Chapter II…

Chapter II

TROUBLES IN THE BARBICAN HOUSEHOLD: CHRISTOPHER MILTON'S COMPOSITION SUIT: MR. POWELL'S COMPOSITION SUIT: DEATH OF MR. POWELL: HIS WILL: DEATH OF MILTON'S FATHER--SONNET XIV. AND ODE TO JOHN ROUS-ITALIAN REMINISCENCES: LOST LETTERS FROM CARLO DATI OF FLORENCE: MILTON'S REPLY TO THE LAST OF THEM--PEDAGOGY IN THE BARBICAN: LIST OF MILTON'S KNOWN PUPILS: LADY RANELAGH--EDUCATIONAL REFORM STILL A QUESTION: HARTLIB AGAIN: THE INVISIBLE COLLEGE: YOUNG ROBERT BOYLE AND WILLIAM PETTY-- REMOVAL FROM BARBICAN TO HIGH HOLBORN--MEDITATIONS AND OCCUPATIONS IN THE HOUSE IN HIGH HOLBORN: MILTON'S SYMPATHIES WITH THE ARMY CHIEFS AND THE EXPECTANT REPUBLICANS--STILL UNDER THE BAN OF THE PRESBYTERIANS: TESTIMONY OF THE LONDON MINISTERS AGAINST HERESIES AND BLASPHEMIES: MILTON IN THE BLACK LIST--ANOTHER LETTER FROM CARLO DATI: TRANSLATION OF NINE PSALMS FROM THE HEBREW--MILTON THROUGH THE SECOND CIVIL WAR: HIS PERSONAL INTEREST IN IT, AND DELIGHT IN THE ARMY'S TRIUMPH: HIS SONNET TO FAIRFAX--BIRTH OF MILTON'S SECOND CHILD: ANOTHER LETTER FROM CARLO DATI.

The two years and four months of English History traversed in the last chapter were of momentous interest to Milton at the time, were preparing an official career of eleven years for him at the very centre of affairs, and were to furnish him with matter for comment, and indeed with risk and responsibility, to the end of his days. While they were actually passing, however, his life was rather private in its tenor, and we have to seek him not so much in public manifestations as in his household and among his books.

PROBLEMS IN THE BARBICAN HOUSEHOLD: CHRISTOPHER MILTON'S COMPOSITION SUIT: MR. POWELL'S COMPOSITION SUIT: DEATH OF MR. POWELL: HIS WILL: DEATH OF MILTON'S FATHER

We left the household in Barbican a rather overcrowded one, consisting not merely of Milton, his wife, their newly-born little girl, his father, and his two nephews, but also of his Royalist father-in-law Mr. Powell, with Mrs. Powell, and several of their children, driven to London by the wreck of the family fortunes at Oxford. For some months, we now find, the state of poor Mr. Powell's affairs continued to be a matter of anxiety to all concerned.

On the 6th of August, 1646, or as soon as possible after Mr. Powell's arrival in London, he had applied, as we saw, to the Committee at Goldsmiths' Hall for liberty to compound for that portion of his sequestered Oxfordshire estates which was yet recoverable. Milton's younger brother, Christopher, we saw, was at the same time engaged in a similar troublesome business. Ho too was suing out pardon for his delinquency on condition of the customary fine on his property; and, according to his own representation to the Goldsmiths' Hall Committee, the sole property he had consisted of a single house in the city of London, worth 40_l._ a year.

The Goldsmiths' Hall Committee being then overburdened with similar applications of Delinquents from all parts of England, the cases of Mr. Powell and Christopher Milton had waited their turn.

The case of Christopher Milton came on first. His delinquency had been very grave. He had actually served as one of the King's Commissioners for sequestrating the estates of Parliamentarians in three English counties. There seems, therefore, to have been a disposition at head-quarters to be severe with him. On the 24th of September the Committee at Goldsmiths' Hall did fix his fine for his London property at 80_l._ (i.e. a tenth of its whole value calculated at twenty years' purchase), receiving the first moiety of 40_l._ down, and accepting "William Keech, of Fleet Street, London, goldbeater," as Christopher's co-surety for the payment of the second moiety within three months. But they do not seem to have been satisfied that the young barrister had given a correct account of his whole estate; and it was intimated to him that, while the 80_l_. would restore to him his London property, the House of Commons would look farther into his case, and he might have more to pay on other grounds. In fact, his case was protracted not only through the rest of 1646, but for five years longer, the Goldsmiths' Hall Committee never letting him completely off all that while, but instituting inquiries repeatedly in Berks and Suffolk, with a view to ascertain whether he had not concealed properties in those counties in addition to the small London property for which he had compounded. [Footnote: It is rather difficult to follow Christopher Milton's case through the Composition Records and other notices respecting it; but here is the substance of the first of them:-- Aug. 7, 1646, Delinquent's Application to Compound, with statement of his property, referred to Sub-Committee (Hamilton's Milton Papers, 128, 129); Aug. and Sept. 1646, Various proposals of the Committee as to the amount of his fine--at 80_l._ or "a tenth," at 200_l._ or "a third"-- ending, ending Sept. 24, in the imposition of a fine of 80_l._ for his London property, with a hint that there might be farther demand (Hamilton, 62 and 129-30, and Todd. I. 162-3); Undated, but seemingly after Dec. 1646, Note of Christopher Milton as a defaulter for the latter moiety of his fine (Hamilton, 62). The case runs on through subsequent years to 1652; nay, as late as Feb. 1657-8 there is trace of it (Hamilton, 130, Document lxvi.).]

Mr. Powell's case, for different reasons, was more complex. On the 2lst of Nov. 1646, or somewhat more than three months after he had petitioned the Goldsmiths' Hall Committee for leave to compound, he sent in the necessary "Particular of Real and Personal Estate" by which his composition was to be rated. He had been living all the while in his son- in-law's house in Barbican; and the delay may have arisen from those circumstances of perplexity, already known to the reader (antè, pp. 473-483), which rendered it difficult for him to estimate what the amount of his remaining property might really be. In the "Particular" now sent in, though he still designates himself "Richard Powell of Forest-hill," the Forest-hill mansion and lands are totally omitted, as no longer his property in any practical sense, but transferred by legal surrender to his creditor Sir Robert Pye. All that he can put on paper as his own is now (1) his small Wheatley property of 40_l._ a year; (2) his "personal estate in corn and household stuff," left at Forest-hill before the siege of Oxford, and estimated at 500_l._ if it could be properly recovered and sold; (3) his much more doubtful stock of "timber and wood," also left at Forest-hill, and worth 400_l._ on a similar supposition; and (4) debts owing to him to the amount of 100_l._ Against these calculated assets, of about 1,800_l._ altogether, he pleads, however, a burden of 400_l._, with arrears of interest, due to Mr. Ashworth by mortgage of the Wheatley property, and also 1,200_l._ of debts to various people, and a special debt of 300_l._ "owing upon a statute" to his son-in-law Mr. John Milton. As a reason for leniency, the fact is moreover stated that he had lost 3,000_l._ by the Civil War. Actually, if his account is correct, he was insolvent; or, if his debt to his son-in-law were regarded as cancelled, he had but about 200_l._ left in the world. In criticising his account, however, the Committee would be sharp-sighted. They would remember that it was his interest, on the one hand, to rate his debts and losses at the highest figure, and, on the other hand, to represent at the lowest figure all his remaining property, except those items of "corn and household stuff," and "timber and wood," which he held to have been illegally disposed of by Parliamentary officials, and for the recovery of which he might bring forward a claim against Parliament. How the Committee, or the sub-Committee to whom the case was referred Nov. 26, did proceed in their calculations can only be conjectured; but the result was that they charged Mr. Powell on his whole returned property, without any allowance whatever for his debts. This appears from three documents in the State Paper Office, all of date Dec. 1646. On the 4th of that month Mr. Powell went through the two formalities required by law of every Delinquent before composition. He subscribed the National Covenant in the presence of "William Barton, minister of John Zachary" (the same clergyman who had administered the Covenant to Christopher Milton seven months before); and he took the so-called "Negative Oath" in presence of another witness. On the same day, before a third witness, he took another and more special oath, to the effect that the debts mentioned in his return to the Goldsmiths' Hall Committee were genuine debts, "truly and really owing by him," and that the estimate of his losses by the Civil War there set down was also just. Nevertheless, in the paper drawn up on the 8th of December by two of the Goldsmiths' Hall officials, containing an abstract of Mr. Powell's case, in which his own statements are accepted, and notice is taken of a request he had made for an allowance of 400_l._ off the value of the Wheatley property on account of the mortgage to that amount with which it was burdened, the fine is fixed by these ominous words at the close: "Fine at 2 yeeres value, 180_l._" The officials had been strict as Shylock. Taking the Wheatley property at Mr. Powell's own valuation of 40_l._ a year, without allowing his claim of a half off for the Ashworth mortgage, they had added 50_l._ a year as the worth of the remaining 1,000_l._ made up by the three other capital items in his return, and thus appraised him as worth 90_l._ a year in all. At the customary rate of two years' value, his fine therefore was to be 180_l._ The debts of the Delinquent might amount to more than his estimated property, as he said they did; but that was a matter between himself and the world at large, and not between him and the Commissioners for Compositions. [Footnote: The documents the substance of which is here given will be found in the Appendix to Hamilton's Milton Papers (pp. 76-78).--The Rev. William Barton seems to be the person of that name already known to us as author of that Metrical Version of the Psalms which the Lords favoured against Rous's (antè, pp. 425 and 512). He may have been an acquaintance of Milton's; at all events, as minister of a church in Aldergate Ward, he was conveniently near to Barbican.]

Either the decision of the Goldsmiths' Hall Committee broke Mr. Powell down unexpectedly, or he had been ailing before it came. It is possible, indeed, that he had been confined to Milton's house during the negotiation, signing the Covenant and other necessary documents there, and unable to walk even the little distance between Barbican and Goldsmiths' Hall. Certain it is that he died there on or about the 1st of January, 1646-7, leaving the following will, executed but a day or two before:--

"In the name of God, Amen!--I, Richard Powell, of Forresthill, alias Forsthill, in the countie of Oxon, Esquire, being sick and weak of bodie, but of perfect minde and memorie, I praise God therefore, this thirtieth daie of December in the yeare of our Lord God one thousand six hundred fortie and six, doe make and declare this my will and testament in manner and forme following:--First and principallie, I comend my soule to the hands of Almighty God my Maker, trusting by the meritts, death, and passion of his sonn Jesus Christ, my Redeemer, to have life everlasting; and my bodie I comitt to the earth from whence it came, to be decentlie interred according to the discretion of my Executor hereafter named.--And, for my worldlie estate which God hath blessed rue withall, I will and dispose as followeth:--Imprimis, I give and bequeathe unto Richard Powell, my eldest son, my house at Forresthill, alias Forsthill, in the countie of Oxford, with all the household stuffe and goods there now remaining, and compounded for by me since at Goldsmiths' Hall, together with the woods and timber there remaining; and all the landes to my said house of Forresthill belonging and heretofore therewith used, together with the fines and profitts of the said landes and tenements, to the said Richard Powell and his heires and assignes for ever: to this intent and purpose, and it is the true meaning of this my last will, that my landes and goods shalbe first employed for the satisfieing of my debts and funerall expenses, and afterwards for the raiseing of portions for his brothers and sisters soe far as the estate will reach, allowing as much out of the estate abovementioned unto my said sonn Richard Powell as shall equal the whole to be devided amongst his brothers and sisters, that is to saie the one halfe of the estate to himselfe and the other halfe to be devided amongst his brothers and sisters that are not alredie provided for; in which devision my will is that his sisters have a third parte more than his brothers.--My will and desire is that my said sonn Richard doe, out of my said landes and personall estate herein mentioned, satisfy his mother, my dearely-beloved wife Ann Powell, that bond I have entered into for the makeing her a joynture, which my estate is not in a condition now to dischardge.--And, lastlie, I doe by this my last will and testament make and ordaine my sonn Richard Powell my sole executor of this my last will, and I doe hereby revoke all former wills by me made whatsoever. And my will farther is that, in case my sonn Richard Powell shall not accept the executorshipp, then I doe hereby constitute and appointe, and doe earnestly desire, my dearely beloved wife Ann Powell to be my sole executrix, and to take upon her the mannageing of my estate abovementioned to the uses and purposes herein expressed. And, in case she doe refuse the same, then I desire my loveing friend Master John Ellston of Forresthill to take the executorshipp uppon him and to performe this my will as is herebefore expressed; to whom I give twentie shillings, to buy him a ring. And my earnest desire is that my wife and my sonn have no difference concerning this my will and estate.-- Item, I give and bequeathe to my sonn Richard Powell all my houses and landes at Whately in the countie of Oxford, and all other my estate reall and personall in the kingdom of England and dominion of Wales, to the use, intent, and purpose above herein expressed: And my desire is that my daughter Milton be had a reguard to in the satisfieing of her portion, and adding thereto in case my estate will beare it. And, for this estate last bequeathed, in case my sonn take not upon him the executorshipp, then my will is my beloved wife shall be sole executrix, unto whom I give the landes and goods last abovementioned, to the uses and purposes herein mentioned. In case she refuses, then I appoint Master John Ellstone my executor, to the uses and purposes above-mentioned.--In witness hereof I have hereto put my hand and seale the daie and yeare first above-written.--For the further strengthening of this my last will, I doe constitute and appoint my loveing friends, Sir John Curson and Sir Robert Pye the elder, Knights, to be overseers of this my last will, desireing them to be aiding and assisting to my executor to see my last will performed, according to my true meaning herein expressed, for the good and benefitt of my wife and children; and I give them, as a token of my love, twentie shillings apiece, to buy them each a ring, for their paines taken to advise and further my executor to performe this my will. "RICHARD POWELL.

"Subscribed, sealed, and acknowledged to be his last will, in the presence of

"JAMES LLOYD, JOHN MILTON, HENRY DELAHAY." [Footnote: Found by me at Doctors' Commons.--The date assigned for Mr. Powell's death depends on his widow's statement on oath, four years afterwards (Feb. 27, 1650-1), that "said Richard Powell, her late husband, died near the first day of January, in the year of our Lord 1646, at the house of Mr. John Milton situate in Barbican, London." (Todd, I. 57.)]

While this is clearly the will of a dying man whose property is in such a state of wreck and confusion that he knows not whether any provision whatever will arise out of it for his wife and family, there are certain suggestions in it of a contrary tenor. It is evident, for example, that Mr. Powell had not given up all hope that his main property, the mansion and lands of Forest-hill, might ultimately be recovered. Though these are entirely omitted in the Particular of his Estate given in a month before to the Goldsmiths' Hall Committee for Compositions, they figure in his will so expressly that one sees the testator did not consider them quite lost. This, followed by the kindly mention of Sir Robert Pye in the end of the will, and the appointment of that knight as one of the overseers to assist the executor in carrying out the will, confirms a guess which we have already hazarded (antè, pp. 475-6): viz. that the entry of Sir Robert Pye into possession of the Forest-hill estate during the siege of Oxford was not the harsh exercise of his legal right to do so, nor even only the natural act of a prudent creditor seeing no other way of recovering a large sum lent to a neighbour, but in part also a friendly precaution in the interests of that neighbour himself and his family. That Forest-hill, if it were to be alienated from the Powells, should pass into the possession of Sir Robert Pye, an old friend of the family, might be for their advantage in the end. Though nominally proprietor, he would regard himself as interim possessor for the Powells; and, should they ever be able to reclaim their property, and to pay the 1,400_l._ and arrears of interest for which it had been pledged, they would find Sir Robert or his family more accommodating than strangers would have been. Something of this kind must have been in Mr. Powell's mind when he made his will. He clung to the Forest-hill property; it was worth much more really than the sum for which it had been alienated; he looked forward to some arrangement in that matter between his heir and Sir Robert Pye, in which Sir Robert himself would advise and assist. Then, as the smaller Wheatley property was also really worth more than the 40_l._ a year at which it was rated, and as, besides other chances only vaguely hinted, the family had immediate claims for 500_l._ on account of goods left at Forest-hill, 400_l._ on account of timber, and l00_l._ in miscellaneous debts, why, on the whole, with patience and good management, should there not be enough to discharge all obligations, and still leave something over for the heir, the widow, and the other eight or nine children, in the proportions indicated? Alas! if this were the possibility, it had to be arrived at, the testator foresaw, through a dense medium of present difficulties. The very items of most importance in the meantime, if his widow and children were to be saved from actual straits, were the items of greatest uncertainty. The household goods, the timber, and the debts due, were estimated together at 1,000_l._ of cash; but it was cash which had to be rescued from the four winds. Nay, most of it had to be rescued from worse than the four winds--from the Parliamentary Government itself, and from its agents in Oxfordshire. The household stuff and goods at Forest-hill! Had they not been sold in June last by the Oxfordshire sequestrators to Matthew Appletree of London, carted off by that dealer, and dispersed no one knew whither? The timber at Forest-hill! Had not that also vanished, most of it voted in July last by the two Houses of Parliament themselves to the people of Banbury for repairs of their church and other buildings? To be sure, the Goldsmiths' Hall Committee, by accepting these portions of Mr. Powell's property at his own valuation and including them in their calculation of his fine for Delinquency, had virtually pledged Government that they should be restored. But then the fine had not been paid. Notwithstanding the statement in Mr. Powell's will that he had compounded for his property, the case was not really so. The Committee had fixed his composition at 180_l.,_ and so had admitted him to compound; but, as he had not yet paid the usual first moiety, the transaction was really incomplete at his death. Who was to pursue the matter to completeness, undertaking on the one hand to pay the composition to Government, and on the other obliging Government to reproduce the value of the goods and timber that had been made away with by itself or by its Oxfordshire agents? All this too was in the testator's mind, and hence his difficulty in fixing on an executor. His eldest son and heir, Richard, then a youth of five-and-twenty, was to have the first option of this office; if he shrank from it, then the widow was to be the sole executrix; but, if she also shrank from it, a certain "Master John Ellston of Forest-hill," in whom Mr. Powell had confidence, was entreated to take it up. This Ellston, it is implied, understood the business, and, as acting for the family, might expect the advice of Sir Robert Pye and Sir John Curzon. [Footnote: The "Ellston" of the will may be the "Eldridge" mentioned in a previously quoted document (antè, p. 478) as having 100_l._ worth of Mr. Powell's timber on his premises. If so, Mr. Hamilton (92) has miscopied "Eldridge" for "Ellston" or "Ellstone" in that document.]

The eldest son did shrink from the hard post of executor under the will; but the widow did not. This appears from the probate of the will, dated March 26, 1647, when she appeared as executrix before Sir Nathaniel Brent of the Prerogative Court, took the oath, and had the administration committed to her. [Footnote: Probate attached to the will in Doctors' Commons. There is a second Probate in the margin, dated May 10, 1662, showing that then the eldest son, Richard Powell, at the age of forty-one, reclaimed the executorship, and was admitted to it, the former Probate being set aside. This fact does not concern us at present.] It was, as we shall find, a legacy of trouble and vexation to her, and collaterally to Milton as her son-in-law, for many years; and, as we shall also find, she fought in it perseveringly and bravely. The trouble and vexation, however, so far as records revive it, do not begin within our limits in this volume. For the present it is enough to add that, some time after Mr. Powell's death and burial, his widow and children removed from Milton's house in the Barbican, and quartered themselves elsewhere. They can hardly have gone back to Oxfordshire. Not only was Forest-hill no home for them now, but the smaller tenement and grounds at Wheatley in the same county seem to have been equally unavailable. There is documentary proof, at least, that immediately after Mr. Powell's death, in the same month of January 1646-7, his relative Sir Edward Powell, Bart., took formal possession of that property in consequence of his legal title to it from non-payment of the sum of £300 which he had advanced to Mr. Powell, on that security, five years before (see Vol. II. p. 497). [Footnote: Document, dated Aug. 28, 1650, among the Composition Papers given by Hamilton (86, 87).] This transaction, by a relative, may, like the similar transaction by Sir Robert Pye, have had some meaning in favour of the Powells; but, on the whole, though Mrs. Powell may have managed to dispose of some of her children, especially the elder boys, by appeal to relatives, the probability is that she remained in London and kept most of them with her. There is evidence that she had to live on in most straitened circumstances. Relatives probably did something for her; and Milton, as we shall find, performed his part.

Little more than two months after the burial of Mr. Powell, and possibly before the removal of his widow and children from the house in Barbican, there was another funeral from that house. It was that of Milton's own father. Father-in-law and father had gone almost together, and the house was in double mourning.

Who can part with this father of one of the greatest of Englishmen without a last look of admiration and regret? Nearly fifty years ago, in the last years of Elizabeth's reign, we saw him, an "ingeniose man" from Oxfordshire, detached from his Roman Catholic kindred there, and setting up in London in the business of scrivenership, with music for his private taste, and a name of some distinction already among the musicians and composers of the time. Then came the happy days of his married life in Bread Street, all through James's reign, his business prospering and music still his delight, but his three surviving children growing up about him, and his heart full of generous resolves for their education, and especially of pride in that one of them on whose high promise teachers and neighbours were always dilating. Then to Cambridge University went this elder son, followed in time by the younger, the father consenting to miss their presence, and instructing them to spare no use of his worldly substance for their help in the paths they might choose. It had been somewhat of a disappointment to him when, after seven years, the elder had returned from the University with his original destination for the Church utterly forsworn, and with such avowed loathings of the whole condition of things in Church and State as seemed to bar the prospect of any other definite profession. There had been the recompense, indeed, of that son's graceful and perfected youth, of the haughty nobleness of soul that blazed through his loathings, and of his acquired reputation for scholarship and poetry. And so, in the country retreat at Horton, as age was beginning to come upon the good father, and he was releasing himself from the cares of business, how pleasant it had been for him, and for the placid and invalid mother, to have their elder son wholly to themselves, their one daughter continuing meanwhile in London after her first husband's decease, and then younger son also mainly residing there for his law-studies. What though the son so domiciled with them was plowing up to manhood, still without a profession, still absorbed in books and poetry, doing exactly as he liked, and in fact more the ruler of them than they were of him? Who could interfere with such a son, and why had God given them abundance but that such a son might have the leisure he desired? All in all, one cannot doubt that those years of retirement at Horton had been the most peaceful on which the old man could look back. But those years had come to an end. The sad spring of 1637 had come; the invalid wife had died; and he had been left in widowhood. Little in the ten years of his life since then but a succession of shiftings and troubles! For a while still at Horton, sauntering about the church and in daily communion with the grave it contained, his younger son and that son's newly-wedded wife coming to keep him company while the elder was on his travels. Then, after the elder son's return, the outbreak of the political tumults, and the sad convulsion of everything. In this convulsion his two sons had taken opposite sides, the elder even treasuring up wrath against himself by his vehement writings for the Parliamentarians. How should an old man judge in such a case? The Horton household now broken up, he had gone for a time with Christopher and his wife to Reading, but only to be tossed back to London and the safer protection of John. We have seen him under that protection in Aldersgate Street, all through the time of Milton's marriage--misfortune and the Divorce pamphlets. There was some comfort, on the old man's account, in the picture given of him by his grandson Phillips, then in the same house, as living through all that distraction "wholly retired to his rest and devotion, without the least trouble imaginable." All the same one fancies him having his own thoughts in his solitary upper room, contrasting the now with the then, and feeling that he had become feeble and superfluous. A cheerful change for him may have been the larger house in Barbican, with his son's forgiven wife in her proper place in it and more numerous pupils going in and out, and at last the birth of the infant-girl that made his grandfatherhood complete in all its three branches. He had been about eighteen months in this house. The Civil War had come to an end, and the King had been surrendered by the Scots at Newcastle and shifted to the second stage of his captivity at Holmby House, and Christopher Milton had returned ruefully to London from Exeter to sue out pardon for his delinquency, and the impoverished Powells also had come to the house from Oxford. Old Mr. Powell and old Mr. Milton had been a good deal together, and at length, when Mr. Powell was dying, old Mr. Milton may have assisted, scrivener-like, in the framing of his will. Only two months afterwards his own turn came. No will of his has been found, and probably he had made a will unnecessary by previous arrangements. His Bible and music-books left in his room may have been the mementoes of his last occupations. He was buried, March 15, 1646-7, in the chancel of the Church of St. Giles, Cripplegate, not far from Barbican; and the entry "John Milton, Gentleman, 15" among the "Burialls in March 1646" may be still looked at with interest in the Registers of that parish. [Footnote: To the courtesy of the Rev. P. P. Gilbert, M.A., Vicar of the parish, I owe a certified copy of the burial- entry.]

