I

The Commonwealth's position in Ireland was perilous from the moment of its birth. For much of the preceding decade, most of the island had been under the sway of the confederate Catholic regime that had emerged from the great upheaval of the 1641 Rising to challenge the rule of Charles I, and latterly to reconciliation with it. The prospect of a conclusive alignment, mediated by the royal lord lieutenant, James Butler, Marquis of Ormond, had served to hasten Charles I toward his fate.Footnote ⁷ Articles of peace proclaimed on 17 January won the support of the majority, though not all, of the confederates and formally brought them under Ormond's authority alongside a Protestant royalist constituency centered in the southern province of Munster. On 26 February, just over a week after it had first assembled, the Council of State, the Commonwealth's executive, approved letters affirming its oversight and offering its support to its three military commanders, Colonel Michael Jones in Dublin, Sir Charles Coote at Londonderry, and Colonel George Monck in east Ulster. Each was more or less beleaguered, their forces facing both encroachment and enticement from Ormond's royalist coalition.Footnote ⁸ To the threat of loss of control of an Ireland, which in stark contrast to Scotland was routinely and symbolically considered part of the newly emerging polity, was added the even greater danger from Stuart tyranny to the entire project of liberty. Across the spring and summer, it was plausible to imagine that, among the English public, the “general Demand of the people is, What is your Newes from Ireland? The sellers of the weekly sheets make answer, and cry aloud in the streets, Newes hot from Ireland.”Footnote ⁹ In March, newsbook readers could be informed of Cromwell's acceptance of the command of an expeditionary army and reassured of Colonel Jones's fidelity in the face of Ormond's blandishments. At least readers could be confident that the new Irish peace terms, though endorsed by the exiled Charles II, “cannot possibly agree” with the stance taken by the king's other self-proclaimed subjects in Scotland and “their desires in the Covenant.”Footnote ¹⁰

Or could they? Milton's first commission from the Council of State, on 28 March, had been the assignment of making “observations” upon the “Complicacion of interest . . . amongst the severall designers against the peace of the Comonwealth,” intended for publication alongside a clutch of “papers out of Ireland” that Parliament had remitted for the council's consideration.Footnote ¹¹ The “Observations” duly appeared as part of a composite printed text, probably in mid-May,Footnote ¹² and have been reckoned Milton's, though he did not own them then or later. More than half of his text was directed at the shortest of the Irish papers, the “Necessary Representation” issued by the Ulster Presbyterians.Footnote ¹³ His closing shot was to urge the presbytery to “take heed, lest” their actions and words “have not involv'd them in . . . rebellion,” “in the appearance of a co-interest and partaking with the Irish Rebells. Against whom . . . they goe not out to battell, as they might, but rather by these their doings assist and become associats.”Footnote ¹⁴ A slight tentativeness remained, for they had only “in a manner declar'd” with “Ormond, and the Irish Rebels . . . and begun op'n war against the Parliament.”Footnote ¹⁵ At this same moment, in mid-May, the Council of State affirmed its continued good faith in George Monck, though it was wary of the degree to which he seemed willing to comply with the wishes of the Presbyterian-inclined troops under his command.Footnote ¹⁶ In fact the critical break had already occurred as March had turned to April.Footnote ¹⁷ In the northwest, one well-placed observer detected and chronicled a “generall revolt of all the Scotch” in these weeks, moving from a refusal to pay a contribution to sustain Coote's forces to efforts to enforce such non-payment, escalating to armed clashes, if small scale at first; by 5 May, Derry was under “close siedg.”Footnote ¹⁸ Further east, Monck had voiced his concern, on 29 March, that “all the Scots will shake off their dependence upon the kingdom of England.”Footnote ¹⁹ His identification of his opponents in national terms, and his assertion of their intentions, were both telling and, as will be seen, contentious.

During the war years, a dense circuitry had been built up that transmitted correspondence, petitions, and orders between Westminster and the English provinces, through intricate connections of committees and representatives and entangled with the wiring carrying material for publication through London print shops and back outward to readers. The resulting network was more than logistical: it was ideological. National agendas were as much shaped by localities as imposed upon them.Footnote ²⁰ Wartime Protestant Ireland had been partially wired in. Parliamentary committees with executive powers, appointees to regional offices and commands, lobbyists or experts eager to express or press Irish needs—or rather, the needs of Protestant or parliamentary interests—abounded.Footnote ²¹ As with English provincial disputes, so their rivalries, from personal quarrels to full factional roils, could be vented through the London press.Footnote ²² In the first months of 1649, the new regime's grip on publication had not yet tightened to the extent visible a year later, when the onset of war with Scotland would prompt a multidimensional propaganda campaign, spanning official statements, commissioned or sponsored polemic, and the gathering and spreading of news reports, with newsbooks confined to a state-authorized few.Footnote ²³ But already a conflation of views was apparent across printed texts, between officially sponsored responses to the trial and execution of the king, supportive newsbooks, and pamphlets at least ostensibly published on their authors’ own initiative.Footnote ²⁴ Milton's “Observations” was not the only printed response to the Ulster “revolt.” Others also took the form of animadversions upon documents produced by the presbytery, or its challengers.Footnote ²⁵ The Complaint of the Boutefeu, Scorched in his owne Kindlings . . . was “Published by Authority,” as was Articles of the Peace containing Milton's “Observations”; both were from the same printer, Matthew Simmons, who was responsible for Milton's two other political works of 1649, Tenure of Kings and Magistrates and Eikonoklastes, and for a dense body of publications supporting the army and its political allies across 1648–49.Footnote ²⁶ As late as the summer of 1650, as the Commonwealth's army made ready to march into Scotland, Edward Husband and John Field, “Printers to the Parliament of England,” brought out the longest of the pamphlets, News from Ireland, which conveyed a cluster of documents dating back to May–September 1649, and urged: “Read this book, and see the pitiful slavery they lie under, where a Presbytery is Established.”Footnote ²⁷

