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"•' The life of John MittonSuMiiM
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THE LIFE
OF
JOHN MILTON,
AND
HISTOEY OF HIS TIME.
VOL. VI.
oxi'obd:
i. fickabd hall, u.a., and j. h. stact,
fbikisbs to tse unitebsiit.
THE LIFE
JOHN MILTO'n
NARRATED IN CONNEXION WITH
THE POLITICAL, ECCLESIASTICAL, AND LITERAKY
HISTORY OF HIS TIME.
BY
DAVID MASSON, M.A., LL.D.,
w
PROFESSOR MT RHETORIC AND ENGLISH LITERATURE
IN THE UNIVERSITY OF EDINBURGH.
VOL. VI.
1660 — 1674.
MACMILLAN AND CO.
u
PEEFACE. TO VOLUME VL
It is naturally with some satisfaction that I complete
at last a work begun so long ago. It is a satisfaction also,
to myself at least, to have been able to persevere to the very
end in the original plan, omitting nothing, slurring nothing,
that the plan required. In the present volume, for example,
I have done my best towards the conjunction of a sufficient
History of the Restoration and its Consequences with the
concluding Fourteen Years of Milton's Biography.
It is unnecessary, I hope, to repeat my assurance that the
historical portions of the six volumes, even those that are
most summary in appearance, are no mere compilations from
any existing history, or from all existing histories- together,
but are the results of origina,l and independent survey and
inquiry, according to gradually formed notions of what
English History ought to be and to include, with very
deep digging, and much use of the pickaxe, in many tracts
and spots of previously neglected ground. What may be
more necessary is the repetition of an acknowledgment made,
more than eight years- ago, in the Preface to Volume II..
" I never can pass a sheet of the historical kind for the
press," I then wrote, " without a dread lest, from inadvertence
or from sheer ignorance, some error, some blunder even, may
have escaped me." No sincere historical inquirer but will
understand this confession and sympathise with it; but
I would repeat it now expressly with reference to the entire
work. The errors of fact that have yet been pointed out
in the previous volumes are few and slight ; but I am aware
of some that have not been pointed out. The gradual
IV PREFACE.
execution of the work and the publication of it in successive
instalments have occasioned also some flaws of mechanical
form, which revision might amend. As it stands, I can but
offer it as, on the whole, a faithful fulfilment of a large
design, and trust that it may not be without its uses in
its professed character, as combining a more thorough and
minute Life of Milton than had before been attempted
with a new Political, Ecclesiastical, and Literary History of
Milton's whole Time.
Though the dimensions of the book are somewhat unusual
they are even moderate for such a combination of the
Biography of Milton with a History of England, and of the
connexions of England with Scotland and Ireland, and with
foreign countries, through the Civil Wars, the Common-
wealth, the Protectorates of Oliver and Richard, the Anarchy,
and the first fourteen years of the Restoration. A copious
Index is needed and is in preparation j and meanwhile there
may be some convenience in the Tables of Contents prefixed
to the several volumes and in the studied fulness of those for
Volumes IV, V, and VI.
Edinbubgh : December, 1879.
CONTENTS.
BOOK I.
MAT 1660— MAT 1661.
HISTORY: — ^The Yeab op the Eestoeation.
BIOGRAPHY : — Milton through the Yeab of the Restobation.
CHAP. PAGE
I. Charles II. and his Ketiirae at the Hague : Deputations to him
from London : Procession from the Hague : Embarkation for
England : The Voyage Home : The landing at Dover and
meeting with Monls : Halt at Canterbury : Eoyal Progress
from Koohester and Triumphal Entry into London, May 29,
1660: Rejoicings in the Three Kingdoms, and Poetical Con-
gratulations : THie Privy Council and Ministry of the Restored
Monarch, with Monk as Duke of Albemarle and Montague as
Earl of Sandwich : The Junto or Cabinet : Lord Chancellor
Hyde and his Premiership : Composition of the two Houses of
the Convention Parliament. — Question of Pardon or Revenge :
Charles's Indemnity Declaration from Breda, and the Indemnity
Bill in the Convention Parliament : Proceedings of the Com-
mons with the Bill before the arrival of Charles (May 9-29) :
Order for the Arrest of all the Regicide Judges living, and
Resolutions for the Capital Exception of Seven of them and the
Attainder of Four of the dead Regicides. — Progress of the Bill
in the Commons after the arrival of Charles : Naming of the
Seven living Regicide Judges to be excepted Capitally, and of
five additional persons to be similarly excepted for their con-
nexion vrith the Regicide: Quest of the two masked Execu-
tioners of Charles I, and Order for the Arrest of Hugh Peters :
Royal Proclamation for the Surrender of the Absconding
Regicides : Resolution of the Commons for the Punishment of
Twenty Persons for General Political Delinquency : Additions
to the list of excepted Regicides, and Nomination of the
Twenty General Political Delinquents : William Hewlet and
Hugh Peters capitally excepted as special Supernumeraries :
Final Modifications of the Bill in the Commons, and Extension
of the list of Capital Exceptions by the addition of Eleven of
the Regicides still fugitive. — ^The Bill in the Lords : Deter-
mination of the Lords to except all the Regicides capitally,
and to make capital exceptions also of Vane, Hasilrig, and
Lambert : Debates and Conferences : Hyde's devices for
Agreement : Analysis of tlie Bill as it passed the two Houses
VI CONTENTS.
CHAP. PACK
and received the King's Aseent, Aug. 29.— The Church Ques-
tion : Charles's Declaration from Breda of Liberty for Tender
Consciences : Kestoration of Episcopacy and Liturgy » fore-
gone conclusion, but Possibility still of a Limited Episcopacy
and Comprehension of the Presbyterians : Reference of the
whole matter to the King: Kapid Return of the ejected
Anglican Clergy to their livings : Negotiations with the lead-
ing Presbyterians : No Result. — Arrangements for the Royal
Revenue and for the Disbandment of the Army of the Common-
wealth : Hyde's great Speech on the Disbandment and the
Indemnity Bill: Adjournment of the Parliament for eight
weeks : Death of the Duke of Gloucester. — Affairs through
the Recess (Sept. 13 — Nov. 6) : The Royal Family and the
Court : Touching for the King's Evil : Quiet Disbandment of
the Army : Trials of the Regicides : Executions of Harrison,
Carew, Cook, Hugh Petets, Scott, Clements, Seroope, Jones,
Axtell, and Hacker : The Unhanged Regicides and others in
Prison : King's Declaration canceming Hcclegiastical Affairs :
Renewed hopes of Baxter and the Presbyterians : Settlement
of the English Episcopate in Nov. 1660 : Story of Ann Hyde
and her Secret Marriage with the Duke of York : the Queen-
Mother and the Princess of Orange in England. — Rea.ssembling
of the Parliament : Collapse of the King's JEcelesiantical Decla-
ration and of the Hopes of a Comprehension : Bill of Attainder
on the Regicides : Vote for disinterring and gibbeting the
bodies of Cromwell, Bradshaw, Ireton, and Pride : Revenue
Settlement : Dissolution of the Convention Parliament, Dec. 29 :
Death of the Prineess of Orange, Acknowledgment of Ann
Hyde's Marriage, and Departure of the Queen-Mother
Insurrection of Venner and the Eifth Monarchy men: Effects
•of the Event : Severities against Sectaries and their Con-
venticles : The Baptists and the Quakers : Anniversary of
Kii^ Charles thp Martyr, Jan. 30, 1660-61 : Gibbeting of the
bodies of Cromwell, Bradshaw, and Ireton at Tyburn, and
exposure of their skulls on Westminster Hall. — State of Ireland
at the Restoration : Irish Questions and Difficulties : Settle-
ment of the Irish Episcopate. — Scotland severed from England :
Scottish Privy Council and Ministry in London : Appearance
of the Marquis of Argyle in London : His Arrest : Apprehen-
sion of Swinton of Swinton, and orders for the apprehension of
Johnstone of Warriston and others ; Revived Committee of
Estates in Edinburgh: Arrests of James Guthrie,' Patrick
GUlespie.^nd others of the Protesters of 1650-51: Escape of
Johnstone of Warriston : Ho'pes among the Besolutioner Clergy
of the preservation of some kind of Presbytery in Scotland :
Equivocations fi'om London on that Subject : Lauderdale and
Mlddleton: Loss of the Scottish Records: Middleton in
Scotland as the King's High iCommissioner : Meeting of a
Scottish Parliament : Middleton and his Colleagues in Edin-
burgh : Acts of the Parliament and Drift towards Episcopacy :
Trials of Argyle, Guthrie, Gillespie, Swinton, and others. —
Preparations for the Coronation of Charles II in Westminster :
New Peerages and Knighthoods : Hyde made Earl of Claren-
don : The Coronation Ceremony in Westminster Abbey and
the Coronation Banquet in Westminster Hall, April 23, 1661 :
Meeting of a new English Parliament, May 8, with Bishops in
the House of Lords : Cavalier Composition of the Parliament :
Abortive Issue of the Savoy Conferences : Burning of the
Solemn League and Covenant, throughout England. — First
CONTENTS. VU
Anniversary of the Eestoration, May 29, 1661 : Renewed
Rejoicings in the three Capitals : Executions of Argyle,
Guthrie, and Govan in Edinburgh : King's intended marriage. S
II. Milton in Abscondenoe : The House in Bartholomew Close : His
Extreme Danger at the Eestoration : Review of his Antece-
dents as they might bear on his chances with the new Powers :
Milton's fate bound up with the progress of the Indemnity
Bill through the two Houses of the Convention Parliament :
Two possible forms of the question regarding him, viz.
(1) whether he should be excepted in the Category of the
Regicides, (2) whether he should be excepted among the
General Political Delinquents : Fatal possibility of the first
arrangement : Special importance of his Tenure of Kings amd
Magistrates in that connexion : Milton, by that Pamphlet,
legally an accessory to the Regicide before the Fact : First
naming of Milton in the Commons in the course of the In-
demnity Bill : Named in the process of Selecting the Twenty
General Delinquents to be excepted noncapitally ; Not
selected among the Twenty after all, but conjoined with John
Goodwin for special prosecution ; Order of the Commons,
June 16, 1660, for his Arrest and Indictment on account of
his Eikonoldastes and Pro Populo Anglicano Defensio, with
petition to the Kin^ respecting those Pamphlets and Goodwin's
Obstructors of Justice : Subsequent vote of the Commons in-
cluding Goodwin among the Twenty, and leaving Milton to
be prosecuted by himself; Ri^k then that he might have
been coupled with Hugh Peters : Milton stUl la abscondence
when the Indemnity Bill went up to the Lords : No disturb-
ance by the Lords of the arrangement in his case made by
the Commons : Royal Proclamation of August 13 against
Milton's Pro Populo Anglicano Defensio and Mkonohlastes and
Goodwin's Obstructors of Justice : The Indemnity BUI passed,
Aug. 29, without mention of Milton in any way whatever
among the Exceptions : Milton legally safe from that moment.
— Milton's escape at the Restoration a Historical Puzzle : Tra-
ditions on the subject and examination of them : Concern of
Davenant, Marvell, and others in the matter : A Combination
of more powerful influences and Dexterous Parliamentary
management of Milton's Case the only sufficient Solution. —
Milton in Custody for some time : Burnings of his and Good-
win's condemned Books by the Hangman : Apparently still in
Custody during the Trials and Executions of the Regicides :
Order of the Commons for his release, Dec. 15, 1660 : His
Dispute with the Sergeant-at- Arms as to his prison-fees : Order
of the Commons in that matter : Last mention of Milton in
the Commons. — Milton a free man from December 1660 : His
temporary residence in Holbom, near Red Lion Fields : Various
fates of his old friends and acquaintances : Marchamont
Needham back in England : Royahst Denunciation of Need-
ham, called A Rope for Pol. : Journalists in' succession to
Needham : Publication in London of the Posthumous Answer
of Salmasius to Milton, entitled Ad Johannem Miltonum
Mesponsio : Account of that Book, with a Translated Specimen :
Milton necessarily precluded from reply : Morus, Du Moulin,
and other old Antagonists of Milton : His Condition in his
Holbom obscurity in the beginning of 1661 : Hardly safe from
mobbing or assassination : His thoughts on public af&irs and
the Clarendon Policy in Church and State 162
Vlil CONTENTS.
BOOK II.
MAT 1661— AUGUST 1667.
BISTORT : — I. The Clakendon Administration continued.
II. Datenant's Kevivbd Laokeatbship, and thb First Seven
Years op the Literature of the Restoration.
BJOGJtAPST: — Milton's Liee erom 1661 to 1667: with Pabadise Lost.
Programme of the first Six Sessions of the Cavalier Parliament:
Clarendon's continued Premiership and settled Policy : Acts
of July 1661 : Acts of May 1662, including the Corporations
Act, Act against Quakers, The Act of Uniformity, a Militia
Act, and a new Press Act : Unsatiated Eevengefulness of
the Eoyaliats : Case of John James : Ignominious Exhi-
bition of three of the imprisoned Eegicides : Capture and
Execution of Barkstead, Corbet, and Okey: Arrival of
the Portuguese Infanta : Her Marriage with Charles : The
new Queen and Lady Castlemaine : Trials of Vane and Lam-
bert, and Execution of Vane : St. Bartholomew's Day, Aug. 24,
1662 : Ejection and Silencing of over Two Thousand Non-
conformist Ministers: Importance of that Event in English
History : Kesponsibility of Clarendon for it : Ministerial
Changes in 1662 : Crypto-Catholioism of Charles and the Court :
Mission of Boilings to Bome : King's Inclinations in favour of
the Nonconformists : His Toleration Edict of December 1662 :
Perplexity of Clarendon : Second Session of the Parliament,
February — July, 1663 : King's designs of Toleration quashed
and Clarendon's Policy confirmed ; Abortive attack on Clar-
endon by Bristdl : Marriage of the young Duke of Monmouth :
Growing dislike of Clarendon at Court : The Conventicles Act,
and other Proceedings of the Third Session of the Parliament,
March — May, 1664 : Clarendon's new Mansion in Piccadilly :
Fourth Session of the Parliament, Nov. 1664 — March 1664-5 :
Foreign Policy since the Bestoration .- Sale of Dunkirk : War
with the Dutch : Battle off Lowestoft, June 3, 1665 : The
Duke of York and the Earl of Sandwich : The Great Plague
in London : Its Progress and Ravages : The Fifth or Oxford
Session of the Cavalier Parliament, Oct. 1665, with the passing
of the Five Miles Act : Gradual Abatement of the Plague :
Continued War with the Dutch: Battles of Albemarle and
Prince Rupert against Ruyter and De Witt : The Great Fire
of London, Sept. 1666 : Outcries against the Court : Sixth
Session of the Parliament, Sept. 1666 — Feb. 1666-7 : Apparent
Security of Clarendon : Intrigues against him, and more
Ministerial Changes: Exhaustion of FinanceSj and Mutiny
among the Seamen : Negotiations for a Peace with the Dutch :
The Dutch Fleet in the Thames, June 1667 : Panic among the
Londoners : Dutch Revenges in the Thames and Medway :
Popular rage and Recollections of Oliver : Mobbing of Clar-
endon's Piccadilly Mansion : Extraordinary Call of Parliament,
July 25, 1667: Peace with the Dutch announced and Par-
liament dismissed ! Fall of Clarendon, Aug. 1667 : His Disgrace
and Exile , 221
CONTENTS. )X
II. Eesumption of the Laureateship by Sir William Davenant : His
Antecedents : His GoruMbert, and his Plays and other Poems.
— The Septuagenarian Thomas Hobbes : His Life and Writings
before the Restoration : General Account of his Philosophy :
Hobbes personally and socially : Prevalence of Hobbism at the
Kestoration and forms of antagonism to it. — The Septuagena-
rians Sanderson and Wither. — The Sexagenarians of Davenant's
Kestored Laureateship, viz. Herrick, King; Hacket, John
Goodwin, Bramhall, Izank Walton, Shirley, Howell, Prynne,
Dr. Brian Walton, Ogilby, Heylin, Calamy, and Thomas
Goodwin. — Davenant's Coetaneans, viz. Earle, Lightfoot, Sir
Kenelm Digby, Thomas Fuller, Jasper Mayne, Pccock,
Edmund Waller, Browne of Norwich, Dugdale, Whitlocke,
Bushworth, Hyde, Fanshawe, Cockayne, Feltham, and Which-
cote : more particular notice of Waller and his Poetry. —
Davenant's immediate Juniors, viz. Harrington, Thomas
Killigrew, Samuel Butler, Jeiemy Taylor, Leighton, Pearson,
Dr. Henry More, Wilkins, Baxter, Denham, Birkenhead,
L'Estrange, Owen, Wallis, Cudworth, Algernon Sidney,
Worthington, Cowley, Chamberlayne, Needham, Neville, and
Evelyn : Antecedents of Butler : Account of Dr. Henry More
and the Cambridge Platonists : Denham and his Poetry :
Cowley and his Poetry : Peculiar Beputation and Position of
Cowley at the Eestoration. — Fleoknoe, CarleU, Sir Samuel
Tuke, and Sir Robert Stapylton. — Younger Effectives and
Latest Recruits of Davenant's Laureateship, viz. Andrew
Marvell, Henry Vaughan, Alexander Brome, the Earl of Orrery,
Sir William Petty, the Marchioness of Newcastle, George Fox,
Sydenham, Thomas Stanley, Aubrey, Dalgamo, Sir Robert
Howard and his brothers, John Wilson, the Duke of Bucking-
ham, Robert Boyle, John Bunyan, Temple, Barrow, Tillotson,
Howe, Charles Cotton, Edward and John Phillips, Anthony
Wood, Dryden, Katherine Philips, Henry Stubbe, John Locke,
Pepys, South, the Earl of Roscommon, Flatman, Stillingfleet,
Etherege, Sprat, George Mackenzie, Lord Buckhurst, Sir
Charles Sedley, Shadwell, andWycherley. — ^Traditional Fallacy
as to the effects of the Restoration on English Literary Activity :
The Restoration credited with much that does not belong to it :
No general new outburst or abundance of Literature in conse-
quence of the Restoration, but rather the reverse : Statistics
on the subject from the Stationers' Registers. — Especial
Paralysis of the Newspaper Press and of all Cognate Literature
of Public Affairs at and after the Restoration : Birkenhead and
his Newspapers, 166& — 1^63 : L'Estrange's Considerations
and Proposals for the Regulation of the Press, June 1663 :
L'Estrange as Book-Licencer, State-Journstlist, and Inquisitor-
General of the Press, from 1663 to 1666 : The Oxford Gazette,
the London Gazette, &o. — ^The Distinctive Literature of the
Restoration and its Characteristics : Its unccHnpromising Anti-
Puritanism : Popular CavaUer Songs and Squibs : Cowley's
finer Anti-Puritaniten : His Discourse of Cromwell hy way: of
Vision : Appearance of Butler's Svdibras, 1662-3 : Immediate
populairity of that Burlesque : Its significance as representing
tendencies of the Restoration Literature : Prevalence of the
Mook-Heroic and the Comic : Coarseness : Tastes and Manners
of Charles II. and his Court. — Revival of the Drama just before
the Restoration : Formal Reooustitution of the London Stage
in August 1660: The two London Theatres, KUligrew's or
the King's and Davenant's or the Duke's : List of Actors and
Actresses : Reproduction of Old Plays, and new Dramatic In-
CONTENTS.
dustry : Glimpses of London theatrical life from August 1660
to August 1667 : Characteristic Comedies and Farces : French
Influence on the Restoration Drama : The Heroic Play, or
Tragedy of Bhymed Declamation : Davenant's Operas and the
Earl of Oixery's Heroic Plaj s : Other Tragedies : The Dramas
of John Wilson : Emergence of Dryden as, aU in all, the chief
man of the Kestoration Literature. — Dryden's First Poems
after the Restoration: His First Comedy, The Wild Gallant:
His marriage, and his Literary Relations with his brother-in-
law, Sir Robert Howard : His Rival Ladies, Indiam Emperor,
Maiden Queen, and Sir Martin Mar-all : Dryden's Supremacy
in the Restoration Drama assured before 1667 : His Character
and Habits, and his notions of Literature : His Annus Mirdbilis,
published 1666-7 : His Essay of Dramatic Poesy, published
1667 : Its Literary Criticisms and Review of English Literary
History : Its Championship of Rhymed Verse and of Rhymed
Tragedy in particular. — Two delusions propagated or fostered
by Dryden's Essay, viz. (1) That the true art of English Verse
was a novelty of his own Time, (2) That the Restoration was
the time of a general return of the banished English Muses :
Re-exposure of this latter delusion from Dryden's own Essay
and from the Registers of English Publications between
1660 and 1667 : Allowance for Intellect in reserve, and for
Clever Stray Versifying : Lyrics of Sedley and Buckhurst. —
English Science before and after the Restoration : Origins and
Foundation of the Royal Society : Sketch of the History of the
Society from 1662 iio 1667 : Boyle, Hooke, and the other chief
Fellows : Henry Oldenburg's Secretaryship to the Society. —
Retrospect of the Loudon Book Trade from 1640 to 1660 :
Chief Booksellers and Publishers of those Twenty Years:
Humphrey Moseley the most memorable among them : Moseley
still alive and active at the Restoration : His death, Jan.
1660-61 : Booksellers and Publishers of the first Seven Years
of the Restoration : Henry Herringman their chief, and the
real Successor of Moseley in the finer Book Trade : Hemng-
man's Shop in the New Exchange : Death of Cowley . . . 273
III. Milton's Removal from Holbom, some time in 1661, to Jewin
Street : Thus back in his old Aldersgate Street and Barbican
suburb, and again a parishioner of St. Giles, Cripplegate:
Dr. Annesley, the Vicar of the Parish 406
Milton in Jewin Stkebt (1661 — 1664) :— Milton's Pre-
dictions of the Consequences of the Restoration : Their verifica-
tion already complete in 1662 : His Reflections in that year :
Milton and Clarendon : Milton and the Restored Episcopal
Church : Milton and the St. Bartholomew Ejectment of the
Nonconformists : Milton's Acquaintances among the Ejected
Clergy: His Acquaintances among the new Episcopal Clergy ;
Parisian celebrity of his old Antagonist, Alexander Morus :
. Morus's Letter to Lauderdale, and his Tendency to England :
His Six Months' Visit to London in 1661-2, and his French
Sermons at Court : The Gauden Episode in Milton's Biography.
— Pre-Restoration Life of Dr. John Gauden, Rector of Booking :
Gauden as the Restoration Bishop of Exeter : His extraor-
dinary Letters from Exeter to Clarendon in Deo. 1660— March
1660-1, claiming the aiithorship of the Eikon Basilike, and
protesting the utter insufficiency of the Bishopric of Exeter as
a reward for that great service : Clarendon's Perplexed Reply
of March 13, 1661, and its Allusion to Milton : Gauden in
CONTENTS. XI
London, proaeouting his claim: His Peremptory Petition to
CSarendon for the Bishopric of Winchester : His Private Cor-
respondence with the Earl of Bristol : The Bishopric of Win-
chester given to Morley, and Gauden put off with the Bishopric
of Worcester : Death of Gauden, Sept. 1662 : Shelving thence-
forward of the inconvenient secret of the authorship of the
Eikon Sasilike. — Extent of Milton's Cognisance of the Secret
still uncertain ; His Oocupatiims in Jewin Street : Probable
extent of his Advance in the Dictation of Paradise Lost before
the end of 1662 : Milton's Pecuniary Losses by the Restoration :
His Probable Income in 1662 : Hia three Daughters : Their
Domestic Rebellion and Mismanagement : Improved Circum-
stances of the Powell Family in 1662, and Milton's Interest
in the same : Milton's Visitors in Jewin Street about 1662 :
Marvell one of the steadiest : Another of them a Mr. Samuel
Parlser, a young Oxonian : Milton's medical friend, Dr. Nathan
Paget : What now of Milton's former iriends, Lady Rauelagh,
Henry OlJenburg, and Mr. Richard Jones 1 : Specimens of
Lady Ranelagh's Letters to her brothers : Mr. Richard Jones
in a new Character: Milton's nephews, Edward and John
Phillips, since the Restoration : Information from Edward
Phillips as to Milton's methods in the Composition and Dicta-
tion of Paradise Lost : Farther Information as to Milton's
Literary Habits in Jewin Street. — ^The young Quaker, Thomas
Ellwood : His acquaintance with the Penningtons of Chalfont
St. Peter's : His Introduction to Milton : His Account of his
Reception by MUton and of his Latin Readings with Milton in
Jewin Street : Interruption of the Readings by EUwood's Im-
prisonment : His Prison Experiences and Return to Chalfont
St. Peter's. — Milton's Third Marriage : Elizabeth Minshull
and her Cheshire Relati<ves : Milton's Allegation preparatory
to the Marriage : TheMarriage itself, Feb. 24, 1662-3.— Blank
in the Records of Milton's Life for some time after his Third
Marriage : Trials of John Twyn and others in Feb. 1663-4 for
Treasonable and Seditious Publications : L'Estrange the In-
former and Chief Witness : Execution of Twyn : Reported
Implication of Milton in the Business : Probable Explanation
of the Tradition: Removal of Milton from Jewin Street to
Artillery Walk, BunhUl : Edward Phillips in his Tutorship to
the Son of John Evelyn : Marvell away as Secretary to the
Russian Embassy of the Earl of Carlisle 408
Milton in Aktillert Walk, Bonhill (1664—1665) : —
The Bunhill Neighbourhood, and Site of Milton's House there :
Perseverance in Paradise Lost : The Poem finished by June
1665 : Historical Synchronisms : Raging of the Great Plague
in London through the Summer and Autumn of 1665 : The
iBunhill Fields Plague-Pit 'close to Milton's house : Cottage
taken for Milton and his Family at Chalfont St. Giles by the
Quaker Ellwood : Removal of the Family thither, probably in
July 1665 482
Milton at Chalpont St. Giles, Buckinghamshire (1665
— ^1666) : — Chalfont St. Giles at present : Milton's Cottage
there ; The Village and its neighbourhood in the Great Plague
Year : Ellwood again in Prison : His Release and hie two
visits to Milton in the Cottage at Chalfont : Has the manu-
script of Paradise Lost lent him to read, and suggests the
subject of Paradise Regained : The Winter Months at Chalfont,
and Abatement of the Mortality in London ; Supposed Frag-
ment of a Sonnet by Milton at Chalfont 491
xii CONTENTS.
Milton back in Aetillbry Walk, Bunhill (1666 — 1667) :
Kepeopling of London after the Great Plague: Beturn of
Milton and his Family with the rest : Relics and Traces of the
Plague : Letter to Milton from his old acquaintance Peter
Heimbach : Milton's Letter to Heimbach in Reply, Aug. 15,
1666 : London in excitement with the successes against the
Dutch : Outbreak of the Great Fire in London : The three
days and nights of the Conflagration : Milton through the
Commotion : His loss in Property by the Great Fire : The vast
area of the burnt ruins : Licensing of Paradise Lost for Pub-
lication : The Licencer Tomkyns and his Hesitations : Effects
of the Great Fire on the London Book-Trade : Milton's Nego-
tiation with Samuel Simmons of Aldersgate Street : Agreement
of Milton and Simmons respecting the Copyright of Paradise
Lost : Printing of the Poem : The Dutch in the Thames, and
the Five Days of Alarm among the Londoners : Registration
of Paradise Lost, Aug. 20, 1667 : Publication of Paradise Lost :
First Copies in Circulation about the , time of the Fall and
Disgrace of Clarendon 498
Pabadise Lost oonsideked Biographioallt : — Rarity of
such Books in the world : Recollection of the Divina Com-
media in connexion with it : Dante and Milton : Points of
Resemblance ; The Characteristic Difference : Early fascination
of Milton for the Subject of Paradise Lost : Significance of his
tenacity to this subject through so many years and of his deli-
berate choice of it at last for his great Epic : The Poem pro-
perly a Cosmological Epic, propounding Milton's theory of the
Universe, visible and invisible, and of the History of Man,
according to his strict Biblical Theology, but in the form of an
optical phantasy determined by the Pre-Copernican System of
Physios : Importance of this matter of the Pre-Copernicanism
of Paradise Lost. — Our present notions of the Cosmos or Mun-
dane Universe : Extraordinary difference of the Pre-Copernican
mode of thinking : The Pre-Copernican System of the Universe
explained and illustrated : Conception of an Empyrean or
Heaven of Heavens beyond the Primum Mobile or the last
Sphere of the Mundane : Notion also of a Chaos anterior to the
Cosmos : Influence of the Pre-Copernican System on the
imaginations and speculations of Mankind for centuries, and
unremarked prevalence of its effects on old Poetry and in
Literature and Language generally : The Pre-Copemicanism
of Dante. — Pre-Copernicanism the inherited belief of Milton :
Traces of it in his earlier Poems : Probably shaken in his belief
long before he began ParoMse Lost : The Struggle between
Copemicanism and Pre-Copemicanism by no means then ended,
and only a minority of Copemicans in England ; Milton per-
haps one of them : The Pre-Copernioan system nevertheless
retained for his Epic, though with caveats and modifications :
Express differences in Milton's Cosmology irom that of Dante.
— Abstract of the Scheme and Story of Paradise Lost, from its
beginnings in the Empyrean, on to the Expulsion of the Rebel
Angels into Hell, and the Creation of the. Mundane Universe,
or Mid-world of Man, and thence again as far as to Satan's
Advent into the Mundane Universe and Arrival on the Earth,
with Illustration of the Miltouic Cosmology throughout :
Milton's Earth, his Adam and Eve, and their Terrestrial
Paradise : The Catastrophe. — Satan the chief personage in the
Poem, if not the hero : Much of the action of the Poem alto-
gether Extra-mundane, and much of the lutra-mundane action
CONTENTS. XIH
PAGE
not properly terrestrial : Preference for the Angelic grandeurs
of the Poem or its Paradisaic beauties left to the tastes of
Keaders : Greatness of the Poem all in all, and the variety
and perfection of its Literary Art : The learning of the Poem
and its saturation with Classical Mythology and Allusion. —
Paradise Lost as belonging historically to Davenant's Laureate-
ship and the English Literature of the Restoration : Probable
first impressions of it in the year 1667, and wonder over such
an unexpected reappearance of the blind Bepublican and
Begicide 518
BOOK in.
AUGUST 1667— NOVEMBBE, 1674.
BISTORT: — English Politics and Litbkatueb from 1667 to 1674.
BIOGRAPHY : — The Last Seven Ybabs op Milton's Life.
I. System of English Government from 1667 to 1674 describable
as Administration by Cabal withoiit any steady Premiership. —
L The Pseudo-Pbemieeship op Buckingham ob Duumvieate
OP Buckingham and Aelington (1667-1670) : — Composi-
tion of the Cabal as left by Clarendon, and Ministerial Changes
, till 1670 : New and more tolerant Church-Policy ; The Pro-
testant Liberal Section of the Cabal and the Crypto-Catholio
Section ; Opposition to the New Church Policy in the Seventh
Session of the Cavalier Parliament, Oct. 10, 1667— May 9,
1668 : Parliament in abeyance for seventeen months : These
seventeen months a breatbing-time for the Nonconformists :
Continued Clareudonian Temper of the Parliament in its
Eighth Session, Got. 29— Dec. 11, 1669 : Foreign Policy : The
Triple Alliance of January 1667-8, and the Secret Negotiation
with !France from April 1668 onwards : Primary object of this
Secret Negotiation a Partnership with Louis XXV in a War
as;ainst the Dutch ; The whole Cabal privy to, this object :
Additional Proposal thrown into the Negotiation by Charles
himself, viz. That he should declare himself a Roman Catholic :
Only the Crypto-Catholic section of the Cabal privy to this
proposal : Procedure of the Negotiation on the double basis :
Charles's demands for French money on both accounts thought
exorbitant by Louis : First portion of the Ninth Session of the
Parliament, Feb. 1669-70— AprU 11, 1670 : The Lord Roos
Divorce Bill : Continued Parliamentary Rigour with the Non-
conformists ; The New Conventicles Act. — IT. The Cabal
' Administeation, usually so-called (April 1670 — June
1673) : — Conbtitution of this Cabal : Conclusion of the Secret
Negotiation with France in the Secret Treaty of Dover,
May 22, 1670 : Abstract of the Treaty, with quotation of the
Article relating to the Declaration of Catholicity : Purchase-
money of the Catholicity settled at ^154,000; Death of
Charles's Sister, the Duchess of Orleans, the chief negotiator
of the Treaty : Second Portion of the Ninth Session of the
Parliament, Oct. 24, 1670— April 22, 1671 : The Parliament
Prorogued, not to meet again for nearly two years : Deception
XIV CONTENTS.
of the Protestant Section of the Cabal by a eimulated Edition
of the Treaty with Louis, omitting the Article about the
Catholicity : Hesitations of Charles about the Catholicity after
he had received the iei54,000 on that account : The Stop of
the Exchequer : Declaration of War with the Dutch, March 18,
1671-2 : First Naval Action against the Dutch, and Death of
the Earl of Sandwich : French Land-Invasion of the United
Provinces : The young Prince of Orange and his Dutch Army
of Defence: Kevolution among the Dutch, and Revival of the
Stadtholderate in the person of the Prince of Orange, June 30,
1672 : Patriotic obstinacy of the Prince-Stadtholder and his
Heroic Protraction of the Defence : Inertness of the English
on the subject of the Dutch War : Koyal Declaration of
March 15, 1671-2, suspending all Coercive Laws in matters
of Religion : Apparent Opportuneness of the Declaration :
Retrospect of the Severities against the Nonconformists, and
especially against the Baptists and Quakers, since 1670 : Strange
Division of the public mind on the subject of the Royal
Declaration of Indulgence : The Nonconformists generally far
from enthusiastic for it : Causes of their apathy : Good practical
effects of the Declaration nevertheless : Experiments of Charles
and the Cabal in the direction of Concurrent Endowment :
Ministerial Changes : Shaftesbury made Lord Chancellor and
Clifford Lord Treasurer : The Tenth Session of the Parliament,
Feb. 4, 1672-3— March 29, 1673 ; Historical Importance of this
short Session : May be called the first " No Popery" Session
of the Cavalier Parhament : Charles defiant, but beaten : The
Declaration withdrawn and apologised for : " No Popery "
Addresses and Resolutions : The Test Act and its Consequences.
— III. DiSINTBGHATION OF THE CaBAL AND BEGINNINGS OV
THE Danbt Administbaition (June 1673 — Nov. 1674) : — The
Eleventh Session of the Parliament, Oct. 27 — Nov. 4, 1673,
and the Twelfth Session, Jan, 7— Feb. 24, 1673-4 : " No
Popery " excitement continued : The Duke of York's second
marriage : Ministers attacked,, and Giyevances of the Reign
discussed : Shaftesbury out of Office and organizing a Whig
Opposition : Peace concluded with the Dutch : Beginning of
the Premiership of the Earl of Danby, with Arlington in the
honorary office of Lord Chamberlain and Sir Joseph Williamson
as Principal Secretary of State : View of the State of the
English Royal Family, in 1674. — English Litbeature fbom
1667 TO 1674. — Adaptation, of Shakespeare's Tempest by
Davenant and Dryden : Death of Davenant, April 7, 1668 :
The Laureateship vacant for more than two years : Dramatic
and other Activity of Dryden during those two years : Dryden
appointed Poet-Laureate, Aug. 1670: The English Drama
through the first four years of Dryden's Laureateship : Com-
petitors with Dryden and Attacks upon him : Buckingham's
BehearsaZ: Dryden's Defence of Rhymed Heroic Plays: Non-
Dramatic Literature from 1667 to 1674 : Writers and Books
of the period : Butler in Neglect : His Miscellaneous Satires :
New Speculative Workings : Infant English Whiggism ... 561
II. Curious Trade-History of the First Edition of Paradise
Lost: Nine successive issues of that edition between 1667
and 1669, differing in their title-pages and in other respects :
The last five of these issues distinguished from the four pre-
ceding by containing fourteen pages of prefixed prose-matter,
consisting of The Argument and the paragraph entitled The
CONTENTS.
Verse : How far these changes owing to Simmons, how far to
Milton himself. — ^First Edition of Paradise Lost exhausted
in April 1669 : Milton's Beceipt of that date to Simmons for
his second Five Pounds: Reception of the Poem among the
critics : Traditions and Anecdotes on the subject : Examina-
tion of them : The Lord Buckhurst story : Dryden's necessary
' interest in the poem from the fact that it contained a challenge
to himself: Milton's prefixed paragraph on Blank Verse
manifestly such a challenge: Dryden's admiration of the
Poem all the more generous : He leads the chorus of praise :
The first public eulogium of Pa/radise Lost nevertheless one
by Milton's nephew, Edward Phillips. — Attention again at-
tracted to Milton personally : Conflux of visitors, foreigners
and others, to his house in Bunhill : Dryden's brother-in-law
Sir Robert Howard, and the Earl of Anglesey, among the
most frequent visitors henceforward : Anecdote of Milton by
Howard : Story of the offer to reinstate MUton in his Latin
Secretaryship : Story incredible : Milton consulted, in the
King's interest, on the subject of the Lord Roos Divorce Bill
in the House of Lords. — Milton's Accedence Commenced
Grammar, 1669 : Nature of the Book : Illustration in it of one
of the peculiarities of Milton's English. — Milton's Eistory
of Britain, 1670 ; Description of the Book : Its interspersed
ethical and political remarks and contemporary applications :
Query as to the perfect genuineness of the book as it left the
licenser's hands : The prefixed Portrait of Milton by Faithorne.
— More about Milton's daughters : All the three boarded out
in or about 1670 : Expense to Milton by this aiTangement :
Temporary residence of Milton himself about this time with
the bookseller MiUington in Little Britain: His walks with
Millington in the streets. — Publication of Paradise Regainbd
and Samson Agonistes together in 1671. — Paradise Re-
gained : Time of its Composition, and its Relation to
Paradise Lost : Scope and characteristics of the Shorter
Epic : Pictorial coherence of the story : The sketch of the
political state of the world in the Time of Tiberius Ceesar :
Miltonic significance of the contrast between Greek Literature
and Hebrew Literature in Book IV. — Samson Agonistes :
Milton's notions of the Drama and his relations to the English
Drama of his own time : His high estimate of the Dramatic
Form of Literature and of the uses of Theatrical Representa-
tions : Obvious Reason of his choice of the subject for his
own Tragedy : The story of the Hebrew Samson a metaphor
of Milton's own Life : His explanation of particulars in the
form of his Tragedy : Describes it as a Tragedy after the
ancient Greek model, not intended to be acted : Does not say
it might not be acted : The Blank Verse of the Dialogue and
the peculiar Verse of the Choruses and other lyrical parts :
Clear plot of the Tragedy and its classic Execution: Extra-
ordinary Subjective Interest of the Poem, and artistic in-
weaving of the subjective with the objective : Much in the
Poem that Milton could not have published at the time in any
other foim : Autobiographic Passages, and Passages on the
Restoration and its Revenges : Autobiographic interpretation
of the last semi-chorus. — Milton's Appearance and Domestic
Habits in his last years : Some of his opinions on Literary
matters: His Religious Individualism^ and Non-Attendance
at any place of public worship : Richardson's Anecdote of him
in this connexion. — Milton's A rtis Lggicce Plmior Jnstitutio, .
xvi CONTENTS.
1672 : Probable origin of the Book : Nature and worth of the
Kamist Logic— Second Edition of Milton's Minor Poems,
with his Tract on Education, in 1673 : Differences of this
Edition from the First Edition of 1645.— Milton's Pamphlet
ofl673 entitled Of TrueBdigion, Heresy, Schism, T<ilerati(m,and
the Growth of Popery : Special occasion and circumstances of the
Pamphlet : Its connexion with the " No Popery " excitement
in England caused by the Royal Suspension of the Coercive
Laws and by the consequent proceedings of tlie Tenth Session
of the Cavalier Parliament, including the Test Act : Milton's
implied advice to Nonconformists to be content with Tolera-
tion and not to aim at Kecomprehension in the Established
Church or at Concurrent Endowments: More general sub-
stance of the Pamphlet presented in Extracts : Bestrictedness
of Milton's Theory of Toleration at this date: His sympathy
with the " No Popery " outcry : His Veneration for the Bible,
and recommendation of the Bible as the one safeguard against
Popery and the sole standard of true or tolerable Religion. —
Reappearance of Mr. Samuel Parker as the great Dr. Parker,
the Scourge of the Nonconformists : His Anti-Toleration
Publications and their effects: Andrew MarveU's Reply to
Parker in the First Part of his Behemsal Transprosed : Ability
and Instant Popularity of that Book : Appearance of Parker's
Eeproof to the BehearsaZ Traneprosed, and of other Pamphlets
on the same side : Second Part of MarveU's Behearsal Trane-
prosed: Milton's name dragged into the controversy; Specimens
of the Mentions of Milton in the Pamphlets on the Parker
side : MarveU's dignified notice of these and Fine Expression
of his Loyalty to Milton. — Visit of Dryden to Milton some
time in 1673 : Milton's Permission to Dryden to turn parts of
Paradise Lost into a Rhymed Drama or Op^a: The Opera
ready in 1674 and then in circulation in manuscript : Specimens
of the Performance. — Second Edition of Paradise Lost,
1674 :■ Differences of this Edition from the First: The Pre-
fixed Commendatory Verses by Dr. Samuel Barrovf and
Andrew MarveU: Sarcastic reference in MarveU's Verses ^^'
to Dryden and his Opera. — Milton's house in Bunhill ^jiad-his.-^'
neighbours there in 1674: His Pecuniary Circumstances in
that year : Not in indigence, but poorer than he had ever
been before : Not indifferent to chance Uterary earnings : The
bookseUer Brabazon Aylmer: Preparation for the press of
Milton's Latin State-Letters and his Latin Treatise of Christian
Doctrine: Daniel Skinner, the last of MUton's amanuenses:
Transcript of the State Letters by Skinner, and Revision and
Part-Transcript of the MS. of the Theological Treatise :
Attempt of Brabazon Aylmer to publish the State Letters :
Their publication stopped by authority : PubUeation by Aylmer
of the little volume of EyistolcB Familiares and Prolusiones
OratoricB instead : Review of the Epistoloe Familiares : In-
terest of some of them to persons still aUve when they were
published : . The Translation of the Latin Declaration of the
Election of John SohiesH to be King of Poland : This probably
Milton's, and his last publication in his life-time. — Milton's
Uluess of July 1674 : Visit of his brother Christopher : De-
claration to Christopher of his WUl in case of his death :
Partial Recovery in August, September, and October : Glimpses
of MUtou at home in those months, and Note of Events around
him ; Milton's Last lUness in November 1674 : His Death and
Burial 621
CONTENTS. :
BOOK IV.
Posthumous Miltoniana.
Quantity of PoBthumous Matter belonging to the Biography of Milton.^^
I. MilTok's Ndncdpative; Will. — Application of the Widow for
Probate : Objections of the three Daughters : Depositions of the
Witnesses : Probate not granted, but Letters of Administration
instead : Effect of that arrangement : Prompt Settlement of the
Widow with the three Daughters : Marriage of Deborah Milton
in Ireland during the suit. — II. The Widow, the three
DaUOHTERS, and MrLTON's DiRBOT DESCENDANTS: — Stay of
the Widow for some time in London : Her removal to Nant-
wich in or about 1681 : Her long life of frugal gentility
there : Her Death in 1727 : Her Will and Inventory of her
Effects. — Death of Milton's eldest Daughter, Anne : Mrs.
Powell's Will : Death of the Second Daughter, Mary. —
Milton's youngest Daughter, Deborah Clarke : She and her
family in Spitalfields, in poOr circumstances, from about 1688
to 1727: Interest in her on her other's account: Addison's
kindness to her ; Various visits to her in her last years, and
exertions for her relief : Her BecoUections of her father, and
Judgments on Portraits of him : Deborah's eldest son, Caleb
Clarke, an emigrant to Madras : His death there in 1719,
leaving two sons : No trace of these Clarkes in India beyond
1727 : Urban Clarke, and Mrs. Elizabeth E'oster : Their life
in Spitalfields : Their removal thence to Holloway : Death of
Urban Clarke : Mrs. Foster and her husband in Shoreditch :
Visits to Mrs. Foster : Her Family RecoUections : Performance
of Comus for her benefit in 1750 : Her death at Islington :
Extinction in her of the direct line from Milton. — III. Other
SuEvivDSfG Relatives op Milton and their Descendants : —
Milton's brother Christopher : A Roman Catholic : Made one
of James the Second's judges in 1686, and knighted : His Dis-
missal from his Judgeship, and retirement to Ipswich ; His
Death there : His son, Thomas Milton : Other children
and descendants of Sir Christopher. — Sketch of the remaining
life of Edward Phillips, from 1674 to about 1698, with List of
his chief Publications through that period. — Similar Sketch of
the Life of John Phillips, with list of his chief Publications,
from 1674 to his Death in or about 1706. — Milton's deceased
Sister and her second husband, Mr. Thomas Agar : His Will of
1671 : His Legacy to Edward Phillips : Mr. Agar's Daughter,
Mrs. Anne Moore, and her Husband, David Moore : Farther
Milton descent in the Agar and Moore branch — IV. Increase
OF Milton's Poetical Celebrity and Multiplication op
Editions op his Poems : — Dryden's tribute to Milton's
memory in 1675 : Edward PhiUips's tribute in his Theatrum
Poeiarum of thesame year: Aubrey's Gatherings about Milton,
and Marvell s Intention to write Memoirs of him : Marvell's
Death : Third Edition of Paradise Lost, 1678 : Quittance to the
Bookseller Simmons by Milton's Widow of her entire remain-
ing interest in PoA-adiae Lost for a sum of £8 : Second Edition
oiPwradise Regained and Samson Agonistes in 1680 : Sale of the
Copyright of Paradise Lost by Simmons to Brabazon Aylmer :
Asquisition of half the Copyright by Jacob Tonson : Increasing
' Frequency of Mentions of Milton's Poetry in books : The
VOL. VI. b
XVIU CONTENTS.
CHAP. PAGE
Fourth Edition, or first Tonsou Edition, of Paradise Lost, 1688 :
Names of some of the Subseriberg : Diyden's famous lines under
the portrait of Milton in that Edition : Accompanying Third
Edition of Paradise Regained and Samson Agonittes : Acquisi-
tion by Tonson of all MUton'g Poetry : Fifth Edition of
Paradise Lost, 1692, with fourth of Paradise Regained : Sixth
Edition of Paradise Jjost in 1695, with fifth of Paradise Re-
gained, fourth of Samson Agonistes, and third of the Minor
Poems : Importance of this Sixth Edition of Paradise Lost :
Patrick Hume's Commentary on the Poem : Three next Tonson
Editions of thePoems : Addison's Criticism on Paradise Lost ;
Subsequent Editions of the Poems as far as to 1763, with
Bemarks on the Tonson monopoly in Milton's Poetry to
about that date : EaiSy Translations of the Poems. — V.
PosTHDMOua Prose Pdelioations of Milton and Fate op
His Papers : — Surviving Prose Manuscripts : The Fair Tran-
script of the Latin State Letters and the Manuscript of the
Latin Treatise of Christian Doctrine left in the hands of Daniel
Skinner : Account of Skinner and his circumstances in 1674 6 :
His Acquaintance with Pepys : His Negotiation with Elzevir
of Amsterdam for printing the two manuscripts : Appearance
in 1676 of a Surreptitious London Edition of the State Letters,
entitled Literce Pseudo-Senatus AngUcani, CrnmwelUi, &o. :
Skinner in trouble w.th Secretary Sir Joseph Williamson on
account of his possession of the Milton Manuscripts : Farther
Story of Skinner and the Manuscripts : Surrender of the Manu-
scripts and their Disappearance in the State Paper Office.
Publication in 1681 of The Character of the Long Pairliammt
and Assembly of Divines, professing to be an omitted passage of
Milton's History of Britain : Suspicious Nature of the Frag-
ment : Two Hypotheses on the subject. — Milton's Brief History
of Moscona, published 1682 : Brabazon Aylmer's Advertise-
ment of the Volume : Fate of Milton's MS Collections towards
a Latin Dictionary. — Increased Attention to Milton's Prose
Writings after the Kevolution : Toland's Collective Edition of
them in 1698. — Publication in 1743 of the volume entitled
Original Letters amd Papers of State addressed to Oliver Crom-
well : Private character and importance of those documents, and
peculiar interest of the fact that they had been in Milton's
possession; Probable explanation. — Accidental Discovery of
the two Milton manuscripts in the State Paper Office, and
publication in 1825 of the Latin Treatise Be Doctrina Christiana,
and of Sumner's English Translation of the same. VI.'
Milton's Treatise op Christian Doctrine :— Importance of
this Treatise intrinsically, and also as a revelation of Milton.
Fundamental idea of the Treatise : Axiomatic nature of
Milton's Belief in the Bible: His contention for the all-
sufficiency of the plain Bible, and for the right of private inter-
pretation : His recognition, nevertheless, of a superior inner
revelation by the Spirit : His theoretical agreement with the
Quakers on this point : His explanation of the mode in which
his 'Treatise had been prepared, and evident expectation that it
would become notorious : Studiously calm and prosaic stvle of
the Treatise : Inteiroixture of disquisition with masses of
Biblical quotations : Division of the Treatise into a Theoretical
Paxt and a Practical Part.-Milton on the nature and attri-
. "?^'rSu^°^ '■ ^^^^ °^'"' Sy»*®"' fr°™ an Absolute Spiritual-
istic Theism : His appended Views of the Divine Decrees-
Milton decidedly Arminiau and Auti-Calvinistio on the
CONTENTS. XIX
subjects of Predestination and Free Will : Milton also an Anti-
Trinitarian : His views of the Nature and Sonship of Christ
those of High Arianism : The Holy Spirit, according to Milton,
a mere created Minister of God, and far inferior to the Son :
Milton's belief in an Empyrean or Invisible Universe preceding
the Visible Universe of Man ; His belief also in a confused
Prime Matter or Chaos: Matter, according to Milton, not
created out of nothing, but an actual efflux or phenomenon of
the substance of God : Pantheistic implication of this Principle :
Milton's views of the relation of the Universe to God deicribable
perhaps as a modified Pantheism : Correspondence of Milton's
real beliefs as propounded in the Treatise with his imaginations
in his Paradise Lost : His view of the Creation of the Six Days,
and peculiar doctrine as to the constitution of Man : His rejec-
tion of the ordinary doctrine of the Immateriality of the Soul :
Fiuds no warrant in Scripture for the usual distinction between
the Soul and the Body in Man, and holds them to be organi-
cally one and inseparable : Extension of this materialistic view
of Man's Mind or Soul into a generally Materinlistic Concep-
tion of all Cosmical life : First inference as regards Man, viz.
that Soul and Body are propagated naturally together:
Milton's notions of the Angelic and Diabolic Worlds : His
Remarks on the Paradisaic State on Earth, and on the Institu-
tions of the Sabbath and Marriage : The Sabbath, according to
MUtou, not a Paradisaic or Primeval Institution at aJl : His
views of Marriage, with re-assertion of his Divorce Doctrine and
a defence of Polygamy : Milton on the Christian Scheme d
Redemption, or Chiist's work on Earth and its Consequences :
Orthodox here in the main, subject to his Arianism and
Arminianism: HisHighArianism here re-propounded in opposi-
tion to the Lower Sooinianism : His contention for the mystery
of the Incarnation, or the actual appearance of the Divine Son or
Logos in the man Christ Jesus : N ew and extraordinary lieresy
of Milton at this point, arising irom farther application of his
principle of the necessary identity of Soul and Body in Man :
His Definition of Death as involving Soul as well as Body, and
his belief in an entire Cessation or Suspension of personal con-
sciousness between Death and theResurreciion : Tliis apparently
the heresy of the Soul-Sleepers or Mortalists among the Sects
of Milton's time : Milton on the two Dispensations : His con-
tention for the Entire Abrogation of the Mosaic Law, including
the Decalogue, under the Gospel : Milton's Anti-Psedobaptisni
and his Independency or Congregationalism in Church matters :
His Millennarianism : His views of the Resurrection, the Last
Judgment, the General Conflagration and Renovation of the
Mundane Universe, the Punisliment of the Wicked, and the
Perfect Glorification of the Just. — The Second or Practical Part
of the Treatise : General Character of Milton's Ethics : Peculiar
Vein of Urbanity, or gentlemanlike habit and taste, through
his expositions of the personal and neighbourly moralities : His
last notions on the duty of subjects to Kings and Magistrates :
His dissent irom the Quakers on the subjects of War and
Oaths : His glance at questions of Casuistry in connexion
with the virtue of Veracity : His notions of Prayer and of the
lawfulness of Imprecation : His Religious Latitudinarianism in
general, and thorough-going Anti-Sabbatarianism in particular. —
Concluding Historical Observations on the whole Treatise . . 735
BOOK I
MAY 1660— MAY 1661.
HISTOEY: — The Year of the Kestoeatiok.
BIOGRAPHY : — Milton theough the Ybab of the
Bestoeation.
YOL. TI.
THE LIFE OF JOHN MILTON,
WITH THE
HISTORY OF HIS TIME.
CHAPTEE I.
THE YEAE OP THI! BESTORATION ; MAT 1660 — MAY 1661.
At the Hague, wHtlier Charles and his retiBue had removed
from Breda, and where their reception by the States-General
was " incredibly noble and splendid," there duly arrived, on
the 15th of May, 1660, the Commissioners from the two
Houses of the Convention Parliament, sent to congratulate
his Majesty and implore his immediate presence in his domi-
nions. In the audiences they had with him next day the
chief spokesman was Denzil Holies, one of the- twelve Com-
missioners for the Commons. He informed his Majesty of
the boundless joy of the Parliament in the prospect of his
return, and of their alacrity in adopting means for manifesting
that joy. " In so doing," proceeded Holies, " they are,
" according to the nature of Parliaments, the true representa-
" tives of the whole nation ; for they but do that in a more
"contracted and regular way which the generality of the
" people of the land, from one end of it to the other, do in
" a more confused and disorderly manner, yet as heartily and
" as affectionately. All degrees and ages and sexes,^rich
" and poor, as I may say, and men, women, and children, — •
B3
4 LIFE 01" MILTON AND HISTORY OF HIS TIME.
" join in sending up this prayer to Heaven, God bless King
" Charles ! Long live King Charles !, so as our English air is
" not susceptible of any other sound, and echoes out nothing
" else. Our bells, bonfires, peals of ordnance, volleys of shot,
"the shouts and acclamations of the people, bear no other
" moral, have no other signification, but to triumph in the
" triumph of our King in the hearts of his people. Your
" Majesty cannot imagine, nor can any man conceive it but
" he who was present to see and hear it, with what joy, what
" cheerfulness, what lettings out of the soul, what expressions
"of transported minds, a stupendous concourse of people
" attended the proclaiming of your Majesty, in your cities
" of London and Westminster, to be our most potent, mighty,
" and undoubted King. The oldest man living never saw the
" like before ; nor is it probable, scarce possible, that he who
" has longest to live will ever see the like again." With this
and the other speeches, copies of the Proclamation, the letters
of the Parliament, and other documents, were delivered to
Charles, and acknowledged most graciously. Then, for yet
another week, the crowded Hague was still festive round the
departing Royalty, of the British Islands, the States main-
taining their hospitalities magnificently to the last. The only
inconvenience to Charles and his brothers was that they had
some difficulty in obtaining cash for the bills on Amsterdam
merchants which had been sent them by Parliament in pay-
ment of the main portion of the sums voted them for their
first expenses. Or, if there was any other inconvenience, it
arose from the necessity of granting interviews to Messrs.
Reyuolds, Calamy, Manton, Case, and the other eminent
Presbyterian ministers who had come from London to bespeak
the King's fidelity to Presbytery and the Solemn League
and Covenant, or at least to obtain his assurance that he
would not show sudden favour to Episcopacy by requiring the
use of the Book of Common Prayer and the surplice by his
own chaplains. In the particular of his own practice the
King told the j-everend gentlemen distinctly that he reserved
the same liberty for himself that he meant to allow to others ;
but on the general question he was sufficiently polite.
CHARLES AT THE HAGUE. 5
There was then with his Majesty another representative
of British Presbyterianism, who had preceded the English
clergymen. This was the Scottish Mr. James Sharp. Monk,
with whom he had been in close intimacy in London for the
last three months, had dispatched him to Breda in a frigate,
with express and very private letters of introduction to the
King and to Hyde. It was thought that Sharp, while his
main business would be to secure the Kirk and Covenant in
Scotland, might be able to do something also for the cause
of Presbytery in England; and, when it was known in
Scotland that he had gone to Breda, his friends among the
Scottish Kesolutioner clergy, and especially Mr. Douglas in
Edinburgh and Mr. Baillie in Glasgow, were intensely in-
terested. By the wild haste of the Convention Parliament
at Westminster, Charles was coming in absolutely without
conditions; and might not Mr. Sharp's dexterity, even at the
last moment, remedy that fatal blunder as it might affect
Scotland ? What passed between Sharp and his Majesty, or
between Sharp and Hyde, no one really knows. " The King,
"at my first address in Breda, was pleased to ask very kindly
"about yov." Baillie was afterwards informed by Sharp, if
that could be any gratification ; and to Douglas it was ex-
plained at the time by a letter from Sharp : " I shall not be
" accessory to anything prejudicial to the Presbyterian govern-
" ment ; but to appear for it in any other way than is within
" my sphere is inconvenient, and may do harm and not good."
This referred only to interference in behalf of Presbytery in
England ; in the business of his dear native Kirk he would,
of course, remain indefatigable. On receipt of the letter,
Mr. Douglas could only sigh, and hope the best. Amid all
that vast jubilation in the three kingdoms which Holies
reported to his Majesty there were, here and there, some heavy
hearts ^.
For some days MontagUic's fleet had been in the Bay of
1 Clarendon, 907—909 ; Lords and 1679), 710 ; Pepys's Diary, May 4—16 ;
Commons Journals, May 23 ; Pari. Hiat. Baillie, III. 410 ; Memoir of Sharp in
IV. 35 — 40 (HuUes's Speech) ; Phillips Chambers's Bfog'.Uiot. o/ Scotsmen (oon-
(continuation of Baker's Chronicle, edit. taining extracts from Sharp's letters).
6 LIFE OF MIIiTON AND HISTORY OF HIS TIME.
Scheveningen, ready for his Majesty's orders. Visitors from
the Hague had been coming on board daily in great numbers,
and some of the officers of the ships had, by Montague's
leave, landed at the village of Bcheveningen for a run thence
to the Hague. One of those so favoured had been Mr. Samuel
Pepys, Montague's private secretary, whose delight with the
city and its fine sights, and his is'hance meetings with Dr.
Puller and other London friends there, and his glimpses of
important Dutch personages, and especisdly his pleasure in
being admitted to kiss the royal hands, are all duly chronicled
in his Diary. Montague himself had remained on board,
waiting the eventful day, while in all the ships there was
carpentering, painting, and cutting out of silks and other
decorations. And lo ! at last, after a delay of two days on
account of rough weather, there did come the complete pro-
cession of departure from the Hague to Scheveningen. His
Majesty, the Duke of York, and the Duke of Gloucester, were
accompanied by the ex-Queen of Bohemia, the widowed
Princess of Orange, and her young son Prince William of
Orange, to see them off, while an " infinity of people " who
were to go with them, the Parliamentary Commissioners in-
eluded, either preceded or followed. This was on Tuesday
the 22nd, when a cannonade twice round all the ships of the
fleet welcomed his Majesty's arrival on the shore, and
Mr. Pepys, firing the first gun on board the Naseby, nearly
blew out his right eye by holding it too near the touch-hole.
But the cannonading was nothing to that of next day, Wed-
nesday the 23rd, when boats from the shore brought off his
Majesty and his Royal relatives, and they actually stood on
the deck of the Naseby. While Montague and the rest were
kissing hands there, the roar of guns in the bay was perfectly
astounding. It ceased only when his Majesty, the two Dukes,
the Queen of Bohemia, the Princess of Orange, and little
Prince William, sat down to a state-dinner by themselves, —
" which was a blessed sight to see " says Pepys most gravely.
After dinner there was a rather interesting' ceremony. It
was on board The Naseby that his Majesty had come, but that
could be the name of the ship no longer. It was agreed that
THE VOYAGE HOME. 7
she should be thenceforth The Charles ; and the King and the
Duke of York, with Montague assisting, went over the names
of the other ships, changing The Sichard into TAe James, The
Dunbar into The Henry, The Lambert into The Menrietta, The
Speaker into The Mary, &c. This ceremony over, the Queen of
Bohemia, the Princess of Orange, and her son, took their
leave, to return to the Hague, the Duke of York at the same
time going on board the London, and the Duke of Gloucester
on board the Swiftsure, in which ships they were to make the
voyage severally, while Charles himself remained in the re-
christened Naseby. Anchor was weighed in the afternoon,
and, "with a fresh gale and most happy weather," the
squadron sailed for England ^.
All the afternoon, while the Dutch coast was yet visible,
Charles was walking " here and there, up and down," about
the ship, " very active and stirring " and chatting and dis-
coursing with everybody. On the quarter-deck he got on
his favourite subject of his escape after the battle of Worcester,
telUng the most laughable stories of his disguised wander-
ings and the queer straits in which he found him'Self, though
Pepys, standing among the listeners, was sometimes " ready
to weep." Evening had come when Montague, by his swiftest
vessel, sent off a letter to the Speaker of the House of Lords,
reporting all well so far. " May 23, 1660, about ten leagues
" from Scheveling, our course west-and-by-north ; seven
" o'clock in the evening, Wednesday ; a fresh gale at north-
" and-by-east," is his sailorly dating of the letter, corrobo-
rated by Pepys's farther report, " Under sail all night, and
most glorious weather." Though the ship was so overcrowded
that there was diflBculty in finding beds for all, Pepys was in
splendid company and never enjoyed himself more. Next day
it was even better, for then Pepys had Mr. Holies, Dr. Earle,
the King's chaplains, the King's physieianSj and others, to
dine with him in his own cabin, and on deck all day persons
of honour were walking about, or distributed into groups,
1 Pepys, May 14 — 23; Letter of Mon- strange from him in such a matter,
tague to the Lords, of date May 23, gives the 24th as the day of setting sail
printed in the Lords Journals of the (p. 910).
25th. Clarendon, hy a blunder rather ;
"8 LIFE OP MILTON AND HISTORY OF HIS TIME.
and among them was the inimitable Tom Killigrew, telling
his funniest stories. And so that day passed, and just before
night they sighted the Kentish coast ^.
On Friday the 25th there was the landing at Dover. The
King and the two Dukes went ashore together about noon in
one barge, the captain of Montague's ship steering, and
Montague himself attending bare-headed. On the beach,
" infinite the crowd of people, and the horsemen, citizens, and
" noblemen of all sorts," with shouting and joy " past imagina-
"tion" when his Majesty set foot on the ground, and
General Monk stepped forward from the rest with a profound
obeisance, as if to prostrate himself, but his Majesty took
him by the hand most gloriously and kissed and embraced
him. Others round Monk were kissing the hem of his
Majesty's garments ; and one of these, who says he observed
his Majesty's countenance closely on his first stepping ashore,
thought he could see in it " a mixture of other passions besides
joy." As there was to be no stay at Dover, a canopy had
been prepared, under which his Majesty walked, attended by
Monk, to a chair of state at some little distance from the
water-side ; and here, while he talked with Monk, the Mayor
and Aldermen of Dover made their formal salutations. They
presented him with " a very rich Bible," which he graciously
accepted, saying " it was the thing that he loved above all
things in the world." Then, in a coach which was in waiting,
ihe and the two Dukes, with Monk, drove off through the
town on their way to Canterbury, these four inside, and the
Duke of Buckingham stowed in the boot. To Montague, who
had never stirred from the barge, it was a relief to know that
his part of the great business was thus happily over without
the slightest mismanagement. He returned to his ship,
thanking God ; and his last order to Pepys that night was
that a mark at the head of the chief cabin, which his Majesty
had made with his own hands that morning, in record of his
exact height, should be carefully gilded, and a crown and the
letters C. R. placed in gold beside it. All future visitors to
1 Pepys, May 23—24 ; Lords Journals, May 25.
THE ROYAL PEOGEESS TO LONDON. »
the ship were to be shown that mark, and to know that
it was in this ship that Charles had come over^-
At Canterbury the Royal party made a halt of nearly three
days, with a fresh influx of people of rank to welcome his
Majesty, and with more and more of conyersation between his
Majesty and Monk. Here it was too that his Majesty con-
ferred the great honour of the Knighthood of the Garter on
Monk and on the Earl of Southampton, with more ordinary
knighthoods on a number of others. Among these was
Mr. William Morrice, now specially introduced by Monk
as his intimate friend and wisest adviser, and on that ground
at the same time admitted of his Majesty's Privy Council and
made one of his Secretaries of State. Monk himself and
Sir Anthony Ashley Cooper . were also sworn of the Privy
Council. More important than these formalities perhaps was
the fact that Hyde, the King's real chief minister all through
his exile, first under his old title of Chancellor of the Ex-
chequer, dating from 1642, but since 1658 under the higher
title of Lord Chancellor of England, had now an opportunity
of taking his private measure both of Monk and of Mr.
Secretary Morrice. Hyde had been making his observations,
and commtinicating to the King his doubts whether " Old
George" was altogether the Solomon he looked, when, on
Monday the 28th, there was a move from Canterbury Lon-
donwards, by Rochester. One reason for the delay at Can-
terbury had been that his Majesty wished to enter London
on his birthday, Tuesday the 29th, when he would be thirty
years old.
So it was arranged, and so it happened. Of that extra-
ordinary royal progress of King Charles from Rochester to
Whitehall on the 29th of May, 1660, there was to be a
remembrance to all generations. Who can describe it ? The
long highway of more than five-and-twenty miles from
Rochester was lined on both sides with acclaiming multitudes,
so that it seemed " one continued street wonderfully in-
habited." On Blackheath there was the passage of review
1 Pepys, May 25 ; Phfflips, 711 ; Pari. Hist. IV. 58—59.
10 LIFE OF MILTON AND HISTORY OF HIS TIME.
through the bannered armj of horse and foot, fifty thousand
strong, drawn up to salute his Majesty, with the address of
loyalty presented by the commanding officer, and all the other
picturesque incidents, as imagined by Scott for the last scene
of his Woodstock. At the skirts of London itself there were
the kneeling Lord Mayor, Aldermen, and Common Council,
with a rest for civic ceremonial, and for the collation which
had been provided ; and thence through the City, the trained-
bands and City Companies keeping order in the streets, and
the windows all hung with tapestry, there was the proces-
sion as far as to Fleet Street and Temple Bar. After it
had passed Temple Bar one could see how it was finally mar-
shalled. Major General Browne led the whole, with a troop
of three hundred in cloth of silver ; next came a marching
mass in purple velvet; next, a troop in bufi", with silver
sleeves and green scarfs ; then smaller troops, in blue and
silver, grey and silver, and pure grey, all with trumpeters
before them, as finely apparelled as those of the former troops;
then three troops more in rich habits, but of colours not re-
ported ; then the Sherifi"s-men, in red cloaks and with pikes
in their hands, to the number of four-score, and six hundred
picked men of the City-companies, in black velvet stdts with
chains of gold ; then kettledrums, trumpets, and streamers ;
then twelve London ministers ; then the Knights of the Bath
and their Esquires ; then more kettledrums and trumpets,
preceding his Majesty's life-guard of horse ; then, in a blaze
of various colours, the City-marshal, the City-waits, and all
other City-officers, concluding vfith the two Sheriffs, the
Aldermen, the Heralds and Macers, and the Lord Mayor car-
rying the sword; then Lord General Monk and the Duke
of Buckingham ; then, O then. His Majesty himself, between
the Dukes of York and Gloucester ; then a number of the
King's servants ; and, last of all, a troop of horse with white
colours, and the Lord General's life-guard, and five regiments
more of horse, and two troops of mounted noblemen and gen-
tlemen. It was about half-past seven in the evening when
his Majesty thus arrived at Whitehall, where meanwhile the
two Houses of Parliament were assembled in the Banqueting
THE ENTRY INTO LONDON. 11
[ouse, ranged in due order. In among these his Majesty
alked, with, strange thoughts perhaps as he remembered
is father's last moments in that fatal room, with the scaffold
;ady outside ; and, after he had seated himself in the chair
F state and there had been all obeisances, he was addressed
1 prepared orations by tfie two Speakers,-^by the Earl of
lanchester for the Lords, and by Sir Harbottle Grimstone
)r the Commons. His Majesty replied briefly, but suitably,
Ecusing himself for his brevity by declaring that the fatigue
f his journey, and the confusion of joyful noises still in his
irs, unfitted him for saying much. He was, indeed, so
jmpletely tired out that the religious service in Westminster
ibbey with which the day was to have ended had to be ex-
banged for private service in the presence-chamber of
P'hitehall. He slept in Whitehall that night, the first time
nee January, 1641-2, when he had left it with his father as
boy of twelve. Gossip says that the beautiful Mrs. Palmer,
) be known afterwards as Lady Castlemaine, and finally as
le Duchess of Cleveland, was already near the Palace ^.
Over England, Scotland, and Ireland flew the news of the
king's triumphant entry into his capital, and everywhere
ith the same delirium of joy. In Edinburgh, Dublin, and
1 considerable towns, there were proclamations and re-
roelamations, with peals of bell-ringing, bonfires and shouting
obs, public feasts and wine running from the spouts for the
meral benefit, drinkings of his Majesty's health and of
[onk's, and burnings of Oliver in efiigy, by himself or with
twin-eflSgy of the Devil. For months and months the
jlirium was to continue, and even to grow ; nor through the
hole reign of Charles was there ever to be an end, or even
uch visible abatement, of that mood of popular adoration of
le monarch, with hatred to the memory of Oliver and all his
(longings, which ran through the Islands, like a sudden
>idemic, in the first year of the Restoration ^-
1 Clarendon, 994 — 996 {Contimtation of State and Lord PriTy Seal in the
Life) ; PMUips, 709—710; Whit- re^n of Queen Anjie.
ike, IV. 415—416 ; Pari. Hist. IV. » Phillips, 714 ; Chambers's Domeatie
—63 ; Burnet (edit. 1823), I. 160, Annals of Scotland, 11. 261 ; and tra-
rtnote by Lord Dartmouth, Secretary dition jpamm. From an Edinburgh
12 LIFE OF MILTON AND HISTORY OF HIS TIME.
From that year, for example, what a universal wheel of
popular English literature to abject Stuartism and systematic
Anti-Oliverianism in polities 1 Passing from the books and
pamphlets of the Protectorate, or even from those of 1659,
to the new mass from 1660 onwards, one is amazed at the
discovery that the Muses in a nation can be such arrant
turncoats. While Oliver lived, and for some time after his
death, they had applauded him and panegyrised him, even
the honest Royalist wits who remained within his dominions
subdued at length into respect for him, and expressing that
respect in language which was the more remarkable because
it was cautious and reluctant. Now it was all otherwise. In
prose and in verse, nothing but panegyrics to Charles, lauda-
tions of Charles and his kindred day after day, renunciations
of Oliver in every form of posthumous insult, reports of his
meditations in Hell and of his blasphemous messages upwards
from his pre-eminence among the damned. Take a few of
the leading instances: — Among the first to celebrate the
Restoration in verse was Edmund Waller, of whose relations
to Cromwell we have already seen enough, and of whose
Panegyric to my Lord Protector in May 1655 there may be
some recollection (Vol. V. pp. 85, 86). Waller must have been
busy with the necessary recantation as soon as he heard of
the King's arrival at Dover ; for his poem To the King on his
Majesty's Happy Return was registered by the publisher,
Richard Marriott, on May 30, the day after his Majesty's
entry into Whitehall i. Amid 120 lines of heroics his Majesty
might read these : —
"Much-suffering Monarch, the first English-born
That has the crown of these three nations worn,
How has your patience with the barbarous rage
Of your own soil contended haK an age,
coraespondent of the London Parlia- "casions) ; after whioli foUowed all the
^^^ify I«'tf''gen^ro{JnRe 25-July "guns in Edinburgh Castle, Leith cita-
2, 1660, we leaxu that the rejoicings in « del, and the ships in the Road." There
■that city were protracted into June. was a largess to the soldiery; and at
One day in that month the Major- night " about 1500 bonfires were made
General m command feed the great on Arthur Seat, one of 40 loads of coals."
'■ cannon called Mounce Meg (a cannon i Stationers' Registers
"never fired but on. extraordinary oc-
POETICAL CONGE A.TULATIONS OF CHAELES. 13
Till (youif tried virtue and your sacred word
At last preventing your unwilling sword)
Armies and fleets which kept you out so long
Owned their great sovereign and, redressed his wrong;
When straight the people, by no force compelled,
Nor longer from their inclination held,
Break forth at once, like powder set on fire.
And with a noble rage their king require ! . . .
Taith, Law, and Piety, that banished train,
Justice and Truth, with you return again ;
Tie city's trade and country's easy life
Once more shall flourish without fraud or strife.
Your reign no leas assures the ploughman's peace
Than the warm sun advances his increase,
And does the shepherds as securely keep
Erom all their fears as they preserve their sheep.
But, above all, the muse-inspired train
Triumph and raise their drooping heads again :
Kind Heaven at once has, in your person, sent
Their sacred judge, their guard, their argument."
Qother of the " muse-inspired train " who made all haste
IS Abrahami Cowley. His Ode upon the Blessed Bestpration
d Return of Ms Sacred Majesty Charles the Second was out on
e 31st of May, published by Henry Herringman ^. Much
to be excused to Cowley, a man of far finer intellect and of
ore generous nature than Waller, and whose compliance with
'omwell's rule, though it involved the rupture of intimate
evious connexion with the Stuarts, had been the effect of
ere momentary despair. All things considered, however,
IS not Cowley labouring too consciously in this poem to win
s pardon by skilful phraseology? He doubts whether the
le, after its long lapse into barbarism, can yet expect back
y of the virtues.
"Of all, methinks, we least should see
The cheerful looks again of Liberty.
That name of Cromwell, which does freshly still
The curses of so many sufferers fill,
Is still enough to make her stay,
And jealous for a while remain,
Lest, as a tempest carried him away.
Some hurricane should bring him back again."
1 Dated Thomason copy in the British Museum.
14 LIFE OF MILTOH AND HISTOEY OF HIS TIME.
Still there are signs of hope : —
"Where's now that ignis fatteus which erewhile
Misled our wandering Isle 1
Where's the impostor Cromwell gone?
Where's now that feHing star, hie son?"
And Charles is on the horizon : —
" Come, mighty Charles ! desire of nations, come !
Come, you triumphant exile, home !
He's come, he's safe at shore: I hear the noise
Of a whole land which does at once rejoice ;
I hear the united people's sacred voice.
The sea which circles us around
Ne'er sent to land so loud a sound;
The mighty shout sends to the sea a gale,
And swells up every sail;
The bells and guns are scarcely heard at all;
The artificial joy's drowned by the natural.
All England hut one bonfire seems to be,
One .^tna shooting flames into the sea ;
The starry worlds which shine to us afar
Take ours at this time for a star.
With wine all rooms, with wine the conduits, flow;
And we, the priests of a poetic rage,
Wonder that in this golden age
The rivers too should not do bo.
There is no Stoic, sure, who would not now
Even some excess allow,
And grant that one wild fit of cheerful folly
Should end our twenty years of dismal melancholy."
Sir William Davenant could at no time write so well as Cowley
hut, as having been Poet-Laureate of the late reign from 1637
and as now stepping legitimately into the Laureateship again,
something was expected of him. He had been a faithful
Royalist all along, had suffered for his Royalism more thai
Cowley, had never lapsed as Cowley had done, and had heei
under no greater obligations to the Protectorate than foi
shelter, and permission at last to set up an English Opera. Ii
these circumstances his Poem upon Ms Sacred Majesty's mos
kappy return to Ms Dominions ^ is even creditable to his modera
tion. There is little of retrospective malice in it, but chiefl;
1 Printed for Herringman, and out in London June 25, as I learn from a copy i
the Thomason Collection.
POETICAL CONGRATULATIONS OF CHARLES. 15
a heavy enumeration of the undoubted virtues of Charlies, — his
clemency, his judgment, his " fire of thought," his valour, his
social and domestic graciousness, and his care for religion ;
and the only thing one cannot wholly forgive in the poem is
its existence. Here are the six lines following the list of
Charles's virtues : —
" Thus showing what you are, how quickly we
Infer what all your sulsgects soob will be !
For froni the monareh's virtue subjects take
The ingredient which does public virtue make;
At his hright beam they au their tapers light,
And by his dial set their motion right."
But what shall we say of Dryden ? He had grown up in the
Commonwealth and the Protectorate, connected with their
statesmen and acknowledging their principles ; he had been
in official employment under Thurloe for Oliver (Vol. V.
p. 375) ; and his best known literary performance hitherto
had been his Heroic Stanzas conseerated to the tnemory of his
Highness Oliver, written just after the entombment of Oliver in
Westminster Abbey. Among the stanzas had been these : —
"How shall I then begin or where conclude
To draw a fame so truly circular?
For in a round what order can be shewed,
"Where all the parts so equal-perfect are %
His grandeur he derived from Heaven alone ;
For he was great ere Fortune made him so.
And wars, like mists that rise against the sun.
Made him but greater seem, not greater grow . . .
And yet dominion was not his design;
We owe that, blessing not to him but Heaven,,
Which to fair acts misought rewards did join,
Eewards that less to him than us were given."
And so, through a sustained eulogy on all Cromwell's military
and political career, till death took him. Even then his grand
influence remained : — -
"No civil broils have since his death arose,
But faction now by habit does obey ;
And wars have that respect for his repose
As winds for halcyons when they breed at sea.
l6 life' OF MILTON AND HISTOBY OF HIS TIME.
His ashes in a peaceful urn shall rest;
His name a great example stands to show-
How strangely high endeavours may be blessed
Where piety and valour jointly go."
And yet now, in the series of Dryden's poems, that which
stands next to the stanzas to Oliver's memory is the Astraea
BediUB, or celebration of Charles's Return, published, as
Cowley's similar poem had been, by Herringman\ Here
there is the most unblushing retractation of all that he had
written less than eighteen months before. There is a poetic
account of the voyage of Charles home, with note of the
ship that brought him^ —
"The Naseby, now no longer England's shame,
But better to be lost in Charles's name ; "
and, after praises of Charles, and predictions of his beneficent
reign, the poem ends : —
" The discontented now are only they
Whose crimes before did your just cause betray :
Of these your edicts some reclaim from sins,
But most your life and blest example wins.
0 happy prince, whom Heaven hath taught the way
By paying vows to have more vows to pay !
O happy age ! O times like those alone
By fate reserved for great Augustus' throne,
When the joint growth of arms and arts foreshew
The world a Monarch, and that Monarch you ! "
It is refreshing, after all this, to read a piece of verse on the
same subject that came afterwards from the pen of honest
Andrew Marvell, At the very least, it has the merit of
bringing us close to the actual figure and physiognomy of
the man that had come over in the Naseby : —
" Of a tall stature and of sable hue.
Much like the son of Kish, that lofty Jew,
Twelve years complete he suffered in exile,
And kept his father's asses all the while.
At length, by wonderful impulse of fate.
The people call him home to help the State;
1 Publisher and author were turncoats had published the stanzas to Cromwell's
together in this case, for Heriingnian memory.
THE PEIVY COUNCIL OF THE EESTOEATION. 17
And, what is more, they send him money too,
And clothe him all, from head to foot, anew :
Nor did he such small favours then disdain
Who in his thirtieth year began his reign.
In a slashed doublet then he came ashore,
And dubbed poor Palmer's wife his royal r"^.
The following was the composition of Charles's Privy
Council and Ministry in June 1660, immediately after his
return : —
Of the Blood Royal.
James, Duke of York (setat. 27), Lord High Admiral of England,
and Lord Warden of the Cinque Ports.
Henry, Duke of Gloucester (setat. 20). He died of small-pox,
Sept. 13, 1660.
Great Officers of State and of the Household.
Sir George Monk, K.G. (setat. 52), Captain-General of the Forces
of the Three Kingdoms, Lord Lieutenant of Ireland, Master of the
Horse to his Majesty, and Gentleman of the Bedehamher. On the
7th of July 1660 he was created Duke of Albemarle, Earl
OP TOREINGTON, AND BaRON MoNK OF POTHERIDGB, BeAUCHAMP,
AND Teyes ; and there was thenceforth much interest in observing
how he, and his slatternly wife, — remembered as Nan Clarges,
a blacksmith's daughter, and once a milliner, — comported them-
selves in the ducal dignity.
Sir Edwabd Hyde, Knt. (setat. 52), Lord High Chancellor of
England, and Chancellor of the Exchequer. The king wanted to
make him a peer at once ; but he declined the honour for the
present.
James Butleb, Marquis of Ormond (setat. 50), Lord Steward of
the Household. His Marquisate (raised, March 20, 1660-1, to the
Dukedom of Ormond) was in the Irish peerage ; but, on the 20th
of July 1660, he was made an English peer also, as Eaul of
Brecknock and Bar on Butlee of Llanthony.
Thomas Weiothesley, Earl of Southampton (setat. 51), Lord
High Treasurer. He was put into this office in September 1660,
the Treasury having meanwhile, at his request, been managed by
commissioners, of whom he and Hyde were the chief.
William Fiennbs, Viscount Saye and Sele (setat. 67), Lwd
Privy Seal. This is " Old Subtlety " (Vol. II. p. 1 55) at the close
of his life.
Sir Edward Montague (setat. 35), Master of the Ward/robe. This is
the Oliverian Admiral Montague, the naval agent of the Restora-
tion, as Monk had been the military one. In July 1660 he was
^ " An Historical Poem." : Groaart's edition of MarveU's Worljs, I. 343.
VOL. VI. C
18 LIFE OF MILTON AND HISTORY OF HIS TIME.
made K.G., and created Earl of Sandwich, Viscount Mon-
tague OP HiTCHINBEOOK, AND BaRON St. NbOTS.
Montague Bbrtib, Eabl of Lindsby, Hereditary Lord Cheat
Chamberlain of England. His tenure of office dated from
1642.
Edward Montague, Earl op Manchester (setat. 57), Lord Cham-
berlain of the Household.
Erancis Sbymoue, Lord Setmoub of Trowbridge, Chancellor of
the Duchy of Lancaster.
Sir George Carteret, Knt. (aetat. 61), Vice-Chamberlain of the
Household. He was an intimate friend of Hyde ; he had been in
charge of Jersey for Charles II, till that Island was surrendered
to the Commonwealth in 1653 ; and he had since then resided in
France.
Sir Frederick Coenwallis, Knt., Treasurer of the Household.
Sir Charles Berkeley, Knt., Comitl/roller of the Household.
Sir Edward Nicholas, Knt. i p„-,^^ j Secrelwries of State.
Sir William Morricb, Knt. J •^
Other Privy Councillors.
William Seymour, Marquis op Hertford. This aged Koyalist
lived only long enough to see the Eestoration, and to be rewarded
with a revival, in his honour, of that Dukedom of Somerset
which had been dormant since the attainder of his great-grand-
father, the Protector Somerset, in 1552. He died Oct. 24,
. 1660.
Henry Piereepoint, Marquis of Dorchester (setat. 54). He
was the son and heir of that Bobert Pierrepoint, Earl of Kings-
ton and Viscount Newark, who had been killed on the king's
side in 1643 (vol. II. p. 248).
Thomas Howard, Earl of Berkshire, son of the former Koyalist
Earl (Vol. II. p. 152 and p. 428).
EoBEB,T Sidney, Earl or Leicester, known to us at intervals
since 1638, both on his account, and as the father of Viscount
Lisle and Algernon Sidney.
Algernon Percy, Earl op Northumberland, first known to us
before the Civil Wars, and afterwards as a conspicuous Parlia-
mentarian through the Wars, from 1642 to 1649.
George Goring, Earl of Norwich, Eoyalist since 1643 (Vol. II.
p. 429), and remembered most by his connexion with the siege
of Colchester in the Second Civil War.
Henry Jermyb", Earl of St. Alban's. As Lord Jermyn, he had
been chief of the household to the Ex-Queen Henrietta-Maria
in France, and also, it is believed, secretly her husband (Vol. III.
p. 495). The earldom had recently been conferred on him abroad
, by Charles II. at his. mother's request. On July 18, 1660, he
returned to France for a wLile, as ambassador for Charles to
Louis XIV.
THE JUNTO OB CABINET. 19
LoED CoLEPEPPEE, known to us as the staunch Royalist Sir John
Colepepper, minister for Charles I. just before the Civil War, and
colleague and friend of Hyde in the councils of Charles II. in his
exile. He died July 12, 1660, having barely lived to see the
Bestoration and join in its first proceedings.
LoED BoBEETS, one of the Parliamentarian Peers in the Civil Wars
(Vol. II. p. 431), but Eoyalist since then. It was intended that
he should be Lord Deputy of Ireland.
Lord Wentwoeth (Vol. II. p. 429). He had been with the King
in Scotland, and had commanded an English regiment for him,
raised abroad.
Colonel Chaeles Howaed. This is the Oliverian on whom
Oliver had conferred one of the only two peerages he created.
By Oliver's patent he had been Viscount Howard since July 20,
1657. That title was null now; but in his new position as
a king's man he might expect compensation.
SiE Ajstthony Ashley Coopee, Baet. (setat. 39).
Me. Dbnzil Holles (setat. 63), sufficiently known already.
Me. Aethue Annesley, late President of the Council of State
which had been appointed by the Parliament of the Secluded
Members, and chief manager, along with Monk, of the proceed-
ings towards the Bestoration in the interval between that Parlia-
ment and the Convention Parliament ■'^-
In this body of thirty mixed old Royalists and new Royal-
ists, forming the King's Privy Council, some with ministerial
offices and others without, there was, of course, a more private
Junto or Cabinet. It Consisted at first of Hyde, Monk, the
Marquis of Ormond, the Earl of Southampton, Lord Colepepper,
and Secretaries Nicholas and Mprriee ; but, in fact, there was
no fixed number, and the King might call any councillor he
chose to an occasional meeting. In the Junto itself, which
was professedly only a Committee for Foreign Affairs, Hyde,
Ormond, and Southampton, all men of stately character and
great ability, and knit together by the strongest mutual
trust and respect, overswayed the rest, and combined especially
^0 keep Monk in his proper place, as Commander-in-chief
of the Army, Duke of Albemarle, and much else nominally,
' but in reality " Old George " defunct ^.
' List in Pliillips, 713, and another consulting him), and -from Peerage-
(less perfect) in Merciwius Veridicus of books and the Lords Journals.
June 5—12, 1660 ; with particles of in- 2 Clarendon, 992—3 and 1004—6
formation from Phillips afterwards, from (Continuation of Life) ; Burnet, 1. 160 —
Clarendon (whose want of dates is a 167.
eonst^it drawhaek and annoyance' in
c a
20 LIFE OF MILTON AND HISTORY OF HIS TIME.
Chancellor Hyde, however, was the Supreme Minister. To
this honour he was entitled by his indefatigable services
through all the weary years of the exile of the Koyal Family.
It was he that had never given up the game ; it was he, with
Ormond, that had always steered Charles in what they thought
the right course of policy abroad, even oflPending the imperious
Queen-mother by setting aside her interferences and sugges-
tions from Paris ; it was he that had organized and main-
tained the correspondence with the Sealed Knot and with
other Royalists in England, urged them on or checked them
on occasion, and been at the centre of all the strings. He
but stepped into his natural place, therefore, in becoming the
Prime Minister of Charles at the Restoration. With such
a king, and with such a complexity of interests and intrigues
round him, it was a position of enormous risk and enormous
responsibility. The English premiership was not then the
organized institution it has since become. All the ministers
held directly from the King, could negotiate with him inde-
pendently in the affairs of their several departments, and could
be dismissed by him at his own pleasure ; it was in the power
of the King also to have private consultations with persons
about him not of the Privy Council, and to do acts by their
persuasion of which the Privy Council or the nominal Cabinet
knew nothing ; and it was only in so far as the King might
choose to follow the custom of having a " Favourite " for the
timcj and regulating his dealings with everybody else by the
advice of this Favourite, that any one minister could exercise
general control. There is no more interesting passage in
Clarendon than those pages of the Continuation of his Life
where he specifies the difiiculties of such an undefined minis-
terial supremacy. His conclusion, he tells us, was to accept
the place as clearly his by right and by necessity, and to do
his best as prime minister for Charles'- till Charles should
discard him, but to avoid the name of " prime minister," as
unpopular in England, and to exercise the functions, in as con-
stitutional a manner as possible, in his capacity as Lord High
Chancellor. In this capacity, and as Privy Councillor and
member of the Junto, he could have access to the King at all
PREMIERSHIP OF HYDE. 21
mes, know all that went on, and have suflScient power of
leck or remonstrance where he disapproved, without lodging
imself permanently in Whitehall, and so imposing his grave
resence upon the King unofficially or unnecessarily, and
iterfering with his companionships and pleasures. And
harles, in the heginning of his reign at least, was most
illing to accept this Premiership of the Chancellor. He
a,d his conferences with other ministers, and his more careless
ours with many sorts of companions, not without effects that
ere annoying or thwarting to Hyde ; hut, in the main, he
ived himself trouble by deferring to Hyde in everything,
id sending everybody to Hyde that came on any public
iisiness.
The King and The Prime Minister, The Junto or Select
ABiNET OF THE Privt Council, and The Puivy Council
self: such was the top of the apparatus of the Restoration
overnment. But the apparatus included The Parliament ;
id all depended on the proper connexion and cooperation
■ the top of the apparatus with this main body of it.
Now the Parliament to which the King, the Prime Minister,
le Junto, and the Privy Council, had to adjust themselves,
r some time at least, was that Convention Parliament
hich had met on the 25th of April 1660, and which on the
venth day of its sittings had received the King's communi-
,tions from Breda, transmitted their enthusiastic response, and
ranged for his return. I. The Koiise of Lords. — At the first
eeting of the Parliament this House had been merely
voluntary gathering of such of the old peers as had chosen
come, knowing that they were wanted. There were but
n peers present, with the Earl of Manchester in the chair.
it these had beaten up for recruits, with such effect that
. April 27 twenty-six peers were present, and on the 1st of
ay, when there was the reception of the King's letters and
e invitation for him to return, as many as forty-one. This
imber remained pretty steady through the subsequent days,
1 May 31, the second day after his Majesty's arrival at
hitehall, when it was voted, by his Majesty's request, that
ers made by his. father during the Civil War should be
22 LIFE OF MILTON AND HISTORY OF HIS TIME.
admitted. That day, accordingly, the House rose to seventy.
It was the last day of the provisional speakership of the Earl
of Manchester. The arrangement thenceforward was that,
as by old custom, the Lord Chancellor should occupy the
woolsack, or, in his absence, by commission from the King,
Sir Orlando Bridgman, who had just been appointed Chief
Baron of the Exchequer. On the 1st of June Hyde took
the chair for the first time, with eighty lords present : viz.
their Royal Highnesses the Dukes of York and Gloucester,
the Duke of Buckingham, the Marquises of Dorchester and
Newcastle, thirtyseven Earls (among whom the Earl of Salis-
bury ventured to show his face), iive Viscounts (of whom
Cromwell's son-in-law Palconbridge was one), and thirty-
three Barons. The King himself made his appearance in the
House that day, and, the Commons having been summoned
to meet him, made his first address to the two Houses, fol-
lowed by a longer speech from the Chancellor. He also gave
his assent, Le Hoy le veuU, to three Bills of pressing import-
ance that had been prepared by the two Houses, one of them
being an Act for confirming the present Parliament and re-
moving all doubts of its validity hitherto. This, as it were,
reconstituted the two Houses ; and from that day between
seventy and a hundred peers continued to be the maximum
attendance in the Upper House, though, as the same peers
were not always present, the total number of peers available
may have exceeded a hundred. They were all temporal or
lay peers, the readmission of Bishops not having yet been
even discussed. Between twenty and thirty of the peers
had been Parliamentarians, and were of Presbyterian prepos-
sessions \ II. The House of Commons. — This House, it is to
be remembered, no longer included representatives from
Scotland and Ireland, but was a representation of England
and Wales only, in the old fashion. Of the 500 members
who had been returned by the constituencies more than
400 had taken their seats at once. When the House was
counted on the 5th of May there were 400 present. Returned
1 Lords Journals, from April 2.5 to June 1, 1660.
THE CONVENTION PAELIAMENT. 23
as tliey had been in a fervour of Royalism among the consti-
tuencies, they were, almost to a man, friends of the Restoration
at all risks, and prepared to support Charles after they had
received him. Lambert, Harrison, Ludlow, Scott, Weaver,
Miles Corbet, and other Republicans or Regicides who had
been daringly proposed for constituencies, had been rejected.
Actually, however, two of the Regicides had got in, — Colonel
John Hutchinson for Nottingham, and Colonel Richard
Ingoldsby for Aylesbury ; and there were at least two more
who, though they had not signed the death-warrant of
Charles I, as these had done, had taken part in his trial, —
Francis Lassels, member for Allerton in Yorkshire, and Robert
Wallop, member for Whitchurch. Several others must have
been uneasy in their seats, in recollection of their extremely
Republican antecedents. There was also in the House a consi-
derable sprinkling of Oliverians proper, or persons who had
been conspicuous supporters and servants of the Protectorate,
as distinct from the old Republicans. Monk himself, Admiral
Montague, and Sir Anthony Ashley Cooper were Oliverians
who had already splendidly redeemed themselves by hailing
the Restoration or helping towards it, — to whom may be
added Lord Broghill, Clarges, and William Pierrepoint.
Oliverians not so sure of forgiveness, but who had yet to
earn it, were Sir Charles Wolseley, Richard Norton, aud
Andrew Marvell, member for Hull. Among Royalists in
Monk's retinue, whether Oliverians or not before, were, be-
sides his brother-in-law Clarges, Colonels Knight and Clobery,
and Mr. William Morrice. Among the members one notes,
more miscellaneously, Fairfex, Lord Bruce, Sir William
Waller, Holies, Arthur Annesley, Prynne, Major-General
Browne, Colonel Massey, Sir George Booth, Colonel Fagg,
Viscount Falkland, Sir Thomas Wenman, Alexander Popham,
Sir John Evelyn of Surrey, Sir John Evelyn of Wilts, Sir
Thomas Middleton, Sir Samuel Luke, Sir Robert Pye, Sir
William Penn, Sir Edward Deering, John Rushworth, John
Crewe, Sir Richard Onslow, Arthur Onslow, Sir Anthony
Irby, Sir Horatio Townshend, Alderman Robinson of London,
and the lawyers Sir Thomas Widdrington, Glynne, Matthew
24 LIFE OF MILTON AND HISTORY OP HI« TIME.
Hale, Maynard, and Heneage Finch. Altogether, the House,
though with old Episcopalian Royalists in it, and young
Royalists pliable enough on the Church-question, was mas-
sively Presbyteriano-Royalist. — In the month it had sat be-
fore the King's arrival the most active members in shaping
the business and keeping all in proper order, under Sir
Harbottle Grimstone's Speakership, had been Annesley,
Prynne, Pierrepoint, Sir Anthony Ashley Cooper, Morrice,
Clarges, Crewe, Alderman Robinson, and the lawyers. The
two first are especially conspicuous in the journals. Annesley,
as President of the Council in State, had reported daily from
that body and submitted the most important motions, while
Prynne, as an independent member of peculiar celebrity, had
taken a great deal upon himself. Holies had gone to the
Hague as one of the Commissioners to the King, or he would
have been as prominent. There was no division till the
29th of May, and then only on the question of adopting some
amendments by the Lords on a bill that had been sent up
to that House. There were then 170 present, of whom 104
voted Yea and 66 voted No. It was the day of the King's
arrival in Whitehall. On the 1st of June, when the House
was summoned for the first time to meet his Majesty in the
liords, as many as 400 niay have been again present. — Thence-
forward, the Parliament having been confirmed and re-
constituted that day by the King's assent to the Act for the
purpose, and the interim Council of State having been super-
seded by the new Ministry and Privy Council, and the
members of the House having taken the oaths of supremacy
and allegiance, all was to go in regular routine. While the
Chancellor presided in the Lords, Sir Harbottle Grimstone
sat on as Speaker of the Commons, with steady attendances
about him of from 200 to 300, rising on occasion to about
350 ; and Annesley, Holies, Sir Anthony Ashley Cooper, and
Mr. Secretary Morrice, the leading councillors or ministers
in the House, interpreted between it and the Junto, or
between it and the King, and managed accordingly. There
were other members who were mucli about the King or in
employment at Court ; and Prynne was still most conspicuously
EOTAL DECLAEATION OP INDEMNITY. 25
ctive as an independent member^. Monk and Montague
vere soon to be removed by their peerages to the other
louse.
One great business in which the Parliament had been
ngaged before his Majesty's arrival was that of Pardon or
levenge. The basis for proceedings in this business was
urnished by that Declaration, dated from Breda, April 4,
nd entitled His Majesty's Gracious Declaration to all his
^joving Subjects, which had been one of the documents
irought over by Greenvilie to Monk, and which, after having
leen kept in reserve till the fit moment, had been produced
a the two Houses on the 1st of May with such immense
ffect (Vol. v. pp. 696-698). Monk's advice having been
hat his Majesty should promise the freest and widest in-
emnity possible, and Hyde and his associates abroad having
oneurred, this was one portion of the Declaration : —
" And, to the end that the fear of punishment may not engage
Qy, conscious to themselves of what is past, to a perseverance in
uilt for the future, by opposing the quiet and happiness of their
juntry in the restoration both of King, Peers, and People to their
ist, ancient, and fundamental rights. We do, by these presents,
eclare, — That "We do grant a Free and General Pardon, which We
"e ready, on demand, to pass under Our Great Seal of England, to
1 Our subjects, of what degree or quality soever, who within forty
lys after the publishing hereof shall lay hold upon this Our grace
id favour, and shall by any public act declare their doing so, and
lat they return to the loyalty and obedience of good subjects :
xepting oyily sueh persons as shall Jiereafier be excepted by Parlia-
ent, — t/iese only to be excepted. Let all Our subjects, how faulty
lever, rely upon the word of a King, solemnly given by this present
eclaration, that no crime whatsoever, committed against Us or
ur Royal Father before the publication of this, shall ever rise in
dgment, or be brought in question, against any of them, to the
ast endamagement of them, either in their lives, liberties, or
tates, or (as far forth as lies in Our power) so much as to the
■ejudice of their reputations by any reproach or term of distinc-
3n from the rest of Our best subjects : We desiring and ordaining
at henceforth all notes of discord, separation, and difference of
,rties, be utterly abolished among all Our subjects ; whom We invite
Commons Journals from April 25 1—66 (including complete list of the
June i, 1660 ; and Pari. Hist. IV, Commons).
26 LIFE OF MILTON AND HISTORY OF HIS TIME.
and conjure to a perfect union among themselves under Our pro-
tection '."
As this Declaration was published in London on the 1st of J
May by order of the Houses, all who chose to avail themselves
of it before the 10th of June were to be safe, with the ex-
ception of such as might be implied in the passage in Italics.
Who the excepted culprits were to be depended on the
Parliament itself. The two Houses were to make the excep-
tions, and not the King or his Councillors.
The business had begun in the Commons on the 9th of
May, the day after the proclamation of his still absent
Majesty. "Mr. Finch reports a Bill of General Pardon,
" Indemnity and Oblivion, which was this day read the first
" time," is the record in the Commons Journals. The second
reading was on the 12th, when a significant indication was
given where the exceptions would lie. Passages from the
Journals of the Rump concerning the late King's Trial were
read, and also a Journal of the Proceedings at the Trial itself.
Naturally this caused a scene. Divers members present, who
had been among the King's Judges, " did severally express
" liow far they were concerned in the said proceedings, and
" their sense thereon." Happy those who could say that,
though named among the Commissioners for the Trial, they
had never sat in the Court, or had discontinued their sittings
before the fatal close. For it was the actual IlEaiciDES that
the House was now in search of, first of all, as the necessary
exceptions from the General Indemnity, and these Regicides;
were now voted to be such of the King's Judges as had been
present at the last sitting of the Court and the pronouncing
of the sentence on Saturday the 37th of January, 1648-9,
whether they had or had not signed the subsequent death-
warrant of Monday the 29th. The debate, having, been
adjourned, was resumed" on the 14th of May, with very
definite farther results. It was then resolved "That all
those persons who sat in judgment upon the late King's
1 Declaration, as given in Lords and Phillips, 702—3, and in Pari. Hist. IV.
Commons Journals of May 1, 1660, in 16 — 17.
QUEST OF THE BEGHOIDES. 27
Majesty when the sentence was pronounced for • his con-
demnation he forthwith secured," — a resolution which, though
absolute in the wording, could apply, of course, only to
such of them as were still alive ; also that Mr. John Cook,
who had been the solicitor or prosecuting counsel at the
Trial, and Messrs. Andrew Broughton and John Phelps,
who had been the clerks of the Court, and Edward Dendy,
who had been the sergeant-at-arms, should be forthwith
secured ; also that the two executioners of the King, if they
were discoverable, should be secured, with specification on
chance of a certain person named Matthew, who had boasted
of being one of them and of having received ,^''300 for the
work ; also that Cornet Joyce, of Holmby House celebrity,
should be secured ; and, finally, " That the number of Seven,
"of those who sat in judgment when sentence was given
" upon the late King's Majesty, be the number who shall be
"excepted, for life and estate, out of the Act of Greneral
" Pardon and Oblivion." These Eesolutions were unanimous.
They amounted to this : — that, while all the Eegicide Judges
were to be branded as infamous, and all the survivors of them,
and six or seven persons more, were to be secured, to await
consideration of the penalties to be inflicted on them, it was
the desire of the House that the number of the" surviving
Regicide Judges to be proceeded against capitally should be
restricted to seven, and that the rest should be reserved for
minor punishments. There was no security so far that other
culprits, not among the Regicide Judges, e. g. the additional
six or seven above-named, might not be thought worthy of
death for their particular shares in the great crime ^. •
At this stage it may be well to enumerate the Regicide
Judges present at the sentence in Westminster Hall on
Saturday, Jan. 27, 1648-9. They were sixty-seven in all,
of whom twenty-three were now dead. In the following list
they are arranged alphabetically, save that the first four are
put in a group by themselves. An asterisk prefixed to a
name denotes the aggravation of having been not only one
1 Commons Journals of dates.
28
LIFE OF MILTON AND HISTORY OF HIS TIME.
of the sixty-seven present at the sentence, but also one of the
fifty-nine who signed the death-warrant two days after :
* John Bradshaw {dead).
* Oliver Cromwell {deaj).
* Henry Ireton {dead).
* Thomas Pride {dead).
Francis Allen {chad).
* John Alured {dmd).
Thomas Andrews {dead).
* John Barkstead.
* Daniel Blagrave.
* John Blakiston {dead).
* Sir John Bourchier.
* John Carew.
* William Cawley.
* Gregory Clements.
* Sir William Constable {dead).
* Miles Corbet.
* Sir John Danvers {dead).
* Eichard Dean {dead).
* John Dixwell.
* John Downes.
* Humphrey Edwards {dead).
* Isaac Ewer {dead).
* George Fleetwood.
* Augustine Garland.
* William Gtoffe.
* Lord Grey of Groby {dead).
Thomas Hammond {dead).
* Thomas Harrison.
Edmund Harvey.
William Heveningham.
* John Hewson.
Cornelius Holland.
* Thomas Horton {dead).
* Jolm Hutchinson.
* John Jones.
* Eobert Lilburne.
John Lisle.
* Sir Michael Livesey.
Nicholas Love.
* Edmund Ijudlow.
* Henry Marten.
* Sir Thomas Mauleverer {dead).
* Simon Mayne.
* Gilbert Millington.
* John Moore {dead).
* Sir Gregory Norton {dead),
* John Okey.
* Peregrine Pelham {dead).
Isaac Pennington.
* Vincent Potter.
* William Purefoy {dead).
* Owen Rowe.
* William Say.
* Thomas Scott.
* Adrian Scroope.
* Henry Smith.
* Anthony Stapley {dead),
* James Temple.
* Peter Temple.
* Eobert Tichbourne.
Matthew Tomlinson.
* John Venn {dead).
* Sir Hardress Waller.
* Valentine Walton.
* Thomas Wayte.
* Edward Whalley.
* Thomas Wogan '.
Two most positive Regicides are here omitted. These are
Thomas Challoner, and Cromwell's kinsman, Richard In-
goldsby, commonly called Dick Ingoldsby. The
reason is
1 List in Lords Journals of July 23,
1 660 ; where, liowever, the names of
Hutchinson and Tomlinson are omitted,
for reasons there given. For the asterisks
I have gone to the death-warrant itself,
as given in Vol. III. pp. 719—720. The
Lords Journals of the above date also
give the names from the death-warrant,
but with two omitted for certain reasons.
— I have culled the dead in the list
from Noble's Lives of the Begicides.
The date of death is unknown in a good
many cases.
THE INDEMNITY BILL IN THE COMMONS. 29
hat the Commons had now defined the Kegicides to be those
udges who had been present at the sentence, and Challoner
.nd Ingoldsby were in the peculiar predicament of having
igned the death-warrant without having been present at
he sentence. Challoner had been present almost every day
if the trial, including that sitting in which the sentence had
leen agreed to ; nay, he had been in his place on the very
lay of the sentence ; but he had been absent at the moment
irhen it was pronounced, — to compensate for which he had
igned the death-warrant. Ingoldsby, it is believed, had
igned the death-warrant without having been present at
he trial at all. How it was to fare with Challoner in the
ircumstances we shall see very soon. That Ingoldsby was
o escape without any punishment whatever was a foregone
onelusion even now. And no wonder. Regicide though he
ras, had he not amply purchased his pardon by his gallant
apture of Lambert and suppression of the last struggle of the
t/epublic, and had he not been thanked for that service by
he House itself not three weeks ago? There could be no
bought now of penal procedure in his case. He was even
3 be exceptionally recommended to his Majesty's -favour ;
nd, though the awkward fact of his name on the death-
'arrant was to be remembered jocularly against him to the
ad of his life, he had his famous explanation ready, and could
irn off the laugh ^.
With the list of the sixty-seven before them, the Commons
ivanced a step on the 15th of May. They at once dis-
nguished the four at the top of the list from the rest, for
iasons perfectly obvious; and, these four being dead and
jyond the reach of punishment personally, they excepted
lem from the Bill of Pardon and Oblivion by the method
i" posthumous Attainder for High Treason. This involved
le absolute and immediate forfeiture of all the property
)ssessed by them at the date of their treason, and also the
corruption of their blood," or the stoppage of all titles,
■operties, or rights that might come from them, or through
1 See note. Vol. III. pp. 720—721.
so LIFE OF MUTON AND HISTORY OF HIS TIME.
them, to their descendants. Accordingly, it was formally
resolved "That John Bradshaw, deceased, late sergeant-at-r
" law, be one of those that shall, by Act of Parliament, be at-
" tainted of high treason for the murthering of the late King's
"Majesty," and similarly for "Oliver Cromwell, deceased,"
"Henry Ireton, deceased," and "Thomas Pride, deceased;"—
each attainder to date from the 1st of January, 1648-9. This
specification of four of the sixty-seven having been made by
the House itself, the Bill of Pardon and Oblivion was referred,
for the rest, to a committee for consideration and report.
Much depended on the composition of this committee. It
consisted of fifty-two members, and included Annesley,
Prynne, Lord Commissioner Tyrrel, Lord Commissioner
Widdrington, Glynne, Maynard, Matthew Hale, Lord Howard,
Sir Anthony Irby, and Mr. Heneage Fipch. Having ap-
pointed the committee, the House turned to other matters
for a while, taking care, however, on the 17th of May, to
pass comprehensive resolutions empowering sheriffs and other
oflScers to search for and seize all or any of the forty-four
Regicide Judges that were still living, and also to seize the
estates, real or personal, of all the sixty-seven, living or dead ;
with an accompanying resolution requiring the Council of
State to stop all the ports, so as to prevent the escape of
the fugitives. The House of Lords, when asked to concur
with these resolutions, demurred somewhat to the one which
vested powers in the Council of State, regarding that body as
temporary and anomalous ; but this did not prevent the most
energetic action of the police by the order of the Lords too.
The Regicides' were hunted for most diligently. Harrison had
been already captured in Staffordshire, and on the 21st of
May he was committed to the Tower ^-
The Committee on the Indemnity Bill were still eno-ao-ed
with it when the King crossed from the Hague to Dover
in Montague's fleet, journeyed thence to Canterbury and
Rochester, and made, his great entry into London on the
29th of May. After his Majesty was in London, he himself,
1. Commpiis Journals of dates.
THE INDEMNITY BILL IN THE COMMONS. 31
p Hyde for him, or the Junto and the Courtiers generally,
lig-ht have something to do privately with the farther
rogress of the Bill, and with the suggestion of the persons
lat ought to be excepted.
Publicly, however, the business went on still within the
bmmons. On the 31st of May, the second day after the
ling's arrival, Mr. Heneage Pinch, from the Committee, re-
orted several amendments to the Bill; these and other
mendments, some of them originating in the House itself,
■ere discussed that day, and on the 1st, 2nd, and 4th of June ;
ad on the 5th of June the House was in a position to put
le question " That the Seven Persons who by former order
are to be excepted out of the Act of General Pardon for life
and estate be named here in this House." The question
aving been carried unanimously in the affirmative, one of
le seven to be so excepted was at once named. He was
homas Harrison. No more were named that day ; but next
ly the other six were named and agreed to in this order —
/"illiam Say, John Jones, Thomas Scott, Cornelius Holland,
Dhn Lisle, and John Barkstead. Of these only Jones, in
Idition to Harrison, was yet in custody; most had es-
tped, or were to escape, to the continent. The tale of the
ven surviving Regicide Judges to be proceeded against
ipitally was now complete. The roll of the doomed, however,
as not yet closed ; for on the 7th of June it was resolved
lat John Cook, Andrew Broughton, and Edward Dendy
lould, in respect of their prominent, though subordinate,
irts at the King's trial, be in the extreme class of those
icepted both for life and estate, and also that the two
;ecutioners " who were upon the scaffold in a disguise "
ould be in the same extreme class. About these two the
ouse had been making eveiy inquiry. One hears no more
the person called Matthew, suspected on the 14th of May ;
it William Lilly the astrologer had, by order of the House
June 2, been examined by a committee as to his know-
ige of the subject, and the report from this committee had
en read to the House by Prynne, June 6. What it was
3 do not learn from the. Journals ;, but we- have Lilly's owa
33 LIFE OP MILTON AND HISTORY OF HIS TIME.
account of the evidence he gave. "The next Sunday but
"one after Charles the First was beheaded," says Lilly,
" Robert Spavin, secretary unto Lieutenant-General Cromwell,
"invited himself to dine with me, and brought Anthony
" Peirson and several others along with him to dinner. Their
" principal discourse all dinner-time was only who it was that
" beheaded the King. One said it was the common hangman ;
" another, Hugh Peters ; others were nominated, but hone
"concluded. Robert Spavin, so soon as dinner was done,
"took me to the south, window. Saith he, 'These are all
" mistaken ; they have not named the man that did the fact ;
" it was Lieu enant-Colonel Joyce. I was in the room when
" he fitted himself for the work — stood behind him when he
" did it — when done, went in again unto him. There 's no
''man knows this but my master [Cromwell], Commissary
" Ireton, and myself.' ' Doth not Mr. Rushworth [then
"Army Secretary] know it?' said I. 'No, he doth not,"
"saith Spavin. The same thing Spavin since had often
" related to me when we were alone." Substantially this had
been Lilly^s information to Prynne ; who, says Lilly, " did with
" much civility make a report hereof to the House." Accord-
ingly, next day (June 7), after Mr. Annesley had reported
the examination of another witness, Leonard Watson, touching
the person who executed the late King, there was a repetition
of the order of May 14 for the arrest of Joyce, with an order
for the arrest also of Hugh Peters. There could be no more
popular candidate for one of the executionerships, if not for
the executioner ship-in-chief, than this unfortunate preacher.
It was with delight that the town heard of his probable in-
dictment in that character; and this rhyme was at once
concocted for the newspapers, —
' The best man next to Jupiter
"Was put to death by Hugh Peter.'
In the House itself the notion that Peters had struck the blow
was too ludicrous for serious belief; but it seems to have
occurred to them that the rhyme, if not true in the literal
sense, might be construed in another, and that in any case
THE INDEMNITY BILL IN THE COMMONS. 33
be arrest of the notorious parson would be universally satis-
actory. Really, as far as one can see, the order for tbe
rrest of Peters, at tbis stage at least, came about by the
.ecident of Lilly's babble in the Committee ^.
On the same 7th of June on which there were the five
.dditional exceptions for life and the order for the arrest of
foyee and Peters there were two other incidents in the
listory of the Act of Indemnity. One was the completion
if a resolution by tbe Commons in these words : " Resolved
'and declared by the Commons in Parliament assembled
• that they do by this their public act, for and in behalf of
■ themselves and every one of them, and of all the Commons
' of England, of what quality or degree soever they be, — ex-
cepting only as is, or shall hereafter he, excepted hy this
Parliament in an Act of Free and General Pardon, Indemnity,
and Oblivion, now under consideration, — lay hold upon his
Majesty's free and general Pardou, in his late gracious
Letters and Declaration granted, tendered, or expressed."
^he other was the issue of a Proclamation by the King,
ecommended by the two Houses, and dated June 6, requiring
11 the surviving Regicide Judges not already in custody,
)rty in number, with Cook, Broughton, and Phelps, to sur-
3nder themselves within fourteen days to the Speaker of the
lOrds, the Speaker of the Commons, the Lord Mayor of
london, or some SheriiF, " under pain of being excepted from
ay pardon or indemnity for their respective lives and estates."
ioth these incidents might bear a merciful construction.
y the first the House had, with the exception we have put
I italics, taken the whole nation under its wing, many of
1 Commons Journals of dates ; Lilly's final s. Though this may have been
istory of his Life and Times, as cpsAfi& for the sake of the rhyme only, it is
Chambers's JSooAo/Doi/s, 1.189 ; and correct. In his own letters he signed
ro news-pamphlets in the Thomason himself always "Hugh Peter." So we
Election — A n Exact A ecompt com- are informed in Vol. VI. of the Fourth
wnicaling the Chief Transactions of ISeries of the Massachusetts Historical
e Three Kingdoms, &c., with the daily Society Collections (p. 91), where many
■)tes and Resolves in ioth Homes of letters of his are printed from the MSS.
itliament: published hy Authority They are addressed chiefly to John
\o. for June I— 8, 1660), and Mer- Winthrop, Junr. ; whom, on account of
rius Veridicus (June 5—12, 1660). their peculiar relationship by marriage,
le second contains the rhyme. — In he calls "dear and loving son." But
at rhyme, it may be observed, the Peter will be Peters so long as he is
me is given as Peter, without the remembered in the world,
VOL. VI. D
34 LIFE OP MILTON AND HISTOKY OP HIS TIME.
its own culpable members included, assuring them thait they
were safe. The othej might be interpreted as a distinct,
pledge by the King that those of the Eegicides that should
surrender in terms of the Proclamation would fare the better
for their confidence in his clemency '^-
Still, in that phrase of the Commons which we have put in
italics, a vast deal was left dubious. It left several questions
open. In the first place, what was to be the fate of the
thirty-seven Regicide Judges still living, over and above the
seven that had been selected capitally, and what was to be
the posthumaus dealing with the nineteen dead, over and
above the four it had been decided to attaint in chief? In
the second place, were any others not yet named to be classed
especially as Regicides and dealt with as such? As the
House had. marked its determination to seek its chief victims
from among those immediately concerned in any way with the
King's death, and had consequently doomed Cook, Broughton,
Dendy, and the two executioners, if they could be found oat,
to the same gibbet with the seven -selected Regicide Judges
themselves, might they not now ignlarge their definition of the
Eegicides by bringing in some of those of the Judges who,
though not present at the actual sentence, had taken some
active previous part in the Trial, and also some oiiiers who
had officiated at the Trial, though not as Judges ? If so, how
many more were to be so counted as Regicides ? Then, apart
altogether from the fate of those implicated in the one crime
of the r^cide, there was the farther question of the selection
of victims from the community at large, on account of the
notoriety of their atftings, whether civil or military, through
the time of the Republic, the Protectorate, and the Anarchy.
There could be no general secmity till that question also
was decided.
1 Commons Journals of date, and clamation were Gregoiy Olements, Har-
original blaok letter copy of the King's rison, John Jones, and Matthew Tom-'
Prodamation. On comparing the list linson. Probably .Clements was by this '
of the Begioide Judges summoned to time already in custody, with HarrisBUl
surrender in this Piroolamatian with and Jones. Tomlinson was at 'liaa«|
that of the Regicide Judges given ante when wanted, whether in custody ib?'l
at p. 28, 1 find that the four surviving not.
Begicide Judges not named in the Pro^
THE INDEMNITY BILL IN THE COMMONS. 35
On the 8th and 9th of June there was some farther lig^ht
in the Commons on all these questions,. On the first of those
days, " a question being propounded, That the numheir of
" twenty and no more (other than those that are already ex-
" cepted, or sat as Judges upon the late King's M9.jesty)
" shall be excepted out of the Act of General Pardon and
" Oblivion, for and in respect only of such pains, penalties,
" and forfeitures, not extending to life, as shall be thought
" fit to be inflicted on them by another Act, intended to be
" hereafter passed for that purpose," there were two divisions.
On the previous question, " whether the question should be
put? " there were 160 Yeas against 131 Noes ; and, the ques-
tion itself having been put, there were 153 Yeas against 135
Noes. In other words, it was carried, though not by a large
majority, that from the general community, apart from the
Regicides, the number of victims to be selected should be
limited to Twenty, and the punishments of these should not
extend to death. But, next' day, it became evident that, as
regarded the Regicides still to be designated, the House was
in a mood of severity. On a report from Prynne, who had
been in his element in a committee for studying all the
records of the King's Trial, it was found that eleven of the
King's Judges, in addition to the sixty-seven who had been
present at the pronouncing of the sentence, had taken such
a part in the trial by sitting in the Court once, twice, or
oftener, that it would be a farce not to include them among
the Regicides. The eleven, here arranged alphabetically,
were these : —
James Challoner : present at three sittings of the Court continu-
ously, though not after Jan. 22.
* Thomas Challoner : present at six sittings, including that of the
26th Jan., where the sentence was agreed to, and present also on
the actual sentence-day, though not at the moment ; also a Signer
of the death-warrant.
John Dove : at one sitting only, but it was that at which the
sentence was agreed on.
John Fry (dead) : six sittings continuously, to that of Jan. 25, at
which the sentence was rough-drafted.
Sir James Harrington : twice present.
D 2,
36 LIFE OP MILTON AND HISTORY OF HIS TIME.
Francis Lassels : three times present continuously, but not after
Jan. 22, — i.e. same as James Challoner.
Thomas Lister : one sitting only, and that the first.
Sir Henry Mildmay : four sittings continuously, including those at
which the sentence was rough-drafted and finally agreed on.
William, Lord Monson : five sittings, including that of agreement
on the sentence.
Sir Gilbert Pickering : three sittings, but not after Jan. 23.
Robert Wallop : three sittings, of which that of Jan. 23 was the
last.
Besides the fifty-six Regicide Judges, thirty-seven of them
living, that had been left in suspense out of the total of sixty-
seven already reckoned, there were now, therefore, these
eleven, of whom ten were alive, to be treated as also Regicides.
Then and there, in a series of Resolutions, the House disposed
of all of both sets, In one Resolution, fifty-two out of the
former fifty-six, including thirty-four of those living and
eighteen of those dead, were named together for exception
from the Indemnity in respect of all pains and penalties, not
capital, that it might be thought right to inflict upon them
by another Act. The four thus left out were Lord Grey of
Groby, among the dead, and John Hutchinson, Adrian Scroope,
and Matthew Tomlinson, among the living. Influence was
being exerted for the family of Lord Grey of Groby, and it
was resolved not to except him "as to his own estate,"
i.e. to leave his family in possession of what property had
been really his. Hutchinson, who was a member of the
House, had been expressing his repentance, and had won
sympathy; and, while it was resolved to expel him from the
House, and also to declare him incapable of bearing any office
of trust in future, there was a separate resolution that, " in
respect of his signal repentance," he should be subject to no
fine, and no forfeiture out of any part of his estate " not pur-
chased from, or belonging to, the public." Adrian Scroope
had sent in a humble petition to the House,, in consideration
of which it was resolved that, by " paying a year's rent of his
lands in lieu of a fine," he should be exempt from farther fine
or loss of estate. Tomlinson, for recent good conduct, had
been virtually condoned since the 17th of May, when the
THE INDEMNITY BILL IN THE COMMONS. 37
Commons omitted him singly from the list of Regicides
to be apprehended and the Lords concurred.— But what of
the new eleven ferreted out by Prynne, to be added to the
former list ? By separate resolutions, eight of these were at
once put in the same class with the fifty-two excepted in
every respect not capital. These were James Challoner,
Thomas Challoner, Fry (dead), Harrington, Lister, Mildmay,
Lord Monson, and Pickering. The remaining three were
treated differently. The case of Dove, on his humble petition,
was referred to a committee ; Lassels, who was a member of
the House, was expelled and declared incapable of any public
trust, but was admitted, by a majority of votes, to the benefit
of the General Pardon on payment of a fine of one year's
value of his estate ; and Wallop, also a member of the House,
was required to appear at next sitting.-^The same oppor-
tunity was taken of disposing of the case of John Phelps, the
other clerk of the Court at the King's trial. Though he had
escaped being conjoined with his fellow-clerk Broughton in
exception for life, it was voted now that he should be among
those amenable to any penalty short of death ^■
On Monday the 11th of June Wallop appeared in the
House according to order. There was no such favour for him
as for his fellow-members Hutchinson and Lassels. Expelled
the House and declared incapable of public trust, he was
reserved moreover for all penalties that might be thought fit,
short of death, and taken at once into custody^. The state
of matters in the House of Commons, as regarded the Regi-
cides, then stood thus: — Eighty-four persons in all, living
or dead, had been classed as Regicides : to wit, the sixty-seven
judges who had been present at the pronouncing of the sen-
tence and the eleven who had taken a culpable part in the
trial, with four of the court-officers at the trial, and the
two executioners, whoever they were. Of these eighty-four
the votes had been that four, who were dead, should be pun-
ished by the most absolute posthumous attainder, twelve of
the living should be punished capitally (seven of the King's
' Commons Journals of June 8 and 9. " Itid. June 11.
38 LIFE OP MILTON AND' filSTOEY OF HIS TIME.
judges, three of the court-officers at th« li'ial, and the two
executioners), sixty-two should stand excepted in every
respect not capital (viz. forty-two of the judges yet living-,
with nineteen of the dead judges and one of the court-
officers), one should have his case farther considered (Dove)j
three should be admitted to the benefit of the Pardon on cer-
tain conditions (Hutchinson, Laseels, and Seroope), and two
unconditionally (Grey of Groby among the dead, and Matthew
Tomlinson among the liviiig). For the forty-two of the
living judges excepted from death-punishment much might
depend, however, on their alacrity in surrendering themselves
according to the King's Proclamation. As that had been
dated June 6, the term of fourteen days Would expire on the
20th, or, with allowance of a day for the publication, on the
21gt. For those who did not surrender it might go worse
than had been arranged.
The Regicides having been disposed of, it remained for the
House to select the twenty out of the general community
deserving to be regarded as prime. Or all but prime, culprits,
and so to be conjoined with the main mass of the Regicides
by being also excepted from the Pardon in all particulars not
extending to life. This diffiealt and intricate business, begun
on Monday the 11th of June, was pursued daily till Monday
the 18th, as follows : — On the 11th, ex-Speaker Lenthall and
Sir Henfy Vane were put among the Twenty. There was
a letter from Monk in Lenthall 's behalf; but it went against
Lenthall notwithstanding, by 2l5 votes to 126, Clarges one
of the tellers in his favour. There was no division in Vane's
case. — On the 12th, a William Burton, better known then
than now, was made one of the Twenty. Sergeant Richard
Keble was named for another, but the question was not put.
—On the 13th, Oliver St. John, Alderman John Ireton, Sir
Arthur Hasilrig, Colonel William Sydenham, and Colonel
John Desborough, were added to the list, the only division
being in the case of Sydenham, who lost by 147 to 106.— On
the 14th, Bulstrode Whitlocke, who had presented a humble
petition, went through the ordeal and came off by a vote of
175 to 134 not to put the question. After all, this mode of
THE INDEMNITY BILL IN THE COMMONS. 39
icape might amount only to a respite. Daniel Axtell was
t the same time unanimously made cue of the Twenty, in
jcoUection perhaps that he had been with Lambert in the
ist rising for the Republic, but also of the fact that he had
immanded the. guard in Westminster Hall daring the King's
rial.— On the 15th, William Butler, on© of Cromwell's major-
enerals, was named ; but such interest had been made for
im that, aftet two divisions, he escaped by 160 to 131. A
ohn Blackwell of Mortlake, the reasons for whose unpopu-
irity might need research, was added without hesitation. —
)n the 16thj Lambert and Alderman Christopher Pack were
nanimously added, as was also Sergeant Keble now, on
Bcond thoughts ; wlnle Sir William Roberts escaped by one
ote only. It was now Saturday, and the House in one week
ad settled on only thirteen of the proposed Twenty. —
)n that same Saturday, in evidence of the fact that, in look-
ig about for a suitable Twenty, the demerits of various stray
ersons besides those that have been named had come duly to
lind, and had been much discoursed of and canvassed, there
i a memorable entry in the journals. The last piece of business
bat day, it appears, consisted of two consecutive ordera and
resolution appended. The orders were (1) that his Majesty
lould be moved to issue his Royal Proclamation for the
illing in of all copies of John Miltoii's EikonoMastes and his
est Prti Populo Avglieano DefensiOy and of all copies of John,
roodwin's Obstructors of Justice, with other books of which
le House would prepare a schedule, in order that all might
B burnt by the hands of the hangman, and (2) that Mr.
Lttorney- General Geoffrey Palmer should be instructed to
istitute immediate proceedingSj by ipdietment or information,
»ainst Milton and Goodwin for their defences of the Regicide
I the books nasaed. The appended Resolution was that
[ilton and Goodwin should be forthwith taken into custody
Y the Sergeant at Arms. In relation to Milton there will
5 subsequent investigation of this incident. We note it now
L its proper chronological place as an occurrence in the week
■deliberations by the Commons concerning the twenty persons
I the general community that were to be excepted from the
40 LIFE OF MILTON AND HISTORY OF HIS TIME.
Pardon in all respects save that of life. It happened precisely
at that point of their deliberations when they had chosen
thirteen of the Twenty and had seven more to choose. In
their ranging for suitable persons, one sees, they had naturally
thought of the two most conspicuous literary defenders of the
Regicide. — Hyde and the Privy Council were growing im-
patient with the slow course of the Indemnity Bill in the
Commons; and on Monday the 18th Mr. Secretary Morrice
delivered a written message to the House from his Majesty.
In very gracious terms, it urged expedition with the Indem-
nity Bill. That day, accordingly, the House completed the
Twenty by adding Charles Fleetwood, John Pyne (called " The
King of the West " and described by his enemies as " a great
tyrant" there), Richard Dean (not the Regicide of that name,
but aqother, represented as " an Anabaptist "), Major Richard
Creed (with Lambert in the last rising), Philip Nye (the
famous Independent preacher), John Goodwin (now separated
from Milton and taken by himself), and Ralph Cobbet (with
Lambert in his last rising, but remembered also as the officer
who had brought Charles I. from the Isle of Wight). The
nominations appear in the Journals as all unanimous, except
Creed's, in favour of whom there were two divisions without
success. There is evidence, however, both in the Journals
and elsewhere, that this day's debate was very vehement, and
that, as only seven of the Twenty then remained to be chosen,
there was a competition for their nominations correspondingly
keen. There had even been motions by Prynne, Lord Falkland,
and others, for debarring members of Republican or Oliverian
connexions from the vote on such an occasion ; and, when that
idea was set aside, there were various proposals of names, with
arguments for and against each. Prynne was the most ruth-
less and reckless in his nominations. It was he that proposed
Fleetwood, and secured him in spite of some defence by
military members. He actually proposed Richard Cromwell,
but was not seconded in that instance ; he then proposed
Major Salw^y, but only to be met by arguments for Salway
which, with a petition from himself, saved him. Philip Jones
was similarly saved, by his own petition and the intervention
THE INDEMNITY BILL IN THE COMMONS. 41
f Mr. Annesley and Mr. Fincli. Bulstrode Whitlocke had
gain a narrow escape. Prynne was eager for including him
fter all, and was supported by some ; but the defences of
Lttorney-General Palmer, Sir Geoge Booth, and others,
irought Whitlocke off a second time. Richard Dean was
lominated by Clarges ; John Goodwin by Prynne : Nye by
)ir William W^ylde, who denounced him as a fellow that
lad enriched himself hugely in the troubles, while others
ttacked his conduct as one of Oliver's triers of church-pre-
entees, and one speaker insisted that he ought to be made
special example by being excepted capitally. Judge Thorpe
(fas proposed in competition with Gobbet for the last place,
nd, to make room for him, it was suggested that Gobbet
Iso might be reserved for trial for his life ; but, the House not
ising to this pitch of severity in Gobbet's case either, Thorpe
ad to be dropped. — The notion, however, of excepting some
apitally, over and above the twenty reserved for any penalties
kort of the capital one, had struck the House as convenient,
'hey were at the end of their Twenty, and yet there were
jveral left over that they longed to include somehow. "Twenty
nd no more " had been the wording of their original Reso-
ition of June 8, in prospect of the only exceptions they
ere to make from the Bill of Indemnity in addition to
le direct mass of the positive Regicides. Without heeding
lat, they ended their sitting of Monday, June 18, their
ournals tell us, as follows: — "The information of William
Young, of Piellcrochun in the Gounty of Pembroke, Doctor
of Physic, concerning Hugh Peters, was read : Resolved,
That William H.ewlet be excepted out of the Act of General
Pardon and Oblivion; Besolved, That Hugh Peters be ex-
cepted out of the Act of General Pardon and Oblivion."
1 the Hewlet here mentioned, an old Parliamentary soldier
ho had risen to captain's rank, the House thought they had
und one of the King's executioners at last ; and, if they
ere right, their resolution in his case was only a confirma-
jn of a previous resolution by inserting his name in one of
m blank spaces there. But Peters was clearly a supernu-
erary. He was not one of the outstanding Regicide Judges
42 LIFE OF MILTON AND HISTOKY OF HIS TIME.
that alone remained to be added in the class of the positive
Regicides when the House passed their resolution for tioenty
and no more beyond that class ; nor had he been included in
that Twenty ; nor was there any relic now in the House of the
absurd ' belief, which might have justified his conjunction
with Hewlet, that he had been one of the two executioners.
What then? Was not Dr. Young's information from Pembroke-
shire to the effect that Peters, when dangerously ill at
Plymouth on his return from Ireland, and attended by Dr,
Young, had told him that "he and Oliver Cromwell, when
" the said Cromwell went from the Parliament unto the Army
" in 1648, didj in a field on this side Ware, none being present
" besides, contrive and design the death of his late Majesty, with
" the change of the Government ?" What evidence could be
clearer? Could not one see the very field, and Cromwell and
Peters talking in the middle of it, and not a soul else on the
horizon ? In such an extraordinary case why should there
not be a twenty-first man ? Why should not Peters, who
was yet skulking somewhere, but sure to be captured, be con-
joined with Hewlet, and left to the law among the capital
exceptions? That, at any rate, was what the House did.
His real crime was that he was Hugh Peters^.
One would have expected Thurloe to be among the twenty
excepted. He had been under arrest, by order of the Commons,
on a special charge of high treason, since May 15, when a
small committee of the House, including Annesley and
Prynne, had been appointed for his examination. He had
been found very reasonable, and willing to be of any use to
the King's government that would not be dishonourable to
himself. The understanding, therefore, had come to be that
he should suffer no very severe punishment. Still the
Commons had inserted into the Bill a special clause for
putting some mark of disgrace upon him ^.
1 Commons Journals of dates ; Mrs. paper called Emet Acemnpt, &c., No.
Green's Calendar of State Papers for 101 (June 15—22, 1660). The summary
1660—1661, pp. 52, 57 ; Pari. Hist. IV. of Dr. Young's infomatlon about Peters
68 — 75 (including extracts from a manu- Is from the last.
script diary of the House by a Member, 2 Commons Journals of May 15 and
beginning June 18, 1660) ; the news- June 29.
THE INDEMNITY BILL IN THE COMMONS. 43
For yet another three weeks the Bill dragged through the
Commons. There had to be adjustments of the wording to
bring it into coherence ; and amendments and provisos still
suggested themselves. Thus, after reconsideration of various
particulars on June 19, 22,27, 29, and 30, and when the Bill was
in the stage of the third reading, there was an exciting and com-
plex debate, from July 2 to July 7, over certain provisos moved
by one member or another in order to make the Bill even
then more stringent and revengeful. One unknown member
had put in a proviso for disabling all who had sat in high
courts of justice since 1648, all Crom well's major-generals
and decimatorg, and all who bad petitioned against the King.
Prynne strenuously supported the proviso, and others were for
extending it so as to include all who had sat in Parliament
in 1647 and 1648, or had been active in any way through the
Protectorate ; and it required all the exertions of Annesley,
Finch, Clarges, and Matthew Hale, to quench this "hand-
grenado thrown into a barrel of gunpowder." Then there
was a proviso for causing all in ofiBce through the Protectorate
to refund their salaries, — a worse hand-grenado than the last,
inasmuch as the punishment it threatened would have been
worse to many than inclusion among the Twenty. Prynne,
of course, spoke for the proviso, which was opposed and scouted
by Sir Thomas Widdrington, Clarges, Sir Anthony Ashley
Cooper, and others, and set aside by 180 votes to 151. Yet
other provisos, tending to the disablement of large classes of
persons, were set aside by the steadiness of the moderate
members ; and, though minor alterations and additions were
agreed to, the Bill emerged at last on the 9th of July, ready
for one other important proviso, the addition of which had
been rendered necessary by circumstances. — Before the ex-
piring of the fourteen days allowed by the King's Proclamation,
twenty of the Regicides till then at large had been reported to
the House as having surrendered themselves, in this order, —
Heveningham, Wayte, Mayne, Peter Temple, Isaac Penning-
ton, Alderman Tichbourne, George Fleetwood, James Temple,
Sir John Bourchier, Owen Bowe, Robert Lilburne, Scroope,
Garland, Harvey, Henry Smith, Henry Marten, Sir Hardress
44. LIFE OF MILTON AND HISTORY OF HIS TIME.
Waller, Lord Monson, Ludlow, and Carew. Wogan had also
surrendered, though after the proper date ; Downes, Milliug-
ton, and Potter are heard of as having surrendered j and
Dixwell had announced himself as ill, but as intending to
surrender. Only eleven of the Regicide Judges apart from
the seven capitally prejudged seem now to have remained at
large. It was deemed proper that these should suffer for
their contumacy; and, accordingly, almost the last proviso
added to the Bill on the 9th of July was one removing them
from the second class of the excepted, and putting them into
the first or extreme class, who were to be excepted for life
as well as for estate. They were Daniel Blagrave, "William
Cawley, Miles Corbet, John Dixwell, William Goffe, John
Hewson, Sir Michael Livfisey, Nicholas Love, John Okey,
Valentine Walton, and Edward Whalley. It would seem
that Dixwell had changed his mind, and that Wogan's late
surrender had been accepted. — All was now complete ; and on
the 11th of July the Bill passed the Commons, and was sent
up to the Lords ^.
The Lords took their own time over the Bill, examinine
it in gross and in detail from their own point of view, which
was by no means that of the Commons. No sooner had it
been brought up by Mr. Annesley than there was a request
to the Commons for all the documents concerning the Kind's
Trial ; and, on the first reading of the Bill, on July 12, there
was a sign already that at least one of the " twenty " of the
Commons would fare worse in the Lords. Axtell had been
talking imprudently in his prison, saying that "Monk's
reign would be short," that the King and Council " would
involve the kingdom again in blood," &c. ; and it happened
that, just as Axtell's good friend reported this to the Council,
there came also a letter from Ireland, written by an old
servant of Charles I, expressing surprise that Axtell was to
escape with life, when the writer could testify that he had
heard him incite his soldiers in Westminster Hall to cry out
re-
1 Pari Hiat IV. 75-80 (with ac- sun-enders of the Regicides -were ■„-
counts of the debates trom MS.) ; Com- ported successively, June 9 13 15 16
mens Journals of dates given. The 18, 19, 20, and 21. > > > >
THE INDEMNITY BILL IN THE LOEDS. 45
for the King's execution. The letter was sent hy the King
to the Lords, and there read with effect. But it was after
the second reading of the Bill, on. July 17, when the Lords
went into Committee of the whole House upon it, with Lord
Eoberts for chairman, that the procedure became practical.
On report from the Committee by Roberts on the 20th, it
was agreed that all the Regicide Judges, senteneers or signers
of the death-warrant, should be excepted from the Indemnity;
and on the 23rd the House had the two fatal lists before
them, — that of the sixty-seven senteneers and that of the fifty-
nine signers. Then, to make their meaning more exact, they
ordered that Colonel Hutchinson's name should be struck out
of both documents, agreeing with the Commons that he de-
served pardon ; and, Ingoldsby's name also being regarded as
deleted from the warrant, there remained sixty-six senteneers,
of whom fifty-six were also signers, while Thomas Challoner,
as the only signer who had not been a sentencer, was put in
a corner of the list of senteneers as virtually one of them.
Thus, in the reckoning of the Lords, there were sixty-seven
Regicide Judges; regarding whom they could come to no
other conclusion than that they should be "absolutely ex-
cepted " from the Bill, whereas the Commons had put only
twenty-tw^o in that extreme category, viz. the four dead and
seven living originally nained, and the eleven afterwards added
because they had persisted in absconding after the King's
Proclamation. In the afternoon sitting of the same day,
however, it was agreed by the Lords to spare Tomlinson,
though not without a protest by the Earl of Lichfield and
Lord Maynard. This reduced the number to sixty-six. The
lists before the House hitherto were the most authentic that
could be had ; but, on intimation that Colonel Francis Hacker,
who was a prisoner in the Tower, could produce the original
death-warrant, on which he had acted on the dreadful day,
with all the names attached in autograph, it was ordered that
Hacker should be examined on the subject. On the 24th it was
reported that Hacker said the parchment was still extant, but
that it was in the country, and could only be obtained by send-
ing his wife to fetch it ; also that, on being questioned who the
46 LIFE OF MILTON AND HISTORY OF HIS TIME.
actual executioner wats, he said he believed him to have been of
the rank of a major in the army^ but did not know his name.
The same day John Rushworth was brought into the House
and interrogated, but could give no information to the point. —
By this time the feeling in the Commons was that the Lords
were very dilatory. It had been hoped that they would
accept the Bill very much as the Commons had sent it up ;
but their Lordships were inquiring into all afresh, as if bent
on shaping an entirely new Bill of their own. There had
been messages from the Commons urging expedition.; and
on July 27 his Majesty himself appeared among the Lords
and mad-e an earnest speech to the same effect. He reminded
thesir Lordships of his large promises of pardon in his Declara-
tion from Breda, quoting the entire paragraph textually; he
hinted that, but for those promises and the very breadth of the
wording of them, neither he nor their lordships might have been
where they now were ; and he exhorted them to pass the Indem-
nity Act "without other exceptions than of those who were
immediately guilty of that murder." Their Lordships thanked
his Majesty, and moved that he would be pleased to cause
his speech to be printed ; but, having thus given him the
benefit of whatever popularity might accrue from his inter-
ference, they persevered in their own course. — Hacker's poor
wife had brought the terrible parchment from the country ;
H acker had delivered it to the Lieutenant of the Tower;
and on the 31st it was in their Lordships' House, where it
has remained ever since. On that day and the next there
was reconsideration of the ease of Matthew Tomlinson. His
name was not on the death-warrant ; but, as one of the
sentencers, and as the colonel in chief charge of the King
between his sentence and his execution, ought he not after
all to be included among the Regicides ? On evidence pro-
duced that the dead King himself had spoken of Tomlinson
as one who had treated him with civility and respect in his
last hours, it was finally agreed .to show him favour and to
omit his name from the list of sentencers. This was on
Aug. 1 ; on which day also the House resolved, on report
from Roberts, that Hacker, Vane, Hasilrig, Lambert, and
THE INDEMNITY BILL IN THE LORDS. 47
Axtell, should be " wholly excepted" from the Bill, thus
adding Hacker and Axtell to the list of the unpardonable
Regicides, and conjoining with them three general culprits
whom the Commons had placed among the twenty reserved
for penalties not capital. As Axtell also had been put among
these twenty by the Commons, there remained but sixteen
of that body whom the Lords agreed to consider not ab-
solutely unpardonable. These the Lords proposed to deal with
in a different way from that which the Commons had designed.
On August 2 it was resolved, on report from Eoberts, " That
" if any of these persons following,-^ viz. William Lenthall,
" esquire, William Burton, Oliver St. John, Colonel William
" Sydenham, Colonel John Desborough, John Bladiwell of
" Mortlake, Christopher Pack, alderman, Richard Keble,
" Charles Fleetwood, John Pyne, Richard Dean, Major
" Richard Creed, Philip Nye, clerk, John Goodwin, clerk,
" Colonel Ralph Cobbet, and John Ireton, alderman, — shall
" hereafter accept or exercise any office, eecJesiastieal, civil, or
" military, or any ©ther public employment, within this
" Kingdom, Dominion of Wales, Town of Berwick-upon-Tweed,
" or Ireland, then such person or persons as do so accept or
"execute as aforesaid shall, to all intents and purposes of law,
" stand as if he or they had been totally excepted by name in
"Ijhis Act." Whether intentionally or not, this brand of
perpetual incapacitation upon the sixteen might prove a less
severe punishment for some of them than might have bften
awarded if they had heen reserved, as the Commons had
proposed, for penalties, not extending to death, to be fixed
by a future Act. On Aug. 4 and Aug, 6, at all events,
there were two slight relapses into mercy ; for it was agreed,
on consideration of the expressed repentance of Thomas
Lister and Sir Gilbert Pickering, and of the &ct that their
part in the King's Trial had been small, to cancel their
names from the list of Regicides and give them the full
benefit of the Act. But on the 7th the House proposed four
additional capital victims, in a second (?) John Blackwell, a
Colonel Croxton, a William Wyberd, and an Edmund Waring,
selected,' by private agreement, from among those who had
48 LIFE OP MILTON AND HISTORY OF HIS TIME.
sat in the courts that had sent the Duke of Hamilton, the
Earl of Holland, and Lord Capel to the seafibld in March
1648-9, and the Earl of Derby in October 1651. On the
8th there was a resolution freeing Thurloe from penalties
altogether ; but on the 9th there was exactly such a final
sweep of indiscriminate vindictiveness as Prynne and others
had demanded in the Commons when the Bill was leaving
that House. It took the form of a resolution "That all
" those that sat in any High Court of Justice shall be made
" uneapable of bearing any office, -ecclesiastical, civil, or
"military, within the Kingdom of England, and Dominion
" of Wales, and that all such persons that have sat in any
" High Court of Justice shall be liable to such further
" penalties as by any future Act of Parliament shall be in-
" flicted upon them, not extending to life." It was intended,
though not here expressed, that the resolution (which, it
will be observed, brought back some of the sixteen for
penalties besides incapacitation) should not apply to Ingoldsby,
Tomlinson, Lister, or Pickering, who had already been con-
doned otherwise. There were yet some concluding adjust-
ments ; but on the 10th the Bill, as amended, passed the
Lords, and went back to the Commons for their con-
currence ^-
There was a debate of two days in the Commons over the
amendments of the Lords (Aug. 11 and 13). Some of the
amendments were accepted, — e.g. that condoning Thurloe
entirely, that removing Lister and Pickering from the list of
excepted Regicides, and that adding Hacker to their number.
A more difficult question was that of adopting the proposal
of the Lords to brand sixteen of the " twenty " with perpetual
incapacitation, instead of reserving them to be dealt with in a
special Act inflicting other penalties. By a division of 197 to
102 it was agreed, however, to concur with the Lords here too,
though adding Lister and Pickering to the sixteen. — But on
the question of transferring the remaining four of the twenty,
viz. Vane, Hasilrig, Lambert, and Axtell, to the list of capital
1 Lords Journals of dates ; Mrs. Green's Calendar of State Papers, 1660—1661
p. 116 (about Axtell). ; .
DIFFERENCES ON THE INDEMNITY BILL. 49
exceptions, the Commons stood firm. They negatived that
amendment, adhering to their own more merciful intention
for the four. No wonder, either, that there was a resolute
opposition to that amendment of the Lords which decreed
capital penalties to all the surviving King's Judges who had
been sentencers or signers of the death-warrant, except the
three specially condoned. It proposed the capital condem-
nation of forty-three in this class, whereas the Commons had
been content with seven originally^ though they had at the
last added eleven more for their contumacy in absconding
after the King's Proclamation. Some were for concurring
with the Lords ; but others pleaded the honour of the House
for the lives of all it had already voted to save, and a large
majority, including Annesley and Sir George Booth, argued
that the honour of the King himself, as well as that of the
House, was pledged for at least the lives of all the sentencers
and signers of the death-warrant who had come in on the
Proclamation. These, it would seem, were reckoned now as
only twenty-one, — Carew, Downes, George Fleetwood, Garland)
Harvey, Heveningham, Robert Lilburne, Henry Marten,
Mayne, Millington, Pennington, Potter, E,owe, Adrian
Scroope, Smith, James Temple, Peter Temple, Tiehboume,
Sir Hardress Waller, Wayte, and Wogan. Ludlow, who had
surrendered, had again absconded ; and old Sir John Bourchier
had died since his surrender, testifying to the Eegicide, it is
said, on his deathbed, " It was a just act, and all good men
will own it." For the twenty-one named the House resolved
to adhere to their previous votes, repeating expressly their
stipulation that Adrian Scroope's penalty should be limited to
a year's value of his lands. The proposal of the Lords for
four additional capital victims from among the judges of the
Royalist peers was negatived with some indignation. Was
it seemly that the blood of the mere Peerage should be
mingled at such a moment with that of the King? Had the
Commons asked for victims on account of misdeeds or insults
to their House ? Finally, on the complex proviso of the Lords
for incapacitating all that had sat in any High Court of
Justice" through the interregnum, and also for inflicting
VOL. VI. E
50 LIFE OP MILTON AND HISTOKY OF HIS TIME.
penalties on such by; a separate Act, the Commons also dis-
agreed with the Lords. They negativ^ed the sepond clause of the
proviso, reserving such culprits for penalties ; and they voted
to accept the first clause if worded as foUpws : " Provided
" likewise that all those who, since the 5th of December, 1648,
" did give sentence of death upon any person, or persons in
"ajiy of the late illegal and tyrannical high courts of
'< justice in England or Wales, or signed the warrant for the
"execution of any person there condemned (except Colonel
" Richard Ingoldsby and Colonel Matthew Tamlinson) shall
"be, and are hereby, made incapable of bearing any officej
" ecclesia,stical, civil, of military, within the ■ kingdom of
" England or dominion of Wales, or of serving as a member
" in any Parliament after the 1st day of September, 1660."
The Bill then went back to the Lords ^.
There had to be four Conferences between the two Hquses,
— Aug 17, 21, 23, 25, — with speeches. and reasonings at each,
besides debq,tes in the Houses tjiemgelyes in the intervals,
before they could come to agreement. The Lords gave up
their demand for four additional capital victims for the slain
peers, and they accepted also the modification of the pro-
viso for those who had sat in high courts of justice ; but
they stood to their determination, to make Vane, Hasilrig,
Lambert, and Axtell capital: exceptions, and also to their
determination to deal capitally with all the Regicides on their
list (the sentencers and, signers), except Ingoldsby, Tomlinson,
and Hutchinson. Qn these two questions there was a keen
controversy.— ^That of the four culprits on general grounds,
was first decided. It was decided on the 24th of August,
and chiefly in consequence of a suggestion thrown out by
Chancellor Hyde, who had managed the third conferenpe for
the Lords an(i reasoned in defenep of their severe policy with
all his lawyerly skill. Vane, Hasilrig, Lambert, and Axtell, he
h,a,d contended, were " persons of a mischievous activity," such,
criminals that the. Lords could not consent to record a punish-
ment against them less than capital ; but their lordships would
1 Commons Joomals of dates, and ferences to Noble's iJeg-JoWe*,— a most
rajLl, Hjrt-,IV. 86— 97; witli some re- slovenly and careless book.
CONFERENCES ON THE INDEMNITY BILL. 51"
join with the Commons, if they pleased, in a petition to his
Majesty that, if they should be capitally condemned, he would
spare their lives. This was fa,r from satisfactory to many in
the Commons, but it had such an eifect that they debated on
the four severally. Axtell was easily given up, as a kind of
assessor of the Regicide. There was a fight for Vane, in
which Holies took a brave part ; but Vane was given up too.
For LambeJit the chief speaker was Sir George Booth, the
very man whose Cheshire insurrection for the King had' been
crushed by Lambert ; but Lambert too was given up. Finally
came Hasilrig's turn. There- was more speaking for and
against in his case than in any of the others, On one side
were Mr. Tomkins, Lord Ancram, and Sir Roger Palmer,,
reminding the House of his evil actings and his evil speak-
ings.. Was it not he that had. stirred up the vote for no more
addresses to the King in the Isle of Wight, saying to the
Spesiker, " Sir> shall we believe that man of .no faith ?"
Had he not said to Sir Roger Palmer not long ago that, if
Charles II. did come in, he knew the consequence for himself
'* It was but three wry mouths and a swing ? " Let him have
what he had expected ! On the other hand, Annesley,, Agliley
Cooper, Colonel Birch, and others, spoke fori him, adducing
also Monk's opinion, in his favour. When it went to a divi-
sion, there were 141. votes for Hasilrig to 116 against him ;
and so h,e was saved.. There had been no division in the cases
of Vane and Lambert ; but it was agreed, on a motion by
Mr. Pierrepoint, going beyond Hyde's suggestion,, to petition
the King that they should not be tried for their lives. Noi
one had anything more to say for Daniel Axtell. — Only the
question of the Regicides now remained. Not all Hyde's,
special plfcading could convince the Copimons that the King
was not bound in honour to mak* a difference, in favour of
those who had come in on his Proclamation. Otherwise they
had beeii " snared " ;. all argument to the contrary by Hyde
or anyone else was bftt ingpitious sophistication. But Prynne
and a few more were for agreeing entirely with the Jjords,—
Prynne, in especial, standing up,, with his obdurate ghaistly
face and the cgwl over the spots, wheje. his ears had been, and,
JE 3
52 LIFE OF MILTON AND HISTOEY OF HIS TIME.
speaking for agreement. He had been for excepting all at
first, he saidj and was so still ; such miscreants ought not to
live ; by sparing these men would not the nation itself incur
the guilt of the Eegieide ? The wave of generous feeling
overwhelmed Prynne, if it could not silence him ; and Hyde
had to be ready with another of his " expedients;" It was
propounded at the fourth conference, and was to the effect
that the Commons should agree with the Lords as to all the
Regicides, so that all might be tried for their lives, but that
there should be a special clause in favour of stopping execu-
tion of the capital sentence m the eases of those who had
" rendered themselves upon an opinion that they might safely
do so." He professed not to know their names, and so had
left a blank for them in the clause as it had been drafted.
That same day (Aug. 25), the Lords having acquiesced in the
decision of the Commons respecting Hasilrig and in their
other desires, the Commons reluctantly agreed to Hyde's com-
promise about the Regicides, appointing a committee to
ascertain which of them were entitled to the benefit of the
saving clause, and at the same time to see to the verbal
coherence of the whole Bill. This committee reported on
the 28th. Then the House, transferring Sir John Bourehier
to the list of the dead Regicides, and also distinctly reiterating
their vote that the dead Lord Grey of Groby's name should
be omitted from the Bill, so that his representatives' might
not suffer in property, agreed, on the other hand, to recant
one of their own former resolutions of mercy. Though they
had voted for condoning Adrian Scroope, so far as to take
him out of the list of exceptions in the Bill altogether, and
allow him to escape with a mulct of one year's value of his
estates, there had been such reports to them of private dis-
courses of Scroope since the King's return, and such remon-
strances with them on their extraordinary charity to him,
that they now flung him overboard. They would not even
returu him among those who had surrendered themselves,
but, by omitting him, reduced the number of such to exactly
twenty.- Even these, it seems, were too many for the Lords ;
for, when the Bill was carried up to them that day by sergeant
THE INDEMNITY BILL PASSED. 53
Glynne, in the name of the Commons, as now complete, they
requested yet another conference. At this conference they
objected to two of the names. They objected to including Sir
Hardress Waller among those to have the benefit of the
saving clause, on the ground that he had " absented himself
since his coming in." On explanation, they accepted Mm;
but in the case of another of the twenty they were obstinate.
This was John Carew. It was admitted that he had surren-
dered himself; but it was pointed out that he had done so
before the Proclamation had gone out. The Commons could
only return to their own House to vote on the subject. For
insisting that Mr. Carew should have the benefit of the
saving clause in his peculiarly hard circumstances there
were 70 votes, against 80 for leaving him to his fate. This
concluded the whole business. It was still the 28th of
August, and Mr. Holies was instructed to carry the Bill up
again to the Lords as absolutely finished this time, and to
request their Lordships to move his Majesty to come to their
House and give his assent to it next day. Mr. Holies brought
back word immediately that it should be so ^.
On Wednesday the 39th of August his Majesty did appear
in the Lords, and, the Commons having been summoned, did
give his assent to the Bill, and then address the two Houses
in a speech concerning it and other matters. From that day,
all not excepted in the "Act of Free and General Pardon,
Indemnity, and Oblivion" might consider themselves safe
and might breathe freely. It was even expressly provided
in the Act that there should be penalties on any sheriff or
other officer that should molest any person not excepted in
the Act for anything pardoned or discharged in it, that for
three years there should be penalties on the use of any words
of reproach or disgrace " tending to revive the memory of the
late difi'erences," and that the construction of the Act in any
dubious case should always be to the advantage of the accused.
We may now, therefore, recapitulate the exceptions as ex-
pressed in the Act itself : —
' Commons and Lords Journals of abstract of speeches in the Commons
dates, and Pari. Hist. IV. 97—111 (with from a MS. Diary).
54 LIFE OF MILTON AND HISTOEY OF HIS TIME.
I. FotTR Dead iREGiciDBS excepted in ohibe : — These were
Oliver Cromwell, iHenry Ireton, John Bradshaw, and Thomas
Pride, now enumerated in that order.
II. Twenty more Dead EEO-rciDBS EXCEPtED : — They were
Francis Allen, Jcihn Alured, Thomas Andrews, John Blaikiston,
Sir John Bourchier, Sir "William Constable, Bart., Sir John Dan-
veis, Richard Dean, Humphrey Edwards, Isaac Ewer, John Fry,
Thomas Hammond, Thomas Horton, Sir Thomas Mauleverer, Bart.,
John Moore, Sir Greisfory ^Norton, Bart., Peregritle Pelham, William
Purefoy, Anthony Sta"jil6yj and John Venn. The " lands, tene-
ments, goods, chattels, rights, trusts, and other the hereditaments "
of these were to be subject to such " pains, penalties, and for-
feitures " as should Ibe expressed and declared by another Act of
Parliament, which should also confitm the Attainder of the four
already named.
HI. Thirty Living Regicides, vtith two mofAMED, abso-
lutely EXCEPTED : — These coftiiprised twenty-two of the Eegicide
Judges, — ^^to wit, John Barkstead, Daniel Blagrave, John Carew,
"William Gawley, Thotiaas Ohallener, Gregcrry Olements, Cornelius
Holland, Miles Corbet, John Dixwell, "William Goffe, Thomas
Harrison, John Hewson, John Jones, John Lisle, Sir Michael
tiivesey, Nicholas Love, Edmund Ludlow, John Okey, William Say,
Thomas Scott, Adrian Scroope, Valentine 'Waltori, and Fdward
"Whalley ; togetlier with Daniel Axtell, Francis Hacker, John Oook,
Andrew Broughton, Edward Dendy, William Hewlet, Hugh Peters,
and those two persons " who, being disguised by frocks and visors,
did appear upon the scaffold erected before Whitehall." Hewlet
and Peters, whether on their own account, or to stand for the two
executioners in default of the real men, were huddled with the
Regicides.
IV. Nineteen Living Regicides excepted with a Saving
Clause: — They were John Downes, George Fleetwood, Augustine
Garlahd, Edmund Harvey, William Heveningham, Robert Lil-
burne, Henry Marten, Simon Mayne, Gilbert Millington, Isaac
Pennington, Vincent Potter, Owen Rowe, Henry Smith, James
Temple, Peter Temple, Robert Tichbourne, Sir Hardress Waller,
Thomas Wayte, and Thomas Wogan. The saving clause van that,
whereas these persons had surrendered on the King's Proclamation
of June 6, wherein they had been named, and " do pretend thereby
"to some favour, npon some conceived doubtful words in the said
" Proclamation," it was part of the Act that, if they or any of them
should be '.' legally attainted for the horrid treason and murther
aforesaid," 'then nevertheless their execution should be " suspended
" until his Majesty, by the advice and assent of the Lords and
" Commons in Parliament, shall order the execution, by Act of
" Parliament to be passed for that purpose."
V. Six more op the Living Regicides excepted, but not
CAPITALLY :— Tliese were the five judges deemed most oulpable,
Abstract op the indemnity bill. 55
for the part they had taken in the trial, though not present at the
sentence nor signers of the death-warrant — ^to wit : James Challoner,
Sir James Harrington, Sir Henry Mildmay, Lord Monson, and
Robert "Wallop, with John Phelps, one bf the clerks of the Court.
They were " reserved to such pains, J)enalties, and forfeitures, not
extending to life," as might be settled by another Act.
VI. Two EeGICIDES liXCEPTBD, BUT FOR iNCAPAdlTATION
ONLY : — These were John Hutchinson and Francis Laesels, neither
of whom was to hold thenceforth auy office df trust, civil or
military, in the kingdota, and the second of whom, moreover, was
to pay to the king " one full year's value of his estate."
VII. Two Non-Regicides wholly excepted : — These were
Lambert and Sir Henry Vane. The agreement of the two Houses
to petition for their lives was understood, but does not appear in
the Act.
VIII. One Non-Eegicide excepted, but not capitally :^
This was Sir Arthur Hasilrig, reserved for '• such pains, penalties,
and forfeitures, not extending to life," as might be settled by
another Act.
IX. Eighteen Persons to be under perpetual beand op
Incapacitation: — These were:— among the Republicans and Oli-
verians of military note, Charles Fleetwood, John Desborriugh,
William Sydenham, Ralph Cobbet, and Richard Creed ; with ex-
Speaker Lenthall, Oliver St. John, Christopher Pack, Alderman
John Ireton, Willialm Burton, John Blackwell of Mortlake, Richard
Keble, John Pyne, and Richard Dean, among civilians, aud Thomas
Lister and Sir Gilbert Pickering, transf^rt-ed by grace from the list
of Regicides ; and with Philip Nye and John Goodwin to represent
the prime offenders among the Oliverian and Republican clergy.
If any of them should accept or exercise any Office of trust iu
England, Wales, or Berwick-on-Tweed, he was to forfeit all benefit
of the Act, a;nd might suffer capitally.
X. A Definite number more incapacitated by description,
but not by name: — These were all persons (Colonel Richard
Ingoldsby and Colonel Matthew Tomlinson honourably excepted)
by whose sentence or warrant in any pretended High Court of
Justice since Dec. 6, 1648, any one had been capitally condemned
or executed. They were to be excluded for ever from all public
offices and from sitting in Parliament.
XI. Miscellaneous Exceptions : — There were to be excepted,
moreover, all who had committed murders, piracifes, or other great
crimes, distinctly unconnected with the civil wars or politics ; also
all who had assisted " in the plotting, contriving, or designing of
the great and heinous rebellion of Ireland " ; also all offences com-
mitted " by any Jesuit, Seminary, or Romish priest whatsoever,"
contrary to the statute of Elizabeth against teuch ; also all menial
servants of his Majesty who had sold or betrayed his secrets.
Also, though there was to be the most general confirmation of all
56 LIFE OF MILTON AND HISTOEY OP HIS TIME.
rights of property acquired by purchase, gift, or conveyance, through
the troubles, this was not to apply to acquisition of lands of the
king or queen, or of the lands of archbishops, bishops, deans, and
deans and chapters. This last exception was in accordance with
resolutions to which the Parliament had come independently while
the Indemnity Bill was in progress. " Because, in the continued
" distractions of so many years and so many great revolutions," the
King had said in his Breda Declaration, " many grants and pur-
" chases of estates have been made to and by many officers, soldiers,
'■ and others, who are now possessed of the same, and who may be
" liable to actions at law upon several titles, we are likewise willing
" that all such differences, and all things relating to such grants,
" sales, and purchases, shall be determined in Parliament." Accord-
ingly, a " Bill of Sales " had been introduced into the Commons,
which had occasioned stormy discussion (July 11), and was not
yet perfected, but the purport of the proceedings in which, so far
as they had gone, was that, while all Crown lands were to revert
to the Crown without compensation, and arrangements would have
to be made by the possessors of CImrch lands before they could
retain them, other properties were to remain undisturbed \
Along with the great Indemnity Bill, his Majesty gave his
assent to five other Bills. One was " An Act for a perpetual
Anniversary Thanksgiving to be observed and kept on the 29th
of May," the day of his Majesty's entry into London ; another
was " An Act for the Confirmation of Judicial Proceedings,"
intended to prevent question of rights depending on decisions
of law-courts under the late Governments ; a third was " An
Act for the restraining the taking of excessive Usury,"
i. e. for limiting interest on borrowed money to six per cent.;
a fourth was a private Act for naturalising two foreigners ;
and the fifth was " An Act for the speedy provision of Money
for disbanding and paying off the Forces of this Kingdom
both by Land and Sea." This last represents the progress
that had been made in one department of the greatest question,
next to the Indemnity Bill, that had been occupying the
Parliament hitherto, the question of Supply and Revenue.
' Statutes at Large : 12 CaroU II, lists is accounted for in the present
Cap. XI. If the reader will refer to the abstract of the Bill, except John Dove
two lists of the Eegioide Judges already in the second list. Though his case was
given— that of the Sentencers at p. 28, kept under consideration in the Oom-
aud that of those who had taken some mons on June 9 (ante 37), he has now
other part in the Trial at pp. 35, 36— vanished altogether,
it will be found that every one in both
SUPPLY AND BEVENUE. 57
It liad been resolved to disband the Army and reduce the
'lavy to a few ships^ so as to save a vast cost monthly ; but
hat could not be done without providing for payment of
rrears. It was also intended that, whereas the revenue of
he Crovwi in the time of Charles I. had been about ,^900,000
year, about ,^250,000 of which came from illegal sources,
r sources not now available, tlie present king's revenue
hould be .^1,200,000 a year, and all valid; but how to carry
his intention into effect was no easy financial problem, and
11 that had been actually voted for Charles since he came
a. was a subsidy for life of the customs of tonnage and
loundage. Meanwhile, for disbanding the Army and Navy,
'arliament had reverted to the rough old device of a poll-tax,
-every Duke to pay ^''100, every Marquis ^80, every Earl
^'60, and so down to Esquires at ,^10 each, and thence again
ownwards to a shilling from every labouring person over
ixteen years, and sixpence from every one under that age,
ot a pauper. It was an Act embodying that proposal that
ad now been submitted to his Majesty along with the
ndemnity Bill ; and the spirit in which his Majesty, or
lyde for him, received the Act appears from one of the pas-
jges in his speech. " For your Poll Bill," he said, " I do
thank you as much as if the money were to come into my
own coffers, and wish with all my heart that it may amount
to as great a sum as you reckon upon; If the work be well
and orderly done to which it is designed, I am sure I shall
be the richer by it in the end ; and, upon my word, if I had
wherewithal, I would myself help you. ... I am so con-
fident of your affections that I will not move you in anything
that relates immediately to myself; and yet I must tell you
I am not richer, — that is, I have not so much money in my
j)urse as when I came to you. The truth is I have lived
principally ever since upon what I brought with me ; which
was indeed your money, for you sent it to me, and I thank
you for it. The weekly expense of the Navy eats up all
you have given me by the Bill of tonnage and poundage.
Nor have I been able to give my brothers one shilling since
I came into England, nor to keep any table in my house,
58 LIFE OF MILTON AlfD HISTORY OF HIS TIME.
" biit what I eat at myself. And that which troubles me
" most is to see many of you eOme to me at Whitehall and
" to think that you must go somewhere else 'to seek your
" dinner." If this was written for his Majesty by Hyde, it
contrasts oddly with Hyde's own aecouht of the same subjeet
written for posterity. " And thus the King's house," writes
Hyde, immediately ^fter describing the formation of thfe
Ministry of which he Was the head, " quickly appearled in its
"full lustre, the eating and drinking very gtateful to all
" men, and the charge and expense of it much exceeding the
" precedents of the most luxurious timeS, and all this before
" there was any provision of ready mohey or ahy assignation
"of a future fund." He adds that tradesmen were ready to
deliver their goods upon trust, and that Charles was plunging
into his first year of debt most recklessly. Th6 speeieh, how-
ever, may not haVe been Written by Hyde ^.
Next to the Indemnity question, thait of Supply and
Revenue, we have said, was the most important that had yet
occupied the Parliatheiit. On a Still more vast and momentous
qiiestion they had touched once or twice, but with little or
no effeot. This was the question of the Church.
The most enormous blunder of the Presbyteriatis in their
IResto'ration of Charles had been in letting him in absolutely
without conditions. The intention at first had been to nego-
tiate with him at Breda or the Hague oh the basis of some
such conditions as those dffered to his fkilher in the Treatj^ of
Newport in the Isle of Wig'ht in 1648, preventing a return
to Preilacy and securing the permanence of a Presbyterian
Chnrch-establishment. There dan'be little doubt that Charles,
in his anxiety to recover his kingdoms, would then have
assented to almost any terms whatsoever, leaving it to chance
whether he should feel himself bound by them or not after-
wards. Bat the hurri6ahe of popukr impatience at home,
and Monk's advice at last, had swept aside the proposals of
definite negotiation made by Matthew Hale aiid others ; and,
1 Lords Journals of Aug. 29 and Com- 719—720 (Poll Bill); Pari Hist. IV.
mens Journals of Sept. 3; fhillips, 114—115; Clarendon, 1005— 1006.
The cirtJKCH QtEStiON. 59
when Charles was in England, it was with ho othel- pledge in
Church-matters than was contained in one passage of his
voluntai'y Declaration from Breda. " And, because the pas-
" sion and uncharitableness of the times," said that document,
" have produced several opinions in Religion, by which men
" are engaged in parties and animosities against each other, —
" which, when they shall hereaifter uriitfe in a freedom of Con-
" versation, will be composed, or better understood, — We do
" declare a Liberty to Tender CbnsoieneBS, and that no man
" shall be disquieted or called in qnestion for differences of
" opinion in matter of Religion which do not disturb the peace
"of the Kingdom, land that We shall be ready to consent to
" sucTi an Act of Parliament as, upon mature 'deliberation,
" shall be offered to TJs, for the fall grantihg that In-
" dulgence." It must have been ii delight to Hyde to haVe
been able to manage this difficulty of the Rtestotatioii in
a manner so vague. Of all the King's eounsello¥s, the fexiled
bishops included, Bot one had so firmly settled with himself
as Hyde had done thait the restoration -of the King should
involve the restoration also of Episcopacy and the Old Church
of England in its fullest form. _rrom this purpose he had
neveY swerved, and -it was a wonder to Lord Colepepper and
others that be was so 'tenacious on a subject about which
-they were coBiparatively indiffeirefnt. As for Charles hiniself,
there were reasons why he should view the -tnatter differently
from HydCj even while taking Hyde's advice. Whe'thet the
Protestantism of the British Islands should be episcopal or
non-episcopal can have been a question of small concern on
its own intrinsic account to one who, for a year at least
already, if not for six years, had been secretly a Roman
Catholic. So far as Hyde was aware of this fact, it must
have added to his difficulties ; but it was a consolation that
the King was not so mtich of a Papist after all, or of a reli-
gionist of any kind, as to go out of his senses for the Papacy,
or for anything else that might be detrimental to his own
interests. With such an easy erypto-Catholic on the throne,
one might succeed in restoring that system of Anglican High
Episcopacy, resting on the doctrine of the Apostolical Succes-
60 LIFE OF MILTON AND HISTORY OF HIS TIME.
sion of Bishops, which the genuine Roman Catholics thought
a worse abortion than Presbyterianism itself ^-
Charles having come in without conditions, and with a
positive intimation of his personal preference for episcopal
forms, all that the Presbyterians could expect was what they
now called a Compeehension, i. e. the settlement of the
Church in such a way that any Episcopacy to be set up in it
should be a very limited Episcopacy indeed, like that sketched
by Usher in his fanjous "Model" of 1641, abandoning the
theory of Episcopacy by divine right, and reducing bishops
to mere presidents of the synods of presbyters (Vol. II.
pp. 229, 230). In this way they hoped that the great body
of the Presbyterian ministers in Cromwell's Established
Church might be able to remain within the Establishment,
not bound to use the Liturgy or other ceremonies contrary to
their consciences, while room for the readmission of such of
the surviving old Anglican and Liturgical clergy as it might
be necessary and proper to restore to their livings would
easily be obtained by the ejection of the most troublesome
of those Baptists or other Independents the conjunction of
whom with the Presbyterians in the Church-Establishment
had been only by Cromwell's wiU. About such sectaries
there was not much concern among the Presbyterians. They
had been accepted into the Establishment as very question-
able brethren, and their ejection might be a good riddance
now ; or, if any provision was to be made for their future, it
was to come in the form of a Toleration out of the Establish-
ment, whereas the present question was Comprehension, or
the amicable blending of Episcopalians and Presbyterians
within the Establishment. Towards this end there had been
much fresh studying of Usher's Model, which indeed had
been again a good deal before the public since 1658, when
there was some notion that Cromwell himself might give
1 Pari. Hist. IV. 17 ; Clarendon, 779 ; of Worcester ; and as early as June
Burnet, 1. 126—127 and 158, II. 449— 1653 Hyde in Paris had teen very
451 and 471 ; Neal, IV. 231—236 ; Hal- anxious to contradict tlie rumours that
lam, II. 344. There had been efforts to Charles had changed his religion (see
convert Charles to Eoman Catholicism Macray's Calendar of Clarendon Papers,
from the time of his first residence in under date June 6, 1653).
France after his escape from the Battle
THE CHUECH QUESTION. 61
feet to it, SO as to incorporate some of the most reasonable
" the old Anglican clergy with the other elements of the
hurch of his Protectorate, and give the somewhat chaotic
^■gregate the benefit of a moderate episcopal organization,
here had also been much private consultation among the
ading Presbyterians as to the possibility of reverting to the
birty-Nine Articles, and to the Liturgy with certain amend-
ents, and as to the ceremonies that might be left optional
. worship. All was uncertain, however, till Charles, or
yde and the Council for him, or the Parliament, should
)en the subject practically. Of the old bishops of the reign
Charles I. there were still alive these nine — William
oberts, Bishop of Bangor ; "WiUiam Pierce, Bishop of Bath
id Wells ; Henry King, Bishop of Chichester ; Matthew
''ren. Bishop of Ely ; Accepted Prewen, Bishop of Lichfield
id Coventry ; William Juxon, Bishop of London ; Robert
dnner. Bishop of Oxford; John Warner, Bishop of Rochester ;
d Brian Duppa, 'Bishop of Salisbury. These, of course, had
once reassumed their titles, with claims to their sees j and
might be taken for granted that, if these claims were allowed,
e remaining sixteen bishoprics, and the two archbishop-
is, would soon be filled up, and that for these and other
jh ecclesiastical posts there would be a preference of eminent
iglicans who had been with the King abroad or had suffered
him at home. Dr. Henry Hammond had died April 25,
SO, the very day of the meeting of the Convention Par-
ment; but Sheldon, Sanderson, Morley, Earle, Hacket,
inning, Brian Walton, and many others, had lived to see
! Restoration, and were waiting for their rewards. It would
enough, or at least all within hope in the circumstances, if
ise men, taught by experience, would waive now any notion
Laudian Episcopacy, and be content with Usher's Model
I a comprehension of the Presbyterians ^.
Dn the part of the King himself the first signs had been
mising. Within a few weeks after his return, and chiefly
the management of the Presbyterian Earl of Manchester
1 Baxter's Autobiography, Book I. 214—218.
63 LIFE OF MILTON AND HISTORY OB" HIS TIME.
iu his ofBce of Loih3 Chamberlain, ten Presbyterian divines
had been sworn in among his Majesty's chaplains : viz. Dr.
Reynolds, Mr. Galamy, Mr. Ashe, Mr. Eichard Bhxter, Dr.
Sp«rstow, Dr. Wallis, Dri Bates, Dr. Manton, Mr. Case, and
Mr. Woodbridge. Though only three of them were ever
asked to preach before the King, and that only onco each,
their access to his Majesty was something. Before the end
of June they had had an interview with him in the Earl of
Manchester's lodgings, Ghanoelloc Hyde and the Earl of
St. Alban's being also present. There Baxter had spoken
very freely to his Majesty. " I presumed to tell him," says
Baxter, " that, the late usurpers that were over us so well
" undevstood their own interest that, to promote it, they had'
" found the way of doing good to be the most, effectual means,
" and had placed and enoouraged many thousand faithful
" ministers in the Church, even suoh as detested their
" usurpation, . . . ; wherefore I humbly craved his Majesty . . .
" that he would never suffer himself to be tempted to undo:
" the good which Cromwell or any other had done because;
" they were usurpers that did it, or discountenance a faithful
" ministry because his enemie? had set them up." Other*
spoke to the like effect ; and the requests made to his Majesty
were specifically these.-^that things not necessary should!
not, be made, terms of membership of the Established Churoh).
that sound Chuvchrdisfiipline should be maintained, and that
neither should faithful ministers be cast out nor unworthy
ministers thrust in. The King's answer, says Baxter, was as
gracious, as possible. He was gladito hear of the inolinatioa»
of' the Presbyterians to an agreement with the Episcopalian
clergy ; and it should not be his fkult if the two pai"tieB were
not brought together, for he was resolved to draw them,
together him self ,-T-whioh " must not be," he said, " by brings.
" ing one party over tp the other, hut by abating somewhai
" on both sides and; meeting in tlie ipidway." On hearing
this old Mr. Simeon Ashe was so much overcome with joy-
that he burst into tears. The English Presbyterian chiefs,,
it is evident, had been tamed into thankfulness for very small
mercies. Actually two of the Presbyterian agents at this
THE CHDBCH QUESTION. 63
nfprence, Calamy an^ Spurstow; were old Smeotymnuans of
41, and a third. Smectymnuan, Matthew Newcomen, was iu
eir confidence. Stephen Marshall and Thomas Youngs, the
ler two Snieetymnuans, were both dead ■'.
But what part had the, Parliamei^t taken ? That the House
Lords, with but a minority of Presbyterians in it, desired
e full re-establighment of the old, Episcopal forms, was a
itter of course, and had been made evident by an order, on
e 31st of May, that the prayers used in the House should
enqefprwa^d be those of the Liturgy. It wag from the
>mmons House that measures for the express protection- of
esbyterianism were to be expected. Oi^e such measure,
ought in as early as May 9, and committed May 16, had
en " a bill for continuing of ministers in their parsonages,
d ecclesiastical livings." That Bill seems to have been,
lothered: by the King's approach | foi; on the 26th of May
) read of an order reported by Prynne " touching qqieting
ssession of ministers, schoolmasters, and other ecclesiastical
rsonSj in seqiiestered livings, until they are legally evicted,"
d of the referenpe even, of this order to a committee for
•ther consideration, Theii, on the 27th of June, there was
3 first reading of a bill "for the m.^intenance of the true
(formed Protestapt Religion; "■ and on this bill, after it had
en read a aecond time and thrown into a grand committee
the whole House, there were two most eager and protracted
bates in grand committee (July 9 and 16): In these
bates Presbyterianism was criticised as it had, not been in
it Hou?e for many a day. Prynne and- others spoke for it
mfiiUy, aud even the. Covenant was cited as an oath still,
ligatory; but a moderate Episcopacy after Usher's Model
,s substantially the utmost, prayer even of the Presbyteriaq
jakers, Prynne included, while the Thirty-Nine Articles,
} Liturgy, and High Episcopacy, found open advocates,
i Finch hoped they were not to " cant after Cromwell " in
^s Bill, but to assume the good old Church of England as
uninterrupted legal possession at that moment. On the
1 Baxter, J. 229-231.
64 LIFE OF MILTON AND HISTOEY OF HIS TIME.
suggestion of Sir Anthony Ashley Cooper, it was agreed at
last to recommend to the House to abstain from the difficult
subject altogether in the meantime, and to refer it to his
Majesty, with the advice of such a Synod of Divines as he
might call. Accordingly, on the 20th of July, it was resolved
by the House — (1) " That this House doth agree with the
" Grand Committee that the King's Majesty be humbly
" desired to call such a number of Divines as his Majesty
" shall think fit, to advise concerning matters of Religion,
" and that the Grand Committee do forbear to sit until the
" 23rd of October next; " (2) " That the King's Majesty be
" humbly moved that he will please, by his proclamation, to
" quicken the execution of all laws in force against the break-
" ing of the Lord's Day, drunkenness, swearing, and other
" profaneness." Next day it was intimated by Mr. Holies
that his Majesty had received the two votes, " liked them
both very well," and wished the House to know, respeetii^g
the first especially, that " he was in hand with it, and did
hope very speedily to do something therein to the good
satisfaction of the kingdom." As Hyde had hoped and
schemed, the whole question of the Church of the Restoration
had been surrendered to his Majesty ^
One part of the question .was rapidly settling itself. From
abroad, or from their obscurities at home, the sequestered old
Anglican clergy were reappearing in scores, clamant for
redress, and taking possession of their former livings. Thus,
by mere act of law, which there was no means of resisting,
many of the Puritan ministers, Presbyterian or Independent,
who had been for years in the Establishment, were already
adrift from their parsonages and parishes. The same process
was in operation very conspicuously at the two University
seats. Armed by an order of the House of Lords of June 4,
and backed by the King and Council, the Chancellors of
the two Universities were ejecting heads of colleges and
feUows, and restoring old heads and fellows, as fast as
fl.l=^S'.™.r'^ ^?wT "^°''™^? °' "« fr°'° tli« «^tracts from a contem-
days named, save that the prooeedmgs poraiy Diary given in Pari Hist IV
in Grand Committee of the Commons 79—84
THE CHURCH QUESTION. 65
they could. At Oxford, where the Marquis of Hertford was
Chancellor in succession to Richard Cromwell, nine heads and
four professors were turned out in favour of the former
holders of the posts; and at Cambridge the Presbyterian
Earl of Manchester, as Chancellor, had the singular experience
of ejecting seven heads, one of whom he had himself ap-
pointed in 1643, and restoring seven instead, of whom five
had been turned out by himself at that date. Of the numbers
of fellows restored and ejected in the colleges of the two
Universities we cannot here take account. A remarkable
accompanying phenomenon was the rush of new men at both
Universities for graduation in all the faculties, and especially
in Arts and Divinity. Quite a host of persons, one can see,
were qualifying themselves for promotion to the places likely
to be vacant ^-
The process here described, including appointments of
Anglican divines to prebends and other cathedral posts, had
begun in June 1660, had continued through July and to
the passing of the Act of Indemnity on August 29, and was
not even then at an end. Petitions from the ejected and
distressed Puritan clergy had been sent in to the Commons ;
and that House, while still abstaining, as by their former vote,
from the general question of the future constitution of the
Church, had thought it right to bring in another bill on the
precise subject of the ejections and restorations (July 37), and
to refer the petitions to the Committee on the Bill. This
bill was still in progress in the House at the date of the
King's assent to the Indemnity Bill 2.
What meanwhile of the King's own progress in the more
general question which had been left wholly in his hands?
His promise had been that he would bring the Presbyterians
and the Anglicans together by mutual concessions. This
promise, the handsomeness of which had moved Mr. Ashe to
tears, he had proceeded to carry out in a peculiar manner.
He had asked his Presbyterian chaplains to draw out on paper
a list of the concessions they would make on their side ; and
1 Lords Journals of date ; Neal, IV. ^ Commons Journals of July 27 and
261—265 ; Wood's Fasti for 1660. thence to Aug. 14.
VOL. VI. I?
66 LIFE OP MILTON AND HISTORY OF HIS TIME.
these gentlemen, after consulting with such of their I^ondon
brethren and country brethren as were at hand, and holding
meetings on the subject at Sion College, had done as re-
quested, and sent in an Ad(kess and Proposals to his Majesty.
While disclaiming Prelacy as it had been repudiated in the
Covenant, they were willing to accept " the true ancient and
primitive Presidency " in the Church, " as it was balanced
and managed by a due commixtion of presbyters ; " and they
tendered Usher's Model, exactly as it stood, as one that
would suit the circumstances, venturing at the same time on
some criticisms on the old Prelacy. They professed them-
selves satisfied with the lawfulness of a Liturgy, if not too
rigidly imposed, so as to supersede oral prayer entirely; but
they took exceptions to the old Liturgy, and desired a
new one, or a careful revision of the old. They pleaded
for moderation in ceremonies generally, for respect for the
scruples of those who might object to kneeling at the sacra-
ment of the Lord's Supper and to holidays of human appoint-
ment, and for prohibition of the use of the surplice, the cross
in baptism, and bowing at the name of Jesus. Requests
made to the King at the same time were that he would
not meanwhile impose tests or subscriptions on holders of
benefices as conditions of their remaining in the Church, that
he would stay the putting in of new men into livings the
former holders of which were dead, and which might now
therefore be held by their Puritan possessors without injury
to old rights, and that he would provide some remedy
against the return to livings of men notoriously insufficient
or scandalous. Such were the demands of the Presbyterians,
reduced to the utmost. Great was their surprise when, in-
stead of receiving in return, as they had expected, a similar
paper drawn up by the Episcopal divines on the same prin-
ciple of conceding as much as possible on that side, they
received only a paper of severe criticisms on their own,
assuming High Episcopacy as indubitably in the right, and
incapable of making concessions, unless it might be perhaps
in the matter of some revision of the Liturgy, and some
relaxation of ceremonies to tender consciences at his Majesty's
VABIOUS ACTS OF PARLIAMENT. 67
pleasure. A defence of their former proposals was offered by
the Presbyterian ministers in reply ; and so, about the time
,pf the passing of the Act of Indemnity, the paper controversy
came to a stop. His Majesty, it seems, had failed so far in
his attempt to bring the two parties together ^.
From the date of the passing of the Indemnity Bill
(August 29) Parliament was quickened in its proceedings
on other subjects by an intimation from the King that, for
his convenience and theirs, the two Houses would have to
adjourn themselves for a recess or vacation within a fortnight.
Their time being thus limited, they confined themselves to
the business deemed most essential.
Due note had been taken of the King's hint, in his speech
on passing the Indemnity Bill, that some more money at
once for himself and his brothers would be very welcome.
The Houses had already been considering the jointure of the
Que^n-mother, and had made her a present ef .^20,000 ; and
now they voted .^10,000 more to the Duke of York, ^7000
more to the Duke of Gloucester, and ^5000 for repairs of his
Majesty's houses. The vaster business of providing securely
a future annual revenue of ^''1,200,000 for the King occupied
much of the attention of the Commons ; but, as it involved
some difficult questions, and especially that of the proper
mode of raising so much of the sum as had hitherto come
from unconstitutional prerogatives which his Majesty was
now expected to resign, it was found impossible to perfect
arrangements before the recess, and the Houses had to con-
tent themselves with a Bill providing an immediate supply
of ^100,000 on account. The provision of means for dis-
banding the army and reducing the navy had, however, been
thoroughly managed. The poll-tax formerly imposed for
this purpose not having been sufficiently productive, a bill
for otherwise raising .^140,000 towards the sum required
was pushed through the two Houses. Another Act of import-
ance now completed was " An Act for the encouraging and
1 Baxter, I. 231 — 259 (where the papers are given).
68 LIFE OF MILTON AND HISTOEX OP HIS TIME,
increasing of Shipping and Navigation": in other words, a
new edition, with modifications, of the famous Navigation
Act of the Commonwealth (see Vol. IV. p. 305). Finally,
the Houses did at length shape " An Act for the Confirming
and Restoring of Ministers." It enacted, on the one hand,
that every holder of a benefice that had been " ordained by
any ecclesiastical persons" before Dec. 25, 1659, and had
not renounced his ordination, should remain in possession of
his benefice, provided there were no " formerly ejected or
sequestered" minister still alive with a legal title to that bene-
fice; bat it enacted, on the other hand, that all such " formerly
ejected or sequestered" ministers still surviving, unless found
scandalous or insufficient, should re-enter in the possession of
their benefices, a division of the profits of the last year of each
benefice to be made between- the outgoing minister and the
restored one. There were, however, some important excep-
tions and provisos. One was that any presentations to
benefices by his Majesty himself under the great seal between
May 1 and September 9, 1660, should hold good on their
own account, whoever might be in possession, or have title
otherwise; and another was that no minister should be con-
firmed in possession or restored to possession who had sub-
scribed any petition to bring the late King to trial, or had,
by writing, preaching, printing, or otherwise, advocated op
justified his trial, or who had, by writing, preaching, or
practice, "declared his judgment to be against Infant
Baptism." Though made applicable nominally on both sideSj
these exceptions, it will be seen, affected really only one side.
Not only were aU ministers of the Establishment standing in
the places of old incumbents still living to be thrown out of
their benefices, but the Establishment was to be cleared of all
Anabaptists, and also of such Independents as had been very
prominently Republican ^.
With these and one or two smaller bills ready, the Lords
and Commons again met his Majesty on Thursday, the
13th of September. He then gave his assent to the bills,
. \ Com™.™? ^"'i, ^°^^ Journals of date ; Statutes at large (for the Navigation
Act and Ministers Act),
htde's speech bepoeb the recess. 69
and, after addressing the two Houses briefly himself, called
upon Chancellor Hyde to address them more at large. Hyde's
speech on the occasion was thought one of his masterpieces. —
He dwelt first on that approaching disbandment of the army
which one of the money bills had provided for, and took the
opportunity of paying the most splendid compliments to the
Army. " No other prince in Europe," he said, " would be
•' willing to disband such an army,— an army to which victory
" is entailed, and which, humanly speaking, could hardly fail
" of conquest wheresoever he should lead it ; ... an army
" whose order and discipline^ whose sobriety and manners,
" whose courage and success, hath made it famous over the
" world ; an army of which the King and his two royal
" brothers may say, as the noble Grecian said of ^neas, —
' Stetimus tela aspera contra,
Contulimusque manus : experto credite quantus
In clypeum assurgat,, quo turbine torqueat hastam.'"
Knowing that this army, whose valour his Majesty had
observed with such admiration, even when it was exerted
against himself, was now thoroughly loyal, and thinking
what wonders he and his brothers might themselves perform
at its head, how could his Majesty disband it without re-
luctance ? How could he part with such soldiers ? " No, my
" lords and gentlemen, he will never part with them ; and the
" only sure way never to part with them is to disband them."
— After this rhetorical audacity, the Chancellor went back
upon the Indemnity Bill, as, though passed a fortnight before,
still in all men's minds. He reminded them of the clause of
that Bill making it penal to use even words of reproach or
mutual invective tending to revive the memory of the late
differences ; and he made this the text of a discourse on the
moral significance of the Bill, over and above the mere
securities it decreed for life and property. " As any name or
" names, or other words of reproach, are expressly against the
" letter, and punishable accordingly, so evil and envious looks,
" murmuring and discontented hearts, are as directly against
" the equity of this statute, a direct breach of the Act of
" Indemnity, and ought to be puiiished too ; and I believe
f they may be so. You know kings are in some sense called
70 LIFE OF MILTON AND HISTORY OF HIS TIME.
" gods, and so they may in some degree look into men's
" hearts ; and God hath given us a King who can look as far
" into men's hearts as any prince alive. And he hath great
" skill in physiognomy too ; you would wonder what calcula^
" tions he hath made from thence ; and, no doubt, if he be
" provoked by evil looks to make a further inquiry into men's
" hearts, he will never choose those hearts to trust and rely
" upon. He hath given us a noble and princely example, -by
" opening and stretching his arms to all who are worthy to be
" his subjects, worthy to be thought Englishmen, — by ex-
" tending his heart with a pious and grateful joy to find all
" his subjects at once in his arms and himself in theirs ; and
" shall we fold our arms towards one another, and contract
" our hearts with envy and malice to each other, by any sharp
" memory of what hath been unneighbourly or unkindly done
" heretofore ? What is this but to rebel against the person
" of the King, against the excellent example and virtue of
" the King, against the known law of the land, this blessed
" Act, of Oblivion? My lords and gentlemen, the King is a
" suitor to you, makes it his suit very heartily, that you will
"join with him in restoring the whole nation to its primi-
" tive temper and integrity, to its old good manners, its old
"good humour, and its old good nature." — Having dilated
somewhat further on this theme, and expressed his hope that
in the merry England now beginning again piety would no
longer consist in sour looks, morose manners, afieeted gestures,
or sighs and sad tones, and having touched on some of the .
other Bills of that day, Hyde concluded his long speech.
The two Houses then adjourned themselves, by his Majesty's
desire, to the 6th of November. At the moment of the
adjournment the young Duke of Gloucester was lying ill of
small-pox in Whitehall. He was not thought to be in danger,
but before the day was over he was dead ^.
Through the eight weeks of the recess (Sept. 13— Nov. 6)
we see Charles in the first full practice and enjoyment of
his Royalty.
' Lords and Commons Journals, Sept. King's speech and Hyde's siven in MI
X3, and Pari. Hist. IV. 122-130 (the in afl these places) ; pfpys, nnder d™
THE ROYAL FAMILY OP THE BESTOBATION. 71
The Duke of York was now the nearest supporter of the
throne ; but, when the widowed Princess of Orange came from
the Hague to live with her two brothers (Sept. 25) and
Prince Rupert followed (Sept. 29), and still more when the
queen-mother, Hfenrietta Maria., arrived from Paris, " a very
little plain old woman," on her first visit to England since
she had left her husband to his fate there in Feb. ] 641-2,
and when there came with her the pretty young Princess
Henrietta, and Prince Edward, the younger brother of Prince
Rupert (Nov. 2), there might be said to be about the King
something of a Royal Family. In domestic respects, it is
true, it was not a Royal Family above criticism, if one were
a very severe moralist. The King had already had five
acknowledged natural children, borne to him abroad by three
different mothers ; and the eldest of these, born at Rotterdam
in 1649, the son of Lucy Waters or Barlow, was now at home
in Whitehall, a handsome and spirited boy of eleven, much
petted by his father and all the rest, and bearing for the pre-
sent the name of James Crofts, though afterwards to shine out
as James Fitzroy, Duke of Monmouth. Then, no legitimate
wife having' yet been provided for Charles, the chief substi-
tute meanwhile was Mrs. Palmer, originally Barbara Villiers,
daughter of William, Viscount Grandison, of the Irish peerage,
but married to a Roger Palmer, Esq., an Irish gentleman, who
was, conveniently or inconveniently, still alive ; and this
Mrs. Palmer, reputed " the most beautiful woman in all
England," was openly and constantly about Charles in White-
hall, amid bishops and chaplains there, and might even be
seen flirting most unbashfully with the Duke of York in the
royal chapel itself through the hangings that separated the
royal pew from that of the ladies. Nor was the Duke of
York immaculate. Not to go too far back in his life, he was
now, by secret marriage in England, the husband of one of
Chancellor Hyde's daughters, after having been her virtual
husband for some time abroad ; and, the secret having just
come out, the question everywhere was whether he would
acknowledge Miss Hyde or prefer novelty. Farther, the
little dark-faced Queen-mother herself was supposed to be
72 LIFE OF MILTON AND HISTOET OF HIS TIME.
not without a secret husband either, — the Henry Jermyn,
now Earl of St. Alban's, who constantly accompanied her,
and by whom it was said ("how true^ God knows!" adds
Pepys charitably) she had had a daughter in France at
some unknown date. Rumour maintained, moreover, that
a younger Henry Jermyn, the nephew of this Earl of St.
Alban's, and master of horse to the Duke of York, was
secretly married or engaged to the Princess of Orange, the
eldest of the royal sisters, then in her twenty-ninth year, and
the iuother already of the Dutch boy who was to be famous
as William III. Positively, the only one of the Royal Family
about whom there was no scandal was the pretty young
Princess Henrietta, sixteen years old, for whom her mother
was providing a match in France. Altogether, the surviving
representatives of Charles I. could not be called models of the
special virtue of domestic propriety. But what then ? The
age of Puritanism was past ; if all were known, how much of
the vaunted domestic propriety of that age, and that even in
the highest quarters, might be exposed now as mere hypo-
crisy and concealment ; in all lands and times there had been
a little liberty, more than the strictly canonical, for royal per-
sonages ; and what was a little indecorum at the centre, if
such there must be, in comparison with the universal bless-
ings of a restored monarchy and restored Church of England,
the deliverance of the whole nation from a reign of cant and
rigidity, and the chance of that free flow once more, which
Hyde had so eloquently invoked, of all the native old English
humours, all the old English joviality?
So reasoning or not, Charles and those about him were
setting the example. What an easy and mirthful Court, with
all its state and magnificence! What banqueting and
abundance of wine, what dancing, what delightful mixing of
the sexes, what flashing of wit and jest between ladies and
gentlemen, or among the gentlemen by themselves on stronger
topics ; -what visiting and receiving of visits ; what walks in
the parks and suburban parties of pleasure; what fine re-
gularity of alternation from chapel and sermon on Sundays,
properly conducted and with good music, to one or other of
THE COimT OF THE RESTORATION. 73
the re-opened theatres on week-day afternoons ! These were
managed in a style far excelling anything Davenant had ven-
tured on in Cromwell's time ; for they were re-producing
regular old plays, by Shakespeare, Beaumont and Fletcher,
and Ben Jonson, and were actually beginning to bring women
on the stage, instead of boys, for the female parts ^.
Besides the stationary courtiers of the household, always
round Charles, there was the whole restored peerage of
England, to be at his beck when he held full Court or would
make a choice of guests for his greater entertainments. That
body had been counted on the 31st of July and had been
found then to consist of 139 persons, spiritual peers not yet
included. Six of them were Dukes, one a minor ; six were
Marquises ; fifty-nine were Earls, five of them minors ; seven
were Viscounts ; and the rest were Barons. Then, of the
existing House of Commons as originally returned, all that
were still members on the 11th of June, to the number of no
fewer than 454, had taken the oaths of supremacy and alle-
giance, and were available for attendance at Court, so far as
his Majesty might countenance commoners. Add the
baronets and knights of England, whether in the House
of Commons or not, forming a large class intermediate
between the peers and the mere commons ; and remember
how many of these knights and baronets, as of recent creation
by Charles himself, were bound in an especial manner to be
courtiers. Monk's brother-in-law Clarges, knighted at Breda,
bad been but the first of a long series of Restoration knights.
A large number of knighthoods had been conferred at the
Hague among those that had gone thither to salute Charles
1 Peerage Books ; Pepys, passim, from " brown, beautiful, bold, but insipid
May to December 1660, with some sub- " creature." Under the second date,
sequent passages ; Note of Lord Dart- speaking of Monmouth, he says, " His
mouth to Burnet, I. 292^293 ; Evelyn's " mother, whose name was Barlow,
Diary, at contemporary dates; and also " daughter of some very mean creatures,
under Aug. 18, 1649 and July 15, 1685. " was a beautiful strumpet, whom I had
Under the former date Evelyn, record- " often seen at Paris ; she died miser-
ing one of the incidents of his stay in "ably, -without anything to bury her."
France after the execution of Charles I, Charles, we are elsewhere told, found,
writes, " I went to St. Germains to kiss after his return to the continent on his
"his Majesty's hand: in the coach, escape from Worcester, that she had
"which was my Lord Wilmot's, went been " behaving loosely " in his absence,
" Mrs. Barlow, the King's mistress and and threw her off.
" mother of the Duke of Monmouth, a
74 LIFE OP MILTON AND HISTORY' OF HIS TIME.
and be of his convoy back in Montague's fleet; and tw*
of these Hague knighthoods had fallen to the two meanest
of the recreant Oliverians, Morland and Downing, in reward
for their perfidy. Of the baronetcies and knighthoods that
had been conferred by Charles since his arrival in England
a reckoning is hardly possible. At Canterbury, besides Secre-
tary Morrice, there had been knighted Major-General Massey,
Alderman Robinson, and five others ; and in London hardly
a week had passed without additions. Naturally, among
those thought worthy of knighthood or baronetcy were the
lawyers that had been put into the chief judicial or ministerial
offices at the beginning of the new reign ; and so such of
these as had not been titled already now wore titles. The
Chief Baron of the Exchequer was Sir Orlando Bridgman ; the
Judges of the Common Pleas were Sir Robert Foster and Sir
Henry Hyde ; a Judge of the King's Bench was Sir Thomas
Mallet ; the Attorney General was Sir Geofirey Palmer,
and the Solicitor General Sir Heneage Finch. Beyond the
circle of these official persons, and of the courtiers of all
other ranks and .denominations, was the great commu-
nity of London and Westminster, related to the Court more
distantly, but still sufficiently, by the honour of being
butchers, bakers, tailors, and what not, to his Majesty or
others of the Royal Family, or to the household and courtiers,
or merely by the pride of having real Royalty and a real
Royal Court once more in the midst of them, and the privi-
lege of watching in the streets or in the parks for a sight of
the royal faces, the dresses, and the equipages.
A selected portion of the general community did have
closer access to his Majesty. One of the unspeakable bless-
ings of the Restoration was the re-introduction into England
of the sovereign cure for scrofula or the king's evil. Hun-
dreds and thousands, it seems, not only in London, but all
over the country, were deeply interested in the fact ; for oa
Monday the 2nd of July there had been the solemnity at
Whitehall of the first of those touchings for the king's evil
which were thenceforth to be one of the institutions of the
reign. " The kingdom having for a long time, by reason of
TOUCHING FOR THE KTNG'S EVIL. 75
lis Majesty's absence," says a London newspaper of that
lek, " been troubled with the evil, great numbers have
ately flocked for cure. His Sacred Majesty on Monday
ast touched 250 in the Banqueting House ; amongst whom,
when his Majesty was delivering the gold, one shuffled him-
self in, out of an hope of profit, which was not stroked, — but
bis Majesty presently discovered him, saying ' This man hath
wt yet been touched^ His Majesty hath, for the future,
appointed every, Friday for the cure ; at which time 200 and
ao more are to be presented to him : who are first to repair
to Mr. Knight, his Majesty's chirurgeon (living at the Cross
Gruns in Russell Street, Covent Garden, over against the
Rose Garden), for their tickets." Evelyn, who was present
the second touching, on Friday the 6th of July, describes
e ceremony in detail. " His Majesty sitting under the
itate in the Banqueting House," says Evelyn, " the chirur^
jeons cause the sick to be brought or led up to the throne,
vhere, they kneeling, the King strokes their faces or cheeks
yith both his hands at once ; at which instant a chaplain
n his formalities says ' He put his hands upon them, and, he
lealed them! This is said to every one in particular. When
ihey have been all touched, they come up again in the same
irder; and the other chaplain, kneeling and having gold
Lngels strung on white ribbon on his arm, delivers them
)ne by one to his Majesty, who puts them about the necks
)f the touched as they pass, whilst the first chaplain repeats.