Nothing came from Milton's pen on the occasion; but one remembers his Latin poem "Ad Patrem," written fifteen years before, and the lines with which that poem closes may stand fitly here as the epitaph for the dead:--

"At tibi, care Pater, postquam non aqua merenti Posse referre datur, nec dona rependere factis, Sit memorasse satis, repetitaque munera grato Percensere animo, fidæque reponere menti. Et vos, O nostri, juvenilia carmina, lusus, Si modo perpetuos sperare audebitis annos, Nec spisso rapient oblivia nigra sub Orco, Forsitan has laudes decantatumque parentis Nomen, ad exmplum, sero servabitis ævo." [Footnote: It seems to me not improbable that the poem, as originally written, ended at the word "menti." and that the last six lines, beginning "Et vos," were an addition when Milton published his Poems in 1645 his father then residing with him.]

SONNET XIV, AND ODE TO JOHN ROUS.

Since the removal from the Aldersgate Street house to that in Barbican, Milton, as we know, had ceased from prose pamphleteering; and all that he had done of a literary kind, besides publishing his volume of collected Poems, had been his two Divorce Sonnets, his Sonnet to Henry Lawes, and his Sonnet with the scorpion tail, entitled On the Forcers of Conscience. To these have now to be added, as written since Aug. 1646, two other scraps--viz.: the Sonnet marked XIV. in most of our modern editions of his Poems, and the Latin Ode to John Rous which generally appears at or near the end of the Latin portion of these editions.

Sonnet XIV., though printed without a heading by Milton himself in the Second or 1673 edition of his Poems, and often so printed still, exists fortunately in two drafts in his own hand (one of them erased) among the Milton MSS. at Cambridge, and bears there this heading, also in his own hand: "On the Religious memory of Mrs. Catherine Thomson, my Christian friend, deceased 16 Decemb. 1646." We have no other information about this Mrs. Catherine Thomson than is conveyed by these words and the Sonnet itself; and the fact that we know of her existence only by chance suggests to us how many friends and acquaintances of Milton there may have been in London whose very names have perished. One may suppose her to have been a neighbour of Milton's, and rather elderly. That he had no ordinary respect for her appears from the fact that he felt moved to write something in her memory. If written exactly at the time of her death, it was while his house was full of the Powells, and Mr. Powell was grieving over the state of his affairs and perhaps known to be dying. There is a suggestion, however, in the wording, that it may have been written later.

"When Faith and Love, which parted from thee never, Had ripened thy just soul to dwell with God, Meekly thou didst resign this earthy load Of death, called life, which us from Life doth sever. Thy works, and alms, and all thy good endeavour, Stayed not behind, nor in the grave were trod; But, as Faith pointed with her golden rod, Followed thee up to joy and bliss for ever. Love led them on; and Faith, who knew them best Thy handmaids, clad them o'er with purple beams And azure wings, that up they flew so drest, And speak the truth of thee on glorious themes Before the Judge, who thenceforth bid thee rest And drink thy fill of pure immortal streams."

Certainly written in Barbican between the death of Mr. Powell and that of Milton's father, but in a very different strain from the foregoing, is the Latin Ode to Rous, the Oxford Librarian. The circumstances were these:--

Milton, we have had proof already, cared enough both about his opinions and about his literary reputation to adopt the common practice of sending presentation-copies of his books to persons likely to be interested in them. He had sent out, we have seen, such presentation-copies of Lawes's 1637 edition of his "Comus," and of some of his pamphlets individually. We find, however, that in 1645 or 1646, when he had published no fewer than eleven pamphlets in all, and when moreover his English and Latin Poems had been issued by Moseley, he must have taken some pains to secure that copies of the entire set of his writings, as then extant, should be in the hands of eminent book-collectors and scholars. Thus, in the Library of Trinity College, Dublin, there is a small quarto volume containing ten of the pamphlets bound together in this order--"Of Reformation," "Of Prelatical Episcopacy," "The Reason of Church- government," "Animadversions upon the Remonstrant's Defence," "An Apology against a modest Confutation," "The Doctrine and Discipline of Divorce," "The Judgment of Martin Bucer," "Colasterion," "Tetrachordon," "Areopagitica;" and the volume exhibits (in a slightly mutilated form, owing to clipping in the re-binding) this inscription in Milton's autograph: "Ad doctissimum virum, Patricium Junium, Joannes Miltonius hæc sua, unum in fasciculum conjecta, mittit, paucis hujusmodi lectoribus contentes" ("To the most learned man, Patrick Young, John Milton sends these things of his, thrown together into one volume, content with few readers were they but of his sort") The volume, therefore, though it has found its way to Dublin, originally belonged to the Scotchman Patrick Young, better known by his Latinized name of Patricius Junius, one of the most celebrated scholars of his time, especially in Greek, and for more than forty years (1605?-1649) keeper of the King's Library in St. James's, London. Milton, it is clear, did not intend the gift for the Royal Library, unless Young chose to put it there. He meant it for Young himself, with whom he had probably some personal acquaintance, and who was of Presbyterian sympathies, and in fact then under the orders of Parliament. [Footnote: There is a facsimile of the inscription to Young in Sotheby's Milton Ramblings, p. 121; but I am indebted for a more particular account of the volume, with a tracing of the inscription, to the Rev. Andrew Campbell of Dublin. There is a memoir of Young in Wood's Fasti, I. 308-9]

About the time when Milton sent this collection of his pamphlets to Patrick Young, or perhaps a little later, he sent a similar gift to another librarian, expressly in his official capacity. This was John Rous, M.A., chief Librarian of the Bodleian at Oxford from 1620 to 1652, Milton, there is reason to believe, had known Rous since the year 1635 (see Vol. I. p. 590); at all events an acquaintance had sprung up between them, as could hardly fail to be the case between a reader like Milton and the keeper of the great Oxford Library; and, as Rous's political leanings, Oxonian though he was, were distinctly Parliamentarian, there was no reason for coolness on that ground. Accordingly, Rous, it appears, had asked Milton for a complete copy of his writings for the Bodleian, and had even been pressing in the request. Milton at length had despatched the required donation in the form of a parcel containing two volumes--the Prose Pamphlets bound together in one volume, and the Poems by themselves in the tinier volume as published by Moseley. On a blank leaf at the beginning of the larger volume he had written very carefully with his own hand a long Latin inscription, "Doctissimo viro, proloque librorum æstimatori, Joanni Rousio" &c.; which may be given in translation as follows: "To the most learned man, and excellent judge of books, John Rous, Librarian of the University of Oxford, on his testifying that this would be agreeable to him, John Milton gladly forwards these small works of his, with a view to their reception into the University's most ancient and celebrated Library, as into a temple of perpetual memory, and so, as he hopes, into a merited freedom from ill- will and calumny, if satisfaction enough has been given at once to Truth and to Good Fortune. They are--'Of Reformation in England,' 2 Books; 'Of Prelatical Episcopacy,' 1 Book; 'Of the Reason of Church-government,' 2 Books; 'Animadversions on the Remonstrant's Defence,' 1 Book; 'Apology against the same,' 1 Book; 'The Doctrine and Discipline of Divorce,' 2 Books; 'The Judgment of Bucer on Divorce,' 1 Book; 'Colasterion,' 1 Book; 'Tetrachordon: An Exposition of some chief places of Scripture concerning Divorce,' 4 Books; 'Areopagitica, or a Speech for the Freedom of the Press;' 'An Epistle on Liberal Education;' and 'Poems, Latin and English,' separately." Here, it will be seen, Milton sends to Rous the same pamphlets he had sent to Patrick Young, and in the same order, only adding the Letter on Education to Hartlib, and the Moseley volume of Poems. Now, all the pieces so enumerated, with the inscription, had duly reached Rous in the Bodleian, with one exception. In the carriage of the parcel to Oxford the tiny volume of Poetry had somehow dropped out or been abstracted; so that Rous, counting over the pieces by the inventory, found himself in possession only of the eleven prose-pamphlets. He had intimated this to Milton, and petitioned for another copy of the Poems to make good the loss of the first. Milton complied; but, as the loss of the first copy had amused him, he took the trouble of writing a mock-heroic Latin ode on the subject to Rous, and causing this ode, transcribed on a sheet of paper in a secretary hand of elaborate elegance, to be inserted by the binder in the new copy, between the English and the Latin portions of the contents. This is the Ode to Rous of which we have spoken as, with the exception of Sonnet XIV., the sole known production of Milton's muse during those eight months of his Barbican life which have brought us to our present point. When he printed it in the second or 1673 edition of his Poems, he prefixed the exact date, "Jan. 23, 1646" (i.e. 1646-7). It was written, therefore, in the interval between Mr. Powell's death and his father's--three weeks after the one, and six or seven weeks before the other. The manuscript copy sent to Rous still exists in the Bodleian in the volume into which it was inserted; and in the same library they show also the volume of the eleven collected prose pamphlets, with the previous inscription to Rous in Milton's autograph. [Footnote: Warton's Note on the Ode to Rous (Todd's Milton, IV. 507-9); Milton's Poems ed. 1678, Latin portion, p. 90; Sotheby's Milton Ramblings, pp. 113-121, where there is a fac-simile of the inscription in the Bodleian volume of the prose pamphlets, and also a fac-simile of a considerable portion of the Latin Ode to Rous from the MS. copy in the other Bodleian volume. The "inscription" is indubitably Milton's autograph; Mr. Sotheby thinks the "ode" also to be in his penmanship, though not in his usual hand, but in a "beautiful secretary hand" which he assumed for the special purpose. Judging from the fac-simile, I doubt this, and think the transcript may have been by some professional scribe.--According to Warton's account, it is by accident that these two precious volumes have been preserved in the Bodleian. In 1720 a number of books, whether as being duplicates or as being thought useless, were weeded out of the Library and thrown aside, and a Mr. Nathaniel Crynes, one of the Esquire Bidels and a book collector, was permitted to have the pick of these for himself on the understanding that he was to leave the Library a valuable bequest. Fortunately Mr. Crynes did not care for the Milton volumes, and so they went back to the shelves.]

The ode is headed "Ad Joannem Rousium, Oxoniensis Academiæ Bibliothecarium: de Libro Poematum amisso, quem ille sibi denuo mitti postulabat, ut cum aliis nostris in Bibliothecâ publicâ reponeret, Ode" ("To John Rous, Librarian of the University of Oxford: An Ode on a lost Book of Poems, of which he asked a fresh copy to be sent him, that he might replace it beside our other books in the Public Library").

What strikes one first in reading the Ode is the strange metrical structure. Evidently in a whim, and to suit his mock-heroic purpose, Milton chose a peculiar form of mixed verse, distantly suggested by the choruses of the Greek dramatists, and more closely by some precedents in Latin poetry. There are three Strophes, each followed by an Antistrophe, and the whole is wound up by a closing Epodos. In an appended prose note Milton calls attention to this novelty, and explains moreover that he had taken considerable liberties with the verse throughout, pleasing his own ear, and regarding rather the convenience of modern reading than ancient prosodic rules. Altogether, in this respect, the poem was a bold experiment, for which Milton has been taken to task by purists among his commentators down to our own time.

It is the matter, however, that interests us most here. The ode opens half-humorously with an address to the little book he was sending to Rous. It is described as a pretty little book enough, with two sets of contents and a double arrangement of paging to match, neatly but simply bound (fronde licet geminâ, munditieque nitens non operosâ), and containing the juvenile productions of a certain Poet of no superlative merit (haud nimii poetæ), written partly in Britain and partly in Italy, partly in English and partly in Latin. [Footnote: Critics have objected to Milton's volume, phrase "fronde licet geminâ," on the ground that "fronte" would be the better Latin word for "title- page." But Milton did not mean only that there were two title pages in the volume, one to the English and one to the Latin poems; he meant also that these two sets of poems were paged separately throughout. His phrase "fronde geminâ," ("with double leafing") was therefore perfectly exact.] Then the Antistrophe asks what had become of the former copy of the same, on its way to the sources of the Thames and the great seat of learning there established. The second Strophe and Antistrophe continue the strain, with a hope that now at length the wretched civil tumults may cease in England and Peace and Literature come back, but still with a return of the query what could possibly have become of the missing volume between London and Oxford, and into what clownish hands it might have fallen. In the third Strophe and Antistrophe there is a compliment to Rous as the faithful keeper of one of the most splendid libraries in the world, with acknowledgment of his kindness in seeking to have the missing volume replaced, so that it might have a chance of readers in such glorious company and in all-famous Oxford. The closing Epode may be given in the skilful, though rather lax, rendering of Cowper:--

"Ye, then, my Works, no longer vain And worthless deemed by me, Whate'er this sterile genius has produced, Expect at last, the rage of envy spent, An unmolested happy home, Gift of kind Hermes and my watchful friend, Where never flippant tongue profane Shall entrance find, And whence the coarse unlettered multitude Shall babble far remote. Perhaps some future distant age, Less tinged with prejudice, and better taught, Shall furnish minds of power To judge more equally. Then, malice silenced in the tomb, Cooler heads and sounder hearts, Thanks to Rous, if aught of praise I merit, shall with candour weigh the claim."

ITALIAN REMINISCENCES: LOST LETTERS FROM CARLO DATI OF FLORENCE: MILTON'S REPLY TO THE LAST OF THEM.

Our next trace of Milton, through anything written by himself in his Barbican abode, belongs to April 1647, the month after his father's death. We owe it also perhaps to the fact that the publication of his Poems by Moseley had given him an opportunity of distributing presentation-copies of some of his former writings.

A feature in that volume, it may be remembered, was its richness in Italian reminiscences. Not only were there included among the English Poems the five Italian Sonnets and the Italian Canzone which Milton is believed to have written in Italy; not only were the encomiums of his Italian friends, Manso of Naples, Salzilli and Selvaggi of Rome, and Francini and Dati of Florence, prefixed to the Latin Poems, with a note of explanation; not only among these Latin poems did he print the three pieces to the singer Leonora, the Scazontes to Salzilli, and the fine farewell to Manso; but in the Epitaphium Damonis, or pastoral on Charles Diodati's death, which ended the volume, and which had been written immediately after his return to England, there were references throughout to his Italian experiences, and passages of express mention of Dati, Francini, the Florentine group generally, and the venerable Manso. What more natural than to have sent copies of such a volume to the various Italian friends named in it, to remind them of the Englishman to whom they had been so kind. The venerable Manso, indeed, was by this time dead; Salzilli seems to have been dead; the great Galileo, whom Milton had at least once visited near Florence, had died in 1642; but most of the Florentine group were still alive. To these last, all of them poets themselves more or less, Milton might have been expected to send copies of his volume. Or, if he did not trouble them with the English part, which they could not read, he might have sent them at least the Latin part, which had been separately paged, and provided with a separate title and imprint, precisely in order that it might be so detached. For a reason which will appear Milton did not even do this. He seems, however, to have procured from the printer some copies of the last eleven pages of the Latin part, which contained the Epitaphium Damonis by itself, and to have sent these to Florence. Either so, or by some prior transmission of this particular poem to his Florentine friends, unaccompanied by any letter, copies of it had reached them. This we learn from the sequel.

Of all Milton's Florentine friends none had remembered him more faithfully than young Carlo Dati (see Vol. I. pp. 724-5). Only nineteen years of age when Milton had visited Florence in 1638-9, but then a leading spirit in the literary Academies of the city, and especially enthusiastic in his attentions to strangers, he had outgone all the others, except Francini, in his admiration of the Englishman who had come among them, and in the extravagance of his parting adieu. The admiration was real; and, after Milton had gone, young Dati had often thought of him, often talked of him among his companions of the Delia Crusca and of Gaddi's more private Academy of the Svogliati, often wondered what he was doing in his native land. Three times at intervals he had written to Milton; but all the letters had miscarried. Conceive, then, Dati's pleasure, when, some time in 1646 (if that is the correct supposition), a copy of the Epitaphium Damonis reached him from London, and he read the passage there in which Milton had made such affectionate mention of his Florentine friends of 1638-9, and of himself and Francini in particular. Immediately he wrote to Milton a fourth time; and this letter, more fortunate than its predecessors, did arrive at its destination. Milton, on his part, though the letter must have reached him about the time of his father's death, had peculiar pleasure in receiving it and returning an answer. The answer was in Latin, and may be translated as follows:--

"To CHARLES DATI, Nobleman of Florence.

"With how great and what new pleasure I was filled, my Charles, on the unexpected arrival of your letter, since it is impossible for me to describe it adequately, I wish you may in some degree understand from the very pain with which it was dashed, such pain as is almost the invariable accompaniment of any great delight yielded to men. For, on running over that first portion of your letter, in which elegance contends so finely with friendship, I should have called my feeling one of unmixed joy, and the rather because I see your labour to make friendship the winner. Immediately, however, when I came upon that passage where you write that you had sent me three letters before, which I now know to have been lost, then, in the first place, that sincere gladness of mine at the receipt of this one began to be infected and troubled with a sad regret, and presently a something heavier creeps in upon me, to which I am accustomed in very frequent grievings over my own lot: the sense, namely, that those whom the mere necessity of neighbourhood, or something else of a useless kind, has closely conjoined with me, whether by accident or by the tie of law (sive casu, sive lege, conglutinavit), they are the persons, though in no other respect commendable, who sit daily in my company, weary me, nay, by heaven, all but plague me to death whenever they are jointly in the humour for it, whereas those whom habits, disposition, studies, had so handsomely made my friends, are now almost all denied me, either by death or by most unjust separation of place, and are so for the most part snatched from my sight that I have to live well nigh in a perpetual solitude. As to what you say, that from the time of my departure from Florence you have been anxious about my health and always mindful of me. I truly congratulate myself that a feeling has been equal and mutual in both of us, the existence of which on my side only I was perhaps claiming to my credit. Very sad to me also, I will not conceal from you, was that departure, and it planted stings in my heart which now rankle there deeper, as often as I think with myself of my reluctant parting, my separation as by a wrench, from so many companions at once, such good friends as they were, and living so pleasantly with each other in one city, far off indeed, but to me most dear. I call to witness that tomb of Damon, ever to be sacred and solemn to me, whose adornment with every tribute of grief was my weary task, till I betook myself at length to what comforts I could, and desired again to breathe a little--I call that sacred grave to witness that I have had no greater delight all this while than in recalling to my mind the most pleasant memory of all of you, and of yourself especially. This you must have read for yourself long ere now, if that poem reached you, as now first I hear from you it did. I had carefully caused it to be sent, in order that, however small a proof of talent, it might, even in those few lines introduced into it emblem-wise, [Footnote: See the lines themselves in the translation of the Epitaphium Damonis, Vol. II. p. 90.] be no obscure proof of my love towards you. My idea was that by this means I should lure either yourself or some of the others to write to me; for, if I wrote first, either I had to write to all, or I feared that, if I gave the preference to any one, I should incur the reproach of such others as came to know it, hoping as I do that very many are yet there alive who might certainly have a claim to this attention from me. Now, however, you first of all, both by this most friendly call of your letter, and by your thrice-repeated attention of writing before, have freed the reply for which I have been some while since in your debt from any expostulation from the others. [Footnote: Although I have supposed that the copies of the Epitaphium Damonis sent by Milton to Italy were from the sheets of the Moseley volume of 1645 as it was passing through the press, the reader ought to note, with me, the possibility (already hinted, and now implied in this passage of the letter to Dati) that Milton had sent copies in some form at an earlier date--say immediately after the poem was written, and when his parting from his Italian friends was quite recent.] There was, I confess, an additional cause for my silence in that most turbulent state of our Britain, subsequent to my return home, which obliged me to divert my mind shortly afterwards from the prosecution of my studies to the defence anyhow of life and fortune. What safe retirement for literary leisure could you suppose given one among so many battles of a civil war, slaughters, flights, seizures of goods? Yet, even in the midst of these evils, since you desire to be informed about my studies, know that we have published not a few things in our native tongue; which, were they not written in English, I would willingly send to you, my friends in Florence, to whose opinions I attach very much value. The part of the Poems which is in Latin I will send shortly, since you wish it; and I would have done so spontaneously long ago, but that, on account of the rather harsh sayings against the Pope of Rome in some of the pages, I had a suspicion they would not be quite agreeable to your ears. Now I beg of you that the indulgence you were wont to give, I say not to your own Dante and Petrarch in the same case, but with singular politeness to my own former freedom of speech, as you know, among you, the same you, Dati, will obtain (for of yourself I am sure) from my other friends whenever I may be speaking of your religion in our peculiar way. I am reading with pleasure your description of the funeral ceremony to King Louis, in which I recognise your style (Mercurium tuum)--not that one of street bazaars and mercantile concerns (compitalem ilium et mercimoniis ad dictum) which you say jestingly you have been lately practising, but the right eloquent one which the Muses like, and which befits the president of a club of wits (facundum ilium, Musis acceptum, et Mercurialium virorum præsidem). [Footnote: The production of Dati to which Milton refers, and of which a copy had probably accompanied Dati's letter, was an Italian tract or book, entitled "Esequie del la Maestà Christianiss: di Luigi XIII. il Giusto, Re di Francia e di Navarra, celebrate in Firenze dall altezza serenissima di Ferdinando Granduca di Tose., e discritte da Carlo Dati: 1644." Louis XIII. of France had died May 14, 1643, and the Grand Duke of Tuscany had ordered a celebration in his honour at Florence.--The hint that Dati was now engaged in mercantile business is confirmed by subsequent evidence.] It remains that we agree on some method and plan by which henceforth our letters may go between us by a sure route. This does not seem very difficult, when so many of our merchants have frequent and large transactions with you, and their messengers run backwards and forwards every week, and their vessels sail from port to port not much seldomer. The charge of this I shall commit, rightly I hope, to Bookseller James (Jacobo Bibliopolæ), or to his master, my very familiar acquaintance (vel ejus hero mihi familiarissimo). [Footnote: I have translated this as well as I can, but it is obscure. Did Milton refer to some Florentine "Jacopo," a bookseller (the publisher of Dati's Esequie?), and playfully entrust the arrangement of the future means of correspondence to Dati himself, as master of the services of this person?] Meanwhile farewell, my Charles; and give best salutations in my name to Coltellini, Francini, Frescobaldi, Malatesta, Chimentelli the younger, anyone else you know that remembers me with some affection, and, in fine, to the whole Gaddian Academy. Again farewell!

London: April 21, 1617." [Footnote: This letter to Dati is the tenth of Milton's Epistolæ Familiares, as published by himself in 1674, and reprinted in the collected editions of his works. By a curious chance, however, a MS. copy of it exists in Milton's own hand--either a draft which Milton kept at the time, or perhaps the actual copy sent to Dati. It is one of some valuable Milton documents in the possession of Mr. John Fitchett Marsh of Warrington, who has described it in his Milton Papers, printed for the Chetham Society in 1851, and given there a fac-simile of the beginning and end of it. There is a copy of this fac- simile in Mr. Sotheby's Milton Ramblings (p. 122). Mr. Marsh, who is inclined to think that the MS. is the actual letter as it reached Dati, has favoured me with an exact list of some verbal variations in it from the printed copy. They are slight, but rather confirm the idea that the printed copy is from the draft which Milton kept and that the MS. was the transcript actually dispatched to Italy. Thus, while the printed copy is headed merely "Carolo Dato, Patricio Florentino," the MS. is headed "Carolo Dato, Patricio Florentino, Joannes Miltonius, Londinensis, S.P.D." Again, at the close, instead of the printed dating "Londino, Aprilis 21, 1647," the MS. presents the dating "Londini: Pascatis feria tertia, MDCXLVII," ("London: the third feast day of Easter, 1647.") On this Mr. Marsh, in a note to me, remarks ingeniously, "Dating from the feast-day, according to the Roman Catholic usage, in writing to an Italian friend, indicates a tolerance and politeness worth noticing." Easter in 1647 fell on Sunday, April 18, so that the third day, or Easter-Tuesday, was April 20. The printed copy is dated a day later.]

