John Milton’s Free Speech Crusade

For John Milton, death was not the end of his troubles. He spent his final years blind and disgraced, in continual fear of execution by the state. As a fervent republican who had written tracts defending regicide, the restoration of the monarchy in 1660 left his legacy in a precarious position. Denied a place in Poets’ Corner in Westminster Abbey, he was instead interred in the humbler environs of St. Giles Cripplegate. Then, to make matters worse, a little over a century later his corpse was exhumed and mutilated.