I. Third Section…

I. Third Section

MONK'S DICTATORSHIP, THE RESTORED LONG PARLIAMENT, AND THE DRIFT TO THE RESTORATION: FEB. 21, 1659-60--APRIL 25, 1660.

THE RESTORED LONG PARLIAMENT: NEW COUNCIL OF STATE: ACTIVE MEN OF THE PARLIAMENT: PRYNNE, ARTHUR ANNESLEY, AND WILLIAM MORRICE: MISCELLANEOUS PROCEEDINGS OF THE PARLIAMENT: RELEASE OF OLD ROYALIST PRISONERS: LAMBERT COMMITTED TO THE TOWER: REWARDS AND HONOURS FOR MONK: "OLD GEORGE" IN THE CITY: REVIVAL OF THE SOLEMN LEAGUE AND COVENANT, THE WESTMINSTER CONFESSION OF FAITH, AND ALL THE APPARATUS OF A STRICT PRESBYTERIAN CHURCH-ESTABLISHMENT: CAUTIOUS MEASURES FOR A POLITICAL SETTLEMENT: THE REAL QUESTION EVADED AND HANDED OVER TO ANOTHER PARLIAMENT: CALLING OF THE CONVENTION PARLIAMENT AND ARRANGEMENTS FOR THE SAME: DIFFICULTY ABOUT A HOUSE OF LORDS: HOW OBVIATED: LAST DAY OF THE LONG PARLIAMENT, MARCH 16, 1659-60: SCENE IN THE HOUSE.--MONK AND THE COUNCIL OF STATE LEFT IN CHARGE: ANNESLEY THE MANAGING COLLEAGUE OF MONK: NEW MILITIA ACT CARRIED OUT: DISCONTENTS AMONG MONK'S OFFICERS AND SOLDIERS: THE RESTORATION OF CHARLES STILL VERY DUBIOUS: OTHER HOPES AND PROPOSALS FOR THE MOMENT: THE KINGSHIP PRIVATELY OFFERED TO MONK BY THE REPUBLICANS: OFFER DECLINED: BURSTING OF THE POPULAR TORRENT OF ROYALISM AT LAST, AND ENTHUSIASTIC DEMANDS FOR THE RECALL OF CHARLES: ELECTIONS TO THE CONVENTION PARLIAMENT GOING ON MEANWHILE: HASTE OF HUNDREDS TO BE FOREMOST IN BIDDING CHARLES WELCOME: ADMIRAL MONTAGUE AND HIS FLEET IN THE THAMES: DIRECT COMMUNICATIONS AT LAST BETWEEN MONK AND CHARLES: GREENVILLE THE GO-BETWEEN: REMOVAL OF CHARLES AND HIS COURT FROM BRUSSELS TO BREDA: GREENVILLE SENT BACK FROM BREDA WITH A COMMISSION FOR MONK AND SIX OTHER DOCUMENTS.--BROKEN-SPIRITEDNESS OF THE REPUBLICAN LEADERS, BUT FORMIDABLE RESIDUE OF REPUBLICANISM IN THE ARMY: MONK'S MEASURES FOR PARALYSING THE SAME: SUCCESSFUL DEVICE OF CLARGES: MONTAGUE'S FLEET IN MOTION: ESCAPE OF LAMBERT FROM THE TOWER: HIS RENDEZVOUS IN NORTHAMPTONSHIRE: GATHERING OF A WRECK OF THE REPUBLICANS FOUND HIM: DICK INGOLDSBY SENT TO CRUSH HIM: THE ENCOUNTER NEAR DAVENTRY, APRIL 22, 1660, AND RECAPTURE OF LAMBERT: GREAT REVIEW OF THE LONDON MILITIA, APRIL 24, THE DAY BEFORE THE MEETING OF THE CONVENTION PARLIAMENT: IMPATIENT LONGING FOR CHARLES: MONK STILL IMPENETRABLE, AND THE DOCUMENTS FROM BREDA RESERVED.

In the nomination of a new Council of State the House adhered to the now orthodox number of thirty-one. Monk was named first of all, by special and open vote, on the 21st of February; and the others were chosen by ballot, confirmed by open vote in each case, on the 23rd, when the number of members present and giving in voting-papers was 114. The list, in the order of preference, was then, as follows:--

General GEORGE MONK

William Pierrepoint John Crewe Colonel Edward Rossiter (Rec.) Richard Knightley Colonel Alexander Popham Colonel Herbert Morley Lord Fairfax Sir Anthony Ashley Cooper, Bart. Sir Gilbert Gerrard, Bart. Lord Chief Justice St. John Lord Commissioner Widdrington Sir John Evelyn of Wilts Sir William Waller Sir Richard Onslow Sir William Lewis, Bart. Colonel (Admiral) Edward Montague (Rec.) Colonel Edward Harley (Sec.) Richard Norton (Rec.) Arthur Annesley (Rec.) Denzil Holles Sir John Temple (Rec.) Colonel George Thompson (Sec.) John Trevor (Rec.) Sir John Holland, Bart. Sir John Potts, Bart. Colonel John Birch (Rec.) Sir Harbottle Grimstone John Swinfen (Rec.) John Weaver (Rec.) Serjeant John Maynard.

With the exception of Monk and Fairfax, who were not members of the Parliament, and the latter of whom was absent in Yorkshire, these Councillors are to be imagined as also active in the business of the House. About nine of them were Residuary Rumpers who had accepted willingly or cheerfully the return of the secluded. The proportion of Residuary Rumpers in the whole House was even larger. Though it had been reported by Prynne that as many as 194 of the secluded were still alive, and a contemporary printed list gives the names of 177 as available,[1] the present House never through its brief session attained to a higher attendance than 150, the average attendance ranging from 100 to 120; and I have ascertained by actual counting that more than a third of these were Residuary Rumpers. It is strange to find among them such of the extreme Republicans as Hasilrig, Scott, Marten, and Robinson. They left the House for a time, but re-appeared in it, whereas Ludlow and Neville and others would not re-appear--Ludlow, as he tells us, making a practice of walking up and down in Westminster Hall outside, partly in protest, partly to show that he had not fled.[2] Actually six Regicides remained in the House: viz. Scott, Marten, Ingoldsby, Millington, Colonel Hutchinson, and Sir John Bourchier. The majority of the Residuary Rumpers, however,--represented by such men as Lenthall, St. John, Ashley Cooper, Colonel Thompson, Colonel Fielder, Carew Raleigh, Attorney-General Reynolds, Solicitor-General Ellis, and Colonel Morley, and even by two of the Regicides mentioned (Ingoldsby and Hutchinson),--were now in harmony with the Secluded, and by no means disposed to abet Hasilrig, Scott, and Marten in any farther contest for Rump principles. In other words, the House was now led really by the chiefs of the reinstated members. Prominent among these, besides Crewe, Knightley, Gerrard, Sir John Evelyn of Wilts, Sir William Waller, Sir William Lewis, Arthur Annesley, Sir Harbottle Grimston, and others named as of the Council, were Prynne, Sir Anthony Irby, Major-General Browne, Sir William Wheeler, Lord Ancram (member for a Cornish burgh), William Morrice, and some others, not of the Council.--Prynne, who ought to have been on the Council, if courage for the cause of the Secluded and indefatigable assiduity in pleading it were sufficient qualifications, had not been thought fit for that honour; but he was a very busy man in the House. He had taken his place there very solemnly the first day, with an old basket-hilt sword on; and he was much in request on Committees.--Of more aristocratic manners and antecedents, and therefore fitter for the Council, was Arthur Annesley, a man of whom we have not heard much hitherto, but who, from this point onwards, was to attract a good deal of notice. The eldest son of the Irish peer Viscount Valentia and Baron Mountnorris, he had come into the Long Parliament in 1640 as member for Radnorshire; he had gone with the King in the beginning of the Civil War; but he had afterwards done good service for the Parliament in Ireland during the Rebellion, and had at length conformed to the Commonwealth and the Protectorate. While the Protectorate lasted he had been really a Cromwellian; but, like so many other Cromwellians, he was now a half-declared Royalist. He had been one of the chief negotiators with Monk for the re-seating of the Secluded, and he took at once a foremost place among them, both in the House and in the Council. He was now about forty-fire years of age.--An accession to the House, after it had sat for a week or more, was Mr. William Morrice. He was a Devonshire man, like Monk, to whom he was related by marriage. He had been sent into the Long Parliament in 1645 as Recruiter for Devonshire, and had been afterwards secluded; and he had been returned to Oliver's two Parliaments and to Richard's. Living in Devonshire as a squire "of fair estate," he had acquired the character of an able and bookish man of enlightened Presbyterian principles; he had been of use to Monk in the management of his Devonshire property; there had been constant correspondence between them; and there was no one for whom Monk had a greater regard. Now, accordingly, at the age of about five and fifty, Morrice had left his books and come from Devonshire to London at Monk's request, not only to take his place in Parliament, but also to be a kind of private adviser and secretary to Monk, more in his intimacy than even Dr. Clarges.--To complete this view of the composition of the new Government, we may add that on Feb. 24 Thomas St. Nicholas was made Clerk of the Parliament, and that on the 27th the House appointed Thurloe and a John Thompson to be joint-secretaries of State. There was a division on Thurloe's appointment, but it was carried by sixty-five votes to thirty-eight. The tellers against Thurloe were Annesley and Sir William Waller, but he was supported by Sir John Evelyn of Wilts and Colonel Hutchinson. Thurloe's former subordinate, Mr. William Jessop, was now clerk to the Council of State.[3]

[Footnote 1: A single folio fly-leaf, dated March 26 in the Thomason copy, and called "The Grand Memorandum: A True and Perfect Catalogue of the Secluded Members of the House of Commons," &c. It was printed by Husbands on the professed "command" of one of the members (Prynne?).]

[Footnote 2: The fly-leaf mentioned in last note gives the names of thirty-three Rumpers who did not sit in the House after the readmission of the secluded members. Arranged alphabetically they were:--Anlaby, Bingham, John Carew, Cawley, James Challoner, Crompton, Darley, Fleetwood, John Goodwyn, Nicholas Gold, John Gurdon, Sir James Harrington, Hallows, Harvey, Heveningham, John Jones, Viscount Lisle, Livesey, Ludlow, Christopher Martin, Neville, Nicholas, Pigott, Pyne, Sir Francis Russell, the Earl of Salisbury, Algernon Sidney, Walter Strickland, Sir William Strickland, Wallop, Sir Thomas Walsingham, and Whitlocke. Compare with the list of the Restored Rump, ante pp. 453-455.]

[Footnote 3: Commons Journals of dates, and generally from Feb. 21 to March 16, 1659-60, with examination of the lists of all the Committees through that period; Ludlow, 845-846; Wood's Ath. IV. 181 et seq. (Annesley), and III. 1087 et seq. (Morrice); Clarendon, 891 and 895.]

By the rough compact made with Monk, the House was to confine itself to the special work for which it was the indispensable instrument, and to push on as rapidly as possible, through that, to an act for its own dissolution. The majority was such that the compact was easily fulfilled. Six-and-twenty days sufficed for all that was required from this reinstated fag-end of the famous Long Parliament.

Naturally much of the work of the House took the form (1) of redress of old or recent injuries, and (2) of rewards and punishments. Almost the first thing done by the House was to restore the privileges of the City of London, release the imprisoned Common Council men and citizens, and issue orders for the repair of the broken gates and portcullises. The City and the Parliament were now heartily at one, and there was a loan from the City of £60,000 in token of the happy reconciliation. Sir George Booth, who had been recommitted to the Tower by the Rump, was finally released, though still on security. There were several other releases of prisoners and removals of sequestrations, and at length (Feb. 27) it was referred to a Committee to consider comprehensively the cases of all persons whatsoever then in prison on political grounds. On the 3rd of March particular orders were given for the discharge of the Earl of Lauderdale, the Earl of Crawford, and Lord Sinclair, from their imprisonment in Windsor Castle; and thus the last of the Scottish prisoners from Worcester Battle found themselves free men once more. Twelve days afterwards the House went to the extreme of the merciful process by ordering the release of poor Dr. Matthew Wren, the Laudian ex-Bishop, who had been committed by the Long Parliament early in 1641 along with Laud and Strafford, and who had been lying in the Tower, all but forgotten, through the intervening nineteen years. At the same time discretionary powers were given to the Council of State to discharge any political prisoners that might be still left.--In the article of punishments the House was very temperate indeed. Notorious Rumpers were removed, of course, from military and civil offices, and there were sharper inquiries after Colonel Cobbet, Colonel Ashfield, Major Creed, and others too suspiciously at large; but, with one exception, there seemed to be no thought of the serious prosecution of any for what had been done either under the Rump Government or during the Wallingford-House interruption. The exception was Lambert. Brought before the Council, and unable or unwilling to find the vast bail of £20,000 which they demanded for his liberty, he was committed by them to the Tower; and the House, on the 6th of March, confirmed the act, and ordered his detention for future trial. While Lambert was thus treated as the chief criminal, the rewards and honours went still, of course, mainly to Monk. To his Commandership-in-chief of all the Armies there was added the Generalship of the whole Fleet, though in this command, to Monk's disappointment, Montague was conjoined with him (March 2). He was also made Keeper of Hampton Court; and the £1000 a year in lands which the Rump had voted him was changed by a special Bill into £20,000 to be paid at once (March 16), As the Bill was first drafted, the reward was said to be "for his signal services"; but by a vote on the third reading the word "signal" was changed into "eminent." Perhaps Annesley, Sir William Waller, and the other new chiefs at Whitehall were becoming a little tired of the praises of so peculiar an Aristides. But he was still a god among the Londoners. From St. James's, which was now his quarters, he would go into the City every other day, to attend one of a series of dinners which they had arranged for him in the halls of the great companies, and at which he found himself so much at ease in his morose way that he would hardly ever leave the table "till he was as drunk as a beast." Ludlow, who tells us so, would not have told an untruth even about Monk; and Ludlow was then in London, knowing well what went on. Let us suppose, however, that he exaggerated a little, and that old George was the victim of circumstances.[1]

[Footnote 1: Commons Journals of dates, and generally from Feb. 21 to March 16; Ludlow, 855-856.]

A large proportion of the proceedings of the House and the Council may be described as simply a re-establishment of Presbyterianism. The secluded members being Presbyterians to a man, there was at once an enthusiastic recollection of the edicts of the Long Parliament between 1643 and 1648, setting up Presbytery as the national Religion, with a determination to revert in detail to those symbols and forms of the Presbyterian system which the triumph of Independency had set aside during the Commonwealth, and which had been allowed only partially, and side by side with their contraries, in the broad Church-Establishment of the Protectorate. The unanimity and rapidity of the House in their votes in this direction must have alarmed the Independents and Sectaries. It was on Feb. 29 that the House appointed a Committee of twenty-nine on the whole subject of Religion and Church affairs--Annesley, Ashley Cooper, Prynne, and Sir Samuel Luke (i.e. Butler's Presbyterian "Sir Hudibras") being of the number; and on the 2nd of March, on report from this Committee, the Westminster Assembly's Confession of Faith, as it had been under discussion in the Long Parliament in 1646 (Vol. III. p. 512), was again brought before the House, and passed bodily at once, with the exception of chapter 30, "Of Church Censures," and chapter 31, "Of Synods and Councils"--which two chapters it was thought as well to keep still in Committee. The same day there were other resolutions of a Presbyterian tenor. But the climax was on March 5, in this form: "Ordered, That the SOLEMN LEAGUE AND COVENANT be printed and published, and set up and forthwith read in every church, and also read once a year according to former Act of Parliament, and that the said SOLEMN LEAGUE AND COVENANT be also set up in this House." Thus, when the bones of Alexander Henderson had been for more than thirteen years in their tomb in Grey Friars churchyard in Edinburgh, was the great document which he had drafted in that city in August 1643, as a bond of religious union for the Three Kingdoms, and only the first fortunes of which he had lived to see, resuscitated in all its glory. What more could Presbyterianism desire? That nothing might be wanting, however, there followed, on the 14th of March, a Bill "for approbation and admittance of ministers to public benefices and lectures," one of the clauses of which prescribed means for the immediate division of all the counties of England and Wales into classical Presbyteries, according to those former Presbyterianizing ordinances of the Long Parliament which had never been carried into effect save in London and Lancashire. The Universities were to be constituted into presbyteries or inserted into such; and the whole of South Britain was to be patterned ecclesiastically at last in that exact resemblance to North Britain which had been the ideal before Independency burst in. What measures of "liberty for consciences truly tender" might be conceded did not yet appear. Anabaptists, Quakers, Fifth Monarchy enthusiasts, and Monk's "Fanatics" generally, might tremble; and even moderate and orthodox Independents might foresee difficulty In retaining their livings in the State Church. Indeed Owen was already (March 13) displaced from his Deanery of Christ Church, Oxford, by a vote of the House recognising a prior claim of Dr. Reynolds to that post.[1]

[Footnote 1: Commons Journals of dates; Neal, IV. 224-225.]

In the matter of a political settlement the proceedings were equally rapid and simple. Celerity here was made possible by the fact that the House considered itself quite precluded from discussing the whole question of the future Constitution. Had they entered on that question, the probability is that they would have decided for a negotiation with Charles II., with a view to his return to England and assumption of the Kingship on terms borrowed from the old Newport Treaty with his father, or at all events on strictly expressed terms of some kind, limiting his authority and securing the Presbyterian Church-Establishment. Even this, however, was problematical. There were still Republicans and Cromwellians in the Parliament, and not a few of the Presbyterians members had been Commonwealth's men so long that it might well appear doubtful to them whether a return to Royalty now was worth the risks, or whether, if there must be a return to Royalty, it was in the least necessary to fix it again in the unlucky House of Stuart. Then the difficulties out of doors! No one knew what might be the effect upon Monk's own army, or upon the numerous Republican sectaries, of a sudden proposal in the present Parliament to restore Charles. On the other hand, the Old Royalists throughout the country had no wish to hear of such a proposal. They dreaded nothing so much, short of loss of all chance of the King's return, as seeing him return tied by such terms as the present Presbyterian House would impose. It was a relief to all parties, therefore, and a satisfactory mode of self-delusion to some, that the present House should abstain from the constitutional question altogether, and should confine itself to the one duty of providing another Parliament to which that question, with all its difficulties, might be handed over.--On the 22nd of February, the second day of the restored House, it was resolved that a new Parliament should be summoned for the 25th of April, and a Committee was appointed to consider qualifications. The Parliament was to be a "full and free" one, by the old electoral system of English and Welsh constituencies only, without any representation of Scotland or Ireland. But what was meant by "full and free"? On this question there was some light on the 13th of March, when the House passed a resolution annulling the obligation of members of Parliament to take the famous engagement to be faithful to "the Commonwealth as established, without King or House of Lords," and directing all orders enjoining that engagement to be expunged from the Journals. This was certainly a stroke in favour of Royalty, in so far as it left Royalty and Peerage open questions for the constituencies and the representatives they might choose; but, taken in connexion with the order, eight days before, for the revival of the Solemn League and Covenant--in which document "to preserve and defend the King's Majesty's person and authority" is one of the leading phrases--it was received generally as a positive anticipation of the judgment on these questions. There was yet farther light, however, between March 13 and March 16, when the House, on report from the Committee, settled the qualifications of members and electors. All Papists and all who had aided or abetted the Irish Rebellion were to be incapable of being members, and also all who, or whose fathers, had advised or voluntarily assisted in any war against the Parliament since Jan. 1, 1641-2, unless there had been subsequent manifestation of their good affections. This implied the exclusion of all the very conspicuous Royalists of the Civil Wars and the sons of such; and the present House, as the lineal representative of the Parliamentarians in those wars, could hardly have done less, especially as there was a saving-clause of which moderate Royalists would have the benefit, and as the electors were sure to interpret the saving-clause very liberally. For there was not even the same guardedness in the qualifications of the electors themselves. It was proposed, indeed, by the Committee to disfranchise all "that have been actually in arms for the late King or his son against the Parliament or have compounded for his or their delinquency" with an exception only in favour of manifest penitents; but this was negatived by the House by ninety-three votes (Lord Ancram and Mr, Herbert tellers) to fifty-six votes (Scott and Henry Marten tellers). Thus, active Royalists of the Civil Wars, if they might not be elected, might at least elect; and, as another regulation disqualified from electing or being elected all "that deny Magistracy or Ministry or either of them to be the Ordinances of God "--viz. all Fifth Monarchy men, extreme Anabaptists, and Quakers--the balance was still towards the Royalists. In short, as finally passed, the Bill was one tending to bring in a Parliament the main mass of which should consist of Presbyterians, though there might be a large intermixture of Old Royalists, Cromwellians, and moderate Commonwealth's men. To such a Parliament it might be safely left to determine what the future form of Government should be, whether Commonwealth continued, restored Kingship, or a renewal of the Protectorate. The present House had not itself decided anything. It had not decided against a continuance of the Commonwealth, should that seem best. It had only assumed that possibly that might not seem the best, and had therefore removed obstacles to the free deliberation of either of the other schemes. The revival of the Solemn League and Covenant might seem to imply more; but the phraseology of a document of 1643 might admit of re-interpretation in 1660.--A special perplexity of the present House was in the matter of the Other House or House of Lords. They were now sitting themselves as a Single House, notwithstanding that the Long Parliament, of which they professed themselves to be a continuation, consisted of two Houses. This was an anomaly in itself, nay an illegality; and there had been a hot-headed attempt of some of the younger Peers to remove it by bursting into the House of Lords at the same time that the secluded members took their seats in the Commons. Monk's soldiers had, by instructions, prevented that; and, with the full consent of all the older and wiser peers at hand, the management of the crisis had been left to the one reconstituted House. The anomaly, however, had been a subject of serious discussion in that House. On the one hand, they could not pass a vote for the restitution of the House of Peers without trenching on that very question of the future form of Government which they had resolved not to meddle with. On the other hand, absolute silence on the matter was impossible. How could the present single House, for example, even if its other acts were held valid, venture on, an Act for the dissolution of that Long Parliament whose peculiar privilege, wrung from Charles I. in May 1641, was that it should never be dissolved except by its own consent, i.e. by the joint-consent of the two component Houses? Yet this was the very thing--that had to be done before way could be made for the coming Parliament. The course actually taken was perhaps the only one that the circumstances permitted. When the House, at their last sitting, on Friday, March 16, did pass the Act dissolving itself and-calling the new Parliament, it incorporated with the Act a proviso in these words: "Provided always, and be it declared, that the single actings of this House, enforced by the pressing necessities of the present times, are not intended in the least to infringe, much less take away, the ancient native right which the House of Peers, consisting of those Lords who did engage in the cause of the Parliament against the forces raised in the name of the late King, and so continued until 1648, had and have to be a part of the Parliament of England." Here again there was not positive prejudgment so much as the removal of an obstacle.--It did seem, however, as if the House would not separate without passing the bounds it had prescribed for itself. It had already been debated in whose name the writs for the new Parliament should issue? "In King Charles's" had been the answer of the undaunted Prynne. He had been overruled, and the arrangement was that the writs should issue, as under a Commonwealth, "in the name of the Keepers of the Liberties of England." At the last sitting of the House, just as the vote for the dissolution was being put, the Presbyterian Mr. Crewe, provoked by some Republican utterance of Scott, moved that the House, before dissolving, should testify its abhorrence of the murder of the late King by a resolution disclaiming all hand in that affair. The untimely proposal caused a great excitement, various members starting up to protest that they at least had never concurred in the horrid act, while others, who had been King's judges or regicides, betrayed their uneasiness by prevarications and excuses. Not so Scott. "Though I know not where to hide my head at this time," he said boldly, "yet I dare not refuse to own that not only my hand, but my heart also, was in that action"; and he concluded by declaring he should consider it the highest honour of his existence to have it inscribed on his tomb: "Here lieth one who had a hand and a heart in the execution of Charles Stuart." Having thus spoken, he left the House, most of the Republicans accompanying him. The Dissolution Act was passed, and there was an end of the Long Parliament. Their last resolution was that the 6th of April should be a day of general fasting and humiliation.[1]

[Footnote 1: Commons Journals of dates; Ludlow, 863-864; Noble's Lives of the Regicides, II. 169-199 (Life of Scott, with evidence of Lenthall and others at his trial); Phillips, 694; Guizot, II. 167-168.]