This is the true Light who cam^ into the world.' Then
bllows an epistle (as at first a gospel), with the liturgy
)rayers for the sick with some alteration, lastly the bless-
ng; and the Lord Chamberlain and Comptroller of the
lousehold bring a basin, ewer, and towel, for his Majesty
0 wash." Friday after Friday, unless there had been notice
the contrary, his Majesty had undergone this trouble for
1 good of his subjects, the chaplains assisting ; and the prae-
3 was continued during the recess of the Parliament '-
Lords Journals of July 31 (where six ateent peers are noted) ; Commons
ty-tki-ee peers are entered as pr«- Journals of June 11 (when there was a
that day and the names of forty- report from Prynne of the number that
76 LIFE OF MILTON AND HISTORY OF HIS TIME,
One important business of the recess was the disbanding
of the Army. The business, which was managed by commis-
sioners of the two Houses, was necessarily a gradual one ; but
on the 8th of October Secretary Nicholas could write, " The
Army is almost wholly disbanded, everywhere expressing
much affection for the King." We learn independently that
fifteen regiments of foot and four regiments of horse in
England, with one horse-regiment and two foot-regiments
in Scotland, besides garrisons in both countries, and six ships
of war, were paid off about this time, leaving only a remnant
of regiments and garrisons, but as many as nineteen ships, to
be similarly treated when more money should be in hand,
Actually, we may say, it was during this recess of the Con-
vention Parliament that the great Puritan Army of the
English Revolution, about 40,000 strong to the last, was dis-
solved and disappeared. With all the changes in its substance
in the course of eighteen years, including Monk's recent dis-
charges from it of discontented Anabaptists and Republicans
by scores and hundreds, there must have stiU been in it not
a few veterans of Marston Moor, Naseby,- Preston, Dunbar,
and Worcester, with grim thoughts and recollections in their
hearts as they now left their colours finally, and carrying
these thoughts and recollections, with their old swords, to
many families and firesides over England. Their quiet and
gradual dispersion was a relief. Thenceforth the only autho-
rized nucleus of a standing army to be left in England was
to consist of three regiments of horse — Monk's own Cold-
stream regiment and two others — ^kept up, out of the King's
own revenue, under the name of Guards \
While the disbanding of the Army was in progress, London
was in commotion with the Trials of the Regicides. The
Court for the purpose consisted of thirty-four Commissioners
had taken the oaths) ; Pepya's Diary, Hallam (11.314—315) ; but details wiU
May 13 and 22, 1660 (knighthoods of be found in the Commons Journals—
Morland and Downing) ; Phiffips, 711 ; espeoiaUy under dates Sept. 13, Nov. 6,
Pitftfoc InlMigencir for July 2—9, 1660 ; and Nov. 23. The process, though far
Evelyn s Diary under date. advanced in the recess, was not com-
• 1 A summary account of the dis- plete till Feb. 1660—1.
banding is given by Phillips (728) and
TRIALS OF THE REGICIDES. Tt
der the great seal. Among these were Lord Chancellor
i^de, the Dukes of Albemarle and Somerset, the Marquis
Ormond, the Earls of Southampton, Lindsey, Manchester,
>rset, Berkshire, and Sandwich, Viscount Say and Sfele,
ird Roberts, Lord Finch, Sir Anthony Ashley Cooper, Sir
irbottle Grimstone, Mr. Denzil Holies, Mr. Arthur Annesley,
cretaries Nicholas and Morrice, and the Lord Mayor of
indon ; but the managing portion of the Court consisted of
lief Baron Sir Orlando Bridgman, and ten. other judges
d lawyers, among whom was Mr. Sergeant Hale. Attorney
meral Sir GeoflPrey Palmer, Solicitor General Sir Heneage
neh, and Sir Edward Turner, Attorney to the Duke of
)rk, were the chief prosecuting counsel. The mode of pro-
iure had been carefully arranged, and rules made for every
lergeney. Especially it had been agreed that the proceed-
js should be founded on a famous Statute of Edward III,
fining treasons, and making one of them to consist in
iompassing or imagining the death of our Lord the King "
quant Jiomme fait compasser oil imaginer la mort noitre Seignur
Eoi ").
First, on Tuesday, October 9, came The Indictment. The
ice was Hick's Hall, Clerkenwell, the sessions house of
J County of Middlesex. There Chief Baron Bridgman
ivered his charge to a grand jury of twenty-one persons,
pounding to them the Law of Treason. " By the statute
if the 25th of Edward III," he said, "it is made high
reason to compass and imagine the death of the King. It
vas the ancient law of the nation. In no ease else was
magination or compassing, without an actual eflfect of
b, punishable by our law ; . . . but, in the case of the King,
lis life was so precious that the intent was treason by the
ommon law, and declared treason by this statute. . . .
?his compassing and imagining the cutting off the head of
be King is known by some overt act. Treason is in the
kicked imagination, though not treason apparent; but,
^hen this poison swells out of the heart, and breaks forth
ito action, in that case it is High Treason. Then what is*
n overt act of an inaagination or compassing of the King's.
78 LIFE OF MILTON AND HISTORY OF HIS TIME.
" death ? Truly, it is anything which shows what the imagina-
" tion is. Words, in many cases, are evidences of this imagina-
" tion ; they are evidences o£ the heart. . . . So, if a man,
" if two men, do conspire to levy war against the King, . . .
" then, I say, in ease not only of words, but if they conspire
" to levy war against the King, there is another branch of
" this statute : the levying of war is Treason. But, if men
" shall go and consult together, and this to kill the King,
" to put him to death, this consultation is clearly an overt act
" to prove imagination or compassing of the King's death.
" But what will you say then if men do not only go about to
" conspire and consult, but take upon them to judge, condemn,
" nay put to death, the King ? Certainly, this is so much
" beyond the imagination and compassing, as it is not only
" laying the cockatrice's egg, but brooding upon it till it hath
" brought forth a serpent. I must deliver to you, for plain
" and true law, that no authority, no single person, no com-
" munity of persons, not the people collectively or representa-
" tively, have any coercive power over the King of England."
Whether this was law or not, some of Chief Baron Bridgman's
colleagues on the bench must have felt that he was going
unnecessarily far for the occasion and uncomfortably far for
them : e. g. Monk, the Earl of Manchester, Holies, and
Annesley, all of whom might deny having ever " compassed or
imagined the death of the King," but none of whom could
deny having been engaged, as Parliamentarians, in " coercing"
him and "levjang war" against him. But Bridgman had
now the opportunity of laying down his own notion of the
law, and he would not miss it. He went on, by citations of
cases and statutes, to argue that the absolute authority of
kings and the passive obedience of subjects in all cases was
the ultimate doctrine of the Law of England. " God forbid,"
he exclaimed at the end of this part of his charge, "I should
" intend any Absolute Government by this. It is one thing
" to have an Absolute Monarchy : another thing to have
" government absolutely without laws as to any coercive
" power over the person of the King." The distinction is
not very obvious ; but the phrase " God forbid !" was charac-
TEIALS OP THE REGICIDES. 79
Tistic of Bridgman whenever he was in the difficulty of
iving to make an admission and nullify it at the same time,
i was to come from his lips often enough in the course of
le trials. Meanwhile his charge was convincing in the main,
he grand jury found the Bill of Indictment to he a true
.11 against the twenty-eight persons named in it.
The next day, Wednesday, Oct. 10, came TAe Arraignment.
; was in the sessions house in the Old Bailey at Newgate.
he prisoners had been conveyed thither from the Tower that
lorning in coaches, with a strong guard of horse and foot,
he whole day was spent in bringing the prisoners into Court
I successive batches, and compelling them individually to
lead Guilty or Not Guilty. Compellinff, we say ; for, natu-
illy, the prisoners, having no counsel, and having various
eas in bar of judgment, wished to state their pleas at the
itset, whereas the Court insisted peremptorily that all such
eas should be postponed and that every one of the prisoners
lould begin with a simple Guilty or Woi Guilty. — The diffi-
ilty was greatest with the first batch brought in, consisting
Sir Hardress Waller, Thomas Harrison, and William
■eveningham. It had been arranged to take Sir Hardress
^aller first, as the likeliest to yield. Being one of those,
)wever, who had come in on the Proclamation, he tried hard
r some time to obtain a hearing on that and other points ;
it, being constantly interrupted by the Court and held to the
evitable alternative, he sank gradually, through a kind of
;perimental Not Guilty, and then an intermediate " I dare not
y Not Guilty P into " I must say Guilty." He was there-
re registered as confessing. Next came Harrison, magna-
mous Harrison, for whom there was no hope whatever.
My lords, have I liberty to speak ?" he said at once ; and
en, against the interruption of the Court, repeated and
peated as he tried to go on, he battled bravely. He had been
prison nearly three months, he said, seeing nobody ; he had
it known that his trial was coming on till nine o'clock last
ght, and had been brought from the Tower at six o'clock
the morning ; he had various things . to urge, such as
unsel might have urged for him ; would not the Court itself.
80 LIFE OF MILTON AND HISTORY OF HIS TIME.
advise him in the circrmistances ? Told at last that, if he did
not plead, he would be entered as standing mute, which was
the same thing as judgment against him, " Then I do plead
Not Guilty" he said with some passion. According to the
formality then in use, the next -question to him was " How
will you be tried ?" On this Harrison fought again. Instead
of answering " By God and my Country," which alone could
be accepted, he answered first, " I will be tried according
to the laws of the Lord." Informed that the phrase would
not do, he altered it to " I put myself upon what you
please to put me upon.^' Then, on being told that he would
still be entered as standing mute unless he followed up his
plea of Not Guilty with the exact phrase prescribed, he ofiered
the modification "I will be tried according to the ordinary
course." The Clerk then said decisively " Whether by God
and the Country ? : you must speak the words." " They are
vain words," said Harrison, and was going on to explain why;
but, the Court being resolute, and the question " How will
you be tried ?" having been put for the fourth time by the
Clerk, there came for final answer " I do oficr myself to be
tried in your own way, by God and my Country." That was
sufiicient; and, the Clerk having pronounced the customary
" God send you a good deliverance! ", Harrison's turn was over.
Heveningham, who had seen what had happened with Waller
and Harrison, gave no ' trouble. He pleaded Not Guilty at
once, added the proper formula, and had the usual '' God send
you a good deliverp,nce !" from the mouth of the Clerk. — ^The
next batch arraigned consisted of Isaac Pennington, Henry
Marten, Gilbert Millington, Robert Tichbourne, Owen Rowe,
and Robert Lilburne ; the next of Adrian Scroope, John
Carewj John Jones, Thomas Scott, Gregory Clements, and
John Cook ; the next of Edmund Harvey, Henry Smith,
John Downes, Vincent Potter, and Augustine Garland ; and
the last and fifth of George Fleetwood, Simon Mayne, James
Temple, Peter Temple, Thomas Wayte, Hugh Peters, Francis
Hacker, and Daniel Axtell. Some of these tried to speak and
made delays, as Waller and Harrison had done ; but the
majority obeyed the Court at once, or after a mere word or
TRIALS OF THE REGICIDES. 81
ro. The only incidents of peculiar note were when Henry
.arten and Hugh Peters were severally arraigned. " I desire
e benefit of the Act of Oblivion," said Marten, to the sur-
ise of the Court. When told he was totally excepted out
' that Act, he declared that his name was not in the Act at
1. The Act was produced, and he was shown his name in
among the rest. He acknowledged that he saw a " Henry
[artyn " named there, but said he was not that person, for
s name was " Harry Marten," spelt with an e. The objec-
3n was overruled, and the wittiest of the Regicides had to
ust to his other chance, in being one of those that had come
. on the Proclamation. There was no such chance for Hugh
eters, who had avoided capture till about a month before ;
id his appearance seems to have been a signal for mirth,
'^hen asked to plead Cruilty or iVb^ Guilty, his answer was,
I would not for ten thousand worlds say I am guilty : I am
ot Guilty ; " and then, when he was asked the next question,
How will you be tried ?" and answered " By the Word of
od," the people laughed. But he rectified his answer sub-
issively when the legal formula was given him. — Altogether,
' the twenty-eight who had been arraigned, twenty-six had
eaded Not Guilty. Only George Fleetwood, in addition to
''aller, had pleaded Guilty. In both these cases the plea had
sen first entered as Not Guilty, but that plea had been with-
awn by permission of the Court.
So far, therefore, there were twenty-six Regicides to be
led. The number, however, was raised to twenty-seven by
e addition of William Hewlet, the man supposed to have
len one of the two executioners. He was separately indicted
L the 12th, and was arraigned on the 15th, when he pleaded
ot Guilty. The trials had then already begun. They ex-
aded over five days in all, — Thursday, Oct. 11, Friday,
3t. 12, Saturday, Oct, 13, Monday, Oct. 15, and Tuesday,
3t. 16, 1660.
On the first of these days, Harrison, Scroope, Carew, Jones,
ements, and Scott, were brought to the bar together, but
ily Harrison was tried. After he had challenged jurymen
the full number allowed him, a jury of twelve was formed.
VOL. VI. G
83 LIFE OF MILTON AND HISTOBT OF HIS TIME.
The charge was propounded more especially by Solicitor
General Sir Heneage Finch. In his speech, after due exposi-
tion of the hideousness of the crime of regicide, especially in
the case of so " blessed and beloved a prince " as Charles I., he
proceeded to say that, of the actors in this crime, many
were dead, a few were penitent and had been guaranteed their
lives, about eighteen or nineteen had fled, " with the mart of
Cain upon them," and twenty-nine remained to abide justice.
Among these, Harrison, he said, on all accounts, deserved
pre-eminence ; for, if any one still alive might be " styled the
conductor, leader, and captain, of all this work," Harrison
was the man. Witnesses were then called. There was no '
diffi,culty whatever in the proof. It was proved that Harrison
had commanded the party that brought the King from Hurst
Castle to Windsor, that he had brought him from Windsor
to* Westminster for his trial, that he had been one of the most
constant at the trial and one of the sentencing judges, and
that he had signed the death-warrant. The only interest lies
in Harrison's own demeanour after the evidence had been
given. "My lords," he said, "the matter that hath been
" offered to you, as it was touched, was not a thing done in
" a corner. I believe the sound of it hath been in most
" nations. I believe the hearts of some have felt the terrors
" of that presence of God that was with His servants in those
" days, howsoever it seemeth good to Him to suffer this turn
" to come on us. . . . I have desired, as in the sight of Him
" that searcheth all hearts, whilst this hath been done, to
" wait, and receive from Him convictions upon my own con-
" science ; and, though I have sought it with tears many
" a time, and prayers over and above to that God to whom,
" you and all nations are less than a drop of water, to this
" moment I have received rather assurance of it, and that in
" the things that have been done, as astonishing on the one
" hand, I do believe ere long it will be made known from
" Heaven there was more from God than men are aware
" of. I do profess that I would not offer of myself the least
" injury to the poorest man or woman that goes upon earth,
"That I have humbly to offer is this to your lordships: —
TRIALS OF THE BEGICIDES. 83
You know what a contest hath been in these nations for
many years. Divers of those that sit upon the bench were
formerly as active ." Here the Court interrupted, for-
idding that vein of remark. Harrison, not insisting on it,
esumed. "I followed not my own judgment," he said;
I did what I did as out of conscience to the Lord. For,
when I found those that were as the apple of mine eye to
turn aside, I did loathe them, and sufiered imprisonment
many years, rather than to turn as many did that did put
their hands to this plough. I chose rather to be separated
from wife and family than to have compliance with them,
though it was said, ' Sit at my right hand,' and such-kind
expressions. Thus I have given a little poor testimony that
I have not been doing things in a corner, or from myself.
May be I might be a little mistaken j but I did it all according
to the best of my understanding, desiring to make the re-
vealed will of God in His holy scriptures as a guide to me.
I humbly conceive that what was done was done in the name
of the Parliament of England, that what was done was done
by their power and authority ; and I do humbly conceive
it is my duty to offer unto you in the beginning that this
court, or any court below the High Court of Parliament,
hath no jurisdiction of their actions. Here are many learned
in the law ; and, to shorten the work, I desire I may have
the help of counsel learned in the laws, that may in this
matter give me a little assistance to offer those grounds
that the law of the land doth offer." He reiterated this
emand in a sentence or two, and was proceeding, " "Whereas
it hath been said we did assume and usurp authority, I say
this was done rather in the fear of the Lord," when Chief
Jaron Bridgman broke in, "Away with him! Know where
•you are. Sir: you are in the assembly of Christians; will
' you make God the author of your treasons and murders ? "
^hen ensued a conversation on the prisoner's demand for counsel,
larrison repeating it, but judges and counsel unanimously
greeing that it could not be granted, and Annesley and Holies
a particular reminding the Court at some length that the
'arliament whose authority Harrison pleaded had not been a
G %
84 LIFE 01" MILTON AND HISTOKY OF HIS TIME.
complete Parliament, but only one House, and ttat reduced
to a fragment of itself by the violent exclusion of many of the
members. It having been intimated to Harrison that his
demand for counsel was overruled, the scene was as follows :
— "Harrison. Notwithstanding the judgment of so many
" learned ones that the kings of England are noways ac-
" countable to the Parliament, the Lords and Commons in the
" beginning of this War having declared the King's beginning
" war upon them, the God of Gods . Court. Do you
" render yourself so desperate that you care not what language
" you let fall ? It must not be suflPered. Harrison. I would
" not speak willingly to offend any man ; but God is no re-
" specter of persons. His setting up his standard against the
" people . Court. Truly, Mr. Harrison, this must not be
" suffered : this doth not at all belong to you. Ha/rrison.
■" Under favour, this doth belong to me. I would have ab-
" horred to have brought him to account, had not the blood of
" Englishmen that had been shed . Counsel. Methinks
■";he should be sent to Bedlam, tiU he come to the gallows to
" render an account of this ". There was a farther
struggle, Harrison anxious especially to repudiate a charge
of one of the witnesses that he had said in the committee
where they were preparing the indictment against the King,
" Let us blacken him," and also the accusation of having been
harsh to the King when he was in his custody. Neither was
true, he said ; such things he abhorred. With evident hurry
at last, the Chief Baron wound up the trial by addressing
the jury. Without withdrawing, and with hardly an instant
of delay, they returned a unanimous verdict of Guilty. The
Chief Baron then pronounced sentence as follows : — " The
" judgment of this Court is, and the Court doth award, That
"you be led back to the place from whence you came, and
" from thence be drawn upon an hurdle to the place of exeeu-
" tion ; and there you shall be hanged by the neck, and, being
" alive, shall be cut down, and . . . [here a portion of the
" sentence which cannot be printed] : your entrails to be
" taken out of your body, and, you living, the same to be
<' burnt before your eyes, and your head to be cut off, your
TRIALS 01" THE REGICIDES. 85
" body to be divided into four quarters, and head and quarters
" to be disposed of at the pleasure of the King's Majesty; and
" the Lord have mercy upon your soul ! "
Harrison having been thus disposed of on the 11th, the
next day, Friday the 12th, sufficed for the five that had
been brought to the bar along with him, — Seroope, Carew,
Clements, Jones, and Scott. With the exception of Clements,
who tried the vain chance of succumbing at once and acknow-
ledging himself guilty, all stood very firm, wrestling with the
Court respectfully, and defending themselves as well as they
could. Next to Harrison, the one most exulting in the style
of his courage was Carew. When asked, at the end, why
sentence should not be pronounced, he would only say, " I
commit my cause unto the Lord," while the others did avail
themselves then of the humbler verbal form of " submitting
to his Majesty^s mercy." Sentence was pronounced on all
the five that day, the same sentence as on Harrison. It was
thought by many at the time, and has been generally
acknowledged since, that the condemnation of Seroope in
particular was an " inexcusable breach of faith." He had
surrendered on the Proclamation ; it had been arranged that
his punishment should be only the forfeit of one year's value
of his lands ; and the Commons had let him be transferred to
the list of the unpardonable at the last moment only because
the Government wanted another victim of his social rank, and
made the most of some evidence to his damage since the
Restoration itself. That evidence was produced on his trial,
when Major-General Browne, the Lord Mayor elect of
London, stepped into the witness-box, and swore to some
conversation he had had with Seroope in the Speaker's
chamber, in which, in reply to a remark of his own about the
King's murder, Seroope had said there were diiferent opinions
on that subject, and declined to express his own. Altogether,
Seroope did not make any special complaint of the injustice
done him, but accepted his fate very bravely.
Saturday the 13th was entirely occupied with the trials of
Cook and Hugh Peters. That of Cook was protracted to
greater length than any that had preceded, by the exertions
86 LIFE OF MILTON AND HISTORY OF HIS TIME.
of Cook himself in arguing with the Court, with all his
lawyerly subtlety, whether it was not a sufficient exoneration
that his part in the King's business had been that of a person
employed as professional counsel merely. The trial of Peters,
though not so long, was more interesting. The points against
him were that he had conspired with Cromwell and others at
various times and places to bring the King to trial, that he
had been a most conspicuous figure in the active crowd round
the trial, that he had preached several sermons rousing the
soldiers and others to the final act of regicide, and that he had
himself been present on the scaffold. Peters, who spoke in a
low voice and in a dispirited manner, but with no mealiness or
abjectness, could not set aside the evidence of his having been
seen about the trial, and having preached rousing sermons
in connexion with it, though he challenged the veracity of the
witnesses in some particulars. He declared solemnly that he
had " never had any near converse with Oliver Cromwell
about such things." On the point of his alleged presence on
the scaffold he positively broke down the adverse testimony.
A certain Eichard Nunnelly, once door-keeper to the Com-
mittee of the Army, had sworn that, on the morning of the
King's execution, he had met Peters in the gallery of White-
hall, had gone with him from the gallery into the Banqueting
Room, had there hea,rd him give some indistinct directions to
one Tench, a joiner of Houndsditch, who was employed about
the scaffold, had afterwards seen him go out himself on the
scaffold about an hour before the execution, as if to observe
that his directions had been attended to, and finally, when
the execution was over, had encountered him again, coming
"in his black cloak and broad hat," and in the hangman's
company, out of the chamber into which the two men in
vizards had retired. In contradiction of this witness, Peters
called a Cornelius Glover, who had been his servant at the
fatal date, and who now testified, as circumstantially, that on
the day of the execution his master was " melancholy sick, as
he used to be,'' and had not left his chamber either before
the execution or during the execution. This evidence seems
to have had some effect upon the Court ; for, after Peters had
TEIALS OF THE REGICIDES. 87
given a short sketch of his life from his arrival from America
ia the beginning of the troubles^ admitting that he had been
" active " in the midst of the " strange and several kinds of
providence " in which he had found himself, " but not to stir
in a v^ay that was not honourable/' the Chief Baron in his
summing up, while mentioning Nunnelly's evidence, said the
Court would lay no great stress on that. The jury returned
a verdict of guilty on Peters, as well as on Cook ; and the
same sentence as on Harrison was pronounced on both.
Axtell, Hackerj and Hewlet, were tried on Monday the
15th. Axtell made a very able defence, reasoning more
energetically on some parts of the main subject than any
other of the Regicides, maintaining that his action through-
out had been but that of a soldier under Parliamentary orders,
and contending boldly that he was no more guilty than the
Earl of Essex, Lord Fairfax, the Earl of Manchester, Monk
himself, or any other military Parliamentarian. Hacker was
no speaker and had little to say for himself, but adopted
Axtell's plea of having been a soldier merely and under
command. In the case of Hewlet, the specific inquiry was
whether he had been one of the two masked executioners.
On this subject the Court had already been thrown into great
ambiguity by certain portions of the evidence during the
trials of Axtell and Hacker.— One of the witnesses there had
been Mr. Hercules Huncks, the " Colonel Huncks " of Jan.
164!8-9 to whom, in conjunction with Colonels Hacker and
Phayre, the death-warrant, signed by Bradshaw, Cromwell,
and fifty-seven others of the judges, had been addressed.
Having been imprisoned in the Tower, and not yet feeling
himself safe, Huncks was willing to purchase security by
telling all he could to convict Hacker and Axtell ; and there
had been some sensation in Court when Huncks and Axtell
were confronted, Huncks "as the dogged renegade and in-
former, and Axtell as the prisoner eyeing his former comrade
with scorn. Himcks's story was that there had been some
diflSculty on the execution day, from the fact that, in addition
to the death-warrant from the judges, addressed to Hacker,
Phayre, and himself, it was deemed necessary that there
88 LIFE OF MILTON AND HISTORY OF HIS TIME.
should be a sub-warrant, or order to the executioner. Natu-
rally it was for Hacker, Phayre, and Huncks, or one or other
of them, on the faith of the main warrant, to write this sub-
warrant. Accordingly, in Ireton's room in Whitehall, where
Cromwell, Ireton, Harrison, Hacker, Phayre, and Huncks
were met, just before the execution, with Axtell standing at
the door, Cromwell had turned to Huncks (so Huncks now
said) and asked him to write or sign the document. Huncks
had positively refused, he said ; whereupon Cromwell had
called him " a fro ward, peevish fellow," and Axtell from the
door had exclaimed : " Colonel Huncks, I am ashamed of
" you ; the ship is now coming into the harbour, and will you
" strike sail before we come to anchor ? " Not to lose time,
continued Huncks, Cromwell had gone to a little table that
stood by the door, with paper, pens, and ink on it, and,
having written the order himself, had handed the pen to
Hacker, who stooped and wrote — Huncks would not swear
what or how much, but had little doubt it was his name and
that only. If this story were true, the inference was that the
executioner-in-chief was already provided, and was waiting
for the warrant for himself and his assistant, and that the
name of the chief, or the names of both, must have been
known to all the seven persons in the room, or at all events
to Hacker, the signer of the warrant after Cromwell had
drawn it up. But Axtell, who treated Huncks's story
as pure invention, protested he had nothing to do with
the choice of the executioners, and even now did not know
their names j and, later in the trial, when another witness,
Lieutenant- Colonel Nelson, stated that, about five or six years
ago, he had been told by Axtell in Dublin that, though
" several persons came and offered themselves out of a kind of
zeal," all such had been set aside, and Hewlet and Walker,
two soldiers known for their steutness, had been chosen,
Axtell still adhered to his denial, declaring particularly that
it was impossible he should have ever named Hewlet, because
he could have spoken by guess only, and "by common fame up
and down the city it was said to be another person." Hacker
also, though admitting that he had signed the warrant to the
TRIALS OF THE EEGICIDES. 89
executioner, and that he might have heard the name at the
time, could not or would not now reveal it. This was attested
by Secretary Morrice and Mr. Annesley, who had examined
Hacker in the Tower. — Such was the uncertainty of the
Court on the question on which they were to try Hewlet
when Hewlet himself was brought to the bar. He was an
oldish grey-haired man ; and, though he had recently held
captain's rank in Ireland, and was styled in the indictment
"William Hewlet, alias Houlet, late of . Westminster, in the
county of Middlesex, gent.," he seems to have been a rough,
uneducated person, though not unsagacious, and with much
presence of mind in his terrible situation. Seven witnesses,
examined in succession, seemed, with more or less of precision,
to fasten the guilt on him, though with a diflPerence among
them as to whether he had been the man who cut the
head off, or only the man who had held it up afterwards.
The first, Richard Gitteris, swore that he and Hewlet had
been sergeants in the same regiment ; that, a day or
two before the execution, a number of picked men of that
regiment had been brought before Colonel Hewson, who
offered any of them that would undertake the work .^100
down and preferment in the army; that all had refused,
Hewlet included; but that he was confident Hewlet had
afterwards consented, for he had seen the executioner on the
scaffold, and recognised him to be Hewlet by his voice and
his grey beard, — more by token that Hewlet had ever since
been known in the army as " Father Greybeard.'' Then one
Stammers, a Captain Toogood, and a Walter Davis, swore
that, in conversations with Hewlet in Ireland, he had ad-
mitted, or all but admitted, the fact. Then Lieutenant-
Colonel Nelson repeated the evidence he had given on Axtell's
trial, but more circumstantially, to the effect that Axtell had
told him in Dublin that Walker and Hewlet, both sergeants,
were the men, and that " poor Walker " (now dead appa-
rently) struck the blow, leaving the rest to Hewlet. Then
Colonel Tomlinson testified that, to the best of his remem-
brance, one of the executioners was grey-haired and the
other flaxen-haired, and that the grey-haired one struck the
90 LIFE OF MILTON AND HISTORY OF HIS TIME.
blow, adding that lie had some recollection now of having'
been told since, by Colonel Pretty in Ireland, that this grey- .
haired one was Hewlet. Finally, a Benjamin Francis remem-
bered the two executioners, both dressed alike, " in butchers'
habits of woollen," but one with a black hat and a black
beard, and the other with " a grey grizzled periwig hung
down very low," and swore that the ■ prisoner at the bar
resembled this latter in stature and in the colour of his
beard. Through these examinations, Hewlet had sat gravely,
now and then putting a brief but effective question, discon^-
certing to the chief witnesses, but , on the whole seeming to
reserve himself. At last, nearly all the witnesses for the
prosecution having been examined, he did bring out his
reserve, and rather startlingly. He should be able to prove,
he said, that he and about nine other sergeants of different
regiments had been in confinement at Whitehall all the day
of the execution precisely because they had refused to go on
the scaffold; nay, though he had known this only recently
himself, h^ should be able to settle for the Court the question
which was so perplexing them, by proving, by " forty and
forty witnesses " if necessary, who the man was that did cut off
the King's head. The Court must have stared at this, though
the old report does not mention that or any other exhibition
of surprise. And Hewlet made good his word, or almost so.
Though, like all the other prisoners, he had hardly known
with precision the nature of the charge to be made against
him, and had in his durance had no time or means allowed
him of seeking out evidence for his defence, he had managed
to do something, or people in London, believing him innocent,
had been stirring in his behalf independently. And so,
though he would have liked more time, as he said, to get
together the " forty and forty witnesses " he believed might
be forthcoming, yet, as the Court ruled that he had had time
enough, he did avail himself of evidence then fortunately at
hand. This was not any evidence in support of his own
alleged alibi on the execution day; it was all for the identi-
fication of the chief executioner. First, there were certain
examinations that had been taken before the Lord Mayor ; of
TKIAL8 OF THE BEGICIDES. 91
which examinations He*let tendered to the Court a written
copy, signed by " Mary Brandon and divers others." The
Court seem to have paid small attention to this paper; but
they allowed some volunteer witnesses present (seemingly
some of those who had been already before the Lord Mayor)
to be examined viva wee, though without being sworn, — the
law being, as the Court explained, that there could be no
oath against the King in such a trial. The first of these
witnesses, a sheriff's officer, stated that " one of our fellows,"
John Rooten by name, had told him that he had been in
Rosemary Lane, Whitechapel, a little after the execution of
the King, " drinking with the hangman ", — i. e. with Richard
Brandon, the common executioner of that time, and that, on
being urged on the subject, the hangman had owned that he
cut off the King's head. Another, an Abraham Smith, who
had been a waterman on the Thames, remembered that the
hangman had beeh brought to his boat just after the execution
by a file of musketeers, that he had put off with him very
unwillingly by order of the musketeers, but that, when a
little way out in the river, he had said, " Who the devil have
I got in my boat ? ", and had made such an uproar that the
hangman " shook every joint of him," and protested he had
not done the deed, though sent for to do it, and that his
"instruments" had been used by others. Apparently this
witness meant to intimate that he believed at the time, and
now believed, that the hangman had lied in this denial. The
next witness, at all events, put that complexion on the affair
immediately and decidedly. His name was William Cox ;
and his evidence is reported thus : " When my lord Capel,
" Duke of Hamilton, and the Earl of Holland, were beheaded
" in Palace Yardj Westminster [i. e. on March 9, 1648-9,
" little more than a month after the execution of Charles],
" my lord Capel asked the common hangman : said he, ' Did
" * ^ou cut off my master's head ? ' ' Yes,' saith he. ' Where is
" ' the instrument that did it ? ' He then brought the axe.
" ' This is the same axe, are you sure ? ' said my lord. ' Yes,
" ' my lord,' saith the hangman, ' I am very sure it is the
" ' same.' My lord Capel took the axe, and kissed it, and
92 LIFE OF MILTON AND HI8T0EY OF HIS TIME.
" gave him five pieces of gold. I heard him say •' Simh.
" ' wert thou not afraid ? ' Saith the hangman, ' They made
" ' me cut it off, and I had thirty pounds for my pains.' "
After this supremely interesting witness, came a Richard
Abell, who testified that, in the house of one Bramston, he
had heard "Gregory himself" (i.e. the hangman) confess
that he had done the deed. Yet one more witness stepped
out, named "a stranger" in the report, as if he had been
moved by charity at the moment, and they did not take the
trouble to inquire who he was. He said, " My -lord, I was
" with my master in the company of Brandon the hangman,
" and my master asked Brandon whether he cut off the King's
" head or no. He confessed in my presence that he was the
" man that 'did cut off the King's head." So stood the ease
for Hewlet when Chief Baron Bridgman summed up. He'
recapitulated the evidence, spying in one place " God forbid
I should omit anything that may be as well for advantage as
against the prisoner," but on the whole putting most stress on
the evidence against Hewlet, and also reminding the jury thatthe
witnesses for him had not been on oath, and that, if he had
been only the assistant executioner, he must be brought in
guilty. The jury, "after a more than ordinary time of consulta-
tion," returned to their places ; and their verdict was Guilty.
It remained now to try those of the Regicides, not entered
as guilty by their own confession on their arraignment, for
whom there was the saving clause in the Bill of Indemnity,
providing that, if they should be found guilty and condemned,
the execution of the sentence in each case should be suspended
till ordered by the King after Act of Parliament. These,
sixteen in all, were brought to the bar on Tuesday, Oct. 16.
In the predicament in which they were, the benefit of the
saving clause depending much on their behaviour or on
the opinion the Court might form of them, anything like
contumacy was obviously unadvisable. Accordingly, they
were all studious to save the Court trouble by withdrawing
their previous pleas of Not Guilty and thus practicably sub-
mitting, though one or two did urge some point which required
the production of a witness or an argument by the prosecuting
TRIALS OP THE REGICIDES. 93
counsel. Still there were degrees in their suhmissiveness.
Harvey professed himself penitent, said he had exerted him-
self to stop the trial of the King, and reminded the Court of
his wife and thirteen children. Pennington avowed that he
had acted in ignorance. Henry Marten had recourse to some
suhtle pleading, not declining confession as to the matter
of fact, hut desiring to set aside the words " maliciously,
murderously, and traitorously " in the indictment. Making
nothing of that, and perceiving, on the contrary, that the
plea was only eliciting evidence of his activity and levity of
behaviour at the King's trial, he ended thus : — " I had then,
" and have now, a peaceable inclination, a resolution to submit
" to the government that God hath placed over me. I think
" his Majesty that now is is king upon the best title under
" Heaven, for he was called in by the representative body of
" England. I shall, during my life, long or short, pay
" obedience to him : besides, my lords, I do owe my life to
" him, if I am acquitted of this. I do confess I did adhere
" to the Parliament's party heartily: my life is at his mercy;
" if his grace be pleased to grant it, I have a double obliga-
" tion to him." After Marten came Millington, who sub-
mitted, pleaded guilty, and petitioned for mercy. Tichbourne
also professed penitence. Owen Rowe did the same, and said
he was a man of no ability, who ought to have kept to his
proper business as a tradesman. Lilbume said he had acted
ignorantly, and submitted. Smith said the same, and that
he could now pray for the King. Downes was penitent, and
explained that, though he had been among the sentencing
judges and had signed the death-warrant, he had strained his
conscience in these very acts, having made strong exertions
for the King at the time. Potter, a large man, with " a fit
of the stone upon him " as he stood in court, said, " I will
deny nothing ; I confess the fact, but did not contrive it ; I
am full of pain." Garland submitted, only denying a charge
that he had insulted the King in a special manner. Mayne
confessed, but said he had acted under compulsion. The two
Temples confessed and craved mercy. Wayte did the same,
and said he had been " trepanned " into his share in the
94 LIFE OP MILTON AND HISTORY OP HIS TIME.
regicide. Heveningham, wbo was brought up last, could
not deny the fact that he had been one of the sentencing
judges, but referred to some " after actions " in extenuation,
which the Court said would be " considered." And so, the
formality of a verdict of Guilty against each of the sixteen
having been gone through, and Sir Hardress Waller and
George Fleetwood, the two who had pleaded guilty on their
arraignment, having been brought into Court, and Axtell,
Hacker, and Hewlet, who had been found guilty on the pre-
vious day, having also been brought in, the Chief Baron
made his closing- speech, and pronounced sentence upon all
the twenty-six, save Heveningham, whose sentence for some
reason was reserved to the 19th. The sentence on all was the
same sentence of hanging, drawing, quartering, &c., that had
already been pronounced on the eight regicides first tried.
For the sixteen who could plead the saving clause there was
to be a respite of the execution till farther order; and the
Chief Baron was also pleased to intimate to Hewlet his belief,
though not positive certainty, that, in consideration of the
conflict of evidence in his case,, there would be a respite for
him too till his Majesty's pleasure should be farther known.
Axtell and JHacker knew their doom ^.
1 My account of the Indictment, Ar- another woman being in a chandler's
raignment, and Trials of the Eegicides shop two or three hours after the exeeu-
is derived fronj Vol. IV. of HoweU'a tion, "hotli weeping," Payne came in
Sto(e-rrtais,pp. 947 — 1230. — One of the "rejoicingly, said his hands had done
nineteen Eegicides named in the Bill of " the work, and asked a countrywoman
Indemnity (or the benefit of the saving " to drink a quart of sack with him in a
clause as having surrendered on the pro- "tavern" (Mrs. Green's Calendar of
clamation (ante p. 54) remains unao- Stoie-Pajjers under date June 26, 1660).
, counted for. He is Thomas Wogan. Payne, if he had made the boast, had
Haviijg had an opportunity of escaping already cleared himself of the fact before
abroad since the passing of the Bill, he the Council, and explained that he " was
had prefen-ed exile at all risks to trial not on the scaffold till an hour and a
with th.e benefit of the saving clause. — half after the execution, when most of
In addition to the six persons hitherto the boards were removed" UMd. June
named in. these pages as having been 25). A Christopher Alured of York-
suspected or accused in one way or shire had been informed against as
another o^ the actual decapitation of having "declared himself to be the
Charles— viz. one Matthew, Colonel man" and boasted of it [Ibid. July
George Joyce, Hugh Peters, Hewlet, 19). There seems, indeed, to have
Walker, and the common executioner been a competition among bragging and
Brandon— one hears of others and still crazed people for the reputation of the
others. Thus a Phineaa Payne, who was tremendous deed. After all, despite
" one of the three doorkeepers of the Lilly's very circumstantial statement,
court " during the King's trial, h^d been about Joyce (which seems to have been
accused before the Council by an Eliza- entirely disregarded before the trials),
beth Parsons, to the effect that, she and and despite any worth that may seem to
EXECUTIONS OP THE REGHCIDES.
95
Before the trials were ended, the hangings and quarterings
had begun. Harrison was the first example. On Saturday,
October 13, he was brought from Newgate, .where he had
taken his last leave of his wife, and of other friends, all in
a state of marvel at the ecstasy or heroic rapture of his de-
meanour. Conveyed on a hurdle or sledge, tied and with the
rope about his neck, through the crowded streets, "^ his counte-
nance never changing all the way," but appearing " mighty
cheerful to the astonishment of many," he came in sight of
the gallows at Charing Cross. Before he left the hurdle, the
hangman, in the customary way, solicited a fee by the pre-
tence of asking forgiveness. Harrison gave him the forgive-
ness, and " all the money he had." Then, mounting the
ladder, still " with an undaunted countenance," he addressed
the people in the strain of a fervid fifth-monarchy Puritan
linger even yet in the evidence respect-
ing the dead Walker, or even respecting
Hewlet, the decided preponderance of
the evidence is in favour of the conclu-
sion that the real executioner was the
common hangman, Brandon. On such
an occasion an expert would he in re-
quest ; and the fact seems to have heeu,
as brought out by Hewlet's witnesses,
that Randan made no secret of the
matter so long as he lived, hut told any
of his neighbours in Eosemary Lane who
chose to inquire, amd always with the
addition that he got £30 for the work.
He died June 20, 1649, not five months
after the behea,ding of the King, and
less than four after the beheading of
Lord Capel, the Duke of Hamilton, and
the Earl of Holland ; and opposite to
the entry of his burial in the register of
St. Mary's parish, Whitechapel, — " June
21, Bieh. Brandon, a man out of Bose-
mary Lane," — some one afterwards
wrote, "This E. Brandon is supposed
to have cut off the head of Charles the
First" (Cunningham's Hand-Book of
London, p. 427). In a tract of the
time, called Tfie Confession of the
Hangman, besides details of the story
of- -the King's execution, as told by
Brandon himself, — e. g. an account of
what he did with " an orange stuck full
of cloves and a handkerchief '■' which he
took from the King's pocket, — there is,
a description of the proceedings at the
"burial of Brandon. Whitechapel was in
riot, and it was with difficulty that the
body escaped being torn to pieces by the
mob. See Chambers's Book of Baiyi, I.
798 — 799 ; where there is also a quota-
tion from a broadside called A Dialogue
between the Hangman and Death. - In-
reply to Death, who comes exultingly
to carry off Brandon at last, and calls
him "the bloodiest actor in this present
age," Brandon is made to say, among
other things,
"I gave the blow caused thousands'
hearts to ache ;
Nay, more than that, it made three
kingdoms quake."
Brandon had succeeded his father
Gregory Brandon in his dreadful busi-
ness ; and the name of this " Gregory."
remembered as "the- executioner of Straf-
ford and others, seems to have been used
for " Eichard " by one of Hewlet's wit-
nesses. It seems strange that, with all
th,e publicity of the tradition respecting
Brandon, and with his wife or daughter,
" Mary Brandon," apparently still alive
to add her testimony to that of so many
others, the government should have
ignored Brandon for the chance of find-
ing some one living to convict. . How
perseveringly they tracked out every
one connected in any way -with the
Eegicide appears from the fact that the
carpenter. Tench of Houndsditch, who
had erected the scaifold, was still sought
for. He was arrested some weeks after
our present date {Public Intelligencer of
Nov. 26— Dec. 3). Whatever he had,
done, he ought to have been safe then
by the BiU of Indemnity.
96 LIFE OF MILTON AND HISTORY OF HIS TIME.
and man of the Commonwealth. " Take notice," he said,
"that, for being instrumental in that cause and interest of
" the Son of God which hath been pleaded amongst us, and
" which God hath witnessed to by appeals and wonderful
" victories, I am brought to this place to suffer death this day;
" and, if I had ten thousand lives, I could freely and cheerftdly
" lay down them all to witness to this matter." Again : —
" I do not lay down my life by constraint, but willingly ; for,
" if I had been minded to have run away, I might have had
" many opportunities ; but, being so clear in the thing,
" I durst not turn my back nor step a foot out of the way,
" by reason I had been engaged in the service of so glorious
" and great a God. However men presume to call it by hard
" names, yet I believe, ere it be long, the Lord will make it
" known from Heaven that there was more of God in it than
" men are now aware of." There was more to the like effect,
his demeanour continuing to astonish the spectators, and,
among them, Pepys, who, having seen the execution of
Charles and approved of it, had come to witness this first
expiation for it. Though there were requests from the
sheriff to be short, and the executioner was bustling to begin
his work, Harrison went on till he had said all he meant
to say. His last words were: " He hath covered my head
" many times in the day of battle. By God I have leaped
" over a wall ; by God I have run through a troop ; and by
" my God I will go through this death, and He will make it
" easy to me. Now into Thy hands, O Lord Jesus, I commit
" my spirit." The sentence was then executed to the letter.
He was flung off, hanged a moment or two, but cut down
still alive, for the opening of his body. As the hangman was
at this savagery, nerve and muscle worked strongly in the
half-dead man, and he struck the hangman a blow in the face.
The head and heart were shown to the people, and there were
great shouts of joy. — At the same place, on Monday the 15th,
Carew was executed in the same manner. He also went out of
the world dauntlessly, a dull, pious man, with prayers and words
of triumph.— Cook, Hugh Peters, Scott, Clements, Scroope,
and Jones, were executed, all at Charing Cross likewise.
EXECUTIONS OB" THE EEaiCIDIiS. 97
the two first on the 16thj the others on the 17th. All died
hravely, — even Peters, who had had depressing doubts in prison
whether he should be able to "go through his sufferings with
courage," and whom the hangman tried to break down, when
his turn came, by ostentatiously rubbing his hands before
him, bloody from the disembowelling of Cook, and saying,
" How do you like this work, Mr. Peters ?" None of the con-
demned went out of the world with less pity. The execution
of Peters, said the newspapers of the day, " was the delight
" of the people, which they expressed by several shouts and
" acclamations when they saw him go up the ladder, and also
" when the halter was putting about his neck." — One does not
know whether his Majesty had been present at the executions
of Harrison, Carew, Cook, and Peters ; but Evelyn tells us
that he was present at that of Scott, Clements, Scroope, and
Jones. The amiable Evelyn missed the main sight himself, but
remarks on the fact that the place was Charing Cross, close to
Whitehall, where Charles had been beheaded. "I saw not
" their execution," he says, " but met their quarters, mangled
" and cut and reeking, as they were brought from the gallows
"in baskets on the hurdle. O the marvellous providence of
" God !" Axtell and Hacker were executed together on the
19th, not at Charing Cross, but at Tyburn, near the present
Marble Arch. Axtell, being a man of speech, could show his
courage in that way as well as by his demeanour. In
Newgate, since his condemnation, he had been speaking with
some soreness of " that poor wretch Lieutenant-Colonel
Huncks," and also of Colonel Tomlinson ; but at the gibbet
he made all the proper professions of a Puritan and Repub-
lican Christian. Hacker, a man of no words, had prepared
a little paper, beginning " Friends and Countrymen, all that
have known me in my best estate have not known me to be
a man of oratory," and containing two or three plain sentences
more, soldierly and pious ^.
- Accounts of the Executions and the Howell's State-Trials, IV. 1230—1302 ;
Last Speeches and Prayers of the Begl- Pepys's Diary and Evelyn's of dates ;
cides, published in 1663 from notes Meromim PvMims, Oct. 11 — 18, 1660.
tak'en at the time, and reprinted in
VOL. VI. H
98 LIFE OF MILTON AND HISTORY OF HIS TIME.
Ten had been hanged, drawn, and quartered ; and thei
prison-walls closed round the remaining nineteen that had
been condemned, as also round the six Regicides of less criminal
grade that were in custody, but had not been tried for their
lives. Little more was to be heard of any of the twenty-five
in this world, save when it was thought proper to cart one or
two of them for exhibition through the streets of London
with halters round their necks. After the twenty yet living
Regicides who had escaped out of England, and were still
fugitive, there was to be a hue and cry to the last. Lambert
and Vane, not classed with the Regicides, were in prison, as
capital exceptions from the Indemnity on other grounds, and
with only a petition of the two Houses to his Majesty between
them and the scaffold. Hasilrig, not excepted for life, but for
everything else, was also in prison for general guilt, as a man
never to see the sun again. For one of the two Regicides,
Lassek and Hutchinson, who had been sentenced to civil
incapacitation only, the escape was to be but nominal.
For some of the eighteen more severely incapacitated culprits,
two of them ranked as minor Regicides, disgrace was not to
be the sole punishment after all. The absolutely condoned
Matthew Tomlinson was to disappear into obscurity; and only
Dick Ingoldsby, of all the Regicides, could hold up his head.
The four-and-twenty Regicides that were dead before the Act
of Indemnity lay in their graves, coffined corpses, and
undisturbed as yet ^.
1 In the enumeration in this para- (April 1661, setat. 49), Pennington (Dec.
graph the reader -will find all the 102 17, 1661), Rowe (Dec. 1661). Trans-
persons excepted by-name from the Bill ferred to other prisons with some tn-
of Indemnity (ante pp. 54—56) ao- dulgence, and died there — Lilburne (in
counted for in a general way. I hare Jersey, Aug. 1665, setat. 52) ; Henry
made no special investigation of the Marten (at Chepstow Castle, as late as
fates of the nineteen Regicides con- 1681, setat. 77). Ultimately released, and
demned capitally in Oct. 1660 but not died in .dmerioo— George Fleetwood,
executed; aud the following ds only I know nothing of Hewlet : but even he
TOughlyfromNobleandother authorities may have been traced to his end by
at hand : — Died in prison, mostly in the some one.--Of the six minor Regicides
Tower, time unascertained— Dovmes, in custody, James ChaUoner, Sir James
Garland (presumably), Harvey, Heven- Harrington, and Phelps, appear to have
lugham (presumably), Millington, Pot- died in prison soon. Hutchinson, though
ter. Smith, James Temple, Peter Temple, nominally condoned, was to die a pri-
Tichboume (presumably), Wayte (pre- soner in Deal Castle, Sept. 11, 1664.
sumably), Sir Hardress Waller. Died Hasilrig died in the Tower, of a fever,
in the Tower at knoten dates— Kayne within the year. Lambert, after several
king's ecclesiastical declaeation. 99
Just after the hanging and quartering of the ten Eegicides
there came forth a Declaration of his Majesty concerning Eccle-
siastical Affairs (Oct. 25, 1660). It was his Majesty's attempt
in that business of a reconstitution of the Church of England
which had been referred to him by Parlianjent.
The first draft of the document, which seems to have been
substantially Hyde's, had been ready for more than a month,
and had been put into the hands of Reynolds^ Calamy, Baxter,
and the rest of the small committee of representative Pres-
byterian divines for the benefit of their private criticisms.
Such criticisms had been freely tendered, both in conferences
with Hyde and in papers sent in to him. Baxter had been
the boldest in his censures of the document, but h^d been
tempered down by Reynolds, Calamy, and the rest. At
length, some alterations having been made in the document,
there had been a special conference over it in the King's pre-
sence, Oct. 23. The conference was held in Worcester House,
in the Strand, then Chancellor Hyde's residence ; and besides
the King and Hyde, the laymen present were the Duke of
Albemarle, Ormond, the Earl of Manchester, Mr. Annesley,
and Mr. Holies. Hyde read over the document, paragraph
by paragraph, and it was commented on by Sheldon, Morley,
Henchman, Hacket, Gunning, Dr. Barwick, and others on
the Episcopal side, while Baxter, Reynolds, Calamy, Spurstow,
Manton, and others argued on what was still called the Pres-
byterian side. Baxter is most emphatic, however, in explain-
ing that this phrase was now a misnomer, purposely kept up
among the courtiers to discredit himself and his friends.
None of them now, he says, spoke for Presbytery, or thought
of bringing any of the essential differences between the Pres-
byterian system and the Episcopal into the discussion. They
had, all of them, practically ceased to be Presbyterians, and h^d
consented to accept Episcopacy and a Liturgy ; what they
now spoke for was simply an abatement of the excesses of Epis-
copacy and the excesses of Ritual. It was a strange pass for
removes, died in Guernsey, as late as continent or in America, about twenty
1694, sstat. about 74.— Of the fates of in all, a perfect account is, I believe,
the Eegicides that were fugitive on the stiU a desideratum.
H 2
100 LIFE OF MILTON AND HISTORY OF HIS TIME.
the great body of the English Presbyterians to have come to
in the persons of their chief representatives. But the fact
was as Baxter states it. Those who had been Presbyterians
hithertOj in a stricter sense than Baxter himself had ever been,
were now at one with him in thinking Usher's Model of
Episcopacy satisfactory, and in the resolution to confine them-
selves to such negotiation with the King and Hyde in behalf
of that model, or of something like it, as should efiect the
great end of a comprehension of the Old Anglicans and the
ci-devant Presbyterians in the established National Church,
achieving at the same time the other desirable end of turning
out the Independents, the Baptists, et hoc genus omne. This
intention as regards the Independents and Sectaries was im-
plied in the present conference and in the whole treaty, and
was indeed one of the operating forces on both sides. At the
end of the conference, however, it seemed as if Baxter and
his friends must give up all hope of seeing his Majesty's
Declaration issue in such a shape as they desired. Some
important modifications which they wanted were declined,
or set aside by the Anglican reasoners ; and, when his Majesty
gave his decision how the Declaration should finally stand,
and intrusted it to Morley and Henchman on the one side,
and Reynolds and Calamy on the other, for verbal perfection
in that form, with Annesley and Holies as umpires in case of
difference, Baxter was much dejected. He attributed a good
deal of his disappointment to Annesley, who, though called
a Presbyterian, and acting on that side, had " spoken more
for prelacy " in the conference than had been expected ; and
he could not refrain from saying to Annesley, as he left the
room, that he would not have done what Annesley had. done
that day against the peace and welfare of the Church for
much more than Annesley was ever likely to get by it. Mr.
Baxter could be thus sharp even to a Privy Councillor ^.
"What was Baxter's surprise, what his joy, when, on buying
a copy of the Printed Declaration, as it was cried about the
streets on the 25th, he found that his rebuke to Annesley had
• \?'"'i^''i \ ^f?''Pl'' 'S'T **^®''^ "'''^ "i^'^ils of the discussion and con-
is the first draft of the Declaration, ference.
king's ecclesiastical declaeation. 101
had excellent effect ! The wording of the Declaration, as thus
authoritatively issued, promised a constitution of the Church,
he says, " though not such as we desired, yet such as any
" sober honest ministers might submit to ; and I was pre-
" sently resolved to do my best to persuade all, according to
" my interest and opportunity, to conform." What was the
purport of the document which thus convinced Baxter and
so many others that they need not leave the Establishment
after all, but might remain in it with a good conscience ?
We must turn to the document itself: — In the preamble his
Majesty expresses his belief that his long residence abroad,
his acquaintance with the forms of all the different Reformed
Churches there, and his frequent conversations in particular
with eminent divines in Holland, " looked upon as the most
able and principal asserters of the Presbyterian opinions," had
qualified him peculiarly for the task of framing such a con-
stitution for the Church of England as was now sorely needed.
His intention at first had been to call a Synod of Divines to
aid him ; and, with that intention, he had meanwhile con-
tented himself with using the Liturgy in his own chapel
and seeing the voluntary use of it by many others. He had
not pressed it upon his subjects generally, or done anything
against that general liberty of conscience which he had pro-
mised from Breda. But men of restless and malicious spirits
had been at work. They had " very unseasonably caused to
" be printed, published, and dispersed throughout the king-
" dom, a Declaration heretofore printed in Our name during
" the time of Our being in Scotland, of which We shall say
"no more than that the circumstances by which We were
" enforced to sign that Declaration are enough known to the
"world." No wonder that his Majesty, or Hyde for him,
thought the resuscitation of that document unseasonable. It
embodied the oaths which Charles, as a Covenanted King,
had sworn again and again in Scotland in 1650 and 1651, to
maintain Presbyterial Government, with the two Covenants,
and the Westminster Assembly's directory, confession, and
catechisms, in Scotland for ever, to observe them in his own
practice and family, and to promote their establishment in
102 LIFE OF MILTON AND SISTOEY OP HIS TIME.
the rest'of his dominions. But other pamphlets, his Majesty
added, were equally inopportune and perturbing. ' Hence his
Majesty bad seen fit " to invert the method " he had first pro-
posed, atid, instead of calling a Synod at once, to make a good
beginning himself, which Parliament and a Synod might
perfect in due time. He was encouraged in this by the pre-
sent harmonious temper of those leading representatives both
of English Episdopalianism and of English Presbyterianism
(with whom he had been conferring. "We must, for the
" honour of all those of either persuasion with -whom we have
" conferred, declare that the professions and desires of all for the
" advancement of piety and true godliness are the same ; their
" professions of zeal for the peace of the Church the same, of
" affection and duty to us the same : they all approve Epis-
" copacy ; they all approve a set form of Liturgy ; and they
" all disapprove and dislike the sin of sacrilege, and the alien-
" ation of the xe venue of the Church. And, if upon these
" excellent foundations, in submission to which there is such
" a harmony of affections, any superstructure should be raised
" to the sha,king of these foundations,' ' — then truly his Majesty
would be most unfortunate. He hoped, however, that the
superstructure he had devised would suit the foundations. It
was this : — (1) Studious promotion of Religion and Godliness,
and of the observation of the Lord''s Day " without unneces-
sary divertisement," and this more immediately by a retention
of the surviving old bishops, the appointment of suitable
colleagues for them, and care that all bishops henceforth
should .be working and preaching bishops ; (3) Sufi'tagan
bishops in every diocese, and especially in the large ones, to
assist the bishops; (3) No bishop in any diocese to ordain,
or exercise jurisdiction involving church-censure, without
" the advice and assistance of the presbyters ;" no chancellor
commissary, or other lay-official in a diocese to exercise
spiritual jurisdiction ; and no archdeacon to exercise jurisdic-
tion without the advice and assistance of six ministers of his
archdeaconry, three to be nominated by the bishop and three
by vote among the presbyters in the archdeaconry. (4) Pre-
ferments to deaneries and other cathedral offices to be from
KING S ECCLESIASTICAL DECLARATION. 103
among "the most pious and learned ministers of the diocese;"
and the dean and chapter of each cathedral to have associated
with them in all their spiritual functions an equal number of
presbyters elected by the presbyters of the diocese, the junior
presbyters so elected always to withdraw at any meeting of
the Dean and Chapter where the presbyters present out-num-
bered those present of the Dean and Chapter. (5) Church-
discipline to be efficiently maintained in every diocese ; and,
for this purpose, every rural dean to have three or four
ministers, elected by the ministers of the deanery, associated
with him in a monthly church-court for admonishing
offenders, composing differences, making representations to
the bishop, &c. (6) No bishop to exercise arbitrary power.
(7) The old Liturgy, though his Majesty himself prefers it to
anything else of the kind he has seen, to be revised by a com-
mittee of an equal number of divines of both persuasions to
be appointed by his Majesty, but meanwhile to be optional
in whole or in part. (8) The ritual of the Church to be
determined by a future National Synod ; and meanwhile
kneeling at the sacrament, the sign of the cross at baptism,
bowing at the name of Jesus, and the use of the surplice
(save in the Eoyal Chapel, Cathedrals and Collegiate Churches,
and the Universities) not to be imperative. Indeed cere-
monies generally to be as little compulsory as possible;
liberality and comprehensiveness to be studied in all ways;
and ministers to be admitted to ordination and benefices with-
out oaths or subscriptions other than the ordinary oaths of
allegiance and supremacy ^.
Such was the King's Declaration of October 25, 1660,
reconstituting the Church of England. It sent a glow of
pleasure through thousands of hearts. For such of the
Independents and Baptists, indeed, as had been retained
within Cromwell's Church-Establishment, and had no ob-
jection of principle against remaining within a State-Church
still, if only it were a State-Church to suit, the document
meant absolute exclusion from the State-Church as actually
1 Baxter, I. 278—279 ; and the Declaration, as given in Pari. Hist. IV. 131—141.
r04 LIFE OF MILTON AND HISTOBT OF HIS TIME.
reconstituted. They had expected nothing* else ; and most of
them, if not all, were already out of the Establishment,
huddled in the same mass with that miseellamy of Independent
and Baptist Voluntaries, Quakers and other Sectaries, and
Roman CatholicSj whose interest personally was not in the
constitution of the State-Church, but in the postponed
question of the amount of Toleration to be allowed out of the
State-Church. There were still also rigid Presbyterians to
whom an Episcopal State-Church in any form, with a Liturgy
and other such accompaniments, was as repugnant as it had
been in the days of the Westminster Assembly and the adop-
tion of the strict Scottish model. But the majority of the
ci-devant Presbyterians and Covenanters were satisfied. The
Episcopacy to be set up by the King's Declaration was a
limited Episcopacy, an Episcopacy of expediency only, a
Presbyterianized Episcopacy, very nearly, if not quite, after
Usher's scheme of reduction back to the Episcopacy of the
Primitive Church just after the age of the Apostles. There
were addresses of thanks to the King by Presbyterian
ministers ; the King or Hyde seemed to have performed a
feat of real statesmanship ; and England lay in repose^.
No time like that for filling up the Episcopate, and so
letting the nation behold in distinct vision the actual fabric of
the restored Church of England. With this view, Hyde and
the King had been making arrangements. Several of the
nine surviving pre-Restoration Bishops had been promoted
already to higher sees; on the 26th of October, the very
day after the King's Declaration appeared, a number of new
bishops were consecrated ; and before the 6th of November
when the Parliament was to re-assemble after the recess, this
was the state of the Episcopate : —
Province op Cauteebijrt.
Aechbishopeio : William Juxon, translated from his former see of
London, Sept. 13.
B. of St. Asaph : George Griffith, consecrated Oct. 28.
B. of Bangor : "William Eoberts, holding since 1637.
B. of Bath and "Wells : "William Pierce, holding since 1632.
1 Baxter, I. 284— ?83 ; Neal, IV. 304-309.
THE ENGLISH EPISCOPATE IN NOV. 1660. 105
B. of Bristol : left vacant.
B. of Chichester : Henry King, holding since 1642.
B. of St. David's : William Lucy, elected Oct. 11.
B. of Ely : Matthew Wren, holding since 1638.
B. of Exeter : John Gauden, elected Nov. 3.
B. of Gloucester : left vacant.
B. of Hereford : left vaeamt.
B. of Lichfield and Coventry : left vacant.
B. of Lincoln : Eobert Sanderson, elected Oct. 1 7.
B. of Llandaff: Hugh Lloyd, elected Oct. 17.
B. of London : Gilbert Sheldon, elected Oct. 23.
B. of Norwich : leji vacant.
B. of Oxford : Robert Skinner, holding since 1641.
B. of Peterborough : left vacant.
B. of Rochester : John Warner, holding since 1637.
B. of Salisbury : Humphrey Henchman, elected Oct. 4.
B. of Winchester : Brian Duppa, transferred from the Bishopric
of Salisbury Sept. 10.
B. of Worcester : George Morley, elected Oct. 9.
Peovince oe York.
Aechbishopeic : Accepted Frewen, transferred from his former see
of Lichfield and Coventry Sept. 22.
B. of Carlisle : left vacant.
B. of Chester : left vacant.
B. of Durham : left vacant.
B. of Sodor and Man : left vacant.
There was a meaning in the ten bishoprics left vacant fdr the
present. For most of these Hyde and the King had meri-
torious old Anglicans in readiness ; but it was thought highly
desirable that three or four of them should be given to the
most eminent among the ci-devant Presbyterians, and the
Bishopric of Coventry and Lichfield had been ofi'ered to
Calamy, that of Hereford to Baxter, and that of Norwich to
Reynolds. It was a subtle temptation, and there was a Babel
of remark. For Baxter and Reynolds to take bishoprics
might not be so shocking, as both of them had in past years
inclined to moderate Episcopacy; but, if Mr. Calamy, the
old Smectymnuan, were seen in a bishopric, what faith could
there be in man any more ? Baxter, on the whole, thought it
best to decline ; for the other two, and for some Presbyterian
divines who had been offered deaneries, the policy was to wait
to see whether, when the Parliament met after the recess, the
106 LIFE OP MILTON AND HISTORY OF HIS TIMK.
King's Declaration would be confirmed by an Act. Then
they might all accept ^-
One other incident of ithe recess deserves to be noted.
It concerned Hyde himself, the prime minister and bishop-
maker, and it made him reel in his place.
It seems to have been about the beginning of October, just
when the trials of the Regicides were coming on, that there
was first divulged the scandal of the strange relations between
the Chancellor's eldest daughter, Anne Hyde, and the Duke of
York. The facts, not then fully known, were these : — While
the girl was in the household of the Princess of Orange
at Breda, the duke had made love to her. There had been a
secret contract of marriage, it is believed, on the 24th of
November 1659 ; and, on the faith of this contract, they had
been living as if married fOT about six months, when the
Restoration brought them both to London. As she was then
with child, concealment was impossible much longer ; and on
the 3rd of September 1660, late at night, there had been
contrived her hurried marriage to the duke in her father's
house, before witnesses, and according to the rites of the
English Church. The Chancellor's own account conveys the
idea that not even then was he cognisant of the affair. It
was first broken to him, he rsays, by his friends Ormond and
/ Southampton, considerately deputed to do so by the King,
to whom the Duke of York had confessed it, with urgent
entreaties that he would recognise the marriage. His
Majesty, acquitting the Chancellor of all connivance. Was
anxious to know how the news might affect him. The
Chancellor, as he himself tells us, behaved at first like a
madman. He swore at his daughter before his friends, called
her by the most opprobrious of names, said he would turn her
out of his house. When, to pacify him, they suggested that
his daughter was perhaps legally married to the duke, he
declared that the case was then much worse. He would
rather that she should have dishonoured herself without
marriage ; there was no course, in such a high state-offence
' Baxter, I. 281—281
THE DUKE 0* tOEK AND ANNE HYDE. 107
in the beginning of the King's reign, but to move his Majesty
to " cause the woman to be sent to the Totver, and to be cast
" into a dungeon, under so strict a guard that no person living
" should be admitted to come to her, and then that an Act
" of Parliament should be immediately passed for the cutting
" off her head." If their lordships would concur, he would
move this himself. The King coming in at this poiut, and
the Chancellor again exploding, and repeating his advice
for imprisonment and decapitation, all his Majesty could do
was to adjourn the matter till the Chancellor should recover
his reasoil. — As days passed he did gro*' calmer. He had
taken pains to ascertain that his daughter really was married ;
and, though he did not then know, he says, that his servants
were all the while admitting the duke to Worcester House
whenever he liked, he knetfr that the duke was passionately
fond of her and very importunate with the King for the
recognition of the marriage. And so, though the Chancellor
still resisted and argued that the marriage must be disallowed,
this would have been the speedy conclusion of the affair, but
for the interference of the ladies of the Royal Family. — It
had been this affair of the Duke of York's marriage, among
others, that had brought the Priticess of Orange from Holland
on the 35th of September ; messages on the subject had been
dispatched to the Queen-mother at Paris, leading to com-
munications from that lady; and, when she herself should
arrive in London, everybody knew what she would do.
She had all along been the Chancellor's greatest enemy ; to
have Hyde's daughter thrust into the Royal Family was a
degradation to which she would never submit ; she would
turn this incident in the Chancellor's domestic life into his
public ruin. — Nor were methods wanting. For, meanwhile,
on the 22nd of October, the very day of the great conference
of divines in Worcester House over his Majesty's Declaration
concerning Ecclesiastical Affairs, the poor girl about whom
there was all the excitement had given birth in that house to
a son, — his Majesty manfully using his good fortune in being
then on the spot to cause the Marchioness of Ormond and
other great court-ladies to be sent for to attend the accouche-
108 LIFE OF MILTON AND HISTORY OF HIS TIME.
ment. The act appeared the more manful to Hyde because
there was already a vile conspiracy among- the courtiers of the
Queen-mother's party, though she herself had not yet arrived,
to break off the marriage by inducing the Duke of York to
think the child not his. Sir Charles Berkeley, the Comptroller
of the Household, was at the centre of the conspiracy, and had
given the duke such assurances of the possibility of another
paternity that the duke was now as anxious to repudiate the
marriage as he had been to have it acknowledged.
Through all the multifarious business of the recess, in-
cluding the trials of the Regicides and the reconstitution of
the Church of England, Hyde had been carrying this private
trouble in his mind. More than once, he says, he had offered
to resign his posts and retire from public life. And now, the
accouchement over, and the recess at an end, and the Duke of
York still giving credence to Berkeley's calumny and refusing
to see his wife and the baby, and the Queen-mother being
herself on the spot to manage matters farther, what was he to
do ? His sole comfort, he says, was in the generous steadiness
of the King. His Majesty had called Berkeley a blackguard,
whose word was not to be trusted; through his Majesty's
influence, the court-ladies who had attended the accoucJiement
were doing all they could to contradict Berkeley's story ; and,
though his Majesty did not see how the affair might end for
Anne Hyde, and cared little about that, he was resolved that
nothing should separate him from his Chancellor. He took
the opportunity, indeed, to insist that Hyde should at last
allow himself to be made a peer. Another honour which
came to Hyde at the same time was his election, October 37,
to be Chancellor of the University of Oxford, in succession to
the Duke of Somerset, who had just died. And so, whatever
might betide Anne Hyde and her child, it was as Baron
Hindonj still Lord Chancellor and Prime Minister, and with
other added honours, that Hyde, on the 6th of November
1660, faced the reassembled Parliament i.
:» Clarendon, 1008—1012 (CorKiima- London, Art. Worcester Some ; Wood's
Uon of Life) ; Burnet, I. 286—287 ; Ath. III. 1022 ; Hallara, II. 361-363,
Pepysaud Evelyn, botli under date Oct. footnote. Hallam characterises Clar-
7, 1660; Cunningham's Handbook of endon's . account of the affair of his
EEASSEMBLING OF THE PABLIAMENT. 109
Among the first acts of the two Houses on the day of their
reassembling were a vote to congratulate the Queen -mother
on her arrival, a vote of a gift of J^10,000 to the Princess
Henrietta, and a unanimous vote in the Commons of their
hearty thanks to the King for his gracious Declaration con-
cerning Ecclesiastical Affairs. In this last vote it was implied
that a Bill would be brought in for adopting his Majesty's
reconstitution of the Church of England and making it
effectual.
On the 7th of November there was introduced into the
Commons by Solicitor-General Sir Heneage Finch, and read
the first and second timesj a Bill for Attainting Oliver Crom-
well and other dead or living Regicides, and the Bill was
referred to a large committee, including Mr. Prynne. A
Lord's Day Bill, a Militia Bill, debates on the public debt
and on the best means of raising the revenue of ^1,200,000
a year that had been promised to his Majesty, and debates
respecting a dangerous political pamphlet by a Mr. William
Drake, occupied the House pretty closely to Nov. 32. On
that day the Commons, meeting the Lords by request, were
informed that the Lord Chancellor had brought an intimation
from the King that he intended to dissolve the present
Parliament in about a month. This may have been a surprise
to the Commons ; but it was very natural in the circum-
stances. The Convention Parliament had effected the Re-
storation, had disposed of the Regicides, had disbanded the
old Republican Army, had decreed a splendid revenue for the
King, and made his path easy. But there were reasons why
daughter's marriage as "overacted hy- pressed, as in this account of the divulg-
pocrisy," a deliberate attempt " to mis- ing of his daughter's secret and of his
lead," and thinks that, as his conduct own hehaviour on the occasion. You
must be called atrocious if the account cannot tell when he first knew the fact
is taken as true, "the most favourable himself, whether before the private mar-
hypothesisS for him is to give up his riage in his own house or after ; you see
veracity." I should be loth to adopt the Queen-mother there before she is
such a hypothesis in the case of such a there, and you see her come after that ;
man as Clarendon ; and it is a hypothesis you have no idea of the extent of time
always to be used sparingly. But 1 have with which you are dealing. And yet
never read, even in Clarendon himself, the story is most flowing and graphiCj
whose regardlessness of dates is always and you cannot positively convict the
a torture, a passage in which dates are writer of false dating at any one point,
so ingeniously jumbled, by being half- Hallam, in reconsidering his note, reluct-
suggested and then retracted or sup- antly admits this.
110 LIFE OF MILTON AND HISTORY OF HIS TIME.
it should sit no longer. For one thing, it ha4 not come into
being in the regular way and under the King's own authority^
but by powers acting while he was in exile; and, though
everything possible had been done to amend the defect, there
were still whispers among the more violent courtiers that it
was not a legitimate Parliament^ and that its acts might be
challenged. But, farther, the material of the present House
of Commons was not in accordance with his Majesty's notions.
He and his brother, and the majority of the courtiers, wanted
to see England turned into an absolute monarehyj like that
of Prance ; and, though there was a remnant in Hyde's mind
of old English constitutionalism, and there had been serious
conversations between him and the Earl of Southampton
respecting the tendency to Absolutism among the courtiers,
yet Hyde too was tired of the present House of Commons.
There was too much of the Puritan tradition in it for his
ecclesiastical tastes ; and he looked forward, with the King,
to such a thoroughly Cavalier Parliament as the country was
sure to return when the present should be dissolved ^.
To make the most of the time remaining, the two Houses
confined themselves chiefly to the bill for givipg effect to his
Majesty's Ecclesiastical Beala/ration, the bill of Attainder on
the Regicides, and the question of methods for providing his
Majesty's revenue.
The Bill for confirming his Majesty's Ecclesiastical Declara-
tion came to a sudden and mysterious collapse in the Commons.
It was read the first time on the 27th of November ; and,
though the House had unanimously and enthusiastically
thanked the King for the Declaration only three weeks before,
there was the strangest conflict of opinion now. Some
speakers, among whom was Prynne, were earnest for pro-
ceeding with the bill ; but others, including Secretary Morrice
and his ministerial associate Finch, were significantly cool
on the subject. In substance, they were for throwing "out
the bill, and leaving his Majesty to manage the Church as
he pleased, whether in accordance with his excellent Decla-
1 Commms Jouimls and Pari. Hist. quoted in a note to Pari, ^ist. IV.
of dates ; Hallam, II. 323 ; Echard, as 177—178 ; Clarendon, 1034.
COLLAPSE OF THE KING's DECLABATION. Ill
ration or not. The debate was brought to a point by Sergeant
Maynard, who moved the question whether the Bill should
be read a second time. On a division there were 183 Noes
to 157 Teas, so that the Bill was thrown out, and the nation
and his Majesty were left, on the ecclesiastical question, with
only a bit of paper signed " Charles E.." between them. There
can be no doubt, in fact, that the King's Declaration concerning
Ecclesiastical Affairs had been, on the part of Hyde and others,
a mere eoi«30ction to answer the purposes of the moment,
and never meant to^be binding, and that the hint had been
given to the Ministerialists in the Commons to stop the con-
firming Bill. "When the Parliament came together again
"after the adjournment," writes Hyde himself, "they gave
" the King public thanks for his Declaration, and never
" proceeded further in the matter of Religion ; of which
" the King was very glad." One gets accustomed to the pros-
titutions in this reign, as in the last, of the formula " On the
word of a King, C. B,. ;" but the present instance passes ordi-
nary bounds. That Charles, the Scottish Covenanter, sworn
in Scotland in 1650 to strict and life-long Pi'esbytery, should
now, in the year 1660 and in England, be restoring Prelacy
and suppressing Presbytery, is nothing astonishing. He had
sworn in 1650 by compulsion, and ten whole years, and
a . mass of events incalculable beforehand, lay between the
oath and the abjuration in that ease. But to have voluntarily
issued a Declaration for Limited or Presbyterianized Episco-
pacy throug'hout England on the 25th of October, 1660, to
have let himself be thanked for that Declaration by the Com-
mons within less than a fortnight, and then, within another
three weeks, to have taken steps for invalidating the Declara-
tion and reducing it to a dead letter, is a too startling example
of swiftness between promise and preparation to falsify promise.
Pew now but will feel some sympathy with Baxter's indigna-
tion on the theme. Not a single promise of the Declaration,
Baxter explains, was ever redeemed, not one atom of any
clause of it put into effect ; and, foreseeing that this would
be the case from the moment that the Confirming Bill was
dropped in Parliament, he could then sum up the gains of the
112 LIFE OF MILTON AND HISTORY OF HIS TIME,
treaty in which he and others had been so much exercised.
They consisted (1) in the fact that the Declaration, though
abortive^ was actually in print and might be referred to by
posterity, (3) in the fact that there must be a short breathing-
time for the Presbyterians within the Establishment, till there
should be new laws to their injury, and (3) in the fact that
there had been an opportunity for argumentation^.
The Bill of Attainder on the Eegicides fared better than
the Ecclesiastical Bill. When it was reported from the Com-
mittee with amendments on the 4th of December there was
no difference of opinion on the main proposition, but only
some difference on the question whether there should be some
allowance for the families and creditors of the Attainted.
Prynne, of course, was for no such proviso ; but Prynne was
outgone in ferocity on this occasion by a gentleman who de-
serves to be now specially introduced. — He was a Captain
Silas Titus, or more properly Silius TituSj born about 1623
at Bushy in Herts, the son of a person of the same name,
who traced his descent from Italy, where the family-name
had been Tito. Educated at Oxford, the young Hertfordshire
native, with Italian blood in him, had become a Parlia-
mentarian captain and " a forward man " in the beginning of
the Civil War, but had tended to the King. After the King's
execution he had attached himself to Charles II. abroad, and,
as groom of the bedchamber, had accompanied Charles into
Scotland and been with him at the Battle of Worcester. And
now, back in England as groom of the bedchamber still, but
with the reputation also of being the author of the famous
tract Killing no Murder, which had appeared in 1657, recom-
mending the assassination of Cromwell, Captain Titus was
reaping his rewards. He had a grant of the Keepership of
Bushy Park, and he had been returned to the Convention Par-
liament in place of some original member whose seat h^d been
vacated. — At the close of this day's debate on the Attainder
Bill up stood Captain Silas Titus. He observed "that execution
"did not leave traitors at their graves, but followed them beyond
THE " DISINTEEKING " OEDER. 113
" it, and that, since the heads and limbs of some were already
" put upon the gates, he hoped the House would order that
" the carcases of those devils who were buried at Westminster,
" — Cromwell, Bradshaw, Ireton, and Pride, — might be torn
" out of their graves, dragged to Tyburn, there to hang for
" some time, and afterwards be buried under the gallows."
Whether Titus made the suggestion entirely on his own
responsibility, or whether he spoke for the Court, it was
instantly and unanimously adopted. " Resolved'^ say the
Journals, " that the carcases of Oliver Cromwell, Henry
" Ireton, John Bradshaw, and Thomas Pride, whether buried
" in Westminster Abbey or elsewhere, be, with all expedition,
" taken up, and drawn upon a hurdle to Tyburn, and there
" hanged up in their coffins for some time, and after that
" buried under the said gallows, and that James Norfolke, Esq.,
" sergeant-at-arms attending the House of Commons, do
"take care that this order be put in effectual execution;"
also " Ordered, That the Lords' concurrence herein be desired,
" and Mr. Titus is to carry it to the Lords." The Lords, we
may add, concurred at once on the 7th, only making the order
more full by a clause or two, which the Commons adopted,
requiring the Dean of Westminster, the Sheriff of Middlesex,
and the common executioner, to assist in their several capa-
cities.— Viscount Falconbridge, Cromwell's son-in-law, I note,
was not in his place in the Lords that day. Having, at the
Restoration, obtained a special certificate of pardon, signed by
Hyde, he had resumed his place among the old nobility, and
had been attending in the Lords very regularly hitherto.
He was present in the Lords on the 4th of December, when
the Commons passed their order about his father-in-law's
corpse ; but from that day I do not find him again in the
Lords till the 17th. At that very moment there was lying
in the Council Office a paper, still to be seen, with the endorse-
ment in the hand of Secretary Nicholas, " Old Mrs. Cromwell,
Noll's wife's, Petition ;" of which this is an abstract : " Among
" her many sorrows, she is deeply sensible of the unjust im-
" putation of detaining jewels, &c., belonging to the King,
" which, besides the disrepute, exposes her to loss and violence,
VOL. VI. I
114 LIFE OF MILTON AND HISTOBY OF HIS TIME.
" on pretence of searching for them ; is willing to swear that
" she knows of none such, and can prove that she never inter-
" meddled with any of those public transactions which have
" been prejudicial to his late or present Majesty, and is ready
" to yield humble and faithful obedience to his government ;
" prays therefore for a protection, without which she cannot
" expect, in her old age, a safe retirement in any place of his
" Majesty's dominions." The petition had been sent in just
before the hideous disinterring order of the Houses ^.
The disinterring order was an accompaniment of the
Attainder Bill, not a fornjal part of it. The Bill itself
passed the Commons on the 7th of December, Prynne moving
" that some others of the regicides who had surrendered
" themselves should be put into this bill and now executed."
He named more particularly the lawyers among them, and
most particularly Garland ; and Captain Titus, seconding the
motion, named Sir Hardress Waller. But the bill went up
to the Lords without any such call in it for more blood. The
Lords returned it on the 14th, with some small amendments,
which were then adopted by the Commons. As thus ready
for the royal assent, it was entitled "An, Act for the Attainder
of several persons guilty of the horrid Murder of his late Sacred
Majesty King Charles I." It enacted, first of all, that the
30th of January, the anniversary of the day of the King's
death, or the 31st if that day should be a Sunday, should be
observed for ever in all his Majesty's dominions as a day of
solemn fast and humiliation, with prayers in all the churches
that the guilt might not be visited on posterity; and then it
enumerated the persons attainted, all whose goods and pos-
sessions, legally their property at the date of March 25,
1646, were to be absolutely forfeited to the King. Oliver
Cromwell, Ireton,' Bradshaw, and Pride, were named first, in
that order ; the twenty other regicides dead before the pass-
ing of the Indemnity Bill were omitted as not worth attainting
1 Commons and Lords Journals of IV.623— 625 (atout Titus); Mrs. Green's
dates and of Deo. 8 ; Pari. Hist. IV. Calendar of State Papers, 1660—1, pp.
1S5— 156, where there is an account of 137, 174, 598 (ahout Titus), pp. 34, 500
the debate in the Commons on the 4th (about Falconbridge), and p. 392 (Eliza-
from a contemporary MS ; Wood's Ath. beth Cromwell's Petition).
BEVENUE ARRANGEMENTS. 115
now ; but all the remaining unpardoned regicides, recently-
executed or left alive, in custody or fugitive, to the number
of forty-eight, were attainted individually. Distributed into
groups, they- were as Mlows :—TAe ten reeently executed,
viz. Harrison, Carew, Cook, Peters, Scott, Clements, Seroope,
Jones, Axtell, and Hacker; The nineteen condemned to death,
hut under respite, viz. Downes, Fleetwood, Garland, Harvey,
Heveningham, Hewlet, Lilburne, Marten, Mayne, Millington,
Pennington, Potter, Rowe, Smith, James Temple, Peter
Temple, Tiehboume, Waller, and Wayte ; Nineteen fugitive,
viz. Barkstead, Blagrave, Broughton, Cawley, Thomas Chal-
loner, Corbet, Dendy, Dixwell, Goffe, Hewson, Holland, Lisle,
Livesey, Love, Ludlow, Okey, Say, Walton, and Whalley.
There were some provisos in the Act respecting property of
the attainted that had passed into other hands by legal con-
veyance ^
In the matter of a settlement of ways for raising the
King's annual revenue of ,^^1,200,000, and other moneys
needed, the Convention Parliament wound up as well as it
could. The poll-bill and the assessments previously voted
not having sufficed for the expense of disbanding the army
and paying off the navy, estimated now at a total of
.i€'670,868, other bills had been framed for supplying the
deficiency. There were bills also for raising sums for minor
purposes. In the main business of the King's revenue the
chief difficulty was in providing a substitute for that part of
1 Lords and Commons Jonmals of Walton had escaped to Holland or other
dates ; Pari. Hist. IV. 158 ; and Act of parts of the north of the Continent, and
Attainder itself in Statutes at Large. little more seems to be known of them
It is curions that, though Thomas Wogan than that Challoner died at Middlehurg
is named in the general enumeration of in 1661, Hewson at Amsterdamin 1662,
fifty-three regicides promiscuously with and Walton in Flanders in 1661. Dix-
■which the Act sets out, he is not repeated well, Goffe, and WhaUey ended their
in any of the subsequent groups. He days in America. The most fortunate
had ,been among those who had sur- of the fugitives were those who found
rendered (ante, p. 44 and p. 49), and he an asylum in Switzerland. Lisle, it is
had been among the nineteen excepted true, was assassinated at Lausanne, by
in the bUl with the benefit of the saving instigation, it was believed, of the Queen-
clause (p. 54). — This may be the place for mother ; but Ludlow, Love, Broughton,
such vague information as is at hand, in Cawley, and Holland were protected by
Noble and elsewhere, about the subse- the Swiss, and the first three of them
quent fates of the nineteen fugitives. treated with much respect, more particu-
Barkstead, Corbet, and Okey, who had larly by the Council of Bern. Ludlow,
fled to Germany at first, were to be after writing his memoirs, died at Vevai
captured in Holland ere long. Blagrave, in 1693, aetat. 73, and his monument is
Challoner, Hewson, Livesey, Say, and there to be seen.
I 2,
116 LIFE OF MILTON AND HISTOKY OF HIS TIME.
the former royal revenue which had been derived, by what
was now considered unconstitutional or undesirable prero-
gative, from " the court of wards and liveries, tenures m
capite," &c. The King had consented to resort no more to
those old feudal sources, if an equivalent could be provided
otherwise. Two schemes had been suggested in the Com-
mons : " one a permanent tax on lands held in chivalry
" (which, as distinguished from those in soceage, were alone
" liable to the feudal burthens) ;• the other, an excise on beer
" and some other liquors.'" The description is Hallam's,
who adds, " It is evident that the former was founded on a
"just principle, while the latter transferred a particular
" burthen to the community. But the self-interest which
" so unhappily predominates even in representative assemblies,
" with the aid of the courtiers, who knew that an excise ia-
" creasing with the riches of the country was far more desir-
" able for the Crown than a fixed land-tax, caused the former
"to be carried, though by the very small majority of two
" voices." This had been on the 21st of November, save that
Mr. Hallam's account of what passed then is not quite correct.
The question then propounded to the House consisted of two
parts, (1) " That the moiety of the excise of beer, ale, eider,
" perry, and strong waters, at the rates it is now levied,
" shall be settled on the King's Majesty, his heirs and suc-
" eessors, in full recompense and satisfaction of all tenures
" in. capiie and by knight's service, and of the court of
" wards and liveries and all emoluments and profits thereby
"accruing, and in full satisfaction of all purveyance;"
(3) " That the other moiety of the revenue of the excise
"of beer, &c., be settled upon the King's Majesty in
" further part of the ,^1,200,000 per annum resolved to be
"settled on his Majesty." The division was only on the
second part, voting the present King one moiety of the Excise
for his life, in addition to the other moiety settled on the
Crown for ever; and in this division it was the Noes that
carried by a majority of two voices, i.e. by 151 to 149.
Annesley, who was opposed to the Excise scheme, was one of
the tellers for the majority. Very soon, however, the vote
DISSOLUTION OF THE CONVENTION PARLIAMENT. 117
was reversed ; and so there went throug-h the Commons, and
then through the Lords, with various debates and conferences,
two connected bills. One was " An Act for taking away the
court of wards and liveries, and tenures in cajjite and by
knight's service, and purveyance, and for settling a revenue
on his Majesty in lieu thereof." This Act vested in the
Crown for ever 154. from every barrel of superior beer, 4d.
from every barrel of inferior beer, 15d. from every hogshead
of cider or perry, ^d. from every gallon of metheglin or mead,
6d. from every barrel of so-called "vinegar-beer/' Id. from
every gallon of aquavitse Or strong water, 4<d. from every
gallon of coffee, and 8d. from every gallon of chocolate,
sherbet, or tea, besides higher duties proportionally from im-
ported ales, cider or perry, or strong waters. The other Act
was " A grant of certain impositions upon beer, ale, and
other liquors, for the increase of his Majesty's revenue
during his life ;" and it assigned him the other 15d. from
every barrel of superior beer, the other 4<d. from every barrel
of inferior, and so on through the rest of the liquors, — the
entire duty on each being, of course, the sum of the moieties
distributed between the two bills. Not till the 24th of
December were there two bills, with all their intricacies,
ready for the King's assent. It was given that day in
the Lords' House, the Commons attending. His Majesty's
revenue of ,^1,200,000 a year having thus been tolerably
well secured, his Majesty was in haste for the dissolution.
There were still, however, odds and ends of business, including
a special vote of .^''70,000 to his Majesty for the expenses
of his approaching coronation and new jewels for his crown ;
and not till Saturday the 29th of December were the two
Houses ready ^.
On that day his Majesty, having passed the Attainder Bill
on the Regicides, and thirty-one Bills besides, most of them
private, dissolved the Convention Parliament. In a short
speech, he magnified the services of that Parliament and ex-
pressed his sense of his obligations to it. " Many former
1 Lords and Commons Journals of text of the two Revenue Bills In Statutes
dates'; Hallam, II. 312—314 ; and tlie at Large.
118 LIFE OF MILTON AND HISTORY OF HIS TIME.
" Parliaments," he said, " have had particular denominations
" from what they have done ; they have been styled Learned
" and Unlearned, and sometimes have had worse epithets :
"I pray let us all resolve that this be for ever called The
" Healing and Blessed Parliament." Hyde followed his master,
as usual, with a more diffuse speech ^.
Before the dissolution eight of the ten bishoprics left
vacant on Nov. 6 had been filled up by the King-, leaving
only the two sees of Lichfield and Coventry and Sodor and
Man still vacant in the total Episcopate of England and
Wales. The bishops additional to those of our previous list
(ante pp. 104-105) were now as follows : —
Peovince op Canteebuey.
B. of Bristol : Gilbert Ironside, elected Dec. 1 4.
B. of Gloucester : William Nicholson, elected Nov. 26.
B. of Hereford : N icholas Monk (brother of the Duke of Albemarle),
elected Dec. 1, instead of B,ichard Baxter, who had declined.
B. of Norwich : Edward Reynolds, elected Nov. 28 ; the only
former Presbyterian who took a bishopric.
B. of Peterborough : Benjamin Laney, elected Nov. 20.
Peovince of York.
B. of Carlisle : Richard Sterne (great-grandfather of Sterne, the
novelist), consecrated Dec. 2.
B. of Chester : Brian Walton (of the Polyglott Bible), consecrated
Dec. 2.
B. of Durham : John Cosins, consecrated Dec. 2.
Just before the dissolution there had happened also the
death of the King's eldest sister, the Princess of Orange.
She died on the 24th of December, of the same disease of
sHiall-pox which had carried ofi" the Duke of Gloucester.
While she yet lived, however, the Koyal Family had con-
sented to the accession to it of Chancellor Hyde's daughter
as the legitimate wife of the Duke of York. The Duke had
come round at last, Berkeley having confessed that he had
invented his calumny against the Chancellor's daughter only
to afibrd the Duke the means of escape from an inconvenient
marriage; and, though the Queen-mother had held out for a
time, declaring publicly that, " whenever that woman should
1 Lords Journals and Pari. Hist, of date (for speeches).
ANNE Hyde's maebiage recognised. 119
" be brought into Whitehall by one door," she herself " would
" go out of it by another door, and never come into it again,"
effective means had been used to conciliate her too. Hyde
himself says that the chief influence was that of Cardinal
Mazarin, who had written over to the Queen-mother that her
reception back in Prance would not be very cordial unless she
desisted from her opposition to the Chancellor. Certain it is
that the reconciliation of the Duke of York to his wife and the
public acknowledgment of their marriage date from about the
middle of December 1660. And so, on Jan. 1, 1660-1, three
days after the dissolution of the Parliament, there was a cere-
monious christening of their baby by the name of Charles, and
with the title of Duke of Cambridge, in Worcester House,
the King and the Duke of Albemarle standing godfathers,
and the Queen-mother and the Marchioness of Ormond god-
mothers. The very day after that ceremony, the Queen-
mother was to leave London, to embark at Portsmouth, on
her return to Prance. No one regretted her ; and Hyde's
sarcastic observation with reference to her unexpectedly
civil parting with him is that thenceforth " there did never
appear any want of kindness" on her part towards him,
" whilst he stood in no need of it, nor until it might have done
him some good." He is here looking forward to the eclipse
of his fortunes some years hence. For the present, who did
not envy him ? Established in his premiership more firmly
than ever, he saw his daughter, whom he wanted to behead
three months ago, the acknowledged Duchess of York. She
was, to Pepys's taste, " a plain woman, and like her mother, my
Lady Chancellor," though Burnet, who knew her well after-
wards, found her " a very extraordinary woman," with " great
knowledge " and " great spirit." Should Charles never marry,
or should he have no legitimate issue, she might be Queen
of England one day, and the crown her husband's \
While the King was away from London, to see his mother
embark at Portsmouth, there broke out the mad little riot
1 Evelyn's Diary, Deo. 24 ; Pepys's of 466, 470 ; Clarendon, 1013—1015 ; Bur-
Dec 10, 1660, and April 20, 1661 ; Mrs net, I. 286—291.
Green's Calendar for 1660—1, pp. 412,
120 LIFE OF MILTON AND HISTORY OF HIS TIME.
known as the insurrection of Venner and his Fifbh-Mouarcliy
men. Venner, the stout wine-cooper who had tried a similar
outbreak in Cromwell's time^ and had only been imprisoned
for a while in consequence (Vol. V. p. 134), fared worse this
time. It was in the evening of Sunday, Jan. 6, 1660-1, that
he and a number more, issuing from their conventicle in
Coleman Street, where they had been rousing themselves to
phrenzy with apocalyptic readings and discourses, marched
into the streets about St. Paul's, to begin that work of the
destruction of Babylon and human monarchy, and the insti-
tution of the reign of King Jesus, which had been delayed
too long. Being fifty or sixty in number, and armed and
desperate, they discomfited easily the force of city trained-
bands that mustered to put them down. After more pro-
menading in the city and about the city gates, they took
themselves off" to Caen Wood between Highgate and Hamp-
stead, where they bivouacked that night. There they were
attacked next day by a party of horse and foot sent against
them by Monk ; but, though some were taken, most escaped
from the wood, to rally again in the city. They did rally
again there, with some reinforcementSj early on Wednesday
morning. Dividing themselves into two parties, they fought
against all odds till they could fight no more. Venner's own
party, whose object was to catch the Lord Mayor, was the
last to be overpowered. Not till some had been killed, re-
fusing quarter, and Venner himself had been knocked down
and severely wounded, was the riot at an end. About twenty
soldiers or citizens altogether had been slain, and as many of
the rioters. Of those apprehended, to the number of sixty-
six in all, twenty were tried at the Old Bailey within ten
days, of whom sixteen were condemned to be hanged, drawn,
and quartered. On Thomas Venner and Roger Hodgkins,
as the two chiefs, the sentence was fully executed in Coleman
Street, close to the meeting-place of the sect, on the 19th of
January. Eleven more were hanged at other places; and
three seem to have been reprieved^.
1 Phillips, 735 ; Pari. Hist. IV. 186—188, note ; The Kingdom's Intelligencer for
Jan. 14—21, 1660-1. r-
THE VENNEE EIOT. 131
Two not unimportant consequences followed Venner's
crazy attempt. One was the reconsideration in Council of
the policy of an entire disbandment of the army, and the
retention, under the name of Guards, of two or three of the
yet undisbanded regiments, to form, as has been already
mentioned, the nucleus still of a standing army. The other
appeared on the IQth of January, the day after the suppression
of the outbreak, when, the King being then back in town,
there was issued a proclamation from Whitehall " for re-
" straining all seditious meetings and eouTenticles under
" pretence of religious worship, and forbidding any meetings
" for worship except in parochial churches or chapels." This
was a dreadful blow to the sectaries of all sorts, but especially
to the Baptists and the Quakers, the two sects immediately
aimed at after the Fifth-Monarchy men, and the only sects
expressly named along with the Fifth-Monarchy men in the
proclamation. The Baptists were still a very numerous and
growing body; the Quakers had of late been recruited largely,
or even enormously, by the melting into their ranks of former
sectaries of all varieties, and even of former Independents and
Presbyterians, finding in Quakerism at last the extreme ,of
spiritual rest. Since the Restoration, though subject to that
popular fury against " fanatics " which had become but a
form of loyalty, and troubled also by oflacious magistrates,
persecuting and imprisoning on their own responsibility, both
sects had been able, in virtue of the King's Breda Declaration,
to keep up their own meetings for worship and preaching.
And now, by Venner's outbreak, though Venner himself had
protested that Baptists and Quakers were no associates of his,
they were to lose the right of meeting. But the prohibition
aifeeted others besides the Quakers and the Baptists. The
Independents generally, though not named in the procla-
mation, knew themselves to be involved ; nor could even
those stricter Presbyterians be safe who had begun to avoid
liturgical worship in the parish churches. In short, there
was wide consternation. The London Independents hastened
to publish a collective manifesto, signed by twenty-five of
their ministers, among whom were Thomas Goodwin, Philip
123 LIFE OF MILTON AND HISTORY OF HIS TIME.
Nye, Joseph Caryl, and John Oxenbridge, declaring their
abhorrence of Venner's rebellion, and of Fifth-Monarchy
principles, and their loyalty to the King and his government ;
the Baptists put forth a similar document, signed by about
thirty-five of their chief ministers; and George Fox and
others, besides publishing " A declaration from the harmless
and innocent people of God called Quakers against all
sedition, plotters, and fighters in the world," presented a
direct address to his Majesty, in which they told him that,
even as it was, there were 400 men and women of their
persuasion then in prison in London, and above 1000
more in country jails, and implored him not to stop
their meetings. The benefit was to be little or nothing.
From the date of Venner's insurrection, what small respect
there had been for the promise of liberty of conscience and
worship in the King's Breda Declaration ceased altogether,
and it became evident that not only was there to be no com-
prehension for Presbyterians within the established Church,
but also no toleration for any religionists whatsoever out of
that Church. The passion for suppressing conventicles and
hunting down itinerant or unordained preachers of all deno-
minations spread from the central authority to all local
authorities ; and soon the silenced or imprisoned Baptist
preachers, in addition to the Quakers, were to be counted
by scores. John Bunyan, however, was not one of the
victims of Venner's insurrection. His turn had come already.
He had been arrested, by warrant of a Bedfordshire justice,
in November 1660, and had been lying in Bedford jail for
two months before Venner's exploit i.
And now, in the midst of the consequences of the Venner
riot, there came round the anniversary of King Charles the
Martyr. The 30th of January that year fell on a Wednesday.
The sermons and prayers on the day, the humiliations and
the exultations, may be imagined. But the grandest ceremony
was in London. The order of the two Houses for disinterring
' Mrs. Green's Calendar of State of Bunyan, 273 (where there is Bunyan's
Papers for 1660—1, pp. 470—471 et own account of his arrest),
seq. ; Neal, IV. 320—325 ; PhiUp's Life
ANNIVEESAEY OF KING CHAELES THE MAETYE. 123
the bodies of Cromwell, Bradshaw, Ireton, and Pride, had
been procured with a view to this day especially. Save that
the body of Pride, which had not been buried in Westminster
Abbey, but in a country churchyard, was left undisturbed at
the request of Monk, the order was executed most punctually.
It IS best to quote the contemporary newspaper account.
" This day, Jan. 30 (we need say no more, but name the day
" of the month), was doubly observed, — not only by a solemn
" fast, sermons, and prayers, in every parish church, for the
" precious blood of our late pious sovereigfi King Charles the
" First, of ever glorious memory, but also by publicly dragging
" those odious carcases of Oliver Cromwell, Henry Ireton, and
" John Bradshaw, to Tyburn. On Monday night Cromwell
" and Ireton, in two several carts, were drawn to Holborn from
" Westminster, where they were digged up on Saturday last j
" and the next morning Bradshaw. To-day they were drawn
" upon sledges to Tyburn. All the way (as before from
" Westminster), the universal outcry and curses of the people
" went along with them. When the three carcases were at
" Tyburn, they were pulled out of their coffins, and hanged at
" the several angles of that triple tree, — where they hung till
" the sun was set ; after which they were taken down, and
" their heads cut off, and their loathsome trunks thrown into
" a deep hole under the gallows." Pepys was not one of the
multitude that went to see the sight, — of which indeed he
rather disapproved ; but he went to Lady Batten's in the
evening to meet his young wife and her ladyship after they
had returned from the pleasure ^.
The heads of Cromwell, Bradshaw, and Ireton, were at
once set up, by the common hangman, on poles on the top of
Westminster Hall, that of Bradshaw in the middle ^. There
they were to remain for years and years, people looking up
at them for a while with whatever thoughts might be con-
venient, and soon with no thoughts at all, and the heads
themselves looking down, with their empty eye-sockets, on
1 Merewrms Publieus of Jan. 24—31, Pepys of Deo. 4, 1660.
1860 1 ; Noble's Regicides (Article, 2 Mereti/riue Publieus of Jan. 31 —
PHde) ; Pepys and Evelyn of date, with Feb. 7, 1660-1.
124 LIFE OF MILTON AND HISTOEY OF HIS TIME,
what was passing underneath. As there was to hh little
of much importance in London till the coronation of his
Majesty, we shall change the scene till then for Ireland and
Scotland.
At the Restoration the Lord-Lieutenancy of Ibeland was
one of the honours that had been heaped on Monk. It was
nominal merely ; and the actual administration of Ireland
remained in the hands of such resident officials, formerly
serving under the Lord-Lieutenancy of Henry Cromwell, as
had accommodated themselves to the change of times. Of
these the two chief were Lord Broghill, President of Munster,
and Sir Charles Coote, President of Connaught. No sooner
had the King's Breda letters been read in the Convention
Parliament, and the Restoration made certain, than the opinion
of these and of other official persons in Ireland as to what
would be best for that country in the new state of things was
made known to the Convention Parliament by commissioners
sent over for the purpose. It was hoped that the two Houses
would concur in a request to his Majesty to revert to the
old practice, and let Ireland have a Protestant Parliament of
her own. To this the two Houses agreed on the 13th of
May. — Thus, before his Majesty had set foot in England, it
had been resolved that England and Ireland should no longer
be tied together,, as during the Commonwealth and the Pro-
tectorate, but that Ireland should rebound into her old con-
dition as a separate dependency of the Crown. Accordingly,
from that date there is hardly a mention of Ireland in the
journals of the English Convention Parliament ^.
There was no danger of revolt in Ireland, if there were
any ordinary good management. The Cromwellian rule had
expelled all that was most furious and formidable of the relics
of the native Roman Catholic confederacy, had enclosed the
most considerable part of the remaining Roman Catholic
population within the single province of Connaught, and had
poured into the island such numbers of soldierly and civilian
colonists of English or Scottish birth, Presbyterians, Inde-
1 Clarendon, 1005 and 1025 ; Lords and Commons Journals of May 8 — 12, 1660.
STATE OF lEELAND. 125
pendents, Anabaptists, or sectaries of rarer sorts, that these,
with the older English settlers, and the Ulster Presbyterian
Scots, formed one vast land-owning garrison, overwhelming
the native Irish element in three of the provinces, and
watching and governing it in the fourth. Now that the
Ludlows, the Axtells, and other Regicide Republicans, were
out of the island, the difficulty for Charles was not in having
to reduce any part of the country or any class of its inha-
bitants to allegiance. His difficulty was in settling in any
tolerable manner the claims that the various portions of the
population might have upon him respectively. These claims
conflicted so among themselves as to be utterly irreconcilable.
There were, first, the Roman Catholics, and especially those
of them that had fought for his father and himself, and been
true to their cause. Were such of these " innocent Roman
Catholics " as had been deprived by the Commonwealth and
Cromwell of their lands in Ulster, Munster, and Leinster,
and forced to accept a pitiful equivalent in Connaught, to be
denied the restoration of their lands? Yet how could these
be now restored? They were in possession of English and
Scottish colonists who had paid for them or purchased them
by military service. Could these, or the persons to whom
these had conveyed their lands, be turned out ? That would
have been a revolution ruinous in itself. " Within little more
" than two years," says Clarendon, speaking of Cromwell's
rule in Ireland, the country had been settled " to that degree
" of perfection that there were many buildings raised for
" beauty as well as use, orderly and regular plantations of
"trees, and raising fences and enclosures throughout the
" kingdom, purchases made by one from the other at very
" valuable rates, and jointures made upon marriages, and all
" other conveyances and settlements executed, as in a kingdom
" at peace within itself, and where no doubt could be made of
" the validity of titles." Even Irnd it been possible, no king,
no statesman, could seriously disturb such a state of things.
But it was not possible. It was the possession of these lands,
and the hope that they would possess them still, that had
turned so many that were Presbyterians, or former Common-
126 LIFE OP MILTON AND HISTOEY OF HIS TIME.
wealth's men and Oliverians, into loyal King's men now ; and
let their possession be disturbed, let there be but a sign that
it might be disturbed, and thousands now ranking as King's
men in Ireland would drop that character and start up as
fighting ironsides. In the main, Oliver's settlement of Ireland
must be ratified, whatever devices of partial redress might
be invented for the dispossessed old Royalists and Roman
Catholics. There was yet, however, a farther complication of
the problem. Among the adventurers for Irish lands there
were a good many who had adventured as Royalists, had paid
a moiety of their subscriptions while Charles I. was still
sovereign of Ireland, but had voluntarily lost the benefit of
their investment by refusing to pay more when the Inde-
pendents and Republicans came into the ascendant. Were
these, whose money in part had gone to help Charles, to have
no consideration or allowance ? Altogether, the calculation
was that, if the whole of Ireland, with its 7,500,000 of Irish
acres of good land, and 3,000,000 Irish acres of bog, moor,
and lake, were sold three or four times over at fair market
price, the proceeds would not satisfy all the claims upon it
among the million and a-half or two millions of mixed Roman
Catholics and Protestants that formed the population ^.
With this vast problem looming upon Charles, it was
thought best to be in no huriy to call an Irish Parliament.
In fact, no such Parliament did meet till May 8, 1661 ; and
in the interim Ireland was left very much to herself. Monk's
nominal Lord-Lieutenancy was rather inconvenient, inasmuch
as it prevented the reinstalment in that office of its former
holder, the Marquis of Ormond, the supreme and fittest
Irishman. As Monk clung to the dignity, however, on
account of interests of his own in Ireland, the arrangement
had been that Lord Roberts, a Cornishman, of "more than
ordinary parts," though of " sullen and morose " temper and
Presbyterian opinions, should be Lord Deputy under him.
It was intended that Roberts should go to Ireland for the
actual exercise of his office ; but, until he should do so, he
1 Clarendon, 1025—1029 ; HaUam, III. 394—397.
STATE OF lEELAND. 127
was virtually the minister for Irish affairs in his Majesty's
Council at "Whitehall. Hyde did not interfere in any direct
manner in the Irish department, leaving Roberts, with advice
from Ormond and Annesley, to receive and study the ap-
plications that continued to pour in from all the Irish parties
and interests. So much progress had been made in this work
before November 1660 that his Majesty was able to issue a
Declaration on the 30th of that month, indicating generally
his will respecting Ireland. The adventurers and Cromwellian
soldiers were substantially to be confirmed in their estates ;
but there were to be various measures of compensation for
the " innocent Roman Catholics," after farther investigation
of claims ; and a number of persons of signal merit mentioned
by name, among whom were thirty-five of the old Irish
nobility and gentry, were to be restored at once to their
estates without farther trouble of proof. Then^ in December
1660, Lord Broghill, now raised to the dignity of Earl of
Orrery in the Irish peerage^ and Sir Charles Coote, created
at the same time Earl of Mountrath, were conjoined as
Lords Justices of Ireland with Sir Maurice Eustace, an old
and valued friend of Ormond's, who had been appointed to
the Irish Chancellorship two months before. It was to be
their business to enforce the oaths of allegiance and supremacy
throughout Ireland, to mature questions of claims for the
consideration of the coming Irish Parlikment, and meanwhile
to carry out his Majesty's Declaration ^-
The ecclesiastical settlement of Ireland was easier than the
civil. It had been decided, of course, to restore the Irish
Episcopal Church. Of the old Irish bishops there were still
alive John Bramhall, Bishop of Derry, Thomas Pulwar, Bishop
of Ardfert, Grifiith Williams, Bishop of Ossory, Henry Jones,
Bishop of Clogher, Henry Leslie, Bishop of Down and Connor,
Robert Maxwell, Bishop of Kilmore, and William Bayly, Bishop
of Clonfert and Kilmacduagh. These seven, most of them of
English or Scottish birth, were regarded as still in legal posses-
sion of their sees; but there were the four Irish archbishoprics
■1 Clarendon, 1030—1031 ; Carte's Life are from Carte ; Clarendon never gives
of Ormond, II. 200—221. The dates any.
128 LIFE OF MILTON AND HISTORY OF HIS TIME.
and twelve other Irish bishopries to be filled up. As early as
August 1660 the. designations for these had been made,
including that of Bramhall, for his merits and sufferings, to
the Irish primacy or archbishopric of Armagh, vacant since
Usher's death in 1655. As it was thought unseemly, how-
ever, that the formal reconstitution of the Irish Episcopate
should precede that of the English, it was not till January
1661, when the English Episcopate was nearly complete, that
the composition of the Irish was fully made public. On the
27th of that month there was a great consecration of new
prelates in St. Patrick's, Dublin, by Bramhall and the other
survivors; and, an addition or two having been made im-
mediately afterwards, with re-arrangements of one or two of
the sees, the Irish Episcopate then stood as follows : —
Peovincb op Ulster: — 1. ArcUishop of Armagh : John Bram-
hall, translated from Derry (Yorkshireman). 2. B. of Clogker :
Henry Jones, holding since 1645 (Irish). 3. B. of Meath : Henry
Leslie, appointed Jan. 18, 1660-1 (Scotch). 4. B. of Kilmore and
Ardagh : Eobert Maxwell, holding from 1643 (Scotch). 5. B. of
Down and Connor: Jeremy Taylor, appointed Jan. 19, 1660-1
(English). He was already Vice-Chancellor of the University of
Dublin, under Ormond's Chancellorship ; and both in that office and
in his Bishopric he distinguished himself by his activity. Carte,
describing the diocese of Down and Connor as the most infested of
all with Scottish Covenanters and other " virulent and clamorous "
sectaries, speaks of Taylor's wise and patient dealings with such ;
but in Scotland the rumour was how " one Taylor, made a bishop,
did tyrannize over honest ministers, so that he deposed all the
Presbyterian ministers in the north of Ireland, the most part
whereof were Scotsmen." We may suppose that Taylor, though,
mild, was resolute. 6. B. of Dromore : Eobert Leslie, appointed
Jan. 19, 1660-1 (Scotch). 7. B. of Berry : George Wylde, ap-
pointed Jan. 22, 1660-1 (English). 8. B. of RapTioe : John Leslie,
holding since 1633 (Scotch).
Peovincb of Lbinstek :— 1. ArchbisJiop af Dublin : James Mar-
getson, appointed Jan. 25, 1660-1 (English). 2. B. of Kildare :
Thomas Price, appointed March 6, 1660-1 (Welsh). 3. B. of
Ossory : Griffith Williams, holding since 1641 (Welsh). 4. B. of
Ferns and LeigUin : Eobert Price, appointed Jan. 25, 1660-1
(Welsh).
Province of Mtjnstee :— 1. Archbishop of Cashd : Thomas
Eulwar, translated from Ardfert, Feb. 1, 1660-1 (English). 2. B. of
Waterford and Lismore : George Baker, appointed Jan. 19, 1660-1
SETEEANCE OF SCOTLAND FEOM ENGLAND. . 129
(Irish). 3. B. of Cork and Ross : Miehael Boyle, appointed Jan. 22,
1660-1 (Irish). 4. B.of Limerick, Ardfert, and Aghadoe : Edward
Synge, appointed Jan. 19, 1660-1 (English), 's. B. of Killaloe :
Edward "Worth, appointed Jan. 19, 1660-1 (Irish). 6. B. of Kil-
fenora: now annexed, in eommendam, to the Archbishopric of
Tuam.
Pbovinob OS Connaught:— 1. Archbishop of Tuam: Samuel
Pulleyn, appointed Jan. 19, 1660-1, with the Bishopric of Kilfenora
in eommendam (English). 2. B.^of Killala and Achonry : Henry
Hall, appointed Jan. 19, 1660-1 (English). 3. B. of Elphin : John
Paiker, appointed Jan. 19, 1660-1 (Irish). 4. B. of Clonfert and
Kilmaeduagh: "William Bayly, holding since 1644 (Scotch)'.'
For Scotland alSo the Restoration was a dissolution of her
recent political connexion with England. Indeed, among the
various causes of rejoicing in Scotland over the Restoration,
not the least was the hope among the Scottish aristocracy
and clergy of getting back their ancient little nationality,
and their old Scottish laws, and of having Parliaments, and
all the other apparatus of independent government, once
more in Edinburgh.
Whether all the Scots shared this feeling may be doubted.
Clarendon, after describing the "prodigious mutation and
transformation " in Scotland that had been effected by the
introduction there of English law and equity by Cromwell's
English judges, says that the submission to the same by the
Scots had been most profound, and that " it might well be a
question whether the generality of the nation was not better
contented" with the system of things established by Cromwell
than with the prospect of a " return to the old road of subjec-
tion." Nor was the union of Scotland and England one of those
achievements of Crogiwell which Hyde himself wanted to see
undone. " But the King," he says, " would not build according
"to Cromwell's models, and had many reasons to continue
" Scotland within its own limits and bounds and sole de-
"pendence upon himself, rather than unite it to England."
In short, the re-severance of Scotland from England was a
necessity of the Restoration, which Hyde had \ o accept ^.
1 Compiled from CottQn's Fasti Ee- and Life of Bobert Blair (Wodrow
desice Hibernicos, with references (for Society), p. 384. >
Jeremy Taylor) to Carte, II. 208—9, ^ Clarendon, 1020—1021.
VOL. VI. K
130 LIFE OF MILTON AND HISTOET OF HIS TIME.
The preliminary arrangements for the future of Scotlandj
however, were made in London. Naturally it was between
the King himself and such of the Scottish nobility as were
now gathered round him that those arrangements were first
contrived. The Earl of Lauderdale was there, radiant and
boistprous in the glory of his recent release from his long
imprisonment since the Battle of Worcester, a kind of stub-
born Scottish Presbyterian still, but so demonstrative in his
Eoyalism that he could never refer to the former Presbyterian
parts of his career, from his membership of the Westminster
Assembly onwards to 1648, without abasing himself to the
ground and using the phrases " when I was a traitor," " when
I was in rebellion." The Earl of Crawford was there, " still
a zealous Presbyterian/' whose chief recommendation to the
King was that, like Lauderdale, he had been at Worcester
and had suffered in consequence. Crawford's son-in-law, the
Earl of Rothes, was there, the son of that Earl of Rothes who
had been the leader of the opposition to Charles I. and Laud in
Scotland from 1633 to 1640, and the foremost of the original
Scottish Covenanters. Despite that parentage, the present
Earl, though "very agreeable to the King", not without
ability, and with the credit also of having been one of the
captives from Worcester, was notorious chiefly, says Burnet,
for having " freed himself from all impressions of virtue or
religion, of honour or good nature," and for being able to
see " two or three sets of drunkards " dead drunk under
the table one after another, any number of nights in suc-
cession, without being visibly disordered himself. The Earl of
Tweeddale was there, rather ashamed of having been of late a
Cromwellian, but educated by that connexion into careless-
ness of ecclesiastical forms. The Earl of Selkirk was there,
a younger son of the Roman Catholic Marquis of Douglas,
but no longer a Roman Catholic himself, having married the
heiress of James, Duke of Hamilton, now Duchess of Hamilton
in her own right, and having thus, by Scottish custom,
entitled himself to be called Duke of Hamilton. Among the
others, two may be mentioned together as the most strenuously
opposed to that policy of indulgence for Presbyterianism in
SCOTTISH COUNCIL IN LONDON. 131
Scotland which was advocated by Lauderdale and Crawford.
These were William Cunningham, Earl of Grlencairn, who
had kept alive the King's cause so boldly in the Highlands
after the disaster of Worcester, and his more soldierly associate
for a while in that enterprise, General John Middleton, now
made Earl of Middleton, in reward for his long services and
exile. Both were of the Cavalier order of politicians, caring
nothing for Presbytery, and desiring rather to see Scotland
forced into Episcopacy, if such should he the King's will. —
From among so many eminent Scots in London there was no
difficulty in forming the beginnings of a Scottish Ministry
and Privy CounciL Middleton, as the supreme man, was
designated as the King's High Commissioner to the Scottish
Parliament when it should meet ; Glencaim was made Chan-
cellor of Scotland ; the Eajrl of Crawford became Scottish
Lord Treasurer; Lauderdale was made Scottish Secretary of
State; and Sir Archibald Primrose, an astute lawyer, who
had been Clerk of the Scottish Privy Council in the days of
Charles I., and had adjusted himself carefully to all turns of
fortune since, was maiie Lord Clerk- Register or Keeper of
the Rolls. These five were the Scottish junto of chiefs,
round whom the other Scots at hand were grouped in
London. It was agreed, however, that the Council should
have an English ingredient j and,, accordingly, Hyde, the
Earl of Southampton, Monk, Ormond, Manchester, and
Secretary Nicholas, were associated with the Scottish council-
lors, and might be present at their meetings with the King.
Such meetings had begun in June 1660, and in July they
seem to have been pretty frequent.
While they are meeting in Whitehall, English and Scots
together, for the consideration of Scottish affairs, who is
this that comes knocking at the door? Actually the
Marquis of Argyle. He had come all the way from: Scot-
land in consequence of some hint from his son Lord Lome,
then already in London and much about his Majesty, that
his Majesty would not object to receiving him among the
rest. Better had he blown himself up in his castle at
Inverary, or tried to escape across the Atlantic in the craziest
K 3
133 LIFE OF MILTON AND HISTORY OF HIS TIME.
boat from Campbellton beach. Yet his appearance might
\Yell put them in a flutter. Though now sixty-two years
of age, and wearing still that grim-favoured visage in which,
" by the ill-placing of his eyes, he did not appear with any
great advantage at first sights" he was worth, for depth of
brain, more than Lauderdale, Glencairn, and Middleton put
together; and, had he been granted a place at the Council
Board, who knows what service to Scotland it was in the
heart and in the power of the much-experienced, much-de-
jected man to render even yet ? But not even for half an hour
would Charles put himself again under the influence of that
cool and strong intellect, that subtle tongue, and those many
other spells, " gay and pleasant humour " not wanting on occa-
sion, which had made Argyle rather his master than his mere
minister in the time of his Covenanted Kingship in Scotland
ten years ago. It needed little, therefore, to instruct Charles
as to the reception to be given to his old friend. It was on
Sunday the 8th of July that Argyle waited, in the presence-
chamber at Whitehall, for the King's answer to his request
for an interview. The answer sent out was an order for
carrying him straight to the Tower.
Argyle thus disposed of, the Whitehall consultations about
Scottish affairs went on without him. Orders were sent
to Major-General Morgan, deputy for Monk in Scotland,
and meanwhile keeping the peace there with some of Monk's
old regiments, for the arrest of Sir Archibald Johnstone of
Wafriston, Sir John Chiesly, and Sir James Stewart, Provost
of Edinburgh. There was also to be arrested in Scotland a
Captain William Govan, rumoured to have been on the
scaffold at Whitehall when Charles was beheaded. Another
Scottish victim was found in London itself. This was Sir
John Swinton of Swinton, Cromwell's favourite Scot next to
Lockhart, :and one of the chiefs of the Scottish government
during the Protectorate. He had recently embraced Quaker-
ism, and he was captured in a Quaker's house in King Street,
Westminster, on the 20th of July. Chi the 3nd of August
a royal proclamation was sent to Edinburgh, to be published
at the market-cross, convoking those that survived of the old
INCIDENTS IN SCOTLAND. 133
Committee of Estates which had been nominated by Charles
and his last Scottish Parliament in 1651, and entrusting to
that body in Edinburgh the management of affairs till there
should be a regular meeting of Parliament ^.
The revived Committee of Estates met in Edinburgh on
the 23rd of August. The Earl of Glencairn, who had come
from London for the purpose, presided as Chancellor, and
there were present nine other nobles, ten lairds or lesser
barons, and ten burgesses. It was from the proceedings of
this body that the people of Scotland were to gather their
first ideas of what had been resolved in London respecting
them and their affairs.
The arrests of Argyle and Swinton in London, and of
Chiesly, Stewart, and Govan in Edinburgh, after Warriston
had contrived to escape to Hamburg, had made it evident
that, whatever grace and indemnity for .past offences there
might be for the Scots generally, there were to be some
exceptions. It might have been easily guessed from what
class of the community these would chiefly be. They were
the Protesters or Remonstrants. Whoever, in 1650 or since,
had been a conspicuous Protester, and especially whoever
had passed beyond the ranks of the Protesters to accept oflSce
in Scotland or in England under Cromwell, might expect to be
called to account. Accordingly, on the very first day of the
meeting of the Committee of Estates, the Protesters had this
lesson sharply read to them. Most inopportunely, Mr. James
Guthrie, minister of Stirling, the chief of the Protesters, had
arranged a meeting that day with nine other ministers from
various parts of Scotland, and two elders, in a private house
in Edinburgh, for the purpose of expressing their views in
a humble address and supplication to the King. The
document, which had been already drafted, was full of con-
gratulations to the King and professions of loyalty to him,
but, for the rest, was a remonstrance, in the name of the
Covenant, and in a dull and stupid ultra- Presbyterian strain,
not only against any restoration of Prelacy or Liturgy any-
1 Clarendoi., 1021-1025 ; Burnet I. f^Jf '=V-^Seofla«^/™m <A.^«<orah^™
173—191 ; Woctrow's History of the to the Bevolviwn (1721), I. d— b ana iz.
134 LIFE OF MILTON AND HISTORY OP HIS TIME.
where in his Majesty's dominions, hut also against the tolera-
tion of any non-Preshyterian sects whatever. The twelve
Protesters, with this supplication before thera, were in a
room near the meeting-place of the Committee of Estates,
and were drafting letters to be sent to their Protester
brethren over the country, inviting them to a general meeting
in Glasgow to adopt the Supplication, when oflBcers from the
Committee of Estates broke in among them and took them
and their papers into custody. They were committed to
Edinburgh Castle the same day (Aug. 23), and there was
much excitement in the tpwn^.
Through September, October, and November, the chief
activity of the Committee of Estates was still in summoning,
imprisoning, or otherwise disabling, selected offenders through-
out the country. The provost of Glasgow, the town-clerk
of Glasgow, and Mr. Patrick Gillespie, the Cromwellian
principal of the University of Glasgow, were among the first
arrested ; after whom were Mr. William Wishart, minister
of Kinneil, Mr. Robert Row, minister of Abercorn, the
Cromwellian Provost Jaffray of Aberdeen, Mr. John Dickson,
, minister of Rutherglen, Mr. James Naismith, minister of
Hamilton, Mr. James Simpson, minister of Airth, and many
more. On the 19th of September there was a proclamation
for the suppression of all copies of Mr. James Guthrie's
Protesting manifesto of 1651 called The Causes of God's Wrath,
and of all copies of Samuel Rutherford's political treatise of
1644 called Lex ^ex ; and in the following month copies of
both books were burnt in Edinburgh by the hangman. On
the 20th of September there was a proclamation against the
Protesters and their principles collectively, forbidding all
meetings in that interest, and all speech, preaching, or writing
in memory or justification of the " seditious and treasonable "
sentiments of the Remonstrance of 1650. On the 10th of
October there was a decree of fugitation or outlawry against
Sir Archibald Johnstone of Warriston, Colonel Gilbert Ker,
Colonel David Barclay, John Hume, Robert Andrew, and
1 Wodrow, I. 7—9, and Appendix, Nos. II. and III.
STATE OF FEEMNG IN SCOTLAND. 135
William Dundas, all in the class of Protesters double-dyed
into Cromwellians *.
Johnstone of Warriston was the fugitive whose escape was
most vexing to the authorities. He and Argyle were to have
been doomed in chief together. From among the rest it was
difficult to say yet with whom it would fare hardest ; but the
odds were greatly against Swinton of Swinton, and the two
clerical arch-Protesters, Guthrie and Gillespie. But, indeed.
Ho one knew how many here and there over the country,
besides those already imprisoned, might yet be put in jeopardy.
Not only had Rutherford's book been burnt, both in Edin-
burgh and St. Andrews, but,' having been deprived of his
St. Andrews principalship, he had been summoned to Edin-
burgh personally ; and, though he had been excused mean-
while, on certificates that he was too ill to move, and indeed a
dying man, he might expect farther trouble till he did die.
So with Andrew Cant of Aberdeen and others ^.
While it was abundantly evident that the Protester variety
of Presbyterianism was to be put down in Scotland, there was
no sign as yet but that Scotland might still enjoy a moderate
Presbyterianism, with the Westminster Assembly's standards,
and perhaps even the Covenants. This, at all events, was the
hope of the great body of the Resolutioner clergy. They had
been observing the proceedings against the Protesters without
much displeasure, though certainly with no desire of extreme or
very severe punishment for Argyle, Warristort, Guthrie, Gille-
spie, or any other of the prisoners, unless it might perhaps be
Quaker Swinton, for whom, as an avowed sectary of the worst
sort, no proper Presbyterian could have much pity. But O that
it could, be made positively certain that, however it might be
thought necessary to deal with the Protesters and other
culprits, the national Presbyterian Church was to be preserved
entire and intact ! Our friend Baillie will here again be the
best representative of the Resolutioners.
Baillie had been dreadfully shocked at first by the news
from London that Episcopacy was to be fully restored in
1 Wodrow, I. 10—12, and Appendix " Baillie, III. 447; Life of Eobert
No3. V. and VL Blair, 365—366 ; Wodi-ow, I. .77—78.
136 LIFE OF MILTON AND HISTORY OF HIS TIME.
England. On the 16tli of June he had expressed himself
on the subject in a letter to his old associate the Earl of
Lauderdale, the first he had written to that nobleman since
two or three he had addressed to him in the Tower in 1653
and 1654. "Is the service-book read in the King's chapel?"
Baillie had there asked. " Has the Bishop of Ely — I hear
" Dr. Wren, the worst bishop of our age after Dr. Laud —
" preached there ? Has the House of Lords passed an order
" for the service-book ? Oh ! where are we so soon ? Is our
' Covenant with England turned to Harry Marten's almanack ?
" Is the solemn oath of the Lords and Commons, assembled
" in Parliament, subscribed so oft by their hands, to eradicate
"bishops, turned all to wind?" The letter is in the same
strain throughout. He could never have dreamed, he says,
that the English Presbyterians and Covenanters, especially
those of London and Lancashire, would so easily have re-
admitted liturgy and episcopacy; and the wrath of God,
he was sure, would follow " so hideous a breach " of the
Covenant. — It is clear that, at the date of this letter, Baillie
regarded the cause of Presbytery as wholly gone in England,
but that, in the midst of his grief over that calamity, he could
not believe that there would be any attempt to deprive
Scotland of Aer Presbyterianism, or such virtue as she might
still find, for her particular purposes, in the Scottish Covenant
of 1638, or even in the Solemn League and Covenant of 1643,
if that were treated no longer as an international bond. And
this is exactly the view of the case which Mr. James Sharp
had been inculcating on the Resolutioners in his letters from
Breda and the Hague, and now from London, where he
remained about the King as the agent for the Kirk. He had
talked with his Majesty again and again on the subject ; and
not only had his Majesty surprised him by the freshness of
his memory " as to all things in Scotland," proved by his in-
quiries about this person and that by name, but there had been
repeated assurances from his Majesty of his desire to preserve
Scottish Presbytery. Thus, on the 12th of June, Sharp
could write, " He was pleased last week to say to me, before
General Monk, that he would preserve our Religion, as it was
STATE OP FEELING IN SCOTLAND, 137
settled in Scotland, entirely to us ; " and again, on the 14th
of June, reporting a conversation of that very day, " He was
" pleased again to profess that he was resolved to preserve to us
" the discipline and government of our Church, as it is settled
"among us." To Mr. Douglas and the other Resolutioner
ministers in Edinburgh these reports from Sharp were
consoling. Like Baillie in Glasgow, they were grieved with
the account of affairs in England, and they seem to have
thought that Sharp might have exerted himself more in
behalf of English Presbyteiy, if only by way of due exonera-
tion of his own conscience and theirs in a matter practically
hopeless ; but they were very thankful that all was to be
so well in Scotland. " He is gifted to his people in return
of their prayers " five of them say of his Majesty in a joint
letter to Sharp, intended for his Majesty's eye ; " and their
" expectations are fixed on him as the man of God's right hand,
" who will refresh the hearts of all lovers of Zion." Not even
yet, it will be seen, had the best and most conscientious
of the P-esolutioner clergy recovered aught of the old
Presbyterian manliness of Knox, Melville, and Henderson,
or risen above sycophancy and cant'.
There was confirmation of the hopes of the Resolutioners
when, on the 31st of August 1660, Mr. Sharp arrived from
London in person, bringing with him a letter from his
Majesty addressed to Mr. Douglas, to be communicated by
him to the Presbytery of Edinburgh, and by that Presbytery
to all the other Presbyteries of the kingdom. The letter,
which was dated Aug. 10 and countersigned by Secretary
Lauderdale, was probably of Sharp's penning. It acknow-
ledged his Majesty's satisfaction with the information he had
received as to the behaviour and dispositions of the Edin-
burgh clergy and " the generality of the ministers of Scotland "
in the present time of trial. " And," it proceeded, "because
1 Baillie, III. 405—407; Wodrow, of Swinton seems to have put him justly
Introduction, xxv — xllx (dated extracts beyond forgiveness. " Quakerism," says
from Sharp's Letters). It is curious to "Wodrow, commenting on Swinton's case,
observe how, not only in Baillie's notion "is but a small remove from Popery and
at the time (p. 447), but also in Wod- Jesuitism."
row's as late as 1721 (p. 6), the Quakerism
138 LIFE OF MILTON AND HISTORY OF HIS TIME.
" such who, by the countenance of usurpers, have disturbed
"the peace of that our Church, may also labour to create
"jealousies in the minds of well-meaning people, "We have
" thought fit by this to assure you that, by the grace of God,
" We resolve to discountenance profanity, and all contemners
" and opposers 'of the ordinances of the Gospel. We do also
" resolve to protect and preserve the government of the
" Church of Scotland, as it is settled by law, without viola-
" tion, and to countenance in the due exercise of their
" functions all such ministers who shall behave themselves
" dutifully and peacefully, as becomes men of their calling."
It was also promised that the Acts of the General Assembly
of 1651 at St. Andrews and Dundee, acknowledged by the
Resolutioners but held invalid by the Protesters, should be
"owned and stand in force meanwhile," and that another
General Assembly should be called soon, in preparation for
which his Majesty would send for Mr. Douglas and some
other ministers to give him their best advice ^.
His Majesty's letter of August 10, 1660, to the presbyteries
and people of Scotland, was a deliberate equivocation. Our
authority for so strong a statement is Clarendon. There is
a very elaborate passage in his Continuation of his Life in
which he gives an account of a debate there had been in
the Scottish Privy Council in Whitehall, the King, Hyde
himself. Monk, and others , of the English lords of that
Council being present, on the question whether it should be
part of Middleton's instructions, in his capacity of High
Commissioner for the King in the coming Scottish Par-
liament, to move at once for the abolition of Presbytery and
the setting up of Episcopacy. The story is as follows: —
Middleton moved earnestly in the meeting that he might
begin at once in Parliament with an Act rescinding the
Covenant and all other Presbyterian Acts and institutions in
Scotland, " and then proceed to the erecting of bishops in
that kingdom." Glencairn, Rothes, and " all the rest " of the
Scots present, concurred, with the single exception of Lauder-
dale. For himself, Lauderdale professed now to abominate
J Wodrow, 1. 13.
LAUDEEDALE AND MIDDLETON. 139
the Covenant, to have contracted the highest reverence for
Episcopacy, and to desire to see it established in Scotland
very soon; but he thought it would be fatal to make the
attempt in the first session of the Parliament. The Covenant
was the idol of Scotland ; his Majesty himself, from his
experience of the temper of the Scots and the power of their
kirkmen, must know how cautiously the ecclesiastical question
ought to be approached among them, and how desirable it
was that Presbytery should be left intact in that part of his
dominions till Episcopacy should be in full operation in the
rest. He moved, therefore, that Middleton should not only
receive no such instructions as he wanted, but should be
restrained by express direction from stirring the Episcopacy
question till farther order. " Many particulars in this dis-
" course, confidently urged," says Clarendon, " and with more
" advantage of elocution than the fatness of his tongue, that
" ever filled his mouth, usually was attended with, seemed
" reasonable to many." Charles himself hesitated, and Monk
inclined to Lauderdale's opinion. But Middleton and the
other Scottish lords were firm to their point. Privately they
knew that Lauderdale, though now disclaiming the Covenant
and Presbytery, was at heart as Presbyterian, as anti-
Episcopal, as ever ; but, without divulging that, they argued
that Lauderdale had been so long out of Scotland that his
knowledge of the state of feeling in that country was nothing
in comparison with theirs. They undertook that Episcopacy
could be established in Scotland without difficulty; and they
hoped his Majesty " would not choose to do his business by
halves." And so, Hyde and the other English counsellors
agreeing with this view, no restraint was put upon Middleton,
and the conduct of the Kirk-question in the Parliament was
to be left to his own prudence and discretion. — Actually this
secret decision and the King's public letter to the contrary
were contemporaneous. But was the King's letter to the
contrary ? " We do also resolve to protect and preserve the
government of the Church of Scotland as it is settled hy
law" was the phrase in the letter; and did not the last
words save all ? As law might be now interpreted, was not
140 LIFE OP MILTON AND HISTOBY OF HIS TIME.
Episcopacy still the legal establishment in Scotland, and was
not Preshyterj but an illegal interposition of two-and-twenty
years? True, there were other phrases in the letter which
seemed to certify to the Scots that only Presbyterianism
could be meant. What then? Was not the equivocal wording
of public documents a part of legitimate state-craft all over
the world ? Middleton by no means liked this view of things.
He was a soldier, and wanted to be straightforward. " For
" his share/' he said, " he did not love that way which made
" his Majesty's first appearance in Scotland to be in a cheat.''
The equivocation which Middleton disliked must have been
the invention of Sharp and Lauderdale. It has to be said for
Lauderdale, however, that he hoped yet to trip up Middleton
and the Episcopal party in the Scottish Council by some
ingenuity or other, and so, by saving Scottish Presbyterianism,
to save perhaps the King's word along with it. He had
enormous faith in his own red head, or, as Buckingham called
it, his " blundering understanding." The traitor Sharp, on
the other hand, walked softly in decent black, knowing all,
but not bound to explain himself^.
Through the months of September, October, and November,
the King's letter to the Presbytery of Edinburgh was in
circulation through Scotland. Passive waiting and hoping
for the best was all that was then left. It was something to
know, from proclamation at the Cross of Edinburgh on the
1st of November, that Parliament was to meet on the 12th of
December, superseding the temporary Committee of Estates.
On the 10th of December, by farther proclamation, the day
was postponed to Jan. 1. Early in December the Marquis of
Argyle and Swinton of Swinton were brought from London
by sea, to be tried by this Parliament. Argyle was conveyed
through the streets to Edinburgh castle, and Swinton, with
his hat taken off, to the tolbooth.
1 Clarendon, 1023—1025; Wodrow, " he was in his principles much against
I. 14 ; Burnet, I. 173—175, 184—185, Popery and arbitrary government," a
and 189—191. Burnet, who knew Lau- zealot for Scottish independence, and so
derdale well, and gives him the character much of a Presbyterian that he "re-
of "the coldest friend and violeutest tained his aversion to King Charles I.
enemy" he ever knew, vouches that and his party to his death."
LOSS OF THE SCOTTISH BECOEDS. 141
A peculiarly unfortunate incident of the same time, remarked
as ominous, was the loss of that mass of the old records of the
Scottish kingdom which had been taken to London in 1651,
after the conquest of the kingdom by Cromwell and Monk.
These, packed in " 107 hogsheads, 13 chests, 5 trunks, and 4
barrels," had been lying in the Tower, and had been made over
to Sir Archibald Primrose, the Scottish clerk-register, for re-
transportation to Scotland. Hyde having suggested that they
should be first examined, in order to the abstraction of any
papers unpleasantly commemorating the King's Presbyterian
professions in Scotland in 1650-1, the despatch of them had
been delayed till winter. Then, very carelessly, thej"- were sent
by sea, on board a frigate called The Bagle, commanded by a
Major Fletcher. A storm coming on, the frigate could not
manage such a cargo; and, as the only alternative that
occurred to Major Fletcher was to throw the greater part
of the rec6rds overboard or transfer a quantity of them to
another vessel, eighty-five of the hogsheads were transferred
from the frigate, in Yarmouth Eoads, to a wretched ship of
Burntisland, called The Elizabeth, the master of which, a John
Wemyss, was compelled to receive them against his will. On
her voyage north, still in the storm, this ship sprang a leak ;
partly because of the unusual nature of the cargo, the place
of the leak could not be discovered ; the ship went down,
somewhere off Berwick, on the 18th of December; and there,
under the water to this day, reduced to pulp or nothing, lie
eighty-five hogsheads of old Scottish history.
Mr. James Sharp, who ought to have been interested in
Scottish history, and especially in means of oblivion for it,
must have heard of the foundering of the ship. Since his
return to Scotland in August, he had been hovering be-
tween Fifeshire and Edinburgh, everywhere with the assurance
that, but for mismanagement, Scottish Presbytery was safe.
The demeanour of the man and his words had by this time
roused suspicions among his best friends. " James, God help
you ! " writes Baillie significantly to him, in a letter of
Dec. 17. No bishopric or archbishopric could have tempted
honest Baillie ; but he did not object to the principalship of
143 LIFE OJ" MILTON AND HISTOR.Y OF HIS TIME.
Glasg-ow University, in succession to his bitterest personal
enemy, tlie Protester and Cromwellian Gillespie, now removed.
Lauderdale, with Sharp assisting, had obtained the King's
promise of that place for Baillie some months ago ^.
" By letters from Edinburgh we understand that, since the
" Marquis of Argyle was close prisoner and Laird Swinton in
" the Tolbooth, a general face of joy and delight is all over that
" place. So many coaches and persons appear in Edinburgh
" since his Majesty's happy return and these Lords' commit-
" ment as have not in many years been seen in that city;
" and the Parliament, no question, is as free as the city, the
" members thereof being such as the people chose for their
" good affection to their king and country ^." Such was the
announcement in the London newspapers of the ceremonious
opening of the Scottish Parliament by Lord High Com-
missioner Middleton on Tuesday, the 1st of January 1661 *.
It may be doubted whether it conveyed to any English mind
the least idea of what the actual Scottish Parliament was.
Under the name of The Three Estates, it comprehended the
body of the Scottish nobility, together with representative
' Life of Botert Blair, 361—365; that Lord Landerdale would be dis^
Wodiow, I. 18; Burnet, I. 188—189; pleased, "they said it mattered mot if
Mrs. Green's Calendar of State Papers, "it were hanged about his neck, if he
1660— 1, pp. 260, 402, and 419; Baillie, "favoured it, and that the Book of
IIL 411—413 and 417—418; Acts of "Common Prayer would soon be settled
Exoneration to Major Fletcher and " in Scotland." On the same day there
Skipper Wemyss for the loss of the was a warrant to Eyley "to deliver to
Scottish Beoords, in the printed Acts of Secretary Nicholas fom vohnnes of
the Scottish Parliament of 1661.— There papers and records at present in, his
had been a very careful examination of custody relating to the transactions of
the hogsheads of Scottish records.before the Parliaments of Scotland from May
shipping them back to Scotland, and 15, 1639 to JKorcA 8, 1651." Eyley had
this chiefly in order to abstract and de- then received nothing for his labour of
tain that oojjy of the Covenant which search ; for on the 19th of December he
Charles had signed in Scotland, and other is found petitioning the King for " such
papers verifying his or his father's con- a reward, out of the excise ofSoe or else-
cessions to Scottish Presbytery. The where, as he thinks fitting for the extra-
person on whom thetroubleofthesearch ordinary pains and charge of examining
was Imposed was William Eyley, Clerk as ordered, 107 hogsheads, 12 chests,"
of the Becords in the Tower (ante &o. {Mrs. Green's Calendar, of dates).
Vol. V. p. 287). In a letter of his, of date The day before Eyley's petition for his
Sept. 7, 1660, he speaks of having had reward the Becords were at the bottom
his accounts checked by Sir John Eobin- of the sea.
son. Keeper of the Tower, and the two a The Kingdom' slnteUigeneer.^ec 31
Scottish Lords, Middleton and New- 1660 — Jan. 7, 1660-1.
burgh. He had been « highly com- » The Scotch then reckoned New
mended by them "for finding the Year's Day as we do still ; in England
Covenant," and told that it should be the dating would have been Jan 1
"burnt by the hangman." On his saying 1660, or Jan. 1, 1660-1. '
SCOTTISH PAKLIAMENT OF 1661. 143
lairds or lesser barons at the rate of two sent in by tbe
lairds of eaeb shire, and representative burgesses elected by
the various Town Councils. Altogether, there were present
11 Nobles, 56 Lairds, and 61 Commissioners of Burghs.
Great care had been taken that among the elected lairds and
burgesses there should be none but King's men. Bnt, still
farther to form this Parliament for the work required from
it, there was a revival, at Middleton's instance, of that old
device of an inner committee, or deliberating core of the
Parliament, under the name of The Lords of the Articles,
which had been found so convenient by James I., and also
by Charles I. till the reforming spirit of his later Parliaments
swept it away. To this committee of 13 selected nobles,
12 selected lairds, and 12 selected burgesses, was entrusted
the preparation of all bills, and in fact the decision what the
House should do or should not do : for the House itself all that
remained was to receive the bills, and, after such brief debate
as there might be, pass or reject them. The alternative of
rejection in the present Parliament was merely nominal. Day
after day, as bill after bill came in, they were passed almost
as fast as Middleton, or Chancellor Glencairn, chose to push
them through. And what bills they were! No English
Parliament, certainly not the Convention Parliament, though
it had settled England for Charles submissively enough,
would have endured such bills for a moment. Hyde could
not have tried any such course in England if he would, and
would have thought himself dishonoured as an Englishman
and lawyer by any thought of trying it if he could. But he
bad no objection to the establishment of absolute despotism
in Scotland, if it could be done by native agency ; and there
might be a convenience from his point of view in seeing
Scotland reduced to a state of' subjection incredibly below
anything possible in England. At all events the soldier-earl
and his rout in the Edinburgh Parliament, with Primrose as
the draftsman of their chief bills, were free to plunge on,
legislating in their own way, as if in iron boots, and with
iron flails, tramping and thrashing a space clear for the
erection of Nebuchadnezzar's image. They did not care for
144 LIFE OF MILTON AND HISTORY OF HIS TIME.
consistency even in their own measures. If one bill did
what had already been done by another, so much the better
for security ; if one bill conflicted with another, a third could
be . applied as a patch of reconciliation ; if Acts passed by
former Scottish Parliaments by authority and in the interest
of Charles I., or of Charles II. during his brief Scottish king-
ship in 1650-1, were conjoined in any repealing bill with
Acts of a different character, all might go together, and the
remedy might be found in Acts de novo on the King's behalf.
Men implicated in this Middletonian phrenzy of 1661 were
to locli back afterwards with wonder at what they had then
done and consented to. Primrose, the draftsman of the worst
Acts, is one instance. " He often confessed to me," says
Burnet, " that he thought he was as one bewitched while he
" drew them ; for, not considering the ill use might be made
" of them afterwards, he drew them with preambles full of
" extravagant rhetoric, reflecting severely on the proceedings
" of the late times, and swelled them up with the highest
" phrases and fullest clauses he could invent." In one case
Primrose had so worded an Act that, but for the interposition
of another lawyer, the effect would have been stupendous
beyond even Middleton^s calculations. For all this mad haste
and recklessness in the manner of Middleton's discharge of his
ofiice (his matter having been predetermined coolly enough)
Burnet can account only in one way. " It was a mad roaring
" time," says Burnet, " full of extravagance ; and no wonder
" it was so when the men of affairs were almost perpetually
" drunk." Middleton's style of living in his Commissioner-
ship was the most splendid the nation had yet seen. There
was revel in his house all night and every night ; and, when
they went to Parliament in the morning, not one of them had
a clear head but the insatiable Rothes ^-
1 Acts of the Parliament as printed in At the same time, I ought to say that,
the Scottish Acts ; Bumet, 1. 194— 207 ; if the chief legislators in the Scottish
Wodrow, L20 -31.— lought to say of Parliament of 1661 were constantly
Bumet, whom it has been the fashion drunk, there is no evidence of drunken-
to discredit, that I have found his in- ness in the form and wording of the
formation about Scotland at this time preserved and printed Acts of that Par-
verified in all essential particulars by liament. They are very numerous ; and
contemporary records of the existence there must have been enormous industry
of which he cannot have been aware. in preparing and drafting them, with
SCOTTISH PARLIAMENT OF 1661. 145
A few of the proceedings of the Parliament may be enume-
rated specially. On the first day of their sitting, after yielding
to Middleton's demand that Chancellor Glencairn should be
president ex officio, they passed an Act confirming that rule
and also imposing upon themselves an oath of allegiance
and supremacy, acknowledging the King's sovereignty " over
all persons and in all causes," and binding them " never to
decline" the same. This oath struck at the fundamental
principle of Scottish Presbytery, which denies to the civil
power supremacy in spiritual causes ; and, though Middleton
and Glencairn explained that the oath did not mean to touch
these, the Earl of Cassilis, Lord Melville, and Lord Kilburnie
refused to take itj unless that exception were put on record.
On the 4th of January there was a very proper order for
taking down the skull of Montrose from its spike on the
Tplbooth, and for the burial of the same, with his disinterred
trunk from the Boroughmuir, and his collected limbs from
Glasgow, Aberdeen, Perth, and Stirling, with all honours, at
the King's expense. On the 11th they passed an Act de-
claring it to be " his Majesty's prerogative to choose officers
of State, Councillors, and Lords of Session " and pronouncing
ail laws, acts, and practices to the contrary since 1637 to
have been undutiful and disloyal ; and on the same day they
passed another Act, asserting it to be part of the King's pre-
rogative to call, prorogue, or dissolve all Parliaments or poli-
tical conventions, declaring all meetings without his warrant
to be void and null, and repealing all Acts to the contrary
since 1640, with the addition that the future impugning or
questioning of anything in this Act should be accounted
treason. On the 16th they issued a proclamation banishing
from Edinburgh, within forty-eight hours, all persons who
had been accessory to the " Remonstrance " of 1650 or to the
book called The Cmses of God's Wrath, and passed (1) An
Act forbidding "convocations, leagues, or bands" without
leave of the Sovereign, and reflecting on the Covenants and
all such bands back to 1638, and (3) An Act vesting the sole
perfect sobriety somewhere, and perfect of every day. One of them is ■ an Act
command of the pen through portions against Swearing and Uruutenness.
VOL. VI, L J
146 LIFE OP MILTON AND HISTORY OF HIS TIME.
power of peace and war in the King, as holding his crown
from God alone, and declaring it to be high treason " for any
subjects, upon any pretext whatsoever, to rise in arms without
the King's allowance." On the 22nd they passed an Act
declaring the Convention of Estates of 1643, which entered
into The Solemn League and Covenant with England, to be
null and void, and annulling also the Act of Parliament of
1644, and all other Acts, ratifying the proceedings of that
Convention. On the 25th, they passed an Act declaring
" that there is no obligation upon this Kingdom, by covenant,
" treaties, or otherwise, to endeavour by arms a reformation
" of religion in the Kingdom of England," pronouncing
therefore the Solemn League and Covenant and all connected
oaths or promises to be not obligatory, and forbidding the
renewing of the same. There followed an Act approving of
Hamilton's Engagement of 1648 and cancelling all subsequent
condemnations thereof, and an Act condemning the prior
Declaration of the Kingdom of Scotland in January 1647.
Then there was a most comprehensive Act, imposing on all
persons in any public trust, or to be appointed to such, an
oath of supremacy and allegiance, formulated so as to reca-
pitulate the Acts respecting Prerogative, or annulling the
Covenants, already passed in the priesent Parliament, and to
require sworn obedience to them all.
These and other Acts, some of them overlapping each
other, had been touched by the sceptre of the High Com-
missioner, and so converted into statute, when Middleton,
observing that none of them assaulted Presbytery directly,
wanted something that should have that eflPect. The rescind-
ing of the Acts of certain particular years by which Charles I.
and Charles II, themselves had recognised, established, or
confirmed the Presbyterian constitution of the Kirk, was the
strictly correct method, but would have stirred awkward
recollections and roused clamour. In this diflBculty, " Primrose
" proposed, but half in jest, as he assured me," says Burnet,
" that the better and shorter way would be to pass a general
" Act Rescissory, as it was called, annulling all the Parliaments
" that had been held since the year 1633." Such an Act,
SCOTTISH PARLIAMENT OF 1661. 147
though annulling over again a good deal that had been
annulled already by previous Acts, and annulling some things
that previous Acts had ratified, would have the advantage
of scraping bare, as it were, the whole tract of time in which
Presbytery or anything favourable to Presbytery could pos-
sibly exhibit any legal growth or lodgment, and so of
effectually extirpating the plant unless it should be replanted
by the King's will. But the proposition was of a monstrous
character. There was no plea that could invalidate some of
the Parliaments in which Charles and his father had sat
voluntarily, on speculation for their own purposes and in-
terests, except that spiritual peers ■ or prelates had not sat in
them too ; and that plea would invalidate the present Parlia-
ment itself. Accordingly, " at a private juncto," says Burnet,
" the proposition, though well liked, was let fall, as not capable
" to- have good colours pmt upon it." But Middleton con-
tinued to discuss the matter with his juncto. " When they
" had drunk higher, they resolved to venture on it. Primrose
" was then ill ; so one was sent to him to desire him to pre-
"pare a bill to that effect." So says Burnet; but, in fact,
Middleton also wrote to Primrose, and his letter is extant,
dated March 27th, 1661. " My Lord/' he says to Primrose,
" the Act that is now before you is of the greatest consequence
" imaginable, and is like to meet with many difiiculties if not
" speedily gone about. Petitions are preparing, and, if the
" thing were done, it would dash all these bustling oppo-
" sitions. My Lord, your eminent services done to his
" Majesty in this Parliament cannot but be remembered to yoiir
" honour and advantage. I am so much concerned, because
" of the great help and assistance I have had from you, that
" I cannot, without injustice and ingratitude, be wanting in
" a just resentment. Now, I am more concerned in this than
" I was ever in a particular. The speedy doing is the thing
" I propose as the great advantage, if it be possible to
" prepare it to be presented to-morrow by ten o'clock in
" the forenoon to the [Lords of the] Articles, that it may be
" brought into the Parliament to-morrow in the afternoon."
Primrose did as he was bid, and drew the Act Bescissory. But
L 3,
148 LIFE OF MILTON AND HISTORY OF HIS TIME.
he " perceived," says Burnet, " that it was so ill-grounded
" that he thought, when it came to be better considered, it
"must certainly be laid aside." Not so. The next day, March
28, it was approved, without a change, by the Lords of the
Articles, brought into the House, and, though vehemently
opposed by the Duke of Hamilton, the Earl of Crawford, and
others, carried by a large majority. Middleton touched it
with the sceptre immediately, without waiting for leave from
the King. " This was a most extravagant act and only fit
" to be concluded after a drunken bout," says Burnet in con-
clusion. Middleton, at all events, must have been perfectly
sober when he wrote his note to Primrose. — Perhaps to stay
the outcry against this tremendous Act Rescissory, there came
soon afterwards An Act Concerning Religion and Chwrch Govern-
ment. It declared his Majesty's resolution to maintain the
Protestant religion, godliness, and sound morality, with
countenance of all ministers of the Gospel behaving them-
selves obediently and within the bounds of their calling;
and it announced that, " as to the government of the Church,
" his Majesty will make it his care to settle and secure the
" same in such a frame as shall be most agreeable to the
" Word of God, most suitable to Monarchical Government, and
" most complying with the public peace and quiet of the
" Kingdom." Presbyterians might construe these phrases as
well as they could ; but they had at least the annexed assurance
that " in the meantime his Majesty, with advice and consent"
of his Parliament, " doth allow the present administration by
" Sessions, Presbyteries, and Synods, they keeping within
" bounds and behaving themselves as sa,id is, and that not-
" Avithstanding of the preceding Act Rescissory." No word
now of the General Assembly promised in his Majesty's letter
of the preceding August '.
Thus, in Parliament itself, Middleton had borne down all
before him. The Earl of Cassilis, still refusing the oath of
supremacy in the form in which it had been passed, was ex-
1 Life of Blair, 371—382'; Bumet, I. Middleton's Letter to Primrose is given
197—203 ; Wodrow, I. 22—29, and Ap- from the Wodrow MSS.) ; Printed Acts
pendix, Nos. VII, VIII, X, XI ; BaUlie, of the Scottish Parliament of 1661.
III. 462 — 465, and Appendix, 586 (where
PERPLEXITY OF THE SCOTTISH CLEEGT. 149-
eluded from the House ; and the opposition by Crawford and
others had been overwhelmed. Over the country the alarm
could express itself only in popular mutterings, or in such
remonstrances as could be ventured on by the clergy in their
pulpits, or in presbyterial meetings. The boldest com-
mentator in the pulpit on the Acts abrogating the Covenant
had been a Mr. Robert McVaird of Glasgow; and he had
been brought to Edinburgh under guard, to answer for
" treasonable preaching." In a graver way, but with equal
steadiness, the venerable Mr. Douglas and other ministers of
Edinburgh had done what they could, both by papers and by
interviews with Middleton. There were still to be meetings
of synods in April, at some of which there were to be demon-
strations for the Covenant and against Prelacy ; but even in
these larger gatherings of the clergy, where they were not
broken up by authority, there was to be such management
that much of the business was to be turned rather into the
deposing and censuring of eminent Protesters not already
censured. Indeed, in aid of Middleton, a wave of feeling in
favour of prelacy had begun to be visible among the Resolu-
tioner clergy, and especially the younger clergy of that
denomination, not only in Aberdeenshire and the North,
where the prelatic feeling had. been lurking ineradicably from
of old, but even in the Lothians and other southern districts.
Care had been taken to bring the cleverest of such compliant
ministers to Edinburgh, to preach, in turn with Mr. Douglas
and others of his steady type, before the Commissioner and
the Parliament; and some of the sermons so preached had
been almost undisguisedly prelatic. One preacher had called
the Covenant the Golden Calf of Scotland. Mr. Sharp him-
self, of course, had been one of the first to preach (Jan. 6), and
had delivered a very puzzling sermon ; after which he had gone
quietly to St. Andrews, to be inducted into one of the profes-
sorships of the New College there, and made a Doctor of
Divinity, all in preparation for another mission to London, on
which he was to be sent shortly by Middleton ^.
^ Wodrow, 1. 31—41 ; Life of Blair, 373 and 384 ; BaiUie, IIL 420—421 ; Claren-
don, 1110.
150 LIFE OF MILTON AND HISTORY Ot HIS TIME.
Before the Parliament had completed that series of their
public Acts of which mention has been made, they were deep
in the trials of Argyle, Guthrie, Gillespie, Swinton, and the
other delinquents in custody. Who or how many might be
the delinquents to be proceeded against eventually was still
unknown, for the policy was to postpone any general Act of
Indemnity as long as possible, so as to keep all in terror.
There were enough in custody to begin with. Argyle's trial
began on the 13th of February, Guthrie's on the 20th,
Swinton's on the 22nd, and Gillespie's on the 6th of March,
Rutherford, who had been cited to appear, and would have
been conjoined with Guthrie and Gillespie, died at St.
Andrews, March 20fch ; and McVaird and the other prisoners
waited their turns. The indictment against Argyle went
through his whole life since 1638, fixing culpability especially
on certain dated actions of his in his government of Scotland,
but bringing in also his correspondence with Cromwell, and
trying to fasten en him particularly the charge of having
been accessory to the death of King Charles before the fact.
The nature of the indictments against the others may be
guessed. All made dignified appearances and able defences.
Argyle strenuously denied any cognisance of the intention to
put Charles to death, and expressed his detestation of the act.
Guthrie and Gillespie argued powerfully for the legality of all
they had done as Protesters or Remonstrants. These three
had the assistance of counsel, which Swinton seems to have
declined. His own appearance and demeanour in his Quaker's
garb were impressive enough. The trials were protracted by
adjournments from day to day, and were not at an end in
April. Especially in Argyle's case there was " no lack of full
hearing and debates to the uttermost," and it seemed very
dubious indeed whether the Government would secure a con-
viction \
Episcopacy not having yet been set up in Scotland, though
the ground had been cleared for it, we cannot end our sketch
of Scotland in the first year of the Restoration, as we ended
1 Baillie, III. 465—467 ; Wodrow, I. There i^ a full account of Argyle's in
42 et seq. (for details of the tri^s). Howell's State Trials.
THE CORONATION OF CHARLES. 151
that of Ireland, with a list of actual bishops. The only
Scottish bishop now alive, of those that had been swept away
by the Glasgow General Assembly of 1638, was Thomas
Sydserf, Bishop of Galloway. He might expect his reward
for having lived so long ; but, as two archbishops and twelve
bishops were required for the proper and complete Episcopa-
tion of Scotland, there may have been many expectants
besides old Sydserf.
In April 1661, when the heads of Cromwell, Bradshaw, and
Ireton had been exposed on the top of Westminster Hall for
two months and more, London was astir for the grand ceremony
of the Coronation of Charles.
Other preparations having been made, there was, on the
10th of April, a creation of sixty-eight knights of the Bath,
in order to their attendance, in the full costume of that
knighthood of the cross and red ribbon, at the eomino-
solemnity. Among the sixty-eight were John, Viscount
Braekley, and his brother Sir William Egerton, sons of the
Earl of Bridgewater who had been "the elder brother"
in Comus; also Sir Henry Hyde, eldest son of Chancellor
Hyde, and Sir Rowland Bellasis, brother of Viscount
Falconbridge ; also Sir John Denham the poet, now in the
lucrative post of his Majesty's surveyor of works, formerly
held by Inigo Jones ; also, unabashed in such company, the
fortunate and forgiven Sir Richard Ingoldsby. Then, on
the 16th, with a view to the same coming solemnity, there
was a chapter of the supreme Knighthood of the most noble
and illustrious Order of the Garter, in St. George's Chapel,
Windsor, for the purpose of settling the arrangement of the
twenty-six stalls, in two rows of thirteen each, then com-
posing that great order. On the Sovereign's side, after the
royal stall itself, were the stalls of the Duke of York, the
Prince Elector of Brandenburg, Prince Rupert, the Earl of
Salisbury, the Earl of Northumberland, the Duke of Ormond,
the Earl of Southampton, the Earl of Bristol, Count Marsin,
the Earl of Sandwich, the Duke of Richmond, and the Earl
of Manchester; and on the other side, after one stall lelt
153 LIFE OF MILTON AND HISTOBT OF HIS TIME.
void, were the stalls of the Elector Palatine, the Prince of
Orange, Prince Edward, the Earl of Berkshire, the Duke
D'Espernon, the Marquis of Newcastle, the Prince of Tarente,
the Duke of Albemarle, and the Earls of Oxford, Lindsey,
and StraiFord. Such of these peers as were now in England
were to figure at the coronation in the dark-blue velvet
mantles, crimson velvet surcoats, gold collars with the George
depending, and other accoutrements, of this highest and
most gorgeous representation of English heraldiy. But, in
addition to these peers of the supreme knighthood and the
rest of the existing body of the peerage, it was thought
proper that there should be a special creation of a few new
peerages, to be conferred on those who had eminently served
his Majesty in the Restoration or in the Convention Parlia-
ment, and had not already, like Monk and Montague, received
their reward in this form. Accordingly, in the Banqueting
House at Whitehall, on the 20th of April, the King created
six earls and six barons, as follows : —
Eabls.
Lord Chancellor Hyde (already Baron Hyde of Hiadon) : created
Earl of Clarendon, and Viscount Cornbury.
Arthur Annesley (Viscount Valentia in the Irish Peerage by the
recent death of his father) : created Earl of Anglesey, and Baron
Annesley of Newport-Pagnel.
Thomas Brudenell (Baron Brudenell since 1627) : created Earl of
Cardigan.
Arthur Capel (Baron Oapel since the execution of his father in
1648-9) : created Earl of Essex, and Viscount Maiden.
Sir John Greenville (the agent for the Kestoration between the
King and Monk) : created Earl of Bath.
Charles Howard (the Cromwellian) : created Earl of Carlisle, Vis-
count Howard of Morpeth, and Baron Dacre of Gilsland. He
had been created Viscount Howard of Morpeth and Baron Gils-
land by Cromwell, July 20, 1657 ; but that fact has sunk out of
the peerage-books.
Babons.
Sir Anthony Ashley Cooper, Bart. : created Baron Ashley.
Sir Frederick Cornwallis, Bart. {Treasurer of the Household) : created
Baron Cornwallis.
Sir George Booth, Bart. : created Baron Delamere.
Sir Horatio Townshend, Bart. ; created Baron Townshend.
THE COEONATION OF CHAELES. 153
Denzil Holies, Esq. : created Baron Holies.
John Crewe, Esq. : created Baron Crewe.
Two days after this creation of peers, viz. on Monday,
April 22, the day before the Coronation, there was, according
to ancient custom, a procession from the Tower to West-
minster, "in such a glorious and splendid manner that it
" seemed to outvie whatever had been seen before of gallantry
"and riches." All along the streets^ and through four
triumphal arches, erected in Leadenhall Street, Cornhil),
Cheapside, and Fleet Street, there marched, with hurrahing
and music of drums and trumpets, a regulated muster of
horse-guards, equerries, esquiresj chaplains, lawyers, judges,
knights, sons of peers, peers themselves in their orders, great
state-officers, heralds, and horse-guards again, all conveying
his Majesty from the main commercial city to the more
sacred suburban one where there was to be the coronation in
the Abbey the next day ^.
That day, Tuesday, April 23, had been selected as being
St. George's day, the anniversary of the patron saint of all
England. We vote it now to have been also the anniversary
of the birth-day of Shakespeare about a hundred years before;
but no one then thought much about Shakespeare's birth-day.
And no wonder in such a vast bustle for the crowning of
Charles as was kept up for four-and-twenty hours between
Westminster Hall and the Abbey.
Early in the morning Charles was in the Hall, " arrayed
in his royal robes of crimson velvet furred with ermine,"
and with the judges, nobles, and heralds, and the elite of
yesterday's procession, about him, all duly robed and in
their ranis, but with bishops and doctors of divinity now
conspicuous in the front, and with privileged spectators
looking down from the galleries. There was the ceremonious
arranging of the crown, the sceptre, the various swords, the
rest of the regalia, and other mystic implements that were
to be borne into the Abbey. 'All being ready, the stately
march thither began, about ten o'clock, through Palace Yard
1 Phillips (Baker's Chronicle continued), 735—737.
154 LIFE OF MILTON AND HISTORY OF HIS TIME.
and the Gate-House^ and along the end of King's Street and
the Great Sanctuary, over blue cloth laid between railings all
the way. — The huge assemblage once fairly marshalled in the
Abbey by the heralds, all in their appointed places, whether
on the floor or in galleries, including the great ladies and
some fourteen or fifteen ambassadors and envoys from foreign
powersj the King entered by the west door. Then there
pealed out the first anthem : " I was glad when they said
unto me, We will go into the house of the Lord." After a
few moments of kneeling at a stool for private devotion, the
King was, led to that part of the Abbey where there was the
raised dais with the throne of state. Then Gilbert Sheldon, the
Bishop of London, did so much of the ceremony as had been
arranged for this point. Turning first to the south, then to the
west, and then to the north, the Bishop, the King standing up
and turning with him, called on the people three times in
each direction to say whether they accepted Charles as their
legitimate sovereign. The replies came in acclamations ;
and, the same question having been put to the nobility, there
was another anthem : " Let thy hand be strengthened, and
thy right hand be exalted ; let justice and judgment be the
preparation of thy seat, and mercy and truth go before thy
face." After this there was the movement from the throne
to the altar, the King surrounded by- bishops and great
nobles, carrying the regalia. These were placed reverently on
the altar, one by one, by the Bishop of London ; and then,
the King kneeling, the bishop prayed : " O God, which dost
visit those that are humble, and dost comfort us by thy Holy
Spirit, send down thy grace upon this thy servant Charles, that
by him we may feel Thy presence among us, through Jesus
Christ : Amen." It was next the turn of Morley, Bishop of
Worcester. Ascending the pulpit, he preached the coronation-
sermon from Proverbs xxviii. 3 : " Por the transgression of a
land many are the princes thereof; but by a man of under-
standing and knowledge the state thereof shall be prolonged."
Sermon ended, the Bishop of London again ofiiciated, by
asking the King whether he would take the coronation-oaths,
to which Warner, Bishop of Rochester, added the request.
THE COBONATION OF CHARLES. 155
according to ancient form, that he would preserve the
Bishops and the Church in their privileges. The oaths
having been solemnly taken at the altar, the King again
knelt, -and Sheldon prayed, "We beseech thee, O Lord,
Holy Father, Almighty and Everlasting God, for this thy
servant Charles," &c. ; aAd, the King still kneeling, and
all the bishops kneeling, and the Dean of Westminster
kneeling, "they began the litany, the quires singing the
responses." After that there were three more short prayers
by Sheldon, at the end of the last of which Juxon, Archbishop
of Canterbury, who was too feeble to have appeared earlier,
did come forward. Standing before the altar, he spoke and
was responded to as follows : — " Archhishop. Lift up your
" hearts. Resp. We lift them up to the Lord. Archbishop.
" Let us give thanks unto the Lord our God. Resp. It is
"meet and right so to do. Archbishop. It is very meet
"and right, and our bounden duty, that we should at all
"times, and in all places, give thanks unto Thee, O Lord,
" Holy Father," &e. Then came the central pageantry of all.
First there was the Anointing, for which the King had been
meanwhile sufficiently disrobed. It consisted in the taking by
the archbishop of the holy oil which had been poured out of an
ampulla (Latin for bottle) into a spoon, and in his anointing
therewith, in the manner of a cross, the palms of the King's
hands, and then his breast, and then his back between the
shoulders, and then his shoulders themselves, and then the
" two bowings of his arms," and lastly the crown of his royal
head. There were suitable prayers by the archbishop and
anthems by the quire during the process. After the oil-films
on his Majesty's person had been " dried up with fine linen,"
there was the proper manipulation about him, by the arch-
bishop or others, of the various symbolic implements from
the altar. One by one, the coif, the surplice, the taffeta
hose and sandals, the spurs, the sword of state, the
armill or neck-bracelet, and the mantle of cloth of gold,
were produced and applied^ with formulas of expository
incantation and blessing. All the while they had been
putting St. Edward's chair in due place right against the
156 LWE OF MILTON AND HISTOET OF HIS TIME.
altar ; and, St. Edward's crown having been already handled
and blessed, and the King having sat down in the sacred
chair, the assemblage hung breathless while the aged arch-
bishop, bringing the crown again from the altar, placed it
on the King's head. Then, through the Abbey, there rang
shouts again and again of God save the King, till the boom
of the ordnance in the Tower, fired by signal, informed those
within that the whole world without knew that the superb
moment had passed. When the noise had subsided, there
were more prayers and anthems ; and, the dukes, marquises,
earls, and viscounts having put on their coronets, and the
barons their caps, there was the delivery by the archbishop
to the King, still seated in St. Edward's chair, of the ring
and the sceptre, and the sceptre with the dove. Of the
kneelings and other religious services of prayer and song
that followed, and the kissing of the bishops by the King
and the homagings to the King by the bishops and the peers,
and the changes of place and posture in the Abbey, and the
proclamation of the King's general pardon by Lord Chan-
cellor Clarendon and heralds, and the flinging of gold and
silver medals about by the Treasurer of the Household, and
the readings of the Epistle and Gospel, and the intoning of
the Creed by the Bishop of London, and the music from the
violins and other instruments by performers in scarlet, with
the bangs from the drums and blasts from the trumpets, the
reckoning becomes incoherent. People were tired of these fag-
ends and longed to be out of the Abbey. — Mr. Pepys, for one,
who had been admitted by favour of Sir John Denham, and
had been sitting in a cramped place since half past four
in the morning, left the Abbey shortly after the showering
of the medals, of which he had not been so fortunate as to
obtain one. He made his way, by privilege, along the railed
footway into Westminster Hall, where his wife was among
the ladies in one of the galleries, and where they were all
waiting now to behold the coronation banquet with which
the day was to be wound up, and for which the tables were
already laid. Not, however, till there had been the Holy
Communion in the Abbey, with the consecration of the
THE COBONATION OF OHABLES. 157
elements, and the handing of the bread to the King by the
Archbishop and the cup by the Dean of Westminster, did
the great retnrn-procession of the main personages over the
footway of blue cloth fill the body of the Hall once more,
and give promise of the concluding sight. — When the King
did come into the Hall, crowned and sceptred, and attended
in state, "under a canopy borne up by six silver staves,"
and had made his way to the upper end, and the Bishop of
London had said grace, and all had sat down at their several
tables, there was infinite variety of amusement in observing
the presentation of the dishes at the chief table, and the
incidents between the courses. One of these was the entry
into the Hall, just before the second course, of the King's
champion. Sir Edward Dymock, on " a goodly white courser,"
all armed, and with heralds and trumpeters. After proclama-
tion by York Herald that here was a champion ready to
maintain with his . life, against all comers, that Charles the
Second was the lawful King of England, Dymock flung
down his gauntlet, once, twice, thrice, with no challenge to
the contrary, and then, having received a gold cup, full of wine,
which his Majesty had tasted to his health, drank it off and
backed out of the Hall. The remainder of the dinner lapsed
into some disorder, the hungry bystanders crowding round the
tables, with inconvenient curiosity, to see what they could
get. Mr. Pepys, by the kindness of his patron Lord Sandwich,
managed to carry off from one of the tables " four rabbits and
a pullet," with which, and a little bread, he withdrew into
a corner, to refresh himself and some friends. It was about
six o'clock in the evening when the King rose to retire, the
third course not having yet been served, and so converted the
remnant of the affair into a mere upstanding and cheering
mob. — But, lo ! just as his Majesty was going, or a little
time before, what a change in the skies outside! All that
day, as through the last, the weather had been remarkably
fair and propitious ; but now it had gloomed and had fallen
"a-raining and thundering and lightening," so that people
remained huddled in the Hall, talking to each other super-
stitiously, after his Majesty had departed. When they did
158 LIFE 01" MILTON AND HISTORY OF HIS TIME.
disperse, it still rained and thundered. There could be no
fireworks that night, and London and Westminster had to be
content with bonfires. And, through the night, on the roof
of Westminster Hall, by the flashes of the lightning, one
might have discerned, as distinctly as through the whole
ceremonial of the day, the three fixed black poles, with the
three skulls on their tops ; and the anointed and crowned
King had gone home to Mrs. Palmer ; and a venerable arch-
bishop, and a bevy of good and learned bishops about him,
had done their blasphemous uttermost ; and is it- God or
Mephistopheles that governs the world ^ ?
On the 8th of May 1661, a fortnight after his Majesty^s
coronation, the new Parliament met. This new English Parlia-
ment, the second of the Restoration era, diflFered from its pre-
decessor, the ConventionParliament, in being properly Charles's
own Parliament, not merely adopted by him, but convoked by
his writs. As the Irish Parliament met at Dublin on the
same day, and as the Scottish Parliament was still sitting
in Edinburgh, there were three Parliaments assembled at
once in the British Islands. The Irish Parliament difiered as
yet in one particular from the others. The bishops were
in their places in the House of Lords in that Parliament,
Archbishop Bramhall presiding in the House; but the
readmission of the bishops into the English House of Lords
was deferred, and in Scotland bishops had not yet been made.
The very first Acts of the new English Parliament, however,
proved that it was likely to go to much greater lengths for
Episcopacy and Prerogative universally than even the Con-
vention Parliament. Of the 500 members of the new House
of Conimons the vast majority were cavaliers, old and young,
ready now to show themselves Church of England men to the
core ; and of the Presbyterians or quasi-Presbyterians that
had formed the bulk of the preceding House not above fifty
or sixty had been returned to this. Charles and Hyde had
now, therefore, an English Parliament that would sweep on
1 Account of the Coronation by Elias into Phillips, pp. 738—749 ; Pepys under
Ashmole, Windsor Herald, transcribed date April 23, 1661.
MEETING OF A NEW ENGLISH PAELIAMENT. 159
with due impetus in the line required. As if to show how
ready they were to do so, the Commons, on the 13th of May,
the fourth day of their sitting, passed a resolution that
every member of their House should receive the sacrament,
according' to the form prescribed in the Liturgy, on a certain
fixed day in St. Margaret's church, and should be reported as
having been seen to do so by a committee of scrutineers, on
pam of being disabled from farther attendance in the House.
This did not hold out much prospect of success for the
twelve Presbyterian or lately Presbyterian divines, with nine
assistantSj who were then, by the King's commission, en-
gaged in a conference at the Savoy with twelve of the bishops
and nine Episcopal assessors on the subject of a revision of
the Liturgy. Indeed, from the first meeting of this so-called
Savoy Conference on the 15th of April, it had been evident
that the bishops meant to be as rigid as they could, and
listened to the pleadings of Mr. Baxter and his colleagues only
to consume time till the temper of the new Parliament should
be fully ascertained. Of that there was another symptom on
the 17th of May, when, by a majority of 228 to 103, it was
resolved by the Commons to put the question whether " the
instrument or writing called The Solemn League and Covenant "
should be burnt by the hangman, and, the question having
been put, it was resolved, without another division, that the
Covenant should be so burnt. The Lords having concurred
May 20, there issued a printed order of the two Houses,
May 21, for the burning of the Covenant by the hangman
at three places in London and Westminster on the following
day, and also " that the said Covenant be forthwith taken off
" the records in the House of Peers and in all other courts
" and places where the same is recorded, and that all copies
" thereof be taken down out of all churches, chapels, and
" other public places in England and Wales, and the town of
" Berwick-upon-Tweed." The burning duly took place on
the 22nd, and is commemorated exultingly in the London
newspapers. And that was the end in England of Hender-
son's famous invention of August 1643 for linking England
and Scotland permanently together. The Irish Parliamenlj
160 LIFE OF MILTON AND HISTORY OF HIS TIME.
had already (May 17) expressed itself against any lingering
of the Covenant in Ireland, and had decreed the Liturgy and
Episcopal government to be the law of that island. The
Covenant, as we have seen, though not yet actually burnt in
Scotland by public order, had been declared non-obligatory
by the Scottish Parliament ^-
One day more of Restoration rejoicings was to close the
famous year. Charles's birth-day. May 29, 1661, the first
anniversary of his triumphant entry into London, had come
round. By the Act of Parliament passed in August, this was
to be the first of those anniversary thanksgivings for the
Restoration that were to go on for ever in the realm of
England. The Scottish Parliament had followed'the example,
and passed, an Act for the same observation of the 29th of
May " as an holiday unto the Lord " perpetually in Scotland.
This was among their boldest measures, the doctrine of
holidays by civil appointment being especially repugnant to
Scottish Presbyterianism ; but the prostrate clergy accommo-
dated themselves as well as they could, by consenting to the
celebration of the day, while not acknowledging the authority
for it, or its " anniversariness.^' In Scotland, accordingly, no
less than in England and Ireland, there was the repeated
outburst on that day of those Restoration shoutings, drink-
ings, bonfires, cannonadings, and bell-ringings, of which the
lieges never could have enough. But there was a tragic
intermixture with the Scottish rejoicings. On the afternoon
of the 27th of May, two days before the anniversary, the
Marquis of Argyle had been beheaded by " the maiden " in
the High Street of Edinburgh ; and, his head having been
set up over the Tolbooth in the place where Montrose's had
been, his body was being carried by his relatives to its rest
in that sepulchre of the Campbells which is still to be seen,
in its fine Highland solitude, on the banks of the Holy Loch.
On the third day after the anniversary, June 1, the good, con-
scientious, brave, narrow, and utterly incompetent Mr. James
Guthrie, and the less-known Captain William Govan, the blunt
1 Lords and Commons Journals of III. 470 ; Neal, IV. 360 ; Mercurius
dates ; Pari, Hist. IV. 178—209 ; Baillie, PuiKcus of May 16—23, 1661.,
KINa's INTENDED MAEHIAGE. 161
Protester soldier, were hanged in the same High Street of
Edinburgh. The head of Guthrie was put over the Nether
Bow, and that of Govan over the West Port. What might
become of the other prisoners was still uncertain. Much
might depend on the instructions that might come from
London, whither Chancellor Glencairn and the Earl of Eothes,
with Dr. Sharp in their company, had been sent by Mid-
dleton, late in April, to report the progress of Scottish affairs
so far, and to consult with the King and Hyde about the
remaining business of the Kirk and about farther dealings
with Scottish delinquents ^.
It had been announced by the King, in his opening speech
to the English Parliament, that he and his Council had
agreed that his marriage with the Princess Catharine,
daughter of Alphonso VI, King of Portugal, would be, in all
respects, the most judicious marriage he could make, and that
a treaty to that effect had been signed. At the end of the
year of the Restoration, therefore, expectations of this lady
were mingled with the other rejoicings.
1 Wodi-ow, I. 28—29, 54—57, and III. 460 and 465—467 ; CliamlDers's Va.
69—70 ; Life of Blaii-, 384— 386 ; Baillie, mestio Annals of Scotland, II. 274—277.
VOL. VI. M
CHAPTEE II.
MILTON THROUGH THE TBAE OE THE EESTOEATION.
OuE last glimpse of Milton was on or about the 7th of
May 1660, when, by the advice of his friends, and by arrange-
ments they had made for him, he absconded from his house
in Petty France, to avoid the danger to which he was exposed
by the Restoration.
The place of his " retirement and abscondenee," Phillips
informs us, was " a friend's house in Bartholomew Close."
The narrow passage so named was entered from West Smith-
field by a very old arch, part of the church of the Priory of
St. Bartholomew, which dated from the twelfth century. It
was a row or labyrinth of tenements that must have been old
and quaint even in Milton's time. Here had lived Dr. Caius
the physician, the founder of Caius College, Cambridge ; here,
in some kind of studio, Hubert Le Soeur the sculptor had
modelled his statue of Charles I., the bronze of which had been
missing during the Commonwealth, but was soon to be dis-
covered in its concealment, and to be set up reverently
at Charing Cross; and here, some sixty-five years hence,
Benjamin Franklin was to work as a compositor in one of the
old houses, when it had been turned into Palmer's printing-
ofiice. To Milton, who may have known the close and its
neighbourhood in his Aldersgate Street days, what mattered
it now, in his blindness, in what dingy recess from any of the
city thoroughfares, or in what room or garret there, they
cooped him up for safety. It seems not improbable that he
may have been shifted from one hiding-place in the city to
MILTON IN ABSCONDENCE. 163
another, though the house in Bartholomew Close was best
remembered by Phillips, and for sufficient reason. One
would have liked to know the name of the friend who gave
him shelter. It was a kindness involving real risk, with
anxiety and vigilance from day to day. A malicious or
indiscreet servant might have ruined all. One has to fancy,
therefore, a small, quiet family, managing among themselves,
and willing to do anything for Mr. Milton, as much for his
own sake as for any recompense offered. And so,, in some
small room, the walls of which he could feel round in his
darkness, much alone, and hearing of the outside world only
through the family, or through some faithful stealthy visitor,
such as Cyriack Skinner or Andrew Marvell, coming from
Westminster at nights, Milton waited to know his fate. He
remained in his concealment, says Phillips, " till the Act of
Oblivion came forth," i. e. till the 29th of August. Three
months and three weeks, therefore, from the beginning of
May to the end of August 1660, did Milton live in that
room, listening for footsteps, and uncertain whether he was
to be hanged or not. The expression is not in the least ex-
aggerated. There had been exulting prophecies by royalist
pamphleteers on the eve of the Restoration that Milton would
soon be seen going to Tyburn in a cart. Everybody expected
it ; Milton himself must have expected it. As surely a^ if he
had left the statement on record, the imagination of his own
execution, to the last ghastly particular of cart, ladder, hang-
man, rope, and the yelling multitude that should see him,
though unseen by him, must have passed through Milton's
mind again and again during those three months and three
weeks of his hiding in Bartholomew Close \
Consider, from the point of view of a royalist, what could
be alleged against Milton. Leave out of account his Anti-
Episcopal pamphlets and Divorce pamphlets, written between
1640 and 1646, though from those there might be produced
matter to aggravate an indictment. Take only his writings
and career since 1648. Remember, first, his Tenure of Kings
1 PhillipB's Memoir of Milton ; Cun- 'Barthdkmew Close, and Art. Charing
Bingham's Handbook of Loudon, Art. Cross.
M 2
164 LIFE 01" UILTON AND HISTORY OP HIS TIME.
and Magistrates: proving that it is lawful, and hath been held so
through all ages, for any who have the power, to call to account
a Tyrant or wicked King, aiid, after due conviction, to depose and_
put him to death. Remember that this pamphlet was partly
written while King Charles was on his trial, and was pub-
lished on the 13th of February 1648-9, only a fortnight
after his execution, actually the first pamphlet justifying the
regicide and the institution, of the Republic ; and remember
with what inveictives against Charles and his reign the
tremendous doctrine announced in the. title-page was made
good in the text. Remember that, just a month after the
publication of that pamphlet, and mainly in consequence of it,
Mil ton was made Latin Secretary to the Council of State for
the Commonwealth, taking his place in that capacity at the
board where Bradshaw presided, and round which Cromwell
and so many other regicides sat. Remember that he had
held this post for more than four years, not only writing
foreign despatches for the successive Councils of State of the
Republic, but doing miscellaneous work for them, and
especially performing to their order several most important
literary commissions. In his Observations upon Ormond's
Articles of Peace with the Irish Rebels, published by authority
in May 1649, he had not only asserted, against royalists of all
varieties, the legality of the infant Republic, but had spoken
with studied contempt of Ormond personally. Then, in his
MkonoMastes, published in October 1649, also by order
of the Republican Government, he had assaulted the King's
own book, the very Bible of the Royalists, accusing the King
of having stolen the prayers in it, laughing at it and at the
popular idolatry of it, pronouncing it a poor tissue of
hypocrisy and mock-piety, and, by fresh invectives against
the character and reign of Charles, representing the worship
of his memory as but a disgusting delusion. In 1650 there
had been a second edition of the same book, with added
passages of new ridicule of the King's memory. Then, in the
beginning of 1651, there had followed his first Pro Populo
Anglicano Befensio, replying to Salmasius, arraigning Charles I.,
Charles II., the whole dynasty of the Stuarts, and kingly
Milton in aescondence. 165
government itself, fcefore the European world, proclaiming
the virtues and deserts of the Republic and its- founders,
and daring all Christendom to deny that the exchange of
Monarchy for Republicanism in England had been an ex-
change of servitude, vice, cruelty, and corruption, for liberty,
probity, manliness, and light. Had not Europe rung with
the fame of that book ; had it not, in the opinion of some,
done more for the continuation of the Republic than anything
else, except Cromwell's battles ? Remember also, through the
whole of the year 1651 and beyond, Milton's licensing editor-
ship of the Mercurim Politicus, and his association with
Marchamont Needham in the articles in that journal, sys-
tematically inculcating Republican principles, and vilifying
Charles II. and his brothers as the exiled Tarquins. His
blindness, coming on in the course of next year, had some-
what paralysed his powers of work; but had he not remained
in office to the last moment of the Republic, on terms of
intimacy with its chiefs, addressing Cromwell and Vane in
eulogistic sonnets, and employing one of his nephews as his
deputy in a new pamphlet of Republican tenor ? Blind though
he was, had he not, after public approbation of Cromwell's
assumption of supreme power, passed into Cromwell's own
sei'viee, and been Cromwell's Latin Secretary throngh the
whole of his ProtectoratCj more and more in Cromwell's
foreign secrets, and active for him officially ? To this period
also, besides reprints of former writings, belonged his second
Pro Fo^ulo Anglieano Befensio, of May 1654, repeating the
doctrines of the first, with even more of popular effijct, but
vindicating the recast of the Republic into the Oliverian
sovereignty, addressing Oliver in a laboured panegyric which
asserted him to be the greatest and best man in the world-,
and bringing in also Bradshaw and other regicides for super-
lative praise. His Pro Se Defensio of August 1655 had been
a sequel, pursuing the policy, so conspicuous already in the
previous treatises, of deadly attack on every person, English-
man or foreigner, that dared to speak in favour of the dead
Charles or the living, or against the Commonwealth and the
Regicide. A servant of Cromwell to the last, he had not
166 LIFE OP MILTON AND HISTOBY OP HIS TIME.
ceased hia activity at Cromwell's death. He had served
through the Protectorate of Richard, had seen its collapse and
the restoration of the Rump, and had heen one of those who,
through the Anarchy of the latter half of 1659, stood for
" the good old cause.'' In two ecclesiastical tracts and
one political letter of this year he had set forth afresh his
extreme views on Church and State, arguing for anything
rather than a return to Monarchy, and for the eradication of
anything in any form that could be called a Church of
England, But, above all, remember his activity in those
months of February, March, and April 1660, just past, when
Monk's dictatorship in London, and the replacing of the
secluded members in the Rump, had cleared the way for the
recall of Charles, and the popular impatience for his recall
had become ungovernable, and the event itself was within
sight. Who had been fighting to the last against that event
like Milton.? Alone almost he had beien standing up, a blind
wonder, adjuring and imploring his countrymen even yet to
keep out Charles and all his kin, disowning his countrymen
as fools and God-abandoned slaves when he knew they would
not listen to his advice, and warning them of woes and bloody
revenges in consequence. The hissing and laughter over
Milton's 'Ready cmd Easy Way to establish a Free Commonwealth
and his Brief Notes on Br. Griffith's Sermon had not ceased
when the Convention Parliament met, and Charles's Breda
letters announced his coming ; and, amid the hissing and
laughter, and just before his absconding, had not Milton's
last act, in a second and more frantic edition of the former
pamphlet, been to double up his fist, register once more his
opinion of the worthlessness of the whole pack that were
coming in, and hit approaching Majesty in the face ?
Absolutely no man could leas expect to be pardoned at the
Restoration than Milton. Things, however, had to go in
regular course even in this dreadful business ; and the regular
course, as we know, was that of a Bill of General Indemnity
and Oblivion, brought into the Commons House of the Con-
vention Parliament on the 8th of May, in accordance with
Charles's pledged word, in his Declaration from Breda of
MILTON AND THE INDEMNITY BILL. 167
April 14, that he would pardon all his subjects, of what
degree or quality soever, except such as Parliament itself
should deem it right to except, "these only to he excepted."
The question of Milton's fate, therefore, was bound up with
those proceedings of the Convention Parliament on the In-
demnity Bill the history of which has been given in detail
in the last chapter. With Parliament, and with Parliament
alone, lay the determination of the extent and nature of the
exceptions from the benefits of the Indemnity Bill that should
be specifically inserted and enumerated in the final wording
of the Bill itself. The determination of the exceptions, first in
one House and then in the other, and the agreement of the
two Houses eventually on one and the same list of exceptions, was
the terrible and difiicult process from the 9th of May onwards.
Periodically, to Milton, during the process, by stealthy visits
of Parliamentary friends, or through copies of the three or
four London newspapers then published on different days of
the week\ there would be conveyed, we may suppose, reports
of what was happening.
Between May 9, when Charles was still abroad, and
May 29, when he entered London, the substance of the in-
formation that can have reached Milton was that the House
of Commons had resolved (1) to except aU persons classed by
them as regicides, consisting of all the sixty-seven King's
judges, dead or living, that had been present at the sentence,
together with Cook, Broughton, Phelps, and Dendy, who had
assisted officially at the trial, and also the two unknown
executioners ; (2) to pass posthumous attainder on Cromwell,
1 The three chief newspapers of that "person whatsoever do presume, at his
date, all weekly, were the Parliamentary " perU, to print any votes or proceedings
Iittdligeneer, published on Mondays " of this House without the special leave
(printed by John Macock and Thomas " and order of the House." Newcome,
Newcome), Mercurius Pnblicus, pub- it wiU be seen, so long the printer of
lished on Thursdays (same proprietor- Needham's Mercwrivs Politicus for the
ship as the /nieHi^encer and with matter Commonwealth, and connected with
in common), and An Exact Accompt, Milton thus and otherwise, had managed
&c., published on Fridays. These were to continue his newspaper business under
authorized. A David Maxwell, a Scots- the new authorities. Edward Husband
man, started, on Tuesday, June 12, 1660, and Thomas Newcome had been ap-
a Mereurita Veridieus ; but, after a pointed Printers to the House May 5 ;
second number, it was stopped by order and it was probably on Newcome's com-
of the Commons, who questioned Max- plaint that Maxwell was crushed,
well, and resolved (June 25) "that no
168 LIFE OF MILTON AND HISTOEY OF HIS TIME.
Bradshaw, Ireton, and Pride, as the supreme dead regicides ;
and (3) to tring to trial for their lives seven of the regicides
still living, reserving the rest for any punishment, the severest
that could be devised, not extending to life. This, with the
intelligence of the orders out for the arrest of the regicides,
wherever they might be found, can hardly have surprised
Milton. — It was at this point, and when 'it had not yet been
announced who the seven capital victims from the living
regicides were to be, but that and other questions had gone
into Committee of the Commons, that there came the day of
Charles's triumphant entry into London. Some sound of the
rush and tumult through the city on that day (May 29) may
have penetrated even to Milton's seclusion in the court off
West Smithfield, and with it the feeling that Hyde and
those about the King would now have a good deal to do with
the farther management of the Indemnity Bill. — Not till a
week more had elapsed, and restored Royalty had fully settled
itself in Whitehall, were there farther distinct tidings about
the Bill in the Commons. Then (June 5—7) Milton might
learn that the House had voted that the seven capital victims
among the King's judges should be Harrison, Say, Jones,
Scott, Holland, Lisle, and Barkstead, but that the House had
seemed to rise in severity above its original mark by making
capital exceptions also of Cook, Broughton, Dendy, and the
two unknown executioners, thus raising the number of the
capitally excepted regicides from seven to twelve. Perhaps,
however, the most startling piece of news to Milton at this
date may have been that Hugh Peters had been named in
the House, on speculation, as an extra regicide, and that an
order had gone out for his apprehension. — Yet a few days
more (June 7-11) and there was fresh proof that the estab-
lishment of Charles and his Court in Whitehall had not
increased the disposition of the Commons to clemency. True
they had in the interim agreed to remove from the class of
sentencing regicides, for special consideration. Lord Grey of
Groby among the dead, and Colonel Tomlinson, Colonel
Hutchinson, and Adrian Scroope, among the living. But, on
the other hand, they had widened their definition of the
MILTON AND THE INDEMNITY BILL, 169
regicide class generally, by adding to the sixty-three
sentencing regicides, living or deadj nine of the eleven King's
judges, not mentioned before, who had taken part in the
trial without being present at the sentence. Also they had
resolved that, apart altogether from the living regicides, of
whom ten or possibly twelve were to be punished capitally,
and the rest by any pains and penalties short of death, there
should be a selection from the general community of twenty
other delinquents, to be coiqoined with this lower division of
the regicides for any punishment not capital.
Let us rest a moment, on Milton's account, at June 11.
The theory of the exceptions to the Indemnity Bill, with
many of the particulars of application, so far as they were
to depend on the Commons, was then clearly announced as
follows : —
Two Classes of Exception* among the Living : viz :
I. All the Living Regicides, as now left in that Class
AND ENDMEEATED BY THE HoUSE ; of whom : —
1. E(Beej)ted absolutely, and to he proceeded against for life amd
estate, these ten (or twelve) : — Harrison, Say, Jones, Scott, Holland,
Lisle, Barkstead, Cook, Broughton, Dendy (and the two unascer-
tained executioners).
2. ExGe2}ted for all hut life, the&BioTij-^r&s: — Blagrave, Bour-
chier, Carew, Oawley, James Challoner, Thomas Challoner, Clements,
Corbet, DixwelljDowneg, George Fleetwood, Garland, Goffe, Harring-
ton, Harvey, Heveningham, Hewson, Robert Lilburne, Lister, Live-
sey, Love, Ludlow^ Marten, Mayne, Mildmay, Millington, Monson,
Okey, Pennington, Pickering, Potter, Rowe, Smith, James Temple,
Peter Temple, Tichbourne, Sir Hardress Waller, Wallop, Walton,
Wayte, Whalley, Wogan ; Phelps.
II. Twenty othee Delinquents, yet to be named, and to stand
in the same category as the second division of the Regicides, i. e.
to he excepted for all hut life.
Actually, on Monday the 11th of June, this was the schedule
which Milton, grasping its purport through the ear, had to
study, and which his friends were studying for him. It
affected himself more than may appear at first sight. It
might appear at first sight that, so far as the Commons had
then resolved, the only risk for Milton was that of being
included among the twenty delinquents that had yet, to be
170 LIFE OF MILTON AND HISTORY OF HIS TIME.
named in addition to the enumerated regicides. That risk was
fearful enough. It might' involve imprisonment for life, every
penalty short of the scaffold. But was there not a possibility
that even yet Milton might be ranked in the class of the
regicides, and put either in the second section of this class,
or perhaps among those doomed to death ? There was.
If the law of treason upon which the Court afterwards pro-
ceeded in trying the regicides was sound law, then Milton
was indubitably one of the regicides. " Compassing or
imagining the Kings death " was the capital offence by the
statute of the 25th of Edward III ; and, as Chief Baron
Bridgman expounded, the compassing or pre-imagining
the death of Charles I. might be proved against any one by
any " overt act " whatever showing such pre-imagination.
Having conspired- and consulted with others to bring about
the King's death was one form of such overt act of compassing
and imagining ; but words or writings would suffice. What,
then, of Milton's Tenure of Kings and Magistrates: 'Roving that it
is lawful, and hath lean held so through all ages, for any who have
the power, to call to account a Tyrant or wicked King, and, after
due conviction, to depose and put him to death ? That pamphlet
had not appeared till a fortnight after the execution of
Charles; but it could be proved, by the language of the
pamphkt itself, by other miscellaneous evidence, and by a
passage in Milton's own hand in his Defensio Secunda, five
years afterwards, that it was schemed, and lying on Milton's
table, nearly complete in manuscript, or in proof-sheets,
while the King was yet alive. True, in this last passage
Milton had declared that not even then did he "write or
advise anything concerning Charles personally," and that the
book had been " made rather for composing men's minds "
after the fact "than for deciding anything about Charles
beforehand," a business which he considered not his, but that
of the public authorities. This would have had small chance
with Chief Justice Bridgman. There, while the King was
yet alive, and his trial was going on, Mr. Milton, on his
own confession, had been deliberately writing a pamphlet
advocating with all his might the doctrine of tyrannicide, in
MILTON AND THE INDEMNITY BILL. 171
such a sense and in such circumstances that it could have no
other application than to Charles, and had been carefully
getting the pamphlet ready, that it might appear as soon as
Charles's head had been cut oflp, to extol and defend the deed.
What more express and continuous overt act of " compassing
and imagining" could there be than that? It was not
' necessary that Mr. Milton should have shown what he was
writing to anybody before the King's death, or should have
been writing it by advice or in concert with others. But was
it likely that no one knew of the forthcoming pamphlet, or
that there were no conversations and confidences about it
while it was in progress ? If even part of it was in the
printer's hands before the King's death, — the hands of
Matthew Simmons of Aldersgate Street, — was not that com-
bining and conspiring between author and printer? Then
were there no friends of Milton's, among the sentencing
judges and signers of the death-warrant, cognisant, at the
time of the sentence, of that justification of their action which
Milton had in preparation ? Was Bradshaw, the president of
the Court, not cognisant ?
All this is exactly what Chief Justice Bridgman would
have brought out, had the matter been already in his hands,
fortunately for Milton, the definition of the regicides had
not yet come into the hands of judges and lawyers, and so
there was no such incessant reference to the statute of the
25th of Edward III, with interpretation of the treasonable
" compassing or imagining " there intended, as there was to
be when the actual trials came on. But the House of
Commons itself, in a vague way, had been feeling on in the
same spirit. Not only had they widened their definition of
regicide by adding to their first list of the excepted regicides
nine of the King's judges not actually present at the sentence ;
they had ordered the arrest of Hugh Peters, on the clear
supposition that he too might be brought in as a regicide.
As the absurd rumour that Peters had been one of the
executioners, though it furnished a pretext, cannot have ^een
entertained in the House for a moment, the real fact must
have been that the House was now inclined to class among
IT'S LIFE OF MILTON ANB HISTOEY OF HIS TIME.
the regicides any one who could be proved to have been in
any notorious and conspicuous manner connected with the
King's death. But might not this inclination have easily
reached Milton as well as Peters ? If Peters had been bustling
about Westminster Hall during the King's trial, if he had
preached sermons about the trial while it was still going on,
had not Milton, in his bouse in High Holborn, been as
strenuously, though more quietly, 'elaborating his pamphlet
in defence of the same proceedings and of the act in which
they were to end? That Milton had not occurred to the
House in such close association with Peters may have been
owing to the fact that the Tenure of Kings and Magistrates,
with the date and circumstances of it, was a far less distinct
affair in the recollection of the House than in Milton's own.
He must have remembered all vividly ; and not one of all his
pamphlets can have seemed to him of such dangerous ■ eon-
sequence to himself now, if attentioa were called to it.
If he were to escape being classed among the regicides,
might it not be only to find himself one of the twenty other
delinquents? That was the terrible question for him from
Monday the 11th of June to Monday the 18th. It was the
week of the very crisis of the fate of Milton and others, for
it was through that week, with vehement and exciting
debates every day, that the Commons were engaged in the
business of nominating tbe twenty. One may imagine the
difficulty and the conflict of opinion. The House having
resolved to restrict itself to "twenty and no more," every
active member would have ready his list of the twenty he
hated most, and there would be a competition among these
lists, every member anxious to get in his own favourite
enemies, and to save friends of his that might be on other
pieople's lists. A good number of persons woHld be common
to all the lists, and it would be after these had been voted
into the twenty, and the remaining places were becoming
fewer and fewer, that the competition would be most eager.
The members that took the lead in harmonising the lists as
far as possible, and then, where they could not be harmonised,
in fighting resolutely either to secure the inclusion of this or
MILTON AND THE INDEMNITY BILL. 173'
that person or to bring this or that other person ofF^ seem
to have been Prynne, Annesley, Clarges, Attorney- General
Palmer, Solicitor-General Finch, Lord Falkland, Mr. Charlton,
Sir George Booth, Mr. Turner, Sir John Robinson, Sir
William "Wylde, Sir Richard Temple, Colonel King, and
Colonel Ralph Knight. Above all, Prynne was active. To
let any one off in any circumstances was not in his nature ;
gladly would he have taken all on all the lists, and voted a
total of forty or sixty instead of twenty ; but all the more
ruthlessly, as he could have but twenty, was he likely to push
his own nominations. He seems to have revelled, however,
in bringing before the House, in the course of the week's
debate, the names of as many delinquents as possible, so that
there might be plenty for himself and others to choose from,
and those that got off this time might be kept in memory
for future occasion. This was all the worse for Milton,
whose contemptuous notices of " marginal Prynne " in several
of his pamphlets had increased an animosity to him on
Prynne's part manifest since 1644. — Milton's name may have
been in many lists besides Prynne's from the first, and may
have been tossed about in the House in those debates of
June 11, 12, 13, 14, and 15, which had settled that Vane,
Lenthall, AVilliam Burton, Oliver St. John, Alderman John
Ireton, Sir Arthur Hasilrig, Sydenham, Desborough, Axtell,
and John Blaekwell of Mortlake, should be ten of the twenty,
while Whitloeke and Major-General Butler had escaped by
divisions in their favour. Not till Saturday, June 16, however,
when half of the twenty had been thus agreed on, did
Milton's time come for passing the ordeal. On that day the
discussion was on Lambert, Alderman Pack, Sergeant Keble
for the second time, Sir William Roberts, John Milton, and
John Goodwin. Roberts escaped by one vote ; Lambert,
Pack, and Keble were unanimously added to the ten already
chosen, raising the number to thirteen. What was done with
Milton and Goodwin will appear from the following extract
from the Journals of the House : —
" Ordered, That his Majesty be humbly moved from this House
that he will please to issue his proclamation for the calling in of the
174 LIFE OI' MILTON AND HISTORY OF HIS TIME.
two books written by John Milton, one entitled Johannis Miltoni
Anglipro Pojmlo Anglicano Defendo contra Claudii Anonymi, alias
Salmasii, Defensionem Regiam, and the otlier [the Eikonohlastes]
in answer to a book entitled "The Portraiture of his Sacred
Majesty in his Solitudes and Sufferings " ; and also the book en-
titled The Ohstr-Mtors of Justice, written in defence of the traitorous
sentence against his said late Majesty by John Goodwin ; and such
other books as shall be presented to his Majesty in a schedule from
this House : and to order them to be burnt by the hand of the
common hangman.
