Decalogue—would be a formidable argument with which their
antagonists would need to contend. By discovering in the Sacred Scriptures such a strong
sanction against kings, they advanced a strong “exclusivist” case for republican government as
the only just constitutional form: for submitting to monarchy was foolish and self-defeating as
well as supremely impious. Yet both writers did not consider the offense solely on grounds of its
irreligion, but also its purely civil component. Idolatry entailed wickedness no doubt—an utter
lack of respect and gratitude to a gracious and omnipotent God, who in return for His bountiful
blessings had reserved the highest homage for Himself. And if all legitimate power flowed from
the Almighty as its source, He in no wise could be seen to uphold the right of a regime
fundamentally allied with this crime. In addition to their sin against God’s majesty, idolaters
furthermore offended against themselves. Genuflecting before any being, especially a false god
or a fleeting mortality, is necessarily debasing and dehumanizing, a forfeiture of the equal rights
with which all men are born. Idolatry breeds slavishness, the state in which all kings, jealous of
their prerogatives and suspicious of talented and virtuous men whose authority might
compromise their own, intend to maintain their subjects. Such servile creatures are not fit for the
rigorous demands of maintaining liberty in a free commonwealth and most certainly offer a poor
81
Paine, “Common Sense,” 11.
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example for imitation. Idolatry is an offense against God as much as it is a treason against the
dignity of man: its eradication therefore becomes imperative to the political philosophy of
strenuous liberty as much as that of biblical Christianity.
John Milton had earned high encomium from John Toland, in his 1698 biography of the
poet, for “those excellent volumes he wrote on the behalf of civil, religious, and domestic
liberty”: indeed the theme of liberty runs consistently throughout his many political treatises. 82
While the notion of liberty—so fundamental to and exhaustively treated in most of modern
political philosophy—may appear straightforward, Milton’s account nevertheless requires
careful explication. As one influential scholar cautioned, “commentators have paid little attention
to the unfamiliar way in which he handles the concept of liberty.”83 Milton had supported
expanding the extent of liberty that citizens were allowed to exercise: he opposed the prior
restraint of the press, promoted toleration for various sects—excepting, of course, Catholics—
and argued for more permissive divorce laws. Yet in fundamental considerations of government,
Milton’s meditations on liberty always also accounted for its antithesis, slavery. Quentin Skinner
had explained Milton’s libertarianism as rooted in the Roman law distinction between a free man
and a slave. Whoever was under the control of another, upon whom he depended for the
necessities of life, inevitably had their actions coerced.84 According to Skinner’s reading of
Milton, the very threat of having one’s liberty revoked—in political terms, the mere possibility
of royal prerogative nullifying the laws of the kingdom or rights of the governed—effectively
constituted enslavement. To acknowledge the right of the king is to consign oneself to vassalage
82
John Toland, “The Life of John Milton” in John Milton, A Complete Collection of the Historical, Political, and
Miscellaneous Works of John Milton, ed. by John Toland (Amsterdam [London]: 1698), Vol I, p. 5.
83
Quentin Skinner, “John Milton and The Politics of Slavery,” in Vision of Politics, Vol II: Renaissance Virtues
(Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2002), 286 – 307, at 299.
84
Ibid.; see esp. 297 – 307 for his explication of Milton’s “Roman law” conception of liberty: in Skinner’s view,
“Milton combines a classical—and more specifically a Roman law—conception of freedom and slavery with a
‘monarchomach’ understanding of lawful government,’” 302.
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28
and perpetual servitude, which in no uncertain terms would gainsay that most notoriously
aggressive assertion of Milton’s that “no man . . . can be so stupid to deny, that all men naturally
were born free.” 85 Subjection to monarchy, as Milton explained in Tenure of Kings and
Magistrates (1649), offends God and abrogates man’s liberty, since “if the king fear not God, as
how many of them do not? We hold then out lives and estates by the tenure of his mere grace and
mercy, as from a god, not a mortal magistrate.”86 The tyranny latent in monarchical government,
according to Milton, reduced the subject to the abject condition of the slave, at the same time
demanding the reverence and worship due only to God: this species of oppression in politics
always accompanied superstition in religion.87
An uncompromising exponent of political “liberty,” Thomas Paine in Common Sense
likewise arrived at similar conclusions to Milton about the slavish nature of idolatrous kingship.
Paine’s account of the Old Testament explicitly had equated monarchy with idolatry, lamenting
how “impious is the title of sacred Majesty applied to a worm,” and how kings, in addition to
luxury and power, also get to be “worshipped into the bargain.”88 Monarchical government
offended Paine not only because it “invades the prerogative of heaven,” but more importantly
because men are born free and equal by right. Men “are originally equals in the order of
creation,” Paine asserted, and so “no one by birth could have a right to set up his own family in
perpetual preference to all others forever”: monarchy is “a degradation and lessening of
ourselves.”89 The artificial hierarchy established in monarchical regimes sundered the natural
equality of men; by requiring idolatrous homage, kings surely incensed God and also unjustly
85
Milton, The Tenure of Kings and Magistrates (London, 1649), 8. Also cited in Skinner, “John Milton and the
Politics of Slavery,” 299.
