SOURCE: "Satan and King Charles: Milton's Royal Portraits," in Reviving Liberty: Radical Christian Humanism in Milton's Great Poems, Harvard University Press, 1989, pp. 33-58.

Below, Bennett discusses Milton's response to the Eikon Basi like, the fraudulent prison reflections of Charles I, and Milton's use of Satan to represent Charles I in his writings.

Milton's conception in Paradise Lost of the fall of Lucifer has always been recognized as political in nature. Because of the poet's twenty years' service to the English revolutionary cause, his readers have sought to understand what relation Milton saw between human and demonic revolution and rule. Romantic attempts to link his God with Charles I as monarchs and Satan with Cromwell and Milton as revolutionaries¹ are widely considered to have been mistaken, although Christopher Kendrick's recent effort to "read the epic Satan as the symbolic expression or fulfillment of Milton's revolutionary desire," his "political libido...