" Ordered, That Mr. Attorney-General [Geoffrey Palmer] do cause
effectual proceedings to be forthwith had, by way of indictment or
information, against John Milton, in respect of the two books by
him written [the two books described again exactly as above],
and also against John Goodwin, in respect of a book by him
written, entitled The Obstructors of Justice, being in defence of the
traitorous sentence against the late King's Majesty.
" Resolved, That Mb. Milton and Me. John Goodwin be forth-
with sent for in custody by the sergeant- at-arms attending this
House."
Construing this result in the light of all the circumstances,
I have little doubt how it was brought about. Milton and
Goodwin had been talked of that day, along with Lambert,
Pack, and Keble, as proper persons to be included among the
excepted twenty. Of Milton's title to that distinction we
are sufficiently aware. The title of our old friend, the free-
thinking and tolerationist preacher, John Goodwin of Cole-
man Street, was that he had been about King Charles in his
last moments, as a minister deputed by the regicides or by
some of them to converse with him, and that, on the 30th of
May 1649, three months and a half after the publication of
Milton's Tenwre of Kings and Magistrates, he had published a
treatise called The Obstructors of Justice opposed, or a Discourse
of the honourable sentence passed upon the late King by the
High Court of Justice. In this treatise, written wholly after
the King's death, he had but followed Milton and reiterated
his doctrine, with admiring quotations from his text^.
Altogether, the conjunction of Goodwin with Milton now
was fit enough, although Goodwin, unless his ministerial
1 See some aooorait of Good-win's about King Cliai'les, in footnote to p.
book, with a curious extract from it 95 of YoL IV.
MILTON AND THE INDEMNITY BILL. 175
pvesenee about the King- in his last moments and on the
scaffold were counted against him, was much the minor
culprit of the two. But a difficulty seems to have occurred
about both. If they also were placed among- the twenty that
day, fifteen of the twenty would have been chosen, and only
five vacant places would be left. In view of the number of
others in reserve, this was a serious consideration ; and more
and more the inconvenience of the limitation to twenty was
felt. As the House could not, however, break its own
resolution of " twenty and no more" an expedient seems to
have suggested itself. Besides all the regicides and Imenty other
delinquents, according to the original scheme of two classes of
exceptions only from the Indemnity Bill, why should not the
House now invent a small and peculiar third class of excep-
tions, to consist of notorious literary defenders of the regicide,
and put Milton and Goodwin at once into this class? Thus,
at all events, there would be seven places left to be filled up
of the twenty, instead of only five. The obvious objection
was that the proposed procedure would be a trick. The
House was engaged on an Indemnity Bill, and the very
meaning of the Indemnity Bill was that every intended
exception from it should be named in itself, so that, after it
had passed, all not specifically named in it for exception,
whatever their antecedents or the amount of their criminality,
should be safe and free. It was but a pretence of escape from
this dilemma to say that the cases of Milton and Goodwdn
might be provided for, apart from the Indemnity Bill alto-
gether, by a present and independent order for burning their
books, accompanied by a resolution for taking themselves
into custody, and an order for their . indictment in ordinary
course of law by the Attorney-General. That, however, was
what was proposed ; and it seems to have, for the moment,
satisfied all parties. The indictment of Milton and Good-
win, their books being what they were,, pointed to their
capital conviction and condemnation, if the Attorney-General
should do his duty ; and was not that better, in the case of
two. such peculiarly black criminals, than including them
among the twenty, whose punishment, it had been expressly:
176 LIFE OP MILTON AND HISTORY OF HIS TIME.
determined, was to stop short of tlie scaffold ? By some such
reasoning I conceive Prynne to have reconciled himself that
Saturday to the omission of Milton and Goodwin from the
twenty. They "would be hanged, at any rate, he could hope,
in course of law; and, by that mode of disposing of them,
seven more might be got in among the twenty, instead of
only five.-
Through Sunday, June 17, Milton, ruminating what had
been determined concerning him in the Commons on the
preceding day, may have had his own thoughts. But the
very next day there was to be a surprise.
The debate on Monday June 18 over the filling up of the
last seven places of the twenty seems to have exceeded all the
foregoing in vehemence. Prynne had asterisked his seven ;
others had their asterisked sevens : the problem was to agree
on any seven out of perhaps a score that might be brought
forward. Actually brought forward, and argued for or
against, were, as we know, these twelve, — Charles Meet-
wood, Colonel Pyne, Colonel Philip Jones, Richard Cromwell,
Major Salway, Richard Dean, Whitlocke again. Major Creed,
Mr. Philip Nye, John Goodwin, Judge Thorpe, and Colonel
Cobbet. Of these there escaped Jones, Richard Cromwell,
Salway, Whitlocke again, and Thorpe ; and the seven actually
chosen by the House were Fleetwood, Pyne, Richard Dean,
Creed, Nye, John Goodwin, and Cobbet. The selection of
Nye at the last moment was a little peculiar, but may have
recommended itself to the House on the ground that there
was no representative of the Independent clergy yet among
the twenty, and that Nye, of all the chiefs of that body, was
most generally disliked. The surprise was in the selection
of John Goodwin. Had he not been disposed of on Saturday,
by the prders couphng him with Milton, securing the burning
of their books, and handing over both pointedly for indict-
ment by the Attorney-General? Whether because Prynne
had been thinking over this arrangement since Saturday and
had begun to have his doubts about it, or for some other
reason, it was he that now moved that Goodwin should be
secured by being made one of the twenty ; and the House
MILTON AND THE INDEMNITY BILL. 177
seems to have had no difficulty in concurring. But how
about Milton, thus dissevered from Goodwin, and left alone
in the predicament in which they had both been placed on
Saturday? Not a word more, so far as we know, was said
this, day about Milton, Indictment ly the Attorney-General,
without inclusion among the Twenty, remained the decreed pro-
cedure in his, now solitary, case. Perhaps well that it was
so ; perhaps well for Milton that they did not' reconsider the
arrangement of Saturday for him while they were recon-
sidering it for Goodwin. For, though they had now com-
pleted their tale of twenty, and had left Milton as a kind of
twenty-first man, separated by a hiatus from the twenty, they
had another device, worse than that, for the treatment of
such supernumeraries. It was that of flinging them among
the Regicides. The number of these was not so fixed but that
any new person that might be conjectured as closely connected
with the King's death might be added to it, and, actually,
on this day, the last business of the House, after the tale of
the twenty had been completed, was a separate vote that
William Hewlet and Hugh Peters should be totally excepted
from the indemnity. Hewlet, suspected of being ofie of the
executioners, only came in where a blank had been left for
him ; but in the case of Peters the decision was a new step.
They had ordered his arrest on June 7 on the speculation
that he might be classed among the regicides ; and now, on
the 18th, they had put him in that class. Why did they
adopt this course with Peters, instead of leaving him out-
standing, for separate indictment, as a kind of twenty-second
man, in company with Milton as the already outstanding
twenty-first? Practically, no doubt, it was because Peters,
in the view of the House, was a being sui generis ; but it may
have been fortunate for Milton that the question was not
started whether it would not be more symmetrical, now
that he was detached from Goodwin and left for indictment
by himself, to club him and Peters together as the only
supernumeraries. For, if that question had been started and
argued logically, it might have led to the production of
Milton's Tenure of Kings and Magistrates; and, had a few
VOL. VI. N
178 LIFE OF MILTON AND HISTORY OF HIS TIME.
passages from that book been read, or even only its full title,
with recollection of the date of publication, the end might
have been that Milton, as well as Peters, would have been
flung among the totally excepted regicides.
Through the remaining three weeks of the passage of the
Bill through the Commons there was little or nothing of
additional significance for Milton personally. He would hear
of the efforts of Prynne and others to obtain the insertion of
provisos increasing the revengeful character of the Bill ; and,
even in his condition, it may not have been without interest
to him that the House had resisted those attempts, and
especially that they had rejected, by a majority of 180 to 151,
the proviso requiring all officials of the Protectorate to
refund their salaries. On the 11th of July he would learn
that the Bill was through the Commons substantially as it
had been settled on the 18th of June, only with the trans-
ference into the category of the totally excepted of those
eleven regicides who had not surrendered to the King's
proclamation, but were still fugitive from justice. These
were Blagrave, Cawley, Corbet, Dixwell, Goffe, Hewson,
Livesey/ Love, Okey, Walton, and Whaliey. Altogether,
to rectify his mental schedule of June 11 (ante, p. 169) so as
to bring it up to date on July 11, when the Bill left the
Commons, Milton had to transfer the names of these eleven
from the lower section to the higher in the class of regicides;
and also to insert in the same higher section the names of
Peters and Hewlet, thus raising the number of the totally-
excepted to twenty-three or twenty-five, and leaving but thirty-
two in the section of those excepted for all but life. He had
already filled up the space in the schedule left for the twenty
other delinquents with the names of the twenty selected.
The strange thing was that he himself had no place in any
part of the schedule, and was the only man in the peculiar
predicament of standing quite out of it under the menace of
separate indictment by the Attorney-General.
But the Bill had to go through the Lords, and all might
be disturbed. How far and in what way it would be dis-
turbed by the Lords was the anxiety for Milton, and for
MILTON AND THE INDEMNITY BILL. 179
Milton's friends on his account, as for so many others on
other accounts, from the 11th of July onwards^- The Lords,
as we know, were deliberate and dilatory, and not till the
beginning of August could Milton know the full drift of
their proposed amendments on the Bill as it had been sent up
from the Commons. He would then know that the Lords
proposed to upset the whole arrangement made by the Com-
mons about the twenty, taking Vane, Hasilrig, Lambert, and
Axtell out of the twenty, as four deserving to be capital
exceptions, but on the other hand dealing more leniently
with the remaining sixteen by punishing them only with
perpetual incapacitation for public office, instead of reserving
them for any penalties short of death that might be fixed
by a special Act. In this recast of the arrangement for the
twenty Milton was concerned only in so far as it indicated
the disposition of the Lords to make the regicides, as such,
the objects of supreme vengeance, and to be content with a
very few other capital exceptions. Here was Milton's danger
in the Lords. From the moment they had the Bill in their
House it was the regicides, the regicides, that they inquired
after. Not content with the enumeration sent up by the
Commons, they were exploring the whole history of the
King's trial, last hours, and execution, over again for them-
selves, by the help of witnesses and documents, including the
original death-warrant, demanded and obtained by them from
Hacker in the Tower. Now, in every investigation round
that fatal 30th of January 1648-9, there was the risk that
Milton's Tenure of Kings and Magistrates, with all the cir-
cumstances of it, should be brought to light, and so that,
1 On the 14th of July there was out God's judgments on Republicans are
in London, "printed and to be sold at specified as follows:—!. Dorislaus. 2.
divers booksellers' shops, 1660," a large Anthony Ascham. "3. Milton, that
folio leaf or placard with this title :— writ two books against the King and
" The Picture of the Good Old Came, Salmasius his Defence of Kings ; struck
drawn to the life in the effigies of Master totally bUud, he being not much above
Praise God Ba/rebone : with several ex- 40 years old. 4. Alderman Hoyle ot
amvles of God's Judgments on some York (hanged himself). 5. Sir Gregory
eminent engagers against Kingly go- Norton (died 'i^,^^). 6. The Levelling
vernment." There is a professed por- trooper Lockyer (shot). 7. Colonel Venn
trait of Barebone, rather well done, with died suddenly).-The copy I have seen
a kind of memoir ; and in the acoom- is among the Thomason pamphlets, and
Jianying letter-press seven examples of bears the dating "July 14 in MS.
N 2,
180 LIFE OF MILTON AND HISTORY OF HIS TIME.
however willing the Lords might be to let Milton be punished
only as a general political delinquent on account of his later
writings and his secretaryship to the Commonwealth and
Cromwell, they should be compelled to exhibit him as acces-i
sory to the regicide before the fact, and so to except him
capitally. It is really singular that this did not occur ; but it
did not. With all the minuteness of their investigations
through a whole month, the Lords do not seem to have once
named Milton, or to have shown any signs of questioning the
sufficiency of -the peculiar arrangement for him made by the
Commons. On the 10th of August, when they had shaped
the Bill fully to their mind, what most interested Milton,
besides the fact of their proposed breaking up of " the
twenty " of the Commons into four to be totally excepted
and sixteen to be incapacitated only, was that they had
extended the list of regicides, refused any sub-classification
of them into more guilty and less guilty, and (with con-
donation only, for Lister and Pickering, in addition to
Hutchinson, Tomlinson, and Ingoldsby) doomed them all
equally for capital punishment, — and yet that they had, some-
how or other, taken no note of himself in this vast connexion,
Axtell, hitherto one of the twenty, they had voted to be a
regicide ; Hacker they had put in the same list ; Adrian
Seroope and Lassels they had put back into the list, refusing
to agree with the Commons in condoning them ; and these
four, with all the other fifty-five or fifty-seven regicides
already enumerated by the Commons, they had left merely to
ihe scaffold or the King's mercy.
For three days (August 11-13), as we know, the Commons
debated the amendments on the Bill as it had thus been sent
back to them. They accepted the amendment of incapaci-
tation for sixteen of their former twenty, and they consented
to include Hacker among the regicides ; but on other points
they would not yield. They refused to agree in making
Vane, Hasilrig, Lambert, and Axtell, capital exceptions ; an4
they strenuously maintained their former classification of the
regicides into less and more pardonable, insisting particularly
that they were bound in honour to spare the lives of the
PROCLAMATION AGAINST MILTON AND GOODWIN. 181
twenty-one regicides who had surrendered in faith in the
King's proclamation, and also that there should be special
favour for Adrian Scroope. On the 13th of August Solicitor-
General Sir Heneage Finch was instructed to carry up this
and other information respecting the Bill to the Lords.
Precisely on this 13th of August 1660, when the Indem-
nity Bill was thus hanging unsettled between the Lords and
the Commons, did the Royal Proclamation respecting Milton
and Goodwin, recommended by the Commons two months
before, come, out in print. It was placarded over London,
and reprinted in the newspapers of the week, as follows : —
" Charles R.
" "Whereas John Milt'on, late of "Westminster in the
County of Middlesex, hath published in print two several Books,
the one intituled Johannis Miltoni Angli pro Fopulo Anglicano
Defensio contra Olaudii Anonymi, alias Salrrvasii, Defensionem
Regiam, and the other in Answer to a Book intituled " The Por-
traicture of his Sacred Majesty in his Solitude and Sufferings " — in
both which are contained sundry treasonable passages against XJs
and our Government, and most impious endeavours to justify the
horrid and unnatural murder of our late deai- Father of glorious
memory; And whereas John Goodwin, late of Coleman Street,
London, clerk, hath also jjublished in print a Book intituled The
Obstructor^ of Justice, written in defence of his said late Majesty
\_sic in some copies, the words " the traitorous sentence against "
having marvellously dropped out in the printing] ; And whereas
the said John Milton and John Goodwin are both fled, or so
obscure themselves that no endeavours used for their apprehension
can take effect, whereby they might be brought to legal trial, and
deservedly receive condign punishment for their treasons and
offences : —
" Now, to the end that our good subjects may not be corrupted
in their judgments with such wicked and traitorous principles
as are dispersed and scattered throughout the before- mentioned
books, "We, upon the motion of the Commons in Parliament now
assembled, do hereby strictly charge and command all and every
person and persons whatsoever who live in any city, borough, or
town incorporate, within this our Kingdom of England, the
Dominion of "Wales, and Town of Berwick-upon-Tweed, in whose
hands any of those Books are, or hereafter shall be, that they,
upon pain of our high displeasure and the consequence thereof, do
forthwith, upon publication of this our command, or within ten
days immediately following, deliver or cause the same to be de-
livered to -the Mayor, Bailiffs, or other Chief Officer or Magistrate,
183 LIFE OP MILTON AND HISTOBY OF HIS TIME.
in any of the said cities, boroughs, or towns incorporate, where
such person Or persons do live, or, if living out of any city,
borough, or town incorporate, then to the next Justice of Peace
adjoining to his or their dwelling or place of abode, or, if living
in either of our Universities, then to the Vice-Chancellor of that
University where he or they do reside.
" And, in default of such voluntary delivery, which we do expect
in observance of our said command. That then, and after the time
before limited expired, the said Chief Magistrate of all and every
the said cities, boroughs, or towns incorporate, the Justices of
Peace in their several cQunties, and the Vice-Chancellors of Our
said Universities respectively, are hereby commanded to seize and
take all and every the Books aforesaid, in wliose hands or pos-
session soever they shall be found, and certify the names of the
offenders to our Privy Council.
" And We do hereby give special charge and command to the
said Chief Magistrates, Justices of the Peace, and Chancellors,
respectively, that they cause the said Books which shall be so
brought unto any of their hands, or seized or taken as aforesaid
by virtue of this Our Proclamation, to be delivered to the respective
Sheriffs of those Counties where they respectively live, the first and
next assizes that shall after happen; And the said Sheriffs are
hereby also required, in time of holding such assizes, to cause the
same to be publicly burnt by the hand of the common hangman.
" And "We do further straitly charge and command that no man
hereafter presume to print, sell, or disperse any of the aforesaid
Books, upon pain of our heavy displeasure, and of such further
punishment as, for their presumption on that behalf, may any way
be inflicted upon them by the laws of this realm.
" Given at Our Court at Whitehall, the 13th day of August in
the 12th year of Our Keign, 1660,"
It is worth' observing that, though the Commons had moved
for such a proclamation on the 16th of June, and though the
order to the Attorney- General to draft it had been given at a
Privy Council meeting on the 37th of June, the issue of it had
been delayed till now. It is worth observing also that there
is no further order in the proclamation for the arrest of Milton
and Goodwin, both of whom it declares to have evaded all
efforts for their apprehension hitherto, but only for the sup-
pression and burning of their books. The order of the Com-
mons of June 16 remained still the only warrant for taking
either Milton or Goodwin into custody. The proclamation,
Jiowever, reminds the public of that warrant, and of the fact
that, if apprehended by it, the two would, in accordance with
Milton's escape. 183
the instructions of the Commons at the time of the warrant,
" be brought to legal trial and deservedly receive condign
punishment for their treasons and offences." Was this a hint
that, unless the Lords and Commons were speedily to agree
about the Indemnity Bill, the Government might be driven
to that kind of independent action against such culprits which
the Commons had prescribed for Milton and Goodwin together
originally, though they had afterwards provided otherwise for
Goodwin ?
After conferences and struggles, extending over another
fortnight, and chiefly by Hyde's expedients for compromise of
differences, the two Houses did come to an agreement. The
Commons gave up Axtell and also Adrian Scroope ; they
consented that Vane and Lambert should be tried capitally if
the King thought fit, on condition that there should be a
petition from the two Plouses themselves for their lives ; they
induced the Lords to accept their final vote that Hasilrig
should not be punished capitally, but only by penalties short
of life ; and, on the great question of the regicides that had
surrendered on the Proclamation, and were therefore entitled
in honour to some grace, they yielded so far as to consent
that there should be no formal distribution of the regicides
into those to be prosecuted capitally and those to be pro-
secuted non-capitally, but that all should be alike liable to
capital prosecution, with only a saving clause for nineteen,
to the effect that, if condemned, their execution should be
stopped till ordered by Act of Parliament. And so at last
the Bill of Indemnity passed the two Houses on the 28t.h of
August ; and on Wednesday, the 29th of August, it received
the King's assent. An abstract of it as it then becapae law,
and as it stands in the Statute-book, has been given (ante,
pp. 54-56) ; and the singular and important fact for us here
is that Milton's name does not occur in it from beginning to
end. He had, therefore, the full benefit of the indemnity,
without any exception whatever ; and, by all construction of
law and equity, the order of the Commons of June 16 for his
special indictment by the Attorney-General was quashed and
at an end. It was at an end also for Goodwin, whom the
184 LIFE OF MILTON AND HISTORY OF HIS TIME.
Bill did mention by name, including' him among eighteen-
persons incapacitated perpetually for any public trust. Not
even this brand of incapacitation was put upon Milton.
There is no greater historical puzzle than this complete
escape of Milton after the Restoration. It amazed people
at the time ^. "John Goodwin and Milton," says Burnet, in
his summary account of the fates of the regicides, after
expressing his surprise that Henry Marten escaped with his
life, " did also escape all censure, to the surprise of all people.
" Goodwin had so often not only justified, but magnified, the
" putting ■ the King to death, both in his sermons and books,
" that few thought he could have been either forgot or
"excused; for Peters and he were the only preachers that
" spoke of it in that strain. But Goodwin had been so
" zealous an Arminian, and had sown such division amone
" all the sectaries upon these heads, that it was said this
" procured him friends. Upon what account soever it was,
" he was not censured. Milton had appeared so boldly,
"though with much wit, and great purity and elegancy of
" style, against Salmasius and others, upon that argument of
'' putting the King to death, and had discovered such violence
" against the late King and all the royal family, and against
"Monarchy, tha.t it was thought a strange omission if he
" was forgot, and an odd strain of clemency if it was intended
" he should be forgiven." There are several inaccuracies in
this passage, besides the insuflBcient acquaintance with the
extent of Milton's demerits shown by the omission of all
reference to his Tenme of Kings and Magistrates. Goodwin
did not escape all censure, but was expressly named amono-
the exceptions in the Indemnity Bill, though for incapaci-
tation only. Milton, on the other hand, as we have seen,
had not been forgotten in the course of the proceedings,
though he emerged unscathed at the last. All the more
1 "Ve Miltmo et captivia quid aetwm Professor Stem (Waion und seine Zeit
fuerit ant agetur praximis tuis mihi IV. 196) from a letter, dated Amsterdam'
resoribes ' ("What has been done or is Aug. 10, 1660, among the Sloane MSs'
teing done about MUton and the pri- (No. 649, f. 42 a). The letter, which is
soners you will send me back word in signed "Q. N. B.", is supposed by Pro-
your next,") is a quotation given by feasor Stern to be to Hartlib.
HOW DID MILTON ESCAPE ? 185
does such absolute final escape in his case require to be
accounted for. Goodwin was dismissed with his minor
punishment, if Burnet is right, because his Arminianism
and years of hard hitting among the Calvinistic sects had
recommended him to the new Anglican clergy as a pardon-
able animal after all. But why and how did Milton, with
ten times Goodwin's culpability, escape altogether ? The why
lay in God's will, but we may inquire into the how.
Edward Phillips, writing in 1694, remembered his uncle's
escape thus: — "It was in a friend's house in Bartholomew
" Close, where he lived till the Act of Oblivion came
" forth ; which, it pleased God, proved as favourable to him
" as could be hoped or expected, through the intercession
"•of some that stood his friends both in Council and Par-
"liament : particularly, in the House of Commons, Mr.
" Andrew Marvell, a member for Hull, acted vigorously in
"his behalf, and made a considerable party for him, — so
" that, together with John Goodwin of Coleman Street, he
"was only so far excepted as not to bear any office in the
" Commonwealth." Phillips ought not to have made this
blunder of representing his uncle as excepted for incapaci-
tation along with Goodwin, when the curious fact was that
he escaped even that small punishment ; but the rest ©f the
passage is valuable. There can be no doubt that Marvell,
the fine and faithful man, did exert' himself to the uttermost
for his friend and late co-secretary. Another tradition comes
to us from the painter Richardson, born about 1665. In
his Life; of Milton, prefixed to his notes on Paradise Lost,
in 1734, there is the following passage about Milton's escape:
« Some secret cause must be recurred to in accounting
" for this indulgence. I have heard that Secretary Morrice
"and Sir Thomas Clarges were his friends, and managed
"matters artfully in his favour. Doubtless they or some-
" body else did; and they very probably, as being very powerful
" friends at that time ; but still kow came they to put their
" interest on such a stretch in favour of a man so notoriously
" obnoxious ? Perplexed and inquisitive as I was, I at length
" found out the secret; which he from whom I had it thought
186 LIFE OF MILTON AND HISTORY OF HIS TIME.
" he had communicated to me long ago, and wondered he had
" not. I will no longer keep you in expectation : 'twas Sir
" William Davenant obtained his release, in return for his own
" life procured by Milton's interest when himself was under
"condemnation, anno 1650. A life was owing to Milton,
" and 'twas paid nobly, Milton's for Davenant 's at Davenant's
' ' intercession. The management of the affair in the Commons,
" whether by signifying the King's desire or otherwise,
" was perhaps by those gentlemen named. — It will now be
" expected I- should declare what authority I have for this
" story. My first answer is, Mr. Pope told it me. Whence
"had he it? From Mr. Betterton. Sir William was his
'' patron. — To obtain full credit to this piece of secret history
'' 'twill be necessary to digress a little, if indeed it be a
" digression. Betterton was prentice to a bookseller, John
" Holden, the same who printed Davenant's Gondibert. There
" Sir William saw him, and, persuading his master to part
" with him, brought him first on the stage. Betterton then
" may be well allowed to know this transaction from the
" fountain head." — This interesting tradition, so circumstan-
tiated as having come from Davenant himself, through
Betterton and Pope, also deserves attention.
Although Marvell must have done his utmost, and
Davenant, we may well believe, took part, neither of them,
nor the two together, could have effected anything, had not
men of greater influence concurred. Marvell, though not an
inactive member of the House, was hardly of much regard
there ; and Davenant's influence was only that of a non-
parliamentary veteran restored to his laureateship and dramatic
activity, and popular with the courtiers. The pardon in this
case was not a something to be obtained by earnest private
application to any one great person or even to the Privy
Council. It- had to be managed as part of a great and intricate
business going through the two Houses of Parliament, where
there were all sorts of opinions and tempers, where everything
was openly debated, and where an indiscreet word or motion
in Milton's favour, rousing Prynne or others, might have
marred all. In short, after the minutest study I have been
HOW DID MILTON ESCAPE? 187
atle to give to the subject, I have no doubt that Milton's
escape was the result of a powerful organization in his behalf,
uniting a number of influences, and most skilfully and
cunningly conducted.
That part of Richardson's tradition which mentions Monk's
brother-in-law, Sir Thomas Clarges, and Monk's intimate
friend, Secretary Morrice, as having " managed matters art-
fully" in Milton's favour, is as significant as it is credible.
They were men of weight in the Commons, and could com-
mand Monk's immediate adherents in that House for anything
they wanted. Then Mr. Arthur Annesley, still more a lead-
ing man. in the House, and with all the credit of having
been the chief manager of the Restoration along with Monk,
is found afterwards, under his higher title of Earl of Angle-
sey, on intimate terms with Milton, visiting him often, and
" much coveting his society and converse," to the day of his
death; and this points, if not to an acquaintance between
them before the Restoration, at least to the origin of the
subsequent acquaintance in Annesley's hearty cooperation
now in Milton's behalf. But persons more powerful still
must have at least concurred. Not a particular in the Bill
of Indemnity, though it belonged to Parliament and to
Parliament only, but must have been discussed privately by
Hyde and his colleagues of the Junto or Cabinet, if not by
the Privy Council as such. Annesley and Morrice were of the
Privy Council and near to the Junto, and Monk as one of the
chiefs of the Junto had all deference paid him ; but every-
thing depended, in last resort, on Hyde. Had Hyde been
resolute against Milton, had he given the word that Milton
must be left to his fate, no exertions to the contrary would
have availed. Now, Hyde certainly did not like Milton.
He had taken sufficient note when abroad of Milton's suc-
cessive publications in defence of the Regicide. " Since so
"impious and scurrilous a pamphlet as that written by
"Milton" Hyde had written from St. Germains, Aug. 27,
1652, to one of his correspondents in Germany, " hath found
" the way into Germany (where we hope it found the same
"exemplary reproach and judgment it met in France), I
188 LIFE OF SlILTON AND HISTORY OF HIS TIME,
" suppose that book written by Salmasius hath likewise got
" thither ^." The reference here, of course, is to Milton's Be-
fensio Prima, out since 1651. Copies had got into Germany,
and Hyde hoped the book of Salmasius, to which it was an
answer, was also in circulation there. Again, writing from
Paris to Secretary Nicholas, Jan. 18, 1652-3, Hyde had said
"Nothing is heard of Milton's book being translated into
" French ^," This referred to the Hikonoklastes, Durie's French
translation of which was then just out in London, though
Hyde was uncertain of the fact. " Though Jo. Jane be really
" an able man," proceeds Hyde in the same letter, " are his
"writings, if translated, weighty enough to gain credit in
"other languages?" The reference here was to the anony-
mous Ei&on. Ahlados of 1651 in answer to Milton's Eikono-
klastes. The author of that book^ was Joseph Jane, a
lawyer of some kind ; and Jane himself and others were
urging Hyde to have his book translated into French, so that
there mig'ht be an antidote to Durie's translation of the
Eikcmoklastes when it reached France. As Hyde had hinted,
the translation recommended had not been thought worth
while, Jane's book being a wretchedly silly one; but, as late
as April 27, 1654, one of Hyde's correspondents is found
writing : " Mr. Jos. Jane desires to know whether his book
" against Milton has been translated into French, as a Jersey
" man undertook that task : he thinks that, were it printed
" in French and dispersed, it might do some good especially
" since Milton's book is now printed in French in England *."
Altogether, there is plenty of evidence that Milton had been
an object of very considerable attention to Hyde while abroad,
and that, when Hyde was back in London, and in the Pre-
miership, Milton had no reason to expect much mercy from him.
Undoubtedly, however, Hyde must have given his consent to
the proposal that Milton should be spared. One may imagine
a generous relenting in one who was a scholar and man of
letters himself towards an enemy of such indubitable ability
1 Calendar of the Clarendon State 3 See aooount of it, in Vol. IV. pp.
Papers by Mr. Maoray, II. 145. 349—350.
2 Ibid. 171. 4 Calendar of the Clarendon State
Papers by Mr. Macray, II. 339.
HOW DID MILTON ESCAPE? 189
and such high literary reputation ; and one may intiagine
also how the fact of Milton's blindness and desolation would
operate in his favour in any heart capable of pity. Indeed,
we must suppose these two feelings, — admiration of Milton's
intellectual power, though it had been exerted on what
was now called the wrong side, and pity for his blind and
disabled condition, — to have been the chief motives with
many in being active for bringing him off, or at least
not vehement for his punishment. The extent of Hyde's
kindness can hardly have been more than a promise to
Annesley, Morrice, and Clarges, that, if they could succeed
in keeping Milton from being named among the exceptions
to the Indemnity Bill in the Commons, he would not himself
disturb tiiat arrangement in the Lords, and would advise his
Majesty to be satisfied. On some such understanding
Annesley, Morrice, and Clarges must have acted, Davenant
assisting and stimulating their efforts ; and whatever could be
done by talking and negotiating among likely members not
on the Government bench, and representing to them what
a man Milton was, and how unnecessary it was to proceed
against him capitally, was done, we may be sure, by honest
Andrew Marvell. '
The business, we repeat, was one of extreme difficulty,
and the least mismanagement might have been fatal. Two
things, one can see, were essential. In the first place, it had
to be contrived, if possible, that Milton's Tenure of Kings awl
Magistrates should be kept out of sight and out of recollection.
It is impossible to conceive the very title of that pamphlet
to have been read in the House, especially if the date and
other circumstances had been explained, without such instant
effect as would have been disastrous and irretrievable. " Why,
here is a regicide-in-chief," would have been the cry; f here
is the very penman of the regicides, who was compassing and
imagining the King's death on paper while he was still alive,
equally with Cook, the prosecuting counsel, in his speeches at
the trial, and with Peters in his preachings to the soldiers."
Any incautious mention of that pamphlet of 1648-9 would
have been ruinous; and hardly less desirable was any reference
190 LIFE OF MILTON AND HISTORY OF HIS TIME.
to Milton's last pamphlet of all, his Beady and East/ Way
to establish a Free Commonwealth, of so late a date as March
1660, and still in men's minds as his dying' defiance of the
Restoration. On the other hand, direct and open procedure,
as if for bringing Milton off, would have been stupidly
imprudent. On the contrary, he must be named, and named
distinctly among the criminals ; offences of his must be
specified ; and the procedure must be as if for his severe and
sufficient punishment. Otherwise Prynne woiild have been
on the floor of the House, and no entreaty could have stopped
his mouth. Hence the method actually adopted. On the
16th of June there was the Resolution for the arrest of
Milton, for moving the King to call in copies of his Defensio
Prima and Eihonoklastes for public burning, and for in-
structing the Attorney-General to prosecute him and Goodwin
by special indictment. That fastened full attention on the
two most celebrated of Milton's defences of the regicide, the
two that everybody remembered, though not legally the worst.
It held out a prospect that Milton would soon be at the bar
in the Old Bailey, and that thence he could hardly depart
with less than a death sentence. From that moment, ac-
cordingly, he could be supposed set aside and disposed of,
and the House could go on settling the fates of other crimi-
nals by the Indemnity Bill itself. To prevent Milton's case
from coming up again in connexion with the Indemnity Bill,
as Goodwin's had done within two days after his conjunction
with Milton in the resolutions of the 16th of June, was then
the policy. Till the Indemnity Bill should be through the
two Houses, the Attorney- General's indictment must be
supposed hanging over Milton, and the police in search of
him. " Milton was not seized, nor perhaps very diligently
pursued," says Dr. Johnson ; and there may be something in
the shrewd remark, — though, as Peters, who waw " diligently
pursued," evaded capture till the end of August, it is not
necessary to suppose that the search for Milton was only
pretended or slack. There is a story, first put in print
by Warton, on information from the critic Thomas Tyers
(1726-1787), that Milton's friends, to divert the search,
HOW DID MILTON ESCAPE? 191
spread the rumour that he was dead, and got up a mock
funeral to confirm the report, and that the King- afterwards
laughed heartily over the trick. The story may be at once
set aside as a myth. There is no mention of the rumour, or
of the funeral, in the London newspapers of the time, where
such a tiling would almost certainly have been turned into a
paragraph; the mock-funeral trick was a stale one; and, if
any one will try to conceive the alleged mock-funeral in
Milton's case, in the visual form of a procession from some
houscj he will see that it could not possibly have happened,
except by absurdly inviting attention to Milton's real hiding-
place, or subjecting some other house and a number of persons
to unnecessary inquiry. In fact, it mattered little, for the
real issue, whether Milton remained in his hiding in Bar-
tholomew Close or was captured and put in prison. What
really mattered was that he should be still thought of by the
public as a delinquent reserved for the law. Hence the
appearance, August 13, when the Indemnity Bill was hang-
ing in its last stage between the Commons and the Lords,
of the King's proclamation about Milton and Goodwin.
One may discern some meaning in Milton's favour in the
delay of that proclamation for so many weeks after it had
been moved for in the Commons, and actually ordered by
the Council. Nor can one read the proclamation without
noting the enormous advantage given, to Milton by the
mention only of his Eikonoklastes and his Befensio Prima as
his treasonable books, and the total suppression, more par-
ticularly, of his Tenure of Kings and Magistrates, the pre-
cursor by three months of Goodwin's Obstructors of Justice, the
one book of Goodwin's mentioned in the same proclamation.
I cannot persuade myself that this advantage to Milton was
accidental. How easily, but for subtle pre-arrangement, the
preamble of the proclamation might have run thus: " Whereas
John Milton, late of Westminster, in the county of Middle-
sex, hath published in print several Books, whereof one,
entitled The Tenure of Kings and Magistrates : proving that it is
lawfuly and hath been held so through all ages, for arvy who have
the power, to call to account a Tyrant or wicked King, and, after
193 LIFE OF MILTON AND HISTOBY OF HIS TIME.
due conviction, to depose and put Mm to death, was in pre-
paration by the said John Milton while our dear Father, his
late saered Majesty of glorious memory, was still alive, and
was put forth in London a fortnight after his Majesty's
execrable muinier, and whereof these following also contain
sundry treasonable passages against Us and our Governmeiit,
and most impious endeavours to jastify the said horrid and
unnatural murder : to wit, one entitled,^' &c. ! Had such a
proclamation appeared, would there not have been a necessity,
even at that stage, for Lords and Commons to go back upon
Milton's case, retract the mere order for his indictment by
the Attorney-General, and insert him by name in the In-
demnity Billj beside Hugh Peters, among the unpardonable
regicides ? There had been precaution against this ; only the
order for indictment by regular process was left hanging over
Milton ; and, sixteen days afterwards, when the Houses had
put their last touches to the Indemnity Bill, and the King
had given his assent to it (August 29), it came forth without
Milton's name in it anywhere or anyhow, so that the order
for his indictment was made waste paper by that fact, and
he could walk abroad an absolutely frpe man.
Not all at once, it seems. It was fated that Milton should,
for a while, experience the inside of a prison. We know for
certain, by the words of the Proclamation of the 13th of
August, that he remained uncaptured then; but it is as
certain that the sergeant-at- arms of the Commons had him'
in custody some little time afterwards. — It is just' possible
that this official, " James Norfolke, Esq,," tracked out
Milton's hiding-place between the proclamation on the I3th
and the passing of the Indemnity Bill on the 29th, and so
had him in custody before the order for his arrest of June 16
could be considered legally cancelled. In that case, Milton
was lying in some prison when the Indemnity Bill was re-
ceiving those last touches of which we have spoken, and when
there were the first burnings of his books by the hangman.
These seem to have begun in London on the 27th of August,
two days Ijefore the passing of the Indemnity Bill, but to
MILTON IN CUSTODY FOE A WHILE. 193
have been repeated several times through the following week
or ten daysj as copies came to hand. " This week, according
"to a former proclamation," say the newspapers of Sept.
3-10, 1660, " several copies of those infamous books made
" by John Goodwin and John Milton in justification of the
" horrid murder of our late glorious sovereign King Charles
" the First were solemnly burnt at the session house in the
" Old Bailey by the hand of the common hangman." Such
burnings in London and Westminster were but the signal for
burnings that were to continue for some time in different
parts of the country, though it may be inferred from the
numbers of copies of the several books that have come down
to our own day that people took very little trouble to obey
his Majesty's strict order for their surrender, and that there
was no very general visitation of libraries to secure copies.
It may have been not inconvenient for Milton to be under
lock and key himself while they were burning his books. —
On the whole, however, Phillips's words, already quoted,
rather imply that his uncle was not in custody at the passing
of the Indemnity Bill. He takes no notice of his uncle's
imprisonment at all, having apparently forgotten it; but he
speaks as if his uncle came out of Bartholomew Close, and
began to be led about the streets again, the moment the Bill
passed. In that case his arrest was a subsequent affair, of
which the date is uncertain. The likeliest time would be
during the seven weeks of the recess of Parliament from Sept.
13 to Nov. 6. The sergeant-at-arms, arguing with himself
that it was no business of his to regard the order of the
Commons of June 16 for Milton's arrest as cancelled by the
Bill, and that at all events he had fees to expect from Milton
before letting him out of his grasp, seems to have ventured
on apprehending him. The Indemnity Bill, indeed, positively
forbade, under damages and other penalties, such arresting or
troubling of any one who could plead the benefit of it ; but
Mr. Norfolke had the extraordinary warrant of the House of
Commons itself for Milton's arrest, and could' allege that,
though the House had sat a fortnight after the passing of the
Indemnity Bill, they had not repealed the warrant. It was
TOL. VI. o
194 LIFE OF MILTON AND HISTOET OF HIS TIME.
not for hinti to assumfe it to be repealed or to reconcile it with
the Indemnity Bill. In fact, it was the interest of officials
generally that persons who had beeh in peculito danger should
not escape by merely pleading the Indemnity, but should be
induced to obtain double assurance of their safety by the
process of applying for their pardons individually under the
great seal or privy seal in t^rms df the Indemnity, and so
yielding clerks and other gentlem-en their proper perquisites.
It inay have been no great mishap to Milton if Mr. Nor-
folke did capture him early in the rebess, and prevent him
from being seen in the streets through all that time. It was
the dreadful time of the trials of the regicides, and of thie
hangings and quartfirings of Harrison, Carew, Coolr, Hugh
Peters, Scdtt, Clements, S^rodpe, and Jones, at Charing Cross,
and Axtell and Hacker at Tyburn (Oct. 13-19). Milton
had known those men, or most of them ; some of them may
have been his familiars ; Harrisoin must have been a man aftet
his own heart in many things. The horror of that week of
bloodshed, we shall suppose, passed round Milton in Ijondon
while he was inlmuted somewhere, and it was inipofesible fot
any of the mobs comiag from 'the executions to surround hitti
in a chance walk in any byfe-way, and salute him in 'mob-
fashion as the blitid regicide who had been left unhanged.
The Various proceedings for the Teeonstitdtibn of the Church
of England Ti^ving also passed, including his Slajetsty's
assurance to the Presbyteriahs, by his Declaration concerning
Ecclesiastiedl 'dffavrs'oi^OMhex S5, that the episcdpacy noW
set up was not to be high episcopacy, "but a modera,te and
limited episcopacy, mlieh after Usher's model, the recess
came to an end and the two Houses reassembled. Prom
Noveniber'6, whfeh they did reassemble, they had so much
to do with their revenue debates, their bill fdr the attainder
of the dead tegieid^s/and other matters, that it was not till
the 15th of "December that they could attend to the case of
Milton. Oh that day, which was a Saturday, they did'attend
to it. „ Ordered that Mr. Milton, now in custody of the
" sergeant-at-arms attending <}his Hotise, be forthwith re-
" leased, paying his fees," is the entty on thesubject in the
MILTON IN CUSTODY FOE A WHILE. 1,95
journak. In otter words, the House had concluded that most
certainly Milton must have the full benefit of the Iiidemnity
Bill, but that, as he had been arrested by authority of an
order of theirs of older date, the sergeant-at^arms must not
lose his money. The money seems to have been forthcoming
:at once, enabling Milton to leave prison that day and to
spend the Sunday with his friends. But the fees demanded
by Mr. Norfolke had been exorbitant ; and on the Mojiday
(Dec. 17), " a complaint having been made thait the sergeant-
" at-arms had demanded excessive fees for the imprisonment
" of Me. Milton," it was ordered " that it be referred to
"the committee for privileges to call Mr. Milton and the
" Sergeant before them, and to determine what is fit to be
" given the Sergeant for his fees in this case." Such is the
entry in the journals ; but on other authority we learn that
the fees demanded had been a^lSO, a sum equal ,to about
^■'500 now. On the same authority, we learn that it was
Mr. Andrew Marvell thait made the complaint in Milton's
behalf and obtained the modifying order, and that he was
seconded by "Colonel King and Colonel Shapcott," while,
on the contrary. Sir Heneage Einch observed that Milton
" was Latin Secretaiy to Cromwell and deserved hanging."
The Colonel King so mentioned I take to have been Edward
■King, one of the members for GreatGrimisby, and the Colonel
Shapcott to have been Robert Shapcott, one of the members
for Tiverton. It may be assumed, I think, that they had been
among those acting in Milton's interest all through. It would
be curious :if the ;Edwi*rd King of this occasion were some
relative of the Edward King of Lr/.oidas^,
Milton, on being fully restored to liberty in December
1660, did not return to his former house in Petty France,
but, as his nephew tells us, "took a house in Holborn, near
Red Lion Kelds." He had lived in 'Holborn, it may be
1 Phillips's Memoir of Milton ; Todd'a 1660; Commons Joumal^of dates-; Pari.
Life, p. 116 (for the burning of Milton's Hist. IV. 162, adding the details of Deo.
books as early as the 27th Aug.) ; Peer- 17, as I imagine, from the contemporary
Immeiitof;'!/ Intejli'gencer of iSept. ,3—10, MiS. diary used in aid of the Journals..
0 a
196 LIFE OF MILTON AND HISTORY OF HIS TIME,
remembered, once before : viz. from about September 1647,
when he broke up bis scbool-establisbmrent in the Barbican,
to March 1648-9, when he became Latin Secretary to the
first Council of State of the Commonwealth. The part of
Holborn where he now took a house, however, was not that
part, on the south side, where he had formerly had his quarters
among the houses opening backward into Lincoln's Inn Fields,
but was on the north side, nearer Bloomsbury, where Holborn
has now Red Lion Square behind it. Both the Square and
the "■ Fields " which preceded it derived their name from' the
Bed Lion Inn, once the largest inn in Holborn. Milton's
new house, taken only till he could find one more suitable,
must have been some small tenement near the bustle of the
Inn, with the Fields behind it. There he began life over
again after the Eestoration, looking about in the havoc caused
by that event, as a blind man could look ^.
What had become, during Milton's abscondence and impri-
sonment, of those public persons with whom he had been most
intimately associated through the time of his secretaryship,
and of whom his recollections were strongest?
Oliver 'Cromwell had been dead two years ; but, in December
1660, thoughts would revert even to him, if only because they
had then resolved to drag his body from its, tomb and hang
it up at Tyburn. They were to do the same with the body
oP Bradshaw, and that would recall also Bradshaw's living
image and valued friendship. Richard Cromwell had van-
ished for the time abroad. Henry Cromwell was in England,
signifying his complete submission to his present Majesty's
government in any way that should not be inconsistent with
his "natural love to his late father," pleading also that in the
time of his government of Ireland he had proved himself to
be no fanatic in politics, inasmuch as he had '' encouraged a
learned ministry," "maintained several bishops," and been
favourable to the king's friends," and hoping that those things
would be considered, and that he and his family might be
allowed to live on in ^eace, with some fragment of their Irish
1 Phillips's Memoir ; Cumngham'a Handbook of London, Art. Sed Lion Square.
OLD FRIENDS. AND ASSOCIATES. 197
estates confirmed to them ^. Of the rergieides that had been
especially known to Milton, besides any that were dead before
the Restoration, or had been hanged and quartered since, there
■was Whalley, one of the condemned fugitives, and to be heard
of no more. Milton's especial friend Vane, and Lambert,
whose exploits for the Commonwealth he had also celebrated,
were prisoners for life, with the possibility of the scaffold
expressly reserved for either or both. Overton, Milton's best
beloved of all the republican soldiers, was in no such extreme
danger, and might even have expected to be in some favour
with the new powers on account of his memorable imprison-
ment through the Protectorate. He seems, however, to have
been an object of special suspicion just at the time of Milton's
release ; for a note of news in Mercurius Publicus for Dec.
13—20, 1660, is that " Colonel Robert Overton, formerly called
Major-General Overton, is sent to the Tower," and one finds
elsewhere that a porter living in St. Andrew's, Holborn,
gave evidence that week that he had been "employed by
" Major-General Overton to pack and carry divers trunks and
"bedding from Counsellor Vaughan's, Holborn Bar, to Mr.
" Stanbridge's, Three Leg Alley, Fetter Lane ^ ," Cromwell's
son-in-law, Fleetwood, Milton's friend from their boyhood,
was now past all his greatness, and more permanently under a
cloud than Overton. He was one of those Incapacitated for
life by the Indemnity BiU ; 'in which list also were Desborough,
Sydenham, and Pickering, three of the Councillors of the Re-
public and the Protectorate for whom Milton had expressed his
particular respect. On the same list were St. John, whom he
must have known well, and John Goodwin, connected with him
now so notoriously. Lawrence, Whitlocke, Strickland, and
Algernon Sidney, four others of the Councillors of the Com-
monwealth grouped for such honourable mention by Milton in
1654, were not among the formally incapacitated, but were
quite out of public view, with small chance of further activity.
Sidney, indeed, had not dared to return to England from that
embassy to Denmark on which he had been sent in July 1659
1 Mrs. Green's Calendar of State Henry Cromwell.
Papers 1660 — 1, p. 519 : Petition of * u,i,j. p. 413 j and Mere. PmJ. of date.
198' LIFE OF EILTON AND HISTORY OF HIS TIME.
by the Restored Ramp. There werfe reports' of his still incur-
able republieanism, and of the dreadful things he had been
saying and doing in that spirit at Copenhagen. Congra/tukted
there by some one on not having been one of those who had
been' giiilty of sentencing Charles or signing his death-warrant,
though he had been nominally one of his judges, " Guilty I "
he had exclaimed: "why, it was the justest and bravest action
that " ever was done in England or anywhere else " ; and, on
hearing that there was a design to seize him, he had gone to
the King of Denmark, and asbed who was at the bottom of
the design, "Est ce notre bandit ?" meaning Charles 11^.
How different the fate of that Montague, " of the highest
ability and the best eulifesre and accomplishments," whom
Milton had praised on that account in 1654 in the same
sentence in which he had noticed Sidney for his " illustrious
name," and Who had been conjoined with Sidney as plenipo-
tentiary for the Rump in his mission to the Baltic Courts.
It was during that mission that he had first veered round to
Charles ; and now he was Earl of Sandwich, and Charles's
great liegeman, with Milton^s farewell blessings
So much for those eminent leaders and statesmen of the-
Commonwealth to whom Milton's personal relations had beeu
closest. But we must not forget Thurloe and Milton's other
colleagues or acquaintances of the Council OiSce, Thurloe had
been handsomely forgiven, and- might have been taken into
Charles's service, with fine prospects, had he chosen ; but he
preferred being remembered by posterity as Oliver's secretary
only, and was to spend his few remaining years in private
between his country-place in Oxfordshire and his chambers in
Lincoln's Inn ^. Jessop, one of the two chief clerks in
Cromwell's council office under Thurdoe, had accommodated
himself to the Restoration, had been clerk to the House of
Commons in the Convention Parliament from the beginning,
aiid had obtained a patent of that office for life, with hopes
of other good things «. As clerk of the Commons, he may
' English dycl., Article Algernon his State Papers.
Siid^ey, with quotations there from s Commons Jonmals, April 25 and
letters between Sidney and his father. Sept. 11 and 13 1660
2 Birch's Life rf Thurloe, prefixed to ' '
OLD FEIENDS AND ASSOCIATES. 199
possibly have been of use to Milton in the passage of his ease
through the House^ — who knows? Scobell, Jessop's fellpw-
clerfc uniier Thurloe, and since then derk ©f Cromwell's
Second Parliament, and troubled on that account by the
Restored Rump,- did not fare so well as Jessop. He had,
been required to deliver up to Jessop all parliaaaaentary papers
in his possession ^, and was now therefore a retired Cromwel-
lian official, from whom a visit to Milton, would be nothing
strange. Morland and Downing, the former attaches of
Thuiiloe's oflSce, and well known to Milton about the office
even before he had drafted their credentials for their famous
foreign missions for Cromwell on the Piedmontese business
and on others, are not likely to have d^^rkened Milton's door.
They- were now Sir Samuel Moirland and Sir George Downing,
the two prosperous re^iegades of the Restoration. Mi^- John
Durie, who had, also figured so much in Cromwell's diplomacy,
and in Milton's society aind correspondence, would not, for
any consideration, have behaved like Morland and Downing' ;
but even be had succumbed, and was trying to manceuvre. \\\.
July 1660 we find him writing to the King, and offering " a
method of treating about peace and unity in matters of religion
between the Episcopal and Presbyterian parties" ; and there is
evidence that for some mon,ths afterwards he was in hopes of
being a.ble to renew, under thegoverninent of Charles, and with
countenance from Hyde and the new clergy, his labour-s for
his life-long idea of a union of all the Protestant Churches,
and was willing in that behalf to represent hiinsplf as " never
having served the turn of any party," and as quite ready, in
loyalty to his restored Majesty, to forget that there had ever
been a Commonwealth or a Cromwell. The Restoration
Government, howeves", would have nothing to do with Mr.
Durie ; and having lost his post of keeper of the library at
St. James's, he was to go abrea"d early iu 1661, and to remain
abroad for the rest of his life ^~ Milton's old friend Hartlib,
a,lso a supernumerary in Thurloe's ofiice, was still extant, in
1 Commons Journals May 8 and 11, 112; Kennett's Register, pp. 197—198;
1660. Bayle, Art. Zto^^us ; Stem's Jir*o« «n(i
2 Mrs. Green's Calendar of State seine Zeil, IV. 21, 22, and note.
Papers (under date July 6, 1660) p.
200 LIFE OF MILTON AND HISTOEY OF HtS TIME.
his house in Axe-yard, in Westminster, beside his daughter
and her husband, the- chemist Clodius, and with another
daughter just married to another German, named Roder; nor,
though he accommodated himself to the Restoration as well
as he could, and had many Restoration acquaintances, of
whom Pepys was one, can he have ceased to look after
Milton, or at least to remember him among those he had
known longer ^? Of Meadows, Milton's former assistant in
the foreign seefetaryship, and lately ambassador for Crom-
well on the great Swedish-Danish business, one would like to
know more than we do. He had returned from the Baltic
before the Restoration, and seems now to have withdrawn
from affairs, to live on, highly respected, as Sir Philip
Meadows, because of some Danish or Swedish knighthood
that had been conferred upon him. The present whereabouts
of Andrew Marvell, the successor of Meadows in the Latin
co-secretaryship with Milton, is no secret to us. Whoever
forsook Milton or was to forsake him, the brave member for
Hull, who had stood his friend so faithfully through his late
danger, was to cultivate him and be proud of him to the last.
Marvell was living in Westminster, and had begun thence
his series of letters to his Hull constituents ^.
What had become of Marchamount Needham, of the Mer-
curius PoUticus, who had absconded about the same time as
Milton, with a hue and cry after him to Amsterdam, de-
scribing him as likely to be seen in that city, a hawk-nosed,
short-sighted, thin-bodied man, wearing ear-rings (Vol. V.
p. 702) ? He had remained in Amsterdam or elsewhere abroad
till the Indemnity Bill passed ; and then, finding himself not
among the exceptions, he had boldly returned to London.
" There is lately come to town that subtile sophister. Mar
"Ned—, Oliver's vindicator, the metropolitan pamphleteer
" and writer of that damnable," &g., is the announcement,
under date October 1, 1660, in a wretched weekly periodical
of the day, trying to establish itself by obscenities and gossip.
1 Pepys, uniterdaieaJ^uly 10 and Aug. series is dated Nov. 17, 1660 See
'^'}^^' « I J T ^4. p XV Grosart's edition of Marvell's Works, II.
2 The first preserved letter of the 17—20;
MAECHAMONT NEEDHAM AGAIN. 201
But the extraordinary fact of Needham's escape with im-
punity had already formed the subject of a formidable special
pamphlet, published on the 7th of September, with the title
" A Bope for Pot., or a Hue and Cry after Marehemount Need-
ham, the late scurrilows news-writer: being a Collection of his
horrid Blasphemies and Revilings against the King's Majesty,
his person, his ea-mse, and his friends, published im his weeMy
Politicus" On the title-page were two Scripture texts, the
first being 2 Sam. xix. 21, " Shall not Shimei be put to
death for this, because he cursed the Lord's Anointed ? "
Then followed " an advertisement to the reader," starting
with the question " whether more mischiefs than advantages
were not occasioned to the Christian world by the invention
of typography," dilating on the enormities of the, English
press since the beginning of the Revolution;, and indicting
Needham in particular as " the Gnoliath of the Philistines, the
" great champion of the late usurper, whose pen was in com-
" parison of others like a weaver's beam." The present
pamphlet, it is announced, is to consist of a series of specimen-
extracts from the Mercurius Politieus under Needham's editor-
ship, from which the reader will doubtless "judge that, had
" the Devil himself, the father of lies, and who has his name
" from calumny, been in this man's ofBce, he could not have
" exceeded him." The pamphlet was published lest, "through
the inconsiderableness of his person," so heinous an offender
should be forgotten. " I have no eamity to his person," says
the writer, " but nevertheless there is some kind of necessity
"that he that hath with so much malice ' calumniated his
" sovereign, so scurrilously abused the nobility, so impudently
" blasphemed the Church, so industriously poisoned the
" people with dangerous principles, should at least carry some
" mark about him, as the recompense of his villainies." Then
comes the body of the pamphlet, consisting of forty-five pages
of accurately cited extracts from the Mercurius Politicus, from
its first number, published June 13, 1650, to. its SSGth num-
ber, published about the close of 1657'. The array is most
impressive and effective, including sueb recurring phrases
about Charles II. as " young Tarquin," " the lad," " the
203* LIFE OF MX'LTOS AND HISTOKY OF HIS TIME.
thing called his) Majesty," aud such expressions about the
death of Charles I. as " the heroic and most noble act of
justice in judging- and exeeuiing the late King." Some of
the longest, andi most striking extracts are from the remark-
able series of leaders that appeared in Mercwrius Poiiticus
during that year or more> from September 1650, or, at all
events, from January 1650-1, oh wards, wheDi Milton was
censor or superintending editor of the f>aper, and, as I believe,
a 'contributor. Milton's connexion with the paper was now
out of mind; it was Needham that had to bear the brunt.
Notwithstanding this convenient "rope for Pol.," so tempt-
ingly furnished, they could not now hang him ; and he was
to live on in England as long as Milton himself, and a little
longer. Asi he had twice ehaaged his polities before be-
coming editor of the Memunus Poiiticus in 1650, one would
not have been surprised if he had become Grovernment
journalist for Charles II. But, since his, flight in April
1660, Henry Muddiman and Giles Dury had been jointly in
pnssBSsion as the authorized Restoration journalists. They
had been publishing the ParMambentary Intelligencer: on
Mondays and the MeKurius Publicus on Thursdays, with
John Macoek and Thomas Newcome for the joint-printers
since May, and John Birkenhead as the supervising censor
and licencer since November. Newcome, so long Needham's
printer and Milton's, has to be noted therefor© as one of
the most rapid of the E-estoration turncoats. Was Need-,
ham himself, who had changed his colours twice already, to
change them once more? To do him justice, he seems to
have had no desire ta try another political phase. To earn
an honest livelihood, he abandoned literature for the time,
and resumed the practice of physic '■•.
1 The Man in the Moon, No. 2 (Oct. Early in May they register the papers
1660) ;. d9,ted copy of A Bope for Pol. ty authority, but -without the name of
among the Thomasou Pamphlets ; any lioencer till November 1660, when
Wood's Ath. 1182—1190 ; my notes Birkenhead stms in as licencer. — Wood
from Stationers' Tlegisters for 1660. actually hints that Needham had man-
Ne-vfoome's last registration .of Need- aged to bribe Hyde. The supposition
Yarn's MeromiuB Politieas had been on eeema preposterous, and could hai;d\T
March 29,1660; Maoook had begun the have been entertained by the good anS-
printrag of Mercurius Publicus a week quary but for his strong personal au-
before ; and Macoek and Newcome are tipathy to the QhanceUor.
co-printers of that and the InteUigeneer.
SALMASIUS'S POSTHUMOUS REPLY TO MILTOX. 203
Claudii Salmadi ad Joharmem MiUonum Mesponsio, opus
posthumum (" Reply of Claudius Salmasius to Jolin Miltoii, a
posthumous work"): such was the title of a little book of
304 pag-es duodecimo, in very small print, which had been
registered on the 29th of September by three booksellers,
" Mr. John Martin, Mr. James Allestree, and Thomas Dicas/'
and which was out in London, from their shop "at the sign,
of the Bell in St. Paul's Churchyard," in December, just
about the time when Milton obtained hia release and was
settling himself in Holborn. It was, in fact, that reply to
Milton's first Pro Popuh Aneflicano Befemio which Salmasius,
at his death in September 1653, had left unfinished. Milton,
as we know, had heard again and again,, even while Salmasius,
was alive,, of some such book as in preparation, and had
waited for its appearance; but, as it never had appeared, he
had begun to have doubts as to its ^istence in any publish-
able form. Dr. Crantzius, indeed^ in his preface to lilac's
Hague reprint -of the Defensio Secunda in 1654, had said,
" If ever the posthumous book of tlie great man -shall come
" forthy Milton will feel that even the dead can bite : I have
" happened to see a portion of it ; and, heavens ! what a
" blackguard is Milton, if one may trust Salmasius ! " Years,
however, had passed without farther word of the book, the
publication of which in Holland, or even in IVance, was no
easy matter while Cromwell's Protectorate lasted. Not till
the Protectorate was a thing of the past, and the British
Islands were in the anarchy preceding the Restoration, do
steps seem to have been taken by the representatives and
executors of Salmasius to give his manuscript to the world.
" Of my posthumous adversary, as soon as he makes his
" appearance, be good enough to give me the earliest in-
" formation," Milton had written to Henry Oldenburg in Paris
on the 20th of December 165.9. And lo ! now, after another
year, here was the book, printed and published in London,
close to his own door. It was a judicious arrangement on
the part of the friends of Salmasius. The book would fall
on Milton when his hands were tied from every attempt
at reply and he must receive it helplessly as part of his
204 LIFE OP MILTON AND HISTORY OP HIS TIME.
punishment. It would also be welcome to the royalists as
a chastisement of Milton personally, and as a new argument
in favour of Monarchy by a man whose fame was still great
throughout Europe. As early as September 1653, the very
month of the death of Salmasius, Hyde had been making
inquiries about " the book Salmasius had prepared to ptint
against Milton," and desiring from Secretary Nicholas a
complete catalogue of the writings of the dead scholar. The
publication now of the Ad Johannem Miltonum Respomio in
London under his own premiership may have been noted by
Hyde, therefore, with some satisfaction ^.
The book being in Latin, only learned readers at the time
could know distinctly what it said of Miltoti, or how it
argued for Monarchy again in opposition to Milton's reason-
ings in the Befensio Prima. Copies of the book are now
scarce, and the tradition of it is very vague. Some account
of itj therefore, may be expected here.
There is, first, a dedication of the book to Charles II by
Claudius Salmasius, the son and representative of the deceased
author, dated from Dijon, Sept. 1, 1660^. "I had no need
"to deliberate, most serene King," says this dedication,
" to whom I should consecrate my father's Reply to John
" Milton, inasmiuch as it is your own property, and can now
" behold the happy re-erection by yourself of that kingly
" dignity in your England which had for some years been
" ruthlessly overthrown. It seems to me to belong to you
" no less rightfully than did the Royal Defence itself, written
" by him to your order and inscribed by him with your name.
" Whereas, however, this Reply had begun to be printed in
" such turbulent and sad times of your kingdoms as there
" have beeai heretofore> I reckon it now the chief part of my
" happiness that it finds your Majesty restored to your
"paternal throne, your native, eountry, and all your goods,
1 Stationers' Registers for date of I find that there are two copies of the
registration of the Respcmaio ; Thomason book in that library,— one of the London
Catalogue for month of publication (day edition, and another of an edition in
of month not given) ; Maoray's Calendar quarto published Dimone (i.e. at Dijon)
of the Clarendon State Fablers, 11.255; 1660). This last must have been an
and ante Vol. V. pp. 151—152 and p. 635. edition for sale on the continent.
2 From the catalogue of the Bodleian
SALMASIUS'S POSTHUMOUS REPLY TO MILTON. 205
" as if by right of recovery after absence, amid the auspicious
" acclamations of your peoples."
The book itself consists of a Preface, occupying fifty pages,
printed without the least break by paragraphing, two com-
pleted chapters, each of greater length, printed in the same
uncomfortable fashion, and a considerable fragment of a third
chapter, ending in the middle of a sentence, with thirteen
asterisks added to mark the fact, and with the subjoined
words " Catera desunt in Autographo " (" The rest wanting in the
Author's Manuscript"). The manuscript used for it, or for
any portion that had already been in type on the Continent,
was that which Salmasius had begun at the Court of Queen
Christina in Sweden in May 1651, when Milton's Pro Populo
Anglicano Defensio had just reached him there, and the smart
of that terrible answer to the Befensio Regia was felt most
severely ; but it had been revised and languidly continued at
intervals in 1653, after Salmasius had returned from Sweden
to Holland, and may be regarded as in the main a per-
formance of that year, with feeble touches of addition even
in 1653, when it was left among the dead scholar's papers.
The sole interest of the book now lies in its vituperations of
Milton. These straggle through the whole. Direct and
special retaliation on Milton, however, is the business of the
fifty pages of preface ; and a string of translated sentences
from those pages will be enough here : —
There appeared two years and more ago a Defensio Regia for
Charles the First, who, with sacrilegious daring, and with a
criminality heard of nowhere else before, was slain with parricidal
axe by impious and rebellious citizens, for no otlier cause than that
he was a ting, and that they wanted to reign themselves. That
writing experienced various judgments, not only here in Holland, but
also in other places, according as the author and the cause pleased
or displeased different sets of persons. The majority, however,
judged of it as the matter itself seemed to demand, and as the
atrocity of the crime deserved, and condemned unanimously a deed
which, to almost all save those that perpetrated it, or had part in
that nefarious conspiracy, could appear no otherwise than detestable
and to be visited upon its authors with avenging flames. That
Defence ran through the hands and through the talk of the public,
set forth in several editions, and translated into various languages,
for the space of a year and more before any ill-employed fellow
206 LIFE OF MILTON AND HISTOET OF HIS TIME.
^presented himself who could, or would, undertake the work of refut-
ing it. The infamous authors of the parricide, as appears, sought for
some one among their adherents, fit to handle well this bad cause,
and found none ; but at length there crept forth from his hovel a
certain obscure scamp of a low London sijhoolmaster, who offered
himself to those labouring to find such an one as he turned out to
be, and ventm-ed to promise that he would execute the task, if it
were assigned to him, neither idly nor weakly. He had, he said,
all the possible requisites in abundance for hatcheting out fluch
a work,— a forehead of iron, a he^irt of lead, a mischievous spirit,
an evil tongue, an atrocious style j his match in railing could not
be found ; uo calumniator anywhere in existence, no sycophant, no
impostor, by whom he could be beaten, or that he could not beat.
He had in his possession at home such chests full of scurriUties
that, if they 'were but crammed with as many coins, he would sur-
pass in wealth the griflBns that inhabit the golden mountains. Not
that he promised to turu a very bad cause .into a good one, for who
can do that ? But that he would strive by every means to get up a
delusion for the credulous, and impose it upon the less cautious by
plenty of lying. Either the parricide admitted of no sort of
defence whatever, or he would defend it -so that it should come out
defended by the same arts by which it had been committed. And
truly he has performed more than he promised, more even than
could be required of him. . . . Among the terms of reproach with
which Milton has aspersed Salmasiua is his designation of Professor,
as if it were a greater crime to be a professor than to be a
.parricide. . . . But who objects this to Salmasius ? The man who
was master in a petty London school, and to whom it seemed a
more compendious way to riehes to attack the Bang's life and
furnish a:pleading for the parricide by which he was taken off than
to set tasks of dictation to boys, and teach lists of odd vocables.
The same gentleman has the additional distinction of having
repudiated his wife after a year of marriage, for certain or uncertain
reasons known to himFelf, and of propounding the lawfulness of
divorce for any cause whatsoever, and wounding the reputation of
the wives of (ihers by calumnious insinuations. In many places
he calls Salmasius a little scrub of a fellow. On my word, when I
read those passages, I thought he must be himself well nigh among
the giants' for height of body. Yet it has been reported to me by
those who have seen him that he is a pigmy in stature, a giant
in maUee only. . . . "Who, or whence, is Milton ? "Who ever
heard bis name before this 'Defence of his for the English people 1
Nay, many deny that even that Defence is of his authorship,
farther than the mere title, averring that it was written by a certain
insignificant French schoolmaster, who teaches boys a deal of
nothing in London, inasmuch ap those who have pretty intimate
acquaintance with Milton himself seriously deny that he knows
Latin or can write it. ... I am of another opinion myself. iFor,
SALMASIUS'S POSTHUMOUS KEPLY TO MiLTON. 207
if Milton is a poet, and of no mean aspiration either, why should he
not be able also to be an eloquent orator ? But that he has sought
the laurel-wreath on account of some namby-pamby poetry i«
proved by his printed Po&mata, in which he exults in the fact that
his father, in producing him, had bestowed a poet on the world.
But that he is no better a poet than he is a citizen appears from
this, that, just a% in his character of a bad citizen, he sins against
the laws of his country by defending its rebels, so, being a very bad
poet, he frequently violates the laws of metre by putting shorts for
longs and longs for shorts. Thus he shortens the last syllable in
^uotannis ^, the first syllable in paruisset ^, the first also in serni-
fraetaf, and in the proper name Opis*, and the second syllable in
Jacobus '. He commits many other errors in these poems through-
out, offensive bdth to grammar and to the Latin idiom. He has
Belgia for Belgium *. He might as well vrritB OallivMi for Gallia.
He calls birds augrires '' ; why should not birds as well be spoken
of as aucwpes ? He calls the sky stMipa/rum ', as if it produced
Stars. There is an infinity of other things, which I omit, and
among them verses out of rule, such as et eallehat avium linguas '.
Even though he had not annexed to those poems the age at
■which tliey were written, we should have easily seen that they
were the poems of a boy. But he ought to correct his boyish
errors now that he is a man, especially as he caused them to be
reprinted in Loudon a few years ago. Had this been his style
for ever, and he had spent his time only in singing of loves,
or in writing doleful funeral elegies, I should think much better of
him as the worst of poets thaa I do now that he figures as the best
of patrons in protedting the 'Worst of causes. For I would rather
have the blunt pen of a leaden poet than the sharp axe of an iron
hangman or defender of hangmen. . . One observes it as of con-
siderable consequence, Milton, that you announce your Defence as
having been undertaken Pro Povulo Anglicano, for the English
people. For the English people? Is it that English people
for whom the dyilig King, in his extreme hour, expressed his care
in his last words, praying to God for their safety? Is it that
English people you speak for that now groans under a savage
tyranny, and Would assuredly recall its King from death if it could.
Or give back his throne to his heir, and restore the form of ancient
government which has prevailed in England from time immemorial ?
Is it that people, Milton, that has empowered you to plead its cause
1 EUg. V. 30, where qimtarmis stood right quantity.
in the edition of 1645 : rectified into ^ -phst line of the third of the epi-
perennis in that Of 1673. grams In ProdUionem BainbaMdieam ;
2 Possibly InQt^nl. Nov. 165 ; where, where the liberty was taken knowingly
however, the word is paruere. and deliberately.
3 In Qwint. Nov. 143, where semf- « EUg. III. 12, where Belgia SWL
fractaqiie stood in the flrist edition :
changed into prcbrvpiaque in the second. ' Eleg. III. 25.
* Is the reference here to ManmsjiTi * Mleg. VI. 85.
The word there is' now Upin,viVib:Mie ^■"Epitaph. Ba/mOnisjIQ.
208 LIFE OF MILTON AND HISTORY OF HIS TIME.
and defend the crime t What ill has it done or merited 1 Did it
revolt from its King, make war upon him, give him up captive at
last to the executioner? Nay, it would willingly give up to the
executioner, if it could, all those who, by a wick«d deed and with
monstrous fury, deprived it of the best of kings. More fitly and
truly, Milton, might you have entitled your Defence Pro Rebdlibua
Anglim, for the Eebels of England, or Profactione Brounistarum et
Indepmdenlium, for the Faction of the Brownists and Independents.
. . . Lest any one hereafter should be misled by Milton's deceptive
phraseology, his People of England is merely Cromwell, with his
satellites and underlings, the commanders, colonels, and captains of
the rebel army. , . . Salmasius, according to Milton, intermeddled
with the affairs of another commonwealth. A great crime, forsooth !
Was it not allowable ? " No," says Milton, " for he is a foreigner
" and a grammarian, though he deny it a thousand times." With
perfect justice he denies it. Milton himself would admit that it is
rightly denied, if he understood Latin or Greek. For he would
then understand that the Greeks and Eomams recognised by the
name of grammarian only a person who publicly taught and read
the poets and historians and expounded them ; and that Salmasius
has done this i± will verily be hard for him to prove. If, however,
Milton will insist that Salmasius has practised this art, Salmasius
may with better right and more truth contend that Milton was one
■of the two vizored executioners who cut off the King's head. But
come, let us grant the schoolmaster what he wants. Let Salmasius
be a grammarian. Why on that account should he not write of the
affairs of another state ? How many grammarians of old exercised
themselves in that way appears from the fact that Greeks wrote
Latin histories and Romans Greek histories. Wliy should that
which was lawful of old to foreigners and grammarians not be
lawful now? Milton forbids it, since from being a two-penny
schoolmaster he has been made Secretary of the B,ebel Parliament.
•Say, Milton, had Salmasius tried to undertake and defend the cause
of the rebels, would you accuse him of having done anything you
would object to, and impute what he had done as a reproach to
liim on the ground of his being a grammarian and foreign-born ?
Does it not occur to your mind, if you have any mind at all, that
this cause, which Salmasius defends, is the common cause of all
kings ? Is it possible that you do not see, blind though you are,
that this business, with which you say he has mixed himself up,
appertains not only to the state to which he is an alien, but also, to
that of which he is a citizen 2 Salmasius, if you do not know the
fact, -defended also his own king in that treatise, and not only yours,
though you will not have him to be yours ; nay, while yours and
his, at the same time all. Are not you the men who, not content
with having beheaded your own king, are ostentatiously showing
that bloody axe, raised.aloft, to all the citizens and subjects of kings
of the whole world, that they may follow your example ? , , . First
SALMASIUS'S POSTHUMOUS BEPLY TO MILTON. 209
you call Salmasius a stage-performer. This name fits ofily yourself
and your instigators. You are the comic actor, or rather the mimic
buffoon, ready with the slavish stage- drollery which makes you
ridiculous : they are the tragic actors, who have bounded through
that tragedy the like of which no theatre has ever presented in all
ages or in any nation. Then you call him a eunuch. Be a man
yourself, if you like ; but, had they been all eunuchs that used to
frequent your house, perhaps you would not have repudiated your
wife. Do you, qv^m olim Itali pro fwmmQ, Tidbtm'wnt, dare to
object to any one that he is too little of a man ' ? . . . The parricide
which the English robbers committed on the person of the King is
nothing, it seems, in comparison with that which the extremely
long-eared, or, as he will explain it, extremely stupid, Milton
accuses Salmasius of having himself perpetrated. He boasts that
he has " horrible news " to bring to Salmasius about himself, which,
if he is not mistaken, " will smite with a more dreadful wound the
ears of all grammarians and critics, — news, to wit, of a parricide
committed among the Hollanders on the person of Aristarchus by
the wicked audacity of Salmasius." At first sight, I confess, I
stuck when I read this, and silently asked myself who this
Aristarchus was whom Salmasius had slain by a horrible parricide
in Holland. I showed the passage also to some friends, who were
not less at a loss. But one of them suddenly exclaimed, " I think
I have just found out who that Aristarchus is : without doubt he is
the elder Heinsius, who has written a book called Aristarchus
Sacer, and whose reputation among the Dutch Salmasius has
ruined." I laughed when I heard this. Soon, however, reading
another page, I came upon these words, " All whom this unspeak-
able rumour reaches of the parricidal Salmasian barbarism."
Then " Lo ! " said I, turning to that awkward interpreter of
Milton, here I have what will make you confess that I perceived
the fanatical fellow's drift better than you. He has doubtless
explained himself. Look at the phrase parricidialem harbaris-
mum in connection with the phrase parricidio in persond
Aristarchi a Salmasio admisso, and it will be clear that Salmasius
has been guilty of some great barbarism, which may pass for a
parricide committed on the person of the grammarian Aristarchus."
As the person I was conversing with appeared still perplexed and
dubious, " Bead," said I, " what follows in Milton, and you will
doubt no longer. His words are, ' What, I pray, is it parrieid,ivm
in persond Regis admittere, or what is in persona Regis t What
Latinity ever so expressed itself? Or is it some Pseudophilippus
that we are to fancy, who, having put on the King's mask, com-
mitted I know not what act of parricide among the English?'
You see now the acumen of the Jong-eared and blear-eyed beast,
and yet won't yon laugh? He denies that persona is Latin
except for a disguise or mask. What Latinity, he says, ever so
1 See ante, Vol. IV. pp. 255-256.
VOL. VI. ^
210 LIFE OF MILTON AND HISTOBY OF HIS TIME.
expressed itself t I used to think that only authors spoke Latin ;
but here he teaches me that Latinity itself is a something that
speaks. It is evident also what a deal of time he has wasted in
turning over Roman writers, in whom there is nothing more
frequent than to find fersona used in that sense in which it is
here objected to in Salmasius." Milton, this excellent inventor of
Latin-speaking Latinity, will take away from lawyers their personal
actions, which are vn personam, and will leave them only those
which are in rem. For he will say that the former are for things
in masks and are granted by the judge against such. Splendida
2)ersona. occurs in Celsus, as equivalent to one of splendid dignity.
This must be a splendid something in a mask. He who said
pareere personis, dicere de vitiis, wanted things in masks to be
spared, we must now believe. Persona imperatoris, if I remember
rightly, is a phrase of ^milius Probus. It is the commonest thing
in the world for lawyers to speak of persona pupilli, persona
tutoris. Mea et tua persona for ego et tu is customary with the
Latins : the Latin rhetoricians speak so constantly. Thus, the
author Ad Herennvwm has Item a nosbra, db adversariorwm, ah
avMtorwm persona, a rehus ipsis, and, a little after, a nostra persona
henevolentiam contrahem/us si offieium nostrwn sine arrogantia
laudahimus. Cicero, in his Topics, has Non qudliscunque persona
testimonii pondus habet. In the law-courts of Greece Trpoa-ana, i. e.
personal, were taken with the same signification for the parties
litigating, ^;ersoKa rei, persona aetoris, ra irpda-ama. No need to bring
more instances, since writers are full of phrases of the sort. . . .
You return again, Milton, to your wonted absurdities, wholly puffed
up as you are with such tricks of evasion, when, in what follows, you
speak by a forged nickname of Salmasius as changed into the nymph
Salmacis. But who can be taken for a Salmacis more readily than
yourself, qm ItaUs, cum ajmd eos viveres, culcita fuisti, et quern pro
fcemina hahuerunt, because they did not believe you to be a man ?
They praised you indeed for the handsomeness of your form, and
wrote verses to the effect that you would be Angelic, and not
Anglic only, if your piety corresponded with your beauty '- Who
more deserves the name of a Salmacis than he who arrogates to
himself what is special to women, and makes a boast of his beauty
as his single endowment, who has even maligned his own engraver
in published verses for having represented him as less beautiful than
he really thought himself? ^ , . . I have answered all the points of any
importance in your preface. I have omitted nothing, and I confess
. that in this I have been more diligent and scrupulous than was fit,
^ or than was the duty of one who ought to have seen good reason to
' fear that on this account he would incur the blame of many. Tor
■what need, they will say, was there for dwelling so long on a
^ Manso's compliment to Milton in III. p. 455.
1638 : see ante. Vol. I. p. 768, and Vol. 2 See Vol. III. pp. 456—459.
SALMASIUS'S POSTHUMOUS REPLY TO MILTON. 211
refutation of the absurdities and trifles of Milton, and a derisive
exposure of his ridiculous jests ? Good hours might have been
better spent, nor did -the drivel of a very nasty, very foolish, and
very senseless creature deserve so much attention. I confess they
speak the truth. But what should I do? My design has been,
Milton, not only to exhibit you as an object for general apprecia-
tion, but also to figure out your complete ugliness, draw you to the
full, and paint you graphically to the full, from the sole of your foot
to the crown of your head and the tips of your nails, so that all
should know you exactly as you are, from the qualities of doctrine,
diction, style, temper, morals, talents, scurrility, lust of lying,
imposture, blackguardism, impiety, which glare out everywhere in
your book. Very often from some one corrupt or base saying, if it is
opportunely thrust back upon its author, the nature of an unskilled
and impious man is made more clear and patent than from any
long exposition. Besides, when I shall have shown that this rascal
is such as I have painted him graphically in his own colours, I
shall, in so doing, have made plain also what sort of persons they
are that assigned him this business of replying for them, and so
verified the adage that the tubs have found their proper lettuces.
The defence of an impious and nefarious deed could not be assigned
by impious and guilty men to any other than one impious himself.
There is a Greek saying, to. SdXta 8i' dd\iav jrpbs SSKiov. And so,
Milton, it has been my pleasure to present you complete for
universal recognition, by no freckle or other congenital blemish
merely, but in your whole body.
Salmasius had evidently intended that his Ad JoTiannem
Miltonum Resjponsio should be symmetrical with his original
Befensio Regia, and with Milton's Pro Populo Anglieano
Defensio in answer to that treatise, and should consist there-
fore of twelve Chapters in addition to the Preface. Had he
carried out that plan, reviewing each of Milton's chapters in
the manner he had prescribed for himself, his book would
have extended to about four densely printed volumes. As it
is, the single volume which he left, though it overtakes only
three chapters of Milton's Befenm), and breaks off abruptly in
the criticism of the third, is about twice as bulky as Milton's
entii-e treatise, the preface and the twelve chapters together.
It is difficult to believe that even in the year of the Restora-
tion there was any royalist scholar in England sufficiently
enthusiastic still on the subject of Salmasius and his contro-
versy with Milton to read through the whole of such a
posthumous fragment, so as to acquaint himself thoroughly
p a
212 LIFE OF MILTON AND HISTORY OP HIS TIME.
with the repeated Salmasian maunderings over the fact
of the Regicide and over the doctrine of kingship among
the Hebrews and in the New Testament. Where these
chapters were glanced at, even cursorily, by University men,
it must still have been for the little personalities contained
in them, and indicated to the eye by the vocative Miltone,
Miltone, recurring in the text at short intervals like the gleam
of a needle. But the substance of the personalities had been
given in the preface; and it was enough for the general
public to know that a posthumous book of the great Salmasius
had appeared at last, punishing Milton as he deserved, though
unfortunately in Latin ^.
Among those who welcomed the appearance of Salmasius's
posthumous book, and were glad to imagine Milton smarting
under it, and yet bound to be silent, must have been all who
had themselves suflFered in controversy with Milton. — Morus
must have hailed the book with delight. That twice-murdered
enemy of Milton was now in full possession of his Protestant
pastorate in Paris, " in the midst of the applauses which his
inimitable manner of preaching drew to him from an extraor-
dinary crowd of auditors," but pursued by the bad reputation
he had acquired in Holland, and which Milton had blazoned
to the world, and indeed with new quarrels on his hands,
some of them with brother-clergymen who had hitherto taken
his part. On new charges, very like the old, he was again to
find himself in the clutches of synods and other church courts ;
" whence," says Bayle, "he escaped only as by fire ^." Nearer
than Morus to the spot of Milton's present degradation was
Dr. Peter Du Moulin, the real antagonist of Milton in the
Regii Sanguinis Clamor. The King had made good his promise
of remembering Du Moulin and his services ; for, on Du
1 At the beginning of Chapter I. there letter to one of his friends, just after the
is a rather interesting personal attack on appearance of Milton's Defemio, that
the younger Heinsius. He is brought in "Milton had pleaded a very bad cause
as "a certain Dutchman, still young," most excellently." See ante, Vol. IV,
and of trifling pretensions in literature, pp. 319—320. It is evident that the
who had been a kind of assessor to information of Heinsius about the pro-
Milton in the Salmasian controversy on oeedings of Salmasius at Stockholm,
account of his own and his father's in- -when Milton's Defensio first roused his
dependent feud with Salmasius, and who rage, had been most exact,
had been impudent enough to say in a 2 Bayle, Article Moms, with the notes.
OLD ANTAGONISTS. 213
Moulin's petition " for the same spiritual estate which was
" bestowed on his father by King James, viz. a prebend
"in Canterbury, with the rectory of Llanrhaiadar, diocese
" Bangor," he had received a grant of these preferments in
June 1660. As prebendary of Canterbury, and also one of the
King's chaplains, he was to live on in peace and distinction,
with no other trouble than that his still zealous Calvinism
was irritated by the growth of Arminianism among the
Restoration clergy. If he had any other trouble, it was
the thought of his irreclaimable Independent and Oliverian
brother. Dr. Lewis Du Moulin, whom the Oxford visitors had
ejected from his History professorship, and who had come to
live in nonconformist obscurity in Westminster. While Dr.
Lewis might keep up his friendship with Milton, Dr. Peter
might have the satisfaction, if he chose, of reprinting his
Regit Sanguinis Clamor, or at least the poems in it in praise of
Salmasius and abuse of Milton. In fact, he was now exulting
in his former anonymous feat of invective against Milton, and
taking every means to let it be known that the credit belonged
to him and not to Morns, though it had been convenient for
him to keep the secret so long ^ If the lawyer Joseph Jane
or old Eowland of Antwerp had been still alive, they also
might have had some recognition now of their smaller services
against Milton in 1651, the one in his contemptible Eikoru
Aklastos, the other in his drivelling Apologia contra JoTiannem,
Poh/pragmaticum. Rowland was probably dead; and in August
1660 there was a lease " to Thomas Jane and the other ehil-
" dren of Joseph Jane, deceased, of Liskeard Park, Cornwall,
" except the mines and quarries ^." Bramhall, though now
1 Wood's Fasti, II. 125—128 and formation that "prefixed is a portrait
195 196 ; Mrs. Green's Calendar of of K. Charles I. by E. Gaywood," and
State Papers for 1660-1, p. 14 (May), that "the running title of the work is
and p. 230 (August). See also ante, Vol. Eucoiv AjtAaoros." I have looked in vain
V. pp. 215 226. for a copy of this publication in the
2 Mrs. Green's Calendar, p. 212. — British Museum, and the Bodleian does
Among the scarcest of the Anti-Milton not seem to contain one ; but, from a
publications seems to be one entitled note in the Addenda to Mitford's Life
" Salmasius his Dissection, and Gonfu- of MUton in Pickering's edition of
iation of the Diabolical Bebel Milton in. Milton's Works (I. clxx), I learn that
his impious Doctrines of Falsehood, iba. it was in fact a mere bookseller's issue
&c. against K. Charles I. Lond. 1660. of the remainder or unsold copies of
4to." So it is described in Bohn's Jane's BlK»»'A/cAa<rTO! of 1651, provided
Lowndes, Art. Saimasius, with the in- with a new title-page and " a leaf of
214 LIFE OF MILTON AND HISTOBY OF HIS TIME.
Archbishop of Armagh and Primate of all Ireland, cannot
have forgotten that he had been credited by Milton with the
books of those two obscure scribblers, and attacked on that
account by John Phillips in the Mesponsio of 1652 in his
uncle's behalf. Nor, ' if I was right in my conjecture that
Gilbert Sheldon may have been the " G. S." who, at the
approaching moment of the Restoration, wrote The Dignity
of Kmgship asserted, in answer to Milton's Beady and Easy
Way to establish a Free Commonwealth, can that divine,
in his present well-earned bishopric of London, have been
indifferent to Milton's fate ? Sheldon, however, was too high-
minded a man to regret that it had been found possible to
spare one he had himself admired even while denouncing him.
— But Milton's enemies were many, and few of them high-
minded. Prynne, I believe, hoped to lay hold of him yet;
nor would the Scottish Presbyterians and " forcers of con-
science," at whom Milton had sneered in his sonnets and
pamphlets, have objected to rougher treatment of him than
he had received. The pious Rutherford, indeed, dying at St.
Andrews, had his heart too full of other thoughts to remember
old enmities. But the stout and more worldly Baillie, Milton's
" Scotch What d'ye call " of 1646, was not so forgiving.
Coaxing himself, in his new principalship of Glasgow Univer-
sity, to think as well of the Restoration as he could, he saw
" the justice of God " in the " shameful deaths " of ten of the
regicides, especially Peters and Harrison, and God's justice
also in the disgrace of "the two Goodwins, blind Milton,
Owen, Sterry, Loekyer, and others of that maleficent crew."
They were all auti-Presbyterians, though of different varieties,
and so Baillie huddles them together ^.
There is something credible enough in the story, trans-
mitted through Richardson, that Milton, for some time after
the Restoration, " was in perpetual terror of being assassinated,
though he had escaped, the talons of the law," and was " so
dejected that he would lie awake whole nights, and kept
address to the Reader," so as to make immediately after that book, and may
the book pass off fraudulently as an be rememberad, though here only in a
English version of Salmasius's Post- footnote, as another kick at Milton
humous.Eeply to Milton. It probably when he was helpless,
came out in London in the end of 1660, i Baillie, III. MS.
MILTON IN HOLBOKN : 1661. 215
himself as private as he could ^." The resentment of some
fanatic royalist at his escape from the gallows might easily
have taken the form of knocking the blind man down in the
streets or stabbing him in his house. Especially on any of
those days of public tumult and phirenzy of royalism in
London with which the year of the Restoration ended it
would have been dangerous for Milton to be visible or within ■
reach. On that Wednesday, the 30th of January, 1660-1,
for example, which was the anniversary of the execution of the
Royal Martyr, and when, in the midst of the humiliations
before Almighty God on that accoimt, there was the dragging
of the disinterred corpses of Cromwell, Bradshaw, and Ireton,
to be gibbeted at Tyburn, it is hardly conceivable that Milton
can have been in his house in Holborn. For it was up
Holborn that the mob ran that morning, howling round the
hurdle on which the corpses were laid ; and it was actually in
the Red Lion Inn, Holborn, close to Milton's house, as
Phillips localises it, that the corpseS had been deposited, since
they had been dug up in Westminster, with a view to that
day's finishing spectacle. Cromwell's and Ireton's, having
been dug up on Saturday, had been taken to the Red Lion
on Monday night ; and Bradshaw's had been placed there the
next day ^. The vicinity, mobbed so for a day and two nights,
would not have been a safe one for Milton, had it occurred to
any one that he was at hand. On the subsequent general
rejoicings of the King's coronation-day, April 23, and of
his birth-day and the anniversary of his entry into London,
May 29, the Holborn neighbourhood might be safer ; but, so
long as Milton remained in Holborn, it must have been advis-
able for him to keep as much as possible within doors.
It was a new world that was now around him, the very
world he had prophesied in the last of his pre-Restoration
pamphlets. The news from Scotland of the beheading of the
Marquis of Argyle, and the hanging of the other two Presby-
terian victims, Guthrie and Govan, only confirmed the ample
1 Richardson, XCIV, where he gives as Temple."
his authority Dr. Tanored Epbinson, 2 Wood's Ath. III. 301 (Memoir of
who had the information from " a rela- Ireton) ; and Merewius PvMieus, as
tion of Milton's, Mr. Walker of the quoted ante, p. 123.
216 LIFE OF MILTON AND HISTORY OF HIS TIME.
information that had been already given as to the character
of the new discipline to which the three kingdoms were to be
subjected. On the great question, which agitated so many
minds, of the setting up of a Uniform episcopacy in all the
three, and of the accommodation of that episcopacy to
Presbyterian consciences, Milton's position, as we know, was
peculiar. The restoration of episcopacy in any form must
have seemed to him, on the ground of the special nature of
that system of ecclesiastical government, a disaster all but
immeasurable. He stiU retained the opinions which he had
propounded in his five anti-Episcopal pamphlets of 1641-43,
when he had made it his effort to dissuade the Long Parliament
from any trial of limited episcopacy, on Archbishop Usher's
model or any other, or from any conclusion respecting prelacy
short of root-and-branch abolition. He would now, there-
fore, probably have preferred the continuance of the broad
non-prelatic Church-Establishment of the Protectorate, or
any feasible modification of it, to a return to episcopacy,
limited or unlimited; and it must have been with something
like disgust and contempt that he heard that so many of the
Presbyterians of that English establishment were trying now
to float on the notion of the acceptability of a limited epis-
copacy, and especially that his old Smectymnuan friends,
Calamy, Newcomen, and Spurstow, had so far forgotten their
former selves. But, since 1643, as we know, he had moved
on into theories about the Church which made the particular
constitution of any Church-Establishment no longer the para-
mount question in his mind. It was a State-paid ministry
of any sort whatever, or any mixture of sorts, that he had
learnt to abominate. And so, though a continued Church-
Establishment on Cromwell's principle of the inclusion of old
Anglicans, Presbyterians, Independents, and such Baptists and
other evangelical sectaries as would accept State-pay, must
have seemed much more endurable to him than the absolutely
Episcopal Establishment which Hyde and the returned bishops
and Anglican doctors were bringing back, and although he may
even have agreed that a less evil would be that comprehension
of the old Anglicans and the Presbyterians by themselves
MILTON IN HOLBOEN: 1661. 217
within the Establishment for which Baxter, Galamy, and the
rest, were contending, yet, as things were, he had his specula-
tive consolations. If the Presbyterians were driven out, as
they were likely to be, after the numerous Independents and
Baptists already ejected, what would remain as the Church-
Establishment of England would be the very worst form con-
ceivable of that bad article. Then, might not Presbyterians,
swarming outside, and swelling the crowd of the already ejected
Independents and Baptists, or of those freer Independents,
Baptists, and other opinionists, who had properly refused to be
ever inside, learn the right lesson at last? Why, in that case,
should not all combine together for the destruction of the
Establishment which they detested in common ; or, till there
should be opportunity for that, why should not all combine to
wrest from the governing powers that liberty of conscience
and worship out of the Establishment in which they were all
equally interested ? So meditating and speculating, as I con-
ceive, did Milton, in his small house in Holborn, in May and
June 1661, look forward, with blind eyes and bold heart, into
the English future.
BOOK II.
MAY 1661— AUGUST 1667.
HISTORY : — The Clakbndon Administeation continued.
Davenant's Eevived Eaueeateship, and the
FiEST Seven Yeaes op the Liteeattjee of
THE BeSTOEATION.
BIOGRAPHY t—l&jnio^^ Lii-b feom 1661 to 1667 : Paradise
Lost.
CHAPTER I.
THE CLAEENDON ADMINISTRATION CONTINUED :
MAY 1661 — AUGUST 1667,
That Second Parliament of Charles which had met on the
8th of May 1661, to continue the work of the First or Con-
vention Parliament, and which was so well fitted for the
business by being almost wholly composed of thoroughgoing
Church and King men, was to suffice for England, with proro-
gations from time to time, till January 1678-9. Accordingly,
while it was still in existence, and seemed to be interminable,
satirists of feeble invention amused themselves by calling it
The Long Parliament. For historical purposes, it is now re-
membered as The Cavalier Farliament, or sometimes as The
Pensionary Parliament. This last name was invented in com-
memoration of the fact that, before it came to an end, a very
large proportion of the members were in the pay of the Court,
or of other interests, directly or indirectly. We are, concerned
in this chapter only with the first six sessions of the Parlia-
ment. They were as follows : —
First Session: — May 8, 1661 — May 19, 1662 (with recess or ad-
journment from July 30 to Nov. 2p).
Second Session ;—Feh. 18, 1662-3— July 27, 1663.
Thi/rd Session :—Us.rch. 16, 1663-4— May 17, 1664.
Fourth Session -.—NoY. 24, 1664 — March 2, 1664-5.
Fifth Session (at Oxford) :— Oct. 9-31, 1665.
Sixth Session :— Sept. 21, 1666— Feb. 8, 1666-7.
As Hyde's Chancellorship, with his personal ascendancy or
premiership, lasted till August 1667, or six months beyond
233 LIFE OF MILTON AND HISTORY OF HIS TIME.
the sixth session of the Parliament, the period of English
history comprehended by the six sessions may be called con-
veniently The Claeendon Administkation continued.
The composition of this Administration remained for a
while substantially what it had been a year before. (See ante,
pp. 17-19). Six of the councillors of the Restoration year,
however, were now wearing the new titles that had been
conferred on them at the coronation. Hyde himself was Earl
of Clarendon ; Annesley was Earl of Anglesey ; Howard was
Earl of Carlisle ; Cornwallis was Lord Cornwallis j Holies was
Lord Holies ; and Sir Anthony Ashley Cooper was Lord
Ashley. This last was now also a Minister. On the 13th of
May, 1661, he became Chancellor of the Exchequer and Under
Treasurer. Neither the introduction of Ashley into the
Ministry, nor any other change in the Council, affected
Clarendon's predominance. He was still premier, and it was
now with a Cavalier Parliament at his back, instead of the
all but Presbyterian Parliament of the previous year, that he
was able to assert his premiership by revealing fully his home
policy. That was, on the one hand, to maintain the Act of
Oblivion and Indemnity as it had been passed, but, on the
other hand, to perfect the Restoration by crushing down all
principles and relies of the twenty years of Revolution, re-
erecting the English monarchy very much as it had been in
the reign of Charles the First, and re-establishing also Laud's
absolute high-episcopal Church of England.
His first difficulty, in the temper of the new Parliament in
its first session, was to save the Indemnity Act. The cavaliers
looked back on the Convention Parliament as an illegal make-
shift, all whose acts required revision. The Indemnity Act
in particular was one they would fain have disturbed, in order
to exact greater reparations from the Commonwealthsmen ibr
the benefit of complaining Royalists and their families. Not
till July 8, 1661, after messages from the King that "his
honour was concerned," was this business cleared by the pre-
sentation for his Majesty's assent of an Act for confirming
all the chief Acts of the Convention Parliament, that of the
ACTS OF JULY 1661. 223
Indemnity included. The two Houses were then free to go
on with their own legislation, and the first results appeared
in a series of bills presented to his Majesty at their adjourn-
ment on the 30th of July. Among these, all assented to
by his Majesty that day, were the following : —
"An Act for safety and preservation of his Majesty's person
and government against treasonable and seditious practices and
attempts." By this Act not only were all designs for the King's
death or deposition to be capital, but it was to be punishable to
affirm the King to be a papist or a heretic, or to write, print, preach,
or speak against the established government, or to maintain the
legality of the Long Parliament or the Solemn League and Co-
venant, or to assert a legislative power in either or both Houses
of Parliament without the King.
" An Act for repealing am, Act of ParUament entitled ' An
Act for disenabling all persons in holy orders to exercise any
temporal jurisdiction or authority! " The Act so repealed was
that Act of the Long Parliament to which Charles I. had given his
assent at Canterbury on the 13th of February, ,1641-2 (Vol II.
p. 351). Bishops were now to be restored to their places in the
House of Lords, and they or other clergymen might exercise civil
offices.
" An Act agadnst Tumults and Disorders upon pretence of
preparing or presenting petitions or other addresses to his Majesty
or the ParUament" It prohibited, under pain of fine and impri-
sonment, the getting up of any petition or remonstrance signed by
more than twenty persons, unless with leave from three justices of
peace or the majority of the grand jury in counties, or, in London,
from the Lord Mayor and Common Council. It also prohibited
the appearance of more than ten persons at the presentation of any
petition or remonstrance to either House or to his Majesty.
"An Act deelarimg the sole right of the Militia to he in ike
King." This was a surrender to the Crown of that great prero-
gative which the Long Parliament had contested, and their contest
about which with Charles I. had been the immediate occasion of
the Civil War in 1642 (Vol. IL pp. 354-355).
"An Act decla/ring the pains, jienalties, and forfeitures imposed
upon the estates and persons of certain notorious offenders excepted
out of the Act of Free and General Pa/rdon, Indemnity, and
Oblivion." Precluded from disturbing the Indemnity Act, the
Parliament sought a partial satisfaction in this supplement to it.
The four dead regicides-in-chief being already attainted, this Act
confiscated the estates of the other twenty dead Eegicides, excepted
in the Indemnity Bill but not yet completely disposed of, enume-
rating them by name (see list ante, p. 54). But it added to the
list the six living regicides whom the bill had not mad& absolute
324 LIFE OF MILTON AND HISTOBY OF HIS TIME.
capital exceptions, — to wit, James Challoner, Sir James Harrington,
Sir Henry Mildmay, Lord Monson, Eobert Wallop, and John
Phelps (see ante, pp. 54-55), — and also Sir Arthur Hasilrig, who had
been left, on general political grounds, in the same predicament of
a delinquent excepted, but not capitally. By the present Act the
estates of those seven persons also were to be absolutely forfeited,
while for the six regicides among them there was a peculiar
addition. They could not be hanged now without breaking the
'Indemnity Bill, but they could be brought to ignominy and the
very verge of being hanged. It was enacted, therefore, that the
three of the six bearing titles should be degraded from the same,
and that Mildmay, Monson, and Wallop, the only, three of the six
then in custody, should be prisoners for Ufe, and should be liable to
be drawn through the streets on sledges, with ropes about their
necks, to the gallows at Tyburn, and thence back to prison.
These Acts and others, passed before the adjournmeut of
the two Houses on the 30th of July, proved tbe concurrence
of the Parliament with Clarendon's policy for perfecting the
Restoration. But no sooner had it reassembled after the
adjournment (Nov. 20, 1661), the bishops then in their places
in the Lords, than the work was resumed •with fresh, energy.
A bill which had been brought into the Commons before the
adjournment for executing the nineteen regicides lying in the
Tower or elsewhere under capital sentence, but respited by the
Act of Indemnity till there should be such a special Act, was
pushed through that House successfully, most of the poor
wretches themselves having been brought before the House in
the course of the debate to be again questioned and gazed
at; and, though this bill was dropped in the Lords, doubtless
with Clarendon's approval, an order of the Commons to the
Attorney-General for the capital prosecution of the two non-
regicide prisoners, Vane and Lambert, was to take independ-
ent effect. But we may pass at once to the end of the
first session of the Parliament on May 19, 1662. They had
then, with the King's assent, added over thirty public bills,
besides about forty private bills, to their produce before the
adjournment j and among the public bills were the fol-
lowing : —
The Corporations Act (Dec. 20, 1661) : — Under the name of an
Act for " the well-governing and regulating of corporations," this
ACT OF UNIFOEMITY, ETC. 225
was, in fact, an Act for ejecting from Town Councils and other
Corporations all who were not of thorough cavalier principles. It
required all Mayors, Aldermen, Recorders, Bailiffs, Town-Clerks,
Common Councillors, and other civic officers, to take not only the
ordinary oaths of allegiance and supremacy, hut also an oath
renouncing the Solemn League and Covenant, and a special non-
resistance or passive obedience oath, in these terms : "I do
" declare and believe that it is not lawful, upon any pretence
" whatsoever, to take arms against the King, and that I do abhor
" that traitorous position of taking arms by his authority against his
" person, or against those that are commissioned by him : so help
" me God." Commissioners were to be appointed to see to the
execution of the Act ; and it was also enacted that none should
be admitted as magistrates "for ever hereafter" who had not,
within a year before their election, " taken the sacrament of the
Lord's Supper according to the rites of the Church of England."
Act against the Quakers (May 2, 1662) : — All Quakers or other
persons refusing to take an oath required by law, or persuading to
such refusal, or maintaining by speech or print the unlawfulness of
oaths, and in particular all Quakers meeting for worship " to the
number of five or more," were to be fined £5 for the first ofience,
and £10 for the second, or, failing to pay such fines, were to be
imprisoned with hard labour for three months for the first ofience,
and six months for the second. Offenders, on third conviction,
might be banished to the Plantations.
The Act of Uniformity (May 19, 1662) : — This famous Act was
the death-blow at last to all those hopes of a comprehension of
the Presbyterians within the Established Church which had been
kept up during the sitting of the Convention Parliament, and con-
firmed by the King's pledged word in his Ecclesiastical Declaration
of October 1660. In that Declaration (ante, pp. 100-103) it
had been promised that the constitution of the new Church of
England should be that of a Limited or Moderate Episcopacy, with
Presbyters partaking largely in the spiritual jurisdiction, with a
carefully revised Liturgy, and without extreme pressure of cere-
monies. There had been ample signs since then that the King,
Clarendon, and the bishops, had trampled that temporary document
under foot, and that it was the highest possible Episcopacy, an
Episcopacy as rigid and florid as Laud's, that was to be imposed
upon England. But this Act of Uniformity, the result of the
deliberations of the two Houses, exceeded all previous belief. Its
main enactment ran thus : — " That every parson, vicar, or other
" minister whatsoever, who now hath and enjoyeth any ecclesiastical
" benefice or promotion within this realm of England or places
" aforesaid, shall, in the church, chapel, or place of public worship
" belonging to his said benefice or promotion, upon some Lord's
" day before the Feast of St. Bartholomew which shall be in the
"year of our Lord Grod 1662, openly, publicly, and solemnly read
VOL. ¥1. Q
226 LIFE OF MILTON AND HISTOEY OF HIS TIME.
"the morning and evening prayer appointed to he read by and
"according to the said Book of Common Prayer [the old Liturgy,
" with some verbal alterations and additions made by the Bishops
"and Anglican Clergy in Convocation], at the times thereby
"appointed; and, after such reading thereof, shall openly and
" publicly before the congregation there assembled declare his un-
" feigned assent and consent to the use of all things in the said
" Book contained and prescribed, in these words and no more: 'I do
" ' here declare my unfeigned assent and consent to all and every-
" ' thing contained and prescribed in and by the book entitled TIte
" 'Book of Common Prayer and Administration of the Sacraments,
" ' and other rites and ceremonies of tlte Church according to the
" ' use of the Chwrch of England, together with the Psalter or Psalms
" ' of Da/eid, printed as they are to be sung or said in ehwrohes, cmd
" ' the form or manner of making, ordaining, and consecratimg of
" ' Bishops, Priests, and Deacons ' : And that all and every such
" person who shall (without some lawful impediment, to be allowed
" and approved of by the Ordinary of the place) neglect or refuse
" to do the same within the time aforesaid (or, in case of such
" impediment, within one month after such impediment removed)
" shall ipso facto be deprived of all his spiritual promotions ; and
" that from thenceforth it shall be lawful to and for all Patrons and
" Donors of all and singular the said spiritual promotions or of any
" of them, according to their respective rights and titles, to present
" or collate to the same, as though the person or persons so offending
" or neglecting were dead." The Act then went on to provide for
the acknowledgment and use of the Book of Common Prayer by all
future ministers ; and it farther enacted that all clergymen of every
rank, all heads and fellows of Colleges, all University professors
and lecturers, all schoolmasters, and private tutors in families,-
should before the same Feast of St. Bartholomew 1662 subscribe a
formula including, (1) the Non-Resistance or Passive Obedience
Oath prescribed for Civic Officers in the Corporations Act, (2) An
oath of Conformity to the Liturgy, and (3) An oath renouncing the
Covenant. The penalty for default in each case was to be loss of
office. Yet farther it enacted that all public preaching by persons
disabled by this Act should subject offenders to three months'
imprisonment for each offence, and also that no one should be
a schoolmaster or private tutor in a family without " license
obtained from his respective Archbishop, Bishop, or Ordinary of
the Diocese," under pain of three months' imprisonment for the first
offence, and the same and a fine of £5 for every subsequent offence.
It enacted, moreover, that, after the said Day of St. Bartholomew,
or Aug. 24, 1662, no one should be a minister of the Church of
England, or should administer the sacrament, who had not by that
time,, whatever his previous ordination or calling, received due
episcopal ordination, the penalty for every offence to be £100.
Act Settling the Militia in Counties (May 19, 1662). In an Act
MOBE BEVENGES. 227
to this effect there were clauses requiring that every Lieutenant or
Deputy-lieutenant of a county, and every militia officer or soldier,
should take, in addition to the Oaths of Supremacy and Allegiance,
the Passive Obedience Oath imposed by the Corporations Act and
the Act of Uniformity.
A new Press Act (May 19, 1662) :— By this Act a universal
Censorship of the Press was re-established. Every law-boot or
law-pamphlet was to require the licence of the Lord Chancellor,
or one of the Chief Justices, or the Chief Baron; books of
history and politics were to be licensed by one of the Secretaries
of State ; books of heraldry by the Earl Marshal ; and all other
books, whether of poetry, prose-fiction, philosophy, science, or
divinity, by the Archbishop of Canterbury or the Bishop of London.
These Licensers-in-chief might, of course, act through deputies.
There were to be severe penalties for press offences, and powers
of search for detecting such. The Act was to be in force for two
years ^- It was renewed, however, in subsequeat Sessions, so as
to remain an Act of Charles till 1679'.
Such were the most characteristic enactments of the second
year of the Restoration and of Clarendon's Premiership. Of
the unabated royalist revengefulness of which they were the
formal outcome there had been several less formal proofs
during the sitting of the Parliament. — In September 1661,
by authority of a royal warrant to Dr. Earle, Dean of
Westminster, dated the 9th of that month, and signed by
Secretary Nicholas, the bodies of about twenty persons who
had been buried in Westminster Abbey since 1641 were dug
up. and thrown promiscuously into " a pit in St. Margaret's
churchyard adjoining." Among them were the bodies of
John Pym, Admiral Blake, Admiral Dean, Dr. Isaac Dorislaus,
Colonel Humphrey Mackworth, Thomas May, the poet and
historian. Dr. Twisse, the prolocutor of the Westminster
Assembly, and Stephen Marshall, the Smectymnuan. The
bodies of four women, named in the same warrant, were taken
from their graves at the same time and buried in the same
pit. One was the body of " Mrs. Elizabeth Cromwell," the
Lord Protector's venerable mother, who had been buried in
the Abbey four years before himself; the others were the
bodies of "Mrs. Desborough," Cromwell's sister, "Anne
1 statutes at Large, with references to Lords and Commons Journals,.aiid to Pari.
Hist,
Q 3
238 LIFE OF MILTON AND HISTORY OF HIS TIME.
Fleetwood," apparently an infant grand-daughter of his, and
" Mrs. Bradshaw," probably the wife of President Bradshaw.
Among "the Cromwellian bodies," as Wood calls them, so
dug up, the omission of that of Lady Claypole, Cromwell's
favourite daughter, can hardly have been accidental. Her
body was permitted to remain in the chapel of Henry \ II,
where it had been buried in August 1658. — Equally sympto-
matic in another way had been the hanging, drawing, and
quartering, on the 26th of December, 1661, of John James, a
preacher of the " Seventh-Day Baptist " denomination, for
what was called treasonable language in the pulpit. They
wanted an example from among such preaching sectaries, and
had dragged this poor man, as suitable for the purpose, out of
his conventicle in one of the city alleys, where detectives had
been catching his words. His wife having gone with a peti-
tion for him to the king, his Majesty's reply, on learning her
errand, was " O ! Mr. James ! he is a sweet gentleman " ;
and, on going a second time, she had again been turned away. —
Then, on the 27th of January, the anniversary of the sentence
of death on King Charles, Lord Monson, Sir Henry Mildmay,
and Robert Wallop, the three regicide judges in the Tower
whose lives had been spared by the Indemnity Act, and who
had been doomed only, to perpetual imprisonment, were duly,
according to the Act of July 30, carted from the Tower to
Tyburn, and thence back, with the ropes round their necks.
It was intended that the ceremony should be periodical so
long as the criminals should be alive. — But, not long after,
London had the pleasure of seeing a real and completed
execution of three others of the regicides. Barkstead, Corbet,
and Okey, fugitives since the Restoration, had been caught in
Holland by the activity of Sir George Downing, now resident
for Charles there, as he had formerly been for Cromwell.
Having traced them to Delft under false names, he had pro-
cured an order from the States for their arrest. In such
cases of reluctant extradition it was usual for the States
to save their conscience by giving private warning to the
offenders, with time to escape ; but Downing was too quick.
Having gone himself to Delft, he had seized the three
THE NEW QUEEN. 229
together in the same room, " sitting by a fireside, with a pipe
of tobacco and a cup of beer," and, though with some demur
among the Dutch, had shipped them home in a frigate. Taken
on sledges from the Tower, Barkstead eating something, Okey
sucking an orange, and Corbet reading a book, they were
hanged, drawn, and quartered at Tyburn on Saturday, the
19th of April, 1662. There seems to have been some pity
for them, and Downing's part in the matter did not increase
his popularity. It was remembered that at one time he had
" owed his bread " to Okey, having begun life in England
as a chaplain in Okey's dragoon regiment ; and so " all the
world," Pepys tells us, " takes notice of him for a most
ungrateful villain for his pains." Bat he was a prosperous
gentleman, M.P. for Morpeth in the Parliament, his Majesty's
envoy in Holland, and had the Earl of Carlisle's sister for his
wife^.
The Portuguese Infanta, Catharine of Braganza, had arrived
in England just before the prorogation of the Parliament,
conveyed from Lisbon by the Earl of Sandwich. Charles met
her at Portsmouth ; where they were married, according to the
English service, by Sheldon, Bishop of London, on the 21st
of May, 1662, having been previously married, according to
Romish rites, by the Abbe Lord Aubigny, a kinsman of the
King. Thence they came, on the 29th, Charles's birthday,
to Hampton Court, wherg they lived in state till the end of
August, the new Queen forming her first acquaintance with
English ways, and undergoing, in particular the dreadful
discipline of beiilg compelled, though after tears, protests,
faintings, sulkings, and mad little rages, to receive Mrs.
Palmer. That lady, however, was Mrs. Palmer no longer.
She was Countess of Castlemaine, a patent having been made
out in the preceding December for creating her husband Earl
of Castlemaine and Baron of Limerick in the Irish peerage.
The new Earl, congratulating himself on the King's marriage,
1 ColoneWhester'sWestminsterAbiey Pepys, Jan. 27, 1661-2, and April 17 and
Registers, pp. 521—523 (warrant lor dis- 19, 1662 ; Mereurius PviMcus of March
interring the Cromwellian bodies, with 6—13 and March 13—20, 1661-2, and of
notes to the several names) ; Wood's April 10—17 and April 17— 2i, 1662 ;
Fasti I. 371— 372 and II. 153 ; Neal, SiV^Qfs Oradmites of Harmrd Univer-
IV. 477 — i84 (Supplement by Toulmin); sity, I. 28—53 (Memoir of Downing).
230 LIFE OF MILTdN AND HISTORY OF HIS TIME.
wished to be reconciled to his wife ; but, as the arrangement
did not suit, they again parted company. On the 15th of
July she removed from London to Richmond, to be near
Hampton Court. She had already been there, and had
been presented by the King to the Q^een for the first
time, within a day or two after their arrival in the palace.
The first outbreak had been then, but six weeks had tamed
the spirit of the poor little foreigner. She was a very
little lady, of dark complexion, and rather flat and broad
form, "not very charming," and with an upper tooth too
projecting, but altogether with a good, modest, and innocent
lookj "and some wit and sense." Charles's account of his
first impression of her was that " he thought they had
brought him a bat." The Portuguese ladies she had brought
with her, old and young, were sad frights ^.
While the King and the new Queen were spending their
honeymoon at Hampton Court, with no lack of brilliant
company, there was the trial of Vane and Lambert in London.
It began on the 2nd of June. The principle on which they
were tried was that Charles II. had been King de facto, as
well as de jure, from the moment of his father's death, and
that therefore their actings through the Commonwealth had
been high treason ; and the conduct of the trial, even on this
" senseless sophistry," as Hallam calls it, was grossly unfair.
Vane behaved with great boldness, while Lambert was
studiously submissive. On the 11th both were found guilty.
It depended then on the King whether he would keep his
promise given to the two Houses of the Convention Parlia-
ment in answer to their joint petition of Sept. 5, 1660. The
petition had been that, if Vane and Lambert should be
1 Pepya in several passages tetweeu tusks. "If you will oblige me eternally.
May and September 1662; Clarendon, "make this business as easyto me as you
1085—1092 ; Burnet, I. 298—300, with " can, of what opinion soever you are
note by the Earl of Dartmouth. In the "of; for I am resolved to go through
Appendix to Vol.- XII. of Dr. Lingard's " with this matter, let what will come
Histoiy of England (2nd edition) there "of it, which again I solemnly swear
is printed an extract from a letter of "before Almighty God . . . And whoso-
Charles to Clarendon among the Lans- " ever I find to be my Lady Castle-
downeMSS. on the subject "of making "maine's enemy in this matter, I do
my Lady Castlemaine of my wife's "promise upon my word to be his
bedchamber." It is very characteristic, " enemy as long as I live."
and reminds one of a boar showing his
ST. EAETHOLOMEW SUNDAY, 1662. 231
attainted, yet his Majesty would be pleased to remit " execu-
tion as to their lives " ; and the King's answer stands recorded
in the Lords' Journals of Sept. 8 in these terms, " The Lord
" Chancellor reported that he had presented the petition of
" both Houses to the King conoerning Sir Henry Vane and
" Colonel Lambert, and his Majesty grants the desires in the
"said petition." The King had now changed his mind.
Having heard of the bold behaviour of Vane at the trial, he
had written to Clarendon from Hampton Court on the 7th
of June, commenting on the same, and adding, " If he has
"given new occasion to be hanged, certainly he is too
" dangerous a man to let live, if we can honestly put him out
" of the way." Honestly or not, they did put him out of
the way. The sentence pronounced on him on the 11th was
that of hanging, disembowelling, quartering, &c., at Tyburn ;
but, on the intercession of his relatives, this was commuted
into beheading on Tower Hill. On the 14th of June his
head was there struck off, after he had made a long and un-
daunted speech, amid interruptions from drums and trumpets
posted under the scaffold. He was fifty years of age. Lambert,
who was about eight years younger, was to live for thirty
years more ^.
The fatal day of St. Bartholomew was Sunday, August 24,
1 662. Everybody knows what happened then. About 2000
of the clergy of the Church of England, or considerably over
one-fifth of the entire body, found themselves ejected from
their livings because they had not complied with the con-
ditions of the Act of Uniformity ; while about 500 more, who
had either already been ejected on independent grounds since
the Restoration, or had been engaged as preachers in training
for livings, found themselves silenced, and incapacitated for
the clerical profession. The following table exhibits the
ascertained or calculated proportions of the sufferers, ejected
and silenced together, in the different parts of the kingdom :—
London, "Westminster, and Oxford University ... 56
Southwark 119 Cambridge Univeisity . . 46
1 Burnet, I. 277—280 ; Hallam, II. nals of Sept. ' 5 and 8, 1660 ; Pepys,
325 — 328 ; Lords and Commons Jour- June 14, 1662.
232
LIFE OF MILTON AND HI8T0BT OF HIS TIME.
Bedfordshire 16
Berkshire 31
Buckinghamshire ... 34
Cambridgeshire .... 19
Cheshire 54
Cornwall 50
Cumberland 30
Derbyshire 46
Devonshire 142
Dorsetshire 67
Durham 29
Essex 133
Gloucestershire .... 60
Hampshire 59
Herefordshire 18
Hertfordshire ..... 35
Huntingdonshire. ... 9
Kent 85
Lancashire 97
Leicestershire 47
Lincolnshire 52
Middlesex 36
Norfolk 78
Northamptonshire . . .61
Northumberland .... 44
Nottinghamshire . . . 40
Oxfordshire ..... 27
Eutlandshire ..... 8
Shropshire 50
Somersetshire 104
Staffordshire 56
Suffolk 105
Surrey 28
Sussex 77
Warwickshire 45
Westmoreland .... 9
Wiltshire 66
Worcestershire . . . . 42
Yorkshire 144
Wales 93
Total
2447^
The wrench to English society represented by this table
must have been terrible at the time. It was not only the dis-
S3ttlement of so many families, the breaking of old links, the
exchange of a customary certainty of livelihood for the un-
certainty of any substitute that might be provided by free
personal exertion or by voluntary contributions from im-
1 Compiled from Calamy's Noncon-
formists' Manual, methodized by Samuel
Palmer, edition of 1802 in three volumes
octavo. There is an Appendix there of
twenty-five more who were silenced,
raising the total to 2472. This includes,
however. Independents, Baptists, and
others who had heen ejected before St.
Bartholomew's Day, and also a small
percentage who afterwards conformed
and went back. The Index to the
volumes enumerates the ^eeted at about
2300, of whom in round numbers 2000
are usually debited to St. Bartholomew's
day itself. There are memoirs or notices
of most of the ejected and sUenoed in
the volumes, with lists of the writings
of a great many of them, still remem-
bered more or less in the Nonconformist
world. The list of the more eminent
includes Joseph AUeine, Dr. Samuel
Annealey, Simeon Ashe, Dr, William
Bates, Richard Baxter, Edward Bowles,
WUliam Bridge, Thomas Brooks, Dr.
Cornelius Surges, Edmund CaJamy,
aenr., Edmimd Calamy, junr., Joseph
Caryl, Thomas Case, Daniel Cawdrey,
Stephen Chamock, Samuel Clarke, Dr.
John Conant, Samuel Cradock, William
Dell, Thomas Doolittle, John Flavel,
Dr. Thomas Goodwin, John Goodwin,
Thomas Gouge, William Greenhill,
Eiohard Heath (Milton's friend and
pupil), Philip Henry (father of Matthew
Henry), Oliver Heywood, John Howe,
Arthur Jackson, Henry JesSey, Dr.
Henry Langley, Samuel Lee, Nicholas
Lockyer, Dr. Thomas Mauton, Dr. In-
crease Mather, Matthew Newcomen,
Philip Nye, Dr. John Owen, John Oxen-
bridge.Matthew Poole, Vavasour Powell,
John Bay (the naturalist). Dr. Gilbert
Eule, Dr. Lazarus Seaman, Dr. William
Spurstow, Dr. Edmund Staunton, John
Tombes, Dr. Anthony Tucknfey, John
Wesley (grandfather of John Wesley),
Dr. Henry WUldnson, Daniel Williams.
ST. BARTHOLOMEW SUNDAY, 1662, SSS"
mediate adherents and a sympathetic public. In comparing
the great English Church-disruption of 1662 with any
similarj though smaller, secession or ejection from an Estab-
lished Church in the British Islands, this has to be re-
membered. In these later cases there have been organization
and calculation of funds beforehand, with freedom of personal
activity afberwards, and of appeal for voluntary assistance and
support. No sucli thing then. The trade of teaching to
which some of the ejected might naturally have betaken
themselves was foreclosed against them by the very Act that
had ejected them ; continued preaching in any public manner
to voluntary congregations of adherents was at the peril of
all ; organization for their support coUeetivelyj or open col-
lection of money for any of them, would have been treated
as sedition and defiance of the law. This explains much in
the contemporary accounts of the hardships that then began.
"Hundreds of able ministers, with their wives and children,"
says Baxter, " had neither house nor bread. . . . The people's
"poverty was so great that they were not able much to
" relieve their ministers. The jealousy of the State and the
" malice of their enemies were so great that people that were
" willing durst not be known to give to their ejected pastors,
"lest it should be said that they maintained schism, or
" were making collections for some plot or insurrection. . . .
" Some of them thought that it was their duty to preach
" publicly in the streets or fields while the people desired it,
" and not to cease their work for fear of men, till they lay in
"jails or were banished. Others thought that a continued
" endeavour to benefit their people privately would be more
" serviceable to the Church than one or two sermons and a
"jail, at such a time when the multitudes of sufferers, and
" the odious titles put upon them, obscured and clogged the
"benefit of sufferings." All other contemporary authorities
tell the same tale as Baxter. " Though they were as frugal
" as possible," says one, " they could hardly live. Some lived
" on little more than brown bread and water ; many had but
" eight or ten pounds a year to maintain a family, so that a
" piece of flesh has not come to their tables in six weeks' time 5
234 LIFE OF MILTON AND HISTOEY OF HIS TIME.
" their allowance could scarce afford them bread and cheese.
" One went to plough six days, and preached on the Lord's
" day. Another was forced to cut tobacco for a livelihood ^."
But the consequences of the St. Bartholomew to English
society -were not exhausted within the lives of the immediate
suflPerers. It is from that date that there has come down,
in the sense in which we now understand it, the great division
of the English people into The Church of England, and
The Nonconfokmists. There had been Nonconformity, both
name and thing, in various fashions, long before; but now
the word acquired a definite significance. All who had
remained adherents of the State Church in August 1662 on
the terms of the Act of Unifomiity of the preceding May,
and all that might succeed them in that adherence, were and
were to be The Church op England ; and all that had not
so adhered, or might in future not so adhere, were and were
to be The Nonconformists. Nay, the subdivisions of each
body were ihen established very much as they have lasted
since. The necessity and obligation of Diocesan Episcopacy ;
the necessity and obligation of Episcopal ordination for all
the clergy.; the use of the Liturgy and a defined ritual in
worship ; acceptance of State-Control in the Church ; avowed
recognition of monarchical government ia the Stuart line as
of divine right or nearly so, with commensurate reprobation
of the Commonwealth and of the memory of Cromwell ;
profession also of the doctrine of passive obedience, or the
duty of non-resistance to the Crown in. any contingency
whatsoever: — ^these, indeed, were now the principles of the
Church of England, standing on legal record, and to which
1 Baxter,!. 384—890; Neal,IV.380— of the old Church of England clergy at
390 (with quotations from a tract called various times during the twenty years
Conformist PleaforiheJfonconformists); of Puritan ascendancy, represented in
Burnet, I. 312— 322.— An endless ques- Walker's Sufferings of the Clergy. The
tiou between the Choroh of England question involves reciprocal challenges
and the Nonconformists, not uninterest- of the accuracy of Calamy's statistics
ing historically, is the question which on the one side and of Walker's on the
was the worse persecution, affected other. See ante, Vol. III. pp. 28—30,
the greater number, and caused most Vol. IV. p. 671, and Vol. V. pp. 52— 53
misery,— the ejection of Puritan minis- and pp. 61—64 ; and compare Hallam's
ters in mass after the Kestoration, re- Constit. Hist. (10th edit.), II. 164 — 166
presented in Calamy's NoneonformAsts' and II. 340—342, for a calm estimate.
Mamutl, or the prior ejection of so many
ST. BARTHOLOMEW SUNDAY, 1662. 233
all within the Church officially were pledged in common. But
there were diversities of temper, diversities of prior belief
and education, different degrees of conscientiousness, and con-
sequent differences in the interpretation of the oaths and
standards that had been accepted ; and so, then as now, the
Church of England Clergy, though all massed together in
a Church constituted on the' principles of a very high
Episcopacy, were seen to distribute themselves into, — (1) High
Churchmen, approving of the principles of the constitution, and
thinking none others right ; (.2) LatUudinarians, or Broad
Churchmen, accepting the constitution as convenient, or on
the whole the best, though they would not themselves have
pushed for it by any such means as th« ejection of the
Presbyterians and Independents ; and (3) Low Churchmen,
consisting mainly of Presbyterians who had conformed from
hard necessity, reconciling themselves to Episcopacy rather
than starve, and trying to retain their Calvinism. The
distribution of the Nonconformists, of course, was into (1)
The Presbyterians, (2) The Independents proper, (3) The Baptists,
(4) The Miscellaneous Sectaries, among whom The (Quakers
were now by far the most considerable both for numbers and
for courage. Whether the Eoman Catholics were to be
classed with the Nonconformists generally,- and whether
among the sectaries in that body, were questions of specu-
lative politics. Practically, they stood apart.
Towards the end of the year 1662, Clarendon, looking
about him, must have been contented, on the whole, with
the success so far of his policy for perfecting the Restoration.
The success, in some respects, had outgone his own expecta-
tions and efforts. In recollection of the King's promises
from Breda and subsequent declarations, he had thought
himself bound, on several occasions through 1661 and 1662,
to do something towards retaining the Presbyterians, or some
of them, within the Church. Even while the Act of
Uniformity was passing through the Lords, he had favoured
the proposal of a clause for enabling the King to suspend it,
or temper its application in practice. These, however, seem
236 LIFE OF MILTON AND HISTORY OF HIS TIME.
to have been mere hesitations in the interest of good faith ;
and, when the zeal of the bishops and High Church party
had swept away the notion of any concession whatever to the
Presbyterians, Clarendon seems to have felt himself relieved
from a coil of difficulties. In the Continuation of his Life
he even suppresses the mention of his latest efforts towards
a compromise with the Presbyterians, and adopts the high-
handed policy with them as having been truly and heartily
his own from the first. " It is an unhappy policy, and always
" unhappily applied," he says, " to imagine that that classis of
" men can be recovered and reconciled by partial concessions."
Again, of the Act of Uniformity he says, " The Chancellor
" was one of those who would have been glad that the Act
*' had not been clogged with many of those clauses which he
" foresaw might produce some inconveniences ; but, when it
" was passed, he thought it absolutely necessary to see
" obedience paid to it without any connivance." Accordingly,
he had been greatly troubled when he found that the King
had been so " irresolute " as to yield to the importunacy of
the Presbyterian petitioners, and promise them, after the Act
had passed, that its operation should be suspended ; and,
though, at a conference on the subject with the King at
Hampton Court, he had said that he " should not dissuade his
Majesty from doing what he had promised," he had been glad
when the contrary opinion prevailed, and the King had
declared himself willing to see the la,w take its course. All
that had been done in Church and State to the end of 1662
had therefore, we repeat, been Clarendon's own, or substantially
Clarendonian ^.
There had by this time been some changes in the Privy
Council and Ministry round Clarendon. It had been a gain
to him that the Act of July 30, 1661, readmitting the bishops
to the House of Lords and ecclesiastics generally to civil
offices, had enabled the King to call Archbishop Juxon and
Bishop Sheldon into the Council. Juxon was old and feeble ;
but Sheldon's energy had made itself felt, and was to be felt
1 Clarendon, 1075—1082 ; Christie's Life of Shaftesbury, I. 262— 26i.
MINISTEEIAL CHANGES. 287
still more after August 1663, when, by the death of Juxon,
he was to be promoted from the bishopric of London to the
primacy. Again, Viscount Say and Sele having died in
April 1662, the office oi Privy Seal had gone to Lord Roberts,
to compensate him for the Lord Beputyship of Ireland, his
tenure of which had been annulled by the re-appointment of
Ormond, Nov. 2, 1661, to his former dignity of the Lord
Lieutenancy of Ireland complete. In the same month Prihee
Rupert, who was henceforth to reside mainly in England,
and the versatile and sumptuous Duke of Buckingham, had
both been brought into the Council together. None of these
changes, all made before the King's marriage, had indicated
any desire on the King's part to check Clarendon's premier-
ship or to thwart his policy. The same cannot be said of
some appointments by the King now to be mentioned. In
October 1662, old Sir Edward Nicholas, Clarendon's faithful
adherent, having been induced to retire from his Secretary-
ship of State, with a6''10,000 as a compensation, the person ap-
pointed to succeed him was Sir Henry Rennet, who had been
Charles's envoy in Spain and his companion in his remarkable
visit to that country in 1659. About the same time Sir
Charles Rerkeley, hitherto Comptroller of the household, and
a prodigious favourite with Charles and the Duke of York,
notwithstanding his infamous conduct in the matter of the
duke's marriage with Clarendon's daughter, was promoted to
the Treaswrership of the Household, left vacant by the death
of Lord Comwallis in the preceding January, and the Comp-
trollership went to Sir Hugh Pollard, M.P. for Devonshire ^,
There was a significance, unfavourable for Clarendon, in these
appointments. Rut this requires explanation.
It was from no mere " irresoluteness " that the King had
hesitated about the Act of Uniformity, and proposed to
suspend it in favour of the Presbyterians. It was because he
had a secret, though indolent, policy of his own, distinct from
Clarendon's.
Thouo-h it had been made penal by Act of Parliament to
' Particulars and dates gathered from son's Political Irdex, De Brett's Peerage,
Clarendon, British Chronologist, Beat- and Anthony Wood.
238 LIFE OF MILTON AND HISTORY OF HIS TIME.
say that Charles was a Roman Catholic, we are able now to
defy the Act of Parliament. Charles had come into England
a Roman Catholic, and had remained such all the while that
his Prime Minister had been re-establishing in his name the
Protestant Episcopal Church of England. No need to go
back upon the question when and where Charles was con-
verted to Roman Catholicism, or upon the question how far
Clarendon, who had again and again proclaimed to the world
the King's exemplary constancy to the Protestant relig^ion,
had voluntarily refrained from too minute inquiry. The very
necessity for a Parliamentary enactment against calling the
King a Papist shows what was the public gossip, and
Clarendon had better means of information than the public.
But Clarendon cannot have known, Clarendon would have to
shoot himself had he known, the full state of the case. This
was that Charles was not only a Roman Catholic, but had
since his Restoration been cherishing that design of bringing
the British Islands back with himself to the Church of Rome
which had been pressed upon him by Catholic powers abroad
while his Restoration seemed possible only by their means.
When back in England miraculously by other means, he
seemsj indeed, to have dismissed the idea from his mind for
a while, and to have revelled in the luxury of being King
anyhow, on Clarendonian principles or not, with abundance
of money and pleasure and no trouble. Nor was he ever
likely to make himself a martyr, or even a labourer, for
Roman Catholicism or for any other religion. But he had
been turning matters over in his mind in a careless and yet
tenacious way, and with other advices than Clarendon's. His
liking for the society of Roman Catholics, English and Irish,
which had never been quite disguised, had become more and
more apparent. The Earl of Bristol, whom he had been obliged
to dismiss from his Privy Council while abroad, because the Earl
had made too great haste to profess his Roman Catholicism
to the Pope and all the world, had never ceased to be in his
confidence. Indeed, while the negotiation for the King's
marriage with the Portuguese Infanta had been going on,
the iEarl, in consequence of a sudden whim of the King that
CEYPT0-0ATH0LICI8M OF THE COURT. 239
he might do better than have the Portuguese wife they had
selected for him, had been sent on a private mission to Parma,
to report on the personal attractions of two princesses there,
who had been highly recommended to Charles by the Spanish
ambassador. Back from this bootless mission, he had resumed
his place about Charles before the arrival of the plain
Portuguese lady yho had been- deemed most eligible, after
all, for the Queenship^. — Even with the bat from Portugal
for Queen, instead of one of the Parmese beauties, the condition
of things at Charles's Court from August 1663 onwards had
been peculiarly favourable for the resuscitation in his mind of
the idea of exchanging his erypto-Catholicism for an open
profession of the Roman Catholic faith. His new Queen had
her chapel, her priests, and confessors; his mother, Queen
Henrietta-Maria, who had come over again from France, to
make the acquaintance of the new Queen, and to try how
long she eould stay in England, had also brought Roman
Catholic priests and servants in her train ; the number of
avowed Roman Catholics at Court, and the conveniences for
Roman Catholic worship there, hadl been largely increased.
And so, though conversions among the Protestants of the
Court were not yet much heard of, the state of mind which we
have called erypto-Catholicism, consisting in a secret inclina-
tion to Roman Catholicism and a willingness to go over to it
openly if there should ever be sufficient occasion, had come
grieatly into fashion. There were now many crypto-Catholics
at Court besides Charles himself. Lady Castlemaine was one ;
Bennet was another ; Berkeley was another ; indeed, the faction
that gathered nightly in Lady Castlemaine's apartments, where
Clarendon and Southampton disdained to be seen, may be de-
scribed as the crypto-Catholic faction. — There was a meaning,
therefore, in the introduction of Bennet into the ministry as
Secretary of State instead of Nicholas, and in the promotion
of Berkeley in the household in October 1663. They were
signs that the King was then strengthening the crypto-Ca-
tholic interest, and building it up about him, for some reason
> Clarendot, 1039, 10i2, and 1070.
240 LIFE OF MILTON AND HISTOET OF HIS TIME.
of opposition or counterpoise to the policy of Clarendon. So
much Clarendon could and did. perceive. He may have
guessed more, but can hardly have known all.
In the same month of October 1662 in which the crypto-
Catholic Bennet was made Secretary of State, a certain
Richard Bellings, a Roman Catholic gentleman who had
played an important part in the Irish Roman Catholic con-
federacy, was despatched to Rome by Charles on a secret
mission. This was with Clarendon's cognisance, and with his
approval, so far as he understood, the purpose. That was to
obtain from Pope Alexander VII. a cardinal's hat for Charles's
kinsman, the Abbe Lord Aubigny, who had. performed the
Roman Catholic ceremony of his marriage with the Queen
and was now the Queen's almoner. To forward this object,
Bellings carried with him letters from the King himself to the
Pope, and to cardinals Chigi and Barberini, letters from the
Queen and the Queen-mother to another cardinal, and. also,
it would seem, letters from Clarendon to several cardinals^
all in the same strain. They solicited the cardinalate for
Aubigny, partly in acknowledgment of the indulgence the
King had shown to the English Roman Catholics since
his restoration, partly as a means and reason for farther
benefit and protection to the King's Roman Catholic sub-
jects. The negotiation was to be conducted with the utmost
secrecy, and Bellings was to seem to be in Rome only on busi-
ness of his own. But underneath the secret there was a
deeper secret/ which it is impossible to suppose that Clarendon
had penetrated. If Bellings should succeed in his application
for the cardinalate for Aubigny, but not otherwise, he was to
open a larger negotiation. It was for nothing less than the
reconciliation of Charles and his subjects collectively to the
Church of Rome on certain proposed terms. The terms were
contained in a profession of faith, and an explanatory paper
of twenty-four articles, to be submitted to the Pope. It has
been ascertained that Bellings, without waiting for the
success of his smaller negotiation, did open the larger, and
thatj when he returned to England, early in 1663, it was
with a courteous explanation from the Pope of the reasons
king's toleration edict. 241
why he could not oblige Charles by making Lord Aubigny
a cardinal, and with a request from his Holiness for farther
information on the other subject, the proposed terms of the
readmission of Charles and his subjects to Catholicity not
having been satisfactory in all points. In fact, the mission
of Sellings had failed ^-
Before Charles knew that it had failed, however, he had
taken a crypto-Catholic step at home, in calculated con-
nexion with his overtures to the Pope. Might not the
position of Eoman Catholics in England be much improved
meanwhile, and might not the establishment of Roman
Catholicism in England be facilitated, by accustoming the
country, first of all, to a toleration of the Roman Catholics,
not separately, as if by special favour to the Roman Catholic
religion, but on the principle of a broad and generous
liberalism which should include the Presbyterians and other
Protestant Nonconformists ? By the Act of Uniformity and
its sequel on St. Bartholomew's day, the vast body of the
English Presbyterians were now in such a miserable condition
that indulgence on any terms would surely be welcomed by
them as a boon. The question of their comprehension
within the Established Church was wholly at an end. The
one and only question for Presbyterians now, as for all
other Nonconformists, was that of liberty or toleration out of
• the State-Church. Were the penal clauses of the Act of
Uniformity, silencing their ministers and breaking up their
congregations, to remain in force, or might there not even
yet, by the King's grace or otherwise, be such an indulgence
for Presbyterians, and for other peaceable Nonconformists, as
should enable them to remain in England with some comfort,
instead of emigrating, as many of them proposed, to Holland
or America? It was of this despair among the Presbyterians
1 The move startling facts in this pamphlet (which somehow has failed
paragraph were first made public in to produce in my mind an impression of
1863, from documents in the archives of absolute authenticity in all points) was
the Jesuit Society at Eome, by Father given in the Gentleman's Magamne for
Giuseppe Boero, in a pamphlet of eighty Jan. 1866. The mere fact that Bellings
pages, entitled Istoria della Conversions had gone to Eome, and also the minor
alUi, Ghiesa CattoUoa de Carlo II., Re purpose of his mission, transpired easily
■ d' inghiherra, eavata da seritture auien- enough at the time, ndtwithstanding his
tiche ed originali. An abstract of the ^ eiforts at secrecy. ■
VOL. VI. E
242 LIFE OF MILTON AND HISTOBY OF HIS TIME.
and so many other sects under the pressure of the Act of
Uniformity, this passion among them for some relief, that
Charles and his Roman Catholic and crypto-Catholic ad-
visers determined to avail themselves for their own ohjects.
It would be doing them wrong to suppose that they had
no feeling for the Presbyterians and other Protestant Non-
conformists on their own account. Roman Catholicism,
though it cannot actnowledge the theory or the sentiment
of religious liberty where it is itself absolute, has always
learnt something of both wherever it has been itself under
oppression, and has then, often for a long while together,
distinguished itself by using the language and the arguments
of religious liberalism, with real belief, and for the general
benefit. There is evidence also that Charles was ashamed
at the non-performance, the actual violation, of his promises
from Breda of a general liberty of conscience when he should
be restored, and out of humour with that relentless high-
church rigidity of Clarendon and the English bishops which
had compelled him to appear as a promise-breaker. Not the
less is it certain that the profession of religious liberalism
with which he astonished his subjects in the end of 1662 was
in calculated connexion with his negotiation with the Pope,
and was motived by the same desire for the advancement of
Roman Catholicism and its ultimate establishment.
According to Burnet, the matter first took shape at a private
meeting of the chief Roman Catholics in London in the Earl
of Bristol's house, where the Earl himself moved, and Lord
Aubigny seconded, a resolution to the effect that it would be
the best policy for the English Roman Catholics to " bestir
themselves " for a toleration of all Nonconformists. Burnet
Mds that Bennet, though absent, was in the secret, and
that, though Bristol appeared as the manager, the plot " had
a deeper root and was designed by the King himself." At
all events, on the 26th of Deaember 1662, after more or
less of discussion in the Council, there went forth, "from our
Court at Whitehall," a Royal Declaration' embodying what
had been agreed on. The Declaration might have been fitly
entitled Declaration of a New H.om^ Policy, for it enumerated
king's toleration edict. ' 243
the criticisms to which his Majesty observed that his Go-
vernment hitherto had been exposed, and, while replying to
•those criticisms, promised more attention in future to such
matters as care of the public morals, retrenchment of expenses,
and the promotion of trade and industry. Essentially, how-
ever, the document was a Declaration of a New Ecclesiastical
Policy, or a Declaration of a General Religious Toleration.
Referring to his Majesty's promises from Breda of indulgence
for religious dissent, and pointing out that the delay in the
performance of those promises had arisen from the necessity
of giving precedency to the great subject of the Constitution
of the Church Establishment, it continued : " That being
" done, we are glad to renew to all our subjects concerned in
" those promises of indulgence this assurance, That, as for
" what concerns the penalties upon those who, living peace-
" ably, do not conform to the Church of England, through
" scruple or tenderness of misguided conscience, but modestly-
" and without scandal perform their devotions in their own
' " way, we shall make it our special care, as far as in us lies,
" without invading the freedom of Parliament, to incline
" their wisdom, at the next approaching sessions, to concur
" with us in making some Act for that purpose that may
" enable us to exercise with a more universal satisfaction that
" power of dispensing which we conceive to be inherent in
" us." To obviate any alarm that the purpose of the Decla-
ration might be specially to benefit the Roman Catholics, it
is expressly stated that his Majesty meant to be less liberal
to them than to the Protestant Nonconformists. Acknow-
ledging the great services rfendered by many Roman Catholics
both to his father and to himself; he would not indeed " ex-
clude them from all benefit from such an Act of Indulgence" ;
but ''they are not to expect an open toleration,'^ and Par-
liament must devise something in their favour of less amount
than that^.
This Declaration, even had no intention lurked in it more
than appeared on the surface, would have been a distinct
1 Bumet, I. 333-338 ; Pari. Hist. 257—259 ; Neal, IV. 400—401.
K 2
,244 LIFE OF MILTON AND HISTORY OF HIS TIME.
challenge of the policy of Clarendon. It had gone forth
against his will, if not against his protest ; and it represented
a coalition against him of Roman Catholics, crypto-Catholics,
and such Protestant liberals as Buckingham and Ashley,
all agreeing to attack his Premiership by the demand of a
toleration for Nonconformists. Clarendon was fully aware of
this, and also of the resource of strength on which he might
depend even against such a coalition. It lay in that " next
approaching sessions " of Parliament to which the King's
Declaration, while maintaining a dispensing power in the
execution of ecclesiastical statutes to be part of the royal
prerogative, had practically appealed the whole question.
That " sessions," the Second Session of the Parliament, met on
the 18th of February 1662-3, when the Declaration was not
two months old. Clarendon did not then need to take up
the challenge for himself. It was taken up by the two
Houses for him. The history of the session, from the day of
its meeting to its prorogation on the 27th of July, may be
summed up in the statement that Parliament rejected and
baffled the crypto-Catholic policy of the King, Bristol,
Bennet, and the rest, supported though it was by Ashley
and other liberals, and maintained and re-proclaimed the
no-toleration policy of Clarendon, equally against Boman
Catholics and against Protestant Nonconformists. The de-
tails are not uninteresting.
The King, in his opening speech, recommended to them
the toleration policy of his Declaration with unusual earnest-
ness, though with the usual assurance that he had no inten-
tion of favouring Popery, and that in the. sincerity of his
personal Protestantism and Church-of-Englandism he would
not yield to any, " not to the bishops themselves." Then, on
the 23rd of February, Lord Roberts, who had been selected
for the duty as an orthodox Presbyterian and beyond sus-
picion, brought a bill into the Upper House for giving effect
to the Declaration by enabling his Majesty to dispense with
the Act of Uniformity and other ecclesiastical statutes so far
as to grant licences at his pleasure to peaceable Protestant
Nonconformists for the exercise of their religion. At once
Bristol's attack on clarendon. 245
the opposition both to the Declaration and to the proposed
Act was resolute and triumphant. There was a remonstrance
from the Commons to the King, Feb. 27, to the effect that
it was " in no sort advisable that there be any indulgence
" to such persons who presume to dissent from the Act of
" Uniformity " ; and Lord Roberts's Bill in the other House
perished in committee after vehement denunciations of it by
Clarendon and Southampton. The King and his associates
were foiled" even on the question of a toleration of the Pres-
byterians or other Protestant Nonconformists. But this was
not all. Though in Lord Roberts's bill the dispensing power
asked had been expressly for Protestant Nonconformists only^
Roman Catholics to have no benefit from it, the HouseSj with
that sure instinct which guides public bodies, had divined the
driftj and had taken alarm. On the 31st of March there
was a petition from the two Houses to his Majesty, repre-
senting the ominous increase of Jesuits and Roman Catholic
priests in the kingdom, and begging him to issue his pro-
clamation for expelling all such, except those permitted to be
about the Queen by her marriage contract, and those allowed
by law to attend on foreign ambassadors. To this also the
King had to yield. In short, the crypto-Catholic policy,
designed for the benefit of the Roman Catholics, had roused
the Parliament, the Church, and the nation at large, to a most
violent animosity against that particular class of Noncon-
formists, and the Clarendonian policy had been confirmed as
well against them as against the Presbyterians and Protestant
sectaries.
The King had bfeen immeasurably offended by Clarendon's
opposition to Lord Roberts's Bill, and had told him so.
The whole Court knew the fact, and regarded Clarendon's
reign as over. " It seems the present favourites now," writes
Pepys on the 15th of May 1663, " are my Lord Bristol, Duke
« of Buckingham, Sir H. Bennet, my Lord Ashley, and Sir
" Charles Berkeley ; who, among them, have cast my Lord
" Chancellor upon his back, past ever getting up again." It
was Bristol that stepped forth from . the rest to ensure this
perpetual prostration of the man whom so many, for various
246 LIFE OF MILTON AND HISTOKT OF HIS TIME.
reasons^ agreed in disliking. On the 10th of July he pre-
sented to the Lords, in his own single name, a series of
articles of impeachment for high treason against Clarendon.
They were most extraordinary articles, containing a jumble
of mutually conflicting accusations. On the one hand, much
was founded on reported discourses of Clarendon, arrogating
to himself the credit of being the one unflinching champion
of Protestant orthodoxy against the King's Popish tendencies.
Clarendon had said to several persons of the Privy Council
" that his Majesty was dangerously corrupted in his religion
" and inclined to Popery," and " that persons of that religion
" had such access and such credit with him that, unless there
" were a careful eye had unto it, the Protestant religion would
" be overthrown in this kingdom." In particular, on the
removal of Nicholas from the Secretaryship of State to make
way for Bennet, Clarendon had been heard to say " that his
Majesty had given ^10,000 to remove a zealous Protestant,
that he might bring in a concealed Papist." So constant
was Clarendon's talk in this strain that it had become the
common saying of his partisans " that, were it not for my
Lord Chancellor's standing in the gap. Popery, would be
introduced into this kingdom." Yet, on the other hand, who
but this self-proclaimed champion of Protestant orthodoxy,
Bristol asked, had been the King's chief adviser and in-
stigator in all those acts and proceedings that looked most
like an intention to bring in Popery, and on which the charge
of such an intention on the part of his Majesty was most
plausibly founded? Here Bristol, in his impeachment of
Clarendon before the Lords, only reverted to an insinuation
he. had already made in a previous speech, which he had been
allowed to deliver to the Commons on a matter personal to
himself and belonging to the jurisdiction of that House. " It
" is true, Mr. Speaker," he had then said, " I am a Catholic
" of the Church of Rome, but not of the Court of Rome : no
" negotiator there of Cardinals' caps for his Majesty's sub-
"jects and domestics; a true Roman Catholic as to the other
"world, but a true Englishman as to this." In the im-
peachment this insinuation was developed more distinctly.
beistol's attack on clarendon. 247
Bellings and his mission to Rome to obtain a Cardinal's hat
for Lord Aubigny were openly mentioned ; the transaction
was denounced as un-Protestant and un-English; and the
whole blame of it was laid at the doors of Clarendon, It was
he that had induced the King to it, " contrary to his own
" reason and resolutions"; it was he that had written letters
to several Cardinals and sent them by Bellings, promising
" exemption to the Roman Catholics of England from the
penal laws in force against them ; " it was he that had thus,
in a manner, acknowledged the Pope's ecclesiastical sove-
reignty in the English realm. All this Bristol offered to
prove against Clarendon, with many special acts of corruption
or tyranny in his administration, insolencies to the King of
various sorts, and an intolerable general presnmptuousness of
speech and behaviour. Clarendon, who tells us that he
replied on the spot, gives only a brief summary of what he
said. He made light, it appears, of the application to the
Pope for a Cardinal's hat for Lord Aubigny, not denying
that he had taken part in that application, but representing
that it was hardly worth talking about, and that, for the rest,
the mission of Bellings had been merely to convey a message
to the Pope from the Queen on a little matter of interest to
herself and to Portugal. He also distinctly declared " that
the King had neither writ to the Pope nor to any other
person in Rome." With the other evidence w^e have, it is
difficult to avoid the belief that Clarendon was here dis-
sembling in his own interest and in the King's. Though he
did not know all that was implied in the mission of Bellings,
he must have known more than it was convenient to acknow-
ledge. Bristol, who probably knew all, and had the King,
as well as Clarendon, at his mercy, seems to have known that
Clarendon's knowledge was but half-knowledge, and therefore
to have thought it safe, and in the King's interest, to speak
out boldly about Bellings's mission, on that side of it on
vvhich he could inculpate Clarendon. Indeed, the whole of
Bristol's impeachment, though extravagant and audacious,
is instructive. It fits in with facts that are known, and
blurts out facts that would not have been known otherwise.
248 LIFE 01" MILTON AND HISTORY OF HIS TIME.
Probably all the sayings it attributes to Clarendon had been
actually uttered by him. All in all, though it was a strange
and unusual impeachment, it was uncomfortable for Clarendon
by its frankness ; and it remained to be seen how the Lords
would deal with it.
The Lords were as loyal to Clarendon personally as they
had been to his policy. They threw out Bristol's paper on
the legal ground that a charge of high treason could not be
originated by one peer against another in the House of Peers
and also because all Bristol's charges together, even if they
were true, did not amount to treason. Bristol was at the same
time disowned by the King, who had in vain tried to dissuade
him from that form of attack on Clarendon, and who, when
a copy of the impeachment was sent him by the Lords, had
replied that " to his own certain knowledge " some of the
charges were untrue, and that the paper contained " scan-
dalous reflections" against himself, and was a libel upon
his government. The defeated accuser had to retire from
the Court in disgrace, as one who had overreached himself
and blundered ; and, at the prorogation of the Parlia-
ment on the 27th of July 1663, Clarendon had risen
from his temporary prostration, and was again in the as-
cendant ^.
An event of the year worth noting by ^itself had been the
marriage, at Whitehall on the 20th of April, of the King's
natural son, the sprightly " Mr. James Crofts," to Anne Scott
the rich young orphan Countess of Buccleuch. In antici-
pation of this event, he had been created Duke of Monmouth
some time before ; and, after the marriage, when he assumed
his wife's surname of Scott, and gave her in exchange the
title of Duchess of Monmouth, he and she were created
jointly Duke and Duchess of Buccleuch also. They were a
1 Pari. Hist. IV. 253—289; Lords 'dates Lord Eoberts's BUI and his own
Journals of Feb. and March, 1662-3 ; opposition to it by more than a vIS^
Clarendon, 1129-1131 ; Christie's Life aid a half, making th^ffill come i/Z
of Shaftesbury, I. Appendix VL (Lord fourth session of^the ParlUmInt ta
Eoberts's Dispensing Bill printed for stead of the second. Hence much' con-
the first time from the Rolls of the fusion in his account of the debate.!
House of Lords) ; Pepys of date given ; on it. "ouatoa
Burnet, I. 338—340. Clarendon mis-
THE CONVENTICLES ACT, ETC. 249
very young couple indeed. He was but fourteen years of age,
and she was two years younger ^.
Through the third and fourth sessions of the Parliament,
carrying us from March 16, 1663-4, to March 3, 1664-5, there
was still no effective disturbance of Clarendon's supremacy.
Bristol and the crypto -Catholics, with Ashley, Buckingham,
and Lord Roberts, continued to intrigue against him ; the
Scottish Earl of Lauderdale, an enemy of Clarendon's from
the first, had joined his counsels with those of the English
intriguers ; and Clarendon and his pompous ways were more
and more the theme of jest in the Castlemaine soirees, and
in Charles's other festivities. Buckingham was great on those
occasions ; but Tom Killigrew, of the Bedchamber, the King's
jester-in-chiefj outshone Buckingham. With a bellows hung
in front of him for a purse, and preceded by a companion
carrying the shovel for a mace, he would imitate the Chan-
cellor's walk and voice before Charles, Lady Castlemaine, and
the rest, to absolute perfection. Nevertheless the Chancellor,
quite well aware of these uproarious jocosities at his expense
in companies which his virtue and sense of decorum would
not allow him to visit, held his own politically, and was still
indispensable to Charles. Such new home-legislation as there
could be in Parliament was still High-Church and Claren-
donian. Two Acts of the third session deserve notice : —
Act Repealing tie Act of Pel. 16, 1640-1 for Triennial Parlia-
ments (April 5, 1664): — The repeal was on the ground that the
said Act of the Long Parliament was "in derogation of his
Majesty's just rights and prerogative inherent to the imperial crown
of this realm " ; but the present Act was, by his Majesty's assent,
to be a new and more proper guarantee that for the future there
should never be an interval of more than three years at the utmost
between one Parliament and another.
The Conventicles Act (May 1 7, 1664) : — The speech of Sir Edward
Turner, the Speaker of the Commons, in presenting this Act for his
Majesty's assent, gives a convenient summary of the reasons for it
and of its provisions. After explaining to his Majesty how busy
they had been on questions of revenue and supply for his Majesty,
the Speaker proceeded thus : — " "Whilst we were intent upon these
1 Piipys of date, and De Brett's Peerage under Bucchuoh.
250 LIFE OF MILTON AND HISTORY OF HIS TIME.
" weighty affairs, we were often interrupted by petitions, and letters,
" and motions, representing the unsettled condition of some countries
" [counties or districts] by reason of Fanatics, Sectaries, and Non-
" conformists. They differ in their shapes and species, and accord-
" ingly are more or less dangerous ; but in this they all agree, —
" they are no friends to the established government either in Church
" or State ; and, if the old rule hold true. Qui £eclesioB contradidt.
" non est ipacificus, we have great reason to prevent their growth
" and to punish their practice. To this purpose, we have prepared
" a Bill against their frequenting of Conventicles, the seed-plots
" and nurseries of their opinions, under pretence of religious
" worship. The first offence [of being in a Conventicle, or meeting
of more than five persons in addition to members of a family,
for any religious purpose not in conformity with the Church of
England] we have made punishable only with a small fine of £5
" or three months' imprisonment, and £10 for a peer. The second
"offence with £10 or six months' imprisonment, and £20 for a
" peer. But for the third offence, after a trial l3y a jury at the
" general quarter-sessions or assizes, and the trial of a peer by his
" peers, the party convicted shall be transported [for seven years]
" to some of your Majesty's foreign plantations, unless he redeem
" himself by laying down £100.
' Immedioabile vulnus
' Ense rescindendum, ne pars sincera trahatur.' "
The Act was to come into operation on the 1st of July 1664, and
was to be in force for three years, dated from the end of the next
session of Parliament.
As if to prove that Clarendon was still the accredited chief
minister, and secure in that place, it was within a month after
the passing of this Conventicles Act that there was the royal
gift to him of a site for a great town-mansion. It was in the
then nearly vacant Piccadilly, in the spot between the present
Berkeley Street and the present Bond Street, and exactly
fronting St. James's Palace. The grant was dated June 13,
1664; and, in the interval between the third session of Parlia-
ment and the fourth, Clarendon, whose quarters were still in
Worcester House in the Strand, had begun the building of a
great house on the new spot, to be called Clarendon House, and
was taking Evelyn and other friends to see the foundations
and consulting them about the plans and the probable expense.
Lord Berkeley had begun a new house on the one side of it,
and Lord Burlington another on the other side ; and the talk
FOREIGN AFFAIRS. 251
of the town was about the three rising mansions in Piccadilly,
but especially about the Chancellor's, when the fourth session
of the Parliament met, Not. 24, 1664. The engrossing busi-
ness of that short session, ending March 3, 1664.-5, was the
conduct of a War with the Dutch, which had been foreseen
in the previous session and had already been practically
begun 1.
In foreign politics the transactions of the Restoration
government hitherto had been few. Although there had been
an immediate stop by the Restoration to the languishing war
with Spain bequeathed from the Protectorate, the subsequent
Treaty with Portugal, in connexion with the King's marriage
with the Portuguese Infanta, had involved England to some
extent in the special war of Portugal against Spain for the
assertion of Portuguese independence. By the same treaty,
Tangier on the African coast, opposite to Gibraltar, and
Bombay in the East Indies, had been ceded to the English
King, as part of the marriage portion of the Infanta. The
importance of Tangier, to England had been much exaggerated,
for a particular reason. The acquisition might cover, it was
hoped, the ignominy of the sale of Dunkirk. The English
were still proud of that conquest df Cromwell's on the
Continent; and, though there would have been much cost and
inconvenience in retaining it, the surrender of it to France,
and the peculiar circumstances of the surrender, were re-
membered with shame. Since October 1662, when Charles,
treating the town as his own property, had, after long
haggling with Louis XIV as to the price at which he would
sell it, accepted and pocketed 500,000 pistoles, people had
been asking how the money had been squandered. Clarendon
was held mainly responsible; and the Londoners, to signify
their opinion that he had not sold Dunkirk without benefit to
himself, had nicknamed the new house he was building
Dunkirk House, For the rest, till 1 664, there had been nothing
between England and any of the foreign powers but the
1 Pari. Hist. IV. 289—317; Burnet, Cunningham's Handbook of London,
I. 445, with note there by Speaker On- Art. Clarendon Hawse ; Evelyn's Diary,
slow; Clarendon, 1129; Statutes at Oct. 15, 1664, and Pejys's, Feb. 20,
Large, 16 Car. II. cap. 1 and cap. 4 ; 1664-5.
353 LIFE OF MILTON AND HISTORY OF HIS TIME.
ordinary diplomacies, as represented in the residence of foreign
ministers in London, and the residence of English ambassadors
and envoys at the various courts abroad. The Earl of St. Albans
was ambassador at Paris ; Sir George Downing was minister
at the Hague ; agents of less note were in other capitals ; and
in July 1663 the Earl of Carlisle had been despatched on
a special mission, as ambassador extraordinary to Muscovy,
Sweden, and Denmark, taking Andrew Marvell with him as his
secretary. Marvell had therefore been absent from his place
in the Parliament through the whole of the third session ;
but he and the Earl were back in January 1664-5, in time to
take part in the fourth, and be in the midst of the excitement
of a great naval war ^-
The commercial rivalry between England and Holland had
been rendering the relations between the two States more and
more precarious since Cromwell's death, and for some time
there had been irritating differences between the merchants of
the English Africa Company and those of the Dutch Africa
Company as to their respective rights of trade on the African
coast. Beset by complaints from the English merchants, and
having other reasons for a rupture with the Dutch, one of
which was supposed to be the desire of the Duke of York to
prove his abilities as Lord High Admiral, Charles and his
Government had at length resolved on a war. The country
being very willing, and Parliament in its third session having
declared its readiness to support the King to any extent
against the Dutch, the war had been actually in progress in
an irregular way since May 1664. The Dutch were captur-
ing English vessels and attacking English settlements in
Africa and the West Indies ; Admirals Lawson and Holmes
were at sea, fighting the Dutch and making reprisals; the
City had lent the King ^300,000 ; there had been the equip-
ment of a great new fleet at Portsmouth, to be commanded
by the Duke of York, with Prince Eupert and the Earl of
1 Clarendon, 1105 — 1107 ; Bumet, I. Marvell's Works, p. xlviii, -with reprint
294—297 ; Pepys, Sept. 30 and Oct. 26, in that edition (II. 100—185) of a large
1661, Nov. 21, 29, and 30, 1662, April 28, part of an account of the Eavl of Car-
1663, and June 1, 1664 ; Dr. Grosart's lisle's embassy, published in 1669.
Memorial Introduction to his edition of
WAR WITH THE DUTCH. 253
Sandwich under him. Still negotiations had been going on
wearily, Downing negotiating at the Hague, Dutch envoys
negotiating in London, and Louis XIV, who declined the
solicitations of Charles to join with him against the Dutch,
offering his services as mediator. Not till the fourth session
of the Parliament lia:d actually met could war be formally
certain. Then there was no doubt. On the 25th of ]Srovem.ber
1664, the second day of the session, there was a vote of
.^2,500,000 to the King for war-expenses. Preparations were
then redoubled at the dockyards ; on the 22nd of February
1664-5 war was formally declared ; and on the 2nd of March
Parliament was prorogued, that there might be attention to
nothing else than the expected battles. Clarendon and
Southampton, who had all along opposed the war, had given
additional offence both to the King and the Duke of York on
that account. The gossip at Court, according to Pepys, was
that " the King do hate my Lord Chancellor, and that they,
" that is the King and Lord Fitzharding, do laugh at him for
" a dull fellow, and in all this business of the Dutch war do
" nothing by his advice, hardly consulting him. Only he is
" a good minister in other respects, and the King cannot be
" without him ; but, above all, being the Duke's father-in-
" law, he is kept in ; otherwise Fitzharding were able to fling
"down two of him." The Fitzhardinge so spoken of is the
person we have seen hitherto only as Sir Charles Berkeley,
Comptroller, and then Treasurer, of the Household. The fond-
ness both of the King and the Duke for their " dear Charles,"
as they called this reprobate, was boundless ; he had been
made Viscount Fitzhardinge in the Irish peerage ; and now, as
he was to accompany the Duke to sea, he was created also an
English peer, with the title of Earl of Falmouth. At the
same time Secretary Sir Henry Bennet was raised to the
peerage as Lord Arlington. These promotions were distinctly
prejudicial to Clarendon and annoyed him much, as did also
the appointment of Lord Ashley to the treasurership of the
prizes that might be taken in the war^ with responsibility for
his accounts to the King only. Clarendon^s remonstrances
against this last appointment were in vain. Ashley seems to
254 LIFE OP MILTON AND HISTOBY OF HIS TIME.
have gone heartily with the Duke of York, Albemarle, Bristol,
Buckingham, and the great majority of the Council and
Ministry, in promoting the war ; but Clarendon's own account
is that the two men who did most to bring about the war
were Bennet and Mr. William Coventry, this latter known
as the able M.P. for Yarmouth, and as Navy Commissioner
and Naval Secretary to the Duke of York. Coventry also
went with the Duke to sea. Albemarle, whose sea-experience
might have made him a better commander of the fleet than
the Duke, remained in London, taking the Duke's place at
the head of the Admiralty ^.
And now, for some months, the names in all men's mouths
were those of admirals and sea-captains. Where was the
Duke, where was Prince Rupert, where was the Earl of
Sandwich ; where were Admirals Lawson, Ayscough, Sir
William Peim, and others ; what was the last news of the
Dutch Ruyter, the Dutch Opdam, and the Dutch Van
Tromp? Of the answers that came, in the shape of reports
of sea-fights here and there, we need take no account before
June 8, 1665. It was on that day that Pepys, going to the
Cockpit, found Albemarle " like a man out of himself " with
joy at the news of a great victory over the Dutch off Lowes-
toft on the 3rd, and received into his own hands the yet
unopened letter of Mr. Coventry announcing the particulars.
The Duke, Prince Rupert, Lord Sandwich, and Mr. Coventry
himself, were all well ; but the Earl of Falmouth, Lord
Muskerry, and Mr. Richard Boyle, had been "killed on
" board the Duke's ship, the Royal Charles, with one shot,
" their blood and brains flying in the Duke's face, and the
" head of Mr. Boyle striking down the Duke, as some say."
There had been killed also the Earls of Marlborough and
Portland, with Rear- Admiral Sansome, and two captains ; and
Admiral Lawson and others had been severely wounded. But
then, on the other hand, Opdam, the Dutch chief admiral,
had been blown up with his ship; other Dutch admirals
had been killed ; the loss of the Dutch in men was estimated
n9-^^n'?a^°"'}^n°i^o7"<5*'"^®-i^21, nals, Nov. 25, 1664; Pepys, Deo. 15,
112 (-1129, and 1133 ; Commons Joui- 1664, and thence onwards to April 1665!
WAE WITH THE DUTCH. 255
at 8000 as against atout 700 on the English side ; twenty-
four Dutch ships had been taken, and the rest were in flight,
with the English fleet in hot pursuit. Such was the first
news ; and within a few days (June 16) the Duke, Prince
Rupert, Mr. Coventryj and others of the conquerors, were
back in Whitehall, receiving the congratulations of the
courtiers, and " all fat and lusty, and ruddy by being in the
sun." Thanksgivings for the victory were ordered in London
and over the kingdom, and a medal was struck in honour of
the Duke as the victor-in-chief, with his bust on one side,
and on the other the date " June 3, 1665 " and the motto
" Nee minor in terris." And, in fact, chiefly on land henceforth
was the Duke to show his prowess. Subsequent reports had
considerably abated the first conceptions of his victory, and
of his merits in the chief command, especially in the matter of
the pursuit of the routed Dutch ; and, though no one denied
that he had given ample proof of his personal courage, there
was some surprise when it became known that his one per-
formance off Lowestoft was to be all, and that it was judged
expedient that the life of the heir-apparent to the throne
should not be again exposed to Dutch cannon-shot. This
reisolution seems to have been taken before the 26th of June ;
on which day, at the Duke's request, Mr. Coventry was sworn
a member of the Privy Council and knighted. This also was
an anti-CIarendonian appointment, the intention being that,
while the Duke, in resuming his home charge of the Admiralty,
should have the benefit still of Coventry's secretarial services,
the King should have the benefit also of Coventry's knowledge
and ability, in opposition to the Chancellor, at the Council
Board. On the 4th of July it was distinctly announced that
neither the Duke nor Prince Rupert was to return to the
fleet, and that Pepys's honoured friend and patron, the Earl of
Sandwich, was to assume the supreme command, with Sir
George Ayscough and Sir Thomas Teddiman immediately
under him, Sir William Penn as his vice-admiral, and
Sir Thomas Allen as his rear-admiral. As the Earl's part
in the great battle ofi" Lowestoft had been underrated, and he
had failed moreover in an attempt on Aug. 3 to seize two
256 LIFE OF MILTON AND HISTOEY OF HIS TIME.
splendid Dutch vessels in the neutral Danish port of Berghen,
it was a pleasure to his friends to hear of two actions, un-
doubtedly his own, on the 3rd and 12th of September, in which
he captured altogether forty-five war-ships and merchantmen,
some of them rich prizes \
Pleasure ! There was no pleasure, in London at least, that
month. The Plague, which had been in the city since the
beginning of the year, and had been spreading and growing
more and more fearful through the months of sea-fighting with
the Dutch, had then reached its very worst. From April 30,
1665, when Pejiys had written in his diary, " Great fears of the
''sickness here in the city, it being said that two or three
" houses are already shut up : God preserve us all ! " the
progress of the red-spot pestilence had been registered by him,
day after day, and week after week, with terrific fidelity. On
June 7 he had written : " The hottest day that ever I felt in
" my life. This day, much against my will, I did in Drury
" Lane see two or three houses marked with a red cross upon
"the doors, and ' Lord have mercy upon us' writ there."
Again, on June 29, "To Whitehall, where the Court full of
" waggons and people ready to go out of town ." The mortality
by plague that month within the bills had reached 590 ; the
King and the Court had left Whitehall two days before for
1 Pepys, June 8, 16, 23, 28, July i, and that Brounoker and Haiman were
and thence to Sept. 14, 1665 ; Burnet, I. responsible between them. Brounoker
375—382, with long footnote. The story had certainly given the order most posi-
in Burnet is that the Duke of York, tively as from the Duke, and the hypo-
when the main battle off Lowestoft was thesis iu the Duke's favour was that
over, and all tliat remained was to pur- Brounoker had invented the order, out
sue the residue of the Dutch fleet, left of care for his own life and the Duke's,
the deck of hia ship about 11 o'clock at Burnet's belief, however, from informa-
night to take some rest, having given tion he had received, was that the deaths
strict orders to call him when they got of Falmouth and the others before his
up with the Dutch, but that, after some eyes had made such a strong impression
time, his bed-chamber man, Brounoker, upon the Duke that he thought with
came on deck, " as from the Duke, and himself in his cabin that one battle was
caid the Duke ordered the sail to be enough and shrank from a second. At
flackened," which order Sir WiUiam all events, as be favoured Harman much
Penn, though surprised at it, obeyed. after the battle, and retained Brouncker
Th e footnote, which is Speaker Onslow's, in his service till 1 667, his anger at their
corroborates Burnet by reporting evi- joint blunder cannot have been very
deuce given before the House of Com- deep. -For the whole story, see, in ad-
mons on AprE 17, 1668, save that Cap- ditionto Bimiet's text, with the footnote,
tain Harman, and not Penn, appears as cited, Pepys's Diary, under dates Oct.
there as theofficer who slackened sail 21, 1667, and April 17, 18, 19, and 21,
on the Duke's supposed order. The in- 1668. Pepys's view seems to have been
quiiy was for the purpose of proving the same as Burnet's,
that the Duke had given no such order,
THE GREAT PLAGUE IN LONDON. 257
Salisbury ; all that could leave town were hurrying away.
In country towns and villages, to the distance of thirty^ forty,
or even a hundred, miles from London, there was dreadful
alarm at this migration among them from the plague-stricken
city ; every outward-bound passenger or waggon along a high
road was suspected ; goods from London were shunned ; and
doors were shut against strangers. Though the plague did
appear in various parts of the country, London and the vicinity
continued to be its principal habitat. " Lord ! the number of
" houses visited which this day I observed through the town
" quite round in my way by Long Lane and London Wall,"
wrote Pepys on the 6th of July ; then, on the 1 8th, " I was much
" troubled this day to hear at Westminster how the officers do
" bury the dead in the open Tuttle-fields, pretending want of'
" room elsewhere " ; and, on the 26th, " Sad news of the death
" of so many in the parish of the plague : forty last night,
"the bell always going." That month the total mortality
by the plague had risen to 4129. The number of houses shut
up was past counting ; they were carrying corpses along the
streets at all hours ; there were pest-houses for the reception
of bodies, and pest-pits for their promiscuous burial. But
in August the mortality rose to 20,046, and the ghastliness
was in proportion. " Lord ! how sad a sight it is to see the
" streets empty of people, and very few upon the Change,"
wrote Pepys on the 16th of that month : "jealous of every
" door that one sees shut up, lest it should be the plague ; and
"about us two shops in three, if not more, generally shut
up " ; and, on the 30th, " Lord ! how everybody looks, and
" discourse in the street is of death and nothing else, and few
"people going up and down, that the town is like a place
" distressed and forsaken." In September the deaths recorded
were 26,230, and it was believed that these were not all.
There were no boats on the river ; grass was growing in the
streets ; there was but a remnant of the papulation left ; and
still every week the silent houses were yielding 6000 or 7000
more red-spotted corpses, and the pest-carts were going their
rounds with the hideous beUs. Nearly all people of means
had by this time deserted both London and Westminster,
VOL. Ti. s
258 LIFE OF MILTON AND HISTOEY OF HIS TIME.
physicians and clergymen included. The brave Monk bad
remained in town, doing all he could, and also the brave
Archbishop Sheldon. Not a few of the silenced Noncon-
formist ministers, who had hitherto obeyed the law by refrain-
ing from every appearance of public preaching, now openly
broke the law, and took possession of the forsaken pulpits. It
was thought that surely at such a time the distinction between
Conformity and Nonconformity might be disregarded ^.
Not so. At the short Fifth Session of the Parliament, from
Oct. 9 to Oct. 31j held at Oxford, for the convenience of the
King and Court on account of the plague, the supply of an addi-
tional .^1,250,000 to the King for the expenses of the Dutch
War was not the only business. There emanated from the
two Houses and the King in this session the following Act : —
The Fvoe Miles Act (Oct. 31, 1665): — This was an Act increas-
ing most severely the Btringency of the Act of Uniformity. The
preamble having stated that divers of the Nonconformist ministers
and preachers had not only continued to preach in unlawful con-
venticles, but had "settled themseves in divers corporations,
" sometimes three or more of them in a place, thereby taking an
" opportunity to distil the poisonous principles of schism and
" rebellion into the hearts of his Majesty's subjects," it was now
enacted that no Nonconformist ex-minister or teacher, of what
denomination soever, who had not taken the oath of passive
obedience, should, "unless only in passing upon the road," come
within five miles of any city, or town-corporate, or borough sending
members to Parliament, or within the same distance of any parish
or place where he had formerly preached or taught, under a penalty
of £40 for every offence. It was also enacted generally that no
person whatever, of either sex, that did not take the said passive
obedience oath, and frequent divine service as by law established,
should " teach any public or private school, or take any boarders or
" tablers, that are taught or instructed by him or herself, or any
"other," the penalty for each offence in this case to be also
£40.
The chief promoters of this horrible Act were Clarendon,
Archbishop Sheldon, and Dr. Seth Ward, Bishop of Salisbury.
It was opposed by Lord Ashley, Lord Wharton, and others,
1 Pepys, of dates, and generally from are from the BiUs of Mortality, as I
April to October 1665 ; Baxter, Part III. find them quoted in Engl. Encyc, Art.
i — 2. The numbers of deaths monthly Pestilence.
THE FIVE MILES ACT. 359
among whom was the Earl of Southampton ; but there is no
record of any division upon it in the journals of either House.
In the Commons Journals of Oct. 27, however, there is the
record of a division on a proposed bill of a still more tremen-
dous character, to which the rigid Uniformity men had been
roused by the opposition to the Five Miles Act. It was
nothing less than a Bill for making the Passive Obedience
Oath compulsory on the nation universally. It was thrown
out only by 57 votes to 51. The Five Miles Act by itself
brought misery enough. Imagine its operation. It required
the many hundreds of ministers already under ban for their
nonconformity, and struggling for their livelihoods in various
ways, to leave the large towns and small towns where they had
naturally settled because there alone could they find chances
of -livelihood, to leave also the parishes where they were known,
and where their children, at worst, would have a right to
poor-law relief, and to remove themselves and their families,
at expenses they could not meet, to obscure villages, or petty
non-corporate places, among farmers and strangers, where
they could have no employment and no friends. "By this
Act," says Baxter, " the case of the ministers was so hard that
" many thought themselves necessitated to break it, not only
"by the necessity of their office, but by a natural impossibility
"of keeping it unless they should murder themselves and their
"families." The result to the Government and the Church
was that they netted a few more conformists, and had to ply
the penalty of imprisonment more widely and vigorously
among those that remained stubborn. Cargoes of Quakers
and others had already been exported to the black ends of the
earth ^.
In London the deaths from plague in October had sunk to
14,373 ; in November they were 3449 only ; and in December
they were below 1000. The total mortality by plague within
the year as given in the bills had been 68,596. The plague
still lingered in the city, and was more severe than before in
' Lords and Commons Journals of in the Country, of date 1675, reprinted
Oxford Session of Parliament ; Statutes in Appendix ,to Pari. Hist. Vol. IV.
at Large (for Fiv Miles Act) ; Letter (attributed to Locke and printed in his
from a Person of Quality to his Friend Works, but not his) ; Bajcter, III. 3 — i.
S 3
260 LIFE OF MILTON A.ND HISTOB? OP HIS TIME.
such places as Deptford, Greenwich, and Deal ; but people had
begun to be reassured, and London was again full ^.
The Dutch War, the Plague, the Act of Uniformity, and the
Five Miles Act, followed people into the year 1666. The
Dutch War was complicated, indeed, from January 1665-6,
by the fact that Louis XIV, and Denmark with him, had dis-
tinctly taken the part of the Dutch. From that date the war
was nominally a war of England single-handed against the
United Provinces, France^ and Denmark together ; and it was
only because Louis XIV had very prudent notions as to the
proper amount of actual French interference that the fighting
through 1666 was still mainly between the English and the
Dutch. The Earl of Sandwich, not having given perfect satis-
faction in the naval command, had been sent on an embassy to
Spain J and the Duke of Albemarle and Prince Rupert were
now the joint admirals of the English fleet. On June 1-4
there was a four days' battle off the North Foreland, Albe-
marle with fifty-four sail having engaged a Dutch fleet of
eighty under Ruyter, but with De Witt also on board, and
having doggedly maintained the fight alone till the fourth
day, when Prince Eupert came to his help. Though the
result was announced as a victory for the English, there had
been great mismanagement on Prince Rupert's part, and the
damage to the English fleet had been enormous. There was
more success in another battle on the 25th and 26th of July,
when the Dutch were driven into their own harbours. For a
week or two the English sailed along the Dutch coasts in
triumph ; and on the 8th and 9th of August a detachment,
under Rear- Admiral Holmes, after destroying about 160 Dutch
merchantmen off Uly, landed in Schelling and set fire to the
chief town in that island, doing damage to the Dutch esti-
mated at a million sterling.
The thanksgivings for this mercy were scarcely over when
the Londoners had to attend to a fire of their own. It broke
out, between one and two o'clock in the morning of Sunday,
the 2nd of September, in the house of a baker in Pudding
1 Autl.orities as before.
THE GKBAT FIRE OF LONDON. 261
Lane ; and, with the aid of a high wind, it spread and raged
uncontrollably till Wednesday the 5th, or Thursday the 6th,
consuming- 400 streets, or 13,200 dwelling-houses, besides
the City Gates, the Exchange, Guildhall, the Custom House,
Sion College, and other public structures, and eighty-nine
churches, including St. Paul's. A space of 436 acres, or two-
thirds of the entire city, extending from the Tower to the
Temple, and from the river nearly to Smithfield and London
Wall, was left in ruins. Attempts have been made to estimate
the destruction of property at so many millions of money ;
but of the consequent misery for many a day among the dis-
housed and impoverished myriads of the population there can
be no adequate measure. The Geeat Plague of 1665, and
the Geeat Fire of 1666, in which the last lingerings of
that pestilence were burnt out, will be remembered for ever
together in the history of London.
The Fire, following so close on the Pestilence, had made
an unusual impression upon the King. He had gone about
daily while the flames were raging, giving orders for blowing
up houses and encouraging the workmen, and "had been
';' heard during that time," says Clarendon, " to speak with
"great piety and devotion of the displeasure that God was
"provoked to. And no doubt the deep sense of it did raise
"many good thoughts and purposes in the royal breast."
Clarendon acknowledges they were but temporary, and that
people were soon scandalized by reports of brutal jests at
Court about the great fire itself, and by other proofs of the
continued "profaneness and atheism" that surrounded Charles.
Evelyn and Pepys also agree in noting the increase of public
disgust with the manners and morals of the Court immediately
after the Great Fire. " Our prodigious ingratitude, burning
lusts, dissolute Court, profane and abominable lives," are the
strong words of the decorous Evelyn on the day of fast and
humiliation ordered on the occasion ; and five days later
Pepys writes, " Colvill tells me of the viciousness of the
Court, the contempt the King brings himself into thereby,
his minding nothing." Lady Castlemaine and others were
now a little in the background, and the talk was chiefly of the
262 LIFE OF MILTON AND HISTORY OF HIS TIME.
renewed assiduities of the King to the beautiful, but wary,
Miss Stewart, and of the amours of the Duke of York with
Sir John Denham's wife, and of the Duchess of York with
Henry Sidney, the brother of Algernon. Meanwhile, the Sixth
Session of the Parliament having met (Sept. 21), to add its
energies to those of the Council for the relief of the sufferers
by the fire, and for the reparation of the calamity, it was
astonishing to see with what rapidity workmen began opera-
tions among the smoking ruins, and with what activity archi-
tects and surveyors were planning a new London that should
surpass the old ^
On the 8th of February 1666-7, while the ruins of the
Great Fire were still smoking here and there, the Parliament
was again prorogued. During the four months and a half
of their sixth session, besides one, or two Acts relating to the
rebuilding of London and to taxation for the purpose, they had
passed an Act for raising an additional supply of ^^1,800,000,
by poll-tax and otherwise, for the expenses of the Dutch war,
and also a Bill, which had occasioned very violent discussion,
prohibiting, in the interest of English farmers, the importa-
tion of cattle from Ireland and from abroad. They had also
exacted from his Majesty another proclamation for the banish-
ment of Roman Catholic priests and Jesuits, and a promise
generally for more strict execution of the laws for religious
uniformity. Altogetoer, a good deal of dissatisfaction had
been exhibited in the two Houses with the state of public
affairs, and especially with the profligate waste on the King's
mistresses and favourites of the money voted for the war. A
Bill had been introduced in the Commons for the investieation
and future audit of war accounts; and, when it had been
signified that the King would resent this as an invasion of
his prerogative, there had been threats of bringing Lady
Castlemaine into Parliamentary view. There had been
sharp language in the King's speeches in giving assent to
Bills, and he had parted with the Parliament on worse terms
than on any previous prorogation^.
1 PBpys, through the year, and speoi- 1185—1189.
ally in June and July, and from Sept. 2 a parj. Hist. IV. 332—360 ; Pepvs
to Oct. 15; Evelyn, Oct. 10; Clarendon, Dec. 12, 1666, and Feb. 8, 1666-7 —
OLABENDON WANING. 263
Clarendon, about tliis timej had made a great impression on
Mr. Pepys, who observed him more particularly at meetings
of the Tangier Committee, of which they were both members.
" I am mad in love with my Lord Chancellor," says iPepys :
" he do comprehend and speak out well, and with the greatest
" easiness and authority that ever I saw a man in my life. I
" did never observe how much easier a man do speak when he
" knows all the company to be below him than in him ; for,
" though he spoke excellent well, yet his manner and freedom
" of doing it, as if he played with it, and was informing only
" all the rest of the company, was mighty pretty." To all
appearance, indeed, Clarendon was now at the summit of his
grandeur. His great new mansion in Piccadilly had been
finished, or all but finished, just before the Great Fire; and
he had entered into possession of it, perfectly satisfied with
its magnificence, though rather troubled at finding that the
outlay upon it was three times what he had originally con-
templated, or nearer .^60,000 than .^20,000. " To the Lord
" Chancellor's house, the first time I have been therein,"
writes Pepys on the 22nd of April 1667; "and it is very
" noble, and brave pictures of the present nobility."
But Clarendon's influence was waning fast. Since the
Oxford session of the Parliament, his intercourse with the
King had become less and less confidential ; Lady Castlemaine
and her clique had gradually laughed out of the King's mind
whatever of awe or respect for the Chancellor's character and
abilities had remained there ; and his own occasional remon-
strances with Charles on his debauched life, only wearisome
at first, had become intolerable. Then, at the Council Board,
there had been less and less of deference to his opinion. In
the business of the Dutch war, Arlington, Ashley, and Sir
William Coventry had been the chief managers, in associa-
tion with Albemarle and the Duke of York ; and Clarendon
observed that Sir William Coventry in particular, in conse-
quence of the authority he had acquired in nayal matters, had
begun to presume in all matters whatsoever. The King, for
Pepys distinctly notes the continued burnt city to as late as March 16, 1666-7,
smoking of parts of the ruins of the more than six months after the fire.
264 LIFE OF MILTON AND HISTOEY OF HIS TIME.
example, having complained to Clarendon of the squibs and
pasquils about himself, and about Lady Castlemaine and
other ladies, that were in circulation in London, fabricated
chiefly in coffee-houses, and Clarendon having agreed with the
King that such licence of speech was atrocious and must be
put down, and having suggested that the best method would
be either an instantaneous closing of all the coffee-houses of
London or the dispersion of spies among them to listen to the
conversations and inform against offenders, Coventry had
turned the notion into such ridicule at the Council Board
that the King, to Clarendon's chagrin, had seen fit to let the
coffee-houses alone. Biit, besides Arlington, Ashley, and
Coventry, there was now in the Privy Council and Ministry
another person hostile to Clarendon. This was Sir Thomas
Clifford, M.P. for Totness, a bold and high-spirited youug
man, and, like Arlington, a erypto-Catholic. On the death of
Sir Hugh Pollard in November 1666, he had been chosen, at
Arlington's instance, to succeed that knight in the Comp-
troUership of the Household, with a seat at the Privy Council.
A still heavier blow came in May 1667. On the 16th of that
month the Earl of Southampton died. Next to the Duke of
Ormond, he had been the firmest of Clarendon's friends and
the most powerful prop of his administration ; and, as Ormond
had been mainly absent in Ireland in the duties of his Lord-
Lieutenancy since 1662, it was on Southampton rather than
on Ormond that Clarendon had been leaning, for advice and
sympathy, for some years past. Who should succeed the
earl in the great post of Lord, High Treasurer ? To Clarendon's
discomfiture, the King and the Duke of York decided not to
fill up the post at all, but to put the Treasury into the hands
of five Commissioners. These were to be Albemarle, Ashley,
Coventry, Clifford, and Sir John Duneombe, a country gentle-
man, known hitherto only as M.P. for St. Edmundsbu'ry.
From that moment the Clarendon administration may be said
to have been completely disintegrated. But the Chancellor
would not yet recognise the fact. He had confidence in
himself; and, though he knew that he had given offence to
both Houses of Parliament by his conduct and speeches in the
THE DUTCH IN THE THAMES. 265
recent session, he had faith still in his Parliamentary following.
His fall, however, was in preparation. It was to come, more
immediately, from the Dutch War i.
With an additional jg'1,800,000 voted for the war, but not
yet in hand, with a vast debt owing in arrears to the sailors
and in other forms, with credit already shattered, and with
all possibilities of raising money stopped at any rate by the
paralysis of London banking and commerce after the Fire,
the King had come to the conclusion that the war must end.
Louis XIV, having his own reasons for desiring peace at the
moment, was most willing to assist Charles in this design,
not only by a secret treaty between themselves withdrawing
France from the war, but also by persuading the Dutch to
consent to negotiation. The demand of Charles was that
there should be a cessation of hostilities during such negotia-
tion. The great De Witt, the head of the war-party among
the Dutch, though unable to resist the peace-party in the
States altogether, and obliged to go with them in the main
matter of a treaty, succeeded in avoiding the proposed
condition. Accordingly, when Lord Holies and Mr. Henry
Coventry arrived at Breda on the 14th of May as plenipoten-
tiaries for England to treat with the Dutch negotiators, there
was no armistice and none could be obtained. They might
treat as rapidly as possible and so bring the war to a close,
but meanwhile the war existed. Now, the treaty was a
complex and intricate one, involving questions about rights
and possessions in the East Indies, the West Indies, and
North America, which could not be settled in a week or two.
This was what De Witt had foreseen. He had sworn revenge
for the burning of the Dutch shipping in their own harbours,
and the ravaging of the Island of Schelling, in the preceding
August ; and the opportunity had come.
To save expense, the English Council, by the advice
chiefly of Sir William Coventry, and against the will of the
Duke of York, had laid up all their large vessels in dock,
trusting that two squadrons of smaller vessels would be a
1 Clarendon, 1190-1224, and 1277 ; Pepys, Oct. 13, 1666, and April 22, 1667.
266 LIFE OF MILTON AND HISTOEY OF HIS TIME.
suflScient protection ; and, though some fortifications of the
. Thames and Med way had been ordered, there was such mutiny
among the unpaid sailors and labourers that little or nothing
of the kind had been done. It was in this condition of things
that Ruyter and Cornelius de Witt, with a fine and orderly
fleet of seventy sail, arrived for their revenge. They were ofi"
the Nore on the 10th of June, sending before them, up the
river, to London and beyond, panic and confusion indescrib-
able. " Everybody was flying, none knew why or whither."
The questions were whether it was an invasion that was
intended, or a general pillage of the coasts of the Thames, or
an occupation and sack of London. Monk, who alone kept
his head so as to be of much use, and who probably guessed
the enemy's intentions better than the rest, was down the
river " in his shirt," about Gravesend, Sheerness, and the
mouth of the Medway, extemporising batteries, moving ships
of resistance, sinking others to choke the channel, and
driving out of his way " a great many idle lords and gentle-
"men," who had accompanied him "with their pistols and
" fooleries." On the 11th and 12th and 13th the main inten-
tion of the Dutch became apparent. While one part of their
fleet was left in the Thames itself, as if for Gravesend and
London, another advanced up the Medway, levelled with
a few broadsides the unfinished fortifications of Sheerness,
broke down or evaded the boom and other obstructions guard-
ing the unrigged English ships that lay in the river, and
deliberately set fire to all the ships they found there, reserving
only as a trophy the half-burnt hull of the Royal Charles
herself, the sacred ship that had brought Charles to England
and had once been Cromwell's Naseby. Meanwhile the
panic had not ceased. Orders were out inland for raising the
miHtia ; there had been beating of drums in London, calling
the train-bands to arms, with money to victual themselves for
a fortnight, under pain of death ; citizens were packing up
their valuables and sending them into the country ; there had
been talk of a removal of the Court to Windsor. But the
Dutch had done all they meant to do in the Thames and
Medway. Generously disdaining mere sack and pillage of the
POPULAR INDIGNATION. 267
towns at their mercy, they sailed down the river again with
the Ro^al Charles in tow, and contented themselves for the rest
with attempts on some other English ports, where there were
ships to burn, and with a blockade of the Thames, which
deprived the Londoners of coal from Newcastle for some
weeks and put them to severe straits for fueP.
The popular indignation was ungovernable. While private
politicians, like Evelyn, were saying that " those who advised
" his "Majesty to prepare no fleet this spring deserved — I
"know what," and while Coventry and others thus pointed
at were in corresponding alarm, the mob wreaked its wrath
more promiscuously in outcries against Charles and his
mistresses, and the shame of the unpaid wages of the sailors,
and in recollections of Oliver. " In the evening comes Mr.
" Povy about business," Pepys writes on the 22nd of June ;
" and he and I to walk in the garden an hour or two, and to
" talk of State matters. He tells me his opinion that it is
" out of possibility for us to escape being undone, there being
" nothing in our power to do that is necessary for the saving
" us : a lazy Prince, no Council, no money, no reputation at
" home or abroad." Again on the 12th of July he writes :
" It was computed that the Parliament had given the King
" for this war only, besides all prizes, and besides the
*'■ .^200,000 which he was to spend of his own revenue to
" guard the sea, above ^"5,000,000 and odd ^100,000 ; which
" is a prodigious sum. It is strange how everybody do now-
" a-days reflect upon Oliver and commend him, what brave
" things he did, and made all the neighbour princes fear him ;
" while here a prince, come in with all the love and prayers
" and good liking of his' people, who have given greater signs
" of loyalty and willingness to serve him with their estates
" than ever was done by any people, hath lost all so soon
" that it is a miracle what way a man could devise to lose so
"much in so little time."
Above all, the fury ran against Clarendon. On the 14th
1 Clarendon, 1210—1220 and 1224— PamUr, p. 271 of Grosart's editioaof
1226 ; Pepys and Evelyn tlirough June Marvell's Works, Vol. I.
1667 ; Marvell's Last Instructions to a
268 LIFE OF MILTON AND HISTORY OF HIS TIME.
of June, just when the Dutch fleet had sailed down the
river^ the mob attacked Clarendon House, cutting down the
young trees in front of it, breaking the windows, and leaving
a gibbet painted on the gate, with this inscription : —
" Three sights to be seen, —
Dunkirk, Tangier, and a barren Queen."
In utter contempt of the mob, the grave Chancellor sat on
among his books and pictures, and let the fury pass. No
one who knew him, he says^ could suppose that the mishap
in the Thames and the Medway could be laid to his charge.
He had but acquiesced in that policy of a reduction of the
fleet to two light defensive squadrons which he had heard
recommended at the Council Board by the best professional
authorities; and, as to the river-fortifications, how could he
have given any advice about them, " being so totally unskil-
" ful in the knowledge of the coast and the river that he
" knew not where Sheerness was, nor had ever heard the
" name of such a place " till he had listened to Monk and
the rest discoursing about it ? In fact, for the prime minister,
as for the King, the important question now was whether
there should be an extraordinary meeting of the Parlia-
ment. The King had been told that this was essential in the
emergency ; and, though the Parliament had been prorogued
to the 10th of Octoberj and it was held unconstitutional to
summon a prorogued Parliament again before the exact day
to which it had been prorogued, means had been taken to
overcome that objection. Mr. Prynne, who was thought a
great authority in such matters, had been brought privately
to the King, to assure him " that upon any extraordinary
occasion he might do it." Mr. Prynne was now a nobody
with either the King or the nation, having been first gagged
with the Keepership of the Records at a salary of ^500 a
year, " purposely to employ his head from scribbling against
the State and Bishops," and then tamed farther by two
public reprimands in the House, one on the 15th of July
1661 for an incautious pamphlet, and one on the 13th of
May 1664 for tampering with the. wording of a bill after it
had been committed. His advice now, however, was con-
THE PALL OF CLABENDON. 269
venient. Clarendon, on the other hand^ argued earnestly in
Council against convoking the Houses again at that moment,
not only because the proceeding would be unconstitutional,
but because it would he inconvenient. He was imprudent
enough, in his passion, he tells us, to advise rather the levying
of men and means by prerogative " as in the late civil war,"
or, if a speedy meeting of Parliament were deemed absolutely
necessary, then the . dissolution of the present Parliament
and the calling of another. Summonses, nevertheless, went
out for an extraordinary meeting of the two Houses, to " con-
sider of weighty affairs " arising from the unexpected invasion
of the kingdom " during a treaty of peace."
On the day appointed, Thursday, July 25, the two Houses
were assembled in suflScient numbers. The message from the
King was that he deferred meeting them till Monday the
29th. The Lords at once adjourned, but the Commons first
passed a unanimous resolution, " That his Majesty be humbly
" desired, by such members of this House as are of his Privy
" Council, that, when a peace is concluded, the new-raised
" forces be disbanded." On the 29th his Majesty met the
two Houses, and informed them that, as a peace had been
concluded at Breda, their farther sitting was unnecessary,
and they might return to their homes, not to meet again till
the 10th of October, as by the formal prorogation. They
obeyed unwillingly, especially the Commons, but not till
threats had been heard against Clarendon for his recent
advice of a dissolution. Peace had actually been concluded
at Breda at last on the 21st of July, by three separate
treaties, one with the United Provinces, one with France, and
one with Denmark. The conditions for England were more
favourable than might have been expected.
"The public no sooner entered into this repose than the
" storm began to arise that destroyed all the prosperity, ruined
" the fortune, and shipwrecked all the hopes of the Chancellor,
" who had been the principal instrument in providing that
" repose." The words are Clarendon's own. To the end of his
life he seems to have retained his amazement at what fol-
lowed. First, and suddenly, came the death of his wife. She
270 LIFE OF MILTON AND HISTORY OF HIS TIME.
was his second wife, but married to him as long ago as 1634,
and " the mother of all his children, and his companion in all
" his banishment; and who had made all his former calamities
" less grievous by her company and courage." She was
buried in Westminster Abbey, August 17, " at the foot of the
steps ascending to King Henry VII's chapel." The widower
sat alone in his splendid house, where he was honoured by his
Majesty a few days afterwards with a visit of condolence.
But a few days after that his SQn-in-law the Duke of York
came with a message from his Majesty that it was highly
desirable on various grounds, but especially for his own safety,
that he should resign the Chancellorship. " The Chancellor
" was indeed as much surprised with this relation as he could
" have been at the sight of a warrant for his execution."
He refused to resign the seals till he should have another
interview with his Majesty, with an explanation of reasons on
both sides. The King was graciously pleased to signify that,
as the Chancellor was in mourning, he would come again to
Clarendon House for the purpose. Meanwhile the Duke of
York remained manfully faithful to his father-in-law, and
the Duchess of York, Archbishop Sheldon, and others, were
imploring his Majesty to reconsider his decision. At moments
it appeared that they had succeeded. The King did not go
to Clarendon House after all, but appointed his own chamber
in Whitehall for a private conference with the Chancellor.
Thither Clarendon went at ten o'clock on Monday the 26th,
and had a discourse with the King for two hours. The King
seemed firm in his resolution, spoke of certain information he
had of an intended impeachment of Clarendon by Parliament
when it met again, professed his anxiety for the Chancellor
on this account, and reminded him of the fate of Strafford.
The Chancellor appealed to his Majesty whether " throwing
off an old servant, who had served the Crown in some trust
for near thirty years," would he to his honour or advantage.
He distinguished his case from Strafford's, said he had no fears
from Parliament for himself, and besought his Majesty, in his
own interest, not to be " dejected with the apprehension of
" the formidable power of the Parliament, which was more or
THE PALL OF CLAEENDON. 271
" less, or nothing, as he pleased to make it," adding that " it
" was yet in his Majesty's own power to govern them, but,
" if they found it was in theirs to govern him. nobody knew
" what the end would be." Thereupon he made " a short re-
lation " of the history of Richard II, but unfortunately, " in the
warmth of this relation," found an opportunity to mention a
certain " lady," with cautions and reflections that might better
have been avoided. The King gloomed, and " rose without
saying anything ; " and the interview came to an end. As
Clarendon was going away through the private garden, it
was full of people, he says, and he saw Lady Castlemaine,
Lord Arlington, and Mr. Baptist May, keeper of the privy
purse, "'looking together out of her open window with great
gaiety and triumph." Pepys tells the same story, with the
difference that Lady Castlemaine was in bed when the
Chancellor left the palace, though it was twelve o'clock, but
" ran out in her smock into her aviary looking into Whitehall
Garden," where, her woman having brought her a dressing-
gown, she " stood blessing herself at the old man's going
away," and chatting with the gallants that came up. Two or
three days of uncertainty yet passed ; but on Friday the 30th
of August Secretary Morrice came with a warrant tinder the
sign-manual requiring Clarendon peremptorily to deliver up
the great seal. He did so "with all the expressions of
duty," and heard afterwards that, when Secretary Morrice
took the seal to the King, Mr. Baptist May fell upon his
knees, and kissed his Majesty's hand, telling him he was now
really king, which he had never been before ^.
Clarendon remained in London till the Parliament did
meet and an impeachment against him for high treason was
actually in process. At length, on the 29th of November,
he obeyed the King's orders by withdrawing hurriedly to
France. Thither he was pursued by an Act of Parliament
banishing him for life. He had left in England four sons,
1 Clarendon, 1211—1212 and 1229— 851—852 ; Commons Journals, July 15,
1236 ; Evelyn, June 28 and July 27— 28, 1661 and May 13, 1664 ; Colonel Ches-
1667 ; Pepys, June 14 and Aug. ,27, ter's Westimnster Abbey Registers, p.
1667; Lords and Commons Journals, 166, with note.
July 25—29, 1667 ; Wood's Ath. III.
272 LIFE OF MILTON AND HI8T0ET OF HIS TIME.
besides the Duchess of York and one other daughter. Of his
eight grand-children of the blood-royal six bad been born
before his exile, of whom only three survived. One of these,
a boy, was to die in infancy, as were two daughters yet to be
born ; but the two infant-girls he had seen and dandled were
to live to be Queen Mary II. and Queen Anne of England.
One of the accusations against him was that he had been too
prescient of this sovereign destiny for his grand- children.