Though the House was dissolved, the Council of State was to sit on, with full executive powers, till the meeting of the new Parliament. Annesley was now generally, if not habitually, the President of the Council, and in that capacity divided the principal management of affairs with Monk.

The Parliament having provided for expenses by an assessment of £100,000 a month for six months, the Council could give full attention to the main business of preserving the peace till the elections should be over. Conjoined with this, however, was the important duty of carrying out a new Militia Act which the Parliament had framed. It was an Act disbanding all the militia forces as they had been raised and officered by the Rump, and ordering the militia in each county to be reorganized by commissioners of Presbyterian or other suitable principles. The Act had given great offence to the regular Army, naturally jealous at all times of the civilian soldiery, but especially alarmed now by observing into what hands the Militia was going. It would be a militia of King's men, they said, and the Commonwealth would be undone! So strong was this feeling in the Army that Monk himself had remonstrated with the House, and the Militia Act, though passed on the 12th of March, was not printed till the House had removed his objections. This had been done by pointing to the clause of the Act which required that all officers of the new Militia should take an acknowledgment "that the war undertaken by both Houses of Parliament in their defence against the forces raised in the name of the late King was just and lawful." When Monk had professed himself satisfied, the re-organization of the Militia went on rapidly in all the counties. Monk was one of the Commissioners for the Militia of Middlesex, and to his other titles was added that of Major-General and Commander-in-chief of the Militia of London. Meanwhile the Council had issued proclamations over the country against any disturbance of the peace, and most of the active politicians had left town to look after their elections. The Harringtonian or Rota Club, one need hardly say, was no more in existence. After having been a five months' wonder, it had vanished, amid the laughter of the Londoners, as soon as the secluded members had added themselves to the Rump. Theorists and their "models" were no longer wanted.[1]

[Footnote 1: Commons Journals, March 10-16; Phillips, 694; Whitlocke, IV. 405-406; Wood's Ath. III. 1120.]

Not even yet was there any positive intimation that the Commonwealth was defunct. No one could declare that authoritatively, and every one might hope or believe as he liked. The all but universal conviction, however, even among the Republicans, was that the Republic was doomed, and that, if the last and worst consummation in a return of Charles Stuart was to be prevented, it could only be by consenting to some single-person Government of a less fatal kind. O that Richard's Protectorate could be restored! The thing was talked of by St. John and others, but the possibility was past. But might not Monk himself be invested with the sovereignty? Hasilrig and others actually went about Monk with the offer, imploring him to save his country by this last means; and the chance seemed so probable that the French ambassador, M. de Bordeaux, tried to ascertain through Clarges whether Monk's own inclinations ran that way. Monk was too wary for either the Rumpers or the Ambassador. He declined the offers of Hasilrig and his friends, allowing Clarges privately to inform the Council that such had been made; and, though he received the Ambassador, it was but gruffly. "The French ambassador visited General Monk, whom he found no accomplished courtier or statesman," writes Whitlocke sarcastically under March 24; and the ambassador's own account is that he could get nothing more from Monk, in reply to Mazarin's polite messages and requests for confidence, than a reiterated statement that he had no information to give. And so, a Single Person being inevitable, and the momentary uncertainty whether it would be "Charles, George, or Richard again" being out of the way, the long-dammed torrent had broken loose. And what a torrent! "King Charles! King Charles! King Charles!" was the cry that seemed to burst out simultaneously and irresistibly over all the British Islands. Men had been long drinking his health secretly or half-secretly, and singing songs of the old Cavalier kind in their own houses, or in convivial meetings with their neighbours; openly Royalist pamphlets had been frequent since the abolition of Richard's Protectorate; and, since the appearance of the Presbyterian Parliament of the secluded members, there had been hardly a pretence of suppressing any Royalist demonstrations whatever. On the evening of the 15th of March, the day before the Parliament dissolved itself, some bold fellows had come with a ladder to the Exchange in the City of London, where stood the pedestal from which a statue of Charles I. had been thrown down, and had deliberately painted out with a brush the Republican inscription on the pedestal, "Exit tyrannus, Regum ultimus," a large crowd gathering round them and shouting "God bless Charles the Second" round an extemporized bonfire. That had been a signal; but for still another fortnight, though all knew what all were thinking, there had been a hesitation to speak out. It was in the end of March or the first days of April 1660, when the elections had begun, that the hesitation suddenly ceased everywhere, and the torrent was at its full. They were drinking Charles's health openly in taverns; they were singing songs about him everywhere; they were tearing down the Arms of the Commonwealth in public buildings, and putting up the King's instead.[1]

[Footnote 1: Phillips, 695; Letters of M. de Bordeaux, Guizot, II. 381-395; Whitlocke, IV. 405; Pepys's Diary, from beginning to April 11, 1660.]

Popular feeling having declared itself so unmistakeably for Charles, it was but ordinary selfish prudence in all public men who had anything to lose, or anything to fear, to be among the foremost to bid him welcome. No longer now was it merely a rat here and there of the inferior sort, like Downing and Morland,[1] that was leaving the sinking ship. So many were leaving, and of so many sorts and degrees, that Hyde and the other Councillors of Charles had ceased to count, on their side, the deserters as they clambered up. He received now, Hyde tells us, "the addresses of many men who had never before applied themselves to him, and many sent to him for his Majesty's approbation and leave to sit in the next Parliament." Between London and Flanders messengers were passing to and fro daily, with perfect freedom and hardly any disguise of their business. Annesley, the President of the Council of State, was in correspondence with the King; Thurloe, now back in the Secretaryship to the Council, was in correspondence with him, and by no means dishonourably; and in the meetings of the Council of State itself, though it was bound to be corporately neutral till the Parliament should assemble, the drift of the deliberations was obvious. The only two men whose resistance even now could have compelled a pause were Monk and Montague. What of them?----It was no false rumour that Montague, the Cromwellian among Cromwellians, the man who would have died for Cromwell or perhaps for his dynasty, had been holding himself free for Charles. Under a cloud among the Republicans since his suspicious return from the Baltic in September last, but restored to command by the recent vote of the Parliament of the secluded members making him joint chief Admiral with Monk, he was at this moment (i.e. from March 23 onwards) in the Thames with his fleet, in receipt of daily orders from the Council and guarding the sea-passage between them and Flanders. He had on board with him, as his secretary, a certain young Mr. Samuel Pepys, who had been with him already in the Baltic, had been meanwhile in a clerkship in the Exchequer office, but had now left his house in Axe Yard, Westminster, and his young wife there, for the pleasure and emoluments of being once more secretary to so kind and great a master. In cabin talk with the trusty Pepys the Lord Admiral made no secret of his belief that the King would come in; but it was only by shrewd observations of what passed on board, and of the strange people that came and went, that Pepys then guessed what he afterwards knew to be the fact. "My Lord," as Pepys always affectionately calls his patron, was pledged to the King, and was managing most discreetly in his interest.[2]--But the power of Montague, as Commander-in-chief of the Navy only, was nothing in comparison with Monk's. How was Monk comporting himself? Most cautiously to the last. Though it was the policy of his biographers afterwards, and agreeable to himself, that his conduct from the date of his march out of Scotland should be represented as a slow and continuous working on towards the one end of the King's restoration, the truth seems to be that he clung to the notion of some kind of Commonwealth longer than most people, and made up his mind for the King only when circumstances absolutely compelled him. With the Army, or a great part of it, to back him, he might resist and impede the restoration of Charles; but, as things now were, could he prevent it ultimately? Why not himself manage the transaction, and reap the credit and advantages, rather than leave it to be managed by some one else and be himself among the ruined? That he had been later than others in sending Charles his adhesion was no matter. He had gained consequence by the very delay. He was no longer merely commander of an Army in Scotland, but centre and chief of all the Armies; he was worth more for Charles's purposes than all the others put together; and Charles knew it! So Monk had been reasoning for some time; and it was on the 17th of March, the day after the dissolution of the Parliament of the Secluded Members, that his ruminations had taken practical effect. Even then his way of committing himself was characteristic. His kinsman, Sir John Greenville, the same who had been commissioned to negotiate with him when he was in Scotland, was again the agent. With the utmost privacy, only Mr. Morrice being present as a third party, Monk had received Greenville at St. James's, acknowledged his Majesty's gracious messages, and given certain messages for his Majesty in return. He would not pen a line; Greenville was to convey the messages verbally. They included such recommendations to his Majesty as that he should smooth the way for his return by proclaiming a pardon and indemnity in as wide terms as possible, a guarantee of all sales and conveyances of lands under the Commonwealth, and a liberal measure of Religious Toleration; but the most immediate and practical of them all was that his Majesty should at once leave the Spanish dominions, take up his quarters at Breda, and date all his letters and proclamations thence. For the rest, as there were still many difficulties and might be slips, the agreement between his Majesty and Monk was to be kept profoundly secret.[3]

[Footnote 1: These two of the late public servants of Oliver--Downing his minister at the Hague, and Morland his envoy in the business of the Piedmontese massacre of 1655--had behaved most dishonourably. Both, for some months past, had been establishing friendly relations with Charles by actually betraying trusts they still held with the government of the Commonwealth--Morland by communicating papers and information which came into his possession confidentially in Thurloe's office (Clar. Hist. 869), and Downing by communicating the secrets of his embassy to Charles, and acting in his interests in that embassy, on guarantee that he should retain it, and have other rewards, when Charles came to the throne (Clar. Life, 1116-1117). There was to be farther proof that Downing was the meaner rascal of the two.]

[Footnote 2: Pepys's Diary, from beginning to April 11, 1660. Montague seems to have first positively and directly pledged himself to Charles in a letter of April 10, beginning "May it please your excellent Majesty,--From your Majesty's incomparable goodness and favour, I had the high honour to receive a letter from you when I was in the Sound last summer, and now another by the hands of my cousin" (Clar. State Papers). But the cousin had been already negotiating.]

[Footnote 3: Clarendon, 891-896; Thurloe, VII. 807-898; Skinner, 266-275; Phillips, 695-696.]

Over the seas went Greenville, as fast as ship could carry him, with the precious messages he bore. At Ostend, where he arrived on the 23rd of March, he reduced them to writing; and the next day, and for several days afterwards, Charles, Hyde, Ormond, and Secretary Nicholas, were in joyful consultation over them in Brussels. The advice of an instant removal to Breda fitted in with their own intentions. Neither the Spanish territory nor the French was a good ground from which to negotiate openly with England; nor indeed was Spanish territory quite safe for Charles at a time when, seeing his restoration possible, Spain might detain him as a hostage for the recovery of Dunkirk and Mardike. To Breda, accordingly, as Monk advised, the refugees went. They went in the most stealthy manner, and just in time to avoid being detained by the Spanish authorities. Before they reached Breda, however, but when Greenville could say that he had seen them safe within Dutch territory, he left them, to post back to England with a private letter to Monk in the King's own hand, enclosing a commission to the Captaincy-General of all his Majesty's forces, and with six other documents, which had been drafted by Hyde, and were all dated by anticipation "At Our Court at Breda, this 4/14th of April 1660, in the Twelfth Year of Our Reign." One was a public letter "To our trusty and well-beloved General Monk," to be by him communicated to the President and Council of State and to the Army officers; another was to the Speaker of the House of Commons in the coming Parliament; a third was a general "Declaration" for all England, Scotland, and Ireland; a fourth was a short letter to the House of Lords, should there be one; a fifth was for Admirals Monk and Montague, to be communicated to the Fleet; and the sixth was to the Lord Mayor, Aldermen, and Common Councilmen of the City of London. Besides the originals, copies of all were sent to Monk, that he might keep the originals unopened or suppress any of them.[1]

[Footnote 1: Clarendon, 896-902; Phillips, 696; Skinner, 276-280.]

It could be an affair now only of a few weeks, more or less. There, at Breda, was his swarthy, witty, good-humoured, utterly profligate and worthless, young Majesty, with his refugee courtiers round him; at home, over all Britain and Ireland, they were ready for him, longing for him, huzzahing for him, Monk and the Council managing silently in London; and between, as a moveable bridge, there was Montague and his fleet. When would the bridge move towards the Continent? That would depend on the newly-elected Parliament, which was to meet on the 25th. Could there be any mischance in the meantime?

It did not seem so. The late politicians of the Rump were dispersed and powerless. Hasilrig sat by himself in London, moaning "We are undone: we are undone"; Scott was in Buckinghamshire, if perchance they might elect him for Wycombe: Ludlow hid in Wiltshire and Somersetshire, also nominated for a seat, but careless about it; the rest absconded one knows not where. The "Fanatics," as the Republican Sectaries were now called collectively, were silenced and overwhelmed. Even Mr. Praise-God Barebone, tired of having his windows broken, was under written engagement to the Council to keep himself quiet. The same written engagement had been exacted from Hasilrig and Scott.--But what of the Army, the original maker of the Commonwealth, its defender and preserver through good report and bad report for eleven years, and with strength surely to maintain it yet, or make a stand in its behalf? The question is rather difficult. It may be granted that something of the general exhaustion, the fatigue and weariness of incessant change, the longing to be at rest by any means, had come upon the Army itself. Not the less true is it that Republicanism was yet the general creed of the Army, and that, could a universal vote have been taken through the regiments in England, Scotland, and Ireland, it would have kept out Charles Stuart. Nay, so engrained was the Republican feeling in the ranks of the soldiery, and so gloomily were they watching Monk, that, could any suitable proportion of them have been brought together, and could any fit leader have been present to hold up his sword for the Commonwealth, they would have rallied round him with acclamations. Precisely to prevent this, however, had been Monk's care. One remembers his advice from Scotland to Richard Cromwell nineteen months ago, when Richard was entering on his Protectorate. It was to cashier boldly. Not an officer in the Army, he had said, would have interest enough, if he were once cashiered, to draw two men after him in opposition to any existing Government. The very soul of Monk lies in that maxim, and he had been acting on it himself. Not only, as we have seen, had he reofficered his own army in Scotland with the utmost pains before venturing on his march into England; but, since his coming into England, he had still been discharging officers, and appointing or promoting others. He had done so while still conducting himself as the servant of the Restored Rump; and he had done so again very particularly after he had become Commander-in-chief for the Parliament of the Secluded Members. The consequence was most apparent in that portion of the Army which was more especially his own, consisting of the regiments he had brought from Scotland, and that were now round him in London. The officers--Knight, Read, Clobery, Hubblethorn, &c.--were all men accustomed to Monk, or of his latest choosing. His difficulty had been greater with the many dispersed regiments away from London, once Fleetwood's and Lambert's. Not only was there no bond of attachment between them and Monk; they were full of bitterness against him, as an interloper from Scotland who had put them to disgrace, and had turned some of them out of London to make room for his own men. But with these also Monk had taken his measures. Besides quartering them in the manner likeliest to prevent harm, he had done not a little among them too by discharges and new appointments. One of his own colonels, Charles Fairfax, had been left at York; Colonel Rich's regiment had been given to Ingoldsby; Walton's regiment to Viscount Howard; a Colonel Carter had been made Governor of Beaumaris, with command in Denbighshire; the Republican Overton had been removed from the Governorship of Hull; Mr. Morrice had been converted into a soldier, and made Governor of Plymouth; Dr. Clarges was Commissary General of the Musters for England, Scotland, and Ireland; and colonelcies were found for Montague, Rossiter, Sheffield, and Lord Falconbridge. When it is remembered that Fleetwood, Lambert, Desborough, Berry, Kelsay, and others of the old officers, Rumpers or Wallingford-House men, were already incapacitated, and either in prison or under parole to the Council of State, it will be seen that the English Army of April 1660 was no longer its former self. There were actually Royalists now among the colonels, men in negotiation with the King as Monk himself was. Still, if Monk and these colonels had even now gone before most of the regiments and announced openly that they meant to bring in the King, they would have been hooted or torn in pieces. Even in colloquies with the officers of his own London regiments Monk had to keep up the Republican phraseology. Suspicions having arisen among them, with meetings and agitations, his plan had been to calm them by general assurances, reminding them at the same time of that principle of the submission of the military to the civil authority which he and they had accepted. On this principle alone, and without a word implying desertion, of the Commonwealth, he prohibited any more meetings or agitations, and caused strict orders to that effect from the Council of State to be read at the head of every regiment. But an ingenious device of Clarges went further than such prohibitions. It was that as many of the officers as possible should be got to sign a declaration of their submission to the civil authority, not in general terms merely, but in the precise form of an engagement to agitate the question of Government no more among themselves, but abide the decision of the coming Parliament. Many who could not have been brought to declare for Charles Stuart directly could save their consciences by signing a document thus conditionally in his interest; and the device of Clarges was most successful. On the 9th of April a copy of the engagement signed by a large number of officers in or near London was in Monk's hands, and copies were out in England, Scotland, and Ireland, for additional signatures. As to the response from Scotland there could be little doubt. Morgan, the commander-in-chief in Scotland, had already reported the complete submission of the Army there to the order established by the Parliament of the Secluded Members. Only a single captain had been refractory, and he far away in the Orkneys. From Ireland, where Coote and Broghill were now managing, the report was nearly as good. Altogether, by the 9th of April, Monk could regard the Republicanism of the Army as but the stunned and paralysed belief of so many thousands of individual red-coats.--It was no otherwise with the Navy. Moored with his fleet in the Thames, or cruising with it beyond, Montague could assure Pepys in private that he knew most of his captains to be Republicans, and that he was not sure even of the captain of his own ship; and, studying a certain list which Montague had given him, Pepys could observe that the captains Montague was most anxious about were all or nearly all of the Anabaptist persuasion. Still there was no sign of concerted mutiny; and it was a great thing at such a time that Vice-Admiral Lawson, Montague's second in command, and the pre-eminent Republican of the whole Navy, had shown an example of obedience.[1]

[Footnote 1: Phillips, 694-698; Skinner, 263-265; Ludlow, 865-873; Whitlocke, IV. 405-406; Pepys's Diary, March 28-April 9.]

There was to be one dying flash for the Republic after all. Lambert had escaped from the Tower. It was on the night of April 9, the very day on which Monk was congratulating himself on the engagement of obedience signed by so many of his officers. For some days no one knew where the fugitive had gone, and Monk and the Council of State were in consternation. Proclamations against him were out, forbidding any to harbour him, and offering a reward for his capture. Meanwhile emissaries from Lambert were also out in all directions, to rouse his friends and bring them to a place of rendezvous in Northamptonshire. One of these emissaries, a Major Whitby, found Ludlow in Somersetshire, and delivered Lambert's message to him. Ludlow was not unwilling to join Lambert, but wanted to know more precisely what he declared for. With some passion, Whitby suggested that it was not a time to be asking what a man declared for; it was enough to know what he declared against. Ludlow demurred, and said it was always best to put forth a distinct political programme! He merely circulated the information; therefore, in Somersetshire and adjoining counties, and waited for further light. Along many roads, however, especially in the midland counties, others were straggling to the appointed rendezvous. Discharged soldiers, Anabaptists, Republican desperates of every kind, were flocking to Lambert.--Alas! before many of these could reach Lambert, it was all over. Hither and thither, wherever there were signs of disturbance, Monk had been despatching his most efficient officers; and, on the 18th of April, having received more exact information as to Lambert's whereabouts, he sent off Colonel Richard Ingoldsby to do his very best in that scene of action. There could not have been a happier choice. For this was honest Dick Ingoldsby, the Cromwellian, of whom his kinsman Richard Cromwell had said that, though he could neither preach nor pray, he could be trusted. He was also "Dick Ingoldsby, the Regicide," who had unfortunately signed the death-warrant of Charles I., to please Cromwell; and that recollection was a spur to him now. Since the abdication of Richard, he had been telling people that he would thenceforth serve the King and no one else, even though his Majesty, when he came home, would probably cut off his head. That consequence, however, was to be avoided if possible; and already, since the restoration of the secluded members, Ingoldsby had been doing whatever stroke of work for them might help towards earning his pardon. Now had come his most splendid opportunity, and he was not to let it slip.--On Sunday, the 22nd of April, being Easter Sunday, he came up with Lambert in Northamptonshire, about two miles from Daventry. Lambert had then but seven broken troops of horse, and one foot company; but Colonels Okey, Axtell, Cobbet, Major Creed, and several other important Republican ex-officers, were with him. Ingoldsby had brought his own horse regiment from Suffolk; Colonel Streater, with 500 men of a Northamptonshire foot-regiment, had joined him; the Royalist gentry round were sending in more horse; the country train-bands were up. The battle would be very unequal; was it worth while to fight? For some hours the two bodies stood facing each other, Lambert's in a ploughed field, with a little stream in his front, to which Ingoldsby rode up frequently, parleying with such of Lambert's troopers as were nearest, and so effectively as to bring some of them over. At last, Lambert showing no signs of surrender, Ingoldsby and Streater advanced, Ingoldsby ready to charge with his horse, but Streater marching the foot first with beat of drum to try the effect of a close approach. There was the prelude of a few shots, which hurt one or two of Lambert's troopers; but the orders were that the general fire should be reserved till the musketeers should see the pikemen already within push of the enemy. Then it was not necessary. Lambert's men had been wavering all the while; his troopers now turned the noses of their pistols downwards; one troop came off entire to Ingoldsby; the rest broke up and fled. But Lambert himself was Ingoldsby's mark. Dashing up to him, pistol in hand, he claimed him as his prisoner. There was a kind of scuffle, Creed and others imploring Ingoldsby to let Lambert go; and in the scuffle Lambert turned his horse and made off, Ingoldsby after him at full gallop. They were men of about the same age, neither over forty, but Ingoldsby the stouter and more fearless for a personal encounter. The two horses were abreast, or Ingoldsby's a little ahead, the rider turning round in his seat, with his pistol presented at Lambert, whom he swore he would shoot if he did not yield. Lambert pleaded yet a pitiful word or two, and then reined in and was taken.--On Tuesday, the 24th of April, Lambert was again in the Tower, with Cobbet, Creed, and other prisoners, though Okey and Axtell were not yet among them. There had been a great review of the City Militia that day in Hyde Park, at which the various regiments, red, white, green, blue, yellow, and orange, with the auxiliaries from the suburbs, made the magnificent muster of 12,000 men. The Parliament was to meet next day, and Monk and the Council of State had no farther anxiety. Among the measures they had taken after Lambert's escape had been an order that the engagement, already so generally signed by the Officers, pledging to agreement in whatever Parliament should prescribe as to the future form of government, should be tendered also to the private soldiers throughout the whole army. In the troops and companies of Fleetwood's old regiments, as many as a third of the soldiers, or in some cases a half, were leaving the ranks in consequence; but in Monk's own regiments from Scotland only two sturdy Republicans had stepped out.[1]

[Footnote 1: Phillips, 698-699; Skinner, 286-289; Ludlow, 873-877; Wood's Fasti, II. 133-134; Whitlocke, IV. 407-409; M. de Bordeaux to Mazarin, Guizot, II. 415.]

