Milton, Grotius, and the law of war (John Milton, Hugo Grotius, The Netherlands)

My dissertation seeks to remedy the popular scholarly consensus that Milton was opposed to war. At present, nearly all published sources categorize him as unreservedly pacifistic. My investigation is among the first to elucidate this subject according to seventeenth-century martial philosophy and international theories of law. Re-contextualizing the poet's relationship to armed strife by means of his association with Hugo Grotius, father of modern international law, I demonstrate how the Dutch scholar's biography and his reception in England confirm his link to Milton. Following Grotius's natural law and sociability theories in De Jure Praedae (1604) and De Jure Belli ac Paci (1625), and in keeping with their shared religious convictions—their respective conversions from Calvinism to Arminianism, a sect of Christianity which prioritized free will and the powers of man's reasoning consciousness to acknowledge faith—the poet envisions rightful battle as a rational instrument for reinforcing natural equity. I show how Milton's Grotianism fuels the revolutionary enthusiasm of his early poetry, Areopagitica (1644), and Of Education (1644). Furthermore, I argue that the elimination of tyrannical leadership he perceives as possible in The Tenure of Kings (1649) and Eikonoklastes (1649) stems from his belief in the Dutch scholar's notion of military strife as a legitimate means to protect personal liberty as part of a person's property. While Milton's Second Defense (1654) confirms this mood of political optimism, it simultaneously reveals the poet's dwindling faith in the intellectual and ethical capacity of his fellow Englishmen which accompanied the failure of the English Civil War, complicating his allegiance to Grotian universal idealism. I consider the effects of this ambivalence in The Ready and Easy Way to Establish a Free Commonwealth (1660) and Paradise Lost (1667), and demonstrate his renewed recognition of the universality among all individuals based on his adherence to Grotian theories of jus gentium—the progressive growth of the law of nations—in Paradise Regained (1671) and Samson Agonistes (1671).