Had he not provided a childless Queen for Charles ; and,
when this might have been remedied by a divorce of that
Queen, and the marriage of Charles with the wary and
eligible Miss Stewart, had he not contrived, in this very year
1667, the sudden marriage of Miss Stewart with the Duke
of Richmond ? It is certain that some such notions did
mingle at last with Charles's other reasons for throwing him
overboard, and that Clarendon did not think it beneath him
to protest to Charles himself his innocence in the matter
of Miss Stewart's marriage. The main thought he must
have carried with him into his exile was that he had been
the great instrument of the restoration of the dynasty of the
Stuarts in the British Islands, and had, in a ministry of seven
years, brought the Church and State of England as near to
his ideal of perfection as the materials would permit. In
this thought, and in the writing of the continuation of his
History, to explain the facts to posterity, flowingly and without
dates, but with all the confidence of impeccability and all the
mastery of a man of genius, he seems to have been happy
enough. He never saw England again, but died at Rouen,
Dec. 9, 1674.
CHAPTER II.
davenant's eevited laueeateship and the fiest seven teaes
of the literature of the rbstobation.
At the Restoration, Sir William Davenant, who had been
poet-laureate to Charles I. after the death of Ben Joiison in
1637, resumed his nominal presidency in the English world
of letters by becoming poet-laureate to Charles II. He was
then fifty-four years of age, and he was to hold the place
till his death, April 7th, 1668, at the age of sixty-two.
Davenant's resumed Laureateship, therefore, almost exactly
coincides with the period of Clarendon's Premiership ; and
the fact may be conveniently remembered. Clarendon him-
self, indeed, would have resented any such association of his
name in the annals of England with that of the popular
and play^writing knight. Long ago, when they were begin-
ning life together in London, Hyde, slightly the younger
man of the two, had been one of Davenant's greatest admirers,
and had contributed a few lines to be prefixed to Davenant's
first published play, in which it was predicted that the play
and Davenant's muse generally would "outlive pyramids."
But the lives of. the two since then had greatly altered their
relations to each other ; and Hyde, as the statesman for
Charles I. through the Civil Wars and for Charles II. through
his exile, had ceased to think of himself and Davenant as
in any way commensurable. Accordingly, we have seen
his contemptuous estimate of Davenant in his account' of
Davenant's mission from Paris in 1646, on the part of Queen
Henrietta Maria, to persuade the captive Charles I. at New-
VOL. VI. T
274 LIFE OF MILTON AND HISTOEY OF HIS TIME.
castle to make peace with his subjects by abandoning Episco-
pacy. "An honest man and a worthy, but in all respects
inferior to such a trust," says Clarendon of Davenant in that
connexion, with an implied sneer at Davenant's profession of
stage-poet and stage-manager.. The sneer may have included
something more. For Davenant's most unrespectable dis-
tinction, mentioned whenever his name was mentioned, and
celebrated in squibs and epigrams about him for the last
twenty years, was, as all the world knows, his want of nose.
" They flew on him, like lions passant.
And tore his nose, as much as was on't\"
Nevertheless, Davenant had as good claims, in the eyes of
Charles II. and his courtiers, to be the first Laureate of the
Restoration as Clarendon had to be its first Premier. He
had been a staunch Royalist, both at home and in exile, both
in camp and in council ; he had twice been a prisoner and in
danger of the scaffold for his Royalist activity ; and, though
of late years he had been living in London by Cromwell's
indulgence, proprietor of an opera-house for musical and semi-
dramatic entertainments, he had not purchased indulgence by
any recantation of his allegiance to the Stuarts^. No one
could grudge to Will. Davenant the recovery of his Laureate-
ship, or any farther honours it might bring.
Davenant was not to contribute very largely to the litera-
ture of his own revived Laureateship. Author already of
about a dozen comedies, tragedies, and tragi-comedies, and
of several masques, all written before the Civil Wars, and
author also of a poem called Madagascar (1648) and of
Gondibert, an Heroic Poem (1651), besides other occasional
short poems of various dates, he was to rest, in the main, on
his acquired reputation. The performance of which he was
proudest was his Gondibert, a vast unfinished epic, or romance
of imaginary and unimaginable Lombard heroes and heroines,
told in twenty cantos of four-line stanzas. The poem, the
1 See ante, Vol. III. pp. 503—504 ; lamium upon the matriage of the Lady
and Clarendon's History, p. 606. Mary, daughter to his Highness, with
2 He had -written, however, and pub- the Lord Viscount Faloonbridge, to be
lished, in the end of 1657, an " Epitha- sung to recitative music."
SIB WILLIAM BAVENANT. 275
greater part of whicli had been written in Paris, when
Davenant was constantly in the society of Hobbes, and which
had been examined, corrected, and approved by Hobbes, " in
parcels ere it arrived at its contexture," had originally been
published with a long preface, addressed to Hobbes, expound-
ing the author's ideas of Heroic Poetry in general, and the
novelty and depth of his intentions in this specimen of it in
.particular. Hobbes had acknowledged the honour in a cha-
racteristic letter, in which, though confessing that poetry
was not his special province, he had propounded his views of
poetry confidently enough, criticised the ancient poets and
modern poetical tendencies, and praised Gondibert. " I never
" yet saw poem," he tells Davenant, " that had so much shape
" of art, health of morality, and vigour and beauty of expres-
" sion, as this of yours ; and, but for the clamour of the
" multitude, that hide their envy of the present under a
" reverence of antiquity, I should say further that it would
" last as long as the ^neid or the Iliad." That he had not
read the poem carelessly is proved by his references to the
parts of it that had struck him most. " To show the reader,"
he says, " in what place he shall find every excellent picture of
" virtue you have drawn is too long, and to show him one
" is to prejudice the rest j yet I cannot forbear to point him
" to the description of love in the person of Birtha in the
" seventh canto of the Second Book. There has been nothing
" said upon that subject, neither by the ancient nor the
" modern poets, comparable to it." One turns with some
interest to the canto mentioned, to see what kind of verse
pleased the old philosopher so much, and finds' this description
there of Birtha, the daughter of the wise seer and physician.
Astragon : —
"To Astragon heaven for • succession gave
One only pledge, and Birtha was her name; .
Whose mother slept where flowers grew on her grave;
And she succeeded her in face and fame.
Her beauty princes durst not hope to use,
Unless, like poets, for their morning theme;
And her mind's beauty they would rather choose,
Which did the light In beauty's lanthorh seem.
T 2
276 LIFE OP MILTON AND HiaTOBY OP HIS TIME.
Sbe ne'er saw courts, yet courts could have undone
With untaught looks and an unpractised heart ;
Her nets the most prepared could never shun,
For nature spread them in the scorn of art.
She never had in husy cities been ;
Ne'er warmed with hopes, nor yet allayed with fears;
Not seeing punishment, could guess no sin ;
And, sin not seeing, ne'er had use of tears.
But here her father's precepts gave her skill,
Which with incessant business filled the hours;
In spring she gathered blossoms for the still,
In autumn berries, and in summer flowers."
Snchj at the best, was the epic muse of Davenant, eulogised
publicly not only by Hobbes ten years ago, but also by others
then and since, such as Waller and Cowley. But Gondihert
had, not unnaturally, had its detractors. It had been the
subject of some clever criticism by wags who, careless of
Hobbes and his backing, could not endure an epic so utterly
without any real backbone of interesting story and so mono-
tonously elegiac in its sing-song. They were quite right.
Eminent modern critics have had a word of praise for Gondi-
hert. Sir Walter Scott, for example, says that it " very often
exhibits a majestic, dignified, and manly simplicity," and
Hallam allows it the credit " due to masculine verse in a good
metrical cadence." But, while passages of it may be read with
a feeling that such praise is deserved, any attempt to read
the poem continuously ends in gentle stupefaction. Hence,
though Gondiberf remained, in a very literal sense, Dave-
nant's piece de resistance among his contemporaries, his real
popularity depended more on the recollection of his plays,
masques, and miscellaneous poems. On that evidence, a very
important place must even yet be assigned to Davenant among
the English dramatists of the reign of Charles I. His comedies
and tragedies produced in that reign may rank fairly above
those of Shirley, and next to those of Massinger and Ford.
His subjects are generally of the same kind as theirs, and
sometimes, like theirs, frightfully repulsive ; there is the same
outrageous licence occasionally in the situations and phrase-
ology ; each play is rather a run of tumid dialogue than
SIR WILLIAM DAVENANT. 277
a definite invention of real plot and character ; but there is
undoubted power, both humorous and poetical, with a remark-
able inheritance of that language of light, elevated, profuse,
and careless ideality which we recognise as the Elizabethan.
The following is a characteristic passage from one of his
comedies : —
The Life of ComfXEX Ladies imagined by Town "Wits.
Thwack. Poor country madams, th' are in subjection still.
The beasts, their husbands, make 'em sit on three
Legg'd stools, like homely daughters of an hospital,
To knit socks for their cloven feet.
Elder Pal. And, when their tyrant husbands, too, grow old,
As they have still th' impudence to live long,
Good ladies, they are fain to waste the sweet
And pleasant seasons of the day in boiling
Jellies for them, and rolling little pills
Of cambric lint to stuft' their hollow teeth.
Luey. And then the evenings, warrant ye, they spend
"With Mother Spectacle, the curate's wife;
Who does inveigh 'gainst curling and dyed cheeks,
Heaves her devout impatient nose at oil
Of jessamine, and thinks powder of Paris more
Profane than th' ashes of a Romish martyr.
Lady Ample.. And in the days of joy and triumph. Sir,
Which come as seldom to them as new gowns.
Then, humble wretches ! they do frisk and dance
In narrow parlours to a single fiddle.
That squeaks forth tunes like a departing pig.
Lucy. "Whilst the mad hinds shake from their feet more dirt
Than did the cedar roots that danced to Orpheus.
Lady Avivple. Do they not pour their wine too from an ewer,
Or small gilt cruise, like orange-water kept
To sprinkle holiday beards ?
Lucy. And, when a stranger comes, send seven miles post
By moonshine for another pint?
Here is a graver passage, the dialogue of two lovers con-
demned to be put to death, and already kneeling together in
expectation of their execution : —
Dialogue aw the Doomed Lovees.
Seojierta. So much of various fate so soon expressed
Two lovers yet ne'er knew, since sympathy
First dwelt on earth.
ScioUo. Ere long we must be cold,
Cold, cold, my love, and wrapped in stubborn sheets
278 LIFE OF MILTON AND HISTORY OF HIS TIME.
Of lead ; housed in a deep, a gloomy vault.
Where no society will mix with us,
But what shall quicken from our tainted limbs.
Scop&rta. Whilst still there 's noise and business in the world.
Whilst still the wars grow loud and battles join,
And kings their queens salute in ivory.
Sciolto. But 0 ! how many ages may succeed
In heaven's dark kalendar ere we again
Material be, and meet in the warm flesh !
Scoperta. And whether that our souls, when they're preferred
To taste eternity, will ever think
Upon the bargains of our human love
Is unto me a desolate suspense.
Sciolto. Philosophy doth seem to laugh upon
Our hopes, and wise divinity belies
Our knowledge with our faith. Jealous nature
Hath locked her secrets in a cabinet
Which Time ne'er saw.
All in all, in the style and verse of Davenant in his plays
there is something from Ben Jonson, something from Mas-
singer, but more from Shakespeare. The fact, at all events,
is that veneration for the memory of Shakespeare was one
of Davenant's ruling passions. The enthusiasm had taken
a rather extraordinary form, if, as Aubrey hints, he did not,
in later life, discourage the rumour that he was Shakespeare's
natural son. The old Crown Inn at Oxford, in which Dave-
nant had been bom in 1606, had been, it seems, the very inn '
which was Shakespeare's habitual resting-place in his journeys
between Stratford-on-Avon and London, as fine and comfort-
able an inn as there was in those parts, and with cellars full
of Gascony and other wines ; and John Davenant, the land-
lord of this inn, and for some time Mayor of Oxford, a man
" of a melancholic disposition and seldom or never seen to
laugh," but " an admirer and lover of plays and play-makers,"
and his wife, Davenant's mother, " a very beautiful woman,
of a good wit and conversation," were well-remembered
persons long after they were both dead. Out of these
facts foolish gossip in the London theatres, possibly while
Ben Jonson was yet alive, had invented the pedigree for Sir
William which he is said not to have disliked. More credit- ••
able to him, and more authentic, is the fact of his constant
profession of literary allegiance to the great Elizabethan.
THOMAS HOBBES. 279
These lines, " In remembrance of Mr. William Shakespeare,"
by one who had' seen the living man and had been patted on
the head by him, are not uninteresting ; and they are among
the very earliest of Davenant's pieces : —
Beware, delighted poets, when you sing
To welcome nature in the early spring,
Your numerous feet not tread
The banks of Avon ; for each flower.
As it ne'er knew a sun or shower,
Hangs there the pensive head.
Each tree, whose thick and spreading growth hath made
Eather a night beneath the boughs than shade.
Unwilling now to grow.
Looks like the plume a captain wears.
Whose rifled falls are steeped i' the tears
Which from his last rage flow.
The piteous river wept itself away
Long since, alas ! to such a swift decay
That, reach the map and look
If you a river there can spy.
And for a river your mocked eye
Will find a shallow brook ^.
Ben Jonson, the first of the regular series of the English
Laureates, hnd been confessedly a larger man than most of
those who were nominally his literary subjects. The same
cannot be said of his successor Davenant. Among the sub-
jects of Ms laureateship there were some decidedly inferior^
but not a few far superior, to himself.
What more massively notable figure in the English world
of letters at that time than Davenant's nominal subject, but
];eal master and mentor, Thomas Hobbes? In his seventy-
third year at the Restoration, — a tall, strong-looking old man,
of ruddy complexion, though with hands shaking from palsy,
1 Davenant's Collected Works, folio and Logan, is the fullest and most
edition of 1673 ; Aubrey's Lives, Dave- careful faiown to me ; and never before
nant ; "Wood's Ath. III. 802 — 809 ; this publication can Davenant's Plays
Ward's Hist, of English Dramatic Lit- be said to have been properly edited,
eratnre, II. 359 — 364 ; Dramatic Works In Herringman's folio of 1673, issued
of Sir WUliam Davenant, in four volumes five years after Davenant's death, enor-
octavo, published in Edinburgh in 1872, mous liberties were taken with the text
as part of a series of new editions of the of the plays. Some of the blank verse
Dramatists of the Restoration. The plays are reduced in that folio to a
Memoir of Davenant prefixed to this chaos of unsightly and nearly unread-
last by the editors, Messrs. Maidment able prose.
280 LIFE OF MILTON AND HISTOEY OF HIS TIME.
his head very bald atop, but with yellowish-g^ey hair in plenty
at the sides , — Hobbes too had already accomplished the best
part of his work. Known to the public before the Civil Wars
chiefly by his translation of ThucydideSj he had since then, —
in a series of books, written either during his eleven years
of voluntary retreat in Paris from the uncongenial strife at
home (1641-1653), or afterwards . in England during his
renewed residence there by Cromwell's leave under the Pro-
tectorate,— taken the world by storm in his true character
of philosopher, or systematic thinker. Called " the atheist
Hobbes" as long ago as 1646, when only the first of this
series of books, the Elementa Philosophica de Give, had been
published, he had become more and more " the atheist Hobbes,"
with all who found advantage in that style of epithet, by
his Human Nature and Be Gorpore Politico of 1650, his all-
comprehensive Leviathan of 1651, and some subsequent
writings, while this dreadful fame pf his for general Atheism
had been fringed latterly by a special reputation for mathema-
tical heterodoxy. We can now ju^ge of Hobbes for ourselves.
He was indubitably the most impiyrtant philosophical or syste-
matic thinker that England had produced since Bacon, and a
bolder and more thorough thinker in some respects than Bacon
had been ; one descries him among his English contempo-
raries as a grim and very irascible old Aristotle ; and one cau
trace the descent of his main notions through the whole
subsequent course of English Philosophy.
And what were the notions ? What was this Hobbism with
which the English mind was said to be already infected
through and through at the time of the Restoration, and
which was alarming and rousing the clergy and all denomi-
nations of the orthodox ?
Was it Atheism? Hobbes, most certainly, did not so
describe his system himself, or want it to be so described.
He expressly denies being an Atheist, and declares that
any person professing Atheism would be justly punishable
by God and the civil magistrate. In his own vocabulary
no words are more frequent than God, Eeligion, our Blessed
Saviour, the Holy Scripture, the Church, sin, immortality,
THOMAS HOBBES. 281
and the like. He is as ready to discuss these topics as
any one else ; they are parts of his encyclopsedia ; he
can use every doctrine of the Christian creed, and every text
or historical averment, of Scripture, with perfect practical
satisfaction, if you allow him a Hobbist interpretation. On
the whole, however, he is emphatic in declaring that it is in
the theological region of speculation that men have chiefly
made fools of themselves, and have accumulated the greatest
quantity of that nonsense which it is the business of philo-
sophy to sweep away. For the clergy of all kinds, as the
professional purveyors of such doctrine, and the inventors of
its jargon, he manifests a very daring contempt. Moreover,
though the names and phrases of Religion are retained in his
own vocabulary, and the entities and objects to which they
correspond do seem to belong somehow to his encyclopaedia of
what is real, they are represented as rather an influx of incon-
ceivables, maintained there by sheer option or constitutional
faith, than as matters with which human reason can comfort-
ably or effectively concern itself. God, as the eternal cause
of all that exists, " is not a fancy, but the most real substance
that is," Hobbes distinctly admits ; the existence of God might
even be demonstrated by natural reason, though it would be
by a very difficult and abstruse process, unintelligible to
the many ; but, practically, God is a name among men for
the largest possible amount of the inconceivable. " The
" name God is used, not to make us conceive him, for he is
" incomprehensible, and his greatness and power are incon-
" ceivable, but that we may honour him." Again, " By the
" visible things in this world and their admirable order, a man
" may conceive there is a cause of them, which men call God,
" and yet not have an idea or image of him in his mind ;"
and, in fact, " men cannot have any idea of him in their mind
answerable to his nature." As respects the supernatural, there-
fore, Hobbes was what we now call an Agnostic. But there
are several schools of Agnostics ; and, more precisely, Hobbes
was an Agnostic of that school which admits, or does not deny,
that the inconceivable God may, in sundry times and in divers
places, have communicated to the human race by revelation
282 LIFE OF MILTON AND HISTORY OF HIS TIME.
some hints of how he would will himself to be conceived
and thought of, with a view to certain important effects upon
the human spirit and upon human society, and that the con-
servation of such sacred tradition may be the business of some
mystic or visible organization on earth called collectively the
Church. What distinguishes Hobbes from some more recent
Agnostics of this school, however, is the sturdy impassiveness
with which, having made this admission of a possible deposit
of revelation in the world, valid for practical ends only and
apprehensible only by faith or trust, he turns away from that
deposit, or supposed deposit, and addresses himself to what he
thinks the real business of philosophy, viz. the rational in-
vestigation of the laws of that phenomenal or phantasmic
world in which, God or no Godj man lives and moves.
" From the propagation of religion," he says in one place,
" it is not hard to understand the causes of the resolution of
" the same into its first seeds or principles ; which are only
" an opinion of a Deity and powers invisible and supernatural,
" that can never be so abolished out of human nature but
" that new religions may be made to spring out of them by
" the culture of such men as for such purpose are in reputa-
" tion.'' Again, having to touch incidentally on the Chris-
tian doctrine of immortality and future judgment, how
does he express himself? "There is," he says, ^^ no natural
" knowledge of man's estate after death, much less of the
" reward that is then to be given to breach of faith, but only
" a helief, grounded upon other men's saying that they know
" it supernaturally, or that they know those that knew them
" that knew others that knew it supernaturally." Here there
is almost a sneer at a religious belief which he admits to be
legitimate on other grounds than those of natural reason.
And so, throughout, there is no ardour in Hobbes, never any
sentimental lingering over the notions of God, Christ, Heaven,
Hell, or any of their cognates. It is as if, having entered
these names in his vocabulaiyj and admitted some correspond-
ing entities in a Hobbist sense into his encyciopsedia, he felt
that he had done enough to appease the clergy or to provide
them with endless matter of minute logomachy with himself
THOMAS HOBBES, 283
in their own department, and so had cleared the decks for the
real action. That was to answer the question, What can man
rationally know of the world he lives in, of his own constitu-
tion in relation to it, and of his duties in it ?
Here Hobbes is at home. The individual man, accord-
ing to Hobbes, is a body with a brain, " a body-animated-
rational," moving amid other bodies or appearances and per-
ceiving them by his senses. " There is no conception in
" a. man's mind which hath not at first, totally or by parts,
" been begotten upon the organs of sense. The rest are
" derived from that original." The cause of sensation in
every case " is the external body or object which presseth the
" organ proper to each sense, either immediately, as in the
" taste and touch, or mediately, as in seeing, hearing, and
" smelling ; which pressure, by the mediation of the nerves,
" and other strings and membranes of the body, continued
" inwards to the brain and heart, causeth there a resistance
" or counterpressure, or endeavour of the heart to deliver
" itself, which endeavour, because outward, seemeth to be
" some matter without." What we call Imagination is simply
decaying sensation, or the relies of former sensation in the
, form of the original nerve- vibrations continued, but growing
weaker and weaker ; and Memory is but another name for
the same thing. Experience, again, is a name for " much
memory or memory of many things," and consists, in every
particular person, of the whole stock of decaying nerve-
vibrations treasured up in that person's bodily organism.
Thinking or mental discourse consists in trains of imagina-
tions, whether spontaneous and unguided or ordered and
regulated ; i. e. in the coming together of some of the
treasured-up relies of sensation at their own pleasure, or the
bringing of such together more stringently and for a definite
purpose. In neither ease are the chains or successions of ideas
arbitrary ; they are determined by previous associations or
successions among the first sensations. " Besides sense, and
" thoughts, and the trains of thoughts, the mind of man has
" no other motion." We cannot, therefore, have any idea,
conception, or imagination of anything we call infinite.
284 LIFE OF MILTON AND HISTORY OF HIS TIME.
Speech or verbal discourse is the generator of all science ; and
speech consists in the imposing of names upon recollected
sensations or past trains of thought and in the connexion of
these names. What are called universals, viz. common names,
such as man, tree, as distinct from proper names, such as Peter,
John, have nothing corresponding to them in real naturCj but
express only abstractions of the mind. Speech is liable to
many abuses ; and the right use of speech, and especially the
art of strict definition of words, is the first necessity of Philo-
sophy. " For words are wise men^s counters, — they do but
" reckon by them ; but they are the money of fools, that value
" them by the authority of an Aristotle, a Cicero, or a Thomas,
" or any other doctor whatsoever." Reason, or the highest
faculty of the mind, is not born with us, as sense and memory
are, nor is it gotten by experience only, as prudence is ; but
it is "attained by industry, first in apt imposing of names,
" and secondly by setting a good and orderly method in pro-
" ceeding from the elements, which are names, to assertions
" made by connexion of them to one another, and so to syllo-
" ffisms, which are the connexions of one assertion to another,
" till we come to a knowledge of all the consequences of
" names appertaining to the subject on hand : and that is it
" men call Science." Geometry alone of the sciences had
been brought to a tolerably satisfactory condition, for there
men had begun " at settling the significations of their words ;"
but, by equally strict ratiocination, man might work out other
sciences, or collections of true theorems, on all subjects. To
formulate experience universally in such general theorems is
man's highest excellence ; " but this privilege is allayed by
"another, and that is the privilege of absurdity." Of all
men the most subject to absurdity are philosophers.
Such is the essence of the Psychology of Hobbes. It was
a system, as will be seen, of thorough-going empiricism or
sensationalism, rejecting every vestige of transcendentalism.
It was also, and has been generally called, a system of Mate-
rialism or Materialistic Realism, inasmuch as it makes the
world to consist of an aggregate of material bodies, with
human bodies among them, acted upon by the rest through
THOMAS HOBBES. 285
the senses and nerves. But, though this is Hobbes's generar>'
conception of the world, there are passages in his writings
which seem rather to propound a kind of modified Idealism.
He declares that image, colour, sound, shape, and the other
qualities by which objects are known and which seem to
belong to these objects themselves, and indeed to constitute
them, are not the objects or in the objects, but are only-
subjective affections of the mind, " apparitions unto us of the
" motion, agitation, or alteration which the object worketh in
" the brain, or spirits, or some internal substance of the head."
As the soft white and grey mass we call brain, or the internal
substance of the head, must itself, on this very principle, be
regarded as only the apparition to us of the motion or agita-
tion caused on our spirits by something unknown, having no
resemblance in its own nature to the apparition it causes, —
i. e. certainly not brain, and neither white nor grey, nor hard
nor soft, — Hobbes might seem to be shut up here either to
Idealism or to a highly refined variety of Natural Realism.
Perhaps, however, unless we were to be allowed the somewhat
self-contradictory phrase Materialistic Idealism or Idealistic
Materialism, the name Materialistic Realism, or that of Mate-
rialism pure and simple, may be kept as defining Hobbes's
metaphysical system best.
Proceeding from Hobbes's Psychology to his Cosmology, or
System of Physics, we need remark little more than that he
did propound a classification of the physical sciences and
attempt something himself not only in mathematics, but also
in astronomy, optics, meteorology, physiology, &c. In as-
tronomy he was a Copernican, and so was in advance of
most of his contemporaries. As to Creation, or the physical
beginnings of the world and of animation and humanity on
the earth, he is very cautious. Of the doctrine of evolution
or development he seems to have had no glimpse ; and hence
his hesitation is between the hypothesis of the eternity of the
world and that of its instantaneous creation or appearance at
some point of past time. Out of that dilemma, however,
he shakes himself very characteristically. " I purposely
" pass over the questions of infinite and eternal," he says.
286 LIFE OF MILTON AND HISTOET OF HIS TIME.
"contenting myself with that doctrine concerning the be-
" ginning and magnitude of the world which I have been
" persuaded to by the Holy Scriptures and fame of the miracles
" which confirm them, and by the custom of my country and
" reverence due to the laws." He will vote, therefore, with
other people, that the world began about six thousand years
ago, with Adam and Eve, in the way described in the Bible.
And so we are brought to the most peculiar part of the
Philosophy of Hobbes, viz. his Ethics and Politics.
For a long while mankind, a multitude of "bodies-
animated-rational," moved over the earth, or inhabited different
parts of it, in a state of nature, with no great differences of
strength or ability between individual and individual, but
with great and growing differences in respect of the nature
and the intensity of their appetites. In this state of natui-e
all men have equal right to all things, and each is sole judge
of what will suit him best. Good is merely the name with
every one individually for what he desires, and Evil merely
the name for what he fears. Obviously, however, as there are
many things, such as food, which all desire and must have,
and other things, especially death and bodily injury, which
all fear, a state of nature, in which each strives to get what he
can and to keep it as long as he can, must be a mere scramble
of all against all, or state of incessant mutual warfare. Gra-
dually it begins to dawn upon people, or upon some, that this
system of the right of all to all is incommodious, and might
be rationally modified. Hence, out of natural craving for
some amount of peace, the first glimmerings of the so-called
laws, of nature. The fundamental law of nature, according
to Hobbes, is " That peace is to be sought after where it may
" be found, and, where not, there to provide ourselves with
" helps of war;" but he enumerates twenty other more special
laws of nature, or inventions in the interest of peace. The
first of these is " That the right of all men to all things
" ought not to be retained, but that some certain rights ought
« to be transferred or relinquished." All civil societies have
had their origin in fear and in the striving after some amount
of peace and self-security, ending at last in the surrender of
THOMAS HOBBES. 287'
the right of all to all things and a contract to obey magistracy
m some form. We may be swift and summary in following
Hobbes through the rest. He recognises aristocracy and
democracy as possible forms of magistracy, but prefers abso-
lute monarchy, where the right of all is conveyed to one
person. The king in a state is the fountain of all law ; if he
decree the moralities of true natural reason, well and good ;
but in that respect he is responsible to God only, and whatever
he may decree is to be obeyed by his subjects. "All judi-
" cature belongs to him ;" " The legislative power is his only ;"
"The naming of magistrates and other officers belongs to
" him ; " " Also the examination of all doctrines ;" " Whatso-
"ever he doth is unpunishable;" "No man can challenge
" a propriety in anything against his will." This doctrine
is repeated again and again in similar strings of emphatic
aphorisms. Even in Religion the king has the sovereignty.
He may set up or establish what religion or forms of public
worship he pleases, and resistance to him even in that depart-
ment, on any plea of private liberty of conscience, is treason
and rebellion. Opinions contrary to the established religion
ought to be silenced ; nay, " disobedience may lawfully be
punished in them that, against the laws, teach even true phi-
losophy." The king is head of the Church, and may do all the
acts of the clergy. Church and State are one ; the clergy have
no powers but what they derive from the civil sovereign ; not
Pope Sylvester, but the Emperor Constantino, who made him
Pope, was the supreme pastor of the Roman Church ; and so,
in modern communitieSj not to bishops or assemblies of clergy,
but to the monarch, belongs the ultimate power ecclesiastical.
Hobbes, though he has studied the history of Episcopacy,
and thinks that it was a slow formation of political expedi-
ency only, and that the first bishops were simply the popularly
elected presbyters or pastors of congregations, accepts modern
English episcopacy as perhaps the best form of Church-govern-
ment and the most consistent with monarchy, but would have
the bishops and all other clergy watched by the civil power and
taught their proper places. " None but kings can put into their
" titles a mark of submission to God only, Dei gratia Bex, Sfc.
288 LIFE OF MILTON AND HISTORY OF HIS TIME.
" Bishops ought to say, in the beginning of their mandates. By
" the f avow of the King's Majesty, bishop of such a diocese ^."
Such was Hobbism. It was partly a reproduction, partly a
most original version, of an eternally base philosophy. Yet
in what a style, and with what vigour, this philosophy
was taught ! Among English writers there are few com-
parable to Hobbes for combined perspicuity and strength.
Every sentence is as clear as can be, and yet full of inde-
pendence and character. Happy and memorable expressions
abound, and in page after page there breaks out the sarcastic
humour of one who sees the faces of his readers as he writes,
and of some readers in particular, and hits the harder the
more they wince. There have been later philosophers pre-
senting the same strange union of practical absolutism in
polities with universal theoretical scepticism or remorseless
reinquiry for themselves into all matters intellectual, though
the most recent followers of Hobbes in metaphysics have
generally gone the other way in politics ; but Hobbes remains
a kind of unique figure in English Philosophy, with a per-
sonality quite distinguishable from that of any forerunner or
any successor. His very face in the portraits is one of the
strongest and most astute ever seen. Strong and low, we
may call Hobbes, but great in that kind.
From the Restoration onwards, Hobbes, whose connexion
with the Devonshire family dated from as far back as 1607,
lived much, as he had done before, at Chatsworth in Derby-
shire, the honoured guest of William, the third earl, to whom,
as to his father, he had been tutor. His method of life there
was somewhat eccentric. He devoted the mornings to
vigorous walking and exercise out-of-doors ; returned to
breakfast ; and then " went round the lodgings, to wait upon
" the Earl and Countess and all the children, paying some
" short addresses to them," till about 13 o'clock, when " he
" had a little dinner provided for him," which he always took
alone. "Soon after dinner, he had his candle and twelve
» Hotbes's Collected Works, edited concerning 'Body, the Human JVatwe,
by Sir William Molesw orth, Bart. (1839) the PMoscpMcal Budiments concerning
in sixteen volumes. The quotations are Government and Society, and the Le-
chieflyfrom fki Elements of Philosophy viathan.
THOMAS HOBBES. 289
" pipes of tobacco laying by it ; then, shutting his door, and
" darkening some paart of the widdowe, he fell to smoking,
" and thinking, and writinig, for several hours." So in the
country ; but he was also a good deal in London, living in
the Earl's town-house in Bifehopsgate Street Without, and
going about with him daily. " I should sooner havef given
" you an account of an interview I had of Mr. Hobbes," writes
Hooke to his patron Hobert Boyle, "which was at Mr. Reeve's,
" he coming along with ihy Lord Dfevonshire to be assistant
" in the choosing a glass. I was, I confess, a little surprised
" at first to see an old man so view me and survey me in
" every way, without saying anything to me ; but I quickly
" shaked off my surprisal when I heard my lord call him
" Mr. Hobbes, supposing he had beeil informed to whom
" I belonged^ I soon found, by staying that little while hei
" was there, that the character I had formerly received of him
" was very significant. I found him to lard and seal every
" asseveration with a round oath, to undervalue all other men's
" opinions and juidgnients, to defend to the utmost what he
" asserted, though never so absurd, to have a high conceit of
" his own abilities and pepforinanees', though never so absurd
" and pitiful, &c. He would not be persuaded but that
" a common spectacle-glass was as good' an eye-glass for a
" thirty-six foot glass as the best in the world, and pretended
" to see better than all the rest by holding his spectacle in
" his hand, which shook as fast one way as his head did the
" other 1 which, I confess, made me bite my tongde." This
is frotn an unfriendly quarter, but it is trustworthy. We see
the strong old fellow in the optician's ^op, dogmatic even
about the best glasses for telescopes, glaring at Hook feroci-
ously because he knew him to be a client of BoyleJsi and
blaspheming like a Trojan. He had outlived all his vices,
except those of temper, and seems never to have had many of
an unphilosophical kind. One natural daughter, whom he
called his delictum, juventutis or " slip of youth," he had duly
provided for somewhere ^.
' Wood's Ath. lil. 1206—1218, with- Coffespofldence; Boyle's Works, V. 533.
quotation from Kennet there; Boyle's Hoofce'a-' letteS is- of-' date 1663; when-
VOL VI. U
290 LIFE OF MILTON AND HISTORY OF HIS TIME.
Hobbism, though Hobbes himself had fancied that the
political part of it might be adjusted to the Protectorate if
necessary, was expressly, in all its parts, the philosophy for
the Restoration. Charles, who had been obliged by clerical
influence to sever his connexion with Hobbes abroad, but who
now showed him all favour, and allowed him a pension of
j^lOO a-year,,was as much a Hobbist as a crypto- Catholic ;
and, indeed, a mixture of Hobbism and crjrpto-Catholicism
was the special court religion. Davenant himself was a
kind of Roman Catholic Hobbist; and the scepticism that
was so prevalent among the politicians and wits individually,
while they abetted collectively the government policy of coerced
national conformity to the Anglican Episcopal Church, was
a modified or diluted Hobbism. Not, of course, that there
were not vehement anti-Hobbists among the chiefs of the
Restoration. The clergy, in a mass, were bound to hate
Hobbes, not only for the heretical theology which they called
his Atheism, but also for the sturdy Erastianism of his views
about Bishops and the Church. Hence there was hardly an
eminent clerical contemporary of Hobbes who did not think
it part of his professional duty to gird at the great heretic on
every possible occasion. Clerical anti-Hobbists, now of the
Church of England, who had already distinguished themselves
in this way before the Restoration, were Bramhall, Wallis,
and Seth Ward, the two latter having assaulted Hobbes's
mathematical pretensions as well as his theology. Hardly
less conspicuous as a declared anti-Hobbist already, and
writer against Hobbes, was the ever active Richard Baxter.
The dislike of Boyle for Hobbes, theological and scientific,
was to manifest itself in various writings of the Christian
philosopher ; and anti-Hobbism, as we have seen from Hooke's
Hobbes was seventy-five years old.— round his eye-lids." When he a'ppeared
Aubrey's anecdotes about Hobbes, at Court, "Here comes the bear" the
•whom he knew intimately, confirm wits would say, and would gather round
Hooke's description of his ferocious fora baiting-match ; on which occasions
manner and his habit of swearing, but "he would make his part good," says
leave altogether a kmdlier impression. Aubrey, being "marvellous happy and
"He had two kmds of looks," says ready in his rejjlies, and that without
Aubrey: " when he laughed, was witty, rancour, except provoked." Aubrey
and m a merry humour, one could scarce adds that he was very charitable with
see his- eyes ; by and bye, when he was his money,
serious and earnest, he opened his eyes
THE SEPTUAGENARIANS. 291
description of Hobbes in his letter to Boyle, was a rooted
sentiment among Boyle's associates. It remained to be seen
whether the hatred of Hobbes among the theologians might
not overbear the liking for him among the freethinking
politicians and wits, and whether, in some swell of popular
clamour, the clergy might not be able to bring the old heretic
to the bar for judgment. Hobbes, who was, after all, a timid
man, was never quite free from this dread of a writ de Aeretico
coniburendo, but was resolved to avoid martyrdom at the last
by any required amount of retractation, attendance at chapel^
or whatever else.
Hobbes thus left standing by himself, it will be enough if
we enumerate more miscellaneously the rest of those whom
Davenant, at the very beginning of his renewed Laureateship,
could regard as his literary subjects. We shaU take them in
groups in the order of their ages.
Coevals of Hobbes, or over seventy years of age at the
Bestoration, were Robert Sanderson and George Wither.
Sanderson was to live to 1663, as the- respected Restoration
Bishop of Lincoln, and was to add some new publications
to the previous series of his sermons and other writings.
Wither is still more astonishing. It seemed as if the literary
career of this most fluent of poets and satirists, begun as far
back as 1612, and continued, in volumes and sheets, through
the reigns of James and Charles I., and through the Common-
wealth and Protectorate, would never have an end. Impover-
ished by the Restoration, and imprisoned for some time on
a charge of political libel, he was no sooner released than his
pen was again busy in his poverty. Tke Prisoner's Plea,
Vox Vulgi, Verses intended to the King's Majesty, Proclamation
in the name of the King of Kings, Tuha Paeifica, Three Private
Meditations, such are the titles of the last imbecile musings
in prose and verse that were to come from the popular old
Puritan and Parliamentarian before May, 1667, when they
buried him in the Savoy church^.
' Wood's Ath. III. 62?— 331 and 761—775.
TJ a
292 LIFE OF MILTON AND HISTOBY OF HIS TIME.
Alive in 1660, and ranging then from seventy years of age
to sixty, in this order of descent, were Herrick, Dr. Henry
King, Dr. John Hacket, Dr. John Goodwin, Dr. John
Bramhall, Ikaak Walton, James Shirley, James Howell,
William Prynne> Dr. Brian Walton, John Ogilby, Peter
Heylin, Edmund Calamy, and Dr. Thomas Goodwin.
Of most of these we know enough already to understand how
they were likely to comport themselves amid the conditions of
the Restoration. King, Bishop of Chichesterbefore the Civil
Wars, returned to that See ; Bramliall, formerly Bishop of
Derry, became Archbishop of Armagh and Primate of all
Ireland, and lived to 1663 ; the learned Brian Walton became
Bishop of Chester, but died in November 1661 ; Hacket, so
conspicuous an episcopal divine before the Civil Wars, was
to be Bishop of Lichfield and Coventry. Heylin, one of the
bitterest and most active enemies of the Puritans, and who had
been living by miscellaneous literature, much of it historical
and much of it scurrilousj since he had been voted a delinquent
and deprived of all his spiritualities in 1643, had recovered
those spiritualities, but was not thought fit for higher
preferments. He died in May, 1663, only sub-dean of
Westminster, after having published his last two or three
books and pamphlets. And what of Herrick, the delicious'
Herrick, who had been ejected in 1648 from his Devonshire
vicarage of Dean Prior, and had been living since then in his
native London as a vague lay^man, with no thoughts of ever
being a parson again, and asserting that fact by collecting
and publishing, as "Robert Herrick, Esq.," those Anacreontics
and other songs and poems which have made his name an
evergreen ? AH that we know is that he did resume the
clerical function; and return to spend hi& old age among his
rude, parishioners in Dean Prior, where there are fond tradi-
tions of hint yet, and where his ghost is said to walk very
contentedly now, though he had written of it dui-ing his
former incumbency :—
"More discontents I never had.
Since I was born, than here.
Where I have been, and still am, sad, —
In this dull Devonshire."
THE SEXAGENARIANS. 293
The three other clergymen on our list, Calamy and the two
Goodwins, went the opposite way, of course, from tlie Heylins
and Herricks, and had to take the consequences. Of the five
non-clerical sexagenariauB mentioned, only Howell iad com-
promised his original Eoyalism by turning Oliverian for
-a time. It was easy for him, however, to revert to his original
principles ; and so^ though he was not restored to hi« Clerk-
ship of the Council, he became historiographer to tlie King,
and was the first who held that sub-presideney of letters,, if
we may so call it, under the poet-laureate. Prynne remained
Prynne, a Royalist of the stiffest Presbyterian persuasion,
, taught submission at last, but pregnant still with pamphlets.
The pious and peaceful Izaak Walton, long retired froia his
haberdasher's Sbusiness, and having the eminent Bishop
Morley for his son-in-law, was living in hiS' own house in
Clerkenwell, or sometimes with his son-in-law the bishop,
a happy Eoyalist, angler, and Anglican. One thinks with
peculiar interest of Shirley as one of the survivors of the
Restoration. Called usually the latest of fee Elizabethan
dramatists, though in reality his first plays date from the be-
ginning of the reign of Charles I., this Romam Catholic
veteran could now consider his sehoolmastering in Whitefriars,
and his other recent shifts, as happily at an end, and could
liope to see some of his plays reproduced on the stage and to
write more. It was much the same with Shirley's friend,
John Ogilby, hitherto less known to us. — Born in or near
Edinburgh in 1660, but brought to London in his ichiidhood,
Ogilby had beg^n life in very hard circumstances. He had
been a stage-dancer and dancing-master ; which second pro-
fession he had been able to continue after having lamed him-
self by an accident in the first. He had been idancing-master
in several noble families, and finally in that of Strafford ;
who took him to Ireland in some liig^lier domestic capacity,
and under whose auspices he bad set up a prosperous theatre
in Dublin. Driven back to England by the Irish Rebellion,
he had set himself with the utmost determination, both in
London and Cambridge, to the task of repairing in middle
age the defects oi iis early education. He had made himself
294 LIFE OP MILTON AND HISTOBT OF HIS TIME.
such a master of Latin as to be able to bring out in 1649-50
bis extraordinary Translation of Virgil. The book bad been
popular, and had been republished in more splendid form in
1654. Having by this time attacked Greek, and published
Fables of Mso;p pa/raphrased in, Terse and adormed wilh Sculptures,
Ogilby did not shrink from a yet bolder feat. TIom,er Jiis
Iliads Translated, adorned with Sculptwres, and illustrated witJt
Annotations, was the title of a folio of his, ready in 1660, and
dedicated to King Charles. At the Restoration, accordingly,
people were speaking of Mr. Ogilby as a kind of self-taught
prodigy. He was to keep up his character of enterprising
author-tradesman to the last. While not ceasing from poetry
■and' the translation of poetry, be was to take more and more
to geography, topography, and all kinds of matter- of-faet
prose that would pay, and was to devise fresh ingenuities in
the methods of printing, bookbinding, and book-illustration,
and also in the art of vending and distributing books \
The Englidi authors binder sixty years of age and over
■fifty at the Restoration may, inasmuch as Davenant himself
was midway between the two ages, be called the authors of
Davenant's own wave. Milton also belonged to this wave,
though among the juniors in it, being but in his fifty-second
year. Others worth mentioning, in the order of seniority,
are Dr. John Earle, Dr. John Lightfoot, Sir Kenelm Digby,
Thomas Fuller, Jasper Mayne, Edward Pocock, Edmund
Waller, Thomas Browne of Norwich, William Dugdale,
Bulstrode Whitloeke, John Rushworth, Sir Edward Hyde
(Clarendon), Sir Richard Fanshawe, Sir Aston Cockayne,
Owen Feltham, and Dr. Benjamin Whichcote.
The excellent Fuller can hardly be reckoned among the
Restoration writers at all. He had written duly, with the
rest, his Panegyrick to Ms Majesty on Ms Kappy Return, had
been readmitted to his prebend of Salisbury, made chap-
lain extraordinary to the King, and D.D. of Cambridge by
1 Authorities for the facts iu .this to which reference may be found by the
paragraph are numerous and scattered ; names in the Index. He brings in Ogilby
but much is from "Wood in the placM under Shirley (Ath. III. 737—744).
davenant's co-etaneans. 295
royal command, and had a bishopric in certain prospect, when
he was cut off by fever, August 1661. All his useful and
delightful books had been already given to the world, save
that his Worthies of England remained to be published in
complete form the year after his death. Dr. John Earle,
whose Microcosmoffrapiyhad been before the world since 1628,
and who had published a few pieces of verse since, besides his
Latin translation of the M^on Basilike, done in exile, had
returned with the King, to be Dean of Westminster, and ere
long bishop of two sees in succession. The Cambridge Orien-
talist, Lightfoot, and the Oxford Orientalist, Pocock, were
to live on as Orientalists still, — Lightfoot abating his Presby-
terianism and his Westminster Assembly recollections so
much as to be retained in the Restoration Church as con-
forming incumbent of Great Munden, in Hertfordshire ;
Pocock restored to his eanonry of Christ Church and made
D.D., but, for the rest of his long life, to be " overlooked
or forgotten." Jasper Mayne, of some reputation as the
author of a comedy and a tragi-eomedy, the translator of
Lucian, and a miscellaneous poet, had been known also
since 1646 as D.D. and author of some published sermons.
Having been deprived, in the Commonwealth time, of two
vicarages he had held conjointly, he had been living mean-
while as chaplain to the Earl of Devonshire, and so under
the same roof with Hobbes, and not much in harmony
with that philosopher. The Restoration delivered him by
bringing him. back his two vicarages, with the archdeaconry
of Chichester in addition, — " all which he kept to his dying
day, and was ever accounted a witty and a facetious com-
panion." Whicheote, the only other clerical member of our
group, and about the youngest person in it, may be noticed
more fitly in a later connexion.
Of Whitloeke, Rushworth, and Hyde, among the laymen
of the group, it is enough to remember that Hyde was now
the first man in England, that Whitlocke's political days
were over and he was living obscurely in Wiltshire, and that
Rushworth, with capacities for business yet which were to
procure him secretarial posts under the new powers, and even
396 LIFE or MILTON AND HI8T0BY OF HIS TIME.
bring him again into Parliament, was to sink lower and lower
in the world. The first part of his Historical Collections had
appeared in 1659; the rest was not to be published for many
years. For the Royalist Dugdale, in reward for his faithful
heraldic services to the late King, and for the vast historical
industry which had enabled him to produce his Antiquities
of Warwichkire, the first volume of his Monaaticon Angli-
canum, and his History of St. Paul's CatA/sdral, all under the
Protectorate, there was immediate appointment, at Chancellor
Hyde's instabce, to the office of Norroy King of Arms, with
still higher heraldic posts to come, and, in due time, when he
had given more of his learned volumes to the world, the
honour of knighthood. That honour was also to come in
time, but more accidentally, to Thomas Browne of Norwich,
to whose jReligio Medici, published in 1642, and his Vulgar
Errors, published in 1646, there had been added, in the Pro-
tectorate, almost everything dse by which he was to be
known, including his beautiful Discowrse of Urn-hurial, and his
Garden of Cyrus, printed together in 1658. For the present
he was merely the well-known physician and scholar of
Norwich, author of those works. A knight since 1623, and
of a family in which knighthood had been usual, was Sir
Kenelm Digby. Though he was to live on as a Londoner,
and even a busy JJondoner, for five years after the Restoration,
he had already achieved the full sum of his distinctions.
Handsome and gigantic in person, of " a wonderful graceful
beh^iyiour, a flowing courtesy and civility, and such a volur
bility of language as surprised and delightedj" men thought
of him now as the hero of the naval . fight of Scanderoon
against the Venetians in " the dwwgy and unactive time " of
1628, as the man who had gone and come for thirty years
between England and the Continent and had changed his re-
ligion and his politics with his climate,, as the romantic hus-
band and romantic widower of the beautiful and frail Venetia
Stanley, as the chemist and natural philosopher, the inventor
of the powder of sympathy and of other mystic medicines for
warts and wounds, the author of many books of svibtle theology
and metaphysics,
datbnant's 00-ETANEANS. 297
"The age's wonder for his noble ,parts,
Skilled in six tongues and learn'd in all the art^."
Besides Sir Kenelm the only two of our group with titled
names were Sir Richard Fanshawe and Sir Aston Cockayne,
both of them baronets. Fanshawe had been in exile with
his Majesty, had served him domestically and in various
foreign embassies, had afterwards attended him to Scotland,,
and had been one of the prisoners from Worcester Battle.
Having rejoined the Kipg at Breda shortly before the Resto-
ration, he had returned with him to be his Latin Secretary, or
secretary for the foreign tongues, i.e. to hold exactly the
same office for Charles II, that had beem Milton's for the Com-
monwealth and for Oliver. His secretaryship was not to be
so stationary, however, as Milton's had been, but was to lead
to a Mastership of Requests and a Privy Councillorship, and
to be varied ai;id interrupted by embassies and diplomatic
missions. He was a scholarly man, a good Latinist, and pro-
bably, from long residence abroad, Milton's practical superior
in the foreign tongues. Nor was he without some independent
reputation in literature. To his translation of Guarini's U
Pastor Fido, published in 1646, he had added several transla-
tions from the Spanish, a translation of The Lusiad, of Camoens
from the Portuguese^ and translations from and into Latin, be-
sides pieces of original English verse. "A gentleman very well
tnown and very well beloved," says Clarendon of Fanshawe.
His brother ba,ronet, Sir Aston Cockayne, had also travelled
abroad and accomplished himself in foreign languages. He
had been a friend of Sir Kenelm Digby, and had turned
Roman Catholic, hke that knight ; for which, and for his
BoyaHsm, he had not escaped trouble. During the Common-
wealth and Protectorate he had lived chiefly among his books
on an estate of his in Warwickshire, known as the author of
a masque, published in 1639, a translation of an Italian
romance published in 1654, a comedy, published in 1657,
^nd a tragi-comedy and miscellaneous poems and epigrams,
published together in 1658.
Though we have named Owen Feltham iu our present
group, because he lived a good while after the Restoration,
298 LIFE OF MILTON AND HISTORY OF HIS TIME.
one has little to tell of him since 1628. His collection of
essays, with the title Besohes, Divine, Political, and Moral, pub-
lished in that year, was in its sixth edition and still a popular
book with the pious ; but the only other thing going with
his name was A Brief Character of the Low Countries, published
in 1659. Far different had been the fates of Waller. What
a history his had been since he was first known, in the end of
James's reign and the beginning of the next ! He was then
the favourite of fortune, " nursed in Parliaments and already
eloquent in them," praised for his juvenile poems and lyrics,
admired by Hyde and by all for the graceful melancholy of
his manners, and " the excellence and power of bis wit and
pleasantness of his conversation." The interval had been one
long course of pusillanimity and time-serving. The very
flagrancy of his time-serving, the very notoriety of his
meanness, seem to have been his protection; for, after the
Eestoration, just as before. Clarendon tells us, "his com-
pany was acceptable where his spirit was odious." Still
wealthy, after all his losses, he could come and go between
the Court and his estate of Beaconsfield, not only as a
pleasant man of society, of tallish, slender figure, brown-
haired, " his face somewhat of an olivaster," to whose witty
compliments no one could be indifferent, but also as one
whose political abilities might make him of some conse-
quence in Parliament and in public affairs to the very end
of his life. Above all, he could be happy in the reputa-
tion he had acquired as "maker and model of melodious
verse." Already among his contemporaries something of
that strange opinion had been formed which, when it
had been expressed more distinctly by Pope and other
eighteenth century critics, was to make it a point of literary
orthodoxy to regard Waller as the first, or one of the first,
that taught the art of smoothness, sweetness, and harmony,
in English metre. Though the opinion is absurd, we can see
on what real characteristics it was founded. In his pane-
gyrics and other poems of occasion, none of them very long,
there is an easy elegance, not too artificial, with an occasional
passage of strength or richness ; his best lyrics are among
davenant's immediate junioes. 299
the gems of light and gallant verse in the language; and
there is much in the whole mind and style of Waller to keep
him among those few of our older poets who are voted to be
modern and still readable. He did not overestimate his
chances with posterity when he wrote : —
" Poets may boast, as safely* vain,
Their works shall with the world remain :
Both, bound together, live or die, —
The verses and the prophecy.
But who can hope his lines should long
Last in a daily changing tongue ?
"While they are new envy prevails;
And, as that dies, our language fails.
When architects have done their part,
The matter may betray their art :
Time, if we use ill-chosen stone.
Soon brings a well-built palace down'."
Under fifty years of age at the Restoration, but over forty,
were James Harrington, Thomas Killigrew, Samuel Butler,
Dr. Jeremy Taylor, Dr. Robert Leighton, Dr. John Pearson,
Dr. Henry More, Dr. John Wilkins, Eichard Baxter, John
Denham, John Birkenhead, Roger L'Estrange, Dr. John
Owen, Dr. John Wallis, Ralph Cudworth, Algernon Sidney,
Dr. John Worthington, Abraham Cowley, William Chamber-
layne, Marchamont Needham, Henry Neville, and John
Evelyn.
At the age of forty a man has generally done a good deal
of his work, however much more may have to follow. There
is one extraordinary exception in the present list. Samuel
Butler was forty-eight years of age, but the world had heard
nothing of Samuel Butler. A man of peculiar temper, he
had lived through the Civil Wars, the Commonwealth, and
the Protectorate, in a suceession of clerkships or stewardships,
in different country-houses, Presbyterian and Royalist, a great
reader of books, and doubtless with a propensity to scribble,
1 For this paragraph, as for the last, references to Clarendon's Life, John-
the authorities are too numerous and son's Lives of the Poets, Ward's History
various to be specified. Wood's Athensa of English Dramatic Literature, ^and
and Fasti, Aubrey's Lives, and Ander- other Literary Histories, as well as to
son's Collection of English Poets are Bohn's Lowndes, and to Biographical
among the chief ; but there have been Dictionaries.
300 LIFE OF MILTON AND HISTOBY OF HIS TIME.
but oeeupying himself more with music and amateur portrait-
painting. Whatever had been his previous phases of politics,
he was sufficiently Royalist at the time of the Restoration to
benefit by that event. Among the dignities of the old mon-
archy then revived by Charles was that of the Presidency or
Vice-royalty of Wales, which had been in abeyance since it had
been held, before the Civil Wars, by the Earl of Bridgewater.
When that dignity was revived, who so fit for it as Richard
Vaughan, Earl Carbery in the Irish peerage, and Baron
Vaughan in the English, who had married, for his thii-d wife,
in or about 1653j the Lady Alice Egerton, the youngest
daughter of the deceased Earl and former President ? That
this Lady Alice, the heroine of Milton's Comus in 1634,
should, as Countess of Carbery, wife of the new President, have
had to revisit Ludlow, the seat of the vice -royalty, and take
up her abode once more in the old castle, mistress herself now
of the great hall in which she had sung and acted her sweet
girlish part in the masque so long- ago, would have been
remarkable independently ; but it adds to our interest in the
occurrence to find that the steward or secretary whom the
Earl and Countess of Carbery toot with them to Ludlow, or
sent to take charge of the castle for some time in their
absence, was the hitherto obscure Samuel Butler. Tradition
at Ludlow still points out a room in the entrance-gateway to
the castle where Butler kept his pen, ink, and paper for any-
thing he had on hand. That he had something on hand
we aU know now very well; but not even the people of
Ludlow were then in the secret. It was probably his marriage
about this time with a lady of some means that was to break
his connexion with Ludlow and bring him to London ^.
Of the ten divines on our list not one but had more oa- less
established his celebrity before the Restoration, by writings or
otherwise. Of Jeremy Taylor, indeed, all that was greatest
and best had appeared between 1638 and 1660 ; his Buctor
DuUtantium was ready for publication ; and little was to come
from him in his Irish bishopric. The eeilebrity of Leighton,
1 Wood's Ath. III. ; Johnson's Lives, Sutfer ; BeU's Memoir of Butler, prefixed
to his edition of Butler's Works.
davenant's immediate junioes. 301
on the other hand, did not at all depend as yet on authorship.
Though weir known as a preacher and religious thinkerj he was
to leave his sermons and discourses wholly for posthumous
publication, and was to be distingui^ed, through the rest of
his life, from the Restoration onwards, only as a Scottish
bishop and archbishop, too saintly for his uneasy conditions.
Pearson, who was to rise by rapid preferments to an English
bishopric, was for the present-only rector of a London parish,
but had been known as a theological writer since 1644, had
published in 1659 his famous Hxpoaition of the Creed, and was
now getting ready his next treatise, published in 1660, and
entitled No Necessity of Meformation of the Public Doctrine (f
the Chwch 0f England. The literary and scientific reputation
of Wilkins dated from 1638, when he had published his Dis-
covery of a New- World, or a Discov/rse to prove that 'tis possible
there may be another habitable world in ■ the Moon ;, and there
had followed, before the Civil Wars, bis Discourse concerning'
tJie possibility of a passage to the World in the Moon, and other
similar ingenuities. Later writings, mathematical and theo-
logical, through the Civil War and the Commonwealth, had
increased his credit ; and, after having been D.D. and Warden
of Wadham College, Oxford, since 1648, he had attained
a kind of national notoriety by becoming the second husband'
of Cromwell's widowed sister, Mrs. French, and so one of the
family props of the Protectorate. Just before the Restoration,
Richard had removed him from Oxford and made him Master
of Trinity College, Cambridge. Of that preferment the
Restoration had, of course, deprived him, and there seemed
little chance of favour under Charles for a brother-in-law- of
Oliver. But, conforming to the new ecclesiastical system,
and settling in London as preacher to Gray's Inn, Wilkins,
" a lusty, strong'grown, well-set, broad-should6red person,
cheerful and hospitable," was again to rise in the world, and'
be a liberal and free-hearted English bishop when it suited
the government of Charles to want such a prelate in counter-
poise to others. With Wilkins we may associate his friend'
Wallis. First known to us when he was a young Presbyterian
parish-minister in London and assistant-clerk to the West-
302 LIFE OF MILTON AND HISTOET OF HTS TIME.
minster Assembly, Wallis had all but merged the divine since
then in the mathematician, had been Savilian Professor of
Geometry in Oxford since 1649, and had published his
Arithmetiea Infinitorwm in 1655, his Mathesis Universalis in
1657, and other writings. Conforming, like Wilkins, and
retaining his professorship and other appointments, he was
to live on beyond all his early contemporaries, engaged in
farther mathematical labours, and leaving the Westminster
Assembly and the memories of the Commonwealth and of Oliver
more and more comfortably behind him. Two divines who
could not conform, and who did not conform, were the semi-
Presbyterian Baxter and the Independent Owen. Baxter was
but about midway yet in the series of 180 distinct publica-
tions that bear his name, while Owen was about the same
point in Ms less numerous, though still formidable, series^.
Dr. Henry More, founder and head of the celebrated school
of the Cambridge Platonists, deserves a place by himself.
His first book had been his large philosophical poem, IPsychodia
Platonica, or A Platonical Song (f the Soul, published at Cam-
bridge in 1642 and republished in 1647, and consisting of
four parts, entitled respectively, (1) Tsychozoia, or the First
Tart of the Song of the Soul, containing a Christiano-Platonicall
display of Life, (2) Psychathanasia, or the Second Part of the
Song of the Soul, treating of the Immortality of Souls, especially
Man's Soul, (3) Antipsychopannychia, or the Third Booh of the
Song of the Soul, containing a confutation of the Sleep of the
Soul after Death, (4) Antimonopsychia, or the Fourth Part of the
Song of the Soul, containing A Confutation of the Unity of Souls.
There had followed in 1646 another poem called Bemocritus
Platonissans, or An Essay upon the Infinity of Worlds out of
PlatonicJe Principles, intended as an Appendix to the Second
Part of the former poem ; and among More's subsequent pub-
lications had been his Antidote against Atheism in 1652, his
Gonjectura Cahbalistica in 1653, his Bnthusiasmus Triumphatus, or
Treatise on the nature, causes, kinds, and cure of Enthusiasm,
in 1656, and his Immortality of the Soul concluded from Reason
^ Authorities as before.
HENEY MOBE AND CAMBKIDaE PLATONISM. 303
and, Philosophy in 1657. Before the Restoration he had also
ready his Explanation of the Grand Mystery of Godliness,
thought by some his greatest work. In these writings, all
issued from Christ's College, Cambridge, the essential prin-
ciples of his Platonic system of philosophy and theology had
been abundantly set forth, partly in queer and rugged verse
after the Spenserian model, and partly in abstruse prose reason-
ings, bristling with fantastic nomenclature from the Greek
and Hebrew. Long ago, when he had first entered Christ's
as a boy of seventeen, More had been firmly fixed by mere
constitutional instinct, as we saw at the time from his own
words (Vol. I. pp. 215-217), in the cardinal maxim of the
Transcendental or Intuitional Philosophy in opposition to the
Empirical, — ^to wit, " that every human soul is no abrasa
" tabula, or mere blank sheet, but hath innate sensations and
" notions in it, both of good and evil, just and unjust, trne
" and felse, and those very strong and vivid." He had also
at that early age shaken off, as he told us, the Calvinism
which had been hereditary in his family, and was passionately
in search of such a grander and richer theology as might
satisfy his soul religiously, and yet be an irrefragable philo-
sophy of pure reason. And by persistent musings, aided by
readings in Plato, and in "the Platonic writers, Marsilias
" Ficinus, Plotinus himself, Mereurius Trismegistus, and the
" mystical divines," including " that golden little book," the
Theologia Germanica of Tauler, the desired philosophy and
theology had been found. Diffused from Christ's College, as
More's Christian neo-Platonism or Cambridge Platonism, it
had procured for the recluse author the reputation among his
admirers and disciples of being one " raised up by a special
" providence in these days of freedom as a light to those that
" may be fitted or inclined to high speculations." More,
in whom there was a vein of resolute and sometimes sharpish,
though far from unamiable, egotism, did not refuse such
a reputation, but could describe himself on occasion " as a
fiery arrow shot into the world." In such a saying he cannot
have thought merely of the novelty of his theology in re-
lation to> the ordinary Calvinistie theology of his time on the
304 LIFE OF MILTON AND HISTORY OF HIS TIME,
one hand or to the ordinary Arminian theology on the other.
His theology was indeed Latitudinarian, and contained matter
of offence to both classes of the ordinary divines, as well as to
most of the sects. For all systematic and rigid Christians,
it glorified human reason too much, made the essence of
religion to consist too much in a few great beliefs and in
noble aspirations after a godly life in accordance with them,
and it scouted too much the authority of definite and minute
objective creeds.
It was, however, in the relations of his system to con-
temporary philosophic thought that More recognised most
radically his own importance. He was the champion of
that, philosophic system of Transcendentalism or Spiritualism,
rooting itself in supposed structural ideas of the human
intellect, which had always been at war with Empiricism,
or the philosophy deriving all knowledge from- sensation
and experience; and, just as this latter philosophy had in
his time taken the form of Hobbism, so More- might believe
that he had provided the exact new form- or version
of Transcendentalism needed by England as an antidote to
Hobbism. With the exception of Browne of Norwich, at all
events, we do not now recognise any antagonist to Hobbes
in his own generation comparable to More of Cambridge and
his followers. While all the clergy were banded against
Hobbes. theologically, and some of them mathematically,
Browne of Norwich and the Cambridge. Platonists supplied
the mind of England with the more subtle counteractive to
Hobbism which consisted in expositions of a speculative
philosophy of directly opposite principles. " Desert not thy
title to a divine particle and union with invisibles;" "Let
intellectual tubes give thee a glance of things which visive
organs reach not ; " " Have a glimpse of ineomprehensibles,
lodge immaterials in thy head, ascend unto invisibles, fill thy
mind with spirituals" : these aphorisms of Browne of Norwich,
the condensation of all his teaching, were simply anti-
Hobbism in its quintessence. The Cambridge Platonism of
Henry More was a larger, more cumbrous, and more mystical
and fantastic construction in the same interest of Spiritualism
H15NEY MORE AND OAMBEIDGE PLATONISM. 305
against Materialism. The main or central principle, iterated
and reiterated, is that there is a structural organ of meta-
physical truth, a vital connexion with infinity, in the mind or
reason of man, and that, wherever there, is the necessary
discipline of a pure and earnest life, this organ may be so
strengthened and qualified that it shall become a kind of di-
vine sagacity, discerning the invisible realities of the universe
to their centre at the throne of God, and indeed entitled
to regard its own dictates, or even its own dreamings, as
certainties and incontrovertibles. Perhaps every form of the
transcendental philosophy has been necessarily, in some sort,
such a philosophy of constitutional postulation ; but in More
the liberty of constitutional postulation ran riot, and loaded
his main doctrine with excrescences and learned whimsicalities
which made his Platonism as a whole a far less effective
counteractive to Hobbism than a simpler Transcendentalism
might have been. He was devoutly deep in witchcraft and
in the lore of angels and their possible and progressive inter-
communion with man ; he held that there was a cabbalistic
tradition of the true philosophy from Moses on through Plato
and the neo-Platonists j and the mere fact that he was a
divine led him to pack into his Platonism all the fragments
he could of school theology. Hence there may be some
jocose significance in the saying attributed to Hobbes, that
he would certainly adopt Dr. More's philosophy if ever he
gave up his own. He may have meant, " You see mine, and
you see the extraordinary jumble he calls his: well, there is
no medium." More, it ought to be added, names Hobbes
respectfully, and opposed him rather by continual implication
than by overt attack \
At the Eestoration, or any time afterwards, More might
have had preferment in the shape of a college-mastership or
an Irish bishopric. Nothing of the kind could induce him to
' More's autobiographfo sketch in the mole's Literatwre of the Chwreh of
form of the Prosfatio Oeneralissima to England (1844) ; and the full Mid valu-
the folio 1679 edition of his Opera able study of More in Principal TuHoch's
Omnia ; Ward's Life of More, 1710 ; Bational Theology and Christian Philo-
Dr. Grosart's edition of The Gomplete eophy in Englmd in the Seventeenth
Poems of Dr. Hermy More in his Chert- Centwy (1872).
sey Worthies Library (1878).; Oatter-
VOL. VI. X
3d6 LIFE OF MILTON AND HISTOEY OF HIS TIME.
leave Ms quiet fellowship of Christ's College ; and for many
years to come his tall, thin, dignified figure, with the radiant
eagerness of his look, was to continue familiar to all in Cam-
bridge. There he was known and quoted as the Chrysostom of
Christ's, while in London, we are told, his Mystery of God-
liness and other works " ruled all the booksellers," such was
the demand for them. Who reads them now ?
The other Cambridge Platonists, so called in their philo-
sophical character, but called also "the latitude-men" in
respect of their ecclesiastical views, were those who, partly
from More's influence upon them, partly by a similar but in-
dependent course of thought and study, had worked themselves
out of the old Calvinistie Puritanism to the same general way
of thinking, though without More's whimsies and extrava-
gancies. Two of the young hopes of the school had died
eight or nine years ago, — Nathaniel Culverwell, whose Dis-
course of the Light of Nature had been published in 1652, and
John Smith, some of whose manuscript remains were yet to
be published, under the title of Select Discomses, by his ad-
miring friends. There remained Dr. Benjamin Whichcote,
some years More's senior, and Dr. Ralph Cudworth and
Dr. John Worthington, slightly his juniors. Whichcote,
who had been provost of King's College since 1644 and had
won golden opinions in that office, had been too much of a
Commonwealthsman and Oliverian to be allowed to keep it ;
and after the Restoration he was to reside chiefly in London,
as the incumbent of one parish after another, maintaining his
great reputation by his masculine and impressive preaching.
He had published nothing and was to publish nothing ; and
it was only by his preaching and conversation that he exerted
the influence which makes him so memorable. " He was
"much for liberty of conscience," says Burnet, "and, being
" disgusted with the dry systematical way of those times, he
" studied to raise those who conversed with him to a nobler
" set of thoughts." His Platonis.m altogether was of a sim-
pler kind than More's. The same may be said of Cud worth's,
who was also to give the cast of his personality to the
B/stem of views common to the school. After having been
CUDWOETH AND OTHER PLATONISTS. 307
Master of Clare Hall and Regius Professor of Hebrew, he
had been made Master of Christ's in 1654, and had thus
been for some years in daily intercourse with More; and,
though, his Oliverianism had been even more pronounced
than Whichcote's, hie was left undisturbed in his master-
ship after the Restoration. He had published little yet,
but was preparing for the great works in which, with such
a combination of thought and learning, he was to set forth
his Platonic transcendentalism and wrestle openly with
Hobbism. Worthington, who had been Master of Jesus
College since 1655, when he succeeded Milton's first pre-
ceptor, Thomas Young, in that post, was less fortunate at
the Restoration than Cudworth. Deprived of his master-
ship, he removed, like Whichcote, to London, where he
was to live on as a preacher, illustrating Cambridge Platon-
ism in a practical Way in his sermons and some theolo-
gical writings. Minor Cambridge Platonists, younger than
any that have been mentioned, and not included formally in
our literary enumeration, were George Rust, Fellow of Christ's
College, afterwards an Irish bishop, and Simon Patrick,
who had recently left Cambridge to become Vicar of Battersea,
and who, conforming at the Restoration, was to rise ultimately
to an English bishopric. Cambridge Platonism had reached
Oxford ; and young Joseph Glanvill, of Lincoln College in
that University, hitherto a zealous Commonwealthsman, and
a follower of Baxter in theology, had contracted an admira-
tion for Henry More and begun to veer into Platonism and
Latitudinarianism. He was to distinguish himself by a long
series of writings, of which his Ycmity of Dogmatising, pub-
lished in 1661, was the first \
Erom the divines in our list we may pass to the lay poli-
tical thinkers. Of these the eldest and most important,
Harrington, was practically defunct. Imprisoned for a while
as a dangerous fanatic, he was to spend part of the rest of his
life abroad, and part in his house in Westminster, still talking
1 Oattermole and Tulloch as before ; volume is'our test History of Cambridge
■with references to Wood and to Bohn's Platonism.
Lowndes. Principal Tullocli's second
X a
308 LIFE OP MILTON AND HISTOBT OP HIS TIME.
of his iRota notions and Republican models to any who
would listen, but gi-owing more and more crack-brained till
he settled in a " deliration or madness." His faithful pupil
and admirer, the free-thinking Henry NeviUe, had also to
undergo a term of imprisonment and self-banishment, but
was to be of some mark in London by occasional new publi-
cations through the whole reign of Charles and beyond. The
Republican Algernon Sidney, avoiding at present by exile
the fate that was to overtake him at last, was not yet known
by his speculaitive political writings, but was thought of more
as a possible plotter abroad, with Ludlow and others, for the
subversion of the restored monarchy on any opportunity.
Birkenhead and L'Estrange, the Royalist journalists and
pamphleteers, were reaping their rewards, and we shall hear
more of both. Needham's career of journalism was, of course,
at an end ; and he was t© live haiceforth, as he had done in
his youth, by the practice of physic, venturing into print
again only at intervals and on safe topics. The wealthy and
artistic Evel)^, whose first book had appeared m 1649, and
whose French Gardener had appeared in 1658, but who had
distinguished himself politically by his Apology for the Royal
Party and his Late News from Brussels immasked, both pub-
lished on the eve of the Restoration, was now a much-honoured
man at Court ^.
There remain, of our list, Thomas Killigrew, John Denham,
Abraham Cowley, and William Chamberlayne. — Killigrew,
the oldest of the four, was one of a family of Killigrews, all
distinguished %j their Royalism, and some others of them
also by literary pretensions. His eldest brother. Sir William
Killigrew, a Royalist soldier, had written several plays, not
yet published; and another brother, Dr. Henry Killigrew,
a clergyman, was the author of a tragedy, published as long
ago as 1638, when be was a mere youth. But Tom Killigrew
was the favourite. He could date his authorship from 1641,
when he had published two tragi-comedies ; and, after having
1 Wood (for Harringtop, Nevffle, Bir- Harrington) ; Bohn's Lowndes, Evelyn's
kennead, and Needham) ; Aubrey (for Diary, &c.
BENHAM AND COWtEY, ' 309
been the companioa and household buffoon of Charles all
through his exile, he had returned wiih. him, to be groom of
the bedchamber and the licensed jester of the Court, a thou-
sand times wittier in table-talk than he had been, or ever
could contrive to be, with his pen. Of a higher and more
serious genius was Chamberlayne, whose I/ove's Victory, a
tragi-eomedy, had been published in 1658, and his PJMronnida,
a Heroic Poem, in 1659. He had fought on the Royalist side
in the C^vil Wars, and was now living as a physician in
Shaftesbury, complaining of his poverty. Denham, most
certainly, had no such cause for complaint. His poetical
celebrity, assured since 1643, when he had published his
tragedy called The Sophy, had been increased by his short
poem called Cooper's Hill in 1643, and by some subsequent
occasional pieces. For his past sufferings and plottings, with
occasional exile, in the King's cause, he had stepped at once
into the rich office of surveyor-general of the royal buildings,
held formerly by Inigo Jones ; and, having been made a
knight of the Bath at the coronation, he was to be pointed
out thenceforth as the distinguished Sir John Denham, recog-
nisable by his long, stooping figure, light flaxen hair, and
absent-minded look, as he walked to and from his official
place of business near Whitehall, often in company with his
deputy, Mr. Christopher Wren. Though he did not cease
to write verse, he was to produce nothing making good his
well-known aspiration in his Cooper's Hill, where, addressing
the Thames, he had said —
" 0 could I flow like thee, and make thy stream
My great example, as it is ,my theme !
Though deep, yet clear ; though gentle, yet not dull ;
Strong without rage, without o'erflowing full."
Although the greater intellect ef Cowley had not worked
itself out so completely as Denham's, even Cowley could re-
gard his best as perhaps already accomplished. To his boyish
Poetical Blossoms, published so long ago as 1633, the earliest
additions had been his pastoral comedy, Love's Riddle, and
his Latin comedy, Naufragium Jocuhre, both published in
310 LIFE OF MILTON AND HISTOBT OF HIS TIME.
1638; and there Lad followed his Satire against Sepamtivity
in 1642, his satire called The Puritan and the Papist in 1643,
his Mistress, or several copies of Love Verses, in 1647, his Four
Ages of England in 1648, his comedy called The Guardian in
1650, and his first folio edition by himself of his Collected
Poetical Works in 1656, containing reprints of a good deal of
the preceding, but suppressing much that was political, and
adding things not before published, such as some of his
Pindaric Odes and his sacred epic called Bavideis. Most
deservedly by this series of publications had Cowley earned
the reputation of being one of the finest minds of his time,
really a man of genius and a poet, though too much of his
so-called poetry consisted less in poetry proper than in the
subtle and ingenious intellection in metre which often passes
for poetry. As he had been an eminent Royalist, it might
have been expected that they would be proud of him at Court
after the Restoration, and that he would fare at least as well
as Denham. But there rested on him the recollection of his
^emi-apostacy under the Protectorate, when he had submitted
to Cromwell as the ruler by right of victory and possession,
giving up the cause of the Stuarts as utterly lost, and even
announcing the fact by implication in the preface to his
volume of collected poems. In vain had he tried to recover
himself by his Ode upon the Blessed Restoration and Return of
his sacred Majesty Charles the Second ; in vain was he to renew
the strain again and again both in verse and in prose ; his lot
through the rest of his life, as far as Charles and the Court
were concerned, was to be respectful neglect. In retirement,
farther and farther from town, first at Battersea, then at
Barnes, and finally at Chertsey, he was to be heard of more
and more as «'the melancholy Cowley," with sufficient wealth
for his comfort, and with occupation enough stiU in poetry,
essay-writing, and the botanical studies to which he had been
attracted since they made him Doctor of Physic at Oxford in
1657, but restless and unsatisfied. Nowhere is his general
mood after the Restoration so well described as in his own
ode of complaint, where he supposes himself lying mourn-
fully under th^ shade of yews and willows on the banks of the
COWLEY AND OTHEES. 311
Cam, where he had first begun to write, and hearing himself
addressed thus by his Muse : —
" Go, renegado ! cast up thy account,
And see to what amount
Thy foolish gains by quitting me :
The sale of knowledge, fame, and liberty
The fruits of thy unleam'd apostasy.
Thou thoughtst, if once the public storm were past,
All thy remaining life should sunshiue be.
Behold, the public storm is spent at last ;
The sovereign is tossed at sea no jnore,
And thou, with all the noble company.
Art got at last to shore :
But, whilst thy fellow-voyagers I see
All marched up to possess the promised land.
Thou still alone, alas ! dost gaping stand
Upon the naked beach, upon the barren sand ^"
Our direct enumeration hitherto has included fifty-seven
writers who had passed the climacteric of their lives at the
Bestoration. Worth mentioning together, in a single sup-
plementary sentence, as also alive at the Restoration and then
more or less veterans in literature, though means for dating
them exactly are deficient, are these : — Richard Flecknoe,
an Irishman and Roman Catholic priest of grotesque reputa-
tion, who had published a religious poem so long ago as 1626,
and many other poems and miscellanies at intervals since,
some of them written dtiring an obscure and poverty-stricken
residence in Rome ; Ludovick Carlell, who had been a gentle-
man of the household to Charles I, and had published five
plays between 1639 and 1657 ; Sir Samuel Tuke, another
courtier of literary pretensions, not to be confounded with
the Presbyterian Sir Samuel Luke to whom Butler had been
secretary; and Sir Robert Stapylton, who had also been of the
royal household, had been knighted in the beginning of the
Civil Wars and had fought in them, and was the author of
poemSj a translation of Juvenalj and other things, published
between 1644 and 1660.
1 Wood's Ath. IV. 621 and 691 (the Ward's Dramatic Literature ; Bohn's
KUligrews), and III. 823—827 (Den- Lowndes ; Anderson's Oolleotiou of
ham); Johnson's Lives of Cowley and British Poets. See also Vol.V. pp. 83-84,
Denham, with Cunningham's notes ; and ante, pp. 13-U.^
312 LIFE OF MILTON AND HISTOET OF HIS TIME.
The following is a list of those younger writers alive at the
Restoration of whom it seems necessary to take note in the
present chapter : —
Andrew Maevell : (stat. 40 : — Milton's colleague in the Latin
Secretaryship to the Protectorate from 1657 onwards, Marvell,
now permanent M.P. for Hull, a stoutish man, " round-faced,
cherry-cheeked, hazel eye, brown hair," had been, as we know, a
poet from his youth. Stray pieces of his had appeared as early as
1649, and his lines on The First Anniversary of the Government
under his Highness the Lord Protector in a separate broad-sheet in
1655; but most of his pieces, English and Latin, were still in
manuscript, or only in private circulation. His courage, and his
ability in rough satire as well as in finer verse, were known to his
friends ; but his public literary reputation was yet to make. He
was rather shy in company, and liked a bottle by himself.
Henry Vattgh!*!! : cetat. 40 : — Poems, with the Tenth Satire of
Juvenal Englished (1646), Olor Iscanus, a collection of some select
Poems and Translations (1650), Silex Scintillans, or Sacred Poems
and Private Ejaculations (1650-5), The Mount of Olives, or Solitary
Devotions (1652), Flores Solitudinis (1654): such, in addition to
some medical writings, had been the pubUcations hitherto of a
physician living in his native Wales and calling himself " The
Silurist." He is remembered under .that name yet with peculiar
regard by lovers of rare old English poetry, and was esteemed " an
ingenious person, but proud and humorous."
Alexander Brome : atat. 40 : — He was an attorney in London,
the son or other relative of Ben Jonson's disciple, the dramatist
Richard Brome, who had died in 1652. He had not only preserved
and published most of this Richard Brome's plays, but had himself
published a comedy, The Gunning Lovers, in 1654. He had also
written a number of Royalist songs and squibs m a "jovial strain "
for " sons of mirth and Bacchus."
Roger Botle, Lord Broghill, Eabl of Oreeet : cetat. 40 :
— A man of culture and of literary tastes, this eminent Oliverian
soldier and politician, now a convert to Charles, had made his first
appearance in literature in an instalment of a great prose romance
called Parthenissa, published in 1655.
_ Sir "William Petty : cetat. 38 :— He was a much more con-
siderable man now than when we first saw him as the friend of
Hartlib and one of the chiefs of the invisible college of scientific
and experimental philosophers (Vol. IIL 664-666). He had
lived from 1647 to 1652 in Oxford, where he became M.D. in
1649, and was elected Professor of Anatomy. In 1652 he had
gone to Ireland as one of the surveyors of Irish lands for the Com-
monwealth; and, living in Ireland through the Protectorate in this
great employment, he had become enormously rich. He had served
in Richard's Parliament; and, just before the Restoration, his
■yOtTNGEB WEITEES AND LATEST EECEUITS. 313
proceedings in the Irisli survey had been called in question. The
£«storation quashed the inquiry ; and Dr. Petty, his previous Oliver-
iauism notwithstanding, became a great favourite with Charles II.
He was knighted in 1661, and carried many schemes in his great
head.
Mabgabet CAVBirDiBH, Mabchioness of Newcastle : cetat. 38 :
— This celebrated lady, daughter of Thomas Lucas, Esq., of
Colchester, Essex, had gone abroad with Queen Henrietta Maria as
one of her maids of honour, and had thus met and captivated the
great Marquis of Newcastle, an exile since the battle of Marston
Moor, and a widower by the death of his first wife in 1643. They
were married at Paris in 1645, the Marquis being then in his fifty-
fourth year, and she in her twenty-third. Never such a mutually
admiring couple as they during their fifteen years at Eotterdam,
Antwerp, and other places, living meagrely, yet grandiosely, on his
shattered fortunes, and waiting for better times. A series of books
published in London, — to wit, PhMosophical Fcmcies in 1653, Poems
and Fancies in the same year, PMhsophiecd and Physical Opinions
in 1655, and The World's OUo in the same year, — had announced
to the English world of the Protectorate what a learned and
literary lady the exiled Marchioness was ; and, when the Bestoration
brought her and her huflband back, she became an object of no small
curiosity on account of this literary reputation, and on account
of her extremely fantastic behaviour and dress. It then appeared
that she had a great many plays in manuscript or designed. No
fewer than twenty-one were to appear in 1662 in a folio volume,
dedicated to her husband ; and there were to be Orations of Divers
Sorts, Philosophical Letters, Sociable Letters, Observations upon
Experimental Philosophy, and another volume of plays, all between
1662 and 1668, besides her Life of her husband, still alive, eulo-
gising him as if he had been a Julius Csesar. They were then
Duke and Duchess of Newcastle, by special letters-patent granted
in 1664-5. — The Marquis himself, as might have been expected
of one who had been a Maecenas of Literature in the reign of
Charles I., was not unknown as an author. He had published two
comedies at the Hague in 1649, and his splendid treatise on the
management of horses in its first or French form at Antwerp
in 1657.
George Fox : atat. 37 : — It is well to remember at this point
the incessant activity of Fox, and of other Quakers, for the last
ten years, in writing and publishing. A large mass of Quaker
literature was in existence before the Eestoration, and more was to
come.
Thomas Sydenham: cetat. 37: — He was a younger brother
of the Oliverian Colonel Sydenham, had been himself a Common-
wealthsman and Oliverian, and had held for some time a fellowship
of All Souls' College, Oxford. He had studied medicine at Oxford,
and had taken the degree of M.B. Already at the Restoration he
314 LIFE OF MILTON ANB HISTORY OF HIS TIME.
was settled as a physician in London, with a large practice His-
medical writings were yet to come.
Thomas Stanley: cetat. 37: — He was a country gentleman of
good estate, who had been educated at Cambridge. Between 1647
and 1652 he had published poems of his own, besides translations
from Theocritus, Anacreon, Bion, and from Italian and Spanish
writers ; but more recently he had been engaged on a History of
Philosophy. Of this work the first volume had appeared in 1655,
and the second in 1656 ; the third appeared in 1660.
John Atjbbet : cetat. 35 : — Also a gentleman of considerable
country estates, but living chiefly in London, where his antiquarian,
literary, and scientific tastes gave him an unusually large circle of
acquaintance. Hobbes was his chief hero, but he knew many others.
He had published nothing yet, and was to publish nothing within
our range of time, but was using his opportunities for the collection
of literary and miscellaneous gossip.
Geoegb Dalgabno (Scottish) : cetat. 35 : — ^Born and educated
at Aberdeen, he had settled in Oxford in 1657, and set up a
private grammar-school there. He continued in that obscure
occupation for thirty years, but was to be heard of by a book
entitled Ars Signorum, published in 1661, and containing in-
genious spectdations as to the possibility of a Universal Alphabet
and Language, anticipating those of Bishop Wilkins. Much later
in life, beyond our range of time, he was to put forth another
ingenious book on the art of teaching the deaf and dumb.
SiH BoBEBT HowAKD : oBtat. 35 : — 'He was a younger son of
Thomas Howard, Earl of Berkshire, and had been educated at
Oxford. A Royalist, like the rest of his family, he welcomed the
Restoration in A Panegyric to General Monk and a Panegyric to
the King, both published in a collection of his poems in 1660 ;
and he was to be known as a busy author thenceforward, a member
of Parliament, and holder of various posts about Court. — "With him
may be associated his brothers, the Hon. James Howaed and the
Hon. Edward Howaed, also to be known as writers.
John Wilson cetat. 35 (?) : — Little more is known of him than
that he was a Royalist lawyer of Lincoln's Inn, who had been
called to the Bar in 1646, and was the son of the Rev. Aaron
Wilson of Plymouth, a Scotchman or of Scottish descent. He may
be imagined for the present as an unemployed barrister in London,
with a liking for literature.
George Villiees, Duke oe Buckingham : aetat. 34 : — ^With
his reputation for wit and wild ability of many kinds fully estab-
lished, the Duke had still tp prove his powers in authorship.
RoBEET Boyle: cetat. 34: — Though Boyle had some finished
writings by him, including his Seraphic Love, written in 1648,
~ his chemical speculations and his thoughtful views about things
in general had hitherto been propounded rather by conver-
sation and correspondence. His career of avowed authorship, even
YOUNGEE WEITER8 AND LATEST BEORUITS. 315"
more than his brother Lord Broghill's, was to date from the
Restoration.
John Buntak : (stat. 33 ; — Here and there, up and down the
country, people had heard of a vehement Baptist preacher of this
name, who had been a tinker, a Parliamentarian soldier, and one
knew not what else. Here and there too some pious Christians
may have been deriving edification from such specimens of the
tinker's marrowy theology as were in print, e. g. his Few Sights
/rom Hell, or the Grocms of a Damned Soul, published in Sept.
1658, and his Doctrine of the Law and Grace, published in May
1659. It was in Bedford jail, however, where they were to keep
him, more or less closely, a prisoner from November 1660 to March
1672, that Bunyan was to begin his immortal dreamings.
"William Tbmplb : cetat. 32 : — Educated in Emanuel College,
Cambridge, under the tutorship of Cudworth, Temple, after travel-
ling abroad, had returned to reside in Ireland, where his father was
Master of the Rolls. Not till 1663 was he to come to London, to
begin his career as statesman, diplomatist, and political essayistj
and be famous as Sir William Temple. Sis publications were to be
later incidents in his life. .
Isaac Barrow: cetat. 31 : — The son of the Bang's linendraper,
and educated at Trinity College, Cambridge, Barrow had lived as a
fellow of that College from 1649 to 1655, kilown as a Royalist
and Anglican at heart, and distinguished by his great in-
dustry and universal scholarship. From 1655 to 1659 he had
travelled and resided in the East and in Italy; but, having re-
turned and taken orders, he was to settle again in Cambridge for
the rest of his Life, to be successively Professor of Greek (1660),
Lucasian Professor of Mathematics (1663), and Master of Trinity
College (1672), and to become a wonder equally for his preaching
and his mathematical and theological autiiorship. He was only
M.A. at the Restoration, but became B.D. in 1661, and D.D.
in 1670.
John Tiliotson : cetat. 31 : — He also was a Cambridge man,
having been educated at Clare Hall, and fellow of that College
from 1651 to 1657. Though of strongly Puritan parentage, he
had adopted in the University the more moderate or latitudinarian
theology professed by men like Wilkins, and had contracted an
especial friendship with that divine. He had been for some time
tutor in the family of Cromwell's attorney-general Prideaux, and
had only recently taken orders and begun to try in a modest way,
before London congregations, the style of pulpit oratory for which
he was to be so celebrated. Having conformed at the Restoration,
he was soon to rise from a mere curacy to a parish rectorship and
the preachership of Lincoln's Inn. His publications and his higher
ecclesiastical promotions were yet in the future.
John Howe : cetat. 31 : — Educated both at Cambridge and
at Oxford, this Independent divine, after taking his M.A. degree
316 LIFE OF MILTON AND HISTOEY OF HIS TIME.
in 1652, had been minister of Great Torrington in Devonshire
through the Protectorate, but had been brought to London by
Cromwell to be for some time his chaplain and a preacher in St.
Margaret's, "Westminster. On the abdication of Eichard, he had
returned to his Devonshire parish ; but, as he could not conform at
the Restoration, he was to be driven, as one of the ejected clergy,
to various shifts and wanderings for many years to come. It was
a matter of regret with many of the Church of England clergy
that a man of such culture, suavity, and polish should have thrown
in his lot with the Nonconformists. Though he was alreaidiy in
high repute as a preacher, his writings had yet to be published.
Charles Cotton : cetat. 31 : — A gentleman of Staffordshire,
educated at Cambridge, Cotton had welcomed the Restoration in
A Panegyriek to the Kin^s most Exeunt Majesty (1660) j and
he was to be farther known by poems and other writings, in-
cluding Scarronides, or Virgil 'Travestie (first book in 1664), a
translation of Montaigne, a translation of one of Comeille's plays,
and an addition to Izaak Walton's Complete Angler.
Edwaed Phillips, mtat. 31, and John Phillips astal. 30: —
Of the pre-Eestoration lives of these two nephews of Milton we
know enough ; but more about them will come hereafter.
Anthony Wood : astai. 30 : — Not to be known till fourteen years
hence as author of the great History of the University of Oxford,
nor till two and thirty years hence as the author of the still greater
Athence et Fasti Oxonienses, Wood was busily engaged in his vast
preparations for those works of his life, reading, collating, and
transcribing in his chamber in Merton College, or going about
among the other colleges and libraries, or perambulating the neigh-
bourhood for the purpose of copying from parish registers and
from the monuments in parish-churches. He was known to all
Oxford as a large-boned man, of crabbed temper and surly habits,
whose recreations, amid his hard antiquarian labours, were ale and
tobacco in moderation and music to any extent. No man had more
heartily welcomed the Restoration, with the deliverance it brought
from those he called " the Presbyterians and Phanatics."
John Dktden : cefai. 30 : — Our first glimpse of Dryden was in
the autumn of 1657 (Vol, V. p. 375). He had then come up to
London, a light-haired, fresh-complexioned squireen from North-
amptonshire, of short and stoutish figure, to attach himself to his
cousin Sir Gilbert Pickering, Oliver's councillor, and seek, under
Sir Gilbert's patronage, some addition to his small patrimonial
income by employment of some kind for the Protector. He had
actually been paid £50 by Thurloe in October that year for some
piece of work already done ; and he was probably still hanging on
about Thurloe's office at the time of Cromwell's death. Hence
those Heroic Stanzas to the Memory of Oliver, written after the
great funeral, which are the first known verses of Dryden, with
two insignificant- exceptions. They had been an unfortunate
YOUNGEE WKITEBS AND LATEST EECEUITS. 317
beginning, and had been cancelled, as far as possible, after the
Restoration, by his next piece, the Astrma Redux. "Who could be
hard on such a wheel by a needy young man who had no longer
an influential cousin to trust to, but saw he must make his way in
the new reign by his own wits, and the use of such learning as
he had acquired at "Westminster School under Dr. Busby, and
afterwards at Trinity College, Cambridge 1 Even at the fend of
1660 he had hardly attracted attention.
"-Great Dryden did not early great appear.
Faintly distinguished in his thirtieth year."
Kathheinb Philips : atat. 30 : — This lady, daughter of a
London merchant named Fowler, was the wife of a "Welsh squire,
James Philips of Cardigan, and was known among her private
friends as "the matchless Orinda," on account of her poems of
occasion. These had for the present only a limited circulation in
manuscript ; and the good lady, though she had been in Ireland,
and was not a stranger at Court, led a quiet and domestic Ufe in
her "Welsh abode. She died in London in 1664, just after the
appearance of a surreptitious edition of her poems, collected by
a bookseller, under the title of Poems iy the IneompaerabU
Mrs. K. P. ; and there were verses of regret by Cowley and others.
An authorised edition of her poems, with translations from Cor-
neille, &c., appeared in 1667.
Henbt Stubbe : mtat. 30 : — Bom in Lincolnshire, the son of
very indigent parents, Stubbe had been carried by them into
Ireland, whither they had migrated for a livelihood. In 1641, on
the outbreak of the Irish EebeUion, his mother had brought him
and another child ba(dc, landing in Liverpool and walking with
them on foot aU the way to London. Supporting them there with
the utmost difficulty by her needle, she yet contrived to send
Henry to Westminster Scbool; where Busby, the head-master,
finding him excessively clever, did what he could for him. One day
Sir Henry Vane, visiting the school, had the boy introduced to him
by Busby ; and from that moment Stubbe recognised "7ane as the
man to whom he was most indebted in the world. By Vane's
interest he was admitted in 1649 into Christ Church, Oxford,
where he remained till 1653, when he took his B.A. degree. Never
had there been in the college an undergraduate at once so re-
markable for scholarship, and so pragmatical, forward, and unruly in
conduct. He was "often kicked and beaten" and once "whipt in
the public refectory." It was in \his time of his imdergraduateship
(1651) that he published his first book, entitled Horas Subseeivm,
and consisting of translations of Jonah and other parts of the Old
Testament, and of Latin epigrams by Randolph and others, into
Greek. From 1653 to 1655 he had been with the English army
in Scotland j and after his return he had published two more
318 LIFE OF MILTON AiTD HISTORY OF HIS TIME.
volumes of Latin and Greek verse. Having graduated M.A. in the
end of 1656, he was appointed, in 1657, by Owen's influence,
under-keeper of the Bodleian Library ; and it was in a series of
writings published by him while he held this post that he had
revealed himself most characteristically. Admiring and knowing
Hobbes, he had flung himself ferociously, in 1657 and 1658, into
the controversy between that philosopher and Dr. Wallis, publishing
two pamphlets against Wallis and heading an opposition to him in
the University; besides which he had published, in 1659 or the
beginning of 1660, some six or seven pamphlets on the political
questions then in agitation. Originally a kind of Independent and
Kepublican of the Vanist School, Stubbe still appeared in these
writings as a strenuous Kepublican and antagonist of the Eoyalists,
but with much in him of the extreme free-thinker, advocating
" a democracy of Independents, Anabaptists, Fifth-Monarchy men,
and Quakers," and assailing the Established Clergy. To a consi-
derable extent his theories in Church and State just before the
Restoration seem to have agreed with Milton's. But, after the
B,estoration, Stubbe, who had meanwhile lost his under-Ubrarian-
ship of the Bodleian, and gone to practise physic in Stratford-on-
Avon, veered round fast enough. Having received confirmation by
his diocesan Dr. Morley, he reannounced himself thus : — " I have
" joined myself to the Church of England, not only on account of .
" its being publicly imposed (which in things indifferent is no small
" consideration, as I learnt from the Scottish transactions at Perth),
" but because it is the least defining, and consequently the most
" comprehensive and fitting to be national." Henceforth, accord-
ingly, though pugnacious as ever, and a Hobbist or free-thinker at
heart, with an undying affection for Vane, he was to be known as
Stubbe metamorphosed. After trying the West Lidies, he was to
return to Stratford-on-Avon, resume medical practice there, remove
subsequently to "Warwick and to Bath in the same practice, and
publish a great many more writings, chiefly scientific and medical,
but some of them political. His end, like his life, was tragi-comic.
He was drowned in crossing a shallow stream near Bath, on the
12th of July 1676, "his head being then intoxicated with bib-
bing, but more with talking and snuffing of powder," says the
punctual Wood, whose character of him, all in all, is that he was
"the most noted person of his age that these late times have
produced \"
John Locke : cetat. 29 :— A year younger than Stubbe, the
course of Locke hithferto had been in the very track of that eccentric.
iWooa'sAth.m.l067— 1083. Wood esHmate of him. I have been struck
seems to have had a peculiar lilcing for chiefly hy his persistent loyalty after
Stubbe, and to have done his best to ■ the Restoration to the memory of his
unmortalise him. The impression pro- benefactor Vane. There are interesting
duced on myself by such of Stubbe's passages to that effect in some of his
writings as I have glanced over by no latest pamphlets.
means answers to Wood's extraordinary
TOUNGEU WBITEES AND LATEST EECBUITS. 319
He had been at Westminster School while Stubbe was there ; he
had followed Stubbe to Christ Church, Oxford, in 1651 ; and in
that college he had devoted himself much, as Stubbe had done, to
" the new philosophy ", as taught in the writings of Bacon and
Des Cartes. He had also chosen the profession of physic rather
than go into the Church. There, however, the parallel ends. The
son of a Parliamentarian in Somersetshire, Locke, though not dis-
satisfied with the Kestoration, did not swerve from his principles ;
and, unlike Stubbe, he was in no haste to come before the world.
He was, for the present, merely a young Oxford physician in weak
health, capable of taking an interest in affairs, and thinking about
them seriously and deeply ^.
Samuel Peptb : cetat. 29 : — Do we not see him, a young navy
official, Clerk of the Acts, Clerk of the Privy Seal, trudging about
Westminster and London, as shrewd and honest a soul as ever
lived, observing everything, knowing everybody, taking his notes,
and keeping his diary ?
RoBEBT South : cetat. 28 : — A Londoner by birth. South had
been educated in the track of Stubbe and Locke, i.e. first at West-
minster School, and then at Christ Church, Oxford. In 1654, when
he was an undergraduate, he had contributed some Latin verses to
a collection of Oxford University pieces addressed to Cromwell on
the conclusion of peace with the Dutch; and in the following
year, when he took his B.A. degree, he had published a little poem,
called Musica Incantams. In 1657 he had taken his M.A. degree ;
by which time he had distinguished himself in his college as a
resolute young Anglican, persisting in the use of the Prayer Book
in spite of Dr. Owen, the head of the College. He had been
ordained privately in 1658 by one of the ex-bishops, and was
known before the Restoration as an eloquent and witty preacher.
Immediately after the Restoration he was chosen Public Orator at
Oxford ; and, having had the good fortune, iij that capacity, to
please Hyde, on his installation in the chancellorship of the Uni-
versity in Nov. 1660, he became domestic chaplain to that great
man, and was on the way to farther preferment. He became D.D.
in 1663, and is generally remembered as Dr. South.
Wektwobth Dillon, Eael oe Roscommon : cetat. 28 : — ^To be
known as a poet later in life, this Irish peer, the nephew and
godson of Strafibrd, was for the present a mere spendthrift courtier,
alternating between England and Ireland, though tending on the
whole to England. He had been educated mainly in France and
Italy, where he had become a dilettcmte in art and letters.
Thomas Flatman: cetat. 28 (?) : — He was a young barrister of
the Inner Temple, who had left Oxford without taking his degree,
and was a dabbler, says Wood, in "the two noble faculties of
poetry and painting or limning."
. Edward Stillingfleet : cetat. 26 : — Recently a graduate and
» Wood's Ath. IV. 638—640.
320 LIFE OF MILT-ON AND HISTOEY OF HIS TIME.
fellow of St. John's College, Cambridge, and since 1657 rector of
a parisli ia Bedfordshire, tids young divine had sprung suddenly
into great reputation by his Irenicv/m, a Weapon Salve for the
GhwrcKs Wound : or the Divine Eight of particidar forms of
Church Government Hxamined, published in 1659. It was dis-
tinctly a Latitudinarian treatise, breathing the spirit of Whichcote
and the other Cambridge latitude-men, and expressly advocating a
comprehension of Presbyterians and others in a National Church of
a broad semi-episcopal model, on the principle that no jus divimim
can be shown for any one form of Church Government, and that the
constitution of a Church is therefore a matter of expediency. The
Eestoration having come, and this somewhat Oliverian theory of a
national church having gone down under the blows of Clarendon and
Sheldon, Stillingfleet found his Irenicum a stumbling-block in his
own path.; and, though he did not positively recant it, he was to
apologise for it very considerably on every opportunity and speak
of it as a juvenile performance. His career thenceforward was to
be that of an orthodox ecclesiastic in the Anglican Church as re-
established, and an able and famous polemical theologian. His
Origines Saerce, or Bational Account of the Christian Fmth, pub-
lished in 1662, was his first important work after his Irenicum,
and is accounted his greatest. He became rector of St. Andrew's,
Holborn, in 1665, on his way to higher preferments.
George Ethbrbgb : cetat. 25 : — To be known ijltimately as
Sir George Etherege, he was for the present a young man of wit
and fashion about town, who had been at Cambridge, had travelled,
and had read for the Bar, without intendiag to practise.
Thomas Speat ; mtat. 25 : — Of Devonshire birth, and recently
a graduate and fellow of Wadham College, Oxford, Sprat had
made his first appearance in print in A Poem on the Death of his
Highness Oliver, late Lord Protector. He had also published in
1,659 a Pindaric Ode, after Cowle/s style, called The Plague of
A thens. Wheeling at the Restoration with so many others, he had
taken orders,^ and was chaplain to the Duke of Buckingham, chap-
lain to the King, D.D., &c., on his way to a bishopric at last.
Ghoege Mackenzie (Scottish): mtat. 25:— Soon to be Sir
George Mackenzie, and very notorious under that title in Scottish
history, he was known in the first years of the Eestoration only as
a young Scottish advocate of scholarly and literary tastes. Aretina,
or the Serious Romamce (1661), Religio Stoici (1663), A Moral
Essay, pr^erring Solibude to PiAUo Employment and all Appanages
(1665), Moral Gallantry, a Discourse proving that point of
honowr obliges mam, to he virtuous (1667), A Moral Paradox,
maintaining that it is rrmch easier to he virtuous them, vicious
(1667): — such were the titles of those publications of Mackenzie
which won him some reputation even with London critics within
the seven years of our preseut chapter. Maekeijzie admired Cowley,
and was a writer of verses.
YOUNGEB WRITEBS AND LATEST EECKUITS. 331
Charles Sackville, Lobd Buckhtjest : cBtat. 24 : — He was
the son of Richard, Earl of Dorset, and was afterwards himself
Earl of Dorset and Middlesex. He had just returned from his
travels, was a member of Parliament, and one of Charles's
favourite courtiers. Inheriting the poetic traditions of his family,
he was to be a poet himself.
Sir Charles Sbdlby, Bart. : aitat. 23 : — Another young man
who had just returned from his travels to be about Charles's Court.
" He lived mostly in the great city, became a debauchee, set up for
" a satyrical wit, a comedian, poet, and courtier of ladies, and I
" know not what," is "Wood's convenient account of him.
Thomas Shadwbll : oetat. 21, and Willlam Wycheeley :
cetat. 21 : — These two, coupled together in a well-known line as
" hasty Shadwell and slow Wycherley," may close our list, though
their public authorship was hardly to be begun within the range of
our present chapter. Shadwell, a Staffordshire man, educated at
Cambridge, was a student of the Middle Temple. 'Wycherley, the
son of a Shropshire gentleman, had been for some time in France,
and had there become a B,oman Catholic ; but, having returned
and entered himself nominally as a student at Oxford, he had
turned Protestant again. Leaving Oxford in 1660, without ever
wearing the gown, he was to lead for the next few years the
life of a man about town and a member of the Inner Temple.
He had written one of his comedies at the age of nineteen, and
was engaged on another about the time we are now first men-
tioning him.
Adding the forty-two mentioned in the last list to the
sixty-one previously enumerated, vre have over one hundred
persons alive in 1660 as potential contributors, in greater
or less amount, according to age and other circumstances,
to that Literature op the Restoration of which Davenant
was the first Laureate. Indeed, even if we take the phrase
The Literature oe the Restoration in the wider sense in
which it is generally and very properly understood, as includ-
ing all English Literature produced between 1660 and the
Revolution of 1688, it will still be found that to the very end
of that term the effectives were supplied in large proportion
from our present hundred of 1660, and there were few
important recruits through the coming twenty-eight years.
While in the rest of the present chapter, therefore, we shall
speak directly only of the Literature of the Restoration as far
as to the end of 1667, much of what is to be said will apply to
the Restoration Literature as a whole.
vol. VI. T
332 LIFE OF MILTON AND HIBTOBT OF HIS TIME.
In the first place, one has to correct a misconception which
the very use of the phrase The Liteeatuee op the Bestoea-
TION in our literary histories, necessary as the phrase is, has
originated and is apt to foster. The phrase suggests fresh
outburst and abundance at the Restoration after a period
of sterility or poverty. Nothing can be farther from the
&ct.
The misconception arises in part from the habit of regard-
ing many of the veterans of our hundred as Restoration writers
merely because they were not defunct at the Restoration, and
so of crediting the Restoration with all that they had done in
the previous portions of their lives. Our enumeration and
datings ought to have helped, in this respect, towards the
required correction. Hobbism, Cambridge Platonism, Theo-
logical Latitudinarianism, Quakerism, an association of almost
national dimensions for the promotion of the Mathematical and
Experimental SciencpSj Harringtonian and other theorisings
in Politics and Economics, speculative free-thinking and
pamphleteering generally and an organized Newspaper Press
in partieularj — aU these had been growths of the Civil Wars,
the Commonwealth, and the Protectorate, So if we look at
the individual lives of not a few of those of our hundred now
accounted most memorable. The best of old Hobbes, the best
of Sanderson, nearly all Wither, all Harrick, nearly all Bxam-
hall, the best of Izaak Walton, all Brian Walton, the best of
Howell, the best of Shirley, the whole of Fuller, a great deal of
Waller, all of Browne of Norwich, nearly all of Jeremy Taylor,
the best of Dr. Henry More, a full half of Baxter and Owen,
much of Wykins and Wallis, nearly the whole of Denham, the
best of Cowley, the best of Henry Stubbe, and at least the
fully announced beginnings of a number more, lie chrono-
logically on the other side of the Restoration. Jeremy
Taylor the Bishop belongs to the Restoration, but the
Jeremy Taylor of English Literature belongs to the twenty
years of the Civil Wars, the Republican Government of the
Rump, and the sovereignty of Cromwell,
That the Restoration was not characterised by any new
burst or abundance of literature may be proved statistically.
STATISTICS OF THE RESTORATION LITERATURE. 323
The Registers of the Stationers' Company of London are not
an infallible source of information as to the quantity of literary
production in England in any one year or in any term of
years. Much depends on the stringency of the press-laws
and of the execution of them at any particular time. Hence
a most remarkable fluctuation in the numbers of the book-
transactions registered annually in the books of the Stationers'
Company from 1640 to the Restoration. The number regis-
tered in 1640 was 259, and that in 1641 was 240 ; in 1643,
when all press-regulation was broken down by the beginning
of the Civil War, it fell to 76 ; in 1643, when the Parliament
found it necessary on their own account to attend to the press,
it rose again to 368 ; in the three following years the numbers
were 447, 652, and 526, respectively ; thence again through
the seven years between 1646 and 1653, including the triumph
of the Independents and the time of Republican rule, there
was a fall, the highest number in any one of those years being
293 and the lowest 156 ; and again in the Protectorate there
was a rise. It would be impossible from these figures to
calculate the actual number of books published- in any one
year of the twenty, inasmuch as, though in every year the
number actually published must have greatly exceeded the
number registered, especially in those years when there were
shoals of small pamphlets, yet the proportion of the registered
to the published was utterly inconstant. Still, the statistics
of the Registers, when studied with some knowledge of the
state of the Press Laws in particular years, are very in-
structive ; and, if there is any range of time for which they
ought to be particularly instructive, it is just after the
Restoration. Under a government like Clarendon's, when
vigilance at head-quarters was at its keenest, and new brooms
were out, the possibility of clandestine publication must have
been reduced to a minimum. Prom May 1662, when the new
Press Act of the Cavalier Parliament came in force, if not
from the very entry of Charles into London, the Registers of
the Stationers' Company ought to represent, more accurately
than they had done through the Commonwealth and Pro-
tectorate, the annual quantity of literary production.
Y a
324 LIFE OF MILTON AND HISTORY OP HIS TIME.
The following is a comparison of the registered book-
transactions of the last seven years before the Restoration
with those of the first seven years of the Restoration. 1 use
the phrase " book-transactions " because, though most of the
entries in the registers are of new books or pamphlets, some
are only of assignments or transfers from one bookseller to
another of copyrights of single books or batches of books
already in the market^: —
Zast Seven, Years iefore the Bestoration,
1654 Eegistered book-transactions 181
1655. „ „ 367
1656.
1657.
1658.
1659.
1660.
562
3Si
327
247
258
First Seven Tears of the Restoration.
1661. Eegistered book-transaotions 108
1662. „ „ 76
1663. „ „ 104
1664. „ „ 86
1665 (Plague Year). „ 58
1666. „ „ 141
1667 (after Great Fire). „ 60
Here, certainly, is no proof of fresh outburst and abundance
after the Restoration^ but rather of arrest and paralysis. As
one ought not to be satisfied, however, with general impres-
sions, some farther investigation may be necessary. We shall
attend, in the first place, to that department in which the
paralysis was most immediate and obvious. This was the
department of Newspaper and Pamphlet Literature, the Lite-
rature of Public Affairs.
The history of the Newspaper Press proper from the begin-
ning of the Civil Wars to the Restoration has already been
sketched in these pages ^. The Parliamentary Intelligenoer,
published on Mondays, and the Mercurius PuUicus, published
on ThursdaySj both under the editorship of Giles Dury and
1 The figures are from my notes
from the Stationers' Registers, taken at
various, times, and extending continu-
ously from 1638 to 1682. As my count-
ing of the entries year by year was only
incidental to my note-taking, and was
rapidly performed by running my finger
along the margins, my figures may not
be absolutely correct, and it might have
been safer to give the computation ap-
proximately in tens thus — " about 180 "
instead of 181, " about 860 " instead of
367. I prefer adhering strictly to my
notes. The miscountings in any case
can be but by a digit or two, and cannot
affect the inferences in the least. — The
year in each counting is from Jan. 1 to
Deo. 31.— The year 1660 diyides itself
between the Anarchy preceding the
Restoration and the Restoration itself.
Of the 258 registrations of that year,
162 belong to the first half of the year,
between Jan. 1 and July 4, and 96
belong to the latter half, between July
4 and Deo. 31 ; which would indicate
that the King's return (May 29) began
to tell immediately on the book-trade.
2 See Vol. IV. pp. 37—39, pp. 116-
118, pp. 324— 335 ; and Vol. V.
51—62, pp. 670—672.
pp.
THE NEWSPAPEE PBESS : BIKKENHEAD. 325
Henry Muddiman ^, were, as we saw, the sole regular news-
papers for London, and indeed for all England, at the time
of the King's return. The printer of the first few numbers
of both was John Macoek ; but, before the King's entry into
London, Milton's and Needham's printer, Newcome, finding
that the days of Commonwealth typography were over, and
that as a tradesman he ought to rat in time, had associated
hipiself with this Macoek, bringing his newspaper experience,
acquired under Milton and Needham, to the aid of the new
undertakings. Muddiman and Dury, as editors, and Macoek
and Newcome, as printers and publishers, represented the
newspaper-press of England when the reign of Charles and
the administration of Hyde began ^.
Hardly had Hyde's administration settled into routine when
the newspaper-press thus already in existence was organized
more definitely for the purposes of the new reign by the ap-
pointment of Mr. John Birkenhead to be the superintendent
of Muddiman and Dury. It was a peculiarly fit recognition
of the past services of that Royalist. Had he not edited at
Oxford, from 1642 to 1646, with help from Peter Heylin and
others, the famous Mercurius Aulicus, the chief organ of the
Court and King's party through the Civil War ; and, since
his ejection from his fellowship of All Souls' College in 1648,
had he not been living by his wits in London, " helping
" young gentlemen out at dead lifts in making poems, songs,
" and epistles, on and to their respective mistresses, and also
" in translating and writing several little things, and other
" petite employments " ? Who so qualified as Birkenhead to
initiate the real journalism of the Restoration by licensing,
and partly editing, the two newspapers, the Public Intelligencer
and the Mercurius Puhlicus, nominally under the charge of
Muddiman and Dury ? He began that congenial occupation,
I find, in November, 1660, and he continued it, and also the
function of occasional licenser of books, with much satisfaction
to the Government, till 1663. But Birkenhead, a man " of
1 The last num'ber of Needham's October 1660. See also the valuahle
Jfer«Mn«sPoK«tct4sIfindregisterediiithe Historyand List of English newspapers
Stationers' Books is for March 29, 1660. in Nichols's Literary Anecdotes, Vf .
2 Stationers' Begisters from March to 33 — 97.
326 LIFE 01" MILTON AND HISTOET OF HIS TIME.
middling stature, great goggle eyes, not of a sweet aspect,"
as Aubrey describes bim, was receiving too many promotions
in otber ways to remain reconciled to sucb drudgery for ever.
Created LL.D. of Oxford in April, cbosen a member of the
House of Commons in the same year, knighted in November
1663, and with a Mastership of Requests promised him, he
was glad to hand over the censorship of newspapers to a
successor \
The general censorship of the press having by this time
come into effect, in accordance with the new Press Act of the
Cavalier Parliament, about half-a-dozen persons were already
in employment as official licensers of books. There can have
been no lack of candidates, therefore, for the succession to
Birkenhead. The selection fell on one whose antecedents had
been not unlike Birkenhead's own. He was that Roger
L'Estrange who had been sentenced to be hanged in 1644 as
a Royalist spy and conspirator (Vol. III. p. 185), had helped
in stirring up the Royalist insurrection in Kent at the begin-
ning of the second Civil War in 1648 (Vol. III. p. 594), and,
after a vague intermediate life, partly of exile and partly of
submission to the Protectorate, had signalized his Royalism
again just before the Restoration by his attack on Milton
entitled Wo Blind Guides (Vol. V. pp. 689-691). Imme-
diately after the Restoration he had written one or two
pamphlets in a revengeful Cavalier strain, attacking the Act
of Indemnity as too indulgent by far, and advocating severer
penal proceedings against the Commonwealthsmen and Non-
conformists^. But the most characteristic of L'Estrange's
' Wood's Ath. III. 1203—1206. Ungliah, was attributed to Milton or
2 One of these, published June 6, Needham or both (ante. Vol, V. pp.
1660, was entitled, L'Estrange hie 664—666). He has since then been in-
Apology, with a short view of some late formed, he says, that the obnoxious
and remarkable transaeti^>ns leading to pamphlet Plain English was written by
the happy settlement of these nations "a renegado parson," though he had
wider the Government of om lawfuU taken it at the time to be " either Need-
one? gracious Soveraign Charles the II,, "ham's or Milton's, a couple of curs of
whom Qodpreserve. From tbis pamphlet " the same pack." In the same Apology
I find that L'Estrange was the author he mentions Milton and his last protests
of the anonymous pamphlet of the for the Commonwealth ironically thus :
previous 3rd of April, entitled Treason —"I could wish his excellency pttonk]
arraigned in answer to Plain English, " had been a little civiller to Mr. Milton ;
in which the Republican Letter to Monk " for, just as he had finished his model
of March 22, 1669-60, called Plain " of a Commonwealth, . . . in come the
THE NEWSPAPER PEES8 : L'ESTKANQE. 337
pamphlets was one licensed by Sheldon's private chaplain,
Dr. Georg'e Stradling, May 28, 1663, and published six days
afterwards, with this title, " Considerations and Proposals in
order to the B,egv,lation of the Press ; together with Divers Irir-
stances of Treasonous and Seditious Pamphlets, proving the
Necessity thereof. By Roger L" Estrange. London, Printed hy
A. C, June 3rd, 1663." The pamphlet is really a curiosity.
In a dedicatory epistle to the King he speaks of it as pre-
senting to his Majesty's view " that spirit of hypocrisy, scandal,
" malice, error and illusion that actuated the late rebellion,"
and also " a manifestation of the same spirit, reigning still,
" and working not only by the same means, but in very many
" of the same persons and to the same ends." He complains
especially of the reprinting or continued sale of certain anti-
Episcopal and Republican pamphlets which he names or
describes, and of the recent issue of a very large edition of
collected farewell sermons preached to different congrega-
tions over England by thirty or forty of the most eminent
of the ejected Nonconformist ministers. Such a book he
regards as " one of the most audacious and dangerous libels
" that hath been made public under any government ;" and
against such and similar press-offences in future he sees no
protective but the severest discipline of the book-trade, as
including not only authors and printers, but also " the letter-
" founders, and the smiths and joiners that work upon presses,"
" with the stitchers, binders, stationers, hawkers, mercury-
" women, pedlars, ballad-singers, posts, carriers, hackney-
" coachmen, boatmen, and mariners." He thinks, for example,
that the number of master-printers in London, which he
reckons as then sixty, might at once be reduced with advantage
to twenty, with a corresponding reduction of the number of
printing-offices, and of the number of apprentices to be allowed
in the printing industry. He recommends that the printing-
offices should be under inspection, and thai; none of them
should have back-doors. He enumerates with approbation
" secluded Imembers and spoil Ms pro- 1661, ie repudiates indignantly the im-
"jeot." In a later pubUoation of putation of having received money from
L'Estrange, in the form of a letter to Cromwell for revealing the^^King's
Chancellor Clarendon, dated Deo. 3, secrets in his exile.
328 LIFE OF MILTON AND HISTOBX OF HIS TIME.
" the ordinary penalties " for treasonable or seditious publica-
tions, viz. " death, mutilation, imprisonment, banishment,
corporal pains, disgrace, pecuniary mulcts," but thinks it
might be a useful addition if culprits of the lower grades were
" condemned to wear some visible badge or mark of ignominy,
" as a halter instead of a hatband, one stocking blue and another
" red, a blue bonnet with a red T or S upon it." He proposes
also that the censorship of the press, as re-established by the
Act of May 19, 1663, should be regularly organized by being
put into the hands of six paid surveyors or licencers, under
the great state-officers charged with the duty by the Act itself.
He recommends that the punishment for all press-offisnees
should be certain and severe, and that informers should be
encouraged and liberally rewarded ^.
Whether on account of this pamphlet, or because he had
already been thought peculiarly well qualified, certain it is
that, in August 1663, Roger L'Estrange, Esq., was appointed
to the new office of " Surveyor of the Imprimery and Printing-
presses," with the right of " the sole licensing of all ballads,
charts, printed portraietures, printed pictures, books, and
papers," except such as had already been otherwise provided
for by the Act of May 1662, and with a grant also of " all
" the sole privilege of writing, printing, and publishing all
" narratives, advertisements, mercuries, intelligencers, diur-
" nals, and other books of public intelligence, and printing all
" ballads, plays, maps, charts, portraietures, and pictures, not
" previously printed, and all briefs for collections, playbills,
" quaek-salvers' bills, custom and excise bills, post-office bills,
" creditors' bills and tickets, in England and Wales, and
" with power to search for and seize unlicensed and treason-
" able, schismatical and scandalous books and papers ^." He
was thus constituted, (1) sole journalist of England and
Wales, (2) one of the licencers of books for the press,
(3) inquisitor-general of the press, and of all printing-offices,
shops of booksellers, and vendors or hawkers of books
pamphlets, or newspapers.
1 L'Estrange'a Condderations and 2 Nichols's Literary Anecdotes TV
Proposal of Jxme leeZ. 54— 55, footnote. >^»-
THE NEWSPAPER PRESS: L'ESTRANGE. 329
L'Estrange lost no time in assuming his functions as sole
journalist, for on Monday, the 31st of August^ there appeared
No. 1 of The Intelligencer, ^published for the satisfaction and in-
fortnation of the People : with privilege. This was Roger L'Es-
trange's own newspaper, superseding and abolishing those that
had been managed by Birkenhead. The prospectus of the new
undertaking, prefixed to the first number, was in L'Estrange's
own strain. — He declares that his ideal of the proper state of
things is that there should be no newspapers at all. " Sup-
" posing the press in order, the people in their right wits, and
" news or no news to be the question, a public Mercury should
" never have my vote ; because I think it makes the multi-
" tude too familiar with the actions and counsels of their supe-
" riors, too pragmatical and censorious, and gives them not
" only an itch, but a kind of colourable right and license^ to be
" meddling with the Government." In the actual state of
things, however, a newspaper being considered indispensable,
he sees that there may be uses for it, if it is prudently managed.
It may help to " redeem the vulgar from their former mis-
takes and delusions^ and to preserve them from the like
for the time to come;'" it is "none of the worst ways of
address to the genius and humour of the common people,
whose affections are much more capable of being tuned and
wrought upon by convenient hints and touches in the shape
and air of a pamphlet than by the strongest and best notions
imaginable under any other and more sober form whatsoever ;"
and, at the very least, it may serve " to detect and disappoint
the malice of those scandalous and false reports which are
daily contrived and bruited against the Government.-" On
the whole, therefore, he undertakes the editorship willingly
enough, and will do his best in it. He cannot say yet whether
his paper will appear once a week or. twice a week, but will
make it twice a week if he finds matter enough. He reserves
also the consideration of the best means of vending and circu-
lating the paper ; because^ though the most profitable plan for
the proprietor of a newspaper hitherto has been " to cry and
expose it about the streets by mercuries and hawkers," he
knows that " under countenance of that employment is carried
330 LIFE OF MILTON AND HISTOBY OF HIS TIME.
on the private trade of treasonous and seditious libels," and
he is resolved to stop that trade. There follow, accordingly,
some intimations of the methods he means to adopt in his
geaerai inquisitorship or surveyorship of the Press. He still
thinks that a great reduction of the numbers employed in the
printing business would be the most effective remedy; but
meanwhile he will encourage the detection of press offences as
much as possible by rewards to informers. Let any one who
knows of "any printing-press erected and being in any private
place, hole, or corner, contrary to the tenor of the late Act of
Parliament," come to Mr. L'Estrange's office at the Gun in
Ivy Lane, and he shall have 40*. for the information if it leads
to proof, "with what assurance of secrecy himself shall desire."
Should the information amount to the discovery of any se-
ditious or unlawful book actually in course through such
a printing-press, then, if the informer shall " give his aid to
the seizing of the copies and the offenders,^' the reward shall
be ^5 ; but the smallest information will be welcome, and
even the discovery of the printing by any one of any book
without a licence shall be rewarded with 10«., and that of the
selling of any unlawful book by any hawker with 5*.-
L'Estrange did make his paper a bi-weekly one, for on the
following Thursday, September 3, 1633, there appeared " TAe
Newes, published for satnf action and information of the People:
with privilege. No. 1." It was, in fact, the second number of
the Intelligencer, but with an alternative name ^.
L'Estrange's bi-weekly quarto sheet, in its alternative forms
of The Intelligencer, published on Mondays, and The News,
published on Thursdays, was the sole English newspaper
in existence from the end of August, 1663, to November,
1665, In this last month, Charles and the Court being then
at Oxford, whither they had removed a good many weeks
before, to avoid the Great Plague, then ravaging London,
it was found desirable, for the convenience of those gathered
in Oxford, not to depend on the coming of copies of The
Intelligencer or Netos from the plague-smitten city. Accord-
1 Nichols's itferary ^necrfoJes, IV. 55— 58.
THE NEWSPAPEE PHESS : l'eSTEANGB. 881
ingly, on Tuesday the 14th of November, 1665, just after the
rising of that short fifth or Oxford session of the Cavalier
Parliament which passed the Five Miles Act, there appeared
the first number of The Oxford Gazette, a folio half-sheet,
printed by the University printer, Leonard Litchfield, licensed
by Lord Arlington as Secretary of State, and written,
Wood thinks, by Henry Muddiman. This Oieford Gazette,
published twice a week in Oxford, and reprinted in London
by Thomas Newcome, "for the use of some members and
gentlemen who desired them," was an infringement on
L'Estrange's rights which he seems to have been unable to
resist. He continued indeed to issue his Intelligencer and
News simultaneously with the Oxford Gazette and its London
reprint till January 29, 1665-6 ; but then he retired from the
competition, allowing his bi-weekly quarto to become extinct
in favour of a continuation of the Oiford Gazette under the
new name of The London Gazette, naturally thought more
suitable after Oxford had ceased to be the head-quarters of
the King and Court and the cessation of the Plague had per-
mitted their return to Whitehall. The first number of The
London Gazette, calling itself No. 24 of the original Gazette^
appeared on Monday the 5th of February, 1665-6, and the
paper continued to appear regularly twice a week thence-
forward, the printer and publisher being Thomas Newcome
and the licencer always Lord Arlington. On the 4th of June,
1666, there appeared the first number of another paper, called
The Owrrent Intelligencer; which, I find, was also an official
journal, licensed by Secretary Morrice or his deputies, and
published by John Macock, It seems to have had but a
short » existence, however ; and the London Gazette remained
in possession, substantially undisturbed by any competitor,
official or non-official, to the end of the term of the present
chapter, and a good way beyond. Wood's information is that,
soon after the numbers of the London Gazette had begun to
appear, "Mr. Joseph Williamson, under-secretary of State,
"procured the writing of them for himself, and thereupon
" employed Charles Perrot, M.A,, and fellow of Oriel College
" in Oxon, who had a good command of his pen, to do that
333 LIFE OF MILTON AND HISTORT OF HIS TIME.
" oflfice under him ; and so he did, though not constantly,
" to about 1671." Wood adds that the business of writing
and editing the Gazette continued to belong to the office of
the Under-Secretary of State to the Revolution of 1688 ; and
we learn otherwise that Thomas Newcome was still the printer
of the paper in that year ^.
Clearly for newspaper and pamphlet literature at least the
Restoration was an arrest and paralysis. Not only was the
number of newspapers kept at the lowest possible minimum ;
but, that minimum being under Government management far
more strictly than at any time during the preceding eighteen
years of the Revolution, and free pamphleteering having
ceased or nearly so, all heart, all pith, was taken out of
English journalism. The Intelligencers and Gazettes and oc-
casional political pamphlets of the Restoration are meagre
and insipid things after the best of those newspapers and
pamphlets pf the Civil Wars, the Commonwealth, and the
Protectorate, in which political ideas and political passions on
both sides were in such ferment and tumult.
While it has been proved that the Restoration was not a
time of fresh outburst and abundance in the literature of
England, but actually of arrest and diminution, in certain
, departments at least, it remains nevertheless true that the
Restoration did bring in a literature of its own, and that our
historians are not wrong in speaking so definitely as they do
of The Liteeature oi? the Restoration. What justifies this
phrase is that, though there was a diminished quantity of
literary production on the whole from and after 1660, yet such
literature as did appear, and especially the popular litejature
favoured at Court, was marked by very strong characteristics,
and included a notable revival in one department.
The prevailing characteristic of the Restoration literature
proper was Anti-Puritanism. From 1660 onwards it became
the rule in English authorship to take revenge for the past
twenty years of Puritan ascendancy by every possible form
1 Nichols's Lilera/ry Aneedptee, IV. 58-59 ; Wood's Ath. IIL 1185 ; and m/
notes from the Stationers' Eegisters. '
CAVALIEE SONGS. 333
of insult to whatever had worn a Puritan guise, or heen
implied in Puritanism, and by every possible assertion and
laudation of the opposite.
Signaling the wheel of the public mind at the very instant
of the return of the Stuarts had been that burst of odes
on the Blessed Restoration, by Waller, Cowley, Davenant,
Dryden, and others, of which we have heard enough. There
was to be no end to the fulsome series while Charles lived, or
to the reprints of such Cavalier songs and poems as were already
in stock before the Restoration, or the production of others in
the same vein to satisfy the increasing demand. The Rump :
or an Exact Collection of the Choicest Poems and Songs relating
to the late Times, is the title of one book, edited by Alexander
Brome, published in June 1660, and republished with addi-
tions in 1663, which served for a good many years as a
manual of anti-Puritan lyrics for ordinary convivial purposes.
With that book, or any similar collection, at hand, a thousand
clubs of jolly fellows could make themselves happy simulta-
neously for hours together in a thousand different London
taverns or village inns, by singing over the whole history of
the past reign of Puritanism in successive snatches of verse to
popular tunes and choruses. Thus : —
"To make Charles a great king and give him no power,
To honour him much and not obey him an hour,
To provide for his safety and take away his Tower,
And to prove all is sweet, be it never so sour.
Is the new order of the land and the land's new order."
" Your fond expounding corrupts the Bibble ;
Yet you'll maintain it with your twihble.
Oh, Roundheads, Roundheads, damnable Roundheads,
what do you mean to do ? "
"What though the zealots pull down the prelates.
Push at the pulpit, and kick at the crown !
Shall we' not ever strive to endeavour
Once more to purchase our royal renown ?
Shall not the Roundhead first be confounded?
Sa, sa, sa, sa, hoys ! ha, ha, ha, ha, boys !"
334 LIFE OF MILTON AND HISTORY OF HIS TIME.
" Sirs, Jocky 's a man held a mickle note ;
Sing heome agen, Jocky, sing heome agen, Jocky.
The breach o' the Covenant stuck in his throat;
Sing heome agen, heome agen, O valiant Jocky."
" Tafify was once Cottamighty of Wales,
Put her cousin 0. P. was a creater;
Was come in her country, catspluttery nails !
Was took her Welsh hook and was peat her;
Was eat up her sheese,
Her tuck and her geese ;
Her pick, her capon was tie for 't ;
Ap Richard, ap Owen, ap Morgan, ap Stephen,
Ap Shenkin, ap Powell was fly for't."
"A Brewer may be a Parliament-man,
For there the knavery first began,
And brew most cunning plots he can :
Which nobody can deny.
A Brewer may put on a Nabal face,
And march to the wars with such a grace
That he may get a Captain's place :
Whidi nobody can deny.
A Brewer may speak so wondrous well
That he may raise great things to tell.
And so be made a Colonel :
Which nobody can deny.
A Brewer may make his foes to flee,
And raise his fortunes, so that he
Lieutenant-Gfoneral may be :
Which nobody can d&iy.
A Brewer he may be all in all.
And raise his powers both great and small.
That he may be Lord General:
Which nobody can deny.
Methinks I hear one say to me.
Pray, why may not a Brewer be
The Chancellor o' the University?
Which nobody can deny.
A Brewer may be as bold as Hector
When he has drunk off his cup of nectar.
And a Brewer may be a Lord Protector :
Which nobody can deny.
OAVALIEB BONGS. 335
A Brewer may do what he will,
And rob the Church and State, to sell
His soul unto the Devil of Hell :
Which nobody can deny."
"Drunken Dick was a lame Protector,
And Fleetwood a backslider:
These we served as the rest,
But the City's the beast
That will never cast her rider.
Then away with the laws
And the good old cause;
Ne'er talk o' the Rump or the Charter,
'Tis the cash does the feat;
All the rest 's but a cheat ;
Without that there's no faith nor quarter."
"But I hope by this time
You '11 confess 'twas a crime
To abet such a damnable crew.
Whose petition was drawn
By Alcoran Vane,
Or else by Corbet the Jew :
By it you may know
What the Rump meant to do
And what religion to frame ;
So 'twas time for Old George
That Rump to disgorge.
And to send it from whence it first came,
And drive the cold winter away."
"We are sensible now that there is no one thing
Can full satisfaction to all interests bring,
But only Charles the Second, our known lawful King :
Which nobody can deny.
Let's dally no longer, but like Britons stand
For God and King Charles and the laws of the land;
Let 's up and be doing and do 't out of hand :
Which nobody can deny."
In such rough, popular lyrics, as in the more elaborate
Eestoration odes of Cowley and the rest, we have the expres-
sion of what may be called the direct form of the anti-
Puritanism which had come into the ascendant. It consisted
336 LIFE OF MILTON AND HISTORY OF HIS TIME.
in perpetual recollection of the persons and transactions of
the foregoing twenty years for burlesque, invective, and exe-
cration. Always, of course, and in the midst of all, and
engrossing the entire retrospect for most, was the figure of
Cromwell, the Brewer Cromwell, the copper-nosed Crom-
well, the supreme villain Cromwell. Hence, in fact, the
most intense and specific exhibition of the direct form of
anti-Puritanism was in loathing, or pretended loathing, of
the memory of Oliver. To name Noll, and repeat the name
Noll, and go on repeating it with every new ludicrous or op-
probrious epithet that ingenuity could invent, was half the
art of being witty in any company for a quarter of a century
after the Restoration.
Indubitably the finest literary expressions of this mood of
anti-Puritanism and reprobation of Cromwell between 1660
and 1663 were in certain pieces of Cowley, continuing or
repeating his first Restoration ode. In particular, his JDis-
cov/rse by way of Vision concerning the Government of Oliver
Cromwell is deservedly regarded as the most eloquent of his
prose-writings. It was published in 1661, and originally
with this longer title ; A Vision concerning his late pretended
Highness, Cromwell the Wicked; containing a Discourse in
Vindication of him hy a pretended Angel, and the Confutation
thereof hy the Author, Abraham Cowley. It was, in fact,
another studied attempt by poor Cowley to retrieve his cha-
racter for loyalty and reinstate himself at Court. Skilfully
enough, the Discourse or Vision is thrown back to the very
day of Cromwell's funeral, so that the author might be sup-
posed not to have needed the Restoration to produce the
sentiments he was now expressing, but to have entertained
them while the Cromwell dynasty seemed secure.
Having been a spectator, he says, of the sombre funeral
pageant, which had " brought some very curious persons as
far as from the Mount in Cornwall and from the Orcades,"
he had retired back to his chamber, weary and melancholy.
There, beginning " to reflect on the whole life of this pro-
digious man," he had gradually fallen asleep or dreamt a
waking dream. He found himself, as he thought, " on the
oowlet's vision ov ceomwell. 387
top of that famous hill in the island Mona which has the
prospect of three great, and not-long-since happy, king-
doms." For two or three hours, recalling to memory all the
late miseries of those kingdoms, he wept bitterly ; and at
length he broke out in a passion of verse, beginning,
" Ah, happy Isle, how art thou changed and curst
Since I was born and knew thee first ! "
He has not ended this metrical plaint, but has just invoked
the spirit of the Eoyal Martyr, when he is interrupted by
" a strange and terrible apparition/' It is the figure of a
gigantic man, whose naked body is tattooed with warlike
figures and representations of battles, whose eyes were like
burning brass, and on whose head were three crowns of the
same metal, also seeming red-hot. In his right hand he. held
a bloody sword, and in his left a thick book of Acts, Ordi-
nances, Protestations, Covenants, and Engagements. This
figure introduces himself as the guardian angel of the three
kingdoms, and the colloquy begins, Cowley suspecting from the
first that the pretended angel is Cromwell himself, but con-
cealing the suspicion as long as he can, that he may be the
more frank in his utterances. And his frankness is unbounded.
He has already had one paragraph of abuse of the dead Pro-
tector when farther discourse is brought on by some obser-
vations of the phantom in reply, to the effect that, though he
has " no personal concernment for his late highness," yet, as
guardian angel of the British Islands, he has naturally taken
some interest in him and his rule, and has come to the conclu-
sion that he was "the greatest man that ever was of the English
nation, if not of the whole world." This, followed by a defensive
sketch by the phantom of Cromwell's whole life, sets Cowley
on at full torrent on the other side. There is a long and
highly eloquent indictment of Cromwell and all his misdeeds,
growing more and more eloquent as the phantom occasionally
irritates the speaker by questions and interruptions. Even
Cromwell's abilities are depreciated, and_[reduced to craft, dis-
simulation, and extraordinary industry. The prose once or
twice lifts itself again into verse. Thus : —
VOL. yi. z
338 LIFE OF MILTON AND HISTORY OF HIS TIME,
" Cursed be the man (what do I wish 1 as though
The wretch already were not so ;
But cursed on let him be) who thinks it brave
And great his country to enslave,
Who seeks to overpoise alone
The balance of a nation."
On the whole, the phantom has kept his temper admirably-
through all this, only smiling or laughing grimly. At last,
telling Cowley he is a mere pedant or Platonical dreamer, and
evidently not a man of property, or a man of the world in
any sense, with his " old obsolete rules of virtue and consci-
ence," the phantom propounds his own ethical system in a
metrical sermon which is a compound of Biblical references
with the rankest Machiavellianism. It ends,
"'Tis godlike to be great; and, as they say
A thousand years to God are but a day.
So to a man, when once a crown he wears.
The coronation-day's more than a thousand years.''
Made furious by this blasphemy, Cowley loses self-command,
and lets the fiend know that he is perfectly aware it is with
Cromwell himself he has the honour of discoursing. The
dreadful figure then loses temper too, tells Cowley he is " an
obstinate and inveterate malignant," hints at a power of
imprisoning and hanging even in the Inferno, and rushes
at him ravenously. The poet felt himself, he says, " almost in
the very pounces of the great bird of prey," when lo ! what ?
" When, lo ! ere the last words were fully spoke.
From a fair cloud, which rather oped than broke,
A flash of light, rather than lightning, came,
So swift, and yet so gentle, was the flame.
Upon it rode (and, in his full career,
Seemed to my eyes no sooner there than here)
The comeliest youth of all the angelic race;
Lovely his shape, ineffable his face."
This radiant and comely youth is the true genius of England,
and you are also to suppose him to be Charles the Second as
much as you can. He goes up to Fiend Cromwell, and
whispers some few words to him, which Cowley did not un-
butlee's evbibbas. 339
derstand, though he was sure that one of them was the name
of Jesus. The fiend immediately collapses, roars, and flies : —
" He knows his foe too strong, and must be gone :
He grins as he looks back, and howls as he goes on."
No one could match Cowley in this finely poetical style of
anti-Cromwellian and anti-Puritan invective. But it was
too good, too serious, aggrandized Cromwell and his part in
British history too evidently in the very act of execrating his
memory, to please the general taste, or be much to Cowley's
advantage where he had hoped it might chiefly help him.
Rougher and coarser things pleased better.
November 11, 1662, "Richard Marriott entered for his copy,
" under the hand of Dr. Birkenhead, and Mr. Pakeman, war-
" den, a book intituled Hudibeas, the Piest Paet, written
" in the time of the late war by Me. Butlbk ;" and, again,
just a year after, November 5, 1663, " Mr. John Martyn and
" Mr. James Allestry entered for their copy, under the hand of
" Mr. Roger L'Estrange and Mr. Warden Pawne, a book or
" copy intituled HudibeaSj the Second Paet, by the author
" of the First." Such were the entries in the Stationers'
Registers of those two parts of Butler's immortal burlesque
which were all that the world was to have of it till the
year 1678, when a third part was published, still leaving the
poem incomplete^. How the first two parts were received
we learn from Pepys. " Hither come Mr. Battersby/' writes
Pepys on the 26th of December, 1662, "and, we falling into
" discourse of a new book of drollery in use, called Hudihras,
" I would needs go and find it out, and met with it at the
Temple : cost me 2/6d. But, when I come to read it, it is
{(
' Though the first part of Sudibras " Kichard Marriott, under St. Duustan's
was not registered till Nov. 11, 1662, it " Church in Fleet Street ; that other
must have heen already out for nearly a "nameless impression is a cheat, and
year. In The Kingdom's Intelligencer iOT "will but abuse the buyer, as well as
the week ending Jan. 5, 1661-2, there is " the author, whose poem deserves to
this advertisement: — "There is stolen "have fallen into better hands." — The
"abroad a most false imperfect copy of new Press Act, requiring books to be
" a Poem called Hvdibras, without name licensed, having come into operation in
"either of printer or bookseller, as fit 1662, a few months after the date of
" for so lame and spurious an impression. this advertisement, Marriott had availed
"H'he true and perfect edition, printed himself of it for the protection of his
"by the author's original, is sold by rights.
Z a
340 LIFE OF MILTON AND HISTORY OF. HIS TIME.
" SO silly an abuse of the Presbyter knight going to the wars
" that I am ashamed of it ; and, by and bye, meeting at
" Mr. Townsend's at dinner, I sold it to him for 18^." Pepys
found very soon that he was in a minority of one on that sub-
ject. The King was reading Hudibras ; the Court was reading
Hudihras ; all the world was reading Hudihraa. Accordingly,
Pepys tried the book again. " And so to a bookseller's in the
"Strand," he writes, Feb. 6, 1662-3, "and there bought
" Sudihras again, it being certainly some ill humour to be so
" against that which all the world cries up to be the example
'' of wit ; for which I am resolved once more to read him, and
" see whether I can find it or no." When the second part
came out, he repeated the experiment. "To St. Paul's Chtireh-
" yard," he writes, Nov. 28, 1663," and there looked upon the
" Second Part of Hudihras ; which I buy not, but borrow to
" read, to see if it be as good as the first, which the world
" cried so mightily up, though I had tried but twice or three
" times reading to bring myself to think it witty." Again,
less than a fortnight afterwards, giving a list of books he had
been looking at, he mentions " Hudihras, both parts, the book
"now in greatest fashion for drollery, though I cannot,
" I confess, see enough where the wit lies." To the end
Pepys found himself singular in his estimate of the book.
All the world continued to read Hudihras and to talk of this
extraordinary Mr. Samuel Butler, hitherto utterly unknown,
who had made himself famous by it at one bound ; and Pepys,
who came afterwards to meet Butler in society, expressly tells
us that it seemed unpleasantly strange to him, in the year of
the Great Plague, to hear a Parliament man quote Hudihras
as if it were the book in the world that everybody ought to
know best.
No wonder at the sudden and immense popularity of Hudi-
hras. No wonder that the King and Clarendon sent for the
author on the appearance of the first part, and gave him hopes
of "places and employments," and so that people, meeting
him afterwards in society, a middle-sized man, strong-built,
of sanguine complexion, and with " sorrel " or " leonine-
coloured" hair, watched and still watched for "the golden
butlee's rudibbas. 341
shower " that was expected to descend upon him ^. The book
was an embodiment of the anti-Puritanism of the Restoration
era exactly suiting the general taste, and was far fitter, in that
respect, to be a vade mecum for the courtiers and cavaliers
than anything that had been provided by Cowley or others.
Little depended on the story. The general idea, indeed,
was good even in that respect, though it was a very profane
desecration of the noble fiction of Cervantes. As in that
fiction Don Quixote and his squire Sancho go out on adven-
tures over sunny Spanish scenery, the one a high-toned
though crazed idealist, the other a sturdy materialist, so in
this Butler sends forth the knight Hudibras and his squire
Ralph, the one a representative of Presbyterianism and the
other of Independency and New Lights in Theology, to find
their adventures on English ground. The adventures them-
selves are nothing. Who eared for them, or even much for
any of the hobby-horse grotesques, in the form of personages
and characters, which they bring round Hudibras and Ralph,
for the purpose of thrashing them, putting them in the stocks,
assailing them with rotten eggs, and all the rest of it, from
the bear-owner and the dog-owning butcher, and the wooden-
legged fiddler Crowdero, and the tinker Magnano, and his
female companion Trulla, at the beginning, on to the confusion-
causing widow, and the astrologer Sidrophel, and the astro-
loger's man Whackum ? It was the plenitude of wit and
quaint learning of all sorts embroidered on the narrative, like
patches of pearl-work on leather, the abundance of quotable
passages and phrases, the mercilessness and yet oddity of the
satire on the Puritans and all their belongings, that made the
book such a favourite. One had not read ten pages, for
example, when this presented itself, the very tit-bit of the
whole book, as a popular expression of anti-Puritanism, from
that day to this : —
The Beligion of Hudibeas.
For his Eeligion, it was fit
To match his learning and his wit.
'Twas Presbyterian true-blue;
1 Aubrey's Lives, BuUer ; Wood's Ath. III. 875 ; Jolinson's Life of Butler.
342 LIFE 01" MILTON AND HISTOKT OF HIS TIME.
For he was of that stubborn crew
Of errant saints whom all men grant
To be the true Church Militant:
Such as do build their faith upon
The holy text of pike and gun ;
Decide all controversies by
Infallible artillery,
And prove their doctrine orthodox
By apostolic blows and knocks ;
Call fire and sword and desolation
A godly, thorough Eeformation,
Which always must be carried on.
And still be doing, never done.
As if Eeligion were intended
For nothing else but to be mended :
A sect whose chief devotion lies
In odd perverse antipathies.
In falling out with that or this.
And finding something still amiss ;
More peevish, cross, and splenetic
Than dog distract or monkey sick;
That with more care keep holiday
The wrong than others the right way;
Compound for sins they are inclined to
By damning those they have no mind to.
Still so perverse and opposite,
As if they worshipped God for spite,
The self-same thing they will abhor
One way, and long another for;
Free-will they one way disavow,
Another nothing else allow ;
All piety consists therein
In them, in other men all sin.
Rather than fail, they will defy
That which they love most tenderly;
Quarrel with mince-pies, and disparage
Their best and dearest friend, plum-porridge;
Fat pig and goose itself oppose.
And blaspheme custard through the nose.''
There are two respects in which Butler's Hudibras, consist-
ently enough with its general character as a satire of the
Puritans and Puritanism for direct and temporary purposes,
represents tendencies of the Restoration Literature not so
apparent in the serious muse of Cowley ^-
1 To prevent mistake, I may say that chapter, I have adopted phrases from
in my acooimt of Butler, as in one or papers of my own, published anony-
two places besides in the present mously.
TENDENCY TO THE BURLESQUE. 343
In the first place, the tendency to a prevalence of the
burlesque or mock-heroic in form, connects itself with the
anti-Puritan reaction of the reign of Charles the Second.
It was the reign of the Merry Monarch, and all things must
correspond. Not only to laugh, but to do nothing else than
laugh, was the rule with the London multitude ; not only to
promote laughter, but to promote nothing else than laughter,
was the rule of most of the London wits. I am not sure but
the degradation of the -name " wit," as applied to a person,
from its original meaning of " man of intellect " to that of
"a maker of jests," dates properly from the Restoration. To
make jests, to live and move in the ludicrous, to find fun in
everything under heaven and over hell, or even within those
realms themselves, so far as they were voted to exist, was the
business of the popular Restoration writers. It was, naturally,
hard work ; and hence, while so much of the literature of the
Restoration was of the kind called generally the comic, and
- there was plenty that was genuinely humorous, hearty, and
convivial, yet not a little was in that austere form of the comic
in which there is no heart whatever, but only sneering and
sarcasm. When, in Rabelais, the meditative giant Pantagruel
hears the story of the miraculous announcement of the death
of Pan and the birth of the great shepherd Christ, as it was
made to the Egyptian Thamuz, ofi" the Island of Naxos, by a
voice from heaven sounding over the ship, the giant reels and
trembles with the sense of the awe and the grandeur, and
tears roll down his cheeks "as big as ostrich's eggs." The
story of the death of Pan, or any similar story would have
had no such efiect at the Court of Charles the Second. The
shrunken Pantagruelism of that Court, represented at its best
in the Hudibrastic genius of Butler, was incapable of such
heights. Not only to burlesque and ridicule Puritanism, but
to burlesque and ridicule whatever, in or out of Puritanism,
was abstract, ideal, earnest, spiritual, remote from common
appetite or common apprehension, was the fashion in the
popular Restoration literature. Cowley had not yielded to
it, nor had others of the more religious intellects in the An-
glican or anti-Puritan ranks ; but these were exceptions.
344 LIFE 01' MILTON AND HISTORY OF HIS TIME.
Another quality of the B-estoration literature, not necessarily-
inherent in the tendency to the burlesque or mock-heroic,
though generally accompanying that tendency, is the quality
called coarseness. Under this name we need not imply any
special pandering to what is known as the licentious. It
would be unjust to Butler to do so. The coarseness which
we see in him has nothing of that accompaniment, though
the same cannot be said of many of his contemporaries. With
or without that accompaniment, coarseness consists in an
unabashed familiarity of the imagination with things and
processes which the taste of civilized mankind in all ages has
agreed to keep as much as possible out of sight and unmen-
tioned, though their existence runs through the daily life of
all, and there are names for them in every national vocabulary.
Taste in this respect, it is true, is very variable in particulars.
The standard of euphemism or fastidiousness in speech has
changed from age to age, and has never been the same, even
in the same age, for all classes of persons or for all kinds of
literature. In Chaucer's time the churl's " manere " in litera-
ture was recognised as distinct from the knight's or lady's.
A writer who practised both, as Chaucer did, could inform
his readers when he was about to pass from the one to the
other, and could warn them, if the next tale was to be a
churl's, to turn elsewhere for some "storial thing that
toucheth gentilesse." It had been much the same through
the age of the Elizabethans. The difference after the Restora-
tion, however, is enormous. Even Clarendon, looking about
him in the popular Restoration literature, must have confessed
himself disappointed in his expectation of a general return of
what. he regarded as the old English "good manners." In
Clarendon's own speeches, as in most of Cowley's writings,
and also, of course, in those of the best of the Restoration
divines, there is all proper decorum and fastidiousness ; but,
to a great extent, it was " the churl's manere " that had
established itself in and round the Court for the regulation
both of talk and of literature. This was the case especially
in that literature of the comic order which was now so much
in request. The coarse had become the accepted equivalent
COARSENESS OF THE RESTORATION LITERATURE. 345
for the comic. For making fun and causing laugliter tlie
method in favour was to bring in as frequently as possible,
out of the churl's dictionary, and from every letter of the
alphabet there, those anatomical and physiological words
which startle us in the streets by their nudity and vigour.
There is no lack of illustration in the pages of Butler, but
even they do not convey an adequate idea of the extent of
this form of the facetious in some portions of the literature of
his time. Let me speak out plainly. The familiar representa-
tion of the Court of Charles the Second as a Court of fine and
gracious manners, a Court in which " vice itself lost half its
evil by losing all its grossness," is a lying tradition. The
principal men and women of that Court, though dressed finely
and living luxuriously, spoke and thought among themselves
in the language of the shambles and the dissecting-room.
How far such coarseness of speech in and round the Court of
Charles is to be regarded as necessarily part and parcel of the
anti-Puritan reaction we need not inquire minutely. Sincere
religious fervour, whatever the theology professed, is always
an education of the taste ; and, if English Puritanism had not
cultivated the graceful, it had certainly discouraged the more
positive forms of the coarse. The taste of the tinker Bunyan,
in matters of speech, was more fastidious and cleanly, I should
say, precisely on account of his Puritanism, than that of a
good many of the Restoration scholars and men of letters who
had been educated at the universities. But I will dare a more
public parallel. The great-hearted Christian gentleman who
had been the soldier of Puritanism from the first, and had
held the sovereignty of the British Islands for five years in the
name of Puritanism, as he himself had generalized that theory
of things, liberalised it, and determined that it might last —
this great man, figuring now in Royalist diatribes as the
brewer, the hypocrite, the copper-nosed saint and ruffian, had
written much and had spoken much. What he had thus
written and spoken through a long tract of years he had left
lying carelessly about, to be examined when the world should
please, and there should be some future man, above the rest in
an unknown posterity, to bring it all together and make the
346 LIFE OF MILTON AND HISTOEY OF HIS TIME,
examination possible. Well, what of those letters and speeches,
hurried, numerous, and variously occasioned, of one whom we
know independently to have been no pedant, no straight-laced
ascetic, but even boisterous in his fits of humour, and fond of
horse-play ? This or that may be objected to in them, from
the literary point of view or from the political ; but from first
to last no one will find in them a really unbecoming word. It
must have been the same, I believe, in Cromwell's most private
and intimate conversation. Both Clarendon and Cowley, in-
deed, have made the most of one reported saying of Cromwell
in a moment of irritation, when one of his words was of the
kind that would require a dash in modern printing. But
even that single instance is doubtful ; and, were it true, the
commemoration of it by Clarendon and Cowley may surprise
us. For what was their hero and royal master, Charles the
Second, the theme of their eulogies ? What, in manners and in
speech was this lazy coffin-faced lout, this Louis Kerneguy
of Scott's novel, this Lord's anointed of Juxon and Sheldon,
that had been brought back to sit upon the throne of England,
and of whose grace and good humour we hear so much, as he
jested with his courtiers in Whitehall, or we%t about with his
spaniels and fed the ducks in the Park ? In the particular of
manners, as distinct from morals or abilities, I will peril the
whole impression on one of his preserved letters to his sister,
the Princess Henrietta. There is nothing immoral in it ; but
it is brutally and disgustingly dirty. Puritanism or anti-
Puritanism, what but coarseness could there be in a Court
where Louis Kerneguy was King ?
The various characteristics of the Restoration literature,
whether anti-Puritanism or others that may seem more spe-
cial and accidental, are best seen in combination in the Deama
OF THE ReSTOEATION.
By the Ordinance of the Long Parliament, at the beginning
of the Civil Wars, enacting that, " while these sad causes and
set times of humiliation do continue, public stage-plays shall
cease and be forborne," the Drama had been practically extin-
guished in England from 1642 to 1656. Occasionally in that
THE DBAMA OF THE EESTOBATION. 347
interval there tad been an attempt in London to act regular
plays ; private theatricals, which the ordinance did not reach,
had been kept up in some great houses ; and " the incorrigible
vitality of the theatre," as Mr. Ward calls it, had asserted itself
in an itinerant perseverance, chiefly under the management
of an old actor named Robert Cox, in the custom of " drolls,^'
or mixtures of tight-rope dancing and farcical dialogue, per-
formed at country fairs. In the main, however, the stage
and all its appurtenances had gone down. The dramatists of
the reign of Charles I., bereft of their craft of play-writing,
were keeping schools ; and the old actors, some of whom may
have trod the boards with Shakespeare, were keeping tap-
rooms and village-inns, actors no more, but excellent in
-anecdote as they poured out the ale. Not that the drama
had ceased to exist as a form of literature. Through the
Civil Wars, and still more through the Commonwealth and
the Protectorate, there continued to be a demand for dramas
for private reading, and there was a considerable activity
among some London booksellers in supplying this demand by
selling and re-printing popular old plays. Indeed some plays
which had been performed before the Civil Wars were first
published in the time of the Commonwealth and the Pro-
tectorate, and some new plays were written in those years,
when there was no chance of their being acted ^.
The first gleam of a returning theatre had been in 1656,
the third year of Cromwell's Protectorate, when Davenant
was allowed to set up his so-called Opera, for recitations with
musical and scenic accompaniments, at the back of Rutland
House in Aldersgate Street (ante. Vol. V. p. 81). There, or after-
wards at the Cockpit in Drury Lane, Davenant had gone as
near to a reproduction of the regular drama as he could. In
the year before the Restoration he had abandoned the pretence
of opera altogether and had begun to put regular plays on the
stage. Nor had he been left without competition in the
business. In the winter of 1659-60, when Monk was on his
' 1 Genest's Account of the English Ward's Hist, of English Dramatic
Stage from the Kestoration in 1660 to Literature, II. 444 — 446 ; Notes from
1830, in ten volumes (1832), Vol. I. ; Stationers' Eegisters from 1642 onwards.
348 LIFE OF MILTON AND HISTORY OF HIS TIME.
march from Scotland and the Republic was tottering, a book-
seller named Rhodes, formerly wardrobe-keeper in a theatre,
had gathered about him as many promising young actors as
he could, and had set up a theatre of his own, whether in
Whitefriars or in the Cockpit beside Davenant's seems uncer-
tain. About the same time some of the surviving old actors,
not to leave all the profits to Rhodes and his young people,
had associated themselves in the Red Bull theatre in St. John's
Street, Clerkenwell. The fact therefore is that the Londoners
were again in full enjoyment of the drama before they saw
the face of Charles the Second ^.
It was fitting, however, that the stage should be re-organized
formally as one of the national institutions of the Restoration.
This was done in August 1660 by the grants of two theatrical
patents, constituting the two companies that were thenceforth
to have the right of supplying the public with dramatic
amusement. One was given to Thomas Killigrew, and the
other to Davenant. Killigrew's company, consisting at first
of " the old actors" from the Red Bull with additions from
Rhodes's, was to be called "The King's Company"; Dave-
nant's, consisting of a combination of his own staff with
part of Rhodes's, was to be known as " The Duke of York's
Company," though the name of " The Opera Company " still
adhered to it for some time. Killigrew's theatre, opened in
November, 1660, was in Gibbons's Tennis Court, Vere Street,
Clare Market, off the Strand j but in April ] 663 he removed
to a new theatre, called " The Theatre Royal," in the part of
Drury Lane, near Covent Garden, famous ever since as the
site of Drury Lane Theatre. Davenant's theatre, after some
shiftings from the Cockpit to other temporary premises be-
tween 1660 and the spring of 1662, was in Lincoln'^ Inn
Fields from the latter date onwards. Although the two com-
panies had been sworn in by the Lord Chamberlain as " The
King's Servants " and " The Duke of York's Servants " re-
spectively, and their patents authorized them and them only
to act, there was some diflSculty at first in suppressing Rhodes
1 Geaest and Ward as before, with notes about Davenant's operatic entertain-
ments from the Stationers Registers.
THE DRAMA OF THE EESTOKATION. 349
and others. One hears aceordingly of stray perforinances
both at the Red Bull and in Whitefriars, neither by Killi-
grew's people nor by Davenant's, for some time after 1660'.
In Davenant's patent, and doubtless also in Killigrew's,
there was this clause : " Whereas the women's parts in plays
" have hitherto been acted by men in the habits of women, at
" 'which some have taken offence, we do permit and give leave
" for the time to come that all women's parts be acted by
"women." As the clause is permissive only and not compul-
sory, the public performance of women's parts by boys, as had
been the English custom before the Civil Wars, did not cease
immediately; but it ceased so soon that Mr. Ward's state-
ment that " from the Eestoration women's parts were invari-
ably acted by women " may be taken as substantially correct.
It is a proof, indeed, of the popularity of the change that,
when women, in the exercise of their new profession, took
revenge for their long exclusion from it by acting frequently
in boys' parts, even that excess was welcomed. This was by
no means all. From 1660 onwards there were to be many
important social consequences from the re-institution of the
drama in London, represented in two theatres, each with its
numerous company, and each company consisting of actors
and actresses mixed ^.
The following is an enumeration of the actors and actresses
connected with the two theatres at one time or another be-
tween 1660 and 1668, and some of them through the whole of
that period : —
KlLLIGBEW's OR THE KiNG's ComPANT.
AcTOES : — Michael Mohun, Edward Kynaston, Theophilus Bird,
Charles Hart, John Lacy, Nicholas Burt, William Cartwright,
"Walter Clunn, "William Wintershall, Eobert Shatterel, William
Shatterel ; with AUington, Bateman, Blagden, Duke, and Hancock,
associated with them in inferior parts from the first, and Beeston,
Charleton, Goodman, Griffin, Haines, TyddoU, and Sherly, as later
additions.
AoTEBSSES : — ^Ann Marshall, Rebecca Marshall, Mrs. or Miss
1 Baker's BiograpMa Dramatica (edit. Theatre, and Red Bull Tlieatre in Cun-
1782) Introduction ; Genest ; Articles ningham's London ; with references to
Cockpit, Drwry Lane Theatre, Gibhons's Pepys.
Tennis Gourt, Lincoln's Inn Fields ■ ^ Q-enest, and "Ward, II. 448—449.
350 LIFE QP MILTON AND HISTOBT OF HIS TIME.
Corey, Mrs. Knepp, Miss or Mrs. Hughes, Mrs. or Miss Kuttef,
Miss E. Davenport, Miss F. Davenport; with four other ladies,
called Eastland, Quin, Uphill, and "Weaver ; to whom were added
Miss Boutel, Eleanor Gwynn, and three others, called James, Eeeves,
and Verjuice.
DAVBNANT's OB THE DuKE's COMPANY.
Actors : — ^Thomas Betterton, Joseph Harris, Cave Underhill,
James Nokes, Robert Nokes, William Betterton (younger brother
of Thomas, and a promising young actor, who came to an early
death by drowning) ; with the following from the first or soon : —
Angel, Dacres, Dixon, Eloyd, Lillieston, Lovel, Medbourne, Moseley,
Norris, Price, Richards, Sandford, Sheppey, Smith, Turner, Young.
AcTBBSSBS : — Miss Davenport, Miss Saunderson (afterwards Mrs.
Betterton), Miss Mary Davis, Miss Long; with five other ladies,
called Gibbs, Holden, Jennings, Norris, and Shadwell.
Killigrew's chief star was, undoubtedly, Moliuii, called also
Major Mohun, because he had held a King's commission
abroad; next to whom, in that company, and accounted his
rivals, or more than rivals, in some important parts, or kinds
of parts, were Bird, Hart, Lacy, Burt, Cartwright, Kynaston,
and Clunn. Hart, who is believed to have been Shakespeare's
grand-nephew, was a man of handsome presence and a fine actor
in stately characters ; Lacy, originally a dancing-master, but
who had held a lieutenant's commission somewhere, was
inimitable in low and eccentric comedy ; Cartwright, who
had been a bookseller and was a man of culture, was the best
Falstaff of his time ; and Kynaston, the loveliest boy-lady on
the London stage so long as ladies' parts were acted by boys,
grew up to be majestic and even lion-like in kingly parts.
None of the actors in this company, however, was so great,
all in all, as Betterton, the chief man in Davenant's company.
Like Kynaston, he had been apprentice to Rhodes the bookseller,
and had begun his performances in the theatre set up by Rhodes;
but Davenant had secured the young man, and it was in Dave-
nant's theatre in Lincoln's Inn Fields, between 1663 and 1668,
that he first fully acquired that extraordinary reputation, both
in tragedy and in high comedy, which lasted for fifty years,
and is one of the most cherished traditions yet of the English
stage. Next to him, in Davenant's company, for high parts
and some of light comedy, was Harris, a man of intelligence
THE DEAMA OF THE RESTOBATION. 351
and aeeomplislimeiits, with a charming voice ; but in low
comic parts the company depended . chiefly on Underhill and
James Nokes, each so admirable in his kind that his very
appearance before he spoke always set the house in a roar.
So much for the actors ; a word or two now for the actresses.
In Davenant's company the chief were Miss Davenport, Miss
Saunderson, Miss Davis, and Miss Long, all of whom, it
appears, were lodged at first in Davenant's own house, under
the charge of Lady Davenant. The arrangement does not
seem to have answered the intended purpose. Miss Saun-
derson, indeed, became the wife of Betterton in 1663, and
shared thenceforward the theatrical • fortunes and the high
social respectability of that great actor ; but in the same year
Miss Davenport was withdrawn from the stage by a shameful
mock-marriage with the Earl of Oxford, while Miss Davis
had' becorhe known as Moll Davis, and had broken bounds
without any mock-ceremony. This Miss Davis, splendid in
singing and dancing, was perhaps the most popular, as she
was to rise the highest in a certain kind of celebrity, of all
the actresses in Davenant's theatre. At the head of those
in Killigrew's at first were the two Marshalls, or at all events
the elder, Ann Marshall, who was great in tragic parts.
They were the daughters of Stephen Marshall, the famous
Presbyterian divine and Smectymnuan, and had inherited
something of their father's energy and ability, applying it
now, brave girls ! in an occupation he had never foreseen for
them when he looked his last upon them from his death-bed.
Mrs. or Miss Corey, Miss or Mrs. Hughes, Miss Boutell, and
Mrs. Knepp, the last of whom was married, and was an inti-
mate acquaintance of Pepys and his wife, were all thought
good in light or comic parts. Not till 1664 were they eclipsed
in such parts by a new comer. Then it was that the world
first heard of a strange, wild, bewitching, kind-hearted crea-
ture, called Nell Gwynn, born one knows not where, and
brought up one need not inquire how. From selling oranges
in the pit of Drury Lane Theatre, she had been promoted to
the stage at the age of fifteen, or more probably seventeen ;
and thenceforward the chief applauses in that theatre were
352 LIFE OF MILTON AND HISTORY OF HIS TIME.
divided between her and Ann Marshall. Nelly was irre-
sistible in comic and witty parts, while the statelier Marshall
still shone in tragedy ^-
At first, of course, both theatres had to depend for the most
part on old plays. It is significant of the increased demand
for such immediately after the Restoration to find the book-
seller Humphrey Moseley on the alert to turn to account such
dramatic copyrights as he already possessed, or saw means of
acquiring. In One registration of his in the books of the
Stationers' Company, of the date June 29, 1660, he enters as
his property, in addition to all the unpublished remains of
Suckling, no fewer than thirty-six old plays, including three
by Beaumont and Fletcher, ten by Massinger, three by Glap-
thorne, one by Shakerly Marmion, two by Chapman, three by
Ford, two by Rowley, two by Decker, and three which he
attributes to Shakespeare under these titles — The History of
King Stephen, Duhe Humphrey, a tragedy, and Iphis and lantka,
or a Marriage without a Man, a comedy. From Moseley's
stock, in fact, or printed stock in other hands, or stock in
manuscript form, Killigrew and Davenant could choose plays
for performance from week to week. Naturally, however,
industry in dramatic production had revived with the theatres
themselves. Accordingly, not only did Killigrew and Dave-
nant republish former pieces of their own, to take their chance
among the older plays of the dead dramatists ; but entirely
new plays, some of them by entirely new hands, began soon
to insert themselves in the series.
With the help of Pepys's Diary and other records, it would
be possible even now to present the reader with the series
complete or. nearly so, in the form of a list of plays, old and
new together, to the number of about a hundred, known to
have been produced in London, at Killigrew's theatre or at
Davenant's, or elsewhere in some cases> in the seven years
between August 1660 and August 1667. That will not be
1 Genest, Vol. I., with help from pas- edition of Davenant's Dramatic Works,
sages in Pepys ; Cunningham's London; 1872) ; and Memoir of John Wilson by
Doran's Thm- MagestU^ Servants; the same editors (prefixed to their
Memoir of Davenant hy Messrs. Maid- edition of the Works of that -dramatist,
ment and Logan (prefixed to their 1874).
THEATRICAL GLIMPSES FBOM 1660 TO 1667. 353
expected ; but here are a few dated glimpses, chiefly from
Pepys, of the ongoiags in the K, T., or King's or Killigrew's
Theatre, and the D. T., or the Duke's or Davenant's, through
that period : —
Nov. 1660 : The Beggar's Bush, a comedy (Beaumont and
Fletcher) : K. T. in Vere Street, opened that month, " the finest
playhouse, I believe, that ever was in England," says Pepys. He
first saw " one Moone," i. e. Mohun, acting in this play, Nov. 20,
" who is said to be the best actor in the world, lately come over
"with the King."
Jan. 1660-61 : Epicene, or the SUetit Woman, a comedy (Ben
Jonson) : K. T. in Vere Street. "Among other things here," says
Pepys, "Kynaston the boy had the good turn to appear in three
" shapes : first, as a poor woman in ordinary clothes, to please
" Morose ; then in fine clothes, as a gallant, and in them was clearly
" the prettiest woman in the whole house ; and lastly as a man,
"and then likewise did appear the handsomest man in the house."
Feb. 1660-61 : The Changeling, a tragedy (Middleton) : D. T. in
Cockpit. "It takes exceedingly," says Pepys; who adds "I see
" the gallants do begin to be tired with the vanity and pride of the
" theatre actors, who are indeed grown very proud and rich."
Sept. 1661 : Boflrtholomew Fair, a comedy (Ben Jonson) : K. T.
in Vere Street. Pepys, who saw the play on the 7th, notes that it
had not been performed for forty years: "it being so satirical
"against Puritanism, they durst not till now; which is strange
" they should aheady dare to do it, and the King do countenance
" it.*" His Majesty, the Duke, and Mrs. Palmer were present ;
" which was great content," says Pepys, " and indeed I can never
" enough admire her beauty."
Nov. 1661 : The Bondman (Massinger): D. T. in Opera House.
Betterton "the best actor in the world" thought Mr. and Mrs.
Pepys.
Sept. 1662 : Midsummer Night's Dream : K. T. in Vere Street.
" Which I had never seen before, nor shall ever again," says the
irreverent Pepys, " for it is the most insipid ridiculous play that
" ever I saw in my life."
Feb. 1662-3 : First performance of TJie Wild Gallant, a comedy,
Dryden's first play : K. T. in Vere Street. Pepys, who saw it. on
the 23rd, reports very badly. "It was ill acted, the King did not
" seem pleased at all, the whole play, nor anybody else ; my lady
" Castlemaine was all worth seeing to-night, and little Stewart."
June 1663: 2%e (7o?n4n.iWe«, a comedy (Sir Kobert Howard) : K. T.
in Drury Lane. " To the Eoyal Theatre," writes Pepys under date
the 1 2th of this month, " and there saw The Committee, a merry but
" indifferent play ; only Laoy's part, an -Irish footman, is beyond
" imagination. There I saw my Lord Falconbridge, and his lady,
VOL. Ti. A a
354 LIFE OF MILTON AND HISTOEY OF HIS TIME.
" my Lady Mary Cromwell, who looks as well as I have known her,
" and well clad ; but, when the house' began to fill, she put on her
" vizardi and so kept it on all the play." Little wonder ! One hardly
expected to find Cromwell's daughter in the King's theatre at aU ;
but she may well have kept her mask on when the play was such a
pointedly anti-Puritan one as this. All through, people must have
been looking at her to see how she in particular took the jests ; e. g.
when Mrs. Day says to her husband, the Chairman of the Com-
mittee of Sequestrations, "By bringing this to pass, husband, we
shall secure ourselves if the King should come ; you'll be hanged
else."
Jan. 1663-4 : The Indicm Queen, a tragedy (Sir Robert Howard,
assisted by Dryden) : K. T. in Drury Lane. The play was very suc-
cessful and attracted crowds. " A most pleasant show and beyond
" my expectation," says Pepys of it ; " the play good, but spoilt by the
" rhyme, which breaks the sense. But, above my expectation most,
" the eldest Marshall did do her part most excellently well as I ever
" heard woman in my life." — Dryden's own second play, a tragi-
comedy, called The Rival Ladies, was produced about the same
time in the same theatre, though Pepys" did not see it till the
following August, when he thought it " a very innocent and most
" pretty witty play."
June 1664 : Henry V (not Shakespeare's, but by the Earl of
Orrery) : D. T. in Lincoln's Inn Fields. Pepys's account of
the play is enthusiastic. " A most noble play, writ by my Lord
Orrery," he says ; " wherein Betterton, Harris, and lanthe's parts
" most incomparably wrote and done, and the whole play the most
" full of heights and raptures of wit and sense that ever I heard."
April 1665 : Mustapha, a tragedy (the Earl of Orrery) : D. T. in
Lincoln's Inn Fields. " All the pleasure of the play," says Pepys,
'' was the King and my lady Castlemaine were there ; and pretty
" witty Nell of the King's house, and the younger Marshall, sat
" next us, — which pleased me mightily." These two actresses were
in the audience on the occasion.
— About this time was produced at the K. T. in Drury Lane
Dryden's third play, a tragedy, 2Vte hidiom Emperor, or ike Con-
quest of Memco by the Spaniards : being the sequel of the Indian
Queen. It was the first thoroughly successful play of Dryden, and
established his reputation.
Interruption of eighteen months by the Great Plague and Great
Fi/re: — Dryden's Indian Emperm at the King's Theatre and Orrery's
Musta/pha- at the Duke's, were the plays principally running when,
in May 1655, the Plague brought horror into London, theatre-
going ceased, and the theatres were shut up. Even after the subsi-
dence of the Plague in the winter of 1665-6 there was no hurry to
resume stage-amusements. In March 1666, when the vast mortality
was over, and the town had again filled, the theatres remained
closed. On the 19th of that month Pepys visited the King's
THEATEICAL GLIMPSES PROM 1660 TO 1667. 355
Theatre at Drury Lane out of curiosity. " All in dirt," he reports,
"they being altering of the stage to make it wider; but God
" knows when they will begin to act again. But my business here
" was to see the inside of the stage, and all the tiring-rooms and
" machines; and indeed it was a sight worth seeing. But .to see
" their clothes and the various sorts, and what a mixture of things
" there was, — here a wooden leg, there a ruff, here a hobby-horse,
" there a crown, — would make a man split himself with laughing ;
" and particularly Lacy's wardrobe and Shatterel's. But then
" again to think how fine they show on the stage by candle-light,
" and how poor things they are to look at near at hand, is not
" pleasant at all." Months more passed ; and, the Great Fire of
September 1666 having added new desolation, it was not till the
last week in November 1666 that the public theatres were effectu-
ally again at work.
Feb. 1666-7 : Th& Chances, a comedy (Beaumont and Fletcher,
altered by the Duke of Buckingham): K. T. in Drury Lane.
" A good play, and the actors most good in it," says Pepys, " and
" pretty to hear Knepp sing in the play very properly ' All night
" ' I weep ' ; and sung it admirably. The whole play pleases me
" well, and most of all the sight of many fine ladies ; among others,
" my Lady Castlemaine and Mrs. Middleton : the latter of the two
" hath also a very excellent face and body, I think. And so home
" in the dark, over the ruins, with a link."
March 1667 : Secret Love, or the Maiden Queen, a tragi-comedy
(Dryden) : K. T. in Drury Lane. — This is Dryden's fourth play,
or his fifth if we include his share in Sir Eobert Howard's Indian
Queen. — Pepys's account of the performance (March 2) is as fol-
lows : — " After dinner with my wife to the King's hovise to see
" The Maiden Queen, a new play of Dryden's, mightily commended
" for the regularity of it and the strain and wit ; and the truth
" is there is a comical part done by Nell, which is ' Plorimel,' that
" I never can hope ever to see the like done again by man or
" woman. The King and Duke of York were at the play. But so
" great performance of a comical part was never, I believe, in the
" world as Nell do this ; — both as a mad girl ; then, most and best
" of all, when she comes in like a young gallant, and hath the
" motions and carriage of a spark the most that ever I saw any
" man have. It makes me, I confess, admire her." Pepys saw the
play again on the 25th of the same month : " which indeed the
" more I see," he then notes, " the more I like ; and is an excellent
" play, and so done by Nell her merry part as cannot be better done
" in nature." — The King also was very much disposed to admire
Nelly; .but her promotion to semi-royalty had yet to come.
— Dryden's first and unsuccessful play. The Wild Gallant^ re-
vived at the K. T. in Drury Lane, considerably altered, and with
a new prologue and new epilogue. The success of his Maiden
Qiteen had emboldened him to that experiment.
Aa 2
356 him OF HILTON AND HISTORY OF HIS TIME.
Aug. 1667: Dryden's Sir Ma/rtin Mar -All, or tfie Feigned In-
nocence, a comedy : D. T. in Lincoln's Inn Fields. Dryden, having
hitherto written only for the King's theatre, had preferred not
giving his name at once for this play at the Duke's; but (save in
so far as he may have used a version of Moli^re's L'Etowrdi by
the Duke of Newcastle) it was wholly his own — the fifth of hid
dramas, or the sixth if we include his share in The Indian Queen.
The play was most successful. " It is the most entire piece of
" mirth," says Pepys, " a complete farce from one end to the other,
" that certainly was ever writ. I never laughed so in all my Ufe,
" and at very good wit therein, not fooUng."
— Dryden's Indicm Emperor revived at the King's theatre in
Drury Lane, to balance the attraction of his new play at the other
house. Pepys was at the King's house on the 22nd ; " where I
" find Nell come again," he says, " which I am glad of, but was most
" infinitely displeased with her being put to act the Emperor's
" daughter, which is a great and serious part, which she does most
" basely." To explain this, it may be mentioned that, about a
month before, Nelly had gone to five with Lord Buckhurst, and
had signified her intention of retiring from the stage altogether.
There had been a quarrel, however; and Nelly had come back,
moneyless, and decidedly under a cloud for the moment. Lord
Buckhurst was saying dreadful things of her ; the actor Hart, her
former admirer, now hated her ; even Lady Castlemaine, who had
been her great friend, had thrown her off; there was a general
agreement to neglect bra-. It could not last long, and she was to
bewitch them aU again. The spirit of the little thing, it appears,
had risen in her temporary adversity. It was about this time, at
all events, that she had an encounter of wits in the green-room
with her fellow-actress Beck Marshall. That lady, with the rest,
having upbraided Nelly with the Lord Buckhurst affair, Nelly's
retort was that, though she was not " a presbyter's praying
daughter," but had been brought up in very bad society, " filling
out strong waters to the gentlemen," yet she had a right to con-
aider herself the more virtuous courtesan of the two \
Who does not feel the charm of such glimpses? What
a world of pleasure, long unnecessarily withheld, had been
restored in the reopened theatres, each with its boxes, pit,
and galleries, where a thousand people or so could sit every
evening, from about three o'clock till nine, seeing and hearing
a play of Shakespeare's once more, or any later Elizabethan
comedy or tragedy, or whatever else of newer sorts might be
produced by living talent !
1 Genest and Pepys, with references to Scott's edition of Dryden's Works and
Onnstie 8 edition ot Dryden's Poems.
EESTOEATION COMEDIES AND FAECES. 357
Charles preferred Comedy and Farce to Tragedy, and re-
commended the dramatists about his Court to take their plots
for farces and comedies from the recent or contemporary conti-
nental drama, but above all from the Spanish. Royal influence,
therefore, may have had something to do with the undoubted
fact of the preponderance of comedy and farce in the drama of
the Restoration, and also with the fact that not a few of the
Restoration comedies and farces were copies, or even transla-
tions, of French and Spanish originals. An importation of
foreign literary tastes, and especially of French literary tastes,
was, however, almost a necessary incident of the Restoration.
Many of the courtiers of Charles, it is to be remembered,
including some of the first aristocratic contributors to the
Restoration drama, had been long resident in France, and had
acquired French habits in literary matters during their exile,
as well as a knowledge of the current French literature.
These brought their knowledge and their acquired tastes
hack with them to England, and so assisted in that sub-
stitution of the French influence for the older Italian, as the
paramount foreign influence in English literature, which our
historians agree in dating from the reign of Charles II.
Nevertheless, in essentials, the English comedy of the Restora-
tion remained still English. Moli^re, whose dramatic activity
had begun in 1653 and who lived tiU 1673, was known, re-
ferred to, quoted, translated in parts, and pillaged from at
pleasure ; but much of him, and the best of him, could not be
transferred. In the humorous coarseness of the native English
farces and comedies of the Restoration, or even of those that
Moliere suggested, there is little of the peculiar genius of his
wit and gaiety. So, though there were translations from
Moreto, Calderon, and other contemporary Spanish draiaatists,
and plots for English comedies were freely borrowed from
them or from their Spanish predecessors, the effect was but
superficial. In body and in spirit the English comedy of the
Restoration retained its characteristic nationality i. Among
-1 On the Spanish and French in- where, besides independent discussion
flnences on the English Drama of the of the Bubjeot, there is a valuable ae.
Restoration see Professor Ward's Eng- cumulation of facts in the text and in
JisA Dramatic Literature, II. 462—478 ; the footnotes.
358 LIFE OF MILTON AND HISTORY OF HIS TIME.
the most ctaracteristic of the Kestoration comedies all in all
one might name Cowley's Cutter of Coleman Street, Sir Robert
Howard's Committee, KiUigrew's Parson's Wedding, and Lacy's
Old Troop and his Sawney the Scot. While all the five agree
in being distinctly anti-Puritan in theme and feeling, the
cleverest of the five are Howard's and Lacy's. Poor Cowley
had rather failed to please the Court by his recast of an old
play of his under thei new name of The Cutter, and had in fact
produced an absurd, ill-tempered thing, coarsely worded, and
utterly unworthy of his genius. There is more of real cha-
racter and real humour in Howard's Committee, with less of
coarseness, and indeed hardly any. Lacy's Old Troop, with
much stir and humour in it, is incredibly coarse in its plot
and its language ; his Sawney the Scot, a new version of the
Taming of the Shrew, is coarse only in the incidental ex-
pressions of the imperturbable Sawney himself, in a dialect
meant for Scotch of the Aberdeen variety, though these are
startling enough. KiUigrew's Parsons Wedding is simply
abominable. It was one of eleven plays he had written
abroad, and seems to have been the only comic piece of his
he ventured to try even on his own stage. He did his utmost
for its bestiality by having it acted wholly by women.
Though Comedy was in the ascendant, there did not cease
to be a demand, of course, for something that could be called
Tragedy. Not only were tragedies or tragi-comedies of Shake-
speare, Beaumont and Fletcher, Massinger, Shirley, and other
old dramatists occasionally revived ; there were also some stray
attempts on the part of new authors to produce fresh tragedies
on the traditional Elizabethan model, with the customary use
of blank verse, wholly or mainly, for the dialogue. But the
peculiar tragic drama of the Restoration was one of a new
kind, bred by the conditions of the Restoration itself, and
belonging exclusively, we may say, to that particular period
of English literature. This was the so-called Heroic Play or
Tragedy of Rhymed Declamation.
The Heroic Play was a combination of several novelties. In
the first place, it proceeded on a new notion that had crept into
the literary mind of Europe as to what constitutes the poetical
HEEOIC PLATS OR RHYMING TRAGEDIES. 359
or ideal in matter. One may trace the phenomenon as far
back as to Sir Philip Sidney's Arcadia. In that pastoral
romance, or romance pastoral and heroic, if I may trust to
my own recollection of it, we are introduced, at first, to two
shepherds, Strephon and Claius, in a Greek island, both in
love with the beautiful shepherdess Urania ; and, as we read
on, we find a Musidorus, a Pirocles, a Kalander, and other
Arcadians, till the story expands itself, " bringing in kings and
" queens, and the war between the Lacedaemonians and the
" Helots, and leading to combats in armour, new friendships
" and jealousies, many adventures and surprises, songs and
" soliloquies of lovers, and extremely high-flown con versa-
" tions." This kind of ideal, a bastard prose-cognate of
Spenser's wondrous Pastoralism and Arthurianism in verse,
and barely tolerable even from the fine hands of Sidney, had
reappeared, with degenerate features, in those voluminous
French heroic romances of Gomberville, Calpren^de, Georges
de Scuderi, Madeleine de Scud^ri, and others, which were the
delight and torture of French readers between 1650 and 1660,
as they came out in instalments, and of English readers also in
translations of the successive instalments. The heroes and
heroines were Pharamonds, Cleopatras, Mustaphas, Bassas,
Cassandras, or other kings, queens, and warriors of historical
or quasi-historical names ; you were supposed to be on
historical ground, and among Greeks, Romans, or Turks
and other orientals ; and yet you were nowhere on this
earth as it ever was or ever will be, but in an impossible
land of eternal fighting and love-making, bombazine gaU
lantry and muslin magniloquence. As far as was con-
sistent with the briefer space and the dramatic form, it was
this kind of ideal world that was assumed for the purposes of
the new English Heroic Ih-agedy. There must be kingly
personages, and their wars, battles, and sieges ; but the ladies
for whom they languish must be on the stage to the battle's
edge and the cannon's mouth, inspiring the feats of valour, or
leading to the truces and treaties, and the real business must
be the love-making. Now, as in such " love and honour "
histories the tendency necessarily was to incessant rhetoric in
360 LIFE OF MILTON AND HISTORY OF HIS TIME.
expression of those sentimeats, there resulted a second differ-
ence of the heroic play from the old English tragedy, in the
subordination of character, thought, and even action, to
declamation. The declamation might run to sonorous ex-
travagance and still be only in keeping with the matter.
And so, what with the natural instinct of the unreal kind of
matter which composed the heroic plays to seek refuge and
justification in verse of the most artificial kind, and what with
the special fitness of rhyme as a trick of emphasis in declama-
tory dialogue, there came to be that third peculiarity of
this class of plays which was the most obvious of all and
occasioned most comment. Abandoning the law or tradition
which, since the beginnings of the great Elizabethan drama,
had prescribed blank verse, or blank verse with the right of
rhyme now and then, as the proper language for tragedies,
histories, and serious plays generallyj the new heroic play
reverted boldly to the rhymed verse which had previously
claimed possession of all English poetry whatsoever, dramatic
or non-dramatic.
In nothing was the French influence on the English litera-
ture of the Restoration more specifically visible than in this
revolt from the established English custom of blank verse for
the drama. Since 1635, when Corneille produced his first
tragedy, the classic French drama had come fully into being
in the successive masterpieces of that author, followed by some
of Moli^re's in comedy; pjecisely in those pre-Eestoration
years when the English national drama was extinct or in
*beyan.ee, this classical French drama of Corneille and Moliere
was the most striking thing in the literature of Europe ; and
the tragedies of Corneille, as all the world noted, and such of
the comedies of Moliere as were in verse at all, were systemati»
cally in rhyme. The contagion had spread into Italy, where
there had appeared, in 1655, a discourse by an eminent Italian
critic recommending rhymed verse only as proper for tragedy.
Nor could England avoid the effects. In 1658 and 1659, just
when Corneille had produced all his best tragedies, and was
employing his decaying powers in the composition of those
critical essays in which he expounded his notions of the drama
HEROIC PLATS OE EHTMIN9 TEA.GEDIES. 361
in general, tragedy in particular, and the law of the three
dramatic unities, his name and authority had come to be of no
small consequence in England. When the Drama was revived
in England, immediately before the Restoratioa, it came there-
fore to be a very natural question whether the old Elizabethan
style of blank verse should be resumed for plays, or whether
it would not be better to conform to the French example of Cor-
neille and Moli^re. The decision, with some at least, was that,
with all respect for Shakespeare and the other Elizabethans,
tragedies and serious plays, and especially the kind of play
called the heroic, ought certainly to be written in rhyme.
The peculiar rhymed verse of the French dramas, however,
being those Alexandrines or Iambic senarian couplets which
had never been very popular in England, and could hardly
reconcile themselves to the English ear, it was voted that the
old English decasyllabic couplet, familiar and- common since
Chaucer's time, and occasional in the English drama itself
hitherto, should be the verse of the new English drama.
Hence the rule of so called rhyming heroics as part a.nd parcel
of the English heroic play. Still, even with this deviation
from the strict French fashion, the English heroic plays,"from
their first introduction, were regarded as direct derivatives
from Corneille and the French. "Corneille, the great dra-
" matic author of France, wonderfully applauded by the present
" age, both among his own countrymen and our Frenchly
" affected English," is the phrase of a contemporary English
critic, who also expressly refers more than once to " the
French way of continual rhyme and interlarding of history
with adscititious love and honour " as the characteristics of
the English heroic play^.
As the English heroic rhyming tragedy was an invention
or importation of Davenant's revived Laureateship, so part of
the credit of it, guch as it was, might have been claimed by
Davenant himself. His operatic drama of The Siege of Rhodes,
the first part of which was produced in 1656, and also to some
1 Professor Henry Morley's Fint 476 ; Phillips's Theatrnm Paetarum of
Sketch of English Literature, pp. 633-4 1676, Articles OorneiBe, Earl of Orrery,
(a very luminous passage on Corneille's and Bryden,
influence) ; Ward's Dram. Lit. II. 473 —
363 LIFE OF MILTON AND HISTOEY OF HIS TIME.
extent his two operatic pieces, The Cruelty of tlie Spaniards in
Peru and The History of Sir Francis Brahe, likewise produced
under the Protectorate, are in the approved " love and honour "
vein of the heroic play, and are written in rhymed heroics,
intermixed with rhyming lyric stanzas. Davenant, however,
had been forced into this rhyming style of heroic declamation
by. the exigencies of his situation at the time. It was not the
regular drama that he had been allowed to revive in London
under Oliver, but only the peculiar kind of dramatic entertain-
ment he called an opera, telling the story in recitative, and
filling out the rest with song, instrumental music, and
pageant ; and each of the pieces of his we have named ought
to be regarded therefore rather as a libretto for an operatic
performance than as a drama proper. They are very good
and careful in that kind, far better than the wording, whether
recitative or song, provided for most operas now ; but there is
every reason to believe that, for the regular drama, had that
been permissible, Davenant would have persisted in his allegi-
ance to the Elizabethan method.
The introduction of the rhymed heroic tragedy upon the
EngMsh stage may be attributed more properly, therefore, to
another person. This was our old friend, Roger Boyle, Lord
Broghill, now Earl of Orrery. There must have been a con-
stitutional proclivity in this member of the Boyle family to
the heroic or "love and honour " species of fiction ; for one of
the celebrated books of the Protectorate had been Lord Brog-
hill's heroic prose-romance, Parthenissa, of which several
portions had appeared, at intervals, before the Restoration,
though it had not then been completed. Retaining his liking
for this style of the poetic, but taking to the dramatic form of
authorship after the Restoration, Orrery had written, between
1660 and 1665, at least three heroic rhyming plays. The Black
Prince, The History of Henry the Fifth, and Mmtapha, the Son
of Solyman the Magnificent. The last two had been acted at
Davenant's theatre ; and the Tragedy of Mustapha in particular,
the subject of which was suggested by Davenant's Siege of
Rhodes, seems to have been the most successful and frequently
repeated thing in the shape of tragedy on the English stage
HEROIC PLAYS OE EHTMING TBAGEDIEg. 363'
between 1663 and 1665. The opening of the first act will be
a sufficient specimen of the verse. The scene is Solyman's
camp with his pavilion : —
Rustan. What influence, mighty Sultan, rules the day
And stops your course where glory leads the way ?
Th' Hungarian armies hasten from the field.
And Buda waits for your approach to yield ;
Yet you seem doubtful what you are to do.
And turn from triumphs when they follow you.
Pyrrhus. We at the sun's one moment's rest should more
Admire than at his glorious course before.
Glory, like time, progression does require :
When it does cease t' advance it does expire.
Solyman. You both mistake. My glory is the cause
That in my conquest I have made a pause.
Whilst Hungary did powerful foes afford
I thought her ruin worthy of my sword ;
But now the war does seem too low a thing
Against a moui-ning Queen and infant King.
Pyrrhus, it will unequal seem in me
To conquer and then blush at victory ^.
The Earl of Orrery's rank, and his acquired reputation both
in state and in war, recommended the new style of the heroic
rhyming drama. One of the first to follow him in the practice
was Sir Robert Howard, whose rhymed tragedy of The Indian
Queen, in which he was assisted to an unknown extent by
Dryden, was produced with much success at the King's theatre
early in 1664, and was published, together with his two
comedies, and another tragedy called The Vestal Virgin, in
1665. Sir Robert, however, was not an absolute convert to
the theory of rhyme only for the serious drama. His other
tragedy. The Vestal Virgin, is partly in rhyme and partly in
blank verse ; and in the preface to his volume containing his
four plays, where he distinctly refers to " the dispute between'
" many ingenious persons whether verse in rhime or verse
" without the sound (which may be called blank verse, though
" a hard expression) is to be preferred," he ventures on the
opinion that, upon the whole, rhyme is " proper for a poem or
copy of verses," but " unnatural " for a drama, inasmuch as it
1 Ward's Dram. Lit. II. 492—495; and Herringmau's 1669 edition of Orrery's
Henry the Fifth and Mustapha.
364 LIFE OF MILTON AND HlSTOBY OF HIS TIME.
would seem strange " when a eenfant is called or a door bid
be shut in rhyme ^."
In the preface to Tie Usurper, a tragedy by Sir Robert's
brother, the Honourable Edward Howard, which was acted at
the King's theatre in or before 1667', that member of the clever
Howard family also declares his general preference for blank
verse in plays. The tragedy itself, accordingly, is in a kind
of limping blank verse. Though of little or no merit, it is
interesting on account of its theme. Damocks, the usurper
in the play, is clearly Cromwell ; his son Dionysius is Richard
Cromwell ; Charles appears as " Clean,derj the true King, dis-
guised like a Moorj " the other characters represent Royalists
or partisans of the Protector ; and among them is Hugo de
Petra, " a parasite and creature of the usurper," i. e. Hugh
Peters. Here is a portion of the concluding scene ; in which
Damocles, overthrown at last, appears, in a kind of stupefied
trance, in the restored King's presence, and Hugo de Petra is
brought in guarded : —
Eu^o. Ha ! the King ! I am blasted. Sir; I most
Humbly beg that you would hang me.
Oleander. The laws may fit you, Sir.
Hugo. I have deserved it.
Oleander. I make no question.
Remove this horrid traitor from my sight :
This day be sacred to our kingdom's peace;
And let him dream on till the laws and death
Awake him.
A lexius. Ask the King mercy : speak for yourself, Hugo.
Hugo. To what purpose? Let me say what I will, I
Know they will hang me [They lead him off'].
Damocles. Then I will wake myself.
The next wound's his that dares approach me.
Oleander, I wiQ do thee justice.
[Wounds himself with a ponia/rdi\.
Oleamder. Restrain him.
Damochs. 'Tis too late. I scorn your canting forms of law;
'Tis in my power to deceive aU your poUcy. Ha !
I do begin to be awake. This wound has do» 't ;
But I shall sleep again, I fe^r, and quickly vanish
I know not whither.
1 Sir Bobert Howard's "Four New Plays'" ■- Herringman's edition of 1665.
JOHN WILSON. 365
My eyes grow dim o' the sudden: 'tis a trouble
Now to look upwards. Heaven's a great way off;
I shall not find my way i' the dark. Farewell !
Alexius. He's dead.
Oleander. But left his name behind: a glorious villain*.
The English Drama of the Eestoration, we have thus seen,
included (1) comedies and farces in prose, (2) comedies in
verse, or in prose and verse intermixed, the verse either blank
or blank and rhytne intermixed, after the native English
fashion, (3) tragedies or serious plays in blank verse, with
occasional rhyme, after the native English fashion, and ' (4)
tragedies and histories of bve and honour in the peculiar new-
fashion of rhyming heroics.
Among the contributors to this composite drama whom
should we recognise now as the men of greatest literary
ability ? — Had Dayenant worked more in the drama after the
Restoration, he would have held his own easily, and even in
the little that he did produce he continued to prove his
trained and versatile faculty. His Flayhouse to Let is a clever
medley and- worth reading, especially the part of it which
consists of a condensed ttanslation from Moli^re in a kind of
broken French English. — Then, among the dramatists who
had obtained some footing on the London stage between
1660 and 1667', but do not seem to have taken perma-
nent hold there or to have been widely appreciated by the
public, there was no one whose plays are entitled to rank
higher now, as plays for reading, than that John Wilson
whom we have barely had occasion to name hitherto in
our literary survey. His two comedies. The Cheats and The
Projectors, the first mainly in prose and the second wholly,
both published in 1664, after having been acted, and his
tragedy in blank verse called Andronicus Co?»«t(?»w, published
in the same year, but without having been previously acted, are
perhaps the very best things in the early dramatic literature
1 "The Uanrper, a Tragedy. As it printed by Herringmau, e.g. Sir Robert
was acted at the Theater Royal by Howard's comedies, one is struck by the
his Majestie's Servants. Written by fact that the sheerest prose, or matter
the Honourable Edward Howard, Esq. not far off from prose, is presented
Liccns'd Aug. 2, 1667, Roger L'Estrange. mechanically as a kind of lawless blank
London ; Printed for Henry Herring- verse,
man, 1668." In this and in other books
366 LIFE OF MILTON AND HISTORY OF HIS TIME.
of the Restoration, the most original, compact, and full-
bodied. Professor Ward, who has lately done justice to
Wilson's long-forgotten merits, discerns in him more of Ben
Jonson's copiousness and ripeness of wit than in any of his
contemporaries, and says justly that "he draws character with
" clearness and strength, and that the manliness of his serious
" as well as of his comic writing refreshes and invigorates the
"student of the literary period in which, unfortunately
" perhaps for his literary reputation, it was his lot to live."
There was wanting only a certain electric something more in
his genius to place him very high ^. — And so the man who did
emerge as the supreme dramatist of the Restoration was, as
all the world knows, not John Wilson, but John DKyDEN.
Between 1660 and 1663 Dryden had been living in London
as a bachelor of very moderate means, often seen in cofiFee-
houses in a homely suit of Norwich drugget, and much in the
society of Sir Robert Howard and other persons of note, but
doing nothing in literature higher than some now untraceable
prose hack-work for the bookseller Herringman and some new
copies of complimentary verses. To my KonowreA Friend Sir
Molert Howard on his excellent Poems, To his Sacred Majesty :
A Panegyric on his Coronation, To my Lord Chancellor: pre-
sented on New Tear's Day, and To my Eonov/red Friend
Br. Charleton on his Learned and Useful Works : — these, added
to the Funeral Panegyric on Cromwell in 1658, and the atoning
AstrcBa Redux of 1660, were the sum and substance of Dryden
till the appearance of his Wild Oallant on the boards of the
King's theatre in Vere Street on the 5th of February, 1663-3.
The failure of that play will astonish no one that tries to read
it now. It is a comedy in prose, with confused and ill-drawn
characters, very heavy wit, and a preposterous plot, in which
> Wilson lived to about 1696, and was Tlie Marriage of the Devil, was not
in public employment in Ireland in the published till 1691, His four plays
latter part of the reign of Charles II. have recently been published together
and through that of James II. He was in a single volume as part of the Edin-
the author of soine legal and political burgh series of the Dramatists of the
■writings in addition to his dramas, the Restoration, edited by Messrs. Maid-
last of which, a tragi-eomedy in prose ment and Logan,
and blank verse, entitled Belphegor, or
dbtden: his first dramas. 367
an old lord is persuaded, by the help of a pillow, that his
daughter is with child, and also that he is with child himself.
Dryden bore the disappointment patiently enough, and had
some consolation in knowing that Lady Castlemaine liked the
play and defended it at Court; He had also continued en-
couragement from Sir Robert Howard and the Earl of Orrery,
both of whom had conceived a friendly interest in his fortunes.
Between Howard and Dryden indeed the relations became
closer now than they had been before. Hitherto they had
been those of aristocratic patron and needy client; but on the
1st of December, 1663, Dryden became Howard's brother-
in-law, by marrying his sister. Lady Elizabeth Howard. The
marriage, which was not only favoured by Sir Robert and his
brothers Edward and James, but had also the public consent
of their father the Earl of Berkshire, caused some surprise at
the time ; and Dryden's biographers are obliged to account
for it now by supposing that, as the lady's reputation was not
unblemished, her family were glad to see her respectably
married to any one. Such as it was, the connection with the
Berkshire family was not without important effects on
Dryden's career. While it was being arranged, he and Sir
Robert Howard had formed a kind of literary copartnership
for the production of a heroic tragedy in rhyme ; and what is
called Sir Robert Howard's tragedy of The Indian . Queen,
brought out with such good success at the King's theatre in
Drury Lane in January, 1663-4, was the result of this co-
partnership. Meanwhile Dryden had written his own second
play, TAe Rival Ladies, a tragi-comedy, mainly in blank verse,
but with intermixed rhyme and prose ; and, this play having
also had good success at the same theatre about the same
time, Dryden published it in 1664, with an interesting dedi-
cation to the Earl of Orrery, highly eulogistic of his lordship's
genius and taste in literary matters, and expounding critically
some of Dryden's own notions of English style and verse.
From that year he felt his footing surer ; but his complete
mastery of the stage-art may date from the beginning of
1665, when his rhymed tragedy of Tke Indian Emperor,
avowedly a sequel to The Indian. Queen, eclipsed, with its
368 LIFE OF MILTON AND HISTORY OF HIS TIME.
success at Drury Lane not only that previous performance
there, but all in rhyming tragedy that had yet been produced
at either house, Lord Orrery's best included. Great pains
were taken in bringing the play on the stage, even to the
distribution among the audience of a printed handbill ex-
plaining the connection of the play with its predecessor. In
The Indicm Queen the subject had been the acquisition of the
throne of Mexico by Montezuma before the arrival of the
Spaniards in America ; but in The Indian Emperor the audi-
ence were to see Montezuma in his imperial glory twenty
years later, and the intermingling of Mexicans and Spaniards,
ending in his fail and death and the Spanish conquest of his
kingdom. And,' what with the poetic merits of the piece
itself, what with the splendid dresses, what with the splen-
did acting of Mohun as Montezuma, Hart as Cortez, and
Ann Marshall as Almeria, the audience were abundantly
satisfied, and the applauses of The Indian Emperor would have
gone on indefinitely but for the interruption of the Great
Plague. Through that interruption Dryden, — having pub-
lished his Indian Emperor, or at least registered it for publi-
cation,— lived in retirement at Charlton in Wiltshire, the seat
. of his father-in-law Lord Berkshire ; and there his first son
was born. He was not idle in his retirement, however; and
in 1667, when the theatres were re-opened, he had a new
play for each of them. To the King's house, early in . the
year, he gave his comedy, or tragi-comedy, partly in verse
and partly in prose, called Secret Lote, or the Maiden Queen.