So sure was the Restoration of Charles now that the only difficulty was in restraining impatience and braggartism among the Royalists themselves. The last argument of the Republican pamphleteers having been that the Royalists would be implacable after they had got back the king, and that nothing was to be then expected but the bloodiest and severest revenges upon all who had been concerned with the Commonwealth, and some of the younger Royalists having given colour to such representations by their wild utterances in private, there had been printed protests to the contrary by leading Royalists in London and in many of the counties. They desired no revenges, they said; they reflected on the past as the mysterious course of an all-wise Providence; they were anxious for an amicable reunion of all in the path so wonderfully opened up by the wisdom and valour of General Monk; they utterly disowned the indiscreet expressions of fools and "hot-spirited persons"; and they would take no steps themselves, but would confide in Monk, the Council of State, and the Parliament, The London "declaration" to this effect was signed by ten earls, four viscounts, five lords, many baronets, knights, and squires, with several Anglican clergymen, among whom was Jeremy Taylor. It was of no small use to Monk, who had equally to be on his guard against too great haste. They were crowding round him now, and asking why there should be any more delay, why the king should not be brought to England at once. His one reply still was that the Parliament alone could decide what was to be done, and that he and others were bound to leave all to the Parliament. Meanwhile Sir John Greenville had been back from his mission for some time, and had duly delivered to Monk the important documents from Breda. Monk had kept Charles's private letter, but had given Greenville back all the rest, including his own commission to be his Majesty's Captain-General. Not a soul was to know of their existence till the moment when they should be produced in the Parliament.[1]

[Footnote 1: Phillips, 699-701; Skinner, 283-284 and 290-294; Clarendon, 902.]

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II. First Section

MILTON'S LIFE AND SECRETARYSHIP THROUGH RICHARD'S PROTECTORATE: SEPT. 1658-MAY 1659.

MILTON AND MARVELL STILL IN THE LATIN SECRETARYSHIP: MILTON'S FIRST FIVE STATE-LETTERS FOR RICHARD (NOS. CXXXIII.-CXXXVII.): NEW EDITION OF MILTON'S DEFENSIO PRIMA: REMARKABLE POSTSRCIPT TO THAT EDITION: SIX MORE STATE-LETTERS FOR RICHARD (NOS. CXXXVIII.-CXLIII.): MILTON'S RELATIONS TO THE CONFLICT OF PARTIES ROUND RICHARD AND IN RICHARD'S PARLIAMENT: HIS PROBABLE CAREER BUT FOR HIS BLINDNESS: HIS CONTINUED CROMWELLIANISM IN POLITICS, BUT WITH STRONGER PRIVATE RESERVES, ESPECIALLY ON THE QUESTION OF AN ESTABLISHED CHURCH: HIS REPUTATION THAT OF A MAN OF THE COURT-PARTY AMONG THE PROTECTORATISTS: HIS TREATISE OF CIVIL POWER IN ECCLESIASTICAL CAUSES: ACCOUNT OF THE TREATISE, WITH EXTRACTS: THE TREATISE MORE THAN A PLEA FOR RELIGIOUS TOLERATION: CHURCH-DISESTABLISHMENT THE FUNDAMENTAL IDEA: THE TREATISE ADDRESSED TO RICHARD'S PARLIAMENT, AND CHIEFLY TO VANE AND THE REPUBLICANS THERE: NO EFFECT FROM IT: MILTON'S FOUR LAST STATE-LETTERS FOR RICHARD (NOS. CXLIV.-CXLVII.): HIS PRIVATE EPISTLE TO JEAN LABADIE, WITH ACCOUNT OF THAT PERSON: MILTON IN THE MONTH BETWEEN RICHARD'S DISSOLUTION OF HIS PARLIAMENT AND HIS FORMAL ABDICATION: HIS TWO STATE-LETTERS FOR THE RESTORED RUMP (NOS. CXLVIII.-CXLIX.).

Milton and Marvell continued together In the Latin Secretaryship through the Protectorate of Richard Cromwell, The following were the first Letters of Milton for Richard:--

(CXXXIII.) To Louis XIV. OF FRANCE, Sept. 5, 1658:--"Most serene and most potent King, Friend and Confederate: As my most serene Father, of glorious memory, Oliver, Protector of the Commonwealth of England, such being the will of Almighty God, has been, removed by death on the 3rd of September, I, his lawfully declared successor in this Government, though in the depth of sadness and grief, cannot but on the very first opportunity inform your Majesty by letter of so important a fact, assured that, as you have been a most cordial friend to my Father and this Commonwealth, the sudden intelligence will be no matter of joy to you either. It is my business now to request your Majesty to think of me as one who has nothing more resolvedly at heart than to cultivate with all fidelity and constancy the alliance and friendship that existed between my most glorious parent and your Majesty, and to keep and hold as valid, with the same diligence and goodwill as himself, the treaties, counsels, and arrangements, of common interest, which he established with you. To which intent I desire that our Ambassador at your Court [Lockhart] shall be invested with the same powers as formerly; and I beg that, whatever he may transact with you in our name, you will receive it as if done by myself. Finally, I wish your Majesty all prosperity.--From our Court at Westminster."

(CXXXIV.) To Cardinal Mazarin, Sept. [5], 1658:--Dispatched with the last, and to the same effect. Knowing the reciprocal esteem between his late Father and his Eminence, Richard cannot but write to his Eminence as well as to the King.

(CXXXV.) To Charles Gustavus, King of Sweden. October 1658:--"Most serene and most potent King, Friend and Confederate: As I think I cannot sufficiently imitate my father's excellence unless I cultivate and desire to retain the same friendships which he sought, and acquired by his worth, and regarded in his singular judgment as most deserving to be cultivated and retained, there is no reason for your Majesty to doubt that it will be my duty to conduct myself towards your Majesty with the same attentiveness and goodwill which my Father, of most serene memory, made his rule in his relations to you. Wherefore, although in this beginning of my Government and dignity I do not find our affairs in such a position that I can at present reply to certain heads which your agents have propounded for negotiation, yet the idea of continuing, and even more closely knitting, the treaty established with your Majesty by my Father is exceedingly agreeable to me; and, as soon as I shall have more fully understood the state of affairs on both sides, I shall indeed be always most ready, as far as I am concerned, for such arrangements as shall be thought most advantageous for the interests of both Commonwealths. Meanwhile may God long preserve your Majesty, to His own glory and for the guardianship and defence of the Orthodox Church."--The peculiar state of the relations between the Swedish King and the English Government is here to be remembered. The heroic Swede, by his sudden recommencement of war with Denmark, had brought a host of enemies again around him; and the question, just before Oliver's death, was whether Oliver would consider himself disobliged by the rupture of the Peace with Denmark, which had been mainly of his own making, or whether he would stand by his brother of Sweden and think him still in the right. That the second would have been Oliver's course there can be little doubt. The question had now descended to Richard and his Council. They were anxious to adhere to the foreign policy of the late Protector in the Swedish as in all other matters; but there were difficulties.

(CXXXVI. AND CXXXVII.) To CHARLES GUSTAVUS OF SWEDEN, Oct. 1659:--Two more letters to his Swedish Majesty, following close on the last:--(1) In the first, dated "Oct. 13," Richard acknowledges a letter received from the King of Sweden through his envoy in London, and also a letter from the King to Philip Meadows, the English Resident at the Swedish Court, which Meadows has transmitted. He is deeply sensible of his Swedish Majesty's kind expressions, both of sorrowing regard for his great father's memory, and of goodwill towards himself. There could not be a greater honour to him, or a greater encouragement in the beginning of his government, than the congratulations of such a King. "As respects the relations entered into between your Majesty and Us concerning the common cause of Protestants, I would have your Majesty believe that, since I succeeded to this government, though our Affairs are in such a state as to require the extreme of diligence, care, and vigilance, chiefly at home, yet I have had and still have nothing more sacredly or more deliberately in my mind than not to be wanting, to the utmost of my power, to the Treaty made by my father with your Majesty. I have therefore arranged for sending a fleet into the Baltic Sea, with those commands which our Internuncio [Meadows], whom we have most amply instructed for this whole business, will communicate to your Majesty." This was the fleet of Admiral Lawson, which did not actually put to sea till the following month, and was then wind-bound off the English coast. See ante p. 428; where it is also explained that Sir George Ayscough was to go out with Lawson, to enter the Swedish service as a volunteer.--(2) The other letter to Charles Gustavus, though dated "Oct." merely in the extant copies, was probably written on the same day as the foregoing, and was to introduce this Ayscough. "I send to your Majesty (and cannot send a present of greater worth or excellence) the truly distinguished and truly noble man, George Ayscough, Knight, not only famous and esteemed for his knowledge of war, especially naval war, as proved by his frequent and many brave performances, but also gifted with probity, modesty, ingenuity, and learning, dear to all for the sweetness of his manners, and, what is now the sum of all, eager to serve under the banners of your Majesty, so renowned over the whole world by your warlike prowess." A favourable reception is bespoken for Ayscough, who is to bring certain communications to his Majesty, and who, in any matters that may arise out of these, is to be taken as speaking for Richard himself. It was not till the beginning of the following year that Ayscough did arrive in the Baltic.

These five letters were undoubtedly the most important diplomatic dispatches of the beginning of Richard's Protectorate. They refer to the two most momentous foreign interests bequeathed from Oliver: viz. the French Alliance against Spain, and the entanglement in Northern Europe round the King of Sweden. Milton, as having written all the previous state-letters on these great subjects, was naturally required to be himself the writer of the five in which Richard announced to France and Sweden his resolution to continue the policy of his father. Marvell's pen may have been used, then and afterwards, for minor dispatches.

To the month of October 1658, the month after that of Oliver's death, belongs also a new edition of Milton's Defensio Prima. It was in octavo size, in close and clear type, and bore this title: "Joannis Miltonii, Angli, Pro Populo Anglicano Defensio contra Claudii Anonymi, alias Salmasii, Defensionem Regiam. Editio correctior et auctior, ab Autore denuo recognita. Londini, Typis Newcombianis, Anno Dom. 1658" (John Milton's Defence, &c. "Corrected and Enlarged Edition, newly revised by the Author" London: from Newcome's press, &c.).[1] This edition seems to have escaped the notice to which it is entitled. As far as my examination has gone, the differences from the original edition through the body of the work can be but slight. There is, however, a very important postscript of two pages, which I shall here translate:--

[Footnote 1: Thomason copy in British Museum, with the date "Octob." (no day) written on the title-page.]

"Having published this book, some years ago now [April 1651], in the hurried manner then required by the interests of the Commonwealth, but with the notion that, if ever I should have leisure to take it into my hands again, I might, as is customary, afterwards polish up something in it, or perchance cancel or add something, this I fancy I have now accomplished, though with fewer changes than I thought: a monument, as I see, whosoever has contrived it, not easily to perish. If there shall be found some one who will defend civil liberty more freely than here, yet certainly it will hardly be in a greater or more illustrious example; and truly, if the belief is that a deed of such arduous and famous example was not attempted and so prosperously finished without divine inspiration, there may be reason to think that the celebration and defence of the same with such applauses was also by the same aid and impulse,--an opinion I would much rather see entertained by all than have any other happiness of genius, judgment, or diligence, attributed to myself. Only this:--Just as that Roman Consul, laying down his magistracy, swore in public that the Commonwealth and that City were safe by his sole exertion, so I, now placing my last hand on this work, would dare assert, calling God and men to witness, that I have demonstrated in this book, and brought publicly forward out of the highest authors of divine and human wisdom, those very things by which I am confident that the English People have been sufficiently defended in this cause for their everlasting fame with posterity, and confident also that the generality of mankind, formerly deceived by foul ignorance of their own rights and a false semblance of Religion, have been, unless in as far as they may prefer and deserve slavery, sufficiently emancipated. And, as the universal Roman People, itself sworn in that public assembly, approved with one voice and consent that Consul's so great and so special oath, so I have for some time understood that not only all the best of my own countrymen, but all the best also of foreign men, sanction and approve this persuasion of mine by no silent vote over the whole world. Which highest fruit of my labours proposed for myself in this life I both gratefully enjoy and at the same time make it my chief thought how I may be best able to assure not only my own country, for which I have already done my utmost, but also the men of all nations whatever, and especially all of the Christian name, that the accomplishment of yet greater things, if I have the power--and I shall have the power, if God be gracious,--is meanwhile for their sakes my desire and meditation."

Perhaps one begins to be a little tired of this high-strained exultation for ever and ever on the subject of his success in the Salmasian controversy. The recurrence at this point, however, is not uninstructive. At the beginning of Richard's Protectorate, we can see Milton's defences of the English Republic were still regarded as the unparalleled literary achievements of the age, and Milton's European celebrity on account of them had not waned in the least. It was something for the blind man, seated by himself in his small home in Westminster, and sending his thoughts out over the world from which for six years now he had been so helplessly shut in, to know this fact, and to be able to imagine the continued recollection of him as still alive among the myriads moving in that vast darkness. This fruit of his past labours, he says, he would "gratefully enjoy," but with no vulgar satisfaction. He would not confess it even to be with any lingering in him now of the last infirmity of a noble mind. In his fiftieth year, and in his present state, he could feel himself superior to that, and could describe his consciousness as something higher. If he had done a great work already, as he himself believed, and as the voice of all the best of mankind acknowledged, had it not been because God had chosen and inspired him for the same, and might he not in that faith send out a message to the world that perhaps God had not yet done with him, and they might expect from him, blind and desolate though he was, something greater and better still? The closing sentence is exactly such a message, and one can suppose that Milton was there thinking of his progress in Paradise Lost.

Whatever was the amount of Marvell's exertion in the secretaryship, Milton was not wholly exempted from the duty of writing even the more ordinary letters for Richard and his Council. There is a vacant interval of three months, indeed, after the five last registered and the next; but in January 1658-9 the series is resumed, and there are six more letters of Milton for Richard between the end of that month and the end of February. Richard's Parliament, it is to be remembered, met on the 27th of January.

(CXXXVIII.) To CHARLES GUSTAVUS, KING OF SWEDEN, Jan. 27, 1658-9 (i.e. the day of the meeting of the Parliament):--Samuel Piggott, merchant of London, has complained to the Protector that two ships of his--the Post, Tiddy Jacob master, and the Water-dog, Garbrand Peters master--are detained somewhere in the Baltic by his Majesty's forces. They had sailed from London to France; thence to Amsterdam, where one had taken in ballast only, but the other a cargo of herrings, belonging in part to one Peter Heinsberg, a Dutchman; and, so laden, they had been bound for his Majesty's port of Stettin. Probably the Dutch ownership of part of the herring cargo was the cause of the detention of the ships; but Piggott was the lawful owner of the ships themselves and of the rest of the goods. His Majesty is prayed to restore them, and so save the poor man from ruin.

(CXXXIX.) To THE HIGH AND MIGHTY, THE STATES OF WEST FRIESLAND, Jan. 27, 1658-9:--A widow, named Mary Grinder, complains that Thomas Killigrew, a commander in the service of the States, has for eighteen years owed her a considerable sum of money, the compulsory payment of which he is trying now to evade by petitioning their Highnesses not to allow any suit against him in their Courts for debts due in England. "If I only mention to your Highnesses that she, whom this man tries to deprive of nearly all her fortunes, is a widow, that she is poor, the mother of many little children, I will not do you the injustice of supposing that with you, to whom I am confident the divine commandments, and especially those about not oppressing widows and the fatherless, are well known, any more serious argument will be needed against your granting this privilege of fraud to the man's petition."--The Thomas Killigrew here concerned may have been one of several well-known Killigrews, then refugee Royalists. Hence perhaps the earnestness of the letter.

(CXL.) To LOUIS XIV. OF FRANCE, Feb. 18, 1658-9:--"We have heard, and not without grief, that some Protestant churches in Provence were so scandalously interrupted by a certain ill-tempered bigot that the matter was thought worthy of severe notice by the magistrates of Grenoble, to whom the cognisance of the case belonged by law; but that a convention of the clergy, held shortly afterwards in, those parts, has obtained your Majesty's order that the whole affair shall be brought before your Royal Council in Paris, and that meanwhile, there being no decision there hitherto, these churches, and especially that of Aix, are prohibited from meeting for the worship of God." His Majesty is asked to remove this prohibition, and to see the author of the mischief properly censured. Such a missive proves that Richard and his Council kept to Oliver's rule of interference whenever there was persecution of Protestants, and also that they did not doubt their influence with Louis and Mazarin.

(CXLI.) To CARDINAL MAZARIN, Feb. 19, 1658-9:[1]--The Duchess-Dowager of Richmond, with her son, the young duke, is going into France, and means to reside there for some time. His Eminence is requested to show all possible attention to the illustrious lady and her son.

[Footnote 1: So dated in the Skinner Transcript, but "29 Feb." in Printed Collection and Phillips.]

(CXLII.) To CARDINAL MAZARIN, Feb. 22, 1658-9:[1]--About eight months ago the case of Peter Pett, "a man of singular probity, and of the highest utility to us and the Commonwealth by his remarkable skill in naval affairs," was brought before his Eminence by a letter of the late Lord Protector (not among Milton's letters). It was to request that his Eminence would see to the execution of a decree of his French Majesty's Council, as far back as Nov. 4, 1647, that compensation should be made to Pett for the seizure and sale of a ship of his, called the Edward, by one Bascon, in the preceding year. His Eminence has doubtless attended to the request; but there is still some impediment. Will his Eminence see where it lies and remove it?--Since the time of Queen Mary there had been three Peter Petts in succession, ship-builders and masters of the Royal Dockyard at Deptford; and the present Peter was the father of the more celebrated Sir Peter Pett, who was fellow of the Royal Society after the Restoration.

[Footnote 1: So dated in Printed Collection and in the Skinner Transcript; misdated "Feb. 25" in Phillips.]

(CXLIII.) To ALFONSO V., KING OF PORTUGAL, Feb. 23, 1658-9:[1]--Congratulations to his Portuguese Majesty upon a victory he had recently obtained over "our common enemy the Spaniard," with acknowledgment of his Majesty's handsome behaviour, through his Commissioners in London, in the matter of satisfaction, according to an article in the League between Portugal and the English Commonwealth, to those English merchants who had let out their vessels to the Brazil Company. But there is still one such merchant unpaid--a certain Alexander Bence, whose ship, The Three Brothers, John Wilks master, had made two voyages for the Company. They refuse to pay him, though they have fully paid others who had made but one voyage; and "why this is done I do not understand, unless it be that in their estimation a person is more worthy of his hire who has earned it once than one who has earned it twice." Will his Majesty see that Bence receives his due?

[Footnote 1: In the Printed Collection and Phillips, and also, I think, in the Skinner Transcript, the king's name is given as "John"; but John IV. of Portugal had died in 1656 and been succeeded by Alfonso.]

These six letters belong to the first month of Richard's Parliament, with its very large and freely elected House of Commons representing England, Scotland, and Ireland, and its anomalous addition or excrescence of another or Upper House, consisting of the two or three scores of recently-created Cromwellian "Lords." The battle between the Republicans and the Protectoratists had begun in the Commons, Thurloe ably leading there for the Protectoratists; the Republicans had been beaten on the first great question by the recognition of the Single-Person principle and of Richard's title to the Protectorship; and the House had gone on to the question of the continued existence and functions of the other House, with every prospect that the Cromwillians would beat the Republicans on that question too. From January to April, not only in the Parliament, but also over the country at large, the all-engrossing interest, as we know, was this controversy between pure old Republicanism, desiring neither single sovereignty nor aristocracy, and that more conservative form of Commonwealth which had been set up by the Oliverian constitution. Over the country, no less than in the Parliament, the conservative policy was in favour, and the Cromwellians or Protectoratists, among whom the Presbyterians now ranked themselves, were far more numerous than the old Republicans. Royalism, or at least Stuart Royalism, was at its lowest ebb. Many that had been Royalists heretofore had accepted the constitutionalized Protectorate as the best substitute for Royalty that circumstances allowed, and saw no course left them but to cooperate with the majority of their countrymen in confirming Richard's rule.

How Milton stood related to this controversy is a matter rather of inference than of direct information. Having been a faithful adherent and official of Oliver through his whole Protectorate, and still holding his official place under Richard's Government, there is little doubt that, if he had been obliged to post himself publicly on either of the two sides, he would have gone among the Cromwellians. Nay, if he had been obliged to choose between the two subdivisions of this body, known as the Court Party (supporting Richard absolutely) and the Wallingford-House Party (supporting Richard's civil Protectorate, but wanting to transfer the military power to the Army-chiefs), there can be little doubt that he would have gone with the former. Had he been in the House of Commons, like his colleague Andrew Marvell, his duty there, like Marvell's, would have been that of a ministerial member, assisting Thurloe and voting with him in all the divisions. But for his blindness, we may here say, the chances are that he would long ere now have been a known Parliamentary man, and that, after having been a Cromwellian leader in Oliver's second Parliament, he might have been now in Thurloe's exact place in Richard's present Parliament, or beside Thurloe as a strangely different chief. This, or that other alternative of a foreign ambassadorship or residency, which must have suggested itself again and again to the reader in the course of our narrative, might have been the natural career of Milton through the rule of the Cromwells, had not blindness disabled him. For, if Meadows, his former mere assistant in the Foreign Secretaryship, had been for some time in the one career with increasing distinction, and if an opening had been easily found for Marvell in the other, why may not imagination trace either career, or a combination of the two, had physical infirmity not prevented, for the greater Cromwellian of whom these were but satellites? It is imagination only, and would not be worth while, were it not for one important biographical question which it brings forward. Had Milton remained capable of any such practical career under the Cromwells, would he have retained, to the same extent as he had done through his blindness, the necessary qualification of being an Oliverian or Cromwellian? How far was his present Cromwellianism the actual consequence of his blindness, the mere submissiveness of a blind man to what he had no power to disturb? It is partly an answer to this question to remember again his Defensio Secunda of 1654, with its great panegyric on Cromwell. Milton had been but two years blind when that was published, and had not lost aught of the vehemence of his Republican convictions. Not without deliberation, therefore, had he given up the first form of the Commonwealth, consisting in a single supreme House of Parliament and an annual Council of State chosen by the same, and accepted the later or Protectoral form, with Cromwell for its head, a permanent Council of State round Cromwell, and Parliaments on occasion. But, underneath this general adhesion to the Protectorate, there had been even then certain Miltonic reserves, and especially the reserve of a protest against the continuance of a State Church. Now, had Milton been in a condition to act the part of a practical statesman through Oliver's Protectorate, might not some extraordinary development have been given to those reserves? With his boundless courage and the non-conforming habits of his genius, would he ever have been the Parliamentary servant of a Government from which he differed at all,--from which he differed so vitally on the question of Church Establishment? Probably in nothing else had Cromwell wholly disappointed him. Through the Protectorate there had been all the toleration of religious differences that could be desired, or what shortcoming there had been had hardly been by Cromwell's own fault; the other interferences with liberty had hardly perhaps, in Milton's estimation, gone beyond the necessities of police; and in Cromwell's foreign policy, with its magnificent championship of Protestantism abroad, what man in England was more ardently at one with him than the draftsman of his great foreign despatches? At the time of the proposal of Cromwell's Kingship, and generally at the time of the transition out of his first Protectorate into his second, with the resuscitation then of so many aristocratic forms and the attempt to reinstitute a house of peers, there may have been, as we have already hinted, an uprising in Milton's mind of democratic objections, and the effect may have been that Milton before the end of Oliver's Protectorate was less of an Oliverian than he had been at the beginning. Still, precluded from any active concern in those constitutional changes, he may have reconciled himself to them easily enough, and also to the transmission of the Protectorship from Oliver to Richard. The one insuperable stumbling-block, I believe, had been and was Cromwell's Established Church. Even in his blindness he could theorize on that, and stiffen himself more and more in his intense Religious Voluntaryism, Conscious of his irreconcileable dissent from Cromwell's policy in this great matter, and knowing that Cromwell was aware of the fact, it may have been a satisfaction to him that he was not called upon to act a Parliamentary part, in which proclamation of the dissent and consequent rupture with Cromwell on the ecclesiastical question would have been inevitable. It may have been some satisfaction to him that he could go on faithfully and honestly as a servant of Cromwell in the special business of the Latin Secretaryship, and for the rest be a lonely thinker and take refuge in silence. It is worth observing, indeed, that nothing of a political kind had come from Milton's pen during the last three or four years of Oliver's Protectorate,--nothing even indirectly bearing on the internal politics of the Commonwealth since his Pro Se Defensio against Morus in 1655, and nothing directly bearing thereon since his Defensio Secunda of 1654. And so, if we conclude this inquiry by saying that, at the time of Richard's accession and the meeting of his Parliament, Milton was still a Cromwellian, but a Cromwellian with the old Miltonic reserves, and these strengthened of late rather than weakened, we shall be about right. To the public, however, in the present controversy between the Protectoratists and the pure Republicans, he was distinctly a Protectoratist, a Cromwellian, one of the Court-party, an official of Richard and his Council.

