Milton did not sign the king’s death warrant, but shortly after Charles was beheaded, the poet did write a treatise justifying the execution. His reasoning was derived from Genesis, making it easy to see the chain of thought that eventually led from the Bible to the American Declaration of Independence: “No man who knows ought, can be so stupid to deny that all men naturally were born free, being the image and resemblance of God himself, and were by privilege above all the creatures, born to command and not to obey,” he wrote.