The merits of the play, and Nell Gwynn's acting in the part
of Florimel, made the success triumphant ; Charles liked it so
much that Dryden called it ever afterwards " the King's own
Play " and would dedicate it to no subject ; and under cover
of its great success, and of the renewed applauses of The Indian
Emiperor, now revived and running a secobd course, even The
Wild Gallant slipped itself in again without protest. While
they were thus all but cloyed with Dryden at Drury Lane,
lo 1 unexpectedly, in August of the same year, the other house
in Lincoln's Inn Fields had his uproarious prbse-comedy or
farce of Sir Martin Mar-all. The triumphant success of this
DBYDEN : HIS PIEST DRAMAS. 369
play was also owing largely to the acting in one of the parts.
What Nell had done for Dryden in his last play in the King's
theatre was done for him by Notes in this at the Duke's. In
the part of Sir Martin, the blundering knight who is always
spoiling by his own awkwardness and stupidity the cleverest
schemes that can be devised in his interest by his servant
Warner, till that subtle-brained plotter is driven mad with
shame and marries the lady himself, the acting of Nokes
was something superb. Colley Gibber, who saw him long
afterwards in the part, has commemorated his performance of
it as the very perfection of that kind of comic acting which,
by dumb show and play of feature suited to the situations
and the words, kills an audience by a continued fatigue of
laughter. Nokes and Nell Gwynn between them, we can
see, had helped greatly to win for Dryden that supremacy in
the London dramatic world which was certainly his in the
year 1667. The supremacy had been won on the boards. Of
his five dramas, only The Rival Ladies and TAe Indian Umperor
had then been published ^.
Dryden was one of those writers who get better and better,
richer and mellower, as they grow older. He was by no
means at his best in 1667, had not even then found out his
vein of highest excellence ; and this is to be remembered while
we estimate for ourselves, without Nell's acting or Nokes's
acting to dazzle us, the real merits of those five plays which
had established his reputation so far.
Their most .obvious merit is that they had been written to
suit and had succeeded. Dryden was a man of very easy con-
science. His notion of literature was not that rare one which
would insist on administering to the public what they need,
whether they like it or not ; nor was it that which would first
1 Sir Walter Scott's Life of Dryden, man, under licence from L'Estrange,
formingVol. I. of his edition of Dry den's June 27, 1664. The Indian JSmperor
Works in eighteen volumes (1808) ; Mr. was registered by the same publisher,
Christie's Memoir of Dryden, prefixed also by licence from L'Estrange, on the
to the GlobeBditionof Dryden'sPoetical 26th of May, 1665 ; but, as I find 1667
Works, with the notes in that edition to generally given as the year of the pub-,
the Prologues and Epilogues of Dryden's lioation of that play, I suppose Her-
first Plays ; Stationers' Registers for ringman kept it back on account of the
registrations of the first Plays. The Great Plague.
Hival Ladies was registered by Herritig-
VOL. TI. B b
370 LIFE OF MILTON AND HISTOEY OF HIS TIME.
let something fashion itself freely and constitutionally, with
more or less of art and elaboration, in the author's own
thoughts and genius, and then publish the same courageously
to the winds and the chances. It was simply the grocer's
notion of finding out the articles immediately in demand with
the best customers and competing for the supply of theSe.
Having turned a Restoration writer, he would go at once to
all extremes in that character. He avowed that he wrote for
Charles II. and his Court, and that he recognised no higher
standard than the tastes of that Court ; and his adulation, not
only of Charles himself, but of all persons, things, or ten-
dencies that had gathered round Charles, was boundless and
unblushing. There was nothing that Dryden would not say
without shame to please any important person. How had
he written to Lady Castlemaine ? —
" True poets empty fame and praise despise ;
Fame is the trumpet, but your smile the prize.
You sit above, and see vain men below
Contend for what you only can bestow;
But those great actions others do, by chance
Are, like your beauty, your inheritance :
So great a soul, such sweetness," &c.
That Dryden had taken to the Drama at all was in itself
a sign of his readiness to accommodate himself. That he had
taken to Comedy first, because that was most in request, was
a further sign. His natural inclinations were hardly in that
direction. But, having taken to Comedy, he had exerted him-
self to please the reigning taste ia that article in every parti-
cular. In the first place, he was studiously anti-Puritan.
None of his first comedies, indeed, is directly such an anti-
Puritan invective as Cowley, Sir Eobert Howard, and others
ofiered for the stage. He had possibly a sense that such
a thing from the pen of one whose connexions had been
Puritan, and who had himself made court to Oliver, would
have been unnecessarily indecent. But there are particles of
anti-Puritanism throughout the comedies to the requisite
extent. " The gude Scotch covenant," " a silenced minister,"
and the like come in sufficiently ; and we have such insinua-
DBYDEN: HIS PIBST DBAMAS. 371
tions of the courtly doctrines of royal prerogative and
passive obedience as the following, — the second actually a
translation into metre of a passage of the speech of Charles I.
on the scaffold : —
Queen. Princes sometimes may pass
Acts of oblivion in their own wrong.
Fhiloeles, 'Tis true; but not recall them.
Maiden Queen, III. 1.
Queen. My people's fears ! "Who made them statesmen ?
They much mistake their business, if they think
It is to govern.
The right of subjects and of sovereigns
Are things distinct in nature. Theirs is to
Enjoy propriety, not empire. Ibid. I. 3^
Further, in that particular concomitant of anti-Puritanism in
the Restoration literature which consisted in coarseness of
language, a degradation of the standard of mannerly speech
between human beings in public or in private, Dryden's
comedies are but too representative. Even his ladies and
their lovers talk disgustingly on the least occasion. What
is worst in Dryden, however, is that he pushes coarseness,
whenever he can, into elaborate obscenity. He was to pander
more and more to this taste of the Court and of the populace,
till in some of his plays the stage is actually turned into
a mere proscenium to the stews ; but already in his Wild
Gallant and his Sir Martin Mar-all, and in one of his pro-
logues, there were passages which one would have thought
ineffable even then in an English theatre.
In those plays of Dryden, such as his two tragi-comedies
The Rival Ladies and The Maiden Queen, where he was not
tied necessarily to prose or to contemporary manners, but had
an opportunity of showing his notions of the ideal or poetical,
he still adopted what he found in fashion. His ideal was
simply that balloon kind of ideal, if we may so call it, which,
under the name of the heroic, suited and satisfied the lords
and ladies of Charles's Court. The rope attaching the balloon
J Compare this passage with a sentence or two of the dying speech of King
Charles, given ante, Vol. III. p. 725.
B b 2
372 LIFE or MILTON AND HISTOEY OF HIS TIME.
to the stage was loosened, and the balloon went up, containing',
at one time, a Don Gonzalvo, a Don Roderigo, a Don Manuel,
a Julia, a Honoria, an Angelina, with the necessary number
of servants and other supernumeraries, or, at another time,
a Queen of Sicily, her princesses and maids of honour, a
Lysimantes, a Philocles, a Celadon, and the rest. There
they remained for three or four houi's; and you saw their
adventures, marvellous with the amount of love-making and
drawing of swords ; and you heard their superfine sentimejits
uttered in verse, save for a dash of prose-fun thrown in now
and then, with a wriggling of the rope underneath, to keep
the gods from being fatigued ; and at the end of the time the
balloon was hauled down, and tied again to .the stage for the
next occasion, and what you had seen and heard was a dream
of things impossible anywhere in nature, and unimagina"ble
anywhere by a sane human intelligence. It was much the
same, with some variations, if you witnessed such a positive
tragedy, in rhymed heroics, as TAe Indian Emperor. The ideal
is still of the narrowest and most absurdly conventional.
Mexicans and Spaniards are alike featureless in their sub-
limity; love and gallantry are at the heart of the fighting;
" Montezuma rises, goes about the ladies, and at length stays
at Almeria, and bows ;" all the other personages, transatlantic
or cisatlantic, are similarly after the approved pattern of
the Trench romances of the day ; and the so-called poetry of
the dialogue is declamation and bombast.
With all this, and with the future uncalculated, Dryden
was already a man to be admired and liked. There was much
in his character and demeanour that was amiable and es-
timable. The very profuseness of his adulation, his readiness
to praise any one, came partly from an honourable desire to
acknowledge any favour done him, partly from a general
benevolence of disposition, a habit of judging people really by
their best, and allowing for every form of merit. If he had
an easy conscience, he had also an easy temper. He was far
from over-estimating himself, was even modest and diffident
in that respect, and always did himself injustice in company
by a certain shyness and slowness. "He had something in
dkyden: his first dramas. 373
his nature that abhorred intrusion into any society what-
soever," Congreve was to say of him from much later ac-
quaintance ; and it was true of him from the first. All the
while there was a secret reserve of independence, a concealed
fund of the nemo me impune lacesset, on which he could draw
if there were occasion, gently and with playful courtesy if the
occasion were slight, hut furiously and terribly if that should
be demanded. This had hardly been discovered as yet ; and,
on the whole, easiness of temper, placability, modesty of self-
estimate, and generosity in his estimates of others, dead or
living, were the qualities most discernible in Dryden per-
sonally when people were beginning to hail him as the chief
of the Restoration dramatists. That place, however, he had
earned, of course, not by his personal characteristics, but by
his dramas themselves. There too, quite consistently with
what has been already said, we must admit that his success
had not been undeserved. If his notion of writing had been
to write what would suit the Court, he had certainly brought
a larger amount of talent into that business, and had bestowed
more careful study upon it, than any of his competitors. For
one thing, he was evidently a new master in the art of writing
English. " I know not whether I have been so careful of the
" plot and language as I ought," he had said in his dedication
of The Rival Ladies to Lord Orrery ; " but, for the latter,
" I have endeavoured to write English, as near as I could dis-
" tinguish it from the tongue of pedants and that of affected
" travellers." He had certainly not failed in this endeavour.
Dryden's English prose, admirable for its ease, lucidity, and
flexibility, its combination of strength and grace with a kind
of happy negligence, might well already have been a subject
of remark. Nor was his mastery of English verse, after
a fashion of his own, in the least more doubtful. In his
verse, blank or rhymed, one could not but observe, though
there was the same general easy negligence as in his prose,
and also a most pernicious tendency to any artificial inversion
of syntax that would suit the exigencies of the metre and the
rhyme, yet a certain growing consciousness of a peculiar
power. Most of all this was visible in Dryden's discipline
374 LIFE OF MILTON AND HI8T0EY OF HIS TIME.
of himself more and more strictly every day in the manage-
ment of the heroic rhymed couplet. That art of the use of
this couplet for purposes of weighty argumentation, sonorous
maxim, or sarcasm and satire, which Dryden was ultimately
to extricate from the dramatic form of industry altogether,
and apply joer se, with so much social and political effect and
so much increase of his own celebrity, was already forming
itself in his earliest prologues and epilogues and in his Indian
Emperor. From this last there may be a single quotation, ex-
hibiting Dryden at his very best in verse as far as we are yet
concerned with him. Understand that Pizarro and a band of
the Spaniards, with a Christian priest among them, have put
Montezuma and the Indian high priest to the rack in prison,
to force them to yield up more gold, the generous Cortez
being at the moment absent and knowing nothing of the
cruelty.
•zn Priest. Those pains, 0 Prince, thou sufferest now
are light
Compared to those which, when thy soul takes flight.
Immortal, endless, thou must then endure.
Which death begins and time can never cure.
Montezuma. Thou art deceived; for, whensoe'er I die,
The Sun, my father, bears my soul on high :
He lets me down a beam, and, mounted there.
He draws it back and pulls me through the air :
I in the eastern parts and rising sky.
You in heaven's downfall and the west, must Ke.
Christian Priest. Fond man, by heathen ignorance misled,
Thy soul destroying when thy body's dead.
Change yet thy faith, and buy eternal rest.
Indian High Priest. Die in your own, for our belief is best.
Montezuma. In seeking happiness you both agree.
But in the search the paths bo difiFerent be
That all religions will each other fight,
"While only one can lead us in the right.
But till that one hath some more certain mark
Poor human kind must wander in the dark.
And suffer pain eternally below
For that which here we cannot come to know.
Christian Priest. That which we worship, and which you
believe.
From nature's common hand we both receive:
All, under various names, adore and love
DBYDEN : HIS FIRST DRAMAS. 375
One Power immense, which ever rules above.
Vice to abhor and virtue to pursue
Is both believed and taught by us and you.
But here owr worship takes another way.
Montezuma. Where both agree, 'tis there most safe to stay;
For what more vain than public light to shun,
And set up tapers while we see the sun?
Christian Priest. Though nature teaches whom we should adore,
By heavenly beams we still discover more.
Montezuma. Or this must be enough, or to mankind
One equal way to bliss is not designed ;
For, though some more may know and some know less,
Yet all must know enough for happiness.
Christian Priest. If in this middle way you still pretend
To stay, your journey never will have end.
Monteeuma. Howe'er, 'tis better in the midst to stay
Than wander farther in uncertain way.
Christian Priest. But we by martyrdom our faith avow.
Montezuma. You do no more than I for ours do now.
To prove religion true
If either cost or sufferings would suffice.
All faiths afford the constant and the wise ;
And yet even they, by education swayed,
In age defend what infancy obeyed.
Christian Priest. Since age by erring childhood is misled.
Refer yourself to our unerring head.
Montezuma. Man and not err ! what reason can you give 1
Christian Priest. Renounce that carnal reason, and believe.
Montezuma. The light of nature should I thus betray,
'Twere to work hard that I might see the day.
Christian Priest. Condemn not yet the way you do not know ;
I '11 make your reason judge what way to go.
Montezuma. 'Tis much too late for me new ways to take
Who have but one short step of life to make.
Pizarro. Increase their pains : the cords are yet too slack.
Christian Priest. I must by force convert him on the rack.
Indian High Priest. I faint away, and find I can no more :
Give leave, 0 King, I may reveal thy store,
And free myself from pains I cannot bear.
Montezuma. Think'st thou I lie on beds of roses here.
Or in a wanton bath stretched at my ease ?
Die, slave, and with thee die such thoughts as these.
\High, Pri^t turns aside amd dies. Enter Cortez.
Not only was Dryden, in the year 1667, the chief of the
Restoration dramatists ; he had been also qualifying himself,
by excursions out of the drama, to be Davenant's lieutenant
376 LIFE OF MILTON AND HISTOKY OF HIS TIME,
meanwhile, and his successor very soon, in the nominal head-
ship of the Restoration literature generally.
"Annus Mirabilis: The Year of Wonders, 1666; An His-
torical Poem, containing the progress and various success of our
Naval War with Holland under the conduct of his Highness
Prince Rupert and his Grace the Buhe of Albemarle, and de-
scribing the Fire of London ": such is Herringman's registration,
under date January 21, 1666-7, of a non-dramatic poem by
Dryden on which he had bestowed as much pains as on
any of his plays. It had been written in his enforced vacation
during the closing of the London theatres on account of the
Great Plague and the Great Fire ; and, when it appeared,
it was dedicated to the Lord Mayor, Aldermen, and Corpo-
ration of London, and was prefaced by a letter, dated " From
Charlton, in Wiltshire, Nov. 10, 1666," and addressed to his
brother-in-law Sir Robert Howard in terms of the most
grateful respect and humility. The poem consists of 304
quatrain-stanzas, like those of Davenant's Gondibert ; and
that performance of Davenant's was avowedly Dryden's model
for the verse. But Dryden's versification, as might be ex-
pected, beats Davenant's for weight and strength, if not for
luxuriance and melody, and shows better than even his Indian
Emperor the progress of his self-discipline in the art of sonorous
metrical rhetoric. Dryden has the advantage also of a more
compact story, and the brevity of the poem makes it more
readable than any long narrative could ever be in a form of
verse so unsuitable for narrative as the elegiac quatrain. —
The title of the poem describes its matter very accurately.
The commercial pride and greed of the Dutch, we are told in
the beginning, had compelled the great and good King
Charles to go to war with them. And what battles there
had been, what prodigies of English seamanship and valour !
Having just glanced at the earlier events of the war and duly
noted the first great battle, off Lowestoffe, on the 3rd of
June, 1665, when the Duke of York was commander-in-chief,
the poem skips the rest of that year, leaving the Plague un-
derstood, to arrive at the true year of wonders, 1666. The
alliance of France and Denmark with the Dutch having been
DRYDEN : HIS ANNUS MIBABILI8. S77
mentioned, we see the English fleets at sea again under Prince
Rupert and Albemarle. Then for about eighty stanzas we are
in the roar of the cannon of Albemarle's great four days'
battle of June 1-4, 1666, off the North-Foreland, ending
with Rupert's arrival to help him and the retreat of the
Dutch. For about fifty stanzas more there is a lull in the
warfare, admitting of his Majesty's visit to the battered fleet
and a " digression concerning shipping and navigation ;" after
which we have the next great battle of the 25th and 26th of
July, with the subsequent pursuit of the Dutch to their har-
bours by Rear- Admiral Holmes, and his destruction of their
merchant-men off Illy and firing of the chief town of Schelling
on the 8th and 9th of August. This being the last notorious
incident of the war while Dryden wrote, the poem makes
a transition to the Great Fire of London, which followed
within a month of Holmes's firing of Schelling. The last
hundred stanzas, perhaps the most interesting in the poem,
are given to this subject, and the incidents of the great
disaster, from the outbreak of the fire on the 3nd of September
to its arrest on the 6th, are related succinctly and poetically
as Dryden had heard of them. — Altogether the poem may
be described as Dryden's retrospective almanac-epic for the
year 1666. Very suitable for sale among the Londoners in
those months of 1667 when his Maiden Queen, his Indian
'Emperor, and his Si/r Martin Mar-all, were running with
such applause at the two theatres, it must have added greatly
to his reputation and the opinion of his versatility. Its per-
vading characteristic, indeed, and what we note in it now
with least liking, is its abject sycophancy to Charles. Not
only is there the inevitable vein of anti-Puritanism, showing
itself in references to the late " usurpers " and their acts of
church-profanation; but there is a studied genufiexion at
every point before the image of Charles himself as the god of
England, her all-wise and all-good genius, her mediator with
the Almighty. This, however, was the first law of all Restora-
tion literature touching on public affairs; and in Dryden's
poem there were merits apart and unusual. It celebrated
recent events and important living personages in stirring and
378 LIFE OF MILTOX AOT) HISTOBT OF HIS TIME.
poetical phraseology, and it furnished passages fit for qaotation
whenever people spoke of the Dutch war or the late terrihle
fire. This anticipation of the rebuilding of London must
have been very popular: —
" Methinks already from this chymic flame
I see a city of more precious mould.
Rich as the town which gives the Indies name,
With silver paved and-^ divine with gold.
Already, labouring with a mighty fate,
She shakes the rubbish from her mounting brow.
And seems to have renewed her chaiier's date,
"Which Heaven will to the death of Time allow.
Alore great than human now and more august,
New deified she from her fires does rise :
Her widening streets on new foundations trust,
And opening into larger parts she flies."
Another excursion of Dryden beyond his province of prac-
tical dramatist had been in a critical prose essay entitled Essay
on Jhamatic Poesy. He had already, in the dedication of his
Bival Ladies to Lord Orrery in 1664, made a short venture
into this field of literary criticism ; but the Essay was of larger
dimensions and much more elaborate. Like the Annus Mira-
bilis, it had been written by Dryden during his leisure in
Wiltshire ; and, though brought to town with him early in
1667, it was not registered for publication by Herringman
till August in that year ^. It is in reality a little treatise on
poetry, and especially on dramatic poetry, thrown into the
form of an imaginary conversation by four friends, named
Crites, Eugenius, Lisideius, and Neander, while they are
barging down and up the Thames on a beautiful day. Crites
is supposed to represent Diyden's brother-in-law. Sir Robert
Howard ; Eugenius to represent Lord Buekhurst ; Lisideius
is a kind of anagram for Sir Charles Sedley ; and Neander
stands for Dryden himself. The essay is charmingly written,
and is an excellent specimen of Dryden's prose style. From
it and the dedication of TAe Bival Ladies to Lord Orrery,
1 The date of registratioii in the Stationers' Books is Aug. 7, 1667, L'Estrange
the licencer.
DBTDEN : HIS ESSAY ON POETRY. 379
taken together, we may gather those opinions of Dryden's own
on literary matters which he had formed before 1667, and
which, so far as he was to have farther influence on the
Restoration literature, were to pass as his rules and recom-
mendations.
Dryden thought of the literature of his own tongue and
nation with a fine patriotic enthusiasm. The only literatures
besides of which he seems to have had any direct knowledge
were the Greek and Latin and the French ; and he will not
lower the English flag to any of them. His knowledge of
English literary history, indeed, is very imperfect. It goes
no farther back than the Elizabethan age ; and even there he
makes such a blunder as to say that Shakespeare " was the
" first who, to shun the pains of continual rhyming, invented
" that kind of writing which we call blank verse, but the
" French, more properly, prose mesure" But from Shake-
speare's time to his own he has a pretty accurate general
knowledge of the course and phases of English literature,
with definite opinions on some important points. All in all,
Shakespeare is his hero, his non-such. " He was the man who,
" of all modern and perhaps ancient poets, had the largest
" and most comprehensive soul." Dryden can hardly quit
this topic. He finds fault with this or that in Shakespeare,
but always returns fondly to the contemplation of his unpar-
alleled greatness. " Shakespeare," he says, " was the Homer
" or father of our dramatic poets ; Jonson was the Virgil,
" the pattern of elaborate writing : I admire him, but I love
" Shakespeare.^' Sufficiently orthodox on this point, Dryden
intimates that, next to Shakespeare, for natural genius, though
longo intervallo, he would place Beaumont and Fletcher, or
rather Fletcher as the real chief of that firm. But he has a
large reserve of afiection for Ben Jonson, and indeed makes
Ben his main text through a considerable part of the essay.
" I think him," says Dryden, " the most learned and judicious
" writer which any theatre ever had." Still fiirther, " As he
" has given us the most correct plays, so in the precepts which
" he has laid down in his Discoveries we have as many and
" profitable rules for perfecting the stage as any wherewith
380 lilFB OF MILTOy AND HISTORY OF HIS TIME.
" the Frencli can furnish lis." By way of detailed illustra-
tion, there is an analysis or " examen" of Jensen's comedy of
The Silent Woman, with reference especially to the ancient
dramatic laws of the three unities. An exposition of these
laws, with discussion for and against them, though g^enerally
in their favour, nms through the essay ; but we are more
interested in Dfyden's continued sketch of English literary
history. Just after Jensen's death, " as if, in an age of so
" much horror, wit and those milder studies of humanity had
" no farther business among us, the Muses, who ever follow
" peace, went to plant in another country. It was then that
" the great Cardinal of Richelieu began to take them into his
" protection, and that, by his encouragement, Corneille and
" seme other Frenchmen reformed their theatre, which before
" was as much below ours as it new surpasses it and the rest
" of Europe." This is spoken by Lisideius, and the drift of
a good deal of the dialogue is to disprove the last words,
and assert that, whatever merits were to be allowed to Cor-
neille, ^leliere, and other living French dramatists, the
English were still the leading literary nation. Of English
writing during the InteVregnum, indeed, little is said. Thither
is mentioned contemptuously, and Cleveland almost con-
temptuously; and such writers as had distinguished them-
selves in Dryden's estimation in the interval between Ben
Jonson's death and the Biesteration are gathered rapidly into
a group for happy adoption into the B«storation at last.
Suckling, whom Dryden praises much, was unfortunately
dead ; but others, as English, and of various excellence, had
survived. In all Greek or Latin non-dramatic poetry
" nothing so even, sweet, and flowing, as Mr. Waller, nothing
"so majestic, so correct, as Sir John Denham, nothing so
"elevated, so copious and full of spirit, as Mr. Cowley."
Then of the revived English Drama of the Ilestoration might
net any nation be proud ? True, the stage had been living
to a great extent, these last seven years, on reproductions of
the great old plays, especially these of Shakespeare, Beaumont
and Fletcher, and Ben Jonson ; in connexion with which re-
mark Dryden gives us the interesting piece of information that
DRYDEN : HIS EBSAT OJf POETET. 381
Beaumont and Fletcher's plays had been most in demand,
" two of theirs being acted through the year for one of
" Shakespeare's or Jonson's." But it was not necessary to
call in the aid of those dead heroes to vindicate the sui)eri-
ority of the English dramatic genius even yet over the much
vaunted French, with their Comeille and their MoliSre.
" Be it spoken to the honour of the English, our nation
" can never want in any age such who are able to dispute
" the empire of wit with any people in the universe ;" and so
" ^ e have seen since his Majesty's return many dramatic
" poems which yield not to those of any foreign nation, and
" which deserve all laurels but the English." This conclusion,
that the English dramatic poetiy of the B«storation, and
indeed the English poetry of the Restoration generally, though
inferior to the best of the Old English, was superior to all
else, ancient or foreign, is emphatically repeated thus: —
" I think it may be permitted me to say that, as it is no
" lessening to us to yield to some plays, and those not many,
" of our own nation in the last age, so it can be no addition
" to pronounce of our present poets that they have far sur-
" passed all the ancients and the modem writers of other
" countries." Of course, there were faults, and there might
be improvements. Let English dramatic writers be true to
their Engbsh instincte and to the genuine English traditions,
taking their lessons rather from their own Shakespeares and
Fletchers and Ben Jonsons in the past, with all their bold
irregularities, their mixture of the comic with the tragic, than
from the contemporary French stage, with its thin and highly
regulated artificiality; and no doubt but improvements would
easily be worked out. There might be advantage, for example,
in a more steady recollection for the fixture of Ben Jonson's
example in the matter of art and correctness of plot. Only
in one particular, but a very important one, would Diyden
recommend an improvement involving a positive departure
from the old English practice in the drama and an assimilation
to Comeille and the French. This was in the matter of the
verse employed. Instead of keeping uniformly to blank verse,
Dryden would advocate in future the use of rhyme for all
382 LIFE OF MILTON AND HISTOET OF HIB TIME.
high dramatic dialogue. Comedy still might most properly
be in prose or in blank verse ; but for tragedy, heroic plays
generally, and the higher and more serious parts of all plays,
rhyme would be the nobler instrument. So much of pleading
to this effect is there in the Essay that it is often remembered
as if it were nothing else than Dryden's defence of the heroic
or rhymed tragedy. That is not the case; the recom-
mendation of rhyme is but an incident in the Essay. It is,
however, a very vital incident. Dryden was especially anxious
to vindicate and extend the practice of that tragedy of heroic
declamation of which Lord Orrery, Sir Robert Howard, and
himself, had given examples, and which he knew had the
King's approval. In fighting for it, and for the entire sub-
stitution in future of rhyme for blank verse in English
tragedies, should that be possible, he believed that he was
doing a service to the national literature.
His argument takes this form : — The charms of rhyme
in itself are admitted ; and such objections as that it is un-
natural, that the. ancients had it not, and the like, might be
refuted afresh, if necessary. Dryden attempts the refutation,
in reasonings of considerable ingenuity, showing how much
minute attention he had given to the subject. In the main,
however, he assumes that rhyme has already, by universal
consent, made itself good in modern times as the kind of verse
suitable and necessary in all non-dramatic poetry. "Blank
verse," he says, " is acknowledged to be too low for a poem,
nay more, for a paper of verses." So much is this the case
that it is only by concession that he calls blank verse by the
name of verse at all ; and in most parts of his essay the word
verse, if not otherwise qualified, stands simply for rhyme.
Now, why should rhyme, in undisputed possession everywhere
else for really poetic purposes, be excluded from the serious or
high drama? He discusses the alleged unfitness of rhyme
for discourse, repartee, &c. ; but, while thus answering
theoretical objections, he adverts also to the historical objec-
tion that the great Elizabethans had rejected rhyme. They
had not done so altogether, for they had rhymed occasionally
in their dramas ; but, so far as they had rejected rhyme, might
DRYDEN : HIS ESSAY ON FOETBY. 383
there not be a sufficient reason ? The art of rhyme was pre-
cisely that part of the general poetic art which those old giants
had not mastered. But it had been mastered by English genius
since. " The excellence and dignity of it were never fully
" known till Mr. Waller taught it; he first made writing easily
" an art ; first showed us to conclude the sense most commonly
" in distichs, which in the verse of those before him runs on
" for so many lines together that the reader is out of breath
" to overtake it. This sweetness of Mr. Waller's lyric poesy
" was afterwards followed in the epic by Sir John Denham in
" his Cooler's Hill, a poem which, your lordship knows, for the
" majesty of the style, is, and ever will be, the exact standard
" of good writing. But, if we owe the invention of it to Mr.
" Waller, we are acknowledging for the noblest use of it to
" Sir William Davenant, who at once brought it upon the
" stage and made it perfect in TAe Siege of Rhodes." What
Davenant had done let others continue to do. Only by this
use of rhyme in high drama, generally in the form of the
rhyming heroic or decasyllabic couplet, but with liberty occa-
sionally of rhyming Pindarics or other variations, as in
Davenant's last-named play, was there hope that the Restora-
tion drama might rival the old Elizabethan. To beat the old
dramatists in matter was impossible. " Not only we shall
"never equal them, but they could never equal themselves,
" were they to rise and write again. We acknowledge them
" our fathers in wit, but they have ruined their estates them-
" selves before they came to their children's hands. There is
" scarce an humour, a character, or any kind of plot, which
" they have not used. All comes sullied or wasted to us."
In these circumstances the remedy was in the adoption of some
new way, some new mechanism, that might lead to difierences
of invention. That new way was rhyme. But the rhymed
drama was unpopular ; the multitude would not have it, were
crying out against it ! Who cared for the multitude ? " It is
" no matter what they think ; they are sometimes in the right,
" sometimes in the wrong ; their judgment is a mere lottery'."
Let the appeal be to Court tastes, or to the people considered
as a due mixture of courtiers with those they could influence ;
384 LIFE OF MILTON AND HISTOEY OF HIS TIME.
and what then ? " If you mean the mixed audience of the
" populace and the noblesse," says Dryden, " I can confidently
" affirm that a great part of the latter sort are favourable to
" verse [i. e. to rhyme], and that no serious plays written since
" the King's return have been more kindly received by them
" than The Siege of Rhodes, the Mustapha, the Indian Queen
" and Indian Umperor."
Dryden's admirable Essay is instructive in many ways. In
the first place, we see in it, with all its fine enthusiasm for the
greater old English poetry, so far as Dryden was acquainted
with it, that special form of delusion in which the literary
mind of the Restoration age had begun to find happiness, and
which it managed to transmit through the next century as an
incontrovertible article of historical belief. Mr. Waller, for-
sooth, had been the first to teach the art of English verse ;
Denham's strength had been added to Waller's sweetness j
and the age of Charles the Second was thus fortunately in
possession of at least one power which it knew how to use and
which had been wanting to the English genius before ! The
art of English verse ! Not to go beyond Dryden's own
horizon in the retrospect of English poetry, had he never read
Spenser, or Shakespeare's minor poems, or the poems and
lyrics of Shakespeare's contemporaries, whether in the drama
or out of it ? Doubtless he had to some extent, and we can
see what he meant; but we can only wonder the more.
Actually it had come to pass that the English ear, within
Dryden's circle, could no longer relish the more exquisite
melody, the richer and more involved harmony, of the older
poetry, but preferred the regularised rhetorical efiFect of that
mechanical kind of metre in which every line is like a plank
poised on a definite fulcrum of swing, and the sense " is con-
cluded most commonly in distichs." Not even in this kind
of verse had Waller and Denham been the first, or the best,
by any means ; but, if Dryden and their other juniors chose
to acknowledge the debt to them, it need be no business
of ours. That kind of verse, therefore, may be conceded
to the Restoration as a congenial literary inheritance, the
value of which, and its farther capacities, might be tested
DEYDEN : HIS ESSAT ON POETBT. 385
by new bands. No one was to do tbis more ably tban
Dryden himself.
A more general delusion pervading Dryden's essay is that
of the supposed flight of the muses from England at the be-
ginning of the Civil Troubles and their return at the Restora-
tion. This delusion has been already exposed by statistics
and otherwise. A total of 2316 registered transactions in
the London book-trade in the seven years immediately pre-
ceding the Restoration, as against a total of 633 in the seven
years immediately following the Restoration, does not look
like an abeyance of the muses in the former period and their
rapid return in the latter ; and, if the statistics were taken
from as far back as 1640, there would be no difference. Let
it be supposed, however, that Dryden meant only the finer
muses. That might help him a little, but not much. During
the twenty years preceding the Restoration the most conspic-
uous and active of the muses in England had certainly been the
Muse of newspaper-editorship and political pamphleteering,
if there be such a lady in the mythological company ; and
the fall in the statistics of the book-trade after the Restoration
is certainly to be accounted for to a great extent by the
banishment of this particular muse when Charles came in, —
i. e., more prosaically, by the suppression after the Restoration
of all pamphlet- writing not in harmony with the re-established
system in Church and State. That would not have disturbed
Dryden's view of things. This particular muse that had
reigned for twenty years was no muse in his eyes, but a
wretched hag and impostor, whose usurpation had kept out
the true muses. Well, but what of Mose ladies ? We have seen
the :&cts for ourselves. However much the finer muses had
been fluttered by the Civil Troubles, they had never actually
taken flight. That they had was part of Dryden's delusion,
as he might have found easily on inquiry. We should not
have expected him, indeed, in his Essay on Poetry, to have
thought of the muses of philosophy, miscellaneous speculation,
history, and oratory ; and hence we need not be surprised that
what had been done in very various prose between 1640 and
1660 did not occur to him. But how, in thinking more
VOL. VI. c c
386 LIFE OF MILTOK AND HISTOBY OF HIS TIME.
psppeiailly of the poetical muses, had he come to ignore
Herrick, Milton, Jasper Mayne, Fanshawe, Cha,mherlayne,
Vaughan, and others, all oJf \yhom. had done and published a
good deal of whajc he -would himself have called v^ry good,
verse? Partly, no doubt, it was because he felt himself
entitled to claini some of the verse-writers yf^om he h^d
not najmed, as well as spnae of the prose-writers he had no
occasion to name, as Royalists, whose misfortune it had been,
and not their will, to write a,nd publish in the conditipns
of the Civil Troubles. That, however, is not the question.
The question is not whether or to what extent the muses
had been in the Opposition during the time of the Puritan
ascendancy, but whether they or any of them had actually fled ?
Our enum^ra|ioij. of names, with the recollection which they
will suggest of impoi'taflt books published, in London between
1040 and 1660, is a sufficient answer in the, negative, '^'here
had been a preponderance of polemicaj, writing, biit other
kinds, h^d by no means ceased, or even languished a,pp,ieciahly
and continuously. The fact is that Dryden's knowledge was
deficient. When, he wrote his essay, he had probably never
read Herrick's poems, or Milton's collected minor poems in
the, volume of 1645, or Henry Vaughan's, or others of tji^
flpest through the period of supposed dearth. For, when h^
comes to the supposed return of th§ muses at the Restoration,
W,hom does he name as tjieir living and reappearing represent-
taftives? Still Waller, Denham, Cowley, a^d Dsiivenant, all
of whom were in effect pre-,E,e^to)?a<jiQn writers, Strange thaij,
in looking about for representatives of reviving English non--
dramatic poetry in the halcyon days between 1660 and 166f,
Dryden should have been driven tp name four elderly gentji©'-
men whosg fame had come down, or hftd been acquire4, t]irpugk
the preceding time of the Civil Wars, the Commonwea].tl)5 and
the Protectorate, and three of whom had been glad to shelter
themselves and their- industry, with what fame they had, under
the Protectpral government. In short, Dryden's, delusion,
adopted by pur literary historians ever since, was eauB^d by
the fa^pt that oiie very substantial, but also very gaudy, for^n
of liters^ture, wl^ich had l?een in abeyance for nearly t\i?e;nty
BOOKS FROM 1660 TO 1667. 387
years, did undeniably come back into London witb Charles.
All our traditional talk about a return of the muses, &c., at
the Restoration resolves itself into the fact that the Dramatic
Muse had returned. The theatres were then re-opened, and
there" was thus again a great business of Acted Drama to
attract, employ, and educate free and uncovenanted English
talent. The wonder is that in the seven years between 1660
and 1667 there should have been no new dramatists superior
to Davenant, Lord Orrery, Sir Robert Howard, and Lacy, to
contest the success with Dryden. Wilson, with all his real
faculty, more compact and deep in some respects than Dryden's,
had not been among the successful dramatists.
That there was no special fertility of literary production, out
of the Drama, in the first seven years of the reign of Charles
the Second will appear more distinctly if we inquire wha;t
non-dramatic writings remembered now as of any mark did
appear among the. 633 publications, or thereabouts, registered
as the total produce of those seven years, so far as it came
within the cognisance of the regular book-trade. Neglecting
mere books of information, and also the dramatic entries in
the registers, 1 niake out the following as an authentic list
of those non-dramatic productions of the seven years that
might be thought worth recollection now on their own
account in a general history of English literature : — the third
and concluding volume of Stanley's Sistm-y of Philosophy,
ready before the Restoration, though not registered till June
1660 ; Heylin's anti-Puritanical History of the BefornmUon
of the Church of lEiigland, registered in July 1660 and pub-
lished in 1661; Hatman's burlesque of the Rump called
Bon Juan Lamberto, registered in December 16fiO; Cowley's
Discourse hy way of Vision concerning the Government of Oliver
Cromwell, with other .^rose Essays of his, published in 1661 ;
Waller's poem, of about 150 lines, entitled On St. James's Park,
as lately improved hy his Majesty, registered for publication by
itself in April 1661 ; Boyle's Physiological Essays and his Con-
siderations touching the Style of the Soly Scriptures, registered
in April and May 1661 ; Hudiiras, the first part registered in
November 1662 and the second in November 1663 ; another
c c a
388 LIFE OF MILTON AND HISTORY OF HIS TIME.
volume of Cowley's, entitled Verses written upon several occasions,
registered in August 1663 ; Poems hy Mrs. Katherine Philips,
registered in November 1663 ; Scarronides; or Virgile Travestie:
a Mock Poem, being the First Bool of YirgiVs Eneis in English
Burlesque, by Charles Cotton, Esq., registered in March
1663-4 ; enlarged edition of Jeremy Taylor's Dissuasive Jrom
Popery, 1664 j Dr. Henry More's Modest Inquiry into the
Mystery of Iniquity, 1664 ; new edition of Baker's Chronicle,
with Continuation to the Coronation of Charles II. by Edward
Phillips, registered in February 1664-5 ; Dryden's An7izis
Miraiilis, registered Jan. 31, 1666-7; Dryden's Essay mi
Dramatic Poesy, registered Aug. 7, 1667 ; and Milton's
Paradise Lost, registered Aug. 20, 1667. This enumeration,
it will be seen, proceeds on a pretty liberal notion of what
might be memorable. Throw out what it may seem unneces-
sary to have included, and we are reduced to Butler's Hudibras,
Cowley's Prose Essays and a few new Poems of his, Dryden's
Annus Mirahilis and his Essay on Dramatic Poesy, and Milton's
Paradise Lost. This last was certainly a vast accession. But
it came unexpectedly, and from an alien quarter.
One ought never to be too sure in the assertion of a negative.
While, therefore, it may be considered proved that the notion
of any extraordinary new fertility in English literature after
the Restoration is a delusion, let it be supposed that there
may have been good things between 1660 and 1667 which
have escaped us in the Registers or are not there chronicled.
Let it be remembered also that a great deal of what was
really done in those seven years may not have made its ap-
pearance till afterwards. Old Hobbes was still speculating
and scribbling; Jeremy Taylor was still thoughtful and
eloquent in his Irish bishopric ; Henry More, Cudworth, and
others were still philosophically inquisitive and studious;
Baxter, Owen, and others were still pugnacious and indus-
trious; Henry Vaughan and other recluse spirits were still
poetically meditative ; Pepys was collecting gossip ; Anthony
Wood and other antiquaries were engfaged in researches ;
Barrow, and Tillotson, and South, and Stillingfleet, and other
younger divines and scholars, were preaching, arguing, and
LTEICS AND FUGITIVE VERSES. 389
making their way. All this, whether registered in the book
form or not during the seven years, ought to count as so
much activity of the muses through that period. Besides,
was there not a quantity of clever versifying by wits about
the Court, fugitive in its nature, but well calculated to keep
up the idea that the muses inhabited the bowers of Lady
Castlemaine ? Sir Charles Sedley and Lord Buckhurst ought
not to go unmentioned, the one the Lisideius of Dryden's
essay, the other the Eugenius of that essay, and also, for
a month in 1667, the predecessor of King Charles in the pos-
session of Nell Gwynn. They were both to live long and to
distinguish themselves in various ways as they grew older,
Buckhurst to be very honourable under his later title of the
Earl of Dorset and Middlesex. For the present, however,
they were simply the two most abandoned young scamps
about town, known not only for such " frolics " as fights with
the night-watchmen,, but also as comrades in the most out-
rageous and indescribable act of drunken indecency recorded
in the police annals of London. They had been fined .5^500
each for this ofience, but do not seem to have suffered a whit
in general estimation. After the laugh had passed, they went
about everywhere as gaily as ever, the witty Sedley and the
witty Buckhurst, the naughtiest and most delightful gen-
tlemen in Court society, the valued friends of Dryden, and
the observed of Pepys when he sat near either of them in the
theatre. And, what is strange, one can find something to
like in the reprobates yet. Sedley, besides six plays, not
written till after our present date, has left us a number of
short poems and songs, most of them worthless or unfit for
reading, but one or two not unpleasant. Let us vote this
dainty little thing to have been written by him in Davenant's
laureateship : —
" Hears not my Phyllis how the birds
Their feathered mates salute?
They tell their passion in their words :
Must I alone be nmte i"
PhyUifi, without frown or smile.
Sat and knotted all the whUe.
390 LIFE OP MILTON AND HISTORY OF HIS TIME.
" The god of love in thy bright eyes
Does like a tyrant reign ;
But in thy heart a child he lies,
Without his dart or flame."
Phyllis, without frown or smile,
Sat and knotted all the while.
" So many months in silence passed.
And yet in raging love,
Might well deserve one word at last
My passion should approve."
Phyllis, without frown or smile,
Sat and knotted all the while.
" Must then your faithful swain expire.
And not one look obtain,
"Which he, to soothe his fond desire.
Might pleasingly explain?"
Phyllis, without frowm or smile.
Sat and knotted all the while.
Though Lord Buckhurst has left us far less than Sedley,
who does not know his famous song, said to have been written
at sea in one of the ships of the Duke of York's fleet the night
before the great battle of June 3, 1665 ? Whether punctually
that night or not matters little. No Restoration lyric ex-
presses more finely the best spirit of the Restoration gallantry,
and, thinking of Lady Castlemaine and of the rest at White-
hall, and of the young fellow addressing them from between-
decks far off, one could read it even with tears : —
To all you ladies now on land
We men at sea indite ;
But first would have you understand
How hard it is to write.
The Muses now and Neptune too
We must implore to write to you.
With a fa la la la' la.
For, though the Muses should prove kind,
And fill our empty brain,
Yetj if rough Neptune rouse the wind
'To Wave the azure main.
Our paper, pen, and ink, and we
Roll up and down our ships at sea.
With a fa la la la la.
SCIENCE AND THE EOTAL SOCIllTt. 39l
Then, if we write not by each post,
Think not We are Unkind;
Nor yet conclude your ships are lost
By Dutchmen or by wind :
Our tears we '11 seUd a speedier way ;
The tide shall bring them twice a-day,
With a fa la la la la.
The King, with wonder and surprise.
Will swear the seas grow bold.
Because the tides will higher rise
Than e'er they used of old ;
But let him know it is our tears
Briug floods of grief to Whitehall Stairs,
With a fa la la la la.
To pass our tedious- hours away,
We throw a merry main,
Or else at serious ombre play :
But why should we in vain
Each other's rain thus pursue i
We were undone when we left you,
With a fa la la la la.
But now our fears tempestuous grow,
And cast our hopes away ;
Whilst you, regardless of our wde,
■ Sit careless at a play :
Perhaps permit some happier man
To kiss your hand or flirt your fan,
With a fa la la la la '.
" Science, as well as Poetry," says Scott in his Life of Dryden,
" began to revive after the iron dominion of military fanaticism
"was ended." The remark is made to introduce the Royal
Society as one of the institutions of the Restoration.
Here, too, sycophancy to the Restoration has obscm-ed the
facts. The real beginnings of the association which afterwards
took shape and name as the Royal Society date, as we know,
from 1645, the very crisis of tjie Civil War, when the German
Theodore Haak, and Dr. John Wallis, then clerk of the West-
minster Assembly, and Dr. John Wilkins, then a Presbyterian
minister, and Dr^ Jonathan Goddard, then a physician of parlia-
mentarian eminence, and a number of other Londoners, aU
I For rinokhiirst and Sedley from 1663, Oct. 4, 1664, Feb. 18, 1666-7, July
leeOtoieeTseeWood's Ath. IV. 731— 13 and 14,. 1667 ; Johnson's Life of
733 ■ I*e{>ys, Feb. 2^, l66l-2, Jtdy 1, Dorset (Bucklliirst).
392 LIFE OF MILTON AND HISTORY OF HIS TIME.
apparently on the same side of politics, held weekly meetings,
sometimes in Goddard's lodgings in Wood Street, sometimes at
the Bull Head Tavern in Cheapside, and sometimes in Gresham
College, for talk on subjects of mathematical and physical
science. The fame of the meetings having spread, and Hartlib,
and young Boyle, and Petty, and others, having attached them-
selves to the society as regular members or as correspondents,
there were the most enthusiastic expectations of the effects to
be produced by this Invisible College, as it was called, not only
in advancing m^hematical and experimental science, but also
in reformittg tEe universities and the notions and methods of
education. About the year 1649 some of the chief brethren
having been removed to high' university posts in Oxford, the
college had divided itself, as we saw, into two sections. There
was the Oxford section, calling itself The Philosophical Society
of Oxford, and consisting of Wilkins, Wallis, Petty, and Boyle,
with such new recruits as Ward, Bathurst, and Willis, and in
time young Christopher Wren and young Robert Hooke, meet-
ing regularly in Petty's rooms, or Wilkins's, or Boyle's ; and
there was still the remnant of the parent club in London,
meeting generally at Gresham College, and receiving from
time to time such recruits as Viscount Brouncker, Sir Paul
Neile, arid Mr. John Evelyn. The two sections were in corres-
pondence, and a member of either was welcome if he appeared
at a meeting of the other. It would be difficult to estimate
the amount of observation in matters of natural history, and
physical and chemical experimentation, and invention of instru-
ments, and anatomical and physiological research, and general
scientific speculation, much of it whimsical, but all in a hopeful
direction, that had gone on among the associated savants of
The Invisible College both in Oxford and London before there
was an idea that the Stuarts would ever return. It would,
indeed, be no paradox to assert that a passion for what was
called the New or Verulamian Philosophy, a disposition to
the physical sciences and to all forms of what is sometimes
designated distinctively as "Useful Knowledge," together with
a desire to recast or radically reform the schools and univer-
sities, so as to make them seminaries and nurseries of such
SCIENCE AND THE KOYAL SOCIETY. 893
knowledge rather than of mere classical learning and scholastic
metaphysics, was one of the most pronounced characteristics
of that wave of the English mind which is vaguely named
the Puritan Revolution. It cannot be too often repeated that
those who use the word "Puritanism" merely to define
a supposed temporary mood of English sanctimoniousness,
or even to define the domination of Calvinistic theology
for a time in the British Islands, know nothing whatever of
what Puritanism was historically and included intellectually.
Puritanism was a revolt from authority, clothing itself at
first in whatever doctrines of a fervid theology or ideas of
popular church-discipline were at hand to suit, but passing
on, by the usual law of development, into a wonderful multi-
plicity of forms and phases, with abundant inclusion of the
most abstruse scientific inquisitiveness and the coolest philo-
sophical free-thinking.
The intellectual leisure of the Restoration, however, just
because it was compulsory, just because it was occasioned by
the arrest and prohibition of many rousing forms of specula-
tion, was undoubtedly favourable to a concentration of energy
upon the physical and experimental sciences. At all events,
the foundation of the Royal Society of London is one of the
few creditable occurrenes of the reign of Charles II. It came
about thus: — ^Wren having been in London since 1657 as
astronomy professor at Gresham College, and Wilkins, Wallis,
Goddard, and others having been brought back to London
at the Restoration, by the loss of their university appoint-
ments, or by other causes, the division of the scientific brethren
into an Oxford section and a London section was virtually
at an end, and the parent society of London again included
the majority^. Their place of rendezvous, of course, was
Gresham College, where Wren's astronomy lectures and Mr.
Rooke's geometry lectures, which had been interrupted by the
anarchy of 1658-9, had been resumed with great acceptance.
Wren's lectures were the attraction on Wednesdays ; and it
was after one of them, on Wednesday, Nov. 28, 1660, that
1 Weld's History of the Royal Society (1848), I. 30—54 ; but see ante, Vol. III.
pp. 661-666, and Vol. V. pp. 230—231, p. 486.
i394 LIFE OP MILTON AND HiSTOEY OF HIS TIME.
the prbpoBal fot a new brganization "for the promoting oJF
physico-iiiiathematical experimental leataifig," was proposed
and adopted. These persons following, " according to the usual
custoto of most of them," having been present at the lecture,
and having afterwards, " according to the iisual manner," re-
solved themselves into a meeting for private conversation, —
" ViiSi the Lord Brouncker, Mr. Boyle, Mr. Bruce, §ir Robert
*' Moray, Sir Paul Neile, Dr; Wilkins, Dr. Goddard, Dr.
« Petty, Mr. Ball, Mr. Rboke^ Mr. Wreti, Mr. Hill,"^it was
resolved to &,tternpt the establishment of a seientific society on
a broader basis than had been tried before, to consist of regular
weekly meetings-, every Wednesday thenceforward, of the per-
sons then present, and feuch other persons aB might be deemed
eligible and might be willing to pay ten shillings of entry-
money and one shillihg a week of SubBcription. Thirty-nine
persons not present were suggested as likely and desiriable
fiiefiibers, aad their names were writteti dowhi AinOng them
were Lord Hattoti, Sir Kehelm Digby, Mr. Evelybj Dehhain,
Dr. Ward, Dh Wallis, Dr. Bathurst, Dr. WilHB, Dr. Cowley
and about a dozen other physicianSj Mr. JoneB, and Mr.
Oldenburg. These two last, Boyle's promising youiag nephew
aad his tutor, had just returned from their foreign tour^.
For a time one of the passions of the new Soeiety seems to
have been for the erectioii and endowment of a London. College
of- Science, with profelsbtships, a museum^ laboratories, &c.,
that should supersede and surpass Gresham College, and be a
rebuke and exauiple to the tWo old-fashioned Universities.
This also, as we know, had been the paSsion of some of the
leading Puritans of the Long Parliaitient as long ago as 1641,
when there had beefl comttiuiiicatiohs between Hartlib and
the pansophic Cbmenius bn the subject, and Coinenius had
actually come to Loftdoti to advise and superintend (see ante,
Vbl. III. pp. 221-234). Not, however, in the form of a new-
building with an apparatus bf prtJfesBorehips and scholarships,
but in th6 easier fortn bf a series of weekly fheetitigs, still
chiefly in Gresham College, for the reading and criticism of
1 Weld's History of thd Edyal Soeifet^, I. 54—67 ; -frhere there are extracts from
the Society's Becprds.
SCIEXCE -VXD THE SOTAL SOCEETT. 395
papers and the exhibition of curiosities and experi<nents, was
the Society of 1660 to attain its celebrity. The King having
at once signified his approbation of the Society through Sir
Robert Moray, and the meetings having been continned under
Wilkins's presidency or Moray's, and many papers having been
read and many experiments performed, and the King having
occasionally shown his interest in the proceedings by a gift of
loadstones, or of some of Prince Rupert's drops, or by a question
as to the cause of the shrivelling of the sensitive plant, there
was an increasing competition for the honour of membership
through the year 1661, accompanied by an extraordinary
steadiness of many of the members in not paying their sub-
scriptions. On the 15th of July 1662 a Royal Charter
incorpoiating the Society passed the gieat seal ; but, as this
was somewhat defective, there was a second and enlarged
charter on April 22, 1663. IVom that date The Royal
Society was fully in existence, as an express foundation of
King Charles the Second, with its president, its council, its
various powers and privileges, and its statutory anniversary
of St. Andrew's day, the 30th of November, in every year for
ever. Though some of Charles's personal tastes were in the
direction of anatomy and nautical mechanics, he does not
appear to have done much more for the Society than call
himself its founder and present it with the silver-gilt mace
which it still possesses and uses. There is no proof that he
ever attended one of the meetings. There was a vague talk
about a large endowment in the shape of Irish lands, but it
came to nothing. The accommodation at Gresham Coll^;e,
with an occasional option of another place of meeting, had to
Suffice ; and for current expenses, including those for apparatus
and experiments, the members had to tax themselves in dona-
tions or increased rates of subscription. There was still a
remarkable backwardness among many of them in the matter
of payment \
I Weld'sHistoiyoftheBoyalSocietT, of his taste for anatomy there is
I. 63—141, with extracts from the this story in Pepys :— Jeft. 7, 1662-3.
Secotds there, and the two charters in " Creed and I and Captain Ferrers to
the Appendix to VoL n. — King Charles "the Park, and there walked finely,
had a taste fior ship-hnildiog and Mn- " seeing people slide, we talking ^ the
died parts of practical mechanics ; and " while ; and Captain Ferrers tellii^
396 LIFE OP MILTON AND HISTOBY OF HIS TIME.
The first President of the Society under the charter was
Viscount Brouncker. He remained in office till 1677. The
first Council consisted of these twenty of the fellows in addition
to the President :— Sir Eohert Moray, Robert Boyle, "William
Brereton, Sir Kenelm Digby, Sir Gilbert Talbot, Sir Paul
Neile, Henry Slingsby, Sir William Petty, Dr. Timothy
Clarke, Dr. John Wilkins, Dr. George Ent, William Erskine,
Dr. Jonathan Goddard, William Ball, Matthew Wren, John
Evelyn, Thomas Henshaw, Dudley Palmer, Abraham Hill,
and Henry Oldenburg. The total number of Fellows on the
20th of November 1663 was 131, of whom 18 were noblemen,
33 baronets or knights, 33 doctors (chiefly of medicine), 3
bachelors of divinity, 3 masters of arts, 47 esquires, and 8
foreigners. Among the fellows were Cowley, Denham, Pepys,
Aubrey, Sprat, and Dryden. The election of the last had
taken place in November 1663, before he had produced his
first play and while he was comparatively undistinguished.
The most diligent and indefatigable of the aristocratic members
were Lord Brouncker, who was exemplary in his presidency,
and of some reputation on his own account for mathematical
ability, and Sir Robert Moray, who had been president before
the incorporation and continued to support the Society in all
ways by his influence at Court. Of the rest no one was more
prominent than Boyle, or more visibly led and directed the
proceedings at first by his papers and experiments. Boyle,
however, was not yet permanently resident in London,
but was still much in Oxford, and therefore often in con-
nection with the Society only by correspondence. Wallis
and Christopher Wren were also much at Oxford, where
Wren had been appointed to the Savilian professorship of
astronomy. Sir William Petty, a leading spirit when
present, was called away for a long while by his business
" me, among other Court passages, how "chance should he." Feb. 17. "Mr.
"about a month ago, at a ball at Court, "Pickering tells me the story is very
"a child was dropped by one of the "true of a child being dropped at the
"ladies in dancmg, hut nobody knew "ball at Court ; and that the King had
"who, it being taken up by somebody "it in his closet a week after, and did
« in their handkeroher. The next mom- " dissect it, and, making great sport of
"ing all the Ladies of Honour appeared "it, said that in his opinion it must
" early at Court for their vindication, so " have been a month and three hours
" that nobody could tell where this mis- " old."
SCIENCE AND THE EOYAL SOCIETY, 397
in Ireland. On the whole, the Society could hardly hare held
together as it did through all its difficulties but for the exer-
tions of Oldenburg and Hooke. Oldenburg, whom we have
seen proposed as one of the original members in November
1660, doubtless on Boyle's recommendation, had thrown such
energy into the affairs of the Society that he had been
appointed joint-secretary with Wilkins in the first Charter
of Incorporation ; and on the 12th of November 1663 Hooke,
who had been for some years in Boyle's employment at Oxford,
had been appointed curator to the Society, with a special
charge of the apparatus and the experiments. Hooke, a
deformed little man, of twenty-seven years of age at the time
of his appointment, was to do wonders in his post by his
mechanical inventiveness; but the man of general business
was Oldenburg. He was thirty-six years of age when ap-
pointed J and, though nominally joint-secretary with Wilkins,
he had the whole burden of the secretaryship. We have his
own account of the duties of the secretary, as follows : — " He
" attends constantly the meetings both of the Society and
" Council ; noteth the observables said and done there ; di-
" gesteth them in private ; takes care to have them entered in
" the journals and register-books ; reads over and corrects all
" entries ; solicits the performances of tasks recommended and
" undertaken ; writes all letters abroad and answers the returns
" made to them, entertaining a correspondence with at least
" fifty persons ; employs a great deal of time and takes much
" pains in satisfying foreign demands about philosophical
" matters j disperseth far and near store of directions and
" inquiries for the Society's purposes, and sees them well
" recommended." To these duties was added, for a time, that
of editing the transactions of the Society. The first number
of these celebrated FIdlosopMcal Transactions, so edited by
Oldenburg, appeared on the 6th of March 1664-5. For all
this Oldenburg received not a farthing. Not till 1669 did
they vote him a salary of .^40 a year ^.
Interrupted, like everything else, by the Great Plague and
'■ First and Second Charters of the History of the Society, with the History
Eoyal Society in Appendix to Weld's itself, 1. 141—178, and 259—261.
398 LIFE OF MILTON AND HISTORY OF HIS TIME.
the Great Fire of 1665-6, the Society had accomplished before
the year 1667 a good deal of work, much of it crude, but all
very interesting now in the history of English science. From
the very nature of its labours and speculations it had become
the object of much popular lampoon and burlesque. This ill
feeling, inevitable in the infancy of such institutions, already
existed in considerable accumulation in 1667, but was to
manifest itself more openly after the publication in that year
of Sprat's History of the Institution, Design, and Progress of the
Mo^al Society. There was some boldness in such a publication
only five years after the Society had been incorporated; and a
prefixed ode by Cowley in honour of the Society, rebuking the
attacks already made on it, did not dimiiiish the provocation
to farther antagonism^.
It would be ungracious to close our account of the Litera.ture
of the first seven years of the Restoration without some notice
of the London booksellers and publishers of those days.
At one time or another between 1640 and 1660 there had
been, as I compute, about 300 persons in London known not
only as booksellers, or printers., or as combining both trades,
but also as regular or occasional publishers. About fifty of
these at least were alive and still in business at the Restora,-
tion, with such repute in the book-tradje as. they had acquired
by their previous dealings. The most conspicuously Royalist
among them had been Richard Royston, the publisher of the
M/con Basilike and, of other things for the royal family, and
the publisher also of most qf Jeremy Taylor's writings ; ne:st
to whom for fidelity to that side of things was perhaps Henry
Seile, the publisher of some of Heylin's writings, and of
several of the strougeet Royalist pamphlets heralding the
Restoration, Matthew Simmons, the first publisher for the
Commonwealth, and consequently the publisher of Milton's
Te:tiure of Kings, and Magistrates and, Eikonoklastes, had been
dead for some time, having left the honour and the emoluments
of ofiicial printing and publishing for the Republic and then
T \y^l^'^ History of tlie Eoyal Society, tered for publication by James AUestree,
I,V.'2— 200; Cowley sWorlts. Sprat's under licence from Secretary Morrioe,
History of the Royal Sociei!/ was regisr July 25, 1667.
booksell5:es and publishees feqm 1640 to 1660. 399
for Oliver to Thomas Newcome and William Dugard, both of
them converljs to the Bepublic early in Milton's secretaryship.
Dugard, after having been in Ijj-ouble for helping Royston to
print <;he Eilfon BasiliiJce^ and for threatening an English editioiii
of the B^ensio Begia of Salmasiijs, hg,d signalised his conver-
sion, as we know, most remaiykably, by printing, for the Repub-
lican Council of State, Milton'g Befensio contra. Salmasium,
the French translation of his BiJsoiiqJcla,stes,, and njuoh besides ;
whilp N^woome bad been the publisher of Milton's Befensio
Secunda and of hia Treatise of Civil Pow^r in Bcolesia^tic(ii
Qa,u.se^, ^nd had been stea,dily the printer of Needham's bi-i
weekly newspaper from 1651. to 1660. Latterly Henry Hills
and John Field ha,d dividjpd with Neweomg the business of
government printing for Oliyei?; ajid Robert I.bbetson also
had dealt in news-pamphlets and miscellanies on the Comi^pUr
wejilth &i4'e. A^ an extreme opdnionist of the Republican sprt
one recognises Livewell Chapman, the publisher of Harring-
ton's Oeeana, and also of those two latest pre-Restoration
pamphlets of Milton which were probably too violent for Ncwt
come,^T-his Means to remove Hirelings out of the, Church g.nd his
Re,ad^ and, Basy Way, to estailish a Free Conmonwealth. Even
g,rnong thoge who did not profess to be specially political pub-
lishers, but deailt in theological or general literature, one can
discern the personal bias, in some eases, easily enough. Thomas
Underhill, who had published the first three of Milton's ajiti-
Episcopal or Smeetymnua,n pamphlets in 1641, and also hjs
Tract on Education in 1644, had remained a stiff Presbyterian
and anti-Tolerationist, apd so had parted from Milton long
ago ; and the same may be S3,id of John Rpthwell, 'the pub--
Usher of the two last of Milton's Smectymnuan pamphlets in
1641 and 1643, John Stafford had published Thomas Fullpr's
books ; one of Baxter's publishers was Nevill Symons, who
had come to London froni Kidderrninster ; ajid Prynnp had;
dealt with Edward Thomas. Very solid men of bujsiness must
have been Abel Roper, who ppiblished for Dugdaje, and
Thomas Roycroft, who had publishpd Waltonj.'s Polyglott
and some of Ogilby's illustrated books. The first volume of
Rushworth had come, I think, from the shop of George
400 LIFE OF MILTON AND HISTORY OF HIS TIME.
Thomason, who is immortal independently for the vast collec-
tion of contemporary pamphlets he had accumulated in his
cellars, with so much trouble and expense to himself, but
so greatly to the benefit of posterity and the British Museum.
Francis Grove inclined to popular ballad-sheets ; and Nathaniel
Brooks, as we have had occasion to see, hovered between
drollery and the finer literature. Thomas Dring had, for
some time before the Restoration, shown a creditable prefer-
ence for the finer literature in his transactions ; but, all in all,
the chiefs of the London book-trade, in poetry and whatever
else the phrase " the finer literature " can include, had been
Humphrey Moseley, Eichard Marriott, and Henry Herring-
man. But of these three chiefs one was still the chief.
Marriott and Herringmaii would have knelt to Humphrey
Moseley ^.
Our first acquaintance with Moseley was in 1645, when
he published, from his shop in St. Paul's Churchyard, the
collection of Milton's minor English and Latin poems, pre-
fixing to the little volume a tasteful paragraph in his own
name, expounding his principles and aspirations in the pub-
lishing business and his confidence in Milton's genius (Vol.
III. pp. 448-459). " It is the love I have to our own
" language that hath made me diligent to collect and set
" forth such pieces, both in prose and verse, as may renew
" the wonted honour and esteem of our English tongue,"
had been Moseley's words in that paragraph. From the
principle so announced in 1645 he had never swerved. By
solicitation of what he liked, rather than by accepting chance
offers, he had drawn to him almost every living writer of
genuine merit or promise in poetry or in any other form
of non-controversial literature. He had acquired a property^
in many eases by original publication, and in others by sub-
sequent purchase, in the poetry, plays, or other writings of
Shirley, Richard Brome, Carlell, Stapylton, Sir Kenelm Digby,
Howell,Waller, Denham, Davenant, Cowley, Cockayne, Stanley,
Fanshawe, and Henry Vaughan ; and it seems to have been his
1 Digested from my notes from the accounts of MUton'a publishing trans-
Stationers' Registers for the period from actions and other particulars ah-eady
1649 to 1660; with references to the given in various places in these volumes.
HUMPHREY MOSELET. 401
ambition to possess the whole of some of these writers, or at
least of their poetrji-. He had acquired copyrights in works of
such recently deceased English celebrities as Donne, Suckling,
Crashaw, Carew, Cartwright, May, and Herbert of Cherbury;
and in the resuscitation of select pieces of the older literature
of the Elizabethan and Jacoban age his assiduity had been
unequalled. More than once in the Stationers' Registers,
through the time of the Civil Wars, the Commonwealth, and
the Protectorate, one is attracted by the assignment to a new
proprietor of a batch of plays by Marlowe, Decker, Shake-
speare, Chapman, Beaumont and Fletcher, Heywood, Ben
Jonson, Webster, Massinger, Ford, Middleton, Rowley, and
Tournenr ; and iu such cases, as in most individual entries of
the same kind, it is Moseley as a matter of course that owns
the transaction. He had not disdained, a philosophical treatise
now and then ; and latterly, I find, he traded also, to a con-
siderable extent, in translations of Italian historical works of
repute, and in translations of Spanish and Italian novels, and
of the contemporary French heroic romances. It was chiefly
from Moseley's shop in St. Paul's Churchyard that the English
public, from 1650 to 1660, obtained their copies of those in-
terminable Cleopatras, Gassandras, Glelias, Grand Scipios, and
Grand Cyruses, which were then regarded, on both sides of the
channel, as the perfection of amusing prose-fiction. But, in-
deed, everything very good was to be obtained at that shop,
everything that was not a pamphlet or a sermon. These
Moseley abhorred. Once or twice, in a moment of weakness,
he did publish a sermon ; but he could endure nothing of the I/''
pamphlet kind, unless perhaps it might be some oldish thing
appertaining rather to the philosophy of politics than to
current polities, and bearing the name of Raleigh or Bacon.
He was a publisher for the finer muses only j and that they
had been visiting him so much in the heart of London during
the twenty years of Puritan ascendancy is one fact more for
those who persist in the delusion that they had then forsaken
the British Islands \
1 My notes from the Stationers' 170 MS. pages of small octavo for
Eeglsters. These notes extend to about the period 1640—1660, and the name
XOL. VI. D d
402 LIFE OF MILTON AND HISTORY OF HIS TIME.
The election to the Mastership and the two "Wardenships
of the Stationers' Company took place in the month of July
every year. The men appointed to those oflBces in the
Corporation were generally seniors in the trade, and were
always men of eminence in it on one account or another,
though often rather as salesmen of books and stationery than
ass publishers. At the election of July 1659, however, when
Mr. William Lee was chosen master, and Mr. Richard Thrale
c one of the wardens, it had so happened that the other warden-
ship came to Humphrey Moseley. Thus in the very year of
the Restoration Moseley was one of the chief office-bearers
in the trade of which he had so long been an ornament. For
aught I know, he may have thought it a pleasure, as well as
a duty, to be in his place, as one of the Wardens of the
Stationers' Company, in that part of the immense triumphal
procession of Charles's entry into London, on the 29th of
May 1660, which consisted of 600 representatives of the
different London Companies, all on horseback, in black velvet
coats, with gold chains, and each company preceded by its
footmen in liveries. At all events, before his term of war-
denship expired, he gave proof that he did not mean to be
less energetic in the business of bookselling and publishing
under the Restoration than he had been through the Com-
monwealth and the Protectorate. We have already noted
his remarkable registration, on the 29th of June, 1660, of
^thirty-six old dramatic copyrights as wholly his own ; and
we may now add that on the same day he registered his joint-
property with Humphrey Robinson in another large batch of
dramatic copyrights, his joint property with Thomas Dring
in Stanley's History of PhihsopJit/ and in four volumes of
a translation of The Grand Cyrus, and his joint property with
Dring and Herringman in two volumes of a translation of
D'Urfe's L'AsMe.
Moseley, Moseley occurs and recurs page and include these—" Tlie History of
after page, always in connexion witli Cardenio by Mr. Fletcher and Shake-
hooks of the kind descrihed. The speare " ; " The Merry Devil ofEdnum-
largest registration by Moseley was on tort, by Wm. Shakespeare " ; " Henry
the 9th of September, 1653, when he «Ae Mrst and Henry the Second, by
entered forty-one separate hooks as his, Shakespeare and Davenport." For
paying 20s. 6d. for the entry. They are another curious Shakespeanan registra-
alniost aU Elizabethan or Jacoban Plays, tion of Moseley's see ante, p. 362.
DEATH OF HUMPHBET MOSELET. 403
On the 31st of January 1660-1 the news among the boob-
sellers was that Humphrey Moseley was dead. He left a
widow, Anne Moseley, and an unmarried daughter of the
same name, and there are traces of a continuation of his
business for some time in their hands. But the sovereignty
of the book-trade was then open to competition. Most of the
remaining booksellers abstained from the competition and
were content to go on in their old tracks. In general business
Royston continued eminent, Thomason was alive till 1666 ;
Seile was then dead, having left a widow in his business ; poor
Dugard was then also dead, having left some scholarly copy-
rights to his daughter, Lydia Dugard ; Live well Chapman and
some of the others are not heard of at all, or are hardly heard
of, after the Restoration ; but to 1667 and beyond there were
persevering survivors in AUestree, Brooks, Andrew Crooke,
Dring, Fletcher, Garthwait, Hills, Norton, Humphrey Robin-
son, Sawbridge, Ralph Smith, and Nevill Symons. One
hears also of a John Martin, a Randal Taylor, a John
Redmayne, a George Hurlock, a Robert Powlett, a Henry
Mortlock, a Samuel Thomson, a Samuel Simmons, a Robert
Boulter, and others, as either new men in the trade between
1660 and 1667, or as busier in those years than they had
been before. Meanwhile the only signs of a real contest
for Moseley's place as the. trade-chief of the finer literature
were between Marriott and Herringman. Both had been
emulous in Moseley's footsteps before the Restoration, catch-
ing up things that Moseley let go. Marriott, who had
been in business as long ago as 1645 in partnership with
his father, had acquired copyrights or part copyrights in
Quarles, Donne, Wotton's Remains, Dr. Henry King's Poems,
and Sermons by Hales of Eton ; and Herringman, who had
been in business since 1653, possessed copyrights in some
writings of Sir Kenelm Digby and. Howell, in several old
plays, in the Musarum Delitice, in the poems of Jasper
Mayne, in Lord Broghill's Parthenissa, and in Davenant's
Siege of Rhodes and others of Davenant's pre-Restoration
operas. Herringman had also published together, in January
1658-9, the three obituary panegyrics on Oliver Cromwell
D d a
404 LIFE OF MILTON AND HISTOET OF HIS TIME.
by Marvell, Dryden, and Sprat; and, in April 1660, the
month before the Restoration, he had advertised that volume
of Sir Robert Howard's Poems which, when it did appear
a few weeks afterwards, was found to contain conveniently a
panegyric on King Charles and a panegyric on Monk. On
the other hand, Waller's more famous poem to the King on
his return had been published by Marriott. On the whole,
at the time of Moseley's death, while the advantage was with
Herringmanj Marriott's chances were considerable ; and the
publication from his shop of the Mrst Tart of Hudihras in
1662 was another incident in his favour. Somehow he
could not follow up that success. The Second Part ofUudi-
Iras, a year after the first, was not published by him, but
by Martin and Allestree ; and, though he published the Poems
of Mrs. Katherine Philips instead, that was a poor substitute.
Meanwhile Herringman had been gaining ground remarkably.
Already in possession of Davenant, Lord Orrery, Sir Robert
Howard, and Dryden, he had brought round him also Cowley
and Boyle, having published the essays of both in 1661, and
a volume of Cowley's poems in 1663. In April 1664 he
acquired the copyright of all Waller's poetry ; and from that
time his superiority to Marriott, and his title to be regarded
as Moseley's successor in the primacy of the book-trade,
admitted of no dispute. He was, to publish more and more
for Waller, for Howard, for Dryden, and for other poets and
dramatists; the scientific connexion he had won through
Boyle drew round him the chiefs of the Royal Society as
well as the wits of the Court ; Hudihras and The Poems of
Mrs. Katherine Philips were to be his when he chose ; and,
whenever any stock of old plays and poems was in the
market, and especially when Anne Moseley, withdrawing
^rom business, wished to dispose of any of her late husband's
/Copyrights in such things, who so ready to purchase as Her-
/ ringman ? In fact Herringman and his shop are one of the
most vivid traditions of the Restoration. The shop was "at
the sign of the Blue Anchor in the Lower Walk of the New
Exchange,"— this New Exchange, so called to distinguish it
from the Old Exchange in the City, being on the south side
HEEBINGMAN AND HIS SHOP. 405
of the Strand, on the site of the present Adelphi. Any time
before the Great Plague and the Great Fire, but perhaps more
distinctly after those events than before, this shop of Herring-
man's was the chief literary lounging-place in London. There,
in the year 1667, when Dryden's Annus Mirabilis had been
added to his previously published Rival Ladies and Indian
Umperor, you might have seen, if you were' lucky in your
moment, Dryden himself, and Boyle, and Cowley, and Sir
Robert Howard, and Waller, and Butler, and half a dozen
more celebrities, dropping in together or one after another ^.
If it had been late in 1667, you would have missed one of
the best of them for ever. " Yesterday in the evening," says
the London Gazette of August 4, 1667, " the body of Mr.
" Abraham Cowley, who died the 28th past, was conveyed
" from Wallingford House to Westminster Abbey, aeeom-
" panied by divers persons of eminent quality, who came to
" perform this last oflSce to one who had been the great orna-
" ment of our nation, as well by the candour of his life as the
" excellency of his writings." Just a fortnight later, on the
13th of August 1667, Bishop Jeremy Taylor died in Ireland.
In Cowley, dead at the age of forty-nine, and Jeremy Taylor,
dead at the age of fifty-four, the literature of Davenant's
laureateship had lost two whom it could ill spare. But a few
months more and Davenant himself was to be gone, leaving
the Laureateship vacant.
1 The date of Moseley's death is and sights of Herringman's publications
from Smith's Obituary ; the rest from and title-pages,
my notes from the Stationers' Begisters
CHAPTER III.
milton's life peom 1661 to 1667:
WITH
PARADISE LOST.
How long Milton remained in his temporary house in
Holborn, near Red Lion Pields, is uncertain. We have
supposed him to have been still there at the coronation
of Charles in May 1661 j and he may have remained there
for some months longer. Hardly, however, to the end of
1661 ; for Phillips's words are that he " staid not long "
in his Holborn house before, " his pardon having passed the
seal, he removed to Jewin Street." It is not diflBcult to
account for the choice so made of a new place of residence.
If a bustling thoroughfare like Holborn was unsuitable for the
blind ex-Secretary of the Commonwealth, much less could he
return to Petty France, or to any other purlieu of West-
minster. He remembered therefore that quiet quarter of the
City, just beyond the walls, and not far from his native Bread
Street, where he had first set up as a householder on his own
account one-and-twenty years ago, and where he had spent
seven of the busiest years of his private life, when he was a
zealous adherent of the Long Parliament through the Civil
Wars and a pamphleteer in that interest, but did not foresee
his more intimate official connexions with the governments
that were to succeed. He would go back now to that
neighbourhood, and be again well at a distance from White-
hall and its associations.
Milton's removal to jewik stbeet. 407
Jewin Street, where a house was aecording'ly found for him,
still exists. It is a narrowish, slightly winding, and not
untidy street, going off from Aldersgate Street on the right
as you leave the City, and connecting that street with Red
Cross Street and the vicinity of Cripplegate church. It goes
off from Aldersgate Street only a few paces from the site of
the " pretty garden house " there, " at the end of an entry,"
where Milton had lived between 1640 and 1645, and into
which he had brought Mary Powell for her short stay with him
after their marriage ; and the very next turn out of Aldersgate
Street, on the same side farther up, is Barbican, where he had
resided from 1645 to 1647, in the larger house he had taken
for the purposes of pedagogy after his wife had gone back to
him, and in which his father-in-law and his own father had
died. In Jewin Street, therefore, Milton was beside those
two former houses of his, and so close to either that, but for
his blindness, he could have passed from one to the other in a
few minutes, and revived his recoUeetions of them by looking
at their doors and windows. As it was, he could but be led
about in the space between them.
No house extant in the present Jewin Street is remembered
as that once occupied by Milton. We can fix approximately,
however, the part of Jewin Street in which the house stood.
Thoug'h the street is by no means a long one, it is not all
included in one and the same city parish, or even in one
and the same city ward. The part of Jewin Street
nearest Aldersgate Street is in the parish of St. Botolph,
in the ward of Aldersgate ; but the rest of Jewin Street,
or the part nearest Red Cross Street, is in the parish of
St. Giles, in the ward of Cripplegate. If, therefore, the
house to which Mr. ex-Secretary Milton removed in 1661 had
been in the part of Jewin Street nearest Aldersgate Street, he
would have become once more a parishioner of St. Botolph's,
Aldersgate, the same parish to which he had belonged when
he was first a London householder; but, if the house was
towards the Red Cross Street end of Jewin Street, then he
became again a parishioner of St. Giles's, Cripplegate, as he
had been when living in Barbican. The latter was the fact.
408 LIFE OF MILTON AND HI8T0EY OF HIS TIME.
The part of Jewin Street to which Milton removed was the
inner end, where there are still some remaining houses of his
date, which at that time may have had more of garden ground
behind them than now ; and for all the rest of his life, first
in this house and then in another, he was to be a parishioner
of St. Giles's, Cripplegate. The vicar of the parish at that
date was a certain popular and energetic Dr. Samuel Annesley.
He was of Oxford training, and of Presbyterian antecedents,
about forty years of age, first cousin to the Earl of Anglesey,
and of much distinction recently among the clergy of Oliver's
established church, though perhaps better likely to be remem-
bered now by the fact that, through his youngest daughter, yet
to be born, he was the grandfather of John and Charles Wesley^.
IN JEWIN street: 1661-1664.
One remembers the predictions of the consequences of the
Restoration so boldly hazarded by Milton in his great pamphlet
of warning published on the eve of that event (ante, V.
pp. 645—655, 677-688). So far as those predictions had not
already been fulfilled by the incidents of the first year of
the Restoration, they were fulfilled to the letter, as we know,
during the next three years, when Clarendon and the Bishops
were no longer checked by the Presbyterianism of the Con-
vention Parliament, but had an instrument more to their mind
in the succeeding Cavalier Parliament. Of the incidents
of the continued Clarendonian administration during those
three years Milton, in his retirement in Jewin Street, can
have been no uninterested observer. The first batch of Acts
passed by the Cavalier Parliament in July 1661, — their Act
for the suppression of all questioning of the Established Go-
vernment or assertion of the legality of the Long Parliament
and the Solemn League and Covenant, their Act for repealing
the disqualification of persons in holy orders for civil ofiices
1 Stow'a London ty Strype (1730), Ath. IV. 509—514, and Fasti, II. 114 ;
Book III. pp. 70—123 (Cripplegata. " Tombstone of Mrs. Susanna Wesley,
Ward and Aldersgate Ward) ; Fai- mother of the Wesleys, in Bunhill
thorne's Map of London in 1658 (re- Fields Burying Ground ; Galamy's Non-
printed 1878) ; Visits to Jewin Street conformists' Memorial (edit. 1802), I,
and its neighhourhood j Wood, by Bliss, 124 — 128.
Milton's estimate of the eestokation. 409
and dignitieSj their Act for curtailing the right of petitioning
Parliament or the King, their Act restoring the power of the
Militia to the King, and their Act of farther penalties against
the surviving Regicides and others, — must have prepared him
for such later Acts of their First Session as the Corporations
Act of December 1661, and the Act against Quakers, the Act
of Uniformity, the Counties Militia .Act, ^nd the new Press
Act, all of May 1662. These pieces of legislation, with such
contemporary proofs of the ruthless mood of the Court and the
executive as were furnished by the disinterring of the dead
Commonwealth's men and Cromwellians from their graves in
Westminster Abbey, the hanging and quartering of the
Baptist preacher John James for imprudent speaking in his
pulpit, the carting' of three of the spared Regicides from the
Tower to Tyburn and back with ropes round their necks, and
the hanging and quartering at Tyburn of the three fugitive
Regicides, Barkstead, Corbet, and Okey, that had been cap-
tured in Holland, verified to the utmost those parts of Milton's
predictions which had prophesied bloody personal revenges,
a general policy of Absolutism, a miserable disappoint-
ment of the hopes of the Presbyterians, and the reinstitution
in England of unmitigated Prelacy, with liberty or breathing-
room for nothing else. The Act of Uniformity by itself,
cancelling at one stroke the King's Declaration from Breda
and his subsequent promises, and turning into ridicule all the
dreams of the Baxters, Calamys, Mantons, and others, and all
their exertions in behalf of a limited Episcopacy that should
comprehend the Presbyterians and the old Anglicans in one
establishment, was a sufficient vindication of Milton's fore-
sight in that particular. Then, in the interval between the
passing of that Act and its fatal execution on St. Bartholo-
mew's day in the same year, there was the arrival of the
prophesied Queen, " outlandish and a Papist," in the person of
the Portuguese Catharine, to add to the foreign and Roman
Catholic influence at Court already represented by the Queen-
mother, and to complicate the King's relations with Lady
Castlemaine. There was also the trial of Vane and Lambert,
with the beheading of Vane, Milton's admired friend of many
410 LIFE OF MILTON AND HISTORY OF HIS TIME.
years. The terrible St. Bartholomew's day itself came at
last, Aug. 24, 1663. Then Milton knew of the wrench to
English society for generations yet to come, occasioned by the
ejection or silencing of more than 2000 parish-pastors. Uni-
versity men, and lecturers, mostly Presbyterians, but some of
them Baptists, that had held livings in Oliver's broad Church
of the Commonwealth, and had hoped to retain them in the
moderate Episcopal Church promised at the Kestoration.
He could think of those 2000 men, in their new condition of
NonconformistSj at a loss what to do for the future support of
themselves and their families, many of them trying still to
subsist by private preaching and ministration • to > adherents
from among their flocks, but many scattering themselves
hither and thither on the hard chance of other occupations.
The question of comprehension of even moderate dissenting
orthodoxy within the Established Church was then at an end,
and the only remaining question was whether there should be
anything like a toleration or indulgence for the ejected and
for their opinions and worship outside of the Establishment.
Or, rather, that question also was practically decided. By the
Act of Uniformity itself it was regulated that aU persons
ejected by the Act should cease from public preaching any-
where or in any manner under the penalty of three months'
imprisonment for each offence, and should also be incapacitated
for schoolmastering or private tutorship anywhere under
severer penalties ; the old Acts enforcing attendance at
the established worship in the regular churches were still
available when necessary ; and had not the special Act called
the Act against Quakers, passed in the same month with the
Act of Uniformity, prohibited, not only for Quakers, but also
for a^ who should refuse oaths tendered by the existing autho-
rities, or should persuade others to such refusal, the right of
meeting even in small private conventicles, under pain of fine,
imprisonment, and ultimate banishment to the plantations ?
One had not to wait for the general Conventicles Act of May
1664, expressly extending to all Nonconformists whatever
this prohibition of private meetings for worship already
operative against Quakers and other extreme sectaries.
Milton's estimate of the restoration. 411
That Act could be foreseen ; and, whatever talk there
might be meanwhile of a possible indulgence for Presby-
terians and other moderate Nonconformists, as distinct from
the Quakers and other Fanatics, all were practically silenced
and at the mercy of the magistracy. At the close of 1663,
though the General Conventicles Act and other Acts of the
same ferocious series were yet. to come, Milton could have no
doubt that he had been right in his mournful augury of a
relapse of England by the Restoration into a state of religious
and civil servitude so abject and profound that no recovery
from it could be expected in his own life-time. His memor-
able words to that effect had been these : — " If we return to
" Kingship, and soon repent (as undoubtedly we shall, when we
" begin to find the old encroachments coming on by little and
" little upon our consciences, which must needs proceed from
" King and Bishop united inseparably in one interest), we may
" be forced perhaps to fight over again all that we have fought,
" and spend over again all that we have spent, but are never
"likely to attain thus far as we are npw advanced to the
" recovery of our freedom, never likely to have it in posses-
" sion as we now have it, never to be vouchsafed hereafter
" the like mercies and signal assistance from Heaven in our
"cause." The vision in these words stretches through the
whole reign of Charles, and through the next reign, and at
least to the Revolution of 1688.
And on whom in Milton's view lay the responsibility for a
degradation of the body-politic and the soul-politic of England
so rapid, deep, and disastrous? Doubtless he thought, first
of all, of Charles himself, with his strange hereditary claims
to the royalty, his strange personal endowment of brutal ideas
and appetites for turning the possession to account, and his
congenial crew of courtiers, wits, and courtesans, in ruffles
and silks, rioting or languishing in Whitehall. Doubtless
also he thought, more at large and more sadly, of the nation
itself as the primary culprit, and had not ceased yet from that
mood of disgust and amazement with which he had witnessed
the tide of unreasoning royalist reaction rise in the " mis-
guided multitude " two years ago. As to the Presbyterians
412 LIFE OF MILTON AND HISTORT OP HIS TIME,
and their clergy, who had lent themselves to this passion of
the miscellaneous populace, and sought to manage it in the
interest of their own vain dream of a royalty duly prelimited
and constrained into respectability and fidelity to the Solemn
League and Covenant, one had little now to say. Their part
was over ; they had failed egregiously and confessedly, and
were reaping their punishment. Nor was it worth while to
be reckoning up those Oliverian politicians and army-officers,
such as Monk, Montague, Howard, Annesley, Broghill, Coote,
Ashley Cooper, and Ingoldsby, who had wheeled round to
Charles, more or less cunningly, in the anarchy succeeding
Richard's Protectorate, had negotiated with Charles before
the event, and had constituted themselves its active and im-
mediate instruments in England or in Ireland. To think of
such men merely as renegades, and to apportion among them,
under that name, the guilt of the transaction in which they
had figured, was but a vulgar satisfaction. In any case the
name " renegades " would hardly have been a fit description
for men who had but done according to their lights in attach-
ing themselves to what seemed to them inevitable and might
be for the best; and, besides, the actual Restoration, as it
stood consummated in 1662, was not what they had schemed
or contemplated, but was a something that had come in upon
them, as upon others, irresistibly since 1660, and on the
current of which they must be content to swim. Lei them
swim in it, in their new dignities, as Duke of Albemarle,
Earl of Sandwich, Earl of Carlisle, Earl of Anglesey, Earl of
Orrery, Lord Ashley, Lord Montrath, and Sir Richard In-
goldsby ; and let history remember, under these new names,
only as much as it pleased of their pre-Restoration ante-
cedents ! Not among such men could one distribute much of
the responsibility for what had been done between 1660 and
1663. That responsibility must rest with those who had
really during that time shaped the counsels of the restored
monarchy in all main matters. Who were they ? To Milton,
making this inquiry, the figures that must have presented
themselves behind the King and his libertines, or mingling
with them, and going out and in among them, were those
MILTON AND OLABENDON. 413
of the bishops and prelatic doctors. He thought of the
Sheldons, the Morleys, the Henchmans, with their retinue of
Gunnings, Pearsons, Earles, Heylins, Haekets, and others.
Were not these the men who had pressed on for full and
absolute Episcopacy and nothing else, returned unweariedly
to the charge again and again, consulted among themselves
so as to evade and neutralize the King's Declarations of
Comprehension and Toleration, and secured that there should
not be the slightest concession to the suppliant Presbyterians ?
" They would request us/' Milton had written in 1641 of the
bishops and prelatic doctors and University men who were
then struggling for the preservation of Episcopacy, — "they
" would request us to endure still the rustling of their silken
" cassocks, and that we would burst our midriffs rather than
" laugh to see them under sail in all their lawn and sarcenet,
"their shrouds and tackle, with a geometrical rhomboides
" upon their heads ; they would bear us in hand that we
" must of duty still appear before them once a year in Jeru-
" salem, like good circumcised males and females, to be taxed
" by the poll, to be sconced of our headmoney, our twopences,
"in their chandlerly shop-book of Easter." And lo! now
the silken cassocks, the lawn and the sarcenet, and all the
other shrouds and tackle of Anglican ecclesiastical costume,
with the old geometrical rhomboides itself, were back in
England, in circumstances that made it death to- laugh at
them. The special loathing of Episcopacy and its para-
phernalia not being yet extinct in Milton, one can imagine
his private estimate of Sheldon and the other churchmen,
who had found nothing better to do than re-edify in England
the entire ecclesiastical system which had been shattered
twenty years ago, avenging thereby the memories of Laud,
Hall, and Wren, and constituting themselves, with whatever
differences of real belief, the successors and executors of those
antediluvians. There was, however, one more central and
representative personage still, who had cooperated with the
Sheldons, Morleys, and Henchmans, and without whose co-
operation their intentions would have been ineffectual. To
Milton, as to all others, the all-responsible chief of the
414 LIFE OF MILTON AND HISTOEY OF HIS TIME.
Restoration, as it had been perfected in 1662, was the Earl
of Clarendon. There are reasons why Milton and Clarendon
should be sometimes recollected together in the history of
England. They were exactly coevals. They had been born
in the same year ; and they were to die in the same year,
after having lived through exactly the same sixty-five years
of English time. Till 1660 their relations to each other had
been of the slenderest. To Milton, the Parliamentarian and the
ofiicial of the Commonwealth and the Protectorate, Clarendon
had been only the exiled Hyde, the chief counsellor of Charles
and intriguer for his desperate cause abroad, while Hyde,
on his part, had taken cognisance of Milton but now
and then, when there was reason to refer to the circulation
in foreign countries of the EikonoMastes or the JDefensio
contra Salmasium. But now, in 1662, when they were both
in their fifty-fourth year, they were nearer each other, and in
relations that must have been greatly impressive to at least
one of them. To Clarendon, indeed, moving in velvet between
Worcester House and Whitehall, Milton can have been now
nothing. He was the blind scribe of the Commonwealth,
an undoubtedly able man, whom it had been thought un-
necessary to hang, and who had removed himself out of the
way, no one need inquire whither. To Milton in Jewin
Street, on the other hand, the great Clarendon could by no
means be an object of the like indifierence. Was it not the
very definition of the condition of England at that moment
that they were all living under a Clarendonian administra-
tion? In Church, as well as in State, was not all that one
beheld in 1662 the work chiefly of Clarendon?
Of the catastrophe of St. Bartholomew's day Milton's
opinions must have been peculiar. To the mere expulsion of
never so many ministers and preachers from their livings in
the Church he could have had no objection ; or, if he had
objected, it would have been because only a proportion had
been expelled and not the whole body at once. In his Dis-
establishment tract of 1659, called Comideraiions touching the
likeliest means to remove Hirelings out of the Church, his pro^
posal had virtually been such a simultaneous ejection of the
MILTON AND THE ST. BAETHOLOMEW EJECTION. 415
'whole body of the clergy from their livings at an appointed
hour and day, without compensation of any kind, the Church
revenues thenceforward to be confiscated for general state pur-
poses, and the ejected to be told that they must depend for their
livelihood entirely on their voluntary preaching of the Gospel,
or otherwise on their industry and their wits. Immediate
disestablishment, or instantaneous separation of Church and
State, being thus his avowed ideal, he would gladly, in
suitable circumstances, have heard of the ejection not only of
2000 of the clergy, but of all the 10,000 or more that were
drawing stipends in England. In suitable circumstances,
also, he might have accepted a partial disestablishment as
an instalment of his ideal, and so have reconciled himself to
the ejection of 2000 only to begin with. But the ejection of
St. Bartholomew's day had nothing in common with Milton's
notion of ejection as a means towards the abolition of a State-
Church. In the first place, it was not an ejection with a
Adew to disestablishment at all, but, on the contrary, with
a view to the refounding and refortification of the State-
Church in what seemed to him its worst form. For the 2000
Presbyterians, semi-Presbyterians, Independents, and Baptists
ejected, there were to be brought in as many of the Prelatic
sort, so that the entire body of the State clergy should be
zealots for High Episcopacy and practitioners of the cor-
responding ritual. But, farther, there was to .be no public
preaching whatever, no liberty of meetings for worship, apart
from the State-Church so re-organized. The ejection of the
Nonconformists was not ejection only, but ejection and
silencing. The world was not to be all before them where
to choose their place of rest. They were not to be allowed to
form voluntary congregations from among their old flocks, or
to go over the country as itinerant preachers, subsisting on
what might be voluntarily offered them ; they were not even
to earn their livings as schoolmasters or tutors in families;
they were to live as they could find the means in unac-
customed ways ; or, if they still persisted in private ministerial
practice from house to house, it was to be with the police on-
the watch, dogging their daily footsteps, and dragging them
416 LIFE OF MILTON AND HISTORY OF HIS TIME.
to fines or imprisonment. And so, whatever had been
Milton's former quarrel with Presbyterians, Independents, or
Baptists, whether on the ground of their consenting to be
hirelings in a State-Church, and thus helping to keep up that
institution of his abhorrence, or on the ground of their too
narrow ideas of the religious liberty to be accorded to others,
what could he do now but join in the general pity for
so many good men in the straits to which they had been
reduced ?
Of the victims of the St. Bartholomew Milton must have
known not a few personally, or by their public reputation.
As an inhabitant of Jewin Street, and parishioner of St. Giles's,
Cripplegate, he cannot but have been interested in the fact
that Dr. Annesley, the popular vicar of that great parish,
was one of those turned adrift. Among the rest he would
remember especially the three survivors of his old friends of
the Smectymnuus brotherhood — Dr. Edmund Calamy, ejected
from his perpetual curacy of Alderm anbury, London, after
having resisted the temptation of a bishopric ; Matthew
Newcomen, ejected from his vicarage of Dedham in Essex;
and Dr. William Spurstow, ejected from his vicarage of
Hackney. Among those who had been Presbyterian coU
leagues of these three in the Westminster Assembly, and
notable men there, he would remember, for various reasons,
Simeon Ashe, now ejected from St. Bride's, London, Thomas
Case, ejected from St. Mary Magdalen, Milk Street, and
Dr. Lazarus Seaman, the Orientalist, ejected from Allhallows,
Bread Street, Milton's own native parish. Of the five
original Independents of the Westminster Assembly only
three survived, and these were all among the sufferers, Dr.
Thomas Goodwin, now silenced in London, whither he had
removed after having been deprived of his Presidentship of
Magdalen College, Oxford ; Philip Nye, to whose punish-
ment in his character as one of the excepted from the In-
demnity Act there had been added ejection from his London
living of Bartholomew, Exchange; and William Bridge,
ejected at Yarmouth. Among the later adherents to In-
dependency in the Westminster Assembly now among the
Milton's acquaintances among the ejected. 417
ejected Milton would note at least Joseph Caryl, of St.
Magnus, London Bridge, the commentator on the Book of
Job, and one of his old opponents in the Divorce controversy.
On personal or on general grounds he would think also, of
course, of such Presbyterian or Independent celebrities, not of
the Westminster Assembly, as Owen, Baxter, Manton, Bates,
Matthew Poole and Howe, of the Baptists Tombes and Jessey,
and of the freethinking John Goodwin, his own associate in
obloquy, long out of the Established Church already, but
now incapacitated also for his voluntary ministry in Coleman
Street. But, indeed, who can tell in how many of the ejected
and silenced all over the country Milton may have felt an in-
terest ? Of these one was certainly John Oxenbridge, late fellow
of Eton College, to whose house, when Marvell was living with
him as tutor to Cromwell's ward, Milton had sent three
copies of his Defensio Secunda. Ejected from his fellowship at
the Restoration, Oxenbridge found himself under farther per-
secution by the Uniformity Act, and had again a life of weary
wandering before him. Also, if I am not mistaken, a certain
Richard Heath, one of the ejected Nonconformist ministers
of Shrewsbury, and mentioned as an Oriental scholar who
had assisted Walton in some portions of his TolygloU, was the
same Richard Heath whom we have known as probably one
of Milton's pupils in the Barbican, and subsequently one of
his correspondents ^.
Among those who had remained in, or been brought back,
to be the dutiful episcopal clergy of the Church of the Res-
toration, as well as among those who had been cast out,
Milton must have been able to reckon up some interesting to
himself personally. He had not forgotten, of course, Robert
Pory, his old schoolfellow in St. Paul's and chum in Christ's
College, Cambridge. Better days had now dawned on this
nearly oldest of all Milton's acquaintances. Not only had
he stepped back into his former London living at the Res-
toration, but, by the favour of Archbishop Juxon, with whom
1 See ante, "Vol. III. p. 6S7 and Vol. been educated at Milton's own College,
IV. p. 469. If I am right in identifying Christ's College, Cambridge, after leay-
Heath of Shrewsbury with Milton's ing Milton's house in Barbican.. ,
former pupil and correspondentj he had
VOL. VI. E e
418 LIFE OF MILTON AND HISTOET OF HIS TIME.
he claimed some kin, lie had been collated to the Arch-
deaconry of Middlesex ; had held also, from 1660 to 1662,
the rectory of St. Botolph, Bishopsgate, and the prebend of
Willesden; and was now, as D.D., to receive a yet richer
rectory in Hertfordshire, which, with his archdeaconry and a
canonship-residentiary of St. Paul's, he was to enjoy to his
death in 1669. — Of those who had been coevals with Pory
and Milton at Cambridge one remembers in this connexion
Thomas Fuller, Jeremy Taylor, and Henry More. The first
had lived to benefit so far by the Restoration as to recover
his prebend of Salisbury, be appointed chaplain in ordina,ry to
the King, and created D.D., but not long enough to obtain
the bishopric which would have been deemed his due, or to
have his moderate and tolerant soul pained by the cruelty of
the St. Bartholomew. He had died Aug. 16, 1661, in the fifty-
fourth year of his age. Jeremy Taylor, who had been a
greater sufferer than Fuller through the Commonwealth, had
received his fit recompence of a bishopric, though an Irish
one, and was now, as Bishop of Down and Connor, under
Bramhall's primacy in Ulster, subjecting his Scottish clergy
in that diocese to the new episcopal discipline with a vigour
that could hardly have been predicted from his Liberty of
Prophesying, published in 1647. Dr. Henry More, as we
kiiow, remained on in his fellowship in Christ's College,
Cambridge, under his friend Cudworth's mastership. — One
would like to know whether Andrew Sandelands, that fellow
of Christ's who had left the college before More entered it,
but whom Milton had known there, and who had been
Milton's correspondent afterwards in such extraordinary cir-
cumstances (ante. Vol. IV. pp. 487'-494), was now alive, to be
restored to his Yorkshire rectory, or otherwise to reap the
benefit of his former Royalism, and connexion with the
Marquis of Montrose. I have obtained no trace of him, and
think it probable that he had died before the Restoration,
while the skull of Montrose, for which he had so touchingly
petitioned Milton in 1652, remained still exposed in the
High Street of Edinburgh.— In Jewin Street itself Milton
was in contact with one eminent example of the substitution
MORUS IN PARIS. 419
of a new man in a parish for one of the ejected of St. Bar-
tholomew, The successor of Dr. Annesley in the vicarage of
St. Giles, Cripplegate, was Dr. John Dolben, a nephew of the
once famous Archbishop Williams. He had been made canon
of Christ Church and was already Archdeacon of London
when he received the valuable living of St. Giles, Cripplegate;
within the same year he was to be Dean of Westminster,
as his famous uncle had been ; and ere long he was to be
Bishop of Rochester, on his way to his famous uncle's last
post in life, the Archbishopric of York. The tenure of Dr.
Dolben's pastorate of St. Giles's, Cripplegate, was from
November 1663 to March 1663-4, when he was succeeded by
John Pritchett, a veteran also in favour on account of his past
fidelity to Royalty and Episcopacy. Pritchett, in succession
to Dolben. was to have the pastoral care of Cripplegate parish
during the whole of the rest of Milton's life ; for, though he
was to be promoted to the Bishopric of Gloucester in 1672,
it was to be with liberty to hold his Cripplegate vicarage
and other benefices in commendam ^.
We already know what the Restoration had done for
Milton's great adversary, the naturalized Frenchman, Dr.
Peter Du Moulin, author of the jRegii Sanguinis Clamor ad
Coelum (ante, p. 213). What is more curious is that there
seemed a chance in 1662 that there would be naturalized
in England, in connexion with the Church of England, as
French preacher and chaplain at Court, Du Moulin's famous
substitute and scapegoat in the Regii Sanguinis Clamor affair,
Alexander Moras : — Confirmed at last in his ministry of the
Protestant church of Charenton by the decision of the
national French Protestant synod of Loudun in the end of
1659 (ante. Vol. V. pp. 633-635), Moras had for two years
been a great man in the Parisian world. His pulpit oratory
was something unprecedented. The peculiarity of his preach-
ing, in respect of matter, " consisted," says Bayle, " in sallies
"of imagination, which contained ingenious allusions, with
" an air of paradox well calculated to surprise the hearer
1 Newoourt's Eepertorium, 1. 83 (for , hen and Pritchett) ; Memoirs of Puller,
Pory), and I. 64, 182, and 358 (for Dol- Taylor, and More.
E e a
420 LIFE OF MILTON AND HISTOEY OP HIS TIME.
" and keep his attention on the stretch. But the manner of
'"his delivery constituted the principal charm. Hence it
" happens that on paper his sermons are very far indeed from
" being so admirable, and that most of those who have sought
"to imitate him have made themselves ridiculous." In
Moras, in fact, Paris then possessed one of those great popular
preachers, not unknown in later times, whose reputation de-
pends not only on fine voice and elocution, but also on liberal
deviation from the conventionalities of pulpit decorum. Then,
as now, there were critics disposed to carp at such an erratic
style of pulpit oratory, and Morus, in the midst of his fatne,
had not a few detractors. His co-pastor M. Daille, who had
stood by him in his late difficulties, had turned against him
after nearer acquaintance. That, it was hinted, might be
owing to chagrin on the part of the good M. Daille at being
eclipsed by a colleague ; but there was much variety of
opinion generally about Morus and his eloquence. " It was
" disputed among people of good taste whether what was best
" in him was solid or merely superficial, and whether he ought
" to be called a flash or a light." With these criticisms of his
style of preaching there mingled, of course, despite his ac-
quittal by the synod of Loudun, recollections of the old
scandals against his character. Morus,. therefore, in all his
new Parisian celebrity, was by no means yet at his ease.
The Restoration of Charles II. to his British dominions seems
consequently to have come upon him as an event that might
have a bearing on his own fortunes. Was his present position
in Paris the best attainable ? Was he not a Scot by descent,
and had he not worked and suffered, in a manner that had
made him notorious over Europe, in the cause of English
Royalty during its eclipse? Long ago, before he had left
Geneva, and afterwards through his changes of abode in
Holland, there had been overtures for bringing him over to
London as pastor for the French church there, or for inviting
him to the prineipalship or a theological professorship in one
of the Scottish universities; and what if now the offers should
take higher shape ? There is proof that Morus, about this
time, did feel some such fascination towards the British
MOKUS IN LONDON'. 421
Islands. He had cultivated the aequaintance of Lord HoUis,
the first ambassador for Charles at the French court ; and there
is extant in manuscript a Latin letter of his to the Scottish
Earl of Lauderdale, of date Jan. 1, 1660-1. "To the most
" noble and illustrious Lord, the Earl of Lauderdale^ Alexau-
" der Morus, S.P.D.", is the heading of this letter, the whole
strain of which is disagreeably characteristic. " Although
" none of those who know me can doubt with what joy my
" mind was suifused by that revolution of afiairs for the
"better among you which has been brought about by the
"marvellous providence of God, yet I have thought it my
" duty to tender some sign of my congratulation on this
" new year's day to you in chief, most illustrious Earl, who,
" having so long and so grievously suffered for the King,
" have risen again with the King himself, and, .liberated by
" the hand of God, now walk abroad adorned also with the
" royal munificence. God be my witness, who has restored so
" bright a light from such darkness, what true sighs I fetched
" from my inmost breast when first I heard that you were
" thrown into prison by that servant of Satan and wicked
" parricide ; nor shall I lie if I say that I was in Christian
" sympathy with you all through your incarceration, inas-
" much as I never prayed to God all that time but you were
"some part of my prayer." So the letter proceeds, to the
length of about as much more, wishing prosperity to the Earl
in future and a worthy exercise of his great abilities. There
is no hint whatever in the letter of any reason why it should
have been written, save generally that Morus in Paris desired
that his existence should be remembered by the powerful Earl
of Lauderdale, whether by the King's side in London, where
he usually was, or on his visits of business to Scotland. We
are thus prepared for the sequel. — In the month of September
in the same year, some fresh complaint against Morus having
been made to the consistory of the Parisian church, he asked
leave of absence for a short stay in England. He did arrive
in England in December 1661 ; and in Evelyn's Diary; under
the date of Sunday the 12th of January 1661-2, we read
as follows : — " At St. James's chapel preached, or rather
432 LIFE or MILTON AND HISTOEY OF HIS TIME.
" harangued, the famous orator Monsieur Morus, in French,
" There was present the King, Duke, French Ambassador,
" Lord Aubigny, Earl of Bristol, and a world of Roman
" Catholics^ drawn thither to hear this eloquent Protestant."
Nor was this all. The great fast-day sermon before the
King and Court on the 30th of January 1661-2, the anni-
versary of the Royal Martyr, was also in French, and by M.
Morus. His text was Romans viii. 28, " And we know that
" all things work together for good to them that love God,
" to them who are the called according to his purpose " ;
and the eloquent sermon itself in the original French may be
yet read by the curious. — There seems to have been no at-
tempt, however, on the part of the King, Lauderdale, or any
of the rest, to detain M. Morus in England. He was back in
Paris in June 1662, and once more among thorns. The
Parisian consistory, or congregational court, having taken up
the complaint against him that had been in progress during
his absence, he was at once suspended from the pastoral office
till it should be farther investigated. There ensued such a
riot next Sunday in the church of Charenton between h^s
partisans in the congregation and his enemies that the service
had to be stopped ; there was an appeal in consequence to the
civil courts, with the result of a reference of the case to a
"colloquy" — ^i.e. to a conference of the neighbouring Protes-
tant churches, analogous to a " presbytery " in Scotland or
" elassis " among the English Presbyterians ; by that colloquy
the suspension was confirmed ; and not till May 1664 was
Morus reinstated in his pastorate by a judgment given in his
favour at last by the Synod of the province of Berri. Hence-
forward there is nothing more concerning him that needs
record here, save that, after four final years of unabated
fame among the Parisians for peculiar pulpit oratory, but
unabated division of serious public opinion all the while re-
specting his real worth, he died in September 1670, in a
manner reported by his admirers as most Christian-like and
edifying, in the house of the. Duchess de Rohan i. — Farewell,
1 Bayle's Diotipuary, Art. Morus; derdale Papers among Add. MSS in
Bruce's Life of Morus, 235—352 ; Lau- British Museum, Vol. 23, 115 f.' l •
BISHOP GAUDEN OF EXETEE. 433
then, at tbis point, to poor Moras, one of the most singular
personages, and surely one of the mtist pitiable, within the
horizon of this History I One wonders how he spent his six
months in London. Hearing that MiljxDn was living in a poor
and neglected way in a street ealfed Jewin Street, did he
give himself the pleiasure of strolling in that direction some
afternoon and passing and repassing Milton's door ? If so,
hush ! The door opens ; Milton comes out, leaning on the
arm of. an attendant ; and, as they walk slowly away, the
attendant tells Milton of a dark foreign-looking man on the
footway oppositej staring after them steadily.
There was one ecclesiastic in Clarendon's new Church of
England whose relations to Milton, though Milton cannot yet
have been aware of the fact, were more extraordinary than those
of either Du Moulin or Morus. This was Dr. John Gauden)
who had been made Bishop of Exeter in November 1660,
when the new episcopate was first arranged by the addition of
the necessary number of new men to the nine surviving pre-
Restoiation bishops. The story of .Dr. Grauden and his
behaviour in that bishopric is, strangely enough, part and
parcel of Milton's biography in Jewin Street.
Born in Essex in 1605, Gauden had been educated in arts
at St. John's College, Cambridge, but had transferred himself
to Wadham College, Oxford, for his divinity studies. In these
he had been very diligent and distinguished ; and, after hav*
ing been known as a successful college tutor, he had become
chaplain to the Earl of Warwick. His connexion with this
great Parliamentarian peer led to his being invited to preach
before the House of Commons on the 19th of November 1640,
when the Long Parliament was in the first flush of its revenges
against Laud, Strafford, and the other agents of " Thorough " ;
and for his sermon on this occasion, sufl[iciently Puritan for the
temper of the moment, he had received the thanks of the
Evelyn's Diary of date. — To the infer- been added some new material from
mation, abundant enough, heretofore records preserved in Geneva and Am-
acoessible about Morus, in Bayle, Bruce, sterdam. See Appendix II. to Vol. III.
Milton's anti-Morus pampHets, Morus's of Professor Stern's Milton imd Seine
own writings, and the other authorities ^eit.
we have had occasion to cite, there has
424 LIFE OP MILTON AND HISTOET OF HIS TIME.
House. Made D.D. in 1641, he had already held one or two
inferior benefices when, in 1643, he was collated to the valu-
able rectory and deanery of Becking in his native county, by
express order of the Lords' House addressed to Archbishop
Laud in his prison. He held the living all through the time
of the Civil Wars, with the reputation of a moderate Parlia-
mentarian, not objecting to the Covenant, if he had not even
signed it himself, but latterly more and more a sympathizer
with the unfortunate King and his family, and a Prelatist in
essentials rather than a Presbyterian. A notable appearance
of his at a critical moment had been in a tract printed by
Royston early in 1648-9 under the title of " The Meligious and
Loyal Protestation of John Gauden, Br. in Divinity, against the
present purposes and proceedings of the Army and others about the
Trying and Destroying of our Sovereign Lord the King : Sent to a
Colonel to he presented to the Lord Fairfax and his General
Council of Officers the first of January, 1648." As only Dr.
Hammond besides, among the Prelatic clergy, had ventured
on a similar protest, while as many as forty-seven Presbyterian
ministers had protested on the same occasion, the bold act was
remembered to Ganden's credit among the Royalists. It did
not deprive him, however, of his rectory of Becking. He
continued in that living as one of those clergy of the Estab-
lished Church of the Commonwealth and the Protectorate
who yet retained their principles of moderate episcopacy, while
disusing the liturgy and otherwise conforming to necessity.
Of a considerable series of publications which came from his
pen in Oliver's Protectorate the chief were Hierapistes, or a
Defence ly way of Apology of the Ministry and Ministers of the
Church of England in 1653, The Case of the Ministers^ Maintenance
ly Tithes in the same year, and A Petitionary Memonstrance
to Oliver in 16^5 on behalf of the Episcopal clergy, then
threatened by the well-known temporary edict of his Highness.
Of some celebrity as an author by these publications, Gauden
was no less celebrated as a preacher ; and among his published
sermons was one preached in 1657-8 at the funeral of Crom-
-well's son-in-law, Mr. Robert Rich, grandson and heir-apparent
of the Earl of Warwick. After Cromwell's death there had
BISHOP GAUDEN OF EXETBE. 425
been few more stirring men for the Restoration than Dr.
Gauden of Bocking. Ucclesia Anglicanm Suspiria, setting forth
her former constitution compared with her present condition, was
one of his publications in 1659 ; on the 36th of February 1659
-60, just after the reseating of the secluded members, he had
preached the thanksgiving sermon for that event before Monk,
and the Lord Mayor, Aldermen, and Council of the City ; on
the first day of the Convention Parliament, April 25, 1660, he
had been selected, together with Calamy and Baxter, to preach
before the Commons on the solemn fast of the following
Monday ; and thanks to Dr. Gauden for this sermon were part
of the proceedings of the House on May 1, the very day when
the King's letters were read there and the Bestoration deter-
mined. There was little surprise, therefore, when Dr. Gauden,
who had meanwhile added the Mastership of the Temple to his
Essex rectory, and had also become one of his Majesty's
chaplains, appeared as one of the new bishops. The Arch-
bishopric of Canterbury fell to Juxon, and the rich Bishopric
of Winchester to Duppa; but, if Sheldon obtained the
Bishopric of London, and Morley that of Worcester, who
could suppose the Bishopric of Exeter too much for Gauden ^ ?
Gauden went to Exeter in December 1660. In the London
Mercuries Publicus of Jan. 3, 1660-1, there is an account of his
joyful reception in that cathedral city. Before that account
appeared, however, Lord Chancellor Hyde had received a com-
munication from Gauden which must have startled him. He
had probably never received another such communication in
his life. It is dated " Exeter, St. Thomas's day [i.e. Dec. 21]
1660," and is signed " The Unhappy Bishop of Exon." The
letter is of considerable length. "■ My Lord," it opens, " hav-
" ing made a tedious and chargeable journey to Exeter, and
^' having been received with very great favour and respect from
" the gentry and people of all sorts, yet, to my infinite regret,
"I find my fears verified that it is no preferment, butabaiiish-
" ment of me, not only from my country, friends, and aequaint-
"ance, but from all kind of happipess, which I formerly
1 Wood's Ath. III. 612—618 ; Biog. Joumals of April 25 and May 1, 1660 ;
Britaim., Article Gauden ; Commons Thomason Pamphlets of 1659 and 1660.
426 LIFE OF MILl?ON AND HISTORY OP HIS TIME.
" enjoyed with great content, in a most elegant competency as
" to estate, dwelling, and reputation. Now, to my horror, I
"find myself condemned to all degrees of infelicity hy the
" distresses of that condition to which I am eipOsed. Here
" is no house yet free to receive me as Bishop ; if it were free,
" yet it is so horribly confused and unha,ndsome that it seems
" a prison rather than a palace, unless I will be so foolish as
" to lay out a vast sum of money to make it iit for use ; and,
" when this is done (that I may with more splendour be un-
" done), there is not a revenue competent to keep house with
" any honour and hospitality. I find it most certain (which
" I at first told your Lordship) that the revenue is short of
" ,^600 per annum, and this so broken with the incumbrances
" of purchasers that neither rent nor fines are expectable for a
"long time in any such proportion as can support me. So
" that, in good earnest, my Lord, unless I had the art of living
"like a cameleon, by the air of good words, I conclude myself
" to be destroyed, with all mine, by this my most unhappy en-
"gagement to be Bishop of Exeter." After more in the
same strain, the letter proceeds, " I make this complaint to
"your Lordship because you chiefly put me upon this adven-
" ture. Your Lordship commanded me to trust in your favour
"for an honourable maintenance and some such additional
" siipport as might supply the defects of the Bishopric. If
"this may not be had, I must not return again to Exeter,
" unless I will be in love with beggary and contempt. I have
" not so little sense of my relations as to sacrifice them with
" myself upon the high place of episcopal honour ; nor am I
" so unconscious to the service I have done to the Church and
" his Majesty's family as to bear with patience such a ruin
" most undeservedly put upon me. Are these the effects of his
" liberal expressions who told me I might have what I would
" desire ? . . . For my past credulity, folly, and ex;penses,
" I must bear them as well as I can. I shall ever be able so
" far to vindicate myself as to let the world see that I deserved
" either not to have been made a bishop against my will or to
" be entertained in that oSice to my content. But I find no
" regard is had of me ; which makes me thus to represent to
gauden's letters to clarendon. 427
" your Lordship the prospect of my unhappy affairs at present.
" If the King and your Lordship do not think me worthy of
" a support becoming this station, I beseech you give me leave
" to degrade myself, and resign the honour, yea the burthen,
" which I cannot bear ; nor can my nearest relation, whose
" happiness is dearer to me than my own. I must not see her
"soul sink under the just apprehension she hath of being
"miserable because mine. Her pious, loyal, and generous
" spirit is too conscious to what I have done, both known and
" unknown to the world, in order to buoy up the honour of
" the Royal Pamily, the Church and Episcopacy, to bear with
" any temper the straits to which she sees me, with herself and
" her children, exposed. I will run upon any rock, short of
" sin, rather than see her perish, who hath deserved of me
" beyond all the world. If your Lordship will not concern
" yourself in my affairs (who can easily find ways to ease them,
" and by your repeated expressions invited me to repose myself
" on your care of my content), I must make my last complaint
" to the Xing ; and, if his Majesty have no regard for me, but
"leaves me to deplore and perish, as neither a considerable
" enemy nor friend, I will yet retire to God and my own con-
" science, where I have the treasure of those thoughts which I
" am sure every one cannot own who think themselves so much
" worthier than myself, whom they joy to see thus driven upon
" a banished and beggarly condition, while themselves swim in
" plenty. There needs some commendam of a^'400 per annum
" at least to be added to the revenue of Exeter ; nor will this
" make me live so well as I did before. I moved your Lordship
" once for the Savoy, which I presume the Bishop of London
" will not keep, nor would I desire it if I were so well provided
" for as he is. If nothing be done, I must be undone if I live
" here ; from whence I hasten to retreat with extreme grief
" and horror, as from a precipice. Let me be degraded from
" this unwelcome dignity, and restored, as Dr. Gaiiden, to my
" living of Bocking ^."
Evidently there was some mystery here. No one could
have sent such a letter to the Chancellor without the con-
' Clarendon State Papers (1786), Vol. III. Supplement, pp. xxvi— xxvii.
428 LIFE OF MILTON AND HISTORY OF HIS TIME.
sciousness of some extraordinary claim. What was it ? This
appears from subsequent letters from Gauden to the Chan-
cellor. Not quite, indeed, from his very next letter, dated
" Morrow after Christmas day, 1660," and signed " The Sad
" Bishop of Exeter." It is in the same strain as the former,
written five days before. " My Lord," it begins, " I yesterday
" spent the saddest Christmas day that ever I did in my life,
" among strangers, in a place where I have not an house to
" live in " ; and the rest is equally lugubrious. He repeats
that he would never have accepted the Bishopric of Exeter
but for the persuasions and promises of the Chancellor ; but
he also throws the responsibility on Sheldon, Bishop of
London, and Morley, Bishop of Worcester, both of whom had
often assured him, he says, that the bishopric was worth no
less than j^^lOOO or ^■'1200 a year. He is sure now, on more
exact calculation than when he last wrote, that it is not worth
more than ^''500 a year at the utmost ; he finds, therefore,
that he has " come to an high rack and empty manger'" ; and
he repeats his protest that, unless his income is augmented by
some in commendam benefice added to the bishopric, he must
consider himself defrauded. " I am sorry," he continues, " to
" see myself reduced to this after-game. Dr. Morley once
" ofiered me my option, upon the account of some service that
" he thought I had done extraordinary for the Church and
" Royal Family ; of which he told me your Lordship was
" informed. This made me modestly secure of your Lord-
" ship's favour, though I found your Lordship would never
" own your consciousness to me, as if it would have given me
" too much confidence of a proportionable expectation." He
mentions again the Savoy in London as a convenient addi-
tional benefice for which he had already petitioned the
Chancellor, and which would be more fitly attached now, he
thinks, to the poor bishopric of Exeter than to Sheldon's rich
bishopric of London. But again he concludes with general
whining and threatening. " If I must perish, poor, banished,
" and forsaken, yet I know how to perish with honour." This
letter not having produced the necessary efieet, Gauden again
takes up his pen on the 21st of January 1660-1, and writes a
GATJDEN AND THE MIEON SASILIKM. 429
letter to the Chancellor, beginning " My Lord, give me leave
" once more, in my serenest temper, to express my sense of
" my affairs at Exeter." In this letter he reiterates at length
his demand either for something better than Exeter or for
some addition of at least ^500 a year to ite revenues ; but
now he throws off all reserve as to the ground of his claims upon
the King's gratitude and munificence. " Nor will your Lord-
" ship startle at this motion/' he says, " or waive the pre-
" senting it to his Majesty, if you please to consider the
" pretensions I may have beyond any of my calling, not as
" to merit but duty performed to the Royal Family. True, I
" once presumed your Lordship had fully known that arcanum;
"■ for so Dr. Morley told me at the King's first coming, when
" he assured me the greatness of that service was such that I
" might have any preferment I desired. This consciousness
" of your Lordship (as I supposed) and Dr. Morley made me
*■' confident my affairs would be carried on to some proportion
" of what I had done and, he thought, deserved. Hence my
" silence of it to your Lordship, as to the King and Duke of
" York ; whom, before I came away, I acquainted with it,
" when I saw myself not so much considered in my present
"disposure as I did hope I should have been. What sense
" their royal goodness hath of it is best to be expressed by
" themselves ; nor do I doubt but I shall, by your Lordship's
" favour, find the fruits as to something extraordinary, since
" the service was so, — not as to what was known to the world
" under my name in order to vindicate the Crown and the
" Church, iut what goes under the late Messed King's name : the
" EtKoji' or Portraiture of his Mcyesty in his Solitudes and Suffer-
" ings. This Book and Figure was wholly and onh/ my invention,
" making and design, in order to vindicate the King's wisdom,
" honour, and piety. My wife indeed was conscious to it, and
" had an hand in disguising the letters of that copy which I
'■'■ sent to the King in the Isle of Wight by the favour of the
" late Marquis of Hertford, which was delivered to the King
" by the now Bishop of Winchester. His Majesty graciously
" accepted, owned, and adopted it, as his sense and genius,
" not only with great approbation, but admiration. He kept
430 LIFE OF MILTON AND HISTORY OF HIS TIME.
" it with him ; and, though his cruel murderers went on to
" perfect his martyrdom, yet God preserved and prospered this
" book, to revive his honour and redeem his Majesty's name
" from that grave of contempt and abhorrence, or infamy, in
" which they aimed to bury him. When it came out, just
" upon the King's death, good God ! what shame, rage, and
" despite filled his murderers ; what comfort his friends !
" How many enemies did it convert ! How many hearts did
" it mollify and melt ! What devotions it raised to his pos-
" terity, as children of such a father ! What preparations it
" made in all men's minds for this happy Restoration, and
" which I hope shall not prove my affliction ! In a word, it
" was an army, and did vanquish more than any sword could.
" My Lord, every good subject conceived hopes of restora-
" tion, meditated revenge and reparation. Your Lordship
" and all good subjects, with his Majesty, enjoy the real and
" now ripe fruits of that plant : O let not me wither, who was
" the author, and ventured wife, children, estate, liberty, life,
" and all but my soul, in so great an achievement, which hath
" filled England and all the world with the glory of it. I did
" lately present my faith in it to the Duke of York, and by him
" to the King. Both of them were pleased to give me credit,
" and own it as a rare sei-vice in those horrors of times. True,
" I played this best card in my hand something too late; else I
" might have sped as well as Dr. Reynolds and some others.
" But I did not lay it as a ground of ambition, nor use it as
"■ a ladder, thinking myself secure in the just value of Dr.
" Morley, who I was sure knew it, and told me your Lordship
" did so too, who I believe intended me something at least com-
" petent, though less convenient, in this preferment. All that
" I desire is that your Lordship would make that good which
« I think you designed, and which I am confident the King
" will not deny me, agreeable to hisroyalmunificence, which pro-
" miseth extraordinary rewards to extraordinary services. Cer-
" tainly this service is such, for the matter, manner, timing, and
" efficacy, as was never exceeded, nor will ever be equalled^."
' Clarendon State Papers, Vol. III., ment that the King's munificence pro-
Supplement, pp. xxvu— XXX. The state- mised " extraordinary rewards to extra-
GAUDEN AND THE ElKON BASILIKE. 431
There are yet three more letters from Gaudjen in Exeter to
the Chancellor in London. The first, of date Jan. 25, 1660-1,
is merely to introduce an official of the diocese who is going
to London on business ; but it reminds the Chancellor of the
writer's disconsolate condition. The next, dated Feb. 20, re-
news his complaint at more length, and with some additional
particulars and suggestions. "A Bishop," he says, had
" need have ^2000, at least ^£''1500, a year, to live here as is
" fitting j where, in earnest, there is not ^500 per annum in
" constant revenue." He intimates also that he is shortly to
make a journey to Booking, to remove his goods from his
dear old rectory, "the saddest journey that ever I did."
Unless something is done for him, he hints darkly that he has
one, and but one, course left. " But I will not despair," he
adds, " till I return back to Exeter, after I have preached on
"Easter Day before the King, and have waited on your
" Lordship. But I wish never to return again to Exeter, if
" it be not more to my own and my relations' content than
" these last two months have been." In the last letter, dated
March 6, he again announces that he is preparing to
come to London, and prays the Chancellor for some answer
before he leaves Exeter. " If I were enabled any way to live
" here as becomes me," he says, " I would cheerfully apply to
" settle ; but I easily see how impossible it is for me so to do
" without ruin and dishonour unless I have some augmenta-
" tion to bear the charges of so dear a place, where I am
" exposed to answer all men's civility and expectations. If
" there be no help for me, I beseech your Lordship to tell me
" so, that so I may from despair take counsel, and bury myself
" in some private obscurity by his Majesty's permission, there
" to pray for his Majesty and prepare to leave a most unpleas-
" ing world ^"
The first five of these six letters of Gauden seem to have
been received and read by Hyde without a word of reply.
ordinary services " is a clever reference "ordinary manner do not oblige their
by Ganden to a phrase in a speech of " Princes to reward them in an extra-
his Majesty to the two Houses on the " ordinary manner " (Lords Journals of
13th September, 1660 : " I am none of date.)
" those who think that subjects by per- i Clarendon State Papers, Vol. Ill,
"forming their duties in an extra- Supplement, pp. xxx — xxxii.
433 LIFE OF MILTON AND HISTORY OF HIS TIME.
He was probably consulting with the King, the Duke of York,
Secretary Nicholas, Duppa, Sheldon, AUi Morley on the
troublesome subject. For Gauden, it appears, had not trusted
entirely to his letters to Hyde, but had written, on the 17th
of. January, to the Duke of York, begging his mediation with
the King. He had also, it would seem, applied to the King
himself directly or through Secretary Nicholas ; for there had
been this message to him from the King in a letter from
Secretary Nicholas, dated Jan. 19 : " As for your own par-
" ticular, he desires you not to be discouraged at the poverty
" of your bishopric at present ; and, if that answer not the
" expense that was promised you, his Majesty will take you
" so particularly into his care that he bids me to assure you
" you shall have no cause to remember Booking." But,
after Gauden's sixth letter, of March 6, 1660-1, announcing
his speedy arrival in London, Hyde thought it best to let the
Bishop have an answer from himself, in anticipation of their
meeting. On the 13th of March, accordingly, he wrote as
follows : " My Lord : I do assure you upon my credit all your
" letters make a deep impression on me, though it is not
" possible for me to acknowledge them particularly, as I ought
"to do, being not only oppressed with severe weight of
" business, but of late indisposed in my health. I am heartily
" glad that we are like shortly to meet and confer together ;
" and then I doubt not but that I shall appear very faultless
" towards you, how unfortunate soever I have been in con-
\" tributing somewhat to your uneasiness, — which I was far
" from pressing upon you when I once found the overture was
" unacceptable to you. I do well remember that I promised
" you to procure any good commendam to be annexed to that
" see, — wliich I heartily desire to do, and long for the oppor-
" tunity, — and likewise that you should be removed nearer to
" this town with the first occasion : for which undertaking I
"have likewise good authority. If the bishops who have
"been made since the King's return feel no other content
"than from the money they have yet received from their
" revenue, I am sure all with whom I am acquainted are most
" miserable, they having not yet received wherewith to buy
clarendon's letter to gauden. 433
" their bread. I shall be very glad to find when we meet that
" it is in my power to contribute anything to your Lordship's
" content. In the meantime I do assure you I am more
" afflicted with you and for you than I can express, and the
" more sensibly that it is the only charge of that kind is laid
" against me ; which, in truth, I do not think that I do
" deserve. The particular which you often renewed I do corf ess
" was imparted to me under secrecy, and of which I did not take
" myself to be at liberty to take notice ; and, truly, when it ceases
" to be a secret, I know nobody will be glad of it but Mr. Milton.
" I have very often wished I had never been trusted with it. My
" Lord, I have nothing to enlarge, all I have to say being fitter
" for conference than a letter ; and I hope shortly to see you,
" when you will find me very ready to serve you as, my Lord, your
*' Lordship's most affectionate servant, Edward Hyde, C ^."
Gauden did come to London, where he seems to have re-
mained through the whole of the rest of 1661, residing latterly
in Gresham College, but much about the Court. He took a
leading part, one finds, in the famous Savoy Conferences of that
year, between the twelve chosen bishops with nine assessors
on the one side, and the twelve chosen Nonconformist chiefs
with nine assessors on the other. "The eonstantest man'' in
attendance after the first meeting on April 15, Baxter tells
us, was " Dr. Gauden, Bishop of Exeter " ; and, in closing his
account of the Conferences, Baxter pays a special tribute to
Gauden for his excellent behaviour in them. " He was the
" only moderator of all the bishops," says Baxter, " except our
1 The substance of Gauden's Letter the words given from Hyde's letter, in
to the Duke of York of Jan. 17, 1660-1, his Life of Milton in 1698, and again,
and of Secretaiy Nicholas's message more fully, in his Amyntor, or Defence
from the King to Gauden of Jan. 19, of Milton's Life in 1699 ; and from that
and also the purport of Hyde's letter to time the abstract of Hyde's letter, with
Gauden of March 13, with some of the its curious words of reference to Mr.
actual words put in italics in the text, Milton, was quite familiar by repeated
were first made public in 1693 in a quotation in books long before Gauden's
pamphlet on the ^t'Aon Basifo'fe subject own letters were divulged in 1786 in
called " Truth brouffht to Light." In the Clarendon State Papers. The ori-
that pamphlet an account was given of ginal of Hyde's, however, did not ap-
these and other Gauden papers, as then pear there with Gauden's six, to which
in possession of a Mr. Arthur North, a it was a reply. It was first published
merchant in Tower Hill, London. He complete in 1824 ; and I take it, and
had married a sister of the wife of also the words of Secretary Nicholas's
Charles Gauden, one of the Bishop's message, from an article on the Eikon
sons, and so had inherited the papers. Sasili&e in the Edinburgh Eeview for
Toland referred to the papers, and quoted June 1826,
VOL. VI. F f
434 LIFE OF MILTON AND HISTOBT OF HIS TIME.
" Bishop Eeynolds : he showed no logic, nor meddled in any
" dispute or point of learning, but a calm, fluent, rhetorical
" tongue ; and, if all had been of his mind, we had been recon-
"eiled." While attending the Savoy Conferences^ Gauden
also found time to write, or at least to publish, some new
pieces in explanation of his views of ecclesiastical policy.
His Anti-Baal-Berith, or the Binding of the Covenant and
all Covenanters to their good behaviour, his Considerations
toiiehing the lAtwgy of the Church of England, his Cotmsel
delivered to 44 Presbyters and Beacons after they had ieen or-
dained in the cathedral church of Eseeter, and A Life of Mr.
Richard Hooker, prefacing a new edition of Hooker's works,
were all published in 1661. Meanwhile, we may be sure, he
was looking after his own interests with Clarendon, the King,
and the Duke of York, and pestering them on every opportu-
nity with his claims on account of his precious secret. Some-
how they appear to have satisfied him or persuaded him to be
patient; for it is not till near the end of 1661 that he again
becomes clamorous. On the 28th of December in that year,
when the Cavalier Parliament had been sitting again for a.
month after its adjournment, and Gauden had duly taken his
place in the House of Lords with the other bishops, he began
to dun Clarendon again in a letter dated from Gresham
College. Duppa, Bishop of Winchester, was then ill and un-
derstood to be dying : might not that bishopric, which
Gauden had thought his due when Duppa got it, be now
promised him ? " My truly honoured Lord, — The daily report
" of my friend the Bishop of Winchester's decay as to bodily
" strength (whom God preserve and comfort) doth no doubt
" give the alarm or watchword to many Bishops, especially
" them of us who have high racks and deep mangers, as expect-
" ing by the vacanpy of that great spe some advantageous
" tide to our little frigates. For upon the tenter are we poor
" bishops set all our lives, like Pharaoh's lean kine. We
" look meagrely and eagerly upon the opulency of others."
The Bishopric of Winchester is reputed to be worth .ag'5000
or .^6000 a year. But Gauden would not be unconscionable.
He suggests that the income of the Bishopric should be
GAXJDEN AND THE EAEL OF BEISTOL. 435
reduced to about half, the other half being employed to mend
the incomes of several of the poorer sees. " It were happy if
" no English bishoprics were less than i^'lOOO per annum, nor
" above ^^''2000, except the archbishoprics." Winchester with
about ^■'2000 a year would be perfectly sufficient for himself;
and he need not remind the Chancellor of his own promises
and the King's, or of the services on which they were founded.
" All the world knows how much I appeared in the most dark
" and dangerous times, how much 1 stood in the gap ; and
" something I did which the world enjoyed, but knew not of."
He is forced now not to be wanting to himself, " not to rely
too much on other men's justice and ingenuity " ; but he can-
not doubt that the Chancellor will second his application to the
King that he may have Winchester when it is vacant. " As
" I amj" he adds, " I can do little, being in an Arabic or ambu-
" latory way of living, without any convenient habitation or
" competent maintenance ^."
While Gauden was waiting for the death of Duppa, he made
acquaintance for the first time with no less a person than the
great Earl of Bristol, the chief declared Roman Catholic at
Courtj Clarendon's most severe critic, and all but his rival in
the real counsels of the King. " Most noble Lord," Gauden
writes to the Earl on the 20th of March 1661-2, "" I was much
" surprised yesterday, at the Prince's lodgings, both with the
" admiration of your knowledge of that great arcanum, and at
" the most generous expressions of your Lordship's esteem and
" favour for me; in both which I do the more rejoice because
" they have given me an opportunity to be known, under a
" character not ordinary, to a person whom of all men living
" I have, at my distance^ esteemed one of the most accom-
"plished by nature, education, experience, and generous
" actions. Nor do I find him (as I have two other persons)
" looking with any oblique or envious eye upon that which
" was the eflFect of a just and generous loyalty. I cannot
" imagine what key your Lordship has to the cabinet, unless the
1 Baxter's Life (edit. 1696); Part II. Clarendon State Papers, Vol. III., Sup-
306 and 363 ; Lords Journals from Nov. plement, pp. xov — xovi.
2Q, 1661 ; Wood's Ath. IIL 612—618 ;
pf a
436 LIFE OF MILTON AND HISTOBT OF HIS TIME.
" King or Royal Duke have lent you theirs ; nor am I curious
" to enquire, because I know it dwells with a very valiant and
" loyal breast, as well as with a most eloquent tongue, which
" only speaks of those things which are worthy of it." Only
six days after the date of this letter, viz. on the 26th of
March 1663, Duppa died ; and that very day Gauden addressed
a second letter to the Earl from Gresham College. "The
"venerable Bishop of Winchester," he begins, "hath this
"morning left all human affairs. How far your nobleness
" shall see fit to make use of the occasion I leave to your great
" wisdom. It seems a good omen of Providence that my con-
" earns should be credited to so generous a breast and so potent
" a speaker." Lest this should not be enough, another letter
to the Earl follows within twenty-four hours. This letter,
which is longer than either of the preceding, is an argument
to the effect that there will be nothing imprudent or incon-
gruous in appointing him to such a very high post as the
Bishopric of Winchester. He is aware that the great secret of
the authorship of the Mkon Basilike must on no account be
divulged, and that any very extravagant show of his Majesty's
favour might " put the world upon a dangerous curiosity " in
that direction if he had not other and universally recognised
claims. But these he had in abundance. He takes the liberty
of sending the Earl one bold and all but unique manifesto of
his for Royalty when it was most prostrate, of which his
Lordship may not previously have seen a copy, — doubtless his
protestation to Fairfax and the Army in January 1648-9
against the King's trial and intended execution ; and that was
but a sample of his many services done openly and with his
name. "Both enemies and friends saw me always standing
" in the gap, with a bold and diligent loyalty, doing my
" duty by preaching, printing, and acting, to the great vexa-
" tion and confusion of those great tyrants and usurpers. So
"that my confidence in his Majesty's special favour is not
" built on that hidden foundation, but on many other open and
" ample superstructures, such as my Eierapistes, or Defence of
"Clergy, also my 'Upa AaKpva, The Tears of the Church of the
" England; besides many other less tracts and parrhesiastjc
GAUDEN MADE BISHOP OF WOBCESTEK. 437
" sermons before General Monk and the City, also before the
" Parliament restored to liberty, and these in the very paroxyms
" or critical points of English affairs." There being such asso-
ciations with the name of Dr. Gauden in all men's minds,
there could be no amazement in the general world, no " sole-
cism of state," if he were raised to the see of Winchester,
even though the true ground for the promotion were, in his
Majesty's esteem, that vast aaonymous or concealed service
" which is consecrated to the highest merit, reputation, and
" honour in the world, as the Urn of the Royal Ashes and the
" Embalming of a Martyred King." The promotion, in any
case, cannot be too much for him if it fits any of the others
he sees about him ; " whom I cannot think giants," he says,
" or myself a pygmy." However, he has had experience of
the uncertainties of courts, and does not know what may
happen.— To this the Earl of Bristol had replied in a letter
expressing the greatest regard for Gauden and his interests,
but apparently advising him to take disappointment magnani-
mously should it come ; for in a short note of April 1, acknow-
ledging the letter, Gauden says, " I suppose these things are
" already concluded against me at Court, Possibly there will
" be such a pretention as neither Winchester nor Worcester
"nor the Lord Almoner's place will be bestowed upon me."
— Gauden's next letter to the Earl, which is of date May 1,
contains nothing expressly about the personal matter, but is
chiefly on the subject of a toleration or indulgence for Quakers
and all other peaceable Nonconformists ; on which subject
Gauden expresses those broad and liberal views which he un-
derstood to be the Earl's own, and in which the Earl, as a
Roman Catholic, had a personal interest. In the intervening
month the great business had been settled. Gauden, after all,
was not to have Winchester. Morley of Worcester had been
appointed to that grand bishopric ; and Gauden was to be
content with being Morley's successor in the less lucrative,
but far from bad. Bishopric of Worcester. The arrangement
as regards Morley was complete in April 1663 ; but the cotige
d'elire for the election of Gauden to Worcester was not issued
till May 13. Clarendon, who cared a hundred times more
438 LIFE OF MILTON AND HISTORY OP HIS TIME.
for Morley than for Gauden, had managed the matter in his
own way ; and there is a tradition that the King, thinking
himself pledged to Gauden for Winchester, was not altogether
satisfied, and expressed the same in handsome terms to Gauden
in a private interview ^-
Gauden remained in town throiagh May and June 1663,
seeing the passing of the Act of Uniformity and the other
Acts that distinguished the conclusion of the first session of
the Cavalier Parliament, and also the arrival of the Portuguese
Queen, with other metropolitan events of those months. As
late as July 9 he dates two more letters to the Earl of Bristol
from Gresham College. But that month he was in Worcester,
taking possession of his new see, the receipts of which during
the month intervening between Morley's removal from it and
his own appointment had been granted him by a special
warrant of June 14. He was at Worcester on the fatal St.
Bartholomew's day, Aug. 24, and may have had his own
thoughts over that result of Clarendon's, Sheldon's, and
Morley's policy for the Church of England. But he was not
long to be Bishop of Worcester. He had been ill for some
time of a painful internal disease, and on the 20th of Sep-
tember 1662 he died at Worcester, aged fifty-seven years. He
was buried in Worcester Cathedral ; where there is or was a
monument to him, with his effigy in half, holding a copy of the
M&on Basilike in his hand. By Clarendon, and by the King
too, at the time, his death may have been regarded as a good
riddance ; but the bishop had left a widow, who was a woman
of spirit, and not likely to give up the benefits of a secret
which might be worth so much to herself and her family.
She petitioned the King for a half-year's rents of the bishopric,
pleading that her husband had made little by so short a tenure,
and that his removal from Exeter to Worcester had cost him
,^200. The petition was refused ; Mrs. Gauden, with her
four sons and a daughter, left Worcester, carrying her papers
with her ; and the successor of the author of the Eikon Basilike
1 Clarendon State Papers, Vol. III. Toland'a Amyntar (edit, of 1761), 222—
Supplement, pp. xovi — xoix ; Calendat 223.
of State Papers for 1662, May 13 ; and
DEATH OF BISHOP GAUDEN.
439
in the see chanced to be the scholar who in his exile had trans-
lated the famous book into Latin, at the King's request, for
circulation on the continent. This was Dt. John Earle, who
for the last year or so had been Dean of Westminster^-
In the course of the Gauden affair, as we have seen, the
prime minister of the Restoration had deigned one glance
in the direction of blind Mr. ex-Secretary Milton. " Truly,
when it ceases to be a secret,'' he had written to Gauden on
the 13th of March 1660-1, " I know nobody will be glad of it
but Mr. Milton." The words are not unkindly or unrespectful,
but it may be questioned whether they do hot miss what
would have been Milton's real feeling if he had then been
. 1 Clarendon State Papers, Vol. III.
Saf)pleinent, pp. xcix— c ; Calendar of
Domestic State Papers for 1662, June
l4 ; Wood, lit mprd ; Toland's Atnyntor,
Wtl ; Account of Gauden in Kennett's
Regiiter. A courageous effort to revive
belief in the lloyal authorship of the
Eikon was made by the Eev. Dr. Chris-
topher Wordsworth, Master of Trinity
College, Cambridge, in his Who Wrote
kihon Basilike 1 published in 1824, and
its sequel in 1828 called King Charles
the First the Author of the Icon Basilike
further proved. The two volumes ate
an extraordinary example of pertinacious
self-bfe*ilderment and love's labour lost.
The case had been hardly tenable since
the publication of "rolahd's proofs of the
Gauden aiithorSihip in 1698 and 1699,
following the True Account published
in 1692 by G«Uden'& former cUrate, Dr.
Anthony Walker. At all events it had
been tihtenable since the beginning of
the eighteenth century, when the public
had distinct information from Bishop
Burnet that he had been told by King
James II. hiniself that the Bikon
Basilike was not of his father's writing,
and when there was the significant ad-
ditional evidehce of the total omissioli
of all reference to the Eikon Basilike in
Clarendon's History, notwithstanding
that Clarendoii had at one time shared
in the popular admiration of the book
i& thfe King's own and spokeii of it as
of immortal consequence for him and
Ms cause (see ailte, Vol. IV. p. 131).
But since 1786, when the Glmendon
State Papers were published, with
Gauden's own letters among them, the
case might have seemed absolutely
hopeless, till Dr. Wordsworth's plead-
ings gave it a new hearing. Then the
Edinburgh Review article of June 1826,
Archdeacon Todd's reasonings in 1825
and 1828, and Hallam'S long note ap-
pended to the first edition of his Con-
stitutional History, again dismissed it
from court. No case of the kind, how-
ever, it would appear, can ever be killed
in'ecoverably ; and, if the reader wants
to see the latest pleading for the royal
authorship of the Eikon Basilike, he will
find it in an article of tliirty-five pages
in th« Chwrch of England Quarterly
Beview for January 1879. My impres-
sion is that any candid reader of that
article, iSfhiiih repeats the Substance of
the reasonings of Dr. Wordsworth with
some additions, wUl form from the
article itself an opinion directly the op-
posite to that argued for. With all the in-
genuity shown in pointing out Some in-
congruities among the Gauden witnesses
&nd calling contradictory evidence irl
the shape of what stray persons said
between 1680 and l700, or said they
had heard others say previously, the
total effect of the argument for the pos-
sibility of ths royail autliorship is but
as a feather-stroke against the massive
and conclusive consideration which re-
mains, and which stares the reader in
the face thfoiighoiit the article, — viz.
that Gaiiden, if he was not the author
of the Eikon Jiixdlike, was the maddest
and most impudent liar and itnpostor in
English history, and that Clarendon,
who could have exposed him, crushed
him, made him bite the earth or stand
in a pillory, was his soft-headed dupe,
and a sheer idiot and coward in the
whole business.
440 LIFE OF MILTON AND HISTORY OF HIS TIME.
told the secret in full. Would it have been any greni
pleasure to Milton to have his own shrewdness in his first
suspicions as to the fictitious nature of the Ei&on Basilike
now publicly acknowledged, when at the same time it would
appear that in answering that book he had not taken up a
King's gauntlet, as he had ventured to call it, though with
reserve, in the preface to his Mkonoklasies, but had only been
dealing with a rhetorical concoction by a rector of Bocking ?
True, the exposure of the fiction, even now, could not be
without effect. Would not the royalists resent having been
deluded into such enthusiasm, such days of adoration and
nights of weeping and sobbing, by a deliberate literary trick ;
and, whenever they looked again at the familiar copies of the
MJcon Basilike in their households, would it not be with a
sense of shame ? All this was possible ; but who could tell ?
If the King's own proclamation had gone out that he had
ascertained that the Eikon Basilike had not been written by
his father, but by Dr. Gauden of Bocking, but that his
Majesty now thanked Dr. Gauden for that splendid secret
service, and would make him Archbishop of Canterbury after
Juxon's death, would any large section of the Royalists have
done anything else than approve ?
As there was no such proclamation, Milton, in Jewin
Street, whatever he knew, had to suppress his knowledge.
It was not for him now to concern himself about public
matters, or to publish his thoughts about that or this oc-
curring at Whitehall. He must employ his time otherwise.
Night and day, evening and morning, he must pursue those
quiet studies among his books which the Clarendon ad-
ministration, with all its faults, did not and could not forbid,
and his leisure for which was far from unacceptable, though
it had come in no such calm of assured and confirmed
Republican liberty as he had fondly imagined, but amid the
wrecks of liberty, with ghastly heads exposed on spikes within
a mile or two of his dwelling, and with the roar of Court
debauchery and City debauchery close to his ears.
Before the end of 1663 considerable progress must have
been made by Milton in the dictation of his Paradise Lost.
PARADISE LOST IN JEWIN STREET. 441
As he had begun it seriously in 1658, he may, notwithstand-
ing the terrible interruptions of the intermediate years, have
brought a book or two of the poem complete with him into
Jewin Street. There is no certainty on the subject; but, if
we suppose Books I. and II., substantially as we now have
them, to have been so brought into Jewin Street, then Milton
had already put on paper the important beginnings of his
grand story. The course of that story so far had been wholly
in the regions of Hell and Chaos; but now it has reached
the point of Satan's first advent within the human universe
which he is to ruin. Hence, at the opening of Book III.,
where the story emerges, as it were, from infra-mundane
darkness into mundane and heavenly light, there is an auto-
biographic interjection or pause : —
Hail, holy Light, offspring of Heaven first-born !
Or of the Eternal co-eternal beam
May I express thee unblamed ? since God is light,
And never but in unapproachfed light
Dwelt from eternity, — dwelt then in thee,
Bright effluence of bright essence increate !
Or hears't thou rather pure Ethereal stream,
"Whose fountain who shall tell? Before the Sun,
Before the Heavens, thou wert, and at the voice
Of God, as with a mantle, didst invest
The rising "World of "Waters dark and deep.
Won from the void and formless Infinite !
Thee I revisit now with bolder wing,
Escaped the Stygian Pool, though long detained
In that obscure sojourn, while in my flight.
Through utter and through middle Darkness borne,
"With other notes than to the Orphean lyre
I sung of Chaos and Eternal Night,
Taught by the Heavenly Muse to venture down
The dark descent, and up to re-ascend.
Though hard and rare. Thee I revisit safe,
And feel thy sovran vital lamp ; hut thou
Revisit'st not these eyes, that roll in vain
To find thy piercing ray, and find no dawn;
So thick a drop serene hath quenched their orbs,
442 LIFE OF MILTON AND HISTOKY OF HIS TIME.
Or dim suffusion Veiled. Yet not the more
Cease I to wander where the Muses haunt
Clear spring, or shady grove, or sunny hill,
Smit with the love of sacred song; but chief
Thee, Sion, and the flowery brooks beneath,
That wash thy hallowed feet, and warbling flow,
Nightly I visit : nor sometimes forget
Those other two equalled with me in fate,
So were I equalled with them in renown,
Blind Thamyris and blind Mseonides,
And Tiresias and Phineus, prophets old :
Then feed on thoughts that veluntary move
Harmonious ilumbers; as the wakeful bird
Sings darkling, and, in shadiest covert hid.
Tunes her nocturnal note. Thus with the year
Seasons return ; but not to me returns
Day, or the sweet approach of even or morn,
Or sight of vernal bloom, or summer's rose,
Or flocks, or herds, or human face divine;
But cloud instead and ever-during dark
Surrounds me, from the cheerful ways of men
Cut off, and, for the book of knowledge fair.
Presented with a universal blank
Of Nature's works, to me expunged and rased,
And wisdom at one entrance quite shut out.
So much the rather thou. Celestial Light,
Shine inward, and the mind through all her powers
Irradiate ; there plant eyes ; all mist from thence
Purge and disperse, that I may see and tell
Of things invisible to mortal sight.
My own impression from ttis passage is that it was written
before the Restoration, in the house in Petty France. It is
possible, however, that it was written in the Jewin Street
house; in which case I should take it as marking Milton's
resumption of the poem on his first settlement in that house
in 1661. If we do so assume that Books I. and II. were
complete before the Restoration, and that Milton recommenced
in Jewin Street with the invocation which opens Book III.,
it would be interesting to know how far he had advanced
PABABISE LOST IN JEWIN 8TEEET. 443
beyond that point before the end of 1662. Now, it is at the
beginning of Book VII., or exactly half-way through the
whole poem, that there occurs the next memorable pause or
passage of autobiographic reference : —
Descend from Heaven, Urania, by that name
If rightly thou art called, whose voice divine
following, above the Olympian hill I soar,
Above the flight of Pegasean wing !
The meaning, not the name, I call; for thou
Nor of the Muses nine, nor on the top
Of old Olympus dwell'st; but, heavenly-born.
Before the hills appeared or fountain flowed.
Thou with Eternal "Wisdom didst converse,
Wisdom thy sister, and with her didst play
In presence of the Almighty Father, pleased
With thy celestial song. Up led by thee.
Into the Heaven of Heavens I have presumed.
An earthly guest, and drawn empyreal air.
Thy tempering. With like safety guided down,
Return me to my native element;
Lest, from this flying steed unreined (as once
Bellerophon, though from a lower clime)
Dismounted, on the Aleian field I fall,
Erroneous there to wander and forlorn.
Half yet remains unsung, but narrower bound
Within the visible Diurnal Sphere.
Standing on Earth, not rapt above the pole.
More safe I sing with mortal voice, unchanged
To hoarse or mute, though fallen on evil days.
On evil days though fallen, and evil tongues.
In darkness, and with dangers compassed round.
And solitude; yet not alone, while thou
Visit'st my slumbers nightly, or when Morn
Purples the East. Still govern thou my song,
Urania, and fit audience find, though few :
But drive far off the barbarous dissonance
Of Bacchus and his revellers, the race
Of that wild rout that tore the Thracian bard
In Ehodope, where woods and rocks had ears
444 LIFE OF MILTON AND HISTORY OF HIS TIME.
To rapture, till the savage clamour drowned
Both harp and voice; nor could the Muse defend
Her son. So fail not thou who thee implores;
For thou art heavenly, she an empty dream.
P. L. VII. 1-39.
The post-Restoration tone is here unmistakeable. Not only
does the poet tell us generally that he has fallen on evil days,
evil tongues, in darkness and solitude, and surrounded with
dangers; he is writing, he tells us, on the edge of another
literature than that to which he would or could belong, a
literature which is no literature to him, but "a barbarous
dissonance of Bacchus and his revellers," the London literature
of Davenant's restored laureateship. The precise date at
which the passage was dictated is of small consequence. If
not written in 1662, it was to be written the next year or
the next, and certainly in the house in Jewin Street. In
that house, now unknown and probably not extant, there
must have been the composition and dictation of a large
portion of the poem.
The house in Jewin Street being of so much importance in
Milton's life after the Restoration, one would like to know
something of the domestic conditions of Milton and his
family while they resided there. Let the date of our inquiry
still be the year 1662.
The Restoration had, of course, brought a great change for
the worse in Milton's pecuniary circumstances. Before the
Restoration, according to the best calculation from all the
evidence, he possessed about .^4000 in money variously in-
vested, besides small pieces of house property in London (his
native house in Bread Street one of them) and small pieces of
country estate (that of Wheatley in Oxfordshire, held by extent
upon the Powells, being one of them), worth in all perhaps
jg'150 a year ; and he was in receipt, moreover, of ^200
a year of official income for his secretaryship. It was as if
one now-a-days had ^^"14,000 or so in bank, about ^500
a year in rental from other sources, and .^700 a year of
official income. The Restoration made havoc of that. His
Milton's pecuniaet circumstances in 1662. 445
official income then ceased entirely. But this was not all.
Part of his investments, as we know (Vol. V. p. 703), had
been in government securities ; and we learn definitely from
Phillips that the sum so invested was jf 2000, « which he had
" put for security and improvement into the excise office, but,
" neglecting to recall it in time, could never after get it out,
" with all the power and interest he had in the great ones of
"those times." The words, though not perfectly precise,
imply that the loss was occasioned by the Restoration. Phillips
also mentions "another great sum" lost, apparently about
the same time, "by mismanagement and for want of good
advice." Remember also Milton's fees to the sergeant-
at-arms on his release from custody in December 1660, and
other incidental expenses and disturbances of his estate at
the Restoration ; and it will be a fair computation that there
remained to Milton after the Restoration about .^1500, in
money, with yearly rents to the amount of about ,^100 from
other property. The rate of interest on money in those
days varied very much, but a safe rate may have been six or
seven per cent. At such a rate Milton would derive a,bout
.5^100 a year from his capital of ^1500 ; which, added to his
rental from other property, would give him about ^''200 a
year to live on, without touching his savings. That, I
imagine, is about the state of Ms affairs in the year 1662.
It is as if now-a-days a person who had been much richer
had still about ^^700 a year left, besides about ^5000 in
bank. Thus, though Milton's losses had been " such as might
well have broke any person less frugal and temperate than
himself," Phillips's farther remark that he had still " a con-
siderable estate, all things considered," seems perfectly ac-
curate ^.
' Besides the data for this calculation between 1662 and the year of his death
furnished by facts in Milton' s family- there were to be farther expenses and
history already known to us, there is losses, obliging him to draw on his
the important datum of the value of capital, it seems that Phillips's figure of
Milton's estate at his death. Phillips's £1600 for that capital, though not right
account is that "he is said to have (lied for 1674, may have been about right
worth £1500 in money, besides house- for 1662. In such matters absolute
hold goods." Bat, as we shall lind, accuracy is impossible, but an approach
Phillips was here misinformed, and to the probable fact is better than
Milton's estate at his death did not nothing,
realize quite £1000. As, in the interval
44^ LIFE OF MILTON AND HISTOET OF HIS TIME.
However Milton's three daughters may have been disposed
of during his time of abscondence, and afterwards during his
temporary stay in Holborn, they were certainly with him in
his house in Jewin Street. In the end of 1663, Anne, the
eldest, was in her seventeenth year, with a handsome face, but
lame and deformed, and with a defect in her speech ; Mary,
the second, had just reached her fifteenth year, and was
active enough ; and Deborah, the youngest, and the likest to
her father, was only in her eleventh. Motherless for ten
years, and the youngest remembering nothing of her motherj
the education of the poor girls had been none of the best.
They had received some kind of nursing in the house in Petty
France in the first years of their father's widowerbood and
blindnessj when he had to depend on servants ; thsey had
doubtless been better tended there during the year of his
second raarriagei, when his "late espoused saint" managed
the household; but, after her death, when the youngest was
but six years old, they had again been left to such homely
teaching as could be given by any day-governess, with irregu-
lar lessons from their blind father. " None of them were
" ever gent to school, but all taught at home by a mistress
" kept for that purpose," was Deborah's information to in-
quirers long afterwards on that point. Whether their grand-
mother Mrs. Powell ever looked in to take superintendence of
them is doubtful ; but there is evidence which suggests that
this lady, in the time of her own greater or less indigence,
passed somewhere in Westminster with the sons and daughters
that still remained about her, did not altogether lose sight of
the three children of the. daughter she had lost. It is just,
possible that, during the time of Milton's abscondence and
danger, the girls were quartered with their grandmother.
Wherever it was, the training had not been such as to im-
prove them. Nor was Milton's own method with them,
when they returned to him in Jewin Street, a fit substitute
for the motherly supervision they required. He did indeed
devise a kind of drill for them, which, while it suited himself,
gave them the advantage of being constantly with him and
always occupied. The eldest could read, but could not write,
MILTON ANB HIS THREE DAUaHTEES. 447
her- bodily deformity having prevented that accomplishment
or made it seem needless ; the second could read well and
write tolerably j the youngest, who was to be the best pen-
woman of the three, and the best book-woman, can have had
but a child's scrawl and a child's power of reading in the
Jewin Street days. The drill to which Milton began in those
days to subject them, but especially the two youngest, is
described by Phillips. He made his daughters " serviceable
" to him," says Phillips, " in that very particular in which
" he wanted their service, and supplied his want of eye-sight
" by their eyes and tongues. For, though he had daily about
" him one or other to read to him, — some, persons of man's
" estate, who of their owi^ accord greedily catched at the
" opportunity of being his readers, that they might as well
" reap the benefit of what they read to him as oblige him by
" the benefit of their reading ; others, of youpger years, sent
" by their parents to the same end, — yet, excusing only the
" eldest daughter by reason of her bodily infirmity and diffi-
"cult utterance of speech (which, to say the truth, I doubt
" was the principal cause of excusing her), the other two were
" condemned to the performance of reading and exactly pro-
" nouncing of all the lauguages of whatever book he should
" at one time or other think fit to peruse : viz. the Hebrew
"(and, I think, the Syriac), the Greek, the Latin, the Italian,
" Spanish, and French." The method so described was to
continue for years, and can by no means have reached such
extraordinary efiiect in 1663. Even then, however, remember-
ing Milton's notions of the rapidity with which languages
might be taught, one can iniagine the second daughter, Mary,
reading French, Latin, and Italian texts feirly for her father,
and the pretty little Deborah in ber first prattle towards
being a polyglott. There were girls then, and there have
been girls since, who could have turned such training to
account, however sternly given, and emerged from it as high-
minded and unusually learned women. For, whatever may
have been Milton's notions of the capacity of women or of the
proper education for thejn, Phillips's farther account, to the
effect that he trained his daughters merely to read aloud to
448 LIFE OF MILTON AND HISTORY OF HIS TIME.
him in any Latin, Greek, or foreign book, as he had occasion,
" without understanding one word " themselves, is credible
only in the sense that it roughly describes the actual result. " It
"had been happy indeed," as Phillips adds, " if the daughters
" of such a person had been in some measure inheritrixes of
" their father's learning ; " but that they were not such in-
heritrixes may have lain more with their reception of his drill
than with his intention in it. They found it irksome ; they
found their lives in Jewin Street irksome ; the poor things
were in dumb rebellion. One knows not how many pictures
and engravings there have been by artists, or how many
more there will be, representing the blind Milton seated in
state, dictating Paradise Lost to one or other of his three
daughters, all reverently grouped round him, or kneeling
beside him, with looks of affection and admiration. The
sad fact is far otherwise. Already, at our present date, we
repeat, they were, all three, in dumb rebellion. The crippled
eldest, whose defect in speech excused her from reading,
and who could not write at all, was in secret league with
the second, who bore for the present the chief burden of the
drudgery of reading, but can have been of small use as an
amanuensis ; and these two beguiled the innocent little
Deborah. Have you ever known, reader, in a household
apparently respectable, but ill-regulated, little deceits and
peculations carried on by some of the members at the ex-
pense of the head, — clandestine traffickings with the servants,
or with the people who come round with bags in the mornings
or afternoons ? There was something of the sort in the house
in Jewin Street. " All his said children did combine together
" and counsel his maid-servant to cheat him in her market-
" ings ; " and " his said children had made away some of his
" books, and would have sold the rest of his books to the
" dunghill women." These horrible statements were made on
oath after Milton's death by a witness who had received the
information from himself, and in a context which referred
the facts to the year 1662. O that house in Jewin Street,
with the blind, self-absorbed, great man in it, and the three
girls left to their own devices, and the ragwomen coming
THE POWELL FAMILY IN 1662. 449
round to the doors ! The poor pitiable orphans ! Anne and
Mary have chosen for themselves"; but will no one take away
the terrified little Deborah i?
The grandmother, Mrs. Powell, might have taken all three
away now, if that would have been any benefit to them. The
struggle which she had carried on so bravely under the Com-
monwealth for the recovery of the wrecks of her late husband's
property at Forest Hill or elsewhere, and in which the latest
documents in her suit prove that she had some beginnings
of success in the Protectorate, had been resumed after the
Restoration, and then naturally with more favourable chances.
She must have made satisfactory progress before the 10th of
May 1662 ; for on that day there was a new proof at Doctors'
Commons of the will of the late Mr. Powell, of Dec. 30, 1646,
on which so much depended (Vol. III. pp. 636-637). In that
will Richard Powell, the eldest son of the deceased, had been
appointed sole executor, but with a provision that, if he did
not accept the executorship, then the widow herself, Mrs.
Powell, was to be sole executrix instead. Now, on the first
probate of the will on the 36th of March 1647 (Vol. III.
p. 640), it was she, and not her son, who had undertaken the
hopeless business ; and, so far as we had occasion to trace her
suit with the Commonwealth authorities, i. e. to 1651, we
heard only of her in connexion with it (Vol. IV. pp. 145-146,
236-246, and 336-341). After that date, however, her eldest
son, Richard Powell, is found conjoined with her in the suit ;
and at that point in the Protectorate where, as we have said,
the documents leave the suit with some signs of a beginning
of success, mother and son were still acting together, with
Christopher Milton as one of their legal advisers and counsel,
and with Milton himself apparently concurring so far as he
was concerned ^. But now, on the 10th of May 1662, there
J Phillips's Memoir of Milton ; Fao- order for repayment to Mrs. Powell or
simile by Mr. Marsh of Receipts given her son, by the Treasurers at Gold,-
by Milton's three daughters for their smiths' Sail, of iei92 4s. Id. of the
shares of his estate after his decease ; composition money that had been paid
Evidence in the case of Milton's Will by Mr. Pye on the Forest Hill property;
(Todd's Milton, I. 179). and Mrs. Powell was still applying for
2 See the latest documents in the suit that sum in January 1655-6, not having
in. Hamilton's Milton Papers, Appendix then received it.
109—128. ^In May 1654 there was an
VOL. VI. Gt.g
450, LIFE OF MILTON AND HISTORY OF HIS TIME.
is a second probate of the late Mr. Powell's will, still to be
seen in Latin on tbe margin of the first in the record of the
will. Oath is then taken before Sir William Merioke, knight,
Poctor of Laws, by " Eichard Powell, Esq.," as the son of the
deceased and the first appointed executor, and the former
arrangement making his mother executrix is annulled. This
seems to imply that, matters now being in a hopeful way, the
widow was glad to hand over the farther management to her
son, the head of the family, and now forty-one years of age.
He, indeed, was the party principally interested ; for, by the
will, the estate of Forest Hill and all the other recoverable
property of the deceased had been bequeathed to him, subject
to the payment of his mother's jointure, and to a provision
for his numerous brothers and sisters. Whether he did
realise all that had thus been bequeathed to him and the rest
of the family is uncertain ; but, as we do find him in posses-
sion of Forest Hill shortly after our present date, and figuring
as the squire of the place, just as his father had done, the
inference is that the Restoration brought back some degree of
prosperity to all the Powells.
Nor was Milton's interest in this improvement of the
fortunes of the Powells only of that indirect kind which one
might have in the bettered circumstances of a family one had
known long, and with which one had been connected, though
not very agreeably, by marriage. Milton was directly in-
terested in two respects. In the first place, was the small
Wheatley property in Oxfordshire now reclaimed and recovered
by his brother-in-law, Mr. Eichard Powell, as well as the
main estate of Forest Hill ? If so, was the process of recovery
the legal one of ending Milton's extent on that property by
paying Milton the full sum of .^"300, with long arrears, for
which the extent had been given? In that case, though
Milton now parted with the Wheatley property and lost the
.5^80 a year which was his estimated income from it, he had
the compensation, of course, of the considerable capital sum
which his brother-in-law must have paid him for the release.
It is quite possible, however, that in such a transaction in
those days the Royalist would have the advantage, and so
THE POWELL FAMILY IN 1662. 451
that Milton had to part with the Wheatley property on very
losing terms. But, on whatever terms he parted with it, he
had yet another reason for keeping the Powells in view after
their reaequisition of that property and of Forest Hill. There
remained due to him the marriage-portion of J^IOOO which
had been promised him with his first wife, hut had never
been paid. There had been express recognition of this
obligation in the late Mr. Powell's will. Precisely in that
portion of the will which related to the Wheatley property
there were these words : " And my desire is that my daughter
" Milton he had a regard to, in the satisfying of her portion,
"and adding thereto in case my estate will bear it." The
" daughter Milton," who had stood by his bed-side when he
expressed this wish, had died not many years after himself;
but were not the three girls she had left the proper heirs of
whatever had been hers ? Should the Powells ever be again
the flourishing Oxfordshire family they had once been, was
not Milton entitled to expect that his wife's marriage-portion
of j^lOOO should be forthcoming for the benefit of her three
children ? That this matter was in Milton's thoughts more
and more frOm 1663 onwards we shall find evidence in time.
But was it convenieijt for the restored squire of Forest Hill
to remember, among the other claims upon him by his mother
and his living brothers and sisters, this more distant claim of
his three nieces,- daughters of a dead sister ? One has an im-
pression that the girls were more in their grandmother's
thoughts than in their uncle's; but altogether the link
between the Powells and Milton's household, after the Re-
storation, cannot have been kindly or cordial. And so, for
better or for worse, the three girls remained with Milton, the
little Deborah growing up with her sisters ^.
1 Mr. Powell's Will, with protates, "charged for, seven hearths." Hunter's
as cited ; previous account of Milton's surmise was correct. — A fact that had
interest in the Wheatley property (Vol. escaped me when I gave my first ac-
IV. pp; 236—246, 336—341) ; and Hun- count of the Powell family (Vol. II. pp.
ter's Milton Notes (1850), p. 33,— where 491 — 501), is that the eldest son Eichard
it is stated that "in the roU of persons PoweU was then a student of law. He
" contributing to the Hearth Tax in had been admitted of the Inner Temple
"1665 the principal person at Forest in May 1638. I owe this information
" Hill is a Mr. Eichard PoweU, probably to Miss Thomasin E. Sharpe, of whose
"a brother-in-law of Milton, who is genealogical researches, and her kind-
GgZ
453 LIFE OF MILTON AND HISTOBT OP HIS TIME,
Among Milton's visitors in Jewin Street must have been
some of his friends of former days. Darie, as we know, was
no longer in England; and, though he was to be ahve till
after 1674, still a stirring man here and there on the conti-
nent, the relations between him and Milton can now have been
but matter of recollection. Hardly either among Milton's
possible visitors in Jewin Street can we reckon Hartlib, Our
last glimpse of this memorable man is early in 1662, and it is
a sad one. He was then old, broken down with bodily pains, if
not wholly bedridden, reduced also to extreme poverty by the
loss of the pension granted him under the Protectorate, and for a
continuation of which, or at least some bounty for his relief, on
the ground of his long and arduous public services of various
kinds, he had in vain petitioned the Convention Parliament.
Nothing more is heard of him ; and he seems to have died
without much notice in the course of that year. Needham,
who deserved worse, had fared better. Once more a practi-
tioner of physic, and going about in safety, or producing his
pardon under the great seal when he was in danger of arrest
by too zealous authorities, he had again, it seems, apostatized
so far as to publish a so-ealled Short History of the English
Mehellion, consisting of a collection of the newspaper verses he
had written when he was the Royalist Mercurius Pragmaticus
and not yet Bradshaw's and Milton's converted Mercurius
Politicus. His calls on Milton, one fancies, must now have
been very rare. Whether the musician Henry Lawes kept
up his acquaintance with Milton after the Restoration is also
a matter of conjecture only. His circumstances may have
made the continued intimacy difficult. For, " outliving the
tribulations which he endured for the royal cause," he had been
restored, with all honour and respect, to his old place and title
as chief court musician and gentleman of the Chapel Royal,
and had composed the anthem for the Coronation of Charles.
In any case Milton's pleasure in the continued or renewed
friendship would have been but brief. " For a short time,"
\8ss in oommunioating their results, I .the Inner Temple from the preserved
shaU have to make father acknowledg- documents relative to Milton's nunou-
ment. Bat I ought to have known the pative will,
general fact that he was a member of
MB. SAMUEL PARKEE, 453
we are told, "Lawes lived happy" in his restored office,
" venerated by all lovers of music " ; but he died in October
1662, and was buried in Westminster Abbey. — About that
time the probability is that among the friends of Milton who
were steadiest in their attendance on him were Andrew
Marvellj Gyriack Skinner, and young Lawrence. As to
Marvell there is no doubt whatever. To the very end Marvell
was to be faithful, and we learn from himself that he found
time, amid his Parliamentary duties, to be pretty often with
Milton in Jewin Street ^
One day, wheh Marvell was in Milton's house, he found a
young man there whom he had never met before. This was
a Mr. Samuel Parker, son of John Parker, an energetic lawyer
who had distinguished himself by his business activity, and also
by publications, in behalf of the Parliament and the Common-
wealth, and who, after having been sergeant-at-law under Oliver,
had risen to be one of the barons of exchequer during the rule of
the restored Rump. Of this office he had been deprived at or
shortly before the Restoration ; but he had so far made his
peace with the new powers that, in July 1660, at the first call
of sergeauts-at-law for Charles II., he had, by Hyde's influence,
been made one of them. His son Samuel, then only twenty
years of age, was in great perplexity as to the line of conduct
that would be proper for himself after this submission of his
Puritanical and Republican father. Educated at Wadham
College, Oxford, on the strictest Presbyterian principles, he
1 Kennett's Eegister, pp. 868 — 873 mentioned in Ms Diary under the date
(Hartlib and Lawes) ; Bayle, Art. Du- Aug. 7, 1660, as referred to in a former
reus ; Wood's Ath. III. 1182—1187 note (ajite, p. 200) t If so, I may be
(Needham) ; MarveU's Behemrsal Trans- right in my former statement that
prosed in Grosart's edition of Marvell, Hartlib left a daughter, married to a
III. 498—500 ; Dircks's Memoir of German named Eoder, besides the one
Hartlib, pp. 22- — 39. 1 observe that married to the German Clodius ; if not,
Hartlib, in Ms petition to the Conven- that was a mistake. The last known
tion Parliament, styles himself " Samuel letter of owr Hartlib is one to Dr. Wor-
Hartlib, Sen." I infer that he had a thington, of date Feb. 14, 1661-2, in
son, or nephew, of the same name ; and which he says, " This may be the last of
in the London Gaeette for April 16 — 19, mine for aught I know." His death
1666, I find an advertisement signed shortly after that is mainly an inference
"Sam. Hartlib, Secretary." Hartlib from the sudden cessation of his cor-
himself, in a letter of Nov. 22, 1660, respondence. But Evelyn, answering
speaks of " a daughter and a nephew " inquiries about him in 1703, speaks,
as two relatives depending upon him though rather ambiguously, of his
in his poverty. Was not this junior having gone ahroad, and having died at
Samuel Hartlib the friend of Pepys Oxford " after his return from travel."
454 LIFE OF MILTON AND HISTORY OF HIS TIME.
had come to be esteemed "one of the preciousest young
men in the University." He was one of a club of students of
different colleges who, on account of the frequency of their
prayer-meetings and their usual restriction of themselves to a
diet of " thin broth, made of oatmeal and water only/' were
nicknamed The Gruelers. He had just taken his B.A. degree
when the Restoration came. Was he then to throw in his lot
with the suffering Nonconformists, and so sacrifice all his future
prospects in life ? For a time he had no doubt on the subject.
" He did pray, cabal, and discourse," says Wood, " to obstruct
" episcopal government, revenues, and authority." It was in
this state of mind, that, having incurred the displeasure of the
warden of his college, he had come up to London. What
attracted him to Milton is uncertain ; but the attraction must
have been unusually strong, for Marvell found that he was
perpetually with Milton or in his neighbourhood. He " wan-
" dered up and down Moorfields, astrologizing upon the dura-
" tion of his Majesty's government " ; and, Jewin Street being
but a step from Moorfields, he " frequented J. M. incessantly,
and haunted his house day by day," asking his opinions of
various matters, and consulting him as to the proper interpre-
tation of the signs of the times. Milton, we may suppose,
gave him the best advice he could, but may not have been
sorry when the young man left London, to return to Oxford
and reason out his difiiculties for himself^.
A more pleasant person to meet at Milton's than young
Mr. Samuel Parker must have been Dr. Nathan Paget. He
was the son of a Cheshire clergyman, had been educated at the
University of Edinburgh, where he took his degree of M.A.,
and had afterwards studied medicine at Leyden, where he
graduated as M.D., Aug. 3, 1639. He had been admitted an
extra-licentiate of the London College of Physicians, April 4,
1640, and incorporated as M.D. at Cambridge June 3, 1642;
since which time he had been in the practice of his profession
with much repute in London. He had been appointed physician
to the Tower by the Council of State of the Commonwealth in
1 Wood's Aft. IV. 225-226, and Fasti, II. 218 ; MarveU's Mehearsal Transprosed,
as beiore. ^ '
DE. NATHAN PAGET. 455
the first year of Milton's secretaryship, and had held the office
of Censor to the College of Physicians in 1655, 1657, and 1659.
He had known Milton well for a long time, probably from the
Aldersgate Street and Barbican days. He had his house in
Coleman Street, very near Jewin Street, and seems to have
been continually coming in to see Milton, partly as a friend
and partly as his medical attendant. The blindness, now total
for ten years, was a settled matter; but Milton's ailments
besides were serious enough, and had taken the form at length
of confirmed and severe gout. A call from Dr. Paget every
other day was as needful as it was agreeable ; and not un-
frequently, when Milton went out, it would be arm-in-arm
with the kindly physician \
Lady Ranelagh is not to be forgotten. She had gone to
Ireland, it may be remembered, in October 1656 (ante. Vol. V.
pp. 277-279), just before Milton's second marriage, and
Milton had then regretted much the loss he was to sustain by
the absence from London of one whose visits to him in Petty
France had helped to brighten all the previous years of his
blindness, and whose assiduity in his behalf he could only
describe by saying that she had stood to him in " the place of
all kith and kin." For two years or more the only compen-
sation he can have had must have been in occasional letters
from her. None such have survived ; but there are some pre-
served letters of hers from Ireland to members of her family in
England. They are so characteristic that an extract or two
from them may be welcome. A letter was written to her
brother. Lord Broghill, on the 17th of September 1658, just
after she had received in Ireland the news of the great Pro-
tector's death. "Dear Brother,^^ it begins, "I must own
" not to have received the news of his Highness's death un-
" movedly . . . Certainly he may justly be esteemed improvi-
" dent that, after such a warning, shall make no better pro-
" vision for himself than the greatest stock of such vanishing
" greatness comes to ; of which we have had express manifest-
" ations, both of his coming into and going out of his
1 Munk's EoU of the College of Physicians, 1. 224—225 ; Phillips's Memoir ;
knd ante, Vol, IV. p. 151.
456 LIFE OF MILTON AND HISTORY OF HIS TIME.
" government. And, if the common ctarity allowed to dead
" men be exercised towards him, in burying his faults in the
" grave with himself and keeping alive the memory of his
" virtues and great aims and actions, he will be allowed to
" have his place amongst the worthiest of men ... I doubt
" his loss will be a growing affliction upon these nations, and
" that we shall learn to value him more by missing him, —
" a perverseness of our nature, that teaches us, in every con-
" dition wherein we are, therewith to be discontent, by under-
" valuing what we have and overvaluing what we have lost. I
" confess his performances reached not the making good of his
" professions ; but I doubt his performances may go beyond
" the professions of those who may come after him." She
then goes on to append to " this great account of loss upon
public score " by Cromwell's death what she calls the " penny
half-penny " matter of her own particular loss by that event.
Cromwell, it seems, had been very friendly to her in the
matter of her Irish estates, and also in her difficult relations
with her husband. Viscount Ranelagh. " His now Highness,''
she says, meaning the Protector Richard, " seems not to me so
" proper a person to summon my lord [her husband], or to
'• deal with him in such an affair as his father did ; from
" whose authority, and severity against such practices as my
" lord's are, I thought the utmost would be done that either
"persuasions or advice would have effected upon my lord."
Equally interesting, in another way, is a letter of Lady Rane-
lagh's to her younger and favourite brother, Robert Boyle,
then still at Oxford, and in constant correspondence with her.
It is dated vaguely " January 7 " ; which may or may not
mean " January 7, 1658-9." Boyle seems to have told her
that he had been recently on a visit to the poet Waller, at his
house of Hall Barn, near Beaconsfield, and to have sent her
some courtly compliment from that gentleman. This is how
she receives it : — " For Mr. Waller, I never heard one word
" from him since I left him, but what you said in your last ;
" and I know his calling as a poet gives him licence to say as
" great things as he can, without intending they should sig-
" nify any more than that ke said them, or to have any higher
LADY EANELAGH AGAIN. 457'
"end than to make him admired by those whose admira-
" tions are so volatile as to be raised by a sound of words ;
"and, the less the subject he speaks of, or the party he
" speaks to, deserves the great things he says, the greater
"those things are, and the greater advance they are to
"make towards his being admired, by his poetical laws,
" Therefore, if he would be but as little proud of saying great
" things to me as I hope I shall be in hearing them from him,
" he would, I am apt to think, escape some guilt that now his
"fine sayings lay him under; and I could never give myself a
" reason why he, who can say such things upon things that so
" little deserved them, should be so unwilling to apply that
" faculty to those subjects that were truly excellent, but this,
" — that there his subject would have been debased by his
" highest expressions, and he humbled in the exercise of his
" wit, but, where he has employed it, his subjects have been
" raised by his fancy, and himself by reflecting upon it. I
" shall therefore return his great professions with a plain
"hearty wish that he may partake in gifts more excellent
"than his wit, and employ that for the time to come upon
"subjects more excellent than hitherto he has done; and,
"without compliment, I should gladly be serviceable to
"him, or his wife, — to whom I am a servant on much better
" accounts than he hitherto makes it possible for me to
be to him" Evidently Lady Ranelagh was a severe judge
of character.— She was certainly back in London in the end
of 1659, and so must have witnessed from the centre the
later events . of that year of confusion, ending in the drift
towards the Restoration and the Restoration itself. Had
she, in the months before the Restoration, resumed her
visits to Milton in Petty France, and was she thus cog-
nisant then of his more private thoughts, as well as, with
all the rest of the world, of his vain thunderings for the
dying Republic ? Milton's character was indubitably more to
her standard of greatness and manliness than Waller's. One
has to remember, however, that her brother. Lord Broghill,
had been one of those who, since the abdication pf Richard, had
seen no other possible close of the anarchy than the recall of
458 LIFE OP MTLTON AND HISTORY OF HIS TIME.
the Stuarts, and also tliat the whole family of the Boyles
welcomed the Restoratioa when it did come, and were taken
conspicuously into court favour. For a time she may have
had to keep somewhat aloof from Milton ; but there is little
doubt that Milton in Jewin Street could still think of her
as really unchanged to him, and that occasionally from 1662
onwards she went to see him, as before, from her house in Pall
Mall. That house was, of course, her brother Robert's resi-
dence when he was in London ; and ere long, leaving Oxford
altogether, he was to be permanently domiciled in it, all the
world admiring the mutual devotion of the incomparable
Boyle and his incomparable sister*.
Not long after Lady B,anelagh's return to London, her son,
Mr. Richard Jones, Milton's former pupil, was safely back
from his travels, in the company of his tutor, the German
Henry Oldenburg. They were back before the end of 1660;
and, when we remember their former intimacy with Milton,
and the confidential correspondence he had kept up with them
during their stay abroad, even to as late as December 1659,
we can hardly, in their case, any more than in that of Lady
Ranelagh, imagine estrangement. Both the German and his
pupil, however, had entered on paths of their own, which were
probably to lead them farther and farther from Milton's
society.
Oldenburg, though his tutorship of young Ranelagh was
at an end, remained, as we know, in the Ranelagh and Boyle
connexion. On account of his many merits, the philosophical
Boyle had taken him permanently under his patronage, and
they were now inseparable. When, on the 28th of November
1660, Lord Brouncker, Sir Robert Moray, Mr. Christopher
Wren, Dr. Petty, and the rest of the chiefs of the London
virtuosi resolved, at one of their meetings in Gresham College,
to organize themselves more regularly for the future into a
society "for the promoting of physico-mathematical experi-
1 Thiu-loe, VII. 395-397 (the first Lord BrogMU and the Boyle family may
letter quoted) ; Boyle's Works, V. S56- have heen one of those concurring in-
667 (the second letter), with Life of fluencea that saved Milton at the Eisto-
Boyle by Birch prefixed to Vol. I.— It ration,
is just possible that the influence of
HENET OLDENBURG IN 1663. 459
mental learning," Mr. Oldenburg's name, as well as Mr.
Boyle's, had been put down, as we saw, in the list of per-
sons, not already of the brotherhood, whom those present
judged " fit to join with them in their design," and who, if
" they should desire it, might be admitted before any other."
Accordingly, on the 26th of December, Mr. Oldenburg had
been actually elected a fellow, together with Mr. Boyle him-
self, the poet Denham, Mr. Evelyn, and Mr. Ashmole. From
that moment Oldenburg's heart and soul had been in the affairs
of the Society and especially in Mr. Boyle's contributions to it ;
and, when the Society received its charter of incorporation in
July 1662 and became The Royal Society, Oldenburg was
appointed by the charter itself, as we saw, to be one of the
first council, along with Lord Brouncker, Sir Robert Moray,
Boylcj Petty, and the. other chiefs, and he and Dr. John
Wilkins were appointed the joint secretaries. In fact,
Oldenburg became the one working secretary, discharging
most indefatigably the duties he has himself so particularly
described (ante, p. 397). Launched in this career of secretary-
ship, his faithfulness in which has kept his name memorable
in the annals of the Society, Oldenburg can have had little
time for continued intercourse with Milton. In any case it
might be inconvenient for him to remember that he had been
Milton's agent in distributing abroad copies of his Defences
of the English Commonwealth, and he could hardly repeat
his recommendation to Milton to employ himself in writing
a history of the Commonwealth and the Protectorates. Any
history of the English Troubles that could have come from
Milton could hardly have been dedicated now to Mr. Olden-
burg. As secretary of the Royal Society, he was in daily
association with Restoration ofiicials and courtiers ; and,
naturally enough, when Mr. Oldenburg married the only
daughter of Mr. John Durie, and a son was born to him,
the boy was to be called Rupert Oldenburg, having Prince
Rupert for his godfather ^.
Mr. Boyle had taken his nephew, young Mr. Richard
i Wood's Fasti, II. 197 ; Weld's History of the Koyal Society, I. 66—67, 96, 135,
and 259—260. '
460 LIFE OF MILTON AND HISTORY OF HIS TIME.
Jones, as well as Mr. Oldenburg, under his wing. The tastes
chiefly fostered in the boy, since he had passed from Milton's
hands to Oldenburg's, had been, as we know, those for
physical science ; and, when he came back from his travels, it
was with the reputation of an ingenious young gentleman
who might one day distinguish himself in his uncle's walks of
research. One is not surprised, therefore, at finding the
name of " Mr. Jones " immediately under that of Boyle him-
self in the list of persons thought fit and proper for election
into the infant Royal Society in November 1660, nor at
finding that, when Mr. Boyle published in April 1661, from
Herringman's shop, a collection of his speculative and chemical
papers, under the title of Certain Pk^sioiogicai Essays, andothef
Tracts, written, at distant times and on several subjects, his
nephew's name was prominently connected with the publica-
tion. Most of the papers having been written in the form of
letters to a young friend of the author, styled " Pyrophilus,"
care was taken to inform the public who this young friend
was. "To save the reader the trouble of guessing who is
" meant by that Pyrophilus to whom most of the following
" treatises are addressed, I think it requisite to infortn him,"
says Boyle, or Herringman for him, in a, prefixed note of
advertisement, "that the person veiled under that name is
" that hopeful young gentleman, Mr. Richard Jones, only son
" to the Lord Viscount Ranelagh and an excellent lady, sister
" to the author." Thus introduced to the world of letters and
science at the age of twenty-one, young Jones might easily,
one thinks, have done credit to his Boyle lineage and to the
part which Milton had taken in his education. The uni»
formly Mentor-like tone of all Milton's letters to him, how-
ever, has taught us what to expect. Evidently Milton had
all along been aware of some weakness in the young man's
character that would show itself as he grew older. Nor had
he judged wrongly. We have but to pass to the year 1662
to meet young Jones, where no pupil of Milton was to be
looked for, in Count Anthony Hamilton's Memoirs of Count
Grammont. In that celebrated, but very much overrated bookj
we have, as all the world knows, a picture of the Court of
MB. RICHABD JONES IN 1662. 461
Charles II., with sketches of its men and women, in the guise
of the adventures and observations of the French chevalier
dwing his residence in London. Banished from the Court of
Louis XIV., and hlase already with all the experiences of life
in France, Grammont had come to London, we are told, just
after the arrival of the Portuguese Queen, when the Enghsh
Court was to be seen in its full splendour. Much as he had
expected, he was surprised by what he found ; and, very soon,
admitted to the most intimate familiarity with Charles II.,
and knowing everybody else, and invited to all the parties of
the Queen, Lady Castlemaine, and the Duchess of York, he
was doing his best to contribute to the "magnificence and
diversions " of the debauched Court. This he did for a while
merely by his wit, his fine manners, his exquisite little
suppers, and his willingness to play high and prove his skill
by winning great sums of money. At length, " weaiy of the
favours of fortune, he had just resolved to pursue those of
love," when an opportunity presented itself, as follows : —
" Mrs. Middleton was the first whom he attacked. She was
" one of the handsomest women in town, though then little
" known at Court : so much of a coquette as to discourage no
" one; and so great was her desire of appearing magnificently
" that she was ambitious to vie with those of the greatest
"fortunes, though unable to support the expense. All this
" suited the Chevalier de Grammont j therefore, without trifling
" away his time in useless ceremonies, he applied to her porter
" for admittance, and chose one of her lovers for his confidant.
" This lover, who was not deficient in wit, was at that time
" a Mr. Jones, afterwards Earl of Ranelagh. What engaged
" him to serve the Chevalier de Grammont was to traverse the
" designs of a most dangerous rival, and to relieve himself
"from an expense which began to lie too heavy upon him.
" In both respects the Chevalier answered his purpose." How
the intrigue was worked out we need not inquire ; enough to
know how far young Jones had advanced in 1662. The
Mrs. Middleton affair was but the first of a series of such in
the young man's progress at Court. His life and services in
political office as Viscount Ranelagh and Earl of Ranelagh
463 LIFE OF MILTON AND HISTORY OF HIS TIME.
were to extend far beyond our present date, but we need not
anticipate more at present ^-
Milton's nephews, both, now past thirty years of age, and
busy in continued hack- writing for the booksellers, can have
had but little leisure for assisting their uncle among his books
and papers.
It may be questioned, indeed, whether the younger nephew,
John Phillips, ever now went near his uncle. The hack-
writing in which this more Bohemian of the two brothers was
engaged was still of the sort most distasteful to Milton. In
the end of 1659 he had published, in emulation and ridicule
of Lilly^s Astrological Annuals, a pamphlet with this title:
" Montelion, 1660 : or, The Trophetical Almanach ; being a True
and Exact Account of all the ^.evolutions that are to happen in
the world this present year, 1 660, till this time twelvemonth : ly
Montelion, knight of the Oracle, a well-wisher to the Mathe-
maticks." Godwin imagines that Milton may have had this,
with other Royalist pamphlets, in his thoughts in that
passage of his Ready and Easy Way in which he had spoken
so bitterly of " the insolencies, the menaces, the insultings of
our newly-animated common enemies," their diabolical " fore-
running libels," their "infernal pamphlets, the spew of every
drunkard, every ribald." This is on the supposition that
Phillips was the author of the Montelion for 1661 and the
Montelion for 1662, almanacks in continuation of the first, but
more exultingly Royalist, and containing scurrilities against
the Rump, Hugh Peters, "Old Noll's wife," and Cyriack
Skinner, and also that he was the author of Bon Juan
Lamierto, or A Comical History of the Late Times: by Montelion,
and of Montelion's Introduction to Astrology, both published in
1661, and both clever specimens of Restoration buffoonery.
These four pubheations of the Montelion set, however, are
more generally ascribed to the poet Flatman ; in which ease
the only known publication of John Phillips intermediate
between the first Montelion, which is certainly his, and our
T '^eld's History Of the Royal Society, p. 635 ; Grammont's Memoirs (edit, of
oi 1 «7i^ ; stationers' Ee^sters, AprU 1809), I. 171-197, and note, pp. 270-
28, 1661 ; Boyle's Works, I. 191; ante, 271
Vol. V. pp. 267—268, p. 278, p. 366, and
THE TWO PHILLIPSES IN 1662. 463
present date, was a new edition in 1661 of his Satt/r against
Hypocrites of 1655, with the title altered to The Religion of the
Hypocritical Presbyterians in Meeter. Such as he was, a clever
writer of Restoration burlesques, he had necessarily increased
his distance from his uncle ^.
Not so his elder brother, Edward Phillips, whose Royalism,
though equally declared, had taken a graver character. Just
before the Restoration he had been employed to prepare for
the press a new edition of Sir Richard Baker's Chronicle of the
Kings of England, the first or 1641 edition of that popular
book, and the second or 1653 edition, having been exhausted.
In those two editions the narrative had been brought down
no farther than the death of James I. j but in the third
edition, prepared by Phillips, and published in 1660, there
was a supplement, written by Phillips, entitled A Continuation
of the Chronicle of England to the end of the year 1658 : leing
a full narrative of the Affairs of England, Scotland, and Ireland,
more especially relating unto the transactions of Charles, crowned
King of the Scots at Scone on the first day of January \G?)0.
The wording here would suggest that, for a book sent to press
before the Restoration, nothing could well have been more
Royalist in design and spirit ; and, accordingly, thougjh there
is a study of candour and moderation, in the text, and very
liberal praise of Cromwell and his administration, the leaning to
the Stuarts is apparent. Charles I. is treated with sympathy;
the story of Montrose's tragic fate is told with eloquence ;
and at the close of the book there are kindly words about
Charles II., then in exile, with an obvious anticipation of his
speedy return. He is styled " this illustrious unfortunate,"
and the history of the three kingdoms since his father's death
is reputed to belong to his reign, on the ground of his being
" the eldest son of the last King of Great Britain," and having
been himself crowned King of Scotland. Thus, at the very
moment when Milton, in his last pre-Restoration pamphlets,
was defying approaching Majesty to the face, his elder
nephew, as well as his younger, had publicly joined the ranks
1 Godwin's Lives of the Phillipses, 96—113 ; Wood's Ath. IV. 764, with notes by-
Bliss.
464 LIFE OP MILTON AND HISTOEY OP HIS TIME,
of the waiting Cavaliers, In Edward Phillips, however, there
was, after all, a spirit of grateful loyalty to his Eepubliean
uncle that seems to have been wanting in his coarser brother.
He had felt all due anxiety about his uncle's fate immediately
after the Restoration ; and, when Milton had settled in Jewin
Street, this one of the two nephews had continued, amid his
own occupations for the booksellers, including a new edition
of his English Dictionary or World of Words in 1662, to drop
in upon his uncle attentively whenever he could ^.
Edward Phillips, as he tells us himself, took interest in the
progress of Paradise Lost. " There is another very remarkable
" passage in the composure of this poem," he says, " which I
" have a particular occasion to remember ; for, whereas I had
" the perusal of it from the very beginning, for some years, as
" I went from time to time to visit him, in a parcel of ten,
" twenty, or thirty verses at a time, — which, being written by
"whatever hand came next, might possibly want correction,
" as to the orthography and pointing, — having, as the summer
" came on, not been showed any for a considerable while, and
" desiring the reason thereof, was answered, That his vein
" never happily flowed but from the autumnal equinoctial to
"the vernal, and that whatever he attempted [in the other
" part of the year] was never to his satisfaction, though he
" courted his fancy never so much ; so that, in all the years
" he was about this poem, he may be said to have spent but
" half his time therein." In all probability it was in Jewin
Street, and in the year 1662, that Milton confided to his
nephew the curious fact that his muse was never so happy as
in the winter half of the year, from the end of September to
the end of March. He had then been engaged on the poem
for four years or for four years and a half, and was in a con-
dition to report his experience in such a matter, whatever it
was. Phillips's statement is certainly curious, and has provoked
remark. Toland actually ventured to fancy that Phillips must
have, by inadvertence, reversed Milton's iuformation, and that
he ought to have writte^, and meant to write, " from the vernal
' Godwin's Lives of the Phillips^s, 113—120 ; Wood's Alh. IV. 761—764, with
notes "by Bliss.
Milton's literary habits. 465
equinoctial to the autumnal." Toland's chief reason is that
Milton's veteran experience, if correctly reported by Phillips,
was in direct contradiction of his juvenile experience, as re-
ported poetically by himself in his elegy of 1629, In Adventum
Veris. Had he not there celebrated, as one of the joyful
phenomena of the returning spring and summer, the renewed
glow and vigour at that season of his own poetical genius
(ante. Vol. I. p. 185)? But, even if those lines should be
taken as a literal record of Milton's experience at the time,
thirty-three years may have made the precise difference which
Phillips is so careful to report. As it is hardly possible to
suppose, with Toland, that Phillips could have made the
blunder of reversing the statement made to him, we must
conclude that, in a general way, the winter half of the year
was the time when Milton advanced most rapidly with the
meditation and dictation of his great poem ^.
" How had that man, Milton," asks Richardson, " the
" courage to undertake, and the resolution to persist in, such
" a work, with the load of such difficulties upon his shoulders,
" — ill health, blindness, &c. ? " The question is worth enter-
taining a little more particularly at this point. — In the first
place, there can have been no great difficulty in the mere
matter of the dictation. Phillips's information on this sub-
ject, supplemented by such more minute reminiscences as
Richardson could afterwards gather, is tolerably sufficient.
Milton, when he was in the vein, says Phillips, would dictate
ten, twenty, or thirty lines at a time to any one that was
near and could write, so that, when Phillips revisited him
after any interval, he would find so much additional manu-
script, in various hands, waiting for such correction of the
spelling and pointing as only a scholar could give. Richardson,
from what he had been told, was able to amplify the account
somewhat. He had heard that usually, when Milton dictated>
1 Phillips's Life of Milton, 1694 ; Vernal." Aubrey had obtained this
Toland's (edit. 1761), pp. 118—119 ; information originally from Phillips in
Richardson's (1734), pp. cxllii — cxliv ; or about 1680 ; but the double booking
Johnson's Lives (edit. 1854), J. 118. ' of it, by Aubrey then and by Phillies in
Aubrey tells the same story as Phillips, 1694, quite disposes of Toland's idea
^i.e. "All the time of writing his that Phillips meant the reverse of what
Paradise Lost, his vein began at the he actually wrote,
Autumnal Equinoctial and ceased at the
A'OL. VI, H h
466 LIFE OF MILTON AND HISTORY OF HIS TIME.
"he sat leaning backward obliquely in an easy cbair, with
" his leg flung over the elbow of it" ; also that " he frequently
" composed lying in bed in a morning)," but with great varia-
tions in the amount composed. Sometimes, " when he could
" not sleep, but lay awake whole nights," not one verse could
he make, however much he tried j at other times the song
came upon him " with a certain impetus and eestro, as himself
" seemed to believe." On such occasions, " at what hour
" soever, he rung for his daughter " — at our date it must have
been his daughter Mary—" to secure what came." Richard-
son, who professes not to omit the least circumstance he had
been told, adds that then " he would dictate many, perhaps
" forty lines, as it were in a breath, and then reduce them to
"half the number," — which last I cannot conceive to have
ever been his habit. On the whole, amid such conditions as
Phillips and Richardson describe, we can imagine the precious
manuscript, in perhaps more than one copy, gradually increas-
ing in bulk, and generally taken out from day to day, to be
again laid aside for careful keeping. Milton probably retained
all that he had composed in his memory, and could have
dictated the whole of it afresh if necessary. — The difficulties
were rather in thoe$ miscellaneous readings in all languages
which were required for the purposes of so learned a poem,
and for the other works Milton had in hand. To find an
amanuensis for thirty or forty lines of English verse at a time
was far easier than to find readers of Latin, Greek, Enghsh,
and foreign books for five or six hours every day. But here
too Phillips's information is all that can be desired. While
Milton employed his daughters, or two of them at least, as
readers, he by no means depended on them. There was even
a competition among his older friends, and among yoimg men
who could obtain his acquaintance, for the privilege and
advantage of being allowed to read to him. There were
perhaps half-a-dozen different young men taking turns in
the house in Jewin Street, through 1662, as Milton's readers
and amanuenses at stated hours; and of one of these in
particular we have a very interesting glimpse. He was a
young Quaker, named Thomas EUwood.
MILTON AND THE QCAKEE EliLWOOD. 467
Bom in 1639, the son of a small sqraire and justice of the
peace at Crowell in Oxfordshire, Ellwood had grown up to
his twentieth year, a rough country-lad, fond of nothing but
horses, dogs, and field sports, when a great change came over
him. It happened through an acquaintance between his
family and that of the Penningtons : — Isaac Pennington, the
elidest son of the famous Republican and Regicide Judge,
Alderman Isaac Penmington of London, had married Lady
Springett, a wealthy widow, and had come, in or about
1658, with her, and her young daughter by h&r former
marriage, to reside at a place called the Grange, iii Chalfont
St. Peter's, Buckinghamshire, about fifteen miles from Crowell.
There, one day in 1659, Ellwood^s father paid them a visit,
taking Ellwood with him. " Very much surprised we were,"
says Ellwood, " when, being come thither, we first heard,
" then found, they were become Quakers : a people we had
" no knowledge of, and a name we had till then scarce heard
" of." In fact, Pennington, greatly to the disgust of his
father the Alderman, had been converted to Cluakerisipa by
George Fox in the preceding year, and had become one of
the leading men of the sect. The elder Ellwood, finding all
grave and demure, however handsome and hospitable, in a
family which he had hitherto known as free and jovial, seems
to have resolved to have little more to do with them ; but
with the younger Ellwood it was difierent. The little step-
daughter, Guli. or Gulielma Springett, whom he had known
from her infaaicy, and whom he found a very pearl of pretti-
ness in her Quaker dress, was probably an attraction ; but, in
any ease, he tended more and more to Chalfont St. Peter's,
and at lemgtth, from being so much among Quakers, turned
Quaker himself. For a while there was a battle between his
fether and him on the subject, his father unable to bear the
sight of him at table with his hat on, and tearing one hat
after another off his head till he had not a hat left, and lock-
ing him up, and refusing to allow him to go to the Penning-
tons or to Quaker meetings. But at length, the old man
having removed himself sulkily to London, young Quaker
Tom, though with little or no money, was more at liberty.
