During his wide-ranging career as both polemicist and poet, Milton proved himself adept at recasting his opponents’ ideologies by framing familiar practices in startling new light. Milton undertakes precisely this act of recasting in Eikonoklastes, the longest of his polemical works. The tract provides a sustained and devastating response to Eikon Basilike, The Pourtraicture of His Sacred Majestie in His Solitudes and Sufferings, which circulated immediately following the execution of Charles I in January 1649 and which generated widespread sympathy for his plight. Published as the official parliamentary response to the king’s tract in October of that same year, Eikonoklastes demolishes Eikon Basilike’s image of Charles as a martyred king—an image that emerges not only through the simple prayers and prose of the royalist tract, but even more strikingly in its frontispiece portrait of the kneeling monarch. In the image, Charles gazes toward the heavens as he raises a token crown of thorns—reminiscent of the one worn by Christ at Gethsemane. According to Milton, the sole purpose of this frontispiece image, with its implicit parallel between Charles and Christ, is “to catch fools and silly gazers.”1 In undertaking the monumental task of demolishing the Eikon Basilike’s literal and ideological icons, Milton establishes a precedent for his own polemics by positioning them within an extensive tradition of early Christian iconoclasm: “For which reason this answer also is intitl’d Iconoclastes, the famous Surname of many Greek Emperors, who, in thir zeal to the command of God, after a long tradition of Idolatry in the Church, took courage, and broke all superstitious Images to peeces” (YP 3:343). In response to Charles’s fictions and pretensions, Milton appropriately counters with an act of role-playing of his own. In the figurative act of appending “Iconoclastes” to his own name, Milton sets himself up as the last in a long line of image-breaking emperors, and creates a genealogical tradition for his own visual, political, and textual iconoclasms.