In January, 1649, James Butler, 1st Duke of Ormond, signed a treaty with the Catholic Confederacy, not knowing that the king on whose behalf he spoke was on trial in London. On January 30, 1649, Charles is executed, and a week later England became a republic, having a nonmonarchical form of government. A Council of State was created, and John Milton was appointed its “Secretary of Foreign Tongues.” The Council charged Milton to write observations on Ormond’s peace treaty and other recent documents from Ireland. The most geographically interesting reflection on Ireland to involve Milton’s work the resulting Articles of Peace offers a map of Ireland, a cultural and political geography overlaid on the ancient provinces of the island, to which Milton adds complicated interisland tensions, on the eve of Cromwell’s invasion of Ireland. Articles reflects the complexity of the situation in Ireland, ramified by English management: A Protestant Royalist signs an extraordinarily generous Peace Treaty with Irish Catholics; the Parliamentary representative in Dublin complains of English influence; the Ulster-Scots make the case for a Protestant Church in Ireland that is neither Anglican nor Episcopalian.

Lord Lieutenant Thomas Wentworth, arriving in Ireland in 1633, unified disparate Ireland into opposition, culminating in his 1641 impeachment, trial, and execution in London. Months later, Ulster and then Ireland more broadly, rose in rebellion. Milton’s first published prose works, including his formative anti-prelatical tracts precede and follow the Ulster Rising. Increasingly Milton addresses Ireland, and the Rising. In James Ussher, Archbishop of Armagh, Milton finds an Irish interlocutor, and foil.

Particularly from 1638 to 1653, John Milton was deeply engaged in Ireland, although his relationship with Ireland is less well known than Edmund Spenser’s. The 1641 Ulster Rising in Ireland informs Milton’s political development, culminating in his service to Cromwell’s republican government. As the Introduction details, the 1641 Rising follows decades of strife in Ireland, following on the 1541 acceptance of Henry VIII as king of Ireland, Counter-Reformation changes in the Roman Catholic Church, and successive English plantation attempts at reforming Ireland, including the Ulster Plantation (which started the year after Milton was born).

Days after the execution of Charles I, Eikon Basilike, a book purported to be written by the king, was published posthumously. Parliament commissioned Milton to write a response. With chapters on Wentworth’s execution and the Irish Rising of the early 1640s, Ireland is threaded throughout Charles’ Eikon Basilike and Milton’s response, Eikonoklastes. When Milton began writing Eikonoklastes, Cromwell was preparing to invade Ireland. By the time Eikonoklastes was published, in October of 1649, Cromwell’s invasion of Ireland had been underway for two months. Its most infamous battles, the siege of Drogheda had already taken place. In 1650, Milton publishes a revised second edition of Eikonoklastes, in which he hits upon the term “pluralist,” and invokes it scornfully against his opponents in Ireland. Milton is now up against a principle: pluralism, which Milton implies is built into the cultural and political map of Ireland. As Milton confronts in Ireland a different way of thinking about government, administration, and policy, the Stuart idea of Great Britain must be defeated in Ireland, because it threatens a century-old project of centralization.

Milton’s poem, “Lycidas,” written in memory of Edward King, who drowned sailing from England to his native Ireland, represents a turning point in Milton’s development, his culminating intervention in the ancient pastoral elegy tradition. Considered archipelagically, “Lycidas” narrates a crisis that is spiritual, political, and regional at the same time: A Cambridge-educated Protestant, King represents an interisland possibility for Irish reformation, lost. With “Lycidas,” Milton rereads Spenser’s "Colin Clouts," revising Spenser’s earlier poem. A new, better-educated Colin – Edward King – does not come home again. The loss of Edward King alters what Milton thinks could have been a more positive, reformed relationship on both sides of the Irish Seas.

During the Interregnum, figures such as Thomas Hobbes, James Harrington, and John Milton produce substantial works of political philosophy. As can be seen in their titles, Hobbes’s Leviathan, or the Matter, Forme, and Power of a Commonwealth Ecclesiastical and Civill (1651), Harrington’s The Commonwealth of Oceana (1656), and Milton’s Ready and Easy Way to Establish a Free Commonwealth (1660), each set out to describe a commonwealth. For Hobbes, Harrington, and Milton, the question after 1649 is how to understand – and, in some cases, how to reconstitute — the “one” that is at the Greek root of monarch. None of the proposals created, under the great pressures of the moment, could be implemented; however, they offered models for English-language political philosophy for decades, even centuries, to come. Later generations had a reservoir of English-language republican actions, rhetoric, and philosophy on which to draw, including in Ireland.