H h 3
468 LIFE OF MILTON AND HISTOKY OF HIS TIME.
Through 1660 and 1661 he had been up and down Oxford-
shire and Buckinghamshire, attending meetings, and getting
himself arrested and released again, and he had visited Lon-
don, where in 1660 he published a Quaker tract. In all his
difficulties Isaac Pennington, when not in prison himself, was
his chief refuge. That eminent Quaker (not to be confounded
with his father the Alderman, who had been tried with the
other Regicides, and who died in Jiis prison in the Tower,
Dec. 17, 1661), had been a prolific writer of religious tracts
long before he had turned Quaker, and when he was only a
mystical kind of Independent or Seeker. He seems to have
been a man of some culture, and to have encouraged EUwood
to mend the defects of his early education. Though EUwood
had made some progress in Latin, and begun Greek at school
in his boyhood, yet " by continued disuse of books " he had
forgotten all he had ever learnt, and " could not have read,
"far less have understood, a sentence in Latin" if it had been
put before him. " Nor was I rightly sensible of my loss
" therein," he says, " until I came among the Quakers. But
" then I both saw my loss and lamented it, and applied
"myself with utmost diligence, at all leisure times, to recover
" it : so false I found that charge to be which in those times
" was cast as a reproach upon the Quakers, that they despised
" and decried all human learning because they denied it to be
" essentially necessary to a Gospel ministry ; which was one
" of the controversies of those times." In short, in the year
1663, EUwood, then twenty-three years of age, felt some
stirrings of ambition and wanted to be a scholar \
At this point he and Milton came together in the foUowing
manner: — "Though I toiled hard, and spared no pains to
" regain what once I had been master of, yet I found it a
" matter of so great difficulty that I was ready to say, as the
" noble eunuch to Philip in another case, ' How can I, unless
"I have some man to guide me?' This I had formerly
" complained of to my especial friend Isaac Pennington, but
" now more earnestly ; which put him upon considering and
» EUwood's Life by himself (edit, of 1714), pp. 33—153.
MILTON AND THE QUAKER ELLWOOD. 469
" contriving a means for iny assistance. He had an intimate
" acquaintance with Dr. Paget, a physician of note in London ;
"and he with John Milton, a gentleman of great note for
" learning throughout the learned world, for the accurate
"pieces he had written on various subjects and occasions.
" This person,, having filled a public station in the former
" times, lived now a private and retired life in London, and,
" having wholly lost his sight, kept always a man to read to
" him ; which usually was the son of some gentleman of
" his acquaintance, whom, in kindness, he took to improve in
" his learning. Thus, by the mediation of my friend Isaac
" Pennington with Dr. Paget, and of Dr. Paget with John
" Milton, was I admitted to come to him : not as a servant to
" him (which at that time he needed not), nor to be in the
" house with him, but only to have the liberty of coming to
" his house at certain hours when I would, and to read to him
" what books he should appoint me ; which was all the favour
" I desired." It had taken some time to bring about this
arrangement ; and, after it was settled, Ellwood, who was
then living like a hermit-crab in his father's empty house
at Crowell, had to sell off some of the stock there before he
could come to London. At length he hastened thither, call-
ing upon the Penningtons at Chalfont St. Peter's by the way,
and immediately went to wait on Milton. " He received me
" courteously, as well for the sake of Dr. Paget, who intro-
" dueed me, as of Isaac Pennington, who recommended me ; to
"both of whom he bore a good respect. And, having inquired
" divers things of me with respect to my former progression in
" learning, he dismissed me, to provide myself of such accom-
" modations as might be most suitable to my future studies.
" I went, therefore, and took myself a lodging as near to his
" house (which was then in Jewin Street) as conveniently I
" could, and from thenceforward went every day in the after-
" noon (except on the first day of the week), and, sitting by
" him in his dining-room, read to him in such books in the
" Latin tongue as he pleased to hear me read. At my first
" sitting to read to him, observing that I used the English
" pronounciation, he told me, if I would have the benefit of
470 LIFE OF MILTON AJfD HISTOKT OF HIS TIME.
" the Latin tongue, not only to read and understand Latin
" authors, but also to converse with foreigners, I must learn
" the foreign pronounciation. To this I consenting, he in-
" stniteted me how to sound the vowels so different from the
"■ common pronounciation used by the English (who speak
" Anglice their Latin) that, with some few other variations in
" sounding some consonants in particular eases, — as c before e
" or i like ch, se before i like sA, — the Latin thus spoken
" seemed as different from that which was delivered as the
" English speak it as if it were another language. I had
" before, during my retired life at my father's, by unwearied
" diligemce and industry so far recovered the rules of grammar,
" in which I had once been very ready, that I could both read
" a Latin author and, after a sort, hammer out his meaning.
" But this change of pronounciation proved a new difficulty to
" me. It was now harder for me to read than it was before to
" understand when read. But Labor omnia vrndt imprbkus :
" ' Incessant pains the end obtains.' And so did I. Which
" made my reading the more acceptable to my master. He, on
"the other hand, perceiving with what earnest desire I
" pursued learning, gave me not only all the encouragement,
"but all the help, he could. For, having a curious ear, he
" understood, by my tone, when I understood what I read
" and when I did not, and accordingly would stop me, examine
" me, and open the most difficult passages to me ^."
EUwood had gone on with Milton in this way for six
weeks, sensible of great improvement, when his health broke
down. After about two months in London he had to return
to the country to recruit. When he had recovered sufficiently,
he came back to resume his studies. "I was very kindly
" received," he says, " by my master ; who had conceived so
" good an opinion of me that my conversation, I found, was
"acceptable to him, and he seemed heartily glad of my
"recovery and retimi; and into our old method of study we
"fell again, I reading to him, and he explaining to me as
" occasion required." Very soon, however, there was another
> EUwood's Life, pp. 153—157.
MILTON AND THE QUAKER ELLWOOD. 471
interruption, and this tixne not from ill health. On the 26th
of October 1662, EUwood, having gone to the usual Quaker
meeting-house at the Bull and Mouth in Aldersgate Street,
not far from Milton's bouse, was arrested, with thirty-one
others. They were marched off by the soldiers to Bridewell
in Fleet Street ; and partly in that prison, partly in Newgate,
to which they were transferred for a while, they were kept for
about three months. — Ellwood's account of his musings and
occupations in the two prisons, and of the horrors and abomina-
tions of both, is one of the most interesting parts of his book.
The common side of Newgate he describes as " a type of hell
upon earth;" and he dwells particularly on one of the many
ghastly and disgusting sights he saw there. " When we came
" first into Newgate," he says, " there lay, in a little by-place,
" like a closet, near the room where we were lodged, the
" quartered bodies of three men, who bad been executed some
" days before for a real or pretended plot ; which was the
" ground, or at least pretext, for that storm in the city which
"had caused this imprisonment." The bodies, in fact, were
those of George Phillips, yeoman, Thomas Tongue, distiller,
and Nathaniel Gibbs, felt-maker, three of six citizens of
London who bad been condemned at the Old Bailey for
treasonable conspiracy, and four of whom were banged and
quartered at Tyburn on the 22nd of December 1662. At
length, as EUwood tells us, the bloody quarters were removed
from the closet, the friends of the dead men having obtained
leave to bury them ; but the beads were kept, to be set up in
some parts of the city. "I saw the heads," says EUwood,
"when they were brought up to be boiled. The hangman
" fietcbed them in a dirty dust-basket out of some by-place ;
" and, setting them down among the felons, he and they made
" sport with them. They took them by the hair, flouting,
"jeering, and laughing at them; and then, giving them some
" ill names, boxed them on the ears and cheeks. Which done,
" the hangman put them into his kettle, and parboiled them
"with bay-salt and cummin-seed: tAat to keep them from
" putrefaction, and iMs to keep off the fowls from seizing on
" them. The whole sight, as well that of the bloody quarters
473 LIFE OF MILTON AND HISTORY OF HIS TIME.
" first as this of the heads afterwards, was both frightful and
" loathsome, and begat an abhorrence in my nature." — With
such horrors fresh in his memory, and also with a considerable
quantity of rough religious verse which he had managed to
compose in his two prisons, the young Quaker was again at
large in January 1662-3, He called on Milton at once ;
Milton was glad to have him back ; and it was agreed that,
after Ellwood had paid a short visit to Buckinghamshire, to
see the Penningtons and other friends there, the . Latin read-
ings and lessons should be resumed. And so, away from
Milton's door went Ellwood, to enjoy, as he tells us, the long
walk in the clear, frosty weather, and along clean and good
roads, that brought him to Chalfont St. Peter's.
His reception there by the Penningtons was most hearty ;
but he had only been with them for a day or two when a
proposal was made to him which completely changed his
plans. .The Quaker household at the Grange then included
not only Isaac Pennington himself, and his wife, Mary Pen-
nington, and her daughter Guli. Springett, but also three
much younger Pennington children, two of them boys. Both
father and mother were anxious to have their children well
taught at home ; and, as no substitute had yet been found for
an excellent young Quaker tutor, called Bradley, who had
grounded the children admirably in English, but had just left
the Grange to teach in a school for Quakers' children in
London, Ell wood's appearance had been most opportune.
Isaac Pennington and his wife had thought they might do
worse than engage one who was thoroughly known to them
and had suffered for his Quakerism, and who, though not by
any means a finished scholar, had recently been trying to
make up for lost time. "Wherefore," says Ellwood, "one
" evening, as we sat together by the fire in his bed-chamber
" (which, for want of health, he kept), he asked me, his wife
" being by, if I would be so kind to him as to stay a while
" with him, till he could hear of such a man as he aimed at,
" and in the mean time enter his children in the rudiments
" of the Latin tongue." As Ellwood was full of the idea of
returning to his lodging in London, and following his inter-
Milton's third marriage. 473
rupted studies with Milton, he hesitated over this proposal of
the Penningtons. His sense of gratitude to them, however,
and perhaps the thought of Guli. Springett, prevailed over
other considerations; and he did remain. His tutorship,
instead of being merely temporary, as at first intended, was
to last for seven years. Chiefly at the Grange in Chalfont
St. Peter's, but sometimes elsewhere, as persecution of the
Quakers compelled change, Ellwood, though gradually per-
ceiving that Guli. Springett could never be his, and therefore
making up his mind to marry some one else, was to continue
with the Penningtons. He did not forget Milton, however,
and was never in London without calling upon him ^.
Whether Ellwood had been informed of the fact or not when
he went into Buckinghamshire, a change of economy was then
in contemplation in Milton's house in Jewin Street. Milton
was on the point of being married again. Things had been
going from bad to worse under the mismanagement of his
three daughters and the maid-servant or maid-servants ; there
had been confidential conversations between Milton and some
of his friends, and especially between him and Dr. Pag«t ,'
and Milton had consented to a third marriage, as the best
thing possible for a person in his circumstances, if a suitable
wife could be found. Here Dr. Paget was able to be helpful.
He had a relative of his own then in London, suitable in
every way, and who would not object, or might be persuaded
not to object, to being the wife of a blind man of fifty-four
years of age, that man being Milton. She was a certain
Elizabeth MinshuU, a very young woman, and never before
married.
The following are the ascertained particulars respecting
her family : — In January 1616-17, less than a year after
Shakespeare's death at Stratford-on-Avon, there had died in
Nantwioh in Cheshire a mercer named Nicholas Gouldsmith,
leaving, by his wife Dorothy, who had predeceased him, one
son and three daughters. Two of the daughters were then
: J Ellwood's Life, pp. 157—229 ; Howell's State Trials, VI. 226—274.
474 LIFE OF MILTON AND HISTORY OF HIS TIME.
already married. One, named Margery Gouldsmith, born in
1579, had married, in April 1613, the Rev. Thomas Paget,
a minister in Cheshire ; the other, named Ellen Gouldsmith,
had been the wife since August 1599 of Richard MinshuU,
yeoman, of Wells Green, "Wistaston, in the same county, close
to Nantwich. To this Ellen Gouldsmith and her husband
Richard MinshuU, connected only very distantly with the chief
Cheshire Minshulls, called the MinshuUs of Stoke, there had
been born four children, three of whom were alive at their
grandfather Gouldsmith's death, — viz. Mabel MinshuU, bap-
tised at Wistaston Jan. 13, 1601, Randal MinshuU, baptised
there May 31, 1605, and Thomas MinshuU, baptised there
May 18, 1613. The two elder of these are inentioned in their
grandfather's will, one to receive a ring with a posy, the other a
piece of gold. It is possible that children of the other or Paget
marriage, though not mentioned in the will, were then also in
existence. At aU events, at our present date of 1662-3, — the
said Richard MinshuU of Wistaston having died in 1657, and
the said Rev. Thomas Paget having died in June 1660, rector
of Stockport in Cheshire, — there were alive various Minshulls
and Pagets, their children, more or less advanced in years,
distributed through various parts of England, but remember-
ing their Cheshire origin and their Gouldsmith cousinship
through their mothers. There was a second Rev. Thomas
Paget ; there were several Paget sisters, all or most of whom
had changed their names by marriage; and there was our
Dr. Nathan Paget, the London, physician and friend of Milton.
Probably because he was a bachelor, Dr. Paget had kept up
a close correspondence not only with his brothers and sisters,
but also with his eoiisins, the Minshulls and Gouldsmiths.
Of the two MinshuU brothers, bis cousins, the younger,
Thomas MinshuU, had settled as an apothecary in Manchester,
while the elder, Randal MinshuU, had remained in his native
Wistaston. It is with this Randal MinshuU that we are
more particularly concerned. He had married, about thirty
years ago, a wife of the name of Boote, by whom he had had
a numerous family, one of them a daughter, named Elizabeth,
whose baptism at Wistagtoa is entered in the registers of that
Milton's third mabkiage. 475
parish under date Dee. 30, 1638. This was the Elizabeth
Minshull who was to be Milton's third wife. Her father, who
had inherited the little property at Wistaston at Ms father's
death in 1657, and had been known since then as Bandal
Minshull of Wistaston, had probably some difBculty in pro-
viding for all his children ; and it may have been by some
arrangement for his convenience made by Dr. Paget that his
daughter Elizabeth, born and bred in Cheshire, was on a visit
to London in 1662-3. She was then, if we may decide by
her baptism-register, exactly twenty-four years of age ^.
The following is a verbatim copy of Milton's marriage
allegation, or declaration of his intended third marriage,
dated Feb. 11, 1662-3 :—
."WTch. day pionally appeared John Milton, of ye parish of
St. Giles, Cripplegate, London, gent, aged about 50 yeares, and
a widower, and alledged that he intendeth to marry with Elizabeth
Minshull, of ye parish of St. Andrew, Holborne, in ye county of
Midd, mayden, aged about 25 years, and att her own dis-
posing, and that he knoweth of noe lawfull lett or impedim*, by
reason of any pfcontraot, consanguinity, affinity, or otherwise, to
kinder the s^ intended marriage ; and of the truth hereof he offered
to make oath ; and prayed Licence to be marryed in ye church of
St. George, in ye Burrough of Soufchwark, or St. Mary Aldermary,
in London.
(Signed)
1 The facts in this paragraph are (1850) ; more laigely from Mr. John Fit-
partly from Hunter's Milton Notes chett'g Marsh's Milton Papers, printed
476 LIFE OF MILTON AND HISTORY OF HIS TIME.
When this intention of marriage became known in Jewin
Street, it naturally caused some consternation among the
daughters. The maid-servant, or one of the maid-servants
then in the house, told the second daughter, Mary, that she
heard her father was to be married ; " to which the said Mary
" replied to the said maid-servant that that was no news, to
" hear of his wedding, but, if she could hear of his death, that
"was something." The marriage, nevertheless; took place.
Although, by the licence, it was to be either in St. George's,
Southwark, or in St. Mary Aldermary, the latter church was
chosen. Very possibly this may have been because the
rector of that church was then Dr. Robert Gell, who had been
one of the fellows of Christ's College, Cambridge, during
Milton's residence there, and who, after having held this
living through the Protectorate, with the reputation of being
a preacher of peculiar mystical lights, had continued in it
since the Restoration. At all events, the marriage-entry
stands thus, under date Feb. 24, 1662-3, in the registers of
St. Mary Aldermary : — " John Milton, of the parish of St. Gyles,
" Cripjoellgate, and Elizabeth Minshull, of the parish of St, Andrew,
" Holborne, married ly licence the IMh of February, 1662." It
was no marriage of romance ; but it gave Milton an excellent
wife, who was to do her duty by him most conscientiously
during all the rest of his life. Aubrey, who knew her after-
wards, describes her as "a gent, person, a peaceful and
agreeable humour." There is a tradition that her hair was
of a fair gold colour, a fact in which Milton's daughters
may have been more interested than Milton himself. One
for the Chetham Society (1851); Ijut wife was of the knightly family of the
with still more recent and exact infor- MinshuIIs of Stoke, Co. Chester. Todd,
mation from an elaborate pedigree by on the authority of Ormerod, the his-
Miss Thomasiu E. Sharpe, printed in the torian of Cheshire, expressly calls her a
Genealogist for April 1, 1878, under the daughter of Sir Edward Minshull. The
title Miltcm, MmshuU,aMd Gmldsmyth," story, intrinsically improbable from the
and most obligingly communicated by first.was exploded by Mr. Marsh's careful
her to me, with MS. additions derived researches, and the Wistaston yeoman,
from farther researches among Cheshire Randal Minshull, only a far-off scion of
wiUs and registers.— There had been the Stoke family, substituted for the
a great deal of investigation of the Min- knight. The Gouldsmith and Paget
shull pedigree on wrong tracks before connexion of the MinshuUs has been
Mr. Hunter suggested, and Mr. Marsh fai-ther ascertained and cleared up by
determined, the right one. The story Mr. Hughes, F.S.A., of The Groves
had come down, and had been repeated Chester, and by Miss Sharpe.
by Todd and others, that Milton's third
TKIALS OF JOHN TWYN AND 0THEE8, 477
of her difficulties with them was her youth. Herself only
twenty-four years of age, she had become step-mother to
three girls, the eldest of whom was little more than seven
years her junior. She was better educated in some respects
than any of her step-daughters, and could write well. She
could also sing, though Milton, when they became better
acquainted, would tell her playfully she had a good voice
but no ear^.
For a whole year after Milton's third marriage I can find
not a single particular of his life in addition to those already
collected in this chapter. The big world rolled on, the world
of Pepys's Diary, Charles and his courtiers revelling ever more
wildly, and laughing now over the first part of Butler's
Hudibras, and Clarendon still in the premiership, and the
second session of the Cavalier Parliament persevering in tlie
persecuting policy of the first against Nonconformists, quash-
ing rigorously the King's own efforts for some measure of
toleration, and beginning even to retaliate by denouncing the
growth of Catholicism round him, and the theatres in full
activity, with new pieces every week, and honest Pepys him-
self zig-zagging through the uproar daily, and making his
notes. Milton's marriage with Elizabeth MinshuU had hap-
pened when the second session of the Parliament had just
begun ; and at the end of that session in July 1663 he had
been married five months. Seven months more passed before
the first incident that I can note in the public world around
him of a kind likely to have roused him strongly from its
bearing on himself. This was the trial, in February 1663-4,
1 The marriage allegation was dis- but it is, so far as I know, the only
covered in the Faculty OfBoe by Colonel authentic specimen of his signature or
Chester some years ago ; and I owe the handwriting of later date than 1652. —
copyofit,andalsothetracingofMilton's The exact copy of the mamage entry I
signature, to his unfailing kindness. Of owe also to Colonel Chester. Authorities
the signature Colonel Chester says, "He for other particulars in the paragraph
" evidently had a bad and scratchy pen, are Aubrey's Memoir of Milton, fac-
"and no perception whatever of the similes of Milton's third wife's signature
"horizontal; but it is an extremely given in Mr. Marsh's Jlfflton Papers and
"interesting autograph for all that." elsewhere, and a note to Paradise Lost,
Most readers will agree with this IV. 305, in Newton's edition of Mil-
opinion. It is not only in itself a most ton. For Gell see ante, Vol. I. pp.
jathetio record of Milton's blindness; 100 — 101.
478 LIFE OF MILTON AND HISTOET OF HIS TIME.
of John Twyn, printer, for high treason, and of Thomas Brew-
ster, bookseller, Simon Dover, printer, and Nathan Brooks,
book-binder, for seditious misdemeanonr.
Twyn, a printer in a small way of business in Cloth Fair,
near Smithfield, had been employed, by some person or persons
unknown, in the preceding October, to print privately a book
er pamphlet entitled A Treatise of the Execution of Justice ;
wherein is clearly proved that the 'Execution of Judgment and
Justice is as well the People's as the Magistrate's duty, and, if
the Magistrates prevent Judgment, the People are hound ly the
Law of God to execute Judgment without them, and upon them.
Some sheets of the book had been set up by Twyn himself
and one or two of his men, working with much secrecy in the
night time, when the premises were broken into, about four
o'clock one morning, by a posse of constables, led by Mr.
Roger L'Estrange, then fresh in his congenial office of censor
of the press and inquisitor-general of the London printing-
offices. A sheet or two were seized, Twyn excusing himself
by saying that he had thought the manuscript " mettlesome
stuff," and the author "a good, smart, angry fellow," but that
he had intended no harm himself, and had thought all in the
fair way of trade. He had been in prison since then ; and
now the government, regarding or professing to regard the
book as part and parcel of a great Republican conspiracy, for
■complicity with which many had already suffered, had resolved
that this wretched printer would be a very fit additional
victim. Tried at the Old Bailey, Feb. 20, 1663-4, before
Lord Chief Justice Hyde, and Judges Ketyng and Wylde, he
was found guilty of " compassing and imagining the King's
death " in his printing-office by the act of putting the said
book into type, and was sentenced to be hanged, drawn, and
quartered. After the sentence the poor man begged Chief
Justice Hyde to intercede for him. " I would noi intercede
for my own father in this case, if he were alive," was the
reply; and the sentence was executed to the letter.— The
offence of Brewster, Dover, and Brooks, who were tried at the
same time, was the minor one of having printed, bound,
and published copies of the dying speeches and prayers oif
TRIALS OP JOHN TWTN AND OTHEES. 479
Harrison, Cook, Hiigli Peters, and the other regicides executed
in 1660, and also copies of a book called The F/iosniie, or
Solemn League and Covenant, It was pleaded for them and
by them that the books, or at least the first of them, had been
in print long, and had been as openly sold in shops as any
diurnal, and that they had only gone on supplying a current
demand. As such books v."ere now to be put down if possible,
the sentence was that Brewster should pay a fine of 100
marks to the King, and Dover and Brooks fines of 40 marks
each, and that all three should stand twice in the pillory, and
should afterwards be imprisoned during his Majesty's pleasure,
finding heavy securities against future dealing in such books
when they should be released ^.
In a notice of these trials in the British Chronologist, printed
in 1775, I find this strange statement : " One of the libels
"was written by Milton to justify the murder of King
" Charles, and to maintain the lawfulness of subjects taking
" up arms against their sovereign." I know not on what
authority this statement can have been made. Milton, content
to be politically silent now, was not likely to concern himself
in any wild Republican conspiracy such as was then talked
of, to be headed by Ludlow^ broi^ht back from Switzerland
for the purpose, or by Lambert, delivered from his prison,
or to employ his time in conveying to the press a recast of
his Tenure of Kings and Magistrates, adapted to the state of
afiairs under Charles II. Nor in the report of Twyn's trial,
including a general description of the book for which he
sufiiered, is there anything pointing to Milton. The tradition,
however, though erroneous in its special form, cannot be
without foundation. For one thing, it is evident from the
very title of Twyn's book, A Treatise of the Execution of
Justice, wherein is clearly joroved, Sfc, that it was nothing else
than a reproduction by somebody or other of the doctrine of
Milton's Tenure of Kings and Magistrates, j)rOving, 8fc., and
possibly with phrases borrowed from that terrible book of
1 649. But, besides, we actually know that Roger L'Estrange,
1 HoweU's state Trials, VI. 513—564.
480 LIFE OF MILTON AND HISTORY OF HIS TIME.
the originator of the trials of Twyn, Brewster, Dover, and
Brooks, and the chief witness against them, had Milton's
Tenure of Ki/ngs and Magistrates and others of Milton's
pamphlets strongly and revengefully in his recollection just
before the trials and in connexion with them. The trials
of those four particular unfortunates were the result of
L'Estrange's first raid upon the London printing-offices and
bookshops in that government inquisitorship of the press to
which he had been appointed in August 1663, in consequence
of his demonstration of fitness for the post by his Considera-
tions and Proposals in order to the Regulation of the Press, pub-
lished on the 3rd of the preceding June (ante, pp. 326-328).
Now, in that pamphlet of qualification for his office, dedicated
to his Majesty himself, L'Estrange had expressly named
certain printers and booksellers as still dealing in reprints or
remaining copies of publications of the old Republican and
regicide kind, exhibiting " a combination and design against
your sacred life and dignity/' and had also given the titles of
some of the dangerous publications so reprinted or still on
sale. He mentions The Tenure of Kings and Magistrates con-
spicuously, though without the author's name ; and he names
Brewster and Simon Dover as among the worst of the offend-
ing book-tradesmen, coupling with them some others, one of
whom is Livewell Chapman, the publisher of Milton's most
famous pre-Restoration pamphlets, his Means to remove Hire-
lings and his Bead^ and Easy Way to establish a free Common-
wealth. Very probably, therefore, Milton's name may have
been bandied to and fro in court during the trials of
Twyn, Brewster, Dover, and Brooks, or in the examinations
of L'Estrange and others preliminary to the trials, and
L'Estrange may have been disappointed in not being able to
bring his old enemy to the bar for a worse punishment than
he had been able to inflict upon him in his No Blinde Guides
of April 1660 (ante,Vol. V. pp. 689-691).— Milton, at all
events, cannot have heard without strange feelings of the
public hanging, drawing, and quartering of a poor printer
for not . a tithe of the high treason of " compassing and
imagining the King's death " which he had himself perpe-
EEMOVAL TO BUNHILL. 481
trated in bygone days, and which might still be found, with
his name, on book-shelves, if not in book-shops ^.
It is not improbable that at the time of this trial Milton
was no longer an inhabitant of Jewin Street. Some time
late in 1663, or perhaps early in 1664, there was another of
those changes of domicile which were so frequent iu his life,
and of which his nephew Phillips has so carefully informed
us, though not always with precise dating. " There he lived,"
says Phillips, speaking of Jewin Street, " when he married
"his third wife, recommended to him by his old friend
" Dr. Paget in Coleman Street ; but he staid not long after
"his new marriage ere he removed to a house in Artillery
" Walk, leading to BunhiU Fields."
Phillips had about the same time made a change himself.
He had gone to reside with the much-respected Royalist,
Church of England man, naturalist, and virtuoso, Mr,
John Evelyn of Say's Court in Essex, to be tutor to that
gentleman's son. Evelyn himself mentions the fact in his
diary under date October 24, 1663, thus: "Mr. Edward
"Phillips came to be my son's, preceptor. This gentleman
"was nephew to Milton, who wrote against Salmasius's Be-
"fensio, but was not at all infected with his principles,
"though he was brought up by him." In his leisure in
Evelyn^'s fine house, with its fine library, Phillips was already
engaged on that fourth edition of Baker's Chronicle which
he was to give to the world not many months hence, and
which is remembered now as perhaps his chief literary per-
formance. Eor that edition he was to recast and rewrite the
Continuation he had inserted in the previous edition of 1660,
not only telling the story of the reign of Charles I. afresh, in
the style now required, but also narrating fully the events
of the Restoration, with the help of private papers expressly
confided to him by Monk himself through his brother-in-law
Sir Thomas Clarges, and bringing down the history to the
glorious coronation of Charles II. in May 1661. The work
was, in fact, partly a bookseller's commission, partly a com-
1 British Ghronologist (1776), I. 260 ; L'Estrange's Considerations and Proposals
of June 1663.
VOL. VI. I i
483 LIFE OF MILTON AND HISTORY OF HIS TIME.
mission from Monk and Clarges ; and, if Phillips did find
time to pay a parting visit to his uncle in Jewjn Street
before the removal to Bunhill, it is quite possible that he
may have taken some of Monk's papers in his pocket and
talked with Milton about them. His visits, however, hence-
forward, were to he necessarily rarer. Those of Andrew
Marvell had ceased altogether for a time. Marvell had
obtained leave of absence from parliament and had gone
away in July 1663 as secretary to the Earl of Carlisle, then
sent as ambassador extraordinary for Charles II. to Russia,
Sweden, and Denmark; and he was to be absent for about
a year and a half ^.
IN ARTILLERY WALK, BUNHILL : 1664-1665.
There is little difficulty in identifying the site of the house
to which Milton removed late in 1663 or early in 1664.
" In Artillery Walk, leading to Bunhill Fields," is Phillips's
description of it, varied by Aubrey, who knew the house
well, into "In Bunhill, opposite the Artillery Garden Wall."
Aubrey's "Bunhill" and Phillips's "Artillery Walk" are
the same thing. They were in fact alternative names for the
piece of roadway which is now the southern part of Bunhill
Row. Let any one, therefore, find his way from Jewin Street
to the neighbouring Chiswell Street, and let him turn out of
Chiswell Street on the left, into the street called Bunhill
Row, and he will have taken the exact walk that led, from
Milton's old house to his new one. Farther, when he is in
Bunhill Row, walking from Chiswell Street towards Old
Street Road, let him keep to the left side of the street, and
somewhere on that left side, considerably nearer the ChisweU
Street end of Bunhill Row than the Old Street Road end,
he will have passed the site of the new house. The house
itself can hardly have been any one of those now to be seen
there ; for, though some of them are oldish, none seems old
enough to have been Milton's. Indeed, the present appear-
1 PhUlips's Memoir of Milton ; Eve- Grosart's Marvell, Memorial Tniroduc-
lyn's Diary, of date; Phillips's later Won, p. xlviii, and Marvell's Correspond-
editions of Baker's Chronicle, with the ence in Vol. II. at pp. 96—99.
prefatory " Epistle to the Reader " ;
ARTILLERY WALK, BUNHILL. 483
ance of Bunhill Row will not do mucli towards suggesting
the Bunhill or Artillery Walk of Milton.
At present Bunhill Row is a street densely built on both
sides, the houses on the eastern side, or right side as you
go from Chiswell Street, concealing from you the famous
Artillery Ground, or exercising ground since 1622 of the
London Artillery Company. That interesting piece of ground
lies behind the houses, and between them and Finsbury
Square. But in Milton's time, and long afterwards, there
were no houses at all on that side, but only the wall of the
Artillery Ground. There was a single row of houses on the
other or left side, and it was this single row of houses,
" opposite the Artillery Garden wall," just as Aubrey says,
and looking over the wall into the Artillery Garden itself,
that was called Bunhill. It had received that name because
it led from Chiswell Street to the open space or common
called Bunhill Fields, immediately north of the Artillery
Ground. Inasmuch, however, as the name Bunhill was often
used generally for those fields themselves, or for the whole
neighbourhood, it was convenient to have another name for
the bit of roadway leading to the fields.- Hence it was
known popularly as Artillery Walk, its very characteristic
being that it was hardly a street, but rather the walk into
Bunhill Fields along the wall of the Artillery Ground.
Through the Civil Wars that ground had been the scene
of the frequent musters and evolutions of the city trained
bands, and even after the general disbandment of the Re-
storation it was still used for occasional parades of the
remnant of the original Artillery Company, the oldest of the
trained bands. These parades could be seen from the windows
of the houses that lined the Walk on the side opposite the
wall. Although this cannot have been Milton's inducement
to become the tenant of one of them, and the occasional
drumming and fifing in the Artillery Ground must have been
a disturbance, there were advantages in the situation. While
not going very far from his former house, and while still
remaining in the great parish of St. Giles, Cripplegate,
though now transferred to that part of it which was called
I i 3
484 LIFK OF MILTON AND HISTORY OP HIS TIME.
" Cripplegate Parish without the Freedom," he had gone
decidedly nearer the green suburbs. In the old maps the
Artillery Ground and Bunhill Fields beyond it form one
stretch of space towards the country on the north of London ;
there are trees in the Artillery Ground itself and all about,
with a picturesque row of windmills on one height ; and,
after tracing Artillery Walk pleasantly enough into Bunhill
Fieldsj one sees it re-emerging from those fields on the other
side, as a country road leading to Newington. Faithorne's
map of 1658 tells us even more. " He always had a garden
where he lived," is one of Aubrey's pieces of information about
Milton, amply confirmed by what we know independently of all
his previous houses in succession. Now, in going to Artillery
Walk from Jewin Street, he had certainly improved his
accommodation in that particular. In Faithorne's map the
houses in Artillery Walk, one of which became Milton's,
are very distinctly figured; to the number of about twelve
in all, some with their fronts to the . walk, some with their
gable-ends, arid there are garden spaces behind every one
of them, larger than any garden space similarly marked in
Jewin Street. Milton, therefore, was to be less dependent
than he had been on long miscellaneous walks with an
attendant for the two or three hours daily in the open air
which he thought necessary for his health. When there was no
one to bear him company far through the streets or out in the
fields, he could be a good deal by himself in his own garden.
From this matter of the garden, however, one must not infer
too finely about the house itself It was a small house, rated
afterwards, during Milton's tenancy, at " four hearths " for
the hearth-tax, while some of the neighbouring houses were
rated at " five hearths " or "six hearths." In other words, it
contained four eSective rooms with fire-places, in addition to
smaller rooms not so provided. Nor was the suburb, all
in all, though Milton had chosen a tolerably airy spot in it,
one where he could expect to have neighbours of fashion. Re-
turning from Artillery Walk into Chiswell Street, for ex-
ample, one came at once upon Grub Street, going ofi" from
Chiswell Street on the opposite or denser side of that street
ASTILLEBY WALK, BUNHILL. 485
towards the City. Grub Street had not then sunk quite into
the Grub Street of the eighteenth century, when its garrets
and taverns were supposed to contain all the starving hack-
writers and small poets of London, and whatever was lowest
in literature was called a Grub Street production ; but some-
thing of this reputation had already attached to it. There
were jests about Grub Street divinity and the Puritan
pamphleteers of Grub Street. There is no Grub Street now.
The City authorities changed its name into " Milton Street "
some time ago, partly to get rid of the associations with the
old name, partly to commemorate the fact that Milton had
lived close by. If it was thought good to rechristen any
street in the neighbourhood by the name of " Milton Street,"
ought not the name to have been given to Bunhill Row
itself ?
Bunhill or Artillery Walk was to be Milton's London
residence for all the ten or eleven years of the rest of his life.
There are reasons, however, why we should take separate note,
in the first place, of that first portion of his residence in
Bunhill which brings us through the year 1664 and to about
the middle of 1665.
During that year and a half, marked politically by the
Third and Fourth Sessions of the Cavalier Parliament, by the
passing of the exasperating Conventicles Act by the first of
these (May 1664), and by the beginnings of that naval war
with the Dutch in which the Duke of York won his first
laurels, Milton sat, in his blindness, in one of the rooms of
his small house opposite the Artillery Ground wall, or in the
garden outside, or was led about daily in the fields and
purlieus of his obscure suburb. The appurtenances round
him are the same as in Jewin Street, — his books, his papers,
and the organ and bass-viol, for the recreation in which he
delights most. The voices most about him are those of his
1 Besides my own explorations of the Watts of the British Musenm, printed
Bunhill neighbourhood, and my consul- in the Addenda to Mitford's Life of
tations of Faithorne's map of London Milton in Pickering's edition of Milton's
in 1658 (reprinted in 1878) and of other Works (I. clxxiv), and also information
old maps and ward-maps -in Stow's given in various articles of Cunning-
London by Strype (1720), I have used a ham's Handbook of London and in
very careful note by the late Mr. Thomas Hunter's Milton Notes.
486 LIFE OF- MILTON AND HISTOBY OF HIS TIME.
wife and his three daughters, little Deborah now old enough
to take her turn with Mary oftener in reading to him. In
and out come, one or other at a time, his volunteer readers
and amanuenses from the neighbourhood, the young men who
were glad to serve him in this way for the benefit of his
conversation and lessons. Marvell is away in Russia, at
Moscow, or elsewhere; but, with that exception, there are
also continued visits from old acquaintances, who know at
what hours he is to be seen. Steadily, by perseverance in
a regular distribution of his time, the works he has in hand
advance, and in the midst of these Paradise Lost. Begun in
Petty France, continued in Jewin Street, the great poem,
as we shall presently have evidence, was brought to a con-
clusion in the first year and a half spent in what is now
Bunhill Row.
In Jewin Street, before the end of 1662, as we have seen
reason to believe, Milton had advanced with his dictation as far
at least as to Book VII, where there begin the great discourses
between the Archangel Raphael and Adam on the creation of
the visible universe of mankind. Let us suppose that these
discourses, occupying now Books VII and VIII of the poem,
but originally forming one long Book, were also completed in
Jewin Street. . Then the autobiographical passage at the
opening of what is now Book IX may mark where Milton
resumed the poem in Artillery Walk. He is now to bring
Satan back from his wild wingings round and round the
earth, and to tell the story of his actual temptation of the
human pair in Paradise, and of its sad success and conse-
quences. An interruption in his own name is therefore again
appropriate : —
No more of talk where God or Angel Guest
With Man, as with his friend familiar, used
To sit indulgent, and with him partake
Rural repast, permitting him the while
Venial discourse unblamed. I now must change
These notes to tragic, — foul distrust, and breach
Disloyal, on the part of man, revolt
And disobedience; on the part of Heaven,
PR0GSE8S OF PARADISE LOST. 487
Now alienated, distance and distaste,
Anger and just rebuke, and judgment given.
That brought into this "World a world of woe,
Sin and her shadow Death, and Misery,
Death's harbinger. Sad task ! yet argument
Not less but more heroic than the wrath
Of stern Achilles on his foe pursued
Thrice fugitive about Troy wall; or rage
Of Turnus for Lavinia disespoused;
Or Neptune's ire, or Juno's, that so long
Perplexed the Greek, and Cytherea's son :
If answerable style I can obtain
Of my celestial Patroness, who deigns
Her nightly visitation unimplored.
And dictates to me slumbering, or inspires
Easy my unpremeditated verse.
Since first this subject for heroic song
Pleased me, long choosing and beginning late.
Not sedulous by nature to indite
Wars, hitherto the only argument
Heroic deemed, chief mastery to dissect
With long and tedious havoc fabled knights
In battles feigned (the better fortitude
Of patience and heroic martyrdom
Unsung), or to describe races and games,
Or tilting furniture, emblazoned shields,
Impreses quaint, caparisons and steeds,
Bases and tinsel trappings, gorgeous knights
At joust and tournament; then marshalled feast
Served up in hall with sewers and seneshals :
The skill of artifice or office mean;
Not that which justly gives heroic name
To person or to poem ! Me, of these
Nor skilled nor studious, higher argument
Hemains, sufficient of itself to raise
That name, unless an age too late, or cold
Climate, or years, damp my intended wing
Depressed ; and much they may if all be mine,
Not hers who brings it nightly to ray ear.
488 LIFE OF MILTON AND HISTORY OF HIS TIME.
In this passage we can see the author's feeling that his
great task is approaching its close. We can see thorough
satisfaction with what has already heen accomplished, and an
anticipation of the rank to which the poem will be entitled
among the great poems of the world. We can see that the
author is comparing it especially with the three great ancient
epics, the Iliad, the Odyssey, and the Aeneid, and with the
mediaeval romances, and the modern epics or romances of
Ariosto, Tasso, and Spenser. We can see him preferring, or
persuading himself to prefer, his own theme to the subjects of
any of those older heroic poems. We can see him remember-
ing his " long choosing," as far back as 1639-1642, when he
had jotted down no fewer than about one hundred diflFerent
subjects, from Scripture History or from the History of the
British Islands, as fit for the tragedy or epic he had then
in view. We can see him remembering how even then
Paradise Lost had eclipsed all the others in his meditations,
and how it had been schemed several times and finally
adopted. We can see him thinking of all that had come in
his life to postpone the work, and at length, after so many
strange years of turmoil, of his " late beginning " of it so
recently as 1658. But now, after five- or six years bestowed
upon it, with some haggard breaks*, when he and it seemed
alike in danger, he is drawing happily to an end. Why
should he doubt? He lives in a late age and a cold climate,
and is now an invalid, past his prime ; but the inspiration
he had prayed for, the old Hebrew inspiration of Oreb and
Sinai, of Sion and the brook of Siloa, has not yet failed.
How is it that he finds his dictation so easy, that his verse
flows from him almost unpremeditated, that in the dead of
night, as he lies sleepless or slumbering, a poor blind man,
it should seem as if there were gleams of heavenly glory
in the darkness, and with the glory came the song ?
Absolutely there is nothing more to tell of Milton in
Bunhill through 1664 and the first months of 1665 than
what is here suggested. He is finishing his Paradise Lost.
Let us pass on to June 1665. It was then certainly finished,
and we may note a few of the synchronisms : — Marvell has
THE PLAGUE YEAB : PABADISE LOST FINISHED. 489
teen back some months from his embassy to Moscow and the
Baltic with the Earl of Carlisle. Edward Phillips has re-
cently left his tutorship of Evelyn's son at Say's Court, just
after having seen through the press his new edition of Baker's
Chronicle, with the revised and. enlarged continuation of the
same in his own name, and has gone to reside with the Earl
of Pembroke, as tutor to his son, Philip Herbert, after-
wards seventh Earl. It is the interval between the Fourth
and Fifth Sessions of the Cavalier Parliament, and the Houses
are not sitting. Men's minds are absorbed in the war with
the Dutch ; and London is full of the thunderings of ac-
clamation for the great victory of Lowestoft of June 3, and
for the safe return of the Duke of York, Prince Rupert, and
others, from that battle. Just then, we say, it was that
Milton had finished his Paradise Lost, bringing down the
story to its last point, where Adam and Eve, expelled from
Paradise, are seen taking their solitary way, with slow and
wandering footsteps, hand in hand, through Eden. The
manuscript had been brought to that termination in the
midst of the Dutch war, and perhaps just about the time
of the news of the battle of Lowestoft. But, besides the
battle and the c<jmpleted book, there was yet another novelty
then in London. The plague, the red-spot plague, was run-
ning through the city.
It had been in the city since April, and in June the number
of monthly deaths by it had reached 590. Then had begun
that migration of all citizens of means into the country which
in the following month, when the mortality in London rose to
4129, became general. In the months of August and September,
as we know, when the mortality had reached the fearful rates of
20,046 and 26,230, London was a ghastly desert, traffic at an
end, the grass growing in the streets, ranges of houses every-
where shut up as plague-stricken, the dead carts carrying
their loads of corpses by day and by night to the plague-pits,
and the remnant of the inhabitants moving about like spectres,
or like brutes, in a world of coffins and burials. Of the plague-
pits opened for the general reception of corpses that could not
be buried individually the chief were that in Tothill Pieldsj.
490 LIFE OF MILTON AND HISTORY OF HIS TIME.
Westminster, and anotter in the suburb of Finsbury. As early
as July 18 Pepys had been alarmed by hearing of the opening
of the first ; but the other acquired a yet more horrible cele-
brity. "1 have heard," says Defoe in his History of the
Plague, " that in a great pit in Finsbury, in the parish of Crip-
" plegate, it lying open then to the fields, for it was not then
" walled about, many who were infected, and near their end,
" and delirious also, ran wrapped in blankets or rags and threw
" themselves in, and expired there before any earth could be
" thrown upon them." This " great pit in Finsbury " was, in
fact, a pit in Bunhill Fields, just beyond the Artillery Garden,
so that in no neighbourhood in all London can the death-cart,
the death-bell, and all the sights and sounds of the plague, have
been more' familiar and incessant than close to Milton's house.
The half-dead maniacs, of whom Defoe speaks, may have run
past Milton's door, along the Artillery Garden wall, to fling
their already putrid bodies into the Bunhill Fields pit ^.
Fortunately Milton and his family had left the spot in time.
About the end of June, as far as we can determine the date,
he had made arrangements for residing out of town while the
plague lasted. His agent was his Quaker friend, young
Ellwood. " I was desired by my quondam master, Milton,"
says Ellwood, "to take an house for him in the neighbourhood
" where I dwelt, that he might go out of the city, for the
" safety of himself and his family, the pestilence then growing
"hot in London. I took a pretty box for him in Giles-
" Chalfont, a mile from me; of which I gave him notice."
Sometime in July 1665, therefore, before the Plague was at its
worst, we are to imagine Milton's house in Artillery Walk
shuttered up, and a coach and large waggon brought to the
door, and the blind man helped in, and the wife and the three
daughters following, with a servant to look after the books and
other things they have taken with them, and the whole party
driven away towards Giles-Chalfont ^.
1 Pepys's Memoir from April 1665 that Milton's commission to Ellwood to
S°,TS'? 1 J Ci'™°"^S"^™ s London, Bun- find a country house for him was " some
Mllields. , ,„ „ little time before "an incident which he
2 Ellwood s Life (edit, of 17U), p. mentions as happening on "the first day
246. From th,e context there we learn of the Fifth Montli, 1665." Now, though
MILTON AT CHALFONT ST. GILES. 491
AT CHALFONT ST. GILES, BUCKINGHAMSHIRE : 1665-66.
Giles-Chalfont, or Chalfont St. Giles, is a village in Buck-
inghamshire, about three and twenty miles from London.
There is now, and there was in Milton's time, an option of two
ways to it from the great city. One, which may be called the
Middlesex route, and is perhaps the more direct one, leads first
to Uxbridge, on the west border of that countyj and then has
a northern bend of about eight miles more through the eastern
skirt of Bucks. The other is by Watford and Eickmans-
worth, crossing the corner of Herts between these two towns
before entering Bucks. At present it matters little whether the
Uxbridge station of one railway or the Rickmansworth station
of another is chosen as the access to Chalfont St. Giles. From
either station there is a walk or drive of between six and eight
miles before the village can be reached ; and in this walk or
drive from either station one can so arrange as to take Hare-
field, the scene of the Arcades, in the way. Few villages in
the south of England, indeed, can lie more lazily and sleepily
off the track of railways and out of the bustling world than
Chalfont St. Giles, with its population of little over a thousand.
Moreover, it lies, most remarkably, down in a cup or' hollow.
Whether you reach it by Uxbridge or by Rickmansworth, you
descend into it at one end by a rather sudden steep ; down at
the foot of this steep you find the main village, consisting first
of a small inn or two, with a duck-pond in front of them, and
then rows of houses, some of them old and timber-joisted, with
an old church and churchyard reached by a lane through the
antique houses on the left side ; and, when you pursue the main
road or street quite through the village to the other end, you
have to re-ascend considerably at that end before the general
level of the country is again attained. " Down in a cup " I
the fifth month in the year in our instead of March. I should have in-
present Calendar is May, it was then ferred their former practice from other
July, hoth in the common reckoning and parts of Ellwood's own book's where it
in the reckoning of the Quakers, who is only by recollecting that March was
did not use tjie heathen name Jviy. Not his " First Month " that one can recon-
till the year 1752, when there was the cile his datings with the otherwise
general change of Calendar by Act of known dates of the facts he mentions ;
Parliament, did the Society of Friends but see, for absolute proof, Suks of
alter their former practice by making Discipline of the Society of Friends
January the " First Month " in the year, (third or 1834 edition), pp. 72—77.
493 LIFE OF MILTON AND HISTORY OF HIS TIME.
have said ; but, if you fancy the cup somewhat in the shape of
a shallow cream-jug^ the resemblance will be more exact.
Coming from Uxbridge or Rickmansworth, you descend into
the village at the handle end of the jug ; and, after threading
the village by the inns, the pond, and the houses, you reascend
at the mouth. The road thence takes you to the market-town
of Beaconsfield, whifeh is about four miles distant.
The " pretty box " which Ellwood took for Milton in Chal-
font still exists, and is known to all the villagers as " Milton's
Cottage." It is the last house in the village on the left side
of the end pointing towards Beaconsfield, and is about half-way
up the slope at that end. It is a small irregular cottage, of
brick and wooden beams, divided now into two inhabitable tene-
ments, each with its own door. The door of the poorer tene-
ment is to the slope of the village-road, and admits to two or
three small and very uninviting rooms ; the other tenement,
regarded as Milton's cottage proper, has its front to a bit of
garden off the road at right angles, with its door and latticed
casements looking up the slope towards Beaconsfield over this
bit of garden. Probably the two tenements were one in Milton's
time, and not too much even then for the accommodation of
a family such as his. The present humble inmates can count,
in the two tenements together, four sitting-rooms and five
bed-rooms ; but novisitor, judging by the modem standard
of what a room is, would allow that name to some of the very
tiny and dark closets that are shown. The best part of the
whole is certainly that which has its front to the garden off
the road, looking up the slope. Here, on the ground-floor,
level with the garden, are two tolerably pleasant small sitting-
rooms, with very low ceilings, while above, up a short wooden
stair, are small and low bed-rooms to correspond. These are
the rooms that Milton and his family must have chiefly in-
habited. One notes the lattices in these rooms, both on the
ground;floor and above, opening into the garden. To all
appearance the small lozenges of glass set in lead which one now
sees are those which were there when Milton sat in the rooms ;
and some of the bolts about the lattices and doors also remain
unchanged. Milton's favourite seat within doors at first must
MILTON AT CHALPONT ST. GILES. 493
have been at one of these latticed casements ; where, knowing
only at second-hand of the somewhat limited view thence of
which others might complain, he could feel the summer air
blowing in upon him from the garden, with the hum of bees
and the odour of honeysuckles. Where there is merely a door
now to the garden, with an old grape-vine trailed over that
part of the front wall, there was once a porch, forming a kind
of independent projecting room, in which Milton may have also
liked to sit. Nightingales are. plentiful about Chalfont, and
he may have heard them from this porch in the evenings,
The walks possible to Milton from his cottage may be easily
indicated. There was the walk up the slope out of the village,
and along the higher road, with its variations, in the direction
of Beaconsfield. Then there were various walks, by acclivities
and declivities, on both skirts of the village itself, through
green lanes and footpaths, well wooded, especially in the
neighbourhood of the church. Or, if the walk were straight
down into and through the village, then one might protract it
in the same direction by reaseending to the country towards
Herts and Rickmansworth. In that direction, on an emi-
nence about a mile from the village, was the old manor-house
of the Vache, the chief estate of the parish of Chalfont St.
Giles. The manor, with its name of legendary origin, dating
from near the Conquest, had been in possession of the Fleet-
wood family, so well known to Milton. It had been acquired
in 1564 by Thomas Fleetwood, Esq., whose son. Sir George
Fleetwood, knight, was the grandfather of the regicide Colonel
George Fleetwood, and of his younger brother, General Charles
Fleetwood, Cromwell's son-in-law. For a century, therefore,
the Fleetwoods had been the chief family of Chalfont parish,
with their arms over houses in the village, and memorial
tablets to some of them in the parish church. Not till 1661,
when the regicide George Fleetwood, then proprietor of the
Vache, was attainted of high treason, had the connexion of
the Fleetwoods with Chalfont come to an end. The forfeited
manor had then been gifted by the King to the Duke of York,
who sold it in 1665 to a Sir Thomas Clayton. This Clayton,
therefore, was the great man of the place when Milton came
494 LIFE OF MILTON AND HISTORY OF HIS TIME.
to Clialfont for a temporary refuge. The late proprietorship
of the Fleetwoods must, however, have been in his recollection.
Horton, where Milton had lived from 1632 to 1639, is in the
same county of Bucks, though ahout. thirteen miles to the
south of Chalfont ; and Milton's friendship with Charles Fleet-
wood, recorded so carefully by himself as dating from Meet-
wood's " very boyhood," may have begun in those days. If
so, Milton was no stranger tp Chalfont St. Giles, but had for-
merly seen with his eyes the hollow-s and roadways about
which he had now to be led ^.
Milton and his family were probably very recluse in their
cottage at the village-end. It was the great Plague year,
and going and coming between village and village, anywhere
in the south-east of England, or even between house and
house in the same village, was a matter of some caution. The
Plague had reached several of the Buckinghamshire towns,
and the registers of Chalfont St. Giles prove that there were
actually cases in that parish itself. The distance from London,
therefore, did not give the Chalfont people and their neigh-
bours perfect sense of security or freedom of movement.
There may have been difficulties even in those occasional
little journeys of Milton's wife and one of his daughters to
Beaconsfield, or to Amersham, the other nearest market-town
in a reverse direction, which must have been necessary for
such purchases for the household as could not be made in
Chalfont itself. Still, what a difference in this sleepy country
hollow in Buckinghamshire, with its fields and trees, from
the plague-desolated metropolis ! If only for talk on that
subject, there would be neighbours of Milton who would drop
in at his cottage. The rector of the parish was a certain
William EoUes, of Jesus College, Oxford, who had been
appointed to the parish in September 1663 by the Archbishop
of Canterbury, on the ejection of the former Presbyterian
rector, Thomas Valentine, M.A., one of the original members
of the "Westminster Assembly ^. Naturally, however, if there
1 Account of the ]^arish of Chalfont " Lipscomb's BueUnghamehire as
St. GUes iuLlpsoomb 8 History of Buck- ahoTe, and Calamy's NonconformiMf
inghamshire, III. 225—236. MeTnorial, I. 297.
MILTON AT CHALFONT ST. GILES. 496
were any Buckinghamshire Nonconformists about, these would
be the readiest to call on the new occupant of the cottage.
What of the Quaker Penningtons, living in the very next
parish of Chalfont St. Peter's, and whose mansion in that
parish, [" The Grange," was within an easy walk from Chal-
font St. Giles? What, especially, of young EUwood, the
tutor in the Pennington family, who had brought Milton
into their vicinity by taking the present cottage for him ?
Honest Ellwood, no doubt, had intended to be at the door
of the cottage to receive Milton on his first arrival. But he
had been prevented by one of those accidents to which the
poor Quakers were everywhere liable in those days. Just after
sending notice to Milton in London that he had taken the
cottage for him, he and the Penningtons had gone to Amer-
sham, to assist in the burial of Edward Parret, a Quaker of
that town, in a private piece of ground designated by the
deceased himself. A Buckinghamshire lawyer and justiee-of-
the-peacCj named Bennett, had seen fit to interrupt the funeral
procession, thrust the coffin from the shoulders of its bearers
till it fell in the street, and order the apprehension of all con-
cerned. The body, after it had lain in the open street for
some time, was buried at night in a grave dug in the uncon-
secrated part of Amersham churchyard ; but the ofiending
Quakers were kept in custody in an inn till another justice-
of-the-peace, who had been summoned, should arrive to aid
Bennett in dealing with them. He was the Sir Thomas
Clayton who has just been mentioned as having entered on
the Vache property by purchase from the Duke of York. By
him and Bennett together ten of the ofienders, among whom
were Pennington and Ellwood, had been committed to jail
in Aylesbury, the assize town of the county ; and here they
had been kept for a month, Ellwood amusing himself, as he
had done ii\ his former imprisonment in Bridewell and New-
gate, by writing verses. He gives us this specimen : —
Middle.
Some men are free while they in prison lie;
Others, who ne'er saw prison, captive die.
496 LIFE OF MILTON AND HISTORY OP HIS TIME.
Solution,.
He's only free indeed that's free from sin;
And he is fastest bound that's bound therein^.
This imprisonment of Ellwood's it was that had prevented
him from waiting on Milton on his first arrival at Chalfont.
" But now, being released and returned home," says Ellwood,
" I soon made a visit to him, to welcome him into the country.
" After some discourses had passed between us, he called for
" a manuscript of his ; which, being brought, he delivered to
" me, bidding me take it home with me and read it at my
" leisure, and, when I had so done, return it to him, with my
"judgment thereon. When I came home and had set myself
"to read it, I found it was that excellent poem which he
" entitled Paradise Lost. After I had, with the best atten-
" tion, read it through, I made him another visit, and returned
" him his book, with due acknowledgment of the favour he
" had done me in communicating it to me. He asked me
" how I liked it and what I thought of it j which I modestly,
" but freely, told him : and, after some further discourse about
" it, I pleasantly said to him, ' Thou hast said much here of
" Paradise Lost, but what hast thou to say of Paradise Found?'
" He made no answer, but sat some time in a muse ; then
" brake off that discourse, and fell on another subject ^."
The date of the first of the two visits connected in this
memorable passage of Ellwood's Life must have been late
in August, or early in September, 1665, when the Plague was
at its worst in London. Ellwood, one sees, had been telling
Milton of his verses in Aylesbury jail and elsewhere, and had
perhaps repeated to him the specimen just quoted ; and hence,
the discourse having turned on poetry, and the scarcity of
other auditors having made Milton unusually commuBicative,
we may account for his extraordinary favour to the trusty,
kindly, but somewhat thick-headed Quaker lad. The manu-
script given to Ellwood, we may also be quite sure, was not
the only copy then in Milton's possession. — The second of the
two visits, when Ellwood returned the manuscript and gave
1 Ellwood's Life, pp. 238-245. 2 Ellwood's Life, pp. 246—247.
, MILTON AT CHALFONT ST. GILES. 497
Milton his impressions of it, must have been only a week or
two after the first. For, before the end of September, Isaac
Pennington having been again arrested and committed to
Aylesbury jail, the household at the Grange had been broken
up. Mrs. Pennington had then gone to Aylesbury to be near
her husband, Ellwood and the younger children accompanying
her, while Guli. Springett went to stay for a while with an old
servant of the family settled in Bristol ^.
September 1665 passes in Chalfont, and October succeeds,
and then the winter months of November, December, and
January, bringing down the mortality by plague in London
with reassuring rapidity. The fall in October was only to
14,373 deaths, still a frightful figure ; but in November the
bills gave but 3449, which sank in December to 1000, and
in January still lower. Through those months of cooling
weather, deepening into snow on the roads and fields, Milton
continued in his Buckinghamshire retreat, more within doors
than he had been at first, but doubtless with daily visits from
some of his neighbours. Besides the great topic of the Plague
and its gradual abatement, the chief news through these
months was of the straggling continuance of the Dutch war
and of the holding at Oxford of that short Fifth Session of the
Cavalier Parliament (Oct. 9 — Oct. 31) in which, unmollified
by the Plague or by the clamours of the Nonconformists for
indulgence after such a judgment, they added the dreadful
Five Miles Act to their previous persecuting acts of the ■
Clarendonian series and almost passed also an Act imposing
the passive obedience oath universally on the nation.
Among several pieces of verse that have been attributed
by vague tradition or conjecture to Milton, though never
printed in his works, not one has any such appearance of being '
possibly his, or a mutilation of something he did dictate, as a
fragment of a sonnet supposed to be of the date of his residence
at Chalfont. It was first printed by Birch, in his Life of
Milton in 1738, in this form : —
Fair mirror of foul times ! whose fragile sheen
Shall, as it blazeth, break; while Providence,
1 EUwood's Life, 237— 2i8.
VOL. TI. K k
498 LIFE OF MILTON AND HISTOEY OF HIS TIME.
Aye watching o'er bis Saints with eye unBeen,
Spreads the red rod of angry pestilence,
To sweep the wicked and their counsels hence :
Yea, all to break the pride of lustful kings,
Who Heaven's lore reject for brutish sense,
As erst he scourged Jessides' sin of. yore
For the fair Hittite, when, on seraph's wings,
He sent him war, or plague, or famine sore^
BACK IN ABTILLERY WALK, BUNHILL I 1666-67.
"After the sickness was over, and the city well cleansed
"and become safely habitable again, he returned thither,"
is EUwood's accoutit of the termination of Milton's stay at
Chalfont St. Giles. The wording may suggest the date.
Pepys, who had returned to town on the evening of the 27th
1 Birch introduces the fragment thus :
— " I have in my hands a sonnet said to
" be written by Milton upon occasion of
"the Plague, and to have been lately
" found on a glass-window at Chalfont."
Then, after quoting the fragment, he
adds, " But the obvious mistake in this
" sonnet, in representing the pestilence
" as a judgment upon David for his adul-
" tery with Bathsheha, whereas it was on
" account of his numbering the people,
"renders it justly suspected not to be
" our author s, who was too conversant
" in Scripture to commit such an error.
" For this and some other reasons, which
" I might mention, I consider it only as
"a Very happy imitation of Milton's
"style and manner. However, I am
"informed by Mr. George Vertue that
"he has seen a satirical medal upon
" King Charles, struck abroad, without
"any inscription, the device of which
" corresponds extremely with the senti-
" ment in this sonnet. On one side is
" represented the King, drest in the most
" magnificent manner, and on the reverse
"his . subjects perishing by a raging
"pestilence sent from heaven." — Birch
seems to have settled in -the belief that
the thing was not Milton's ; for in the
s6ooad edition of his Life in 1753 he
does not reprint it. Told, however,
who prints it in a note (I. US'), says,
" I have seen a, copy of it written, ap-
" parently in a coeval hand, at the end
" of Tonson's edition of Milton's Smaller "
" Poems in 1713, where it is also said to
" be Milton's." — I should not lay much
stress on Birch's objection ; but there
seems a more fatal objection in the
supposed subject or ocension of the
sonnet. It seems to- have been sug-
gested by the sight of some glittering
object, whether a medal or some curious
piece of glass manufacture that would
break in blazing ; and this would nep-
tive the idea of its being by a blind
man. But possibly the first two lines,
which are the least MUton-like, may
have been fitted on to the rest by some
one who had the rest in bis memory,
but had forgotten the proper beginning.
In any case, four lines are wanting to
make the thing a complete sonnet of
any kind ; and there ought to be a re-
arrangement of the order of the rhymes
in the first part, with two additional
rhymes in een, one in ings, and one in
ore, to make it a Sonnet on the Miltonic
model Birch's story Of the discovery of
the thing inscribed on a glass-window
at Chalfont I give up as nonsense.
Where was the pane of glass at Chal-
font that could hold it ; and, if the
notion is that it was exhibited in 1665,
what Chalfont householder was mad
enough to advertise his disaffection by
cutting the lines on his window with a
diamond after having Tieard them in
MUton's cottage ? I wish people, when,
handing on a tradition, would always
imagine distinctly the physical and
historical possibility of what they are
putting on paper.— Very likely Birch's
decision was right ; but " Jessides' sin "
and "the fair Hittite" make one hesitate.
MILTON BACK IN LONDON, 499
of NoveHiber, had then found "few people yet in the streets,
nor shops open," On the 13th of December he reportsi " The
town do thicken so much with people that it is much if the
plague do not grow again upon us;" and there had been
subsequent alarms of the kind when the mortality again rose.
But for the week ending the 22nd of January 1665-6 Pepys
could write, " Good news, beyond all expectation, of the de-
crease of the Plague, being now but 79 and the whole but 272."
Under Jan. 31 he writes, "I find many about the city that
" live near th^ churchyards solicitous to have the churchyards
" covered with lime, and I think it is needful ; and ours,
" I hope, will be done." The next day, Feb. 1, the King
and the Duke of York were back in town. From that time
London, we may assume, was itself again, — -safer, indeed, than
much of the country round, inasmuch as the Plague, though
nearly extinct in Middlesex, was still running its course in
Kent and Essex. Milton, therefore, we may calculate, re-
turned to his London house in February, or at latest in March,
just when people were beginning to write 1666 instead of
1665. If Pepys was solicitous about having the churchyard
round Ms place of worship (St. Olave's, Hart Street) covered
with lime, much more may Milton have hesitated about again
inhabiting his house in Artillery Walk before every possible
process of cleansing had been applied to the field near by,
which had been used as the most promiscuous plague cemetery
for all London. The city authorities, however, were already
alert on, that subject. Bunhill Fields were no longer to be
left a mere open piece of ground, but were to be enclosed with
a brick wall " at the sole charges of the city of London," and
converted permanently into what Southey calls " the Campo
Santo of the Dissenters," i.e. the favourite burying ground
thenceforward of all the Nonconformist sects of London.
Visitors who go to Bunhill Fields burial ground now, to look
at the monuments and tombstones of which it is full, and to
linger before those of Thomas Goodwin, John Owen, John
Bunyan, and Daniel Defoe, may remember that the brick-
wall which was to enclose the Bunhill plague- pit ground for
the regular purposes of such a cemetery was begun just about
K k 2
500 LIFE OF MILTON AND HISTORY OF HIS TIME.
the time when Milton and his family came back to their
house in Artillery Walk from Chalfont St. Giles \
Paradise Lost having been complete in the autumn of 1665^,
one might have expected that Milton, on his return to town,
would take steps for its publication in the course of 16G6.
Whether he did take such steps and found difficulties, or
whether he voluntarily kept the manuscript for yet further
revision, We have no means of knowing. Nor, in fact, have
we a single certain glimpse of Milton's occupations between
his return to London early in 1666 and the month of August
in that year. To that month of August 1666 belongs the
last of his printed Latin Familiar Epistles.
The reader will remember Milton's young German friend
Peter Heimbach, who had been one of his admiring visitors
in the house in Petty Prance, whom he had employed in Nov.
1656 to inquire about the sizes and the prices of the best
atlases in Amsterdam (Vol. V. pp. 279-281), and to whom he
had written a rather discouraging note in December 1657, in
reply to a request that he would use his influence to obtain
Heimbach's appointment to be secretary to Downing, then
going as ambassador for the Protector to the Hague (Vol. V.
pp, 380-381). Heimbach had since then returned to his
native part of Germany, the Duchy of Cleves, and had im-
proved his fortunes there. Since April 1664, he had held the
rank of state-councillor to the Elector of Brandenburg for the
affairs of the Duchy, then in possession of the house of Bran-
denburg ; and he was still in that post in the year 1666.
He had never, it appears, ceased to think of Milton, and now,
after a long interval, he was moved to reopen correspondence
with him, in a Latin letter, which may be translated as
follows :—
1 EUwood s Life, 247 ; Pepys of dates ; Phillipg, that MUton finished Paradise
Cunninghain's London, Bwnhill Fields Lost " about 3 yeares after the K's
BmM Ground. restauration." This might mean 1663
2 Ellwood's words, like those of every or 1664; hut, even without EUwood's
■other Quaker of that time, are to be ab- correction, at least another year would
flolutely trusted. But there is coirobo- have to be added to bring the date into
ration, though of a vague kind, in accord with independent probability.
Aubrey's information, gathered from
LETTER TO PETEK HEIMBACH. 501
To HIS John Miltoit, a man above praiss, Pbtee Hbimbach.
Had there been earlier assurance among us, John Milton, man
of the highest note every way, that you were still in the congrega-
tion of the living, I should also have sooner reverted in thought
to London to testify our most friendly regards for you. For the
rumour ran that, removed from our trifling affairs, you had been
restored to your native heaven, and were looking down upon all
our concerns from an eminence above the earth. As there is no-
access permitted to that kingdom, I had to check and restrain my
pen, heretofore ready enough to write to men like you. And truly
I, who admired in you not so much your individual virtues as the
marriage-union of diverse virtues, do now, while I discern many
things besides in you, admire especially how it has happened that,
by the union of a grave dignity (exhibited in a face worthy of the
wearer) with the calmest politeness, of kindness with prudence, of
piety with policy, of policy with immense erudition, and, I will add, of
a generous and far from timid spirit (even when younger minds were
slipping) with a genuine love of peace, you have been an example
of a mixture of qualities altogether rare and beyond the allowance of
the age. Hence I pray God that all things may again turn out ac-
cording to your own wish and purpose, one alone excepted. For,
ample in years, and full of honours (even those you have refused),
you desire nothing more now than the reward of quiet and the
crown of justice ; and your wish seems to be that of Simeon of
old, 'Lord, now lettest thou thy servant depart in peace.' But
our desire is far contrary : to wit, that God Almighty may suffer
you to live on as long as possible in activity in the world of
literature and to preside among us there. And so farewell, most
learned Milton, and long life and happiness to you and all yours,
with best salutations from us. Dated at Cleves, where we live as
councillor on the Electoral territory, this 8th of June 1666 of the
common Christian era. Again farewell ; and continue to love us
as much as you can, and gratify us as soon as possible with one of
your most delightful replies ^.
To this odd, but not uninteresting, letter Milton did send
a reply. It was partly ironical, as follows, and is worth,
study : —
To THE VEEY distinguished Petee Heimbach, Councilloe
TO THE Elector op Beandbnbueg.
Small wonder if, in the midst of so many deaths of my country-
1 Translated from a copy oommuni- The Ijatin in that copy is dreadful, with
cated by the late Mr. Thomas Watts of false case-constructions and a syntax
the British Museum to the Appendix to defying analysis ; but the meaning is
Mitford's Life of Milton in the Picker- uumistakeable, and I have tried to
ing edition of his Works (I. cxcvi-vii). render it exactly.
503 LIFE OF MIXTON AND HISTORY OF HIS TIME,
men, in a year of such heavy pestilence, you believed, as you -write
you did, on the faith of some special rumour, that I also had been
cut off. Such a rumour among your people is not displeasing, if it
was the occasion of making known the fact that they were anxious
for my safety, for then I can regard it as a sign of their goodwill
to me. But, by the blessing of God, who had provided for my
safety in a country retreat, I am stiU both alive and well, nor
useless yet, I hope, for any duty that remains to be performed by
me in this life. — That after so long an interval I should have come
into your miud is very agreeable ; although, from your exuberant
expression of the matter, you seem to afford some ground for
suspecting that you have rather forgotten me, professing as you do
such an admiration of the marriage-union in me of so many
different virtues. Truly, I should dread a too numerous progeny
from so many forms of the marriage-union as you enumerate, were
it not an established truth that virtues are nourished most and
flourish most in straitened and hard circumstances ; albeit I may
say that one of the virtues on your list has not very handsomely
requited to me the hospitable reception she had. For what you
call poUcy., but I would rather have you call loyalty to one^s coimtry,
— this particular lass, after inveigling me with her fair name, has
almost expatriated me, so to speak. The chorus of the rest, how-
ever, makes a very fine harmony. One's country is wherever it is
well with one. — And now I will conclude, after first begging you,
if you find anything incorrectly written or without punctuation
here, to impute that to the boy who has taken it down from my
dictation, and who is utterly ignorant of Latin, so that I was
forced, while dictating, not without misery, to spell out the letters
of the words one by one. Meanwhile I am glad that the merits of
one whom I knew as a young man of excellent hope have raised
him to so honourable a place in his Prince's favour ; and I desire
and hope all prosperity for you otherwise. Farewell !
London, Aug. 15, 1666 ^
1 Milton's I!putol<B Fammares, No. possibility of some trap laid for him
31.-1 hardly like to express m the text politically. Certainly, & this letter of
a fancy that has oocurred to me in kilton's to a Council'lOT of the Elector
translating the letter and studying it iu of Brandenburg had been intercepted
tWMJnV^*^ Heimbach's,-to wit, by the English Government, it is so
that Milton may not merely have been cleverly worded that nothing could have
ironically rebuking Heimbach for his been made of it.-But Heimbach may
adulation and. silly phraseology, but have been as honest as he looks. Even
may also have been suspicious of the then, however, Milton, knowing little or
MILTON AND THE GREAT FIEE OF LONDON. 503
When this letter was written all London was alive with
the last successes against the Dutch. Not only had there
been the great four days' battle of June 1-4 off the North
Foreland, in which Albemarle, Rupert, and the other English
admirals had managed to win what they could call a victory
over Ruyter and De Witt ; not only had there been another
and less dubious battle on the 26th of July ; but news had
reached London of the proceedings of Rear-Admiral Holmes's
detachment on the Dutch coasts, on August 8 and 9, when
a vast number of Dutch merchantmen were burnt and de-
stroyed, the quiet Dutch island of Scbelling was ruthlessly
invaded and devastated, and the chief town of that island
left in a blaze. Less than a month after that, as we know,
or exactly eighteen days after Milton's letter to Heimbach,
London itself was in a blaze. In other words, the Great
Fire of London (Sept. 2 — Sept. 5, 1666) inserts itself into
Milton's biography at this point.
The Fire was no collateral casualty for Milton, but an actual
and tremendous experience. For three days or so he and his
household were among the huddled myriads on the edge of that
roaring, crackling^-vconflagration, which was reducing two-
thirds of the entire city to ashes, drawing down the vast bulk
of St. Paul's and a hundred other towers and steeples from
their familiar solidity on the old sky-line, hurling burning
timbers and scorching smoke whichever way the wind blew,
turning the sun overhead by day into a blood-coloured ball,
and lighting up the sky at night over four counties with a lurid
glare like that from a thousand furnaces. Helpless on the
edge of this horror and commotion, only the sounds of which
could come into his own sensation, while the sights had to
be reported to him, the blind man sat for three days and three
nights. — Not till the third or fourth day could it be known
where, in any direction, the conflagration would stop, or
whether it would ever stop. Then it was known that the area
of the fire included the 436 square acres from the Tower to
nothing of Heimbach for the last nine bach see Stem's Milton und Seine Zeit,
years, had reason to be cautious. — For III. 184 and note to that page,
some further particulars about Heim-
504 LIFE OF MILTON AND HISTORY OF HIS TIME.
Temple Bar, and from the river to Aldersgate, Cripplegate,
and Moorgate, and that what remained of London was but
the irregular fringe of built ground round this desolated
space, consisting of a shred of the east side of the old city
within the walls, and of the suburbs beyond the walls to the
north. Having been stopped on the north, by the City Wall
and Ditch, exactly at the three gates mentioned, it had spared
the two suburbs with which we have had principally to associate
Milton. It had spared the Aldersgate Street suburb, in-
cluding Aldersgate Street itself, where he had lived from
1640 to 1645, the Barbican, where he had lived from 1645 to
1647, and Jewin Street, where he had lived more recently.
It had spared, and only just spared, the church of St. Giles,
Cripplegate, immediately outside the walls, — the church which
had been Milton's parish church in his Barbican days, again
his parish church when he was in Jewin Street, and which
was his pariah church still. As nearly as I can measure, the
fire had come within a quarter of a mile of Milton's house in
Artillery Walk, leaving so much of a belt of unburnt streets
and lanes, Chiswell Street and Grub Street among them, to
separate him from the part of the ruins that lay between
Cripplegate and Moorgate. — Inside, among the ruins, in the
very centre of the map of the fire, there lay, as Milton knew,
whatever remained distinguishable or indistinguishable of
what had formerly been his native Bread Street, with the
rest of the neighbourhood of old Cheapside. His house in
Bread Street, the Spread Eagle of his birth and boyhood,
" which was all the real estate he had then left," as Wood
expressly tells us, was, of course, totally gone, its very site
hardly to be identified ; and, as there could be no more visits
of admiring foreigners to that house "to see the chamber
where he was born," so to himself there was to be the
cessation thenceforward of what had hitherto been no un-
important part of his yearly income. It is to be remembered,
therefore, in Milton's biography, that he was not merely on
the edge of the Great Fire among the myriads of witnesses
for three days and nights, but was also one of the sufferers
by it in property.
MILTON XND the GREAT ElEE OP LONDON. 505
We know with what alacrity the Londoners set themselves
to repair their great disaster. Not for six or seven years was
there to be anything like a completely re-edified city ; but
already^ through the winter of 1666-7,— the Sixth Session of
the Cavalier Parliament (Sept. 21, 1666— Feb. 8, 1666-7)
having thrown the necessary legislative energy into the
business by enacting bills for the relief of the dishoused
citizens, bills for rebuilding, and bills for a judicature to
settle disputed sites and claims, — the operations had begun.
What has to be remembered, however, is that they had then
oiily just begun, and that through that winter, and into the
next spring and summer, the whole heart of London remained
one vast chaos of ruins and rubbish-heaps, with workmen and
surveyors here and there busy among them, but amid which
it was dangerous for any others to walk. " This day," says
Pepys, under dat^'Tune^6, 1666-7, more than four months
after the fire, " 1 observe still in many places the smoking
"remains of the late fire: the ways mighty bad and dirty ;"^-
and again on the 26th of February, " I did within these six
" days see smoke still remaining of the late fire in the City ; "
and yet again, as late as the 16th of March, " It is observable
" that within these eight days I did see smoke remaining,
"coming out of some cellars, from the late great fire, now
"above six months since." After that the smouldering of
actual remains of the fire anywhere among the rubbish-heaps
may be supposed to have ceased; but the rubbish-heaps
themselves were still there, with charred masses of wall
wherever a church or other strong stone building had not
quite fallen, and with carts and men moving about in the
unsightly confusion. Such was the state of things in London
when Milton began the printing of his Paradise Lost.
It is possible that the first step necessary in those days
towards the publication of a book had been taken by Milton
before the Fire. This was the transmission of the complete
manuscript to the appointed ofiicial licencer, to be examined
by him and approved as fit to be printed. The Press Act of
May 1662, reviving the system of censorship for books of all
kinds as well as for newspapers, was now very stringently in
508 LIFE OF MILTON AND HISTORY CF HIS TIME.
force. By that Act, as we know, the duty of licensing books
of general literature had been assigned to the Secretaries of
State, the Archbishop of Canterbury, and the Bishop of
London; but it was exceptional for any of those dignitaries
to perform the duty in person. It was chiefly performed for
them by a stafi" of under-licencers, paid by fees. Roger
L'Estrange, one of the censors by royal appointment since
1663, was still peculiarly biisy as a licencer of books in 1666 ;
but five or six others, most of them chaplains for the time
to the Archbishop of Canterbury, were employed in the work
and had a share in the perquisites. Whether an author could
choose his own licencer, or whether manuscripts had to be
left at the porter's lodge in Lambeth Palace, or at some
other appointed place, thence to be distributed among the
members of the licensing staff and take their chance, does not
appear very distinctly. In either case, the maiuuscript of
Paradise Lost came into the hands of the Rev. Thomas
Tomkyns, M.A. of Oxford, then domestic chaplain to the
Archbishop of ' Canterbury and also rector of St. Mary
Aldermary, — in which living he had recently succeeded Dr.
Robert Gell, that old acquaintance of Milton, who, as we have
seen reason to believe, had performed the marriage ceremony
for Milton and Elizabeth MinshuU, not long ago, in St. Mary
Aldermary church. Tomkyns was not more than eight-and-
twenty years of age ; but he was a great favourite of Arch-
'bishop Sheldon, and he had already distinguished himself by
one or two publications in a zealous Royalist and High
Church spirit. One, which had appeared in 1660, bore the
title TAe Beiel's Plea Escamined: or Mr. Baxter^ s Judgment
concerning the late War; another, which appeared in 1661,
had consisted of strictures on the Covenant ; and to these
was soon to be added a third, equally characteristic, under
the title of The Inconvenieneies of Toleration. "Liberty of
"conscience," says Tomkyns in this last, "is a thing which
" hath often made a very great noise in the world, and is at
"the first view a thing highly plausible; but, although it
" looks hugely pretty in the notion, yet it was always found
" strangely unmanageable whenever it came to be handled by
LICENSING OF PABADISE LO&T. SOT*
" experience -, and we shall continually find that those which
" cried it up for the most reasonable thing in the world, when
" themselves stood in need of it, as soon as ever they came
"into power would never endure to hear of it any longer."
Tomkyns, one can see, was no fool ; but, with such opinions,
now that he had his turn of power, he was not likely to be a
very propitious examiner of books from suspected quarters.
Next to Roger L'Estrange he was perhaps the most active
licencer in 1666, and he had a number of books then in
hand ^. With Sheldon beside him, and perhaps talking with
him about the manuscripts, he was likely to examine Paradise
Lost with more than usual vigilance. Accordingly, the tra-
dition, through Toland, is that the world "had like to be
" eternally deprived of this treasure by the ignorance or
"malice of the licencer; who, among other frivolous ex-
" eeptions, would needs suppress the whole poem for imaginary
" treason in the following lines : —
'As when the Sun, new-risen,
Looks through the horizontal misty air
■Shorn of his beams, or from behind, the moon,
In dim eclipse, disastrous twilight sheds
On half the nations, and with fear of change
Perplexes monarchs.'"
One would think that Tomkyns might have found passages
more dangerous to Church and State than this towards the
end of Book I (lines 594-599) ; but, whether because he got
tired of reading beyond that Book, or because he allowed
himself to be reasoned out of his objections, he did at length
give his imprimatur to the whole poem. The actual press-
manuscript of the First Book still exists, with this inscription
on the inside of the fii-st leaf in Tomkyns's hand, applicable
not only to that First Book, but to all the rest. " Imprimatur :
Tho. Tomkyns, i?"*". in Christo Patri ac Domino, P^. Gilherto,
Pivina Providentid ArcMepiseojpo Cantuariemi, a sacris domes-
iicis" i.e. "Authorized to be printed: Thomas Tomkyns,
1 stationers' Begisteis of the time ; Inconvenieneies of Toleration ; New-
Wood's Ath. III. 10i6-8 ; Tomkyns's court's Beperfcorium, I. 436.
508 LTFE OF MILTON AND HISTORY OF HIS TIME.
domestic chaplain to the Right Rev. Father and Lord in
Christ, Gilbert, by divine providence Lord Archbishop of
Canterbury K"
With Tombyns's authority in his possession, some time
early in 1667, Milton was free to negotiate with any printer
or publisher. It was a bad time commercially. The Great
Fire, injurious to every trade in London, had affected the
book-trade in particular. "The loss of books," says Baxter
in his account of the Fire in his autobiography, " was an ex-
" ceeding great detriment to the interests of piety and learning.
" Almost all the booksellers in St. Paul's Churchyard brought
" their books into vaults under St. Paul's Church, where it
" was thought almost impossible that the fire should come.
" But, the church itself being on fire, the exceeding weight
" of the stones falling down did break into the vaults and let
" in the fire, and they could not come near to save the books.
" The library also of Sion College was burnt, and most of the
" libraries of ministers, conformable and nonconformable, in
" the City, with the libraries of many Nonconformists of the
" country, which had been lately brought up to the City. I
■■' saw the half-burnt leaves of books near my dwelling at
" Acton, six miles from London ; but others found them near
" Windsor, almost twenty miles distant." Pepys's summary
account is that books to the value of .^150,000 were burnt in
and round St. Paul's and " all the great booksellers almost
undone." To the loss of their stpck was added that of their
premises. Some of the more enterprising of them found
temporary premises outside the ring of the ruins, not to return
to their former quarters for several years ; but meanwhile the
London book-trade was thrown into fewer hands ^.
The leading London publisher at that time, as we know
(ante, pp. 403-4^5), was Henry Herringman, " at the sign of
the Blue Anchor in the Lower Walk of the New Exchange,"
1 Toland's Life of Milton (edit. 1761), or was recently, in the possession of
p. 121 ; Sotheby s Ramblmgs in Eluol- William Baker, Esq., of Bayfordsbury.
dation of Milton's Autograph (1861), Herts. > i' j j>
p. 166 and p. 196, with plate there. The 2 Baxter's Life (1696), Part III. p. 16 ;
original manuscnpt press-copy of the Pepys, under dates Oct. 5, 1666 and Jan.
First Book of Paradise Lost, mentioned 14, 1667-8.
by Newton .as existing in 1761, is now,
Milton's agreement with simmons. 509
in the middle of the Strand. As his shop had fortunately
escaped the range of the Great Fire, there can have been
less of interruption to his business than to that of most of
his brethren. It would not have been surpising,, therefore^ if
Paradise Lost had been published by Herringman, and so if
Milton had been remembered as one of that numerous group
of the most celebrated authors of the reign of Charles II. who
were to be seen tending, habitually or occasionally, to Herring-
man's shop in the afternoons.
Whether he did go to Herringman only Herringman knows.
The actual bargain was with a printer and publisher in a far
inferior way of business. He was a Samuel Simmons, " next
door to the Golden Lion in Aldersgate Street," probably
a son or nephew of the Matthew Simmons, of the same
Aldersgate Street premises, who had published Milton's B-ucer
Divorce Tract in 1644, and his Tenure of Kvngs and Magistrates
in 1649, and who, probably by Milton's means, had been the
official printer for the Commonwealth in the first years of.
Milton's secretaryship, and had in that capacity published
also Milton's Observations on Ormondes Peace with the Irish,
and his MkonoHastes, This Matthew Simmons seems to have
been now dead, for, on the 7th of March 1663-4, a Mary
Simmons, probably his widow, is found registering a part of
Caryl's Commentary on Job, the previous parts of which
had been the copyright of Matthew Simmons. The Samuel
Simmons who had at length taken up the family business in
the old premises was, therefore, new in the business when
Milton went to him ; but his relationship to the former
Simmons, and the nearness of his premises to Artillery Walk,
may have been recommendations.
The following is the agreement between Milton and Sim-
mons in the matter of Paradise Lost. There were, of course,
two copies of the agreement.; and it is the copy signed for
Milton by proxy and kept by Simmons that has been pre-
served : —
These Presents, made the 27th day of Aprill 1667, Betweene
John Milton, gent., of thone ptie, and Samuel Symons, Printer, of
thother ptie, Wittness : — That the said John Milton, in considera-
510 LIFE OF MILTON AND HISTORY 01" HIS TIME,
tion of five pounds to him now paid by the said Sam^l. Symons and
other the considerations herein mentioned, hath given, granted,
and assigned, and by these pnts doth give, grant, and assigne, unto
the said SamU. Symons, his executors and assignes. All that Books,
Copy, or Manuscript of a Poem intituled Paradise lost, or by whatso-
ever other title or name the same is or shalbe called or distinguished,
now lately Licensed to be printed. Together with the full benefitt,
proffitt, and advantage thereof, or w\ shall or may arise thereby.
And the said John Milton, for him, his ex's. and ad^., doth
covenant with the said Samll. Symons, his ex™, and. ass^s.. That hee
and they shall at all tymes hereafter have, hold, and enjoy the
same, and all Impressions thereof accordingly, without the lett
or hinderance of him, the said John Milton, his ex™, or ass^is.^ or
any pson or psons by his or their consent or privitie. And that the
said Jo. Milton, his ex™, or ad^., or any other by his or their
meanes or consent, shall not print or cause to be printed, or sell,
dispose, or publish, the said Booke or Manuscript, or any other
Booke or Manuscript of the same tenor or subject, without the
consent of the said Sam^l. Symons, his ex™, and ass"^. In con-
sideracion whereof, the said Samll. Symons, for him, his ex'^. and
ads., (Joth covenant with the said John Milton, his ex™, and ass^.,
well and truly to pay unto the said John Milton, his ex™, and ad'.,
the sum of five pounds of lawfuU english money at the end of the
first Impression which the said Sam^l. Symons, his ex™, or asb'^K,
shall make and publish of the said Copy or Manuscript ; "Which im-
pression shalbe accounted to be ended when thirteene hundred
Books of the said whole Copy or Manuscript imprinted shalbe sold
and retaild off to pticular reading Customers : And shall also pay
other five pounds unto the said Mr. Milton, or his ass^, at the
end of the second Impression, to be accoimted as aforesaid, Ajid five
pounds more at the end of the third Impression, to be in like
manner accounted ; And that the said three first Impressions shall
not exceed fifteene hundred Books or volumes of the said whole
Copy or Manuscript a peice : And further. That he the said Samuel
Symons, and his ex™., ad^., and assus., shalbe ready to make oath
before a Master in Chancery concerning his or their knowledge and
beleife of or concerning the truth of the disposing and selling the
said Books by Eetail, as aforesaid, whereby the said Mr. Milton is
to be intitled to his said money from time to time, upon every
reasonable request in that behalfe, or in default thereof shall pay
Milton's agreement with simmons.
511
tbe said five pounds agreed to be paid upon each Impression, as afore-
said, as if the same were due, and for and in lieu thereof. — In
wittness whereof the said pties have to this writing indented inter-
changeably sett their hands and seales, the day and yeare first
abovewritten.
<nv>
Sealed and delivered in the
presence of us,
John Fisher,
Beniamin Greene, serv*. to Mr. Milton '.
' The original of this famous Agree-
ment is in the British Museum, having
heeu presented to that collection in
1852 by Samuel Eogers, the poet, who
had purchased it in 1831, for a hundred
guineas, from Mr. Pickering, the pub-
lisher. It had come down in the pos-
session of the famous publishing family
of the Tonsons, who had acquired part
copyright of Paradise Loit In 1683 and
the whole before 1691, and had thus
got into their hands this evidence of
the original sale. It is distinctly men-
tioned by Bishop Newton, in his Life of
MUton in 1749, as being then in the
possession of Jacob Tonson, tertiiis, to-
gether with the nianuscript copy of the
First Book of the poem, containing Tom-
kyns's imprimatur. After the death of
this Jacob Tonson in 1767, when the
great publishing business of the Tonson
family ceased, the business papers of
the firm were negligently kept in the
premises of a Bank in the Strand, of
which Tonson had been a partner. Some
of them got astray in the hands of
clerks, who appropriated them as relics ;
and not till 1824 is the contract with
Simmons again heard of. It was then
in the possession of a tailor in Clifford
Street, Bond Street, who said it had
been left him, with other papers, by a
lodger, who had been in arrears with
his rent. It was sold by this tailor,
with the other papers (some Tonson
papers relating to Dryden, Addison,
Steele, &c.), for £25, to Mr. Septimus
Prowett, a London bookseller, who was
then bringing out an edition of Paradise
Lost with illustrations by Martin. Prow-
ett sent the papers to a sale by auction
on the 28th of February, 1826, when
the Simmons and Milton contract was
bought, by itself, by Mr. Pickering, for
£45 3s. Sold afterwards by Mr. Pick-
ering for £60 to Sir Thomas Lawrence,
it remained in the possession of Sir
Thomas till his death in 1830, when Mr.
Pickering re-acquired it, to sell it again,
in the following year, to the poet Eogers.
For farther details see Mr. Leigh
Sotheby's Bamblings, pp. 202 — 204.
Notwithstanding the vague history of
the document between 1767 and 1824,
there is not the least doubt as to its
genuineness. It is the actual copy of
the agreement as kept by Simmons.
But there has been a general mistake
as to the signature. The poet Eogers,
who was proud of the relic, never
doubted, when he showed it to his
friends, that the signature was Milton's
own ; most of those who now look at
the relic in the British Museum never
doubt it. Most certainly, however, the
signature is not Milton's own, but a
signature written for him by some one
else, and certified by the touch of Mil-
ton's finger and by the annexed Milton
family seal of the Spread Eagle. This
might have occurred to any one on re-
flecting that Milton in 1667 had been
fifteen years totally blind. The signa-
ture in the contract is not like any
signature of Milton's before his blind-
ness ; and how unlike it is to the only
now known signature of Milton after his
blindness will be apparent to any one
who will turn back to p. 475. The pre-,
sent signature cannot even have been by
Milton's pen led by another person. The
writing is too neat and regular for that.
512 LIFE OF MILTON AND HISTOBY OF HIS TIME,
The substance of this bargain, drawn up in such unusually-
strict legal form, was that Milton, for five pounds paid down,
and for the chance of three future payments of a like sum of
five pounds, had parted absolutely and for ever with the copy-
right of Paradise Lost. But for the second and third clauses,
one might imagine that Milton had sold only the three first
editions of the book for the ^20 thus part paid and part in
prospect, and that after the third edition the copyright would
revert to himself or his representatives. As the copyright of
books was then regarded as perpetual, such a reversion of the
book to the author after a certain number of editions might
be of consequence. Clearly, however, if Milton contemplated
the possibility of more than three editions, he was willing to
waive any interest or expectation of his own after the third.
Simmons was to be the proprietor of the book for ever ; all
impressions of it to the end of time were to be by, him, his
representatives and assigns, and none others ; and for this
absolute possession he had settled the purchase money in such
a way that, if the book were a failure, he could hardly lose
a farthing in addition to his costs in printing and the ^5
paid down. To allow a margin, perhaps, for gift-copies, the
first edition as printed ofi" might actually consist of 1 500, but
in the account with Milton 1300 copies were to constitute an
edition. After a retail sale of 1300 copies Milton was to be
entitled to another ^5 ; if 1300 copies more should go off in
a second edition, a third .^''5 would be due; a fourth £^
would follow after the sale of a third edition of 1300 ; after
that nothing. According to the present value of money it
was as if Milton had received ^17 10s. down, and had to
expect at the utmost three more sums of that amount, making
.^70 in all for his Paradise Lost. That was on the supposition
of a sale of 3900, or say a circulation of 4500 copies. Beyond
that Milton's thoughts did not range.
From April, through May, June, July, and August, 1667,
we are to conceive the proof-sheets passing between Simmons's
printing premises at the Golden Lion in Aldersgate Street
and Milton's house in Artillery Walk, and most careful re-
visions of them by some scholarly person or persons assisting
PBINTINO Oy PARADISE LOST. 513
Milton, and also by Milton himself, so far as his sensitive
ear could detect mispunetuations or other errors in the suc-
cessive pages as they were read to him aloud. But through
what a new turmoil in London, round the ruins and rubbish-
heaps, was this quiet process between author and printer
carried on 1 The public debt by this time so enormous, and
the paralysis of trade by the Great Fire so complete, that the
sailors and all in the employment of Government were in
mutiny for arrears of pay, and the whole population excited
and turbulent, with outcries growing ever louder against Cla-
rendon and the Court ! Negotiations, therefore, reluctantly
begun by Charles for a peace with the Dutch ; these negotia-
tions in progress, and all the larger vessels of war in the
Thames and Medway laid up in dock, and the works of forti-
fication that had been going on down the river stopped, and
the river-banks crowded with the mutinous sailors, and dock-
labourers, and their wives, — when lo, from the 10th to the
14th of June, that disgrace which marked England's lowest
point of degradation even in the reign of Charles II, and
which brought back to the lips of the Londoners the name of
their unforgotten, and now sorely regretted, Oliver ! Ruyter's
Putch fleet off the Nore, come to revenge Holmes's outrage
on the Isle of Schelling ; Ruyter's Dutch fleet up the river^
breaking booms and obstructions, cannonading forts, cap-
turing and burning at will the best ships of the English
navy ; London blockaded, and uncertain whether the Dutch
would not be in what remained of her streets for sack and
pillage, below the Tower "or around Whitehall itself; the
Court in a panic ; the drums beating in the streets to call
the citizens to arms ; the citizens packing their goods for
escape into the country ; the country itself astir for miles
and miles, as far as there was the sound of the Dutch
cannon ! During those five dreadful days of June 1667
Simmons in Aldersgate Street, then about half through the
printing of Paradise Lost, must have had to interrupt the
work. But on the 14th of June the Dutch were gone,
towing the Epyal Charles in flames after them, and having
otherwise had revenge enough; and, though the execration^
VOL, VI. L 1
514 LIFE OF MILTON AND HISTOEY OF HIS TIME.
against the Court and Clarendon was all the fiercer, and
Clarendon's great new house in Piccadilly was attacked by
the mob, the panic had passed away. On the 21st of July
peace with the Dutch was concluded at Breda j and on the
39th the King, meeting the two Houses, who had been
summoned in the panic for an extraordinary session, informed
them that, as the necessity for such a session was over, he
would not require their attendance till the day in October
to which they stood formally prorogued. The printing of
Paradise Lost was then nearly complete ; and our next notice
of it is in the Stationers' Registers under date Aug. 20, when
it was ready, or nearly ready, to appear.
In the seven months of the year 1667 preceding that of the
publication of Paradise Lost, there had been forty-two registra-
tions in the books of the London Stationers' Company. Among
them I note the following : — Dryden's Annus Mirabilis,
licensed by L'Estrange, and published by Herringman (Jan.
21, 1666-7) ; T/ie Reasons of the Christian Religion, by Richard
Baxter, licensed by Mr. Thomas Cook, and published by
Mr. Eyton (March 12) ; a Translation of the Visions of Bon
Francisco de Quevedo, licensed by L'Estrange, and published
by Herringman (March 26, 1667) ; Tie Princes, or the Death
of Richard the%l^hird, a Tragedy, licensed by L'Estrange, and
published by Thomas Dring (June 1) ; the second part of
Bishop Jeremy Taylor's Dissuasive from Popery, licensed by
Tomkyns, and published by Royston (June 29) ; Sprat's His-
tory of the Institution, Design, and Progress of the Royal Society
of London for the advancement of Experimental Philosophy,
licensed by Mr. Secretary Morriee, and published by John
Martyn and James AUestree (July 25) ; and Memoirs of the
Lives, Actions, Sufferings, and Death, of those noble, revered and
excellent personages, that died or sziffered hy sequestration, deci-
mation, or otherwise, for the Protestant Religion, and the great
principle thereof, Allegiance to their Sovereign, in the late wars
from the year 1627 to 1660, the author being David Lloyd,
the licencer Tomkyns, and the publisher Samuel Speede (July
27). The following is a complete list of the registrations
for August 1667, the Master of the Stationers' Company being
EEGISTEATION OF PARADISE LOST. 515
then Mr. Humphrey Robinson, and the two Wardens being
Mr. Evan Tyler and Mr. Richard Royston : —
Aug. 7 : — Herringman registers, under licence from L'Estrange,
"three new plays: viz. Tfie Usurper, a tragedy, The Ghcmge of
Crowns, a play, and Tlie London Gentleman, a comedy; all three
written by the Hon. Edward Howard, Esq."
Same day: — Herringman registers, also under licence from
L'Estrange, Mustaplia, a tragedy by the Earl of Oirery.
Same day : — Herringman registers, also under licence from
L'Estrange, "An Essay of Dramatick Poesie, &c.. The Wild
Gallant, a comedy, and The Maiden Queen, a comedy, by John
Dryden, Esq."
Aug. 12 : — Ralph Needham registers, under licence from Mr.
John Hall, " Disquisitio anatomiea de formato foetu, autore
Gualtero Ifeedkam."
Aug. 19: — Herringman registers his acquisition, by purchase
from Anne Moseley, of the copyrights of the following books, which
had belonged to her late husband, Humphrey Moseley :— Cowley's
Miscellanies, his Mistress or Love Verses, his Pinda/rique Odes,
and his Davideis; Donne's Poems, Songs, Sonnets, and Elegies;
Davenant's Love amd Honowr (one-half), Unfortunate Lovers,
Alhovine, Just Italian, Gruel Brother, Madagascar with other
Poems, and the masques called Lrnninalia, Salmanda, Thelia,
Temple of Love, and Britannia Triumphans ; Oarew's Poems, with
a masque of his ; Crashaw's Steps to the Temple ; Ben Jonson's
Works, Vol. Ill, containing fifteen masques, Horaces Art of Poetry
in English, English Gramma/r, Timber and Discoveries, Under-
woods, The Magnetic Lady, A Tale of a Tub, The Sad Shepherd,
The Devil is an Ass, The Widow; Sir Richard Fanshawe's transla-
tion of II Pastor Fido, with annexed poems ; Sir John Suckling's
Poems, Letters and Plays, and Remains ', Denham's Coop&r^s Hill,
The Sophy, and Translation of the Second Aeneid. These, being
old copyrights, did not need fresh licence.
Aug. 20, 1667 : — "Mr. Sam. Symons entered for his copie, under
" the hands of Mr. Thomas Tomkyns and Mr. Warden Eoyston, a
" booke or copie intituled Paradise lost, a Poem in Tenne Bookes,
" by J. M." The association of the name of one of the wardens in
the registration with that of the official licencer is not peculiar to-
this entry, but oijQurs in nearly all. One notes it as curious, how-
ever, that the attesting warden in this case should have been the
staunch Royalist Royston, the publisher of the Eikon Basilike and
the other works of Charles I.
Same day .■— ^Thomas Eooke registers, under licence from Thomas
Cook, Decimal Arithmetiak, or a Plainer and [more^ Familiar
Teaching the said Art than has hitherto been published : Also
Tables of Interest upon Interest, the Value of all Sorts of Pwchases
L 1 3
516 LIFE OF MILTON AND HISTORY OF HIS TIME.
at any rate of interest from five to twelve j)6r cent, Sc. By James
Hodder, Schoolmaster, late of Lothhwry, now at Bow,
Aug. 30 : — Mrs. Anne Maxwell registers, under licence from
L'Estrange, The Life and Death of Mother Shipton.
Althougli only Milton's initials are given in the registra-
tion, the book itself appeared with Milton's name in full
on the title-page thus : — " Paradise lost. \ A \ Poem \ viritten
in I Ten Books \ By John Milton. \ Licensed and Untred accord-
ing I to Order. | London \ Printed, and are to be sold by Peter
Parker \ under Creed- Church, neer Aldgate ; And by \ Robert
Boulter at the Turks Head in Bishopsgate-street ; \ And Mat-
thias Walker, under St. Bunstons Church \ in Fleet - street,
1667." It is to be observed that in this title-page the
printer Simmons does not give his own name, but only
the names of three booksellers whom he had employed to sell
the book. The shops of these three booksellers were, of
course, in the unburnt fringes of the City, two at the east
end, and one at the west end, nearer "Westminster and the
fashionable world. It is worth while also to note that
Simmons cannot have at once distributed the whole impres-
sion he had printed among the three booksellers, Parker,
Boulter, and Walker, but only ascertain number of bound
copies for the first supply of the market, keeping the rest in
sheets on his own premises in Aldersgate Street.
Copies of the book may have been out in I^ondon in the
last week of August 1667. The selling price was 3«, per
copy ; which is as if a similar book now were to cost 10*. 6^.
The volume was of small quarto size, and of rather handsome
appearance, with good yellowish paper, and good legible type.
It consisted of 342 pages ; but this could not be ascertained
from immediate inspection, inasmuch as the pages were not
numbered, the heading in every page giving only the running
title of the poem, with the number of the Book. To make
up for this deficiency, the lines in each Book were numbered
in tens on the outer margin of each page, so that reference
to any passage might be easy. Once or twice, in some copies
at least, there is a miscounting of the lines. As the number-
ings on the outer margins are contained between two per-
PUBLICATION OF PAltADISE LOST. 517
pendieular lines, as the headings are M'ithin two similar
parallels, and as there are single lines along the inner margin
and at the foot, each page of the text has the look of being
inclosed neatly in a frame. The general look of neatness
thus given to the pages is not belied on closer examination
of the text. The spelling is, of course, the customary one of
Milton's day, with some recurring peculiarities that must
have been regulated by himself, but in the main exhibiting
that instability or want of uniformity, that alternation at will
between two spellings of the same word, or variation at will
among three or four different spellings of the same word,
which characterizes all books of the time. Nor is the point-
ing on any strictly logical principle, or uniformly on any
principle of any kind ; it is, as most pointing is to this day,
a mere empirical compromise, for the reader's convenience,
between pause -marking and clause -marking. Altogether,
however, the book had been printed with wonderful accuracy.
I do not know that any other book of Milton's was put forth
in his lifetime so accurately printed and in such pleasant form.
One peculiarity of the form was that the book contained no
preface or other preliminary matter whatever. You passed from
the title-page at once to tlie text of the Poem.
Not only is it memorable that Paradise Lost appeared in
London when the heart of the City was one great space of
hardly touched ruins after the Fire, and that it had been
printed while the Londoners were in their first phrenzy of
rage and shame on account of the national disgrace inflicted
by the Dutch outrages and triumphs on the Thames and
Medway : the very week> of the announcement of the book
is marked most exactly by another coincidence. It was the
week of Clarendon's fall. On Monday, the 20th of August,
when Simmons was registering the book, Clarendon, then in
mourning for his wife, whom he had buried three days before
in Westminster Abbey, could still hope that the support
of the King and the Duke of York would carry him through
the crisis of his unpopularity. Only a day or two after that,
however, there came to him in Piccadilly the stunning mes-
sage from the King that he must resign the seals ; on
518 LIFE OF MILTON AND HISTOKT OF HIS TIME,
Monday the 26th there was that interview between him and
the King when, to cut short his passionate remonstrances,
the King at last rose in gloom, dismissing him through the
private garden, to he gazed at by Lady Castlemaine j and it
was on Friday the 30th, while he still proudly or madly
hesitated, that there came the peremptory warrant, through
Secretary Morrice, which compelled him to give up the seals.
The first copies of Paradise Lost, from Parker's shop or
Boulter's in the east end, or from Walker's in the west end,
may then have been in the hands of readers here and there in
the streets, turning over the leaves as they went along ; and
the poem was gradually to find its way about, and make its
first impression, during those next three months of the year
1667 which were the time of Clarendon's desperate lingering
in London, till the danger of capital impeachment by the
Parliament, after their meeting in October for their Seventh
Session, drove him into his perpetual banishment.
PARADISE LOST.
The other day, tired with excess of readings in the English
Literature of the Eestoration, I took up again, by a kind of
instinct, Dante's Bivina Commedia, in Gary's translation. I
read no farther than to where Dante, astray in the gloomy
wood, is met by Virgil, who offers to be his guide through
two of the regions of the eternal world, explaining that he
has been sent for that purpose by Beatrice, and promising
that Beatrice herself will be his guide into the realms of the
highest. At that point, remembering what a succession of
things and visions was to follow, first in the Inferno, then in
the Purgatorio, and then in the Paradiso, I had suddenly to
stop, overcome by the thrill already as I held the book in my
hand, and exclaiming once and again, " Mercy of heaven !
this is a book, here is literature." Hardly otherwise can
a reader have been impressed who took up Paradise Lost
on its first appearance and compared it with the printed pro-
ductions into the midst of which it had come.
The comparison of Paradise Lost with the Bivina Commedia
PARADISE LOST. 519
is more obvious now than it could be then. In the one poem
as in the other we have the personal philosophy of a great
and much exercised man, set forth in the form which poetry-
requires; and which alone constitutes poetry, i. e. in the form
of optical or visual phantasy. Moreover, in the actual plans
and contents of the two poems there are resemblances or
correspondences. Both are cosmological visions, including
things and ongoings beyond the known universe, but exhibited
as everlastingly in connexion with that universe, and inter-
involved with the actions of mankind. Under this general
similarity, however, there is a specific difference. It may be
defined in terms of the common and still useful distinction
between the subjective mood or genius and the objective
mood or genius in poetry.
With Dante, preeminently a subjective poet, the vast
personal purpose preceded and caused the cosmological vision.
His head and heart were full of a history of men and things
on earth, this history eotaiposed largely of personages and
transactions belonging to the Italy of his own time, or of
times lately past, but ranging a little over the rest of
medifeval Europe for select figures and instances, and with a
winding path back through Roman and Greek antiquity to
the Hebrews and the primeval patriarchs. He had formed
his theory of this histoty, concluded what had been good and
what had been evil in it, who were the scoundrels and who
the heroes or the more or less meritorious. He had his ideal
also of what might still be accomplished in the moral and
political system of Italy; and in the system of the world as
instructed and regulated from that centre. When, accord-
ingly, he had resolved to express all that was thus in his
mind, his ethics, his politics, his notions of empire, his
judgments of those he had known, his hatreds and his sorrows,
his admirations and his hopes, in a poem that should be
adequately symbolic of such a mental medley, he had but to
fall into the poetic musing, let the musing protract itself, and
accept the visions as they then infallibly came. It was in
his thirty-fifth year, as he tells us, while he was still in
Florence, that his dream of the three worlds began, and it
520 LIFE OF MILTOif AND HISTORY OF HIS TIME.
followed him, haunted him, grew upon him, in his subsequent
years of exile, wanderings, and penurj', till it was optically
complete, and nothing remained that had not been put into
it somehow, He had actually seen the three worlds in suc-
cession, circle after circle of each, and conversed with their
inhabitants ; and what he had thus seen, the glorious and the
grotesque together, was to be regarded as nothing arbitrary
or determined by will merely, but as, by strict poetic law, the
translation of his entire mind and life into the one visual
phantasmagory that was fully and exactly equivalent. In
order, therefore, that it should be known in future times how
Dante had thought and felt on all subjects, human and
divine, while he was alive, he would report this strange
vision of his Hell, his Purgatory, and his Paradise, to their
last particulars, in studied song, p,nd burn it into the imagina-
tion of the Italians for ever.
" Se mgi continga che '1 po^ma sacrp
Al quale ha posto mano e cielo e terra,
^i clie in' ha fatto per piu anni macro,
Vinca la crudelt^ che fuor mi serra
Del hello ovile ov' JQ dormii agnello
Nimico a' lupi che li danno guerra.
Cop altra voce omai, con altro vello,
Eitornerb poeta."
In the case of Milton the process was, in some sense
reversed. He had chosen a subject, and whatever of his own
mind and philosophy he could insert into his poem had to
come in the course of his treatment of this subject as already
chosen. Nor was Milton different in this from his former
self. Though the subjective genius of a great personalitj^
was as conspicuous in his life as in Dante's, though he had
striven and suffered in the actual affairs of his time as
vehemently as Dante had in the affairs of his, though he too
had been an opinionist and idealist in ethics and politics, a
man of hatreds and antipathies, a controversialist all but in-
cessantly, one observes generally in his poems from the first
less of the subjective element than in Dante's, and more of
the habit of the objective artist. In his earlier poems,
PARADISE LOST, 521
Miltonic though they all are, full of his own peculiar
character and of no other, what one generally sees is a theme
or incident externally given, and accepted and treated artisti-
cally on its own account, the Miltonism inevitable indeed,
but infused or superinduced. Even in his Comus this is
apparent. If, as is probable, the myth or story of that
masque was an invention of Milton's own in the interest of that
principle of the invincibility of virtue which he meant the
masque to inculcate, then the claim of the poem to be classed
as one of the subjective kind would be considerably enhanced ;
nor on any other supposition, providing an independent origin
for the myth, can the strongly subjective character of the
poem be denied. Milton is there the young Plato of Horton,
making his masque for Ludlow Castle enforce a spiritual
lesson and subserve an idea that had taken possession of his
own mind. But what fidelity at the same time tb the story
itself, what pure love of the objective phantasy for its own
sake, what artistic tact for the capability of beautiful ad-
dition, valuable for poetic reasons only, in every turn and
circumstance of the sylvan vision ! And so when, in his later
age, he formally resumed his " singing-robes," after so long
and stormy an interval, the same general poetic method is
still visible, the same essential priority of the objective con-
ception to the subjective infusion. Paradise Lost, at all
events, is primarily a poem of the objective order. As long
ago as 1640 or 1641, when he set down on paper no fewer
than a hundred subjects miscellaneously for consideration, with
a view to the selection of that one, or those two or three,
that should seem fittest eventually, the story of Adam and '
Eve had fascinated him most, captivated him most, of all the
hundred. It was to this subject, accordingly, that he had
returned in his fiftieth year, when the competition of the '
rest had faded ; and the great epic which he had now given
to the world in his fifty-ninth year was simply that old
Biblical story of the beginnings of humanity on our earth,
as his imagination had dared at last to shape it out poetically
and perfectly, with the Bible for his main authority and the
Spirit of God for his guide. As Dante's conception of the
532 TjIFE of MILTON AND HISTOEY OF HIS TIME.
three worlds in connexion with ours had been left burnt for
ever into the imaginations of his countryiaen, so was this
Miltonie conception of the beginnings of human history to
be impressed with luminous distinctness for ever on the
imaginations of all who should read or speak English. The
difference is that the visual phantasy bequeathed by Dante
was tnainly a congeries of intense and intricate symbolisms
of his own personality, whereas that offered by Milton was
mawjly a sublime vereion of an independent objective tra-
dition.
' Be. the genius of a poet, however, as resolutely objective as
it may, the personality has nevertheless already asserted itself
in this very matter of his choice of a subject. An artist left
free to choose his subjects will be drawn to those with which
he is in affinity constitutionally or by education, those into
which he feels he can put most of himself. The subject chosen
by a poet is thus a kind of declaration or allegory of his own
mind and intentions. Why had Milton been so fascinated by
the subject of Paradise Lost? Why, had he abandoned all the
other subjects that had once attracted him, and fixed at last
conclusively on this as the subject for his great epic ? It was
because he felt that this subject would enable him to throw
into the epic form the latgest possible amount of his own
philosophy of Man and History. True, the title he had given
to the subject when it first seized him, Paradise Lost or Adam
Unjjaradised, did not necessarily suggest very much. It
suggested, indeed, the infant earth, with two human beings
upon it, and the garden of loveliness in which they moved,
and the forbidden tree in the midst, and the story of the
temptation, fall, and expulsion, as told in the first three
chapters of the Book of Genesis. Adequately treated, there
might be a rich and beautiful poem out of the subject within
those limits. But, from the first moment when Milton
meditated the subject, it was evident that he did not mean
to remain within those limits, and more and more, as he
thought of the subject, those limits had been discarded. In
his first drafts of the subject for an intended tragedy one had
heard of Michael, and Gabriel, and Lucifer, and choruses of '
PABADISE LOST. 523
Angels, showing that even then the scenery and action were
not to be only on the infant earth, but there were to be con-
nexions of that infant earth with the grander pre-human
realms of being, out of which earth and mankind had sprung,
and which still encircled them invisibly. When the fuller
epic was schemed these transcendental connexions of the
merely terrestrial story had necessarily assumed still larger
proportions. At the core of the epic was still to be the story
of Adam and Eve in Paradise on the newly-created earth ;
but, in the interest of that human story itself, the poet was
to range back into the infinitudes of more absolute existence
that had preceded the appearance of the earth in space and the
whole rondure of luminaries to which it belongs. Thus the
epic was to be no epic of man and the earth merely, but, by
implication thence, an epic of the entire created universe, in
its relations to prior and aboriginal eternity. Here was a sub-
ject Miltonic enough even for Milton. It could receive and
express all his physics, all his metaphysics, all his theology.
He could tell the story of the Fall of Man so that it should
be a poetic representation of his profoundest views as to the
origin of the world, God's purposes with mankind, the con-
nexion through all historic time of man and his world with
other realms of created and active being, the causes of the
sad course of human history hitherto, and the prospects of
simplification and recovery. In short, Paradise Lost, as it left
Milton's hands, was a complete cosmologieal epic, setting
forth his theory of all things, physical and historical, in the
form of an optical and narrative phantasy, conceived mainly
in conformity with that pre- Coper nican system of belief
respecting the arrangements of the universe which was still
prevalent while he lived. This matter of the Pre-Coperni-
canism of Paradise Lost deserves farther attention.
In our own days the necessary peculiarity of the educated
con&ption of nature, the cosmos, the mundus, the physical
or created all of things, is absolute unboundedness. We walk
on a ball 8000 miles in diameter, called the earth ; this earth
spins on its axis, and the attendant moon goes round the earth'
524 LIFE OF MILTON AND HISTOEY OF HIS TIME.
in an orbit ; earth and moon together perform their longei*
annual journey round the sun ; this sun, however, has other
bodies also obeying him and wheeling round him at various
distances, — two of them, Mercury and Venus, nearer to him
than the earth, and others, Mars, the asteroids, Jupiter>
Saturn, Uranus, and Neptune, farther off, some with moons
and some without ; and the eight principal planets, with their
moons, the asteroids, and the sun himself, form what is called
the solar system, to which appertain also the visitants called
comets. But this solar system, enormous as is its extent in
our measurements, is a mere shining set of particles in the
astronomical whole. It is but a small frame-work of lamps,
hung, or rather sailing,^-for the sun himself not only rotates
on his axis, but is advancing in some mightier orbit, with all
the planets in his convoy, — in a vaster vague of space, studded
with similar systems, similar orbs and star-islands, all glitter-
ing and all moving. There are the stars, the galaxy, the
nebulae, at incredible distances from the solar system, the
thousand luminaries that we see in the nocturnal heaven, and
the myriads more that the telescope reveals, each a suggestion
of sun and planets, or whatever else, with millions and billions
of miles of sheer space separating the twinkling systems ; and
these banks of shining worlds recede from the telescope in
depth after depth of circular immensity, the last depth reached
still hazy with the dispersed shimmer of them, and the
certainty still being that they exist and sparkle potentially
in endless depths beyond. Our imagination of the physical
cosmos, therefore, or rather that inconceivable puzzle which
our imagination cannot compass and from which it always
retires baffled, is that of an absolute, boundless, ocean of
azure space, pervaded by stars and starry archipelagos. We
cannot by any effort send our imaginations completely round
it ; we cannot at any point of telescopic distance say " Here
" the Universe ends : here the boundary is reached." Lo 1 at
that point, though it would take millions of years to reach it,
we can still stretch out the arm in fancy into space beyond,
and still see fresh star-islands glimmering into view out of
the unfathomable obscurities. By a daring act, we may, in
PAMABISE LOST. 525
our fatigue, refuse to imagine the starred portion of space as
boundless ; but then all we can do is to conceive the enormous
sphere of blue in which our astronomy hangs as backed and
surrounded at last by a still outer shell of blackness, which
must itself be infinite. Such an act of imagination may be
illegitimate, but we may rest in it if we like. Anyhow,
boundlessness, infinitude, space out and out, up and down,
interspersed with starry , worlds, but of immeasurable pro-
fundity in every direction, without bar or stoppage anywhere
against which the thought may strike and from which it
is obliged to rebound ; this is the conception of the cosmos
to which we are habituated by the teachings of modern
science.
Now, this was not always the mode of thinking about the
physical all of things. There was the pre-Copemican mode
of thinking, that mode of thinking which prevailed before the
views of Copernicus, first propounded in 1543, were generally
adopted. The pre-Copernican system of astronomy is known
more specificially as the Ptolemaic system, because it was
expounded in its main extent by the Greek astronomer
Ptolemy in the second century of our era. It is also
called the Alphonsine system, because it was expounded
in more developed form by the famous king and astronomer,
Alphonso X. of Castille, in the thirteenth century. This
Alphonsine or Ptolemaic system, though there had been
traces of dissent from it here and there, was the system of
belief about physical nature in which all human beings,
in the most civilized countries of the earth, lived and died,
till it was superseded by the system of Copernicus. As the
doctrine of Copernicus was much resisted and made way very
slowly, the change of belief was not complete even at the close
of the seventeenth century.
What was this Ptolemaic or Alphonsine system ? In brief,
and with particulars omitted, it was that the earth is the
fixed and immoveable centre of the physical universe, and
that all the rest of this universe consists of ten successive
spheres of space wheeling round the earth with diverse
motions of their own, but all subject to one outermost motion
526 LIFE OF MILTON AND HISTORY OF HIS TIME.
which carries the whole spectack of the heavens regularly
round the earth every twenty-four hours. More in detail, it
was as follows : —
The earth at the centre : a small orb, with the element of air
immediately around it.
1st sphere : that of the moon, regarded as a planet.
2nd sphere : that of the planet. Mercury.
3rd sphere : that of the planet Venus.
4th sphere : that of therliin, regarded as a planet : " the
glorious planet sol," as Shakespeare calls him.
5th sphere : that of the planet Mars.
6th sphere : that of the planet Jupiter.
7th sphere : that of the planet Saturn (the last planet then
known).
8th. sphere : that of all the fixed stars : differing from the
preceding seven spheres in this, that, while each of those
seven spheres had but one luminary in its circumference,
to wit, its own particular planet, this 8th sphere was
studded with stars multitudinously throughout. At this
8th sphere (which was called also the firmament, because'
it " walled in and steadied " all the inner spheres), Ptolemy
S3 .
> m
PARADISE LOST. 527
and the ancients had stopped, reckoning the sphere of the
fixed stars the outermost, and attributing to it the general
diurnal motion which carried all the heavens round in
twenty-four hours. Observed irregularities in the heavenly
motions on that hypothesis, however, had required the
addition, before the time of King Alphonso, of two extra
spheres for the purposes of astronomical explanation,
thus : —
9th sphere : the Crystalline.
10th sphere : the peimum mobile, or "fibst moved," en-
closing all like a solid outermost shell, and causing the
general diurnal wheeling of all the spheres, while the
separate motions of the inner spheres accounted for other
astronomical phenomena.
This pre-Copernican system of the mundane universe was,
certainly, a comfortable system. It afforded an explanation of
phenomena which was satisfactory for the time, and yet the
conception which it gave of the totality of things was pleasant
and manageable. It was not unpleasant to think of oneself
as living on a ball fixed at the very centre, and of ten succes-
sive heavens or spheres of space wheeling variously round
this ball, most with their single lights, but one radiant with
innumerable lights, and all strongly shelled in by the primum
mobile. True, this primum mobile was vastly distant; but
vast distance does not burst the imagination like infinitude,
and here there was no infinitude. All was comfortably
bounded. You could put your hand round the whole, as it
were, and pat the primum mobile on the outside.
There were compunctions and difiiculties, nevertheless.
There was some difficulty, for example, in imagining the nine
inner spheres as concentric and yet independent spheres of
mere transpicuous space, sliding and slipping complexly among
each other at different angles and with different velocities,
and only the tenth or outmost as having a certain shelly
solidity, like that of opaque or dull-brown glass. There may
have been some compunction also in the thought of so many
vast motions of sun, planets, and stars round so small a body
as the earth, and all merely for her particular convenience and
pleasure. That compunction, it appears, was easily pacified.
538 LIFE OP MILTON AND HISTOBY OF HIS TIME.
Did not the system of the ten revolving spheres round a fixed
earth accord vcith the glory of man and of human nature ?
Whathetter occupation for sun, planets, and stars, than
to revolve round the little orb on whieh man, the monarch of
the created universe, had his abode, delighting him by their
changes among themselves, and exhibiting to him, every
twenty-four hours, in most parts of the earth, the eternally
repeated alternation of clear sunlit day and sapphire night
with her jewels? A third difficulty was more important.
The puzzle of infinitude still remained. Though the Pto-
lemaic system rather numbed and discouraged the sense of the
boundlessness of space, by keeping men's thoughts mainly to
the ongoings in the great visual round of things within the
primum mobilcj yet they could not really, if they did persist
in thinking and imagining, be stopped by the primum
mobile. They could send their thoughts beyond it, and
could fancy the outer ocean of space, if space it could be
called, beating and roaring against the opposing and exclud-
ing bosses of the last sphere of the mundane. This is what
the pre-Copernicans could not avoid doing, and actually did.
But even here they extracted a kind of relief for their reason
out of the crude definiteness of their peculiar cosmology. It
was a comfort to them to call all toithin the primum mobile
by one name, regarding it as nature, the creation, the
cosmos, the mundane universe, man's world of time and
space and motion, about which he could speculate and have
real knowledge, and to regard all leyond that boundary by a
different name, voting -it to be the motionless empyrean, the
supernatural or metaphysical world, the imiverse of eternal
mysteries, the home of Godhead, the restful heaven of heavens,
into which the reason of man could never penetrate, and of
whieh he could have glimpses only through faith and in-
spiration. This, accordingly, may pass as a supplementafy
diagram to that of the pre-Copernican cosmology : —
FABADISE LOST.
529
The inner circle is simply the previous circle of the ten
spheres of the knowable, with the bounding lines of the inner
spheres omitted. It is the entire cosmos or mundane uni-
verse of man^ consisting of the orb of earth at the centre, the
seven planetary heavens next to the earth, the eighth and
more distant heaven of the fixed stars, the ninth or crys-
talline heaven beyond all the stars, and the tenth heaven or
heaven of the primum mobile, including all. It represents,
accordingly, that whole round of visible things which con-
stitutes in a special sense the heavens and the eauth of
Scripture and of common speech. But beyond all the
mundane heavens is the empyrean heaven, or heaven of
heavens, the abode of Deity and of all eternal mysteries.
VOL. VI. M m
530 LIFE OF MILTON AND HISTORY OF HIS TIME.
That cannot be exhibited as bounded in any way by any
geometrical figure or possible circumference. Let the out-
going rays of corona or sunflower round the primum mobile
suggest at once the mystery and the infinitude.
One thing more. The diagram represents infinitude after
the universe pf man, or the present cosmos of heavens and
earth, had come into being. But that cosmos had not been
always there. It had been created ; and • the creation of it,
according to the Biblical belief, had been the work of six
days at a certain definite epoch of past time. What had
preceded the created cosmos in that part of infinitude which
it now occupies ? Was infinitude before the creation of the
cosmos all one pure uninterrupted empyrean, or had there
been anything intermediate, in the space of the present
cosmos, between the pure aboriginal empyrean and the
orderly heavens and earth that were to cOme? There does
not seem to have been perfect uniformity of belief or imagina-
tion on this point ; nor indeed did it come into discussion
much among the ordinary holders of the pre-Copernican
creed, but only among those who were not contented with
the conception of the mundane universe as existing round
them, but would speculate on the mode of its genesis. Among
these the general belief, favoured by primeval and even classical
tradition, and not out of accord with hints in Scripture, seems
to have been that deity did not create the mundane universe
immediately out of nothing, but out of a prior chaos, or huge
aggregate of formless matter, which had been prepared for
the purpose, and had been waiting for a time indefinite, in
and round the predestined purlieus of the cosmos, for the
consummating miracle of the six days. Perhaps as homely
an expression of this traditional belief as can be found is that
of Du Bartas in Sylvester's translation : —
" As we may perceive
That he who means to build a warlike fleet
Makes first provision of all matter meet,
As timber, iron, canvas, cord, and pitch, . . .
So God, before this Frame he fashioned,
I wot not what great word he uttered
From's sacred mouth, which summoned in a mass
PARADISE LOST. 531
Whatsoever now the heaven's wide arms embrace . . .
That first world yet was a most formless form,
A confused heap, a chaos most deform;
A gulf of gulfs, a body ill compact.
An ugly medley."
Such was the pre-Copernican system of cosmology, with its
common adjuncts. What has now to be noted, and what does
not seem ever to have been noted suflSciently in connexion
with the literary history of our own or of other nations, is the
immense influence of this system on the thinkings and imagi-
nations of mankind on all subjects whatsoever till about two
hundred years ago. There are surviving traces of Ptolemaism
or Pre-Copernieanism in our current speech yet. We still
speak of a person as being " out of his sphere," and the fine
old fancy of " the music of the spheres " has not lost its
poetical significance. But we must go back into the older
literaturCj and especially the older poetry, of the various coun-
tries of Europe, to be aware of the strength and the multiform
subtlety of the efiects of the pre-Copernican cosmology on all
human thought. Of course, the amount of Pre-Copernicanism
discernible in any old poet or other writer will vary with the
nature of the poetry or the writing, generally or in particular
pieces. Where the themes are the histories, actions, and
humours, of men in society on this earth, with the miscella-
neous objects and scenery of earth that go along with such
social history and action, e. g. in dramas and the great majority
of poems, it will only be incidentally, in the form of phrases^
allusions, or short passages, that the pre-Copernican mode of
thinking will be detected. These, however, are far more
numerous than might be supposed. Prom the whole series
of the English poets, from Chaucer to the Elizabethans and
beyond, Shakespeare not excepted, there might be culled an
extraordinary collection of passages assuming the mundane
constitution of the successive spheres, with the primum
mobile as the last of them, and the empyrean over and
above, and requiring the recollection of that system for their
due enjoyment and interpretation. These poets lived and died
in the pre-Copernican belief, and thought and wrote in the
M m 2
532 LIFE OP MILTON AND HISTOBY OF HIS TIME.
language of it whenever there was occasion. Naturally, how-
ever, it is when a poem, or a part of a poem, is of a highly
comprehensive or philosophical kind, when the nature of the
'subject leads the poet to treat in any way of the world and
human history as a whole, that the pre-Copernicanism becomes
pronounced and formal. Then the poem is actually unintel-
ligible to modern readers, or at least fails of complete effect,
if the cosmology which it assumes is not taken into account.
There are masses of old poetical matter, in English and in
other languages, that can be adequately understood by no
other key than that the imagination of the poet worked by a
distinct optical diagram of the Ptolemaic constitution of the
universe, or by some personal variation from that model ^.
'f' We may recur to Dante. To every edition of the Divina
Gommedia there ought' to be prefixed a diagram, however
vague and crude, of the cosmological scheme adopted in the
poem or invented for it. That scheme is essentially the
Ptolemaic. You begin on the surface of one hemisphere of
the earth, and, after some mystic preliminaries, you find your-
self descending, in the company of Virgil and Dante, through
a kind of funnel or inverted cone, of nine successive whorls or
circles, shrinking in width as you descend, till you come to
the very apex of the cone at the earth's centre. This descend-
ing funnel of nine whorls is Hell or the Infeeno ; in the
lowest depth of which, jammed through a strange aperture at
the earth's centre, is the hideous form of Satan or Lucifer,
" the abhorred worm that boreth through the world." It is
only by clutching the hairy hide of this monster, sinking by
such clutches to his middle, and then turning round painfully
at the proper moment, that Virgil and Dante wriggle through
the aperture and find themselves on the other side of the
centre. Thence their journey is no longer one of descent, but
of ascent to the air again through the bowels of the other
hemisphere of the earth. They emerge at that solitary
1 I may mention Sir David Lyndsay's few ; Shakespeare some, but fewest of
Vidon and his Monarchy, Drummond's all. Shakespeare recognised all that
poetry generally, and parts of Donne's. " heaven's air in this huge rondure
Chaucer, I should say, from recollection, hems" (Sonnet 21), hut his customary
would yield many illustrative passages ; image of space for his drairaas did not, I
Spenser and other Elizabethans not a think, go beyond the orbit of the moon.
PABADISE LOST. 533
ocean-island of the antipodes, the remains of the original
Eden, where the Puegatoeio awaits their vision. It is a huge
tapering mountain rising from the island into the ether, and
taking the form at last of seven successive ledges or terraceSj
corresponding to the seven deadly sins that have to be
cleansed, each ledge and the ascent to it easier as they
rise higher in the ether. When they do reach the summit,
they are in the upheaved residue of the terrestrial Paradise
which was once Adam's ; but that name only foreshows what
is to come. Virgil now disappears, leaving Dante suddenly,
while Beatrice descends to undertake the rest and be his guide
through the true Paeadiso. It is represented in the nine
successive heavens, or wheeling spheres, above and round the
precincts of earth. First there is the heaven of the moon,
then that of Mercury, then that of Venus, and so on, through
the fourth heaven or sphere of the sun, the fifth heaven or
sphere of Mars, the sixth heaven or sphere of Jupiter, the
seventh heaven or sphere of Saturn, and the eighth heaven or
sphere of the fixed stars, till the ninth sphere or heaven is
reached. That sphere is the last or highest in Dante's
reckoning, as it • was generally in the reckoning of his con-
temporaries and for an age or two longer, though the
Alphonsine completion of the Ptolemaic system required a
tenth. In fact the ninth sphere or heaven was the primum
mobile in Dante's reckoning, the outermost sphere of the
cosmos, and the boundary between it and the empyrean or
heaven of heavens. Into the empyrean itself, the con-
summate and eternal Paradise, Dante is vouchsafed admis-
sion ; and the poem ends with a glimpse of the unspeakable
glories of that transcendental world, the brightness of the
living Godhead, and a vision of the mystery of mysteries
in the Trinity and the Incarnation^
Such is the general optical scheme of Dante's poem. The
filling out of the vision, with all the dense circumstance of
1 Diagrams and other optical helps AShadowofSanlehY'Miss'M.a.via.Fmn-
for the Diijina Gommedia have, of oesoa Eossetti. This is an admirable
course, been provided by the Italian and most compact little book in intro-
commentators ; and there is a beauti- duotion to Dante, a book which it is
ful reproduction of the best of these, a pleasure to read and a duty to re-
■with additional artistic suggestions, in commend,
SM LIFE OF MILTON AND HISTOBY OF HIS TIME.
figure, physiognomy, colloquy, incident, imaginary scenery,
and grotesque or mystical symbolism, that is crowded into
every part of it, defies all art of diagram or continuous paint-
ing, and will remain to the end of time a matter of negotia-
tion between Dante himself and his readers. What is to be
observed in the general optical scheme, in addition to the fact
that it adopts the customary Ptolemaic cosmology, is that it
makes ,Hell, Purgatory, and Paradise itself, ^arts of that
cosmology, i. e. intramundane. Hell is a funnel down through
one hemisphere of the earth to the centre ; Purgatory ascends
skywards from the other hemisphere ; and, though the
Paradise ends everlastingly in the empyrean, twenty-nine of
the thirty-three cantos dedicated to it detain us still within
the cosmos, in the spheres of wheeling space from the earth to
just beyond the stars.
Milton also inherited the Ptolemaic cosmology. In pas-
sages of his minor poems, e. g. TAe Hymn on the Nativity, the
Arcades, and Comus, it will be found assumed, especially in
the form of a delight in the poetic notion of the music of the
spheres ; which notion is also the subject of one of his Latin
academic esercises. Be Spkcerarum Goncentu. In his Italian
tour, in 1638 or 1639, he saw and conversed with Galileo,
then old and blind, in his villa near Florence, where he was
still in a manner " a prisoner to the Inquisition for thinking
" in astronomy otherwise than the Pranciscan and Dominican
" licencers thought," i. e. for his obstinacy in the Copemican
heresy. From that moment Milton's admiration for Galileo
may have given him more favourable thoughts of that heresy
than he had entertained before ; but, after his return to
England, we still find him so far a Ptolemaist that the book
from which he taught astronomy to his nephews and other
pupils from 1640 to 1647 was the Be Sphesra of Joannes a
Sacrobosco or John Holywood, a popular work of the
thirteenth century, and entirely and especially Ptolemaic.
Paradise Lost had been then schemed ; but, before he began
to write it in its epic form, his Ptolemaism had greatly abated,
if it had not been wholly exchanged for Copernicanism.
There is some uncertainty on the point. From 1650 on-
PARADISS LOST, 535
Wards the two systems of astronomical belief were still,
struggling with each other for the possession of even the
most educated intellects in England, and only the most
forward of these, Hobbes conspicuous among them, had un-
hesitatingly embraced and advocated the views of Copernicus
and Galileo. Milton's position seems to have been that of
thorough acquaintance with the Copernican system and with
the arguments for it, and of private conviction of its truth,
or its superiority for the purposes of scientific explanation.
But, for the purposes of his Paradise Lost, what was he to
do ? He required a cosmology for that poem, and the cos-
mology of all European poetry hithertoj of his own poetic
imaginings hitherto, had been the Ptolemaic. This cosmology;
had followed him into his blindness, and it was mainly in
accordance with it that the optical visions rose, — those visions
of heaven, hell, chaos, and the mundane universe, in their
relations to each other, which he was to set forth in his epic.
He must reduce all to coherence and clearness, and for that
purpose must fuse through his own imagination all that
he could remember from his past readings, or could still have
read to him, of the disquisitions of the fathers, the tal-
mudists, the mediseval doctors, and more modern scholars
and theologians, on such fantastic subjects as the situa-
tions of hell and heaven in space, the time and process of
the mundane creation, the nature of the angels, and the
time oi thei/r creation. A quantity of cumbrous lore of this
kind he must have let pass through his mind for the sake of
a hint here and a hint there ; he had drunk deeply and sym-
pathetically of Dante, and must have known his great poem
better than any other Englishman alive ; but he was shaping
out a phantasy of the universal by independent art. And so,
his very blindness, as I believe, assisting him in his stupendous
task, by having already converted all external space in his
own sensations into an infinite globe of circumambient black-
ness or darkness through which he could, dash brilliance at
his pleasure, there did come forth a eosmical epic which
was without a precedent and remains without a parallel. It
adopted, indeed, in the main the Ptolemaic or pre-Copernipan
636 LIFK OF MILTON AND HISTOEY OF HIS TIME.
cosmology-; but in such a simplified way, with such inserted
caveats, and with such extraordinary Miltonic adjuncts, that
the poet could expect the effective permanence of his work in
the imagination of the world, whether Ptolemy or Copernicus
should prevail.
In the cosmology of Paradise Lost, and indeed in the whole
matter and tenor of the epic, Milton, it is interesting to
know, was true, as far as a poet could be true, to his personal
beliefs. What appears as grand song and free imagination
in the poem may be seen reduced to the dry bones of cor-
responding theological proposition in his Latin Treatise of
Christian Doctrine. That treatise illuminates us particularly on
two matters in which Milton positively rejects the cosmology
of the Divina Commedia. Dante, as we have seen, places his
hell within the earth, his purgatory on the earth, and makes
even his heaven in some sense intramundane. Milton, on
the other hand, places his hell and his heaven out of the
cosmos altogether, representing them as necessarily extra-
mundane. The reasons appear in his theological treatise,
chap. XXIII., where he says, " Hell appears to be situated
beyond the limits of this universe," refers to Chrysostom,
Luther, and some later divines, as holding this opinion, and
quotes texts from Scripture decidedly disproving the more
general opinion that hell was " in the bowels of the earth."
Connected with this is his difference from Dante as to the
date of the creation of the angels. It is revealed to Dante
by Beatrice, in the twenty-ninth canto of the Paradise, that
the creation of the angels was contemporaneous with that of
mankind, and that St. Jerome's opinion to the contrary was
unsound. Here Beatrice followed Thomas Aquinas and the
orthodox majority; but Milton decides the controversy the
other way, reverting to the doctrine of St. Jerome. " Not
" six thousand years of the existence of our world have yet
"been fulfilled," that father had saidj "and so it is to be
" imagined what eternities there were before, what stretches
"of time, what cycles of ages, in which angels, thrones,
"dominations, and other virtues, served God, and subsisted
" by God's ordination, without our changes and measures of
PARADISE LOST. 537
" season ^." So Milton, in chap. VII. of his treatise, admitting
that " it is generally supposed that the angels were created
at the same time with the visible universe," argues against-
that opinion, and agrees with those of the Fathers, most of
them Greek, though some Latin, who had maintained the
indefinite pre-mundane existence of the angels. This, like
the other supposition as to the situation of hell and heaven,
is a necessary postulate in the Paradise Lost. For the rest,
a sketch of the actual story, in the chronological order of the
incidents, will present the poem in the aspects in which it
here concerns us^ as a revelation of Milton himself, and as a
novelty in English Literature and in European Literature in
the year 1667. I avail myself partly of what I have written
already on the subject ^ : — •
" Before the creation of our earth or of the starry universe
" to which it belongs, universal space is to be considered, ac-
" cording to the requisites of the poem, not as containing
" stars or starry systems at all, but as, so to say, a sphere of
" infinite radius, divided into two hemispheres, thus—
1 Cary's note to line 38, Canto XXIX. ^ 'What is within quotation marks in
of his translation of the Paradise. the following is from the Introduction
538 LIFE OF MILTON AND HI8T0ET OF HIS TIME.
" The upper of these two hemispheres of primeval infinity
"is HEAVEN, or THE EMPYEIAN — a boundlcss, unimaginable
"region of light, freedom, happiness, and glory, in the
"midst whereof Deity, though omnipresent, has his im-
" mediate and visible dwelling, and where he is surrounded
"by a vast population of beings, called 'the angels,' or
" ' sons of God,' who draw near to his throne in worship,
" derive thence their nurture and their delight, and yet live
" dispersed through all the ranges and recesses of the region,
"leading severally their mighty lives and performing the
" behests of Deity, but organized into companies, orders, and
"hierarchies. Milton is careful to explain that all that he
" says of Heaven is said symbolically, and in order to make
"conceivable by the human imagination what in its own
" nature is inconceivable ; but, this being explained, he is
" bold enough in his use of terrestrial analogies. Round the
" immediate throne of Deity, indeed, there is kept a blazing
"mist of vagueness, which words are hardly permitted to
"pierce, though the angels are represented as from time to
"time assembling within it, beholding the divine presence
"and hearing the divine voice. But Heaven at large, or
" portions of it, are figured as tracts of a celestial earth, with
" plain, hill, and valley, whereon the myriads of the sons of
" God expatiate, in their two orders of seraphim and cherubim,
" and in their descending ranks as archangels or chiefs,
"princes of various degrees, and individual powers and in-
" telligences. Certain differences, however, are implied as
" distinguishing these celestials from tjie subsequent race of
" mankind. As they are of infinitely greater prowess, im-
" mortal, and of more purely spiritual nature, so their ways
" even of physical existence and action transcend all that is
"within human experience. Their forms are dilatable or
" contractible at pleasure ; they move with incredible swift-
" ness ; and, as they are not subject to any law of gravitation,
"their motion, though ordinarily represented as horizontal
to Paradise Lost in the Cambridge Golden Treasurj- and Globe Editions.
Edition of Milton's Poetical Works Where I add or deviate the quotation
(1874), and also in the subsequent marks cease.
I-ASADISE LOST. 539'
" over the heavenly ground, may as well be vertical or in any
" other direction, and their aggregations need not, like those
" of men, be in squares, oblongs, or other plane figures, but
"may be in cubes, or other rectangular or oblique solids,
" or in spherical masses. These and various other particulars
" are to be kept in mind concerning Heaven and its pristine
"inhabitants. As respects the other half or hemisphere of
"the primeval iniinity, though it too is inconceivable in its
" nature, and has to be described by words which are at best
" symbolical, less needs be said. For it is chaos, or The Un-
" inhabited — a huge, limitless ocean, abyss, or quagmire of
" universal darkness and lifelessness, wherein are jumbled in
"blustering confusion the elements of all matter, or rather
" the crude embryons of all the elements, ere as yet they are
" distinguishable. There is no light there, nor properly earth,
" water, air, or fire, but only a vast pulp or welter of un-
" formed matter, in which all these lie tempestuously inter-
" mixed. Though the presence of Deity is there potentially
" too, it is still, as it were, retracted thence, as from a realm
"unorganized and left to night and anarchy; nor do any
"of the angels wing down into its repulsive obscurities.
" The crystal floor or wall of Heaven divides them from it ;
"underneath which, and unvisited of light, save what may
" glimmer through upon its nearer strata, it howls and rages
" and stagnates eternally.
" Such is and has been the constitution of the universal
" infinitude from ages immemorial in the angelic reckoning.
" But lo ! at last a day in the annals of Heaven when the
"grand monotony of existence hitherto is disturbed and
"broken. On a day — 'such a day as Heaven's great year
" brings forth ' — all the empyreal host of angels, called by
"imperial summons from all the ends of Heaven, assemble
"innumerably before the throne of the Almighty; beside
"whom, imbosomed in bliss, sat the Divine Son. They
" had come to hear this divine decree :—
'Hear, all ye Apgels, progeny of Light,
Thrones, dominations, princedoms, virtues, powers,
Hear my decree which unrevoked shall stand !
540 LIFE 01" MILTON AND HISTORY OF HIS TIME.
This day I have begot whom I declare
My only Son, and on this holy hill
Him have anointed, whom ye now behold
At my right hand. Your Head I him appoint ;
And by myself have sworn to him shall bow
All knees in Heaven, and shall confess him Lord.'
" With joy and obedience is this decree received throughout
" the hierarchies, save in one quarter. One of the first of the
" archangels in heaven, if not the very first — the coequal of
" Michael, Gabriel, and Raphael, if not their superior — is the
" archangel known afterwards (for his first name in Heaven is
" lost) as -Satan or Lucifer. In him the effect of the decree
"is rage, envy, pride, the resolution to rebel. He conspires
" with his next subordinate, known afterwards as Beelzebub ;
" and there is formed by them that faction in Heaven which
"includes at length one third of the entire heavenly host.
"Then ensue the wars in Heaven — Michael and the loyal
" angels warring against Satan and the rebel angels, so that
" for two days the Empyrean is in uproar. But on the third
" day the Messiah himself rides forth in his chariot of power,
" armed with ten thousand thunders. Right on he drives,
"in his sole might, through the rebel ranks, till they are
" trampled and huddled, in one indiscriminate flock, incapable
" of resistance, before him and his fires. But his purpose is
"not utterly to destroy them, — only to expel them from
" Heaven. Underneath their feet, accordingly, the crystal wall
" or floor of Heaven opens wide, rolling inwards, and disclosing
" a spacious gap into the dark Abyss or Chaos. Horrorstruck
" they start back ; but worse urges them behind. Headlong
"they fling themselves down, eternal wrath burning after
" them, and driving them still down, down, through Chaos,
" to the place prepared for them.
" The place prepared for them ! Yes, for now there is a
"modification in the map of universal space to suit the
"changed conditions of the universe. At the bottom of
" what has hitherto been Chaos there is now marked out a
" kind of antarctic region, distinct from the body of Chaos
" proper. This is hell —
PABADISE LOST.
541
a vast reg-ion of fire, sulphurous lake, plain, and mountain,
and of all forms of fiery and icy torment. It is into this
nethermost and dungeon-like portion of space, separated
from Heaven by a huge belt of intervening Chaos, that the
fallen angels are thrust. For nine days and nights they
have been falling through Chaos, or rather being driven
down through Chaos by the Messiah's pursuing thunders,
before they reach this new home. When they do reach it,
the roof closes over them and shuts them in. Meanwhile
the Messiah has returned in triumph into highest Heaven,
and there is rejoicing over the expulsion of the damned.
" For the moment, therefore, there are three divisions of
universal space — heaven, chaos, and hell. Almost im-
mediately, however, there is a fourth. Not only have the
expelled angels been nine days and nights in falling through
Chaos to reach Hell ; but, after they have reached Hell and
it has closed over them, they lie for another period of nine
days and nights stupefied and bewildered in the fiery gulf.
It is during this second nine days that there takes place a
great event, which farther modifies the map of infinitude.
Long had there been talk in Heaven of a new race of beings
542 LIFE OF MILTON AND HISTORY OF HIS TIME.
" to be created at some time by the Almighty, inferior in
" some respects to the angels, but in the history of whom and
" of God's dealings with them there was to be a display of the
" divine power and love which even the angels might contem-
" plate with wonder. The time for the creation of this new
" race of beings has now arrived. Scarcely have the rebel
" angels been enclosed in Hell, and Chaos has recovered from
" the turmoil of the descent of such a rout through its depths,
" when the paternal Deity, addressing the Son, tells him that,
" in order to repair the loss caused to Heaven, the predeter-
" mined creation of Man and of the World of Man shall now
"take effect. It is for the Son to execute the will of the
" Father. Straightway he goes forth on his creating errand.
" The everlasting gates of Heaven open wide to let him pass
" forth ; and, clothed with majesty, and accompanied with
" thousands of seraphim and cherubim, anxious to behold the
'■'■ great work to be done, he does pass forth — far into that
" very Chaos through which the rebel angels have so recently
" fa,llen, and which now intervenes between Heaven and Hell.
" At length he stays his fervid wheels, and, taking the
" golden compasses in his hands, centres one point of them
" where he stands and turns the other through the obscure
"profundity around. Thus are marked out, or cut out,
" through the body of Chaos, the limits of the new Universe-
" of Man— that starry universe which to us seems measureless
" and the same as infinity itself, but which is really only a
" beautiful azure sphere or drop, insulated in Chaos, and hung
" at its topmost point or zenith from the Empyrean. But,
" though the limits of the new experimental creation are thus
" at once marked out, the completion of the creation is a work
" of six days. On the last of these, to crown the work, the
" happy earth received its first human pair — the appointed
" lords of the entire new creation. And so, resting from his
"labours, and beholding all that he had made, that it was
" good, the Messiah returned to his Father, reascending
" through the golden gates, which were now just over the
" zenith of the new World, and were its point of suspension
" from the Empyrean Heaven ; and the seventh day or Sabbath
PABADIsk LOST. 543
" was spent in songs of praise by all the heavenly hosts over
" the finished work, and in contemplation of it as it hung'
" beneath them,
'another Heaven,
From Heaven-gate not far, founded in view
On the clear hyaline.'
" And now, accordingly, this was the diagram of the universal
" infinitude :• —
" There are the three regions of heaven, chaos, and hell, as
" before ; but there is also now a fourth region, hung drop-
" like into Chaos by an attachment to Heaven at the north pole
" or zenith. This is the new woeld, or the staeey universe
" ^all that universe of orbs and galaxies which man's vision
" can reach by utmost power of telescope, and which even to
"his imagination is illimitable. And yet as to the propor-
" tions of this World to the total map Milton dares to be
" exact. The distance from its nadir or lowest point to the
" upper boss of Hell is exactly equal to its own radius ; or, in
" other words, the distance of Hell-gate from Heaven-gate is
544 LIFE OF MILTON AND HI8T0ET OP HIS TIME.
" exactly three semi-diameters of the Human or Starry Uni-
" verse."
This NEW WOELD, introduced by Milton into his map of
infinitude at this point in the chronology of his poem, is
substantially the Ptolemaic cosmos. In his account of the
creation of the six days, indeed (Book VII, lines 205-550),
there is no specific mention of the ten Ptolemaic spheres,
nor anything that compels the supposition of them. After
the earth, the sun is first made, as being the chief of celestial
bodies ; then the moon, as the lesser of the two great lights
for the use of man ; and on the same fourth day all the other
luminaries appear, stars and planets together, with no enume-
ration of the latter by their orbs or distances. This is in
strong contrast to the description of the fourth day's creation
in Du Bartas, which propounds the procedure most elaborately
according to the Ptolemaic mechanism and nomenclature,
with an inserted passage of anti-Copernican invective. Clearly
Milton did not want to commit himself. The Ptolemaism
of his general conception is implied, however, in two things.
In the first place, the suggestion decidedly is that the earth
is steady at the centre, and that all the other bodies, the
great sun himself included, move round her and minister to
her. In the second place, and more emphatically, it is an
absolute postulate of the poem that there is a definite boundary
to the created universe, an uttermost convex of the great
round, by which it is all walled in from circumambient
chaos : —
" Thus far extend, thus far thy bounds ;
This be thy just circumference, 0 "World,"
had been the words of the Messiah, as he turned the point
of the golden compasses through chaos for the express pur-
pose of circumscribing that scoop of chaos that was to be
occupied by the new cosmos. Hence, whatever the constitu-
tion of the interior of the spherical World of Man seen pendent
in the last diagram from the Empyrean into remaining Chaos,
the circular boundary has necessarily to be imagined as a
hard, impervious shell, equivalent to the Ptolemaic primum
PABADISE LOST. 545
mobile. This requisite of the poem is maintained through-
out ; the action from first to last depends upon it ; and
it is pressed upon the attention with every study of optical
art in several very notable passages. It is in one of these
that the poet does seem to intimate formally in three lines
that he does not care though he should accept wholly for his
poetical purpose the Ptolemaic constitution of man's world.
In those lines he, not only afiixes to the outermost convex its
Ptolemaic name of primum mobile, or " first moved," but also
mentions rapidly the seven planetary spheres, the sphere of
the fixed stars, and the ninth or crystalline sphere, as the
successive heavens or divisions of cosmical space that must be
passed through in ascending from the earth to the primum
mobile (III. 481-483). But for that passage we should
hardly have been able to say that the interior of Milton's
cosmos was imagined by him with strict Ptolemaic precision.
The impression would rather have been of an uninterrupted
single sphere or hollow round, centred by the little earth,
irradiated by stars and other luminaries, but with the sun
predominant in size and splendour.
" Meanwhile, just as the final modification of the map of
" infinitude has been accomplished by the creation of the six
" days, Satan and his rebel adherents in Hell begin to re-
" cover from their stupor— Satan the first, and the otbers
•'at his call. There ensue Satan's first speech to them,
" their first surveys of their new domain, their building of
" their palace of Pandemonium, and their deliberations there
" in full council as to their future policy. Between Moloch's
" advice for a renewal of open war with Heaven, and Belial's
" and Mammon's counsels, which recommend acquiescence in
'' their new circumstances and a patient effort to make the
" best of them, Beelzebub insinuates the proposal which is
" really Satan's, and which is ultimately carried. It is that
" there should be an excursion from Hell back through Chaos,
" to ascertain whether that new universe, with a new race of
" beings in it, of which there had been so much talk in
" Heaven, and which there was reason to think might come
"into existence about the time, had come into existence.
VOL. VI. N n
346 LIFE OF MILTON AND HISTORY OF HIS TIME.
' If it had, might not means be found to vitiate this new
' universe and the favourite race that was to possess it, and
' to drag them down to the level of Hell itself? "Would not
' such a ruining of the Almighty's new experiment at its
outset be a revenge that would touch him deeply ? Would
it not be easier than open war? And on the stepping-
stone of such a success might they not raise themselves to
further victory, or at least to an improvement of their
present condition, and to an extent of empire that should
' include more than Hell ?
" Satan's counsel having been adopted, it is Satan himself
' that adventures the perilous expedition up through Chaos in
' quest of the new Universe. He is detained for a while at
' Hell-gate by the ghastly shapes of Sin and Death, who are
' there to guard it ; but, the gates being at length opened
' to him, never to shut again, he emerges into the hideous
' Chaos overhead. His journey up through it is arduous.
' Climbing, swimming, wading, flying, through the boggy
' consistency — now falling plumb-down thousands of fathoms,
' again carried upwards by a gust or explosion — he reaches
a;t length, about midway in his journey, the central throne
' and pavilion where Chaos personified and Night have their
government. There he receives definite intelligence that
' the New World he is in search of has actually been created.
' Thus encouraged, and directed on his way, again he springs
' upward, ' like a pyramid of fire,' through what of Chaos
' remains ; and, after much farther flying, tacking, and
' steering, he at last reaches the upper confines of Chaos,
' where its substance seems thinner^ so that he can wing
about more easily, and where a glimmering dawn of the
' light from above begins also to appear. For a while in this
' calmer space he weighs his wings to behold at leisure
'(II. 104.6} the sight that is breaking upon him. And
what a sight ! —
' Par off the Empyreal Heaven extended wide
In crescent, undetermined square or round,
W th opal towers and battlements adorned
Of living sapphire, once his native seat,
PARADISE LOST. 547
And, fast by, hanging in a golden chain.
This pendent "World, in bigness as a star
Of smallest magnitude close by the moon.'
" Care must be taken not to misinterpret this passage.
" Even Addison misinterpreted it woefully. He speaks of
" Satan's distant discovery ' of the earth that hung close by
" the moon ' as one of the most ' wonderfully beautiful and
" poetical ' passages of the poem. But it is more wonderfully
" beautiful and poetical than Addison thought. For, as even
" a correct reading of the passage by itself would have shown,
" ' the pendent world ' which Satan here sees is not the earth
" at all, but the entire starry universe, or mundane spheire,
" hung drop-like by a golden touch from the Empyrean above
" it. In proportion to this Empyrean, at the distance whence
" Satan gazes, even the starry universe pendent from it
" is but as a star of smallest magnitude seen on the edge of
" the full or crescent moon.
" At length Satan alights on the opaque outside, or convex
" shell, of the New Universe. As he had approached it, what
" seemed at first but as a star had taken the dimensions of
" a globe ; and, when he had alighted, and begun to walk on
" it, this globe had become, as it seemed, a boundless con-
" tinent of firm land, exposed, dark and starless, to the stormy
" Chaos blustering round like an inclement sky. Only on the
" upper convex of the shell, in its angles towards the zenith,
" some reflection of light was gained from the wall of Heaven.
" Apparently it was on this upper convex of the outside of
" the new world, and not at its nadir, or the point nearest Hell,
" that Satan first alighted and walked. At all events he had
" to reach the zenith before he could begin the real business
" of bis errand. For only at this point — only at the point of
" attachment or suspension of the New Universe to the Em-
" pyrean — was there an opening into the interior of tbe
" Universe. All the outer shell, save at that point, was hard,
" compact, and not even transpicuous, to the light within,
" as the spherical glass round a lamp is, but totally opaque,
" or only glistering faintly on its upper side with the re-
" fleeted light of Heaven. Accordingly, — after wandering on
If n a
548 LIFE OF MILTON AND HISTORY OF HIS TIME.
" this dark outside of the Universe long enough to allow
'' Milton that extraordinary digression (III. 440-497) in
" which he finds one of the most magnificently grotesque
" uses for the outside of the Universe that it could have
" entered into the imagination of any poet to conceive, — ^the
" Fiend is attracted in the right direction to the opening at
" the zenith. What attracts him thither is a gleam of light
" from the mysterious structure or staircase which there serves
" the angels in their descents from Heaven's Gate into the
" Human Universe, and again in their ascents from the Uni-
" verse to Heaven's Gate. Sometimes these stairs are drawn
" up to Heaven and invisible ; but at the moment when Satan
"reached the spot they were let down, so that, standing
" on the lower stair, and gazing down through the opening
" right underneath, he could suddenly behold the whole in-
" terior of the Starry Universe at once. He can behold it
" in all directions — both in the direction of latitude, or depth
" from the pole where he stands to the opposite pole or nadir,
" and also longitudinally, —
' from eastern point
Of Libra to the fleecy star that bears
Andromeda far off Atlantic seas
Beyond the horizon.' "
Into this glorious world, through the opening, the Fiend,
after a pause of wonder, suddenly precipitates himself. Wind-
ing his way among the fixed stars, he makes first for the sun,
which attracts him by its all-surpassing magnitude. Alight-
ing on its body, and finding the archangel Uriel there, who
has been sent down from the empyrean to be regent of the
great luminary, he disguises himself and pretends to be one
of the lesser angels who, not having been present at the
creation, has now come alone, out of curiosity, to behold its
glories. To his inquiries as to the particular orb which is the
abode of newly-created man, Uriel replies by pointing out
the earth shining at a distance in the sunlight. Thus in-
formed, he wings off again from the sun's body, and, wheeling
his steep flight towards the earth, alights at length on the
tpp of Mount Niphates, near Eden.
Pabadise losi!. 549
It might seem at first sight that the advent of Satan into
the mundane universe and his arrival on the earth took place
only a day or two after the creation. There are passages of
the poem which suggesft this interpretation. It is evident,
howeverj that a transcendental or arbitrary measure of time
has to be applied to some of those extra-mundane actions
which had brought Satan from Hell to Earth ; for^ when we
first see the primal pair and hear them conversing in their
bowers of happiness, with the Fiend now close by their side^
and eyeing them with mingled envy and pity, we are aware
that the paradisaic life has already for some time been going
on, and that the new universe has been wheeling for some
time in quiet beauty^ diurnal and nocturnal, round the earth
and its creatures. " That day I oft remember," Eve is made
to say to Adam in their first dialogue, describing her sensa-
tions when she first awoke to the amazement of existence,
and to the sight of him as the sole other human being ; and
there are various other passages which similarly throw back
the beginnings of the paradisaic life to a considerable distance.
Not till now, however, when the Fiend is at hand on the
scene, does the poet put forth his hand to paint for us all the
loveliness of that grand and simple life of original innocence,
with all the richness and deliciousness of beauty round it in
Paradise itself, bound in by its verdurous wall and steep woody
slopes from the rest of Eden. But now he does put forth his
hand, and succeeds to a marvel. The Adam and Eve of
Milton are "not intended in any sense," it has been well said,
" to represent men and women such as we know them,
"worn with the wars of thought and passion, made complex
"or dwarfed by civilization, but the archetypal man and
" woman, fresh from the hand of God ^" Here was Milton's
difficulty, and he has overcome it. He abstains from all
attempt at complexity or intricacy of portraiture ; the linea-
ments are simple, unsophisticated, and majestic; and yet the
characters are distinct, the pure masculine and feminine of
the imaginary primal world. Nor are their surroundings
i Mr. Stopford Brooke's Milton in Mr. Green's Series of Classical Writers. ■,
550 LIFE OF MILTON AND HISTORY OF HIS TIME.
unworthy of themselves. Did ever a blind man before so
trust to his own mastery in recollections of the world of sight
and colour as did Milton when he dreamt out in his darkness
a fit paradise for his first human pair, lavishing on it such
wealth of lawn and hillock, golden dawn and sparkling
night-sky, sylvan shade and fruit-trees blooming, bowers of
niyrtle and walks of roses ?
- Uriel, whose gaze has followed Satan from the sun, and
discovered by his gestures on earth that he was probably one
of the rebel spirits escaped from Hell, has descended to give
warning to the archangel Gabriel, who commands the legion
of angels that are in guard of Paradise. Through the night,
accordingly, Paradise is searched ; and Satan, detected by the
scouts, " squat like a toad, close at the ear of Eve," insinuating
false dreams into her sleep, starts up in his own gigantic
shape, and is brought before Gabriel. They exchange words
of mutual defiance, and there was about to be battle between
Satan and the angelic guard, when, reading the result in one
of the shining constellations, the Fiend betakes himself to
flight,, one knows not whither. Next day rises, presenting
Eve alarmed bynier dream and Adam consoling her, and then
their hymn of worship, and their pleasant work in the garden,
till at noon there is the glorious apparition of the Archangel"
Raphael, who has been despatched from Heaven that Adam
may be fortified against the coming danger by his discourses
and admonitions. The conversations between Raphael and
Adam begin at line 361 of Book V., and extend through the
rest of that Book, and the whole of Books VI., VII., and
VIII. ; and it is in these that there comes in, by relation
from Raphael to Adam, that history of pre-mundane events,
including the rebellion of a third part of the Angels, the wars
in Heaven, the expulsion of the rebel Angels from Heaven,
their inclosure in Hell and the subsequent creation of man's
universe in Chaos immediately under Heaven, which is
already assumed in the poem, but which Adam had not yet
known. In return, Adam relates to Raphael his recollections
of his first existence and thoughts and of the creation of Eve.
It is in these conversations also that there occur poetical
PASADISE LOST. 551
summaries of Milton's physics, physiology, and metaphysics.
Especially curious is that long passage (VIII. 15-178) in
which the relative merits of the Ptolemaic theory of the cosmos
and the Copernican theory are made the subject of an express
discussion between Adam and the Archangel. Adam is repre-
sented as having arrived by intuition at the Copernican theory;
and Haphael, in reply, leans also distinctly to that side, and
criticises severely the intricacy of the Ptolemaic system, with
the shifts of " centric and eccentric,'' " cycle and epicyle/' to
which it had been driven to save its main notion of " orb in
orb." On the whole, however, he discourages the speculation
as too abstruse, and represents the decision either way as of no
great consequence to man's chief business, which is to enjoy
life innocently, do his duty, and fear God. After these con-
versations, at only part of which Eve has been present, the
two colloquists part, the Archangel to Heaven and Adam to
his bower.
Six days have passed since the departure of Raphael when
Satan, who has meanwhile been winging vaguely in the
mundane spaces round and round the earth, keeping in her
shadow as much as possible, returns to Para^se as a fnist in
the night, enters the sleeping serpent, and addresses himself
in that guise to his work of evil. Einding Eve alone, the
Fiend succeeds. At his temptation, she eats of the forbidden
fruit ; at' hers, Adam, when she has rejoined him, eats of it
also ; and mankind is ruined;
" Earth trembled from her entrails, as again
In pangs, and Nature gave a second groan ;
Sky loured, and, muttering thunder, some sad drops
"Wept at completing of the mortal sin
Original."
The rest is misery. The Angels forsake the Earth; Satan
hies back to Hell to announce his victory ; the Son of God
comes down to pronounce doom ; and the guilty pair, who,
after their first delirium of guilt, have broken out in mutual
reproaches and revilings, are left wailing a night and a day in
inconsolable despair. Their wild rage of wailing and mutual
revilings dies at last into a kind of sobbing calm, with some
553 LIFE 01' MILTON AND HISTORY OF HIS TIME,
ray of hope from recoUeotion of the very words in which they
had been judged; and they fall prostrate in prayer. Their
prayer is heard. Another of the archangels, Michael, is sent
down from Heaven, with a band of cherubim, to expel the _
fallen pair from Paradise, but also to comfort them before their
expulsion by foreshowing them the future history of the
ruined world to the very end of things, with the golden thread
through that history which certifies retrieval and redemption.
The last two books of the poem relate this prospective vision,
vouchsafed to Adam through Michael, of the things that were
to be on earth ; and at the close of all we see the eastern side
of Paradise waved over by a flaming brand, and the gate
thronged with dreadful faces and fiery arms, while the ejected
pair, with slow footsteps, are taking their solitary way through
Eden, hand in hand.
" The world was all before them, where to choose
Their place of rest, and Providence their guide."
Already, before their expulsion, there had been certain
modifications in the structure of the Mundane Universe in
consequence of their sin. " In the first place, there had been
" established, what did not exist before, a permanent communi-
" cation between Hell and that Universe. "When Satan had
" come up through Chaos from Hell-gate, he had done so with
" tail and difficulty, as one exploring his way ; but no sooner
" had he succeeded in his mission than Sin and Peath, whom he
" had left at Hell-gate, felt themselves instinctively aware of
" his success, and of the necessity there would thenceforward
" be for a distinct road between Hell a,nd the New World, by
" which all the infernals might go and come. Accordingly,
" they had constructed such a road, — a wonderful causey or
" bridge from Hell-gate, right through Chaos, to that part of
"the outside of the New Universe where Satan had first
" alighted, — i. e. not to its nadir, but to some point near its
" zenith, where there is the break or orifice in th^ primuln
" mobile towards the Empyrean. And what a consequence
"from this vast addition in the physical constitutiou of the
" Cosmos !. The infernal host are no longer confined to Hellj
PASADISE LOST, 553
" but possess also the New Universe, like an additional island
" or pleasure-domain, up in Chaos, and on the very confines of
" their former home, the Empyrean. Preferring' this conquest to
' ' their proper empire in Hell, they have been thenceforth perhaps
" more frequently in our World than in Hell, winging through
" its various spheres, but chiefly inhabiting the air round the
" central earth and passing as the gods and demigods of the
" earth's various polytheisms and mongrel religions. But the
" new causeway from Hell to the World, constructed by Sin and
" Death, was not the only modification of the physical universe
" consequent on the fall. The interior of the Human World as
" it hangs from the Empyrean received some alterations for the
" worse by the decree of the Almighty himself. The elements
" immediately round the earth became harsher and more
" malignant; the planets and starry spheres were so influenced
" that planets and stars have ever since looked inwards upon
" the central earth with aspects of malevolence ; nay, perhaps
" it was then first that, either by a heaving askanOe of the
" earth from her former position, or by a change in the sun's
" path, the ecliptic became oblique to the equator. All this
" apart from changes in the actual body of the earth, including
" the obliteration of the site of the desecrated paradise, and
" the outbreak of virulence among all things , animate since
" Sin and Death fastened on the Earth to begin their ravages. '^
And so it has been, and so it will he, a world always from
worse to worse, but for the remedy. That had been predicted
in the invocation beginning the epic, where it had been
announced that the theme of the poem was to be man's first
disobedience, with its consequences of death, woe, and the
loss of Eden,
"till one greater Man
Eestore us and regain the blissful seat."
From this sketch and exposition it will have appeared that
Paradise Lost was, properly and professedly, as we have called
it, a new cosmical epic. The very characteristic, in respect of
aim and matter, by which it offered itself as one of the great
poems of the world, or, which is the same thing, as a contri-
554 LIFE OF MILTON AND HISTORY OF HIS TIME.
bution to the permanent mythology of the human race, was
that it connected, by a narrative of vast construction, the
inconceivable universe anterior to time and to man with the
beginnings and history of our particular planet. This it had
done by fastening the attention on one great supernatural
being, supposed to belong to the angelic crowd that peopled
the empyrean before our world was created, by following this
being in his actions as a rebel in heaven and an outcast in
hell, and by leaving him at last in apparently successful pos-
session of the new universe for which he had struggled. If
" the hero " of an epic is that principal personage who figures
from first to last, and whose actions draw all the threads, or
even if success in some sense, and command of our admiration
and sympathy in some degree, are requisite for the name, then
not wrongly have so many of the critics regarded Satan as
" the hero " of Paradise Lost. There is, at all events, no other
" hero " there, unless Humanity itself, which is the noble con-
trary object of our afiections and hopes throughout, and which
we may accept as personified distfibutively in Adam and Eve,
can stand to us in that character. But, however that verbal
question may be settled, it remains incontestable that the
heroic substance of the poem, though it all bears on the cata-
strophe on earth, includes an extraordinary proportion of the
superhuman and extramundane. The action in the empyrean
or heaven of heavens itself, direct or reported, occupies about
a fourth part of the whole ; that in hell and chaos not much
less j a certain proportion even of the intramundane action is
not on the earth, but in the mundane spaces round the earth ;
the sum of the extramundane action and the non-terrestrial
action within the mundus taken together considerably exceeds
all that is left of the properly terrestrial ; and even of the
properly terrestrial action it is but a portion that consists of
the sweet human life paradisaic. This must have been per-
ceived at once by the first readers of the book. They, of
course, were at liberty, while perceiving the compound cha-
racter of the whole, and acknowledging the wonderful poetical
unity, the organic necessity of the interconnexion, to divide
the book into parts on the more private ground of their own
PABADISE LOST. 555
preference for this or the other moiety of the contained matter.
Some of them, perhaps, may have had the feeling to which
not a few have confessed from that time to this, and to which
Tennyson has given such subtle expression in his Horatian
ode : —
" O mighty-mouth'd inventor of harmonies,
0 skill'd to sing of Time or Eternity,
God-gifted organ-voice of England,
Milton, a name to resound for ages ;
Whose Titan angels, Gabriel, Abdiel,
Starr'd from Jehovah's gorgeous armouries,
Tower, as the deep-domed Empyrean
Eings to the roar of an Angel-onset :
Me rather all that bowery loneliness.
The brooks of Eden mazily murmuring.
And bloom profuse of cedar arches
Charm, as a wanderer out in ocean.
Where some refulgent sunset of India
Streams o'er a rich ambrosial ocean isle
And crimson-hued the stately palmwoods
Whisper in odorous heights of even."
Praise like this, whether of the angelic grandeurs of the
poem or of its paradisaic beauties, could come only after
consent that the artistic execution had not fallen beneath the
sublime conception. On this question, whether the verdict
were to come sooner or later, there could be no doubt what
it would be. The " mighty-mouthed," the " skilled to sing,"
the " organ-voice of England," the " inventor of harmonies,"
were epithets for Milton which remained to be devised, but
some presentiment of which could not but be felt wherever the
first copies of the poem came into the hands of fit readers.
In whatever respect the poem was examined, it answered the
test of the superlative. Was it the conduct of the story ; was
it the sustained elevation of the style and the perfect texture
and finish of the wording ; was it the music of the verse,
varying from the roar of hurricane and the tramp of bannered
hosts to the charm of bees and birds ; was it the plenitude of
gem-like phrases and of passages memorable individually and
sure to be quoted for ever ; was it wealth of maxim and weight
of thought ; was it the incessant suggestion of subjects for
556 LIFE OF MILTON AND HISTORY OF HIS TIME.
other forms of art, whether of single figures and statuesque
moments for the sculptor, or of groups, incidents, and land-
scapes for the painter ? In any or all of these respects what
a poem it was ! Then, through all, and imparting to all a
sense of difference from anything known before, who could
miss that tone of a certain personal something, that boom of
self-conscious magnanimity, for which we have no name yet
but the Miltonic ? Even the occasional languours and lapses
into the prosaic, as when some doctriiie of Puritan theology
had to be expounded in set terms, might give pleasure to
many. What were they but the rests or sinkings of the
eagle, that he might prove his strength of plume the next
moment by again soaring to his highest in the sunbeams ?
Apart from every other recommendation of the poem,
its scholarliness, its extraordinary fulness of erudition of all
sorts, must have been admired immediately. What abund-
ance and exactness of geographical, as well as of astronomical,
reference and allusion ; what lists of sonorous proper names
rolled lovingly into the Iambic chaunt ; what acquaintance
with universal history ; what compulsion of allthelusciousness
of iEgean myth and Mediterranean legend into the service of
the Hebrew theme ! This man, who had the Bible by heart,
whose verse, when he chose, could consist of nothing else than
coagulations of texts from the Bible or concurrent Biblical
gleams from the first of Genesis to the last of the Apocalypse,
had also ransacked and enjoyed the classics. Though his
flight was above the Aonian mount, yet Jove and Jason,
Proteus and Apollo, Pan and the Nymphs, the Fauns and
the Graces, all came into view as they were wanted, captives
to his heavenly muse. The epic, while planned from the
Bible, and while original in the entire conception and in
every part, was also a mosaic of recollections from all that
was best in Greek and Latin literature. Homer, Hesiod, the
three Greek tragedians, Plato, Lucretius, Cicero, Virgil, Ovid,
and the rest, had all yielded passages or flakes of their
substance to be melted into the rich English enamel. But
the learning displayed included more than the classics. The
author's readings had evidently been wide and various in the
PARADISE LOST. 557
mediaeval Latinists and later scholars of different countries,
and especially close and familiar in Dante, Petrarch, Ariosto,
Tasso, and others of the Italians. Of his acquaintance with
all the preceding' poetry of his own tongue there was no room
for doubt. There were proofs, more particularly, of his
intimacy with Spenser, Shakespeare, and those minor English
poets of his own century who are best described as the
Spenserians, and of whom Browne, Giles and Phineas Fletcher,
and Drummond of Hawthornden, were the finest representa-
tives. Had it been worth while, it could have been proved
from Paradise Lost that Milton was no stranger to the
writings of Cowley and Davenant^.
We are thus brought back to the fact that Paradise Lost
made its appearance in Davenant's Laureateship and belongs
by right of date to the English literature of the first years of
the Restoration. On a comparison of the poem with all bhat
was then recent or current what can have been the impression ?
The last things even nominally of the heroic or epic kind in
^ In connexion with this subject of tions by two different minds ; but it is
the learning shown in Paradise Lost just possible that there was more. When
one might lose oneself again in the in- the Csedmonian fragments were first
quiry, prosecuted at such length by published, at Amsterdam, in 1655, by
Todd and others, as to the amount of the Teutonic scholar Franoiscus Junius,
Milton's possible indebtedness to pre- i.e. Fran9ois Dujon, Milton, it is true,
vious writers, Italian, Spanish, Latin, had been blind for three years, and
German, Dutch, and English, for this there is some difficulty in understand-
or that in his epic. Having eLsewhere ing how he could then have found a
{Cambridge Milton, I. 36 — 40) given my reader fit to spell out to him the small
impressions of the results of these mis- quarto of 106 pages containing the frag-
cellaneous bibliographical researches, meuts, printed as they were in the old
and characterized them as, with one or Anglo-Saxon characters, running on
two exceptions, "laborious nonsense," painfully in prose fashion, without
I will advert here only to that one form metrical break, and without comment
of the inquiry which seems to me the or translation of any kind. The imique
most curious biographically. Was Mil- manuscript from which the volume was
ton acquainted with the Anglo-Saxon printed, however, had been in Arch-
Csedmon? The Cosmos of Csedmon bishop Usher's library, and had been
has, of course, nothing in common with given by the Archbishop to Junius about
Milton's Cosmos, and is but a very 1651; andJunius, having been a resident
limited and homely old Northumbrian in London continuously from 1620 to
world indeed ; but there are some strik- that year, must almost certainly have
ing coincidences between notions and been a personal acquaintance of Milton's,
phrases in Satan's soliloquy in Hell in Hence it is just possible that Milton
the Csedmonian Genesis and notions and had become acquainted with the precious
phrases in the description of Satan's Csedmonian manuscript before he was
rousing himself and his fellows in the blind. If he heard of the discovery
first book of Paradise Lost. Very pro- of such a thing, he was not likely to
bably the coincidences imply only strong remain ignorant of its nature or con-
conception of the same traditional situa- tents.
558 LIFE OF MILTON AND HISTORY OF HIS TIME.
English poetry were Cowley's Davideis, Davenant's Gondibert,
and Dryden's Annus MirabUis. None of these, of course, could
stand within the sight of such an epic as this ; nor, in going
back through previous English poetry in search of the latest
book, nominally of the epic order, worthy of being named with
this in respect of general importance, could one bestow even
a passing thought on Drayton, Daniel, or any of the rest of
that century, or stop short of the Faeri/ Queene. Then, the
view enlarging itself, and the distinction of poetry into kinds
ceasing to be relevant for the farther purpose of estimate,' the
recollection would be that the English nation had hitherto
possessed but three poets of any kind that all the world could
regard as really consummate. Chaucer, Spenser, and Shake-
speare were the trio of England's greatest, with none, later
or intermediate, that could rank in their company. And
now what had happened? A fourth poet had stepped out
who must be associated for ever with those three predecessors.
He had stepped out, — who could have expected it ? — ^in the
person of a blind man domiciled in an obscure suburb of
London, who, though there was a dim remembrance that he
had professed poetry in his youth, had been known through
his middle life as a Puritan pamphleteer, a divorcist, an
iconoclast in Church and State, and who seven years ago, when
Charles came to the throne, had been so specially infamous for
his connexion with the Republic and the Regicide that he had
barely escaped the gallows. Chaucer, Spenser, Shakespeare,
and Milton, were thenceforth to be the quaternion of largest
stars in the main portion of the firmament of English poetry.
Nay, if there was to be a discrimination of degrees among the
four, was it not Milton that was to be named inevitably
whenever, on any plea of coequality of poetic genius visible
through difiference of modes, the supreme radiance of Shake-
speare was to be challenged by the contrast of a peer or
second ? That is the understanding now, and it was formed
with unusual rapidity, we shall find, in Milton's own genera-
tion. Meanwhile we are still in the year 1667. Paradise Lost
has yet to find its readers, and there are lions in the path.
BOOK III.
AUGUST 1667— NOVEMBER 1671.
HISTORY: — English Politics and Litbbatube from 1667
TO 1674.
BIOGRAPHY :^-TBSi Last Seven Years of Milton's Life.
CHAPTER I,
English politics and litbeatube feom 1667 to i67'4.
There are few periods during which it is more diflBcult to
describe the mechanism of the English government than
during the seven years following the fall of Clarendon. The
difiSeulty has been acknowledged, rather than explained, by
calling the period, or the greater part of it, The time of the
Cabal Administeation.
No need now to correct the old popular fallacy that the word
cahal was an invention of that time. Most people know
that the word cabal had already been in use in England, as a
designation for any number of persons putting their heads
together for any object whatever, but more especially as an
alternative name for that secret committee of the King's
privy council and ministry which had been long known as
The Junto, and which we now call The Cabinet. Though the
strict constitutional theory was that the right and duty of
advising the sovereign lay in the whole body of the privy
council, and that each minister was the independent servant
of the crown in his own department, the two connected insti-
tutions of The Junto and The Premiership are so rooted in the
very necessities of politics aiid of human nature that the
existence of one or other, or of both together, had been, more
or less an open fact in the reigns of all recent English
sovereigns. That neither was liked, that both were regarded
as unconstitutional, and that the premier or favourite for the
time being, and other members of the Junto or Cabal for the
time being, always, ran peculiar risks, bad not prevented the
VOL. VE. 0 0
562 LIFE OF MILTON AND HISTOEY OF HIS TIME.
definite transmission of both institutions through the reigns
of James I. and Charles I. The Clarendon Administration
for Charles II. from 1660 to 1667 had been in reality a
government by intermixed cabal and premiership. What,
then, was the difference from 1667 onwards? It was that,
instead of a government by continued cabal and premiership
in combination, there was now a government by continued
cabal without any steady premiership. In other words,
Charles himself, so far as he took trouble with public affairs,
was now more the master than he had been. No one stood
now by his side as indubitably and necessarily the prime
minister; and, while he still had his general privy council
and ministry of some thirty or forty persons, to be used as a
formal agency of state, he could depute the real work of
deliberation for him and co-operation with him in state-
affairs to any five or six, or any seven or eight, of the privy
councillors and ministers most in his confidence. These were
his Cahal or Cabinet, as distinct from the general body of the
privy council and ministry ; and the peculiarity was that, as
the composition of the cabal depended entirely on his own
pleasure, it might fluctuate from month to month, or even
from week to week. At certain times, indeed, there might
even be two halves of the one nominal cabal, separately em-
ployed and consulted by the King, and played off against each
other.
FEOM AUGUST 1667 TO APEIL 1670.
Immediately after the fall of Clarendon, the Duke of
Ormond being then absent in his Lord-Lieutenancy of
Ireland, the cabal round Charles for English affairs con-
sisted of the Duke of York, the Duke of Albemarle, the
Duke of Buckingham, Sir Orlando Bridgman (made Lord
Keeper in succession to Clarendon as Lord Chancellor), Lord
Trivy Seal Roberts, and Lord Arlington and Sir William
Morrice, the two Secretaries of State ; with whom, for occa-
sional purposes, were associated Lord Ashley, as Chancellor of
the Eascheguer and one of the Commissioners of the Treasury,
Sir Thomas Clifford, as Comjptroll&r of the Household and one
THE CABAL FROM 1667 TO 1670. 563
of the Commissioners of the Treasury, and Sir William Coventry,
as one of the Commissioners of the Treasury. This cabal was
modified by some subsequent changes. In June 1668 Clifford
was promoted to the Treasv/rership of the Household, the Comp-
trollershij) going to Lord Newport. In September in the
same year Sir William Morrice, who had been dwindling in
importance, retired from his Secretaryship of State for .^"'10,000,
and was succeeded by Sir John Trevor. In March 1668-9,
in consequence of a quarrel with Buckingham, Sir William
Coventry was dismissed. Early in 1669, the Duke of Ormond
having been removed from the Lord- Lieutenancy of Ireland
by Buckingham's contrivance, Lord Roberts went to Ireland
as his successor. On the 3rd of January 1669-70 Monk died
of a dropsy, at the age of sixty-one, and there was to be no
farther influence of his in the affairs of the Restoration. The
general effect of these changes had been to increase the im-
portance of Ashley and Clifford in the cabal. On the whole,
however, the chiefs from the beginning were Buckingham
(without office till he became Master of Horse by purchase
from Monk) and Lord Secretary Arlington. A kind of
pseudo-premiership, indeed, had been accorded to Bucking-
ham, which might have been turned into a real premiership
but for his incorrigible fitfulness and the scandal of his
private profligacies. As it waSj the steadier, calmer, and
more laborious Arlington was more than his rival, especially
in the foreign department. Ashley was first distinctly
adopted into the cabal as an adherent of Buckingham, and
Clifford as an adherent of Arlington ^.
/ // Consisting mainly of a selection of the politicians that had
been in opposition to Clarendon, the very characteristic of this
cabal of Buckingham's pseudo-premiership was its willing
agreement with the King in an endeavour to reverse some
parts of Clarendon's policy, and more especially his rigid
church-policy, as it had taken shape in such barbarities as
the Act of Uniformity, the Conventicles Act, and the Five
Miles Act.
1 Beatson's Political Index ; several Pepys in various places ; Christie's
Articles in Wood's Ath. sai Fasti; Zdfe of Shaftesbwy, II. I— i.
0 0 3
564 LTPE OF MILTON AND HISTOKT OP HIS TIME.
Already, since the Great Fire of London, and partly in
consequence of that eventj there had been a considerable re-
laxation of the severities against Nonconformists. After the
burning of so many churches, it was thought " a thing too
gross '' to try to prevent the ejected Nonconformist ministers
of London from meeting their distressed and impoverished
old congregations in the open air, or in temporary tabernacles
amid the ruins. The liberty thus recovered by sheer necessity
in London had extended itself by contagion into most parts
of the country. Nonconformist ministers everywhere were
preaching openly, and crowds were flocking to hear them.
With this breaking' down of the practice of the Acts against
Nonconformity there had naturally come a disposition to
revive the question of their expediency. Now that England
had an established Episcopal Church, with abundant powers
and revenues, and that Church was safe, was there no other
mode of dealing with the dissenters from that Church than
the systematic coercion by pains and penalties, the systematic
persecution, that had seemed necessary to Clarendon, Sheldon,
and the rest, and had been organized into statutes by the
Cavalier Parliament? Might there not be a return to that
policy of a moderate indulgence in religious matters, a
regulated toleration of Nonconformist worship, which the
King had promised from the first, which he had again and
again recommended in vain, and which he was understood
still to favour ^ ?
Buckingham's Cabal, if we may so call it, took this very
proper view of things, and were all so far of the King's mind
in that matter. There were, however, two sets of politicians
in the Cabal, with a corresponding difference in their reasons
for inclining to a policy of toleration. There was the Protestant
Liberal section of the Cabal, consisting of Lord Keeper
Bridgman, who was an Episcopalian of a temperate order.
Monk and Roberts, who had been Presbyterians and retained
Presbyterian sympathies, and Buckingham and Ashley, who
were Sceptics or Deists in the guise of Church-of-England
. ' Baxter, Part III. p. 22.
CHUECH-POLICY FBOM 1667 TO 1670. 565
men. There was also the crypto-Catholie section of the Cabal,
represented by the Duke of York, Arlington, and Sir Thomas
Clifford. The former were inclined to a policy of toleration
by arguments of natural good sense, Buckingham by far the
most liberal of them, and willing to go to great lengths, but
the rest recognising limits, and Ashley with an express
reservation, which he had put on paper, that no toleration to
be granted could with political safety be extended to the
Roman Catholics or the Fifth Monarchy men i. One of the
very motives of the crypto-Catholics of the Cabal, on the
other hand, in concurring in a policy of toleration for the
Presbyterians, the Independents, the Baptists; and other
Protestant sects, was that the Roman Catholics might be
included, and there might thus be farther study of Roman
Catholic interests and prospects in England. Charles him-
self, it was to appear very notoriouslyj was inspired, and had
all along been inspired, by this peculiar motive in his efforts
for a toleration. His Majesty, therefore, was best represented,
and knew himself to be best represented, in the religious
question, by the crypto- Catholic section of his Cabal. They
were sincere enough in their desire for a general toleration,
and were influenced by the same reasons of good sense and
good nature that actuated their liberal Protestant colleagues;
but their conduct of the toleration question practically was
liable to a subtle influence from their secret motive. A
toleration of the Roman Catholics being a notion to which
-the mass of :fche English people were obstinately opposed,
might not the only way to educate them in that notion, and
to obtain a toleration for the Roman Catholics, be to give full
rein now and then to the persecution of the Protestant Non-
conformists of all varieties? Might not the Nonconformists
be thus driven, for their own sakes, into conjunction with the
Roman Catholics and a demand for a general toleration of all
religionists? This peculiar subtlety of motive on the part of
the crypto-Catholic tolerationists of the Cabal of 1667 was
to take effect in occasional infidelities to their principle of
toleration, and relapses into the persecuting policy.
■ > Memorial on Toleration by Ashley in Christie's SJmflesbwy, Vol. II. Appendix,
566 LIFE OF MILTON AND HISTOKT OF HIS TIME.
Not, however, at any time between 1667 and 1670. During-
those years the King and the Cabal collectively moved in
a straightforward course on the religious question. They
allowed the subject of toleration to be freely ventilated and
discussed ; Sheldon, Morley, and the other High Episcopal
divines found themselves out of favour ; and the agreement
was to let the persecuting Acts be as inoperative as possible.
They even did their best for a repeal in Parliament itself of
the Clarendonian Acts against the Nonconformists. Here,
however, they ran against a rock.
Parliament was not sitting when the Buckingham Cabal
was formed ; and, when it did meet for its Seventh Session on
the 10th of October 1667, the great business for some time
was the impeachment of Clarendon. That having been ended
by Clarendon's flight to France and an Act for his perpetual
banishment, and the two Houses, after an adjournment for
seven weeks, having reassembled on the 6th of February,
1667-8, the question of a toleration for the Nonconformists
was most expressly recommended to them by a speech from
the King. Neither the speech nor the subsequent exertions
of ministers and others in debate had any effect. The Parlia-
ment, though it had just been impeaching Clarendon for high
treason, was, in two thirds of its bulk, an obdurate mass of
unmitigated Clarendonianism still in all matters ecclesiastical.
There were resolutions in the Commons humbly desiring the
King " to enforce obedience to the laws in force concerning
"religion and church-government;" there were complaints
of the " insolent carriages " of Nonconformists ; and, after a
debate of several days on the motion "that his Majesty be
"desired to send for such persons as he shall think fit to
"make proposals to him in order to the uniting of his
"Protestant subjects," the proposal was lost on the 8th of
April by 176 votes to 70. There had also been brought in
a bill for continuing the Conventicles Act of May 1664, which
had expired on the 3nd of March 1667-8, and the expiry of
which had contributed somewhat to the recent liberty of the
Nonconformists. This bill passed the Commons by 144 votes
to 78 on the 38th of April, and it would doubtless have passed
CHUBOH-POLICY FBOM 1667 TO 1670. 567
the Lords tooj had not the two Houses adjourned themselves
for three months, by the King's desire, on the 9th of May.
By farther adjournments, followed by a prorogation, they were
to be kept from farther concern with public affairs for seven-
teen months^.
Evidently, it was better for the Nonconformists that
Parliament should not be sitting, and that they should be
left to the mercies of the King and the Cabal: Pot seventeen
months, aceotdingly, there was a continued breathing-time
for the milder Nonconformist sects. The Kihg and the
Cabal even perseVered in the design in which they h^i been
baffled by Parliament. Dr. John Wilkins having been made
Bishop of Chester in November 1668, thfere was a negotiation
in the following year by this liberal bishopj Lord Keeper
Bridgman, and Chief Justice Matthew Hale, on the part .of
the government, with Baxter, Mailton, and other lieading
Nonconformists, pointing not only to a settlement of terms
for a limited toleration of sects beyond the Established Church,
but even to a revival of the question of a comprehension. The
negotiation was still in progress when Parliament met again,
Oct. 19, 1669 2.
This, the Highth Sessron of the Cavalier Parliament, was a
short one, for the Houses Were again prorogued by the King
on the 11th of December. But in those two months they fell
again with such fury on the Nonconformists that the King
and the Cabal had to succumb. The negbtiation with the
Presbyterians was quashed ; there were numerous informations
and complaints in the two Houses as to evasions of the
Conformity Acits, the increase of conventicliBS and wooden
" tabernacles " in London, &c. ; and a bill was again brought
in for renewing the Conventicles Act. Only the brevity of the
session prevented the passing of such a bill. That and other
things were reserved for the Ninth Session of the Parliament,
which was to meet on the 14th of February 1669-70.
Connected more intimately than was then kuown with the
1 Commons Journals and Pari. Hist, of dates.
2 Baxter, III. 23, et ^q.
568 LIFE OJ? MILTON AND HISTORY OF HIS TIME.
domestic question of religion whicli had been thus managed
by the Cabal from 1667 to 1670, and agitated between them
and Parliament, had been certain transactions of the foreign
policy of Charles and the Cabal during the same years.
They cluster themselves in English history under the two
names of The Triple Alliance and The Sechet Negotia-
tion WITH Feance.
Since the death of Mazarin in 1661 Louis XIV. had been
acting the Grand Monarque superbly and laboriously for
himself. The dominant idea of this young monarch in his
foreign relations, the idea which was to determine all the
vicissitudes of his unusually long reign, had been fully re-
vealed. He was bent on the Spcmish Succession, i.e. on the
triumph of France at last over her European rival, the decay-
ing empire of Spain, by the assertion of the rights of his
wife, Maria Teresa, the daughter of Philip IV. of Spain, to
her full Spanish inheritance after her father's death. Direct
application to Philip IV. having failed, Louis had negotiated
on the subject with other powers, and especially with the
Dutch. Admitting that the succession to the main Spanish
monarchy should belong, by Spanish law, to Philip's male
heir, the young child Carlos, born by a second marriage, he
had contended that a portion of the Spanish Netherlands
ought to come at once to Maria Teresa on the death of
Philip. To induce the Dutch to favour his claim, he had
proposed that they and he should, on Philip's death, partition
the Spanish Netherlands between them. The Dutch had
declined the temptation, dreading the proximity of such a
power as the French to their Eepublican seven provinces,
and thinking it better that those dear-bought provinces
should continue to have their old enemies, the now weakened
Spaniards, for their neighbours and their barrier against
France. Accordingly, when Philip IV. of Spain did dip in
1665, leaving all his dominions to the feeble and sickly
Carlos II., Louis had acted alone. Having reiterated his
demands on Spain for the immediate cession of the portion of
the Spanish Netherlands which he claimed as his wife's, he
had, in 1667, sent an invading Frenph army into the disputed
THE TRIPLE ALLIANCE, 569
territory. But the invasion had spread uneasiness throughout
Europe. The Pope, the German Emperor, and other friends
of Spain, were in alarm ; the Dutch were in alarm : how was
England to act ? Anxious to secure the co-operation or the
neutrality of England, Louis had sent an embassy, with mag-
nificent offers to Charles himself, and with money to bribe
his advisers ; but, though Charles inclined decidedly to a
bargain with Louis, popular feeling and the feeling of a part
of the Cabal ran in the other direction. The result was that
Sir William Temple, then English agent at Brussels, had
been instructed to open negotiations with the Dutch. Sir
William, in a few interviews at the Hague with the Dutch
Grand Pensionary De Witt, had done his work well ; and, on
the 23rd of January, 1667-8, there was the famous Tuiple
Alliance, consisting of three treaties, one of them secret,
pledging England, the United Provinces, and Sweden, to act
in concert in compelling Louis to accept one or other of two
alternative sets of terms he had been offered by Spain. Then,
more easily than had been expected, Louis had given way.
On the 15th of April 1668 he made peace with Spain on the
arrangement of keeping his conquests in Flanders and re^
signipg others. He had so managed matters that, while
seeming to yield, he lost nothing. But the conduct of the
Dutch rankled in his memory. By adopting the alternative
which allowed him to retain his conquests in Flanders, he had
becoqie deliberately their close neighbour ; and he had vowed
a terrible revenge ^.
Hardjy had the Triple Alliance been formed when there
began The Secret Negotiation with Fbajtcb for undoing
it. The first overtures were made by Charles himself, in
conversation with the French ambassador Ruvigny, in April
1668 ; and through the rest of that year and the whole of
1669 the negotiation went on, with missioiis and cross^missions,
divisions in the Cab^l, distributions of French money among
the members of it, and the employment of Buckingham and
Arlington alternately as chief negotiator for Charles,
^ Mignet's great work entitled Nkgo- to suoli a work as this, so masterly in
ciations relatives a la Sticcession d'Es- its kind for lumiaousness, accuracy, and
pagne sous Louis XIV. : Introd. and insight.
Vols. I. and II. It is a pleasure to refer
570 LIFE OF MILTON AND HI8T0BT OF HIS TIME.
What Louis wanted was simply the co-operation of England
in his meditated war against the Dutch ; and for this he was
ready to pay Charles most handsomely. So far nothing could
be more agreeable to Charles. What he wanted above all
things was money. The vast sums voted him by Parliament
had been squandered no one knows how ; he was immeasurably
in debt ; the pay of the navy, the household, the public offices,
was wretchedly in arrears ; the daughters of the horse-leech
were clamorous. Readiness to accept money in the largest
possible quantity from any quarter had thus become nine-
tenths of the whole soul of Charles. He hated the Dlitch,
and was pleased enough to be a party to a war against them,
and to receive money on that account. But in thfe proposed
partnership with his young cousin Louis he foresaw a splendid
futurity of money generally. Might he not increase his price
at once by throwing something else into the bargain besides
that promise of co-operation against the Dutch which Louis
wanted ? Might he not, for example, offer to declare himself
a Eoman Catholic? There is no doubt that the crypto-
Catholicism of Charles was as sincere a sentiment as any he
felt, and that he had never ceased in a lazy way to re-
member his secret overtures to the Pope in 1663-3. Equally
certain it is, however, that his negotiation with Louis came
upon him rather unexpectedly as a fit opportunity, and that
a judicious use of the opportunity for money purposes was part
of his calculations. There were family consultations on the
subject, ending in a conference held in the Duke of York's
house on the 25th of January 1668-9. It was at this con-
ference, at which, besides Charles himself and the Duke, there
were present Arlington, Clifford, and the Roman Catholic
Lord Arundel of Wardour, that the scheme took formal
shape, The Duke had for some time been so honestly a
Roman Catholic as to be uneasy in concealing the fact, and it
was agreed that he ■ and Charles should declare themselves
Roman Catholics together at the right moment. It was
then communicated to Louis that Charles desired to enlarge
the scope of the negotiation that had been going on between
them. He would assist Louis, as required, against the Dutch ;
THE SECRET NEGOTIATION WITH EEANCE. 571
but he would also declare his change of religion, and thus
take a step towards the re-establishment of Catholicism in his
dominions, if Louis would be his patron in that intention.
It may be doubted whether Louis altogether liked the idea of
becoming patron and paymaster of so stupendous an enter-,
prise as the conversion of the British Islands to the true faith
in the manner proposed. He felt it impossible, however, to
decline ; and so the negotiation did proceed on the double
basis of the Declaration of Catholicity and Fartnership in a War
against the Butch. The utmost secrecy had now to be studied.
All but the crypto-Catholie members of the Cabal were kept
in the profoundest ignorance of the extended purpose of the
negotiation ; even M. Colbert de Croissy, who had succeeded
Ruvigny as French ambassador in London, was kept in
ignorance for a time. The agents for Charles and his brother
were Arlington, Clifford, Lord Arundel, and Sir Richard
Boilings; and the, special link of communication between
king and king was Charles's favourite and only remaining
sister, the Princess Henrietta, now for seven years the Un-
happy wife of Philip, Duke of Orleans, the only brother of
Louis. The differences that arose in the course of the enlarged
negotiation were on two questions. Whether should the
declaration of Catholicity or the war with the Dutch have the
precedence ; and how much would Louis give to Charles on
the two accounts ? While Louis was for the war first and the
declaration of Catholicity afterwards, Charles and the Duke
of York were for giving precedence to the declaration of
Catholicity ; and, while Louis wanted to give as little on
either account as would be accepted, Charles wanted all he
could obtain. On the 18th of December 1669, Colbert having
by this time been taken into complete confidence, there was
submitted to him, on the part of Charles, a draft treaty,
reducing all to regular form. It fixed the price of the
Declaration of Catholicity at j^200,000 sterling, stipulating
farther that Louis should " assist his Britannic Majesty with
troops and money " if there should be any rebellion in England
in consequence of the declaration; and it fixed the subsidy to
be paid by Louis to Charles for the Dutch War at .^'800,000
572 LIFE OF MILTON AND HISTOEY OF HIS TIME.
a year while the war should last. Louis, at sight of the
draft treaty, pronounced the demands exorbitant; Charles
intimated that they might be lowered; and, Louis having
agreed that the time of the declaration of Catholicity should
be left to the discretion of Charles, the two Kings were
chaffering over the sums when the Ninth Session of the
English Parliament met^.
From Feb. 14, 1669-70, when Parliament met, to April 11,
1670, when it adjourned, much of its attention was occupied
by a piece of business of an apparently private nature. This
was known as " Lord Roos's business," and consisted in the
pushing of a bill through the two Houses to enable John
Manners, Lord Roos, the eldest son of the Earl of Rutland,
to marry again, notwithstanding that his wife, accused of
infidelities to him, was still alive.
What gave importance to the bill was the knowledge that
it was pushed with an ulterior purpose, interesting to the
whole kingdom. Charles's Portuguese Queen was childless,
and an heir by her to the throne seemed an impossibility.
Would Charles acquiesce in leaving the succession to his
brother, or to that brother's children, the grandchildren of the
exiled Clarendon ? Might he not be either divorced from his
present wife, so as to be able to marry again, or permitted
that bigamy for which there had been precedents in other
countries and arguments by some of the reforming divines?
The method of divorce seeming the easiest, Buckingham had
undertaken to create the necessary precedent for legitimizing
a second marriage after divorce by carrying the Lord Roos
bill. Introduced into the Lords on the 5th of March, it did
not pass the first reading till the 17th, when, after a long and
vehement debate, there was the narrow success of 41 present
lords and 15 proxies in favour, to 42 present lords and 6
proxies against. The Duke of York, whose interests were at
1 Sir John Dalrymple's Memoirs of velations was first given to the world
Great Britain and Irdand 0.11 1 — 1778), by Dalrymple from archives in the
II. 3—56; Lingard (second edition), French Foreign Office; but Mignet's
XII. 200 — 206 ; Mignet, III. 1 — 168. narrative is the most elaborate and
The substance of the extraordinary IC' thorough.
THE LORD BOOS DIVOECE BILL, 573
stake, was, of course, one of the most strenuous opponents of
the bill ; and he was backed by the two archbishops, nearly-
all the bishops, and a number of the peers, among whom were
Bristol and other Roman Catholics. The second reading
having been carried with the same extraordinary difficulty,
it seemed very likely that it might be thrown out on the
third. What was the surprise of their Lordships when, at
this stage, — to wit, on the 21st of March, — ^the King sauntered
into the House unexpectedly, and announced that he meant
to renew a laudable custom of his predecessors long ago, by
coming in among them now and then in a friendly and
informal way and listening to their debates ! Their Lord-
ships, though much perplexed, thanked his Majesty for his
condescension ; and from that day all order was at an end in
the upper House, in consequence* of the King's formed habit
of dropping in when he liked, standing by the fire, chatting
with the peers in groups, and soliciting them for anything he
wanted. He had been several times in the House in this
fashion when, on the 28th of Maj"ch, the Lord Roos bill
passed the third reading, still after much opposition, and with
the recorded dissents of the Duke of York and many bishops
and peers. Going into the Commons that day, it passed the
second reading there next day by 141 votes to 65, and the
third reading on March 31^.
The bill for enabling Lord Roos to marry again was con-
sequently one of the bills to which Charles had the pleasure
of giving his assent on the 11th of April 1670, when there
was an adjournment of the two Houses for six months.
Another of the bills, to which he gave his assent more
reluctantly, was a New Conventicles Act. At the beginning
of the session he had let it be known to the Nonconformists
that, as he needed supplies from Parliament, he could no
longer resist the determination of that highly Clarendonian
assembly to revert to the full stringency of Clarendon's
ecclesiastical laws. The New Conventicles Act had, accord-
ingly, been carried without more formidable opposition than
1 Lords and Commons Journals of dates ; Pari. Hist. IV. 447 ; Bvtmet, I.
452—455 ; Lingard, XII. 210—214.
