United by ambition: the ruthless rapacity of England’s two famous Cromwells
In the early years of the English civil war John Milton turned his mind from the poetic arts and committed himself to writing some of the most searing pamphlet polemic of the 1640s. With the nation convulsed by violence, he set about finding causal explanations for the revolutionary ferment, and saw its roots in the 1530s and the unfinished nature of the Protestant Reformation. Only by completing the work of Reformation, Milton thought, would the English come closer to God and lasting peace. Such arguments had domestic as well as national urgency for Milton, much in need of peace himself, as he tried to extricate himself from his stupendously misguided marriage to Mary Powell, half his age and from a royalist family.
