Essay: The Ready and Easy Way to Establish a Free Commonwealth

Context

The pamphlet appeared in 1660 as England moved from civil war and republican experiment toward restoration of the monarchy. John Milton, best known for his poetry but also a committed republican and polemicist, had served the Commonwealth government and published a series of tracts arguing against monarchy and episcopacy. The fragile political settlement and popular appetite for stability made Milton's case both urgent and contrarian: a direct appeal to preserve the gains of the interregnum and resist the legal and moral claims of hereditary rule.
Milton wrote with the immediacy of someone confronting a breaking historical moment. The pamphlet addresses an audience weary of conflict yet wary of unexamined returns to old forms of power, and it aims to translate republican principles into practical steps that might secure a free commonwealth without descending into fresh violence.

Central argument

The pamphlet insists that legitimate government rests on consent, law, and the public good rather than on accidental birth or divine sanction. It rejects the notion of hereditary monarchy as both unjust and politically dangerous, arguing that any ruler must be accountable and removable if public liberty is imperiled. For Milton, liberty is not a rhetorical flourish but a substantive condition of civic life that requires institutional checks against arbitrary authority.
Milton frames the choice before the nation as moral and practical: to accept the rule of law and a mixed, accountable form of governance or to restore an arrangement that concentrates power and invites abuse. The work emphasizes prudence and civic responsibility, urging people to prefer arrangements that preserve liberties already won rather than surrender them for a promise of stability that history has not borne out.

Rhetoric and sources

Milton's style in the pamphlet combines classical rhetoric, biblical language, and plain persuasive prose. He deploys examples from ancient republics and draws on Scripture to undercut claims of divine right, while favoring clear argumentation over ornate display. The tone shifts between admonition and appeal: stern in confronting what he sees as error, yet earnest in inviting citizens to reflect on long-term consequences.
His learning undergirds the tract's intellectual heft, but the drive is practical rather than merely scholarly. Milton's rhetoric seeks to persuade the broad literate public as much as to challenge political elites, and his invocations of history and morality aim to make republicanism intelligible and respectable rather than radical and incendiary.

Practical proposals

Although resolutely ideological, the pamphlet is attentive to mechanics. Milton contends that maintaining the institutions and safeguards developed under the Commonwealth, law, representative assemblies, and mechanisms for accountability, offers a feasible route to secure liberty without plunging the country into renewed civil strife. His emphasis is on legal continuity, civic participation, and vigilance against any concentration of power that would nullify the gains of the Revolution.
He urges citizens and magistrates alike to act with foresight, to protect the impartial administration of justice, and to avoid settling for symbolic or hereditary remedies that leave underlying patterns of domination intact. The "ready and easy" claim functions as both critique and promise: republican arrangements need not be extravagant to be effective, but they do require deliberate maintenance.

Reception and legacy

The pamphlet failed to prevent the Restoration and Milton paid a personal price for his political stance, suffering persecution and the loss of official standing. Yet the tract remains an important articulation of seventeenth-century republican thought, notable for its fusion of moral philosophy, classical learning, and practical concern for the mechanics of government. It illuminates why some contemporaries resisted the return to monarchy and provides later readers with a clear statement of republican principles rooted in law, consent, and the protection of liberty.