There are passages in this letter which we can interpret now better than Dati can have done then. The sentences in which Milton speaks of his hard fate in being tied by accident or law to the constant companionship of people with whom he had no sympathy, while those whom he really cared for were distant or dead, may have been read by Dati with only a vague general construction of their meaning, and perhaps would not have been written by Milton to any one capable of a more exact construction from knowledge of the circumstances. We can now discern in them, however, a reference by Milton to his domestic troubles, to the worry brought on him by the whole Powell connexion, and perhaps also to the recent loss of his father. Altogether the letter is a melancholy one. One sees Milton, as he wrote it in Barbican in the spring of 1647, the gloomy master of an uncomfortable household.

PEDAGOGY IN THE BARBICAN: LIST OF MILTON'S KNOWN PUPILS: LADY RANELAGH.

Yet precisely this spring of 1647, if we are to believe his nephew Phillips, was Milton's busiest time with his pupils. "And now," says Phillips, after mentioning the death of Milton's father, and the departure at last of the Powell kindred from the house in Barbican, "the house looked again like a house of the Muses only, though the accession of scholars was not great. Possibly his proceeding thus far in the education of youth may have been the occasion of some of his adversaries calling him Pedagogue and Schoolmaster; whereas it is well known he never set up for a public school to teach all the young fry of a parish, but only was willing to impart his learning and knowledge to relations, and the sons of some gentlemen that were his intimate friends, besides that neither his converse, nor his writings, nor his manner of teaching ever savoured in the least anything of pedantry; and probably he might have some prospect of putting in practice his academical institution, according to the model laid down in his sheet Of Education!" Taking this passage in connexion with prior passages already quoted from the same memoir, we are to conclude that, though Milton's practice in teaching had begun as far back as 1639-40, when he gave lessons to his two nephews in his lodgings in St. Bride's Churchyard, and although the practice had been kept up all through the time of his residence in Aldersgate Street, when his nephews boarded with him and other pupils were gradually added (1640-45), yet it was in the Barbican house, and there more especially in 1647, that his employment in pedagogy was most engrossing. The house had been taken expressly that there might be accommodation for additional pupils, and such pupils had come in--not in any considerable number, nor yet miscellaneously from the neighbourhood, but rather by way of favour on Milton's part to select boys whose parents knew him well, and were anxious that they should have the benefit of his instructions.

As to Milton's theories and methods of education we are already sufficiently informed. This may be the place, however, for a list of those who can be ascertained to have had the honour of being his pupils. Perhaps that honour may have been shared by as many as twenty or thirty youths in all, afterwards distributed through English society in the seventeenth century, and some of them living even into the eighteenth; but I have been able to recover only the following:--[Footnote: It is to be understood that Milton may have continued the practice of pedagogy, in individual cases at least, after the Barbican period of its fullest force, and hence that one or two of the pupils in my present list may not have been in the Barbican house, but may be strays afterwards undertaken by him, on special request, in those later days and those other houses into which we have yet to follow him. As it is not worth while, however, to break up such a list, I present all Milton's known pupils, of whatever date, in one cluster.]

EDWARD PHILLIPS (the elder nephew):--Not ten years old when he first received lessons from Milton in the St. Bride's Churchyard lodging, this elder nephew, after five years of board in Aldersgate Street, and about a year and a half in Barbican, had reached his seventeenth year. He had received the full benefit so far of his uncle's method of teaching; and, if he were to go to the University, it was about time that he should be preparing. About two years after our present date, or in March 1648-9, by whatever management of his uncle, or of his mother and step-father, Mrs. and Mr. Agar, he did enrol himself in Magdalen Hall, Oxford. The rest of his life will concern us hereafter. [Footnote: Wood's Ath., IV. 760, and Godwin's Lives of the Phillipses, p. 12.]

JOHN PHILLIPS (the younger nephew):--This nameson of Milton's, first committed to his entire charge in the St. Bride's Churchyard lodging, had been as long under training as his elder brother, and had now reached his sixteenth year. He was to remain a more unmixed example of his uncle's training, for he never went to any University. He also will reappear in the subsequent course of his uncle's life. [Footnote: Wood's Ath., IV. 764, and Godwin.]

RICHARD HEATH, OR HETH:--That a person of this name was among Milton's pupils, rests on the evidence of one of Milton's own Epistolæ Familiares, dated Dec. 1652, and addressed "Richardo Hetho." As he was then a minister of the Gospel somewhere, it is to be inferred that he was one of the earliest pupils of the Aldersgate Street days. I have not been able to identify him farther.

----PACKER:--"Mr. Packer, who was his scholar," is one of Aubrey's Jottings about Milton, written in 1680 or thereabouts. This is a very insufficient clue. A John Packer, who had taken the degree of Doctor of Physic at Padua, was incorporated in the same degree at Oxford, Feb. 19, 1656-7. [Footnote: Aubrey's Notes on Milton's Life (Godwin's reprint, p. 349); Wood's Fasti, II. 196.]

CYRIACK SKINNER:--He was the third son of William Skinner, a Lincolnshire squire (son and heir of Sir Vincent Skinner, Knt., of Thornton College, co. Lincoln) who had married Bridget Coke, second daughter of the famous lawyer and judge, Sir Edward Coke. As his father died in 1627, Cyriack must have been at least twenty years of age in 1647: he had, therefore, been one of the Aldersgate Street pupils. The fact that he was a grandson of the great Coke was one of his distinctions through life; but he was to become of some note in London society on his own' account. The connexion formed between him and Milton continued, as we shall find, unbroken and affectionate through future years. Indeed, there came to be associations, presumably through Cyriack, between Milton and other persons of the name of Skinner. A Daniel Skinner, and a Thomas Skinner, presumably relatives of Cyriack's, are heard of as merchants in Mark Lane, London, from 1651 onwards. This Daniel Skinner, merchant, had a son, Daniel Skinner, junior, whose acquaintance with Milton in the end of his life led to curious and important results. Care must be taken, even now, not to confound this far future Daniel Skinner, junior (not born till about 1650), with our present Cyriack, his senior, and probable kinsman. [Footnote: Aubrey's Notes; Wood's Ath., III. 1119; Skinner's Pedigree in Introd. to Bishop Sumner's Translation of Milton's Treatise on Christian Doctrine (1825); Hamilton's Milton Papers, 29 et seq. and 131-2. Wood (Fasti, I. 486) has confounded Cyriack Skinner in one particular with the much later Daniel Skinner junior, and the mistake has been kept up.]

HENRY LAURENCE:--There is no positive attestation, as in the other cases, that this person, certainly intimate with Milton in subsequent years, began acquaintance with him as one of his pupils. The presumption is so strong, however, that I risk including him. He was the second son of Henry Laurence, of St. Ives, Hunts, member for Westmoreland in the Long Parliament, known in 1647 as a thoughtful man, and author of "A Treatise of our Communion and War with Angels," and afterwards a staunch Oliverian, President of Cromwell's Council (1654), and one of his Lords (1657). He had an elder son, Edward, who was fourteen years of age in 1647, and died in 1657, when Henry became the heir. Therefore, if we are right in supposing Henry to have been Milton's pupil in the Barbican, he cannot have been older than twelve or thirteen at the time. [Footnote: Wood's Ath., IV. 63, 64; note by Bliss.]

SIR THOMAS GARDINER, OF ESSEX:--That a person of this name was among Milton's pupils in the Barbican, either with the title already, or having it to come to him, seems to be implied in a statement of Wood, quoted in the next paragraph.

RICHARD BARRY, 2ND EARL OF BARRIMORE:--"To this end that he might put it in practice," says Wood, after describing Milton's system of education as explained in his Letter to Hartlib, "he took a larger house, where the Earl of Barrimore sent by his aunt the Lady Ranelagh, Sir Thomas Gardiner of Essex, to be there with others (besides his two nephews) under his tuition." [Footnote: Wood's Fasti (edit. by Bliss), I. 483. The sentence is exactly in the same form in earlier editions.] The pointing and structure of the sentence make it obscure; but I take the meaning to be that Wood had heard of two of Milton's pupils in the Barbican house specially worth naming on account of their rank--the Earl of Barrimore and Sir Thomas Gardiner--and that he had also been informed that it was the Earl of Barrimore's aunt, the Lady Ranelagh, that had placed that young Irish nobleman under Milton's charge. The full significance of this was clear when Wood wrote, for Lady Ranelagh was then still alive, and known as one of the most remarkable women of her century; but readers now may need to be informed who Lady Ranelagh was.--Her husband was Arthur Jones, 2nd Viscount Ranelagh in the Irish peerage; but that was not her chief distinction. By birth she was a Boyle, one of the daughters of that Richard Boyle, an Englishman of Kent, who, having gone over to Ireland in 1588, had risen there, by his prudence and integrity through three reigns, to be successively Sir Richard Boyle, Lord Boyle of Youghall, Viscount Dungarvan, and Earl of Cork, with the office of Lord High Treasurer of Ireland, and with vast estates both in Ireland and England. This great Earl, dying in good old age in 1643, after some final service against the Irish Rebellion, left four sons mid six daughters surviving out of a total family of fifteen. The eldest surviving son, Richard, till then Viscount Dungarvan, succeeded to the Earldom of Cork, and was afterwards created Lord Clifford of Lanesborough (1644) and Earl of Burlington (1664) in the English peerage; the second, Roger, created Baron Broghill in his father's lifetime, bore that title till the Restoration, with a high character for wisdom and literary talent, which he maintained afterwards as Earl of Orrery; the next, Francis, after giving proof of his Royalism both in England and in exile, received a place with his brothers in the Irish peerage as Viscount Shannon; and the fourth and youngest, born Jan. 25, 1626-7, was called to the end of his days merely "The Hon. Mr. Robert Boyle," but became the most famous of them all as "the divine philosopher," and founder of English Chemistry. So also, among the daughters, though all were "ladies of great piety and virtue and an ornament to their sex," one was the paragon. This was Catharine, Viscountess Ranelagh, born March 22, 1614-15, or twelve years before her brother Robert. Of her reputation for "vast reach both of knowledge and apprehension," "universal affability," and liberality both of mind and of purse, there is the most glowing tradition, interspersed with facts and anecdotes; and the singularly strong mutual affection that subsisted between her and her brother Robert till the close of their lives runs like a silver thread through that philosopher's biography. At our present date she was yet a young woman, but her influence among the members of her family was already recognised. Since the Irish Rebellion the fixed residence of herself and her husband had been in (Pall Mall?) London. Here her relatives from Ireland and elsewhere gathered round her; and here in 1644 her youngest brother, the future chemist, turning up brown and penniless, a foreign-looking lad of eighteen, after his six years of travel abroad, had been received with open arms. He had remained in her house about five months, and then had retired to his estate of Stalbridge in Dorsetshire, where he continued mainly till 1650, corresponding with her from amid his speculative studies and his apparatus for chemical experiments.--One other service, if Anthony Wood's information is correct, Lady Ranelagh must have rendered about the same time to another member of her family. Most of her sisters had married into noble English or Irish houses; but the eldest of them, Alice, Lady Barrimore, had been left a widow with three young children by the death of her husband, David, first Earl of Barrimore. This death had occurred before that of her father the great Earl of Cork, and in that Earl's will, dated Nov. 24, 1642, he had shown his concern for this unexpected widowhood of his eldest daughter by special bequests to her three children. Two of them, being daughters, were to receive 1,000_l._ apiece; and for the behoof of the only son there was this provision: "For that I have ever cordially desired the restitution and recovery of the Earl of Barrimore's noble and anciently honourable house, that his posterity may raise the same to its former lustre and greatness again, and in regard that in my judgment there is no way so likely and probable (God blessing it) to redeem and bring home the encumbered and disjointed estate of the said Earl, and his house and posterity, as by giving a noble, virtuous, and religious education to the said now young Earl, my grandchild, who, by good and honourable breeding, may (by God's grace) either by the favour of the prince, or by his service to the King and country, or a good marriage, redeem and bring home that ancient and honourable house, which upon the marriage of my daughter unto the late Earl I did with my own money freely clear: I do hereby, for his lordship's better maintenance and accommodation in the premises, bequeath unto my said grandchild, Richard, now Earl of Barrimore, from the time of my decease, for, during, and until he shall attain the full age of 22 years, one yearly annuity of 200_l._" This was the boy who, a year or two afterwards, was sent to Milton's in the Barbican for tuition. His aunt Ranelagh had heard of Milton, or had come to know him personally; and she thought he was the very man to give the boy the training which his wise grandfather had desired for him.--There will be proof in time that Lady Ranelagh did know Milton well, saw him often, and entertained a high regard for him, which he reciprocated. Meanwhile we may anticipate so far as to say that she was not content with having obtained Milton's instructions for her nephew, the Earl of Barrimore, but secured them also for her only son, Richard Jones, afterwards third Viscount and first Earl of Ranelagh. This nobleman, who lived to as late as 1712 with considerable distinction of various kinds, and on the site of whose last house at Chelsea Ranelagh Gardens were established, is also to be reckoned, we shall find, in the list of Milton's pupils. It is just possible he may have begun his lessons, with his cousin Barrimore, in the Barbican house; but, as he was but seven years of age in 1647, this is hardly probable. [Footnote: Birch's Life of Robert Boyle, prefixed to the 1714 edition of Boyle's Works in five volumes folio (pp. 1-20); Collins's Peerage by Brydges, VII. 134 et seq. (Boyle, Lord Boyle), and VI. l84; Irish Compendium or Rudiments of Honour (1756), for Barrimore family, Debrett's Peerage, for Ranelagh family; Worthington's Diary, by Crossley, I, 164-7; Cunningham's Handbook of London, 373 and 418; Phillips' Memoir of Milton; and four letters "Nobili Adolescenti Richardo Jonslo" in Milton's Epistolæ Familiares.]

EDUCATIONAL REFORM STILL A QUESTION: HARTLIB AGAIN: THE INVISIBLE COLLEGE: YOUNG ROBERT BOYLE AND WILLIAM PETTY.

There may be something in Phillips's guess that his uncle, about 1647, had some idea of putting in practice his system of Pedagogy on a larger scale than a mere private house permitted, by becoming the head of some such public Academy as that which he had described three years before in his Letter to Hartlib.

The question of a Reform of the apparatus for national Education had never quite vanished from the public mind even in the midst of the engrossing struggle between the Presbyterians and the Independents, and a fresh interest was imparted to the subject by the Ordinance of Parliament in May 1647 for a Visitation and Purgation of the University of Oxford (antè, pp. 545-6). Hartlib, for one, was again on the top of the wave. The claims of this indefatigable man to some reward for his long and various services had at length been brought before Parliament. On the 25th of June, 1646, on the report of a Committee, the House of Commons had voted him 100_l._ and in April 1647 the two Houses farther agreed in a resolution to pay him 300_l._ "in consideration of his good deserts and great services to the Parliament," with a recommendation that, on account of his special merits "from all that are well-wishers to the advancement of learning," he should be provided with some post of emolument at Oxford. [Footnote: Commons Journals of June 25, 1646, and March 31, 1647; and Lords Journals of April 1, 1647.] Nothing came of the last suggestion, and Hartlib lived on in London as before, still only ventilating his ideas of Educational Reform in a general way, amid the other novelties of all sorts which he patronized.

Hartlib's hero-in-chief on the Educational subject, the great Comenius, though doubtless remembered, had practically gone out of view. Labouring at Elbing on that piece of mere drudgery for which Oxenstiern and others had persuaded him to lay aside his Pansophic dreams (antè, p. 228), he had indeed compiled, in four years, a large recast of his Latin Didactics under the title of Novissima Linguarum Methodus, and had returned to Sweden in 1646 to present the mass of manuscript to his employer Ludovicus de Geer. The Swedish critics do not seem to have yet been satisfied with the performance, and Comenius had carried it away with him again for corrections and additions, not any longer in Elbing, but in his old Polish home. [Footnote: Comenius's Preface to the Second Part of his Opera Didactica, between 1627 and 1657.] No chance for Hartlib, then, of co-operating again with Comenius in the foundation of a Pansophic College in London! Hartlib's faculty of making new acquaintances, however, was as versatile as his passion for new lights; and a certain "Invisible College" which had already some habitat in London, had become the substitute in his fancies for the unbuilt Pansophic Temple of the distant Slavonian sage. Since 1645 there had been held, sometimes in Wood Street, sometimes in Cheapside, and sometimes in Gresham College, those humble weekly meetings of a few "worthy persons inquisitive into Natural Philosophy," out of which there grew at length the great Royal Society of London. Theodore Haak, a naturalized German, had originated the club; and among the first members were Dr. John Wallis (the clerk of the Westminster Assembly, but with other things in his head than what went on there), the afterwards famous Wilkins, and the physician Dr. Jonathan Goddard. If Hartlib, the fellow-countryman and friend of Haak, was not an original member, he knew of the meetings from the first; and the Invisible College of his imagination seems to have been that enlarged future association of all earnest spirits for the prosecution of real and fruitful knowledge of which this club might be the symbol and promise. The Invisible College, at all events, was the temporary form of his ever-varying, and yet indestructible, zeal for progress. It figures much in his correspondence at this time with one new friend, who, though not more than twenty years of age, had that in him which made his friendship as precious to Hartlib as any he had yet formed. This was young Robert Boyle, recently returned to England from his foreign travels, and dividing his time between philosophical retirement at his house in Dorsetshire and occasional visits to London. In a letter to a Cambridge friend written in Feb. 1646-7, during one of those London visits, Boyle says: "I have been every day these two months upon visiting my own ruined cottage in the country; but it is such a labyrinth, this London, that all my diligence could never yet find my way out on't.... The cornerstones of the Invisible, or, as they term themselves, Philosophical College, do now and then honour me with their company, which makes me as sorry for those pressing occasions that urge my departure as I am at other times angry with that solicitous idleness that I am necessitated to during my stay: men of so capacious and searching spirits that school-philosophy is but the lowest region of their knowledge, and yet, though ambitious to lead the way to any generous design, of so humble and teachable a genius as they disdain not to be directed by the meanest, so he can but plead reason for his opinion,--persons that endeavour to put narrowmindedness out of countenance, by the practice of so extensive a charity that it reaches unto everything called man, and nothing less than an universal goodwill can content it. ... I will conclude their praises with the recital of their chiefest fault, which is very incident to almost all good things; and that is that there is not enough of them." The first extant letters of Boyle to Hartlib were written from his Dorsetshire retreat immediately after this visit to London, and are in reply to letters received there from Hartlib. A new system of Real characters or Universal Writing; Pneumatical Engines or Wind-guns; Mr. Durie, his Church-conciliation Scheme, and a Discourse on the Teaching of Logic he had brought out; the ingenious Utopian Speculations of a certain young Mr. Hall; the Copernican Astronomy (to which Mr. Boyle was "once very much inclined"); the French mathematicians, Mersenne and Gassendi; Oughtred's Clavis Mathematica; a Cure for the Stone suggested by Hartlib, or rather by Mrs. Hartlib: such are some of the topics of the correspondence, but with the Invisible College irradiating all. Thus, May 8, 1647, Boyle, writing to Mr. Hartlib, to congratulate him on the 300_l._ he had been voted by Parliament, says: "You interest yourself so much in the Invisible College, and that whole society is so highly concerned in all the accidents of your life, that you can send me no intelligence of your own affairs that does not, at least relationally, assume the nature of Utopian." In the same letter Boyle expresses his anxiety to have a copy of a pamphlet of Hartlib's which had just appeared. He names it rather vaguely; but I have ascertained it to be "A Briefe Discourse concerning the Accomplishment of our Reformation: tending to shew that by an Office of Publicke Address in spirituall and temporall matters the Glory of God and the Happiness of this Nation may be greatly advanced." It consisted of a preface, addressed by Hartlib to Parliament, and 59 pages of text, explaining the said Office of Public Address to be a kind of universal Register House "whereunto all men might freely come to give information of the commodities they have to be imparted to others." The pamphlet was out in May 1647. [Footnote: Birch's Life of Boyle, pp. 20-25; Worthington's Diary by Crossley, 1. 313; and copy of Hartlib's pamphlet in the British Museum, with MS. note of date of publication.]

While Hartlib was writing on all things and sundry to young Boyle, the Education subject included, there was another new acquaintance of his, only three years older than Boyle, with whom he seems to have been discussing the Education subject more expressly. William Petty, afterwards so famous as "the universal genius, Sir William Petty," had returned from France at the age of twenty-three. The considerable stock of knowledge which he had taken abroad with him when he left his native Hampshire, eight years before, a pushing boy of fifteen, had been increased by his studies at foreign Universities, his readings with Hobbes in Paris, his commercial dealings, and his inquisitiveness into the processes of all trades and handicrafts by which men earn their livings. He came back a tall, slender youth, with a very large head, to be spoken of in London as an encyclopædia of information, a wonderful mathematician and mechanician, teeming with schemes of all sorts, and yet shrewd, practical, and business-like. He was an invaluable addition to the Invisible College, and a delightful discovery for Hartlib; and he took to Hartlib at once, as every one else did. What occupied him especially at the moment was a machine for double writing, i.e. for making two copies of any writing at once. He hoped to obtain a patent for this invention from Parliament; and such a patent, for seventeen years, he did obtain in March 1647-8. While the thing was in progress, however, Hartlib was his chief confidant. This appears from a tract of his, of 26 pages, published Jan. 8, 1647-8, and entitled "The Advice of W. P. to Mr. Samuel Hartlib for the advancement of some particular parts of Learning." The invention for double writing is described in the tract, but it also sets forth Petty's ideas on Hartlib's favourite subject of a Reformation of Schools. In fact, in any collection of seventeenth-century tracts on that subject, it ought to be bound up with Hartlib's own older tracts in exposition of Comenius, and with the Letter on Education which Hartlib had elicited from Milton in 1644. Petty's notions, as may be supposed, differ considerably from Milton's. He is for a universal education in what he calls Ergastula Literaria or Literary Workhouses, "where children may be taught as well to do something toward their living as to read and write;" and, though he does not undervalue reading and writing, or book-culture generally, he lays the stress rather on mathematical and physical science, manual dexterity, and acquaintance with useful arts and inventions. Besides reading and writing, he would have all children taught drawing and designing; he would rather discourage the learning of languages, both because people may have all the books they want in their mother-tongue, and because the use of real characters, or an ideographic system of writing, would lessen the necessity of knowing foreign tongues; but, so far as languages might have to be learnt, their acquisition, as well as that of the simple arts of reading and writing, might be much facilitated by improved methods. In short, in Petty's project of Education, with much of the same general spirit of innovation, utilitarianism, contempt of tradition, as in Milton's, there is a characteristic difference of detail and even of principle. You are to be made expert in "graving, etching, carving, embossing, and moulding in sundry matters," in "grinding of glasses dioptrical and catoptrical," in "navarchy and making models for building and rigging of ships," in "anatomy, making skeletons, and excarnating bowels;" but you miss all that Milton would have taught you of Latin and Greek, Poetry and Philosophy, Italian and Hebrew, moral magnanimity and spiritual elevation, the History of Nations, and the ways of God to men. [Footnote: Wood's Ath., IV. 214; Worthington's Diary by Crossley, I. 294- 8; and Pett's own Tract. On its title-page are the words "London: Printed anno Dom 1648;" but a copy in the British Museum bears the MS. note "London, 8 January, 1647-8."]

REMOVAL FROM BARBICAN TO HIGH HOLBORN.

It would have been no surprise if Milton, on the skirts of the Invisible College as he was, and in sympathy with many of their aims, had exerted himself about this time in setting up a great Academy for young gentlemen, embodying some of the new utilitarian fancies even to the satisfaction of Petty, but fulfilling also his own higher ideal. He was peculiarly fond of Pedagogy; and his notion of an institution combining the School with the University, and so tending to the abolition of Universities, seems to have been coming more and more into favour.