574 LIFE OF MILTON AND HISTOEY OF HIS TIME.
could be offered by private members. In some respects it was
more severe than the former Act, and Marvell calls it the
"quintessence of arbitrary malice." It defined an illegal
conventicle to be any meeting for worship, otherwise than
according to the practice of the Church of England, at which
more than four persons should be present in addition to the
members of the family in whose house it should be held, or at
which, if it were in the fields or an uninhabited place, more
than four persons should be present in all. Any person over
sixteen years of age attending such a conventicle was to be
liable to a fine of five shillings for the first offence, and of ten
for every subsequent offence, while the penalties for preachers
or teachers in conventicles were to be ,^''20 for the first offence
and ^40 for every other, and householders allowing con-
venticles in their premises were to forfeit ^20 for each
offence. One third of the fines in every case was to go to the
informer and his assistants. Justices of peace and constables
were empowered to break open doors if necessary in execution
of the Act; lieutenants and deputy-lieutenants of counties,
and officers of the militia, were to disperse conventicles with
horse or foot, if necessary ; and, in all cases of doubt, the Act
was to be interpreted most beneficially for the suppression of
conventicles ^.
I-EOM APRIL 1670 TO JUNE 1673.
The most curious result of Charles's interest simultaneously
in two such matters as the Secret Negotiation with France
and the Marriage Bill of Lord Roos was the disintegration
of the Cabal for the time into two halves. For the negotia-
tion with France the real Cabal consisted only of the crypto-
Catholie members of the nominal Cabal, — viz. the Duke of
York, Arlington, and Clifford,— while Buckingham, Ashley,
Trevor, and the rest, were kept quite in the dark as to the
King's true drift. For the Lord Roos business, on the other
hand, Charles had worked precisely through Buckingham,
Ashley, and Trevor, with assistance from Lauderdale and the
Earl of Orrery, while the Duke of York, and Arlington and
1 statutes at Large, 22 Car. II. cap. 1 ; Grosart's edition of Maivell, II. 316.
THE CABAL FEOM 1670 TO 1673. 575
Cliflford, in the Duke's interest and ia the interest of Roman
Catholicism, were keenly in the opposition. This co-existence
of two Cabals could hardly continue long; and it depended
on Charles's choice between perseverance in the French
negotiation and perseverance in the design of a second mar-
riage which of the two should have to be discharged and
which extended to the necessary dimensions by recruitment.
The difficulty was solved by the abandonment of the project
of a second marriage. Although there was talk of a Royal
Divorce Bill, to be brought into Parliament when it reas-
sembled, Charles seems to have given little attention to the
subject after the passing of the Lord Roos Bill, or rather
to have made up his mind that it would be harsh and un-
necessary to insult and disturb the poor Portuguese lady who
was his wife. Hence, from April 1670 onwards, an apparently
reunited Cabal. It consisted of Buckingham, Arlington,
Ashley, Cliffoed, the Scottish Lauderdale, the Duke of
York, Lord Keeper Bridgman, and co-Secretary Sir John
Trevor, with one or two subordinates. The first five being
the real chiefs, and some ingenious person having observed
that the initials of their names, if taken in a certain order,
actually formed the word Cabal, the anagram has come down
as a convenient device for recollecting the personal com-
position of Charles's Cabinet from 1670 to 1673. It is not
to be forgotten, however, that there was still a division of
the Cabal, which Charles could recognise on occasion. There
was the Liberal Protestant section, of which the chiefs were
the Deists Buckingham and Ashley and the Scottish Pres-
byterian Lauderdale ; and there was the crypto - Catholic
section, headed by Arlington and Clifford, in private league
with Charles and the Duke of York for the secret purposes
of the negotiation with France ^-
That negotiation reached a definite conclusion in the so-
called Secret Treaty of Dover of May 23, 1670. The
Duke of Orleans had sulkily consented that his wife, the
Princess Henrietta, should visit her brother in England for
I Burnet, I. 454—155; Liogard, XII. 233—238; Christie's Shaftesbury, II.
53—55.
576 LIFE OF MILTON AND HISTORY OF HIS TIME.
the purpose, on the strict condition that she should remain
but a few days and should not g-o to London. Charles had
met her, on her arrival at Dovet on the 15th, with the
fondest demonstrations of afifection ; and it was under cover
of festivities in honour of her visit, dramatic performances
for her entertainment, and the like, that the treaty was ar-
ranged, signed, and sealed. The signatories on the English
side were Charles himself, and Lord Arlington, Lord Arundel,
Sir Thomas CliflPord, and Sir Richard Sellings, as his com-
missioners, while M. Colbert de Croissy alone, as representa-
tive of Louis, signed on the other part. The treaty consisted
of one general article, constituting perpetual alliance and amity
between the two kingdoms, and of ten specific articles.
Nine of these ten specific articles related to the co-operation
of the two powers for the assertion of any rights to the
Spanish succession that might eventually accrue to Louis,
but chiefly to their co-operation in an immediate war with the
Dutch. Charles bound himself to furnish a land force of 6000
foot, in aid of the French army invading the United Pro-
vinces, and to be paid and maintained by Louis, and also
to furnish a fleet of fifty men-of-war to be conjoined with
a smaller French fleet, the combined fleets to be under the
command of the Duke of York. For this service Charles was
to receive from Louis an annual subsidy of three millions of
livres tournois (about ^230,000 sterling) as long as the war
should last. This subsidy was to be quite independent of what
was promised to Charles by the first of the ten specific articles.
That article, the article of The Declaration of Catholicitr/, ought
to be given textually : —
" His Majesty the King of Great Britain, being convinced of the
truth of the Catholic Religion, and resolved to make his declaration
of the same, and to reconcile himself with the Church of Rome, as
soon as the interest of the affairs of his kingdom may permit, has
every ground of hope and assurance, from the affection and loyalty
of his subjects, that none of them, even of those on whom God may
not yet have so abundantly shed his grace as to dispose them by
this so august example to a like conversion, will ever fail in the
inviolable obedience which all peoples owe to their sovereigns, even
when of a contrary religion. Nevertheless, as there are found
sometimes turbulent and unquiet spirits who endeavour to trouble
THE SECBET TEEATY OF DOTEE. 577
the public tranquillity, especially when they can cover their designs
with a plausible pretext of Religion, his Majesty of Great Britain,
who has nothing more at heart, after the peace of his own con-
science, than to confirm that which the gentleness of his govern-
ment has procured for his subjects, has thought that the best means
to prevent alteration of the same will be to be assured, in case of
need, of the assistance of his Most Christian Majesty : who, on his
part, wishing to give to the King of Great Britain indubitable
proofs of the sincerity of his friendship, and to contribute to the
good success of a design so glorious, so useful to his Majesty of
Great Britain, and even to the whole Catholic Religion, has pro-
mised and hereby promises to give for this purpose to the said
King of Great Britain the sum of 2,000,000 livres towrnois [about
£154,000 sterling] ; of which one half shall be paid in cash three
months after exchange of ratifications of the present Treaty to the
order of the said King of Great Britain at Calais, Dieppe, or Havre
de Grace, or remitted by letters of change to London, at the risk,
peril, and expense of the said Most Christian King, and the other
half in the same manner three months afterwards. Moreover, the
said Most Christian King binds himself to assist with troops his
Majesty of Great Britain, to the amount of 6000 foot if necessary,
and also to raise and maintain them at his own oharn-e and ex-
pense, so long as the said King of Great Britain shall judge them
needful for the execution of his design ; and the said troops shall
be transported by vessels of the King of Great Britain to such
places and ports as he shall judge the fittest for the interest of bis
service, and from the day of their embarkment shall be paid as
aforesaid by his Most Christian Majesty, and shall obey the orders
of the said King of Great Britain. And the time of the Declara-
tion of Catholicity is left entirely to the choice of the said King of
Great Britain \"
" Vendidit hie auro patriam : This man sold his country
" for gold." If ever that sentence of infamy to all ages v^as
applicable to an English sovereign, it was to Charles II. after
these transactions with Louis. Had they been divulged at
the moment, who knows what might have happened ? But
the Treaty of Dover was kept as secret as the grave, and the
1 The sutstance of the story of this Treaty (Liugard, 2nd edit. XII. 215—
treaty was first given to the world as 218, and note at end of the volume),
late as 1773 in Sir John Dalryinple's But all the facts and particulars, with
Memoirs; but the text of the perfected the most correct text of ■ the Treaty
Treaty had eluded his researches in the and elucidations, are now to be studied
French Foreign Oflice. It was first pub- best in the third volnme of Mignet's
lished in 1829, in the original French, Nigoeidtions Bdatives & la Succession
by Dr. Lingard, who iiad obtained his d'Bspagne, published in 1842. The
copy from Lord Clifford of Ohudleigh, French dating of the Treaty is " June
the descendant of the Clifford of the 1,1670,"
VOL. TI. I" P
578 LIFE OF MILTON AND HISTOBY OF HIS TIME.
gatherings of so many people, French and English, for a
fortnight or three weeks in the English port-town nearest the
French coast, seemed only the natural celebration of the visit
of the charming Duchess of Orleans to her native land and
her meeting with her brother. For her the festivities were to
have a swift confusion. She had parted from her brother at
Dover a few days after the treaty had been signed, and had
returned to her husband at St. Cloud, when the shocking
news came of her death there on the 20th of June after a
sudden and short illness. The suspicion ran immediately that
she had been poisoned by her husband, or by persons about
him, and it was not allayed by the negative evidence of a
post-mortem examination attended by two English physicians.
Charles was greatly shaken ; but he lived on to prosecute for
many years yet the compact with Louis which his sister had
arranged for him. At the age of forty years he had become
the pensionary of a foreign King, eight years his junior, but
with fifty times his ihtellect and a thousand times his dignity ;
and from this moment he was never to dream of being anything
else. He was to go on begging and receiving new sums and
subsidies of French money, permitting his ministers and
mistresses to receive French presents and pensions, and in
return taking instructions from Louis on all the affairs of the
British Islands, even in such matters as the times of calling,
proroguing, and dissolving the Parliaments of England. One
agreeable fruit of his secret alliance with Louis was the arrival,
in November 1670, of a clever and beautiful young French-
woman, Mademoiselle Louise de Querouaille, who had been
maid of honour to his dead sister, and was now sent over, by
Louis to be a new mistress for his Britannic Majesty and a
connecting link between the two nations. Lady Castlemaine,
this year created Duchess of Cleveland, had been in and out of
favour very often of late, and had for some time had publicly
established competitors in Nell Gwynn and Moll Davis ;
but now Mademoiselle de Querouaille, made a lady of the Bed-
chamber to the Queen, took her place as chief of the barem^
1 Mignet, III. 206—214 ; Lingard, July and Aug. 1667, et sea. ; Evelvn,
XII. 218 ; Burnet, I. 522-527 ; pfpys^ Nov. 1670. ^ ' ^
THE SECRET TREATY OP DOVER. 579
Just before the arrival of the new mistress, viz. on the 24th
of October 1670, the Wmth Session of the Parliament was
resumed after its six months of adjournment. There was, of
course, not the least idea in either House of any alliance
between Charles and Louis, or any suspicion that the Triple
Alliance of January 1667-8 was not still in full force as the
compact paramount in the foreign, relations of England. It
was, therefore, by various general pretexts, and even with
professions of zeal for the maintenance of the Triple Alliance,
that Charles contrived, through his ministers, to extract from
Parliament the very considerable subsidies he wanted for
fitting out a fleet and raising some land forces. Having been
tolerably successful in this, and not desiring that the Parlia-
ment should be in session when he should proclaim the Triple
Alliance defunct and proceed to carry out the Secret Treaty
of Dover, he got rid of the two Houses by another proroga-
tion on the 22nd of April 1671. The prorogation, was to
be extended twice, and Charles was not to see the face of
Parliament again for nearly two years ^.
Meanwhile, formal ratifications of the Secret Treaty of Dover
having been exchanged between Charles and Louis, the only
remaining obstruction to Charles, in the matter of a war with
the Dutch, to be conducted by himself and his Cabal in the
abeyance of Parliament, had been cleverly removed. Only
two members of the Cabal, it is to be remembered, had signed
the treaty- of Dover, the crypto-Catholics Arlington and
Clifibrd, while the other three chiefs, Buckingham, Ashley,
and Lauderdale, had been kept purposely ignorant that there
was such a treaty at all. Tbey were, and were to remain, as
ignorant of the fact as the rest of the world. Not the less was
it necessary, for the carrying out of the treaty, that these
Protestant chiefs of the Cabal should be made parties to it in
all save the promised Beclaration of Catholieity.. With no
engagement of that kind could they or would they have
concurred ; they would probably have broken with Charles on
the mention of it, and appealed to the nation. There was no
1 Lords Journals, of date, and Pari. Hist. IV. 456—497.
ppa
580 LIFE OF MILTON AND HISTOEY OF HIS TIME.
reason, however, why they should not consent easily enough
to all in the treaty that concerned the promised co-operation
with Louis in a war against the Dutch. And, in fact, their
consent had been brought about by a most extraordinary and
prolonged deception. Buckingham had been sent on an
embassy to France, as if to end - by his own abilities and
exertions the intricate negotiations that had been going on
between Louis and the whole Cabal in 1668 and 1669, — ^from
which negotiations with the whole Cabal the Catholicity
project had been always carefully excluded . The result was that
Buckingham, gravely fooled by Louis in Paris, and fooled and
played with after his return to London by Arlington, CliflFord,
and Colbert, worked out, apparently by his own exertions and
against irritating opposition^ a treaty which was identical in
all points with the secret treaty of Dover, except that the
article about religion was omitted and the .^154,000 sterling
promised by that article to Charles for his change of creed
was promised in the other form of an increase exactly to that
amount in the subsidy for the Dutch war. This traite
simule or " mock treaty," as it was called at the time in the
correspondence of Charles and Louis, had been solemnly con-
cluded at London on the 21st of December 1670, Buckingham,
Ashley, and Lauderdale putting their names to it, in the
belief that it was the only and real one, while Arlington and
Clifford also signed, to complete the delusion. The whole of the
Cabal was thus pledged to the war with the Dutch by the later
document, while Charles and the crypto-Catholies of the Cabal
were pledged also to the Catholicity project by the earlier^.
Charles, when he had received the ^154,000 for his Be-
claration of Catholicity, seemed suddenly less eager about that
part of his bargain. His brother James was behaving man-
fully, not indeed proclaiming himself a Papist, but not caring
who knew the fact ; and, after May 31, 1671, when he lost his
Duchess, Clarendon's daughter, and it transpired that she had
been a Roman Catholic for some time, the fact became
notorious. But through the whole of 1671, when all seemed
» Mignet, III. 199—268.
THE SECRET TREATY OF DOVER. 581
ready for the royal Declaration of Catholicity, Charles pro-
crastinated. He was not so sure now that the declaration
should precede the war with the Dutch. He wanted to
consult theologians as to the proper method; he wanted to
consult the Pope ; he wanted the Pope to send a French
legate into England to manage the business; he was of
opinion that the concession by the Pope of the sacrament in
both kinds and the mass in English would gain most of the
English bishops and facilitate a national reunion with the
Roman Church. He was more and more convinced that a
precipitate declaration would cause enormous commotion
among his subjects, and that only extensive foreign help^ and
a much larger amount of money than the .^154,000 he had
received, could carry him through the crisis. He could not
expect more from his brother Louis, who had been very
generous . already ; but might not the Pope be persuaded
to open his purse^ and might there not be a general sub-
scription among the French clergy ? About a million sterling
more, or say half a million, and up would go the Catholicity !
— Louis was only amused by these vacillations. Having con-
ceded to Charles his own time for the Catholicity Declaration,
and never having cared much himself for that fancy part of
the bargain, he was resolved to invest no more money in it
than the .^154,000 already paid, and for which he had duly
taken receipts, and was content with the loss if Charles would
keep his engagement for the Dutch War^.
How could Charles keep that engagement? His govern-
ment was bankrupt. What with the expenses of fitting out
a fleet and fortifying garrisons, what with the drain by interest
on previous debts and reckless current lavishness of every
kind, all the regular revenue, all the extraordinary supplies of
last session of Parliament, and the ,^154,000 paid by Louis,
were exhausted or on the point of exhaustion, while credit, or
power of fresh borrowing anywhere, was also gone. How
^ Dalrymple, II. 83 — Si, and an in- was not only that Charles should profess
structive memoir by Colbert to Louis Roman Catholicism himself, hut that
XIV, translated In Appendix' to Chris- he should also attempt the establish-
tie's SAa/(es6twy;Vol. 11. This memoir ment of that religion among his sub-
proves distinctly that the understanding jeots.
582 LIFE OF MILTON AND HISTORY OF HIB TIME.
could such a goremment go to war? The difficulty was
overcome by the famous Stop of the Ixcheguer on the 2nd of
January 1671-2. Formally, this was the suspension for
twelve months of all payments to public creditors of whatever
denomination ; and, practically, it was the retention of about
,#l,300j000 owing to goldsmiths and bankers who had
advanced moneys to government on the security of assign-
ments upon the revenue. The shock to the commercial world
was terrible and the distress among hundreds of families in-
calculable. The immediate purpose of Charles and the Cabal,
however, was served ; and, with some ready money in pos-
session, and an advance from Louis, they were able to face
the war. On the 2nd of February 1671-2 there was signed
at Whitehall, by the five chiefs of the Cabal and Colbert, a
third edition of the Secret Treaty, renewing the articles as
they had been expressed in the second edition, or Tmite SimuM,
but, on account of the straitened circumstances of Charles,
relieving him for a year from his obligation to furnish a land
force together vrith his fleet. On the 18th of March the
English And French declarations of war against the Dutch
appeared simultaneously. In the following month, as if to
signalize the momentousness of the enterprise to which
England was thus committed, and also Charles's continued
tnast in the ministers who were to aid him in it, there was a
remarkable distribution of honours among the members of the
Cabal. Buckingham, being a duke, and having also the pre-
eminent honour of being Master of the Horse, could be raised
no higher ; but Arlington, from being a baron only, became
Earl of Arlington, Lord Ashley became Earl of Shaftesbury,
and Sir Thomas Clifford became Baron Clifford of Chudleigh,
while the Earl of Lauderdale, for his various merits, was made
Duke of Lauderdale and a Knight of the Garter. There were
some new admissions to the privy council and minor ministerial
rearrangements about the same time ^.
Though surprised at the sudden rupture of the policy of
1 Burnet, L 532—533 ; Lingard, XII. 711 ; Parl.'His*. IV. 512—515 ; British
288—247; Christie's JShci/ieitm-y, II. Chronologiat.
56—71 and 83—84 ; Mignet, III. 699—
ALLIANCE WITH LOUIS XIV. AGAINST THE DUTCH. 583
the Triple Alliance, the English public do not seem to have
objected much to a new war with their old enemy. At all
events, when news was received of the first great naval battle
of the war, the patriotic spirit was roused. It was the battle
of Southwold Bay on the Suffolk coast, fought, on the 28th of
May 1673, between the combinfed Eiiglish ahd French fleets
under the Duke of York and the Dhtch fleet under Ruyter.
It was a confused and desperate fight, with heavy slaughter
on both sides, but ending in Huyter's retreat and so in a kind
of victory for the English, though the victory was saddened
for them by the loss of one of their admirals, the brave, wise,
and gentle Earl of Sandwich. His body was recovered and
brought to Westminster Abbey for public funeral. He was
forty-seven years of age, and had for some time been disgusted
with the state of affairs and with his own concern in them.
He had lived to see i)ut the beginnings of a war which was
more and more to astound all Europe '.
The battle of Southwold Bay, though it had not been won
by the Dutch, had at least so crippled the English and French
fleete as to ward off for the time the threatened descent of
those fleets on the Dutch coasts, to co-operate with the invad-
ing French army of 110,000 men led by Louis. That army
had to act independently, but with what shattering effect upon
the Dutch ! On the 31st of May, or three days after the
battle of Southwold Bay, the whole army, having approached
the Dutch territories by the circuit of the B-hine, had crossed
that river ; and within a week from that day the three
provinces of Guelders, Utrecht, and Overyssel were overrun,
and the other four provinces were in consternation. Once
more the Hollauders were driven to that last resource of theirs
which they had learnt in their war of independence, the open-
ing of their sluices and dams so as to flood the country in
front of the invaders, leaving' their towns as mere islands on
which to live and flght. Especially the yoting Prince of
Orange, at the head of the little Dutch army of 25,000 men,
was moving about among those islands and their canals and
1 Bumet, I. 561—562 ; Evelyn's Diary, May 31— July 3, 1672 ; Mignet, IV.
16—19.
584 LIFE OF MILTON AND' HISTORY OF HIS TIME.
dykeSj animating Ms countrymen and doing his best to harass
and keep back the French. But why should this young hero,
the descendant of those illustrious ancestors who had created
HoUandj the inheritor of their great wealth and of their
German and French titles of Nassau and Orange^ be fighting
now as the mere general of a Dutch Republican Government
headed by the grand pensionary John De Witt and his brother
Cornelius? Who but those De Witts and the bourgeois
or Republican party which they led, and which had been in
power since the death, of the last Stadtholder in November
1650, had cultivated the French alliance, had starved the
Dutch land army to its present dimensions, had persuaded the
Dutch to trust to their naval strength only, and so had brought
about this disaster of an overwhelming French invasion ?
Why not revert even now to the policy of the old military, or
Orange, or semi-monarchical party, whiah had been suppressed
for more than twenty years ? True, it had recently been
paralysed beyond recovery, as it seemed, by the so-called
Perpetual Edict of 1667, pledging the States-General on oath
never to revive the Stadtholderate, but to maintain the strictly
Republican constitution of the Seven United Provinces for ever.
The present Prince of Orange, then but sixteen years of age,
had been sworn to the observance of that edict, and so had
resigned all claims to the succession to his father in the Stadt-
holderate. But, now that he was in his twenty-second year
and the military hope of his country, why should not the edict
be repealed ? Such were the excited questions and discussions
in Amsterdam, Rotterdam, Dordrecht, Delft, and other Dutch
towns, formulated at last into the universal popular cry Bowu
with the Whites; and, the States of the various provinces having
deliberated with what formalities were possible at such a time,
the great revolution was accomplished.with electric rapidity,
and on the 30th of. June 1672 William Henry, Prince of
Orange, went to the Hague tq be invested with the dignity of
Stadtholdee, Captain General, and Admiral or the United
Provinces. Six weeks later, in the same city, there was the
brutal murder of the two brothers, John and Cornelius De
Witt, by an insurgent mob, depriving Holland of two of the
THE DUTCH WAB : THE PKINCE OF OEA.NGE. 585
most noble and virtuous statesmen that ever ruled a com-
monwealth. The Prince of Orange was absent from the
Hague at the time, and heard of the act with horror ; but it
may have facilitated his first exertions in his new and terribly
difficult position. These were no longer against Louis in
rerson, who had set out on his return to Paris on the 16th of
July, leaving farther operations to Turenne as his generalissimo
and his governor of Utrecht. There was plenty of work
for Turenne ; but not till winter, when the floods should be
frozen into ice, could there be footing for his cavalry and
infantry into the stubborn region that still remained Dutch.
There, with the eyes of all Europe upon him, the young
Stadtholder was standing his ground marvellously. He was
pretty well known by this time in England, having spent four
or five months of the winter of 1670-1 in London on a visit
to his uncle. Charles had then studied and sounded him,
with a view to ascertain whether he might not be admitted
to some knowledge of the secret treaty between himself and
Louis, and with some design also to serve him, if he found
him tractable, by carving out for him, from among the wrecks
of his fatherland, when ' it had been sufficiently conquered, a
Batavian princedom in vassalage to Louis. But he had found
the young man " so passionate a Dutchman and Protestant "
that he had been obliged to desist from the attempt. Now,
therefore, uncle and nephew were at open war with each other,
and the sole apparent chance for the nephew personally was
that the uncle would, in some kindly way, look after his
interests when the Dutch were beaten and there should be
negotiations for the terms of their surrender. Such negotia-
tions there had been already, Buckingham, Arlington, and
Viscount Halifax having been sent to Holland as English
plenipotentiaries for the purpose, to join the French agents
in treating with the Stadtholder and the States-General; but
the terms offered had been so insulting and ignominious that
they had been, by the Stadtholder's advice, not only rejected,
but posted up in all public places, that all relies of a peace-
party among the Dutch might be abashed by reading them,
and the entire people might be inspired by his own resolution,
586 LIFE OF MILTON AND HISTORY OF HIS TIME.
communicated by his own lips to Buekingbam, to " die in the
' last ditch " that remained of a once free Republic. And so,
through the autumn of 1673, the dykes having been broken
down everywhere, to flood what of the level country had not
been already submerged, the unconquerable little population
lived on somehow in their archipelago of habitable islands,
abiding the worst. Emissaries were out among all powers
likely to be friendly, and Spain, the Emperor, and some of the
German states, dreading the vast aggressiveness of Louis,
were astir for the rescue. Might not English feeling itself
yet turn in favour of the Dutch and express itself in the next
session of the English Parliament'?
Not the war with the Dutch so much as a certain Declara-
tion ofEome Policy, which Charles had put forth simultaneously
with the declaration of the war, had been agitating the pubhc
mind of England during the unusually long abeyance of
Parliament. It was a declaration, dated March 15, 1671-2,
suspending by royal prerogative all coercive laws in matters
of religion and granting indulgence of separate worship to
Nonconformists.
It was high time surely that there should be such a sus-
pension and indulgence. Maddening as had been the treatr
ment of the Nonconformists before, it had become more and
more maddening since the passing of the New Conventicles
Act of April 1670. There had been a general conspiracy of
the civil and ecclesiastical authorities, encouraged by Arch-
bishop Sheldon and other eminent persons, to enforce that
Act and all the kindred statutes to the uttermost, so as to
stamp out Nonconformity of every variety, if possible, by a
tremendous pressure continued through two or three years.
The business of detecting and suppressing conventicles had
been organized into a system ; hundreds of blackguards were
making a lucrative living by it, at the rate of £1 or £^
for a single successful information, or sometimes even ,#15 ;
county justices, as well as magistrates in towns, were perpetually
I Mignet, IV. 1—75 ; Dalrymple, II. the Dutch EepuWio in 1672 and its
79. Nothing can exceed the lucidity of immediate consequences.
Mignet's narrative of the inras'itii of
DECLABATION OP RELIGIOUS INDULGENCE. 587
occupied in receiving informations and trying offenders ; the
jails were full of convicted Nonconformists and Sectaries who
could not or would not pay their fines. Most of the Presby-
terian ministers and many of the Independent and Baptist
preachers tried to avoid conflict with the law by arrange-
ments for preaching among their adherents from house to
house with never more than four persons present in addition
to the family; but even these might blunder or be trepanned.
Others broke bounds defiantly and took the consequences.
Such offenders were numerous among the Baptists ; but no
denomination so amazed and perplexed the authorities by
their obstinacy as the Quakers. It was their bqast that their
worship, from its very nature, could not be -stopped " by men
or devils." From a meeting of Roman Catholics, they said,
you have but to take away the mass-book, or the chalice, or
the priest's garments, or even but to spill the water and blow
out the candles, and the meeting is over. So, in a meeting
of Lutherans or Episcopalians, or in a meeting of Presby-
terians, or Independents, or .Baptists, or Socinians, there is
always some implement or set of implements upon which all
depends, be it the liturgy, the gown or surplice, the Bible, or
the hour-glass : remove these and make noise enough and
there can be no service. Not so with a Quaker meeting.
There men and women worship with their hearts and without
implements, in silence as well as by speech. You may break
in upon them, hoot at them, roar at them, drag them about :
the meeting, if it is of any size, essentially still goes on till
all the component individuals are murdered. Throw them out
at the door in twos and threes, and they but re-enter at the
window and quietly resume their places. Pull their meeting-
house down, and they reassemble next day most punctually
amid the broken walls and rafters. Shovel sand or earth
down upon them, and there they still sit, a sight to see,
musing immovably among the rubbish. This is no description
from fancy ; it was the actual practice of the Quakers all over
the country. They held their meetings regularly, persever-
ingly, and without the least concealment, keeping the doors
of their meeting-houses purposely«pen that all might enter.
588 LIFE OF MILTON AND HISTORY OF HIS TIME.
informers, constables, or soldiers, and do whatever they chose.
In fact, the Quakers behaved magnificently. By their peculiar
method of open violation of the law and passive resistance
only, they rendered a service to the common cause of all
the Nonconformist sects which has never been sufficiently
acknowledged. The authorities had begun to fear them as a
kind of supernatural folk, and knew not what to do with
them but cram them into jails and let them lie there. Indeed
the jails in those days were less places of punishment for
criminals than receptacles for a great proportion of what was
bravest and most excellent in the manhood and womanhood
of England ^.
How welcome then the Royal Declaration of March 1672 !
Proclaiming the King's attachment to the Established Church
of England, and his resolution to preserve all her rights, it
confessed the utter failure of the persecuting policy against
Nonconformists; it ordered that "the execution of all and all
" manner of penal laws in matters ecclesiastical, against what-
" soever sort of Nonconformists or Recusants, be immediately
" suspended ; " and, while it distinctly intimated that public
places of worship could not be granted to " Recusants of the
Roman Catholic religion," and that they must be content with
" exemption from the penal laws " and with " worship in their
private houses only," it promised the licensing by his Majesty
himself of a sufficient number of meeting-houses for the use
of Protestant Nonconformists. Could anything be more
ample or opportune ? Yet, strange to say, no sooner had the
Declaration appeared than there had been a division of opinion
respecting it even among those who had been expected to
welcome it with enthusiasm. To the Cavaliers and High
Churchmen generally it was, of course, odious beyond ex-
pression. It was treason to the Church ; it was the recognition
of sects and heresies by the Sovereign himself; where would
the Church of England be in three years if the Declaration
should take full effect? The wonder is that the Declaration
J Baxter, Part III. 74, et seq. ; Neal, and 445—446 ; Sewel's History of the
IV. 444—454 ; Barclay's Apology for Quakers (edit. 1834), II. 191, et seq.
the Quakers (edit. 1765), 321—324 /> > i
DECLARATION OF RELIGIOUS INDULGENCE 589
seemed to be hardly more pleasing to those politicians of
comparatively liberal views who had begun to be called " The
Country Party/' or even to the Presbyterians and the mass of
other Nonconformists themselves. "What were the reasons?
One was that the Declaration assumed and asserted a right of.
the crown by prerogative to suspend, and therefore to defeat
and annul, Acts of Parliament. However desirable might be a
relaxation of the penal statutes against Nonconformists, was the
boon to be accepted by an admission of a principle of regal
absolutism which might extend to all laws whatsoever ? But,
further, though the boon professed to be only or chiefly for
Protestant Nonconformists, who could mistake the real and
ultimate intention? How could a genuine Protestant Non-
conformist rejoice in an edict which, while giving liberty to
himself indeed, would let loose at the same time the Papal
Antichrist? These reasonings of the popular instinct, aided
perhaps by some information that had meanwhile leaked out
as to the Secret Treaty of Dover, did cause alarms among the
Nonconformists almost as vivid as if they had divined the real
fact. This undoubtedly was that, while the declaration for
the suspension of the penal laws against Nonconformists
recommended itself to the King and the whole Cabal on
general grounds, the King and the crypto-Catholie section of
the Cabal designed it as a harbinger of the forthcoming
Declaration of Catholicity. Almost as if this had been divined,
the attitude of the Nonconformists to the declaration of sus-
pension was hesitating and Suspicious. Only the Quakers
were thoroughly thankful, regarding the refusal of the boon
because it came from prerogative as an excess of constitutional
scruple, and seeing no reason, in their simple theory, why
toleration should not include the Roman Catholics, This
exceptional willingness of the Quakers to see the Roman
Catholics admitted to equal toleration with themselves and all
other classes of Nonconformists did not pass unobserved ; and
the very fact that the Quakers and the Roman Catholics
were drawn together by a common interest in the declaration
of indulgence increased the general distrust in the declaration;
while it brought the Quakers into new odium. Nevertheless,
590 LIFE OF MILTON AND HISTORY OF HIS TIME.
the good practical effects of the Declaration had been already
undeniable. It had occasioned, directly or indirectly, the
release of many Nonconformists from prisons. John Bunyan,
for example, who had been in Bedford jail since 1660,
.was again at large as a Baptiist preacher outside the jail in
September 1672. Even before that date Congregational and
Presbyterian ministers in considerable numbers had applied
for the King's licences for their tabernacles and had received
them. There is even evidence that some of the more eminent
Nonconformist ministers were offered and accepted temporary
government allowances of from ^'50 to ^100 a year for the
exercise of their pastoral services among their flocks. This
curious fact can bear no other construction than that it had
occurred to Charles and some of his advisers that they might
go beyond the mere offer of future toleration or indulgence for
dissent, and might venture cautiously on some attempt to
reopen the greater question of the constitution of the Estab-
lished Church itself by an experiment in the direction of con-
current endowment of sects.
Willingly would Charles and the Cabal have persevered in
the Dutch war and the domestic administraition together
without the troublesome interference of Parliament. By the
device of prolonging the Stop of the Exchequer they had been
able to manage current expenses somehow, and so defer the
re-assembling of Parliament. But, as farther supplies had
become absolutely necessary, renewed prorogation was im-
possible, and Parliament must be again faced on the 4th of
February, 1672-3. In preparation for that date there were
various ministerial changes both within and out of the
Cabal. Sir John Trevor having died in July 1672, Sir
Henry Coventry, a younger brother of the retired Sir Wil-
liam, had been then brought into the Privy Council, and
appointed to the subordinate Secretart/sUp of State that had
been held by Trevor. But the changes in November 1673
were more remarkable. Sir Orlando Bridgman, uncomfort-
able or too punctilious in his Keepership of the Great Seal,
resigned or was discharged ; and the Great Seal, with the
supreme title of Lord Chancellor, which had been in abeyance
TENTH SESSION OF TI^E CAVALIER PARLIAMENT. 591
since Clarendon held it, was conferred on tlie Earl of Shaftes-
bury, to the great surprise of those who regarded the office
of Lord Chancellor as tenable only by a professional lawyer.
At the same time the high office of Lord Treasurer^ which
had been distributed among Commissioners since the death of
the Earl of Southampton in 1667", was revived and bestowed
on Lord Cliffi)rd, while Sir John Duncombe succeeded Cliflford
in the TreamrersMp of the Household, and became also bis
Chancellor qf the Exchequer. Notwithstanding these and some
minor re-arrangements, the Cabal proper remained visibly the
samCj with Buckinghamj Shaftesbury, Cliffi)rd, Arlington,
and Lauderdale as the five chiefs still. Evidently, however,
it was on Shaftesbury and Cliffi)rd that the King now de-
pended most, on Shaftesbury for his general inventiveness
and powers of parliamentary management, on Cliffi)rd for his
daring resoluteness of character. Arlington, if not the others,
felt this ascendancy of the favoured two. As he had expected
the High Treasurership, he was chagrined by the appointment
of Cliffijrd to that post ; and, though' they had been fast
friends hitherto, they were henceforth divided ^.
The Tenth Session of the Cavalier Parliament extended over
less than two months, or from Feb. 4, 1672—3 to March 29,
1673. But, though short, it was to be a most memorable
session. The topics of the King's opening speech to the two
Houses, and of Shaftesbury's oratorical amplification of the
same, were the Dutch war, the French alliance, and the
Royal Declaration of B«ligious Indulgence ; and both the
King and the Chancellor protested in the strongest manner
the utter groundlessness of the suspicions, in any of these
connexions, of his Majesty's ardent Protestantism and af-
fection for the Church of England, or of his fidelity to English
and constitutional principles. Delenda est Carthago was
Shaftesbury's summary of what he considered the duty of
Parliament against the detestable Dutch. About that matter,
and about various other matters of importance, the two
Houses exhibited a singular indifference. They let alone the
> Beatson's Political Index ; Christie's Shafieilvfy, II. 93—99.
593 LIFE OF MILTON AND HISTORY OF HIS TIME.
subject of the Stop of the Exchequer ; they'signified' no general
opposition to the Dutch war ; they even astonished the King
and Court by at once declaring their willingness that one of
the results of their session should be a grant of ,5^1,238,750
for the King's [use in the conduct of that war. But this
grant they held in suspense till there should be fully accom-
plished what they had resolved should be the main business
of the session. Whether by deliberate agreement, or by
general instinctive sagacity, they concentrated their entire
energies on an attack on the Royal Declaration of Indulgence
to Nonconformists. By some means or other they had con-
verted vague suspicions of the secret drift of afikirs into
tolerable certainty, and had come to regard the Declaration of
Indulgence as not only unconstitutional in itself, but also
a furtive symbol of a conspiracy, in which Charles, the Duke
of York, Louis XIV., and others were engaged, for the sub-
version of Parliamentary government and Protestantism in
England. Nothing else can account for the vehemence of
their debates on the l)eclaration, or for the engineer-like craft
of their approaches for sapping and blowing up the whole
crypto-Catholic design. " I shall take it very ill to receive
" contradiction in what I have done, and, I will deal plainly
" with you, I am resolved to stick to my Declaration,' ' Charles
had said in his opening speech. In answer it was resolved by
the Commons, Peb. 10, by a majority of 168 to 116j " That
" penal Statutes in matters ecclesiastical cannot le suspended, but
" hi/ Act of Parliament" and, four days later, that there should
be an address to his Majesty conveying that information.
Then, as if to show that it was to the unconstitutional form
of the King's Indulgence that there was now objection,
and that something equivalent might be yielded by Parlia^
ment itself in proper constitutional shape, it was resolved
unanimously " That a Bill le brought in for the ease of his
" Majesty's Protestant subjects that are Dissenters in matters of
" Religion from the Church of England" For a whole fort-
night there was a struggle between the King and the House
on the constitutional question, the King maintaining that the
right of suspending ecclesiastical laws was a prerogative of
TENTH SESSION OF THE CAVALIEK PAELIAMENT. 593
the Crown, and the House maintaining the opposite. No farther
would the King yield than that he would take the matter " into'
consideration." To hasten his decision, it was unanimously
resolved, Feb. 28, (1) ^^ That an Address he prepared to he pre-
" sented to his Majesty, for suppressing the growth of Popery"
and (3) " That a Bill be brought in for the incapacitating of
" all persons who shall refuse to tahe the oa/ths of allegiance
" and supremacy, and the Sacrament according to the rites of the
" Church of England, for holding any public employments,
" military or civil." Here at length was flung before the
King the real gage of battle. Whatever should be done
eventually for the Protestant Nonconformists of England, the
Roman Catholics of England were to be found out and in-
capacitated. Charles was furious. What should he do ?
He could dissolve this Parliament, now nearly twelve years
old, and call another ; he could dissolve the present Parlia-
ment without calling another ; he could prorogue the Par-
liament ; or he could leave the Parliament sitting and try to
defy it. All these methods had their peculiarities of peril,
while all alike would leave Charles moneyless for an inde-
finite time. Dissolution was recommended by Shaftesbury^
Clifford, Lauderdale, Buckingham, and the Duke of York,
though not by Arlington. An attempt was made to bring
over the Lords to the King's views, with no other effect than
an intimation that their Lordships would be glad to see him
agree with the Commons. To the night of the 6th of March
there seemed no chance of such an agreement, or of anything
else than an angry dissolution, to be followed by a national
commotion. Next day, however, all was changed. The miracle
was wrought by a message from Louis through his ambas-
sador Colbert. It was to the effect that Louis sympathized
with his Britannic Majesty in his dilemma, but that, as
money was indispensable for the Dutch war, and as Charles
could have .^1,338,750 at once by pleasing Parliament and
giving up his Declaration, he had better do so, reserving
revenge for some future opportunity. That day, accordingly,
Friday March 7, when tte two Houses waited upon the
King at Whitehall to present the No Fopery address which
VOL. VL (® q
594 LIFE OF MILTON AND HISTORY OF HIS TIME.
they had agreed on, and which prayed his Majesty to banish
all Jesuits and Roman Catholic priests not in attendance on
the Queen, and also to take means for ejecting all Roman
Catholics from the public service or thehouseholdj his Majesty
signified his heartiest concurrence. Next day, Saturday,
March 8, he twice met the two Houses more formally to com-
plete his concessions, and caused it to be intimated that he
had on the previous evening, in the presence of some of his
Council, cancelled the original of the Declaration which had
given so much trouble. " My Lords and Gentlemen," he
said at the second meeting, in reply to the profuse thanks
of both Houses, " I hope there will be never any more dif-
" ference amongst us, and I assure you there shall never be
" any occasion on my part." There had not been such bon-
fires of joy for a long while as blazed in London that Satur-
day night ^.
In accordance with the resolution of the Commons, a Bill
for the relief of Protestant Dissenters did pass through that
House. It was a very moderate substitute for the cancelled
Declaration, but might have been of some use. The Lords,
however, were so dilatory over it, or so uncertain about it,
that the session came to an end by adjournment before the
bill could be matured. Both Houses had been much more in
earnest with the incapacitating bill which they had threat-
ened; and, on the 29th of March 1673, when the King had
the pleasure of assenting to the bill securing him at last
the promised ^1,280,750 for his " extraordinary occasions,"
one of the bills he had to pass along with it was the " Act for
preventing dangers which may happen from Popish Recusants"
known more familiarly as The Test Act. In substance, it was
as follows : —
The Test Act (March 29, 1673) :— " All and every person or
persoiis, as well peers as commoners," bearing " any office or offices,
civil or military," or receiving "any pay, salary, fee, or wages" from
the Crown, or in the household of the King, or that of the Duke of
York, were to be disabled from continuing in their places or draw-
1 Lords and Commons Journals of rymple, II. 93—96: Mignet, IV. 155—
dates; Pari. Hist. IV. 518-561; Chris- 158. oB^.^'-ioo
tie's Shaftesbury, II. 128—135; Dal-
THE TEST ACT. 595
ing their emoluments, unless tliey should, on or before the 1st of
August 1673, (1) publicly, in the Court of Chancery or in the Court
of King's Bench, or at quarter sessions, take the oaths of allegiance
and supremacy, (2) produce evidence of their having received " the
Sacrament of the Lord's Supper according to the usage of the
Church of England " in some parish church on some Lord's day,
and (3) subscribe this declaration : " I, A. B., do declare that I do
" believe that there is no transubstantiation in the Sacrament of the
" Lord's Supper, or in the elements of bread and wine at or after
" the consecration thereof .by any person whatsoever." In addition
to loss of office, there was to be a fine of '£500 on every person not
complying, with disqualification for suing in any court of law, or
being guardian of any child, or executor or legatee under any will.
There were one or two exceptions or saving clauses, e. g. for the
Earl of Bristol and his countess, and for Hoinan Catholics who had
assisted in preserving his Majesty after the battle of Worcester ; and
it was also provided that there might be re-qualification for ofiice
by subsequent compliance '.
Thus, on the 29th of March 1673, ended the famous Tenih
Session of the Cavalier Parliament. Burnet, who characterizes
. it as " much the best session of that long Parliament," sums
up its merits by saying that "the Church party showed a
" noble zeal for their religion, and the Dissenters got great
" reputation by their silent d-eportment." It was, in fact, the
first of a series of what may be called the No Popery sessions
of this Parliament, giving voice to that national determination
to save England at all hazards froifl any relapse towards Rome
in which the Protestant Nonconformists were at one with the
English Churchmen and Cavaliers^ and in the interest of which
they were content to postpone their own claims to tolera-
tion; and its distinction in English history is that it had
effectually and for ever quashed, as far as Charles himself was
concerned, his cherished scheme of a Declaration of CatholicHy,
to be followed by an attempt to re-establish Roman Catholicism
in the British islands. It was the more honest Duke of York
that was henceforth to trudge on as the Roman Catholic
brother, sustaining all the inconveniences of that unpopular
profession, while the elder brother on the throne was to re-
lapse into his comfortable crypto-Catholicism, professing
1 Lords and Commons Journals from March 8, 1672-3 to Marcli 29, 1673;
Statutes, 25 Car. II. c. 2.
Qq2
596 LIFE OF MILTON AND HISTOEY OF HIS TIME.
Churcb of England Protestantism as hitherto, and persecuting
Roman Catholics professedly to any required amount \
Charles still clung tenaciously to his partnership with Louis
in the Dutch war. He was to assist now not only with a re-
fitted and increased fleet, but also with the land force which
he had promised in the secret treaty. The Duke of York
having resigned his office of high admiral and all his other
coinmissions rather than comply with the Test Act, the com-
mand of the fleet was given to Prince Rupert. After two
indecisive actions at sea with the combined English and
French fleets against the Dutch fleet under the skilful Ruyter,
one on the 28th of May and the other on the 4th of June, the
Prince returned to England to take on board the auxiliary
land force of 8000 men, which had meanwhile been collected
at Yarmouth for a descent on the Dutch coasts. The com-
mand of this army, though Buckingham had desired it, had
been entrusted to Count Schomberg, a foreign Protestant who
had been in the service of Louis. On the 11th of August
Rupert, with the English and French fleets, fought Ruyter in
a third battle close to the Dutch coasts, for the purpose of
landing Schomberg's army. After fighting from daybreak to
evening, he was baffled by Ruyter, and had to retreat, carrying
the army "back to England. This in itself was a great relief
for the Dutch ; and on the 20th of the same month their pros-
pects were still further brightened by the conclusion of an
alliance at the Hague, by which the Emperor Leopold, the
King of Spain, and the Duke of Lorraine became bound to
support tlieir cause offensively and defensively against Louis.
For two months before this coalition a congress of French,
English, and Dutch plenipotentiaries had been sitting at
Cologne, discussing the terms of a possible peace, but with no
success ^.
The Cabal of the five was by this time broken up. The
Test Act of March 1673 had accomplished that effect among
others. The example of the Duke of York in demitting all
his offices, rather than take the test, and so exchanging crypto-
1 Bumet, II. 14; Mignet, IV. 136—157.
2 Mignet, IV. 138 et seq.
BREAK-UP OP THE CABAL. 597
Catholicism for open and avowed Catholicism, had been fol-
lowed by many persons of various ranks in the public service.
Of these the most conspicuous by far was the Lord Treasurer
Clifford. A man of high courage and temper, he had resisted
the Test Act in the Lords with a resolute eloquence which
surprised his colleagues ; and, though every argument was
used by Charles, after the session was over, to induce him to
submit to the test, he disdained farther concealment of his
religion by so flagrant a hypocrisy. He resigned his High
Treasurership on the 19th of June, quitting also his place in
the Council and his connexion with Court, and retired in
disgust to his estate in Devonshire ; whence, four months
afterwards, came the news of his death : " hanged himself in
a silk sash," as the report ran. His former friend and recent
rival, Arlington, was of more yielding metal. Taking the
test, and remaining in the Cabal, he had made sure now of the
treasurership in succession to Clifford, but only to be again
disappointed. That great office was conferred on a politician
who had not hitherto been of the Cabal, though he had been
of the Council for some time, and had there, as well as in the
House of Commons, and in the treasurership of the navy,
proved himself an able man of business and won the reputation
of being an especially sound Protestant of the Clarendonian or
strict Church of England type. This was Sir Thomas Osborne,
M.P. for York, now raised to the peerage as Viscount Latimer
of Dan by and Baron Osborne of Kiverton, both in Yorkshire.
It was symptomatic that about the same time the Duke of
Ormond, who had been in eclipse since the fall of Clarendon,
and had been long out of that Lord Lieutenancy of Ireland
which was naturally and properly his post, was re-admitted to
the Cabal. His re-admission was intended as an additional
guarantee that the King had learnt the " No Popery " lesson
read to him with such emphasis in the late session. In the
summer of 1673, accordingly, the reformed Cabal consisted of
these seven : — the Earl of Shaftesbury, still Lord Chancellor ;
the Duke of Buckingham, still Master of the Horse ; the Duke
of Ormond, in his old ofiice of Lord Steward; the Duke of
Lauderdale, without definite English office ; Viscount Latimer
598 LIFE OF MILTON AND HISTOEY OF HIS TIME.
of Danby, as Lord High Treasurer ; the Earl of Arlington, as
Principal Secretary of State; and Sir Henry Coventry, as
Second Secretary of State. It was a very unstable body, com-
prising irreconcileable elements ; and farther changes might
be expected. Nor were men wanting in the general council
and ministry round the Cabal that might be available for such
reconstruction. The Earl of Anglesey, a councillor since the
Restoration, but never yet in such high office as seemed his
due, had recently been made Lord Privy Seal ; eminent and
experienced councillors, more or less of the " country party,"
were the Earl of Carlisle, Viscount Falconbridge, Viscount
Halifax, and Lord Holies ; and a new councillor, of uncertain
principles, was Mr. Edward Seymour, Speaker of the House
of Commons ^.
rSOH JTJWB 1673 TO NOVEMBER 1674.
The Tenth Session of Parliament, at its rising on the 29th
of March, had adjourned itself to the 20th of October. When
Parliament did reassemble on that day, however, it was im-
mediately prorogued to the 27th of the same month. The
session which met on the S^th of October 1673, though only
to be prorogued again on the 4th of November, is to be
remembered, therefore, as the Eleventh Session of the Cavalier
Parliament.
It owed its brevity to its own behaviour. Still in the
vehement " No Popery " temper of the former session, it had
been provided with a special aggravation of its rage agaiast
the Roman Catholics by the fact that the Duke of York had
chosen for his second wife the young Roman Catholic prin-
cess Maria d'Este, sister of the Duke, of Modena. He had
already been married to her in Italy by proxy, and was now
expecting her in England. Paying no attention, therefore,
to the requests of the King and of Chancellor Shaftesbury, in
their opening speeches, for continued support in the war
against the obstinate Dutch, the Commons fell on the subject
of the Duke of York's re-marriage. They had already, at
' Beatson'a Political Index ; Wood's Christie's Shaftesbury, II. 144, et seq. ;
Fasti, II. 161 ; Burnet, II. 10—12 ; Lingai'd, XII. 277. > i '
SHAFTESBURY IN THE OPPOSITION. 599
their meeting of the 20th as an adjourned House, agreed on
an address to Charles praying him to disallow the marriage
with the Duchess of Modena and to refuse his assent to the
Duke's marriage with any other person not a Protestant ;
and this address they renewed with the utmost determination,
the King's arguments to the contrary only rousing them the
more. They also threatened a Disabling Bill against the
Roman Catholics more sweeping and severe than the Test
Act itself, and they voted a standing army to be a grievance.
Thus utterly unmanageable, the two Houses were suddenly
prorogued on the 4th of November to the 7th of January
].673-4, but not till the Commons, keeping their doors shut,
and detaining the Speaker in the chair by force while the
Black Rod was knocking outside, had hurriedly passed three
significant parting resolutions. The first declared- that the
alliance with France was a grievance; the second declared
that the evil councillors about the King were a grievance;
and the third declared that the red-headed Duke of Lauderdale
was a grievance by himself*.
On the 9th of November 1673, five days after the pro-
rogation, Shaftesbury was dismissed from the Chancellorship,
and ceased to be any longer a member of the Cabal. Hardly
had he been dismissed, indeed, when efforts were made to
bring him back again. But he had resolved on a different
employment of his abilities for the rest of his life. He had
become aware by this time of the real purport of that Secret
Treaty of Dover of which he and others had been so long the
unconscious dupes ; he had been studying the present feelings
of his countrymen, and their future needs ; and his conclusion
had been that he would extricate himself from his connexions
with Charies, and be the independent chief of a popular
English policy. Henceforward, accordingly, Shaftesbury
assumes that final character by which he is best remembered,
the " wise Achitophel " of the infant English Whigs, their
"daring pilot in extremity," the "fiery soul" in a "pigmy
body" that could scheme for them and lead them. The
' Pari. Hist, and Eapin ; Christie's Shafteibmry, II. 151 — 155.
600 LIFE OF MILTON AND HISTORY OF HIS TIME.
Cabal, as he had left it, consisted of the Duke of York,
Ormond, Buckingham, Lauderdale, Latimer of Danby, Ar-
lington, and Sir Henry Coventry, together with Sir Heneage
Finch, who had been Attorney- General since 1670, and had
now been selected as Shaftesbury's successor in the Great
Seal, though only with the title of Lord Keeper. They were
still an ill-assorted body, and it could not be foreseen which
of themj or whether any of them, would predominate. Mean-
while they had to do their best for the King in the coming
sessiom of Parliament. One difficulty had been removed out
of their way by the actual arrival of the young Duchess of
Modena and the completion of her marriage with the Duke
of York on the 21st of November ^.
The TwelftTi Session of the Parliament (Jan. 7— Peb. 1673-4)
was another short " No Popery " session. At once, both in
the Lords, where Shaftesbury led the Opposition, and also in
the Commons-j the accumulated passion of the last few months
broke forth irrepressibly and at all points. The alliance with
France was denounced ; the war with the Dutch was de-
nounced ; the Duke of York's marriage was again attacked ;
a standing army in England was again declared to be a
grievance; even the institution and retention of the regi-
ments of the Guards- were declared unconstitutional and dan-
gerous. Addresses were carried for removing Lauderdale and
Buckingham from' the King's presence and counsels for ever ;
and there was modified procedure to the same effect against
Arlington^ as the only remaining member of the old Cabal.
Nothing of a questionable kind that had been done of late
years, or even through the whole reign of Charles, escaped
mention and criticism. Through all, and giving unity to all,
there ran, however, the "No Popery" enthusiasm. There
was a prayer to the King for a proclamation ordering all
Papists, not householders or otherwise privileged, to withdraw
from London ;. there was a prayer for a fast-day for imploring
the protection of the nation against Popery ; there was an
address for holding the militia of the counties in readiness
1 Christie, II. 165 and 179—187.
PEACE WITH THE DUTCH. 601
against designs or risings of the Papists ; there were debates
as to securities to be taken for the Protestant education of the
children of Roman Catholics in the royal family, or of Roman
Catholic noblemen ; even the subject of the exclusion of
Roman Catholies from the swicession to the throne was
daringly broached. A new and more universal and searching
Test Act was also in preparation in the Commons. — One
result of this many-sided pressure upon Charles was a sudden
conviction on his part that he must abandon his alliance with
Louis against the Dutch. Accordingly^ the Dutch having
again made overtures for a separate peace with England, and
Charles having consulted the two Houses on the 24th of
January, and Sir William Temple having speedily adjusted
the terms with the Spanish ambassador in London, the Houses
were informed on the 11th of February that a peace had been
signed. It was with infinite regret and some shame that
Charles communicated to Louis the humiliating conclusion
to which he had been thus driven ; but Louis received the
news more good humouredly than could have been expected.
He acknowledged that Charles could hardily have done other-
wise in his hard circumstances ; and, though his advances to
Charles on the ground of their partnership against the Dutch
amounted now to a vast sum, lost irrecoverably, he did not
see that their relations should not continue on some such
footing that Charles might still be of use to him and entitled
to draw ^€"100,000 yearly in present pension, with more on
specific occasion. — Having made peace with the Dutch, and
having also yielded to the Parliament in such matters as the
proclamation against the Roman Catholics, the appointment
of a fast-day for "No Popery" prayers and sermons, consent
to disband his forces, &c., Charles hoped that the two Houses
would be satisfied and that a handsome subsidy would be at last
forthcoming. But the Houses had not yet worked out their
"No Popery" resolutions to the full. They occupied them-
selves still with the new Test Act for disabling Roman
Catholies universally, and with discussions as to the treatment
and cure of Roman Catholicism in the royal family; and,
in their search after miscellaneous matters of suspicion and
602 LIFE OP MILTON AND HISTORY OF HIS TIME.
grievance, they- ranged even to Ireland and Scotland, pro-
posing a rigid inquiry in particular into certain recent mea-
sures of Lauderdale and the Scottish government for levying
forces for unknown purposes. At length, finding the Par-
liament in a mood from which nothing could be hoped,
Charles again prorogued it on the 34th of February 1673-1,
before it had sent up to him a single completed bill. The
prorogation was to the 10th of the following November;
but, by subsequent postponement, there was not to be another
meeting of Parliament till April 1675 '.
The state of affairs in England in the abeyance of Parlia-
ment through tbe rest of the year 1674 may be described
generally by saying that the country was then in the begin-
nings of The Danbt Administration. For, though Arling-
ton, Lauderdale, and Buckingham had survived the attacks
made upon them in the late session of Parliament, and were
still of the Cabal, and though Ormond, Lord Keeper Finch,
Sir Henry Coventry, and even the Duke of York, remained
also members of the body, the Englishman who was proving
himself all in all the most efficient for the King's purposes in
the new condition of affairs was the Lord Treasurer Osborne,
Viscount Latimer of Danby. He was " a positive and under-
taking man," says Burnet ; " a plausible, well-spoken man,
of good address, and cut out naturally for a courtier,'
Shaftesbury himself admits ; but, as these and other authori-
ties agree, monstrously unscrupulous. He had gained so much
on Charles that on the 27th of June 1674, he was raised from
his Viscountcy to an Earldom by the title of Earl of Danby ;
and from that date, Ormond's reappointment to the Irish Vice-
royalty taking him again to Ireland, the formal premiership in
England was more distinctly and continuously in the hands of
Lord Danby than it had been in those of any other minister
since the fall of Clarendon. It seemed also as if Clarendon's
general policy had come back in the person of this astute
successor. Mutatis mutandis after the lapse of seven years,
Danby was to be a kind of second Clarendon in his ecclesias-
l Pari. Hist, and Eapin ; Christie, II. 185—200.
BEGINNINGS OP THE DANBY ADMINISTRATION. 603
tical notions and in his notions of government generallj',
though with a faith all his own in the power of bribery and
corruption for managing persons and Parliaments. It was to
be chiefly in consequence of Danby's manipulation of the future
sessions of the long Cavalier Parliament that the name of
" The Pensionary Parliament " was to be affixed to that body.
His opportunities of this kind were yet to come, and through
1674 the limit of his powers was in conducting the King's
private English counsels and managing his colleagues. In
September in that year there was a modification of the
Cabinet to suit his views and those of Charles. Buckingham.,
out of favour for some time, was sent adrift almost with
insult, to join his forces to those of Shaftesbury in the
opposition, or do otherwise as he might think fit ; Arlington,
retained in the Cabinet, was promoted to the office oi Lord
Chamberlain in succession to the Earl of St. Alban's, but with
an understanding that his star was to set finally in that dig-
nity ; and in succession to Arlington in the vacant Secretary-
sMp of State, and with a payment to him of ^"'6000, there
was brought in Sir Joseph Williamson, M.P. for Thetford,
formerly Arlington's under-secretary and clerk of the Council,
and more recently one of the English plenipotentiaries at
Cologne. The King still placed immense trust in the Duke
of Lauderdale, whom he had created an English peer, with
the title of Earl of Guildford and Baron Petersham, two days
before he raised Danby to his earldom. But, though it
might thus seem that Danby and Lauderdale were co-equals,
and though Lauderdale had the higher rank, there had come
to be something like an understood partition of powers be-
tween the two favourites, Lauderdale content thenceforward in
the main with the Scottish supremacy, and leaving to Danby
the credit of the English ^.
All that seems farther necessary, before we take leave of the
politics of England in 1674, is a view of the state of the
royal family in that year. It was as follows : —
1 Rapin for 1674 ; Christie, II. 197— nologist, Antliony Wood, and Carte's
199 and 312—313 ; witli gleanings from Ormmd.
Peerage Books, Beatsoil, British Chro-
604 LIFE OF MILTON AND HISTORY OF HIS TIME.
His Majesty, Charles the Second : atat. 45.
His Queen, Cathaeine op Beaganza : childless.
The King's acknowledged Concubines still living: — (1)
Baebaea Villiees, known as Lady Castlemaine for some time, but
since 1670 as Duchess of Cleveland, Countess of Southampton, and
Baroness Nonsuch ; (2) Maey Davis, the actress ; (3) Nell Gwynn,
the actress ; (4) The Frenchwoman Louise db Queeouaille, called
by the Londoners for some time Madam Kerwell or Carwell, or
anything else that would pass, but ennobled since 1673, as Duchess
of Portsmouth, Countess of Farehatn, and Baroness Petersfield.
She had an estate and title in France by gift from Louis XIV., and
was the chief political medium between Louis and Charles. Though
the principal mistress, she had not dispossessed others in the King's
regards ; and the fascinating Nelly, who had no title, was still liked
by him and was indubitably the popular favourite.
The King's acknowledged natural chilbeen : — These are
enumerated as twelve in all : to wit : — (1) James Crofts, or Fitzroy,
or Fitzroy-Scott, Duke op Monmouth and Buccleuch siuce 1663,
and now mtat. 25- He had been of the Privy Council since coming
of age ; held other honours, and was still very popular ; had recently
seen military service in the French army against the Dutch and
received from Louis the compliment of being made a lieutenant-
general, and had just been elected to the Chancellorship of the
University of Cambridge, in succession to Buckingham, displaced
from that office by the King's desire.. There had been born to the
Duke and his young Scottish Duchess a son, called the Earl of
Dalkeith, from whom the present Buccleuch family are descended.
(2) A daughter Mary, by the same mother, Luey Waters. Though
the sister of Monmouth, she attained no other distinction than
becoming the wife of an Irish gentleman, and afterwards of an
English. (3) A daughter called Charlotte-Jemima-Henrietta-Maria
Boyle or Fitzroy, bom of Elizabeth, Viscountess Shandon, whose
husband was a brother of the Earl of Orrery, Robert Boyle, and
Lady Eanelagh. This natural daughter married first a Howard
of the Suffolk family, and afterwards Sir "William Paston, hart.,
created Viscount Yarmouth in 1673, and Earl of Yarmouth in
1679. (4) Charles Fitzcharles, born of a Mrs. Catherine Peg. He
died in Tangier. (5) A daughter by the same Mrs. Peg, who died
in infancy. (6) Charles Fitzroy, the King's eldest child by tie
Duchess of Cleveland, and her heir-designate in that Duchy, but
created also Duke of Southampton, Earl of Chichester, and Baron
Newbery in 1675. (7) Henry Fitzroy, another son by the Duchess
of Cleveland, created Earl of Euston in 1672, and Duke of Grafton
in 1675, still in his boyhood. (8) George Fitzroy, also by the
Duchess of Cleveland, created Earl of Northumberland in his infancy
in 1674, and Duke of Northumberland in 1683. (9) Charlotte
Fitzroy, a daughter by the same Duchess of Cleveland. She was
to marry Sir Edward Henry Lee of Ditchley, co. Oxon, who became
THE ROYAL FAMILY IN 1674. 605
Earl of Lichfield. (10) A daughter by Mary Davis, called Mary
Tudor, who was to marry Francis, Lord Ratcliffe, afterwards Bavl
of Derwentwater. (1 1) Charles Beauclerk, son of Nell Gwynn, and
ancestor of the St. Alban's family. He was born 1670, created
Earl of Burford in 1676, and Duke of St. Alban's in 1684. (12)
Charles Lennox, son of the Duchess of Portsmouth, and ancestor of,
the house of Richmond. He was born July 29, 1672, and created
Duke of Richmond in ,1675. — Older than all these, some recent
authorities say, was a certain mysterious James La Cloche, bom to
Charles by a Jersey girl so long ago as 1646 or 1647, when Charles
was but sixteen or seventeen years of age. The story is that this
boy had been brought up as a Protestant in Holland, had come to
England by his father's desire in 1665, had lived there for about
two years in some secret way about the Court, but returned to
the continent, became a Roman Catholic at Hamburg, " entered the
novitiate of the Jesuit society in Rome" in the end of 1667, and
afterwards came and went between Rome and London, under the
name of Henri de Rohan, as a confidential agent in his father's
Catholicity scheme. If this vague personage was the son of Charles,
and carried with him, as it is said he did, Charles's own written
acknowledgment of the fact, he had rights of priority over even
the Duke of Monmouth.
The next in succession to the throne : — These were the
!Roman Catholic Duke of York, now cBtat. 41, and, after him, his
two only surviving' children by his first wife : viz. the Princess
Mary, cetat. 13, and the Princess Anne, cetaf. 9. Measures had been
taken for bringing up these two girls as Protestants ; and, since the
peace with the Dutch, there had been speculation by Danby,
Arlington, and others, whether it might not be arranged that Mary
should become the wife of the Prince of Orange, the heroic young
Stadtholder of the Dutch Provinces. There was just a chance, how-
ever, that the Duke of York's second wife, Mary of Modena, might
bring him a son and heir ; in which case Clarendon's grand-daughters
would be set aside by an interloping half-Italian \
What of novelty in English Literature during those seven
years, from 1667 to 1674, the political history of which has
been thus sketched? The question brings ns back to
Dryden.
In November 1667, just after Dryden had so successfully
divided himself between the two London theatres, giving his
Maiden Queen to the King's or Killigrew's and his Sir Martin
1 Peerage Books, &c.; and, forthe story the authenticity of all the documents
of James La Clochej Father Boero's Is- there mentioned in connexion with the
toria deUa Conmrsione, &o. (see ante, La Cloohe story ; hut there are traces of
pp. 240 241). I am not satisfied as to La Cloche or Henri deEohan elsewhere.
606 LIFE OF MILTON AND HISTORY OF HIS TIME.
Mar-all to the Duke's or Davenant's, there was produced at
this latter theatre an extraordinary adaptation from Shake-
speare by Dryden and Davenant jointly, under the title of
The Tempest, or the Enchanted Island,. The thing has been
universally condemned since as a desecration of Shakespeare's
great play ; but, with the aid of music and scenery, it made
a fine show at the time ^.
The play was still new to the boards, and had not been
published, when, on the 7th of April 1668, Davenant died.
Who was to succeed him in the Laureateship ? Had the
vacancy occurred three or four years sooner, when Iludibras
was new to. the public, the claims of Butler might perhaps
have been discussed. Not only had the morose Butler,
however, made himself ineligible by retiring into his cave,
but it had become almost a necessity that the Laureateship
should be. retained among the dramatists. Among these
certainly Dryden was the chief. Author of five plays and
in part of two more, author also of the Annus MirabiUs, and
of some masterly pieces of criticism in the form of prose
essays and prefaces reviewing the past history of English
literature and all but assuming the superintendence and
direction of the English literature of the Restoration, who so
fit as Dryden to be Davenant's successor ^ ? The surprise,
indeed, is that Dryden was not appointed to the office at once.
That there was some such intention may be inferred from
the fact that on the 17th of June 1668 the degree of Master
of Arts, which Dryden had neglected to take in the regular
way at Cambridge, was conferred on him eso gratia by Arch-
bishop Sheldon at the King's special request. For some
reason or other, however, the Laureateship was left vacant
for more than two years. Possibly the Buckingham Cabal,
or Buckingham and Arlington Cabal, in power from 1667 to
1670, did not care to promote Dryden ^.
His dependence for more than two years wds still, therefore,
mainly on his dramatic industry. In this respect he was not
1 Scott's Life of Bryden and Di^den's " Scott's Life of Dryden and Christie's
Hays and Prefaces in Scott's Edition of Memoir.
Drydeu's Worlcs (1808).
DEYDEN FROM 1667 TO 1670 607
badly off. While Davenant was yet alive, an arrangement
had been made by the King's or Killigrew's company for
stopping that loan of Dryden's talents to the rival house
which had led to the production there of Sir Martin Mar-all
and the adaptation of The Tempest. On the understanding
that he was to write no more for the Duke's company, but
exclusively for the King's, and at the rate of three new plays
for tbe King's every year, he had been admitted a partner in
the concern to the extent of a share and a quarter out of
a total of twelve shares and three quarters, i e. with a right
to about a tenth of .the entire annual profits of the theatre.
The income thus secured is estimated at between ^300 and
.^400 a year in the money of that. day. With such an in-
ducement Dryden seems to have exerted himself at first to
perform his part of the contract to the full. The following
were his labours for the King's theatre during the two years
of the abeyance of the Laureateship : — An Evening's Love, or
the Mock Astrologer, a comedy, chiefly in prose, produced in
June 1668, and published immediately afterwards, with
a critical preface, and an epistle dedicatory to the' Duke
of Newcastle ; Ladies a la mode, a comedy from the French,
produced in September 1668, but so unsuccessfully that it
was withdrawn after one performance and never published ;
Tyrannic Love, or the Royal Martyr, a tragedy in rhyme,
produced in February 1688-9, and published the following
year, with a dedication to the Duke of Monmouth ; and
Almanzor and AVmahide, or the Conquest of Granada hy the
Spaniards, a rhyming tragedy in two parts, produced in
1670, and afterwards published, with a dedication to the
Duke of York, an essay on heroic plays, and other critical
accompaniments. In the two comedies Dryden had done
himself no additional credit ; but in the Tyrannic Love and
the two parts of the Conquest of Oranada he was thought
to have reached his very highest in heroic rhyming tragedy,
and to have established that form of play in the possession of
the English stage. The chief parts in them were acted
magnificently by Mohun, Hart, ' Kynaston, Ann Marshall,
Mrs, Boutel, and Nell Gwynn ; there were crowded houses
608 LIFE OF MILTON AND HISTOBY OF HIS TIME.
and continued applauses ; and Nelly's appearance in the'
epilogue to Tyrannic Love is matter of history. Having killed
herself in the last scene of the tragedy in the paroxysm of
supernatural virtue required by the part, she was being borne
slowly off the stage as a corpse, when, resuming her natural
character, she addressed her bearer, —
" Hold ! are you mad % you damiied confounded dog J
I am to rise and speak the epilogue ; "
and then, running to the footlights, began —
" I come, kind gentlemen, strange news to tell ye :
I am the ghost of poor departed Nelly.
Sweet ladies, be not frighted ; I'll be civil :
I'm what I was, a- little harmless devil;"
and ended : —
" As for my epitaph when I am gone,
I'll trust no poet, but will write my own: —
'Here Nelly lies, who, though she lived a slattern,
Yet died a princess, acting. in St. CathaFine.'"
It was too ravishing, and the authorities date Nelly's com-
plefte conquest of Charles from her flushed run to the foot-
^ y lights that evening, Feb. 9, 16^8-9 \
What with the triumphant success of Dryderi's last rhyming
heroic plays, what with the effects of his encomiastic dedica-
tions to the Duke of Monmouth and the Duke of Newcastle
and his acquisition of new patrons in the Duke of York and
Sir Thomas Clifford, his prom^otion to the Laureateship could
no longer be deferred. On the 18th of August 1670, about
four months after the formation of the " Cabal Ministry "
usually so called, and three months after the Secret Treaty
of Dover, Dryden obtained his official patent. It was in very
handsome terms, appointing « John Dryden, Master of Arts,"
to be not only Poet Laureate in succession to Davenant, but
also Historiographer Royal in succession to James Howell,
who had died in November 1666. The salary for the conjoint
offices was to be £%m a year, with the customary annual
butt of Canary wine from the King's cellars. To compensate
1 Scott's Dryden, the Life and the Plays ; Cliristie ; Genest's EngXiih, Stage.
dbydbn's laueeateship. 609
for the delay, the payment was to be retrospective from Mid-
summer 1668, or the first quarter day after Davenant's death.
From 1668, therefore,, if we add to Dryden's ,^''200 a year
from the Laureateship, and his ^"300 or .^400 from his
partnership in the King's theatre, his other incidental earn-
ings by publication and dedications, and his patrimonial
income of ^40 a year from his Northamptonshire property
(increased to ^''60 a year by the death of his mother in 1670),
his total yearly income can hardly have been less than between
j^700 and ,^800 ; which was then worth for all purposes about
^■"2500 a year now. In 1670 he was in his fortieth year,
and thenceforward, to all appearance, his prosperity was as-
sured. If he was not yet quite the " glorious John " of whom
Claud Halcro was to carry away such delightful reminiscences
to the far Shetlands, he was growing into that character, and
was indubitably the most observed man in the daily gather-
ings of the wits of London in Will's coffee-house in Bow
Street, or among the more select visitors to Herringman's
shop on the other side of the Strand ^.
Dryden's Laureateship was to extend- to 1688, and we are
concerned here only with the state of English literature from
August 1667 to November 1674. That period includes the
last eight months of Davenant's Laureateship, and only the
beginnings of Dryden's, whether we measure those beginnings
by the four years and three months from Dryden's formal
laureation or by the six years and eight months from Dave-
nant's decease. Altogether there is not much of novelty to
report concerning the second seven years of the literature
of the Restoration.
The Drama was still paramount. Thomas Killigrew and
others of the Killigrew family, with Mohun, Hart, and several
more of the actors, still managed the King's theatre ; and, at
or shortly after Davenant^'s death, the management of the
Duke's came into the hands of Betterton, Harris, and Mr.
Charles Davenant, the last representing the very considerable
proprietary interests of his mother, Lady Davenant, the poet's
1 Scott's Life of Dryden, pp. 113 — 117; Christie's Memoir; Cunnjjoghani'a
London, Art. " Will's Coffee-house."
VOL. VI. E r
610 LIFE OF MILTON AND HISTOEY OF HIS TIME.
widow. On the 9th of November 1671 the latter company
removed from their theatre in Lincoln's Inn Kelds to a much
larger one, called the Dorset Giardens Theatre, whieh they had
built by subscription in Salisbury Gourt, Fleet Street ; and in
February 1671-2, the King's Theatre in Drury Lane having
been burnt down, the King's company were glad to avail
themselves of the premises in Lincoln's Inn Fields which had
thus been conveniently left vacant by their rivals. They
continued their performances there till March 26, 1674, when
they were able to return to a new theatre in Drury Lane,
designed by Sir Christopher Wren. On the whole, by these
changes, though the King's compaiiy had a serious loss in the
burning of their theatre, and Dryden's share of the loss was
about .^400, there was no interruption of the business of thte
London stage. A list of about a hundred plays could be made
out that are known to have been produced successively at one
or other of the theatres, 'and to have had their rans of so many
nights each, from the middle of 1667 to the end of 1674.
Plays by Shakespeare, Beaumont and Fletcher, Ben Jonson,
and others of the older writers were still in occasional demand ;
successful Restoration plays of the jjTevious seven years, in-
cluding some of Davenant's, Dryden's, Sir Robert Howard's,
and Lord Orrei-y's, were duly revived from time to time ; but
there was a larger draft than before on fresh industry. To the
new plays by Dryden himself already mentioned as having
been performed between 1667 and his accession to the
Laureateship in 1670 there were added Mariag-e h la Mode, a
comedy in mixed prose, blank verse, and rhyme, acted in 1672
and published with a flattering dedication to the blackguard
young Earl of Rochester, The Asmgmdion, or Love in, a Nunnery,
a comedy of similar construction, acted in the same year,
and published with a dedication to Sir Charles Sedley, and
Amhoyna, or the Gmelties of the Bwteh to theUnglish Merchants,
a tragedy in prose and blank verse, hastily concocted in 1673
to stimulate the flag-ging animosity against the Dutch. This
last was published in June of that year, with a dedication to
Lord Clifford, just after the retirement of that Roman Catholic
statesman from the Cabal in consequence of the Test Act.
DBTDEN FEOM 1670 TO 1674. 611
■Evidently Dryden had become lazier since his appointment to
the Laureat«ship ; for, though he was drawing his profits
of over ^^300 a year from the King's Theatre as before, he
had mot from that date given the theatre one third of his
promised number of plays annually. No complaint on that
score had yet been ^made by his co-pa/rtners ; nor was either,
theatre in want of playwrights who could compete for the
supply of its full requirements. Sir Robert Howarrd and his
brothers Edward and James were not exhausted ; the Earl of
'Orrery deigned to attempt at least one comedy, by way of
variety after his heroic plays ; Bther^e and Sedley were not
quite idle ; Buckingham flashed out brilliantly in one farce ;
the actor Lacgr wrote another comedy ; Betterton tried his
greater hand in two ; and one heard much now of such later
candidates for dramatic fame as Thomas Shad well, William
Wycherley, John Crowne, {Edward Ravenscroft, ^Elkanah
Settle, and the warm-blooded Dutch-English lady, Mrs.
Aphra Behn. Before the end of 1674 Shadwell had pro-
duced five of his comedies and a tragedy, Wycherley all his
•four classic comedies, Crowne two of his plays, Ravenscroft
'two of his. Settle two of his heroic tragedies, and Mrs. Behn
at least three of her naughty comedies, in addition to some of
her poems and naughty novelettes. Nat Lee and Thomas
Otway were but just on the horizon, stripling actors who had
failed on the boards and were meditating poetry and play-
writinigas easier work^.
at was not mere laziness that made Dryden less prolific of
dramas between 1670 and 1674 than he had previously been.
The competition of some of the younger craftsmen had dis-
turbed his temper and drawn him into personal controversies.
The extraordinary success, more especially, of Settle's two
heroic tragedies, Camhfses, King of Persia and The Empress of
Morocco, the first acted in 1671 and the second in 1673, had
challenged Dryden's rights in the very walk he thought bis
own. It is now a marvel how this wretched Elkanah Settle,
jeisnembered only as a ludicrous object .in English literary
1 Genest's English Stage; Dryden's Works; Baier's Biogra^hia Bramatioa;
Notes from the Stationers' '■Eegistra'S.
R r a
612 LIFE OF MILTON AND HISTORY OF HIS TIME.
history, should have for a year or two of his youth disputed,
the poetic supremacy with Dryden. But so it was. Rochester
had deserted Dryden and taken Settle under his patronage ;
half the court and more than half the town were won over to
Settle ; passages of Settle's Cambyses and impress of Morocco
were quoted against the best in Dryden's Tyrannic Love and
his Conquest of Granada ; at the Universities, where it was
keenly discussed whether Dryden or Settle was the greater
genius, " the younger fry," we are told, " inclined to
Elkanah." Although Dryden, Crowne, and Shadwell clubbed
together to crush the young upstart by an abusive pamphlet,
entitled TUma/rhs upon the Bmpress of Morocco, he was not to be
so crushed, but retorted vigorously in Notes and Observations
of self-defence and counter-attack.
There would have been annoyance enough for Dryden in
this controversy with Settle and in a similar exchange of per-
sonalities at the same time with young Ravenscroft. But
there was much more to trouble him. His cherished doctrines
of dramatic construction, and especially his doctrine of the
superiority of rhyme to blank verse for all serious dramatic
purposesj had never been cordially accepted either by the
. public or by the critics j and even as early as 1668 there had
been a passage at arms on the subject between him and his
brother-in-law Sir Robert Howard. This little quarrel
between the brothers-in-law, however, had been soon made
up ; and it was not till Dryden had been settled in the
Laureateship that the ftill storm of criticism burst upon him.
Then it was, just when he could congratulate himself on
having exhibited the capabilities of the heroic play to the
utmost in his Tyrannic Love and' Conquest of Granada, and his
only danger seemed to be from the competition of Elkanah
Settle and others in that form of the drama, that there broke
forth at last the public expression of disgust with heroic plays
themselves.
It broke forth at many points, and was continued till 1674
in pamphlets and squibs against Dryden by Matthew Clifford,
Richard Leigh, and others. Already, however, the fatal blow
had been inflicted in the famous farce of The Rehearsal, first
DRYDEN AND THE SESEASSAL. 613
produced on the 7th of December 1671 at the King's Theatre
by Dryden's own company, acted with increasing effect through
that winter, and published in 1673. This larce, the work
chiefly of the Duke of Buckingham, but with help from his
chaplain Sprat, and also from Samuel Butler and the above-
named Matthew Clifford, had been in preparation while Dave-
nant was alive, and the intention is said to have originally
been to make Davenant the chief character and satirize heroic
plays in his person. Now, however, all had been reshaped
to fit Dryden. Under the name of the poet Bayes, which was
but an obvious metaphor for "The Laureate," he was made
to figure through the farce as present at the rehearsal of an
imaginary rhyming tragedy of his own, called "The Two Kings
of Brentford," directing and scolding the actors, running upon
the stage now and then to show them what to do, and keeping ■
up all the while a chatty conversation with two friends, Smith
and Johnson, whom he has posted at the side of the stage to
observe the success of the performance, and to whom he ex-
pounds the merits of the play, the thread of the story where
they fail to catch it, and his intention in this part or that
where the meaning is obscure. At the close of the second act
Bayes is made to tumble on the stage and break his nose in
trying to instruct one of the actors how to fall dead properly,
and through the last three acts he goes about with a patch of
wet brown paper over the bruised organ. In the fifth act,
having gone out for a minute, he finds, on his return, that
Smith and Johnson, who have been secretly laughing at him all
along, have gone off to dinner without bidding him good-bye,
and that the actors, ec[ually sick of the whole business, have
gone off to dinner too. Imagine such a piece acted night
after night before crowded houses in Dryden's own theatre,
the part of Bayes by the popular Laey, dressed to look as
like Dryden as possible, and mimicking his voice, gait, and
manner, the better to set off the hesitations and confusions of
speech, and the interjections " faith," " i' gad," " i' fackins,"
which Buckingham had taken care to transfer from the real
Dryden's conversation to the caricature of it in Bayes's mouth.
Imagine also the studied absurdity of the burlesque ^in the
614 LIFE OF MILTON AND HISTORY OF HI8 TIME,
imaginary hcFoie play, the ludicrously imposable situations,
the utterly inexplicable plot, the snatches of extravagant simile
and bombastic rhyme, the actual parodies of passages from
the latest and best known of Dryden's rhymed dramas, the
conversion of his ranting hero Almanzor into a grotesque
Drawcansir, and the echoes- of his manner of rhyming, even
to his trick or device of the occasional sonorous triplet. The
two Kings of Bren.tfbrd, having descended in a cloud, and
seated themselves on the throne together, are being enter-
tained by a grand dance in front of them before they proceed
to serious counsel on state-affairs, when an alarm soundsj and
enter two heralds : —
" 1st King,. What saucy groom molests our privacies ?
Is* E&raM. The Army's at the door, aud, in disguise.
Desires a wovA. with both your Majesties:
2nd Berald. Having from- Knightsbridge hither marched by
stealth.
2nd King. Bid 'em attend a while and drink our health.
1st King. Here, take five guineas for those warlike men.
2nd King. And here 's five more : that makes the sum just
ten.
1st Herald. "We have not seen so much the Lord knows
when."
Buckingham's farce was a very clever and opportune piece
of satire. It was caricature throughout, but an excellent
specimen of that style of art ; and, though we naturally
condemn it now as irreverent to Dryden, yet, let any one put
himself back to the proper moment by reading one of those
heroic plays of Dryden which it satirized, and it will be a
very pompous reverence indeed for the name of Dryden that
will prevent' the acknowledgment that Buckingham's farce
deserved the applauses which it received, and was, for its date,
a sound and successful operation in literary surgery. He and
many more were surfeited with the rhyming heroics of the
Restoration Drama, and, if nothing better was to offer itself
in the guise of serious or ideal poetry, were entitled at least
to the moderate wish expressed in the epilogue to The
Rehearsal : —
NON-DRAMATIC LITEBATURE FROM, 1667 TO 1674. 615
"Wherefore, for ours and for the kingdom'a peace,
May this prodigious way of writing cease.
Let's have, at least once in our lives, a time
When we may hear some reason, not all rhyme.
We have this ten years felt its influence :
Pray let this prove a, year of prose and sense ^."
Dryden could not yield at once. In his essay Of Heroic
Plays, published in 1672, he defended that species of drama
and his own exertions in it as well as he could, though
without a single word of reference to Buckingham's attack.
" Whether heroic verse ought to be adrnitted into serious
" plays is not now to be disputed," he said ; " it is already
" in possession of the stage, and 1 dare confidently affirm that
"very few tragedies in this age shall be received without it."
This opinion was never formally retracted. One can see,
however, that The ReAearsal and the other attacks of the first
four years of his laureateghip had shaken his confidence in bis
favourite practice ; and there is evidence, moreover, that about
the year 1674 he was becoming tired of the Drama altogether,
aad thinking of some new. employmejit for his talents. Such
new employment, plenty of money being one of the conditions,
was not easily to be found, and Dryden was to go on writing
plays almost to his life's end, though only one more was to
be in rhyme. Not till seven years beyond our present date
did he strike out those new paths in rhyming verse his suc-
cesses in which were to count for so much more with posterity
than all bis successes as a dramatist. We are dealing with
Pryden, it is to be remembered, at a time when the extent
and variety of his faculties were not half revealed and when
it was still unknown to Buckingham and his other critics how
terribly he could revenge himself.
Apart from the Drama, what, was the condition of English
literature in the seven years fronj 1667 to 1674? Here
again, as for the preceding seven years of the literature of the
Restoration, the Stationers' Registers tell but a sorry tale. In
1 Scott's Life of Dryden; Preface to (^Dramatic Toesy; AAer'a exoelleut
the J)vM of Lerma in the Dramatic Reprint of the first edition of The
Works of Sir Robert Howard (edit. Rehewrsal.,
1722) ; Dryden's Defence of his Essay ' i
616 LIFE OF MILTON AND HISTOKT OF HIS TIME.
no year, from 1668 to 1674 inclusively, does the number of
registered book-transactions rise higher than to between eighty
and ninety; and, when it is remembered that a proportion of
those registrations were of plays, the official newspapers in
batches every three months or so, or mere transfers of old
copyrights from one bookseller to another, it will be inferred
how meagre is the show of original book-prodiietion out of the
department of the acted drama. The Censorship and the Press
Acts of Chstrles being still strictly in force, we cannot suppose
any very great amount of authorship to have escaped unlicensed
and unregistered. Roger L'Estrange was still the chief licencer,
and almost all the plays and other books of light literature
through the seven years are registered under his permission.
Lord Arlington or Sir Joseph Williamson officiated sometimes,
but the duty of licensing heavier books was distributed among
several clergymen, among whom the Mr. Thomas Tomkyns
who had licensed Paradise Lost was still one, and Mr.
Samuel Parker was another. They had very little to do. So
far as the registers show, we should know little more than
that Baxter, Owen, Cudworth, Stillingfleet, Tillotson, Henry
Stubbe, Robert Boyle, Izaak Walton, and one or two more of
the prose-authors of our previous Restoration list, were still in
the land of the living: and in the whole series of individual
registrations of new books of a poetical kind through the
seven years, if we deduct those of the successive plays of
Dryden, Orrery, the Howards, Shadwell, and the rest, there
is positively only one of real interest now in English literary
history. It is the registration of Milton's Paradise Regained
and Samson Agonistes together by John Starkey on the 10th
of September 16701.
The registers, of course, even if they included all that was,
actually published in London through the seven years (which
they certainly do not), cannot be taken as fully representing
the literary activity of England through those years. Much
was in preparation that was to be published afterwards.
Bunyan, for example, had brought his Pilgrim's Progress out of
1 My notes from tjie Begisters from Aug. 1667 to the end of 1674,
BUTLEB IN NEGLECT. 617
prison with him, finished^ or all bat finished, and to be added
in due time to his Holy City and other writings already
in print. Hobbes, advancing from his eightieth year to his
ninetieth, and with his Ofera Philosophica Omnia lying
behind him safe in an Amsterdam edition, was writing or
recasting his Behemoth, or History of the Civil Wars, and
hammering out his marvellous translation of the whole of
Homer. Clarendon's great history was completing itself on
paper abroad j at home Barrow, Cudworth, Howe, Henry
More, South, Stillingfleet, Tillotson, and others of the specu-
lative or practical theologians known before the Restoration
or immediately afterwards, had by no means ceased their
labours ; and, among their versifying contemporaries who
were versifying still, though not for the stage or for open
publication at the moment, one is bound to remember Waller,
Marvell, and Butler. Of Waller we have seen enough ; we
shall hear of Marvell again ; but poor Butler cannot be dis-
missed here without a parting glance.
They had never thought of making Butler poet-laureate in
succession to Davenant. They had accepted his two parts of
Hudibras in 1662-4, and had laughed over them and con-
tinued to carry them about and quote them ; but they had
done nothing for the author whatever, unless it could be
counted something that Clarendon, when forming his great
collection of national portraits for the decoration of his
Piccadilly mansion, had taken care to include Butler's, and
had given it a specially conspicuous place among those in his
dining-room. Through the interval, though there are traces
now and then of Butler at dinner tables where he could be
seen by Pepys, or in momentary connexion with Buckingham
and other aristocratic patrons, one has to fancy him walking
more and more by himself in the old streets about Covent
Garden, near the churchyard where one can now see his
grave, and growing more and more crabbed and cynical from
increasing age and poverty and the sense of undeserved
neglect. He had still his unfinished Hudibras in hand to
occupy hirft when he eared to take up the pen, and a third
part of the burlesque was to appear before he died ; but
618 LIFE OF MILTON AND HISTORY OF HIS TIME.
his chief pleasnTe now seema to have been in scribblins^ those
miscellaneous scraps in prose and- verse, entitled Thaughts^
Satires, CAarasfers, and the like, in which he vented his ill
humour on persons and tihings, indiscripainately, and which,
he was to leave among* his papers to be printed posthumously
if any one should choose. Here is one of them :^-
" Dame Fortune, some men's tutelar,
Takes' eharge of them without their care ;
Does all their drudgery and Work,
Like fairies, for them in the dark;
Conducts them blindfold, and advances
The naturals by blinder chances :
While others by desert or wit
Could: never make the matter hit,
But still, the better they deserve.
Are but the abler thought to starve."
Among the special objects of his. satire in those witty scraps
are the Royal Society, Boyle and Dr. Charlton as two of its
Fellows, the Duke of Buckingham, Dryden's Rhyming Heroics,
and one of the poems of the Honourable Edward Howard ; bat
ether celebrities are snarled at, and there is hardly a good word
for anybody. What one principally observes, however, is the
movemeut of Butler's mind in his later days out of his former
Hudibrastic mood of mere anti-Puritani§m into a mood of
general pessimism, brought on by the contemplation, of all
he saw around him in the reign of Charles the Second. He
still growls at the Fanatics, the Anabaptists, the Cluakers,
Nonconformists of all sorts ; but he despairs of human nature
under all forms of Church alike, and he would lay the lash
impartially on surviving Puritan hypocrites and on Charles
and his courtiers : —
"Our universal inclination
Tends to the worst of our creation.
As if the stars conspired to imprint
In our whole species, by instinct,
A fatal brand and signature
Of nothing else but the. impure."
So in a piece entitled " Satyr upon the weakness and misery
of Man " ; and another, entitled " Satyr upon the licentious
age of Charles the Second," begins : — >
INEANT WHIGGISM. 619
" "lis a strange age we--ve lived in and a lewd
As e'er the sun in all his travels viewed^."
Our' date of 1674 is but half way through that lewd age.
Could any other spirits be then descried, " standing apart
upon the forehead of the age to come," as Keats expresses it,
and could " any hum of mighty workings " be heard among-
them from which a nobler future could be anticipated ? Isaac
Newton, now in his thirty-second year, and for some time
Lucasian professor of Mathematics at Cambridge, had re-
cently been elected a Fellow of the Royal Society ; but,
unless what /te had already thought out or was carrying as
great conjecture in his mind is to be taken into the account,
it would be difficult to detect anything in the English in-
tellect about the year 1674, or indeed for another genera-
tion or two, that could be described as " mighty workings "
of any kind or in any direction. Locke, indeed, now forty-
two years of age, and the client, friend, and admirer of
Shaftesbury, was helping that displaced statesman in the
formation of the Whig theory of polities, while beginning
his own more general investigations towards a new English
Philosophy that should be different from that of Hobbes ;
and among other persons, older and younger, who were, con-
sciously or unconsciously, grouping themselves into what was
to be known as the Whig party, one cannot but mark the
liberal Gilbert Burnet. He had just resigned his Glasgow
professorship of Divinity to settle in London at the age of
thirty, and he had been appointed preacher at the Eolls
Chapel. Though the names Whig and Tory did not come into
use till 1679, Whiggism, or the Whig philosophy of politics,
was a pretty definite phenomenon in the English mind before
the death of Milton. But, though a very interesting and
important phenomenon, it was hardly "a hum of mighty
workings " in comparison with those profounder agitations
of the English body-politic and soul-politic that were within
recent recollection. English Whiggism was little else than
1 Letter of Evelyn to Pepys printed Butler, with Cunningham's notes ; But-
In Appendix to Erelyn's Diary, p. 695 ler's Oenuine Remains in Verse and
of edit, of 1870 ; Johnson's Life of Prose, edited by Thyer in 1759.
620 LIFE OF MILTON AND HISTOKY OF HIS TIME.
English Puritanism and B/epublieanism strained and perco-
lated painfully and secretly through the intervening medium
of so many years of the restored Stuart misgovernment.
Whatever were to he its virtues, as far as to 1688 or beyond,
it was but the reappearance of the strong original article in
a state of extremely mild dilution and refinement. One
might call it Puritanism and water.
CHAPTEE II.
THE LAST SEVEN TEARS OP MILTON S LIFE.
No English book has had a more curious trade-history than
the first edition of Paradise Lost, It appeared, as we saw, in
or shortly after August 1667, and original copies with the
date 1667 exist in our libraries, and fetch high prices at
book-sales^. But there are copies also bearing the date 1668
on the title-page, and other copies bearing the date 1669 ;
and these, no less than the copies of 1667, belong indubitably
to the first edition, and are valued accordingly. Nor is this
all. If all the extant copies of the first edition were collected
and compared with each other, they would be found to differ
not only in the dating of their title-pages as above, but also
in the form and typography of their title-pages and in other
particulars. Perhaps no two copies are precisely alike in all
respects. There are minute differences in the text, such as a
with in some copies where others give an in, a misnumbering
of the lines on the margin in some copies where others give
the correct numbering, a comma in some copies where others
have no comma. In this respect, however, there is nothing
peculiar. Many of our early printed books present such
slight variations of text in copies of one and the same edition,
arising from the fact that, in the days of leisurely hand-
printing, corrections might be made in a sheet while it was at
press, of which corrections only the remaining part of the
1 Avery exact facsimile reproduction with the date 1667, has been published
of the First Edition of Paradise LoO,, by Mr, Elliot Stock of Paternoster Bow.
622 LIFE OF MILTON AND HISTORY OF HIS TIME.
impression of that sheet would have the benefit. The varia-
tions of this kind in the first edition of Paradise Lost are far
less numerous than in some other old books, and indeed very-
few and altogether insignificant. Of much more consequence
are the variations in the form of the title-page and in the
leafing of the book before the text of the poem. At least
nine different forms of title-page have been discovered in
original copies of the first edition ; and these variations of
title-paging are complicated by the fact that some copies
have fourteen pages of preliminary prose-matter between the
title-page and the text of the poem, while other copies have
nothing of the sort. The explanation of all this belongs to
Milton's biography.
The explanation, in brief, is that, though the IBBO or 1500
copies constituting the first edition of Paradise Lost were all
printed off in or about August 1667, th^y were no* all then
bound and issued to the public, but were issued in successive
instalments or bindings, to meet the gradual demand at the
bookshops. There were at least mine successive bindings and
issues of copies before the edition was exhausted, two of them
in 1667, four of them in 1668, and three of them in 1669.
The printer and publisher Samuel Simmons had the manage-
ment of this process of dealiirg out copies of the book gradually,
but Milton's hand was also in it.
We may repeat here the title-page of the first binding sent
out : — " Pnradise lost. A Poem written in Ten Boaks By John
" Milton. Licensed and Entrsd mcording to Drder. London
" Prinied, and are to be sold by Peter Parker under Creed "Church
" neer Aldgaie ; And by Robert Boulter at the Turks Head in
" Bishopsgate-street ; And Matthias Walker uitder St. Bunstons
" Church in Fleet-street, 1667." The moderate nnmber of
copies sent out with this title-page seem to bava been sold
before the end of 1667 ; for there was a second binding that
year. For this second binding Simmons printed a new title-
page, the wording exactly the same as before, but the author's
name in u smaller size ofiij^e. Thus before the end of 1667
there were copies out with two slightly differing forms of
title-page. The sale so far seems to have been too slow to
FIRST EDITION OF PABADISE LOST. 623
satisfy Simmons, and he bad begun to fancy tlia,t it was checked
to some extent by the appearance of the author's name in all
the copies yet sent out. In some of these copies it was in
smaller type than in others ; but, whether in smaller type or
in larger, what was to be expected but that many people,
seeing the name John Milton on the title-page, would throw
down the book with an exclamation of disgust? To suit
such weak-minded brethren, it seems to have occurred to
Simmons to issue copies without the author's name in full,
but with his initials only. The book had been entered in the
Stationers' Registers as merely " by J. M. " ; and " J. M. "
might be any respectable person. Accordingly, early iii
1668, a third binding of copies was issued, most probably
with Milton's sanction, bearing the title, "Paradise lost.
" A Poem in Ten Boohs. The Author J. M. Licensed and
" Entred according to Ordier. London Pointed, and are to
"he sold by P&ter Parker vmder Greed Gkuroh neer Aldgate ;
" And h/ Robert Boulter at the Turks tSead 'in Bishopsgate-
" street ; And MaMhias Walker under St. ^.unstans Church in
" Meet-street, 1668." This was followed in the same year by
a fourth binding, with a title-page identical in the wording,
bxrt with variations in the size of the type. 'To print a new
title-page for every new binding was ^a convenient plan, for
it enabled the book to be dated afresh so as to keep :it always
one of ihe current year. And so, by about the middle of
1668, there had been sent out four bindings of Paradise Lost,
giving customers the option of copies with the author's name
in full, if they would have it, or only his initials, if these
were thought more innocent.
Still the sale seemed to lag, and to need what is now known
in the trade as a "push." The push could not be given, of
course, in the modern fashion of a repeated burst of ad-
vertising. The machinery of advertisement was then scanty,
and was less used for books than for missing dogs, while the
machinery of book-paragraphing and reviewing had not been
invented. The push was given in the sim'pler form of an
adaptation of the look of the book to the habits of purchasers
and readers. — Simmons had ascertained by this time that it
624 LIFE OF MILTON AND HISTORY OF HIS TIME.
was not the author's name that impeded the sale so much
as the want of such introductory matter as might indicate
the nature of the contents. The mere title Paradise Lost
conveyed but vague ideas. It suggested perhaps the story of
Adam and Eve, and so corresponded with some of the sweeter
and more idyllic parts of the poem ; but it gave no intimation
that the poem contained also the pre-mundane history of
Satan, the angelic wars in heaven, the expulsion thence of
the rebel angels, their incarceration in the abyss of hell, the
six days' creation of the universe of man between the fallen
angels and their lost heaven, their debates in hell for revenge
'and recovery, and Satan's voyage of invasion for them
upwards into the new universe, all inwrought coherently into
one epic and leading to its particular catastrophe on earth.
Of these grandeurs there was no promise in the title. Besides,
even those who became aware of the grandeurs by actually
reading the poem, or parts of it, could hardly at once grasp
its plan, and had no clue afterwards but that of memory to
the succession of the incidents. So much having been
gathered by Simmons, and having been reported by him to
Milton, the remedy was easy. Milton prepared what he called
" The Argument" consisting of ten sections of prose-headings,
giving a summary of the contents of the poem, book by book,
for all the ten books. That would show any one who took
up the poem casually what it was about, and it would serve
as an index to readers who wanted means of reference ^ He
was the more willing to take this trouble because he had the
1 It seems to me possible that Milton like a defence of his departure from the
took advantage of the Prose Argument ordinary or orthodox conception of his
to fumisli explanations of the plan of time as to the place of hell. His
the poem at one or two points ■where he readers may have expected to find it
had already heard that readers had heen in "the centre," i.e. within the earth's
in difficulty. Thus, in the Argument howels, as in Dante's poem, whereas he
to Book I, "the Poem," he says, having has made it wholly extra-mundane. If
assumed the rebellion of the Angels in reasons are wanted, he offers two. In
heaven and their expulsion as events the first place, did not the expulsion of
already passed, " hastens into the midst the rebel angels into hell freixde the
" of things, presenting Satan, with his existence of the earth and the material
"Angels, now fallen into Hell, — de- universe to which it belongs? In the
" scribed here not in the centre (for second place, even if the earth had been
" heaven and earth inay be supposed as in existence, it was not occtwseo! till
" not yet made, certainly not yet ac- after the fall of man, and how could the
" cursed), but in a place of utter dark- ball, while innocent, have contained a
"uess,fitliest called Chaos." This looks hell?
FIKST EDITION OF PABADISE LOST. 625
opportunity at the same time of noticing another objection to
the poem, which had interested himself more than Simmons.
A long epic in blank verse, put forth at the very time when
the great controversy among the critics was whether blank
verse was not too low for even the serious drama, and when
even those who contended for the suflBciency of blank verse
for the serious drama agreed that it was too mean for any
form of non-dramatic poetry, had been a very daring ex-
periment indeed. Accordingly, so far as there had been talk
about the poem hitherto in the critical world, the chief
stumbling-block to its reception had been the question
whether it could be called strictly a poem at all, inasmuch as
it did not rhyme. Though the objection can have been no
surprise to Milton, it may have reached him so annoyingly
from some quarters after the first appearance of the poem as
to prompt him now to a few words of remark. While hand-
ing to Simmons, therefore, the prose " Argument " to be in-
serted in future issues of copies, he handed him also that
little prefatory paragraph, entitled "The Verse" which now
appears in every good edition of the poem. ' When set up in
type, the Argument and this little paragraph on the Verse,
together with a list of a few errata that had been discovered,
made fourteen pages of absolutely new matter, to be inserted
in future issues between the title-page and the text. Simmons
did not grudge the expense of printing as many copies of the
new fourteen pages as were needed for the copies of the poem
still on hand ; and, when he sent out his fifth binding of the
poem in 1668, it was thicker by these additional fourteen
pages than any of the previous bindings, and swelled the
small quarto volume from a total of 342 pages to a total of
356. The title-page of this fifth binding marks it as an
epoch in the history of the book in yet other respects. It
runs thus : — " Paradise lost. A Poem in Ten Boohs. The
Author John Milton. London, Printed hy 8. Simmons, and to
he sold hy S. Thomson at the Bishops-Head in Duck-Lane,
H. Mortlock at the White Hart in Westrninster Hall, M. Walker
under St. Bunstons Church in Fleet-street, and R. Boulter at
the Turks-Head in Bishopsgate-street, 1668." Here we have
VOL. VI. s s
626 LIFE OF MILTOK AND HISTORY OF HIS TIME.
several novelties. Not only is Milton's name restored in full
to the title-page, as if there were no longer any idea that it
did harm ; but Simmons for the first time ventures to put his
own name in the title-page, acknowledging himself to the
general public as the printer and publisher of the book. He
had already done so, neeessarilyj in his registration of the
book at Stationers' Hall, but had kept back his name hitherto
in all the published copies. Moreoverj it seems to have been
part of his " push " to change some of his bookselling agents
and to increase their number. One of the three former agents,
" Peter Parker under Creed Church near Aldgate," is employed
no longer, and with the remaining two. Walker and Boulter,
there are conjoined two new agents in Thomson and Mortlock.
It is worth observing also that the four were well distributed
through the town, Boulter's shop being as far east as Bishops-
gate Street, Thomson's near Smithfield, Walker's as far west
as Fleet Street, and Mortlock's actually in Westminster Hall
itself, one of the book-stalls allowed there for the convenience
of the lawyers, and members of Parliament, and all the quality
of the West End. But there is yet another curious circum-
stance about this fifth binding of Paradise Lost. To introduce
the fourteen pages of new matter, Simmons, alone in his
printing office, had taken up his pen and written this four-
line advertisement': "The Printer to the Reader: Courteous
"Reader, There was no Argument at first intended to the
" Book, but for the satisfaction of many that have desired it,
" is procured. 8. Simmons." This precious effusion he had caused
to be set up on his own responsibility, stuffing it in, rather
clumsily, in the smallest type, at the very top of the first of
the fourteen pages of new matter, just above the beginning of
" The Argument " as it had been supplied by Milton. Provi-
dentially, before the requisite number of copies of the fourteen
pages were wholly printed off, Milton was able to stop the
press, and tell Simmons to correct his grammar. " The Printer
" to the Reader. Courteous Reader, There was no Argument at
"first intended -to the Book, but for the satisfaction of many
" that have desired it, I have procur'd it, and withall a reason
"of that which stumbled many others, why the Poem Rimes
FIKST EDITION OF PARADISE LOST. 627
" not. 8. Simmons : " such is the amended advertisement
sent or taken by Milton to Simmons to be substituted for the
ungrammatical one. Simmons met Milton half way. He
would not, or at all events he did not, cancel the ungram-
matical form of advertisement in the copies of the fourteea
new pages already printed off; but he substituted the correct
form in the copies remaining to be printed. The consequence
is that it is a matter of chance whether in any copy now
extant of the fifth binding of the first edition of Paradise Lost,
or in any copy of any subsequent binding, there shall be found
Simmons's incorrect form of the advertisement or Milton's
amended form. With only this difference, all copies of the
fifth binding and of later bindings contain the fourteen pages
of preliminary prose-matter that had been wanting in the
copies previously issued.
Simmons was very fickle in his taste in title-pages. When
he sent out a sixth binding, still in 1668, he equipped it also
with a title-page set up expressly for itself. This differed from
the last, however, in nothing essential, but only in a little
detail of ornamentation. But more was needed for the last
three bindings, issued in the year 1669. Not only was it
desirable to put that year in the title-page, that the book
might appear still in season ; but Simmons had become dis-
satisfied with his four bookselling agents, and had resolved to
entrust the sale of the remaining copies to one bookseller, con-
veniently near his own printing-premises in Aldersgate Street.
Accordingly, this is the title-page in all copies of the seventh
binding : — " Paradise lost. A Poem in Ten Boohs. The Author
John Milton. London, Printed hy S. Simmons, and are to he sold
ly T. Eelder, at the Angel, in Little Brittain, 1669." Holder,
who had received this binding early in 1669, must have dis-
posed of it rapidly ; for the last two bindings of the book,
the eighth and the ninth, seem to have been in his hands before
the end of April in that year. The title-pages of these were
exactly the same in wording as the last, but differed from it
and from each other in small details of letteriug and pointing i.
■ " I have previously discussed this trade-history of the First Edition of
curious and intricate subject of the Paradise Lpst in the Introduction t(i;
s s a
628 LIFE OF MILTON AND HISTOBY OF HIS TIME.
Before the end of April 1669 the first edition of Paradise
Lost had been exhausted. The proof exists in the following
receipt, the signature to which was of course by proxy : —
"April 26, 1669.
"Eeceived then of Samuel Simmons five pounds, being the
Second five pounds to be paid mentioned in the Covenant. I say
reed, by me, John Milton ^
" Witness, Edmund Upton."
Thus, to April 1669, Milton had received £\0 in all for his
poem. The sum was equal to about ^35 now. Simmons, if
one may venture on a calculation on the subject, had made
about five or six times as much.
The sale of an edition of 1300 copies in little more than
eighteen months was no bad commercial success for such a
book as Paradise Lost, and would be proof in itself that the
poem had at once made a very strong impression. Have we
any more definite information as to its first reception among
the critics and judges of literature ? The statement on this
subject professing to be most authoritative is Richardson's.
It was published in 1734 ; but Richardson's own memory of
things and persons went as far back as 1680 or 1685 : — " Sir
" George Hungerford, an ancient member of Parliament," says
Richardson, " told me, many years ago, that Sir John Denham
" came into the Hoilse one morning with a sheet, wet from the
"press, in his hand. 'What have you there, Sir John?'
" ' Part of the noblest poem that ever was wrote in any
" ' language or in any age.' This was Paradise Lost. How-
" ever, 'tis certain the book was unknown till about two years
" after, when the Earl of Dorset [not then Earl of Dorset, but
" only Lord Buekhurst] produced it. Dr. Tancred Robinson
" has given permission to use his name ; and what I am going
the Poem in the Oamhridge Edition of (Art. Milton) and Mr. Leigh Sotheby's
Milton's Poetical Works, and also in an Milton "Eambliugs " (pp. 80—81).
Introduction to Mr. Elliot Stock's Fac- i This receipt was given, in facsimile,
simile Eeprint of the First Edition ; in the Gentleman's Magazine for July
and I have here, while studying the 1822, and there is a copy of the fac-
suhjeot afresh, taken a phrase or two simile in Mr. Leigh Sotheby's "Eam-
from those Introductions. The study blings." I have sketched the history
has been from my own inspection of all of the document in a note to the Intro-
copies of the First Edition within my ductiou to Paradise Lost in the Cam-
leach, with help from Bohn's Lowndes bridge Milton (I. pp. 12—13),
EECEPflON OF PASADISE LOST. 629
"to relate he had from Fleet Shephard, at the Grecian
" coffee-house, and who often told the story. My Lord was in
" Little Britain, beating about for books to his taste. There
" was Paradise Lost. He was surprised with some passages he
"struck upon dipping here and there, and bought it. The
" bookseller begged him to speak in its favour if he liked it,
" for that it lay on his hands as waste paper (Jesus !). Shep-
" hard was present. My Lord took it home, read it, and sent
" it to Dryden, who in a short time returned it. 'This man,'
" says Dryden, ' cuts us all out, and the ancients too i.'"
This passage, very creditable to Richardson's desire to be au-
thentic, breaks down at several points on investigation, though
perhaps hardly to the extent of Malone's commentary upon it.
Sir John Denham, Malone points out, never was a member of
Parliament ; and, moreover, " during a great part of the year
1667, " when Paradise Lost was passing through the' press, the
unfortunate knight was in a fit of insanity, and removed from
public view. In this last observation Malone is hypercritical ;
for Denham had recovered so far as to be back in society before
August 1667, and to publish in that month his lines on the
death of Cowley. He was therefore quite able to form a
judgment on Paradise Lost in the very month of its appear-
ance, had it come then in his way. But, for the rest, one
must agree with Malone, and suppose that there was some
confusion of memory on the part of the old Parliament man.
Sir George Hungerford, when he told the story of Denham to
Richardson, or on Richardson's part in recollecting what Sir
George had said. Even if we waive the question of the place
where Denham came in with the sheet of proof in his hands
and made his enthusiastic remark, how can we account for his
being before all the rest of the world in having access privately
to the proof-sheets of a forthcoming book by such a political
recluse as Milton ? And how was his remark so ineffective, the
celebrated Sir John Denham though he was, that the book
received no benefit from his vast admiration and its merits
had to be re-discovered and re-proclaimed two years afterwards ?
1 Eiohardson's Life of Milton, prefixed to Notes on Paradise Lost (1734), pp.
cxix — cxx.
630 LIFE OF MILTON AND HISTORY OF HIS TIME.
In short, the first part of the tradition given by Richardson
will not cohere with the second part ^.
This second part of the tradition deserves more attention.
Eichardson's authority for it, he says, was Dr. Tancred Ro-
binson. In or about 1734, this gentleman, an old London
physician of eminence, authorized Richardson to use his name
in authentication of a story he had heard " Meet Shephard "
relate more than once at the Grecian coffee-house, i. e, at
a coffee-house in Devereux Court, Strand, much frequented
by wits and men of fashion in the latter part of the seven-
teenth century and beginning of the eighteenth, and deriv-
ing its name from its first proprietor, who had been a
Greek. We are thus referred to " Fleet Shephard," and the
reference is very interesting. Fleet Shephard, known in the
last years of his life as Sir Fleetwood Shepherd, had died in
September 1698, and had been about thirty-two years of age
at the time of the publication of Paradise Lost, and then one
of the chief wits and roues at the court of Charles the Second.
Anthony Wood's account of him is to the point. Having
come to London after the Restoration from his native Oxford-
shire, he "hanged on the Court,^' says Wood, "became a
" debauchee and Atheist, a grand companion with Charles,
" Lord Buckhurst, afterwards Earl of Dorset and Middlesex,
" Henry Savile, and others." Wood goes on to relate how he
became steward to Nell Gwynn, and one of Charles's closest
"companions in private to make him merry" through the
rest of his reign ; but our concern with him here does not go
farther than the beginning of 1669. It was then, as we have
seen, that Simmons the printer had committed the sale of the
last remaining copies of Paradise Lost to a single bookseller,
his neighbour, " T. Helder, at the Angel in Little Brittain."
That shop, therefore, was the scene of Fleet Shephard's Little
Britain anecdote. The anecdote itself has a look of credi-
bility. We can see Lord Buckhurst and his friend Fleet
Shephard together in Holder's shop, two as notorious profli-
gates as could have strolled thither from Westminster, but
Buckhurst, as we know, with a vein of genius through his
1 Todd's Life of Milton (1852), pp. 128—129; where there is a quotation from Malone.
EaOKPTION OP PABADISE IOST4 631
profligacy, and a keen delight in books. We can see Buck-
hurst, the author of To all you Ladies now on land, taking up
Paradise Lost from Helder^s counter " with a fa la la la la,"
and glancing at passages here and there till his mood changed
and both Shephard and Helder were startled by his lordship's
earnestness. We can see the three shillings paid, and the book
pocketed, and Holder's profound bow of parting, as he re-
quested his lordship to do him the honour of mentioning the
book, if he continued to like it, among any lords and gentle-
men of his lordship's most noble acquaintance. And to whom
should Buckhurst, the "Eugenius" of Dryden's essay, send the
extraordinary new poem, for a confirmation of his own opinion
of it, but to the " Neander " of that essay, the master-critic of
the day, Dryden himself? And what more like Dryden's ever
ready and never stinted generosity than the reply attributed to
him, " This man cuts us all out, and the ancients too "?
Difficulties and incongruities do appear in the story. How
can Helder have said that the book was lying on his hands as
waste paper, when in fact a large part of the total impression
of 1300 had already been sold by, other booksellers and he
had only the remainder in his hands ? This difficulty is not
insuperable. Helder may have exaggerated a little, or he may
have sold none of Ms copies till Lord Buckhurst took one.
More serious is the difficulty of supposing that Dryden had
not seen the poem till he received Lord Buekhurst's copy.
This, though not positively asserted, is almost necessarily im-
plied ; for, if the book had been already known to Dryden, it
would not have remained for Buckhurst to become acquainted
with it accidentally. — On the whole, we have to allow some-
thing perhaps for Fleetwood Shepherd's habit afterwards of
telling his story so as to make it out beyond a doubt that it
was his friend Lord Dorset, and no other, that had fiirst dis-
covered the greatness of Paradise Lost, he himself having
chanced to be with his lordship at the very moment and
remembering all the particulars. With this allowance, the
story, I believe, does admit us to a glimpse of the real facts.
Whatever circulation of copies, by sale or by gift from Milton
himself, there had been late in 1667 and through 1668, it
632 LIFE 0:P MILTON AND HISTOKY OF HIS TIME.
does seem to have been about the beginning of 1669 that the
extraordinary merits of the poem began to be a matter of talk
among the critics and court-wits, and then chiefly because of
the boundless praises of it by Dryden and Lord Buekhurst.
Nor need Sir John Denham lose altogether the credit claimed
for him. Though we must give up the myth of his enthusi-
astic production of the wet proof-sheet in the House of
Commons in 1667, we can suppose that he too had seen the
poem before his death on the 19th of March 1668-9, and had
joined in the praises. When a book appeared near the end of
a year, it was quite usual to date it by the coming year in the
title-page ; and the seventh binding of copies of Paradise Lost,
dated 1669, may have been in Helder's hands as early as
December 1668. If Buckhurst's visit to Helder's shop was
in that month or the next, Denham may have seen the poem
before he died. Davenant had died on the 9th of April 1668,
when the poem had been out about seven months at most ; but
it is difficult to imagine that even he had gone to his grave
in total ignorance of the addition that had been made to the
Literature of his Laureateship by his old friend Milton. We
may assume, I think, that Davenant was one of those to
whom Milton had sent presentation copies. There would be
no wonder if Dryden was another. Dryden, having been a
literary attache to Thurloe's office in 1657, must have had
some slight acquaintance with Milton personally from that
date ; and Milton must have had sufficient cognisance of
Dryden's increasing fame since then, till they were hailing
him in 1667 as the most successful of the Restoration drama-
tists and the author of Annus MiraUUs. Now, as Dryden's
Essay on Bramatie Poetry and Milton's Par,adise Lost were
almost simultaneous publications in that year, it would be
nothing remarkable, surely, had there been an exchange of
presentation copies^.
' Wood's Ath. IV. 627—628 (Flcnt- been notorioua since the year of the
woodShephard) ; and ante, pp. 389-391. Restoration. Under date Oct. 23, 1668,
Backhurst was about thirty-one years which might he but two months or so
of age at the date of his alleged dis- before his visit to Little Britain to " beat
covery of Paradise Lost, but had not about for books to his taste," Pepys
then given up those courses of shameless mentions a kind of repetition by him
frohc and debauchery for which he had and Sedley of their outrageous indecency
RECEPTION OF PARABISM LOST. 633
If there had not been an exchange of presentation copies at
the moment of publication, most certainly there had been an
exchange of regards by the two authors over the two books
since they had been published. What was the doctrine of
Dryden's Essa^ of Dramatic Poes^ ? That blank verse was
unsuitable for all ■ high or serious poetry, even for the tragic
or poetical drama for which, and for which only, it had been
brought into use by the Elizabethans. What was the most
obvious peculiarity of Paradise Lost on the first glance at its
pages ? That, though an epicj it was written wholly in blank
verse, thus not only asserting by implication the very oppo-
site of Dryden's doctrine for the drama, but vindicating the
rights and powers of blank verse, nay, its sole legitimate sove-
reignty, in domains from which Dryden and all the rest of the
world had agreed in assuming it to be necessarily excluded.
Paradise Lost, therefore, when Dryden first read it or any
part of it, must have come upon him like a revelation or a
thunderbolt. — It rather favours Fleetwood Shepherd's story of
Dryden's comparatively late introduction to the poem that he
makes no mention of it in the course of his memorable con-
troversy in 1668 with his brother-in-law Sir Eobert Howard
on the subject of blank verse versus rhyme. Sir Robert,
though he had written rhymed tragedy himself, was not a
bigot for the practice, and had resented some parts of Dryden's
essay in which he had himself been made to figure under the
name of " Crites." Accordingly, in an introduction to his
blank verse tragedy oi The Luke of Lerma, published about
the middle of 1668, he had made some rather tart observa-
tions on Dryden's essay and its doctrine. Dryden had
immediately retorted by publishing a second edition of his
Indian Umperor and prefixing to it " A Defence of an Essay
of Dramatic Poesy." This was in fact a sequel to his essay,
reasserting his doctrine of the supremacy of rhyme, though
now only in the mild form of a personal preference and belief,
of June 1663. " They had been running It was thought that, in one respect at
up and down all the night, almost naJked, least, they were corrupting even Charles,
through the streets, and at last fighting their seniof though he was by seven years,
and being beat by the watch and clapped Drinking was not his royal vice; but
up." There were other stories about he had been drunk and incapable several
Buckhurst and Sedley at the same time. times recently in their company.
634 LIFE Oy MILTON AND HISTORY OF HIS TIME.
and at the same time teaching his knightly brother-in-law,
by a mixture of the severest irony with the most com-teous
compliment, that even he had better not persist in a quarrel
with John Dryden. A reference to Paradise Lost would have
been natural in this reply to Howard if Dryden had then
known and admired the poem. — Milton, on his side, all the
while, was no stranger to Dryden's essay and its doctrine^
or to the controversy between Dryden and Howard. The
little paragraph entitled '' The Verse " which he gave to
Simmons to be prefixed, together with " The Argument," to
the fifth issue of copies in 1668, and to all subsequent issues,
in order that the public might have not only the desired
index of contents, but " withal a reason of that which
stumbled many others, why the Poem rimes not," was nothing
else than Milton's contribution to the controversy in his own
interest. It comes in here biographically : —
"The Veese.
The measure is English heroic verse without rime, as that of
Homer in Greek and of Virgil in Latin, rime being no necessary
adjunct or true ornament of poem or good verse, in longer works
especially, hut the invention of a barbarous age to set off wretched
matter and lame metre ; graced indeed since by the use of some
famous modern poets, carried away by custom, but much to their
own vexation, hindrance, and constraint to express many things
otherwise, and for the most part worse, than else they would have
expressed them. iNot without cause therefore some both Italian
and Spanish poets of prime note have rejected rime both in longer
and shorter works, as have also long since our best English trage-
dies, as a thing of itself, to all judicious ears, trivial and of no true
musical delight ; which consists only in apt numbers, fit quantity
of syllables, and the sense variously drawn out from one verse into
another, not in the jinghng sound of like endings, — a fault avoided
by the learned ancients both in poetry and all good oratory. This
neglect then of rime so little is to he taken for a defect, though it
may seem so perhaps to vulgar readers, that it rather is to he
esteemed an example set, the first in Enghsh, of ancient liberty
recovered to heroic poem from the troublesome and modern bond-
, age of riming."
FIRST PRAISES 01" PABADISE LOST. 635
If Dryden did not see Paradise Lost till 1669, he saw it
then with this emphatic condemnation of his own doctrine of
Verse, this all hut contemptuous reference to himself, printed
in its very forefront. At all events, from the moment the
poem was in his hands, whether before 1669 or not till that
year, he must have always thought of it as having come into
the world to turn the tables against his doctrine at the very-
time when he had been preaching it most confidently and
successfully. It is to the credit of Dryden's candour and
placability that he did not allow this feeling to interfere in
the least with his admiration of Milton. Buckhurst, Ros-
common, and others of the Restoration wits and critics, may
have helped in the first appreciation of Pa/radise Lost; but
Dryden was their leader.
It is not unpleasing to .find, however, that the first person
who expressed openly in print the opinion that was thus
steadily forming itself in private among the critics was
Milton's nephew, Edward Phillips. — In his tutorship in the
Pembroke family, where he had been since he left Evelyn's
house, in 1665, Phillips had not ceased authorship. He had
been employed to superintend a new edition, actually the
seventeenth, of the once popular book of Joannes Buch-
lerus entitled Sacrarum Prqfanarumque Phrasmm Poeticarum
Thesaurus, i. e. " Dictionary of sacred and profane Poetical
Phrases." To the new edition, which appeared in 1669, there
were subjoined two little Latin essays of Phillips's own,
entitled respectively " A Short Treatise on the Verse of the
Dramatic Poets," and " Compendious Enumeration of the
Poets, Italian, German, English, &c. (the most famous of them
at least), who have flourished from the time of Dante Alighieri
to the present age." In this second essay Milton is mentioned
in these words: — "John Milton, in addition to other most.
"elegant writings of his, both in English and Latin, has
" lately published Paradise Lost, a poem which, whether we
" regard the sublimity of the subject, or the combined pleasant-
" ness and majesty of the style, or the sublimity of the inven-
" tion, or the beauty of its images and descriptions of nature,
" will, if I mistake not, receive the name of truly Heroic,
636
LIFE OF MILTON AND HISTOEY OF HIS TIME.
" inasmuch as by the suffrages of many not unqualified to
"judg-e it is reputed to have reached the perfection of this
".kind of poetry." One observes here Phillips's fine loyalty
to his uncle, but also his feeling that he was not speaking
without warrant. His uncle had again, at the age of sixty,
become a mentionable person. The blind Republican and
Regicide had redeemed himself, so far as his redemption was
possible, by the atonement of a great poem ^.
One consequence was that, from and after 1669, there was
an increased conflux of visitors to the small house in Bunhill.
1 Wood's Ath. IV. 762, and Sodwin's
Lives of the Phillipses, 141 — 145. Wood
gives the titles of Phillips's two Essays
appended to the 17th edition of Buchler.
Godwin disinterred the book; and I
take the account of it, and the quota-
tion, from him. — ^Such public mentions
as there had been of Milton in his re-
tirement before the publication of Fara-
dise Lost had all been in. the vein of
continued execration and regret that he
had not been hanged. "One .Milton,
since stricken with blindness," he is
called in Heath's Chronicle, published
in 1663, tfie reference being to his "im-
pudent and blasphemous libel called
Iconoclastes " and his reply to Salma-
sius. " The Latin advocate, Mr. Milton,
who, like a blind adder, has spit so
much poison upon the King's person
and cause," South had said in one of
his sermons, quoting a Latin sentence
of Milton for indignant refutation ; and,
from passages in other sermons of
South, it appears that he rather Uked
an opportunity of glancing at Milton
from the pulpit. In Hacket's Life of
Archbishop Williams, which, though not
published tiU 1692, was complete in
manuscript while Hacket was bisliop of
Lichfield (1661—1670), Milton figures
as "that serpent Milton," "that black-
mouthed Zoilus," "a Shimei," "a dead
dog," a "canker-worm," "the saine, 0
horrid ! that defended the lawfulness of
the greatest crime that ever was com-
mitted, to put our thrice-excellent King
to death : a petty school-boy scribbler
tha,t durst grapple in such a cause with
the prince of the learned men of his
age, Salmasius." Perhaps the most re-
spectful references to Milton in the time
of his obscurity before his reappearance
in Paradise Lost were one by Hobbes,
in his yet unpublished Behemoth, and
one by Butler, in the private scraps of
verse with which he was amusing him-
self in his morose idleness after the
publication of the first two parts of his
Hvdibras ; and in both these references
it was stui the Milton of the Salmasian
controversy that was in view. One of
the two ooUoquists in the Behemoth
having said, "About this time came out
two books, one written by Salmasius,
a Presbyterian, gainst the murder of
the King, another written by Milton,
an English Independent, in answer to
it^" Hobbes, little to the credit of his
discrimination, makes the other reply,
" I have seen them both. They are very
good Latin both, and hardly to be judged
which Is better ; and both very ill rea-
soning, hardly to be judged which is
worse ; like two declamations, pro and
eon, made for exercise only in a rhetoric
school by one and the same man. So like
is a Presbyterian to an Independent."
In Butler's lines the wit proceeds ^ith
equal disregard of the facts :—
"So some polemics use to draw their swords
Against the language only and the words :
As he who fought at barriers with Salmasius
Engaged with nothing but the style and phrases ;
Waived to assert the murther of a Prince
The author of false Latin to convince.
But laid the merits of the cause aside,
By those that understood them to be tried,
And counted breaking Priscian's head a thing
More capital than to behead a king :
For which he has been admired by aU the leam'd
Of knaves concern'd and pedants unconoern'd."
CONi'LUX OF VISITOBS TO BUNHILL. 637"'
In addition to the Marvells, the Pagets, the Cyriack Skinners,
the Ellwoods, and the others of different ranks and sorts, who
had remained faithful to Milton through his time of obscurity,
there were now to be seen at his door, more or less frequently,
many " persons of quality," glad to form acquaintance or to
renew acquaintance with the author of Paradise Lost.
Whether Lord Buckhurst ventured to call and took Sir
Charles Sedley with him must be left to conjecture. There
is no impossibility in the matter ; and, though it would have
been a strange meeting, Milton would have been civil.
Dryden, we know for certain, did henceforward cultivate
Milton's acquaintance. It is not so generally known that
Dryden 's brother-in-law, Sir Robert Howard, did the same ; but
Toland had the fact from Howard himself. " He was a great
" admirer of Milton to his dying day," says Toland, " and,
" being his particular acquaintance, would tell many pleasant
"stories of him." Another of Milton's most frequent visitors
was the Earl of Anglesey, the same who, under his former
name of Mr. Arthur Annesley, had been the chief manager of
the Restoration along with Monk, and who had since been a
member of Charles's Privy Council and one of the most active
politicians through Clarendon's Administration and that of
the Cabal. He was a man of superior tastes and abilities,
" very subtil, cunning, and reserved," says Wood, " much
conversant in books and a great Calvinist," though the free-
dom of his sympathies with " very different persuasions " had
" left it somewhat diflBcult peremptorily to determine among
what sort of men, as to point of religion, he himself ought in
truth to have been ranked.'" Some interest attaches to his
special intimacy with Milton from 1669 onwards. That it
was a special intimacy appears from the fact that Phillips,
in his memoir of Milton, mentions him in chief among the
visitors to Bunhill, leaving the rest of the crowd unnamed.
" The said Earl of Anglesey," says Phillips, " came often
" here to visit him, as very much coveting his society and
" converse ; as likewise others of the nobility, and many per-
" sons of eminent quality ; nor were " the visits of foreigners
" ever more frequent than in this place, almost to his dying
638 LIFE OF MILTON AND HISTOEY OF HIS TIME.
" day." One wishes that Phillips had given us more names
at -this date ; but, in addition to Anglesey, Sir Robert
Howard, and Dryden, we may certainly assume Lady Rane-
lagh. By the death of her husband, precisely in this year
1669, she had become the Dowager Lady Ranelagh, her son,
Mr. Richard Jones, Milton's former pupil and correspondent,
succeeding his father as Viscount Ranelagh. The young
Viscount himself, when not in Ireland, and his former tutor,
Henry Oldenburg, now of the Royal Society, may have been
among the occasional visitors at Bunhill. John Aubrey,
also a fellow of the Royal Society, was certainly another.
As he assures us, with some emphasis, that Milton was visited
" much by the learned, more than he did desire," would it be
ill-natured to guess that he had found out the fact by expe-
rience ? But why did not Toland put on paper some of those
" many pleasant stories " of Milton which he says Sir Robert
Howard used to tell ? He has given us but one. Howard,
it seems, could take the liberty of talking with Milton on
political subjects ; and, " having demanded of him once what
"made him side with the Republicans, Milton answered,
" Among other reasons, because theirs was the most frugal
"government, for that the trappings of a monarchy might
" set up an ordinary Commonwealth ^."
It is in this connexion, if anywhere, that one may refer
to the story of the oflFer to reinstate Milton in his old place of
Latin Secretary. The story comes to us through Richardson,
who had heard, on what he thought good authority, that,
" soon after the Restoration," such an offer was made to
Milton on the King's part. "Milton withstood the offer,"
Richardson had been informed ; and, when his wife " pressed
his compliance," he had said to her, "Thou art in the
" right : you, as other women, would ride in your coach ;
"for me, my aim is to live and die an honest man." Were
the story true, the most probable date for it would be early
in 1664, a year after Milton's marriage with Elizabeth
Minshull, when Sir Richard Fanshawe, the King's Latin
1 Phillips's Memoir ; Aubrey's Lives ; Toland's Life of Milton (edit. 1761),
p. 129 ; Wood's Ath. IV. 182—183. ' ^
MILTON AND THE LORD EOOS DIVOEOE BILL. 639
Secretary to that time and also one of the Privy Council,
was sent abroad on that embassy to Spain and Portugal in
which he died in June 1666. But the thing seems incre-
dible. Apart from the insult to Milton, it is difficult to
imagine such combined absurdity and indecorum in Charles as
would have been implied in an invitation to the blind author
of The Tenure of Kings and Magistrates and Bikonoklastes
to a place at Court or at the Council Board. From and
after 1669, however, when the Earl of Anglesey and other
Courtiers and Privy Councillors had begun to go about
Milton, it is not unlikely that the name of the blind ex-
Secretary may have reached Charles now and then in
connexion with other matters than those defunct Regicide
and Republican pamphlets. "After his Majesty's Restora-
" tion^" says Anthony Wood, " when the subject of Divorce
" was under consideration with the Lords, upon the account
" of John Lord Ros or Roos his separation from his wife
"Anne Pierpont, eldest daughter to Henry, Marquis of
"Dorchester, he [Milton] was consulted by an eminent
"member of that House, as he was about that time by a
"chief officer of state, as being the prime person that was
" knowing in that affiiir." The Lord Roos Divorce Bill,
which was brought into the Lords by Buckingham on the
5th of March 1669-70, and received the royal assent on
the 11th of April 1670, after a hurried and stormy passage
through the two Houses, was, as we know (ante, pp. 573-573),
a bill of no less than national significance, inasmuch as its
real object was to prepare the way for the King's divorce
from his barren Queen and his marriage with some one else.
While the Duke of York, in the interest of his own succes-
sion to the crown, and all the Roman Catholics, and almost
all the English bishops, opposed it energetically, the King's
lay ministers and councillors generally, as we saw, were
as zealous on its behalf as he was himself. Either before
the Bill was brought into the Lords, or while it was in
debate there, two of its supporters, it now appears, had con-
sulted Milton, as the most learned living authority on the
Divorce subject. The eminent peer mentioned by Wood
640 LIFE OF MILTON AND HISTORY OF HIS TIME,
may have been the Earl of Anglesey, and the chief officer
of state may have been Lord Keeper Bridgman ; and argu-
ments and references supplied to them by Milton may have
been used in the House of Lords. The affair, however, as
we saw, came to nothing, the project of a Royal Divorce
Bill having been abandoned by the King himself on subse-
quent reflection ^.
The first edition of Paradise Lost having re-introduced
Milton to the bookselling world, it was natural that more
books bearing his name should follow. One would hardly
have expected, however, that his next publication after his
great epic should be a shabby little Latin Grammar. Yet
such we may call " Accedence Commeiu^t Grammar, Swpphfd,
with sufficient 'Rules, For the use of such [Younger or Elder)
as are desirous, without more trouble than needs to attain the
Latin Tongue, The Blder sort especially, with little Teaching
and their own Industry, By John Milton. London, Printed
for 8. S. and are to he sold by John StarJcey at the Miter
in Fleet-street, near Temple-bar, 1669." It is a small
duodecimo, consisting of two pages of preliminary address
" To the Reader " and 65 pages of text, with a list of some
errata at the end. There can be little doubt that the
substance of the thing had been lying among Milton's
manuscripts since the days of his pedagogy in Aldersgate
Street and Barbican, when the possibility of a far swifter
attainment of the Latin tongue than by the ordinary school
methods was one of his favourite ideas. That idea is pro-
pounded in the preliminary address in terms reminding us of
the Letter on Education to Hartlib twenty-five years before.
" It hath been long," says Milton, " a general complaint, not
" without cause, in the bringing up of youth, and still is,
" that the tenth part of a man's life, ordinarily extended, is
"taken up in learning, and that very scarcely, the Latin
"Tongue. Which tardy profieience may be attributed to
" several causes : in particular, the making two labours of
"one, by learning first the Accidence, then the Grammar,
"in Latin, ere the language of those rules be understood,
i Biohardson, p. c ; Wood's Fasti, I. 483.
Milton's latin aRAMliAE. 641
" The only remedy of this was to join both books iiito oile,
" and in the English tongue." Accordingly, the little b6ok
diflFerS from most Latin Grammars of the time in being in
English. It is divided into two parts, the first on Ety-
mology, with examples and rules for the inflections of the
Lattin noun, pronoun, verb, and participle, and the Second on
Syntax, also with rules and examples. On the whole, though
there was a cast of novelty and simplicity in the plan, it can
have beeii in no great deiliiand among teachers, and there have
been bfetter Latin primers in English since. The publisher
" S. S." was probably Samuel Simmons ; but, as the book
purports to be "printed /or S. S.," Milton himself, and not
Simmons, may have paid the printing expenses. Dr. Johnson
could find noflhifig remarkable in the book but the proof it
aflForded that Milton could deseetid to drudgfery. •
While treating of Latin g-rammar, however, it presents
Its with one interesting peculiarity of Milton's grammar in
his own Enghsh. This is his abstinence from the pro-
nominal neuter possessive form its. The niongrel word had
been creeping into use since 1598, in lieu of the genuine
old neuter possessive his, or the substitute Aer, and it had
become so common antiong Milton's contemporaries, especially
after the Restoration, that Dryden, writing in 1672, could
asstirne'ignoralitfy that its had beeii the true possessive of it
since the beginning of the English language, and accuse Ben
Jonson of incorrectness for using Ms instead. What would
Dryden have Said if he had looked into Milton's Acdedence ?
In all MUton's poetry the word its occurs but three times,
his or Mr occurring everywhere else iii places in which its
would now be used ; he is likewise very sparing of the form
its in his prose ; but his avoidance of the word in his Acce-
dence Commenc't Grammar has all the force of a grammatical
protest against the existence of the upstart. Discoursing of
the comparison of the Latin Adjective, he says : — " The supef-
" lative exceedeth Ais positive in the highest degree, as duris-
" simus, hardest ; and it is formed of the first case of Ids
" positive that eiids in is, by putting thereto simus." Again,
in the part on Syiitax, we are informed, "There be three
VOL. VI. T t
642 LIFE OF MILTON AND HISTORY OF HIS TIME.
" concords or agreements : The first is of the Adjective with
« Ms Substantive ; The second is of the Verb with his Nomi-
" native Case ; The third is of the Relative with Jiis Antece-
"dent"; and, further, "An Adjective with his Substantive,
" and a Relative with his Antecedent, agree in Gender and
" Case." So emphatic a preservation of the old neuter English
form his in a printed book to as late as 1669 is worthy of
remark^.
A far more important publication was Milton's next. It
was a rather good-looking small quarto of 308 pages, with an
annexed Index of 53 unnumbered pages more, and bore the
title " The History of Britain, That part especially now calVd
" Unglamd. From, the first Traditional Beginning, continu'd to
" tlie Norman Conquest. Collected out of the antientest and
" best Authours thereof ly John Milton. London, Printed
" hy J. M. for James Allestry, at the Rose and Crown in St.
"PauFs Church-Yard, MBCLXI." This too must have been
the mere publication of a manuscript which Milton had long
had by him. A History of Britain had been one of the
three great prose-tasks he had prescribed for himself in the
Aldersgate Street days, the other two being a Latin Dic-
tionary, and a Compendium of Biblical Theology; and we
have his own distinct statement that in 1648, when he was
living in High Holborn, just before he was called to the
Latin Secretaryship for the Commonwealth, he had been
busy on this History, having already written four books
of it, but meaning to persevere till he had brought it down
to his own time^. The idea of such a complete History of
England had since then been necessarily abandoned; but
' Original copy of Accedence Com- of date 1669; the Bodleian copy, Ileam
menc't Qra/mmar in the British Museum ; from the Catalogue, is of the same date ;
Reprint in Pickering's 1851 Edition of I have heard of no copy anywhere hear-
Milton'sWorks; Dryden's Defence of his ing any other date; Lowndes's Biblio-
Epilogue to The Conquest of Granada, grapJier's Manual distinctly gives 1669
as published in 1672 (Scott's Edition of as the date, while noticing 'Todd's adop-
Dryden, IV. 218— 219). In Anthony tion of 1661 as inexplicable. Besides,
Wood's Article on Milton (Fasti, 1. 485) it is difioult to imagine that Milton,
the year 1661 is given as the date of just after his escape with his life in
the publication of the Accedence Com- 1660, should have hastened to re-
menc't Grammar ; and the dating has mind the public of his continued exist-
been generally followed. But the ao- ence in such a cool trifle as a Latin
curate Wood must have made a slip Grammar,
here. The copy in the British Museum is " Ante, Vol. IV. pp. 77—78.
MTLTON's EISTOBY of BRITAIN. 643
he had added, prohably in the first years of his Secretaryship,
two more books to the four already written. It is this
narrative in six books, bringing the History of Britain on
to the Conquest, that he now sends forth.
The book, as the title indicates, is a compilation from
Csesar, Tacitus, Beda, Gildas, Nennius, the Saxon Annals,
Geoffrey of Monmouth, William of Malmesbury, Henry of
Huntingdon, and the other old chroniclers, with help from
such more recent authorities as Buchanan, Holinshed, Cam-
den, and Spelman. It has no claim now to the character of
a reasoned or ascertained History of Britain before the Con-
quest ; nor indeed did it profess to be such at the time. " I
" intend not with controversies and quotations to delay or
" interrupt the smooth course of history/' the author says
near the beginning ; " much less to argue and debate long
" who were the first inhabitants^ with what probabilities, what
" authorities, each opinion hath been upheld ; but shall en-
" deavour that which hitherto bath been needed most, with
"plain and lightsome brevity to relate well and orderly
"things worth the noting, so as may best instruct and
" benefit them that read." Again, in another place, " What
" would it be to have inserted the long bead-roll of arch-
" bishops, bishops, abbots, abbesses, and their doings, neither
" to religion profitable nor to morality, swelling my authors
" each to a voluminous body? — by me studiously omitted, and
" left as their propriety who have a mind to write the ecclesi-
" astical matters of those ages ; neither do I care to wrinkle
"the smoothness of history with rugged names of places
" unknown, better harped at in Camden and other choro-
"graphers." On the same principle, he will not even in-
vestigate legends and fables too sceptically,, but will leave
them in their places in the stream of tradition. "Ofttimes
" relations heretofore accounted fabulous have been after
"found to contain in them many footsteps and reliques of
" something true " ; and, besides, there is a fine relish in
some of the legends themselves. " I have therefore deter-
" mined to bestow the telling over even of these reputed tales,
"be it for nothing else but in favour of our English poets
T t a .
644 LIFE OF MILTON AND HISTOKY OF HIS TIME.
"and rhetoricians, who by their art will know how to use
" them judiciously." Milton's Histbry of Britain before the
Conquest is, therefore, not a work of real research anid criti-
cism, nor even of patient study and luminous coherfeni effect.
It is a mere p6pulstr compilation of such matter as was
easily at hand about thoSe old times, by al man who sfew in
them, for the most part, only a dismal fog of darkness and
barbarismi, and who wrote all the i^hile With a kind of eon-
tempt of the work on which he wafe engaged, but believed at
the same time that a tolerable digest of the strange old stuff
might have its uses. Snth as it was, it was British a,nd
Eugligh stuff, a native tradition from the past of these
Inlands, which ought to be interesting on that account to
modern Englishmeni, and about which no educated English-
man could afford to hk quite ignoratt ; and, though it was
accessible already in various books, a readable reductioii of
it within moderate compass feeemed still a desideratum. It
was such a perfoi'mance that Milton had in view, and he has
accomplished it vely sttccfessfully. His History of Britain,
while it is a fair and careful abstract of the matter of the
fchrohicles for Rotiaan Britain and Anglo-Saion Britain, has
the peculiar merit of containing the most plfedsant short com-
pilation we have of those British legends of the mythical or
pire-Roman period, and those later legends and semi-legeiids
on to Ai-thiir, which have furnished Etiglish poets with their
most charming' themes, aM some acquaintance with which
is therefore absblutely necessary for the student of English
literature. Without ever deceiving in the matter of credi-
bility, and indeed whik sometimes sarcastic in the expres-
sion of his scepticism, he can always give the duel poetic
touch to a striking story. The same faculty accompanied
him into the later portions of his narrative, though one feelS
throughout that his impatience hurries him, and that, even
where there is the fullest light from record, neither person-
ages nor transactions are featured with adequate distinctness.
Amoiig tbe earlier personages Boadicea is sketched with the
most pains, and he does not like her at all, — " a distracted
"woman, -svith as ilikd a crew at her heels,-" a woman "of
Milton's histoby of bbitain. 645
" stature big and tall, of visage grim and stern, harsh of voice,
" her hair of bright colour flowing down to her hips." Of
King Alfred he gives the usual high character, adding that
" much more might be said of his noble mind, which rendered
" him the mirror of princes." He has a qualified word or two
of liking for King Canute. The Norman Conquest is de-
scribed as the easy and necessary result of the worthlessness,
ignoj-ance, and viciousness of jthe English under their last native
kings : " not but that some few pf all sorts were much better
" among them ; but such was the generality ; and, as the
" long-suflFering of God permits bad men to enjoy prosperous
" days wjlth the good, go His severity ofttimes exempts not
" good men from their share in evil times with the bad."
The last quotation illustrates a marked peculiarity of the
book. In his letter to Henry de Brass of July 15, 1657,
giving his opinion of Sallust as a historian and his notions
of the mode in which history should be written, Milton dis-
tinctly objects to the habit of interspersing history with " fre-
" quent maxims or criticisms on the transactions " (ante, Vol.
V. p. 364). His own practice ip the History of Britain is all
tjhe other way. He is perpetually interjecting ethical and
political remarks, sometimes in a sarcastic word or two,
but occasionally in the form of delibeiate and prolonged
parenthesis. A collection of the^e pungenA particles and longer
passages of Miltonism from the total text of the book, as
published in 1670, would fill a good many pages. Sometimes
it is the previous writers from whom he is compiling that
provoke his jibes : e.g. " William of Malmesbury must be ac-
" kno'wledged, both for style and judgment, to be by far the
" best writer of them a,ll ; but wMt labour is to be endured
" in turning ovej volumes of rubbish in the rest, Florence of
'.' Worcester, Huntingdon, Simeon of Durham, Hoveden,
" Matthew of Westminst,er, and many others of obscurer
"note, with 9,11 their monachisms, is a penance to think."
But for monks and inonk^y as such, everything specially
Biomish or Popish, in old English life as well as in literature,
he is constantly on the watch ; the corruptions of the old
clergy and their disastrous influence aje a recurring theme ;
646 LIFE OF MILTON AND HISTORY OF HIS TIME.
and he is as fond df a sneer at the vows of chastity and re-
ligious seclusion by women in the chronicles as at feminine
government and the appearance of women in public affairs.
Here and there his sarcasms glance off into studied parallel-
isms between past and present. Thus, the " gallantry" of
the ancient Britons, " painting their own skins with several
" portraitures of beast, birdj or flower," is " a vanity which
" hath not yet left us, removed only from the skin to the
" skirt, behung no^ with as many coloured ribbands and
" gewgaws." Again, in connexion with the story of the offer
to the British bishops of payment of their expenses by the
Emperor if they would attend a general council of bishops
he had summoned at a distant place, and of the compliance
of only three, whom poverty constrained, and who thought
shame to let their richer brethren piay for them, " esteeming
" it more honourable to live on the public than to be obnoxious
" to any private purse," Milton cannot refrain from this ap-
plication of the moral to the Westminster Assembly : —
" Doubtless an ingenuous mind, and far above the Presbyters
"■of our age, who like well to sit in Assembly on the public
" stipend, but liked not the poverty that caused these to do
" so." Never was a history written, professing only to be a
compilation, in which there was more obtrusion of the per-
sonal sentiments of the author.
In this respect, however, a certain amount of mystery sur-
rounds the book. Did Milton in 1670 send to press without
change the matter which had been lying by him since about
1648, or did he modify it ? Farther, in whatever shape the
book stood adjusted for publication in 1670, did it then leave
the press exactly and in every place as Milton intended?
The words on the title-page. Printed hy J. M. for James
AUestry, need not imply, though they may imply, that
Milton printed the book himself and employed AUestree to
publish it, the rather because there was a London printer of
that day whose initials were "J. M." But that AUestree
should have been the publisher is remarkable in itself. He
had been notoriously a Royalist publisher before the Restora-
tion, and was the same who, in conjunction with Martin and
THE FAITHOBNE POBTEAIT. 647
Dicas, had published Salmasius's posthumous answer to Milton
in 1660, and who, in conjunction with Martin alone, had pub-
lished the second part of Butler's Hudibras in 1663. I have
not found his registration of Milton's History (f Britavn in
the Stationers' Books at the moment of publication ; but there
can be little doubt that he would not have published such a
book unless it had been duly licensed by L'Estrange or some
one else. As the author was Milton, and the book a historical
one, dealing with kings, queens, and old revolutions in Church
and State, the licencer, whoever he was, must have been
especially strict in his revision. Accordingly, the distinct
tradition is that he was so, and that the book underwent
careful official manipulation, and was mutilated by the ex-
cision of passages of the manuscript. It may be a question
whether there were not also additions here and there, touches
by the licencer, which Milton was compelled to accept. There
will be occasion to return to this subject. Meanwhile it will
be well to remember that Allestree was the publisher and
that the work was tampered with to some unascertained
extent ^-
An interesting feature of this volume of Milton's has yet
to be mentioned. With the exception of Moseley's edition of
the Collected Poems in 1645, which contained Marshall's
wretched botch professing to be a portrait of Milton, no
preceding book of his had been put forth with such an
ornament. Prefixed to the History of Britain, however, is a
portrait which seems to have been expressly made for the
purpose. It is a faithfully executed engraving, with this
1 The non-registration of the "book at 1672, I find an entry certifying that
the time of its original publication may Thomas Davies had acquired, " by virtue
have been caused by AUestree's death of an assignment under the hand and
about that time'and'the transference of seal of John Dunmore, citizen and sta-
his business into other hands. I have tioner of Loudon, bearing date the 24th
a copy of the bcfok now before me with of August 1671," the copyright of
a new title-page substituted for that twenty-three 'separate books in one lot,
of 1670 and differing in the imprint " Milton't Histmy of England" one of
thus : — "London, Printed by J. M. for them, while among the others were
Spencer Hickman, at the Bose in St. Sprat's History of the Royal Society,
Paul's Ghv/roh-Yard, 1871." 1 infer that Hooke's Micrography, Barrow's Optics,
Hickman was AUestree's successor, and and the Second Part of Hudibras. Thus,
that his "Rose" in St. Paul's Church- between 1670 and 1672, we have appar-
Yard was AUestree's " Rose and Crown " ently four proprietors of Milton's book
in the same place. Further, in the in succession — Allestree, Hickman, Dun-
Stationers' Registers; under date Dec. 29, more, and Davies.
648 LIFE OP MILTON AND HISTOET OP HIS TIME.
inscription underneath^ "Joannis Miltoni Effigies Mtat: 63.
1670 ", and with the artist's name also inscribed thus : " Gul.
Faithorne ad Fivum Belin. et soulpsit " (" Drawn from the life
and engraved by William Faithorne "). — Faithorne, who had
been in arms on the King's side in the Civil Wars, and
had been some time in exile, had been a well-known engraver
and print-seller in London since 1650, with his shop in the
Strand. He had taken high rank in his professionj and had
executed many engravings, still valued by collectors. He
excelled in portraits ; and among the most notable of his
engravings of this kind Walpole mentions a portrait of
Henrietta Maria, done in Paris, various portraits of English
Royalists of rank after Vandyke, a large emblematical print
of Cromwell in armour, a portrait of Fairfax after Walker,
a portrait of the physician Harvey, one of Sanderson, done
in 1658, one of Hobbes, done in 1664, and portraits of Queen
Catharine, Lady Castlemaine, and Prince Rupert. Pepys was
a not unfrequent visitor at Faithorne's shop and inentions
him and works of hig admiringly; and the poet Flatman
had written of him : —
A "Faithorne sculpsit" is a charm to save
From dull oblivion and a gaping grave '.
Generally, JPaithorne worked from pictures or busts by
other artists ; but sometimes he worked from drawings or
paintings done by himself. He had issued in 1662 a treatise
on engraving, entitled T&e Art of Graveing and Etching, 8fc. ;
and, as this treatise had been published by Allesteee, in part-
nership with Martin and Dicas, the proposal to prefix to
Milton^s Ristory cf Britain a portrait of the author by
Faithorne may have been Allestree's own ^ In any ease, it
was a fortunate proposal, for otherwise posterity would have
had no adequate idea of the visage and look of the real
Milton. Faithorne did the .portrait in crayons, in Milton's
1 Mr. 3. p. Marsh On iU Engramei ningham's London, Art. Sironfi : Pepys,
and Pretended Portraits qf Milton Nov. 7, 1666 and April 9 1669
a860) whence I take Platman's lines ; 2 Eeglstration of Falthorne'a Treatise
English Encyolopsdia, Art. Faithorne, under date March 1. 1661-2.
where the facts are from Walpole ; Gun-
Milton's daughtees in 1670. 649
house or in his own studio in the Strand, and he seems also
to have made an oil-painting of it, with some differences
from the drawing. His engrg,ving for the History qf Britain
was from the crayon-drawing, in which style of art he was
more at home than in painting. No one can desire a more
impressive and authentic portrait of Milton in his later life.
The face is such as has been given to no other human being ;
it was and is uniquely Milton's. Underneath the broad fore-
head and arched temples there are the great rings of eye-
socket, with the blind unblemished eyes in them, drawn
straight upon you by your voice, and speculating who and
what you are ; there is a severe composure in the beautiful
oval of the whole countenance, disturbed only by the sipgular
pouting round the rich mouth; and the entire expression is
that of English intrepidity mixed with unutterable sorrow.
As nearly as can be ascertained, it w^ in or about 1670
that Milton parted with his 'three daughters. The eldest,
Anne, was then twenty-four years of age ; the second, Mary,
was twenty-two ; and the youngest, Deborah, was eighteen.
The experiment of their remaining witJi their father after his
third marriage had been persevered in for about seven years,
and it seems to have been given up at last, not so much on
account of any direct quarrel of the girls with their step-
mother as in consequence of their persistent rebellion against
the drudgery required from them, or from the two younger,
in constantly reading to Milton from Latin, Greek, Hebrew,
French, Italian, and Spanish books. " All which sorts of
" books to be confined to read without understanding one
"word," says Phillips, "must needs be a trial of patience
" almost beyond endurance ; yet it was endured by both for
" a long time : yet the irksomeness of this employment could
'■' not be always concealed^ but broke out more and more into
" expressions of uneasiness." The vigilance of the third wife
had probably stopped the petty pur^oinings of which we
heard at one time, but the alienation of the three girls from
their father, their dissatisfaction with their dull lives in
the same hfxase with him, had increased with their years.
650 LIFE OF MILTON AND HISTOKY OF HIS TIME.
Nothing but books and papers, nothing but papers and
books ! " At length," says Phillips, " they were all, even the
" eldest also, sent t)ut to learn some curious and ingenious
" sorts of manufacture that are proper for women to learn,
" particularly embroideries in gold or silver." This may have
been the stepmother's suggestion. The step, at all events, was
a wise one, and ought to have been taken before. Had they
been the most dutiful daughters in the world, nothing better
could have been done for them, by a father who knew that he
could not leave them means for their sufficient support after
his death, than to put them in the way of earning their own
livelihood by some suitable industry. That chosen seems to
have been the most open and promising in those days for
girls calling themselves gentlewomen. The expense to Milton
for their boarding-out and apprenticeship was, we are in-
formed, very heavy i.
"Whether connected with this change of arrangements in
the house in Bunhill or not, we hear about the same time
of a temporary absence of Milton himself from that house.
" About 1670," says Richardson, " I have been told by one
" who then knew him that he lodged some time at the house
" of Millington, the famous auctioneer some years ago, who
" then sold old books in Little Britain, and who used to lead
" him by the hand when he went abroad." Millington, who
may have been a relative of the regicide Gilbert Millington,
is described as having been " a man of remarkable elocution,
wit, sense, and modesty," and Milton's temporary residence in
his house in Little Britain over the stores of old books may
have been agreeable to both. The picture of their companion-
ship in the streets, the cordial and scholarly bookseller leading
the blind, and now gouty and stiff-limbed, poet gently by the
hand, while they talked together, is one of the pleasantest in
Richardson's . pages. Painter-like, he completes it for us by
telling us how Milton was dressed. " He then wore no sword
" that my informant remembers, though probably he did ; at
" least 'twas his custom not long before to wear one with a
1 Phillips's Memoir, and evidence given in the case of Milton's Nuncupative Will.
PABADISE SEGAINEB AND SAMSON AGONISTES. 651
" small silver hilt, and in cold weatber a grey camblet coat."
The residence with Millington in Little Britain can have
been but for some purpose of a temporary nature ; and, only
adding Millington at this point to the number of Milton's
friends, we must return to Bunhill '.
On the 20th of September 1670 there was this entry in the
registers of the Stationers' Company : " Mr. John Starkey
*' entred for his Copie, under the hands of Mr. Tho. Tomkyns
" and Mr. Warden Roper, a Copie or Booke intituled Paradise
" regayn'd, A Poem in 4 Bookes. The Author John Milton.
" To which is added Samson Agonistes, A drammadic [sic]
" Poem, by the same Author." The volume so registered did
not appear till some little time afterwards, and then with this
title, " Paradise Beffain'd. A Poem. In IV Boohs. To which, is
added Samson Agonistes. The Author John Milton. London,
Printed by J. M.for John Starkey at the Mitre in Pleetstreet,
near Temple Bar. MB CLXXI." On the fly-leaf at the be-
ginning are the words, " Licensed, July 3, 1670." That was
the date on whieh the licencer Tomkyns, the same who had
licensed Paradise Lost, had passed the two new poems for the
press ; and the volume, therefore, though dated 1671, may
have appeared late in 1670. The publisher Starkey was the
same who had published the Accedence Commenc't Grammar
in 1669 ; and, though the words " Printed by J. M. for John
Starkey," may imply that Milton had printed the book at
his own cost, su«h a conjecture is no more necessary than
in the case of the History of Britain, " printed by J. M. for
James Allestry." The same printer, whose initials chanced
to be Milton's, may have been employed by the two pub-
lishers. His work in the two Poems is hardly so satis-
factoiy as it had been in the History. The new volume,
indeed, was handsome enough in general appearance, a small
octavo of 230 pages, the first 113 of which, after the
general title-page, contained Paradise Regained, while the
remainder, with a special title-page and the pages separately
numbered thenceforth, contained Satnson Agonistes. The
1 Eiohardson, pp. iii— iv and p. xciii.
652 LIFE OF MILTON AND HISTORY OF HIS TIME.
paper is thick and the type rather large, with such wide
spacing between the lines as to make the reading easy. But
the printing is slovenly, and the pointing careless throughout,
and sometimiBs very bad. Milton can have had no such excel-
lent deputy for revising th,e proof-sheets as when Paradise
Lost was passing through Simmons's press. These, however,
were but mechanical details. The author of Paradise Lost
had added two new poems to the English language worthy
even of that cojnpanionship.
Among the ra^py subjects which Milton had noted in
1640-1, as fit for poetic treatment, had been eight from New
Testament history. One of these was the death of John the
Baptist; the other seven were from the Life of Christ at
various points, from his Birth to the Agony in the Garden,
the Crucifixion, and the Resurrection ■'•. Not one of these
subjects, however, cori;esponds exa,etly with the subjeict of
Paradise Regained. That su-bject had been suggested to Milton,
as we know, late in 1665, by what the Quakesr EUwood had
said to him, in the cottage in Chalfont St. Giles, while le-
turning the manuscript of Paradise Lost. " Thou hast said
'.' much here of Paradise lost, but what hast thou to say of
^'Paradise fqund?" had been Ellwpod's remauk; to which
rema.rk, as Ellwaod told us, Milton made no answer, but " sat
some time in a muse," and then changed the discourse.
We can see now wji,at occurred to Milton in that brief
"muse" at Chalfont. It occuri;ed to him. that there might
very well be a .sequel to Po-radise Lost, such as Ellwood had
suggested. There could be no narration, indeed, of the re-
gaining of Paradise as a f9,et fully accomplished, to the extent
of the restoration of all that had been visibly and phy^cally
wrecked in the first poem, an(J tbe bringing back of Eden upon
earth. There wa.s no restored Eden upon earth even while
Milton lived and wrote, but sin, war, murder, tyranny, famine,
pestilence, as plentiful as in the generations by- gone, and
with no visible prospect of their cessation or diminution
1 Ante, Vol. II. pp. 111—112.
PARADISE BEGAINED. 653
through the ages yet to come. But there had befen wrought
out in the Life of Christ, as Milton believed, the promise
and certainty, at least, of that perfect redemption which had
been predicted to Adam by the Archangel Michstel at ihe close
of the former poem. By that single life, passed in Judsea
seventeen hundred years ago, Paradise had been regained for
all mankind in the sense that all human beings, from Adaift
himself to his latest posterity, had been poteiitially enabled by
it to possess a paradise within themselves meanwhile, and tO
look forward to the final restitution at that SeCond coming
in which Christ should appear —
"In glory of the Father, to dissolve
Satan with his perverted World ; then raise
From the cohflagrant mass, purged and refined.
New Heavens, new Earth, Ages of endless date.
Founded in righteousness and peace and love."
There might therefore, fitly enough, be ah epic froni the life
of Christ with the title of Paradise Regained and artistically
a sequel to Paradise Lost. But, that it might be artistically
such a sequel, care must be taken to select that portion of the
life of Christ which could be made the most exact counterpoisfe
to the story of the former poein. Now, the part of the
narrative in the Gospels to which Milton was irresistibl;^
drawn by his especial purpose was the Temptation in thfe
Wilderness. It was there that Satto> the conqueror of thfe
world in the former poem by his temptation of Adam and
EvCj reappeared as one fully habituated to the rule of that
world by his possession of it for some thousands of years, but
with the uneasy sense that the prophesied "greater than"
was now alive somewhere that was to wrest it from him. It
was for Milton to resume the story of his former Satan at this
point of his existence, when he was no longer the great rebel
archangel, winging at will through all infinitude, mundane
and extra-mundane, in quest of an empire, but only the
prince of the powers of the air, content with the one bridge
that had been built for him through chaos to connect his hell
with the mundane world, and so accustomed to his self-
selected function, at the centre of that mundane world as to
654 LIFK OP MILTON AND HISTOBY OF HIS TIME.
have lost every lineament of the archangel, and degenerated
into the mere devil of terrestrial meteorology, the magician of
mists and marshes. It was for Milton to bring this changed
Satan by the side of that Second Adam whose advent he
feared, to narrate the temptation by which he sought to find
whether there was also weakness in this Second Adam, and to
exhibit him foiled, exasperated, and put to flight. After the
discomfiture of Satan by Christ in the temptation of the
three days all the rest was certain, though it was yet to come ;
and an epic on that single portion of Christ's life might there-
fore justly entitle itself Paradise Regained. The authorities
would be Matthew iv. 1-11, Mark i. 12-13, and Luke iv.
1-13 ; but, while adhering strictly to these authorities, Milton
could use his own imagination, and could study connexion
with Paradise Lost.
It is possible that the poem was begun in 1665 at Chalfont.
It is possible also that it was finished before the publication
o^ Parad'ise Lost in 1667, and that the wording of some parts
of that poem may have been altered at the last moment to
hint the coming sequel. Our only information on the point
is from Ellwood. Having mentioned Milton's return to
London on the cessation of the Plague early in 1666, he adds,
" And, when afterwards I went to wait on him there (which
" I seldom failed of doing, whenever my occasions drew me to
"London), he showed me his second poem, called Paradise
" Regained, and in a pleasant tone said to me, ' This is owing
" to you ; for you put it into my head by the question you
"put to me at Chalfont; which before I had not thought
" of 1.' " This only certifies that Ellwood saw Paradise Re-
gained in one of his visits to Milton in London after the
Great Plague, but does not certify that it was on the first of
these visits, or even on the second or third. Though the
possibility, therefore, is that the poem was ready in 1667 and
might have then been published with Paradise Lost, the time
of its dictation may have been any time between 1665 and
July 2, 1670, when Tomkyns licensed the manuscript. Phillips
1 EEwood's Life, edit. 1714, p. 247.
PABADTSE REGAINED. 655
ventures on the opinion that the poem was "begun and
finished and printed " by his uncle after the publication of
its predecessor, i.e. between August 1667 and July 1670, — "a
wonderful short space considering the sublimeness of it," he
adds rather oddly;' but this opinion was only from guess.
A move definite piece of information from Phillips is that,
though Paradise Regained was "generally censured to be
much inferior to the other," Milton himself " could not hear
"with patience any such thing when related to him." As
usual, the statement has been exaggerated in the repetition,
so that we commonly hear and read that Milton preferred his
Paradise Regained to his Paradise Lost. There is no warrant
whatever for that idea, but only for the fact that he did not
like his shorter epic to be decried in comparison with his
longer. "Possibly the subject," says Phillips, "may not
" afford such variety of invention, but it is thought by the
" most judicious to be little or nothing inferior to the other
" for style and decorum." That is the criticism which Milton
would probably have accepted, and with which we may now
agree. In 1641, when taking the public for the first time
into his confidence about his literary plans and dream-
ings, Milton had recognised, as among the forms of poetry
open to him, "that epick form whereof the two poems of
" Homer, and those other two of Virgil and Tasso, are a
"difftise, and the Book of Job a brief, model." As his
Paradise Lost had been a Miltonic specimen of the epic after
the more diffuse or complex model, so his Paradise Regained
was a Miltonic experiment in the epic after the briefer
model. So understood, the smaller poem, in four succinct
books, was no less a success than the larger one in ten books
of double length each. The theme chosen was managed
beautifully to its utmost capabilities ; and, liWiMon's Paradise
Regained has not engraved itself into the imagination of the
world so deeply as his Paradise Lost, it is only because the
story of the three days of Christ's Temptation attracts less
than the story of Satan's Rebellion, the Creation of the
Universe, and the Fall of Man.
The smaller epic is even more purely objective in its
656 LIFE OF MILTON AND HISTORY OF HIS TIME.
character throughout than the larger. MiltoA's chief aim was
simply to think out all the details of the story as it is
suggested by the evangelists, and especially by Luke, and to
present them in that form of vivid optical phantasy which
constitutes a poem proper as distinct from a song or lyric.
There are very few poems indeed tha:t possess in so marked
a dfegree this quality of visuality, or pictorial clearness and
Coherence, from first to last :— We see the b^ptisto of Christ
at thirty years of age by John at Bethabara on the Jordan.
We see Christ for the few next days in his mother's housfe
in Bethabara, meditating his proclaimed Messiahship, with
his first disciples already around him. Then we see him
led by his thoughts into the wilderness, and his forty days
of solitary wandering and fasting amid the dreary and dusky
hotrors. On the fortieth day we see Satan's Stealthy ap-
proach to him in the guise of an aged man in rural weeds
that had come to ga:ther sticks or was iii quest of a stray e^e.
We see the temptation begun in its first form of an appeal to
Christ's hungier, a6d we listen to the dialOgtie till the day
ends, Satan withdraws, "bowing low his gray dissimula-
tion," and the shades of night come over the_ desert. — In
the second book, after an episodic account of the perplexity
of Mary a;nd the disciples at Bethabara since Christ's mys-
terious disappearance, and an account also of Satan's consul-
tation with his council of evil spirits, we see the temptation
renewed. Through all the rest of that Book, the whole of
Book III, and two-thirdS of Book IV, we are reading of the
second day's temptation. It consists first of a repetition of
the hunger-temptation of the preceding day, and then of ^
protracted appieal to Christ's ambition. This includes the in-
stantaneous Conveyance of Christ out of the wilderness, by
Satan's magical art, to the top of the specular mount, whence
there is the vision of all the kingdoms of the earth. One can
hardly admire too much the learning and the artistic manage-
ment shown in this kernel of the poem. In the vision of the
kiiigdoms we have a splendid and yet most exact account otf
the political state of the world in the time of Tiberius Csesar.
The world was then bisected into the two grCat empires of the
PABADISE BEGAINEB. 657
Romans and the Parthians, the one mainly western or Euro-
pean, and the other eastern or Asiatic, with Syria as the
debateable land between them. There is an air of Machiavel-
lian ability in the minute explanation of this by Satan and in
his suggestion to Christ of the various ways in which, as
claimant of David's throne or the old Hebrew monarchy from
ilgypt to the Euphrates, he might at that moment strike in
between the Roman and the Parthian and avail himself of
their rivalry. The interjected sketch of Hebrew history from
the time of the Maccabees is also masterly. But our wonder
at so much geographical and historical knowledge, all so poeti-
cally compact and relevant, passes into, new wonder as the
temptation changes its form. The trial of Christ's supposed
ambition of kingship or political power having failed, the
appeal is next to his supposed passion for prophetship,
teachership, intellectual activity and distinction. Here, still
from the specular mount, our eyes are turned from the splen-
dours of Asia and from the Rome of Tiberius, and are fastened
on Greece and Athens. Nothing could be more brilliant in
its rapidity than the summary of the historical glories of
Greek thought and literature; But even that fails to tempt ;
and, Satan's whole labour of the second day having been in
vain, we are swiftly back by his magic from the specular
mount into the wilderness once more. No passage of the
poem is finer than the description of the ensuing night of
stormy rain and lightning, with fiendish gibberings and other
sounds of ghastlinras, around the sleeping Christ. — Morning
rises fair in amice grey after the dreadful night, and there
comes the temptation of the third day, or rather of only part
of that day J for the result of this third temptatipH) the
subtlest of all, is evident in short space. Satan, professing
that he has found Christ unassailable hitherto, and that he
waits only for some indubitable proof that he is the Son of
God to desist from all farther trial of his firmness and confess
himself conquered, conveys him, by another magical journey
through the air, to the topmost pinnacle of the Temple in
Jerusalem. Placing him there, the Tempter solicits his pre-
sumable vanity in its bi^he^t forrp, requesting the single
VOL. VI. V u
658 LIFE OF MILTON AND HISTORY OF HIS TIME,
miracle of his descent without harm, and quoting the scrip-
tural prophecy of him which will then be verified. Christ
replies with another quotation from Scripture, and stands un-
moved. Not so the Fiend. Smitten with amazement, he
falls ingloriously, flying while he falls, and carrying the news
of his defeat and of Christ's victory into the infernal council,
Bound Christ meanwhile there gathers a globe of angels, who
bear him softly down on their wings, as on a floating couch,
into a flowery valley. There rested and refreshed, he returns
home unobserved to his mother's house, after all the angels
have sung the hymn of his proved Messiahship : —
"Now thou hast avenged
Supplanted Adam, and, by vanquishing
Temptation, hast regained lost Paradise,
And frustrated the conquest fraudulent."^
While the poem is thus, like Paradise Lost, mainly and
distinctively one of the objective order, there are, of course,
as in everything that Milton wrote, those peculiar sub-
jective characteristics which we recognise as the Miltonic.
In the sentiments of the dialogue between Satan and Christ,
and more especially in those put in the mouth of Christ and
therefore approved as the best, we can hear Milton himself
speaking and moralizing. Quotation from Paradise Regained
here ought to be for biographical reasons only ; and it will
he enough to ask the reader to re-peruse the following pas-
sages, regarding them as the expression of Milton's notions
of literature in his sixty- second year, when the English
Literature immediately around him was that of the Re-
storation. He distributes his opinions, it will be observed,
between Satan and Christ, making Satan the spokesman for
Greek literature, and then not cancelling what Satan has
said, but only correcting and modifying it, by Christ's as-
sertion of certain diviner grandeurs in the literature of the
Hebrews : —
CLASSIC MTEEATURB, ESPECIAIiLY THAT OP THE GREEKS.
{Satan loquitur.)
"All knowledge is not couched in Moses' law,
The Pentateuch, or what the Prophets T^rote;
PASABISE REGAINED. 659
The GJentiles also know, and write, arid teach-
To admiration, led by Nature's light ;
And with the Gentiles much thou must converse,.
Ruling them by persuasion, as thou mean'st.
Without their learning, how wilt thou with them,
Or they with thee, hold conversation meet ?
How wilt thou reason with them, how refute
Their idolisms, traditions, paradoxes t
Error by his own arms is best evinced.
Look once more, ere we leave this specular mount.
Westward : much nearer by south-west, behold
Where on the ^gean shore a city stands.
Built nobly, pure the air and light the soil, —
Athens, the eye of Greece, mother of arts
And eloquence, native to famous wits
Or hospitable, in her sweet recess,
City or suburban, studious walks and shades.
See there the olive-grove of Academe,
Plato's retirement, where the Attic bird
Trills her thick-warbled notes the summer long'
There, flowery hill, Hymettus, with the sound
Of bees' industrious murmur, oft invites
To studious musing ; there Ilissus rolls
His whispering stream. Within the walls' then view
The schools of ancient gages : his who' bred
Great Alexander- to subdue the world,
Lyceum there; and painted Stoa next.
There thou shalt hear and learn the secret power-
Of harmony, in tones and numbers hit
By voice or hand, and various-measured verse,
jEolian charms and Dorian Ijrric odes,
And his who gave them breath; but higher sung,.
Blind Melesigenes, thence Homer called,
Whose poem Phoebus- challenged for his own.
Thence what the lofty grave Tragedians taught
In chorus or iambic, teachers best
Of moral prudence, with dblight received
In brief sententious precepts, while they treat
Of fate and chance, and change in human life,.
High actions and high passions best describing.
U u 3
660 LIFE OF MILTON AND HI8T0BY OF HIS TIME.
Thence to the famous Orators repair,
Those ancient, whose resistless eloquence
Wielded at will that fierce democraty.
Shook the Arsenal, and fultnined over Greece
To Macedon and Artaxerxes' throne.
To sage Philosophy next lend thine ear,
From heaven descended to the low-roofed house
Of Socrates, — see there his tenement, —
Whom, well inspired, the oracle pronounced
Wisest of men; from whose mouth issued fai'th
Mellifluous streams, that watered all the schools
Of Academics old and new, with those
Surnamed Peripatetics, and the sect
Epicurean, and the Stoic severe."
HEBREW LITSlRATUEE COMPARED WITH CLASSIC.
{Christua loquitwr!)
" Alas ! what can they teach, and not mislead,
Ignorant of themselves, of God much more,
And how the World began, and how Man fell,
Degraded by himself, on grace depending ?
Much of the soul they talk, but all awry ;
And in themselves seek virtue; and to themselves
AJl glory arrogate, to God give none;
Bather accuse him under usual names.
Fortune and Fate, as one regardless quite
Of mortal things. Who, therefore, seeks in these
True wisdom finds her not, or, by delusion
Far worse, her false appearance only meets,
An empty cloud. However, many books,
Wise men have said, are wearisome; who reads
Incessantly, and to his reading brings not
A spirit and judgment equal or superior
(And what he brings what needs he elsewhere seek ?)
Uncertain and unsettled still remains.
Deep-versed in books and shallow in himself
Crude or intoxicate, collecting toys
And trifles for choice matters, worth a sponge,
As children gathering pebbles on the shore.
Or, if I would delight my private hours
PABADISE EEGMNEB. 661
With music or with poem, where so soon
As in our native language can I find
That solace? All our Law and Story strewed
"With hymns, our Psalms with artful terms inscribed,
Our Hebrew songs and harps, in Babylon
That pleased so well our victor's ear, declare
That rather Greece from us these arts derived,
111 imitated while they loudest sing
The vices of their deities, and their own.
In fable, hymn, or song, so personating ,
Their gods ridiculous, and themselves past shame;.
Remove their swelling epithets, thick-laid
As varnish on a harlot's cheek, the rest,
Thin-sown with aught of profit or delight,
Will far be found unworthy to compare
With Sion's songs, to all true tastes excelling,
Where God is praised aright and godlike men,
The Holiest of Holies and his Saints
(Such are from God inspired, not such from thee), ;
Unless where moral virtue is expressed
By light of Nature, not in all quite lost.
Their orators thou then extoU'st as those
The top of eloquence : statists indeed,
And lovers of their country, as may seem ;.
But herein to our Prophets far beneath,
As men divinely taught, and better teaching
The solid rules of civil government, <
In their majestic unaffected style.
Than all the oratory of Greece and Rome.
In them is plainest taught, and easiest learnt,
What makes a nation happy and keeps it so.
What ruins kingdoms and lays cities flat."
Samson, Agonhtes, though pttblished in the same volume
with Paradise Begaitied, had a sepatate title-page, thus: —
" Samsoii Agonistes, A Dramatic Poem. The Author John
Milton. — Aristot. Poet. Gap. 6. Tpayatia ixlij,r}<ns iTjodfetoj
(TTTovbaCas, &c. Tragcedia est imitatio actionis seriae, ^e. Per
miserieordiam et metv/m perfioiens ialium affeefimm lustrutionem. —
London, Printed by J. M. for John Starkey at the Mitre in
662 LIFE OF MILTON AND HISTORY OF HIS TIME,
Fleetstreet, near Temple-Bar. M3CLXZL" We have no
information as to the date of the composition, except what
is conveyed in the poem itself. That certifies it beyond all
doubt as a post-Restoration poem; and the most probable
date is between 1666 and 1670,
The first thing to be remarked about this latest produc-
tion of Milton's muse is that it was in the dramatic form. —
Milton had used that foxm in his youth, in his fragment of
a masque called Arcades, and in his perfect and elaborate
masque of Comus. Not only had those pieces been dramatic
in character; they had been actually written for theatrical
performance by the young members of one noble family,
the latter on a stage in the great hall of Ludlow Castle
on a semi-public occasion. That Milton had not then shared
the antipathy of Prynne and the other straiter Puritans
to the Acted Drama is proved also by the fact that he had
attended theatres freely enough in his college days and
afterwards, and by his admiring references in his earlier
poems to the acted plays of Shakespeare and Ben Jonson.
Even then, it is true, he had been disgusted with the moral
degradation of the theatres, fed as they were for the most
part by " the writings and interludes of libidinous and
ignorant poetasters." As late as 1641, however, when he
had published this disgust, his faith had been in a re-
formation of the stage by State authority rather than in
its prohibition or suppression. " It were happy for the
commonwealth," he had then written, "if our magistrates,
" as in those famous governments of old, would take into
" their care not only the deciding of our contentious law-
" cases and brawls, but the managing of our public sports
" and festival pastimes " ; and he had explained his meaning
farther by advising "the procurement of wise and artful
" recitations " and other " eloquent and graceful enticements "
for the instruction and improvement of the nation, "not
" only in pulpits, but, after another persuasive method, at
" set and solemn paneguries in theatres, porches, or what
"other placed" And, if not then a foe to the Acted
^ Reason of CliorcU-Goveinmeut, 16il.
SAMSON AGONISTES. 663
Draina, much less ha,d he objected to the Drama as a form
of poetic literature. Oa the contrary, he had himself tended
to that form by preference in his meditations, after his
return from Italy, over " something " in English to be " so
written to aftertimes as they should not willingly let it
die," and in his collection in 1640 and 1641 of subjects from
Scripture and from British history from among which he
might select the " something " that promised best. All or
most of those subjects, including Paradise Lost itself, had
been projected in the form of tragedies ; and, though in
announcing his literary aspirations to the public he had di-
lated on the competing claims of the Epic and the Lyric, his
deliberate affection seemed still to be for " those Dramatic
constitutions wherein Sophocles and Euripides reign," and
of which he found Biblical examples in the Song of Solomon
and the Apocalypse^. — So to Milton's twenty-fourth year
and the beginning of the Civil Wars. In the suppression of
the Stage then by the Long Parliament, and in its abeyance
thenceforward till the eve of the Eestoration, he had, doubt-
less, acquiesced without di£Bculty, if only on grounds of
political or social necessity. With this acquiescence, however,
there had come necessarily a weakening of his private affec-
tion for the dramatic form itself. The Acted Drama having
vanishedj there was less of the dramatic taste and instinct
in poetry than there had been, less of inducement to abide
by the dramatic form in writing. Hence, when Paradise
Lost was resumed, it was not as a tragedy with choruses,
but as an q)ic. — But the reinstitution of the Stage at the
Restoration, and the prodigious dramatic bustle of Davenant's
renewed Laureateship, had not been without effects upon
Milton. No more could he witness acted plays, good or
bad ; but of all that Davenant had been doing for his
theatre, and Killigrew for his, and of the plays produced
at the two theatres, and especially the rhymed tragedies
of Orrery, Sir Robert Howard, Dryden, and others, he had
heard and tasted enough in his privacy. Why should he
not revert to the dramatic form himself, in at least one
1 See ante. Vol. II. 117—1X9.
664 LIFE OF MILTON AND KlSTOBY OF HIS TIME.
poetic performance of his later years, if only to show these
rhymers and playwrights what a drama should be ? The story
of the Hebrew Samson had been in his repertory of subjects
for possible dramas since 1641, when he had jotted down
" Samson fursoplioims or Hybristes or Samson Marrying or
Mamnth-Lechi " as a likely subject from Judges Xvi^. He
had jotted down these subjects then on mere poetic specula-
tion, little knowing how much of his own future life was
to correspoBid with the fate of that particular hero of the
Hebrews. The experience had come, coincidence after coinci-
dence, shock after shock, till there was not one of all the
Hebrew heroes so constantly in his imagination as the blind
Samson captive among the Philistines. If he were to write
a scriptural tragedy now, not Abraham, nor Lot, nor Joshua,
nor Gideon, nor Saul, nor David, nor Ahab, nor Hezekiah,
nor any of those others whose lives he had once contemplated
as fit for dramatic treatment, could compete in his regards
with Samson the Wrestler. A tragedy on Samson would be
in effect a metaphor of the tragedy of his own life. That,
therefore, by destiny as much as by choice, was Milton's
dramatic subject after the Hestoration.
In his preface to the poem, entitled " Of that sort of
Dramatic Poem called Tragedy," Milton asserts his con-
tinued or revived belief in the nobleness of Tragedy as a
form of literature, but expounds also his ideal of Tragedy,
and informs his readers what peculiarities they are to expect
in the specimen of Tragedy now before them. " Tragedy,"
he says, " as it was anciently composed, hath been ever held
"the gravest, moralest, and most profitable of all other
" poems ; therefore said by Aristotle to be of power, by rais-
"ing pity and fear or terror, to purge the mind of those
"and siich-like passions: that is, to temper and reduce
"them to just measure with a kind of delight, stirred
"up by reading or seeing those passions well imitated."
Philosophers and the gravest writers in all ages, hfe goes on
to say, have given their testimony in favour of Tragedy
by quoting from the tragic poets ; a verse from Euripides,
' See ante. Vol. II. p. 110.
SAMSON A&omSTHS. 665
quoted by St. Paul, is actually bedded into the text of the
New Testament^} according to one eminent commentator
the whole book of the Apocalypse was a tragedy divided
into acts and choruses ; Emperors and Kings had been
ambitious to write a tragedy ; and one had been written
by Gregory Nazianzen, a Father of the Church. " This is
" mentioned/' he continues, " to vindicate Tragedy from the
" small esteem, or rather infamy, which in the account of
" many it undergoes at this day, with other common inter-
" ludes ; happening through the poet's error of intermixing
" comic stuff with tragic sadness and gravity, or introducing
" trivial and vulgar persons : which by all judicious hath
" been counted absurd, and brought in without discretion,
" corruptly to gratify the people." It is impossible not to
see a reflection here upon the practice of Shakespeare and
others of the Elizabethans. In the present tragedy, at all
events, that fault is avoided. It is a tragedy after the
severe Greek model, rather than after the recent English ;
and of its plot and other merits " they only will best judge
"who are not unacquainted with ^schylus, Sophocles, and
"Euripides, the three tragic poets unequalled yet by any."
The dialogue is interspersed with chorus, after the Greek
manner, still kept up by the Italians ; and the verse in the
chorus is irregular and of all sorts. One of the so-called
unities at least has been studied : for " the circumscription
" of time wherein the whole drama begins and ends is,
"according to ancient rule and best example, within the
" space of twenty-four hours." Formal or numerical divi-
sion into act and scene is omitted, that being only a
custom of convenience for the stage, " to which this work
never was intended." — The last words are significant. They
do not imply that Milton would not willingly have con-
sented to the production of his Samson on the stage had it
been possible. My belief is that he would have regarded
such a production as an example towards the restoration of
1 1 Corinth. XV. 33 : " Evil oommuni' foufid totli in a fragment of Euri'
cations corrupt good manners." Tiie pides and in one of tlie comic poet
Greelf ao translated is an Iambic verse, Menander.
666 LIFE OF MILTON AND HISTOBY OF HIS TIME,
the stage to its right uses, just as my belief is that now
or at any time Samson Agonistes, in prpper hands, might
make a grand stage performance. But, practically, there
was no question on the subject. Neither Killigrew of the
King's theatre, nor Davenant's successors in the management
of the Duke's, wanted any such thing ; nor perhaps would
the authorities have allowed the representation. In short,
Milton had published the tragedy merely as a poem to
be read.
Published at a time when the tragedies most in repute
were such as Orrery's Muatapha, Howard's Indian Queen, and
Dryden's Indian Mnperor, Tyrannic Love, and Conquest of
Granada, the new poem was a lecture in literary art. Critics
would note at once that the dialogue was in blank verse, and
yet that Milton had not deigned even to mention that fact in
his preface, but had treated the demand for rhyme in tragedy
as a temporary hallucination, unworthy of notice. The poem
was therefore Milton's third appearance in behalf of blank
verse in the controversy then raging. In his Paradise Lost
and his Paradise Begaimed, indeed, his championship of blank
verse had been bolder than it was in the Samson, inasmuch as
in the former two he had vindicated its supremacy even in
the epic, where no one had dreamt of seeing it, while in the
last he only added his authority to that of many others in
behalf of the retention of the old English practice of blank
verse for the drama. Still the fact that he had thus kept
to blank verse in his tragic dialogue could not escape remark.
On the other hand, he had introduced some puzzling novelties
of versification in his choruses and the lyrical soliloquies of
Samson. His consciousness that they were novelties appears
from the elaborate sentence on the subject in his preface. In
the verse of his lyrical passages, he there explained, he held
himself free from any law of metrical uniformity ; and, on
examination, critics would see this to be the fact. The
choruses and lyrical pieces are, in the main, in iambic
measure, like the dialogue ; but the lines are of varying
lengths, from short lines of two iambi each to the Alexan-
drine of six iambi. Being also for the most part unrhymed.
SAMSON AGONISTES. 66/
they diflFer in that respect from the so-called Pindarics of
Cowley and others. On the whole the verse in the lyric
parts of Samson may be described as that of the free musical
paragraph, the length of line determined by the amount and
kind of meaning and feeling from moment to moment. There
are, however, two complicating specialities. In the first
place, though the verse in the lyric parts is prevailingly
iambic, yet often there are such liberties as give a trochaic
eifect, and now and then there are the most extraordinary
dactylic or anapaestic touches in single lines or in passages.
In the second place, the free musical paragraph, especially
when the chorus speaks, tends to break itself, by pauses,
into irregular stanzas, and to aid in this there is sometimes
the subtle introduction of a rhyme, and even of a rhyme
quaint in itself, into the flow of the blank. One marks with
interest this curious occasional use of rhyme by Milton in
the lyric parts of his Samson, three years after he had taken
farewell of rhyme, as if for ever, in his prefatory note to
Paradise Lost, In that note, indeed, there had been just a
shade of reserve for rhyme in smaller pieces ; but, even had
there been no reserve, Milton was too exquisite a metrical
artist to feel himself bound by an absolute law. While all his
poems may be studied for their metrical art, the Lycidas of
his early manhood and the Samson Agonistes of his later age
are perhaps the most instructive and illustrative in the matter
of his theory of metrical liberty and artifice. The later poem
is the sterner and more daring in its prosody, as in its sub-
ject and nature ; but both are consummate specimens of
English verse, and they have points in common in that
character ^.
If the critic passed from such minutiae of form and
mechanism to the substance of the poem, the superiority to
all that was contemporary ought to have been equally
apparent. Here was a classic work, simple and strong in
structure, noble and beautiful in thought and language, with
not a languid or flaccid passage in it, but every paragraph
1 The chorus from line 293 to line for some of the peculiarities of verse
329 of the Samson may be referred to described in the text.
66S LIFE OF MILTON AND HISTORY OF HIS TIME.
like wrought metal for weight and finish. It was as if there'
were an English Sophocles or Euripides writing on a Hebrew
subject. Here again, as in Paradise Regained, the optical
coherence of the story was perfect. Milton had studied the
entire history of Samson as it is told in Judges xiii-xvi,
and knew it in its every detail; but what he images forth
in the drama is the last day of the hero's life in his captivity
among the Philistines : — It was a holiday among the Philis-
tines in honour of their god Dagon, and we hear and see
the blind Samson soliloquizing in the open air near his
prison in Gaza, relieved for that day from his task-work, but
with his ankles fettered. The chorus of his countrymen of
Dan comes in, condoling with him and comforting him ; and
his aged father, Manoa, comes in, condoling and comforting
too, and intimating his hope of success in his suit to the
Philistine lords for his son's ransom. Dalila, the treacherous
wife, sails in, decked like a ship of Tarsus bound for the
Isles, and there is the scene of accusation and recrimination
between her and Samson. The Philistine giant, Harapba
of Gath, next strides in, taunts Samson, is answered with
defiance and counter-taunts, and retires Crestfallen, but
threatening revenge. Soon^ accordingly, there arrives the
public officer, sent to bring Samson to the temple of Dagoa,
where the Philistine lords, and a vast multitude with them,
are assembled in festival to the god. They want to see their
great enemy in his slavery and blindness, and be amused by
his feats of strength. He refuses to do wrong to his religion
by attending their heathenish rites. No sooner is the officer
gone with this refusal than a thought occurs to Samson,
which he does not reveal ; and, when the officer returns, with
powers to drag him to the temple by engines if he resists,
he goes willingly. « Go, and the Holy One of Israel be thy
guide," say the chorus watching him depart, they themselves
remaining behind. Manoa, who had gone out on the busi-
ness of his son's ransom, now returns, and informs the chorus
how he has negotiated with the chief Philistine lords one
by one and considers the business nearly concluded. "While
Manoa and the chorus are conversing, there is heard the
SAMSON AGONISTES. 669
great shout which announces that Samson has arrived at the
temple and is under the gaze of his assembled enemies.
The chorus and Manoa then resume their talk, Manoa pictur-
ing the peaceful years which may yet be in reserve for his
son when he is restored to his country, there to be tended in
his blindness, and honoured for his past achievements. The
chorus are sympathizing with the old man and encouraging
his hope, when
" 0, what noise !
Mercy of Heaven ! what hideous noise was that 1
Horribly loud, unlike the former shout."
In consternation, Manoa and the chorus are conjecturing
what the dreadful accident may have been when there runs
in a breathless messenger. He is a Hebrew who had chanced
to be at the temple on the skirts of the Philistine ci-owd, and
had seen Samson brought in ; and now he relates what had
happened. The building was a great theatre, one half of it
arched over and supported by two main pillars in the midst,
the rest open to the sky. Within the covered space, on seats
rising tier after tier, were the lords and all others of any
considerable rank; in the open space was the unprivileged
throng, clustered on scaffolds and benches. Samson had been
brought in, clad in state livery as a public servant, preceded
by pipes and timbrels, and attended by an armed guard.
After the first shout of his reception, he had patiently let
himself be led to the stage where his feats of strength were
expected, and had performed incredibly whatever of that sort
had been demanded. For an interval of rest his guide had
then led him to the central spot between the two pillars;
against which, as if over-tired, he leant a little while, with
his arms outstretched to feel them. He had stooped for a
moment as if praying, and then for the first time had spoken
out. Hitherto, he said to the Philistines, his feats had been
according to command, but he would now perform for them
one more of his own accord.
" This uttered, straining all his nerves, he bowed ;
As with the force of winds and waters pent
670 LIFE OF MILTON AND HISTORY OF HIS TIME.
When mountains tremble, those two massy pillars
With horrible convulsion to and fro
He tugged, he shook, till down they came, and drew
The whole roof after them with burst of thunder
Upon the heads of all who sat beneath.
Lords, ladies, captains, counsellors, or priests,
Their choice nobility and flower, not only
Of this, but each Fhilistian city round,
Met from all parts to solemnize this feast.
Samson, with these immixed, inevitably
Pulled down the same destruction on himself:
The vulgar only soaped, who stood without."
Sucli is the scheme of Milton's drama, and it is impossible
to point out a single particular in which, having chosen for
his subject the Biblical story of Samson's dying revenge,
he has overstrained it for a personal purpose. Neither in
the plot nor in the language of the dialogue or the choruses
is anything forced, anything inserted that is out of keep-
ing with the incidents of the Hebrew legend, as they might
be reconceived for narration by the coolest poetic artist.
The poem indeed was offered by Milton to the public simply
as a specimen of pure and careful dramatic production after
the Greek model. This is seen in his preface, where the
points discussed are exactly such as might have been dis-
cussed in a critical essay by Dryden or Boileau. The marifel,
then, is that this purely artistic drama, this strictly objective
poetic creation, should have been all the while so profoundly
and intensely subjective. Nothing put forth by Milton in
verse in his whole life is so vehement an exhibition of his
personality, such a proclamation of his own thoughts about
himself and about the world around him, as his Samson
Agonistes. But, indeed, there is no marvel in the matter.
The Hebrew Samson among the Philistines and the English
Milton among the Londoners of the reign of Charles the
Second were, to all poetic intents, one and the same person.
They were one and the same not only by the similarity of
their final circumstances, but also by the reminiscences of
their previous lives. That was, no doubt, the great recom-
8A3IS0N AGOmSTES. 671
mendation to Milton in his last years of the sabject he had
thought of only casually, amid so many others, a quarter of
a century before. By choosing that subject he had taken
means to be thoroughly himself once more in addressing his
countrymen, to be able to say what he would as tremendously
as he could, and yet defy the censorship.
Let us look at some of the passages which Mr. Tomkyns
the licencer was oblig^ed to pass for the press because, though
the writer was Mr. Milton, they could not possibly be ejected
from a tragedy on Samson if it were to be allowed to go
forth at all.
Take Samson's soliloquy on his blindness, and think of
Milton as you read : —
"But, chief of all,
O loss of sight, of thee I most complain.
Blind among enemies ! 0 worse than chains,
Dangeon, or beggary, or decrepit age !
Light, the prime work of God, to me is extinct,
And all her various objects of delight
Annulled, which might in part my grief have eased.
Inferior to the vilest now become
Of man or worm, the vilest here excel me :
They creep, yet see ; I, dark in light, exposed
To daily fi:aud,. contempt, abuse, and wrong,
Within doors or without,, still as a fool
In power of others, never in my own, —
Scarce half I seem to live, dead more than half.
O dark, dark, dark, amid the blaze of noon.
Irrecoverably dark, total eclipse
Without all hope of day !
O first-created beam, and thou great Word,
'Let there be light, and light was over all,'
Why am I thus bereaved thy prime decree ?
The Sun to me is dark
And silent as the Moon
When she deserts the night,
Hid in her vacant interlunar cave.
Since light so necessary is to life,
And almost life itself, if it be true
673 LIFE OF MILTON AKD HISTOBT OF HIS TIME.
That light is in the soul,
She all in every part, why was the sight
To such a tender ball as the eye confined,
So obvious and so easy to be quenched.
And not, as feeling, through all parts diffused,
That sh.e might look at will through every pore t
Then had I not been thus exiled from light,
As in the land of darkness, yet in light,
To live a life half dead, a living death,
And buried ; but, O yet more miserable !
Myself my sepulchre, a moving grave ;
Suried, yet not exempt.
By privilege of death and burial.
From -worst of other evils, pains, and wrongs;
But made hereby obnoxious more
To all the miseries of life,
Life in captivity
Among inhuman foes.
But who ai-e these ? for with joint pace I hear
The tread of many feet steering this way ;
Perhaps my enemies, who come to stare
At my affliction, and perhaps to insult."
Though we have had Milton's own word to Philaras that
he had submitted to his affliction without repining, and his
word to Cyriack Skinner that he had not argued against
heaven's will or bated a jot of heart or hope, and though
we have seen the fact for ourselves manifestly enough, there
must have been hours and hours, especially after the Ke-
storation, when this meditation on his blindness recurred
to him overpoweringly, and his d^ection was extreme.
Again, while Samson speaks, let Milton be imagined : —
"Now blind, disheartened, shamed, dishonoured, quelled,
To what can I be useful ] whei'eiu serve
My nation, and the work from Heaven imposed 1
But to sit idle on the household hearth,
A burdenous di-one; to vidtants a gaze.
Or pitied ohject; these redundant locks,
Eobustious to no purpose, clustering down.
Vain monument of strength; till length of years
SAMSOS AGOSISTES. 673
And cedentoiy immliiiffw craze n^ limbe
To a eonten^ptiUe old age ofaeenrB."
Tbe depreseion is at i^ deepest in the £:dloiniig Uneg, the
last dt wludi is among the most pa&dae in the TSngliuli
"ISj flionghtB pmtead
Hiat tfaeae dazk otli« no more t^all treat with Ta^t,
Hor the atSaer li^bt of life e«Hitiniie loi^
But jidd to doable darknes nig^ at h^id;
So zLuch I fied nijr geirial ^nrits droop.
My hopes all flat : Xatme withm me seems
In all her fnoetiong wearj of heneif ;
My race of £^017 ran, and race of shame.
And I shall ehortfybe whh than that rest/*
In one of the ehomees there is this distinct glance at tihe
Bestoration itself with all its taieamstaaces of reaction and of
lerenge on the legiddes, and its effects on Milton's finrtones
in narticolar: —
" God of our hibeti I what h Man,
That thou towards him with hand so Tarioos, —
Or im^tt I say eontzazioos 1 —
Tranper'st tl^ ptmdenee throo^ Us short course :
Kot eveidy, as tfaon ml'st
The angeUc ordos, and isderiar oeatores nmte^
Irradcmal and brotel
"Sor do I name of men the oonmion rant,
That, wandoing looee abont.
Grow np and peririi as t^ summer fly,
"ITp!«/1« witiioat name, no mare remeinb»«d ;
But euA as iboa hast ecAemiij dented.
With gifts and graces emhiently adorned.
To £ome great work, thy g^my.
And pet^le^s ai&ij, whieh in part they e&ct.
Yet toward the^ dms dignified, than oft,
Amidst tiieir hig^ of noon,
Changest thy conntaianoe and thy hand, with no regard
Of lughest &Ton» past
From tiiee on them, <v than to thee of aarnee.
VOL, YU XX
674 LIFE OF MILTON AND HISTORY OF HIS TIMB.
Nor only dost d^rade them, or remit
To life obscured, which were a fair dismission,
But throw'st them lower than thou didst exalt them high, —
Unseemly falls in human eye,
Too grievous for the trespass or omission ;
Oft leav'st them to the hostile sword
Of heathen and profane, their carcases
To dogs and fowls a prey, or else captived.
Or to the unjust tribimals, under change of times.
And condemnation of the ungrateful multitude.
If these they scape, perhaps in poverty
With sickness and disease thou bow'st them down,
Painful diseases and deformed.
In crude old age;
Though not disordinate, yet causeless suffering
The punishment of dissolute days.''
On the general autobiographical significance of the episode
of Dalila's entry and her dialogue with Samson there has
been sufficient remark ; but it may not have been noted how
much of the following, from the chorus on her departure, is
almost literal excerpt from Milton's Divorce Pamphlets, and
how strongly the whole sums up his incurably perverted
opinion of women : —
"Is it for that such outward ornament
Was lavished on their sex, that inward gifts
Were left for haste unfinished, judgment scant,
Capacity not raised to apprehend
Or value what is best
In choice, but oftest to affect the wrong?
Or was too much of self-love mixed.
Of constancy no root infixed.
That either they love nothing, or not long 1
Whate'er it be, to wisest men and best
Seeming at first all heavenly under virgin veil,
Soft, modest, meek, demure.
Once joined, the contrary she proves, — a thorn
Intestine, far within defensive arms
A cleaving mischief, in his way to vu-tue
Adverse and turbulent; or by her charms
SAMSON AGOXISTES. 675
Draws him awry, enslaved
With dotage, and his sense depraved
To foDy and shamefiil deeds, which min ends.
What fiiat so expert but needs most wreck.
Embarked with such a steers-mate at the hehni
Favoured of Heaven who finds
One virtuons, rarely found.
That Id domestic good combines T
Happy that honse ! his way to peace is Emooth :
Bnt virtue which breaks throngh all opposition,.
And all temptaticin can remove,
Most shines and most is acceptable above.
Therefore God's unrversal law
Gave to the man despotic power
Over his female in dae awe,
Nor from that right to part an hour.
Smile she or lonrr
So shall he least confiiEion draw
On his whole life, not swayed
By female nsnrpation nor dismayed."
In the chained Samson's challenge to the giant Harapfaa
may we not read Milton's own unabated pngnadty, his
longing for another Salmasius to grapple with, his chaiing
nnder the public silence to which he is enforced in the midst
of repeated attacks and insults ?
"Thoefore, without feign d shift e, let be assigned
Some narrow place enclraed, where a^t may give thee,
Or rather fli^t, no great advantage on me;.
Then pat on all thy gorgeous arms, thy helmet
And brigandine of brass, thy broad habergeon,
Yant-brace and greaves and gauntlet ; add thy spear,
A weaver's beam, and seven-times-folded shield :
I only with an oaken sudf will meet thee.
And raise such outcries on thy clattered iron.
Which long shall not withhold me from thy head,.
That in a little time, while breath remains thee^
Thou oft shalt wish thyself at Giath, to boast
Again in safety what thou wonldst have done
To Samson, but shalt never see Gath more."
X X 2
676 LIFE OF MILTON AND HISTOBt OF HIS TIME.
The management needed for Milton's escape from punish-
ment at the Restoration, and the variety of opinions in Par-
liament and at Court in his case, seem to be hinted at in
Manoa's account of his negotiations with the Philistine lords
for the ransom of Samson : —
" I have attempted, one by one, the lords,
Either at home, or through the high street passing,
With supplication prone and father's tears,
To accept of ransom for my son, their prisoner.
