SOURCE: "Milton: Political Beliefs and Polemical Methods, 1659-60," in PMLA, Vol. LXXIV, No. 3, June, 1959, pp. 191-207.

In the following essay Lewalski examines Milton's political pamphlets in the tumultuous years of 1659-60. She argues that his seeming inconsistencies and reversals are not evidence of fickleness or hypocrisy, but rather reveal a practical flexibility that allowed him to remain constant to his principles.

Milton's polemical tracts of the Puritan Revolution have long offered difficulty to scholars, and these difficulties are intensified in the eight pamphlets which he wrote during the chaotic closing years of the interregnum.¹ One problem concerns Milton's bewildering shifts of political allegiance among the various parties and models of government:² he first acquiesced in the protectorate of Richard Cromwell, then denounced protectorian government and eulogized the restored Rump Parliament and the commonwealth, then defended an army government which deposed the Rump, then demanded the Rump's return, then...