Yet such assaults only safeguarded one flank. Two days before Milton's commission, the Council of State had engaged on another front. The veteran Irish administrator Sir William ParsonsFootnote ²⁸ was mandated to ready his papers on Ireland, later clarified as “discourses asserting the English Interest in Ireland,” including his “Examen Hiberniae” and “another discourse” addressing “certain questions, consideracons and obiections” to the Irish war. Parsons was also entrusted with “ordering, preparing & publishing” the “examinations” in the hands of Thomas Waring, formerly clerk to the commission that had collected “depositions” from Protestants in the aftermath of the 1641 Rising, to vindicate the “Protestant cause,” perpetuate the infamy of “Irish Papists” and their abettors, and address “causelesse cavills and queries” raised about the “reliefe” of Ireland.Footnote ²⁹ John Cunningham has revealed the importance of Parsons's substantial “Examen,” surviving in manuscript though not published as composed (Parsons died in March 1650). In particular, “Examen” closely matches An answer to certain Jesuitical queres, published in 1651 and claimed by Waring, which Cunningham plausibly supposes to be in fact the second Parsons “discourse” considered by the council.Footnote ³⁰ The implications may be worth pressing a little further, for the “Queres,” which Waring described as a “seditious pamphlet” that had been “dispersed” among the soldiery intended for Ireland, has been prominent in discussions of English “radical” opposition to a renewed Irish campaign.Footnote ³¹ It was first tackled in print in May/June 1649 in a series of editorials in the newsbook the Moderate Intelligencer, which claimed that “in discourse, the same Queries have been put by some very active and eminent in the present Government.”Footnote ³² Waring would later maintain that he had received the “Queries” from Theodore Jennings, who as press licenser was responsible for authorizing the Moderate Intelligencer and who “had delivered them over” to John Bradshaw, lord president of the council.Footnote ³³ Bradshaw had alerted the council to Parsons's writings, and Milton has been seen as an admirer, if not indeed friend, of Bradshaw.Footnote ³⁴

The connections are at least suggestive of a council, or a party within it, for whom Milton's “Observations” were but one component in its defense of its interests in Ireland, complementary to more direct assaults on Irish claims and resistance to any undermining of the case for intervention from among the regime's supporters.Footnote ³⁵ Important studies of Milton's text have suggested that his “primary concerns . . . are much less with Irish affairs than with a crucial phase of English domestic politics,” the need to “discredit Presbyterian leaders” and detach from them their “rank-and-file supporters,”Footnote ³⁶ and have drawn attention to the significant Scottish dimension to a text produced in conditions of deteriorating relations between republican England and a Scotland that had proclaimed Charles II as ruler of all Great Britain and, of course, Ireland.Footnote ³⁷ Milton's limited engagement with massacre themes, or even comparative neglect of Irish and Catholic iniquity in “Observations,” would then not be due to any squeamishness or lack of zeal on his part, or determination to reorient his brief toward his own particular English concerns.Footnote ³⁸ Rather, his outbursts in these directions were among the more conventional of his opinions, especially prevalent among supporters of Parliament or the Commonwealth especially; his priorities were reflective of an assignment that allowed for or even encouraged his attending to the “complication” between threats to the Commonwealth within and beyond Ireland, complementing publications designed to drive home the necessity of Irish war by foregrounding the fiendishness of the Catholic enemy.Footnote ³⁹

News from Ireland alerted its readers to complications, how the “Presbyterians of Ireland” looked to the Scottish kirk for “infallible directions,” such as were once issued from Rome, and to “how Reverentially” they received “Dictates and Opinions” from the Presbyterian Province of London.Footnote ⁴⁰ The Ulster presbytery, for its part, had boasted the “laudable Examples” of “free and faithfull testimonies against the insolencies of the Sectarian party”Footnote ⁴¹ from the London ministers and the commissioners of the Scottish General Assembly.Footnote ⁴² Responding to queries raised by James Kerr and Jeremy O'Quinn, two dissidents from within their own ranks, they pointed them also to “the Paper emitted by the Ministers of Essex” and the “Agreement of the People,” and contested with them readings of the army's “Remonstrance” of November 1648.Footnote ⁴³ In “remote” Ulster, such materials, for the most part published in January, had been received and digested and their arguments incorporated into February's “Necessary Representation.” Its political and constitutional stance echoed that of the Londoners’ Serious representation, which expressed a like horror toward both the purging of Parliament and the actions against the king—events “without parallel” or precedent and unacceptably acted by “private men.”Footnote ⁴⁴ For the London Presbyterians, the Covenant underwrote “those declared Grounds and Principles, upon which the Parliament first tooke up Armes, and upon which Wee were induced to joyne with them,” and which no pleas of Providence or “necessity” could override.Footnote ⁴⁵ The Ulster presbytery charged that those they deemed the “Sectarian party” had “despised the Oath in breaking the Covenant” and become “guilty of the great evill of these times . . . the despising of dominion”; covenant-takers must not “shake off the ancient, and fundamentall Government of these Kingdomes by King and Parliament” to which they had “deeply ingaged” themselves.Footnote ⁴⁶ Though the London ministers alluded to anxieties around “opening a door to desperate and damnable Errors and Heresies,”Footnote ⁴⁷ Edinburgh placed this to the fore. Their “horror and amazement” was “that in a Land Covenanted with God,” that “monstrous Iniquity may be established by a Law” of a “Toleration unto all Errours” save “expresse Popery and compulsion.”Footnote ⁴⁸ “Compulsion” they construed as referring to “those who plead for the Government of Jesus Christ by Presbyteries, and hold that all men are to walk according to the rule of the Word of God.”Footnote ⁴⁹ But they fell short of the Ulster detection not merely of “strong oppositions to Presbyteriall Government (the hedge, and Bulwarke of Religion)” but a looming “Universall Toleration of all Religions” that embraced “even Paganisme, and Judaisme.”Footnote ⁵⁰

