Appointed Latin Secretary to the Council, he wrote foreign dispatches and treatises upon the persons and events of the day.
In 1644 he published his _Areopagitica_, a noble paper in favor of _Unlicensed Printing_, and boldly directed against the Presbyterian party, then in power, which had continued and even increased the restraints upon the press.

No stouter appeal for the freedom of the press was ever heard, even in America.

But in the main, his prose pen was employed against the crown and the Church, while they still existed; against the king's memory, after the unfortunate monarch had fallen, and in favor of the parliament and all its acts.

Milton was no trimmer; he gave forth no uncertain sound; he was partisan to the extreme, and left himself no loop-hole of retreat in the change that was to come.
A famous book appeared in 1649, not long after Charles's execution, proclaimed to have been written by King Charles while in prison, and entitled _Eikon Basilike_, or _The Kingly Image_, being the portraiture of his majesty in his solitude and suffering.

It was supposed that it might influence the people in favor of royalty, and so Milton was employed to answer it in a bitter invective, an unnecessary and heartless attack upon the dead king, entitled _Eikonoklastes_, or _The Image-breaker_.