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English republicanism grew during the English Civil War after the royalist forces were defeated at Worcester during September 1651. In 1649, Milton wrote The Tenure of Kings and Magistrates expressing his support of a republican form of government. Milton supported a republican form of government. Warren has argued, “For a republican independent like Milton observing these gestures, it was vital to demonstrate that the Presbyterians could not trust the promises of safety implied by the royalist allegories.” Paradise Lost’s Sin and Death allegory speaks to this concern by forestalling “comic reconciliation,” urging the reader to recall England’s violent political past, rather than “forgetting or sanitizing” the past in the move towards reconciliation. Such broadsides had a political agenda: in this case, persuading Presbyterians to assent to a restoration of the monarchy. For instance, scholars have argued that Paradise Lost was informed in part by contemporaneous comic broadsides like The Life and Death of Mris. Milton’s politics also revealed themselves in his fictional works. His controversial works, starting with The Tenure of Kings and Magistrates and Eikonoklastes, were able to appeal to a larger audience than many of Milton's previous works, and, in turn, they sold well even though the content of the works were not received positively. His writing brought him into a position of power in the Commonwealth, Secretary for Foreign Tongues to the Council of State, and he served in that duty from 1649 until 1659. By 1654, Milton was involved in public controversies, thinking that he could help the English people by using his writings to promote his political beliefs. Milton enjoyed little wide-scale early success, either in prose or poetry, until the production of his later, controversial political works starting with The Tenure of Kings and Magistrates and Eikonoklastes.Īlthough Milton was known early on for a poem that he wrote about Shakespeare and for his masque Comus, he was only a minor figure until he started writing in a pamphlet war. Politics were an important part of John Milton's life.