The Ulster presbytery was as insistent on the Covenant as the strong foundation both for “Religion, and Liberties” as their brethren in the other kingdoms.Footnote ⁵¹ As they shared common concerns, so, in part at least, it was the very “dependency of this Kingdome upon the Kingdome of England” that “necessitated” their response to recent upheavals.Footnote ⁵² Their brief “Representation” omitted the extended argumentation of its counterparts in favor of the bold assertion and concrete application suitable to a text not to be mulled over in studies but declaimed to all congregations over which the presbytery bore sway, and to be enacted in plans for a renewal of commitment to the Solemn League and Covenant,Footnote ⁵³ which had been first administered in Ulster communities in the spring of 1644.Footnote ⁵⁴ Where they pressed beyond their models was in the concrete application of their “charge” in a fourfold set of “duties,” each grounded on Covenant principles, radiating outward from the personal to the communal, to participation in tri-kingdom endeavors. Their hearers must “study more to the power of godlinesse, and personall reformation of themselves, and families”; “earnestly contend for the faith,” “every one in their station and calling,” avoiding even the company of those who promoted error or demoted public ordinances or church government; stand to the established political order; and support “the Union amongst the well-affected of the Kingdomes, not being swayed by any National respect,” ensuring that, in avoiding “Sectaries,” they not fall into the clutches of “Malignants” hostile to the “worke of Reformation.”Footnote ⁵⁵

The brethren of the presbytery represented themselves as “Watchmen in Sion”Footnote ⁵⁶ and “Messengers of God”;Footnote ⁵⁷ they had “from our watch-towre blowen the trumpet unto the people,” and could not “forbeare to cry aloud to our flockes, to beware of ravenous Wolves.”Footnote ⁵⁸ They were “Overseers” owing duty to God “and his people,”Footnote ⁵⁹ empowered to wield the “Rod of Discipline”Footnote ⁶⁰ or “denounce judgement.”Footnote ⁶¹ Using scriptural and thereby commonplace terminology, they articulated that which was most indigestible to the opponents of full-blooded presbytery. This was neither its organizational particularities nor its doctrinal preferences but its conception and cultivation of a divine office, at once prophetic and governmental, that would infuse into statements and diffuse across actions a moral imperative predicated on constancy, fidelity, and endurance, in the teeth of royalists or republicans. Milton's jab at Presbyterian deviation, “that John Knox, who was the first founder of Presbytery in Scotland, taught professedly the doctrine of deposing, and of killing Kings,” reflected a tactical appropriation of “Scotchmen and Presbyterians” among the historical “examples . . . all Protestant and chiefly Presbyterian” in defense of the late actions against Charles.Footnote ⁶² Milton's far weightier blow was the assertion that “the generall exhortation to Justice and Obedience . . . is the utmost of their Duty” in “affaires of State”; it was “not for their Medling” as “busie Bodies, to preach of Titles, Interests and alternations in government.”Footnote ⁶³ Rather than offering a “nuanced” perspective on Presbyterianism,Footnote ⁶⁴ or an accommodating gesture, Milton pressed his demand for a stilling of Presbyterianism's prophetic voice raised against social or political sin. Knox might be applauded for having voiced correct political doctrine, but his heirs must be barred from emulating a readiness to “Charge and obtest all who resolve to adhere unto truth” with duties necessarily political because grounded in moral and spiritual demands and commitments at once personal and public.Footnote ⁶⁵

In April and again in the early summer of 1649, the Rump Parliament had made efforts to settle church government in England in the “Presbyterian way” by a declaration confirming and implementing existing legislation.Footnote ⁶⁶ Such a measure embraced Ireland, and despite allowing some space for “godly” dissidents, roused concern or hostility, not least in the army.Footnote ⁶⁷ On both occasions, those efforts coincided with the publication of anonymous attacks on the Ulster presbytery. Not they alone but “all others” should “take heed they be not found guilty of the great evils of the Priests of these times, which is to despite Dominion”; they should instead “cheerfully contribute their best endeavors for the establishing their own liberty, as it is now constituted in this Common-wealth.”Footnote ⁶⁸ The “shadow” of the Ulster presbytery could be detected “here in England,” where only the absence of a “Consistory for the forming those dreadfull Thunder-bolts” confined ministerial misdeeds to the pulpit-trumpeting of rebellion: “[W]hat would our Priests doe, if they had the power of the Kirk of Scotland?” News that they had broken with the local grandee, James, Viscount Montgomery of the Ards, military leader of the Ulster “revolt” but now revealed as a royalist “malignant,” was shaped into a warning for English pulpit-politicians whose “poore silly Brethren at Belfast” could “raise more such Devils than they can conjure downe.”Footnote ⁶⁹ The regime's accommodating initiative ran alongside debate on what must surely be seen as complementary measures intended to stifle any application of religious principle as political critique, “prohibiting Ministers and Preachers, in their Praying, Preaching, or Writing, to declare against the present established Form of Civil Government.”Footnote ⁷⁰ The royalist regime in Ireland was equally ready to bridle the prophets. Having secured from Protestant clergymen in the south of Ireland an acknowledgment that they should “keepe themselves within their owne Line, preaching faith, and good manners, with obedience to the Civill Magistrate” and ensure their “Discourses” not “intrench upon the Civill Government” nor “communicate any Mysteryes of State,”Footnote ⁷¹ Ormond would in due course promulgate royal orders imposing punishments for “any Ecclesiastical Person” who “in his Prayer or Sermon, shall presume to exercise the People to Sedition or Disobedience, or shall intermeddle in Pulpit or Consistory with the managery of Civil Affairs.”Footnote ⁷²

