Whether, however, the hundred Jacobuses were forthcoming or not, Salmasius’s undertaking was none the less a commission from Charles II., and the circumstance put him into a false position, and increased the difficulty of his task.  Human feeling is not easily reconciled to the execution of a bad magistrate, unless he has also been a bad man.  Charles I. was by no means a bad man, only a mistaken one.  He had been guilty of many usurpations and much perfidy:  but he had honestly believed his usurpations within the limits of his prerogative; and his breaches of faith were committed against insurgents whom he regarded as seamen look upon pirates, or shepherds upon wolves.  Salmasius, however, pleading by commission from Charles’s son, can urge no such mitigating plea.  He is compelled to maintain the inviolability even of wicked sovereigns, and spends two-thirds of his treatise in supporting a proposition to state which is to refute it in the nineteenth century.  In the latter part he is on stronger ground.  Charles had unquestionably been tried and condemned by a tribunal destitute of legal authority, and executed contrary to the wish and will of the great majority of his subjects.  But this was a theme for an Englishman to handle.  Salmasius cannot think himself into it, nor had he sufficient imagination to be inspired by Charles as Burke (who, nevertheless, has borrowed from him) was to be inspired by Marie Antoinette.

His book—­entitled “Defensio Regia pro Carolo I.”—­appeared in October or November, 1649.  On January 8, 1650, it was ordered by the Council of State “that Mr. Milton do prepare something in answer to the Book of Salmasius, and when he hath done it bring it to the Council.”  There were many reasons why he should be entrusted with this commission, and only one why he should not; but one which would have seemed conclusive to most men.  His sight had long been failing.  He had already lost the use of one eye, and was warned that if he imposed this additional strain upon his sight, that of the other would follow.  He had seen the greatest astronomer of the age condemned to inactivity and helplessness, and could measure his own by the misery of Galileo.  He calmly accepted his duty along with its penalty, without complaint or reluctance.  If he could have performed his task in the spirit with which he undertook it, he would have produced a work more sublime than “Paradise Lost.”

This, of course, was not possible.  The efficiency of a controversialist in the seventeenth century was almost estimated in the ratio of his scurrility, especially when he wrote Latin.  From this point of view Milton had got his opponent at a tremendous disadvantage.  With the best will in the world, Salmasius had come short in personal abuse, for, as the initiator of the dispute, he had no personal antagonist.  In denouncing the general herd of regicides and parricides he had hurt nobody in particular, while concentrating all Milton’s lightnings on his own unlucky head.