There were two occasions when the imagination of John Milton, the supreme writer of the Puritan Revolution, focused on Oliver Cromwell, its supreme soldier and statesman. There is the sonnet ‘To the Lord General Cromweir in May 1652; and there is the passage about Cromwell in Milton's Latin prose work Defensio Secunda, published in May 1654, when Cromwell had been Lord Protector for six months. Both the sonnet, an exercise in verse, and the passage of prose, an exercise in eloquence, are tributes of praise. Milton honours Cromwell's stature, which elicits and affirms the poet's own. Art and power meet and pay homage to each other.

Yet after Defensio Secunda Milton's writings never mention Cromwell's name again. During the remaining four years of Cromwell's life they pass no explicit comment on his government. Milton's pen offers no tribute to the military and naval exploits of the protectorate, no lament on Cromwell's death. His silence is loud. In August 1659, four months after the fall of Richard Cromwell and of the protectorate, the silence was broken. Now Milton described the Cromwellian regime as ‘a short but scandalous night of interruption': interruption, that is, of the Long Parliament, which Cromwell had expelled by force in April 1653. The significance and bitterness of that attack have been brought out by Austin Woolrych in much the most authoritative and penetrating account of Milton's attitudes to Cromwell that we have. How do we reconcile the attack with Milton's earlier praise of Cromwell? Did Milton undergo, between 1654 and 1659, a change of heart? Or can we find, in his feelings about Cromwell, a thread of continuity? I believe we can.