The Ulster presbytery presented its actions as those of “lovers of the standing of Christs Kingdome” and upholders of “Christs throne.”Footnote ⁷³ Milton's exhortations to counter error and ungodliness through “diligent preaching . . . confuting not . . . railing down errors, encountring both in public and private Conference” and “the spirituall execution of Church discipline within their own congregations,” were to render into metaphor all talk of spiritual “government.”Footnote ⁷⁴ The presbyters’ figuration of “Presbyteriall Government” as “the hedge, and Bulwarke of Religion”Footnote ⁷⁵ could allow critics some playfulness with this “thorny part” of their text, for a hedge was “no essentiall part of Religion it self: old hedges are commonly burned, and so will that amongst other superstructions of like combustible nature, that are built upon the foundation, when the fire shall try every mans work.”Footnote ⁷⁶ But their image of a secure garden or walled city depicted to good effect one necessary dimension of government: protection. Within the safe space that Presbyterian governance provided, pastoral ends could be attained: the cultivation of individual spirituality within parish and wider, national, communities; the reconciliation of internal and external dimensions of religious life, of private and public duties as set out in the fourfold charge. It was an image of security far removed from that designed as a refuge only for those who were already—or already considered themselves to be—the godly.Footnote ⁷⁷ Milton's sense that such “compulsive power upon all without exception,” with “fleshly” support, approximated “the Popish and Prelaticall Courts, or the Spanish Inquisition” was not far short of the view of an earlier printed attack on the Ulster presbytery.Footnote ⁷⁸ The Necessary Examination of a Dangerous Design detected a Satanic transition from a deceiving and persecutory Rome to the promotion of “formality” and a drive to “persecute the Puritans” by means of “Protestant Bishop and a Protestant State” to “yet another secret transmigration of the deceiving serpent . . . now powerfully working in a faction of Presbytery, to persecute those for Sectaries, whom he can no longer call Puritans.”Footnote ⁷⁹ A pretended pity could be extended even to the “malignant” Ards, represented as preferring to acknowledge treason against the Commonwealth than “Treason against the Presbyterie, and Covenant, which may not be forgiven him, neither in this World, nor that to come.”Footnote ⁸⁰

The propensity of “priests” to usurp prophetic and kingly office in the church was what distinguished the “Scottified” among Presbyterians, so abhorrent to the army and its allies when detected in disparate corners of England.Footnote ⁸¹ Ulster demonstrated the full horror of presbytery, and on “English” soil; its “teeth and claws” showed it “not such a harmless Beast as it hath been represented.”Footnote ⁸² Tensions among supporters of the Commonwealth might exist between those who regarded its Presbyterian critics as a “political problem,” appropriately addressed through accommodation alongside repression, and those who detected “agents of Antichrist.”Footnote ⁸³ But the Ulster revolt signaled not only a regional challenge to the regime but a reminder, exploitable by the more adamant critics, and resonating with the more restrained, that any acceptable Presbyterianism was one domesticated and defanged.

Could even more ferocious beasts be tamed? Even as Milton was berating Ulster Presbyterians for nudging toward “a co-interest and partaking” with Irish rebels, it was in fact the republic's own commanders who had determined to “goe not out to battell . . . but rather by these their doings assist and become associats” of a Catholic Irish faction.Footnote ⁸⁴ Most evaluations of their nonaggression agreements with Owen Roe O'Neill's Ulster army, decidedly Gaelic in composition and previously demonstrably staunch in commitment to church interests, conclude them to be designed for immediate, mutual, practical military benefits.Footnote ⁸⁵ George Monck expressed doubt about the “wonderful high” terms that O'Neill offered as a means of securing a “more absolute agreement” authorized by Westminster.Footnote ⁸⁶ But there was more at play. Monck seems to have won O'Neill around to the important modification of his request for the repeal of all legislation “against the Roman Catholiques their Ministers or professors their liberty or exercise of the said Religion,” the rock on which royalist negotiations with Catholic Ireland had once foundered, to that of assurance that O'Neill and those who joined him “in the service of the Parliament of England . . . may have liberty of Conscience for themselves and their issue.”Footnote ⁸⁷ This position, much closer to that put forward by Cromwell when in Ireland,Footnote ⁸⁸ also bore some resemblance to the multiple conversations, negotiations, and propositions regarding accommodation for Catholics with the Commonwealth conducted in London.Footnote ⁸⁹ The possible formula being worked out there balanced firm commitments of political loyalty with a paring back of autonomous church governance, or its surrender to state supervision, and a “liberty of Conscience” interpreted as a confined but secure pastoral ministry with no state impositions upon lay belief or private religious practice. However improbable of realization, the Catholic negotiations bespoke the furthest limits of the new moral geometry of the English Republic, at once authoritarian sponsor and monitor of “Christian liberty.”Footnote ⁹⁰ It was a vision at the furthest odds from Presbyterian aspirations to religious unity as the moral foundation of political order. Had the arrangement with O'Neill moved from temporary cooperation to full-scale accommodation, it would not have precluded Cromwell's Irish campaign, merely detached some from among the Commonwealth's muster of enemies. It might even have aided the construction of a rival complication of interests aligned with the new republic, which could embrace some Catholics, if not Catholicism, as it might woo Presbyterians but bless only an attenuated Presbyterianism.

II

George Monck sought to justify his dealings with O'Neill as encompassed within his “utmost endeavors to reserve the interest of England in the North” in a situation with “the Scots deserting me (although they are unwilling to own it).”Footnote ⁹¹ If his remarks caught the tone of rendering defection in national terms, which the Commonwealth's agents and adherents would continue to pursue toward Ulster, his response to challenges within his own ranks would be met with a mobilization of the language of Presbyterian constitutionalism, with an organization to give it voice, acting and speaking as trustees for the authority of an English crown and constitution temporarily in abeyance. Monck drafted a “Declaration” of common purpose against a “common enemy,” silent on English political developments, and obligatory for any who would hold military command. His declaration was issued on 21 March from his headquarters, Lisburn, an “English” town within the plantation geography of Ulster and one that Adair would later describe as “a place where neither Landlord nor People (a very few excepted) did give Countenance or Entrance to the Gospell.”Footnote ⁹² It was countered by a statement from an alternative gathering of officers at Scottish-inflected Newtown (or Newtownards), the family borough of the viscounts Montgomery, insistent that “any new association” could only be founded on covenant renewal.Footnote ⁹³ For Lieutenant-Colonel James Wallace, covenant renewal was understood as a response to the discernment of divine judgment against “polesies” [policies] and “prudentiall wayes.” It was the fruit of a welcome readiness to “no moir consulte with flesh and bloode” but, determining on duty, “with boldness and confidence chearfullie to stepe forward and tak upp Christ and his crosses in our airmes as the onlie meane even of our owne securitie.”Footnote ⁹⁴ But such zeal was fused with a remarkable and clear-eyed political initiative.

