ABSTRACT
The Commonwealth leaders, then, were much more conservative than John Milton in their attitude to religious conformity, and much too frightened of economic and political revolution to support the Levellers and Diggers. Religious intolerance was based on more than fear of the multiplication of eccentric religions; it went along with a fear of the breakdown of law and order, property, and the class structure. At the beginning of his literary career, Milton was a fairly orthodox Anglican: St Peter in Lycidas actually wears a bishop’s mitre. The struggle for liberty, in Milton’s poems, is portrayed in language of rebellion and violence which, taken by itself, might seem to justify those critics who think that Milton unconsciously identified himself with the cause of Satan. Many critics of Milton, like many historians of the Civil War, seem to repeat, if in rather subtler terms, the famous 1066 and All That division of the dramatis personae into Cavaliers and Roundheads.