Not only, however, did Milton abandon the experiment of which Phillips thinks there was then some prospect; but, precisely in 1647, he broke up his actual pedagogic establishment in Barbican, and went into a new house, where he either ceased to teach altogether, or had no pupils remaining but his two nephews. What may have been his reasons for the step we do not know; but it is not unlikely that the change of his circumstances by his father's death had something to do with it. No will of the ex-scrivener having been found, it is not known what property he left; but there is reason to believe that he left something considerable, and that, whatever it was, it came more completely to the two sons, and their sister Mrs. Agar, than while the old man lived. [Footnote: We may remember here Phillips's and Aubrey's hints as to the scrivener's prosperity in business. Phillips's information is that he "gained a competent estate, whereby he was enabled to make a handsome provision both for the education and maintenance of his children;" and he adds such particulars as that his mother, Mrs. Phillips, "had a considerable dowry given her" on her first marriage, and that the lease of the scrivener's house in Bread Street--the Spread Eagle, where he had carried on his business, and where his children had been born (or at least of some house in that street)--became in time part of the poet's estate. Aubrey distinctly reckons the Spread Eagle house as the scrivener's property, besides another house in the same street called The Rose," and other houses in other places." Christopher Milton, as we know, owned a house in London called the Cross Keys, worth 40_l._ a year, while his father was alive.] At all events, the fact of Milton's change of residence within a few months after his father's death is certified by Phillips. "It was not long," says Phillips, "after the march of Fairfax and Cromwell through the City of London, with the whole Army, to quell the insurrections Browne and Massey, now malcontents also, were endeavouring to raise in the City against the Army's proceedings, ere he left his great house in Barbican, and betook himself to a smaller in High Holborn, among those that open backward into Lincoln's-Inn Fields." The date of that famous march of the Army through London, to tame the tumultuous Presbyterianism of the City, rescue Parliament from its domination, and compel a policy more favourable to Independency and Toleration, was August 6 and 7, 1647 (see antè, pp. 553-4). Milton's removal from Barbican may be assigned, therefore, to September or October in the same year.

Change we, then, from those eastern purlieus of Aldersgate Street and Barbican, where we have been observing Milton for seven years, to a scene farther west, more within the cognisance of Londoners generally, and nearer to those two Houses of Parliament which the Army had rescued for the time from Presbyterian leadership within and Presbyterian mob-law without. Holborn was not then the dense continuity of houses it is now; there were more spaces in it of gardens and greenery, and the houses had not crept as far as Oxford Street; but it was, as now, the familiar thoroughfare of relief from the narrower and noisier Fleet Street and Strand, and the part of it which Milton had chosen was the most convenient. The actual house which he took may be still extant, wedged somewhere in the labyrinthine block between Great Turnstile and Little Turnstile; but one could judge but poorly from present appearances how pleasant may have been its old outlook to the rear. The fine open area of Lincoln's-Inn Fields was then only partly built round, and was used as a lounge and bowling-green by the lawyers and citizens. The houses in the neighbourhood were mostly new ones. [Footnote: Cunningham's London: Holborn and Lincoln's-Inn Fields.]

MEDITATIONS AND OCCUPATIONS IN THE HOUSE IN HIGH HOLBORN: MILTON'S SYMPATHIES WITH THE ARMY CHIEFS AND THE EXPECTANT REPUBLICANS.

When Milton removed to High Holborn, with his wife, their infant daughter, and the two nephews, the King was in the third and least disagreeable stage of his captivity. His detention with the Scots at Newcastle, and his subsequent residence under Parliamentary custody at Holmby House, were affairs of the Barbican period; and, by Joyce's act of the previous June, his Majesty had been for some months in the keeping of the Army, very generously treated, and permitted at last to reside, with much of restored state-ceremony, at his own palace of Hampton Court. Fairfax, Cromwell, Ireton, and the other Army-chiefs, from their head- quarters at Putney, were negotiating with him; and, the march of the Army through London having disabled the ultra-Presbyterians for the moment and transferred the ascendancy to the Independents, people were looking forward to a settlement on the basis of an established Presbyterian Church for the nation at large, but with liberty of conscience and of worship for Dissenters. For Milton, among others, this was a pleasant prospect. His sympathies, nay his personal interests, were wholly with the Independents; all that the Army had done had his approbation; and, whatever he might have had to say now (with the strong new lights he had obtained since 1641) as to the propriety of a Presbyterian Establishment on its own merits, he was probably prepared to accept such an Establishment, if with a sufficient guarantee of Toleration. Now, although he cannot have retained, more than other people, any strong confidence in Charles personally, any real hope of his voluntary and unreserved assent to a system of kingly government limited by great constitutional checks, yet a Treaty with Charles by the Independents rather than the Presbyterians must have seemed to him the most feasible way of reaching the end in view. Hence, while the King was at Hampton Court, and the Army-chiefs, with Cromwell most prominent among them, were plying his royal mind with arguments to bring him round, there can have been no private person more interested in their endeavours, more willing to believe them in the right, than Milton. Hardly had he been settled in his new house in High Holborn, however, when there came the snap of all those negotiations by the King's flight from Hampton Court to the Isle of Wight (Nov. 11, 1647). Then, I conceive, Milton's mood changed, in exact unison with the change of mood at the same time among the Army-chiefs and other leading Independents. For a month or two, indeed, there may have been some interest, some faint prolongation of hope, in attending to the proceedings of Parliament in pursuit of the King, and their attempt to obtain his assent to the Four Bills. But, from the moment when that attempt failed, and the two Houses passed their indignant resolutions that there should be no more communications with the King (Jan. 1647-8), all hesitation must have ceased. From that moment Milton was a Republican at heart. From that moment he was one of those who, with Vane, Marten, Cromwell, Ireton, and the Army officers generally, had forsworn all future allegiance to the Man in the Isle of Wight, and looked forward, through whatever intermediate difficulties, to his deposition and punishment, and the conversion of England iinto some kind of free Commonwealth. In such a matter, it could not, of course, be expected that a private citizen like Milton, who had no ambition to rank with Lilburne and other London Levellers of the coarser order, would anticipate Cromwell, Vane, and Ireton. He expressly says himself that, though he had been so prominent as a speculative politician, had made certain great questions of the time more peculiarly his own, had written largely on them and publicly identified his name with them, yet he had not hitherto taken any direct part in the immediate practical question of the future constitution of the State, but had left it to the appointed authorities [Footnote: Df. Sec. pro Pop. Angl., published in 1654]. Not the less are we to imagine that the time of his residence in High Holborn, while the King was a prisoner in the Isle of Wight, was the time when those high and semi-poetic Republican sentiments which seem always to have been congenial to him, and which his classic readings may have nurtured, took a definite shape applicable to England. From the end of 1647, I should say, Milton has to be reckoned as a foremost spirit in the band of expectant English Republicans.

Whether the issue was to be a Republic or not was a question which Milton had to leave in the hands of the Army and Parliament. While they were slowly working it out, what could he do but occupy himself, as patiently as possible, with his books and studies? There is evidence, accordingly, that three pieces of work, already begun or projected by him in Aldersgate Street or Barbican, were prosecuted with some increased diligence in his house in High Holborn. One of these was the collection of materials for a Thesaurus Linguæ Latinæ, or Latin Dictionary, which he hoped some time to complete. Another was the composition of a History of England, or History of Britain, from the earliest times to the Norman Conquest:--nay, though that was the form it ultimately took, the original project was nothing less than Hume anticipated, or a complete History of England, brought down in a continuous thread from the remotest origins of the nation to Milton's own time. The third was the long-meditated Body of Divinity, or Methodical Digest of Christian Doctrine. Here, surely, were three huge enough tasks of sheer hackwork hung round the neck of a poet! Milton's liking all his life for such labours of compilation, however, is as remarkable as his liking for pedagogy. Nor, though we may regard the tasks as hackwork now, were they so regarded by Milton. To amass gradually by readings in the Latin classics a collection of idioms and choice references, with a view to a Dictionary that should be an improvement even on that of Stephanus, was a side-labour to which a scholar, who was also a poet, might well dedicate a bit of each day or a week or two at intervals. To write a complete History of England, or even to compile, from Geoffrey of Monmouth, Bede, and the old chroniclers, a popular summary of the early legendary History of Britain, and of the History of the Saxon Kings and Church, was a blending of daily recreation with useful labour. Above all, the compilation of a System of Divinity was no mere dry drudgery for Milton, but a business of serious personal interest. From an early date he had resolved on some such compendium for his own use; he had ever since kept it in view and made notes for it; but his notions of the form it should take had undergone a change. "I entered," he says, "upon an assiduous course of study in my youth, beginning with the books of the Old and New Testament in their original languages, and going diligently through a few of the shorter Systems of Divines, in imitation of whom I was in the habit of classing under certain heads whatever passages of Scripture occurred for extraction, to be made use of hereafter as occasion might require. At length I resorted with increased confidence to some of the more copious Theological Treatises, and to the examination of the arguments advanced by the conflicting parties respecting certain disputed points of faith." Apparently he was still in this stage of his design in the Aldersgate period; for then, as we have seen (antè, pp. 254-5), one of his exercises with his pupils on Sundays was the dictation to them of a Tractate on Christian Divinity digested from such approved Protestant Divines as Amesius and Wollebius. But this method, he tells us, had ceased to satisfy him. Often he had found the theologians quibbling and sophistical, more anxious to "evade adverse reasonings" and establish foregone conclusions than to arrive at the truth. "According to my judgment, therefore," he adds, "neither my creed nor my hope of salvation could be safely trusted to such guides; and yet it appeared highly requisite to possess some methodical Tractate of Christian Doctrine, or at least to attempt such a disquisition as might be useful in establishing my faith or assisting my memory. I deemed it therefore safest and most advisable to compile for myself, by my own labour and study, some original treatise which should be always at hand, derived solely from the Word of God itself, and executed with all possible fidelity, seeing I could have no wish to practise any imposition on myself in such a matter." In all probability the preparations for the work on this new plan began in the house in High Holborn. For some years England had been in such a state of theological ferment that it was impossible not to inquire how much of the traditional Orthodoxy had real warrant in the Bible and how much was mere matter of inveterate opinion; in one important particular Milton, to his own surprise, had found himself standing out publicly as the champion of what was thought a horrible heresy; might it not be well to go over the whole ground, and fix one's whole Christian creed so as to be able to give an account of it, when called upon, in every other particular? The Westminster Assembly, like other Assemblies before it, had laboured out a Confession of Faith which it wished to impose on the entire community; but, as "it was only to the individual faith of each man that God had opened up the way of eternal salvation," was it not the duty of every Englishman to examine that Confession before accepting it as his own, or even to compile his own private Confession first and let the comparison follow at leisure? [Footnote: Phillips's Memoir at several points; Milton's Def. Sec.; and Preface to his posthumous "Treatise on Christian Doctrine" (Sumner's Translation, 1825). Phillips mentions expressly the History of England as occupying Milton in High Holborn; but the most interesting allusion to it is Milton's own in his Def. Sec., where the words are "Ad historiam gentis, ab ultimâ origine repetitam, ad hæc usque tempora, si possem, perpetuo filo deduoendam, me converti."]

STILL UNDER THE BAN OF THE PRESBYTERIANS: TESTIMONY OF THE LONDON MINISTERS AGAINST HERESIES AND BLASPHEMIES: MILTON IN THE BLACK LIST.

Alas! Milton, busy with these occupations in his room looking out upon Lincoln's-Inn Fields, could not shut out the continued hue and cry after him on account of his Divorce heresy. It was more than two years since his wife had returned to him; he had then closed the controversy so far as it was a personal one; he was now respectably in routine, as a married man with one child. But the world round about, more especially the clerical part of it, had not forgiven him his Divorce Pamphlets. Were they not still in circulation, doing infinite harm? Had not their infamous doctrine become one of the heresies of the age, counting other unblushing exponents, and not a few practical adherents? Keep silence as he now might, move as he might from Aldersgate Street to Barbican and from Barbican to High Holborn, would not his dark reputation dog him, sit at his doorstep, and gaze in at his windows? Actually it did. The series of attacks on Milton for his Divorce Doctrine, begun by Herbert Palmer and other mouthpieces of the Westminster Assembly in 1644, and continued in that and subsequent years by the Stationers' Company, Featley, Paget, Prynne, Edwards, Baillie, and others, had not ceased at the close of 1647. One fresh attack, of some significance in itself, may be instanced as a sample of the rest.

London, it is to be remembered, was now under Presbyterian Church- government. In every parish there was the Parochial or Congregational Court, consisting of the minister and lay-elders, charged with all the ecclesiastical concerns of the parish, and with the right of spiritual censure over the parishioners. The parishes were also grouped into Classes of ministers and lay-elders. At last there had come into operation even the crowning device of Provincial Synods for all London, in which representative ministers and elders met to discuss metropolitan Church affairs generally and to revise the proceedings of Classes and Congregations. The first of these Provincial Synods, with Dr. Gouge for Prolocutor, had met in St. Paul's in May 1647, and had continued its sittings twice a week in Sion College till November 8, 1647, when its half-year of office expired, and it was succeeded by the Second Provincial Synod, under the Prolocutorship of Dr. Lazarus Seaman. Now, had London been perfect in its Presbytery according to the extreme rigour of the Scottish model, Milton could not possibly have escaped the clutch of one or other of these Church-judicatories. As a resident in Barbican, he had been, I think, in the parish of St. Botolph without Aldersgate; and, when he removed to High Holborn, he came into the parish of St. Andrew, Holborn. Had the Scottish strictness prevailed in London, the minister of either of these parishes would have felt himself bound to bring Milton before the parochial consistory for his Divorce heresy [Footnote: From Newcourt's Repertorium and Wood's Ath. III. 812, I learn that the Curate or Vicar of St. Botolph's, Aldersgate, "in the late rebellious times," was George Hall, a son of Bishop Hall and himself promoted to the Bishopric of Chester after the Restoration; and the Rector of St. Andrew's, Holborn, before the civil troubles was Dr. John Hacket, already well known to us (Vol. II. 225-8), and also afterwards a Bishop. Both of these, as strenuous Prelatists, must have been dispossessed from their charges long before the time with which we are now concerned; and I have not been able to ascertain who were their Presbyterian successors at this exact date.--There may be some significance in the fact that the parish minister before whom Milton's brother Christopher and his father-in-law Mr. Powell performed the necessary ceremony of taking the Covenant, with a view to their admission to compound for their Delinquency, was William Barton, minister of John Zachary (antè, p. 485 and p. 634). The parish of St. John Zachary was one of the parishes of Aldersgate Ward, and the church stood at the north-west corner of Maiden Lane, till it was burnt down in the Great Fire of 1666; after which it was not rebuilt, and the parish of St. John Zachary was united to that of St. Ann in the same ward. Had Milton found Mr. Barton of John Zachary's a more convenient minister to have dealings with than other ministers of the Aldersgate Street and Barbican neighbourhood; and did he attend Mr. Barton's church when he attended any? If so, and if we are right in identifying this William Barton with the minister of the same name whose Metrical Version of the Psalms was preferred by the Lords to Rous's (see antè, p. 425), their metrical sympathies may have had something to do with the connexion.--The fact that a son of Bishop Hall's was Curate or Vicar of St. Botolph's, Aldersgate, at the time when the Bishop and another son of his were attacking Milton for his part in the Smectymnuan controversy, and speaking of him as then living in a "suburb sink about London," and collecting gossip about him, was not known to me when I was engaged on that part of the Biography (Vol. II. p. 390 et seq.); but it may be worth remembering even now.]; or, if the duty had been neglected, Classis IV., to which the parish of St. Botolph belonged, or Classis VIII., to which the parish of St. Andrew belonged, would have interfered; or, finally, in the case of so notorious an offender, the Provincial Synod itself would not have been asleep. True, the censure that could have been inflicted would only have been spiritual; but, by zealous management, especially if the culprit were obstinate, such spiritual censure might have led to farther prosecution by the secular courts. Certainly, if Milton had been in Scotland, this would have happened. Certainly it would have happened in London if the English Presbyterians had succeeded in subjecting that city to the grip of their absolute or ideal Presbytery. But they had not succeeded, and it was their constant lamentation that they had not. Though the Presbyterian organization of London had been voted on trial, the Congregationalist principle still asserted itself in the existence of many independent congregations and meeting-houses; though sometimes interfering with the less respectable of these, Parliament and the law- courts had taken no steps for their general suppression; and, by belonging to one of them, a Londoner of peculiar opinions might have the comfort and respectability of being a church-goer like his neighbours, and yet avoid unpleasant inquisitorship. Then, again, through what the ultra-Presbyterians regarded as the Erastian backwardness of Parliament, those offences for which the parochial or other Church-judicatories might inflict even spiritual censures had been very strictly defined. Only for certain faults of ignorance or of scandalous life, enumerated and specified by Act of Parliament, could the Presbyterian Church- judicatories debar from the communion; in any case lying beyond that range they could not act without reference to the superior authority of a great Parliamentary Commission (antè, pp. 399, 405, 423). Sore had been the complaints of the Presbyterians over this limitation of the powers of Church discipline, as well as over the negligence of Parliament in not having yet passed such an Act against Heresies and Blasphemies as might enable the State to use the sterner discipline of fines, imprisonment, scourging, and hanging, in aid of true Christianity. Even as things were, however, it may be wondered that some zealot did not try to bring Milton's case within the powers actually assigned to the Church-courts, or to push it on the notice of the secular judges in virtue of such Acts as did exist against Heresy. There was very good reason, however, for not making the experiment. It had already been tried and bad failed. Twice had Milton's case been brought before Parliament, and Parliament had distinctly declined to trouble him. Evidently, whatever the hotter Presbyterians desired, Milton was safe in the respect entertained for him personally by some of those who were at the head of affairs, or in an opinion prevailing in high quarters that the publication of a new speculation on Divorce was not an offence for which a man otherwise eminent ought to be questioned at law.

What cannot be done in one way, however, may sometimes be done in another. Not only was London the central stronghold of English Presbyterianism; the power of Presbyterianism there centralized was a kind of Proteus. One of its forms was the Westminster Assembly, a large nucleus of which consisted of ministers from London and the suburbs; another, since May 1647, was the London Provincial Synod. But, in aid of these two bodies, and including many that belonged to both, there was a third, of vaguer character, in that Sion College conclave which the London clergy had instituted of their own accord for the concoction of notions that might take shape in the Assembly or the Synod (antè, p. 394). Now, in December 1647, this Sion College conclave, "since they could do no more," sent forth a Presbyterian manifesto of some magnitude. It was "A Testimony to the Truth of Jesus Christ, and to our Solemn League and Covenant; as also against the Errors, Heresies, and Blasphemies of these times, and the Toleration of them: wherein is inserted a Catalogue of the said Errors, &c.: subscribed by the Ministers of Christ within the Province of London, Dec. 14, 1647."

This Testimony, which was immediately published, [Footnote: London: Printed by A. M. for Tho. Underhill at the Bible in Wood Street: 1648.] bore the signatures of 58 London ministers in all, of whom 41 signed to the whole document, while 17, being members of Assembly, abstained from signing to those parts that related particularly to the Confession of Faith and the Directory of Worship, not because they did not thoroughly approve of those parts, but because they thought themselves precluded, by constitutional etiquette, from publicly affirming portions of the Assembly's work which still waited full Parliamentary sanction. All the 58, however, subscribed to that main portion of the Testimony which consisted in an enumeration, and condemnation of certain "abominable errors, damnable heresies, and horrid blasphemies." Among the seventeen members of Assembly so subscribing were Dr. Lazarus Seaman of Allhallows, Bread Street (Milton's native parish), then Prolocutor of the London Provincial Synod; Dr. Gouge of Blackfriars, ex-Prolocutor of the same; Dr. Hoyle of Stepney, Dr. Tuckney, and Messrs. Gataker, Calamy, Ashe and Case; and among the forty-one others were Samuel Clarke of Benetfink, Christopher Love of Anne's, Aldersgate, John Downam of Allhallows, Thames Street, Henry Roborough, one of the scribes of the Assembly and minister of Leonard's, Eastcheap, and John Wallis, sub-clerk of the Assembly, now uniting as well as he could the duties of that office and the parish-cure of Gabriel's, Fenchurch Street, with his mathematical proclivities and his association with the "physicists" of the Invisible College. And what were the errors, heresies, and blasphemies, thus publicly certified against by these London divines and the rest? They were classified with great punctuality under nineteen heads, each head being subdivided into specific varieties of error, and the chief heretics under each openly named. First came Anti-Scripturism, or "Errors against the divine authority of Holy Scriptures," associated with the names of John Goodwill and Laurence Clarkson; then, in four heads and their subdivisions, came Anti-Trinitarianism, or "Errors against the nature and essence of God, against the Trinity, against the Deity of the Son of God, and against the Deity and divine worship of the Holy Ghost," the culprits named for chief condemnation in this department being Biddle and Paul Best; and so on the catalogue proceeds through various forms of Arminianism, Antinomianism, Seekerism, Anti-Sabbatarianism, Antipædobaptism, Anabaptism, Materialism or Mortalism, ending in Tolerationism. Among the Arminians denounced as notorious are Paul Best again, Paul Hobson, but especially John Goodwin again, and the Episcopalian and Royalist Dr. Henry Hammond, whose Practical Catechism, published in 1644, is cited as full of Arminian error. Among the Antinomians are denounced Randall, Simson, Eaton, Crisp, and Erbury; among the Seekers, Saltmarsh and Jos. Salmon; among the Anti- Sabbatarians, Saltmarsh again; among the Antipædobaptists and Anabaptists, Saltmarsh again, Tombes, and Webb. In a special group, as opposing magistracy and lawful oaths, are mentioned Roger Williams, Samuel Gorton, and Dr. Henry Hammond again; the chief representative of the tremendous doctrine of Materialism or the Denial of the Immortality of the Soul is R. O., the anonymous author of the tract on Man's Mortality; and among the leading Tolerationists or representatives of the grand error of Liberty of Conscience, "patronizing and promoting all other errors, heresies, and blasphemies whatsoever," are named Roger Williams again and Paul Best again.--One head or department in this long black list we have reserved. It is the 17th in order, including "Errors touching Marriage and Divorce." Here the anonymous author of a pamphlet called Little Nonsuch, published in 1646, bears the brunt of the obloquy, on account of the opinion that, as "that marriage is most just which is made without any ambitious or covetous end," so, "if this liking and mutual correspondency happen betwixt the nearest of kindred, then it is also the most natural, the most lawful, and according to the primitive (Patriarchal) purity and practice." But Milton comes in company with this Little Nonsuch, as hardly less worthy of execration on account of his Divorce Doctrine. The main proposition of his Doctrine and Discipline of Divorce is extracted textually from page 6 of the Second or 1644 Edition of that treatise, to show what a dreadful doctrine had been there maintained; but, in case this should not seem enough, the Testifying Divines, in the marginal note where they give the reference, add the words, "Peruse the whole book." They do not name Milton fully, but only by his initials "J. M.," as on the title-page of his Treatise. [Footnote: There is a general account of this Testimony of the London ministers in Dec. 1647 in Neal's Puritans, III. 359-363; but the account in the text is from the published copy of the Testimony itself.]

Sold at the shop of that very Underhill in Wood Street who had been the publisher of three of Milton's own pamphlets in the Smectymnuan Controversy in 1641 (antè, p. 450), this Testimony of the London ministers had an extensive circulation. It was adopted, in fact, as the authorized manifesto of all the English Presbyterianism then most militant for that full right of ecclesiastical and civil control over heresy and its dissemination which Parliament hitherto had refused to recognise. In a short time, accordingly, it received the adhesion of 64 ministers in Gloucestershire, 84 in Lancashire, 83 in Devonshire, and 71 in Somersetshire. Nor was this subscription of the same printed document by 360 of the most active Presbyterian ministers throughout England a mere appeal to public opinion. It was intended as an aid to Presbyterianism in its anxious endeavour to obtain even yet all it wanted from Parliament. One observes, for example, that, within a month after the manifesto of the London ministers had gone forth from Sion College, i.e. on the 12th of January, 1647-8, a petition was presented to Parliament by the London Provincial Synod itself, praying for various extensions and amendments of the Presbyterian system in the City, among which was the better establishment of Church censures for notorious and scandalous offenders. [Footnote: Neal's Puritans, III. 359-363; and Lords Journals, Jan. 12, 1647-8; but see also Halley's Lancashire and its Puritanism (1869), I. 467 et seq.]