From a sequence of exchanges and a flurry of proposals emerged a “Declaration” in direct competition with that from Monck, perhaps authored by Viscount Ards,Footnote ⁹⁵ issued from the alternative council of war, and endorsed by “the Gentry and others of the Country.” In due course it would reach print in London (and perhaps Edinburgh), apparently transmitted in part through the south Ulster gentleman and officer Robert Ward, an important Ormond informant and conduit to Ulster.Footnote ⁹⁶ James Kerr claimed that the presbytery had preached up the declaration and encouraged subscriptions to it, even stating that the Council of War had issued orders “to all Ministers and Elders” to return the names of those who would not subscribe or were covenant-refusers.Footnote ⁹⁷ It is possible the presbytery had agitated for the establishment of a broad-based council of war, acting in cooperation with “country gentlemen” representing the two counties of Antrim and Down, and also that some organization emerged reflective of the interests being pressed by both “the Army” and “the Country.”Footnote ⁹⁸ What Monck considered “another posture and command” usurping his ownFootnote ⁹⁹ was one committed to “proceed to no thing whatsomever in reference to Religion, without advice of Gods Ministers and servants here given to us,” but rather “to prosecute every mean of surety to our Religion, which they shall propose to us according to the word of God, and the Covenant.” Eschewing any overtly Scottish identification, it spoke for “faithfull and loyall Subjects to the Crown of England.”Footnote ¹⁰⁰

From London to Londonderry to Lisburn, adherents of the Commonwealth were consistent in representing the Ulster revolt as “Scottish”; its adherents did not do so. As in the northern counties of England, so in Ulster, the earlier years of the decade had seen an army sent from Scotland prove burdensome in its demands for funds and other resources and provocative in its sponsorship of Presbyterianism. But it was a shattered force when it was finally rolled up by Monck in 1648.Footnote ¹⁰¹ The presbytery in Ulster, though its ministers were brisk, brusque young Scottish graduates, had expanded its hold well beyond army quarters, encountering anguished cries from supporters of prayer-book Protestantism and on occasion generating “national” tensions within the Protestant population between those of English or Scottish origin. It was never a neat divide. The covenanting alliance between Westminster and Edinburgh had meant that the English Parliament and its agents had countenanced the Ulster presbytery from the mid-1640s; nor was its support only Scottish.Footnote ¹⁰² But if a breach was now to occur, the republic needed to fall back on the call of “nationality,” not only to mobilize support within England against hostile external forcesFootnote ¹⁰³ but to sustain an interest in Ireland, whether among Protestants of the type of Coote or JonesFootnote ¹⁰⁴ or indeed those of more traditional liturgical tastes.Footnote ¹⁰⁵

Though the movement associated with the declaration was centered on the two eastern counties of Antrim and Down, home of the densest clusters of parishes aligned with the presbytery, from the first it had sought with some success to tap support in the Derry hinterland.Footnote ¹⁰⁶ Coote's response to the presbytery's initial “Representation” had insisted that there was no scriptural warrant “authorizing us, being but a Branch of a subordinate Kingdom, to declare against the Parliament of England . . . who are the visible Authority of both Kingdoms.”Footnote ¹⁰⁷ In the moment of constitutional hesitancy before the Rump Parliament declared England a “Commonwealth and Free State” in May, the language of “crown” and “kingdoms” could still be of use,Footnote ¹⁰⁸ and the idea of inherited “dependency” of the Irish kingdom could be deployed by supporters of a regime determined to stress constitutional continuity over innovation, to see the remnant of the Commons as the last “deposit of lawful government.”Footnote ¹⁰⁹ One use was to drive home the Scottish peril. Milton alleged Ireland's historical “dependence on the Crown of England” against an Ormond treaty that enabled its adherents “by degrees to throw off all subjection to this Realme,” “a whole Feudary Kingdome from the ancient Dominion of England.”Footnote ¹¹⁰ Milton dismissed the presbytery's recognition of “the dependency of this Kingdome upon the Kingdome of England” as a “shamelesse untruth” belied by their actions, “driving on the same Interest” as that of the Irish rebels, “to loose us that Kingdome, that they may gaine it themselves, or at least share in the spoile.”Footnote ¹¹¹ The Necessary Examination, consistently more virulent in its anti-Scots rhetoric, insisted that the adherents of the presbytery “intend to destroy the interest of England in Ireland, and root out, if they can, the Soveraignty of England there, and transfer it to the Scots.”Footnote ¹¹² One newsletter cast an alignment of Ulster interests with the exiled Charles as tending toward a conquest of Ulster “to be called new Scotland.”Footnote ¹¹³

These were hoary allegations, previously more associated with wartime English royalism.Footnote ¹¹⁴ And they would continue to be pressed. As the Commonwealth edged toward war with Scotland, Marchamont Nedham would construct a reading of prolonged Scottish determination to advance their interest in the “fat soil” of England, before and across the war years, with the covenant twisted and manipulated so that “grandees” could “domineer in the possessions, as their pharasaical priests would over the consciences, of the English.”Footnote ¹¹⁵ So in another “Countrey better then thir own,”Footnote ¹¹⁶ Scottish ambitions could be tracked from the reign of James VI and I, when “that whole Province [Ulster] was alreadie possessed in their hopes, and a design was laid in time to have in realitie, by finding some or other to forfeit also the English Plantations there.”Footnote ¹¹⁷ As recounted in a text printed “by the Appointment of the Council of State” in 1650, the Scots had been deceived at the outset of the 1641 Rising by Irish claims to have “no quarrel” with them, “knowing their good natures such, as they would bee content to sit still, and see the English destroied, so they might escape, there would bee the more room for Colonies of their Nation.” Even now, the English should be “taught of an Enemie” and remove Scots from the coasts of Ireland, if not from the land altogether.Footnote ¹¹⁸

