What does it mean to be a free person?

Quentin Skinner on Milton

After the appearance of Poems of Mr John Milton in 1645, Milton published no further works of poetry until Paradise Lost in 1667. During the intervening decades he devoted almost the whole of his literary energies to attacking the Stuart monarchy and defending the creation of the English commonwealth and, later, the Cromwellian Protectorate. As he repeatedly made clear, moreover, he took these commitments to be equivalent to furthering the ideal of a free way of life. Speaking in one of his sonnets about the blindness that finally engulfed him in the early 1650s, he proudly declared that he had lost his sight because it had been ‘overplied/In liberty’s defence, my noble task’.