At least two of the heretics denounced in the Sion College manifesto published replies. The Royalist Dr. Henry Hammond thought it worth while to defend his Practical Catechism in a tract called Views of some Exceptions, &c. [Footnote: Wood's Ath. III. 494-5.] John Goodwin of Coleman Street, who had been more largely attacked, and who indeed had reason to believe that the manifesto was mainly directed against himself, replied with his usual cool stoutness in a pamphlet called Sion College Visited. He there rebukes his accusers for their uncharitableness, unfairness, and malice in seeking to "exasperate the sword of the civil magistrate" against pious and peaceable citizens who had done them no injury. [Footnote: Jackson's Life of Goodwin. 172-175.] In effect, this reply of Goodwin's answered for the others as well as for himself. Milton, at all events, let the thing pass unnoticed. Entering his house in High Holborn, it may have been enough for him to repeat to himself, by way of comment, the lines he had already written--

"I did but prompt the age to quit their clogs By the known rules of ancient liberty, When straight a barbarous noise environs me Of owls and cuckoos, asses, apes, arid dogs;"

or perhaps, by way of more determinate conclusion, his other and ever famous line,

"New Presbyter is but old Priest writ large."

ANOTHER LETTER FROM CARLO DATI: TRANSLATION OF NINE PSALMS FROM THE HEBREW.

Exactly at this time, when the repeated attentions of New Presbyter in England must have been annoying Milton, he had a friendly gleam from the land of the Old Priest. Carlo Dati had duly received his Latin Epistle of the previous April, and had acknowledged it in a long Italian letter, dated Nov. 1, 1647, but which may not have reached Milton till Jan. 1647- 8, or even later. The letter still exists in Dati's own hand, and the following is a translation of as much of it as can interest us here:--

All Illmo. Sig. Gio. Miltoni, Londra [meaning literally "To the most illustrious Signor John Milton, London;" but this is merely the polite Italian form of correspondence, and implies no more than "To Mr. John Milton, London."]

When all hope of receiving letters from you was dead in me, most keen as was my desire for such, lo! there arrives one to delight me more than I can express with this most grateful pen. O what feelings of boundless joy that little paper raise in my heart--a paper written by a friend so admirable and so dear; bringing to me, after so long a time and from so distant a land, news of the welfare of one about whom I was as anxious as I was uncertain, and assuring me that there remains so fresh and so kind a remembrance of myself in the noble soul of Signor John Milton! Already I knew what regard he had for my country; which reckons herself fortunate in having in great England (separated, as the Poet said, from our world) one who magnifies her glories, loves her citizens, celebrates her writers, and can himself write and discourse with such propriety and grace in her beautiful idiom. And precisely this it is that moves me to reply in Italian to the exquisite Latin letter of my honoured friend, who has such a very singular faculty of reviving dead tongues and making foreign ones his own; hoping that there may be something agreeable to him in the sound of a language which he speaks and knows so well. I will take the same opportunity of earnestly begging you to be please to honour with your verses the glorious memory of Signor Francesco Rovai, a distinguished Florentine poet prematurely dead, and, to the best of my belief, well known to you: this having already been done at my request by the very eminent Nicolas Heinsius and Isaac Vossius of Holland, peculiarly intimate and valued friends of mine, and famous scholars of our age. [Footnote: About Nicolas Heinsius (1620-1681) and his intimacy with Dati and the other Florentine wits, see Vol. I. 721 2. Both he and Isaac Vossius (1618-1688) will reappear in closer connexion with Milton himself.] Signor Francesco was noble by birth, endowed by nature with a genius of the highest kind, which was enriched by culture and by unwearied study of the finest sciences. He understood Greek excellently, spoke French, and wrote Latin and Italian wonderfully. He composed Tragedies, and excelled also in lyrical Canzoni, in which he praised heroes and discountenanced all vice, particularly in one set of seven made against the seven capital sins. He was well-bred, courteous, a favourite with our Princes, or uncorrupted manners, and most religious. He died young, without having published his works: a splendid obituary ceremonial is being prepared for him by his friends, faulty only in the fact that the charge of the funeral oration has been imposed upon me. Should you be pleased to send me, as I hope, some fruit of your charming genius for such a purpose, you will oblige me not only, but all my country; and, when the Poems of Signor Francesco are published, with the eulogisms upon him, I will see that copies are sent you.--But, since I have begin to speak of our language and our poets, let me communicate to you one of the observations which, in the leisure-hours left me from my mercantile business, I occasionally amuse myself with making on our writers. The other day, while I was reflecting on that passage in Petrarch's Triomf' d'Amor, C. 3:

"Dura legge d'Amor! mà benchè obliqua, Servar conviensi, però ch' ella aggiunge Di cielo in terra, universale, antiqua," [Footnote: "Hard law of Love! but, however unjust, it must be kept, because it reaches from heaven to earth, universal, eternal."]

I perceived that already the gifted Castelvetro had noted in it some resemblance to the lines in Horace, Ode I. 33:

"Sic visum Veneri; cui placet impares Formas atque animos sub juga ahenea Sævo mittere cum joco,"-- [Footnote: "So it seemed good to Venus; whose pleasure it is, in savage jest, to bind unlike forms and minds in a brazen yoke of union."]

excellently imitated by the reviver of Pindaric and Anacreontic poesy, Gabriello Chiubrera, in Canzonetta 18:

"Ah! che vien cenere Penando un amator benche fedele! Cosi vuol Venere, Nata nell' ocean, nume crudele." [Footnote: "Ah that there should be ashes from the torture of a lover, though faithful! So Venus wills it, the ocean-born, a cruel deity."]

To me these verses look like a little bit taken from Horace, as the remainder is taken from Tibullus, not without a notable improvement; for in Tibullus, Eleg. I. 2, one reads this threat against the revealers of Love's secrets:--

"Nam, fuerit quicumque loquax, is sanguine natam, Is Venerem e rapido sentiet esse mari." [Footnote: "For whosoever is indiscreet with his tongue, he shall feel that Venus was born of blood and came from the rapid sea."]

[Dati then suggests the reading of rabido in the last line and discusses the subject in six folio pages, with passages from Catullus, Ovid, Virgil, Horace, Seneca, Claudian, Homer, Tasso, &c.; and then proceeds as follows]:

I communicate to you these considerations of mine, sure of being excused, and kindly advised by your exquisite learning in such matters as I submit, urgently begging you to pardon me if excess of affection, the sense of being so long without you, and our great intimacy, have made me exceed the limits proper for a letter.--It is an extreme grief to me that the convulsions of the kingdom have disturbed your studies; and I anxiously await your Poems, in which I believe I shall have large room for admiring the delicacy of your genius, even if I except those which are in depreciation of my Religion, and which, as coming from a friendly mouth, may well be excused, though not praised. This will not hinder me from receiving the others, conscious as I am of my own zeal for freedom. Meanwhile I beg Heaven to make and keep you happy, and to keep me in your remembrance, giving me proofs thereof by your generous commands. All friends about me send you salutations and very affectionate respects.

Your most devoted,

Florence, 1st Nov. 1647. CARLO DATI [Footnote: The original of this letter is in the possession of Mr. J. Fitchett Marsh of Warrington, who has printed facsimiles of the opening and closing words ("All' Illmo. Sig. Gio. Miltoni, Londra," and "Ser. Devotino. Carlo Dati") in his Milton Papers. To Mr. Marsh's kindness I owe the transcript from which I have made the translation; and the words within brackets, describing the omitted portion in the middle, are Mr. Marsh's own.]

Circumstanced as Milton was when he received this letter, he can hardly have been in a mood to respond sufficiently to its minute and overflowing dilettantismo. The amiability and polite affectionateness, perceptible even yet through the dilettantism, may have been pleasant to him; and he may have noted the subtle and delicate expression of sympathy with his domestic unhappiness which seems to be conveyed in the passages quoted, as if by accident, from Petrarch, Horace, Chiabrera, and Tibullus. Dati may have been there replying to that portion of Milton's letter in which he had vaguely intimated his private melancholy in being doomed to unfit companionship; or he may have heard more particular rumours in Florence of Milton's marriage-mishap and its consequences. At all events, there is no trace of any answer by Milton to this long epistle from Dati, or of any poetical contribution sent by him, as Dati had requested, to the exequies of the interesting Rovai.

About the time when Milton should have been answering Dati's epistle, enclosing the requested tribute to the memory of Rovai, and also the exquisite comments which Dati expected on his quotations from Petrarch, Horace, Chiabrera, and Tibullus, his occupation, we find, was very different. "April, 1648, J. M. Nine of the Psalms done into Metre, wherein all but what is in a different character are the very words of the Text translated from the Original;" such is the heading prefixed by Milton himself to the Translations of Psalms LXXX.-LXXXVIII. which are now included among his Poetical Works. [Footnote: The heading stands so in the Second Edition of Milton's Miscellaneous Poems, published by himself in 1678.] Through some mornings and evenings of that month, therefore, we can see him, in his house in High Holborn, with the Hebrew Bible before him, making it his effort to translate, as literally as possible, these nine Psalms into English verse. On looking at the result, as it now stands among his Poems, with Hebrew words printed occasionally in the margin, and every phrase for which there is not a voucher in the original printed carefully in italics, one has little difficulty in perceiving one of the motives of Milton in this metrical experiment. It was his knowledge of the interest then felt in the chance of some English metrical version of the Psalms that should supersede, for popular purposes and in public worship, the old version of Sternhold and Hopkins. Rous's version, with amendments, had been recommended by the Westminster Assembly, and approved by the Commons (antè, 425); the Lords were still standing out for Barton's competing version (antè, 512); other versions were in the background, but had been heard of. In these circumstances, might not a true poet, attending to all the essential conditions, and especially to the prime one of exactness to the Hebrew original, exhibit at least a specimen of a better version than any yet offered?

Unfortunately, if this was Milton's intention, it cannot be said that he succeeded. By all the critics it is admitted that his version of those Nine Psalms is inferior to what we should have expected from him; nor is it, I think, the mere prejudice of habit that leads those that have been accustomed to one particular revision of Rous's version--that which has been the Scottish authorized Psalter since 1650--to prefer Psalms LXXX.- LXXXVIII. as there given, rude though the versification is, to the Translations of the same Psalms proposed even by Milton. Something of this impression may have prevailed even in 1648, if, as is likely enough, Milton took the trouble of showing his translations to some who were interested in the question of the new Psalter, and wavering between Rous's and Barton's. On the faith of dates, however, there is another interest to us now in these careful translations by Milton of Psalms LXXX.-LXXXVIII. in April 1648. Why did he choose those particular Psalms? Not for metrical experiment only, but also because their mood fitted him. He needed the strong Hebrew of those Psalms himself, and he drank it in afresh from the text that he might reproduce it for himself and others. Petrarch, Tibullus, Horace, Chiabrera! silence all such for the time, and let the Hebrew Psalmist speak! Thus (Psalm LXXX.):--

"Turn us again; thy grace divine To us, O God, vouchsafe; Cause thou thy face on us to shine, And then we shall be safe."

Or again, with reference to the dangers then gathering round Parliamentary England (Psalm LXXXIII.):--

"For they consult with all their might, And all as one in mind Themselves against thee they unite, And in firm union bind. The tents of Edom, and the brood Of scornful Ishmael, Moab, with them of Hagar's blood That in the desert dwell, Gebal and Ammon, there conspire, And hateful Amalec, The Philistims, and they of Tyre, Whose bounds the sea doth check. With them great Asshur also bands And doth confirm the knot All these have lent their armed hands To aid the sons of Lot. Do to them as to Midian bold That wasted all the coast, To Sisera, and, as is told Thou didst do to Jabin's host, When at the brook of Kishon old They were repulsed and slain, At Endor quite cut off, and rolled As dung upon the plain."

Or perhaps, with closer personal reference, such lines as these (Psalm LXXXVII.):--

"The Lord shall write it in a scroll That ne'er shall be outworn, When He the nations doth enroll, That this man there was born: Both they who sing and they who dance With sacred songs are there; In thee fresh brooks and soft streams glance, And all my fountains clear."

MILTON THROUGH THE SECOND CIVIL WAR: HIS PERSONAL INTEREST IN IT, AND DELIGHT IN THE ARMY'S TRIUMPH: HIS SONNET TO FAIRFAX.

While these translations were being written, there was the ominous rumour of the Engagement between the Scots and the King in the Isle of Wight, terrifying all men's minds with the prospect of a Second Civil War. We have seen what effects this prospect had on the English Parliament--how the resolute mood of the winter of 1647-8 was changed into a mood of timidity; how negotiations with the King were again talked of; how the Presbyterians recovered from their temporary submission to the Independents, and began to turn on them rather than on the King; how, in order to repudiate the Republican sentiments appearing in the Army and elsewhere, the Commons pledged themselves to a continuance of Royalty and the House of Lords, and, in order to please the English Presbyterians and the Scots, the two Houses passed at length the tremendous Ordinance against Heresies and Blasphemies, making the least of them punishable with imprisonment and the graver punishable with death. This last Ordinance, passed May 2, 1648, the very day before the meeting of the Third Provincial Synod of London in Sion College, must have given great satisfaction to that body, but may well have spread alarm through general society. Beyond a doubt, most of those persons who had been denounced as notorious heretics and blasphemers in the Sion College manifesto of the preceding December were, by this Ordinance, liable to death if they did not recant. With due zeal on the part of the prosecution, nothing could have saved from the scaffold such of Milton's co-heretics as Biddle, Paul Best, the anonymous Mortalist R. 0. (Richard Overton, or Clement Wrighter?), or even perhaps John Goodwin. Milton's particular heresy not being specifically named in the Ordinance, it would have been more difficult to apply it to him; but, if the terrible Presbyterian discipline which the Ordinance favoured were once imposed upon London, there would have been ingenuity enough to include Milton somehow among those worthy of minor punishment.

The comfort was that, before the Ordinance could come into real effect, before the terrible Presbyterian discipline it promised could be set up, the SECOND CIVIL WAR had to be fought through. How would that war end? Would it end in a triumph of Presbyterianism in hypocritical reconciliation with Royalty; or, despite the ugly mustering of forces in all parts of England to aid Duke Hamilton and his Scottish invasion, would it end, after all, in the triumph of that little English Army of Independents and Sectaries which had always beaten before, and might now, though distrusted and discountenanced by its own masters, prove once more its matchless mettle? With what anxiety, through May, June, July, and August 1648, must Milton, with myriads of other Englishmen, have revolved these questions! With what anxiety must he have watched Fairfax's movements round London, his preliminary smashings of the Royalist Insurrection in Kent and Essex, and then the concentration of his efforts (June 12) on the siege of Colchester! With what anxiety must he have followed Cromwell into Wales, heard of his doings against the insurgents there, and then of his rapid march into the north (Aug. 3--10), to meet the invading Scottish Army under Duke Hamilton! But O the relief at last! O the news upon news of that glorious month of August 1648! Hamilton and the Scots utterly routed by Cromwell in the three days' battle of Preston (Aug. 17-19); Colchester at last surrendered to Fairfax (Aug 28); the Prince of Wales a fugitive back to Holland with his useless fleet (Aug. 28); the little English Army of Independents and Sectaries were more everywhere the victor, and the Parliament and the Presbytery-besotted Londoners ruefully accepting the victory when they would have been nearly as glad of a defeat! No fear now of any very violent execution of the Ordinance against Heresies and Blasphemies, or of a Presbyterian discipline of absolutely intolerable stringency! The Army and the Independents were once more supreme.

The sole piece of Milton's verse that has come down to us from the time of the Second Civil War is an expression of his joy at its happy conclusion. It is in the form of a Sonnet to Fairfax. The Sonnet is generally printed with the mere heading "To the Lord General Fairfax;" but in the original in Milton's own hand among the Cambridge MSS. one reads this heading through a line of erasure; "On ye Lord Gen. Fairfax at ye seige of Colchester." This assigns the Sonnet to the end of August, or to September, 10-48.

"Fairfax, whose name in arms through Europe rings, And fills all mouths with envy or with praise, And all her jealous monarchs with amaze, And rumours loud that daunt remotest kings, Thy firm unshaken virtue ever brings Victory home, though new rebellions raise Their Hydra-heads, and the false North displays Her broken League to imp their serpent wings: O yet a nobler task awaits thy hand, For what can War but endless war still breed, Till Truth and Right from Violence be freed, And public Faith cleared from the shameful brand Of public Fraud! In vain doth Valour bleed, While Avarice and Rapine share the land." [Footnote: For obvious reason, Milton could not print this Sonnet in the Second or 1673 Edition of his Minor Poems. It was first printed by Phillips at the end of his Memoir of Milton prefixed to the English translation of Milton's State Letters in 1688; and Toland inserted it in his Life of Milton in 1698.]

Through the later months of 1648 Milton's heart must have been wholly with Fairfax and the other Army-chiefs, as he saw them driving things, cautiously at first, but more and more boldly by degrees, into the exact course marked out by this Sonnet. Their very professions were that, having finished the war and crushed the Hydra-heads of the new rebellions, they must and would proceed to the yet nobler task of preventing future wars, by freeing Truth and Right once for all from Violence, and clearing the public Faith of England from the brand of public Fraud. Hence, from September to December, the adoption by the Army of that peculiarly intrepid policy which has been described in our last chapter. Though the Parliament began their new Treaty with the King in the Isle of Wight, there were significant signs from the first that the Army regarded the Treaty with utter disdain; as the Treaty proceeded, regiment after regiment spoke out, each with its manifesto calling for justice on the King, and otherwise more or less democratic; and so till the Army rose at last collectively, issued its great Remonstrance and programme of a Democratic Constitution (Nov. 16), dragged the King from his unfinished Treaty at Newport to safer keeping in Hurst Castle (Dec. 1), and itself marched into London to superintend the sequel (Dec. 2). Nominally in the centre of all this was the Lord General Fairfax, with Ireton as his chief adviser. Cromwell had not yet returned from his work in the north.

BIRTH OF MILTON'S SECOND CHILD: ANOTHER LETTER FROM CARLO DATI.

In the very midst of these thrilling public events there inserts itself a little domestic incident of Milton's life in Holborn. Oct. 25, 1648, his second child was born, two years and three months after the first. This also was a daughter, and they called her Mary after her mother. From that date on to our limit of time in the present volume we have no distinct incident of the Holborn household to record, unless it be the receipt of another letter from Carlo Dati. Although the amiable young Italian had received no answer to his last, of Nov. 1647, there had meantime readied him, by some slow conveyance, those copies of the Latin portion of Milton's published volume of Poems which had been promised him as long ago as April of the same year. This occasioned the following letter:--

Illmo. Sig. e Pron Osso [literally, "Most Illustrious Sir and Most Honoured Master," but the phrase is merely one of custom].

As far back as the end of last year I replied to your very courteous and elegant letter, thanking you affectionately for the kind remembrance you are pleased to entertain of me. I wrote, as I do now, in Italian, knowing my language to be so dear and familiar to you that in your mouth it scarcely appears like a foreign tongue. Since then I have received two copies of your most erudite Poems, and there could not have reached me a more welcome gift; for, though small, it is of infinite value, as being a gem from the treasure of Signor John Milton. And, in the words of Theocritus:--

[Greek: hæ megala chariz eoro xiyn holigo, panta de gimanta ta par' philon.]

"Great grace may be In a slight gift: all from a friend is precious."

I return you therefore my very best thanks, and pray Heaven to put it in my power to show my devoted appreciation of your merit. There are some pieces of news which I will not keep from you, because I am sure, from your kindness, they will be agreeable to you. The most Serene Grand Duke my master has been pleased to appoint me to the Chair and Lectureship of Humanity in the Florentine Academy, vacant by the death of the very learned Signor Giovanni Doni of Florence. This is a most honourable office, and has always been held by gentlemen and scholars of this country, as by Poliziano, the two Vettori, and the two Adriani, luminaries in the world of letters. Last week, on the death of the Most Serene Prince Lorenzo of Tuscany, uncle of the reigning Grand Duke, I made the funeral oration; when it is published, it shall be my care to send you a copy. I have on hand several works, such as, please God, may lead to a better opinion of me among my learned and kind friends. Signor Valerio Chimentelli has been appointed by his Highness to be Professor of Greek Literature in Pisa, and there are great expectations from him. Signors Frescobaldi, Coltellini, Francini, Galilei, and many others unite in sending you affectionate salutations; and I, as under more obligation to you than any of the others, remain ever yours to command. [No signature, but addressed on the outside, All Illmo. Signor e Pron Osso, Il Signor Giovanni Miltoni, Londra.] [Footnote: The Italian of this letter is printed in the Appendix to Mr. Mitford's Life of Milton prefixed to Pickering's edition of Milton's Works, and was communicated, I believe, by the late Mr. Watts of the British Museum from the original in that collection. It is doubtless the copy which Milton received. Of the Doni mentioned in the letter, as Dati's predecessor in the chair of Belles Lettres at Florence, we had a glimpse Vol. I. p. 746. He died, Mr. Watts says, in Dec. 1647, and left to Dati the charge of publishing his works. Frescobaldi, Coltellini, and Francini are already known (Vol. I. 725-9); the Galilei mentioned is not the great Galileo, who had died in 1642, but his natural son Vincenzo Galilei, also a man of talent.--As we take leave of Dati at this point, for some time at least, I may quote an interesting sentence, respecting one of his intentions in later life, from the notices of him in Salvini's Fasti Consolari dell' Accademia Fiorentina (1717): "He had particularly in view the publication of the letters which he had received from various literary men, such as John Milton, Isaac Vossius, Paganino Gaudenzio, Giovanni Rodio, Valerio Chimentelli, and Nicolas Heinsius: from the last he had a very large number." When he died, Jan. 11, 1675, a few months after Milton, he had not fulfilled this intention; but it is likely, as we have seen (antè, p.655), that there has survived from among his papers only the one letter of Milton to him which Milton himself published. ] Florence, Dec. 4, 1648.

While this letter was on its way to Milton, and possibly before it could have reached him, there had enacted itself, close within his view in High Holborn, that final catastrophe of a great political drama the boom of which was not to stop within the British Islands, but was to be heard in Italy itself and all the foreign world.

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Chapter III

THE TWO HOUSES IN THE GRASP OF THE ARMY: FINAL EFFORTS FOR THE KING: PRIDE'S PURGE AND ITS CONSEQUENCES--THE KING BROUGHT FROM HURST CASTLE TO WINDSOR: ORDINANCE FOR HIS TRIAL PASSED BY THE COMMONS ALONE: CONSTITUTION OF THE COURT--THE TRIAL IN WESTMINSTER HALL: INCIDENTS OF THE SEVEN SUCCESSIVE DAYS: THE SENTENCE--LAST THREE DAYS OF CHARLES'S LIFE: HIS EXECUTION AND BURIAL.

In taking the King out of the Isle of Wight, and lodging him for a time in the solitary keep of Hurst Castle on the Hampshire coast, the Army had proclaimed their intention of bringing him to public justice, and it was that they might compel this result that they had marched into London with Fairfax at their head. As they desired that the proceedings should be regular, they had resolved that the two Houses of Parliament, or at least one of them, should conduct the business.

THE TWO HOUSES IN THE GRASP OF THE ARMY: THEIR FINAL EFFORTS FOR THE KING: PRIDE'S PURGE AND ITS CONSEQUENCES.