Since Cromwell's death, we have now to add, Milton had been re-mustering his reserves. Under a new Protector, and from the new Parliament of that new Protector, might he not have a hearing on points on which he had for some time been silent? On this chance, he had interrupted even his Paradise Lost, in order to prepare an address to the new Parliament. As might be expected, it was on the subject of the relations of Church and State. Meditating on this subject, and how it might be best treated practically at such a time, Milton, had concluded that it might be broken into two parts. "Two things there be which have been ever found working much mischief to the Church of God and the advancement of Faith,--Force on the one side restraining, and Hire on the other side corrupting, the Teachers thereof." He would, therefore, write one tract on the effects of Compulsion or State-restraint in matters of Religion and Speculation, and another on the effects of Hire or State-endowments in the same. The two would be interconnected, and would in fact melt into each other; but they might appear separately, and it might be well to begin with the first, as the least irritating. Accordingly, before the meeting of the Parliament he had prepared, and after it had met there was published, in the form of a very tiny octavo, a tract with this title-page: "A Treatise of Civil Power in Ecclesiastical Causes: Shewing that it is not lawfull for any power on Earth to compell in matters of Religion. The author J.M. London, Printed by Tho. Newcomb, Anno 1659." The tract consists of an address "To the Parlament of the Commonwealth of England with the Dominions thereof," occupying ten of the small pages, and signed "John Milton" in full, and then of eighty-three pages of text.[1]

[Footnote 1: The little book was duly registered at Stationers' Hall, under date Feb. 16, 1658-9, thus: "Mr. Tho. Newcomb entered for his copy (under the hand of Mr. Pulleyn, warden) a book called A Treatise of Civil Power in Ecclesiastical Causes by John Milton."]

After intimating that this was but the first of two tracts and that the other would follow, and also that his argument is to be wholly and exclusively from Scripture, Milton propounds the argument itself under four successive heads or propositions.--The first is that, there being, by the fundamental principle of Protestantism, "no other divine rule or authority from without us, warrantable to one another as a common ground, but the Holy Scripture, and no other within us but the illumination of the Holy Spirit so interpreting that Scripture as warrantable only to ourselves and to such whose consciences we can so persuade," it follows that "no man or body of men in these times can be the infallible judges or determiners in matters of religion to any other men's consciences but their own." Having reasoned this at some length by quotations of Scripture texts and explanations of the same, he proceeds to "yet another reason why it is unlawful for the civil magistrate to use force in matters of Religion: which is, because to judge in those things, though we should grant him able, which is proved he is not, yet as a civil magistrate he hath no right." Under this second head, and also by means of Scripture quotations, there is an exposition of Milton's favourite idea of the purely spiritual nature of Christ's kingdom and of the instrumentalities it permits. The third proposition advances the argument by maintaining that not only is the civil magistrate unable, from the nature of the case, to determine in matters of Religion, and not only has he no right to try, but he also does positive wrong by trying. In arguing this, still Scripturally, Milton dilates on the meaning of the "Christian liberty" of the true believer, with the heights and depths which it implies in the renewed spirit, the superiority to "the bondage of ceremonies" and "the weak and beggarly rudiments." The fourth and last reason pleaded, still from Scripture, against the compulsion of the magistrate in Religion, is that he must fail signally in the very ends he proposes to himself; "and those hardly can be other than first the glory of God, next either the spiritual good of them whom he forces or the temporal punishment of their scandal to others." Far from attaining either of these ends, he can but dishonour God and promote profanity and hypocrisy.--"On these four Scriptural reasons as on a firm square." says Milton at the close, "this truth, the right of Christian and Evangelic Liberty, will stand immoveable against all those pretended consequences of license and confusion which, for the most part, men most licentious and confused themselves, or such as whose severity would be wiser than divine wisdom, are ever aptest to object against the ways of God."

Such is the plan of the little treatise, the literary texture of which is plain and homely, rather than rich, learned, or rhetorical. "Pomp and ostentation of reading," he expressly says, "is admired among the vulgar; but doubtless in matters of Religion he is learnedest who is plainest." It was, we may remember, his first considerable English dictation for the press since his blindness, and what one chiefly notices in the style is the strong grasp he still retains of his old characteristic syntax.[1] The following are a few of the more interesting individual passages or expressions:--

[Footnote 1: I have noted in the Tract one occurrence at least of the very un-Miltonic word its, as follows:--"As the Samaritans believed Christ, first for the woman's word, but next and much rather for his own, so we the Scripture first on the Church's word, but afterwards and much more for its own as the word of God."]

Blasphemy.--"But some are ready to cry out 'What shall then be done to Blasphemy?' Them I would first exhort not thus to terrify and pose the people with a Greek word, but to teach them better what it is: being a most usual and common word in that language to signify any slander, any malicious or evil speaking, whether against God or man or anything to good belonging."

Heresy and Heretic:--"Another Greek apparition stands in our way, 'Heresy and Heretic': in like manner also railed at to the people, as in a tongue unknown. They should first interpret to them that Heresy, by what it signifies in that language, is no word of evil note; meaning only the choice or following of any opinion, good or bad, in religion or any other learning."

A Wrested Text of Scripture:--"It hath now twice befallen me to assert, through God's assistance, this most wrested and vexed place of Scripture [Romans XIII, 'Let every soul be subject unto the higher powers,' &c.]: heretofore against Salmasius and regal tyranny over the State; now against Erastus and State-tyranny over the Church."

Are Popery and Idolatry to be Tolerated?--"But, as for Popery and Idolatry, why they also may not hence plead to be tolerated, I have much less to say. Their Religion, the more considered, the less can be acknowledged a Religion, but a Roman Principality rather, endeavouring to keep up her old universal dominion under a new name and mere shadow of a Catholic Religion; being indeed more rightly named a Catholic Heresy against the Scripture; supported mainly by a civil, and, except in Rome, by a foreign, power: justly therefore to be suspected, not tolerated, by the magistrate of another country. Besides, of an implicit faith, which they profess, the conscience also becomes implicit, and so, by voluntary servitude to man's law, forfeits her Christian liberty. Who, then, can plead for such a conscience as, being implicitly enthralled to man instead of God, almost becomes no conscience, as the will not free becomes no will? Nevertheless, if they ought not to be tolerated, it is for just reason of State more than of Religion; which they who force, though professing to be Protestants, deserve as little to be tolerated themselves, being no less guilty of Popery in the most Popish point. Lastly, for Idolatry, who knows it not to be evidently against all Scripture, both of the Old and New Testament, and therefore a true heresy, or rather an impiety; wherein a right conscience can have naught to do, and the works thereof so manifest that a magistrate can hardly err in prohibiting and quite removing at least the public and scandalous use thereof."

Christ's unique act of Compulsion:--"We read not that Christ ever exercised force but once; and that was to drive profane ones out of his Temple, not to force them in."

Concluding Recommendation to Statesmen and Ministers:--"As to those magistrates who think it their work to settle Religion, and those ministers or others who so oft call upon them to do so, I trust that, having well considered what hath been here argued, neither they will continue in that intention, nor these in that expectation from them, when they shall find that the settlement of Religion belongs only to each particular church by persuasive and spiritual means within itself, and that the defence only of the Church belongs to the magistrate. Had he once learnt not further to concern himself with Church affairs, half his labour might be spared and the Commonwealth better tended."

* * * * *

In this last extract there is a distinct outbreak of the intention which is rather covert through the rest of the tract. To a hasty reader the tract might seem only a plea for the amplest toleration, of religious dissent, a plea for full liberty, outside of the Established Church, not merely to Baptists, but also to Quakers, Anti-Trinitarians, and all other sects professing in any way to be Christians and believers in the Bible, Papists alone excepted, and they but partially and reluctantly. There would be no censure on Cromwell's policy, if that were all. But an acute reader of the tract would have detected that more was intended in it than a plea for Toleration, that the very existence of any Established Church whatever was condemned. In the passage last quoted it is clearly seen that this is the ultimate scope. It is a reflection on Cromwell, almost by name, for not having freed himself from the notion that the settlement of Religion is an affair of the Civil Magistrate, but on the contrary having made such a supposed settlement of Religion one of the passions of his Protectorate. It is a reflection on him, and on Owen, Thomas Goodwin, and all his ecclesiastical advisers and assessors, Independent or Presbyterian, for having busied themselves in maintaining and re-shaping any State-Church, on however broad a basis, and so having perpetuated the old distinction between Establishment and Dissent, Orthodoxy and Heresy, instead of abolishing that distinction utterly, and leaving all varieties of Christianity, equally unstamped and unfavoured, to organize themselves as they best could on the principle of voluntary association. For the future, statesmen and ministers are invited to cease from persevering in this delusion of the great and good Cromwell.

The tract was addressed, as we have said, to the Parliament of Cromwell's son. The preface, signed with Milton's name in full, is a recommendation of the doctrine to that body in particular. "I have prepared, Supreme Council, against the much expected time of your sitting," Milton there says, "this treatise; which, though to all Christian Magistrates equally belonging, and therefore to have been written in the common language of Christendom, natural duty and affection hath confined and dedicated first to my own nation, and in a season wherein the timely reading thereof, to the easier accomplishment of your great work, may save you much labour and interruption." Then, after having stated the main doctrine, he continues:--"One advantage I make no doubt of, that I shall write to many eminent persons of your number already perfect and resolved in this important article of Christianity: some of whom I remember to have heard often, for several years, at a Council next in authority to your own, so well joining religion with civil prudence, and yet so well distinguishing the different power of either, and this not only voting but frequently reasoning why it should be so, that, if any there present had been before of an opinion contrary, he might doubtless have departed thence a convert in that point, and have confessed that then both Commonwealth and Religion will at length, if ever, flourish, in Christendom, when either they who govern discern between Civil and Religious, or they only who so discern shall be admitted to govern." In other words, Milton's hopes of a favourable hearing for his doctrine in Richard's Parliament were founded (1) on the general ground that many members of the Parliament were old Commonwealth's men, of the kind that would have carried the abolition of Tithes and of a State-Church in the Barebones Parliament of 1653, had not Rous broken up that Parliament and resurrendered the power to Cromwell, and (2) on the special fact that some of them were men whom Milton had himself heard with admiration, in the Councils of State of the Commonwealth, when he first sat there as Foreign Secretary in attendance, avowing and expounding the principle of Voluntaryism in Religion, in its fullest possible extent. Among these last Milton must have had in view chiefly such members of the Commons House in Richard's Parliament as Vane, Bradshaw, Harrison, Neville, Ludlow, and Scott, all of whom had been members of one, or several, or all, of the Councils of State of the old Commonwealth; but he may have had in view also such members of the present Upper House as Fleetwood, St. John, and Viscount Lisle. Above all, Vane must have been in his mind,--Vane, on whom half of his eulogy in 1652 had been.

"To know Both spiritual power and civil, what each means, What severs each, thou, hast learned; which few have done. The bounds of either sword to thee we owe."

Might not Vane and his fellows move in the present Parliament for a reconsideration of that part of the policy of the Protectorate which concerned Religion? Might they not induce the Parliament to revert, in the matters of Tithes, a State Ministry, and Endowments of Religion, to the temper and determinations of the much-abused, but really wise and deep-minded, Barebones Parliament? Nothing less than this is the ultimate purport of Milton's appeal; and little wonder that he prefixed an intimation that he wrote now only as a private man, and without any official authority whatever. "Of Civil Liberty," he says in the conclusion of his preface, "I have written heretofore by the appointment, and not without the approbation, of Civil Power: of Christian Liberty I write now,--which others long since having done with all freedom under Heathen Emperors, I should do wrong to suspect that now I shall with less under Christian Governors, and such especially as profess openly their defence of Christian liberty, although I write this not otherwise appointed and induced than by an inward persuasion of the Christian duty which I may usefully discharge herein to the common Lord and Master of us all." The words imply just a shade of doubt whether he, a salaried servant of the Government, might not be called to account for having been so bold.

Altogether, Milton's Treatise of Civil Power in Ecclesiastical Causes can be construed no otherwise than as an effort on his part, Protectoratist and Court-official though he was, to renew his relations with the old Republican party in the Parliament in the special interest of his extreme views on the religious question. Merely as a pleading against Religious Persecution, the treatise might have had some effect on the Parliament generally, where it was in fact much needed, in consequence of the presence of so much of the Presbyterian element, and the likelihood therefore of increased stringency against Quakers, Socinians, and other Non-Conformists. The treatise would have found many in the Parliament, besides the Republicans, quite willing to listen to its advices so far. But only or chiefly among the old Republicans can there have been any hope of an acceptance of its extreme definition of Christian Liberty, as involving Disestablishment and entire separation of Church and State.

The Treatise, so far as we can see, produced no effect whatever. So far as the Religious Question did appear in the Parliament, it was evident that the preservation of Cromwell's Church-Establishment, its perpetuation as an integral part of Richard's Protectorate, was a foregone conclusion in the minds of the vast majority. Any Disestablishment proposal, emanating from the Republican party, or from any individual member like Vane, would have been tramped out by the united strength of the Presbyterians, the Cromwellians of the Court, and the Wallingford-House Cromwellians. The danger even was that there might be a retrogression in the matter of mere Toleration, and that the presence and pressure of so many Presbyterians among the supporters of Richard might compel Richard's Government, against his own will and that of his Cromwellian Councillors, to a severer Church-discipline than had characterized the late Protectorate. But, indeed, it was not on the Religious Question in any form that the Republicans found time or need to try their strength. Their battles in the Parliament were on the two main constitutional questions:--first, the question of the Protectorate itself or Single-Person Government; and, next, the question of the Other House or House of Lords. On the first they were definitively beaten in February; and on the second they were beaten, no less definitively, and with more distressing incidents of defeat, before the end of March (ante pp. 432-435). Then, feeling themselves powerless as an independent party, they changed their tactics. No sooner had the Protectoratists or Cromwellians triumphed collectively under Thurloe's leadership than there had begun among them that fatal straggle between the two divisions of their body of which the beaten Republicans could not fail to take advantage. The Court party of the Cromwellians, still led by Thurloe in the Commons, desired to preserve the Protectorate unbroken and with full powers, reducing the Army, as in an orderly and well-constituted State, to its proper place and dimensions as the instrument of the civil authority; the Army Party, or Wallingford-House Party, represented by Fleetwood and Desborough in chief, wanted to leave Richard only the civil Protectorship, and to set up a co-ordinate military power. The differences between the two parties had been smouldering since Richard's accession, and had been too visible since the first meeting of the Parliament; but it was in April 1659, after their joint victory over the Republicans, that they turned against each other in deadly strife, the Republicans looking on. Through that month the ominous spectacle was that of two rival Parliaments in Westminster--Richard's regular Parliament, and the irregular Wallingford-House Parliament of Army officers--watching each other and interchanging threats and denunciations. It was on the 18th of the month that the regular Parliament passed their two courageous resolutions asserting their supreme authority. They were that the Wallingford Council of officers should be immediately dissolved and no more such meetings of officers permitted, and that all officers of the Army and Navy should take an engagement not to interrupt the established power (ante pp. 440-441). Then it was evident there would be a crash, but in what form was still unknown.

Precisely at this crisis in Richard's Protectorship comes the last batch of Milton's official letters for him. The letters are four in number:[1]--

[Footnote 1: These Letters do not appear in the ordinary Printed Collection, or in Phillips; but they are in the Skinner Transcript, and have been printed thence by Mr. Hamilton in his Milton Papers, pp. 12-14.]

(CXLIV. and CXLV.) To FERDINAND, GRAND DUKE OF TUSCANY, April 19, 1659:--Two Letters to this Prince on the same day. (1) Sir John Dethicke, James Gold, John Limbery, and other London merchants, are owners of a ship called The Happy Entrance, which they sent out with merchandise for trade in the Mediterranean, under the command of a John Marvin. They can get no account from him, and have reason to fear he means to play the rogue with the ship and cargo and never return. It is believed that within two months he may put in at Leghorn; and the Protector requests the Grand Duke to give the merchants, in that case, facilities for the recovery of their property. (2) A James Modiford, merchant, complains to the Protector that certain goods of his, taken to Leghorn about 1652 by another English trader, Humphrey Sidney, were there seized by some Italian creditors of Sidney. Modiford has been unable to obtain redress; and the Grand Duke is now prayed to see his goods restored and any claims Sidney may have upon him referred to the English Courts.

(CXLVI.) To ALFONSO V., KING OF PORTUGAL, April 1659:[1]--A Francis Hurdidge of London complains that a ship of his, called The Mary and John, cargo valued at 70,000 crowns, employed in the Brazil trade in 1649 and 1650, was seized by the Portuguese. The ship was afterwards taken from the Portuguese by the Dutch. The Treaty between the English Commonwealth and Portugal provides for such cases; and his Portuguese Majesty is requested to make compensation to Hurdidge to the extent of 25,000 crowns. The man is in great straits.

[Footnote 1: "Joanni Portugallioe Regi" is the heading in Mr. Hamilton's copy from the Skinner Transcript; but this is a mistake (see ante p. 576, note).]

(CXLVII.) To CHARLES GUSTAVUS, KING OF SWEDEN, April 1659:--David Fithy, merchant, informs the Protector that, about a month ago, he contracted to supply to the Navy 150 sacks of hemp. He has the hemp now at Riga, and a ship ready to bring it thence for the use of the fleet--"part of which," the Protector skilfully adds, "has just sailed for the Baltic for your protection" (i.e. Montague's fleet, despatched this very month: see ante p. 435). It appears, however, that his Swedish Majesty has forbidden the exportation of hemp from his port of Riga without special permission. His Majesty is requested to give Fithy this permission, that he may be able to fulfil his contract. The Protector will consider himself much obliged by the kindness.

No more letters was poor Richard to write to crowned heads. On the very day on which the two first of the foregoing were written, he appeared in Wallingford House, and ordered the dissolution of the Council of Officers according to the edict of the Parliament. Next day it was known through all London that the question was between a dissolution of this Council of officers and a dissolution of the Parliament itself. The day after, Thursday, April 21, there was the famous double rendezvous of the two masses of soldiery round Whitehall to try the question, the rendezvous for Richard and the Parliament utterly failing, while that for Fleetwood, Desborough, and the other rebel chiefs, flooded the streets and St. James's Park. That night, quailing before the rough threats of Desborough, Richard and his Council yielded; and on Friday, the 22nd, the indignant Parliament knew itself to be dissolved, and Richard's Protectorate virtually at an end. Nominally, it dragged on for a month more.

On Thursday, April 21, the day of the dreadful double rendezvous, and of Desborough's stormy interview with Richard in Whitehall to compel the dissolution of the Parliament, Milton, in his house in Petty France, on the very edge of the uproar, was quietly dictating a private letter. It is that numbered 28 among his Epistoloe Familiares, and headed "Joanni Badioeo, Pastori Arausionensi," i.e. "To John Badiaeus, Pastor of Orange." With some trouble, I have identified this "Badiaeus" with a certain French JEAN LABADIE, who is characterized by Bayle as a "schismatic minister, followed like an apostle," and by another authority as "one of the most dangerous fanatics of the seventeenth century." The facts of his life, to the moment of our present concern with him, are given in the accepted French authorities thus:--Born in 1610 at Bourg-en-Guyenne, the son of a soldier who had risen to be lieutenant, he had received a Jesuit education at Bordeaux, had entered the Jesuit order at an early age, and had become a priest. For fifteen years he had remained in the order, preaching, and also teaching rhetoric and philosophy, reputed "a prodigy of talent and piety," but also a mystic and enthusiast, with fancies that he must found a new religious sect. While preaching orthodox Catholicism in public, he had been indoctrinating disciples in private with his peculiarities; and, when they were numerous enough, he wanted to leave the Jesuits. By reasonings and kindness, they managed to retain him for a while; but he grew more odd and visionary, fasting often, eating only herbs, and having divine revelations. After a dangerous illness, which brought him to death's door, he did obtain his dismissal from the Jesuit order in April 1639, and went over France propagandizing. The Bishop of Amiens, caught by his eloquence, made him prebendary of a collegiate church in that town; in connexion with which, and with the Bishop's approval, he founded a religious association of young women, called St. Mary Magdalene. All seemed to go well for a time; but at length there was a scandal about him and a girl in Abbeville, with a burst of similar scandals about his abuse of the confessional for vicious purposes. To avoid arrest, he absconded to Paris in August 1644, and thence to Bazas, where he lived under a feigned name. But the Bishop of Bazas took him up; he cleared himself to the Bishop and others, and defied his calumniators. Only for a time; for again there were scandals, and he was expelled the diocese. Going then to Toulouse, he gained the confidence of the Archbishop there, who gave him charge of a convent of nuns. In this post he developed more systematically his notions of the religious life, described as a compound of Quietism and Antinomianism, after the fashion of sects already known in France and Germany, but with sexual extravangances which, when divulged, raised an indignant storm. In November 1649, he had to abscond from Toulouse; and, after various wanderings, in which he called himself "Jean de Jesus Christ" and obtained popularity as a prophet, he came to Montauban, and there publicly abjured Roman Catholicism in October 1650. Elected minister of the Protestant church of that town in 1652, he lived there for some years in great esteem among the Protestants, but in deadly feud with the Roman Catholics. The schism was such that at last the magistrates had to banish him from the town as a disturber of the peace. Then he had found refuge in Orange; and he was in some kind of temporary Protestant pastorship in that town of south-east France when there was this communication between him and Milton.[1]

[Footnote 1: Article LABADIE in Nouvelle Biographie Générale (1859), with additional information from Article on him in the Biographie Universelle (edit. 1819), and from La Vie du Sieur Jean Labadie by Bolsec (Lyon, 1664), and some passages in Bayle's Dictionary (e.g. in Article Mamillaires). It is from the additional authorities that I learn the fact of the removal of Labadie from Montauban to Orange; the Article in the N. Biog. Gen. omits it.--I have seen two publications of Labadie at Montauban--one of 1650, entitled Declaration de Jean de L'Abadie, cydevant prestre, giving his reasons for quitting the Church of Rome; the other of 1651, entitled Lettre de J. de L'Abadie à ses amis de la Communion Romaine touchant sa Declaration.]

