Eikonoklastes ('breaker of images') is the scornful response to Eikon Basilike that Milton was commissioned to write by the Commonwealth’s Council of State. Milton bitingly responds, chapter-by-chapter, to that book’s portrayal of historical events and is particularly contemptuous of the ‘quaint emblems and devices’ of its frontispiece. Nevertheless, the royalist cult would survive Milton’s venomous debunking: Eikon Basilike went through 35 editions in England alone by the end of 1649.

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