Here was their difficulty. On Dec. 2, 1648, when the Army took possession of London, there were nineteen Peers present in their places in the House of Lords: viz. the Earl of Manchester, as Speaker; the Earls of Pembroke, Rutland, Salisbury, Suffolk, Lincoln, Mulgrave, Middlesex, Stamford, Northumberland, and Nottingham; Viscount Save and Sele; and Lords Howard, Maynard, Dacres, Montague, North, Hunsdon, and Berkeley. From such a body the Army could not hope much. Three or four of them might be reckoned on as thorough-going; but to most a crisis had come which was too terrible. Ah! had they foreseen it six years before, had they then foreseen that their own order and all the pleasantness of their aristocratic lives would go down in the contest to which they were lending themselves, would their choice between the two sides have been the same? To have sat on through those six years, a mere residuary rag of the English Peerage, at variance with the King and the vast majority of their own order; to have figured through the struggle as nominally the superior House, but really the mere ciphers of the Commons; to have had to throw all their aristocratic dignity and all their permissible conservatism at last into the miserable form of partisanship with a despotic Presbyterianism and zeal for the suppression of Sects, Heresies, and Independency:--here was a retrospect for men of rank, men of ambition, men of pride in their pedigrees! And now to have an Army of these Independents, Sectaries, and Heretics, holding them by the throat, and prepared to dictate to them the alternative of their own annihilation or their assent to a deed of horror!--Such being the position of the Lords, how was it with the Commons? In that House about 260 members were still giving attendance, or were at hand to attend when wanted. On the 2nd of December there were 232 in the House. A staunch minority of these were Independents in league with the Army; but the decided majority were men of the Presbyterian party, full of regrets at the failure of the Treaty of Newport, but ready to resume negotiations with the King on the basis of the terms offered him in that Treaty, or indeed now on any other basis on which there could be agreement. Detestation of the Army was, therefore, the ruling feeling in this House too: but the detestation was mingled with dread. With regiments at their doors, with regiments posted here and there on the skirts of the City, all alert against any symptom of a rising of the Presbyterian Londoners, they could not hope now for any chance of seeing the Army overmastered for them by the only means left-popular tumult and a carnage in the streets. All that the Commons could do, therefore, was to be sullen, and offer a passive resistance. [Footnote: Lords and Commons Journals of Dec. 2, 1648; and Records of Divisions in Commons Journals through the previous month. There were thirteen divisions in that month, showing an attendance ranging from 80 to 261.]

It was on Monday the 4th and Tuesday the 5th of December that the attitude which the two Houses meant to take towards the Army was definitely ascertained. On the first of these days, the news of the King's removal to Hurst Castle having meanwhile arrived, there was a fierce debate in the Commons over that act of the Army, the Presbyterians protesting against its "insolency," and at length carrying, by a majority of 136 votes to 102, a Resolution that it had been done "without the knowledge or consent" of the House. On the same day the House proceeded to a debate, continued all through the night, and till nine o'clock next morning, on the results of the Treaty of Newport. The Presbyterian speakers, such as Sir Robert Harley, Sir Benjamin Rudyard, Harbottle Grimstone, Sir Simonds D'Ewes, and Clement Walker, contended that the King's concessions were satisfactory; the negative was maintained by a succession of speakers, among whom were the two Vanes. The Presbyterians, having originally put the question in this form, "Whether the King's Answers to the Propositions of both Houses be satisfactory," did not risk a division on so wide an issue, but thought it more prudent to divide on the previous question, "Whether this question shall now be put." Having carried this in the negative by 144 to 93, they were enabled to shape the question in this likelier form, "That the Answers of the King to the Propositions of both Houses are a ground for the House to proceed upon for the Settlement of the Peace of the Kingdom;" and it was on the question in this form that the debate was protracted through the night of the 4th and into the 5th. The most extraordinary incident of the debate on the 5th was the appearance made by Prynne. He had been a member of the House only a month, having taken his seat for Newport in Cornwall on the 7th of November; and he now came forward, the poor indomitable man, with a speech of vast length and most elaborate composition, in favour of that sovereign whose reign had been to him of all men ruinous and horrible. With his face muffled to hide the scars of his old mutilations by the hangman's knife, he stood up, and, after a touching recitation of all that he had suffered, denounced the Army and its outrages on Parliamentary freedom, expounded his views of Presbyterianism and right constitutional government, and pleaded earnestly for a reconciliation with Charles. His speech, if it was actually delivered as it is printed, must have occupied four or five hours in the delivery; but one must suppose he gave only part of it and reserved the rest for the press. He was heard, he says, with great attention, and had the satisfaction not only of pleasing his own party, but also of making converts. At one time or another during the debate there had been, he says, as many as 340 members present; but many of these had been wearied out by the long night-sitting. Accordingly in the final vote on Tuesday morning there were 129 for the affirmative in the question, and only 83 for the negative: i.e. in a House of 212 there were three-fifths for a reconciliation with the King, and two-fifths for complying with the Army and bringing the King to justice. The concurrence of the Lords with the majority in the Commons was a matter of course. It was given the same day, nem. con., Manchester being in the chair, and only fourteen other Peers present. By way of tempering the whole result as much as possible, a Committee was appointed by the Commons to wait on Fairfax and his officers that afternoon, with a view to "the keeping and preserving a good correspondence" between Parliament and the Army. [Footnote: Commons and Lords Journals of the days named; Clement Walker's Hist, of Indep. Part. II. pp. 28, 29; and Parl. Hist. III. 1147-1239. Of these 92 closely printed columns of the Parl. Hist. 86 are taken up with a reprint of Prynne's speech, as published by himself in the end of Jan. 1648-9. The editor remarks on the fact that, with the exception of Clement Walker, none of the contemporary writers mention Prynne's speech at all. This confirms the supposition that it cannot have been so large in delivery as it is in print. Yet that it must have been very large appears not only from Prynne's own account, but also from who says: "This he held on the affirmative with so many strong and solid reasons, arguments, and precedents both out of Divinity, Law, History, and policy, and with so clear a confutation of the opposite argument, that no man took up the bucklers against him."]

The Army had their own plan for bringing about a "good correspondence," and they put it in operation on the two following days, Dec. 6 and 7. Not troubling themselves with the Lords--who met for mere form on each of these days (only seven present on the first and eight on the other)--they applied their plan to the Commons. It consisted in what was called PRIDE'S PURGE, the style of which was as follows:--On the morning of the 6th, when the members were going into the House, they found all the entrances blocked by two or three regiments of soldiers, under the command of Colonels Pride, Hewson, and Sir Hardress Waller. Every member, as he came up, was scrutinized by these armed critics, and especially by Colonel Pride, who had a list of names in his hand, and some people about him to point out members he did not know. If a member passed this scrutiny, they let him in; if not, they begged him not to think of taking his place in the House, and, if he persisted, hauled him back, and locked him up in one of the empty law-courts conveniently near. Mr. Prynne, who made a conspicuous resistance, was locked up in this way; Sir Robert Harley, Sir William Waller, Sir Samuel Luke, Sir Robert Pye, General Massey, Clement Walker, Sir Simonds D'Ewes, Sir Benjamin Rudyard, and others and others, including even Nathaniel Fiennes, who had shown momentary weakness, were similarly disposed of; till at length the members who had presented themselves were sifted into two divisions--a goodly band regularly within the House, and forty-one fuming outside as prisoners in the law-courts. Messages passed and repassed between the two divisions, and the House made some faint show of protest and of anxiety for the release of the arrested. Any decided motion to this effect, however, was prevented by a communication to the House from Fairfax and his General Council of Officers. Colonel Axtell and some other officers, being admitted, announced the message verbally, and it was subsequently presented in writing by Colonel Whalley. Under the name of "Humble Proposals and Desires," this paper reminded the House of their former votes for expelling and disabling Denzil Holles, General Massey, and the rest of the Presbyterian Eleven impeached by the Army in 1647, and demanded that these members, irregularly and scandalously re-admitted to their places, should be again excluded and held to trial. It farther demanded that about 90 members, alleged to have been more or less in complicity with the Scots in their late invasion of England, should be disabled; it prayed for an immediate repeal of the Votes on which the Treaty of Newport had proceeded, and of the Vote of the previous day for reliance on that Treaty; and it begged all truly patriotic members to form themselves visibly into a phalanx, apart from the others, that they might be counted and known. In fact, the message not only adopted Pride's rough measure of that day as authorized by the whole Army, but represented it as only a friendly interposition, doing for the House in part what the House must be anxious to do more fully for itself. So the afternoon passed, the forty-one, still remaining in durance, visited by various persons who had Fairfax's or Pride's permission, and especially by Hugh Peters. He took a list of their names, discoursed with them, released Rudyard and Fiennes, and promised the rest that they should be removed to fit quarters for the night in Wallingford House. As night came on, however, and Wallingford House was not available, they were taken, under guard, to a common victualling-house near, jocularly called Hell; and here, some of them walking about, and others stretched on benches and chairs, or on the floor, in two upper rooms, they spent the night "reading and singing psalms to God." Next day there were again requests from the House to Fairfax for their release. It could not be granted; but they were marched through the streets to better accommodation in two inns in the Strand, called the Swan and the King's Head. Meanwhile Pride's watch at the doors of the House had been effectively continued. There were several new arrests on the 7th; many members, not arrested, were forcibly turned back; and many more, among whom was Denzil Holies, kept prudently out of the way. Altogether, the number of the arrested was 47, and that of the excluded 96. It was a purgation quite sufficient for the Army's purpose. This was proved by a vote actually taken in the House on the 7th, after the purgation was complete. "The question being propounded, That the House proceed with the Proposals of the Army," it was carried by 50 to 28 that the question should be put and the Proposals proceeded with. As most of the minority in this division withdrew in consequence, the House was reduced from that moment to just such a tight little Parliamentary body as the Army desired. [Footnote: Lords and Commons Journals of days named; Rushw. VII. 1353-1356; Parl. Hist. III. 1240-1249 (a careful compilation of contemporary accounts).]

Cromwell was again among them. He had returned to town on the evening of the 6th, and he was in his place in the Commons on the 7th, receiving the thanks of the House, through the Speaker, for his "very great and eminently faithful services" in Wales, Scotland, and the North of England. He had not been concerned in the design of Pride's Purge, and the business was half over before his arrival in town; but he quite approved of what had been done, and said he would maintain it. The younger Vane, on the other hand, had been so staggered by the proceeding that he had withdrawn from the scene, to avoid further responsibility. [Footnote: Commons Journals, Dec. 7; Parl. Hist. III. 1246; and Godwin, III. 31.]

For a fortnight after Pride's Purge, the two Houses, reduced now to such dimensions as might suit the Army's purpose, went on transacting various business. The attendance in the Lords had dwindled to five, four, and even to three, raised on one occasion to seven. In the Commons the attendance does not seem to have ever exceeded 50 or 60. It is in the proceedings of this House, of course, that one sees the steady direction of affairs towards the end prescribed by the Army. There were all kinds of items of employment during the fortnight, including orders about the Navy, orders in mercantile matters, discharges of some of the secluded and imprisoned members, votes condemning those who continued contumacious and had ventured on protests in print, receptions of petitions and addresses of confidence from various public bodies, and attendance by such as chose on a special Fast-day Sermon preached by Hugh Peters. But through these miscellaneous proceedings one notes the main track in such votes as these:--Dec. 12, Vote for repealing all former votes and acts condoning the faults of Denzil Holles and the rest of the impeached Presbyterian leaders, and on the same day a Vote declaring the re-opening of a Treaty with the King in the Isle of Wight to have been dishonourable and apparently destructive to the good of the kingdom; Dec. 13, A farther Vote, in compliance with the Army's Proposals, disowning entirely the Treaty in the Isle of Wight, and repealing the Vote of the previous week for proceeding to a settlement on the grounds supplied by the King's Answers in that Treaty; Dec. 23, Resolution, "That it be referred to a Committee to consider how to proceed in a way of justice against the King and other capital offenders, and that the said Committee do present their opinions thereupon to the House with all convenient speed." The Committee so appointed consisted of 38 members of the House, among whom were St. John, Whitlocke, Skippon, Lord Grey, Lord Lisle, Sir Henry Mildmay, Pennington, and Henry Marten. [Footnote: Lords and Commons Journals from Dec. 8 to Dec. 23; Parl. Hist. III. 1247-1253; Whitlocke, Dec. 23.] Cromwell was not of the Committee, and some of those put upon it were not likely to attend. Indeed, though the Resolution passed without a division, the reluctance of some who were present had appeared in the course of the debate. They argued that there was no precedent in History for the judicial trial of a King, and that, if the Army were determined that Charles should be punished capitally, the business should be left to the Army itself as an exceptional and irregular power.

THE KING BROUGHT FROM HURST CASTLE TO WINDSOR: ORDINANCE FOR HIS TRIAL PASSED BY THE COMMONS ALONE: CONSTITUTION OF THE COURT.

Some days before the Resolution of Dec. 23 was adopted by the Commons, the Army had taken steps for bringing the King nearer to London, to abide the issue. He had been in Hurst Castle for about a fortnight, rather poorly lodged in the old apartments of the keep, and complaining of the fogs that rose from the salt-water marshes around, with their beds of ooze and sea-kelp. His amusement had been in the sight of the passing ships, in his daily walk along the narrow neck of shingle connecting the castle with the mainland, and in the companionship of his select attendants in the evenings, when the drawbridge was up, the guard set, the woodfires blazing indoors, and the candles lit. He had brought with him from Newport fourteen personal attendants in all, including his two gentlemen of the bedchamber, Mr. James Harrington (afterwards known as the author of Oceana) and Mr. Thomas Herbert. Both these gentlemen, though their principles and connexions were originally Parliamentarian, had, in the course of their long attendance on the royal captive, contracted a respectful affection for him. Harrington, indeed, had been speaking out so openly in praise of his Majesty's conduct in the Newport Treaty, and of the talent he had shown in his debates with the Presbyterian divines, that those who were in charge had thought it unsafe to let him remain in the service. He had therefore been dismissed, and the duty of immediate waiting on the King had been left entirely to Mr. Herbert.

It was at midnight on the 16th or 17th of December that this gentleman, asleep in the little room he occupied next to the King's chamber, was roused by hearing the drawbridge outside let down, and some horsemen enter the Castle. Next morning he found that the King had heard the noise too, and was curious to know the cause. Mr. Herbert went out to inquire, and came back with the information that Major Harrison had arrived in the night. Nothing more was said at the moment, and the King went to prayers; but later in the day the King seemed very much discomposed, and told Herbert that Harrison was the very man against whom he had most frequently received private warnings. He had never, to his knowledge, seen the Major, but he had heard much of the wild enthusiasm of his character; and, if assassination were intended, and this man were to be the agent, what likelier place than the lonely sea-keep where they then were? To relieve his Majesty's mind if possible, Mr. Herbert went out to make farther inquiries. He soon returned with the intelligence that the purpose of Harrison's visit was to arrange for his Majesty's removal to Windsor Castle. Nothing could be more agreeable to the King than the prospect of "leaving the worst to enjoy the best Castle in England;" and all fear vanished.

After two nights, Major Harrison left the Castle mysteriously as he had come, and without having seen the King or spoken to any of his attendants. He had made the necessary arrangements, and the actual removal of the King was to be superintended by the same Colonel Cobbet who had managed his abduction from the Isle of Wight. This officer, arriving two days afterwards, formally announced his business; and, his Majesty being very willing, there was no delay. Passing along the spit of land from Hurst Castle to Milford, they found a body of horse there waiting; and, under this convoy, they rode inland through Hampshire, gradually leaving the sea behind. By a route through the New Forest and past Romsey, they reached Winchester, where they made some stay, the Mayor, Aldermen, and Clergymen of the City, and many of the gentry round, coming in dutifully to pay their respects. Thence to New Alresford, and so to Farnham in Surrey. It was on the road between these two towns that they passed another troop of horse drawn up in good order, which immediately closed up in the rear and went on with them. The King was particularly struck with the appearance of the commander of this troop, a man gallantly mounted, with a velvet montero on his head, a new buff- coat, and a crimson silk scarf round his waist, who, as the King passed at an easy pace, saluted him splendidly "alia soldado" and received a gracious bow in return. Inquiring of Mr. Herbert who he was, the King was greatly surprised to learn he was the dreadful Major Harrison. He looked a real soldier, the King said, and, if there might be trust in men's faces, was not the man to be an assassin. On arriving at Farnham, where they spent the night in a private house, the King took care to pay considerable attention to Harrison. Standing by the fire before supper, in a large wainscoted room full of people, he singled out Harrison at the other end, beckoned him to come up, took him by the arm, and led him to a window-recess, where they conversed for half an hour. Apparently Harrison's words were not so satisfactory as his looks. He disowned indignantly any such design against the King as had been imputed to him, but added something to the effect that great and small alike must be subject to Law, and that Justice could pay no respect to persons. The King, who had never yet brought himself to imagine the possibility of his public trial in any form, saw no particular significance in Harrison's words, but thought them "affectedly spoken," and broke off the conversation. He was very cheerful at supper, greatly to the delight of his suite. Next day, taking Bagshot on the way and dining at Lord Newburgh's house there, they arrived at Windsor, and were received by Colonel Whichcot, the officer in command. It was the very day, Saturday Dec. 23, on which the Commons had appointed their Committee for considering the means of bringing the King to justice, and the Committee were holding their first meeting in Westminster that afternoon. The news had probably not yet reached Windsor, or it remained unknown to the King. He took up his abode in his royal apartments in the Castle; and the next day, as he paused in his Sunday walk round the exterior, he looked with no especial anxiety Londonwards, but rejoiced once more in the view of the Thames flowing by Eton, and the far expanse of lull and valley, villages and fair houses, noble even in its wintry leaflessness and the dull gloom of the December air. [Footnote: Herbert's Memoirs, 126-145; Rushworth VII. 1371; Parl. Hist. III. l26.]

Christmas-week having passed, and the Committee for justice on the King having had several meetings, the Commons, on the 1st of January 1648-9, passed a Resolution and an Ordinance. The Resolution was "That, by the fundamental laws of this kingdom, it is Treason in the King of England for the time being to levy war against the Parliament and Kingdom of England;" the Ordinance was one beginning "Whereas it is notorious that Charles Stuart, the now King of England," and ending with the appointment of a High Court of Justice for the Trial of the King, to consist of about 150 persons named as Commissioners and Judges expressly for the purpose. Five Peers were named first on this Commission; then Chief Justices Rolle and St. John and Chief Baron Wylde; then Fairfax, Cromwell, Ireton, and many more members of the Commons and Army Officers; but a considerable proportion of those named were Lawyers, Aldermen, and Citizens, not members of the House. Any twenty of the Commissioners were to be a quorum.--On the following day (Jan. 2), the Resolution and Ordinance having been sent up to the Lords for their concurrence, there was a scene of agony in that House. As many as twelve Peers had mustered for the occasion, including four of the five whom the Commons had named first in the dreadful Commission. Unanimously and passionately all the Peers present rejected both Resolution and Ordinance, the Earl of Denbigh declaring he "would be torn in pieces rather than have any share in so infamous a business," and the Earl of Pembroke, who came nearest to neutrality, saying he "loved not businesses of life and death." Having hurled this defiance at the Commons, the Lords were powerless for more, and adjourned for a week.

It was a week of rapid action and counter-defiance by the Commons. Not a few of the feebler spirits, indeed, had taken leave of absence. Whitlocke, for one, had gone into the country. The Clerk of the House, Mr. Elsyng, had feigned ill-health and resigned. Nevertheless, with a temporary substitute to do Mr. Elsyng's duty, the House pushed on. Jan. 3, they sent two of their number to inspect the Journals of the Lords and ascertain formally the proceedings of that House on the preceding day. When these were reported, some were for impeaching the twelve Peers as co-Delinquents with the King. To the majority, however, such a course appeared quite unnecessary; it was enough to declare that, as the Lords would not concur, the Commons would act without their concurrence. Jan. 4, after a debate with locked doors, this momentous Resolution was passed: "That the Commons of England in Parliament assembled do declare, That the People are, under God, the original of all just power; and do also declare, That the Commons of England in Parliament assembled, being chosen by and representing the People, have the supreme power in this nation; and do also declare, That whatsoever is enacted, or declared for law, by the Commons in Parliament assembled hath the force of a law, and all the People of this nation are concluded thereby, although the consent and concurrence of the King, or House of Peers, be not had thereunto." The Ordinance for a High Court of Justice for the King's trial had meanwhile been re-introduced, with the omission of the five Peers, the three Judges, and some other reluctant persons named in the original Ordinance, and with the addition of two eminent lawyers not there named; so that Fairfax, Cromwell, and Treton now stood at the top of a total list of 135 judicial Commissioners. Hurried through the proper three stages, this Bill became law by the authority of the Commons alone, Jan. 6,--On the 9th of January, when the Peers re-assembled after their adjournment, seven being present, they made a faint attempt to recover influence. They sketched out an Ordinance to the effect that whatsoever King of England should in future levy war against the Parliament and the Kingdom should be guilty of High Treason, and they appointed a Committee to prepare such an Ordinance. At the same time, ignoring the virtual abolition of their House by the Commons, they endeavoured to renew communications between the two Houses in the usual manner, by sending a message about various matters of mere ordinary business that had been pending between the two. This led to a curious proof that even in the thoroughgoing body that now constituted the Commons there was still a difference between most thoroughgoing and moderately thoroughgoing. There was first a division on the question whether the messengers from the Lords should he received at all; and, while 31 voted for admitting them, a minority of 18, with Henry Marten and Ludlow for their tellers, voted No. Then, after the messengers had been received and had delivered their message, it was debated whether they should be dismissed with the customary answer that the House would reply in due course by messengers of their own. Out of 52 present, 19 voted No (Ireton one of the tellers), and 33 voted for keeping up the usual courtesy. But, though a majority were thus for treating the Lords as still extant, practically the whole House was in the same ultra- democratic temper. That very day, for example, on the report of a Committee, orders were given for the engraving of a new Great Seal, with instructions that on one side there should be a map of England and Ireland, with the Islands of Jersey and Guernsey, also the English and Irish arms, and the words "The Great Seal of England: 1648," and on the reverse a representation of the House of Commons sitting, and the motto "In the First Year of Freedom by God's blessing restored: 1648." The deviser of these emblems was the Republican Henry Marten. [Footnote: Lords and Commons Journals of days named; Rushworth, VII. 1379 et seq.; Parl. Hist. III. 1253-1258; Whitlocke under dates given.]

Not even yet did Charles realize the extent of his danger. Well-treated at Windsor, and allowed the liberty of walking on the terrace and in the grounds, he had kept up his spirits wonderfully, and had been heard to say he "doubted not but within six months to see peace in England, and, in case of not restoring, to be righted from Ireland, Denmark, and other places." Even after information of the proceedings of the Commons and their rupture with the Lords had reached him, he scouted the idea of the public trial which was threatened. They dared not do such a thing! At the utmost, he expected that the Commons might venture to depose him, confine him in the Tower or elsewhere, and call upon the Prince of Wales, or perhaps the Duke of York or the Duke of Gloucester, to assume the succession! [Footnote: Herbert's Memoirs, 145-156; Whitlocke, II. 488.]

Meanwhile the Court appointed to try the King had met to constitute itself. Formal proclamation of its authority and of its business had been made in various public places in London; and, in a series of meeting held in the Painted Chamber in Westminster, preliminaries had been arranged. Not so many as half of the Commissioners appointed by the Ordinance seem to have attended at any of these meetings. Fairfax, who was present at the first (Jan. 8), recoiled then and there, and never went back. [Footnote: In Notes and Queries for July 6, 1872, Mr. William J. Thorns gave a carefully prepared list of the 135 persons named King's Judges by the Second Ordinance for the Trial, so printed as to show which of them really took part in the business thus assigned them, and to what extent, and which of them abstained wholly or withdrew before the close of the proceedings.] For President of the Court, with the title "Lord High President," there was chosen John Bradshaw, one of the lawyers added in the second form of the Ordinance, to make up for the omission there of the three Judges from the regular Law-Courts who had been appointed in the first Ordinance, but had been excused. He was over sixty years of age; had been eminent for some time in his profession; and had recently been one of a group of lawyers raised to the serjeantcy, with a view to their promotion to the Bench. As counsel for the prosecution, four lawyers, not on the Commission, were appointed, one of them John Cook, and another the learned Dutchman Dr. Dorislaus. Although these arrangements had been made before the 12th of January, another week elapsed before the Court was quite ready. The vaults under the Painted Chamber, which was to be the ordinary place of meeting of the Court, when not sitting in Westminster Hall for the open trial, had to be searched and secured against any attempt of the Guy Fawkes kind; a bullet-proof hat, it is said, had to be made for Bradshaw: the Mace and Sword of State had to be brought from their usual repositories; &c. The two Houses of Parliament meanwhile met from day to day, four or five Peers still keeping up the pretence of their corporate existence, and about 50 Commoners transacting this or that business as it happened, without the least reference to the Peers. Prynne, from his confinement in the King's Head Tavern in the Strand, had issued a defence of the King in the form of A Brief Memento to the Present Unparliamentary Juncto; and a good deal of the time of the Commons was taken up with notices of this pamphlet and votes for the prosecution of its author. [Footnote: Rushworth, VII, 1389-1394; Lords and Commons Journals; and Godwin's Hist. of the Commonwealth, II. 621 and 664-668.]