The author of the Necessary Examination had charged the presbytery, “We would have you remember the dependence, for that is like to last, but forget the Kingdom in them both, for that is at an end.”Footnote ¹¹⁹ Milton heartily disparaged Ormond's depiction, writing to Jones, of a legislature reduced from its ancient “three estates of King, Lords & Commons” to “a small number . . . the dregs and scum of the House of Commons,” the mere “name of a Parliament.”Footnote ¹²⁰ In his subsequent correspondence, Ormond had pressed further. As he acted “by the same Power that in all ages since the Conquest, hath and only can dispose of the Government of this Kingdome,” he understood “of no English Interest separate from, or Independent of the King and Crown of England” (let alone the “misshapen Republique” now in being).Footnote ¹²¹ Jones's admission “that were there neither King nor Parliament, yet should I stand firm to my principles, and to this my trust, against those Bloody Rebels, to the best of my power, for preserving the English interest in Ireland”Footnote ¹²² sounded an authentic note, that of Protestant Ireland's readiness to relativize constitutional forms to the substance of national or religious interest.Footnote ¹²³ But it threatened to render an abstract “England” rather than one delineated using “the Fundamentall Lawes and Constitutions of the Kingdome.”Footnote ¹²⁴ It was to just such an England, construed in constitutional terms, that the Presbyterians of London believed themselves attached by the “Grounds and Principles” upon which they first took up arms for Parliament, and they remained committed to maintenance of its “setled Government.”Footnote ¹²⁵ “The confirmation and inviolable settlement of which happie Nationall constitution, with its preservation, were the ground of our Engagements, and no change or alternation of the same.”Footnote ¹²⁶ Those coming together around a Presbyterian platform in Ulster were also resolved to “carry on the service under King and Parliament of England according to our first undertakings;” if these related to an Irish rather than an English war, they were readily enough coupled with rejection of a “usurped power” set “to put down the lawful authority of King, Lords and Commons.”Footnote ¹²⁷

This was a striking and strident affirmation, and one profoundly threatening to the Commonwealth regime. Within days of the formulation of the Ulster “Declaration” and its accompanying “Propositions,” the presbytery were in a position to broadcast through their pulpits a “Vindication” of their proceedings. Their resolution “to Subject ourselves to the Lawful Authority of the Righteous King and free Parliament of England” allowed them to defy the usurping sectaries, “whom we are resolved never to obey as the Lawful Authority in England.”Footnote ¹²⁸ If “obedience to the Crowne of England” meant “obedience to the King and free Parliament thereof,” then “untill it shall please God to establish these according to our Solemne League and Covenant,” the army and its supporters would press ahead against the “Common Enemy.”Footnote ¹²⁹ As the Council of War clarified for Monck, their service to the king and Parliament of England would continue, “though (for a time) they be violently bereft of the exercise of their just and lawful power” and duty demanded they declare “against the Publick Enemies of our God, such as are now the prevalent party in England.”Footnote ¹³⁰ This was a Presbyterian appropriation of the good old cause, the embrace of a trusteeship for a suspended constitution. And it came with an army.

The danger was both the weakening of the Commonwealth's hold upon Ireland and the articulation—and mobilization—of a constitutionalist opposition that challenged the very premises upon which the regime founded its authority in England. The opportunity to enact such ideas in Ulster came not merely by its distance from the political center but also by Ulster's particular covenanting experience. Where the English and Scottish sister legislatures had set their seal on the Solemn League and Covenant, the Irish parliament (which had maintained a residual royalist existence) had roundly condemned it.Footnote ¹³¹ In due course, Ulster Presbyterian ministers would spin their willingness to obey Westminster-made law as partly due to “finding this Kingdom in such Posture by the Bloody Rebellion that from our own Parliament, wholesome Laws cou'd not Issue.”Footnote ¹³² The covenanting regime in Scotland had always been ready, even eager, to acknowledge English legislative oversight of Ireland.Footnote ¹³³ Westminster had slipped Ireland into the pledge to reform the Church of England in the text of the Solemn League and Covenant.Footnote ¹³⁴ Like its Scottish counterpart, it had ordered that the Covenant be sworn by all troops in its pay in Ireland. But it was ministerial initiative and popular pressure that had extended the Covenant's reach to the civilian population. Those “distressed Christians in the North of Ireland” who petitioned the Scottish General Assembly of 1644 acknowledged that they had “made bold to lay hold upon the opportunity,” long desired, “to joyne ourselves with the People of God in the aforesaid League.”Footnote ¹³⁵ The author of the Necessary Examination charged that the presbytery had been “very active sometime to impose it upon others, who were the subjects of England in Ireland, upon the authority of the generall Assembly of Scotland; a thing which in time may cost you the pain of praemunire, being within the letter of it.”Footnote ¹³⁶

The Ulster presbytery was as ready as its London brethren to renounce the revolutionary deeds in England as the lawless and furious actions of “private men.”Footnote ¹³⁷ Matters were less certain when it was spiritual craving that called forth actions beyond the boundaries set by national churches or national laws.Footnote ¹³⁸ Milton had shown himself ready to burst the bounds of a conventional, regulated, “resistance theory” confined to magistrates, such as was endorsed by Presbyterians, in order to justify deeds of justice and righteousness.Footnote ¹³⁹ But already in his “Observations” there are hints of an emerging tension in his thought, more fully displayed in the second edition of his Tenure of kings and magistrates; he now needed to uphold the Rump, guardian of that revolution toward liberty, against challenges to its authority,Footnote ¹⁴⁰ including from those who, like the Ulster presbytery, stood in no more relation to the Commonwealth as a whole than “Private persons,” no distinct “Tribe and party by themselves.”Footnote ¹⁴¹ Where Jones could play up the continuity of his authority over the hiatus of 1648–49,Footnote ¹⁴² the presbytery and its allies could find no sure footing there. If they were to avoid being cast as “private” incendiaries, their recourse must be to the covenant. However imposed, the pledge of the covenant, once sworn, was enduring in its own terms. Covenant-takers were now numbered among “the well-affected in the Kingdomes” and perhaps too an earnest of Ireland's admission to the covenanted fold.Footnote ¹⁴³

There was, however, a wrinkle in the logic. When might such a trusteeship be ceded back to restored authority? In Scotland, after all, kingship had also in effect been rendered a trust, the title of Charles II recognized but his exercise of his powers suspended pending his embrace of the Covenants, acted on his behalf by the legislative and executive organs in Edinburgh. So for all that the Ulster Declaration committed its signatories’ lives to uphold the new king's “just succession,” it immediately qualified the same as dependent on his giving security for covenanted ends “before He be admitted to the exercise of His Royall Power.”Footnote ¹⁴⁴ Scottish priorities were replicated, too, in the exclusion of malignants, specifically those associated with the Engagement, until suitable repentance and satisfaction was accepted by both “Church” and “Army.”Footnote ¹⁴⁵ Yet no mention was made of Scotland throughout these documents, and no parallel to its legitimated institutions was present in Ulster. The wrinkle could be smoothed. As the sure foundation for local action was the Covenant, so the restored English constitution was to come in by Covenant means, an option perhaps being explored through some contacts between English Presbyterians and the exiled court.Footnote ¹⁴⁶ Truly the covenant was the panpharmacon,Footnote ¹⁴⁷ the panacea for constitutional as for religious ills.

