But the first important work required of Milton belonged rather to the man of letters than to the Foreign Secretary. The horror aroused both at home and abroad by the execution of Charles, already great enough in itself to be very inconvenient to the Government, was greatly increased by the publication of a book called _Eikon Basilike_ which purported to be the work of the king himself and appeared immediately after his death. It is a kind of religious portrait of Charles, reporting his spiritual meditations and containing a justification of his life. Its success was prodigious; fifty editions are said {58} to have appeared within a year. It was obviously necessary that some reply should be attempted; and the task was naturally assigned to Milton, who published his _Eikonoklastes_, or Image-Breaker, in October. It is a mere pamphlet, even more violent than the _Tenure of Kings_, not ashamed to rake up such absurdities as the alleged poisoning of James I by Buckingham, with the usual Miltonic inconsistencies, such as that which denounces Charles for the crime of refusing his consent to bills passed by Parliament and forgets that the Government on whose behalf he is writing established itself by a forcible suppression of the Parliamentary majority. It survives now only by the curious passage in it which tells us that William Shakspeare was "the closet companion" of Charles I in the "solitudes" of the end of his life; and by the puritanical allusion to the "vain amatorious poem of Sir Philip Sidney's _Arcadia_" from which, however "full of worth and wit" in its own kind, it was a disgrace to the king to borrow a prayer at so grave an hour. Perhaps as a mark of their approval of _Eikonoklastes_, the Council of State gave Milton lodgings in Whitehall; and soon afterwards, in January 1650, called upon him to reply to another Royalist book which was making a {59} great stir. The result was the beginning of a political and personal controversy which lasted almost as long as it was safe for Milton to write about politics at all.