THE TRIAL IN WESTMINSTER HALL: INCIDENTS OF THE SEVEN SUCCESSIVE DAYS: THE SENTENCE.

On Friday, Jan. 19, Charles was brought from Windsor in a coach, guarded by a body of horse under Harrison's command, and conveyed through Brentford and Hammersmith to St. James's Palace. That same night he was removed to Whitehall; and, on the afternoon of Saturday the 20th, he was taken thence to Cotton House, adjoining Westminster Hall. This great hall, used for Strafford's trial, had now been fitted up for the King's, and the High Court of Justice were already assembled in it, waiting their prisoner. Bradshaw was in the chair, and sixty-six more of the Commissioners were present. Among them were Cromwell, Ireton, Henry Marten, Edmund Ludlow, General Hammond, Lord Grey of Groby, several Baronets and Knights, Colonels Ewer, Hawson, Robert Lilburne, Okey, Pride, Hutchinson, Purefoy, Sir Hardress Waller, and Whalley, with Major Harrison, Alderman Pennington of London, and three barristers. The hall was crowded with spectators, both on the floor and in the galleries; and order was kept by a guard of red-coats under Colonel Axtell. As the Court was forming itself, there had been a rather startling interruption by a woman's voice from one of the galleries. It was that of Lady Fairfax, who had gone in indignant curiosity, and, on hearing her husband's name read in the Commission, called out loudly to this effect, "He is not here, and will never be; you do him wrong to name him." This interruption was over, and the Court composed, when Charles was brought in by Colonel Hacker, and a select guard of officers armed with halberts. The Serjeant-at-Arms receiving him, and preceding him with the mace, he was conducted to the bar, where a chair of crimson velvet had been set for him. Some of his own servants followed him and stood round him. He looked sternly at the Court and at the people in the galleries; then sat down, keeping on his hat; then stood up, and turned round to look at the soldiers and the multitude; then sat down again, still with his hat on. He was now face to face with his judges. He looked at them carefully, and recognised about eight as personally known to him. [Footnote: Rushworth, VII. 1394-1399, and Herbert, 150-161. It is strange to find some points of contradiction between these two trustworthy accounts. Herbert, after apparently implying that the King had been brought from Windsor to St James's before the 19th, makes his removal from St. James's to Whitehall occur on that day. Rushworth brings him to St. James's exactly on the 19th, and removes him to Whitehall next morning. Again, Herbert makes the King conveyed from Whitehall to Cotton House "in a sedan or close chair," and describes the walk through the posted guards, along King Street and Palace Yard, adding that only he himself was allowed to go with the King that way; whereas Rushworth says that the King was brought to Cotton House from Whitehall by water, "guarded by musketeers in boats." Rushworth's accounts, written at the moment, ought to be more accurate in such particulars, and especially in dates, than Herbert's, written from recollection; but Herbert can hardly have been wrong in the matter of the sedan chair. Perhaps, while the King went in such a chair, Herbert accompanying him, most of the King's servants went by water. For the names of all the sixty-seven King's Judges present on the first day of the Trial see Mr. Thomb's list in Notes and Queries, July 6, 1872. The figure 20 there appended to a name intimates presence that day.-- Among those of the 135 appointed Judges who did not attend on that day or on any subsequent one, and therefore must be supposed to have agreed with Fairfax in disowning the entire business, we may note Skippon, Sir Arthur Haselrig, Sir William Brereton, Desborough, Lambert, Overton, Lord Lisle, and Algernon Sidney.]

The proceedings of the Trial will be best exhibited in the following condensed account of the particulars of each day:--

Saturday, Jan. 20:--The President, in a brief address to the King, informed him of the business on which the Court had met, and called on him to hear the Charge against him. Solicitor Cook, standing within the bar, on the King's right, then began to state the Charge, but was interrupted by the King, who held out a stick which he had in his hand, and laid it softly twice or thrice on the Solicitor's shoulder, bidding him stop. Bradshaw having interfered, the Solicitor continued his statement, and delivered in his Charge in writing, which Bradshaw called on the Clerk of the Court to read. Charles again interrupted, and continued to interrupt; but, Bradshaw telling him that he would be heard afterwards if he had anything to say, the document was at length read. It accused Charles Stuart, King of England, of having "traitorously and maliciously levied war against the present Parliament and the People therein represented;" and it supported the Charge by a recitation of specific acts of the King done in the First Civil War from June 1642 to 1646, and again more generally of acts done in 1648 before and during the Second Civil War. Charles had smiled often as the Charge was read; and, when the President at the close asked what answer he had to give, begged to know by what authority he had been brought thither. He had been in treaty with Parliament in the Isle of Wight; he had been forcibly taken thence; he saw no Lords present; the crown of England was hereditary and not elective; in whose name was this Court held? "In that of the Commons of England," Bradshaw replied; and there ensued a skirmish between him and the King on the question of authority, which Bradshaw ended by adjourning the Court till Monday at ten o'clock.

Monday, Jan. 22:-After a consultation in the Painted Chamber, the Court met in Westminster Hall, seventy members present, and answering to their names. The skirmish between Bradshaw and the King was renewed: Bradshaw requiring the King's Answer to the Charge "either by confessing or denying," and the King refusing the Court's jurisdiction, not for his own sake alone, he said, but "for the freedom and liberty of the people of England," imperilled by the assumption of the Court's legality. "Sir, I must interrupt you," said Bradshaw; "which I would not do, but that what you do is not agreeable to the proceedings of any Court of Justice." No Court, he said, could permit its own authority to be questioned; the King must not go out into such wide discourses; he must give a punctual and direct answer. No such answer would the King give; he would have law and reason for his being in that place at all. "Sir, you are not to dispute our authority," again interrupted Bradshaw; "you are told it again by the Court: Sir, it will be taken notice of you that you stand in contempt of the Court, and your contempt will be recorded accordingly." The King "did not know how a King might be a delinquent by any law he ever heard of;" but any Delinquent might put in a demurrer. And so on and on for a considerable time, the Clerk of the Court reading out the Resolution of the Court that the King should give his answer, and the King still insisting on giving reasons why he would not. "Serjeant, take away the prisoner," said the Lord President at last; and the King, still talking, was removed to Cotton House.----He left in writing, for subsequent publication, the reasons he wanted to state to the Court that day. The chief of them was that no earthly power could justly call a King to account. He quoted, as Scripture authority, Eccles. viii. 4: "Where the word of a King is, there is power; and who may say unto him, What dost thou?" But he appealed also to the Law and Custom of England.

Tuesday, Jan. 23:-The Court again met in Westminster Hall, 63 Commissioners present. Solicitor Cook moved that, the King having refused to plead either Guilty or Not Guilty, the rule for such cases of contumacy should be applied to him, his refusal taken pro confesso, and judgment pronounced. The Lord President, calling the King's attention to this motion, offered him another opportunity of pleading, which he used only to return to the discourses of the two previous days. "Clerk, do your duty!" said Bradshaw at last. "Duty, Sir!" exclaimed the King; and, the Clerk having again read out a paper requiring the King's positive answer to the Charge, and the King still refusing, "Clerk, record "the default," said Bradshaw, "and, gentlemen, you that took "charge of the prisoner, take him back again." That night, like the preceding, was spent in Cotton House.

Wednesday, Jan. 24, and Thursday, Jan. 25:--No public meetings of the Court in Westminster Hall on these days; but more private sessions in the Painted Chamber for the purpose of receiving the depositions of witnesses,--the Court having determined that, though not obliged to that course, they would adopt it for their own satisfaction. Accordingly there were examined more than thirty witnesses from various parts of England-- "W. C., of Patrington in Holderness, in the county of York, gentleman, aged 42;" "W. B., of Wixhall, in the county of Salop, gentleman;" "H. H., of Stratford-upon-Avon in Warwickshire;" "R. L., of Cotton in Nottinghamshire, tiler;" "J. W., of Ross in Herefordshire, shoemaker;" "S. L., of Nottingham, maltster, aged 30 years;" "A. Y., citizen and barber-surgeon of London, aged 29;" "H. G., of Gray's Inn, in the county of Middlesex, gentleman;" &c. &c. They deposed to various acts of the King seen by themselves, from the setting up of his standard at Nottingham onwards. Papers in the King's own hand, or by his authority, were also produced and read. Finally, the Court, "taking into consideration the whole matter," resolved to proceed to sentence on the King as "a tyrant, traitor, and murderer," and as "a public enemy to the Commonwealth of England."

Friday, Jan. 26:--A private sitting of the Court in the Painted Chamber, in which the Sentence was drafted, agreed to, and ordered to be engrossed.

Saturday, Jan. 27:--First another private meeting in the Painted Chamber to settle the procedure of the Court for the day, and give President Bradshaw instructions for his behaviour in any contingency that might arise, one of them being that he "should hear the King say what he would before the sentence, and not after." Then, about one o'clock, an adjournment to full state in Westminster Hall. The Lord President was now robed in scarlet, and there were 67 Commissioners present. The Court having been opened, Charles, whose presence had not been required on the three preceding days, was brought in. As he went to his place, the soldiers in the Hall called out "Justice," "Justice," and "Execution!" till the Court commanded silence. The King, in his usual posture, with his hat on, immediately began to speak. The President told him he would have liberty to do so, but must hear the Court first. After some farther attempts to speak then, the King submitted; and Bradshaw, reminding him of what had passed in the first three meetings of the Court, related the subsequent action of the Court, and their conclusion on the whole matter, and called upon him to say anything he pleased in bar of judgment, provided it were in his own defence, and not in renewed challenge of the Court's jurisdiction. With difficulty keeping off the forbidden topic, Charles dwelt on the dangers of a hasty sentence, and urged a special request which he had reserved for the occasion. It was that, before sentence was read, he should be permitted to have a conference with the Lords and Commons in the Painted Chamber. Bradshaw, though he gave it as his opinion that the request only tended to delay, and was in fact a farther declining of the jurisdiction of the Court, yet announced that the Court would withdraw to consider it. There was therefore a private consultation for half an hour in the Court of Wards, the King meanwhile being removed from the Great Hall. When the Court had returned thither, and the King had been brought back, Bradshaw intimated that the consultation had been pro forma only, that the request could not be granted, that the Court must proceed to sentence. There was another painful altercation, the King pressing his request for delay, and seeming to hint he had some important proposal to make to the Lords and Commons (abdication in favour of the Prince of Wales, it was afterwards guessed); and Bradshaw trying to stop him. At length, the King ceasing to interrupt, Bradshaw's words took continuous form for a minute or two in that kind of address which a Judge makes to a capital criminal before passing sentence. "Make an O yes," he said in conclusion to the officers, "and command silence while the Sentence is read." The Clerk then read out the sentence as it had been engressed on parchment, as follows:--"Whereas the Commons of England in Parliament, &c. [a statement of the purpose of the Court, an insertion of the Charge against Charles, and a record of his refusal to plead and the consequent proceedings of the Court], this Court doth adjudge that the said Charles Stuart, as a Tyrant, Traitor, Murderer, and a Public Enemy, shall be put to death by the severing of his head from his body. "The President then said, "The sentence now read and published is the act, sentence, judgement, and resolution of the whole Court;" whereupon all the Commissioners stood up to express their assent. "His Majesty then said, Will you hear me a word, Sir? President: Sir, you are not to be heard after the sentence. King: No, Sir? President: No, Sir, by your favour. Sir. Guard, withdraw your prisoner. King: I may speak after sentence, by your favour, Sir; I may speak after sentence, ever. By your favour, hold [the guard, one must suppose, now hustling around Charles]. The sentence, Sir--I say Sir, I do--I am not suffered to speak; Expect what justice other people will have." As he passed out with the guard, there were again cries from the soldiers of "Justice," "Justice," and some brutes among them puffed their tobacco-smoke in front of him, and threw their pipes in his way. He was taken to Whitehall and thence to St. James's. [Footnote: Abridged mainly from Rushworth's collection of accounts in 30 folio pages (VII. 1395-1425). The sixty-seven of the King's judges who were present in Westminster Hall on the 27th, when the sentence was pronounced, are to be regarded as the men most resolute in the business, the committed Regicides. Two of these (George Fleetwood and Thomas Wayte) came in at the last moment, not having attended any of the previous meetings of the Court from the beginning of the Trial on the 20th. On the other hand, some nine or ten who had been present on one, two, or even all of the three previous public days of the Trial (the 20th, 22nd, and 23rd), had dropped off before the sentence; among them whome I note Alderman Isaac Pennington. He had been present all the three previous days; but could not reconcile himself to the conclusion. Of the sixty-seven who did reconcile themselves to it, fifty-one, as I reckon, are conspicuous for their unswerving steadiness throughout the proceedings, never having missed a day in their attendance from the 20th to the 27th inclusively. Among these are Bradshaw, Cromwell, Ireton, Marten, General Hammond, Ludlow, Lord Grey of Groby, Sir John Danvers, Pride, Purefoy, Hewson, Hutchinson, Robert Lilburne, Okey, Sir Hardress Waller, Whalley, Harrison, Sir M. Livesy, and Thomas Scott. Several of those, however, who had missed one or even two of the days of the Trial had done so accidentally, or for some reason of business, and not from flinching. Finally, of the sixty-seven who were present at the sentence, and stood up when it was pronounced to signify their concurrence, several were either reluctant at the time, or at all events afterwards wished people to believe that they were.]

LAST THREE DAYS OF CHARLES'S LIFE: HIS EXECUTION AND BURIAL.

The last two days and three nights of Charles's life were spent by him in the utmost possible privacy. From the first day of his trial, by an order of the Commons, procured by the intercession of Hugh Peters, he had been allowed to have Dr. Juxon, ex-Bishop of London, constantly in attendance upon him; and there was a fresh order continuing this favour after the sentence. Except Juxon and the faithful gentleman of the bedchamber, Thomas Herbert, the King did not desire company; and it was a relief to him when, on the remonstrances of these two with Hacker, that officer desisted from his intention of placing two musketeers on guard in his chamber. [Footnote: Commons Journals of the 20th and the 27th, and Herbert, 182-3.]

On the evening of the 27th, the day of the sentence, the King's nephew, the Prince Elector, who had special permission to see him, came for the purpose, accompanied by the Duke of Richmond, the Marquis of Hertford, the Earls of Southampton and Lindsey, and some other noblemen. They had to be content with a message of thanks through Herbert, and went sorrowfully away. The same evening there also arrived Mr. Henry Seymour, with a letter from the Prince of Wales, dated from the Hague a few days before. This messenger, having been admitted by Colonel Hacker, did see the King, and knelt passionately at his feet, while he read the letter, and returned some verbal answer. There then remained only Herbert and Juxon with the King; but, as the night came on, Herbert was sent out on a message. He was to take a ring which the King gave him, an emerald between two diamonds, and deliver it to a lady living in Channel Row, who would know what it meant. The night was very dark; but Herbert, having got the pass-word from Colonel Tomlinson, who was in command outside, made his way through the sentries to the house indicated. He saw the lady, and, on delivering the ring, received from her a sealed cabinet. It was a box of diamonds and other jewels, chiefly broken Georges and Garters, which had been deposited with the lady, who was the King's laundress and wife of Sir William Wheeler. Returning with it to St. James's, Herbert found Juxon just gone to his lodging near, and the King alone. Herbert slept that night in the King's chamber, as he had done since the beginning of the trial, a pallet-bed having been brought in for the purpose by the King's order, and placed near his own bed. As always, the wax-light in the silver basin was kept faintly burning. [Footnote: Herbert, 170-178; and Wood's Ath. IV. 28-31. Wood's account was derived from Herbert himself, and substantially is the same as Herbert's own in his published Memoirs, but with additional particulars, of which some are peculiarly interesting.]

Of the next day, Sunday the 28th, there is nothing to record, save that in the morning the King opened the cabinet of jewels, and that the rest of the day was passed in hearing a sermon from Juxon on Romans ii. 16, and in private readings and devotions. Clement Walker, indeed, foists into this day a myth he had heard about a certain "paper-book" tendered to the King by "some of the grandees of the Army and Parliament," offering him his "life and some shadow of regality" on conditions of such a portentous character, so "destructive to the fundamental Government, Religion, Laws, Liberties, and Properties of the People," that his Majesty firmly refused them. The air was full of such myths. [Footnote: Clement Walker's Hist. of Independency, Part II, 109, 110.]

On Monday, the 29th, the two royal children then in England, the Princess Elizabeth, thirteen years old, and the Duke of Gloucester, a boy of eight, came to St. James's to bid their father farewell. The Princess, as the elder, and the more sensible of her father's condition, was weeping excessively; the younger boy, seeing his sister weep, took the like impression, and sobbed in sympathy and fright. He sat with them for some time at a window, taking them on his knees and kissing them, and talking with them of their duty to their mother, and to their eldest brother the Prince of Wales, who should be rightful King of England in long future years, when they would hardly remember their dead father. He distributed to them most of the jewels from the recovered casket; and at last, when the time allotted for the interview was over, and the door was opened from without, he rose hastily, again kissed them and blessed them, and then turned about to hide his own tears, while they departed crying miserably. [Footnote: Herbert, 178-180. In one particular there is a discrepancy between Herbert's account of the two days immediately succeeding Charles's sentence and the account found in Rushworth and others. Herbert says that on Saturday, after the sentence, Charles was taken from Westminster Hall back to Whitehall, "whence after two hours' space he was removed to St. James's." Accordingly it is at St. James's, as in the text, that Herbert represents Charles as passing the Saturday night and the Sunday and Monday. In Rushworth, on the other hand, the King remains at Whitehall through Saturday night and Sunday; and it is not till Monday that he is removed to St. James's, where he sees his children. Herbert's surely is the better authority in this matter.]

And what of surrounding London, what of England, what of the three kingdoms, and the world beyond the seas? A King condemned as a Traitor and a Murderer by a fraction of his subjects; his children taking farewell of him; his time on earth now measured by hours, and the hours by the ticks of a clock; the hum close at hand of carpenters at work in hideous, unnameable preparations! Was there then to be no arrest, might there be no delay? Would not the very stones of London rise and mutiny; might not the land around, even if led but by popular fury, surge in to the rescue; from beyond the seas might there not come execration sufficient, and some foreign voice to stop?

Nearly eight weeks, it is to be remembered, had elapsed since the Army had assumed the absolute political mastery by Pride's Purge of the Commons; and somewhat more than three weeks since the small stump of the Commons which they had fitted for their purpose had voted the Peers a farce, declared all power to reside in itself, and appointed the High Court of Justice for the Trial of the King. If there was to be interposition for Charles, from within Great Britain or from abroad, there had therefore been time for it before his Trial actually began, or at least before his Sentence. What had been the appearances? Among foreign powers and potentates a mere curious amazement, a feeling that the strange Islanders had gone mad, too mad to be meddled with: in France perhaps, where Mazarin had his own notions, even a pleasure in the sense of being unable to interfere and a willingness to see the English fury burn itself out in its own way. The French Ambassador in England had, indeed, conveyed a letter from Queen Henrietta Maria, addressed to the Speaker of the House of Commons; but the House had passed it by, and left it unanswered. Then, among the English Royalists abroad! Among them, of course, a phrenzy unutterable,--passionate pacings of rooms and courtyards in the foreign towns that quartered them; wild clamours of grief wherever a few of them were gathered together; mingled sobbings, curses, prayers, gnashings of teeth, at the thought of what was passing in the home-island beyond their reach! But what within that island itself? What of England and London? The population, as we know, consisted of three sections--the numerous Independents and Sectaries; the multitudinous Presbyterians; and the suppressed and all but silenced Prelatists, or adherents of the old Church of England, What had been the signs from these three sections? Well, while petitions had come in to the Commons from the "well-affected," i.e. the Independents and Sectaries, of various counties, praying for justice on Delinquents of whatever rank, and therefore virtually adhering to the Army; while the Independents of the City of London itself had bestirred themselves in the same sense, and, in spite of the opposition of the Lord Mayor and most of the Aldermen, had carried at a Guildhall meeting an Address from the Common Council to the Commons, which the Commons received with great form and much expression of thanks; while all this had been done in the Army's interest, there had been much fainter counter-demonstrations, from either the Prelatists or the Presbyterians, than might have been expected. The Prelatists, believing their interference would do harm, had remained in dumb horror: only Dr. John Gauden and Dr, Henry Hammond had ventured on protestations in the King's behalf, addressed to Fairfax and the Army Council. The Presbyterians, having more liberty in the way of speech, had certainly not been silent. What indignation among them, what outcries, during the last seven weeks, over the suppression of all legal authority, and the monstrous usurpation of power by the Army-Grandees and their heretical adherents! Among the Presbyterian multitudes of London there had been no protester in this sense more brave than Prynne. Whatever could be done with pen and ink, or by vehement verbal messages, in addition to his published Brief Memento, from his durance in the King's Head Tavern, he had done, and continued to do. Clement Walker was hardly less active. From the Presbyterian Clergy of the City also, notwithstanding the exertions of Hugh Peters and others, in private conferences with them, to keep them from interfering, there did come voices of remonstrance. The Westminster Assembly, or what of the body then remained sitting, had signified their unanimous desire for the King's release; and forty-seven ministers, meeting at Sion College, had drawn up and signed a document, addressed to Fairfax, in which they protested most earnestly, in the name of Religion and general morality, and also of the Solemn League and Covenant, against the usurpation of power by the Army and the violence intended to the King's person. There had been manifestations to the same effect from Presbyterian ministers in various parts of the country, in which, it appears, even some of the Independent ministers had joined. Finally, there was all Presbyterian Scotland. What of it? The Scottish Parliament had met in Edinburgh on the 4th of January, and had been greatly agitated by the news, received from the Earl of Lothian, Sir John Chiesley, and William Glendinning, then acting as Scottish Commissioners in London, "how that above 160 members of the House of Commons were extrudit the House by the blasphemous Army," and how there was no doubt but the King's life was in peril. There had been an express to London in consequence, with instructions to the Commissioners to do their best, by every form of entreaty and remonstrance, to avert the dreaded catastrophe. Both before and during the Trial, accordingly, these Commissioners, aided by Mr. Blair and other Commissioners of the Scottish Kirk, had been going to and fro in London, reasoning, threatening, and imploring. Charles Stuart was King of Scotland; the whole Scottish nation was loyal to Monarchy in him and in his race; from all the pulpits in Scotland there were prayers for him, and forgiveness of his past errors in pity of his present state; would the English nation dare, in defiance of all this, and in outrage of the League and Covenant, to put him to death? [Footnote: Commons Journals, Jan. 15, 1648-9; Neal's Puritans, III. 490-6; Whitlocke Jan. 3; Walker's History of Independency, Part II. 61-87; Balfour's Annals, III. 373 et seq. Life of Robert Blair (Wodrow Society), pp. 213-215.]

All this before the King's trial had actually begun, or at least before his sentence. And what now that the sentence had been pronounced, and Charles in St. James's was making ready for his doom? The Trial had been swift; hardly more than the expectation of it can have reached foreign shores; of the actual sentence many parts of England were yet ignorant. Only at the centre, only in London itself, could there be interference at this last moment. To the last there were some efforts. After the sentence the pleadings and protests of the Scottish Commissioners became nearly frantic in their vehemence, the Presbyterianism of London too numb for farther expression itself, but speaking through the Scots. All to no effect. Nor was greater attention paid to the intercession of the only foreign Power that then made an effort to save Charles. The States- General of Holland had sent over a special embassy for the purpose; but, though the Ambassadors were in London on the 29th and were received that day with most ceremonious respect by the Commons as well as by the Lords, they knew that they had come on a vain errand.