III

The demise of the Ulster revolt was swift, and its stages are well established.Footnote ¹⁴⁸ At the end of June, Ards revealed his possession of a royal commission to command-in-chief in Ulster, obtained and deployed before any commitment by Charles to “secure Religion.” His commission brought full and unrelenting condemnation from the presbytery.Footnote ¹⁴⁹ The “quarrell of the Covenant”Footnote ¹⁵⁰ pursued Ards to Derry, where he sought to join his forces to an increasingly heterogeneous besieging army, only to find that not only his own men but many of the west Ulster forces heeded the calls of the ministers and melted away, disdaining service alongside so-called malignants. Though not the sole cause of the collapse of a now-prolonged siege, presbytery opposition continued across the summer and autumn, as Ards's army shriveled, west Ulster garrisons surrendered to Coote, and some of the harried ministers themselves took flight for Scotland.Footnote ¹⁵¹

With wisdom after the event, James Kerr, minister of Ballymoney, lamented that the presbytery, though setting themselves against both “sectaries” and “malignants,” had not first turned upon the more immediate and more pestiferous threat, the “numerous Army of Papists and Malignants,” instead entangling the “honest Army” with the duplicitous Ards.Footnote ¹⁵² Even the commissioners of the Scottish General Assembly, who backed the presbytery in its standoff with Kerr and his neighbor minister O'Quinn,Footnote ¹⁵³ had suggested that it was the “Malignant party” who were “the greatest opposits at this tyme within that land.”Footnote ¹⁵⁴ The two men had framed their earliest disagreement as cautious concern at pronouncements issued in undue haste and “exceedingly more hask than beseemeth us,”Footnote ¹⁵⁵ mounting to very Presbyterian pleas to allow them “clearness” in squaring their consciences and not to demand “implicit” obedience without conviction, “to believe as the Church believeth, without any further tryal of what the Church believeth.”Footnote ¹⁵⁶ But one forceful challenge, reiterated and elaborated as the months passed, was to the determination of the presbytery, being merely a few young men “and far from true Intelligence,”Footnote ¹⁵⁷ to act in advance of their brethren in the other kingdoms in moving to “proclame war . . . we not being ane intyr [entire] kingdome, but a handful of scattered people,” and where “the king hath not given as yet security for religion . . . neither (for ought as we know) just satisfaction to both kingdomes.”Footnote ¹⁵⁸ The presbytery had “caused all the Countrey and Army to rise in Arms . . . against all the Power that now rules in England; notwithstanding that neither our friends in England that is against that Army, has given us any call so to do, nor has Scotland risen in Arms against them as yet.”Footnote ¹⁵⁹

Milton had claimed, and challenged, a “Copartning,” a shared “Interest,” of “op'n enemies” and “pretended Brethren” in Ireland.Footnote ¹⁶⁰ Possibly the phantom of a project was more real, and more terrible, than he knew. A set of propositions formulated for transmission to Charles II, perhaps as early as February, survive, in which both Ards and the presbytery almost certainly had a hand. Present concession of a Presbyterian church order in Ulster was an instalment toward a future when “God shall afforde his Highnesse the opportunitie to settle it though the whole Kingdomes,” as royal approbation for their renewing of the Covenant prefigured the heartily wished-for “ioyning therein” of the king himself.Footnote ¹⁶¹ The implicit premise was the successful outcome of the negotiations then in train between Charles and the Scottish regime, and confidence in such a settlement may have lingered in Ulster.Footnote ¹⁶² Whether the Ulster terms were dispatched to the court or not, some inkling reached Ormond.Footnote ¹⁶³ Contact with Ards was established, perhaps by March, and Ormond preempted the royal initiative in issuing his own commission for Ards to command in Ulster in April.Footnote ¹⁶⁴ Ards may have been a little Lucifer who “practiced falsehood under saintly show,”Footnote ¹⁶⁵ but he was less a cavalier in covenanter guise than the aspiring sponsor of Presbyterian incorporation into a reconfigured royal cause.Footnote ¹⁶⁶ In his person he bridged royalism's alternative Irish and Scottish strategies—for the Commonwealth, a truly monstrous conflation of interests.

Even political genius far beyond Ards's could hardly have succeeded in accommodating the Ulster component of a covenanted monarchy to an Irish settlement founded on the Ormond articles. By May, even as the exiled Charles issued his commission to Ards,Footnote ¹⁶⁷ negotiations with the Scottish government collapsed. Any commitment Charles would make to uphold the covenants or Presbyterianism was confined to Scotland, and he refused anything that might “obstruct or disturb” the Ormond treaty in Ireland.Footnote ¹⁶⁸ In early July, after his breach with the presbytery had opened, Ards still publicly proclaimed his commitment to royal confirmation of Presbyterianism in Ulster.Footnote ¹⁶⁹ He may have procured the letter from Ormond's deputy, Viscount Inchiquin, which asserted the king's resolution to “Establish the Presbyterian government in these Parts, and I Believe, it may be in other Parts also, of the Kingdom.”Footnote ¹⁷⁰ But at best this was a scaled-back promise, detached from the promise of a tri-kingdom covenanted future, in effect rescaling the Ulster option to fit an internal Irish settlement lacking solid guarantees.Footnote ¹⁷¹ The presbytery knew that Ards could not deliver what the king had refused Scotland. It was “of small purpose though His Majesty should tolerat Presbyteriall Government in this Province for a time, and yet refuse to setle it in the rest of His Dominions.” Without an underpinning in the Solemn League and Covenant, “Religion can never be truly secure here.”Footnote ¹⁷²

