John Milton and religious Tolerance: The origins and contradictions of the western tradition

Abstract

In a prose work, The Tenure of Kings and Magistrates, written during the trial of Charles I in January 1649 and published within a fortnight of his execution, John Milton (1608-1674) wrote: ‘No man who knows ought, can be so stupid to deny that all men naturally were borne free, being the image and resemblance of God himself, and were by privilege above all the creatures, born to command and not to obey: and that they liv’d so.’1 This is the first of several ringing declarations of individual liberty which bejewel the Tenure: the statement may have influenced Thomas Jefferson in composing the most famous lines of the Declaration of Independence.2 The next prose piece by Milton to appear in print, Observations upon the Articles of Peace with the Irish Rebels, attacked the Irish for displaying a disposition not only sottish but inducible and averse from all Civility and amendment, and what hopes they give for the future, who rejecting the ingenuity of all other Nations to improve and waxe more civill by a civilizing Conquest, though all these many years better taught and shown, preferre their own absurd and savage Customes before the most convincing evidence of reason and demonstration: a testimony of their true Barbarisme[.]3.