86
Milton, The Tenure of Kings and Magistrates, 11.
87
Cf. Paine, “Common Sense,” 11: “monarchy in every instance is the popery of government.”
88
Ibid., 9, 15.
89
Ibid., 8, 11.
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29
demanded the humiliation of their subjects, fellow men who by nature are their equals. In his
discussion of the so-called checks and balances of the English constitution, Paine also speculated
about the futility of such a complex arrangement and in particular warned that, despite these
vaunted “checks,” if the king wields the ultimate power, the people are as entirely subjected as
under an absolute monarchy.90 Englishmen deluded themselves to think they “shut and lock a
door against absolute monarchy,” when they “at the same time have been foolish enough to put
the crown in possession of the key.”91 To Paine it did not matter whether the royal incumbent
exercised his prerogatives moderately and executed his office to the benefit of the people, for
nevertheless his subjects depend on his whim and fancy for their liberty and security from
oppression. Just as David’s virtue did not alter the idolatrous and iniquitous nature of kingship,
so forbearance in the use of arbitrary power does not thereby render a people any freer. Paine’s is
a two-fold attack on the nature of monarchy: as effective idolatry, God does not approve it, and
only men who have ignominiously laid aside their equal birthright can bring themselves to
perform the dehumanizing obsequies owed to kings, and place their lives and fortunes at his
mercy.
The question of Paine’s sources for Common Sense has beguiled scholars of political
thought for years: he seldom quoted, often denied reliance on other authors and arguments, and
seemingly drew on a diverse and disparate collection of intellectual traditions. Contemporaries—
perhaps owing solely to their anti-monarchical sentiments— often remarked upon his similarity
to Milton. John Adams even remembered him at one point admitting to a debt to the republican
bard. While, barring future epiphanies, we may never prove definitively that Paine had read the
political treatises of Milton, nevertheless in his pamphlet he echoed the poet’s arguments and
90
Ibid., 5 – 8, esp. 7: “That the crown is this overbearing part of the English constitution needs not be mentioned,
and that it derives its whole consequence merely from being the giver of places and pensions is self-evident.”
91
Ibid., 7.
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30
rhetoric. In his survey of Scripture, he considered at length the passage in I Samuel 8 that Milton
had reinterpreted according to the judgment of rabbinic sources, and came to a similar
conclusion. Paine followed Milton also in drawing an equivalence between monarchy and
idolatry; and both thinkers’ dedication to liberty, in theory and practice, had exacerbated the
offense, since only servile men, deprived of their freedom, could consent to bow down to an
earthly king. Their distinctly similar themes, examples, rhetoric—even their frank and forceful
style—seem to argue for their very close intellectual affinity. Milton, as recent scholarship has
indicated, himself had revolutionized the exegesis of that crucial Old Testament chapter, to
which so many disputants on all sides had directed their attention. The centrality of idolatry in
this account, as well as his peculiar conception of liberty that attended it, likewise distinguished
Milton’s contribution to republican thought. Whether Paine, bashfully declining to admit his
sources—except, of course, to Adams—extracted directly these Miltonic contributions for use in
Common Sense, or rather collected them from the ether of the informal republican discourses of
the coffeehouses and debating clubs, perhaps may remain unknown forever. Such an explicit
correspondence, however, does not need to be proved to confirm that Paine’s arguments and
rhetoric are distinctly Miltonic. If Milton’s interpretation of I Samuel 8, through which he
articulated the equivalence between monarchy and idolatry, represented an innovation in
“republican” political thought, Thomas Paine in Common Sense was an important figure within
this particular strain.
Thomas Paine, like John Toland in the previous century, had earned a reputation in
history as a freethinker and skeptic, one who did not conform to contemporary standards of
orthodoxy or piety. John Milton, for all of his heresies, however still often is remembered,
perhaps on the fame of Paradise Lost alone, as a convicted if not conformist Christian. Religious
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31
concerns indeed played a crucial role in Milton’s political writings; and his fierce invective
against monarchy found its firmest intellectual support in the Bible. By casting monarchy as a
political form of idolatry, Milton had made it seem a sin; but superstition in religion, he also
suggested, is intertwined inextricably with illiberal servility in politics—bowing down to an idol
enervates a man and makes him unfit for freedom. This trope, linking “popery” in religion and
monarchical tyranny in politics, also was a recurring and important element in republican
discourse for writers such as Toland and Paine. As perhaps the first republican “exclusivist,”
John Milton had initiated this school of thought, and—despite the lack of recognition from most
scholars on this topic—earned a flock of disciples.
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32
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