TO JEAN LABADIE, MINISTER OF ORANGE.

"If I answer you rather late, distinguished and reverend Sir, our common friend Durie, I believe, will not refuse to let me transfer the blame of the late answer from myself to him. For, now that he has communicated to me that paper which you wished read to me, on the subject of your doings and sufferings in behalf of the Gospel, I have not deferred preparing this letter for you, to be given to the first carrier, being really anxious as to the interpretation you may put upon my long silence. I owe very great thanks meanwhile to your Du Moulin of Nismes [not far from Orange], who, by his speeches and most friendly talk concerning me, has procured me the goodwill of so many good men in those parts. And truly, though I am not ignorant that, whether from the fact that I did not, when publicly commissioned, decline the contest with an adversary of such name [Salmasius], or on account of the celebrity of the subject, or, finally, on account of my style of writing, I have become sufficiently known far and wide, yet my feeling is that I have real fame only in proportion to the good esteem I have among good men. That you also are of this way of thinking I see plainly--you who, kindled by the regard and love of Christian Truth, have borne so many labours, sustained the attacks of so many enemies, and who bravely do such actions every day as prove that, so far from seeking any fame from the bad, you do not fear rousing against you their most certain hatred and maledictions. O happy man thou! whom God, from among so many thousands, otherwise knowing and learned, has snatched singly from the very gates and jaws of Hell, and called to such an illustrious and intrepid profession of his Gospel! And at this moment I have cause for thinking that it has happened by the singular providence of God that I did not reply to you sooner. For, when I understood from your letter that, assailed and besieged as you are on all hands by bitter enemies, you were looking round, and no wonder, to see where you might, in the last extremity, should it come to that, find a suitable refuge, and that England was most to your mind, I rejoiced on more accounts than one that you had come to this conclusion,--one reason being the hope of having you here, and another the delight that you should have so high an opinion of my country; but the joy was counterbalanced by the regret that I did not then see any prospect of a becoming provision for you among us here, especially as you do not know English. Now, however, it has happened most opportunely that a certain French minister here, of great age, died a few days ago. The persons of most influence in the congregation, understanding that you are by no means safe where you are at present, are very desirous (I report this not from vague rumour, but on information from themselves) to have you chosen to the place of that minister: in fact, they invite you; they have resolved to pay the expenses of your journey; they promise that you shall have an income equal to the best of any French minister here, and that nothing shall be wanting that can contribute to your pleasant discharge of the pastoral duty among them. Wherefore, take my advice, Reverend Sir, and fly hither as soon as possible, to people who are anxious to have you, and where you will reap a harvest, not perhaps so rich in the goods of this world, but, as men like you most desire, numerous, I hope, in souls; and be assured that you will be most welcome here to all good men, and the sooner the better. Farewell.

"Westminster: April 21, 1659."

It is clear from this letter that Milton had never heard of the scandals against M. Labadie's moral character, or, if he had, utterly disbelieved them, and regarded him simply as a convert from Roman Catholicism whose passionate and aggressive Protestant fervour had brought intolerable and unjust persecution upon him in France. Durie was his informant; and, for all we can now know, Milton's judgment about Labadie may have been the right one, and the traditional French account of him to this day may be wrong. It is certainly strange, however, to find Milton befriending with so much readiness and zeal this French Protestant minister, against whom there were exactly such scandals abroad as those which he had himself believed and blazoned about Morus, for the murder of Morus's reputation over Europe, and his ruin in the French Protestant Church in particular. Nor does the reported sequel of Labadie's life, in the ordinary accounts of him, lessen the wonder.--Labadie did not come to London, as Milton had hoped. When he received Milton's letter, he was on the wing for Geneva, where he arrived in June 1659, and where he continued his preaching. Here, in the very city where Morus had once been, there still were commotions round him; and, after new wanderings in Germany, we find him at Middleburg in Holland in 1666, thus again by chance in a town where Morus had been before him. At Middleburg he seems to have attained his widest celebrity, gathering a body of admirers and important adherents, the chief of whom was "Mademoiselle Schurmann, so versed in the learned languages." At length a quarrel with M. de Wolzogue, minister of the Walloon church at Utrecht, brought Labadie into difficulties with the Walloon Synod and with the State authorities, and he migrated to Erfurt, and thence to Altona, where he died in 1674, "in the arms of Mademoiselle Schurmann," who had followed him to the last. He left a sect called The Labadists, who were strong for a time, and are perhaps not yet extinct. Among the beliefs they inherited from him are said to have been these:--(1) That God may and does deceive man; (2) That Scripture is not necessary to salvation, the immediate action of the Spirit on souls being sufficient; (3) That there ought to be no Baptism of Infants; (4) That truly spiritual believers are not bound by law and ceremonies; (5) That Sabbath-observance is unnecessary, all days being alike; (6) That the ordinary Christian Church is degenerate and decrepit. One sees here something like a French Quakerism, but with ingredients from older Anabaptism. Had Milton's letter had the intended effect, the sect might have had its home in London.[1]

[Footnote 1: Nouvelle Biographie Générale, as before.--It is to be remembered that Milton himself authorized the publication of his letter to Badiaeus with his other Latin Familiar Epistles in 1674 (see Vol. I. p. 239). By that time he must have known the whole subsequent career of Labadie and all the reports about him; and he cannot even then have thought ill of him or of Mad'lle Schurmann. To the end, he liked all bold schismatics and sectaries, if they took a forward direction.]

Virtually at an end on the 22nd of April by the enforced dissolution of the Parliament, Richard's Protectorate was more visibly at an end on the 7th of May, when the Wallingford-House chiefs agreed with the Republicans in restoring the Rump. Eight days after that event Milton was called on to write two letters for the new Republican authorities. They were as follows:--

(CXLVIII.) TO CHARLES GUSTAVUS, KING OF SWEDEN, May 15, 1659:--"Most serene and most potent King, and very dear Friend: As it has pleased God, the best and all-powerful, with whom alone are all changes of Kingdoms and Commonwealths, to restore Us to our pristine authority and the supreme administration of English affairs, we have thought it good in the first place to inform your Majesty of the fact, and moreover to signify to you both our high regard for your Majesty, as a most potent Protestant prince, and also our desire to promote to the utmost of our power such a peace between you and the King of Denmark, himself likewise a very potent Protestant prince, as may not be brought about without our exertions and most willing good offices. Our pleasure therefore is that our internuncio extraordinary, Philip Meadows, be continued in our name in exactly the same employment which he has hitherto discharged with your Majesty for this Commonwealth; and to that end we, by these presents, give him the same power of making proposals and of treating and dealing with your Majesty which he had by his last commendatory letters. Whatever shall be transacted and concluded by him in our name, the same we pledge our promise, with God's good help, to confirm and ratify. May God long preserve your Majesty as a pillar and defence of the Protestant cause.--WILLIAM LENTHALL, Speaker of the Parliament of the Commonwealth of England."

(CXLIX) To FREDERICK III., KING OF DENMARK, May 15, 1659:--The counterpart of the foregoing. His Danish Majesty, addressed as "most serene King and very dear Friend" is informed by Lenthall of the change in English affairs, and of the sympathy the present English Government feels with him in his adversity. They will do their utmost to secure a peace between him and the King of Sweden; and Philip Meadows, their Envoy Extraordinary to the King of Sweden, has full powers to treat with his Danish Majesty too for that end. "God grant to your Majesty, as soon as possible, a happy and joyful outcome from all those difficulties of your affairs in which you behave so bravely and magnanimously!"

On the 25th of May Richard sent in his reluctant abdication, leaving the Rump, which had already assumed the supreme authority, to exercise that authority without further challenge or opposition on his part. Most of the public officials remained in their posts, and Milton remained In his. After five years and five months of Secretaryship under a Single-Person Government, he found himself again Secretary under exactly such a Republican Government as he had served originally, consisting now of the small Parliament of the Restored Rumpers and of a Council of State appointed by that Parliament. In this Council of State were Bradshaw, Vane, Sir James Harrington, St. John, Hasilrig, Scott, Walton, and Whitlocke, who had been members of all the first five Councils of the Commonwealth, from that which had invited Milton to the Secretaryship in 1649 to that which Cromwell forcibly dissolved in 1653, besides Fairfax, Fleetwood, Ludlow, John Jones, Wallop, Challoner, Neville, Dixwell, Downes, Morley, Thompson, and Algernon Sidney, whom Milton had known as members of one or more of those five Councils, and Lambert and Desborough, who had not been in any of them, but were among his later acquaintances.

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II. Second Section

MILTON'S LIFE AND SECRETARYSHIP THROUGH THE ANARCHY: MAY 1659--FEB. 1659-60.

FIRST STAGE OF THE ANARCHY, OR THE RESTORED RUMP (MAY--OCT. 1659):--FEELINGS AND POSITION OF MILTON IN THE NEW STATE OF THINGS: HIS SATISFACTION ON THE WHOLE, AND THE REASONS FOR IT: LETTER OF MOSES WALL TO MILTON: RENEWED AGITATION AGAINST TITHES AND CHURCH-ESTABLISHMENT: VOTES ON THAT SUBJECT IN THE RUMP: MILTON'S CONSIDERATIONS TOUCHING THE LIKELIEST MEANS TO REMOVE HIRELINGS OUT OF THE CHURCH: ACCOUNT OF THE PAMPHLET, WITH EXTRACTS: ITS THOROUGH-GOING VOLUNTARYISM: CHURCH-DISESTABLISHMENT DEMANDED ABSOLUTELY, WITHOUT COMPENSATION FOR VESTED INTERESTS: THE APPEAL FRUITLESS, AND THE SUBJECT IGNORED BY THE RUMP: DISPERSION OF THAT BODY BY LAMBERT.

SECOND STAGE OF THE ANARCHY, OR THE WALLINGFORD-HOUSE INTERRUPTION (OCT.--DEC. 1659):--MILTON'S THOUGHTS ON LAMBERT'S COUP D'ÉTAT IN HIS LETTER TO A FRIEND CONCERNING THE RUPTURES OF THE COMMONWEALTH: THE LETTER IN THE MAIN AGAINST LAMBERT AND IN DEFENCE OF THE RUMP: ITS EXTRAORDINARY PRACTICAL PROPOSAL OF A GOVERNMENT BY TWO PERMANENT CENTRAL BODIES: THE PROPOSAL COMPARED WITH THE ACTUAL ADMINISTRATION BY THE COMMITTEE OF SAFETY AND THE WALLINGFORD-HOUSE COUNCIL OF OFFICERS: MILTON STILL NOMINALLY IN THE LATIN SECRETARYSHIP: MONEY WARRANT OF OCT. 25, 1659, RELATING TO MILTON, MARVELL, AND EIGHTY-FOUR OTHER OFFICIALS: NO TRACE OF ACTUAL SERVICE BY MILTON FOR THE NEW COMMITTEE OF SAFETY: HIS MEDITATIONS THROUGH THE TREATY BETWEEN THE WALLINGFORD-HOUSE GOVERNMENT AND MONK IN SCOTLAND: HIS MEDITATIONS THROUGH THE COMMITTEE-DISCUSSIONS AS TO THE FUTURE MODEL OF GOVERNMENT: HIS INTEREST IN THIS AS NOW THE PARAMOUNT QUESTION, AND HIS COGNISANCE OF THE MODELS OF HARRINGTON AND THE ROTA CLUB: WHITLOCKE'S NEW CONSTITUTION DISAPPOINTING TO MILTON: TWO MORE LETTERS TO OLDENBURG AND YOUNG RANELAGH: GOSSIP FROM ABROAD IN CONNECTION WITH THESE LETTERS: MORUS AGAIN, AND THE COUNCIL OF FRENCH PROTESTANTS AT LOUDUN: END OF THE WALLINGFORD-HOUSE INTERRUPTION.

THIRD STAGE OF THE ANARCHY, OR THE SECOND RESTORATION OF THE RUMP (DEC. 1659-FEB. 1659-60):--MILTON'S DESPONDENCY AT THIS PERIOD: ABATEMENT OF HIS FAITH IN THE RUMP: HIS THOUGHTS DURING THE MARCH OF MONK FROM SCOTLAND AND AFTER MONK'S ARRIVAL IN LONDON: HIS STUDY OF MONK NEAR AT HAND AND MISTRUST OF THE OMENS: HIS INTEREST FOR A WHILE IN THE QUESTION OF THE PRECONSTITUTION OF THE NEW PARLIAMENT PROMISED BY THE RUMP: HIS ANXIETY THAT IT SHOULD BE A REPUBLICAN PARLIAMENT BY MERE SELF-ENLARGEMENT OF THE RUMP: HIS PREPARATION OF A NEW REPUBLICAN PAMPHLET: THE PUBLICATION POSTPONED BY MONK'S SUDDEN DEFECTION FROM THE RUMP, THE ROASTING OF THE RUMP IN THE CITY, AND THE RESTORATION OF THE SECLUDED MEMBERS TO THEIR PLACES IN THE PARLIAMENT: MILTON'S DESPONDENCY COMPLETE.

With what feelings was it that Milton found himself once more in the employment of his old masters, the original Republicans or Commonwealth's-men? That there may have been some sense of awkwardness in the re-connexion is not unlikely. Had he not for six years been a most conspicuous Cromwellian? Had he not justified again and again in print Cromwell's coup d'état of 1653, by which the Rump had been turned out of power, and which the now Restored Rumpers, and especially such of their leaders as Vane, Scott, Hasilrig, and Bradshaw, were bound to remember as Cromwell's unpardonable sin, and the woeful beginning of an illegitimate interregnum? He had justified it, hardly anonymously, in his Letter to a Gentleman in the Country, published in May 1653, only a fortnight after the fact (Vol. IV. pp. 519-523). He had justified it a year later in his Defensio Secunda of 1654, published some months after the Protectorate had actually begun. In that famous pamphlet, he had, amid much else to the same effect, made special reference to Cromwell's Dissolution of the Rump in these words addressed to Cromwell himself: "When you saw delays being contrived, and every one more intent on his private interests than on the public good, and the people complaining of being cheated of their hopes and circumvented by the power of a few, you did what they themselves had so often declined to do when asked, and put an end to their Government" (Vol. IV. p. 604). Rumpers of tenacious memories cannot have forgotten such published utterances of Milton, while the fact that he had for some years past been an Oliverian, a Protectoratist, a Court-official for Oliver and Richard, was patent to all. Yet, now that the old Rumpers were restored to power, the survivors of the original "few" whose dissolution by Cromwell he had publicly praised and defended, here was Milton still in his secretaryship and writing the first foreign letters they required.

How was this? It is hardly a sufficient answer to say that it is quite customary for officials to remain in their places through changes of Government. On the one hand, Milton was not a man to remain in an element with which he could not conscientiously accord; and, on the other, the Rumpers were rather careful in seeking public servants of their own sort. Thurloe was out of the general Secretaryship; and one of the first acts of the restored House was to punish Mr. Henry Scobell, Clerk of the Parliament, for having entered, the fact of Cromwell's Dissolution of the House on April 20, 1653, in the Journals tinder that date. They ordered a Bill to be brought in for repealing the Act by which Scobell held the Clerkship.[1] The truth, then, is that Milton was not, on the whole, displeased by the return of his old friends to power. Though he had justified Cromwell's dissolution of the Rump and had become openly an Oliverian at the beginning of the Protectorate, he had never ceased to regard with admiration and affection such of the old Republicans as Vane, Bradshaw, and Overton. It had probably all along been a question with him whether the blame of their disablement under the Protectorate lay more with themselves or with Oliver. Then, as we have abundantly seen, there is reason for believing that before the end of the Protectorate his own Oliverianism or Cromwellianism had become weaker than at first. The Miltonic reserves, as we have called them, with which he had given his adhesion to the Protectorate even at first, had taken stronger and stronger development in his mind; and, whatever he found to admire in Cromwell's Government all in all, the whole course of that Government in Church matters had been a disappointment. Milton wanted to see Church and State entirely separated; Cromwell had mixed them, intertwined them, more than ever. Milton wanted to see the utter abolition in England of anything that could be called a clergy; Cromwell had made it one of the chief objects of his rule to maintain a clergy and extend it massively. Whether this policy might not yet be reversed had been one of Milton's first questions with himself after Cromwell's death; and his Treatise of Civil Power in Ecclesiastical Causes, addressed to Richard's Parliament, had been a challenge to that Parliament not to shrink from the great attempt. In that treatise, it is not too much to say, Milton had shaken hands again with the old Republican party. In the preface to it he had dwelt fondly on his former connexion with them, on his recollection especially of the speeches he had heard from some of them in the old Councils of State of the Commonwealth, when he had first the honour to sit there as Latin Secretary, and listen to their private debates. What clearness then, what decisiveness, in such men as Vane and Bradshaw, on that "important article of Christianity," the necessary distinctness of the Civil from the Religious! Ah! could those old days be back! He had written as if those days had not been satisfactory, as if the dispersion of his old masters of those days had been necessary; but, in so writing, had he not been too hasty? So he had been asking himself of late; and though, as Richard's Latin Secretary, and writing under his Protectorate, he had not said a word against the established Protectoral Government, he had expressed generally his conviction that England would never be right till either those charged with the Government should be men "discerning between Civil and Religious" or none but such should be charged with the Government. Now, however, in May 1659, he might speak more plainly. Richard's Government had been swept away;--Richard's Parliament, which he had addressed, was no more in being; and, by a revolution which he had not expected, and in which he had taken no part, the pure Republic, with the relics of the Parliament that had first created it, was again the established order. All round about him the men he respected most were exulting in the change, and calling it a revival of "the Good Old Cause." Without pronouncing on the change in all its aspects, he could join in the exultation for a special reason. Would not the restored Republican Parliament and their Councils of State see it to be part of their duty to assert at last the principle of absolute Religious Voluntaryism?

[Footnote 1: Commons Journals, May 19, 1659.]

This representation of Milton's position at the time of the restoration of the Rump is confirmed by a private letter then addressed to him. The writer was a certain Moses Wall, of Causham or Caversham in Oxfordshire, a scholar and Republican opinionist of whom there are traces in Hartlib's correspondence and elsewhere.[1] Milton had recently written to him, sending him perhaps a copy of his Treatise of Civil Power in Ecclesiastical Causes; and this is Wall's reply--written, it will be observed, the very day after Richard's abdication:--

[Footnote 1: Worthington's Diary and Correspondence, by Crossley, I. 355 and 365.]

"Sir,

"I received yours the day after you wrote, and do humbly thank you that you are pleased to honour me with your letters. I confess I have (even in my privacy in the country) oft had thoughts about you, and that with much respect for your friendliness to truth in your early years and in bad times. But I was uncertain whether your relation to the Court (though I think that a Commonwealth was more friendly to you than a Court) had not clouded your former light; but your last book resolved that doubt.

"You complain of the non-progressency of the nation, and of its retrograde motion of late, in liberty and spiritual truths. It is much to be bewailed; but, yet, let us pity human frailty. When those who had made deep protestations of their zeal for our liberty, both spiritual and civil, and made the fairest offers to be the asserters thereof, and whom we thereupon trusted,--when these, being instated in power, shall betray the good thing committed to them, and lead us back to Egypt, and by that force which we gave them to win us liberty hold us fast in chains,--what can poor people do? You know who they were that watched our Saviour's sepulchre to keep him from rising [soldiers! see Matthew XXVII. and XXVIII.]. Besides, whilst people are not free, but straitened in accommodations for life, their spirits will be dejected and servile; and, conducing to that end [of rousing them], there should be an improving of our native commodities, as our manufactures, our fishery, our fens, forests, and commons, and our trade at sea, &c.: which would give the body of the nation a comfortable subsistence. And the breaking that cursed yoke of Tithes would much help thereto. Also another thing I cannot but mention; which is that the Norman Conquest and Tyranny is continued upon the nation without any thought of removing it: I mean the tenure of land by copyhold, and holding for life under a lord, or rather tyrant, of a manor; whereby people care not to improve their land by cost upon it, not knowing how soon themselves or theirs may be outed it, nor what the house is in which they live, for the same reason; and they are far more enslaved to the lord of the manor than the rest of the nation is to a king or supreme magistrate.

"We have waited for liberty; but it must be God's work and not man's: who thinks it sweet to maintain his pride and worldly interest to the gratifying of the flesh, whatever becomes of the precious liberty of mankind. But let us not despond, but do our duty; God will carry on that blessed work, in despite of all opposites, and to their ruin if they persist therein.

"Sir, my humble request is that you would proceed, and give us that other member of the distribution mentioned in your book: viz. that Hire doth greatly impede truth and liberty. It is like, if you do, you shall find opposers; but remember that saying,'Beatius est pati quam frui,' or, in the Apostle's words, James V. 11. [Greek: Makarizomen tous hypomenontas] ['We count them happy that endure']. I have sometimes thought (concurring with your assertion) of that storied voice that should speak from heaven when Ecclesiastics were endowed with worldly preferments, 'Hodie venenum infunditur in Ecelesiam' ['This day is poison poured into the Church']; for, to use the speech of Gen. IV. ult., according to the sense which it hath in the Hebrew, 'Then began men to corrupt the worship of God.' I shall tell you a supposal of mine; which is this:--Mr. Durie has bestowed about thirty years' time in travel, conference, and writing, to reconcile Calvinists and Lutherans, and that with little or no success. But the shortest way were:--Take away ecclesiastical dignities, honours, and preferments on both sides, and all would soon be hushed; those ecclesiastics would be quiet, and then the people would come forth into truth and liberty. But I will not engage in this quarrel. Yet I shall lay this engagement upon myself,--to remain

"Your faithful friend and servant,

"M. Wall.[1]

"Causham: May 26, 1659."

[Footnote 1: Copy in Ayscough: MS. in British Museum, No. 4292 (f. 121); where the copyist "J. Owen" (the Rev. J. Owen of Rochdale) certifies it as from the original. It was printed, not very correctly, by Richard Baron, in 1756, in his preface to his edition of the Eikonoklastes.]

Here, from a man evidently after Milton's own heart on the Church question, we have Milton's welcome back into the ranks of the old Republicans. And more and more through the five months of the first Restoration of the Rump (May 7--Oct. 13) the friends of "the good old cause" had reason to know that Milton was again one of themselves. It happens, indeed, that we have no more letters of his for the Restored Rump Government than the two of May 15, already quoted, which he wrote for the restored House, and which were signed by Speaker Lenthall. Those two letters close the entire series of the known and extant State-Letters of Milton. He and Marvell, however, were still in their Secretaryship, drawing their salaries as before; and of the completeness of Milton's re-adherence to the Republican Government there is evidence more massive and striking than could have been furnished by any number of farther official letters by him for the Rump or its Council.

