John Milton (1608–1674) Έικονοκλάστησ. [Eikonoklastes] In Answer To a Book Intitl’d Εικων βασιλικη, [Eikon Basilike] The Portraiture of his Sacred Majesty in his Solitudes and Sufferings. (London: Matthew Simmons, 1649). Ee.3.23, title page.
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.