SOURCE: Bennett, Joan S. “Satan and King Charles: Milton's Royal Portraits.” In Reviving Liberty: Radical Christian Humanism in Milton's Great Poems, pp. 33-58. Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 1989.

In this essay, Bennett contends that although Paradise Lost is not a true political allegory, a comparison between Milton's prose works on English history and his characterization of Satan reveals a strong connection between the tyranny of Charles I and the false freedom of the fallen angels.

Milton's conception in Paradise Lost of the fall of Lucifer has always been recognized as political in nature. Because of the poet's twenty years' service to the English revolutionary cause, his readers have sought to understand what relation Milton saw between human and demonic revolution and rule. Romantic attempts to link his God with Charles I as monarchs and Satan with Cromwell and Milton as revolutionaries¹ are widely considered to have been mistaken...