After nine months in Ireland, Cromwell is recalled to London. Andrew Marvell writes “An Horatian Ode upon Cromwell’s Return,” an ambiguous encomium. In Ireland, Cromwell’s early return to London is largely forgotten in public memory. By revising existing English-language discussions of Ireland, and incorporating its demographic variety into an emerging idea of “the Irish,” Milton contributes to reconceptualizing Ireland from pluralist variety to a new, flatter pairing, “the Irish” and “the English.” The Cromwellian conquest produces a stronger Irish Catholic identitarian response, as can be seen in the November 1649 meeting of “The Archbishops, Bishops, and other Prelates” at Clonmacnoise (and their subsequent, 1650 publication, to which Cromwell and Milton both responded). Around the same time that Certaine Actes and Declarations of the Clonmacnoise conference was published, the Council of State assigned Milton the task of responding to Defensio Regia pro Carolina I, by Salmasius. Cromwell’s invasion of Ireland is wrapped into Milton’s response, known in English as A Defence of the People of England (1651).

Although Milton’s relationship with Ireland will not be as active after 1653 as it had been in the previous fifteen years, Ireland does not entirely disappear from Milton’s work. Ireland is implied in “On the Late Massacre in Piedmont” and in Paradise Lost (1667, 1674). Ireland also appears occasionally in Milton’s The History of Britain. Milton’s personal connections to Ireland grow after the Cromwellian conquest. More importantly, though, Milton has been a persistent presence in Ireland – not only as a literary figure, but also as a republican political theorist: He is cited by Irish Republicans in the eighteenth and twentienth centuries, and by Irish authors including W. B. Yeats, Samuel Beckett, John McGahern, Eimear McBride, and more. At the same time, Milton’s insights into pre-Cromwellian Ireland represent a hidden potential for today’s post-Brexit Ireland.

Questions of literary periodisation and related questions of context have been hotly debated in recent years, especially in relation to the discourses of New Historicism, and this essay engages critically with such questions with specific reference to the ‘period’ we usually refer to as ‘The Restoration and Eighteenth Century’. While acknowledging some of the problems and limitations of canonical literary periodisation, the essay will suggest how a distinctive set of historical pressures make contextualisation particularly important to an understanding of the drama, fiction and poetry published after 1660 and up to the Romantic era. It will suggest, for example, the difficulties of reading Dryden out of context, and how the very novel-ty and contemporaneity of the emergent novel, as exemplified by Richardson’s epistolary fiction, epitomises the period’s preoccupation with time. Indeed, one might say that the eighteenth century is decidedly a period period because of its signal interest in marking time, and this will be one of the main lines of discussion here.

At the same time, attention needs to be paid to influences and continuities across periods, both from the past and into the future. The Restoration depends on an interregnum, so knowing the earlier period matters too; similarly, the novel emerges in part from the medieval romance, so knowing even earlier periods also matters; and our knowledge of later developments of eighteenth-century legacies, such as the realist novel for example, retroactively informs our understanding of the original developments. In this spirit, a rereading of Gray’s Elegy Written in a Country Church Yard – ‘yet once more’ (to quote ‘mute inglorious Milton’) – will be offered here as a metaphor for literary history seen as a set of buried possibilities ready for rediscovery and reimagining.

Milton’s late poems suggest that the best way to represent the experience of modernity is to turn to and to reimagine the work of the Ancients—the modern paradox. This raises questions of periodization, and time. Milton is more “Renaissance” than “early modern,” at least in terms of how the early modern is usually understood, i.e., as a temporally delimited historical period after the medieval and before Enlightenment modernity. The Renaissance was modernizing in its appropriation of the Ancients. Milton’s late poems are obsessed with temporality—well, temporalities, plural, actually—since Paradise Lost, Paradise Regained and Samson Agonistes narrate three different temporalities. Paradise Lost narrates the continual backwards and forwards of living in history—a present affected by the past, and by anticipatory imaginings of an as-yet unrealized future. Paradise Regained stays in the present, bringing readers along in a story that moves from a beginning to an end. In Samson Agonistes, Samson sees no future. The key subsequent literary development in verbally representing forms of modernity, the novel has a deep presentism which persists. Milton is received in a literary-critical tradition deeply affected by the novel’s focus on the present and on the synchronous life of the characters.