Why was all in vain? For one very simple and yet very sufficient reason. At the centre of England was a will that had made itself adamant, by express vow and deliberation beforehand, for the very hour which had now arrived, and that, amid all entreaties and pleadings of men, women, classes, corporations, and nations, would go through with the business that had been begun. Relentings there were near the centre, but not at the very centre. Fairfax had relented; Pennington had relented; others who had taken part in the Trial had relented; Vane, St. John, Skippon, Fiennes, leaders hitherto, had withdrawn from the work, and were looking on moodily; there was an agony over what was coming among many that had helped to bring it to pass. Only some fifty or sixty governing Englishmen, with OLIVER CROMWELL in the midst of them, were prepared for every responsibility, and stood inexorably to their task. They were the will of England now, and they had the Army with them. What proportion of England besides went with them it might be difficult to estimate. One private Londoner, at all events, can be named, who approved thoroughly of their policy, and was ready to testify the same. While the sentenced King was at St. James's there were lying on Milton's writing- table in his house in High Holborn at least the beginnings of a pamphlet on which he had been engaged during the King's Trial, and in which, in vehement answer to the outcry of the Presbyterians generally, but with particular references also to the printed protests of Prynne, the appeals of the Prelatists Hammond and Gauden, and the interferences of the Scots and the Dutch, he was to defend all the recent acts of the Army, Pride's Purge included, justify the existing government of the Army-chiefs and the fragment of Parliament that assisted them, inculcate Republican beliefs on his countrymen, and prove to them above all this proposition: "That it is lawful, and hath been held so through all ages, for any who have the power, to call to account a Tyrant, or wicked King, and, after due conviction, to depose and put him to death, if the ordinary Magistrate have neglected or denied to do it!" The pamphlet was not to come out in time to bear practically on the deed which it justified; but, while the King was yet alive, it was planned, sketched, and in part written. [Footnote: Commons Journals, Jan, 22 and 29; Lords Journals, Jan. 29; Rushworth, VII. 1426-7; Milton's Tenure of Kings and Magistrates, and his Def. Sec.--That Milton's Tenure of Kings and Magistrates, though not published till after the King's death, had been on hand before, if not completed, might be inferred from the pamphlet itself, the language and tense of some parts of which are scarcely explicable otherwise. But see his account of the composition of the pamphlet in his Def. Sec. He there says that the book did not come out till after the King's death, and consequently had no direct influence in bringing about that fact; but this very statement, and the sentences which precede it, confirm what is said in the text as to the time when the pamphlet was schemed and begun.]

Actually on Monday, Jan. 29, while the Dutch Ambassadors were having their audiences with the two Houses, the Death-Warrant was out, as follows:--

"At the High Court of Justice for the Trying and Judging of Charles Stuart, King of England, January XXIXth, Anno Dom. 1648.

"Whereas Charles Stuart, King of England, is and standeth convicted, attainted, and condemned of High Treason and other high Crimes, and sentence upon Saturday last was pronounced upon him by this Court to be put to death by the severing of his head from his body; of which sentence execution yet remaineth to be done: These are therefore to will and require you to see the said sentence executed in the open street before Whitehall upon the morrow, being the Thirtieth day of this instant month of January, between the hours of Ten in the morning and Five in the afternoon of the said day, with full effect. And for so doing this shall be your sufficient warrant. And these are to require all Officers and Soldiers and other the good people of this Nation to be assisting unto you in this service. Given under our hands and seals:--

"Jo. Bradshawe Ri. Deane Thos. Horton Tho. Grey Robert Tichborne J. Jones O. Cromwell H. Edwardes John Moore Edw. Whalley Daniel Blagrave Gilb. Millington M. Livesey Owen Rowe G. Fleetwood John Okey William Perfoy J. Alured J. Danvers Ad. Scrope Rob. Lilburne Jo. Bourchier James Temple Will. Say H. Ireton A. Garland Anth. Stapley Tho. Mauleverer Edm. Ludlowe Gre. Norton Har. Waller Henry Marten Tho. Challoner John Blakiston Vint. Potter Thomas Wogan J. Hutchinson Wm. Constable John Venn Willi. Goffe Rich. Ingoldesby Gregory Clements Tho. Pride Will. Cawley Jo. Downes Pe. Temple J. Barkestead Tho. Wayte T. Harrison Isaa. Ewer Tho. Scot J. Hewson John Dixwell Jo. Carew Hen. Smyth Valentine Wauton Miles Corbet. Per. Pelham Simon Mayne

"To Colonel Francis Hacker, Colonel Huncks, and Lieutenant-Colonel Phayre; and to every of them." [Footnote: The original of this Warrant, a parchment eighteen inches wide and ten inches deep, is in the possession of the House of Lords, having been produced before that body by Colonel Hacker in 1660, and then retained. Mr. William J. Thorns, who has minutely inspected it, made it the subject of a curious and interesting inquiry in Notes and Queries, July 6 and July 13, 1872. He observes that the date of the Warrant itself, and the words "upon Saturday last" for the day of the sentence, are written over erasures and in a different hand from the rest, and that the word "Thirtieth" for the day of execution is inserted in a space too large for it; and, for this and other reasons, he arrives at the conclusion that we see the document now in its second state, and that a good number of the signatures were not attached to it on the 29th, but had been attached to it on an earlier day when it was in its first state. His conjecture, on the whole, is that it had been expected, at the private meeting of the Court on Friday the 2eth, when the sentence was agreed upon, that it might be pronounced that same day, and executed the next day (Saturday the 27th), and that a warrant to that effect had then been drawn up and signed; but that, this idea having been abandoned, for whatever reason, and the Sentence not having been pronounced till Saturday, it was thought better, at the meeting on Monday the 29th, still to use the first Warrant with its signatures, only with the dates altered, and with additional signatures then obtained, than to write out a fresh warrant and apply for second signatures from absentees who had signed the first.--It is noteworthy that, though sixty-seven of the Commissioners had, as we have seen, virtually constituted themselves "the Regicides" by being present in Westminster Hall on Saturday when the Sentence was pronounced, and then standing up in assent to it, nine of these did not attach their names to the Warrant. They were Francis Allen, Thomas Andrews, General Hammond, Edmund Harvey, William Heveningham, Cornelius Holland, John Lisle, Nicholas Love, and Colonel Matthew Tomlinson. Subtract these nine from the sixty-seven, and the number of the signers to the Warrant ought to be fifty-eight. But they are fifty-nine. Who, then, is the fifty- ninth? Cromwell's young kinsman, Colonel Richard Ingoldsby, who, though a member of the Court, had attended none of its meetings till precisely that of the 29th, the date of the Warrant. Here comes in Clarendon's famous story, a distortion of some convenient rigmarole of Ingoldsby's own in later times. Ingoldsby, says Clarendon, "always abhorring the action in his heart," had purposely kept away from every meeting of the Court, till, chancing to look into the Painted Chamber on the fatal 29th, he was clutched by Cromwell, dragged to the table on which the Warrant lay, and compelled to sign it, Cromwell forcibly holding his hand and tracing the letters for him, with loud laughter at the joke! More by token, as Clarendon reports him, if his name on the Warrant "were compared with what he had ever writ himself," the difference would be seen! Unfortunately, Mr. Thoms, who has made this comparison, vouches that no difference can be detected, and that the name "Rich. Ingoldsby" in the Warrant "is as bold and free as signature can be," and could never have been written by a hand held by another's. Ex uno omnes. In the hard straits that were coming eleven years hence, there were to be others of the signers of the Warrant, besides Ingoldsby, who were to aver that they did it under compulsion, Cromwell and Henry Marten sitting beside each other, smearing each other's faces with ink in their fun, and overbearing the scrupulous with jeers or threats. The simple fact I believe to be (and this I do believe) that Cromwell was anxious that the Warrant should be well signed, and reasoned, or perhaps remonstrated, with some waverers, as he had done with young Hammond of the Isle of Wight in a similar case two months before. Cromwell was now in his fiftieth year.]

In the King's last hours he had offers of the spiritual services of Messrs. Calamy, Vines, Caryl, Dell, and other Presbyterian ministers, and hardly had these gone when Mr. John Goodwin of Coleman Street came to St. James's, all by himself, with the like offer. They were all dismissed with thanks, the King intimating that he desired no other attendance than that of Bishop Juxon. Late into the night of the 29th, accordingly, the Bishop remained with the King in private. After he had gone, Charles spent about two hours more in reading and praying, and then lay down to sleep, Mr. Herbert lying on the pallet-bed close to his. For about four hours he slept soundly; but very early in the morning, when it was still dark, he awoke, opened the curtain of his bed, and called Mr. Herbert. The call disturbed Herbert suddenly from a dreamy doze into which he had fallen after a very restless night; and, when he got up and was assisting the King to dress by the light of the wax-cake that had been kept burning in the chamber as usual, the King observed a peculiarly scared look on his face. Herbert, on being asked the cause, told his Majesty he had had an extraordinary dream. The King desiring to know what it was, Herbert related it. In his doze, he said, he had heard some one knock at the chamber-door. Thinking it might be Colonel Hacker, and not willing to disturb the King till he himself heard the knock, he had lain still. A second time, however, the knock came; and this time, he thought, his Majesty had heard the knock, and told him to open the door and see who it was. He did go to the door, and, on opening it, was surprised to see a figure standing there in pontifical habits whom he knew to be the late Lord Archbishop of Canterbury, Dr. Laud. He knew him well, having often seen him in his life. The figure said he had something to say to the King, and desired to enter. Then, as Herbert thought, the King having been told who it was, and having given permission, the Archbishop had entered, making a profound obeisance to the King in the middle of the room, a second on coming nearer, and at last falling on his knees as the King gave him his hand to kiss. Then the King raised him, and the two went to the window together, and discoursed there, Herbert keeping at a distance, and not knowing of what they talked, save that he noticed the King's face to be very pensive, and heard the Archbishop give a deep sigh. After a little they ceased to talk, and the Archbishop, again kissing the King's hand, retired slowly, with his face still to the King, making three reverences as before. The third reverence was so low that, as Herbert thought, the Archbishop had fallen prostrate on his face, and he had been in the act of stepping to help him up when he had been awakened by the King's call. The impression had been so lively that he had still looked about the room as if all had been real.--Herbert having thus told his dream, the King said it was remarkable, the rather because, if Laud had been alive, and they had been talking together as in the dream, it was very likely, albeit he loved the Archbishop well, he might have said something to him that would have occasioned his sigh. There was yet more conversation between the King and Herbert by themselves, the King selecting with some care the dress he was to wear, and especially requiring an extra under-garment because of the sharpness of the weather, lest he should shake from cold, and people should attribute it to fear. While they were still conversing, poor Herbert in such anguish as may be imagined, Dr. Juxon arrived, at the precise hour the King had appointed the night before.

An hour or two still had to elapse before the last scene. Charles arranged with Herbert about the distribution of some of his favourite books, with some trinkets. His Bible, with annotations in his own hand, and some special accompanying instructions, was to be kept for the Prince of Wales; a large silver ring-sundial of curious device was to go to the Duke of York; a copy of King James's Works, with another book, was left for the Duke of Gloucester; for the Princess Elizabeth Hooker's Ecclesiastical Polity, Bishop Andrewes's Sermons, and some other things. These arrangements made, the King was for an hour alone with Juxon, during which time he received the Communion. Then, Herbert having been re-admitted, the Bishop again went to prayer, and read the 27th chapter of Matthew; which, by a coincidence in which the King found comfort, chanced to be one of the lessons in the Rubric for that day. While they were yet thus religiously engaged, there came Colonel Hacker's knock. They allowed him to knock twice before admitting him; and then, entering with some trepidation, he announced that it was time to go to Whitehall. The King told him to go forth, and he would follow presently.

It was about ten o'clock in the morning (Tuesday, Jan. 30) when the procession was formed, from St. James's, through the Park, to Whitehall. With Bishop Juxon on his right hand, Colonel Tomlinson on his left, Herbert following close, and a guard of halberdiers in front and behind, the King walked, at his usual very fast pace, through the Park, soldiers lining the whole way, with colours flying and drums beating, and such a noise rising from the gathered crowd that it was hardly possible for any two in the procession to hear each other speak. Herbert had been told to bring with him the silver clock or watch that hung usually by the King's bedside, and on their way through the Park the King asked what o'clock it was and gave Herbert the watch to keep. A rude fellow from the mob kept abreast with the King for some time, staring at his face as if in wonder, till the Bishop had him turned away. There is a tradition that, when the procession came to the end of the Park, near the present passage from Spring Gardens, the King pointed to a tree, and said that tree had been planted by his brother Henry. Arrived at last at the stairs leading into Whitehall, he was taken, through the galleries of the Palace, to the bed- chamber he had usually occupied while residing there; and here he had some farther time allowed him for rest and devotion with Juxon alone. Having sent Herbert for some bread and wine, he ate a mouthful of the bread and drank a small glass of claret. Here Herbert broke down so completely that he felt he could not accompany the King to the scaffold, and Juxon had to take from him the white satin cap he had brought by the King's orders to be put on at the fatal moment. At last, a little after twelve o'clock, Hacker's signal was heard outside, and Juxon and Herbert went on their knees, affectionately kissing the King's hands. Juxon being old and feeble, the King helped him to rise, and then, commanding the door to be opened, followed Hacker. With soldiers for his guard, he was conveyed, along some of the galleries of the old Palace, now no longer extant, to the New Banqueting Hall, which Inigo Jones had built, and which still exists. Besides the soldiers, many men and women had crowded into the Hall, from whom, as his Majesty passed on, there was heard a general murmur of commiseration and prayer, the soldiers themselves not objecting, but appearing grave and respectful.

Through a passage broken in the wall of the Banqueting Hall, or more probably through one of the windows dismantled for the purpose, Charles emerged on the scaffold, in the open street, fronting the site of the present Horse Guards. The scaffold was hung with black, and carpeted with black, the block and the axe in the middle; a number of persons already stood upon it, among whom were several men with black masks concealing their faces; in the street in front, all round the scaffold, were companies of foot and horse; and beyond these, as far as the eye could reach, towards Charing Cross on the one side and Westminster Abbey on the other, was a closely-packed multitude of spectators. The King, walking on the scaffold, looked earnestly at the block, and said something to Hacker as if he thought it were too low; after which, taking out a small piece of paper, on which he had jotted some notes, he proceeded to address those standing near him. What he said may have taken about ten minutes or a quarter of an hour to deliver, and appears, from the short-hand report of it which has been preserved, to have been rather incoherent. "Now, Sirs," he said at one point, "I must show you both how you are out of the way, and I will put you in the way. First, you are out of the way; for certainly all the way you ever have had yet, as I could find by anything, is in the way of conquest. Certainly this is an ill way; for conquest, Sirs, in my opinion, is never just, except there be a good just cause, either for matter of wrong, or just title; and then, if you go beyond it, the first quarrel that you have to it, that makes it unjust at the end that was just at first." A little farther on, when he had begun a sentence, "For the King indeed I will not," a gentleman chanced to touch the axe. "Hurt not the axe," he interrupted; "that may hurt me," and then resumed. "As for the King, the Laws of the Land will clearly instruct you for that; therefore, because it concerns my own particular, I only give you a touch of it. For the People: and truly I desire their liberty and freedom as much as anybody whomsoever; but I must tell you that their liberty and freedom consists in having of Government those laws by which their life and their goods may be most their own. It is not having share in Government, Sirs; that is nothing pertaining to them. A subject and a sovereign are clean different things; and therefore, until they do that--I mean, that you put the People in that liberty, as I say--certainly they will never enjoy themselves." In conclusion he said he would have liked to have a little more time, so as to have put what he meant to say "in a little more order and a little better digested," and gave the paper containing the heads of his speech to Juxon. As he had said nothing specially about Religion, Juxon reminded him of the omission. "I thank you very heartily, my Lord," said Charles, "for that I had almost forgotten it. In truth, Sirs, my conscience in Religion, I think it very well known to the world; and therefore I declare before you all that I die a Christian, according to the profession of the Church of England as I found it left me by my father; and this honest man (the Bishop) I think will witness it." There were some more words, addressed particularly to Hacker and the other officers; and once more, seeing a gentleman go too near the axe, he called out, "Take heed of the axe; pray, take heed of the axe." Then, taking the white satin cap from Juxon, he put it on, and, with the assistance of Juxon and the chief executioner, pushed his hair all within it. Some final sentences of pious import then passed between the King and Juxon, and the King, having taken off his cloak and George, and given the latter to Juxon, with the word "Remember," knelt down, and put his neck on the block. After a second or two he stretched out his hands, and the axe descended, severing the head from the body at one blow. There was a vast shudder through the mob, and then a universal groan. [Footnote: Herbert's Memoirs, 183--194; Wood's Ath. (repeating Herbert), IV. 32--36; Rushworth, VJI 1428-1431; Fuller's Church Hist. (ed. 1842) TTI. 500, 501; Disraeli's Charts J. (ed. 1831) V. 449-50; Cunningham's London, Whitehall. Herbert only mentions the fact of his dream in the body of his Memoir; but the detailed account of it in his own words, written in 1680, is given in the Appendix, 217-222, and in a note in Wood's Ath. as above.--The coherance of Charles's last speech seems to have struck Fuller, who says that, "though taken in shorthand by one eminent therein," it is done defectively. I rather think it is punctually literal. I find in the Stationers' Registers this entry, under date Jan. 31, 1648-9: "Peter Cole entered for his copy, under the hand of Mr. Mabbott, King Charles his Speech upon the Scaffold, with the manner of his Suffering, on Jan. 30, 1648." I suppose this is the Report afterwards repeated by Rushworth, though objected to by Fuller. Was Rush worth the reporter?]

Immediately after the execution Juxon and the sorrowing Herbert were allowed to take charge of the corpse. Embalmed, coffined in wood and lead, and covered with a velvet pall, it lay for some days in St. James's Palace, where crowds came to see it. There was some difficulty about the place of burial. Charles himself having left no directions on the subject, Juxon and Herbert thought that the fittest place would be King Henry the Seventh's Chapel, in Westminster Abbey, containing as it did the tombs of his four immediate predecessors, and those of his grandmother Mary, Queen of Scots, and his brother Prince Henry. The authorities, however, considering that this place was too public and would attract inconvenient crowds, Juxon and Herbert next proposed the Royal Chapel in Windsor, where some of his earlier predecessors had been buried, and among them Henry VIII. To this no objection was made, and on the 7th of February the body was conveyed from St. James's to Windsor in a hearse drawn by six horses, and followed by four mourning coaches. Colonel Whichcot, the Governor of the Castle, having been shown the order, allowed Herbert and those with him to select whatever spot they chose. They thought first of what was called "the tomb-house," built by Cardinal Wolsey, and intended by him as a splendid sepulchre for his master, Henry VIII.; but they decided against it, partly because it was not within the Royal Chapel, but only adjoining it, and partly because they were uncertain whether Henry VIII. (of whose exact place of burial the tradition had been lost) might not actually have been buried in the "tomb-house," and they recollected that this particular predecessor of Charles was not one of his favourites. He had been heard, in occasional discourses, to express dislike of Henry's conduct in appropriating Church revenues and demolishing religious edifices. They therefore fixed on the vault where Edward IV. was interred, on the north side of the choir, near the altar. The vault was opened for the purpose, and preparations for the interment there were going on, when (Feb. 8) the Duke of Richmond, the Marquis of Hertford, and the Earls of Southampton and Lindsey, with Dr. Juxon, arrived from London, specially authorized by the House of Commons to attend the funeral, and the Duke empowered to arrange all wholly as he thought fit. Herbert and those with him having then resigned the duty into the hands of these great persons, there was a new inquiry as to the best spot for the grave. The "tomb-house" was again looked at, and the choir of the Chapel diligently re-investigated. At length, a spot in the choir having been detected where the pavement sounded hollow when struck- -"being about the middle of the choir, over against the eleventh seat on the Sovereign's side"--the stones and earth were removed, and a vault was disclosed; in which there were two leaden coffins close together, one very large and the other small. From the velvet palls covering them, some portions in their original purple colour, and others turned into fox- tawny or coal-black by the damp, there was no doubt that they were the coffins of Henry VIII. and his third wife, Lady Jane Seymour. As there was just room for one coffin more in the vault, it was determined that the fact of its being the vault of Henry VIII, now accidentally discovered after so long a time, should be no bar to the burial of Charles in the otherwise suitable vacancy. Accordingly, on Friday the 9th of February, the body was brought from the royal bed-chamber, where it had been meanwhile lying, to St. George's Hall, and thence, with slow and solemn pace, to the Chapel. It was borne on the shoulders of some gentlemen in mourning; the noblemen in mourning held up the pall; and Colonel Whichcot, with several gentlemen, officers, and attendants, followed. As they were moving from the Hall to the Chapel, the sky, which had been previously clear, darkened with snow, which fell so fast that, before they reached the Chapel, the black velvet pall was white with the flakes. The coffin having been set down near the vault, ex-Bishop Juxon would have read the burial-service over it according to the form of the Book of Common Prayer; but, though permission to do so seemed to be implied in the wording of the order granted to the Duke of Richmond by the House of Commons, and though the noblemen present were desirous that it should be done, Colonel Whichcot did not think himself entitled to allow any service except that of the new Presbyterian Directory. Without any service at all, therefore, save what may have been rendered by the tears and muttered words of those who stood by, the coffin was deposited, about three o'clock in the afternoon, in the vacant space in the vault. A kind of scarf or scroll of lead, about five inches broad, had been soldered to it, bearing this inscription in capital letters: "KING CHARLES, 1648." At the time of his death, King Charles was forty-eight years, two months, and eleven days old, and he had reigned twenty-three years and ten months. [Footnote: Herbert's Memoirs, 194-216; Commons Journals, Feb. 8; Fuller's, Church Hist,. III. 501-4.--In March 1813 some workmen, employed in making a passage from under the choir of the Royal Chapel at Windsor to a mausoleum erected by George III. in the "tomb- house" described in the text, accidentally broke into the vault containing the bodies of Charles I., Henry VIII., and Queen Jane Seymour. The fact having been reported to the Prince Regent, a careful examination was ordered. It was made April 1, 1813, in the presence of the Prince Regent himself, the Duke of Cumberland, Count Munster, the Dean of Windsor, Sir Henry Halford (Physician to the King and the Prince Regent), and Mr. B. C. Stevenson. The coffin of Charles I. was examined with great minuteness, and corresponded in every particular with the account given by Herbert. When the black velvet pall had been removed, the coffin was found to be of plain lead, with the leaden scroll encircling it, bearing the inscription "KING CHARLES, 1648," in large legible characters. A square opening was then cut in the upper lid, so that the contents might be clearly seen. An internal wooden coffin was found to be very much decayed, and the body was found to be carefully wrapped up in cerecloth, into the folds of which there had been poured abundantly some unctuous substance mixed with resin. With considerable difficulty the cerecloth was removed from the face, and then, despite the discolouring and the decay of some parts, the features of Charles I., as represented in coins and busts, and especially in Vandyke's portraits of him, could be distinctly recognised. There was the oval face, with the peaked beard. When, by farther removal of the cerecloth, they had disengaged the entire head, they found it to be loose from the body. On taking it out, they saw that "the muscles of the neck had evidently retracted themselves considerably, and the fourth cervical vertebra was found to be cut through its substance transversely, leaving the surfaces of the divided portions perfectly smooth and even--an appearance which could have been produced only by a heavy blow indicted by a very sharp instrument." The hair, which was thick at the back, looked nearly black; but, when a portion of it was afterwards cleaned and dried, the colour was found to be a beautiful dark brown,--that of the beard a redder brown. The body was not examined below the neck; and, the head having been replaced, the coffin was soldered up again and the vault closed. (See account by Sir Henry Halford, quoted by Bliss in his edition of Wood's Ath. IV. 39-42.)]

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