Milton, had not judged wrongly in supposing that the question of Church-disestablishment would now be made part and parcel of "the good old cause." We have already glanced at the facts (p. 466), but they may be given here more in detail:--Hardly had the Rump been reconstituted when petitions for Disestablishment, in the form of petitions for the abolition of Tithes, began to pour in upon it. One such, called "The Humble Representation and Petition of many well-affected persons in the counties of Somerset, Wilts, and some parts of Devon, Dorset, and Hampshire," was read in the House on the 14th of June. The petitioners were thanked, and informed that the House resolved "to give encouragement to a godly, preaching, learned ministry throughout the nation, and for that end to continue the payment of Tithes till they can find out some other more equal and comfortable maintenance for the ministry, and satisfaction of the people; which they intend with all convenient speed." That day, accordingly, in a division of thirty-eight Yeas (Carew Raleigh and Sir William Brereton tellers) to thirty-eight Noes (Hasilrig and Colonel White tellers) it was carried, by the Speaker's casting vote, to refer the question of some substitute for Tithes to a Grand Committee. On the 27th of June, there having been other petitions against Tithes in the meantime, signed by "many thousands," the House came to a more definite resolution, which they ordered to be printed and published by the Judges in their circuits. It was "That this Parliament doth declare that, for the encouragement of a godly, preaching, learned ministry throughout the nation, the payment of Tithes shall continue as now they are, unless this Parliament shall find out some other," &c. As the word unless had been, substituted for the word until without a division, it is evident that the House had gone back in their intentions in the course of the fortnight, and were less disposed to commit themselves to any serious interference with the Church Establishment as left by Cromwell. The disappointment to the petitioning thousands must have been great. Still, the question had been raised, and might be regarded as only adjourned. What was wanted was continued agitation out of doors, more petitioning and more pamphleteering.[1]

[Footnote 1: Commons Journals of dates.]

It was in this last way that Milton could help. As advised by his friend Moses Wall, he had been busy over that second Disestablishment tract which he had promised; and in August 1659 it appeared in this form: "Considerations touching the likeliest means to remove Hirelings out of the Church. Wherein is also discourc'd of Tithes, Church-fees, Church Revenues; and, whether any maintenance of ministers can be settl'd by law. The author J.M. London, Printed by T.N. for L. Chapman at the Crown in Popes-head Alley, 1659." The volume is a very small octavo, and contains eighteen unnumbered pages of prefatory address to the Parliament in large open type, signed "John Milton" in full, followed by 153 pages of text.[1]

[Footnote 1: Copy in Thomason Collection, with date "Aug." marked on title-page--month only, no day.]

The Address to the Parliament deserves particular notice. The following is the main portion of it, with two phrases Italicised:--

"Owing to your protection, Supreme Senate, this liberty of writing which I have used these eighteen years on all occasions to assert the just rights and freedoms both of Church and State, and so far approved as to have been trusted with the representment and defence of your actions to all Christendom against an adversary of no mean repute, to whom should I address what I still publish on the same argument but to you, whose magnanimous counsels first opened and unbound the age from a double bondage under Prelatical and Regal tyranny, above our own hopes heartening us to look up at last like Men and Christians from the slavish dejection wherein from father to son we were bred up and taught, and thereby deserving of these nations, if they be not barbarously ingrateful, to be acknowledged, next under God, the authors and best patrons of Religious and Civil Liberty that ever these Islands brought forth? The care and tuition of whose peace and safety, after a short but scandalous night of interruption, is now again, by a new dawning of God's miraculous Providence among us, revolved upon your shoulders. And to whom more appertain these Considerations which I propound than to yourselves, and the debate before you, though I trust of no difficulty, yet at present of great expectation, not whether ye will gratify, were it no more than so, but whether ye will hearken to the just petition of many thousands best affected both to Religion and to this your return, or whether ye will satisfy (which you never can) the covetous pretences and demands of insatiable Hirelings, whose disaffection ye well know hath to yourselves and your resolutions? That I, though among many others in this common concernment, interpose to your deliberations what my thoughts also are, your own judgment and the success thereof hath given me the confidence: which requests but this--that, if I have prosperously, God so favouring me, defended the public cause of this Commonwealth to foreigners, ye would not think the reason and ability whereon ye trusted once (and repent not) your whole reputation to the world either grown less by more maturity and longer study or less available in English than in another tongue: but that, if it sufficed, some years past, to convince and satisfy the unengaged of other nations in the justice of your doings, though then held paradoxal, it may as well suffice now against weaker opposition in matters (except here in England, with a spirituality of men devoted to their temporal gain) of no controversy else among Protestants."

This is, unmistakeably, a public testimony of Milton's re-adhesion to the Rumpers, with something like an expression of regret that he had ever parted from them. After all, he could call them "the authors and best patrons of religious and civil liberty that ever these Islands brought forth"; and, with this renewed conviction, and remembering also their former confidence in himself, especially in the Salmasian controversy, he could now congratulate them and the country on their return to power. But is not the Address also a recantation of his Oliverianism? To some extent, it must be so interpreted. It seems utterly impossible, indeed, that the phrase "a short but scandalous night of interruption" was intended to apply to the entire six years of the Cromwellian Dictatorship and Protectorship. That had not been a "short" interruption, for it had exceeded in length the whole duration of the Commonwealth it had interrupted; and it would be the most marvellous inconsistency on record if Milton could ever have brought himself to call it "scandalous." Who had written the panegyric on Cromwell and his actually established Protectorship in the Defensio Secunda? Who had been Oliver's Latin Secretary from first to last, and penned for him his despatches on the Piedmontese massacre and all his greatest besides? The likelihood, therefore, is that "the short but scandalous night of interruption" in Milton's mind was the fortnight or so of Wallingford-House usurpation which broke up Richard's Parliament and Protectorate, and from the continuance of which, with all the inconveniences of a mere military despotism, the restoration of the Rump had seemed a happy rescue. But, though this single phrase may be thus explained, the tone of the whole address intimates far less of gratitude to Oliver dead than there had been of admiration for Oliver living. And the reason at this point is most obvious. Was it not precisely because Cromwell had failed to fulfil Milton's expectation of him, in his sonnet of May 1652, that he would deliver the Commonwealth from the plague of "hireling wolves," calling themselves a Clergy--was it not because Cromwell from first to last had pursued a contrary policy--that it remained for Milton now, seven years after the date of that sonnet, to have to offer, as a private thinker, and on mere printed paper, his own poor Considerations touching the likeliest means to remove Hirelings out of the Church? It was not in a pamphlet on that subject, wherever else, that Milton could say his best for the memory of Cromwell.

After some preliminary observations connecting the present treatise with its forerunner; Milton opens his subject thus:--

"Hire of itself is neither a thing unlawful, nor a word of any evil note, signifying no more than a due recompense or reward, as when our Saviour saith, 'The labourer is worthy of his hire.' That which makes it so dangerous in the Church, and properly makes HIRELING a word always of evil signification, is either the excess thereof or the undue manner of giving and taking it. What harm the excess thereof brought to the Church perhaps was not found by experience till the days of Constantine; who, out of his zeal, thinking he could be never too liberally a nursing father of the Church, might be not unfitly said to have either overlaid it or choked it in the nursing. Which was foretold, as is recorded in Ecclesiastical traditions, by a voice heard from Heaven, on the very day that those great donations of Church-revenues were given, crying aloud, 'This day is poison poured into the Church' [Note the adoption of the anecdote from Mr. Wall's letter]. Which the event soon after verified, as appears by another no less ancient observation, that 'Religion brought forth wealth, and the Daughter devoured the Mother.' But, long ere wealth came into the Church, so soon as any gain appeared in Religion, HIRELINGS were apparent, drawn in long before by the very scent thereof [References to Judas as the first hireling, to Simon Magus as the second, and to various texts in the Acts and Epistles proving that among the early preachers of Christianity there were men who preached 'for filthy lucre's sake,' or made a mere trade of the Gospel] .... Thus we see that not only the excess of Hire in wealthiest times, but also the undue and vicious taking or giving it, though but small or mean, as in the primitive times, gave to hirelings occasion, though not intended yet sufficient, to creep at first into the Church. Which argues also the difficulty, or rather the impossibility, to remove them quite, unless every minister were, as St. Paul, contented to teach gratis: but few such are to be found. As therefore we cannot justly take away all Hire in the Church, because we cannot otherwise quite remove Hirelings, so are we not, for the impossibility of removing them all, to use therefore no endeavour that fewest may come in, but rather, in regard the evil, do what we can, will always be incumbent and unavoidable, to use our utmost diligence how it may be least dangerous. Which will be likeliest effected if we consider,--first what recompense God hath ordained should be given to ministers of the Church (for that a recompense ought to be given them, and may by them justly be received, our Saviour himself, from the very light of reason and of equity, hath declared, Luke X. 7, 'The labourer is worthy of his hire'); next, by whom; and, lastly, in what manner."

In this passage and in other passages throughout the Treatise it is clear that Milton's ideal was a Church in which no minister should take pay at all for his preaching or ministry, whether pay from the state or from his hearers, but every minister should, as St. Paul did, preach, absolutely and systematically gratis, deriving his livelihood and his leisure to preach from his private resources, or, if he had none such, then from the practice of some calling or handicraft apart from his preaching. Deep down in Milton's mind, notwithstanding his professed deference to Christ's words, "The labourer is worthy of his hire," we can see this conviction that it would be better for the world if religious doctrine, or in fact doctrine of any kind, were never bought or sold, but all spiritual teachers were to abhor the very touch of money for their lessons, being either gentlemen of independent means who could propagate the truth splendidly from high motives, or else tent-makers, carpenters, and bricklayers, passionate with the possession of some truth to propagate. This, however, having been acknowledged to be perhaps an impossibility on any great scale, he goes on to inquire, as proposed, what the legitimate and divinely-appointed hire of Gospel-ministers is, from whom it may come, and in what manner. The general result is as follows:--I. The Tithes of the old Jewish dispensation are utterly abolished under the Gospel. Nearly half the treatise is an argument to this effect, and consequently for the immediate abolition of the tithe-system in England. Here Milton lends his whole force to the popular current on this subject among the friends of "the good old cause," advocating those petitions to the Rump of which he has spoken in his preface. But he goes farther than the abolition of tithes. He will not allow of any statutory substitute for tithes, any taxation of the people in any form for the support of Religion. The only substitute for tithes which he discusses specifically is compulsory church-fees for ministerial offices, such as baptisms, marriages, and burials. These, as well as tithes, he utterly condemns; and he winds up this part of his inquiry thus: "Seeing, then, that God hath given to ministers under the Gospel that only which is justly given them (that is to say, a due and moderate livelihood, the hire of their labour), and that the heave-offering of Tithes is abolished with the Altar (yes, though not abolished, yet lawless as they enjoy them), their Melchizedekian right also trivial and groundless, and both tithes and fees, if exacted or established, unjust and scandalous, we may hope, with them removed, to remove Hirelings in some good measure." II. It is maintained that the lawful maintenance of the ministry can consist only in the voluntary offerings of those they instruct, whether tendered individually, or collected into a common treasury for distribution. The flocks ought to maintain their own pastors, and no others are bound to contribute for the purpose. But what of poor neighbourhoods that cannot maintain pastors and yet need them most sorely? Milton has unbounded confidence that these will be overtaken and provided for by the zeal of pious individuals, or by "the charity of richer congregations," taking the form of itinerant missions. "If it be objected that this itinerary preaching will not serve to plant the Gospel in those places unless they who are sent abide there some competent time, I answer that, if they stay there for a year or two, which was the longest time usually staid by the Apostles in one place, it may suffice to teach them who will attend and learn all the points of Religion necessary to salvation: then, sorting them into several congregations of a moderate number, out of the ablest and zealousest of them to create elders, who, exercising and requiring from themselves what they have learnt (for no learning is retained without constant exercise and methodical repetition), may teach and govern the rest: and, so exhorted to continue faithful and stedfast, they may securely be committed to the providence of God and the guidance of his Holy Spirit till God may offer some opportunity to visit them again and to confirm them." The only concession Milton will make is that, in cases of urgent necessity, application may be made to magistrates or other trustees of charitable funds for aid in these temporary and itinerant missions. For the rest, it will be seen, it is with difficulty that he allows the existence of a permanent pastorate anywhere. If there is to be a body of men in the community making a business of preaching, and if in towns and populous neighbourhoods congregations choose to retain the services, for life or for an indefinite period, of particular ministerial persons selected from this body, and to erect handsome buildings convenient for such services, well and good, or rather it cannot be helped; but the picture most to Milton's fancy is that of an England generally, or at all events of a rural England, without any fixed or regular parish pastors or parish-churches, but each little local cluster of believers meeting on Sundays or other days in chapel or barn for mutual edification, or to be instructed by such simple teaching elders as may easily, from time to time, be produced within itself. Add the itinerant agency of more practiced and professional preachers, circulating periodically among the local clusters, to rouse them or keep them alive; and nothing more would be needed. There would be plenty of preaching, and good preaching, everywhere; but, as most of it would be spontaneous by hard-handed men known among their neighbours, and working, like their neighbours, for their ordinary subsistence, the preaching profession, as a means of income, would be reduced to a minimum. In a Church so constituted there would still be hirelings, especially in large towns and where there were wealthy congregations; but the number of such would be greatly reduced. III. Under the third head of the "manner" of the recompense to ministers, where there is any recompense at all, the substance of Milton's remarks is that the purely voluntary character of the recompense must be studiously maintained. It must be purely an alms, an oblation of benevolence. Hence it should never take the form of a life-endowment, or even of a contract conferring a legal title to demand payment. The appearance of a minister of the Gospel in a law-court to sue for money supposed to be due to him for his ministerial services, even by promise or agreement, is spoken of with disgust. Were it the understood rule that there could be no recovery by a minister even of his promised salary, would not that also tend in some degree to keep Hirelings out of the Church?

The pamphlet, it will be seen, is more outspoken and thoroughgoing than its forerunner. It contains also more of those individual passages that represent Milton in his rough mood of sarcastic strength, though none of such beauty or eloquence as are to be found in his earlier pamphlets. The following are characteristic:--

Mr. Prynne's Defences of Tithes:--"To heap such unconvincing citations as these in Religion, whereof the Scripture only is our rule, argues not much learning nor judgment, but the lost labour of much unprofitable reading. And yet a late hot Querist for Tithes, whom ye may know, by his wits lying ever beside him in the margin, to be ever beside his wits in the text,--a fierce Reformer once, now rankled with a contrary heat,--would send us back, very reformedly indeed, to learn Reformation from Tyndarus and Rebuffas, two Canonical Promoters."[1]

[Footnote 1: The reference is to Prynne's Ten Considerable Queries concerning Tithes, &c., against the Petitioners and Petitions for their Total Abolition: 1659.]

Marriages and Clerical Concern in the same:--"As for Marriages, that ministers should meddle with them, as not sanctioned or legitimate without their celebration, I find no ground in Scripture either of precept or example. Likeliest it is (which our Selden hath well observed I. II. c. 28. Ux. Heb.) that in imitation of heathen priests, who were wont at nuptials to use many rites and ceremonies, and especially judging it would be profitable and the increase of their authority not to be spectators only in business of such concernment to the life of man, they insinuated that marriage was not holy without their benediction, and for the better colour made it a Sacrament; being of itself a Civil Ordinance, a household contract, a thing indifferent and free to the whole race of mankind, not as religious, but as men. Best, indeed, undertaken to religious ends, as the Apostle saith (1 Cor. VII. 'In the Lord'); yet not therefore invalid or unholy without a minister and his pretended necessary hallowing, more than any other act, enterprise, or contract, of civil life,--which ought all to be done also in the Lord and to his glory,--all which, no less than marriage, were by the cunning of priests heretofore, as material to their profit, transacted at the altar. Our Divines deny it to be a Sacrament; yet retained the celebration, till prudently a late Parliament recovered the civil liberty of marriage from their encroachment, and transferred the ratifying and registering thereof from their Canonical Shop to the proper cognisance of Civil Magistrates" [The Marriages Act of the Barebones Parliament; in accordance with which had been Milton's own second marriage: see ante p. 281, and Vol. IV. p. 511].

Sitting under a Stated Minister:--"If men be not all their lifetime under a teacher to learn Logic, Natural Philosophy, Ethics, or Mathematics, ... certainly it is not necessary to the attainment of Christian knowledge that men should sit all their life long at the foot of a pulpited divine, while he, a lollard indeed over his elbow-cushion, in almost the seventh part of forty or fifty years, teaches them scarce half the principles of Religion, and his sheep ofttimes sit the while to as little purpose of benefiting as the sheep in their pews at Smithfield."

Congregations for mutual Edification:--"Notwithstanding the gaudy superstition of some devoted still ignorantly to temples, we may be well assured that He who disdained not to be laid in a manger disdains not to be preached in a barn, and that by such meetings as these, being indeed most apostolical and primitive, they will in a short time advance more in Christian knowledge and reformation of life than by the many years preaching of such an incumbent,--I may say such an incubus ofttimes,--as will be meanly hired to abide long in those places."

A Reflection on Cromwell for his Established Church:--"For the magistrate, in person of a nursing father, to make the Church his mere ward, as always in minority,-the Church to whom he ought as a Magistrate (Isaiah XLIS. 23) 'to bow down with his face toward the earth and lick up the dust of her feet,'--her to subject to his political drifts and conceived opinions by mastering her revenue, and so by his examinant Committees to circumscribe her free election of ministers,--is neither just nor pious: no honour done to the Church, but a plain dishonour."

University Education of Ministers:--State of the Facts: "They pretend that their education, either at School or University, hath been very chargeable, and therefore ought to be repaired in future by a plentiful maintenance: whereas it is well known that the better half of them, and ofttimes poor and pitiful boys, of no merit or promising hopes that might entitle them to the public provision but their poverty and the unjust favour of friends, have had the most of their breeding, both at School and University, by scholarships, exhibitions, and fellowships, at the public cost,--which might engage them the rather to give freely, as they have freely received. Or, if they have missed of these helps at the latter place, they have after two or three years left the course of their studies there, if they ever well began them, and undertaken, though furnished with little else but ignorance, boldness, and ambition, if with no worse vices, a chaplainship in some gentleman's house, to the frequent imbasing of his sons with illiterate and narrow principles. Or, if they have lived there [at the University] upon their own, who knows not that seven years' charge of living there,--to them who fly not from the government of their parents to the licence of a University, but come seriously to study,--is no more than, may be well defrayed and reimbursed by one year's revenue of an ordinary good benefice? If they had then means of breeding from their parents, 'tis likely they have more now; and, if they have, it needs must be mechanic and uningenuous in them to bring a bill of charges for the learning of those liberal Arts and Sciences which they have learnt (if they have indeed learnt them, as they seldom have) to their own benefit and accomplishment. But they will say 'We had betaken us to some other trade or profession, had we not expected to find a better livelihood by the Ministry.' This is what I looked for,--to discover them openly neither true lovers of Learning and so very seldom guilty of it, nor true ministers of the Gospel."

University Education of Ministers not Necessary: "What Learning, either human or divine, can be necessary to a minister may as easily and less chargeably be had in any private house ... Those theological disputations there held [i.e. at the Universities] by Professors and Graduates are such as tend least of all to the edification or capacity of the people, but rather perplex and leaven pure doctrine with scholastical trash than enable any minister to the better preaching of the Gospel. Whence we may also compute, since they come to reckonings, the charges of his needful library; which, though some shame not to value at £600 [equivalent to £2000 now], may be competently furnished for £60 [equivalent to £200 now]. If any man, for his own curiosity or delight, be in books further expensive, that is not to be reckoned as necessary to his ministerial either breeding or function. But Papists and other adversaries cannot be confuted without Fathers and Councils, immense volumes and of vast charges! I will show them therefore a shorter and a better way of confutation: Tit. I. 9; 'Holding fast the faithful Word as he hath been taught, that he may be able, by sound doctrine, both to exhort and to convince gainsayers,'--who are confuted as soon as heard bringing that which is either not in Scripture or against it. To pursue them further through the obscure and entangled wood of antiquity, Fathers and Councils fighting one against another, is needless, endless, not requisite in a minister, and refused by the first Reformers of our Religion. And yet we may be confident, if these things be thought needful, let the State but erect in public good store of Libraries, and there will not want men in the Church who of their own inclinations will become able in this kind against Papists or any other Adversary."

No Parliament that England ever saw, not even the Barebones Parliament itself, could have entertained for a moment, with a view to practical legislation, these speculations of the blind Titan in all their length and breadth. Disestablishment, Disendowment, Abolition of a Clergy, had been the dream of the Anabaptists and Fifth Monarchy men of the Barebones Parliament. Even in that House, however, the battle practically, and on which the House broke up, was on the question of the continuance of Tithes, and it is dubious whether some in that half of the House which voted against Tithes would not have been for preserving a Church Establishment or Preaching Ministry by some other form of state-maintenance. Nor can one imagine, even in those eager and revolutionary times, an utter disregard of that principle of compensation for life-interests which any Parliament now, contemplating a scheme of Disestablishment, would consider binding in common equity. The old Bishops, and the Prelatic Clergy, indeed, had been disestablished without much consideration of life-interests; but the procedure in their case had been of a penal character, and it is unlikely that it would have been equally unceremonious with the new clergy of Presbyterians and Independents, allowed generally to be orthodox. From any hesitation on that score Milton is absolutely free. He sees no difficulties, takes regard of none. It is not with a flesh-and-blood world that he deals, a world of men, and their wives, and their families, and their yearly incomes, and their fixed residences and household belongings. It is with a world of wax, or of flesh and blood that must be content to be treated as wax. It is thought right to disestablish the Church: well, then, let the Clergy go! Abolish tithes; provide no substitute; proclaim that, after this day week, or the first day of the next year, not a penny shall be paid to any man by the State for preaching the Gospel, or doing any other act of the ministry: and what then? Why, there will be a flutter of consternation, of course, through some ten thousand or twelve thousand parsonages; ten thousand or twelve thousand clerical gentlemen will stare bewilderedly for a while at their wives' faces: but do not be too much concerned! They will all shift very well for themselves when they know they must; the best of them will find congregations where they are, or in other places, and will work all the harder; and, if the drones and dotards go threadbare and starve for the rest of their lives, that is but God's way with such since the beginning of the world! Be instant, be rapid, be decisive, be thoroughgoing, O ye statesmen! What are vested interests in the Church of Christ?

