Non-fiction: Defensio Secunda

Overview
John Milton's Defensio Secunda (1654) is a Latin polemic written to answer renewed attacks on the English Commonwealth and on Milton himself. Composed after Milton's earlier defenses and amid the pamphlet warfare of the 1650s, it presses a vigorous case for the legitimacy of the regicide and the authority of the new republican government. The tract positions Milton as both advocate and memorialist, aligning his literary voice with the political cause of the Protectorate while insisting on the moral and legal grounds for England's revolutionary actions.

Argument and Contents
Milton mounts a twofold argument: first, to justify the execution of Charles I and the legal establishment of the Commonwealth; second, to rebut specific critics who had labeled the republican regime as illegitimate or tyrannical. He insists that tyranny forfeits sovereign rights and that resistance, up to and including capital punishment of a tyrant, can be lawful and necessary for the protection of the commonwealth. The pamphlet engages particular opponents, most famously the royalist scholar Claude Saumaise (Salmasius), with sustained counter-argumentation designed to show that their appeals to tradition and divine right are inadequate against evidence of misrule and popular necessity.
Milton also undertakes a personal defense. He replies to charges against his earlier writings and reputation, framing his polemical activity as service to truth and public good rather than personal rancor. The tract mixes legalistic reasoning about government and sovereignty with vivid recounting of historical abuses, treating recent English history as a case study in why revolution became unavoidable. Repeated appeals to precedent, scripture, and natural law aim to situate the English experiment within a wider moral and juridical framework.

Style and Tone
Written in Latin and addressed to learned European readers as well as to an English political audience, the tract relies on classical allusions, scriptural citation, and the rhetorical conventions of learned disputation. Milton's diction is elevated and often combative; he deploys classical exempla to expose what he sees as the hypocrisy and folly of his opponents. The tone moves between forensic sobriety, legal argument and moral reasoning, and fierce invective, reflecting the heightened passions of pamphlet warfare.
Elements of personal testimony and grief appear alongside forensic exposition. Milton invokes his own sacrifices and service, and his physical blindness is used as a rhetorical marker of integrity rather than weakness. The Latin idiom gives the pamphlet international reach and allows Milton to engage continental scholars on their own intellectual ground, even as his polemical heat sometimes borders on the scathing and acrimonious.

Historical Significance
Defensio Secunda reinforced Milton's reputation as the principal apologist for the Commonwealth and as one of the most relentless polemicists of the mid-seventeenth century. It played a central role in the pamphlet exchanges that shaped European perceptions of England's revolution, and it underscored the emergence of republican arguments framed in juridical and moral terms rather than merely partisan invective. The pamphlet's Latin medium and classical posture aimed to legitimize England's new order before an international audience of scholars and statesmen.
Longer-term, Defensio Secunda contributes to an understanding of Milton not only as a poet but as a public intellectual whose prose engaged urgent political questions of sovereignty, resistance, and conscience. Its energetic mixture of legal argument, moral conviction, and rhetorical force helped to define the language available for discussing revolution and authority in the decades that followed.