Illegitimate monarchy and legally-sanctioned king-killing in Milton’s Tenure of Kings and Magistrates and Eikonoklastes

Abstract

In my article, I establish how the poet’s pro-regicidal tracts The Tenure of Kings and Magistrates and Eikonoklastes support an evolutionary notion of kingship, and in doing so seek to shift the balance from a concept of monarchical rule in which the differentiation between adequate versus criminal leadership is largely inconsequential to one in which the quality of sovereign leadership matters. I specifically demonstrate how Milton follows Dutch scholar Hugo Grotius, leading proponent of just/unjust martial theory during the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries, to determine that restricted modes of battle were necessary means to the creation and perpetuation of an orderly and organized society, which more and more responded to misuses of sovereign authority by supporting the individual’s right to resist and expel a bad king.