As the Restored Rumpers had already decreed that an Established Church should be kept up in England, and had gone no farther on the Tithes question than to say that Tithes must be paid, as by use and wont, until some substitute should be provided, it is not likely that, however long they had sat, Milton's views would have had much countenance from them. There were individuals among them of Milton's way of thinking on the whole; but he had probably made a mistake in fancying that he had materially improved his influence, or the chances of his notions of Church-polity, by his public re-adhesion to the Rump. In fact, the continued existence of the Rump was more precarious than he had thought. In August 1659, while his pamphlet was in circulation, Lambert was away in the north, suppressing the Cheshire Insurrection of Sir George Booth; in the next month discontent with the Rumpers and their rule was rife in Lambert's victorious northern Brigade; and in the beginning of October London was again in agitation with the rupture of the hasty alliance that had been patched up between the Republicans and the Wallingford-House Council of Army Officers. It was on the 12th of October that the Rump defied the Army by cashiering Lambert, Desborough, Berry, and six other officers; and on the 13th Lambert retaliated by his coup d'état, filling the streets with his soldiery, catching the Rumpers one by one as they went to the House, and informing them that it was the will of the Army that they should sit no more. Thus had begun that "Second Stage of the Anarchy" which we have called The Wallingford-House Interruption.

Of Milton's thoughts over the change effected by Lambert's coup d'état we have an authentic record in a letter of his, dated "October 20, 1659" (i.e. just a week after the coup d'état), and addressed to some friend with whom he had been conversing on the previous night. It appears in his works now with the title "A Letter to a Friend, concerning the Ruptures of the Commonwealth: Published from the Manuscript."[1] Who the Friend was does not appear; but the words of the Letter imply that he was some one very near the centre of affairs. "Sir," it begins, "upon the sad and serious discourse which we fell into last night, concerning these dangerous ruptures of the Commonwealth, scarce yet in her infancy, which cannot be without some inward flaw in her bowels, I began to consider more intensely thereon than hitherto I have been wont,--resigning myself [i.e. having hitherto resigned myself] to the wisdom and care of those who had the government, and not finding that either God or the Public required more of me than my prayers for those that govern. And, since you have not only stirred up my thoughts by acquainting me with the state of affairs more inwardly than I knew before, but also have desired me to set down my opinion thereof, trusting to your ingenuity, I shall give you freely my apprehension, both of our present evils, and what expedients, if God in mercy regard us, may remove them." At the close of the Letter he says, "You have the sum of my present thoughts, as much as I understand of these affairs, freely imparted, at your request and the persuasion you wrought in me that I might chance hereby to be some way serviceable to the Commonwealth in a time when all ought to be endeavouring what good they can, whether much or but little. With this you may do what you please. Put out, put in, communicate or suppress: you offend not me, who only have obeyed your opinion that, in doing what I have done, I might happen to offer something which might be of some use in this great time of need. However, I have not been wanting to the opportunity which you presented before me of showing the readiness which I have, in the midst of my unfitness, to whatever may be required of me as a public duty." The expressions might suggest that the friend who had been talking with Milton was Vane or some one else of those Councillors of the Rump who still sat on at Whitehall consulting with the Wallingford-House Chiefs as to the form of Government to be set up instead of the Rump (ante pp. 494-495). It may, however, have been some lesser personage, such as Meadows, back from the Baltic this very month. In any case, the letter was meant to be shown about, if not printed. It was, in fact, Milton's contribution, at a friend's request, to the deliberations going on at Whitehall.

[Footnote 1: It was first published in the so-called Amsterdam Edition of Milton's Prose Works (1698); and Toland, who gave it to the publishers of that edition, informs us that it had been communicated to him "by a worthy friend, who, a little after the author's death, had it from his nephew"--i.e. from Phillips.]

He does not conceal his strong disapprobation of Lambert's coup d'état. Indeed he takes the opportunity of declaring, even more strongly than he had done two months before, how heartily he had welcomed the restoration of the Rump. Thus:--

"I will begin with telling you how I was overjoyed when I heard that the Army, under the working of God's holy Spirit, as I thought, and still hope well, had been so far wrought to Christian humility and self-denial as to confess in public their backsliding from the good Old Cause, and to show the fruits of their repentance in the righteousness of their restoring the old famous Parliament which they had without just authority dissolved: I call it the famous Parliament, though not the harmless, since none well-affected but will confess they have deserved much more of these nations than they have undeserved. And I persuade me that God was pleased with their restitution, signing it as He did with such a signal victory when so great a part of the nation were desperately conspired to call back again their Egyptian bondage [Lambert's victory over Sir George Booth]. So much the more it now amazes me that they whose lips were yet scarce closed from giving thanks for that great deliverance should be now relapsing, and so soon again backsliding into the same fault, which they confessed so lately and so solemnly to God and the world, and more lately punished in those Cheshire Rebels,--that they should now dissolve that Parliament which they themselves re-established, and acknowledged for their Supreme Power in their other day's Humble Representation: and all this for no apparent cause of public concernment to the Church or Commonwealth, but only for discommissioning nine great officers in the Army; which had not been done, as is reported, but upon notice of their intentions against the Parliament. I presume not to give my censure on this action,--not knowing, as yet I do not, the bottom of it. I speak only what it appears to us without doors till better cause be declared, and I am sure to all other nations,--most illegal and scandalous, I fear me barbarous, or rather scarce to be exampled among any Barbarians, that a paid Army should, for no other cause, thus subdue the Supreme Power that set them up. This, I say, other nations will judge to the sad dishonour of that Army, lately so renowned for the civilest and best-ordered in the world, and by us here at home for the most conscientious. Certainly, if the great officers and soldiers of the Holland, French, or Venetian forces should thus sit in council and write from garrison to garrison against their superiors, they might as easily reduce the King of France, or Duke of Venice, and put the United Provinces in like disorder and confusion."

He adds more in the same strain, and calls upon the Army, as one "jealous of their honour," to "manifest and publish with all speed some better cause of these their late actions than hath hitherto appeared, and to find out the Achan amongst them whose close ambition in all likelihood abuses their honest natures against their meaning to these disorders,"--in other words, to disown and denounce Lambert. But, having thus delivered his conscience on the subject of the second dismission of the Rump, he declares farther complaint to be useless, and proceeds to inquire what is now to be done.

"Being now in anarchy, without a counselling and governing power, and the Army, I suppose, finding themselves insufficient to discharge at once both military and civil affairs, the first thing to be found out with all speed, without which no Commonwealth can subsist, must be a SENATE or GENERAL COUNCIL OF STATE, in whom must be the power first to preserve the public peace, next the commerce with foreign nations, and lastly to raise moneys for the management of these affairs. This must either be the [Rump] Parliament readmitted to sit, or a Council of State allowed of by the Army, since they only now have the power. The terms to be stood on are Liberty of Conscience to all professing Scripture to be the Rule of their Faith and Worship and the Abjuration of a Single Person. If the [Rump] Parliament be again thought on, to salve honour on both sides, the well-affected party of the City and the Congregated Churches may be induced to mediate by public addresses and brotherly beseechings; which, if there be that saintship among us which is talked of, ought to be of highest and undeniable persuasion to reconcilement. If the Parliament be thought well dissolved, as not complying fully to grant Liberty of Conscience, and the necessary consequence thereof, the Removal of a forced Maintenance from Ministers [Milton's own sole dissatisfaction with the Restored Rump], then must the Army forthwith choose a Council of State, whereof as many to be of the Parliament as are undoubtedly affected to these two conditions proposed. That which I conceive only able to cement and unite the Army either to the Parliament recalled or this chosen Council must be a mutual League and Oath, private or public, not to desert one another till death: that is to say that the Army be kept up and all these Officers in their places during life, and so likewise the Parliament or Councillors of State; which will be no way unjust, considering their known merits on either side, in Council or in Field, unless any be found false to any of these two principles, or otherwise personally criminous in the judgment of both parties. If such a union as this be not accepted on the Army's part, be confident there is a Single Person underneath. That the Army be upheld the necessity of our affairs and factions will [at any rate] constrain long enough perhaps to content the longest liver in the Army. And whether the Civil Government be an annual Democracy or a perpetual Aristocracy is not to me a consideration for the extremities wherein we are, and the hazard of our safety from our common enemy, gaping at present to devour us. That it be not an Oligarchy, or the Faction of a few, may be easily prevented by the numbers of their own choosing who may be found infallibly constant to those two conditions forenamed--full Liberty of Conscience and the Abjuration of Monarchy proposed; and the well-ordered Committees of their faithfullest adherents in every county may give this Government the resemblance and effects of a perfect Democracy. As for the Reformation of Laws and the Places of Judicature, whether to be here, as at present, or in every county, as hath been long aimed at, and many such proposals tending no doubt to public good, they may be considered in due time, when we are past these pernicious pangs, in a hopeful way of health and firm constitution. But, unless these things which I have above proposed, one way or other, be once settled, in my fear (which God avert!), we instantly ruin, or at best become the servants of one or other Single Person, the secret author and fomenter of these disturbances."

There is considerable boldness in these proposals of Milton, and yet a cast of practicality which is unusual with him. They prove again, if new proof were needed, that he was not a Republican of the conventional sort. He glances, indeed, at the possibility of an "Annual Democracy," i.e. a future succession of annual Parliaments, or at least of annual Plebiscites for electing the Government. But he rather dismisses that possibility from his calculations; and moreover, even had he entertained it farther, we know that the Parliaments or Plebiscites he would have allowed would not have been "full and free," but only guarded representations of the "well-affected" of the community,--to wit, the Commonwealth's-men. But the Constitution to which he looks forward with most confidence, and which he ventures to think might answer all the purposes of a perfect democracy, is one that should consist of two perpetual or life aristocracies at the centre,--one a civil aristocracy in the form of a largish Council of State, the other a military aristocracy composed of the great Army Officers,--these two aristocracies to be pledged to each other by oath, and sworn also to the two great principles of Liberty of Conscience and resistance to any attempt at Single Person sovereignty. What communication between the Central Government so constituted and the body of the People might be necessary for the free play of opinion might be sufficiently kept up, he hints, by the machinery of County Committees. The entire scheme may seem strange to those whose theory of a Republic refuses the very imagination of an aristocracy or of perpetuity of power in the same hands; but both, notions, and especially that of perpetuity of power in the same hands, had been growing on Milton, and were not inconsistent with his theory of a Republic. Nor was his present scheme, with all its strangeness, the least practical of the many "models" that theorists were putting forth. It would, doubtless, have failed in the trial,--for the conception of a perpetual Civil Council at Whitehall always in harmony with a perpetual Military Council in Wallingford House presupposed moral conditions in both bodies less likely to be forthcoming in themselves than in Milton's thoughts about them. But everything else would have failed equally, and some of the "models" perhaps more speedily. Since the subversion of Richard's Protectorate by Fleetwood and Desborough there had been no possible stop-gap against the return of the Stuarts.

The consulting authorities at Whitehall and Wallingford House did adopt a course having some semblance of that suggested by Milton. Before the 25th of October, or within six days after the date of Milton's letter, the relics of the Council of State of the Rump agreed to be transformed, with additions nominated by the Officers, into the new Supreme Executive called The Committee of Safety; and, as The Wallingford-House Council of Officers still continued to sit in the close vicinity of this new Council at Whitehall, the Government was then vested, in fact, in the two aristocracies, with Fleetwood, Lambert, Desborough, Berry, and others, as members of both, and connecting links between them. But the new Committee of Safety was not such a Senate or Council as Milton had imagined. For one thing, it consisted but of twenty-three persons (see the list ante p. 494), whereas Milton would have probably liked to see a Council of twice that size or even larger. For another, it was not composed of persons perfectly sound on Milton's two proposed fundamentals of Liberty of Conscience and Abjuration of any Single Person. Vane, to be sure, was on the Committee, and a host in himself for both principles; and there were others, such as Salway and Ludlow, that would not flinch on either. But Whitlocke, Sydenham, and the majority, were but moderately for Liberty of Conscience, and certainly utterly against that Miltonic interpretation of it which implied Church-disestablishment, while one at least, the Scottish Johnstone of Warriston, was positively against Liberty of Conscience beyond very narrow Presbyterian limits. Nor, though probably all would have assented at that time to an oath abjuring Charles Stuart, were they all without taint of the Single Person heresy in other forms. Some of them, including Whitlocke and Berry, would have liked to restore Richard; and Fleetwood and Lambert were not wrongly suspected of seeing the most desirable Single Person every morning in the looking-glass. Milton's former regard for Fleetwood must have suffered considerably by recent events; and he thought of Lambert as the very "Achan" to be dreaded. But, farther, even had the two aristocracies been of perfectly satisfactory composition, they had abandoned that idea of their own permanence which Milton had made all but essential. They had agreed that their chief work should consist in shaping out a fit constitution for the Commonwealth, and that the Committee of Safety should continue in power only till that should be done and the new Constitution should come into operation.

Such as it was, the new Government of the Wallingford-House Interruption had no objection to retaining Mr. Milton in the Latin Secretaryship if he cared to keep it. That he had held the post throughout the whole of the Government of the Restored Rump (though all but in sinecure, as we must conclude from the cessation of the series of his Latin Letters in the preceding May) appears from a very interesting document in the Record Office. The Council of State of the Rump, it is to be remembered, had not vanished with the Rump itself on Oct. 13, but had sat on for twelve days more, though with its number reduced by the secession of Hasilrig, Scott, Neville, and other very vehement Rumpers,--the object being to maintain the continuity of the public business and to make the most amicable arrangement possible with the Army-officers. That object having been accomplished by the institution, of the new Committee of Safety, the Council of the Rump, before demitting its powers to this new body, which was to meet on the 28th of October, held its own last meeting at Whitehall on the 25th. At such a last meeting it was but business-like to clear off all debts due by the Council; and, accordingly, this was done by the issue of the following comprehensive money-warrant, signed by Whitlocke as President, and by four others of those present.

"These are to will and require you, out of such moneys as are or shall come into your hands, to pay unto the several persons whose names are endorsed the several sums of money to their names mentioned, making on the whole the sum of Three Thousand Six Hundred Eighty-two Pounds, Eight Shillings, and Six Pence: being so much due to them for their salaries and service to this Council unto the Two-and-twentieth day of this instant October. Hereof you are not to fail; and for so doing this shall be your sufficient warrant. Given at the Council of State at Whitehall this 25th day of October, 1659.

"B. WHITLOCKE, President. A. JOHNSTON. JAMES HARRINGTON. CHARLES FLEETWOOD. JA. BERRY.

"To GUALTER FROST, Esq.,

"Treasurer for the Council's Contingencies."

"The eighty-six persons to whom the payments are to be made are divided into groups in the Warrant, the particular sum due to each person appended to his name. The first five groups stand thus:--

£ s. d. Richard Deane 234 7 6 "At £500 per annum each Henry Scobell 234 7 6 William Robinson 83 0 0

At £1 per day Richard Kingdon 86 0 0

At £200 per annum each JOHN MILTON 86 12 0 ANDREW MARVELL 86 12 0

Gualter Frost 138 0 10 _At 20_s. per diem each Matthew Fairbank 139 0 0 Samuel Morland 88 0 0 Edward Dendy 169 0 0

Matthew Lea 56 6 8 _At 6_s._ 8_d. per diem each [Clerks] Thomas Lea 56 6 8 William Symon 56 6 8"

Then follow the names of twenty-nine persons at 5_s._ per diem each: viz. Zachary Worth, David Salisbury, Peter Llewellen, Edward Cooke, Richard Stephens, Stephen Montague, Thomas Powell; Henry Symball, Joseph Butler, Thomas Pidcott, Richard Freeman, George Hussey, Roger Read, Edward Osbaldiston, William Feild, Robert Cooke (or his widow), Thomas Blagden, William Ledsom, Edward Cooke; Edward Tytan, Thomas Baker, John Bradley, Nicholas Hill, Anthony Compton, Joshua Leadbetter, Alexander Turner, Thomas Wright, William Geering, and Edward Bridges. The occupations of the first seven are not described, but they were probably under-clerks; the next twelve were "messengers"; the last ten "serjeant deputies" under Dendy as Serjeant-at-Arms. The sums ordered to be paid to them vary from £4 to £42 5_s._--Forty-four more persons are added more miscellaneously, with the sums due to them respectively. Among these I may note the following:--"George Vaux, Housekeeper" (£69 9_s._ 8_d._), "Mr. Nutt, the Barge-keeper" (£65), "Mr. Embrey, Surveyor" (£140 12_s._ 6_d._), and "Mr. Kinnereley, Wardrobe-keeper" (£140 12_s._ 6_d._).[1]

[Footnote 1: From Warrant Book in Record Office. On comparing the list of persons in this warrant with that in the extract from the Order Books of Oliver's Council of date April 17, 1655 (pp. 177-179), and with lists in a former Council minute of date Feb. 3, 1653-4, and in a Money Warrant of Oliver of same date (Vol. IV. pp. 575-578), it will be seen that there had been changes in the staff meanwhile. Milton, Scobell, Gualter Frost, Serjeant Dendy, Housekeeper Vaux, Bargemaster Nutt, and about a dozen of the clerks, messengers, and serjeant-deputies remain (one of the former clerks, Matthew Fairbank, now promoted from his original 6_s._ 8_d._ a day to 20_s._ a day); but Thurloe, Jessop, Meadows, two younger Frosts, and a good many others are gone, while new men are Deane, Robinson, Kingdon, Morland, Marvell, and others. Morland, as we know, had been brought in a while ago to assist Thurloe; and his salary, we now see, was larger than Milton's.--When Milton's salary was reduced, in April 1655, it was arranged that it should be a life-pension, and payable out of the Exchequer; but the present warrant Directs payment to him, as to the rest, out of the Council's contingencies. It would seem, therefore, that Oliver's arrangement for him had not taken effect, or had been cancelled by the Rump, and that he was now not a life-pensioner, but once more a mere official at the Council's pleasure.]

There is nothing in this warrant to show that Milton's services were transferred to the new Committee of Safety; but the fact seems to be that he did remain nominally in the Latin Secretaryship with Marvell through the whole duration of that body and of the Fleetwood-Lambert rule, i.e. to Dec. 26, 1659. Nominally only it must have been; for we have no trace of any official work of his through the period. There was very little to do for the Government at that time in the way of foreign correspondence, and for what there was Marvell must have sufficed.

Through the months of November and December Milton's thoughts, like those of other people, must have been much occupied with the negotiations going on between the new Government and their formidable opponent in Scotland. What would be the issue? Would Monk persevere in that championship of the ill-treated Rump which he had so boldly undertaken? Would he march into England to restore the Rump, as he had threatened; or would he yet be pacified and induced to accept the Wallingford-House order of things, with a competent share in the power? No one could tell. Lambert was in the north with his army, to beat and drive back Monk if he did attempt to invade England,--at York early in November, and at Newcastle from the 20th of November onwards; Monk was still in Scotland,--at Edinburgh or Dalkeith till the end of November, then at Berwick, but from the beginning of December at Coldstream. Between the two armies agents were passing and repassing; negotiators on the part of the London Government were round about Monk and reasoning with him; Monk's own Commissioners in London had concluded their Treaty of the 15th of November with Fleetwood and the Wallingford-House Council, and there had been rejoicings over what seemed then the happy end of the quarrel; but again the news had come from Scotland that Monk repudiated the agreement made by his Commissioners, and that the negotiation must be resumed at Newcastle. To that the Committee of Safety and the Wallingford-House Council had consented; but, through Monk's delays, the negotiation had not yet been resumed. Would it ever be, or would Monk's army and Lambert's come into clash at last? If so, for which ought one to wish the victory? So far as Milton was concerned, he was bound to wish the success of Monk. Was not Monk the champion of that little Restored Rump to which Milton had himself adhered, and the late suppression of which he had pronounced to be "illegal and scandalous"? Was not Monk also professing and proclaiming that very principle of the proper submission of the military power to the civil on which Milton himself had dilated? Would it not be only God's justice if Lambert, "the secret author and fomenter of these disturbances," should be disgraced and overthrown? Yet, on the other hand, who could desire even that consequence, or the Restoration of the Rump, at the expense of another civil war and bloodshed? Where would the process stop? And, besides, was Monk, with his Presbyterian notions, learnt among the Scots, the man from whose ascendancy Milton could hope anything but farther disappointment in the Church question? All in all, we are to imagine Milton anxious for a reconciliation.

No less interesting to Milton must have been the activity of the new Government meanwhile in their great business of inventing "such a Form of Government as may best suit and comport with a Free State and Commonwealth."----The Rump itself, as we know, had been busy with this problem through the last month of its sittings, having appointed on the 8th of September a great Committee on the subject, with Vane named first, but all the most eminent Rumpers included (ante p. 480). Through this Committee there had been an inburst into the Parliamentary mind, as Ludlow informs us, of the thousand and one competing proposals or models of a Commonwealth already devised by the Harringtonians and other theorists; and, in fact, while the Committee was sitting, there had started up for its assistance, close to the doors of Parliament, the famous Harrington or Rota Club, meeting nightly in Miles's Coffee-house, and including Neville and others of the Rumpers among its most constant members (ante pp. 484-486). That Milton knew already about Harrington and his "models" by sufficient readings of Harrington's books there can be no doubt. In the address to the Rump prefixed to his Considerations touching Hirelings in August last he had distinctly referred to the kind acceptance by the Rump of "new models of a Commonwealth" daily tendered to them in Petitions, and must have had specially in view the Petition of July 6, which had been drawn up by Harrington, and which proposed a constitution of two Parliamentary Houses, one of 300 members, the other much larger, on such a system of rotation as would change each completely every third year (ante pp. 483-484). His only criticism on the competing models then had been that, till his own notion of Church-disestablishment were carried into effect, "no model whatsoever of a Commonwealth, would prove successful or undisturbed." At that time, accordingly, Milton was so engrossed with his Church-disestablishment notion as to be comparatively careless about the general question of the Form of Government. But, two months later, as we have seen, in his Letter on the Ruptures of the Commonwealth occasioned by Lambert's assault on the Rump, he had abandoned this indifference, and had proposed a model Constitution of his own, adapted to the immediate exigencies. From that time, we may now report, though Church-disestablishment was never lost sight of, the question of the Form of Government had fastened itself on Milton's mind as after all the main one. From that time he never ceased to ruminate it himself, and he attended more to the speculations and theories of others on the same subject. If, once or twice in the winter months of 1659, Cyriack Skinner, the occasional chairman of the Rota Club, did not persuade Milton to leave his house in Petty France late in the evening, and be piloted through the streets to the Coffee-house in New Palace Yard to hear one of the great debates of the Club, and become acquainted with their method of closing the debate by a ballot, it would really be a wonder.----Not in the Rota Club, however, but in the Committee of Safety at Whitehall and in the Wallingford-House Council, was the real and practical debate in progress. On the 1st of November the Committee had appointed their sub-committee of six to deliberate on the new Constitution; and through the rest of the month, both in the sub-committee and in the general committee, there had been that intricate discussion in which Vane led the extreme party, or party of radical changes, while Whitlocke stood for lawyerly use and wont in all things, and Johnstone of Warriston threw in suggestions from his peculiar Scottish point of view. So far as Milton was cognisant of the discussion, his hopes must have been in the efforts of his friend Vane. If any one could succeed in inducing his colleagues to insert articles for Church-disestablishment and full Liberty of Conscience into the new Constitution, who so likely as he who had held those articles as tenets of his private creed so much earlier and so much more tenaciously than any other public man? Seven years ago Milton had described him on this account as Religion's "eldest son," on whose firm hand she could lean in peace. Now that he was again in power, and that not merely as one of a miscellaneous Parliamentary body, but as one of a small committee of leaders drafting a Constitution de novo, what might he not accomplish? That Vane did battle in Committee for the notions he held in common with Milton, and for others besides, we already know; but we know also that the massive resistance of Whitlocke, backed outside by the lawyers and the Savoy clique of the clergy, was too much for Vane, and that the draft Constitution as it emerged ultimately was substantially Whitlocke's. It was on the 6th of December that this draft Constitution was submitted to the Convention of Army and Navy delegates at Whitehall; and it was on the 14th that, after modifications by this body tending to make it still more Whitlocke's than it had been, it went back to the Committee of Safety approved and ratified. A Single House Parliament of the customary sort to meet in February; a new Council of State of the customary sort to be appointed by that Parliament; the Established Church to be kept up, and by the system of Tithes until some other form of ample State-maintenance for the clergy should be provided; Liberty of Conscience for Nonconformists, but within limits: this and no more was the parturition after all. If Ludlow was in despair because no sufficient security had been taken that the new Parliament should be true to the Commonwealth, and if the theorists of the Rota were disappointed because none of their patent models had been adopted, Milton's regret can have been no less. Government after government, but all deaf alike to his teachings! Even this one, with Vane at the heart of it, unable to rise above the old conceits of a customary state-craft, and ending in a solemn vote for conserving a Church of Hirelings!