IV

It could be said that the presbytery's fullest triumph in 1649 was to collapse Ards's efforts to incorporate Presbyterians within a malignant construction. Even positive evaluations of English Presbyterian arguments have discerned “an almost self-destructive integrity” or, more resoundingly, an “impotence” in the face of the revolutionary events of 1648–49.Footnote ¹⁷³ By such standards, Ulster Presbyterianism demonstrated only a temporary virility. But the Commonwealth's Ulster problem demanded a resolution, not only in arms but in print, in Milton's “Observations” and across a scattering of pamphlets and press reports. Constitutional and religious ideas reflective of Presbyterian thinking in England as well as Scotland had been mobilized to add to the threat to the Commonwealth's hold on Ireland. To ensure support for the massive new Irish expedition taking form in 1649 meant not only fending off any “radical” concerns about the appropriateness of reconquest, either in principle or in light of unfinished English business. It meant quashing any option between republic and rebel, stamping out the idea as well as the armed forces of a covenanted interest on the English ground of Ulster. The same strategy that would routinely render Scottish the revolted of UlsterFootnote ¹⁷⁴ would brand as Scottified those English Presbyterians deemed to promote principles incompatible with the liberty and security of England's new Free State. For Milton and other writers whose hostility to Presbyterianism was ingrained, Ulster offered a model of subversion and examples of churchly tyranny that could tug at those of moderate, or Erastian, or merely patriotic disposition, to curb any tendency to challenge on the grounds of Covenant or calling any political order that “refuses to give Christ his due first.”Footnote ¹⁷⁵ Ireland mattered in the resolution of England's Presbyterian question. It was because the Ulster Presbyterians posed a real threat to Commonwealth interests, militarily confined but ideologically connected, that they could serve as a proxy in campaigns that revealed the most widely unacceptable elements of covenanted Presbyterianism.

Milton celebrated those “endu'd with fortitude and Heroick vertue” who battled the “calamities and thraldoms of a People” regardless of “gibrish Lawes . . . the badge of their ancient tyranny,” or the “inconstancie” of “revolters.”Footnote ¹⁷⁶ For him, the untrammeled pursuit of religious as of civil liberty, beyond the bounds of constraining laws or confining religious establishments, was a moral imperative.Footnote ¹⁷⁷ Students of the English Revolution must heed J. C. Davis's depiction of the “dynamism” of a providential religion where God's control was unquestioned but his designs unperceived, where a sense of God as a divine “destabiliser” was the absolute against which all forms, political or ecclesiastical, were rendered provisional.Footnote ¹⁷⁸ The Ulster Presbyterians in their “remote” province gave expression to a widely shared counter-imperative, as intense and comprehensive in its obligation, and as tailored to present need, the call to the faithful to “choose affliction rather than sinne . . . suffering rather than compliance . . . that neither perswasion nor terrour may with-draw them from the Truth that is now opposed.”Footnote ¹⁷⁹ The call was to emulate Nebuchadnezzar's victims of old: to face “Papists, Sectaries, or Malignants” with the affirmation that “yet the Lord our God will deliver us from them, or if he doe not, yet we will not serve their gods, nor by any connivance, or politique lukewarmness, be any wayes partakers of their iniquities.”Footnote ¹⁸⁰ A God of covenants was a God of promises, to whom vows must be honored, whose word revealed the lineaments of his kingly rule, his governance over conscience.Footnote ¹⁸¹ This was no static vision. For a Samuel Rutherford, a “biblically prescribed church government” was more than compatible with a “passionate subjectivity” of devotion: it was one of the “channels through which true spiritual experience would freely flow.”Footnote ¹⁸² For the Ulster presbytery it was the hedge safeguarding the garden of the Lord, in which all might—indeed, must— be gathered to cultivate the fruits of righteousness. As the regicide was more than an act of religious fanaticism but a stimulant to the political imagination,Footnote ¹⁸³ so the covenant could inspire the zeal of Colonel Wallace or the practical political reasoning that could cast his fellow officers as the trustees of a suspended constitution, acting “for the Parliament of England, And onely against those who have illegally usurped their power.”Footnote ¹⁸⁴

Milton's “vehemence” when confronted with Presbyterian backsliding has been seen as evidence of an “intense commitment to community”—but to an “idealized national community . . . in his own image and likeness,” one perhaps always, to some extent, a textual community only imaginable, let alone realizable, in a world of ready print.Footnote ¹⁸⁵ Milton delivered polemical service to regimes that offered the promise of religious deliverance,Footnote ¹⁸⁶ of a strong state brooking no spiritual rivals but countenancing all those engaged in the honest pursuit of truth. It was a more imaginable outcome in a print-strewn and institution-rich London than in a war-torn and desolate Ulster, where any spiritual provision was sparse and with little by way of uncontested or effective civil authority. The Ulster presbytery and its supporters were no strangers to print debate, citing texts in their exchanges with George Monck or with Kerr and O'Quinn.Footnote ¹⁸⁷ But their community was more than textual; their declarations and declamations rarely if ever reached print at their own hands but were readily broadcast through a network of pulpits, not only articulating but activating covenanted ideals, creating as well as confirming community. Sixty years later, Milton would be called as a defense witness by Belfast Presbyterians protesting charges of the ingrained disloyalty of dissenters. “Milton's invectives” showed how staunchly their predecessors had stood by monarchy, “contrary to the Sectarian and Rump-Parliament-Council of those Times.”Footnote ¹⁸⁸ The descendants of the “treacherous guests” had gone “out to battell,”Footnote ¹⁸⁹ again, in the Jacobite wars, as the heirs of the “blockish presbyters” would demonstrate in stout histories compiled to reassure a greatly expanded flock of their place in the narrow ground of Ulster and the broad terrain of British history.Footnote ¹⁹⁰