So in the middle of December. Then, for another week, the strange phenomenon, day after day, of that whirl of popular and army opinion which was to render all the long debate over the new Constitution nugatory, to upset the Wallingford-House administration, and stop Whitlocke in his issue of the writs for the Parliament that had just been announced. Monk's dogged persistency for the old Rump had done the work without the need of his advance from Coldstream to fight Lambert. All over England and Ireland people were declaring for Monk with increasing enthusiasm, and execrating Lambert's coup d'état and the Wallingford-House usurpation. Portsmouth had revolted; the Londoners were in riot; Lambert's own soldiery were falling away from him at Newcastle; Fleetwood's soldiery in London were growing ashamed of themselves and of their chief amid the taunts and insults of the populace. On the 20th of December appearances were such that Whitlocke and his colleagues were in the utmost perplexity.

One great Republican had not lived to see this return of public feeling to the cause of his heart. Bradshaw had died on the 22nd of November, all but despairing of the Republic. His will was proved on the 16th of December. It consisted of an original will, dated March 22, 1653, and two codicils, the second dated September 10, 1655. His wife having predeceased him, leaving no issue, the bulk of his extensive property went to his nephew, Henry Bradshaw; but there were various legacies, and among them the following in one group in the second codicil,--"To old Margarett ffive markes, to Mr. Marcham^t. Nedham tenne pounds, and to Mr. John Milton tenne poundes." There is nothing here to settle the disputed question of Milton's cousinship, on his mother's side, with Bradshaw.[1] The legacy was a trifling one, equivalent to £35 now; and, as Needham and Milton are associated on terms of equality, Bradshaw must have been thinking of them together as the two literary officials who had been so much in contact with each other, and with himself, in the days of his Presidency of the Council of State,--Needham as the appointed journalist of the Commonwealth, and Milton as its Latin champion, and for some time Needham's censor and supervisor. In Milton's case perhaps, as the codicil was drawn up fifteen months after the publication of the Defensio Secunda, the legacy may have been intended not merely as a small token of general respect and friendliness, but also as a recognition by Bradshaw of the bold eulogy on him inserted into that work at a critical moment of his relations to Cromwell.

[Footnote 1: Ormerod's Cheshire, III. 409; but I owe the verbatim extract from the codicil to the never-failing kindness of Colonel Chester.--By an inadvertence the date of Bradshaw's death has been given, ante p. 495, as Oct. 31, 1659, instead of Nov. 22.]

* * * * *

More than two years had elapsed since Milton's last letters to Oldenburg and young Ranelagh (ante pp. 366-367). They were then at Sáumur in France, where they remained till March 1658; but since that time they had been travelling about, and from May 1659, if not earlier, they had been boarding in Paris. There are glimpses of them in letters from Oldenburg to Robert Boyle, and also in letters of Hartlib to Boyle, in which he quotes passages from letters he has received both from Oldenburg and from young Ranelagh. Thus, in a letter of Hartlib's to Boyle of April 12, 1659, there is this from Oldenburg's last: "I have had some discourse with an able but somewhat close physician here, that spoke to me of a way, though without particularizing all, to draw a liquor of the beams of the sun; which peradventure some person that is knowing and experienced (as noble Mr. Boyle) may better beat out than we can who want experience in these matters." Young Ranelagh seems to have fully acquired by this time the tastes for physical and experimental science which characterized his tutor; and his uncle Boyle may have read with a smile this from Hartlib of date October 22, 1659:--"This week Mr. Jones hath saluted me with a very kind letter, containing a very singular observation in these words: 'Concerning the generation of pearls I am of opinion that they are engendered in the cockle-fishes (I pray, Sir, give me the Latin word for it in your next) of the same manner as the stone in our body,--which I endeavour fully to show in a discourse of mine about the generation of pearls; which, when I shall have done it, shall wait upon you for my part in revenge of your observations. I heard lately a very remarkable story about margarites from a person of quality and honour in this town, which you will be glad, I believe, to hear. A certain German baron of about twenty-four years old, being in prison here at Paris, in the same chamber with a Frenchman (who told this, as having been eyewitness of it, to him that told it me), they having both need of money, the baron sent his man to a goldsmith to buy seven or eight ordinary pearls, of about twenty pence a piece, which he put a-dissolving in a glass of vinegar; and, being well dissolved, he took the paste and put it together with a powder (which I should be glad to know) into a golden mould, which he had in his pocket, and so put it a-warming for some time upon the fire; after which, opening the mould, they found a very great and lovely oriental pearl in it, which they sold for about two hundred crowns, although it was a great deal more worth. The same baron, throwing a little powder he had with him into a pitcher of water, and letting it stand about four hours, made the best wine that a man can drink.' Thus far the truly hopeful young gentleman, whereby he hath hugely obliged me. I wish he had the forementioned powder, that we might try whether we could make the like pearls and wine." From a subsequent letter of Hartlib's, dated Nov. 29, 1659, it appears that Oldenburg and Jones were both much interested in the optical instruments of a certain Bressieux, then in Paris, who had for two years been chief workman in that line for Descartes. They were anxious to make him a present of some good glass from London, because he was rather secretive about his workmanship, and such a present would go a great way towards mollifying him.[1]

[Footnote 1: Letters of Oldenburg and Hartlib to Boyle in Boyle's Works (1744), V. 280-296 and 300-302.]

Very possibly with this last letter of Oldenburg's to Hartlib there had been enclosed a letter from Oldenburg, and another from young Ranelagh, to Milton. Two such letters, at all events, Milton had received, and undoubtedly through Hartlib, who was still the universal foreign postman for his friends. We can guess the substance of the two letters. Young Ranelagh does not seem to have troubled Milton with his speculations on the generation of pearls, or his story of the German baron and his alchemic powders, but only to have sent his dutiful regards, with excuses for long neglect of correspondence. Oldenburg had also sent his excuses for the same, but with certain pieces of news from abroad, and certain references to the state of affairs at home. Among the pieces of news were two of some personal interest to Milton. One was that the unfinished reply to his Defensio Prima, which Salmasius had left in manuscript at his death six years ago, was about to appear as a posthumous publication. The other was that there was to be a great Synod of the French Protestant Church, at which the case of Morus was to be again discussed. For, though it was more than two years since Morus had received his call to the collegiate pastorship of the Protestant Church of Paris or Charenton, the question of his admissibility to the charge had hung all that while between the Walloon Synods of the United Provinces and the French Protestant Church Courts, the latter on the whole favouring him, the former more and more bent on disgracing him. In April of the present year a Walloon Synod at Tergou had actually passed on him a sentence of suspension from the ministerial office and from the holy communion "until by a sincere repentance of his sins he shall have repaired so many scandals he has brought upon us." In spite of this, a French Provincial Synod, held at Ai in Champagne in the following month, had ordered his admission to be carried into effect, and the Parisian consistory had obeyed this order, though two members of it protested. There had since then been another Walloon Synod, held at Nimeguen in September, in which the former sentence of the Tergou Synod was confirmed, but, for the sake of peace between the Walloon Church and their brethren of the French Protestant Church, it was agreed to waive all farther jurisdiction over Morus in Holland and to "remit the whole cause unto the prudence, discretion, and charity of the National Assembly of the French churches to meet at Loudun." This was the Synod of whose approaching meeting Oldenburg had informed Milton--the Synod of Loudun in Anjou (Nov. 10, 1659--Jan. 10, 1660). It was to be a very important assembly indeed,--no mere Provincial Synod, but a national one, expressly allowed by Louis XIV., and to consist of deputies, clerical and lay, from all the Protestant churches of France, empowered to transact all business relating to those churches under certain royal regulations and restrictions, and in the presence of a royal Commissioner. As there had been no such National Protestant Synod in France for fifteen years, there was an accumulation of business for it, the case of Morus included. They were to examine that case de novo, and to pronounce finally whether Morus was guilty or not guilty, whether he should remain a minister of the French Church or not.[1]

[Footnote 1: Bayle, Art. Morus, and Bruce's Life of Morus, 204-226.]

Milton's replies to the two letters will now be intelligible. He writes, it will be observed, in a gloomy mood, on the very day on which Whitlocke, for different reasons, was in a gloomy mood too and "wishing himself out of these daily hazards":--

TO HENRY OLDENBURG.

"That forgiveness which you ask for your silence you will give rather to mine; for, if I remember rightly, it was my turn to write to you. By no means has it been any diminution of my regard for you (of this I would have you fully persuaded) that has been the impediment, but only my employments or domestic cares; or perhaps it is mere sluggishness to the act of writing that makes me guilty of the intermitted duty. As you desire to be informed, I am, by God's mercy, as well as usual. Of any such work as compiling the history of our political troubles, which you seem to advise, I have no thought whatever [longe absum]: they are worthier of silence than of commemoration. What is needed is not one to compile a good history of our troubles, but one who can happily end the troubles themselves; for, with you, I fear lest, amid these our civil discords, or rather sheer madnesses, we shall seem to the lately confederated enemies of Liberty and Religion a too fit object of attack, though in truth they have not yet inflicted a severer wound on Religion than we ourselves have been long doing by our crimes. But God, as I hope, on His own account, and for His own glory, now in question, will not allow the counsels and onsets of the enemy to succeed as they themselves wish, whatever convulsions Kings and Cardinals meditate and design. Meanwhile, for the Protestant Synod of Loudun, which you tell me is so soon to meet [Milton does not seem to know that it had been sitting already for six weeks] I pray--what has never happened to any Synod yet--a happy issue, not of the Nazianzenian sort,[1] and am of opinion that the issue of this one will be happy enough if, should they decree nothing else, they should decree the expulsion of Morus. Of my posthumous adversary, as soon as he makes his appearance, be good enough to give me the earliest information. Farewell.

"Westminster: December 20, 1659."

[Footnote 1: The allusion seems to be to the great OEcumenical Council of Constantinople in 381, which confirmed Gregory Nazianzen in the Patriarchate of Constantinople, and in which Gregory presided for some time and inefficiently.]

TO THE NOBLE YOUTH, RICHARD JONES.

"For the long break in your correspondence with me your excuses are truly most modest, inasmuch as you might with more justice accuse me of the same fault; and, as the case stands, I am really at a loss to know whether I should have preferred your not having been in fault to your having apologised so finely. On no account let it ever come into your mind that I measure your gratitude, if anything of the kind is due to me from you, by your constancy in letter-writing. My feeling of your gratitude to me will be strongest when the fruits of those services of mine to you of which you speak shall appear not so much in frequent letters as in your perseverance and laudable proficiency in excellent pursuits. You have rightly marked out for yourself the path of virtue in that theatre of the world on which you have entered; but remember that the path is common so far to virtue and vice, and that you have yet to advance to where the path divides itself into two. And you ought now betimes to prepare yourself for leaving this common path, pleasant and flowery, and for being able the more readily, with your own will, though with labour and danger, to climb that arduous and difficult one which is the slope of virtue only. For this you have great advantages over others, believe me, in having secured so faithful and skilful a guide. Farewell.

"Westminster: December 20, 1659."

Two days after the date of these letters the uproar of execration round the Wallingford-House Government had reached such an extreme that Whitlocke made his desperate proposal to Fleetwood that they should extricate themselves from their difficulty by declaring for Charles and opening negotiations with him. Two days more, and Fleetwood's soldiery, under the command of officers of the Rump, were marching down Chancery Lane, cheering Speaker Lenthall and asking his forgiveness. Again two days more, and on the 26th of December, Fleetwood having given up the game and sent the keys of the Parliament House to Lenthall, the Rumpers were back in their old places. We have arrived, therefore, at that Third Stage of the Anarchy which may be called "The Second Restoration of the Rump."

* * * * *

Of Milton in this stage of the Anarchy we hear little or nothing directly; but there are means for tracing the course of his thoughts.

As may be inferred from the melancholy tone of his letter to Oldenburg, he had all but ceased to hope for any deliverance for the Commonwealth by any of the existing parties. Even the Second Restoration of the Rump, though it was what he was bound to approve, and had indeed suggested as possibly the best course, can have brought him but little increase of expectation. If, in its best estate, after its first restoration, the Rump had disappointed him, what could he hope from it now in its attenuated and crippled condition, with Vane expelled from it because of his actings during the Wallingford-House Interruption, with Salway out of it, who had worked so earnestly with Vane on the Church-question, and with others of the ablest also out of it, leaving a House of but about two scores of persons, to be managed by Hasilrig, Scott, Neville, and Henry Marten? Nay, not to be managed even by those undoubted Republicans, but to a great extent also by Ashley Cooper, Fagg, and others, whose Republicanism was of a very dubious character! For Milton cannot have failed to take note of the abatement in this session of the Rump of that Republican fervency which had characterized its former session. What had been his own two proposed tests of genuine Republicanism? Willingness of every one concerned with the Government to take a solemn oath of Abjuration of a Single Person, and willingness also of every such person to swear to the principle of Liberty of Conscience. How was it faring with these two tests in this renewed Session of the Rumpers? An abjuration oath of the kind indicated had been imposed indeed on the new Council of State; but nearly half of those nominated to the Council had remained out of that body rather than take the oath, and Hasilrig's proposal to require the same oath from all members of the House itself had been so strenuously resisted that it had fallen to the ground. Then, on the religious question, what was the deliberate offer of the House to the country in their heads for a public Declaration on the 21st of January 1659-60? "Due liberty to tender consciences" was promised; but that was a mere phrase of custom, implying little or nothing, and it was utterly engulphed, in Milton's estimate, by the accompanying engagement to "uphold a learned and pious ministry of the nation and their maintenance by Tithes." On the Church-disestablishment question the House had actually receded from its former self by announcing that it was not even to prosecute the inquiry as to a possible substitute for Tithes. Altogether, before the twice-restored Rump had sat a month, Milton must have seen that his ideal Commonwealth was just as far off as ever. All he could hope was that the wretched little Parliament would not prove positively treacherous.

With others, however, he must have been thinking more of Monk's proceedings and intentions than of those of the Parliament. Monk's march from Coldstream southwards on the 2nd of January; the vanishing of the residue of Lambert's forces before him; the addresses to him in the English counties all along his route; his answers or supposed answers to these addresses; his wary behaviour to the two Parliamentary Commissioners that had been sent to attach themselves to him and find out his disposition in the matter of the Abjuration Oath; his arrival at St. Alban's on the 28th of January; his message thence to the Parliament to clear all Fleetwood's regiments out of London and Westminster before his own entry; that entry itself on the 3rd of February, when he and his battered columns streamed in through Gray's Inn Lane; finally his first appearance in the House and speech, there:--of all this Milton had exact cognisance through the newspapers of his friend Needham and otherwise. It was very puzzling and by no means reassuring. If he had ever thought of Monk as by possibility such a saviour of the Commonwealth as he had been longing for, the study of the actually approaching physiognomy of Old George all the way from Scotland, and still more Old George's first deliverance of himself in the Parliament, must have undeceived him. The Abjuration Oath, it appeared, was not at all to Monk's mind. He would not take it himself in order to be qualified for the seat voted him in the Council of State, and he plainly intimated his opinion that the day for such oaths and engagements was past. Milton cannot have liked that rejection by the General of one of the tests on which he had himself placed so much reliance. But, further, what meant Monk's very ambiguous utterance respecting the three immediate courses one of which must be chosen? He had distinctly mentioned in the House that the drift of public opinion, as he could ascertain it from the addresses made to him along his march, was towards either an enlargement of the present House by the re-admission of the Secluded Members or a full and free Parliament by a new general election; and, though he had seemed to acquiesce in that third course which was proposed by the House itself, viz. the enlargement of the House by a competent number of new writs issued by itself under a careful scheme of qualification for electing or being eligible, he had left a very vague impression as to his real preference. Now to Milton, as to all other ardent Commonwealth's men, the vital question was which of these three courses was to be taken. To adopt either of the two first was to subvert the Commonwealth. To re-admit the secluded members into the present House was to convert it into a House with an overwhelming Presbyterian majority, and to bring back the days of Presbyterian ascendancy, with the prospect of a restoration of Royalty on merely Presbyterian terms. To summon what was called a new full and free Parliament was, all but certainly, to bring back Royalty by a more hurried process still. Only by the third method, the Rump's own method, did there seem a chance of preserving the Republican constitution; and yet Monk's assent to it had been but hesitating and uncertain. More ominous still had been his few words intimating his wishes in the matter of ecclesiastical policy. He could conceive nothing so good, on the whole, as the Scottish Presbyterianism he had been living amidst for the last few years, and he thought that the 'sober interest' in England, steering between the 'Cavalier party' on the one side and the 'Fanatic party' on the other, would be most secure by keeping to a moderate Presbytery in the State-Church. That Milton's views as to the merits of Scottish Presbytery were not Monk's is an old story, needing no repetition here. What must have concerned him was to see Monk not only at one with the great mass of his countrymen on the subject of a Church-Establishment, but actually retrograde on the question of the desirable nature of such an Establishment, inasmuch as he seemed to signal his countrymen back out of Cromwell's broad Church of mixed Presbyterians, Independents, and Baptists, into a Church more strictly on the Presbyterian model. Then another unpleasant novelty in Monk's case was his fondness for the phrases Fanatics, Fanatic Notions, the Fanatic Party. The phrases were not new; but Monk had sent them out of Scotland before him, and had brought them himself out of Scotland, with a new significance. Very probably they had been supplied to him out of the vocabulary of his Scottish clerical adviser Mr. James Sharp, or of the Scottish Resolutioner clergy generally. At all events, it is from and after the date of Monk's march into England that one finds the name Fanatics a common one for all those Commonwealth's men collectively who opposed a State-Church or the moderate Presbyterian or semi-Presbyterian form of it. Had Monk drawn out a list of his 'Fanatics,' he would have had to put Milton himself at the top of them, with Vane, Harrison, Barebone, and the leading Quakers.

Nevertheless, here was Monk, such as he was, the armed constable of the crisis, the one man who could keep the peace and let the Rumpers proceed in doing their best. That "best" as they had agreed specifically on the 4th of February, the day after Monk's arrival, was to be the recruiting of their own House up to a total of 400 members for England and Wales, such recruiting to be effected by the issue of a certain number of new writs, together with a scheme of qualifications calculated to bring in only sound Republicans, or persons likely to cooperate in farther measures with the present Rumpers. This being what was promised by the conjunction of Monk and the Rump, what could Milton do but acquiesce, be glad it was no worse, and contribute what advice he could? This, accordingly, is what he did. Pamphlets on the crisis, as we know, had been coming out abundantly--pamphlets for the good old cause of the Republic, pamphlets from Rota-men, pamphlets from Prynne and other haters of the Rump, pamphlets from crypto-Royalists, and pamphlets openly Royalist; and many of these had taken, and others were still to take, the form of letters addressed to Monk. It need be no surprise that Milton had his pamphlet in preparation. He had begun it just after Monk's arrival in London and the resolution, of the Rump to recruit itself; he had written it hurriedly and yet with some earnest care; and it seems to have been ready for the press about or not long after the middle of February. Before it could go to press, however, there had been another revolution, obliging him to hold it back. There had been the rebellion of the Londoners because of the resolution of the Rump to perpetuate itself by recruiting, instead of either readmitting the secluded members or calling a new free and full Parliament; there had been Monk's notorious two days in the City, by order of the Rump, quashing the rebellion, and breaking the gates and portcullises (Feb. 9-10); there had been his extraordinary return the third day, with his profession of regret before the Lord Mayor and the Aldermen and Common Council, and his announcement that he had dissolved his connexion with the Rump,--that third day wound up with yells of delight through all the City, the smashing of Barebone's windows, and the universal Roasting of the Rump in street-bonfires (Feb. 11); there had been the ten more days of Monk's continued residence in the City, the Rumpers vainly imploring reconciliation with him, and the Secluded Members and their friends gathering round him and negotiating; and, on Tuesday, Feb. 21, when he did remove from the City to Westminster, it was with the Secluded Members in his train, to be marched under military guard to their seats beside the Rumpers. The writs issued by the Rump for recruiting itself were now useless. It had been recruited in the way it least liked, by the sudden reappearance in it of the excluded Presbyterians and Royalists of the pre-Commonwealth period of the Long Parliament.

Far more than the mere stopping of his pamphlet was involved for Milton in the events of that fortnight. He could construe them no otherwise than as the breaking down of the inner rampart that defended the Commonwealth against Charles Stuart. The Roasting of the Rump in London was but a rough popular metaphor for "Down with the Republic"; and, had the tumult of that night extended from the City to Westminster and the breaking of the windows of "fanatics" become general, Milton's would not have escaped. Then, in the course of the negotiations with Monk through the fatal fortnight, had not the Rump itself quailed? Had they not offered to cancel the solemn Abjuration Oath, alike for the Councillors of State and for future members of Parliament, and to substitute only a general engagement to be faithful to the Commonwealth, without King, Single Person, or House of Lords? Hardly anywhere now did there seem to be that stern, bold, uncompromising opposition to Royalty which would register itself, as Milton wanted, in an oath before God and man, but only that feebler Republicanism which would pledge itself with the understood reservation of "circumstances permitting." But worst of all was the crowning fact that the Secluded Members had been restored. By that one stroke of Monk's all that had happened since the Commonwealth had been set up was put in question, and the power was given back into the hands of the very men who had protested and struggled against the setting up of the Commonwealth eleven years ago. How would these act? It might be hoped perhaps that some of the more prudent among them, having regard to the lapse of time and the change of circumstances, might not think it their duty to be as vehemently Royalist now as they had been in 1648, and also perhaps that the power of Monk, if Monk himself remained true, might restrain the rest. But would Monk remain true, or would his power avail long in restraining a Parliament the majority of which were Presbyterians and Royalists? Not to speak of the varied ability and subtlety of such of the new Parliamentary chiefs as Annesley, Sir William Waller, Denzil Holles, Ashley Cooper, and Harbottle Grimstone, what was to be expected from the remorseless obstinacy, the rhinoceros persistency, of such a Presbyterian as Prynne? How often had Milton jeered at Prynne and the margins of his endless pamphlets! It might be of some consequence to him now to remember that he had done so, and had therefore this virtual Attorney-General of the Secluded for his personal enemy. Altogether, Milton's despondency had never yet been so deep as it must have been at this beginning of the last phase of the long English Revolution, represented in the Parliament of the Secluded Members and in Monk's accompanying Dictatorship.

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