Some much averse I found, and wondrous harsh,
Contemptuous, proud, set on revenge and spite;
That part most reverenced Dagon and his priests :
Others more moderate seeming, but their aim
Private reward, for which both God and State
They easily would set to sale : a third
More generous far and civil, who confessed
They had enough revenged, having reduced
Their foe to misery beneath their fears;
The rest was magnaminity to remit,
If some convenient ransom were proposed."
But in the entire idea of the drama what else have we than
a representation of the Puritan and Republican Milton in his
secret antagonism to all the powers and all the fashions of
the Restoration ? Who are the Philistines but the partisans
of the Restoration, all and sundry, its authors and abettors
before the fact, and its multitudinous applauders and syco-
phaints through the nation afterwards? Who are the
Philistine lords and ladies, and captains, and priests, as-
sembled in their seats within the covered part of the
temple of Dagon on the day of festival ? Who but Charles
himself, and the Duke of York, and the whole pell-mell
of the Clarendons, Buckinghams, Buckhursts, Killigrews,
Castlemaines, Moll Davises, Nell Gwynns, Sheldons, Morleys,
and some hundreds of others, men and women, priests and
laymen, with even Anglesey, Howard, and Dryden included,
that formed the court-society of England in that most swinish
period of her annals? They were of all. varieties individually,
the more respectable and the less respectable, and some of
SAMSON AGONISTES. G77
them now in friendly relations with Milton j but, collec-
tively, in his regard, they were all Philistines. There were
moments, I believe, in Milton's musings by himself, when it
was a fell pleasure to him to imagine some exertion of his
strength, like that legendary one of Samson's, by which,
clutching the two central pillars of the Philistine temple,
he might tug and strain till he brought down the whole
fabric in crash upon the heads of the heathenish congrega-
tion, perishing himself in the act, but leaving England
bettered by the carnage. That was metaphorical musing
only, a dream of the embers, all fantastical. But was there
not a very real sense in which he had been performing feats
of strength under the gaze of the Philistine congregfation,
to their moral amazement, though not to their physical
destruction? Degraded at the Restoration, dismissed into
obscurity, and thought of for some years, Mdien thought of
at all, only as a shackled wretch or monster, incapacitated
for ferther mischief or farther activity of any kind, had he
not re-emerged most gloriously ? By his Paradise Lost
already, and now by his Paradise Bsgained and this very
Samson Agonistes, he had entitled himself to the place of
preeminency in the literature of that Philistine age,, the
Philistines themselves being the judges. This man,, the'
generous Dry den had said, surpassed them all. And. so
even the closing semi-chorus of the drama, though directly
a chaunt of triumph over Samson's great revenge and end,
will bear, and even requires, an interpretation appropriating
it to Milton himself. No one can study the subtle wording
and curious imagery without seeing that the secondary idea
in Milton's mind was that of his own extraordinary self-
transmutation, before the eyes of the astonished Restoration
world, out of his former character of horrible prose icono-
clast into that of supreme and towering poet : —
" But he, though blind of sight, .
Despised, and thought extinguished quite.
With inward eyes iUumLnated,
His fiery virtue roused
From under ashes into sudden flame,
678 LIFE OP MILTON AND HISTORY OF HIS TIME.
Aftd as an evening dragon caine.
Assailant on the perched roosts
And nests in order ranged
Of tame villatic fowl, but as an eagle
His cloudless thunder bolted on their heads.
So Virtue, given for lost,
Depressed and overthrown, as seemed,
Like that self-begotten bird.
In the Arabian woods embost.
That no second knows nor third.
And lay erewhile a holocaust.
From out her ashy womb now teemed,
Eeyi-ves, reflourishes, then vigorous most
"When most 'unactive deemed ;
And, though her body die, her fame survives,
A secular bird, ages of lives."
And what all the while, to ordiBary appearance, was this
man wlio could be so tremendous still in his self-consciousness
in private reverie ? Only that spare figure, of middle stature
or a little less, whom people saw led about, generally in a gfey
overcoat, by the bookseller Millington, or by some other
friend, in the streets between Bunhill and Little Britain.
There was still a tinge of h«althy red in his fair complexion,
and any trace of grey in his hair did not affect the natural
lightish aubufn ; but he was "beginning to look old, and his
gait was feeble from establis'hed goiit. This disease, certainly
not brought on in his case by a "disordinate" life, had mad«
such advances as to show itself now in the extreme form of
the swelling and stiffening of the fingef-joints by the peculiar
chalky d-eposits called gout-calctili. From accounts of the
gout in medical books one learns that affections of the eye,
ending in loss of sight, are not an unfrequent accompaniment.
There may therefore have been -some organic connexion
between Milton's blindness, total since 1652, and the gout
which had declared itself so strongly in his later years as
then to have superseded apparently every other ailment to
which he had been liable.
As we have to thank Richardson for our best glimpse of
Milton's habits in his last years. 679
Milton walking* out of doors in his later years, so we have to
thank him for our best glimpse of Milton as he was to be
seen about the same time at home in Artillery Walk, Bunhill..
" I have heard many years since," says Kichardson, " that he
" used to sit in a grey coarse cloth coat at the door of his
" house, near Bunhill Fields, without Moorgate, in warm
" sunny weather, to enjoy the fresh air, and so, as well as
" in his room, received the visits, of people of distinguished
"parts, as well as ^quality ; and very lately I had. the good
" fortune to have another picture of him from an aged
" clergyman in Dorsetshire, Pr. Wright. He found him in
" a small house, he thinks but one room on a floor. In that
" up one pair of stairs, which was humg with a rusty green,
" he found John Miltom, sitting in an elbow- chair, black
" clothes, and neat enough, pale but not cadaverous, his
" hands and fingers gouty and with chalk-stones. Among
" other disoouarse he expressed himself to- this purpose : that,
" was he free from the pain this gave him, his blindness
" would be tolerable." Neat black within-doors when visitors
were expected, and rough grey for home desAabiUe, as for out-
of-doors walking,, were therefore Milton's latest ^colours. How
he appeared to visitors Richaj-dsou would have us conceive
more minutely by seminding us tbat he wore his light brown
hair parted from the crown to the middle of the forehead-)
and " somewhat flat, long, and waving, a little curl-ed." The
Paithorne portrait tells us much the same. Of his manner
with his visitors, or with those of them with whom he was
least familiar, the accounts are uniform. " His deportmenli
" was manly amd resolute, but with a gentlemanly aiffability,"
Biichardson had heard ; and, on the whole, the impression
given is that of a stately and deliberate courtesy, with just
a shade of austei-ity. " His voice was musically agreeable,"
says Richardson ; which is .no news, and would not be worth
repeating-, but far a paTticular from Aubrey which may go
along with it. " He pronounced the letter r very hard,"
says Aubrey, having noted the fact himself, and adding this
comment by Dryden, when he and Dryd^n talked of the
peculiarity : " literct canina, the .dog-letter, a certain sign .of
LIFE OP MILTON AND HISTORY OF HIS TIME.
" a satirical wit." Whatever tendency to the satirical went
alon^ with the strong utterance of the dog-letter in Milton's
case showed itself chiefly, of course, in those hours of the day
when he was at liberty for conversation.
His economy of his day, if we may trust Aubrey and
Toland, was very strict. He rose, they say, as early as four
o'clock in summer, and five in winter, but would sometimes,
Toland judiciously hints, lie in bed beyond those hours. In
either case he began the day by having a chapter or two of
the Hebrew Bible read to him by his " man," as Aubrey calls
him, i.e., we are to suppose, by whatever scholar he had in
attendance upon him, for leve or money, as his servant in
such matters. Breakfast downstairs, and then " contempla-
tion " by himself in bis upper room or study, carried him on
to about seven o'clock, when his "man" came to him again
for the solid work of the day in the upstairs room. That
corasisted of reading and dictation till the mid-day dinner,
the man then changing from reader to amanuensis by direc-
tion, and the writing generally being " as much as the
reading," says Aubrey. At the mid-day dinner down stairs,
Milton "took what was set before him," says Richardson,
" which was anything most in season or the easiest procured,"
explains Toland, both agreeing that he was " extraordinary
temperate in his diet " and " no friend to sharp or strong
liquors." He had his. preferences, however, in matters of
diet, like other people, and his wife knew them. Dinner
over, some three or four hours of the afternoon were given
to exercise and recreation. Walking, either out in the neigh-
bourhood, or in his own garden, was always the favourite
exercise ; but some kind of swinging machine served him for
more artificial exercise within doors in wet weather. What-
ever other recreation there was, music was indispensable, and
the organ, or some other instrument, with singing, or listening
to song, whiled away part of every afternoon. At about four
o'clock Milton seems generally to have returned to his own
room again for an hour or so by himself; but from six to
eight he was again accessible to his friends. At eight o'clock
" he went doyim to supper, which- was usually olives or some
Milton's habits in his last years. 681
" light thing ; and after supper he smoked his pipe and drank
" a glass of water, and went to bed." We do not hear of a
pipe at any other time of the day, but may suspect as we
like. Doubtless he was temperate in this as in every other
indulgence. " Temperate, rarely drank between meals," says
Aubrey, thinking that an exceptional trait.
Such being the usual round of Milton's day, visitors
in general, we can see, could take their chance of finding
him between one and four in the afternoon, but were surest
to find him between six and eight. Company with him
at table, either at the mid-day dinner or at the eight-
o'clock supper, can have been but a rare occurrence, when
his brother Christopher dropped in, or a favoured friend or
two were specially invited or were asked to stay. His
daughter Deborah, who could recollect occurrences of the
kind before 1670, while she was still in the Bunhill house,
and also the little afternoon gatherings round Milton there
for talk and music, answered inquiries on the subject long
afterwards by vouching that her father on such occasions
" was delightful company, the life of the conversation, and
" that on account of a flow of subject and an unaffected cheer-
" fulness and civility." The words are Richardson's, from
report to him of what she had said to others ; but the sub-
stance must be hers. Richardson had himself picked up an
anecdote of one of the little musical parties. " In relation
" to his love of music and the effect it had upon his mind,"
says Richardson, " I remember a story I had from a friend
" I was happy in for many years, and who loved to talk of
" Milton, as he often did. Milton hearing a lady sing finely,
" ' Now will I swear,' says he, ' this lady is handsome.'
" His ears now were eyes to him." This is Milton in a
gallant moment; and, for the rest, we may believe Richard-
son when he says, " He was a cheerful companion, but no
"^ joker: his conversation was lively, but with dignity," not
forgetting Aubrey's equivalent summary, " Extreme pleasant
" in his conversation, and at dinner, supper, &c., but satirical."
Of his actual discourse when he was in fullest flow among
his most capable visitors we should have liked to have more
682 LIFE OF MILTON AND HISTORY OF HIS TIME.
specisaens than have come down to us. With his varied
tastes, vast learning^j, and strong memory, the topics ranged
over must have been most miscellaneous; but the few pre-
served Miltoniana of our p-resent date refer exclusively to
his judgments in some literary matters. If talking of Greek
literaturCj we are told, be would go back again and again
on the greatness of Homer, whom he could repeat almost by
heart, and, while always full of admiration for ^sehylus
and Sophoeles, he would resent any depreciation of Euripides
in comparison. Among the Latin poets, while enthroning
Virgil, he had still always a word of liking for Ovid. Among
English poets he wmed aliegiance chiefly to Spenser and-
Shakespeare. His allegiamce to Shakespeare, we can see, was
a something which he couid not help. It was a reluctant
survival of that sense ©f Shakespeare's intellectual prodigi-
ousness which he had ■expressed so enthusiastically in the
" What needs my Shakespeare ? " of his youth, and which
he had striven in vain to subdue since by reflections and
after-earpings. It cost him less to confess openly his allegi-
ance to Spenser. " Milton has acknowledged to me that
Spenser was his original," is Bryden's reminiscence long
afterwards of some saying of Milton's to him in Bunhill
about 167S, to the effect that he had begun his poetical life
as a Spenserian. Of recent English po€*s, his own contem-
poraries, he admired Cowley most. Aubrey ascertained that
Hobbes was not one of his acquaintances, and that he did
not like Hohbes's phitosophy, but " would acknowledge him
to be a man of great parts and a learned man." Einalfy,
his opinion of Dryden, from all of Dryden's that was yet
before the world, was that he was " a rhymist but no poet \"
Milton, in his last years, belonged to no religious com-
munion, and attemied no place of worship. Toland's words
on this subject may be quoted. " In the latter part of his
"life," saysToland, "he was not a professed member of any
1 The collection of minutiiB in this one or two of Ws particulars by tra-
paragraph is from Aubrey, Wood, To- dition through Milton's widow; and
laud, Kichardson, and Newton's Life of Aubrey had interrogated' her, as well as
ffliltou prefixed to his edition of Milton's Edward PhUIips, for additions to his
roetioal Works. Newton obtained notes.
Milton's habits in his last years. 683
"particular sect among Christians; he frequented none of
"their assemblies, nor made use of their peculiar rites in
"his family. Whether this proceeded from a dislike of
" their uncharitable and endless disputes, and that love
" of dominion, or inclination to persecution, which he said
"was a piece of Popery inseparable from alL churches, or
"whether he thought one might be a good man without
"subscribing to any party, and that they had all in some
" things corrupted the institutions of Jesus Christ, I will
" by no means venture to determine ; for conjectures on such
" occasions are very uncertain, and I never met with any of
"his acquaintance who could be positive in assigning the
" true reasons of his conduct." Milton has left us his own
doctrine in the matter. "Although it is the duty of all
"believers," he says, "to join tliemselves, if possible, to a
"church duly constituted (Heb. x. 25.),"— by "church"
Milton meant any congregation of persons meeting volun-
tarily in any place for worship and mutual edification, all
contributing and ofiiciating on occasion though there may
be elected ministers,—;-" yet such as cannot do this conveni-
"ently, or with full satisfaction of conscience, are not to be
" considered as excluded from the blessing bestowed by
" God on the churches." He •claimed the benefit of the
exception himself, partly perhaps on account of his blind-
ness, but mainly because he fonnd no denomination to suit
him. As in his middle life the Baptists and other very
free varieties of Independeats had been most to his taste,
so in his later years he seems to have found much to like
in the religious habits of the Quakers ; but, on the whole,
his hatred of anything like a professional clergy ^ any sem-
blance of officialism or maehinery in religion, had settled
into a disgust at even the simplest formalities of the plainest
conventicle. Richardson has a story showing positively that
Milton's contempt of clergy did not stop at those who
called themselves clergy, but extended even to those humble
Nonconformist preachers whose persistence in gospel ministry
under difficulties he was bound to admire. "Milton had a
"servant,'' he says, "who was a very honest, silly fellow,.
684 LIFE OF MILTON AND HISTORY OF HIS TIME.
" and a zealous and constant follower of those teachers,
" When he came from the meeting, his master would fre-
"quently ask him what he had heard, and divert himself
"with ridiculing their fooleries, or, it may be, the poor
"fellow's understanding: both one and toother probably.
" However, this was so grievous to the good creature that
"he left his service upon it." Eichardson, while vouching
that he had heard the story on excellent authority, wishes
that it were not true. It is certainly a little savage, hut it
is perfectly credible ^.
The next publication of Milton after his volume of 1671
containing his Paradise Regained and Samson Jgonistes was
of a very different nature. It was a duodecimo of 235
pages, with this ill-printed title : '' Joannis Miltoni Angli,
Artis Logiem Plenior InstitUHo, ad Petri Rami Meihodum,
Concinnata, Adjeeta est Praxis Annalytica [sic] et Petri Rami
Vita. Iiihris duohus. Londini, Impensis Spencer Hickman,
Societatis Regalis Typographi, ad insigne Rosce in Cmmeterio
D. Pauli. 1672." ("The English John Milton's Fuller
Treatment of the Art of Logic, adjusted to the method of
Peter Ramus ; to which are added an Analytic Praxis and
a Life of Peter Ramus. In two books. London, at the
charge of Spencer Hickman, Priuter to the, Royal Society,
at the sign of the Rose in St. Paul's Churchyard. 1672 ").
The publisher, it will be seen, is the same who had held
the copyright of the History of Britain for some time in
the preceding year in succession to the original publisher
AUestree^ There is, accordingly, a prefixed portrait of
Milton, re-engraved on a reduced scale from the Faithorne
portrait in that work, with the inscription "W. JDolle sculpsit.
Joannis Miltoni Effigies, estat. 63, 1671." This reduction of
the Faithorne portrait by "W. Dolle, thsugh copying the
original engraving in the main, is not nearly so carefully
done or so life-like.
There must have been some demand for such a book at
1 Eicliardson; xlvli, and MUton's Treatise of Christian Doctrine, Book I.
chap. XX12. 2 Ante, p. 6i5, footnote.
Milton's treatise on logic. 685
the time to induce the printer for the Eoyal Society to
be at the expense of publishing this of Milton's. It
can hardly have been written by Milton, however, for the
occasion. It was probably like his Accedence Gommenc't Gram-
mar of 1669, an old manuscript which he found among his
papers, and thought worth offering to Hickman or giving
to him on Hickman's own request for something from his
pen. It may even have been sketched out in Milton's uni-
versity days at Cambridge, between his taking his B.A. degree
and his passing as M.A. The Ramist Logic, adopted with
fiueh zeal by the Protestant Universities of Europe, in the
last half of the sixteenth century, in opposition to the Aris-
totelian, with which the cause of Eoman Catholicism was
thought to be identified, had been taught, as we know, in
Cambridge before Milton was a student there, especially
by George Downam, praelector of Logic in the University
from 1590 onwards ^ The controversy between Ramism
and Aristotelianism, therefore, may have been raging rather
fiercely in the Cambridge colleges during Milton's residence
in Christ's from 1625 to 1632 ; and the most natural sup-
position respecting the present book is that Milton, always
disposed to revolt from authority, took the Ramist side, and
had qualified for that side by compiling the material after-
wards worked up into this Latin digest of the Ramist Logic.
It is not of thrilling interest, and indeed conveys the idea
that Ramus's Logic, memorable though Ramus himself was
as a sE'rotestant and a victim of the St. JBartholomew mas-
sacre, was a mere audacious bungle, concocted in a spite
of phrenzy against the good old Roman Catholic Aristotle.
Fir-st, in a few introductory pages, Milton speaks of the
importance of Logic, and of th« desirableness of a fuller
account of the Ramist Logic and its developments than could
be obtained in Ramus's own writings. Then he defines
logic to be "the art of reasoning well," and treats it as
consisting of two parts or processes, — the " Invention " of
arguments and their "Disposition" or "Arrangement." He
devotes a book to each of these subjects. The first book,
1 See ante. Vol. L p. 231.
686 LIFE OF MILTON AND ■ HISTOKY OF HIS TIME.
whicli is mainly De Argumentorwm Inventione, consists of
thirty-three chapters, and the second book, which is headed
De Argumentorum JDisposifdone, of seventeen chapters, with
certain interpolations. The treatise, it will be seen, proceeds
so far in the track of the Ancient Rhetoric rather than in
that of the Ancient Logic proper. " Oportet in Oratore esse
Inventionem, Dispodtionem, Elocutionem, Memoriam, et Pronun-
tiationem " is Cicero's enumeration of the requisites of Rhetoric
or Oratory; and the first three, Invention, Disposition, and
Style, under the names of irtorts, t&^is, and ki^is, constitute
in fact the whole art and science of Rhetoric in Aristotle's
famous treatise on that subject. Milton, therefore, follow-
ing Ramus, assumes into Logic two-thirds of what Aristotle
and Cicero regarded as Rhetoric, thus treating Logic less as
the formal science of the laws of thought than as the Art
of Popular Reasoning, and leaving for Rhetoric nothing of
the abstruser portions of that art, but only Style or Diction,
or that together with Cicero's, Memoria and Pronuntiatio, —
to wit. Mnemonics' and Delivery. Much of the treatise, at all
events, is made up of excerpts or suggestions from Aristotle's
Rhetoric and Cicero's miscellaneous Rhetorical writings, what-
ever of soldering matter there may be from Ramus. The
Syllogism is discussed but imperfectly. The appended Praicis
Anah/tica is from one of Downam's commentaries on Ramus ;
and the appended Life of Ramus, which may have been an
addition to suit the book for publication in 1673, is a brief
abridgment of the Life of Ramus by the German Joannes
Thomas Freigius, who died in 1583. On the whole, though
one looks with interest, at the examples from the classic
poets given in illustration of the abstract terms and rules,
the entire performance, as a Digest of Logic, may be
called disorderly and unedifying. That Milton thought it
worth publishing in his last years ought, however, to re-
commend it tO' a more minute examination than it has yet
received from those who are curious in the history of Logic
in England^.
^,\?°^^\^ ^"^^fs gives an edition of as 1670 ; but my own judgment and
Milton s Arlis Logiece Inttttutto as early that of others Is that the book appeared
SECOND EDITION OF THE MINOR POEMS. 687
The year 1673 was marked by two publications of Milton
which are accepted now as more in his own line. One was
a new edition of his Minor Poems with this ti^le : — " Poems,
Sfc, upon Several Occasions. By Mr. John Milton : Both English
and Latin, 8fc. Composed at several times. With a small
Tractate of Education to Mr. Hartlib. London, Printed for
Tho. Bring at the White Lion next Chancery Lane End, in
Fleet-street, 1673." In some copies the imprint gives "for
Tho. Bring at the Blew Anchor next Mitre Court over against
Fetter Lane in Fleet-street, 1673," as if Dring had changed
his premises in the course of the year. The volume is a very
pretty and neatly printed small octavo of 290 pages in all,
the Latin poems following the English with a separate title-
page and numbering of the pages, and the reprint of the
tract to Hartlib coming at the end. In some copies there
is a repetition of DoUe's reduction of the Paithorne portrait
of Milton used for the Treatise on Logic-. The other Milton
publication of the same year was a much poorer speeimen
of typography. It was a small quarto tract of sixteen pages,
with this title : — " Of True Religion, H&resie, Schism, Tolera-
tion, And what best means may he us'd against the growth of
Popery. The Author J. M. London, Printed in the year, 1673."
The absence of any printer's- or publisher's name, the use of
Milton's initials only, and the general appearance of the tract,
the last page of which is huddled into smaller type than the
rest, suggest that the publication was by Milton himself at
his own risk, and in evasion of the press law.
The second edition of the Minor Poems is, of course, in the
main a reprint of the first edition in the Moseley volume of
1645^. But there are some changes. Moseley's fine little
preface to the first edition, entitled "The Stationer to the
first in 1672. As there are subsequent nends Poemata. Qmrvmpleraqueintra
copies with the date 1673, it has. been Armwm tBiatie Vigedrmm, Coneeripdt.
nsual to speak of a " second edition " in Nunc primwm JSdita. Londini, Exeu-
that year. I suspect there was only a debat W. B. Anno 1673." Here, while
newly dated title-page for the unsold the proper alteration is madte in the
copies of 1672. corresponding title-page of the edition
1 The printer; indeed,, adhered too of 1645 (see it ante.VoL.ni.p. 452) so
strictly in one instance to the Moseley far as the printer's name and the dating
volume of 1645. The separate title-page are concerned, the words " Nunc prirmim,
to the LatinPoems in the Second Edition edila " are retained inadvertently,
runs thus; — "Joarmis MiUoni Londi- ' _ ■
688 LIFE OF MILTON AJ^'D HISTORY OF HIS TIME,
(Reader," is omitted, as afe also Lawes's dedication of the
Comus to Lord Brackley in 1637 and Sir Henry Wotton's
letter to Milton in praise of Comm in 1638. It is the less
easy to account for these omissions of praise of the English
poems because the foreign Be Authore Tesiimonia, from Manso,
Salsilli, Selvaggi, Francini, and Dati, are all duly retained
at the beginning of the Latin poems. Probably the author
of Paradise Lost thought his English poems did not now
need praise, even from Sir Henry Wotton. More extensive
than the omissions, however, are the additions. To the ten
Sonnets which had appeared in the edition of 1645 there are
now added nine more: to wit, the two on the reception of
his divorce pamphlets (XI. and XII.), that to Henry Lawes
(XIII.), that on the death of Mrs. Catherine Thomson (XIV.),
the famous Piedmontese sonnet (XVIII.), the sonnet on his
blindness beginning "When I consider " (XIX.), that to young
Lawrence (XX.), the first sonnet to Cyriack Skinner (XXL),
and the sonnet to the memory of his second wife (XXIIL),
These were all that Milton had written in the sonnet form
since 1645, with the exception of his sonnet to Fairfax (XV.);
that to Cromwell (XVI.), that to Vane (XVII.), and the
second sonnet to Cyriack Skinner, beginning " Cyriack, this
three-years' day" (XXL). These four sonnets were neces-
sarily excluded from a volume of the year 1678 by the
nature of their political references. The same objection did
not apply to the lines, or sonnet prolonged, entitled " On the
New Forcers of Conscience under the Long Parliament,"
the anti-Presbyterian invective of which would be welcome
enough after the Restoration. The lines were, accordingly,
among the added pieces. So were the translations that had
been done at various times since 1645 : to wit, the fifth
of the first book of Horace, Psalms i-viii. in service metre
ode (done in April 1648), and Psalms Ixxx-lxxxviii. in
various metres (done in August 1653). Yet two other pieces
not printed in the Moseley volume appeared among the
English poems in the new or Dring edition. They were the
elegy " On the death of a Pair Infant dying of a cough,"
and the fragment entitled " At a Vacation Exercise in the
SECOND EDITION OF THE MINOK POEMS. 689
College." As the first had been written in the winter of
162.5-6 on the death of Milton's infant niece, and the second
for a college festivity at Cambridge in 1628, they are among
the most juvenile of Milton's pieces. One guesses that Milton,
who had been recently directing a search among his old
papers, and had in this way turned up his manuscript digest;
of Ramist logic, recovered these two poems unexpectedly;
aod the guess is confirmed by the. fact that the second of
the two is out of its chronological place in the Dring volume,
as if it had been sent for inseijtion while the volume was at
press. Altogether the English additions in the volume were
not unimportant. The Latin additions consisted only of the
short piece entitled Apologus de Rustico et Hero, written at.
some uncertain date after 1645, and the longer ode Ad
Joannem RousruM, written in January 1646-7. The former
was now appended to the book of Elegies, and the latter to
the Sylvse. Among the sylvse was now also included the
pungent Greek epigram which Milton had caused Marshall
to engrave under the portrait in the Moseley volume of
1645 in abuse of his own handiwork. The portrait itself
was dismissed into ignominious oblivion, but Milton would
not lose the epigram. It re-appeared, therefore, in the text
of the Dring volume, with the heading In Effigiei ejus sculp-
The publication of the new edition of the Minor Poems in
1673 was most natural and judicious. The Moseley volume
of 1645 having become scarce, people had almost forgotten
that Milton had been a poet long before he had been a
pamphleteer. They had now the proof in their hands in the
form of a handsome little volume^ containing those earlier
miscellanies which would have entitled Milton to a memorable
place among English poets, even though he had not lived to
be the author of Pa/radi&e Lost, Paradise Regained, and Samson
Agonistes. It was not of no consequence even to the author
of these great poems that the contemporaries of his later
age, thirteen years now after the Restoration,, should have
the opportunity of reading pleasantly not only nearly all his
Sonnets, arranged in series, but also his Ode on the Nativity,
VOL. VI. Y y
690 LIFE OF MILTON AND HISTORY OF HIS TIME.
his Ij Allegro and U Penseroso, his Comus, his Lyeidas, his
Maiimis, and his Epitaphium Bamonis, written in the ddys of
their forefathers, before most of them were bom. There was
some sig-aifieance also in the reprinting' of the Letter on
Education to Hartlib, to be an appendage to the poetry of
the new volume. *^ Of Education. To Muster Samuel Hartlib.
Written above twenty years since" is the heading of the re-
print. Milton held the doctrine of the tract in some value
still; on its first appearance in July 1644 it had been but
an anonymous thing in small type, and had probably had
no great circulation ^ ; and people might now peruse it more
at leisure, presented in larger type and with the name of
the author distinctly in front of it.
But what shall we say to Milton's reappearance once more
about the same time in his old and hazardous character of
political pamphleteer? Nothing can show more strongly
the inveteracy of his interest in public affairs, his passion
for inserting his hand into any current controversy, than
the publication in 1673 of his tract Of True Religion, Heresy,
Schism, Toleration, and the growth of Popery. Were not
Pcetry, Latin Grammar, British History, and Logic suf-
ficient to occupy the blind old political offender, that he
must venture once more on ground so perilous to him here-
tofore ? That Milton was aware that this question might be
asked appears from his having put forth the tract irregularly,
without printer's name, and apparently without licence. As
he gave. his initials, which were as good in his case as his
name in full, the publication cannot be called clandestine.
But, in fact, his venture becomes explicable enough when
we remember the state of public affairs at the time and read
the tract itself.
Charles's Declaration of March 15, 1671-2, suspending
by his own prerogative the penal statutes against Non-
conformists, and granting them liberty of worship again,
under certain restrictions, in meeting-houses licenced for
the purpose, had brought on, it will be remembered, the
1 See ante, Vol IH. p. 233.
TRACT ON TEUE EELIGION ASTD TOLERATION. 691
most extraordinary wave and conflict of English opinion on
the subjects of religion and church-policy that there had
been since the Uniformity Act and its St. Bartholomew
consequence in 1662. As the Declaration had come out and
been put into effect in the long interval of nearly two years
between the Ninth Session of the Cavalier Parliament and
the Tenth, the conflict through the year 1672 had been
popular only and not Parliamentary. The mass of the
Church of England clergy and Cavaliers were alarmed and
indignant, and began to question their own doctrine of Royal
Prerogative when they found it turned in favour of the Non-
conformists. The Nonconformists themselves were perplexed.
On the one hand, they were thankful for the enormous relief
brought them in the release of so many of them from jails,
and the restored privilege of their tabernacles and congre-
gations. On the other hand, they could not be indifferent
to the fact that this relief had not been regular or consti-
tutional, but by the King's grace merely, on the assumption
of a doctrine of royal prerogative in ecclesiastical matters
which it would be dangerous to admit, if only because he
might annul or reverse by prerogative to-morrow what he
had done by prerogative to-day. Thus strangely drawn, at
the expense of their own immediate interests, into a kind of
co-operation on the constitutional question with their op-
ponents and persecutors, the mass of the Nonconformists were
drawn into such co-operation yet more strongly by another
sentiment, which they and the mass of Church of England
men had in common. Charles's policy of toleration for the
Nonconformists was motived mainly by his attachment to
the Roman Catholic interest, and was, in fact, as we now
know, part and parcel of his secret agreement with Louis XIV,
with the cognisance of some of his ministers only, for his own
profession of the Roman Catholic faith and its re-establishment
at his leisure in his dominions. Though not known in detail at
the time, all this had been substantially ascertained or guessed
by Church of England men and Nonconformists alike j and
hence a unanimous " No Popery" cry among them, blended
with their criticisms of the Declaration of Indulgence. Of
■■x y a
69.2 LIFE OF MILTON AND HISTOBY OF HIS TIME,
the Nonconformist sects only the Quakers seem to have with-
stood this combination of the "No Popery" excitement with
the question of the prerogative, and to have been willing not
only that the toleration should come by mere grace from the
King's own hands, as it was forbhcomimg from no other
quarter, but also that the Roman Catholics should, have their
full share of the benefit. Pfesbyterians, Independents, Bap-
tists, and Nonconformists generally, agreed to subordinate
or postpone their own immediate interests to the great cause
of the preservation of the national Protestantism, and won
good opinions by their moderation where good opinions of
them had. been hitherto scarce. — Such had been the con-
dition of matters when the Parliament met for its Tenth
Session, Feb. 4, 1673-3, the chief ministers of the Cabal
being then Lord Chancellor Shaftesbury and Lord Treasurer
ClifiTord. The results of that memorable short session, which
ended on the 29th of March 1673, will be in the reader's
recollection. Charles and his ministers baffled and subdued ;
the Royal Declaration of Indulgence to Dissenters cancelled
and apologized for; the right of suspending statutes in
matters ecclesiastical asserted for Parliament only ; emphatic
addresses and resolutions against the encroachment of Popery
registered and published ; and the Test Act passed, disabling
all Roman Catholics for public employments: such is the
summary. That short " No Popery" session broke Charles's
scheme of the Catholicity to pieces, compelled him to be
content with crypto-Catholicism for himself for the rest of
his life, and handed over the open representation of Roman
Catholicism in England thenceforth to the Duke of York,
disabled by the Test Act. It dismissed Clifford to privacy
and suicide, shook the Cabal, and taught Shaftesbury a new
and more popular course of tactics. — In reward to the Non-
conformists for their moderation and acquiescence, it had been
part of the business of the session to promise them a Par-
liamentary substitute for the cancelled Royal Declaration.
The brevity of the session, however, had prevented the pass-
ing of the Bill which had been brought in for the relief of
Nonconformists. Through the rest of 1673, therefore, or at
TRACT ON TRUE EELIGION AND TOLERATION, 693
least till Parliament should meet again, they had to live on
hope. There was meanwhile the satisfaction of joining with
the rest of the nation in the " No Popery" acclamations and
rejoicings, and at the same time discussing the various ques-
tions respecting the future of Nonconformity which the
Royal Declaration and the j)romise of a substitute had stirred.
Ought the Nonconformists to be content with a mere tolera-
tion outside the Establishment, or ought they to press for
more or desire more? Was re-comprehension of the whole
body, or of a portion of it, within the Establishment, to be
argued for or regarded as a possibility? Some of the pro-
ceedings under the King's Declaration of Indulgence had
pointed to a scheme of concurrent endowment as perhaps
more practicable to some extent than re-comprehension : was
it expedient to steer in that direction ? Such were- the ques-
tions with which the Nonconformists had occupied them-
selves through 1672 and with which they continued to occupy
themselves through 1673. The Presbyterians and some of
the Independents favoured the notion of re-comprehension or
concurrent endowment; but the mass of the Independents,
Baptists, and sects generally, the duakers of course included,
wanted only a toleration.
Milton's tract was one of matny, most diiseordamt amomg^
themselves, which the juncture called forth. It was a very
plain and simple, not to say feeble, performance. For the
quintessence of Milton's views on the religious and ecclesi-
astical question, we must go to his pre-Restoration pamphlets;
the Miltonism of this one is very diluted indeed. There is
no thunder whatever and very little lightning, nothing of
that disestablishment notion which we know to have been
his cardinal one, nor anything insulting or even appreciably
disrespectful to the Church or the Monarchy of the Restora-
tion. From all expression of that kind he was precluded,
and he adjusted himself to the necessity. His tract, in short,
is his adhesion to the populw "-No Popery " vote of the day,
with an implied advice to the Nonconformists not to dream
of re-comprehension within the iEstablishment, but .to be
content with a toleration beyond its pale, and also with an
694 LIFE OF MILTON AND HISTORY OF HIS TIME.
exposition of the reasonableness of such a toleration of all
professedly Christian sects, except only the Roman Catholics.
The following quotations contain the whole theoretical sub-
stance of the tract : —
True Seligion : — " True Religion is the true worship and service
of God, learnt and believed from the Word of God only. No man
or angel can know how God would be worshipped and served unless
God reveal it. He hath revealed and taught it us in the Holy
Scriptures by inspired ministers, and in the Gospel by his own
Son and his Apostles, with strictest command to reject all other
traditions or additions whatsoever . . . With good and religious
reason therefore all Protestant Churches, with one consent, and
particularly the Church of England in her thirty-nine Articles
(Articles 6th, 19th, 20th, 21st, and elsewhere), maintain these
two points as the main principles of true religion : that the rule
of true religion is the Word of God only ; and that their faith
ought not to be an implicit faith, — that is to believe, though as
the Church believes, against or without express authority of
Scripture.''
Heresy or False Religion : — " Heresy therefore is a religion
taken up and believed from the traditions of men and additions
to the Word of God. Whence also it follows clearly that of all
known sects or pretended religions at this day in Christendom
Popery is the only or the greatest heresy, and he who is so for-
ward to brand all others for heretics, the obstmate Papist, the
only heretic."
Seasonablmess of mutual toleration among all Protestant
Religionists :—" Sects may be in a true Church as well as in a
false . . . Heresy is in the will and choice profestly against
Scripture; Error is against the will, in- misunderstanding the
Scripture after all sincere endeavours to understand it rightly . . .
The Lutheran holds consubstantiation : an error indeed, but not
mortal. The Calvinist is taxed with predestination, and to make
God the author of sin: not with any dishonourable thought of
God, but, it may be, overzealonsly asserting His absolute power,
not without plea of Scripture. The Anabaptist is accused of deny-
ing infants their right to baptism: again, they deny nothing but
what the Scripture denies them. The Arian and Socinian are
charged to dispute against the Trinity: they affirm to believe
TEACT ON TEUE EELIGION AND TOLEEATION. 695
the Father, Son, and Holy Ghost, according to Scripture and the
Apostolic Creed. As for terms of Trinity, Triunity, Co-essenti-
ality, Tripersonality, and the like, they reject them as scholastic
notions, not to be found in Scripture ; which, by a general Protes-
tant maxim, is plain and perspicuous abundantly to explain its
own meaning in the properest words belonging to so high a matter
and so necessary to be known : a mystery indeed in their sophistic
subtleties, but in Scripture a plain doctrine. Their other opinions
are of less moment. They dispute the satisfaction of Christ, or
rather the word satisfaction, as not Scriptural; but they acknow-
ledge him both God and their Saviour. The Arminian, lastly,
is condemned for setting up free will against free grace; but that
imputation he disclaims in all his writings, and grounds himself
largely upon Scripture only. It cannot be denied that the authors
or late revivers of all these sects or opinions were learned, worthy,
zealous, and religious men, as appears by their lives written, and
the same of their many eminent and learned followers, perfect and
powerful in the Scriptures, holy and unblameable in their lives ;
and it cannot be imagined that God would desert such painful and
zealous labourers in his Church, and ofttimes great sufferers for
their conscience, to damnable errors and a reprobate sense, who
had so often implored the assistance of his Spirit . . . What
Protestant, then, who himself maintains the same principles and
disavows all implicit faith, would persecute, and not rather charit-
ably tolerate, such men as these, unless he mean to abjure the
principles of his own religion ? If it be asked how far they should
be tolerated, I answer, — Doubtless equally, as being all Protestants ;
that is, on all occasions, to give account of their faith, either by
arguing, preaching in their several assemblies, public writing, and
the freedom of printing."
Piypery not to he tolerated : — " Popery is a double thing to deal
with, and claims a twofold power, ecclesiastical and political, buth
usurped, and the one supporting the other . . . The Pope, by this
mixed faculty, jjretends right to kingdoms and states, and especi-
ally to this of England ; thrones and unthrones kings, and absolves
the people from their obedience to them; sometimes interdicts to
whole nations the public worship of God, shutting up their churches;
and was wont to drain away greatest part of the wealth of this then
miserable land, as part of his patrimony, to maintain the pride
and luxury of his court and prelates ; and now, since through the
696 LEPE OF MILTON AND HISTOBY OF HIS TIME.
infinite mercy and favour of God we have shaken off his Babylonish
yoke, hath not ceased, by his spies and agents, bulls and emissaries,
once to destroy both King and Parliament, perpetually to seduce,
corrupt, and pervert as many as they can of the People. "Whether
therefore it be fit or reasonable to tolerate men thus principled
in religion towards the State I submit it to the consideration
of all magistrates. ... As for tolerating the exercise of their
religion, supposing their state-activifcies not to be dangerous, I
•answer that toleration is either public or private, and the exercise
of their religion, as far as it is idolatrous, can be tolerated neither
way : not publicly, without grievous and unsufferable scandal given
to alLeonsoientious beholders ; not privately, without great offence to
God . . . Are we to punish them by coiiporal punishment, or fines
in their estates, upon account of their religion ? I suppose it
stands not with the clemency of the Gospel, more than what
appertains to the security of the State. But first we must remove
their idolatry and all the furniture thereof, whether idols, or the
mass wherein they adore their God under bread and wine . . .
If they say that by removing their idols we violate their con-
sciences, we have no warrant to regard conscience which is not
grounded on Scripture."
This, from Milton in 1673, may disappoint those who re-
member -the vast throb of his utterances for religious and
intellectual liberty through the series of his greater pamphlets
from 1641 to 1660. If he had not been a tolerationist thea
absolutely and uniyersally, at one with Roger Williams and
John Goodwin in expressly advocating liberty in every State
for Jews, Turks, anti-Scripturists, and Atheists, as well as for
all varieties of Christians, the drift of his reasonings, and
especially his repeated protests that the sphere of conscience
and religion is distinct from that of the civil magistrate, had
always indicated a sympathy with the doctrine and spirit of
absolute toleration rather than with any scheme of toleration
limited. Compare, for example, the extracts given at pp. 583-
584 of Vol. V. from his Treatise of Civil Power in Ecclesias-
tical Causes, ^published in 1659, with the extracts just given
from his True Religion, Heresy, Schism, and Toleration, of 1673.
In the former we found him laughing at the word "heresy"
TRACT ON TRUE RELIGION AND TOLERATION. '697
as a mere hobgoblin word, "no word of evil note" really^
but only a Greek word for " the choice or following of any
opinion, good or bad, in religion or any other learning."
Now he re-de'fines the word opprobriondy as the wilful choice
of religious opinions without or against Scripture authority,
and he affixes it to Eoman 'Catholicisni in particular. Then,
though he had not positively asserted that no action ought to
be taken against Roman CathioHc% non-Christian religionists,
or anti-Christians, he had slurred over the subject as a dis-
agreeable one, remarking that the reasons for not tolerating
the Roman Catholics were political rather than religious, and
hinting that the prohibition of the "public and scandalous" ex-
ercise of non-Christiam religions anight be enough. , He comes
forward now with a doctrine of toleration which throws Jews,
Turks, and all non-Christians or anti-Christians overboard
by iraplication, and he declares that Roman Catholic worship
is not to be tolerated either in public or in private. " We
have no warrant to regard conscience which is not grounded
on Scripture " is now his unmitigated maxim. How had he •
shrunk into this rigidity, this narrowness? The times had
changed, and Milton with them. Rudely disenchanted of his
former great dreams of disestablishment, an absolute divorce
of Church from State, as the one sovereign way to universal
spiritual liberty, he had steeled himself to think of what
would suit facts and circumstances. At the same time there
had been a growing intensification, we may say induration,
in "his own heart and mind of his habitual worship of the
Bible as God''s one revelation of himself to mankind, and the
infallible and exhaustless source of instruction for the human
spirit. These two considerations going together,^present
expediency and his personal conviction that the one sheet-
anchor for the soul of 'every man in this world of uncer-
tainties is the Bible, — ^there was evolved the Miltonic doctrine
of toleration for 1'673. Until and without the acceptance of
the Scriptures, no liberty of conscience-; after and with that
acceptance, all liberty ! Practically in England at the time
this was a very broad platform of limited toleration, broader
than any which had ever been proposed by Owen or others
698 LIFE OF MILTON AND HISTORY OF HIS TIME.
of the Limited Toleration Nonconformists. Episcopalians of
the Established Churchy and Presbyterians, Independents,
Baptists, and all other sects of Protestant Christians, out of
that Church, inasmuch as they all professed faith in the Bible
as the one authority in religion, were to have equal rights
in the interpretation of the Bible, and were to tolerate all
differences among themselves arising from differences of in-
terpretation. Arians and Soeinians are included by name,
the very class of heretics about whom there had been most
horror and most difficulty in the schemes of limited toleration
hitherto. What proportion of the English population re-
mained unprovided for? Milton takes no notice of the
Quakers, and it does not appear from the tract what he
would have done with those good friends of his. Probably
he meant that they should be included among the Protestant
sects, though their doctrine about the Bible as a rule of faith
was slightly under the common Protestant mark. For the rest,
why should he trouble himself? Jews, Turks, and the like
were not numerous in England j and such as resided there
were foreigners, whose exceptional rights by the law of nations
he expressly postulates in his tract. As for domestic anti-
Scripturists and Atheists, they need not suffer in the least,
if they would keep their opinions prudently to themselves.
Liberty of separate meetings for worship was not observed
to be so passionate a demand among them but that they
could continue to belong professedly, as most of them had
hitherto done, to the Church of England, or they could lodge,
like Milton himself, in the interstices of the different com-
munions, belonging to none, disliking them all, and staying
at home on Sundays. Thus all was left free for the main
matter. That was the suppression of Popery. Roman Catholic
worship was to be permitted at the embassies and to resident
foreigners, but not to natives. The " No Popery " excitement
of 1673, the sudden popular dread of " the growth of this
Romish weed," was the healthiest thing Milton had seen in
England for many a day, and he had thought it his duty,
" how unable soever," to assist what was going forward by
writing his little tract. Part of its purpose, according to the
SAMUEL PAEKEE AND ANDEEW MAEVELL. 699
title, had been to propound " what best means may be used
against the growth of Popery." That had been done so far
by his exposition of the true idea of toleration and by his
advice not to tolerate the Papists, but to suppress their
worship and opinions by every possible means, short of that
punishment by fine and imprisonment which he supposed
" stands not with the clemency of the Gospel more than what
appertains to the security of the State." How there could
have been a policy of suppression without fines and imprison-
ment he leaves unexplained. But he adds, at the end of the
tract, other means for the diminution of Popery in England.
Let the English of all ranks become, more than hitherto, a
Bible-reading, Bible-believing, and Bible-studying nation, and
Popery will vanish from among them very fast. Then also,
as " it is a general complaint that this nation of late years
"is grown more numerously and excessively vicious than
" before," let there be a thorough reformation of manners,
" lest through impenitency we run into that stupidly which
" we now seek all means so warily to avoid, the worst of
"superstitions, and the heaviest of all God's judgments,
"Popery."
We have another glimpse of Milton as involved in the
complex ecclesiastical controversy of the years 1672 and 1673.
The reader may remember a certain young Mr. Samuel Parker,
of Puritan parentage and education, who used to go much
about Milton, in his house in Jewin Street, as long ago as
1661 or 1663, confiding to Milton his difficulties about con-
formity to the Church of the Restoration, and asking -his
advice. He may remember also that Andrew Marvell met
the young man there and did not like him. Ten years had
passed since then ; and now, in 1673, all England was ring-
ing with a paper-warfare between this Samuel Parker and
Mr. Andrew Marvell.
The young man's difficulties about conformity had not
. lasted long. Having been " rescued," in Trinity College,
Oxford, " from the chains and fetters of an unhappy educa-
tion," he had graduated as M.A. and taken holy orders in 1663,
and bad become "a zealous anti-Puritan and strong asserlor
700 LIFE OF MILTON AND HISTORY OF HIS TIMiE.
of the Church of England," — in fact, the most Tancorous
•ribald against the Nonconformists among the younger Angli-
can clergy. Having become known, by some theological
publications, to Sheldon, Archbishop of Canterbury, he had
been brought to London in 1667 as one of the archbishop's
chaplains, and had become a fellow of the Royal Society.
Like his fellow-chaplain Tomkyns, he was employed in
licensing work ; and the Stationers' Registers exhibit him as
an occasional lioencer of books from 1669 onwards, — ^e. g. of
Isaak Walton''s life of George Herbert, and of a volume of
Stillingfleet's sermons. The fourth of his own publications
appeared in 1670, with the title A Discourse of Ecclesiastical
Politf, wherein the Authority' of the Givil Magistrate over the
Consciences qfSvhjects in matters of External Religion is asserted,
the mischiefs and inconveniences of Toleration are represented,
and all ,pretenoes pleaded in iehoijf of Liberty of Conscietiee are
fully answered. The book -caused a consternation among the
Nonconformists. " He Wtriteth," says Baxter of it, " the
" most scornfully and rashly and .profanely and cruelly against
" the Nonconformists of any man that ever yet assaulted
" them that I have heard of, and, in a ftuent, fervent, ingenious
" style of natural jhetoric, poureth out floods of odious re-
" .preaches, and, with ineamtelous extrem-ities, saith as much
"to make them hated and to stir up the Parliament to
" destroy them as he could well speak." Dr. Owen wanted
Baxter to write a reply, as " the fittest man in England for
that work," and, when Baxter declined, wrote one himself,
called Truth and Innooe^ice Windicated. This brought Owen
.personally under Parker's notice. Having meanwhile brought
out another anti-Noneonformdst pamphlet, called Toleration
discussed in two Biailogms, he published in 1671 A Defence
and Continuation of Ecclesiastical J'olify. Here there was not
only another " most voluminous torrent of natural and mah-
" cious rhetoric " against the Nonconformists of all varieties,
as collectively "the most villainous, unsufFerable sort of
" sanctified fools, knaves, and unquiet rebels," but also such
an onslaught on .Dr. Owen, with inconvenient recollection of
his former preachings and political intriguings, more especi-
SAMUEL PAKKEB AND ANDBEW MARVELL. 701
ally when he aided Fleetwood and Desborough to pull down
Richard's Protectorate, that the poor doctor was silenced and,
felt that he had injured the Nonconformist cause by his
appearance for it. Though one or two others replied to
Parker, he remained virtually master of the field ; and in
1672 he returned to the charge in A Discourse in Viwdieation
of Bishop Jijhn Bramhall and the Clergy, of the Church of
Bnr/land from the fanatic charge qfPoperyi togetjier. with some Re-
flections on the present state of affairs. In this discourse, which
was prefixed to a posthumous treatise of Bramhall, Owen was
again attacked, with Baxter and the whole body of the Non-
conformists. Parker was now Archdeacon of Canterbury, and
D.D., with any farther preferments ready for him that could
be expected by a man of thirty-two years of age who had
made himself the terror of the Nonconformist world.
Would nobody grapple with this Harapha of Gath ?■
Andrew Marvell stepped out, fifty-two years of age, but hale
and smiling. — He had given up long ago that vein of pure
idyllic poetry in which he had promised so well in his-
tutorship in Fairfax's house of Nunappleton during the
Commonwealth. His literary performances since the Res-
toration had been almost exclusively rough satirical pieces
in prose and verse, such as came naturally from the patriotic
and incorruptible member for Hull, one of the staunchest
voters with the small knot of extreme liberals in the Cavalier
Parliament, though not much of a speaker. Some of these
scraps of satire, all necessarily anonymous, had been extremely
clever and witty, treating Clarendon and his government,
and the court and courtiers of Charles,, and Charles himself,
with a severity quite refreshing amid the sickly panegyrics
of Waller, Dryden, and the rest, though descending now
and then, as in several pictures of the Duchess of York and
Lady Castlemaine, into reckless savagery and coarseness.
Thus he had been qualifying himself for an encounter witih
ajiy one that needed a public exposure ; and he had not the
least hesitation in appearing for the defence of the Noncon-
formists, and of civil and religious liberty generally, against
Dr. Parker. — Taking as his immediate text Parker's last
703 LIFE OF MILTON AND HISTORY OF HIS TIME.
publication, his preface to Bramhall's treatise, but referring
to his previous writings, Marvell sent out quietly in the
same year 1672, without his name, The Behearml Transprosed,
or Animadversions upon a late Book. The fantastic title was
suggested by the Duke of Buckingham's farce, The Rehearsal,
which had been so famous since December 1671, when it
had been brought out to ridicule Dryden and heroic plays.
It had just been published and was in everybody's hands.
One of the jests against Dryden, in his character of Bayes
in the farce, turns on the explanation which Bayes gives
to his friends Johnson and Smith of his " Rule of Trans-
version, or Begula Duplex, changing verse into prose, or
prose into verse, alternative as you please." They ask how
he works that rule. " Why, thus, sir," says Bayes ; " nothing
" more easy when understood : I take a book in my hand,
" either at home or elsewhere, for that 's all one. If there
" be any wit in 't, as there is no book but has some, I trans-
« verse it; that is, if it be prose, put it into verse, (but
"that takes up more time) ; if it be verse, put it into prose."
On Johnson's remark, '' Methinks, Mr. Bayes, that putting
verse into prose should be called transprosing," Bayes answers,
"By my troth, a very good notion, and hereafter it shall
be so." — Marvell's appropriation of the title of Bucking-
ham's popular farce, and of the new word "transprosing,"
may have been to the advantage of his book against Parker,
whom throughout, to keep up the jocose reference, he persists
in calling " Mr. Bayes." That was but a clumsy trick ; but
it was convenient to have some personification for Parker,
while respecting the etiquette of the anonymous. There was
no other respect for him from first to last. He is played with
and lectured ; he is battered and shattered ; he is turned about
and about with every variety of ludicrous dexterity of
invention ; he is kept standing in the midst, while Marvell
fetches amusing anecdotes and apophthegms from all quarters,
with much quaint learning, and fine quotations from the
Latin and Italian poets, all to be mixed with the scurrilities
already at hand in plenty. The satire, for mingled humour,
irony, and indecency now and then, may match with some of
maevell's buheabsaz tbanspbosed, 703
Swift's, though the texture is looser and sometimes fiiaer, and
there are ordinary argumentative passages interspersed, quot-
ing sentences from Parker and commenting on them seriously.
Marvell had resolved at all risks to be readable, and he had
succeeded. " To which," says Baxter, speaking of Parker's
preface to Bramhall, " Mr. Andrew Marvell, a Parliament
" man, burgess for Hull, did publish an answer so exceeding
" jocular as thereby procured abundance of readers and pardon
" to the author." Not only was the Nonconformist world in
thankful ecstasies, but, as Baxter hints, the public at large,
Church of England men included, looked on with glee at
Parker's punishment.
Exerting himself to the utmost, Parker produced in 1673
A Seproqf to the Rehearsal Transprosed in a Discourse to its
Author. There also appeared about the same time at least
five other anonymous answers to Marvell by friends or ad-
herents of Parker. One was called A Commonplace Booh out
of the Rehearsal Transprosed ; another, entitled The Transproser
Rehearsed, was thought at the time to be by Parker himself,
though the real author, according to Wood, was Richard
Leigh, B.A., of Queen's College, Oxford, then an actor in one
of the London theatres. Of the controversy, when it was
thus at its thickest, and of the comparative merits of the
two principals, Parker and Marvell, Wood's account may be
taken as the most unprejudiced. "This pen combat exer-
" cised between our author and Marvell," he says in his
sketch of Parker, " was briskly managed, with as much smart,
" cutting and satircal wit on both sides as any other perhaps
" of late hath been, they endeavouring by all the methods
" imaginable, and the utmost forces they could by any means
" rally up, to blacken each other's cause, and to set each
" other out in the most ugly dress ; their pieces in the mean-
" while, wherein was represented a perfect trial of each other's
" skill and parts, in a jerking, flirting way of writing, enter-
" taining the reader with a great variety of sport and mirth,
" on seeing two such right cocks of the game so keenly
" engaging with sharp and dangerous weapons. And it was
" generally thought, nay even by many of those who were
704 LIFE OF MILTON AND HISTOBY OF HIS TIME.
" otherwise favourers of Parker's cause, that he, through a
" too loose and unwary handling of the debate, though in a
" brave, flourishing, and lofty style, laid himself too open to
" the severe strokes of his sneering adversary, and that the
" odds and victory lay on Marvell's side. However it was,
" it wrought this good effect upon our author that for ever
" after it took, down somewhat of his high spirit, insomuch-
" that, though Marvel! in a Second Part replied upon our-
" author's Reproof, yet he: judged it more prudent rather to-
" lay down the cudgels than to enter the lists again with an
" untowardly CDmhatant so well versed and experienced in;
" the then but newly-refined art (though much in mode and
" fashion almost ever since) of sportive and jeering buffoonery."
The Second Part of Marvell's Rehearsal Transprosed, which
thus finished Paipker and wound up the controversy, appeared
very late in 1673, with this title : — 'The Rehear sail Transpros!d :
The Second Part. Oocasioned ly two Letters : The first, printed.
by a nameless Author, intituled a Reproof, 8fc. The Second.
Zetter left for me at a Friend's- house, dated November 3, 1673.
Subscribed J. G., and concluding with these words- ; if thou- darest
to Print or Publish any Lie or Libel against Dr. Parker, By the
eternal God I will cut thy Throat. Answere/d by Andrew Marvel.
London, Printed for Nathaniel Ponder at the Peacock in Chancery>
Lane near Meet Street, 1673." Marvell, as the victor, now
gave his name openly.
That Milton's name should have occurred in the course of
this controversy was the most natural thing in the world in
any case. Oa the appearance of the first part of Marvell's.
Rehearsal TroMsprosed, however, Parker and his friends seem
to have assured themselves that Marvell had been inspired
and assisted by Milton. Hence, both in Parker's own reply,
called A Reproof, and in Leigh's Transproser Rehearsed, which
Marvell supposed to be Parker's also, as well as in the
Commonplace hook out of the Rehearsal Transprosed, Milton is
dragged in. The following are specimens of the references
to him : —
" If we take away some simpering phrases and timorous intro-
ductions, your collection mil afford as good, precedents for rebellion
MILTON A.NT) THE PAEKEB-MARVELL CONTBOVEBST. 705
and king-killing as any we meet with in the writings of J. M.
in defence of the Behellion and the Murder of the King." Reproof,
p. 212.
" He might have as well called him Bayes Anonymus, in imita-
tion of Milton's learned bull (for that bulls in Latin are learned
ones none will deny) ; who in his answer to Salmasius calls him
Claudius Anonymus." Trans. Reh. p. 9.
" The work would have been more gratefully accepted than
Donne's Poems turned into Dutch, — but what talk I of that ? —
than Prynne's Mownt Orgueil or Milton's Paradise Lost in blank
verse." Ihid. p. 30.
" He has all the terms of that art [railing] which Smeetymnuus,
Marchamont Needham, J. Milton, or any other of the professors,
ever thought of." Ibid. p. 32.
" Dark souls may be illuminated with bright and shining
thoughts. As, to seek no farther for an instance, the blind author
of Paradise Lost (the odds betwixt a Transproser and a Blank
Verse poet is not great) begins his third Book thus, groping for
a beam of light : —
Hail, holy Light, offspring of Heaven first-born
Or of the Eternal coeternal beam
May I express thee unblamed t . . , .
Thee I revisit safe.
And feel thy sovran vital lamp ; but thou
Kevisit'st not these eyes, that roll in vain
To find thy piercing ray, and find no dawn ;
So thick a drop serene hath quenched their orbs.
Or dim suffusion veiled.
No doubt but the thoughts of this vital lamp lighted a Christmas
candle in his brain. "What dark meaning he may have in calling it
this thick droj> serene I am not able to say ; but, for his Eternal
coeternal, besides the absurdity of his inventive Divinity in making
light contemporary with its Creator, that jingling in the middle of .
his verse is more notoriously ridiculous because the blind bard (as
he tells us himself in his apology for writiug in blank verse)
studiously declined rhyme as a jingling sound of like endings.
Nay, what is more observable, it is the very same fault which
he was so quicksighted as to discover in this verse of Hall's Tooth-
'To teach each hollow grove and shrubby hill.'
This teacTi each he has upbraided the Bishop with in his Animad-
versions on the Eemonstrant's Defence against Smeetymnuus."
lUd. pp. 41-43.
" Once perhaps in a century of years there may arise a Martin
•Marprelate, a Milton, or such a brave as our present author."
lUd, p. 55.
"I shall only match them with some historical remarks in
VOL. TI. Z Z
706 LIFE OF MILTON AND HISTORY OF HIS TIME.
ap ingeHious writer against Mr. Milton, concerning the rise and
fall of Republics [quotation from Censure of the Rota on Milton]."
/6irf. p. 113.
" In his Accidence (whether it be the same with Milton's Ac-
cidence Gommene'd Gra/immi/r I know not) . . . ." Ihid. p. 126.
" In page 83 he tells us this J. 0. [John Owen] has a head and,
a mouth, with tongue and teeth in it, and ha/nds with fingers amd
nails wjpon them. Which is almost as apposite a description of an
Independent as his friend Mr. Milton has given us of a Bishop ;
who in his Apology for his Animadversions upon the Remonstrant's
Defence against Smectymnuus says that a Bishop's foot that hath
all his toes, maugre the gout and a linen sock over it, is the aptest
emblem of the Bishop himself ; who, being a pluralist, under one
surplice, which is also of linen (and therefore so far like the toe-
surplice, the sock), hides four benefices, besides the metropolitan
see. So that, when Archbishop Abbott was suspended, we might
say, in Mr. Milton's style, his metropolitan toe was cut off. But,
since Milton is so great an enemy to great toes (however dignified
and distinguished, be they Papal or Metropolitan), we would fain
know whether his are all of one length, since the Leveller it seems
affects a parity even in toes. Whether now his Bishop with a
metropolitan toe or our author's Congregational Man with ten
fingers and long nails upon all be the fitter monster to be shown is
hard to say. Only, &c. . . . For, unluckily, among other calami-
ties of late, there has happened a prodigious conjunction of a Latin
Secretary and an English Schoolmaster, the appearance of which
none of our astrologers foretold, nor no comet portended. . . ,
O marvellous fate ! O fate full of marvel !
That Noll's Latin pay two clerks should deserve all,
Hiring a gelding, and Milton the stallion."
Ihid. pp. 126-8 and 135.
" In his [Marvell's] discourse of the liberty of unlicensed printing,
p. 6 (which is little else but Milton's Areojiagitioa in short hand),
the very sponges, &c. [quotation from Marvell]." Ihid. p. 131.
" If you will have it in hia elegancy, I never saw a man in
so high a state of salivation. If in Milton's (I know he will be
proud to lick up his spittle), he has invested liimself with all the
rheum of the town, that he might have sufficient to bespawl the
clergy." Ihid. p. 132.
" Such was the liberty of his [Milton's] unlicensed printing that
the more modest Aretine, were he alive in this age, might be set to
school again to learn in his own art of the blind schoolmaster"
Ihid. pp. 136-7.
In the Second Part of the Rehearsal Transprosed Marvell
devotes one dignified paragraph to a notice of these attacks
MAETELL ON HIS CONNEXION WITH MILTON. 707
on Milton and insinuations that Milton had assisted him in
the First Part. He addresses Parker thus : —
" You do three times at least in your Reproof, and in your
Transproser Rehearsed well nigh half the book thorough, run upon
an author J. M. ; which does not a httle offend me. For why should
any other man's reputation suffer in a contest hetwixt you and
me ? But it is hecause you resolved to suspect that he had an
hand in my former book ; wherein, whether you deceive yourself
or no, you deceive others extremely. For by chance I had not
seon him of two years before ; but, after I undertook writing, I
did more carefully avoid either visiting or sending to him, lest
I should any way involve him in my consequences. And you
might have understood, or I am sure your friend the author of
the Commonplaces could have told you (he too had a slash at
J. M. on my account) that, had he took you in hand, you would
have had cause to repent the occasion, and not escaped so easily as
you did under my Transprosal. But I take it moreover very ill
that you should have so mean an opinion of me as not to think me
competent to write such a simple book as that without any assist-
ance. It is a sign (however you upbraid me often as your old
acquaintance) that you did not know me well, and that we had not
much conversation together. But, because in your p. 115 you are
so particular, — ^You ' know a friend of ours^ intending that J. M.
and his answer to Salmasius, — ^I think it here seasonable to ac-
quit my promise to you in giving the reader a short trouble
concerning my first acquaintance with you. — J. M. was, and is,
a man of great learning and sharpness of wit as any man. It was
his misfortune, living in a tumultuous time, to be tossed on the
wrong side, and he writ, ^flagrante bello, certain dangerous treatises.
His books of Divorce I know not whether you may have use of ;
hut those upon which you take him at advantage were of no other
nature than that which I mentioned to you, writ by your own
father : only with this difference, that your father's, which I have
by me, was written with the same design, but with much less wit
or judgment ; for which there was no remedy, unless you will
supply his judgment with his High Court of Justice. [The al-
lusion is to the fact that Parker's father, the Puritan and Re-
publican lawyer, John Parker, had been one of the High Court of
Justice that sentenced to death the three great Royalist peers.
Lord Capel, the Earl of Holland, and the Duke of Hamilton, im-
mediately after the execution of Charles I.] At his Majesty's
happy return J. M. did partake, even as you yourself did for all
your hnflSng, of his regal clemency, and has ever since expiated
himself in a retired silence. It was after that, I weU remember it,
that, being one day at his house, I there first met you, and acci^
dentally. Since that I have been scarce four or five times in your
company ; hut, whether it were my foresight or my good fortime,
Z z 2
708 LIFE OF MILTON AND HISTOBT OF HIS TIME.
I never contracted any firiendsHp or confidence with you. But
then it was, when you, as I told you, wandered up and down Moor-
fields, astrologizing upon the duration of his Majesty's Government,
that you frequented J. M. incessantly, and haunted his house day
by day. What discourse you there used he is too generous to
remember. But, he never having in the least provoked you, for
you to insult thus over his old age, to traduce him, by your scara-
muccios and in your own person, as a schoolmaster, who was bom
and hath lived much more ingenuously and liberally than yourself;
to have done all this and lay at last my simple book to his charge,
without ever taking care to inform yourself better, which you had
so easy opportunity to do ; nay, when you yourself too have said,
to my knowledge, that you saw no such great matter in it but that
I might be the author : it is inhumanly and inhospitably done, and
will, I hope, be a warning to all others, as it is to me, to avoid
— I will not say such a Judas, but — a man that creeps into aU
companies to jeer, trepan, and betray them \"
The Second Part of Marvell's IteAearsal Transprosed, with
this passage in it, was out in London in the winter of 1673—4.
It must have been in that winter, if not a little before, that
Milton received a memorable visit, perhaps the last, from the
real Bayes. " Jo. Dreyden, Esq.^ Poet Laureate, who very
* Authorities for my account of following year, he is very large upon
Parker, and of the Parker -Marvel! Marrell, lepresenting him as one of
controversy in its connexion with Mil- those infamous reprobates who kept
ton, are :— Wood's Ath. IV. 225 — ^235 English society agitated after the Ee-
(Parker), IV. 101 and 108 (Owen), and storation by a deliberate and chronic
IV. 533 (Leigh) ; Baxter's Life, Part III. conspiracy for the subversion of the
41, 42, and 102 ; my notes from the Monarchy. " Amongst these lewd re-
Stationers' Begisters ; old copies of the vilers," he says, " the lewdest was one
books on the Parker side quoted from ; "whose name was MarveU. As he had
and Marvell's Bdiearsdl Transprosed, "lived in all manner of wickedness from
in Dr. Grosart's edition of Marvell's " his youth, so, being of a singular im-
Works. The quotation from this last "pudence and petulancy of nature, he
is from pp. 498—500. ^Parker wrote " exercised the province of a Satirist for
more books, some of them theological "the use of the faction, being not so
and others of High Church and Passive " much a Satirist through quickness of
Obedience politics, and had farther pre- "wit as sourness of temper;- of but in-
fennents in the Church, ending in his " different parts, except it were in the
being Bishop of Oxford in the reign of " talent of railing and malignity . . . Out
James II. He held the bishopric, re- "of the House, when he could do it with
taining his archdeaconry TO comm«»Kfc[m, "impunity, he vented himself witji the
but a short time, i. 6. from Oct. 17, 1688 "greater bitterness [because he was
to his death, March 20, 1687-8. He "always hissed down in the House,
figures in Burnet's History as carrying " asserts Parker] and daily spewed in-
his rancour and meanness with Mm to " famous libels out of his filthy mouth
all lengths through his life, his High "against the King himself. If at any
Churchism transmutable into Popery at "time the Fanatics had occasion for
last if need were. He had never for- " this libeller's help, he iiresently issued
gotten Marvdl's castigation; for in a "forth out of his cave like a gladiator
History o/Awi^ Time which he left "or wild beast." There is much more
behind him, an«,which was published about MarveU, with one or two allusions
in Latin in 172^-and in English in the to Milton as his patron.
dbyden's visit to MILTOK. 709
" much admired him/' says Aubrey, " went to him to have
" leave to put his Paradise Lost into a drama in rhyme. Mr.
" Milton received him civilly, and told him that he would
" give him leave to tag his verses." The proposal strikes us
now as an impudent one ; hut, with Dryden's ideas, it was
the highest compliment he could pay to Milton. Dryden's
veneration for Shakespeare had not prevented him and
Davenant together from recasting Shakespeare's Tempest six
years before, to adapt it to the improved dramatic tastes and
the improved stage-decorations of the Restoration. Remem-
bering this, and ' always in quest of new subjects, it had
occurred to Drydenthat a condensation of the plot of Paradise
Lost into several acts of a sacred drama or opera, with a
cunning selection of the most telling passages, " transversed "
into sonorous rhyme by his peculiar method, would be an
attractive novelty at the King's Theatre. There might be
difficulty in obtaining permission for such a production, and
there would be the farther difficulty of devising a proper
stage-substitute for the costume of Paradise. But both diffi-
culties might be overcome ; and, even if the stage-perform-
ance of such a drama should turn out to be impossible, the
written drama would be a good example of Dryden's process
of " transversing," and might illustrate, in corpore nobili, that
very question of the comparative powers of rhyme and blank
verse in poetry about which he and Milton differed. It was
but polite in Dryden to ask Milton's sanction of the liberty
beforehand ; and Milton, it appears, was equally polite in
granting the request. " O, certainly, you may tag my verses
if you please, Mr. Dryden," seem to have been the words.
Tags, in those days of elaborate dressing, were the metal
points or knobs, gold or silver if possible, at the ends of the
laces or cords with which dresses were fastened. They were
partly for ornament, partly to keep the ends of the laces from
fraying. Blank verse, therefore, in Milton's clever momentary
fancy, consisted of lines in their natural state, or untagged,
and to make them rhyme, as Dryden proposed, was to tag
them, or put on the fashionable shining points at the ends.
To that experiment with Paradise Lost Dryden was made
710 LIFE OP. MILTON AND HISTORY OF HIS TIME.
welcome to any extent, and went away satisfied. If ever
Milton laughed by himself after the departure of a visitor, it
must have been on this occasion. His amusement must have
lasted for some time ; for he mentioned the visit and its
purport, we shall find presently, to Marvell, if not to others,
repeating the exact words of the answer he had given to
Dryden.
Dryden was a rapid worker ; and within the space of a
month, as he tells us himself, he accomplished his task. He
does not mention the particular month, but it must have
been before the 17th of April 1674 ; on which day, as the
Stationers' Registers inform us, " Mr. Henry Herringman
" entered for his copy, under the hands of Roger L'Estrang,
'• Esq., and Mr. Warden Mearne, a Booke or Coppy entituled
" The Fall of Angells and Man in Innocence : An Heroieh
" Opera, written to [sic] John Dreyden, Servant to his
" Majestie.'" For some reason, though the opera was then
quite ready, its publication was postponed. But, as all the
poet-laureate's movements interested the public, and his
intention of transversing Milton's poem had become a matter
of special gossip, there was such a curiosity to see the result
that, without Dryden's knowledge or consent, transcripts of
his opera were in circulation through the town, he says, while
his own manuscript still lay in Herringman's hands. These
transcripts were passing from hand to hand and being multi-
plied, each new copy more erroneous than the last, and critics
were already pronouncing their judgments on the performance,
some of which reached Dryden's ears, and were not flattering.
Among those critics of the opera, as it was to be read in the
copies that had got about early in 1674, were Milton himself
and his friend Marvell. The fact has escaped notice hitherto,
but is certain nevertheless ^.
If Milton had been amused by Dryden's proposal of a
V,''''"?»P.™°^ '"1^^® completed pre- published in the end ofl67t that "many
sently.it it should not seem complete hundred copies of it" had meanwhile
aJready m the fact of the entry of the heen " dispersed abroad," doing injustice
?fS^* in the Stationers' Registers on the to the work by their incorrectness. See
17th ot Apnl , 1 674, taken m connexion the Preface in Scott's edition of Dryden's
with Dryden s express statement, in his Works, Vol. V.
preface to the opera when it was actually
dbyden's opera feom pabadism lost. 711
dramatic transversion of his Paradise Lost, he must have been
even more amused by the result. The heroic opera consists
of five short acts^ grasping the main story of Milton's epic
pretty coherently for scenic efifect, and telling it in soliloquies
and dialogue, aided by stage-directions. The soliloquies and
dialogue are almost entirely rhymed translations of passages
of Milton's blank verse, only a speech or two being left un-
rhymed, and the translation in those speeches being from
Milton's blank to Dryden's other kind of blank. The fol-
lowing are sufficient specimens : —
Act I : Scene I.
Represents a Chaos, or a confused mass of matter ; the stage is
almost wholly dark : A symphony of warlike music is heard for
some time; then from the Heavens (which are opened) fall the
rebellious Angels, wheeling in air and seeming, transfixed with
thunderbolts ; The bottom of the stage, being opened, receives the
Angels, who fall out of sight. Tunes of victory are played, and
an hymn sung ; Angels discovered above, brandishing their swords :
The music ceasing, and the Heavens being closed, the scene shifts,
and on a sudden represents Hell : Part of the scene is a lake of
brimstone or rolling fire, the Earth of a burnt colour : The Fallen
Angels appear on the lake, lying prostrate ; a tune of horror and
lamentation is heard.
LUOIFEE, RAISING HIMSELF ON THE LAKE.
Lucifer. Is this the seat our conqueror has given t
And this the climate we must change for Heaven 1
These regions and this realm my wars have got;
This mournful empire is the loser's lot :
In liquid burnings or on dry to dwell
Is all the sad variety of Hell.
But see, the Victor has recalled from far
The avenging storms, his ministers of war :
His shafts are spent, and his tired thunders sleep,
Nor longer bellow through the boundless deep.
Best take the occasion and these waves forsake
While time is given. — Ho 1 Asmodai, awake,
If thou art he ! But ah ! how changed from him,
Companion of my arms ! how wan, how dim,
How faded all thy glories are ! I see
Myself too well and my own change in thee.
Asmodai. Prince of the Thrones, who in the fields of light
Led'st forth the embattled Seraphim to fight;
Who shook, &c.
713 LIFE OF MILTON AND HISTORY OF HIS TIME.
Act 11: Scene II.
Paradise.
Trees cut out on each side, with several fruits upon them ; a
fountain in the midst : At the iai end the prospect terminates in
walks.
Adam. O virgin heaven-begot, and born of man.
Thou fairest of tiiy great Creator's works !
Tbee, goddess, thee the Eternal did ordain
His softer substitute on earth to reign;
And, wheresoe'er thy happy footsteps tread,
Nature in triumph after tiiee is led.
Angels with pleasure view thy matchless grace.
And love their Maker's image in thy fece.
£ve. O only like myself (for nothing here
So graceful, so majestic, does appear).
Art thou the form my longing eyes did see.
Loosed from thy fountain, and come out to me i
Yet sure thou art not; nor thy face the same,
Nor thy limbs moulded in so soft a frame ;
Thou look'st more sternly, dost more strongly move,
And more of awe thou bear'st and less of love.
Yet pleased I hear thee, and above the rest
I, next myself, admire and love thee best.
Adam. Made to command, thus freely I obey,
And at thy feet the whole Creation lay ....
Hve. Something forbids me, which I cannot name;
iFor, ignorant of guilt, I fear not shame :
But some restraining thought, I know not why,
Tells me you long should beg, I long deny.
It was evidently high time that there should be a second
edition of the real Paradise Lost. The wonder is that, the
first edition having been sold out five years ago, there should
not have been a second long ere this time. The printer
Simmons may have thought that the 1300 or 1500 copies
already published had reached all the likely purchasers of
such a poem then in England, and that a new edition might
be postponed till new readers grew up. He was stirred at
last, however, and it seems not impossible that the poet-
laureate's proposed publication of his dramatic transversion of
Paradise Lost may have been the immediate stimulus. Were
the poet-laureate and Mr. Herringman to be making money
by the sale of hundreds of copies of a rapid adaptation of an
important book the copyright of which belonged to him,
SECOND EDITION OF PABADISE LOST. 713
Mr. Simmons ? Had Mr. Milton acted legally in authorizing
such an adaptation? In the covenant of April 1667, when
Mr. Simmons acquired the copyright and paid Mr. Milton
his first five pounds, was it not expressly stipulated "that
"he the said Jo. Milton, his executors or administrators, or
" any other by his or their means or consent, shall not print
"or cause to be printed, or sell, dispose, or publish the
"said book or manuscript, or any other hook or manuscript of
" the same tenor or subject, without the consent of the said
" Samuel Symons, his executors or assigns ? " Whether it was
this consideration that moved Simmons, or whether he and
Milton had already been agreeing independently in the course
of 1673 that a new edition of Paradise Lost ought to be
ventured, certain it is that such a new edition was one of
the events of the year 1674. " Paradise Lost. A Poem In
Twelve Books. The Author John Milton. The Second Edition
Revised and Augmented by the same Author. London, Printed
by S. Simmons nemt door to the Qolden Lion in Aldersgate-street,
1674 : " such was the title-page of the new volume. The
precise month of its appearance in the year 1674 cannot be
ascertained ^.
The Second Edition difiers from the First in various me-
chanical particulars, in some for the better, in others for the
worse. The size of the volume is small octavo, instead of
small quarto, and some copies at least contain Dolle's portrait
of Milton, reduced in 1671 from the Faithome engraving.
The pages, not numbered in the first edition, are now num-
bered in the ordinary fashion. On the other hand, the mar-
ginal numbering of the lines by tens is omitted, — a decided
inconvenience. The " Argument " of the poem, prepared for
the late issues of copies of the first edition, and then put in
block at the beginning, is now distributed through the
volume, each piece heading its own proper Book. More im-
1 Why is there not in every printed announcement of Dryden's opera might
book a note of the month of its publioa- account for the delay in the publication
tion, as well as of the year t For his- of the opera so long after its registration
torioal and biographical purposes the in April 1674. Simmons may have in-
mere notation by the year is very in- sisted that his second edition of Par-aiWse
sufiScient. — The hypothesis that Sim- Lost should have the precedence by
mons was roused by Hemngman's some mouths at least.
714 LIFE OF MILTON AND HISTORY OF HIS TIME.
portant still, the poem is arranged now in twelve books,
instead of ten as originally. This is done by dividing the
two longest books of the poem in the first edition, viz. those
numbered VII. and X. there, into two books each. To smooth
the breaks caused by these divisions a few new lines had to
be dictated by Milton ; and, accordingly, the second edition
contains eight lines that had not been in the first, — ^to wit,
the three that now open book VIII. and the five that open
book XII. This is all that can justify the word " augmented "
in the title-page. There are one or two slight alterations of
the text besides, and a few verbal or literal variations due to
the printer. Altogether the book is a very correct one, and
presents the poem in the form finally judged best by Milton ;
but it is not nearly so handsome, or so pleasant to read, as a
copy of the first edition. The two editions taken together,
there were now 2600 or 3000 copies of the epic in print.
Two sets of commendatory verses were prefixed. One was
in Latin elegiacs, headed In Paradisum Amissam Summi Poeta
Johannu Miltoni, and signed " S. B., M.B. ;" the other was
in English heroics, headed " On Paradise Lost," and signed
•'A. M." These sets of verses are, or ought to be, in all
modern editions of the poem, and are of interest here
biographically. — ^The writer of the Latin set was that Dr.
Samuel Barrow, a Norfolkshire man by birth, whom we en-
countered as long ago as 1659, when he was chief physician
to Monk's army in Scotland and one of Monk's most con-
fidential advisers, and whom we found marching with Monk
and that army into England, and assisting Monk in the first
difiiculties of his temporajy dictatorship ^. Having been one
of the minor negotiators for the Restoration, he had been
made physician in ordinary to the King and advocate general
and judge martial of the armyj he had a large medical
practice in London ; and he had married the wealthy widow
of a knight. It need be no surprise to us, after finding the
Earl of Anglesey, Sir Robert Howard, and others more or
less eminent in Court society, on terms of kindly familiarity
1 See ante, Vol. V. p. 476 ; ako p. B28, and p. 534.
ENCOMIUMS BT BABROW AND MAETELL. 715
with Milton in his lat«r years, to find that the eminent
court-physician Dr. Barrow had also then been drawn into his
company. Though this is his first appearance there, he has
now to be added, therefore, to the list of those who had been
among Milton's admirers and visitors since the publication
of Paradise Lost in 1667. He was then but forty-two years
of age, Milton's junior by about seventeen years. That he
was a scholarly and intelligent man, whose admiration was
worth something, is attested by his Latin lines themselves,
and by the fact that Milton used them to introduce his
second edition. Whether they were offered expressly for that
purpose, or had already been in Milton^'s possession for some
time as a private testimony of Barrow's regard, does not
appear. The concluding four lines, calling upon all Roman
and all Greek writers to acknowledge Milton's superiority, and
declaring that the readers of Paradise Lost would agree with
him in thinking Homer and Virgil but poor in comparison,
may pass as mere hackneyed hyperbole. But the preceding
thirty-eight lines show real acquaintance with the poem, and
are a spirited summary of a portion of its contents. " Thou
who readest Paradise Lost, the grand poem of the great
Milton," says Barrow, " what readest thou but the universe of
things ?" There is then a sketch of Milton's plan of Heaven,
Chaos, Hell, and Earth, and of his story of the Angelic
Wars \ — The " A. M." of the English commendatory verses
was, of course, Andrew Marvell. They must have been written
expressly for the second edition; for their very peculiarity
consists in their being a studied combination of eulogium on
Milton for his Paradise Lost with rebuke to Dryden for his
impudence in attempting a dramatic and rhymed transversion
of such an epic. When first he saw the blind poet engaging
with his vast theme, he says, he trembled for his failure,
great as he knew his powers to be. Heaven, Hell, Earth,
Chaos, the crowned Messiah, the Rebel Angels, the Fall of
1 Ante, Vol. v. p. 476, p. 528, and p. of Ms life; Chambeilayne's Anglice
534 ; Lysons's Environs of London, II. Nolitia from 1671 to 1682 ; the Com-
371, where there is qnoted the long mendatory Verses. Barrow died March
iktin inscription on Barrow's tomb in 21, 1681-2, aetat. 57.
Fulham church, containing particulars
716 LIFE OP MILTON AND HISTORY OP HIS TIME.
Man : how could the blind man compass such a union of
grandeurs? Would he not, like his own Samson, pull down
the edifice, and be buried in the ruins ? There was yet another
danger : —
" Or, if a work so infinite he spanned.
Jealous I was that some less skilful hand
(Such as disquiet always what is well.
And by ill-imitating would excel)
Might hence presume the whole Creation's Day
To change in scenes, and show it in a play."
Marvell's fears for Milton's success had been groundless, and
he begs the mighty poet's pardon for having ever entertained
them —
" Thou singst with so much gravity and ease,
And above human flight dost soar aloft
"With plume so strong, so equal, and so softi
The bird named from the Paradise you sing
So never flags, but always keeps on wing..
Where couldst thou words of such a compass find?'
Whence furnish such a vast expense of mind?
Just Heaven, thee like Tiresias to requite,
Rewards with prophecy thy loss of sight"
Then, in that very thing which had been most misdoubted,
his use of Blank Verse, what a literary revelation he had
given to all, and what a lordly lesson to certain litterateurs
who need not be particularly named I —
"WeU mightst thou scorn thy readers to allure
With tinkling rime, of thy own sense secure ;
While the Town-Bayes writes all the while and spells,
And, like a pack-horse, tires without his bells.
Their fancies like our bushy poiuts appear;
The poets tag them, we for fashion wear.
I too, transported by the mode, offend.
And, while I meant to praise thee, must commend.
Thy verse, created, like thy theme sublime,
In number, weight, and measure, needs not rime."
Marvell's discipleship to Milton, it will be seen, is perfect
and exceptionless to the last. He will do anything' for
Milton,— drink up eisel for him, eat a crocodile. He will
forswear rhyme for him, though he had himself practised
nothing else in his own poetry; and he will beard Bayes
MILTON'S CIRCUMSTANCES IN 1674. 717
the poet-laureate for him as fearlessly as he had bearded
Bayes the archdeacon on a more general account \
In a preserved account of the Hearth-money taxation of
the county of Middlesex for the year ending at Lady Day
1674 Milton's house is entered as the ninth from one end in
the row of houses then forming Artillery Walk, Bunhill, and
his position among his nearest neighbours in the row is
presented thus : — " Mr. Becke, 6 hearths ; Samuel Kindall, 4
hearths ; Widow Bowers, 4 hearths ; John Melton, 4 hearths ;
Richard Hardinge, 6 hearths j Mr. Howard, 5 hearths."
His house was, therefore, one of the smallest in the row at
that date, of the same size as that of Widow Bowers, the
next on one side, but considerably smaller than that of
Richard Hardinge, the next on the other. As the house,
however, had sufficed for Milton ten years before, when he
had removed to it from Jewin Street with his third wife
and his three daughters, and as now the only inmates were
himself, his wife, and a single maidservant, named Elizabeth
Fisher, there is no reason to doubt that, besides being the
most celebrated householder in the row, the most famous man
of the whole Bunhill neighbourhood, he still ranked also
among his neighbours as a man of very good means.
Richardson, it is true, has transmitted these lines " Upon
" John Milton's not suffering for his Traitorous Book when
" the Triers were executed 1660," found written, appar-
ently about the year 1674, and certainly while Milton was
alive, on the spare leaf at the beginning of a copy of the
Mikonoklastes : —
That thou escaped'st that vengeance which o'ertook,
Milton, thy regicides and thy own book
Was clemency in Charles beyond compare;
And yet thy doom doth prove more grievous far.
Old, sickly, poor, stark blind, thou writ'st for bread :
So for to live thoud'st call Salmasius from the dead."
1 The quotations from Marvell's ment that Milton and Marvell had
verses for the second edition of Para- talked together over Dryden's visit to
dise Lost complete the evidence of a Milton to request leave to turn parts of
previous note (ante, p. 710); and the Pwradite Lost into rhyme, and over
wording of the last quotation, "tag," Milton's answer (ante, pp. 709—710).
" bushy points," &c., verifies the state>
718 LIFE OF MILTON AND HISTORY OF HIS TIME.
The writer of the lines, however, must have written very-
much from hearsay. As at no period of Milton's life had be
known what poverty was, as his condition through a great
part of his life might be described as that of wealth or at
least of very easy and liberal means, so not even in his latest
years had he sunk into anything like destitution. What is
true, and what the writer of the lines has exaggerated, is
simply the fact that he was now, with all his new celebrity
as the author of Paradise Lost, Paradise Regained, and Samson
Agonistes, a much poorer man than he had ever been before.
That fact is certain and is worth' remembering. Our calcula-
tion of Milton's means about the year 1662, when his former
fortunes had been wrecked by the Restoration, was that he
was then still in possession of about a^l500 of saved capital
and of about £Z(X) a year of income from that capital and
from other sources. But in the interval between that date and
1674 there had been, as we have had to note, other losses and
disturbances. By the Great Fire of London in 1666 he had
lost, it appears, all that part of his income which consisted in
rents from remaining pieces of house property, and so had
been reduced nearly, if not quite, to the interest from his
savings. Add the expenses, reported as very heavy, to which
he had been put, in and after 1670, by the apprenticing and
boarding out of his daughters, and it may be a fair estimate
that Milton's personal estate from about 1670 was one third less
than it had been in 1662, and that he had been living for
some years on an income of not more than ,^100 a year of
the money of that time. The equivalent might be somewhere
about a^SOO a year now. To ensure even such an annual
competency he had, it seems, been put to shifts. " Towards
the latter end of his life," Toland informs us, " he contracted
" his library, both because the heirs he left could not make a
" right use of it, and that he thought he might sell it more to
" their advantage than they could be able to do themselves."
As Milton's library must have been a pretty valuable one,
the probability is that the conversion of a portion of it into
cash was convenient to himself for more immediate reasons.
All in all, though it has to . be distinctly repeated that
MILTON'S GIEOUMSTANCES IN 1674 719
Milton's condition in 1674 was by no means that of poverty,
but only of very frugal gentility, and that not even then, any
more than at any former time in his life, was he reduced to
" write for bread," yet one can see that the writer of the lines
quoted was not so very far astray in one part of his guess.
Any little sums that Milton may have made by his recent
publications in verse and prosCj in addition to the ^10 he
had received from Simmons for Paradise Lost, must have
been welcome enough to him, and the prospect of another
£5 or ^10 now and then from a bookseller, for any little
thing he had by him or could concoct and dictate in an
honest way on the spur of occasion, may not have been in-
different to him as late as 1674 ^.
In addition to Simmons, Allestree, Hickman, Starkey, and
Bring, the five booksellers or printers with whom there had
been transactions by Milton since his literary reappearance
in 1667, a sixth now comes on the scene. He was Brabazon
Aylmer " at the sign of the Three Pigeons in Cornhill.-" The
tradition is that he was a man of noted integrity and good
taste in his business, and it is borne out by what we see of
him in his transactions with Milton. They were Milton's
last with any bookseller.
1 Hunter's ITiKon iVoJe« J. 43, for the te remembered, had been one of the
extract from the Hearth Tax Eeoord ; members of the Eepublioan Council of
Kiohardson's Life of Milton, p. xcv ; To- State in the secondT year of the Com-
\a,xA's Life ; and ante, pp. 444—5. — May monwealth (Vol. IV. p. 177), and again
not the sale of part of the library have in the fourth year, and in the fragment
been in or about the year 1670, and may of the fifth preceding Cromwell's disso-
not the transaction have had something lution of the Rump Government on the
to do with the residence of Milton about 20th of April 1663 (Vol. IV pp. 354 —
that time with the book-auctioneer, 355) ; and he had been one of those
Millington? (see ante,, pp. 650—651). ultra-Eepublieaus who had bearded
— Richardson, in noticing the state of Cromwell most boldly in the House at
Milton's oiroumstanoea in his later years, the moment of the famous dissolution,
talces into account " presents " received and had been addressed by Cromwell on
by him from friends and admirers, add- that occasion in language more forcible'
ing " for so I have heard it intimated " than polite (Vol. IV. p. 412). Went-
(p. xcix). In Notes and Queries for worth's regard for Milton must date
March 3, 1877, a correspondent, signing from those days, when they used to
himself " W. S. E.," communicates the meet in the Council-Room, Wentworth
fact thit Milton is mentioned in the as Councillor and Milton as Foreign
will of Sir Peter Wentworth, K.B., of Secretary ; and the fact that Wentworth
Livingston LoveH, Co. Oxon, dated Deo, continued his ftiendship with Milton to
20, 1673, in these words : — " To my as late as 1673, and then remembered
■worthy and verrie leamed friend Mr. him so handsomely in his will, and with
John Milton (who wrote against Sal- a spirit of the old Eepublioan in the
matins) one hundred pounds of like words of the bequest, is peculiarly in-
money." Sir Peter Wentworth, it may teresting.
720 LIFE OF MILTON AND HISTORY OF HIS TIME.
There were two masses of manuscript lying by Milton the
publication of which, in his own lifetime if possible, he es-
pecially desired. One was that Latin Body of Divinity from
the Bible, or Treatise of Christian Doctrine, on which he had
been engaged for many years, and which he had now com-
pleted j the other was his collection of Latin State Letters,
written by him during his Secretaryship to the Councils of
the Commonwealth, and to Oliver and Richard. For the pre-
paration of these manuscripts for the press, and for assistance
to him among his papers generally, there had for some time
been in his employment a certain Daniel Skinner, the son of
a merchant in Mark Lane. He had been educated at Trinity
College, Cambridge, and had taken his B.A. degree in 1673.
He was a relative, it is believed, of Milton's intimate friend
Cyriack Skinner, and had probably been recommended to
Milton by Cyriack. At all events, he was an excellent
amanuensis, perhaps the best Milton ever had, — not only
a trained scholar, but a beautiful penman. He had already,
under Milton's direction, made a complete transcript, in his
clear Italian hand, of such of the Latin State Letters as
Milton had preserved or thought worth publication, and he
had transcribed the first 196 pages of the Treatise of Christian
Doctrine, and gone over the remaining 540 pages of the
bulky manuscript of it left by previous amanuenses, revising
the spelling, and inserting little additions from Milton's dic-
tation. Readings aloud of the two manuscripts to Milton
by the young Cantab, for the purpose of perfecting them
for the press, must have been among the occupations in the
house in Artillery Walk through part of 1673 and some way
into 16741.
An attempt was made with the Latin State Letters, They
were to be put forth by Brabazon Aylmer in a volume in-
1 Mr. LeigK Sotheby's Milton. Ram- is distinctly recognisable that of the
bhngs, pp. 159—165 ; where there is an person to -whom MUton had dictated
ample account of the manuscript of the the Sonnet in memory of his second
Treatise of Chiistian Doctrine and of wife, and who had also signed for him
Daniel Skinner's share in the trausorip- the transfer of a Bond to Cyriack Skm-
tion and revision of it, with fac-simfle ner in May 1660 (ante. Vol. V. p 409,
specimens of his and the other hand- footnote, and p. 703).
writings. Among the other handwritings
MILTON AND EEABAZON AYLMEE. 721
eluding- also Milton's Latin Familiar Epistles. It was perhaps
thought that the conjunction of the Private Letters with the
State Letters might make the publication less objectionable
to the authorities. But it was an absurdly bold hope in
those days. How vigilant the authorities were in preventing
publications of a suspicious tendency is proved by Baxter's
account of what happened in his case in 1673. " My book-
" seller/' he says, " came to me and told me that Roger
" L'Estrange, the overseer of the Printers^ sent for him, and
" told him that he heard I was answering Bishop Bramhall,
" and swore to him most vehemently that, if I did it, he
"would ruin him and me, and perhaps my life should be
" brought in question." If so with a book of Baxter's, how
could Milton expect to be allowed by the Government of
Charles II. to publish his State Letters for the Republic and
Oliver, reviving memories of Oliver and of a foreign policy
which it was convenient now to forget? In such a case
permission by L'Estrange himself might be insuffieientj even
if it could be obtained, and appeal might have to be made
to Lord Arlington, as Secretary of State, or to his Under-
Secretary, Sir Joseph Williamson, who was also Keeper of
the State Papers. That there was some kind of application
to the authorities, and that it failed, we learn from Brabazon
Aylmer in a neat little Latin advertisement, headed " The
Printer to the Reader," at the beginning of the little volume
which took the place of the projected larger one. " I had
" reason for some time to hope, benevolent reader," he says,
" that I might be permitted the printing of both the Public
" and the Familiar Letters of our author in one volume."
Intimation had reached him, however, that the Public Letters
must be kept back, — the form of the intimation, we may fancy,
having been a message from Arlington or Williamson through
the rude L'Estrange. Daniel Skinner's fine transcript of the
State Letters, therefore, remained private property; and only
the Latin Familiar Epistles which Milton had selected, or
which were all he had kept copies of, were at Aylmer's dis-
posal. To eke out these, too few to make even a small volume
by themselveSj Aylmer, as we saw in his own words long ago,
VOL. VI. 3 A
722 LIFE OF MILTON AND HISTOBY OF HIS TIME.
had applied to Milton for something' else of a publishable
kind, and had ohtained his Prohisiones Qumdan Oratories or
Jjatin Academical Exercises. These very juvenile conaposi-
tions. must have been turned up in the rummaging among
Milton's old papers in 1,673; for the English verses "At
a Vacation Exercise in thft College " had then been detached
from one of them to be printed in the Second Edition of the
Minor Poems. All the rest, with that esception, having
been handed over to Aylmer, he did make up a neat little
duodecimo volume of 156 pages, whieh he published with the
title": " Joanms MiMonii Angli, Epistolarvm FamiliaKhum, Liber
Unm : Quibus aocesserunt, Ejusdem, jam, olim. in QoUegio Ado-
Igspentis, Prolmiories Qucedam Oratoriee. LonMni, Impemis
Srahazoni Ayl/m^ri sub Signo Trium, Cohmbatrvmin, Via vulgo
Curnhill dicia. An. Dom. 1674." (" One Book of the Familiar
Epistles of John Milton> Englishman : to. whieh are added
some of his Oratorical Exercises long ago when, he was. a
youth at College. London, at the expense of Erabazon Aylmeu,
at the sign of the Three Pigeons in the street commonly called
Cornhillj An. Dom. 1674.") Aylmer had taken every pre-
caution j for the little book was duly entered in the Stationers?
Eegisters as licensed by L'Estrange. The date of the entry is
July 1, 1674, Copies, we may suppose, were out that month'-.
Of the Pwlmiones Oratories we gave a sufficient account
when editing them, or portions of them,, in connexion with
Milton's University life at Cambridge^. They belong properly
to that early periocl of the biography, and the only observation
about them required here, is thdt it is characteris,tic of Milton
that those juvenile performances should have been preserved
and accessible after two^-andf^fbrty years, and that he: did
not then hesitate tp let them go forth just as they were.
The Epistoles Pamiliares have all been given in translation
in the^e pages, each in its proper chuonologieal place. It is
' Book itself, with Aylmer's Preface; been those addressed by Cromwell to
Stationers' Eegisters of date ; and ante, Charles Gustavus, showing Cromwell's
Vol. I. pp. 239^240. Toland'a state- adniiration qf that heroic Swede and
ment is that "the Danish Resident pre- his desire of a strict alliance between
yaijed with MU1;on to gat the fetters of ijngland and Sweden for common action
State transcribed." The letters chieily on the Continent,
interesting to, tiiai Resident must have a Vol. I. pp. 289.— 2554i
PUBLICATION OF THE EPISTOLAE FAMILIABES, 723
characteristic that these too, ran^ng' as Hbej do from 1625,
Milton's seventeenth) year, to 1666, his fifty-eighth year,
should have been preserved; but they may be supposed tobe
only the. easual survivors, of a great many Latin lelfters he
had written and of which he had not kept copies. The fact
of their publication by Milton in 1674 is also chafraeteristic,
when we consider the very private and confidential nature
of the contents of sonie of them. They were thirty-one in
number in all, and had been addressed to seventeen persons.
Of the seven earliest, appertaining to the Cambridge and'
Italian periods of his life,, two had- been addressed to his first
preceptor, Thomas Young, three to Albsjandler Gill the younger,
his preceptor in St., Paul's^ School,, and two to the bosom-
friend of his youthy the never -forgotten Charles Diodabi.
Two letters> addressed respectively tc Buommattei, the Elor-
entine Grammarian, and Lucas Holstenius, the Librarian of
the Vatiean, recalled memories of his Italian journey in-
1638-9. One, written from London in 1647 to the Florentine
Carlo Dati, returned' to those Italian memories, but contained
intimate details: respecting Milton himself in the interval.
Three, addressed respectively to the Oldenburg diplomatist
Hermann Mylius, the Greek Parisian Philaras, and the
English clergyman Heathi belonged to the time of his
Secretaryship for the Council of State of the Common-
wealth. Fourteen belonged to the time of his Secretaryship to
Oliver ; of which; one was to Philaras again, one to the Dutch
Aitzema, one to the Genevese Ezekiel Spanheim, one to the
French Emeric Bigot, two to Henry de Brass, two to the
German Peter Heimbach,. three to Henry Oldenburg, and
three to Mr. Richard Jones. Of three written between Crom-
well's death and the Restoration one was to the French en-
tbusiast Jean L'Abadie, one to Oldenburg again, and one to'
Richard Jones again ;: and the last of the series, and the only
one written after the Restoration, was that to Peter Heim-
bach in 1666, just after the Great Plague. Most of the
seventeen correspondents' were dead, some of them long itgo;
but, of the foreigners among them' Carlo Dafci, Spanheim,
Bigot, and others were still alive,, as were also Oldenburg,', the
3 A3
724 LIFE OF MILTON AND HISTOET OF HIS TIME.
naturalized Englishman, now Secretary of the Royal Society,
and his and Milton's pupil, Mr. Richard Jones. This last, now
thirty-four years of age, was no longer merely Mr. Richai-d
Jones, but Viscount Ranelagh, Vice-Treasurer of Ireland, a
very important man in that kingdom, reputed " of good parts,
great wit, and very little religion," and on the eve of being
created Earl of Ranelagh. Several of the persons mentioned
in the letters, in terms of praise or dispraise, were also alive.
Morus, indeed, who had figured chiefly in them for dispraise,
was dead ; but Viscount Banelagh's mother, the incomparable
Lady Ranelagh, was the living lady-chief of learned society
in London, the brilliant hostess, in her sixtieth year, for her
brother Robert Boyle, in -their well-known house in Pall
Mall. On the whole, though Oldenburg may not have been
altogether satisfied with his appearance in Milton's Epistola
Familiares, the only living person entitled to complain a little
was the dashing Viscount Ranelagh. What need was there
to remind the public, the good-natured fellow might have
asked in the midst of his troubles with Irish revenue-affairs,
that he had been formerly the soft-headed boy Jones, who
had caused so much anxiety to his mother, and who had been
held in such tight rein both by blind Mr. Milton and by Mr.
Oldenburg ? That was a trifle ; and, for the rest, Milton had
judged for himself and had judged wisely. He had been pre-
vented from giving to the world such a history of his Latin
Secretaryship as might have been gathered from his State
Letters / but he had communicated in his Familiar Epistles a
good many autobiographic particulars that would otherwise
have been unknown. Who would now miss one of them ^ ?.
1 See Carte's Ormond, II. 451 et seq., sons and four daughters by his first mar-
for an account of Eanelagh's part in riage ; but, the sous having died young,
the Irish administration from 1670 on- the Earldom ofRanelagh became extinct,
wards and his differences with Ormond, The Visoountcy of Eanelagh, however,
and also for an ill-natured mention of with the Barony 6f Navan, was revived,
his mother. Lady Eanelagh, as a strong- In the codicil to the will of the Earl of
minded woman, with « the same genius Eanelagh, dated Feb. 20, 1710-11, is
or taste for intrigue" as her son, and mentioned "his dear mother's picture
holding political cabals "several nights hanging up in his closet in Chelsea"
m every week at her house." Earl Bane- (Lodge's Peerage of Ireland, enlarged by
lagh lived on through King William's Arohdall, 1789, Vol. IV. pp. 303—304).
reign, was a Privy Coimcillor in that Eanelagh Gardens, Chelsea, derived their
reign and a man of consequence gene- name from the faot that they occupied
rally, and did not die tUl Jan. 6, 1711-12. ground that had belonged to this Irish
H« had been twice married, and had two Earl, once Milton's pupU.
THE SOBIESKI DBCLAEATION. 725
In the same month of July 1674, or perhaps a little later
in the year, Brabazon Aylmer published a small quarto tract
of twelve pages with this title: "A Declaration, Or Letters
. Patents of the Election of this present King of Poland John the
Third, Elected on the %%d of May last past. Anno Bom. 1674.
Containing the Reasons of this Election, the great Vertues and
Merits of the said Serene Elect, His eminent Services in War,
especially in his last great Victory against the Turks and Tartars,
whereof many Particulars are here related, not published hefore.
Now faithfully translated from the Latin Copy. London, Printed
for Brabazon Aylmer, at the Three Pigeons in Cornhil, 1674." The
translation was reprinted as Milton's in the collected edition
of his prose- works m 1698, and was then distinctly ascribed
to Milton by Toland ; and there seems no reason to doubt
the fact. The subject of the tract must have been strongly
interesting to Milton : — Through the reign of John Casimir
(1648-1668), and under his successor Michael Wisnowietzki,
Poland, once an important European kingdom, had been
struggling for her very existence. Disorganized internally
by her wretched political constitution, and by the reactionary
policy that had been adopted against the Protestant religion,
which had taken such a strong hold of her population in the
sixteenth century, she had been overrun by invasion after
invasion of Swedes, Russians, Tartars, and Turks. Her
warrior-chief, the one man upon whom her hopes had been
centred in the confusion, was John Sobieski, Castellan of
Cracow. His last great victory over the Turks had been in
November 1673, the very day after the death of the Polish
King Michael. Accordingly, when the Polish Diet met at
Warsaw in April 1674 for the election of a new King, and
when, as usual, several foreign candidates were nominated,
one of them by Sobieski himself, the words " Let a Pole
reign over Poland," uttered by another Polish magnate, had
an electrical effect, Unanimously and with acclamation
Sobieski was elected King ; and a Latin Declaration to that
effect having been duly executed and vouched at Warsaw, on
the 22nd of May, by ten Polish bishops, twenty-three palatins,
twenty-four castellans, and seventy-five senators and great
726 - LIFE OF MILTOaf AND HISTOEY OF HIS TIME.
ofBeers, and Sobieski having taken his oath on the 5th of
June, the doemment was published for the information of
Europe. Too large to be given in full in the miserable
London, Gazette of that day, it was likely to be in demand if
put forth in the form of a tract in English ; and Aylmer
may either have applied to Milton for a translation, or
been offeEcd one. The document is by no means a dry and
formal affair but full of fervour, and with sentiments about
popular rights and the nature of true 'Sovereignty which it
must have pleased Milton to present again, in any form, to his
countrymen. It begins by sketching the proceedings of the
Biet and referring to the foreign candidates who had tendered
their iservices. "But the Commonwealth," it proceeds, "be-
" coming more diligent by the prodigal ambition used in the
" last imteisreigiQ and factions and disagreeings of minds, nor
" careless of the futuTe,, considered with herself whether firm
" or idoubtful things were promised, and whether she should
"seem from the present state to transfer bath the did and
" new honours of Poland into the possession of strangers, or
"the military glory, and tiheir late unheard of victory over
" the Turks, and blood spijlt in the war, upon the purple of some
" unwarlike Prince ; as if any one could so put on the love
" of the country, land that Poland was not so much an enemy
"t© her own nation and fame as to favour strangears more
" than her own, and, valour being found in her, should suffer
" a guest of new power to wax proud in her. Therefore she
" thenceforth turned her thoughts upon some one in her own
" nation, and at length abolished {as she began in the former
"election) that reproach cast upon her, under pretence of a
" secret maxim THt time cm be elected King <f Poland bid
" mi>h m are bom out tf Poland. Neither did 'she seek keg
" among her citizens whom she should prefer above the rest
"(for this was no uncertain or suspended election: there
" was no place for delay) ; for, although in the equality of
" our nobles many might be elected, yet the virtue of a hero
" appeared above his e(juaJ,s. Therefore the eyes and minds
" of all men were willingly, and by a certain divine instinct,
"turned upon the High Marahal of the Kingdom, Captain of
■Milton's last days. 727
"the Army, John Sobietzki." Thete follows a glowing cha-
racter of Sobieski, with an account of his family and his
life hitherto. At the time off his election Sobieski was forty-
five yeairs of age. His great reign of twenty-two years, with
such farther exploits against the Turks as were to earn the
admiration of ail Europe, justified the election, and gave
Poland her one chance of being permanently a nation. Of
that reign Milton was to know nothing. He had lived but
to see another hero emerge out of things in wreck and become
John III. of Pdland.
The Declaration of the Election of John Itl. of Folmd and
the tiny volume containing the EpistoliB Familiares and the
Prolusiones Oratorice were both on sale in Brabazon Aylmet's
shop, as we have seen reascwi for believing, in July 1674.
In the end of that month Milton had an attack of gout
more serious than usual. His brother, Christopher Milton,
Bencher of the Inner Temple, and Deputy Recorder for Ipswich,
had occasion to remember the fact very particularly. It was
Christopher Milton's custom, before going to Ipswioh, which
he generally did for each vacation after the midsummer term,
to call on his brother for a special leave-taking ; and " on or
about the 20th of July 1674," as he afterwards testified, he
went to Bunhill, on this custotnary visit. He could not be
more precise as to the day of the month ; but he was certain
that the visit was in the forenoon, because the IpsWich coach,
by which he was to start that day, always left town about
noon. He found his brother in his own chamber, " not well,"
though "of perfect mind and memory" and discoursing
sensibly. In a very serious manner Milton spoke of the
possibility of his dying before his brother's return to London,
and desired him to take noticfc, in that case, of his intentions
with regard to his property. He spoke deliberately, like one
miaking a word-of-mouth will. As near as Christopher could
recollect, the woMs were these: "Brother, the portion due
" to me from Mr. Powell, my former wife's father, I leave to
" the unkind children I had by her ; but I have received no
" part of it : and my will and meaning is they shall have no
" other benefit of my estate than the said portion and what
728 LIFE OF MILTON AND HISTORY OF HIS TIME.
" I have besides done for them, they having been very un-
" dutiful to me. And all the residue of my estate T leave to
" the disposal of Elizabeth, my loving wife." At the time of
his thus speaking his wife was in the room, and the maid-
servantj Elizabeth Fisher, was "going up and down the
room"; but whether they heard the words, or, at all events,
whether the maidservant heard them, Christopher could not
be sure. He was quite sure, howeverj that his brother, " then
ill of the gout," was perfectly calm, only declaring; "but
without passion," that "his children had been unkind to
"him, but that his wife had been very kind and careful of-
"him;" and the entire impression on Christopher was that
his brother had been induced to the communication merely by
the thought that, as he, Christopher, was going into the
country, they might never meet again. The complaint about
the undutifulness of the daughters was not then made for the
first time. Christopher had heard it from him before more
than once ^
It may have been on the same day, just after Christopher
had left the house in Bunhill to take the Ipswich coach, or
it may have been a day or two afterwards, that Milton, seated
with his wife at their midday dinner, recurred to the subject
of his conversation with his brother. Our informant is the
above-named maidservant, Elizabeth Fisher. She had been
about a year in Milton's service; and she remembered per-
fectly that, on a certain day which she could not farther
specify than that it was in July 1674, Milton and his wife
being at dinner together by themselves in his "lodging-
chamber," and she waiting on them, and something having
been provided for dinner which Milton " very well liked,"
she heard him say to his wife, whom he usually called Betty,
" God have mercy, Betty, I see thou wilt perform according
" to thy promise in providing me such dishes as I think fit
" whilst I live ; and, when I die, thou knowest that I have
" left thee all." He was at that time " of perfect mind and
memory, and talked and discoursed sensibly and well, but
^Christopher Miltou's evidence in Court in the case of his brother's Nuncupative
Milton's last datjs. V29
was then indisposed in his body by reason of the distemper
of the gout which he had then upon him " ; and she remem-
bered that, at the moment of his speaking the above words, he
was " very merry and not in any passion or angry h'umour.'"
Nor did she hear him then refer at all to his children or
their conduct. She had heard him say enough on that
topic before^.
Milton, it appears, recovered suflBciently from his illness
of the end of July to be seen again, in his garden, or at
the door of his house, in his grey coarse cloth coat, receiv-
ing visitors or led about on his walks out of doors. And so
August passed with its heat, and September and October came
with the falling leaves. Not by fall of leaf or changing
colour did month follow month for Milton. The world came
to him by hearing only. — From abroad the main rumours,
in those months, were still of the war between Louis XIV.
and the Dutch, and of the unflinching heroism of the young
Prince of Orange. England having retired from that war
several months ago by her separate peace with the Dutch,
there was leisure at home for speculating on the new domestic
policy of the Danby Administration, then shaping itself se-
cretly in the interval between the Twelfth Session of the
Parliament and the uncertain day of the meeting of the
Thirteenth. It was necessarily to be a "No Popery" policy,
on the principles of the Test Act, and so far popular ; but,
for the rest, appearances were that it would be very much
a return to Clarendon's policy, and therefore unpromising
for the Nonconformists. By the advice of Danby, Charles
had begun to entertain the idea of the marriage of his niece,
the Princess Mary, with the Prince of Orange; and the
chances that the marriage might corne about were eagerly
discussed among the Londoners. Among other matters of
public gossip were Shaftesbury's plottings for the revenge
of his political disgrace, and the appointment of Arlington
to the office of Lord Chamberlain, in compensation for his
removal from the Secretaryship of State, now held by Sir
' Elizabeth Fisher's evidence in Court in the case of Milton's Nuncupative Will.
See ante, p. 476.
730 LIFE OF MILTON AND HESTOEY OF HIS TIME.
JoBeph Williamson. The statue of Charles I. had been set
up at Charing Cross, and they were laying the foundations of
the new St. Paul's. There were new pieces every week at
the two theatres, and Shad well, Wyoherley, and Crowne were
now tihe familiar names among theatre-goers after Bryden's.
There were advertisements in the London Gazette of a new
and enlarged edition of Hudibras, the first and second parts
together, as on sale jointly by Martin and Herringman, and
of an exhibition in Grocers' Hall of Sir Samuel Morland's
new pumps and enigines, for which his Majesty bad granted
ibim a patent for seventeen years.— Amid this confused buzz
of facts and rumours round the invalid Milton, with whatever
of more vague news reached him of the state of affairs in
Scotland and in Ireland, his thoughts, one finds, were tuTning
more and more on the certainty that his own days were
numbered. Again and again he recurred, in conversation
with his wife, and also quite openly with the maidservant
Elizabeth Fisher, to the arrangement he had made with his
brother in case of his death. He seems to have thought
the verbal arrangement sufiicient without the formality of a
written will, but to have been anxious to leave additional
testimnony to it, and to his reasons for it, if there should be
need. Several times, accordingly, after his partial recovery
from his gout-fit in the end of July, Elizabeth Eisher heard
him " declare and say that he had made provision for his
"children in his life-time, and bad spent the greatest part
"fflf his estate in providing for them, and that he was resolved
" he would do no more for them living or dying, for that little
" part whioh he had left he had given to his wife." In these
words, and in the fact that he likewise told Elizabeth Fisher,
one Sunday afternoon, that "there was a thousand pounds left
" in Mr. Powell's hands to be disposed amongst his children
"hereafter," we see something like pains taken to prove
himself not unjust. But, indeed, tiie settlement he had made
seems to have been such a relief to his mind that he could
not help reverting to the topic whoever was present. As
late as October 1674 there was a repetition, with slight
variation, of the little incident of the midday dinner of July-j
DEATH AND BURIAL OP MILTON. 731
with its ejaenlattion " God have mercy, Betty." 'The fact
comes to us not from Elizabeth Pi^er, but from her sister
Mary Fisher, a servant in the same neighbourhood, who used
often to look in upon her sister, and in that way knew Mr.
Milton ivfery well. She testifies that, one day about the
middle of October, as nearly as she could remember, beimg
in Milton's house about noon, and in the kitchen with her
sister, amd Milton and his wife dining that day in the
kitchen, she heard Milton say to his wife, " Make much of
" me as long as I live, for thou knowest I have given thee
" all when I die at thy disposal." He " was then very merry
and seemed to be in good health of body." The words about
his will, we can see, had by this time established themselves
half-humorously between him and hi« wife as his formula for
his sense of helplessBess and dependence on her alone-'.
November 1674 had come^ — Ohe beginning, as the chronicles
inform us, of an unusually warm and unhealthy winter fhrough
the British Islands. Again Milton was ill, this time of " the
gout struck in," or severe goii't-fever. His neighbours were
thenceforth to miss their famous blind man in grey. He
died on Sunday, the 8th of November, late at night, " with
" so little pain that tihe time of his expiring was not perceived
" by thfose in the room." He haid readied the age of sixty-
five years and eleven months.
Bunhill iPields Burying-ground, close to Milton's house,
was already known as peculiarly the London burying-ground
of the Dissenters, and was to be more and more famous in
that character as cue eminent Nonconfformist after another
found a grave within it and the number of the tombstones
increased. Not there, however, was Milton buried, but in his
own parish-ehii!rch of St. Giles, Cripplegate, feeside his father,
and according to the rites of the GhuTch of England. The
funeral was on Thursday, the 12th of November. " He had
" a very deeemt interment, accardiiig to his quality," says
Phillips, " being attended from his 'bouse to the church by
" several gentlemen then in town, his principal well-wishers
1 Evidence of Elizateth Fisher and Mary Fisher in the case of Milton's Nuncu-
pative Will.
732 LIFE OF MILTON AND HI8T0EY OF HIS TIME.
"and admirers." Toland's account is as trustworthy and
is more particular. " All his learned and great friends in
" London, not without a concourse of the vulgar," says Toland,
" accompanied his hody to the church of St. Giles, near Crip-
" plegate, where he was buried in the chancel." We can see
the coffin brought out from the small house opposite the
Artillery Garden Wall, the neighbours looking on from their
windows, and the widow left in the house with one or two
women attending her, but perhaps not one of the three
daughters. We can see the funeral procession, from Bunhill •
Row, along Beech Lane and Whitecross Street or Redcross
Street^ to Gripplegate church, Christopher Milton and
perhaps the two Phillipses as chief mourners, and surely
Andrew Marvell and Dr. Nathan Paget following in the
ranks, whether the Earl of Anglesey, Sir Robert Howard,
and Dryden were there or not. It arrives at the church
gate, where there is some little concourse, either because the
neighbourhood has heard that Mr. Milton is to be buried,
or merely, because it is the funeral of somebody. There one
or two clergymen meet the coffin ; they place themselves
before it and begin the reading or chaunt, "I am the
" resurrection and the life, saith the Lord : he that believeth
" in me, though he were dead, yet shall he live." They read
or chaunt the rest, advancing into the church, till the coffin
rests by the side of the grave that has been opened for it in
the pavement of the upper end of the chancel, and round
which the mourners are now grouped. Then comes the
moment for the lowering of the coffin and for the words,
" Forasmuch as it hath pleased Almighty God, of his great
" mercy, to take unto himself the soul of our dear brother here
" departed, we therefore commit his body to the ground) earth
" to earth, ashes to ashes, dust to dust." With these words,
the handfuls of earth fall on the coffin-lid ; some eyes are in
tears ; the remaining prayers are read ; the workmen bustle
to fill up the grave ; and the company depart.
BOOK IV.
Posthumous Miltoniana.
POSTHUMOUS MILTONIANA.
In no case can the life o£ a man be said to end preeiflely at
his death ; but the amount of posthumous matter appertain-
ing to the biography of Milton is unusually large. It may
be arranged under a series of headings : —
Milton's ntjnctjpatite will.
Hardly was Milton dead when there arose a dispute
between his widow and his three daaighters as to the in-
heritance of his property. The dispute took the form of
resistance by the thTce daughters to the widow's application
in the Prerogative Court of Canterbury for probate of the
nunicapative or word-of-mouth will which she alleged Milton
to have made, on or about the 2Qth of the preceding July,
in presence of his brother; Mr. Christopher Milton, Bencher
of the Inner Temple and Deputy of Recorder of Ipswich (ante,
p. 727-728). The words of the will, as they were reduced
to writing by Christopher Milton on the 23rd of November
1674, and lodged that day in Court on the widow's behalf,
attested by Christopher Milton's signature and by the mark
of Elizabeth Fisher, Milton's maidservant, were these : —
" The poriion due to me from Mr. Powell) my former wife'»
"father, I leave to the nnhind children^ I had hy her, having'
" received no part of it ; hut my meaning is they shall have no
" other benefit of my estate than the said portion and what I
" ham besides done for them, they having been- very vmdwtiful to
" me : All the rest of my estate I leave to disposal of Elizabeth, my
" laeing.wifeP The question fiju the Court was whether this,
in the circumstances, could be taken, as-- a good nuncupative
will. Verbal or nuncupative wills, if sufficiently voucfaedi
736 LIFE OF MILTON AND HISTOKT OF HIS TIME.
were valid enough in those days for personal property, and
it was not till 1677 that they were distinctly discouraged
by a statute subjecting them to very strict conditions. Natu-
rally, however, wills of this kind were always liable to sus-
picion, and were never allowed till the objections of adverse
parties had been fully considered.
The objections lodged in Court on the part of the daughters
were in the form of a paper of nine interrogatories to be
tendered to the witnesses for the will. It was desired that
it should be asked — (1) in wha,t relation or dependence each
witness stood to the widow, and to which of the contesting
parties each witness would give the victory if it depended on
mere vote ; (2) whether each witness could be positive as to
the day of the alleged will, the time of the day^ and the very
words spoken by the deceased ; (3) whether, if the will was
as had been declared, the deceased was not in perfect health
at the time, and declared the will in a " present passion or
some angry humour against some or one of his children ; "
(4) whether the deceased was known to have any "■ cause of
displeasure " against his daughters, and whether, on the con-
trary, they had not always been and still were " great fre-
quenters of the Church and good livers;" (5) whether the
will, if any, had not been that the widow should have ^1000,
and that the residue should go to Mr. Christopher Milton's
children, and whether there was not an understanding to that
effect between Mr. Christopher Milton and the widow, if her
present suit should succeed ; (6) whether the unpaid marriage-
portion which was all that had been left to the three daughters
by the alleged will, and which it supposed to be still recover-
able out of the estate of the Powells, was not " reputed a very
bad or altogether desperate debt ;" (7) whether Mr. Christopher
Milton was not acting as the widow's solicitor in the cause,
superintending the suit, and paying fees to her proctor, &c. ;
(8) what provision deceased had made for his daughters in
his life-time, and whether the eldest of them, Anne Milton,
was not " lame and almost helpless ; " (9) what, as far as each
witness could guess, was the total value of the estate of the
deceased.
Milton's nuncupative will. 737
The depositions of the witnesses for the will in answer
to these interrogatories were duly taken and recorded. The
examination of Christopher Milton was on the 5th of De-
cember, before Dr. Lloyd, one of the surrogates of the Court ;
that of Elizabeth Fisher on the 15th, before Dr. Trumbull,
afterwards Sir William Trumbull, Ambassador and Secretary
of State for some time to William III, and remembered as in
his last years the friend and literary adviser of Pope ; and on
the same 15th of December another surrogate took the evi-
dence of Mary Fisher, who had been in the habit of dropping
in upon her sister Elizabeth in Milton^s kitchen, knew Milton
and his wife in that way pretty well, and had heard him,
on one of these visits, about two months after the date of the
alleged will, use words which seemed to refer to the will
as a settled thing. How the story of Milton's express de-
claration of his will to his brother, and his subsequent re-
ferences to it in conversation, and the story also of the
unpleasant relations between Milton and his daughters, did
come- out in the three examinations, we know already to the
last detaU. There are several points of additional interest here,
however, in the answers to the queries of the three daughters,
Christopher Milton distinctly acknowledged that he had
drawn up the will with his own hand out of consideration for
the widow, recollecting his brother's exact words to the best
of his ability, and that he wished to see the will take effect,
though he denied that there was any other foundation for
the idea that he was conducting the case at his own expense
than that, having gone with the widow to proctor's chambers
in the course of the business, he had lent her two half-
crowns to make up a sum she wanted. He also acknow-
ledged that Mrs. Milton had told him that Milton had pri-
vately intimated a wish to her that, if the property left should
exceed ,^''1000, the surplus should be given to Christopher
Milton's children ; but he denied having heard anything to
that effect from his brother himself or considering it part
of the will. In the matter of the undutiful behaviour of the
daughters to their father he could speak mainly from what
his brother, when declaring his will and at different times
VOL. VI. 3 B
738 LIFE OF MILTON AND HISTORY OF HIS TIME.
before, hnd told him; and of their present chureh-going-
habits and general manner of life he knew nothing, "they
living apart from their father four or five years last past."
He was by no means of opinion that the bequest to the three
girls of their mother's unpaid marriage-portion was valueless,
knowing the said portion to be "in the hands of persons
of ability, able to pay the same, being their grandmother and
Unele," and having " seen the grandfather's will, wherein 'tis
particularly directed to be paid unto them by his executors."
This marriage-portion, consisting of a principal of a6''1000,
" besides the interest thereof for about twenty years," was,
he believed, all that Milton had given to his daughters, over
and above " his charges in their maintenance and breeding ;■"
and the eldest of the daughters, Anne Milton, he did under-
stand to be " lame and helpless." On this last point the
maidservant Elizabeth Fisher, as a workwoman herself, had
more distinct notions than the Ben-cher. "Anne Milton,"
she said, " is lame, but hath a trade and can live by the samCj
which is the making of gold and silver lace, and which the
deceased bred her up to." The same witaess had also several
times heard Mr. Milton " declare and say that he had made
provision for his children in his life-time, and had spent the
greatest part of his estate in providing for them," and assign
this as one reason for doing nothing more for them at his
death. She believed, moreover, that their mother's marriage-
portion, left them, and due to them by their uncle Mr. Powell,
was a good debt enough, " for that the said Mr. Powell is re-
puted a rich man." On the whole, though it was the evi-
dence of this witness that was most damaging to the girls, and
especially to the second daughter, Mary, the dreadful story of
whose words about her father as far back as 1663 she testified
to have heard from Milton's own lips, yet there seems to
have been no spite in her evidence, but good rough sense and
feeling. To the first of the nine interrogatories she answered
that she was still in Mrs. Milton's service, and therefore,
of course, had " a dependency upon her as her servant," but
declared that, notwithstanding that relation, if the decision
of the case were in her power, " she would give the deceased's
Milton's nuncupative will. 739
estate equally to be shared between the ministrants and the
producent," i.e. between the three daughters and the widow.
Elizabeth Fisher's notion of rough justice seems to have
been also that of the Court. There was not the least doubt
of the trustworthiness of any of the witnesses ; but the nun-
cupative will as attested by them wanted some of the qualifi-
cations deemed essential. It had not been made on the death-
bed of the testator, nor even in what could be supposed his
last sickness ; the evidence of the witnesses was concurrent
from several moments in the last months of the life of the de-
ceased and not from one and the same moment ; nor had there
been the solemnity of a distinct call from the deceased to the
witnesses to hear his words and remember them as his last
will. " On these principles," says Warton, " we may presume
Sir Leoline Jenkins to have acted in the rejection of Milton'&
will." Sir Leoline Jenkins, afterwards Ambassador and Se-
cretary of State, was then the chief judge of the Prerogative-
Court, arid had a high reputation for uprightness ; but I do
not find the proof of any such definite decision by him as- i&
here assumed. All that appears is that the widow came out
of Court without the probate of the will whieh she had applied
for, but with letters of administration granted to her instead.
They were granted on the 25th of February- 1674-5, and the
register of the Court bears that they were granted, " the
" nuncupative will of the said defunct, otherwise alleged by
" the aforesaid Elizabeth Miltoa, having not yet been proved
" (nofulum probato)" My construction is that the various
parties had by this time come together, Christopher Milton
advising the widow, while the three girls were represented, as
they had probably been from the begimiing of the suit, by
their grandmother Mrs. Powell and their uncle Mr. Richard
Powell, and that, to save farther trouble, the widow had
abandoned her claim for probayte of the will and agreed to be
content with that administration of the effects of the deceased
which the Court was willing to assign her. The grant of
administration constituted her the officer of Court for realising
all the effects, and dis.tributing the surplus, after payment of
the debts of the deceased, among all entitled to share, accoi'd-
3B^
740 LIFE OP MILTON AND HISTORY OF HIS TIME.
inig to the proportions fixed by the law and custom of that
time ; and the difference for herself was that, whereas probate
of the will would have given her all, administration gave her
two-thirds, one third as widow, another as administratrix,
the remaining third to be distributed equally among the
daughters^.
The widow was most prompt and business-like in her
arrangements. She was entitled to take time in settling with
the daughters ; but, even before the letters of administra-
tion had been granted, she had virtually settled all. The
proof exists in. the form of the three releases or receipts given
to her by the three girls. Those of Anne and Mary Milton
are both dated Feb. 22, 1674-5, or three days before the date
of the letters of administration. They are in identical terms,
and are signed by the same four witnesses, one of whom is
a " Richard Milton ; " and the only difference is that Aane's
release is signed by her mark merely over the seal, her name
" Anne Milton " being written for her by this Richard
Milton, while Mary's release bears her own signature, " Mary
Millton," spelt so. Each states that "before the ensealing
and delivery hereof " the sum of j^'lOO has been " secured to
be payd" by the widow, " to the end the said one hundred
pounds may, by and with the consent and approbation of
Christopher Milton and Richard Powell, both of the Inner
Temple, London, Esqrs., be layd out and disposed off for aiid
in purchasing of a rent charge or annuity " for the giver of
the receipt during her life, " or otherwise as they shall judge
to be for the best benefitt and advantage ;" and, in considera-
tion of this security, each " doth hereby acknowledge herselfe
fuUy sattisfyed of her share and distribueion of her said late
father's estate." The release of the third and youngest
daughter, Deborah, does not come till about a month later,
i.e. on the 27th of March 1675, and then with some interest-
ing peculiarities. In the first place, it is not granted by
> The documents relating to the pro- by Todd, with Warton's notes (Todd's
cedure in the Nuncupative Will were Milton, edit. 1852, 1. 167—183), and by
first printed by Warton in his second Mr. John Fitchett Marsh (Appendix to
edition of Milton's Minor Poems in Milton Papers, printed for the Chetham
1791, and have been reprinted in fuU Society, 1861).
Milton's itdncupative will. 741
" Deborah Milton," but jointly by " Abraham Clarke, of the
Citty of Dublin in ye Kingdome of Ireland, weavor, and
Deborah, his wife," and is signed and sealed accordingly by
both, the signature " Deboroh Clarke " having an o for the a
in the christian name, and a correction in the last letter of the
surname, as if the writer were hardly yet accustomed to it.
The four witnesses to this receipt are different from those who
had witnessed the other two ; two of the names seem Irish ;
and, though the receipt does not positively bear to have been
signed in Dublin and sent over thence, that seems self-
evident. Now, as it was under her maiden name of " Deborah
Milton " that Deborah had appeared as one of the parties to
the suit against the widow in November 1674, and as she
retains that name in the documents of the suit till the 5th of
December, there seem to be only two ways of accounting for
her appearance as '•' Deborah Clarke " on the 27th of March
1675. Having gone to Dublin, we are told, some years
before her father's death, as companion to a lady named
Merian, and having there met the Abraham Clarke who
describes himself as a " weaver," but whose business Aubrey
explains further by the words " a mercer, sells silk," she may
have been married to him for some time, without having
taken the trouble of informing her father or her sisters ; and
so, when her sisters did look after her interests as well as
their own in the suit, they may have entered her as still
Deborah Milton, and only on correspondence with her in con-
sequence of the suit may it have emerged that she was now Mrs.
Clarke. It is more probable, however, that she was still only
Deborah Milton when the suit began, was then in Dublin, and
remained there through the whole progress of the suit, and
that her marriage with Abraham Clarke occurred in Dublin
between the 5 th of December 1674, when the paper of inter-
rogatories to the widow's witnesses, tendered in the Prero-
gative Court in London, purported to be from " Anne, Mary,
and Deborah Milton," and the 27th of March 1675, when she
and her husband signed their joint release to the widow. In
that case the signing of the release must have been one of the
earliest incidents of her married life ; and in either case the
743 LIFE OF MILTON AND HISTORY OF HIS TIME.
widow must have settled with her by correspondence.
Whether because the husband, Abraham Clarke, took care
to exact from the widow all he could before giving the
release, or because the widow recollected the young Deborah
with kindlier feelings than she could own to the two
elder sisters, the settlement with the Clarkes yielded some-
thing more to I>eboi"ah than had been yielded to Anne and
Mary. The release from Deborah and her husband is as
complete as the others had been, but is " in eonsideracion. of
" the full and just summe of one hundred pounds sterling paid
" by Elizabeth Milton, relict and also administratrix of the
" goods and chatties of the said John Milton, unto John
^'Burrough of Cornehill, London, cabinet-maker, for the use
"and by the appointment of the said Abraham Clarke and
" Deborah his said wife, and of the delivery unto ye said
" John Burrough, for the [like] use and by the like ap-
"pointment, of severall goods late of ye said John Milton>
" deceased, by ye said Elizabeth Milton." The goods thus
entrusted to the cabinet-maker of Cornhill to be sent to
Dublin with the j^'lOO may have included articles of furni-
ture that would be useful to a newly married couple ; but we
chance to know independently that they included one or two
little articles that a daughter might like to have as relics of
her father. One was a silver seal which Milton had used,
bearing the family arms.
One point more in the widow's settlement with the three
daughters. All the three releases contained an excepting
clause. That of the Clarkes discharges the widow of all
further claims on her on account of the estate of the deceased,
realized or to be realized, " except such share thereof as ye
" said Deborah, or as ye said Abraham Clarke in right of
" ye said Deborah, doth or may claim or demaund by force or
" colour of one bond or obligacion, dated ye two and twentieth
" day of February now last past, of ye penall summe of Two
" Hundred Pounds, entred into by Christopher 'Milton of ye
" Inner Temple, London, Esqr., unto Richard 'Powell, of the
" same Inner Temple, London, Esqr., or of ye condition there
" under- written." The exception had been totidem verbis in
Milton's nuncupative will. 743
the two previous releases. The bond given by Christopher
Milton, the paternal uncle of the three girls, to Mr. Powell,
their maternal uncle, has not come down to us ; but there can
be little doubt that it referred to the unpaid marriage-portion
of Milton's first wife. By the very'act of quashing the nun-
cupative will that debt of .^1000, with twenty-one years of
interest, belonged no longer, as by the will, to the three
daughters, but to the widow, as administratrix for herself and
for them ; and, whatever the debt might turn out to be worth,
two thirds of it, as of the rest of the estate, would be legally
the widow's, and only the other third would be divisible
among the daughters. Is it too much to suppose that Mr.
Powell, on the one hand, was anxious to guard himself against
a claim of the widow which might be very inconvenient to
him, and that the widow, on the other hand, having made «p
her mind that the three daughters were the proper persons to
benefit by their mother's marriage-portion, if it should ever
be recovered, was willing to leave that debt as a family matter
to* be settled between Mr. Powell and his nieces without her
interference ? If so, her good friend Christopher Milton
agreeing with her and willing to be her security, the bond to
Mr. Powell may have been to the effect that Mr. Powell
should have no further trouble from her in that matter, and
that, whenever he should see fit to pay up anything of the
long due marriage-portion, as enjoined by his father's will of
December 1646, it should all go to the daughters*.
Mrs. Milton having paid Deborah's shave of .^100 by the
37th of March 1675, it may be assumed that she had by that
time paid also the other two shares of .5^100 each, and so was
then clear of a,ll her liabilities. What she had retained for
herself can have been about ^''600 only, with the greater
portion of her deceased husband's household goods. Phillips's
report from hearsay, that his uncle had died worth ^1500 in
money besides household goods, must, therefore, be consider-
' My chief authority for the transac- with facsimiles of the signatures to
tions between the widow and the them, and excellent annotations by Mr.
daughters is the little volume of Milton Marsh. But see also Vol. I. pp. 3 — 4,.
Papers edited for the Clietham Society footnote, Vol. III. pp. 635 — 637, and
by Mr. John Fitchett Marsh in 1851- ante, p. 449—451.
The volume contains the three releases,
744 LIFE OF MILTON AND HISTOEY OF HIS TIME.
ably abated. Milton had estimated his own estate just before
his death at ^1000 or perhaps a little more, and his estimate
had turned out tolerably correct. He had wanted to leave his
widow ^1000, and what had actually come to her was about
two- thirds of that sum. It was as if now a widow were left
about .^2000, to be invested in an annuity for her life or
otherwise.
THE WIDOW, THE THREE DAUGHTEES, AND MILTON S DIRECT
DESCENDANTS.
At Milton's death his widow was just thirty-six years of
age. Though she might have married again, one hears of
no such intention. She lived on in London, for six or seven
years longer, still apparently in the house in Artillery Walk,
Bunhill. One of her most frequent visitors, and her most
intimate friend all iii all in London, was her relative Dr.
Nathan Paget, who had first introduced her to Milton. He
died in January 1678-9 ; and in his will, dated the 7th of
that month and proved the 15th, while leaving a sum of
money to the College of Physicians, and other sums to his
brother the Rev. Thomas Paget, his widowed sister Elizabeth
Johnson, and her children, he expressly marks his regard for"
his " cosen " Elizabeth Milton by a bequest to her of ,^20.
An occasional visitor of Mrs. Milton, especially about 1680,
was the inquisitive Aubrey, some of whose particles of in-
formation about Milton, jotted down about that year, are
authenticated by him by the repeated phrase " vidua affirnut"
" his widowe assures me," &c. Aubrey was particularly in-
terested by finding that she Had a great many letters by her
that Milton had received "from learned men of his ac-
quaintance, both of England and beyond sea," and also that
she had still in her possession the portrait of Milton he
thought the best, viz. that taken when he was twenty-one
years of age and a Cambridge scholar. As Aubrey liked this
portrait better than the later one prefixed to some of Milton's
books, he thought it " ought to be engraven," and he pro-
Milton's widow. 745
posed to write Milton's name upon it in " red letters " for its
safer preservation ^.
It seems to have been in or about 1681 that the widow,
then in her forty-third year, made up her mind to leave
London and retire to her native Cheshire. Preparation had
been made by an arrangement with her brother, Richard
MinshuU, rather more than two years younger than herself,
and still living in the parish of Wistaston, -near Nantwich,
where they had both been born and baptized. On the 4th
of June 1680 this Richard MinshuU of Wistaston, describing
himself as a " frame-work knitter," had given a bond in j^''30
to "Elizabeth Milton of the city of London, widow," to the
effect that, in consideration of the sum of ^150 " payd or
secured to be payd " by her to him for her use, he surrendered
to Sir Thomas Wilbraham, baronet, a lease of " a messuage
and tenement, with the appurtenances and diverse lands
thereunto belonging," held by him from the said baronet,
and situated in Brindley, in the county of Chester, in order
that a new lease of the same should be made to the said
Elizabeth Milton. As the new lease was to be for the
widow's life, conjointly with that of Mary MinshuU, the wife
of the Richard MinshuU who gives the bond, and with that
of a son of his, also named Richard MinshuU, for the benefit
of whichever of the three should live longest, it is evident
that the arrangement was one for the common interests of
the family, with the help of the widow's money. When
Mrs. Milton did retire to Cheshire, it was not to the messuage
at Brindley, which is about six miles west from Nantwich,
but to Nantwich itself, much closer to her brother and his
family. Wistaston was the place where he carried on his
trade of frame-work knitter, and the lease at Brindley was
a mere farming investment, sublet to undertenants.
Having arrived in Nantwich, some time in 1681, the
widow took up her abode either in some very small house in
the town by herself, or more probably in a portion of the
1 Munk's Boll of the Boyal College of notes, ty Miss Tliomasin E. Sharpe, re-
Physicians, I. 224—225 ; Milton, Min- printed from The Genealogist of April
shull, and Gouldsmyth pedigree, with 1878 ; Aubrey's Lives, Milton.
746 LIFE OF MILTON AND HISTORY OF HIS TIME.
house of some friend, where she placed her furniture, and
where she could have all the attendance she wanted without
keeping her own servant. There, among her relatives and
old acquaintances once more, and near her native spot, she
grew older and older, utterly forgotten in London, but
gradually more and more known to all Nantwieh as an
eminently respectable and pious person, widow of the famous
Mr. Milton, and living frugally on what he had left her.
So well known were her habits and circumstances among her
neighbours that it became a saying among the Nantwieh
people, when they would describe the hospitalities of persons
of straitened means, "They have had Mrs. Milton's feast,
enough and no more.''^ This must have been late in her life,
when she was also known as the member of a small con-
gregation or chapel of General Baptists in Nantwieh, the
pastor of which was a Mr. Samuel Acton. Phillips, while
writing his memoir of Milton in 1694, was not quite sure
that she was still alive in her Cheshire retirement ; and, save
that Toland, when preparing his Life of Milton in 1698,
caused a friend to write to her for information, who received
a letter in reply, admirers of Milton do not seem to have
troubled her with any inquiries about him till in her very
last years. It was from some^ one who had seen her in
Nantwieh that Bishop Newton heard that her hair had been
originally of a golden hue ; and there is another tradition
that, on being asked by some visitors whether her husband
had not been a great reader of Homer and Virgil, she resented
the question, thinking it implied plagiarism, and answered
with some eagerness that her husband stole from nobody but
the muse that inspired him, and that muse was God's Holy
Spirit. One or two more documents are extant relating to
her money-affairs. On the 11th of April 1713, or the last
year but one of the reign of Queen Anne, she became bound
jointly with Mr. Samuel Acton in .^-"SO for the payment six
months afterwards of a debt of ^10, with interest, to a Randal
Timmis, of Greasty, co. Chester, yeoman ; and, though the
nature of the debt is not stated, one imagines it to have been
connected somehow with the Baptist chapel. On the 23nd
Milton's widow. 747
of October 1720, when George I. had been six years on the
throne, and she was in her eiglity-second year, she signed
an agreement with John Darlington, yeoman, letting to him
her farm and premises at Brindley at a rent of .^'30 yearly
on certain carefully stated mutual conditions. On the 16th
of June 1725, when she was in her eighty-seventh y6ar, there
was a farther transaction between her and the same John
Darlington, relating to the same premises and farm at
Brindley. She lived more than two years after that, for her
last win is dated Aug. 22, 1727, in the first year of tlie reign
of George II., and it was proved on the 10th of October in
that year. She died, therefore, between these two dates, near
the age of eighty-nine. Hers had been an unusually long
widowhood, for she had outlived her husband fifty-three
years. A funeral sermon said to have been preached on her
in the Baptist chapel, Nantwieh, by the Rev. Isaac Kimber,
assistant to Mr. Acton, was published in 1756 by the preacher's
son, Mr. Edward Kimber, but with a mistake as to the date
of her death. It contains no allusion whatever to Milton,
and next to nothing about herself.
Most of Mrs. Milton's small prpperty having terminated
with her life or been already settled beyond that, her will
was a very simple one. It constituted her " loving friends "
Samuel Acton and John Allecock, both of Nantwieh, her
executors, and gave all her effects, after payment of her debts,
to her " nephews and nieces in Namptwich " equally, without
naming them. Allecock alone took out letters of administra-
tion, and there was very little to administer. The goods and
chattels she had left were sworn under .^40 ; and the " true
and perfect inventory" of them, made for the purpose of
the oath, still exists, and exhibits the total as exactly ^'38
8s. M. It is a most touching document. The total, small
though it is, comprises 108 different items. First comes " a
pair bedsteads and hangings," valued at 18«;, then "a feather
bed and bolster," valued at d^2 7s., then " 2 quilts and pair
of blanketts, old patched ones," valued at 10«., then " 2 tea-
spoons and 1 silver spoon, with a seal and stopper and bitts
of silver," valued together at 12s., then a " chest of drawers
74'8 LIFE OF MILTON AND HISTORY OP HIS TIME.
and frame," valued at ISs., then " one dress-box, bottles, and
things belonging," valued at 12s., then " one pencil-case,"
valued at Ss. ; and so on the document goes, through a miscel-
lany of pewter dishes, other dishes, pails and small barrels, a
brass fender, fire-irons, cooking utensils, trunks, old tin candle-
sticks, " S. totershell knife and fork with other old ones,^' an
old looking-glass, two old pairs of scissors, a tobacco-box,
" one mask and fan," " one old muflf and case," " a fine cloak
and hood," " a Norwich gown and pettycoat," " a calimancoe
gown," " an old Norwich gown and coat/' handkerchiefs
and other articles of body attire, " three pair old gloves," '' a
pair shoes and two pair cloggs," " two pair of spectables/'
&c., &c. The majority of the items range from two or three
shillings to threepence or lower in value, and there are in-
cluded 17s. in money and sixpence worth of coals that had
been left unburnt. The highest item by far in the inventory
is " Mr. Milton's pictures and coat of arms," valued at ^10
10s. ; the next in value is the above-named feather-bed and
bolster at ^2 7s., the next the Norwich gown and petticoat at
.^1 5s., the next the bedstead and hangings at 18s., the next
the "fine cloak and hood" at 17s. 6d., and the next "two cane
chairs and two velvet cushions " at 17*. Under the name
of " 2 Books of Paradise/' valued at 10*., one recognises bound
copies of Paradise Lost and Paradise Regained ; " some old
books and few old pictures " go together for 12*. ; and there
is " a large Bible " valued at 8*. Ta assist myself in inferring
the domestic accommodations of Mrs. Milton at the close of
her life, I have submitted the inventory to practised feminine
judgment ; and the report is that her part of whatever house
she lived in consisted probably of a single chamber, with a
small attached scullery, but that the chamber, though uncar-
peted, and serving as sitting-room, kitchen, and bed-room ia
one, may have been of good size, and bright and tidy enough,
with its fire-place and brass fender, its old chest of drawers,
its two old tables, its two cane chairs with velvet cushions,
and two or three sedge-bottomed chairs and stools beside ,
and with Mr. Milton's pictures and coat of arms on the walls,
and the two Books of Paradise and the large Bible as the
Milton's widow. 749
conspicuous table-ornaments. I am informed also that the
venerable old lady's wardrobe, though it included curious
little articles of fashion, like the mask and fan, that must
have been carefully conserved from the days of the Restora-
tion, and also handsome enough changes of more lately pur-
chased apparel, in which to walk out or receive visitors, was
deficient in woollen and linen under-comforts, and that her
tastes were evidently much less in the direction of needle-
work or knitting than of cookery and pastry. The proportion
of saucepans, mortars and pestles, and other little articles of
cooking apparatus, to the rest of her scullery effects is, I am
told, remarkable ; and some of these articles, it appears,
indicate a certain preference for minces, stews, made dishes,
and generally for the daintier style of cookery. One re-
members Milton's compliment to her, " God have mercy, B^tty"
&c. (ante, p. 728). On the whole, the ascendancy of Milton in
the widow's memory and surroundings to the last is a thing
most manifest. Besides the relics of him in the old furniture,
such as it was, in the two portraits of him and his coat of
arms, in the bound copies of his Paradise Lost and Paradise
Regained, and in the few silver trinkets, it seems probable
that she had retained more familiar mementoes in the articles
entered in the inventory as " the best suit of twad cloaths,"
" the wprser do," and " 2 pair of ruffles." The two suits of
" twad," possibly Milton's old suits of grey in Bunhill fifty-
three years before, were valued at 3*. and Is. 6s. respectively,
and the ruffles at 2s. If they were Milton's, they ought to
have fetched higher prices even from Nantwich antiquaries.
The two portraits of him, the one his sweet round-headed little
boy-portrait, the other that graceful portrait of him in his
Cambridge days which Aubrey had wanted to mark, were to
be sold ere long for considerable sums, and were to find their
way southward ^.
1 The facts in this account of the Papers for the Chetham Society, and
later life of Milton's widow, so far as from a subsequent paper of his read
they are not incidentally from Toland, before the Historic Society of Lanca-
Newton, or previous information in shire and Cheshire in Feb. 22, 1855.
these volumes (e. g. in footnotes at p. Tliis last contains the inventory of Mrs.
50 and pp. 278 — 279 of Vol. I.) are Milton's effects at her decease, with Mr.
from Mr. J. Ktchett Mai-sh's MiUon Marsh's notice of the same.
750 LIFE OP MILTON AND HISTOBY OF HIS TIME.
At Milton's death, his eldest daughter, Anne, was twenty-
eight years of age, Mary was twenty -six years of age, and
Deborah was in her twenty-third year. They had each the
^100 of their father's money that had been surrendered by
the widow, besides their dependency on the Powells and the
chances of their own exertions. The dependency on the
Powells can have been worth little ; but, for one of them,
it hardly mattered. Anne Milton, the eldest daughter, the
handsome-faced but deformed one, with an impediment in her
speech, found a husband very soon, it seems, in a person
whose name has not come down to us, and of whom nothing
more is known than that he was a " master-builder/' or archi-
tect of some kind ; and she died in giving birth to her iirst
child, the child dying with her. This muit have been before
the 34th of October 1678 ; on which day Mrs. Powell, mak-
ing her will, mentions her two grandchildren, " Mary Milton,
spinster," and " Deborah Clarke, wife of Clarke
of in Ireland,'^ as " the two surviving daughters " of
her late daughter " Mary Milton, deceased," and leaves them
i^lO each. The bequest shows that the grandmother had still
some kindly feeling for the two ; but the other items of the
will indicate that her main regards were elsewhere. To her
son Richard Powell of the Inner Temple, Esq., she bequeathes
discharge of a bond of his for .^120, dated July 8, 1665,
together with a gold ring, " which was his grandmother
Arehdale's," and all goods left in the house at Forest Hill ;
to Anne, the wife of her said son, she leaves the said son's
picture in a case of gold or enamel ; and to her grandchild,
Richard Powell, son of the said son, she leaves 20s. for a ring.
The other principal legatees are her four living daughters,
Anne Kinaston, wife of Thomas Kinaston of London, merchant,
Sarah Pearson, wife of Richard Pearson, gent., Elizabeth.
Howell, wife of Thomas Howell, gent., and Elizabeth Hol-
loway, wife of Christmas Holloway, gent., — to each of whom
she leaves ^^50, the said Anne Kinaston to have the residue
of her goods besides, and to be executrix. As the will was
not proved till Nov. 6, 1682, Mrs. Powell must have lived
about four years after making it, and not till after those four
FORTUNES OF MILTON'S DAUGHTEBS. 751
years can Mary Milton and Mrs. Clarke have received their
^10 each. It seems to have been the last beneiit to them
from their Powell connexion ; for, though their uncle Richard
Powell lived till 1695, a prosperous man, one of the Readers
of the Inner Temple, &c., and all his forementioned sisters
were then still alive, there seems to have been no farther
recollection among them of any obligation or relationship to
their Milton nieces. At the time of the uncle's death, indeed,
only one of these nieces was left. Milton's second daughter,
Mary, the likest to her mother, and the most disagreeably
remembered of the three, had died, still unmarried, at some
uncertain date before 1694 ; in which year Phillips, in his
memoir of Milton, speaks of Deborah as the sole daughter
then surviving ^-
Deborah Milton and her hmsband, Abraham Clarke, after
they had been a good number of years in Dublin, came over to
London "during the troubles in Ireland under King James II,"
or some time between 1684 and 1688, the husband continuing
his Irish business of weaving and silk-dealing by becoming
" a weaver in Spitalffields." They had ten children in all,
seven sons and three daughters, born either in Ireland between
1676 and the date of their migration to Spitalfields or after-'
wards in Spitalfields itself. Most of these died in infancy ;
the husband, Abraham Clarke, died at some unknown date
after 1688 ; but Deborah did not die till the 24th of August
1727, when she was in her seventy-sixth -year. Her death
was almost contemporaneous with that of Milton's widow at
Nantwich, thirteen years her senior. Her only surviving
son, Urba,n Clarke, was then a Spitalfields weaver, as his
father had been, and unmarried ; her only surviving daughter
had changed her name, a good many years before, from
Elizabeth Clarke to Elizabeth Foster, by her marriage with a
Thomas Foster, also " a weaver in Spitalfields ; " and Deborah's
' Milton Pedigree by Sir Charles —It will be noted that there were two
Young, Garter King at Arms ; and ab- living sisters in the Powell family bear-
straots of the wills of Mrs. Powell and ing the same name, Elizabeth. See
her son Richard PoweU, kindly com- Vol. II. p. 499 ; where I gave the baptism
municated to me by Miss Thomasin E. dates of both the Elizabeths, but as-
Sharpe. Mr. Powell's will is dated samed, wrongly it now appears, that
Dec. 29, 1693, and proved Feb. 3, 1695-6. one of them had died m infancy.
752 LIFE OF MILTON A.ND HISTORY OF HIS TIME.
abode in her widowhood, for some years before her death,
seems to have been in the house in Spitalfields occupied by
the Fosters and their family, where her son Urban was also
a lodger. Her eldest son, Caleb Clarke, had emigrated to
Madras long ago, had married there, and had children before
his death in 1719. She remembered that dead son well, and
could think vaguely of her grandchildren in India whom that
son had left ; but the home of her immediate interests and
anxieties was in the little weaving world of Spitalfields.
Even in this little weaving world Mrs. Clarke had been
always pursued by some recollection that she was Milton's
youngest daughter, and for some years before her death, in
her old age and widowhood, she had been publicly redis-
covered and made a celebrity on that account. " I was in
London," says Voltaire, " when it became known that a
daughter of blind Milton was still alive, old and in poverty,
and in a quarter of an hour she was rich." This would
make the excitement about her a sudden thing, and refer it
to the year 1726 or to the beginning of 1727, the year of
her death. But it is certain that for at least seven or eight
years before that date she had been an object of considerable
interest and curiosity to eminent persons in London. Addison
died on the 17th of June 1719 ; and the credit of first inquir-
ing after Milton's daughter, or at least of calling attention to
her circumstances, seems to belong to him. Hearing that
there was such- a person living in Spitalfields, he sent for her,
asking her to bring with her any papers or other evidences
that could prove her Milton birth. When she came into his
presence, with or without papers, and was about to explain
herself, " Madam," he said, " you need no other voucher ; your
face is a sufiicient testimonial whose daughter you are." The
good Addison then conversed with her, said he hoped he might
be able to procure a small annual pension for her, and gave her
some guineas from himself. Addison's death prevented the
proposal of a pension from taking eflfect ; but from that time
Mrs. Clarke was very well known, and visits to her for her
father's sake were not unusual. The engraver, George Vertue,
visited her on Thursday the 10th of August 1721, for the
MBS. DEBORAH CLARKE. 753
purpose of taking her advice as to the authenticity of a
picture of Milton that had been put into his hands to be
engraved. He carried this picture with him, and also two
or three different prints of Milton's portrait as already en-
graved, i. e. from or after the Faithorne crayon-drawing of
1670. She rejected the picture which Vertue had brought,
as being dark^omplexioned and dark-haired, and therefore
quite unlike her father ; but she immediately recognised the
likeness in the prints, explaining that, having been in Ireland
some time before her father's death, she had not been aware
of any such portrait of him in his later life, and knew of no
other pictures of him than the boy-portrait and the student-
, portrait which her step-mother then had in Cheshire. These
facts are from a letter of Vertue's own, da;ted Aug. 12, 1721 ;
but either that letter omits some of the particulars, or there
must have been a subsequent experiment of Mrs. Clarke's dis-
crimination in the matter of portraits of her father. The sight
of one portrait of her father, we are told, greatly moved her.
Richardson, who was then the possessor of that portrait, but
who expressly tells us that an accident prevented him from
seeing Mrs. Clarke himself, is our authority for this interest-
ing addition. " The picture in crayons I have of him," says
Richardson, "was shown her after several others, or which
" were pretended to be his. When those were shown, and
"she was asked if she could recollect if she had ever seen such
" a face, No, No ; but, when this was produced, in a transport,
*' 'Tis my father, 'Tis my dear father, I see Mm, 'tis him, and then
" she put her hands to several parts of her face, 'T'ls the very
" man ! here, here ! " All who saw Mrs. Clarke observed this
tone of reverence and fondness in her reminiscences of her
father, though there seems to have been some natural aspe-
rity in her references to her step-mother, the old lady at Nant-
wich. One of her visitors was Professor Ward, of Gresham
College; and to him she oonfirmed the accounts giTcn by
Aubrey and Phillips of her father's domestic methods with
herself and her two sisters. Their father in his bhndness had
employed them all in reading to him " in eight languages "
which they did not themselves understand, his frequent joke ia
VOL. VI. 3 c
J'54 LIFE OF MILTON AND HISTORY OF HIS TIME,
their hearing, when there was remark on that anomaly, being
that "one tongue was enough for a woman." To test her
memory of her readings, Professor Ward asked her whether
she could repeat anything from Homer and Ovid, two authors
she mentioned as having been often in request. " At my
desire," he says, " she repeated a considerable number of verses
from the beginning of both these poets with great readiness."
Some one else seems to have tested her in Euripides, with
like effect. She spoke to Mr. Ward with much gratitude of
Addison^s kindness to her, and altogether she appeared to Mr,
Ward "to be a woman of good sense and a genteel behaviour,
and to bear the inconveniences of a low fortune with decency
and pradence." His visit to her would therefore seem to
have been before that burst of bounty of which Voltaire
speaks, and the date of which may be fixed by the appearance
of an a^rtiele on her ease, and an appeal in her; behalf, in Mist's
Weekly Journal of April 29, 1727. That there was then, or
about that time, some such burst of bounty is proved by
Richardson's words in 1734. "She that died a few years
"• since, and was so much spoke of and visited, and so nobly
" relieved for his sake," Richardson then wrote of Milton^s
daughter ; and he repeats the word " relieved " emphatically
in two other passages, as if a fund had been raised which
satisfied even his notion of what was fitting. He had the
satisfaction, he modestly hints, of contributing to the fund
himself. Another contribtttor must have been the Princess
Caroline of Wales, then about to become Queen Caroline by the
accession of her husband to the throne as George II., if indeed
the fifty guineas which that liberal-minded princess is known
to have sent to Milton's daughter had not already been sent
independently. And so, not in utter neglect, but in some
comfort and honour at last, came the sunset of life in Spital-
fields for our poor motherless, misguided, but never unlikeable
little Deborah of Petty France and Jewin Street,, more than
sixty years ago \
. LyS?J"l'^ ^^^^^ °f •*-"g- 12, 1721, in xcvi, and xcix ; Birch's Life of Milton
Add. MS 5016* in British Museum (see (1753), p. Ixxvi; Note of Mr. J. Fi
mte, Vol. I. p. 277, footnote, where it is Mavsh in his Milton Papers, pp. 29—30 :
quoted) ; Eichardson, pp. xxxli, zxxvi, Todd's Life, 1. 148—149 (mainly quota-
Milton's geandson, caleb claeke.
755
Caleb Clarke, Deborah's eldest son and Milton's eldest
grandson, had gone out to Madras, then better known as
tion from Warton) ; Letter of Voltaire
as quoted in Mitford's Life of Milton
(1851), p. cxxxix, footnote.— That there
was a second visit to Mrs. Clarke to
consult her about portraits of her father,
and that it was in this second visit that
she testified so strongly to one "picture
in crayons" that was shown her, is
suggested hy a passage in the Memoirs
of Thomas HoUis (p. 620), where it is
said that "about the year 1725" Mr.
George Vertue found her " lodged in a
mean little streetnearMoorflelds," where
she then "kept a school for children
for her support," and where the result
is stated to have been just such a
transport of excitement over one "draw-
ing in crayons " as that which Eichard-
son reports. Thus, if there were two
separate experiments of her discern-
ment in the matter of her father's por-
traits, one in 1721, as Vertue himself
records, and another about four years
later, it was still Vertue, according tO-
this account, that was the experimenter
in the second case. The experiment,
whether in one visit or in two, is of
much importance in connexion with the
subject of the portraits of Milton ; and
this may be the place for some in-
formation on that subject, additional to
what has been already given in Vol. I.,
p. 50 and footnote, and footnote to pp.
277—278. — The two portraits there dis-
cussed were the two that remained in
possession of Milton's widow till her
death at Nantwich in 1727 : viz. th«
boy-portrait and the student-portrait.
About the authenticity of these there
is no doubt whatever. But they are
juvenile portraits ; and the question now
is as to portraits of Milton in more ad-
vanced life;— (1) Absolutely and indu-
bitably authentic is the Paithorne of
1670, drawn from the life in Milton'*
sixty-.seoond year, and engraved, with
his own sanction, for the first edition of
his History of Britain. See ante, pp.
647 — 649. Faithome's original crayon-
drawing of this portrait was eertainly
in existence, in possession of the Tonson
publishing family, as late as 1760, when
an etching from it was made by Cipriani
for the Milton enthusiast Mr. Thomas
Hollis. See Memoirs &f Hollis, p._529,
where a copy of the etching is given^
and p. 620, where the original is ex-
pressly described as "a, drawing in
crayons by William Faithome, now in
the hands of Messrs. Tonson,booksellers,
inLondon." This crayon-diawing having
now disappeared, however, and Cipri-
ani's etching from it being of little
worth, the only tme remaining Faithome
is Faithome's own engraving from the
drawing, as published in 1670. All in
all, for certainty and impressiveness, I
prefer this to any other portrait of
Milton. It has been repeatedly repro-
duced, more or less truthfully, and is
therefore tolerably familiar. The por-
trait prefixed to the present volume is
a careful reduction from it by the late
Mr. Jeens; but 1 would also recom-
mend a very fine and striking enlarge-
ment of it done recently by Mr. W. J.
Alais for Dr. Grosart, and issued by
Dr. Grosart as a companion to a portrait
of Spenser engraved for him by the
same artist. (2) A number of the en-
graved portraits of Milton from 1734 to
the present time, while presenting un-
mistakeably the same Milton face as
the Faithome, differ from the tme
Faithome of 1670 in having the faee
posed to the left instead of to the right,
and also in the size and shape of the
collar and in the folds of the costume.
These, it seems now to have been
ascertained, have all been derived' from
that " picture in crayons "' which was
in possession of Eichardson in 1734, and
which, as he tells us, had been shown
to Mrs. Clarke and verified by her so
remarkably. After Eichardson's death
in 1745, this crayon-drawing was ac-
quired-by Jacob Tonson, tertixis, the
last of the Tonson publishing family ,-
who must thus have had in his posses-
sion, till his death in 1767, two crayon-
drawings of Milton, — the Faithome and
this. Most of the heir-looms of the
Tcmson family descendeet to their rela-
tives, the Bakers of Bayfordbury,Herts ;
but, only the Bichardson crayon-draw-
ing having been preserved in this familyy
confusion has arisen. It had been for-
gotten that there were two drawings,
and the preserved one has been repro-
duced and referred to for eighty years
or more as the original Faithome. The
mistake had just been pointed out by
Mr. J. Fitchett MarSh in his learned
tract of 1860 on the engraved portraits
of Milton when the late Mr. Leigh
Sbtheby threw new light on the sub-
ject by a reproduction of the preserved
drawing far more exact and effective
than any of the previous derivatives
from it. Prefixed to his sumptuous
volume of Milton Bamilinge, published
in 1861, appeared a photo^aph with
3ca
756 LIFE OP MILTON AND HISTOKT OF HIS TIME.
Fort George, when he was a very young man. He is found
there as a married man in 1703, his wife's Christian name
this inscription, " This portrait is taken
from the dramng in crayons formerly
in possession of J. Richardson, sen., and
jaeob Tonson, now the ptoperty ,of
WilUam:Baker, Msq^., of Bayfordbwry,
Herts, iy whose kind permission it is
photographed." To my mind the most
remarkable thing about this beautiful
photograph is the extraordinary re-
semblan'-e of the face altogether to that
in the Eaithome. Though there are
the differences of position and costume
already mentioned, and though the
photograph conveys a somewliat softer
look, less worn and aged in its sadness,
the features are, in every point, wonder-
fully the same. If the preserved draw-
ing at Bayfordbuiy was an independent
original from the life, it corroborates
the Faith ome signally, and receives
corroboration in return. But is the
drawing at Bayfordbury an independent
original? Granted that, it is, as Mr.
Leigh Sotheby assured himself, the
actual "picture in crayons" which
Hichardson owned in 1734, and not,
as Mr. Marsh was inclined to think in
1860, a mere derivative which the
Tonsons had caused to be made about
1758, we have still to inquiie as to its
origin. " A picture which I have reason
to believe he sate for not long before
his death " are Eichardson's somewhat
vague words aboutit in 1734. Mr. Leigh
Sotheby, from his careful inspections
of the drawing, was "led to consider
whether it could have been an earlier
drawing by Faithorne,.from which, when
he made the engraving in 1670, he took
another copy for that purpose, altering
the form of the dress," &c. Were this
hypothesis correct, the two drawings
once in possession of the Tonsons must
have been both Faithornes ; and it is
at least onrious, though not very ex-
plicable, that in the version given in
the HoUis Memoirs of the story of
Vertue's visit to Mrs. Clarke "about
the year 1725," it is the now missing
Faithome drawing, and not the pre-
served drawing now at Bayfordbury,
that is credited with such instant
effects on Mrs. Clarke. "When she
perceived the drawing," say the Hollis
Memoirs, p. 620, "she cried out, ' 0 Lord!
that is the pietv/re of my father : how
came you by itV and, streaking the
hair of his forehead, added, 'Just so
my father wore his hair.' " If the
Eioliardson cannot be thus resolved
into identity with the Faithorne on the
supposition of two Faithomes, may it
not bave been an early derivative from
the Faitihorne by an artist who kept to
the face of the original, but altered the
pose and the costume ? (S) One hears of
a third drawing as possibly an original :
viz. one by Eobert White, a London
line and mezzotint engraver, who also
"drew portraits in black chalk," and
who, having been bom in 1645, was
oonsiderably Faithome's junior, and
about twenty-nine years of age when
Milton died. The sole evidence,_how-
ever, for the existence of such an original
is, I believe, a rare " folio mezzotint "
of Milton, inscribed " R. White ad mmm
delin. J.Simon feeitJ" It bears no date,
but must have been executed between
1704, when White himself died, and
1753, when Simon, the engraver of
White's supposed original, died. The
probable date may be between 1730
and 1740. But why, if White drew
Milton from the life some time before
1674, did he leave his drawing un-
engraved by himself; and why, espe-
cially, does the portrait of Milton which
White did engrave, — that for the Somers
or subscription folio edition oiParadisi
Lost published by the first Jacob Ton-
son in 1688, — bear only the words " E.
White, sculp." with no hint of the en-
graver's previous ad vivum drawing?
Coupling this difficulty with the fact,
vouched by Mr. Leigh Sotheby, that
"there Is most undoubtedly a great
similarity between the design of the
Eichardson and White portraits," I am
disposed to doubt • the independent
originality of any portrait by White.-^
On the whole, without concluding posi-
tively that Milton in his later life sat
to no other artist than Faithome, we
shall be safe io making the Faithome
of 1670 the standard by which to judge
of all professed portraits of the veteran
Milton. Several oil-portraits of him,
extant in various places, of small merit
as pictures, recommend themselves as
obvious derivatives from the Faithome
or the Eichardson ; but others must he
rejected. Most of the engraved por-
traits being also, as we have said, deri-
vatives from the Faithorne or the
Eichardson, though with more or less
of phantasy and variation, the general
idea of the Milton face which they have
fixed in the English mind is sound
enough. In not a few of them, how-
ever, one traces a specific influence
from an alleged bust of Milton taken
MTLTON's grandson, CALEB CLABKE.
757
being Mary, but her surname unknown. They had three
children, commemorated in the Parish Register of Fort
from thelife about 1654, when he was six-
teen years younger than in the Faithorne.
This bust, the face of which is supposed
to be a unique plaster oast from the
original mould, while the hair and the
rest of the head have been added in
modeDing, was long in the possession
of the engraver Vertue ; who "believed
it was done by one Pierce, a sculptor
of good reputation in those times, the
same who made the bust in marble of
Sir Christopher Wren which is in the
Bodleian library." An engraving after
it by Vertue himself was prefixed to-
Birch's edition of Milton's Prose Works
in 1783. On Vertue's death in 1756 the
bust was purchased by Sir Joshua
Reynolds for £9 128. ; Sir Joshua after-
wards parted with it, for £12, to Mr.
Thomas Hollis, who had it engraved
again twice by Cipriani (Hollis Memoirs,
p. 383 and p. 513) ; and, from among
Mr. HoUis's effects, it passed at length,
by gift, to Christ's College, Cambridge,
— where it now is. A photograph from
it, giving a more exact idea of its look
than the engravings by Vertue and
Cipriam,appearedinMr.LeighSotheby's
Milton Ramblings in 1861 ; and a still
more correct copy of it, with an ac-
companying account and criticism,, was
given a year or two ago in Seribner's
Illustrated Magazine. The head in the
bust is certainly a noble one, very
handsome and stately, and yet almost
Cromwellian in its expression of bold
courage and magnanimity ; and, though
the pedigree of the relic is far from
perfect, and one has some difficulty in
imagining Milton submitting to a plaster
oast from his face in the first years of
his blindness, yet the opinion of sueh
experts as Vertue, and the sensation one
has that the manly countenance here
represented at the age of about forty-six
is not irreconcileable with the Faithome
of Milton sixteen years later, lend a
probability to the conjecture that this
may be a genuine bust of Milton in
the time of his Latin Secretaryship and
European celebrity as the oonijueror of
Salmasius. At all events, an mfluence
from this bust, through the engravings
from it in the last century, may be
detected in a good many of the engraved
portraits of Milton, from Vertue's own
downwards. Better, I think, leave the
bust by itself, or engrave from it
avowedly and separately, and adhere,
for the sexagenarian Milton, strictly to
the Faithorne and the Richardson.—
One professed portrait of Milton, which
has attained some celebrity, must be
absolutely rejected. It is the supposed
miniature of him, at the age of between
for-ty-flve and fifty, by Samuel Coopar.
Sir Joshua Reynolds, having purchased
this miniature from a dealer, became so
fond of it, so sure that it was Milton,
that he caused it to be engraved, and
published in beautiful form, by Miss
Caroline Watson, in 1786. It is doubt-
less a genuine Cooper, and a very fine
miniature of some one ; but it is cer-
tainly, conspicuously, not Milton. It
is utterly iiTeconoileable with the
Faithome, the Richardson, or the bust,
— a wholly different face, which some
have thought might be Selden's. More-
over, the pedigree breaks down hope-
lessly. For a skirmish on the subject,
in Sir Joshua's last years, between him
and the Scottish judge. Lord Hailes,
see Oentleinan'sMagazine for May, July,
and October 1791. Lord Hailes pointed
out that the manuscript placard on the
back- of the picture, on the faith of
which Sir Joshua had bought it, was
a clot of historical incongruities and
absurdities, — a mere dealer's concoction
to sell the picture as a Milton ; and
Sir Joshua could answer but lamely.
But the external evidence against was
stronger than even Lord. Hailes csuld
then know. " This picture belong'd to
Deborah Milton," was the main state-
ment of the placard, before it went on
to tell, in that jumble of impossible
datings which Lord Hailes exposed, how
it had passed from her into the family
of Sir WilliamDaveuant, and had been
competed for by many persons of dis-
tinction, including Lord Dorset, Dryden,
and Sir John Denbam. Now, not only
did Deborah Milton never possess a
picture of her father, but one of her
definite pieces of information to Vertue,
when he called on her on. the IGth of
August 1721, was that till that moment
she was unaware of the existence of
any picture of her father besides the
schoolboy picture and the student pic-
ture which her step-mother, Milton's
widow, then had with her at Nantwioh.
Nay, as I read Vertue's letter describing
the interview (see ante. Vol. I. p. 277),
it seems possible that this very minia-
ture founding its claim to be Milton on
the statement that it had belonged to
his daughter was the actual picture
which Vertue submitted to her for
verification before he would engrave it,
758 LIFE OF MILTON AND HISTORY OF HIS TIME,
George, — Abraham, baptized on the 2nd of June 1703 ; Marjr,
baptized on the 17th of March 1706, and buried on the 15th
of December in the same year ; Isaac, baptized on the 13th of
Pelbruary 1711. It is at least a coincidence that, during
those first years of the fortunes or misfortunes of Milton's
grandson in Madras, and till the first two of Milton's
Madras ga'eat-grandchildren were born, the Governor of the
settlement was Addison's elder brother, the Hon. Galstom
Addison. He died in 1709 ; and it was under another go-
vernorship that Caleb Clarke rose to what seems to have been
his highest position in life, that of parish-clerk of Madras
or Port George, He was in this post in 1717 ; and the same
register which records the baptism of his three children and
the burial of one of them records his own burial on the 26th
of October 1719. He camnot then have been more than forty-
three years of age. His eldest son, Abraham, a lad of sixteen,
was not in Madras at the time, having gone to England with
" Governor Harrison." But, on the news of his father's death,
he returned to Madras ; in September 1725 he married there
an Anna ; and the baptism of a child of theirs, Mary
Clarke, is registered on the 3nd of April 1727, With this
registration in the parieh books of Madras all trace of Milton's
posterity in India ceases. We do not know whether Abraham
Clarke, then ndt quite four-and-twenty years of age, had any
other children, or when or where be died ; we do not know
what had become of his younger brother Isaac, who, if then
alive, was but a boy, or whether, if then alive, he married
afterwards or remained unmarried; we do not know what
became of the infant Mary Clarke, Our last glimpse is that
of this infant, Milton's indubitable great-great-grandchild,
born in Madras, strange to say, while her great-grandmother,
Milton's daughter, was still alive in Spitalfields, and her
step-great-great-grandmother, Milton's widow, was still alive
in Nantwich. The rest is mere oblivion, with thoughts of
and which she at once lejeoted as quite 1786 where the complexion and colour
unlike her father. On this last point, of the hair are not apparent. Anv-
however, I would not he too sure, Know- how, the portrait ought never asain
^g the miniattti-e only through Miss to be named or thought of as one of
Watson's fine engraving from it in Milton.
LAST DESCENDANTS OF MILTON. 759
the jungle fever, and of the long uncertainties of the
struggle of whites with natives and of whites with other
whites in India before the Presidencies became British ^.
The descent from Milton through Deborah's eldest son,
Caleb Clarke, thus >coming to a stop in India precisely in
the year of Deborah's death, attention is fastened on Caleb's
brother and sister, Urban Clarke and Mrs. Elizabeth Foster,
then remaining in Spitalfields. They must have benefited
by the fund raised for their mother, biit the henefit was not
permanent. The silk-weaving seems to have been given
up, or to ha,ve become precarious and intermittent, before
February 1737-8 ; at "which time the Fosters are found keep-
ing a small grocer's or chandler's shop in Pelham Street,
Spitalfields, with Urban Clarke still staying with them,
There, on the 11th of that month, they were visited by
Mr. Thomas Birch, then writing his memoir of Milton to
be prefixed to his 1738 edition of Milton's Prose Works.
Mrs. Foster gave him some information about her mother,
and about Milton, derived from her mother, accurate in
the main points, but with some confusion and inaccuracy,
and with nothing of novelty after what we already know,
except that she had heard that one of Milton's losses after
the Restoration had Ijeen an 'estate of .^60 a year, reclaimed
by the Dean and Chapter of Westminster. From Pelham
Street, Spitalfields, the Fosters removed, in or about 1742,
to Lower Holloway, hetween Highgate and London ; where
they remained for about seven years, still apparently keeping
a chandler's shop, and where Urban Clarke, who had accom-
panied them, died in their house, still unmarried. About
the beginning of 1749 the Fosters transferred themselves
from Holloway to a small chandler's sh«p in Cock Lane,
Shoreditch. Of seven .childrem that had been born to them,
three sons and four daughters fey one aecouat, five sons and
two daughters by another, not one was then alive, most
having died long ago, and all without issue, if not all
>■ Edinturgli Beview Article of Got. results of researches about the Madras
1815 on Godwin's Lives of the PhMipses, Clarices ; Birch's Life of Milton (1753),
containing about a page of information p. Ixxvi.
j^from Sir James Mackintosh ?) as to the
760 LIFE OF MILTON AND HISTORY OF HIS TIME.
unmarried. The childless couple, keeping their chandler's
shop in Cock Lane, received a visit in 1749 from the Rev.
Dr. Thomas Newton, afterwards Bishop Newton, then at press
with the first volume of his edition of Milton. To him
Mrs. Foster, whom he found "weak and infirm," but who
struck him as " a good, plain, sensible woman," told her story
over again, furnishing nothing new, save that her mother
had inherited Milton's weakness of the eyes, having been
obliged to use spectacles from the time of her going to
Ireland, and that she herself had inherited the same, and
had "not been able to read a chapter in the Bible these
twenty years." One hears of other visits ; but the last of any
importance was a second by Birch on the 6th of January
1749-50. He carried her five guineas from a Mr. Yprke ;
and it was on this occasion that Mrs. Foster showed him
her grandmother's Bible, with the dates of the births of her
children entered on the blank leaf in Milton's own hand.
These, as we know. Birch transcribed (ante, IV. p. 335, foot-
note). One consequence of the visits of Dr. Newton and
Birch was a public efibrt in Mrs. Foster's behalf, like that for
her mother three-and-twenty years before. It took the shape
of a performance of Comus for her benefit at Drury Lane on
the 5th of April 1750. " She had so little acquaintance with
diversion or gaiety," says Dr. Johnson, "that she did not know
what was intended when a benefit was offered her." Johnson
bestirred himself vigorously in the affair, and wrote the Pro-
logue; Dr. Newton also exerted himself; and so did others.
" The profits of the night were only jf 130," we are told by
Dr. Johnson. In reality, the receipts ut the theatre were
.^147 14«. ea, leaving but ^67 14«. 6d. of profits after de-
duction of .^80 for expenses ; and the sum was made up to
,^130 for Mrs. Foster by contributions from various persons.
Of this sum, Dr. Johnson tells us, .^100 was placed in the
funds, " after some debate between her and her husband in
whose name it should be entered " ; and the rest, he adds,
" augmented their little stock, with which they removed to
Islington." Mrs. Foster lived four years more. " On Thursday
"last, May 9, 1754," says a contemporary newspaper, "died
LAST DESCENDANTS OF MILTON. 761
"at Islington, in the 66th year of her age, after a long and
" painful illness, which she sustained with Christian fortitude
" and patience, Mrs. Elizabeth Foster, granddaughter of John
"Milton." With her Milton's line became extinct, unless
any of the Clarkes still lived in India. Mrs. Foster's own
account to Newton in 1749 was that she doubted whether
any of them then survived, as she had used to hear from
them sometimes, but had then heard nothing of them for
several years ^.
OTHEE StTEVIVING EELATIVES OF MILTON, AND THEIB
DESCENDANTS.
Christopher Milton was near the end of his fifty-ninth year
when his brother died. His practice in law, to which he had
returned after the First Civil War in 1646, burdened with the
difficulties of his previous Royalist delinquency, had never
amounted to much. " Chamber practice every term " is Phil-
lips's description of it, with the addition that " he came to no
advancement in the world in a long time, except some small
employ in the town of Ipswich," and that he did not take this
greatly to heart, being " a person of a modest, quiet temper,
preferring justice and virtue before all worldly pleasure and
grandeur." Through the rest of the reign of Charles II,
there was no great change in, his fortunes. He was still
merely Bencher of the Inner Temple and Deputy-Recorder
of Ipswich, alternating between London and Ipswich, but
having a house at Ipswich and liking to be there as much
as he could. The reign of James II. brought a differ-
ence. " Wanting a set of judges that would declare his
will to be superior to our legal constitution," says Toland,
King James thought Christopher Milton would suit for one.
It was an additional recommendation that he was by this
time of the King's own religion, a professed Roman Catholic,
' Birch, Life of Milton, pp. Ixxvi — ton, prefixed to his edition of Paradise
Ixxvii.with a note of Birch of date Jan. Lost; Johnson's Life of Milton, with
,6, 1749-50, quoted in Hunter's Milton Cunningham's notes ; newspaper para^
JVotes (p. 34) from Add. MSS. 4244 in graph quoted in the HuUis Memoirs
British Museum ; Newton's Life of Mil- (p. 114).
762 LIFE OP MILTON AND HISTOBY OF HIS TIME.
Accordingly, having received the coif at a call of sergeants
on the 21st of April 1686, he was sworn as one of the Barons
of the Exchequer on the 24th of that month, and knighted
at Whitehall the next day. On the 18th of April 1687 he
was transferred from the Exchequer and became Chief Justice
of the Common Pleas. All this, according to Phillips, was
for "his known integrity and ability in the law," while
Toland's character of him is that " he was of a very supersti-
tious nature and a man of no parts or ability." One inclines
to a middle opinion, and to picture Sir Christopher as a mild,
gentlemanly Roman Catholic judge, of mo particular ability,
who would not purposely or daringly inveat harm, but might
do a great deal of harm by compliance with what was ex-
pected. His term of judgeship, however, was brief. " His
"years and indisposition not well brooking the fatigue of
" public employment," says Phillips, " h« continued not long
" in either of his stations, but, having his qm^m est, retired
"to a country life, his study, and devotion." This is a
euphemism for the fact that, on the 3rd of July 1688, he was
dismissed. As the Revolution was at hand, which would have
dismissed him at any rate, it was of little consequence. His
last days were spent in retirement in a mansion called the
White House in the village of Rushmere, close to Ipswich,
where, as in his previous house in Ipswifch itself, he is said to
have had a chapel fitted up for Roman Catholic worship.
The parish registers of St. Nicholas, Ipswich, bear that Sir
Christopher Milton of Rushmere was buried in the church
•of that parish on the 22nd of March 1692-3. He had lived
eleven years longer than his brother, having attained the age
of seventy-seven. His wife, the Thomasine Webber, of London,
•whom we saw married to him in 1638, before he and she went
to keep house for his old father, the ex-scrivener, at Horton,
during Milton's absence on his Italian tour, had predeceased
•him and been buried in the same church at Ipswich, without
having lived long enough to be Lady Milton K
1 Phillips, Toland, Birch, and Todd ; Arms, prefixed to Pickering's 1851
Pedigree of Christopher Milton in Harl. edition of Milton's Works: and ante,
MS. 5802 fol. 196 ; Milton Pedigree by Vol. I. p. 685.
Sir Charles Young, Garter Eng at i
SIR CHBI8T0PHER MILTON AND HIS FAMILY. 763
The three children of whom we had to take note as
horn to Christopher Milton and his wife before 1642, two of
them at Hortou and one at Reading, had died long ago;
and the surviving children at the death of Sir Christopher
were a son, Thomas, and three daughters. Thomas Milton
was already a person of some consequence. Having been
taken into the Crown Office in Chancery under his uncle
Mr. Thomas Agar, Deputy Clerk of the Crown, he had, on
Mr. Agar's death in 1673, succeeded him in the Deputy-
Clerkship. He was still in that office in 1694, " with great
reputation and ability," says Phillips. The date of his death
has not been ascertained. By his wife, Martha, daughter
of Charles Fleetwood of Northampton (who found a second
husband in William Coward, M.D., of London and Ipswich),
he left one daughter, who is heard of in 1749 as " Mrs. Milton
of Orosvenor Street," a maiden lady, housekeeper to Dr. Seeker,
and who died July 36, 1769. She seems to have been the
last living descendant of Sir Christopher Milton, Of her three
aunts two, Mary and Catherine, had remained unmarried,
and bad lived long together at Highgate, till, one of them
dying, the other took up her abode with the Posters, at their
little chandler's house and shop in Holloway, and died there
at a great age some time after 1743. The other aunt had
married a Mr. Pendlebuiy, a clergyman, and nothing more
is known of her. The descent from Christopher Milton seems
to have stopped about the same time as that from his brother ^.
At the death of Milton, his ellder nephew and pupil,
Edward Phillips, was forty-four years of age, and the other,
John Phillips, was a year younger. Of their careers and
characters in Milton's life-time we have had to take account
already. It is necessary only to sketch their remaining lives.
Edward Phillips retains his character of being by far the
more likeable and respectable of the two. His profession
was still that of pedagogy combined with hack-authorship.
1 Ante, Vol. I. p. 685 and Vol. IL p. Museum (quoted by Hunter, p. 34) ;
489 f Phillips ; Biroli's Life of Milton Milton Pedigree, as in last note ; and
(1758), pp. Ixxvi — Ixxvii, and additional Addenda to Mitford's Life of Milton in
note .by Birch from MS, in British Pickering's Milton'(p. clxxxiv).
1764 LIFE OP MILTON AND HISTORY OP HIS TIM®.
From his tutorship, with a salary of abont ^20 a year, to
the young son of John Evelyn of Sayes Court, near Deptford,
from October 1663 to February 1664-5, be had gone direct,
as we saw, toi a similar tutorship, with a higher salary, in
the family of Philip, fifth Earl of Pembroke. It is uncer-
tain how long he continued in this tutorship, which must
have kept him a good deal at Wilton, the seat of the Pem-
brokes in Wiltshire-; but he is mentioned in a letter of
Evelyn's as still at Wilton in the year 1667, " where my lord
makes use of him," says Evelyn, " to interpret some of the
Teutonic Philosophy, to whose mystic theology his lordship,
you know, is much addicted." In the same letter Evelyn
adds,. "As to Mr. Phillips' more express character, he is
"a sober, silent, and most harmless person, a little versatile
" in his studies, understaading many languages, especially
" the modern." Phillips's principal pupil at Wilton was
Philip Herbert, one of the younger sons of the Earl. On his
father's death in 1669 this young man became heir-apparent
to the earldom, his elder half-brother William having then
succeeded as sixth earl ; in July 1674 he became seventh Earl
of Pembroke himself, by the death of this elder brother
without issue ; and in May 1675 he married Henrietta de
Querouaille, sister of the Duchess^ of Portsmouth, the mistress
of Charles II. Phillips's connexion with him and with the
Pembroke family may be supposed, therefore, to have ceased
about 1670 or 1671. We do not encounter him again dis-
tinctly till the 14th of September 1674, or two months before
Milton's death. On that day there was licensed by Roger
L'Estrange, and in 1675, a month or two after Milton's death,
there was published by "Charles Smith, at the Angel, near
the Inner Temple Gate in Fleet Street," a little book called
Theatrum Poetamm, which is remeskbered now as one of the
most interesting of Phillips's literary attempts. It is interest-
ing on its own account, being " a brief, roving, and cursory
account," as Wood well calls it, of the poets of all ages and
nations, but chiefly of the English, arranged alphabetically,
with rapid characters and criticisms of a good many of them,
and a prefixed Discourse on Poets and Poetry in general. It
liATEE LIFE OF EDWARD PHILLIPS. 765
was one of the first books of that kind in English and has
been a basis for later compilations. It is farther interesting,
however, as conveying opinions about poets which Phillips
must have imbibed from Milton, with sometimes, perhaps,
as in the sketches of Euripides, Marlowe, Shakespeare, Ben
Jonson, Drummond, Waller, Cowley, and Dryden, a phrase
lent by Milton or recollected from his talk. The Prefatory
Discourse opens with a strain of expression so Miltonic,
so much above Phillips's usual range, that one is obliged to
fancy either that Milton actually dictated some of the sen-
tences, or that Phillips had Milton's ideas and voice in his
mind and was trying to echo them. Less interesting than
the Theatrum Poetarum, but creditable to Phillips's industry,
was his Supplement to the Book (f John Speed, called, the Theatre
of the Empire of Great Britain, published in 1676, and con-
sisting of geographical and topographical extensions of the
previous editions of Speed's work, originally published in
1611. This must have been a bookseller's commission, as was
also an enlargement of his Continuation of Baker's Chronicle
for the sixth edition of that popular book in 1674. It seems
to have been a relief to Phillips from such drudgery when,
in 1677, he received another appointment of the tutorial
or secretarial kind in a family of distinction. " I preferred
Mr. Phillips, nephew of Milton," Evelyn writes in his Diary
under date Sept. 18 in that year, "to the service of my Lord
Chamberlain, who wanted a scholar to read to and entertain
him sometimes." The Lord Chamberlain so mentioned was
still the same Henry Bennet, Earl of Arlington, of whom we
have heard so much through the Clarendon and Cabal Ad-
ministrations, and whom we left honourably shelved in that
dignity in 1674, when his real power was gone and the Pre-
miership of Danby had begun. Evelyn had just been on
a visit of three weeks to this noble courtier and ex-statesman,
now apparently a Roman Catholic no longer, at his great
place of Euston in Suffolk, and had been wondering how,
on his dilapidated fortunes, he could support such a magni-
ficent establishment, with at« vast halls and numerous apart-
ments, its picture-gallery, its bathrooms, its conservatories
766 LIFE OF MILTON AND HISTORY OF' HI3 TIME.
and gardens, its cascades and canals in the grounds, its staples
and outhouses, the one hundred domestic servants running
about on the premiseSj and the thousand red and fallow deer
twinkling among the trees in the nine miles of park. He
could not account, for it, but found the Earl and his lady quite
at ease, and most hospitable and kind. "My lord himself
" is given to no expensive vice but building, and to have all
" things rich, polite, and princely. He never plays, but reads
" much, having the Latin, French, and Spanish tongues in
" perfection." Evelyn's words would lead us to suppose that
Phillips's duties were to be those only of secretary and reader
to the Earl ; but we learn otherwise that these were not all.
On the 1st of August, 1672, Arlington's only daughter and'
heiress, Isabella, then a child of five years old, had been mar-
ried, " the Archbishop of Canterbury officiating, and the King'
and all the grandees being present," to Henry Pitzroy, the
King's second natural son by the Duchess of Cleveland, then
a boy in his ninth year, created Earl of Euston that same
month, and Duke of Grafton in 1675. Till the very young
couple should be old enough to live together, Arlington was
retaining his daughter under his charge; and the engagement
of Phillips had been partly for the sake of this little lady, the
Duchess of Grafton, now ten years of age, the pet of her
father and mother at Euston, and described by Evelyn as a
" charming young creature," worthy of the greatest prince in
Christendom. Sfee needed a tutor in languages ; and, as the
Earl's nephew, Henry Bennet, was also one of the household, and
needed instruction, Phillips, whatever his other services', was
a convenient tutor for both. There is a commemoration of
this tutorship in a dedication to the young Duchess of a
fourth and: enlarged edition of Phillips's English Dictionary,
The World, of Words, published in 1678. Bat the tutor-
ship, whether at Euston or elsewhere, cannot have lasted'
beyond November 1679. On the 6th of that month Evelyni
who had witnessed the marriage, of the little Duchess to
the little Duke by the Archbishop of Canterbury seven years
before, witnessed their re-marriage, in the Earl of Arling-
ton's lodgings at Whitehall, by the Bishop of Rochester, in
LATEB LIFE OF JOHN PHILLIPS. 767
the presence of the King, the Duchess of Cleveland, and a
large company, the bridegroom being then sixteen years of
age and the bride twelve. Phillips must have been then once
more adrift, at the age of nearly fifty, and what we next
hear of him is a sad descent from the palatial splendours of
Euston. " He married a woman with several children, taught
" school in the Strand near the May-Pole, lived in poor con-
" dition (tho' a good master), wrote and translated several
" things meerly to get a bare lively hood; was out of employment
« in 1684 and 1685." This is Anthony Wood's pithy sum-
mary ; and nothing can be added, except a list of the " several
things " of a literary kind by which Phillips, in his last years,
tried to eke out his failing pedagogy. In 1679 appeared the'
seventh edition oi Baker's Chronicle with his revised Continua-
tion ; in 1682 his Tractatulus de modo formandi voces derivativas
Mngum Latines ; in 1684 his eighth and last edition of Balcer''s'
Chronicle, his Enchiridion Lingum Latince, and his Speculum
Lingum Latince, — these two last, according to Wood, being " all
or mostly " taken from his uncle Milton's papers in preparation
for a Latin Dictionary; and in 1685 a Poem on the Corona-
tion of his Most Sacred Majesty King James II. and his Royal
Consort. There may have been other things anonymously;
but these, with a translation or two from the Greek and the
French, are all that are known of Phillips in his later years,
till 1694; when he published his English translation of
Milton's jEe^^er* of State, with the valuable prefixed Memoir.
That was a good and affectionate piece of service, and it was
Phillips's last in the world, with the exception of a fifth
edition of bis World of Words in 1696. He was dead before
1698, having lived to the age of about sixty-seven. Whether
he left children or step-children only is unknown ^.
The coarser, though perhaps stronger, John Phillips lived
longer than Edward. He seems to' have contrived at last to
live by literary hackwork without pedagogy. His chief
1 Godwin's Lives of the PhilUpeet ; Peerage, Ditfos of Grafton ; also a letter
Wood's Ath. IV. 760—769, in Bliss's of Evelyn's (edit, of Diary and Con-es-
edition of 1820; Evelyn's Diasy, under pondenoe in 1852, Vol. III. pp. 196—
dates Aug. 1, 1672, Aug. 28-Sept. 18, 198).
1677; and Nov. 6, 1779; De Brett's _^
768 LIFK OF MILTON AND HISTORY OF HIS TIME.
productions before his uncle's death had been his Satyr against
Ht/pocritea of 1655, reprinted in 1661 and 1671, and his
Maronides, or Virgil Travesty, a low Hudibrastic burlesque of
the fifth and sixth jEneids, published in two parts in 1673
and 1673. As these were in some demand, there were later
editions of each, — of the Maronides, both parts together, in
1678, and of the Satyr in 1680; but the main activity of
John Phillips from the date of Milton's death is represented
by a long succession of new publications of various sorts,
anonymous or with his name. Of these the more important,
as far as to the death of Charles II., were the following :—
A Continuation of Heath's Chronicle, in 1676 ; translations of
the French romance of Pharamond by CalprenMe and M. de
Scuderi's romance of Almahide, in 1677 ; part of a folio trans-
lation in the same year of Tavernier's Voyages in the East;
a controversial book in 1680 called Br. Gates's Narrative of the
Popish Plot Vindicated ; another in 1681, called Character of
a Popish Successor, professing to be the second part of a book
under that title by Elkanah Settle; Speculum Crape-Gown-
orum, or An Old Looking-glass for the Young Academicles, in
1682; History of Mhiopia from the Latin of Ludolphus, in the
same year; and Treatises in Phtarch's Morals from the Greek, in
1684. To the reign of James II. belong these, among others: —
' a handsomely printed poem, in sixteen pages of Pindarics, To
the Sacred Memory of the late most serene and potent monarch
Charles II., published in 1685, and concluding vast eulogies of
Charles with a prostration before James; The History of Bon
Quiaiote,. in 1687, the second English translation of the great
Spanish novel, and a work of " power and spirit," Godwin ad-
mits, though debauching the original by incredible interpola-
tions of slang and obscenity; and a pamphlet in 1688 against
Marvell's old enemy, Samuel Parker, now bishop of Oxford.
The most dangerous part of Phillips's Bohemian career through
those fourteen years had been his connexion from 1678 to 1681
with the infamous Titus Oates. Phillips, it has been proved,
was in the closest intercourse with Oates ; from which fact,
as Phillips, a man of "little or no religion" himself, can
hardly have been a dupe in the Popish Plot business, Godwiw.
LATER LIFE OF JOHN PHILLIPS. 769
thinks we may better infer " the debasement of his mind and
the impurity of his tastes'^ than even from his writings.
When the revenge upon Gates and his associates came in
the reign of James, Phillips escaped ; and after the Revolution
of 1688 he conformed his politics to the ordinary Whiggism
then in fashion. His main dependence from 1690 seems
to have been on what Wood calls his Monthly Accounts,
a political periodical containing a history of contemporary
affairs from month to month, chiefly, but not exclusively,
translated from a French journal in high repute published in
Holland. These Monthly Accounts, entitled more fully The
Present State of Europe, or A Historical and Political Mercury ,
were edited regularly by Phillips, from August 1690 onwards,
as long as he lived. Additional trifles from his pen in prose
and verse have been discovered in the years 1693, 1694, and
1695 j in which last year Anthony Wood, then dying, leaves
him still alive in the world with this farewell character:
" A man of very loose principles, atheistical, forsakes his wife
" and children, makes no provision for them.'' After an Elegy
on Queen Mary by Phillips in 1695, poems and other things
of his are found in 1697 and 1700; and in 1703 he sent
.forth, with his initials only, under the title oiThe English
Fortune-Tellers, a thin whimsical quarto, enabling persons,
"for harmless mirth and recreation'" merely, to tell their
own fortunes by means of astrological diagrams, a table of
questions, and a large quantity of provided verses. In the
memoirs of the London bookseller John Dunton, published
in 1705, John Phillips is mentioned as still alive, " a gentle-
man of good learning and well-born," with the addition,
" He '11 write you a design ofi" in a very little time, if the
" gout or claret don't stop him." In one of the numbers of
the Monthly Mercury there is an apology by Phillips himself
for the deficiency of the previous number, on the ground that
"the author was then so violently afflicted with the gout,
" both in hands and feet, that it was as much as he could do
" to continue the series." The last known thing of Phillips
is a poem, published May 6, 1706, with the title The Vision
of Mons. Chamillard concerning the Battle of families. It does
VOL. VI. 3 D
770 LIFB OF MILTON AND HISTORY OF HIS TIME.
not bear the author's name, but it is " humbly inscribed " on
the title-page to Lord Somers " by a Nephew of the late
Mr. John Milton." One or tvsro sulky references to Miltofl,
I believe, have been detected in the preceding series of
Phillips's performances since Milton's death ; but here Phillips
reverts to the relationship openly. His career of Bohemianism
seems to have ended in or about that year, when he was
seventy-five years of age. Of his children we know nothing i.
One little inquiry more, to complete this posthumous
Milton genealogy. The two Phillipses, it will be remem-
bered, were the only surviving children of Milton's sister,
Anne Milton, by her first marriage. But, after the death
of her first husband, Edward Phillips of the Crown Office, in
1631, this only remaining sister of the poet and of Christopher
Milton had married that first husband's friend and successor
in the Crown Office, Thomas Agar. By this second marriage,
wbich cannot have been till after 1633, when Agar's first
wife, Mary Rugeley, was still alive, the issue had been two
daughters, Mary and Ann Agar, half-sisters to the Phillipses,
and nieces of the poet and his brother (see ante. Vol. II.
pp. 98-101). What had become of this line, the Agar line,
of the general Milton descent ?
Though the two Phillipses had been resigned almost wholly
to Milton's charge from their early boyhood, there is no need
to suppose any break between Milton and his sister during
her second marriage, or that there was not much more of
continued communication between the Miltons on the one
kamd and the Agars on the other, from that date forward,
than has left itself recorded. Mr. Agar, indeed, had been a
Royalist through the great struggle, as might have been
expected from his official position as Deputy Clerk of the
Crown, and had been ejected from his office sometime before
the establishment of the Commonwealth. Difference of politics
about that time may have occasioned a coolness between him
1 Godwin's Lives of the PliilUpses, fhe Stationers' Books under date April
and Wood's Ath. as before. I find th« 18, 1676. The licencer was " Henry
registration of Phillips's Oontinuaiion of Oldenhurgh, Esq.," Milton's friend, who
Meath'i Ghrouiele from 1662 to 1675 in licensed occasionally ahout that time.
THE AGAB BRANCH OF THE MILTONS. 771
and Milton, but not necessarily more than there may have
been between Milton and his Royalist brother Christopher on
the same ground ; and, at all events, after the Commonwealth
had confirmed itself and passed into the Protectorate, and the
Stuart monarchy had begun to seem a thing of the past, and
Milton was a man of influence with the new powers, ani-
mosities among the Miltons on account of political differences
must have died out as in other familieSj and more easily than
in most. Milton and his brother-in-law Mr. Agar, the ex-
Deputy Clerk of the Crown, may have been very good friends
during the years immediately before the Restoration, when
Milton was residing in Petty France as the blind Foreign
Secretary for Oliver and Richard. When the Restoration did
unexpectedly come. Agar may have been one of those who
were most anxious about Milton's fate, and most relieved by
his marvellous escape. For Agar himself the event was
heaven. It brought back distinction and prosperity. He was
reinstated in his important and valuable office as Deputy Clerk
of the Crown ; and, if it were necessary, mentions of him in
his official capacity might easily be recovered, I doubt hot,
from the State papers and Parliamentary records of Charles's
reign through the Clarendon and Cabal administrations.
Enough for us here to pass on to the 10th of June 1671.
On that day, " being in good health of body and of perfect
mind and memory," but considering " the approaching cer-
tainty " of his departure, and the propriety of disposing of
such " goods and chattels " as " with much industry " he had
"scrambled for amongst others in this wicked world," Mr.
Agar, styling himself " Thomas Agar, of London, gentleman,"
made his will. This will gives us a very clear glimpse of the
state of his family and circumstances at that time*
Mr. Agar's second wife, Milton's sister, was then dead.
The date of her death is unknown, and it may have been any
time between 1637 and 1671, though it seems probable that
it was nearer the latter term than the former. Her elder
child, Mary, had "died very young," as we leam inde-
pendently from Phillips. Mr. Agar's only child by his
-former marriage to Mary Rugeley being also dead, his natural
3Da
772 LIFE OF MILTON AND HISTORY OF HIS TIME.
heir was the only remaining daughter of the second marriage,
Ann Agar, Milton's niece and the half-sister of the two
Phillipses. She was no longer Ann Agar, however, but Ann
Moore, the wife of a David Moore, and with an infant son,
Thomas Moore. There was also a nephew and namesake of
Mr. Agar's, in a grown up Thomas Agar, much about his
uncle and much regarded by him. In the will, accordingly,
the three principal legatees are Mr. Agar's daughter Ann
Moore, his infant grandson Thomas Moore, and this nephew
Thomas Agar. But very kindly mention is made in the will
of Dr, Luke Rugeley, Mr. Agar's brother-in-law by his first
wife, and also of one of the two Phillipses, his stepsons by his
second wife. The stepson so mentioned is Edward Phillips ;
and from the absence of all mention of the other stepson,
John Phillips, one infers that Mr. Agar had long ceased to
concern himself about that gentleman. As the wording of
the will is more than usually characteristic, the main parts
may be given textually : —
"... And first I give and bequeathe unto Edward Phillipps, my
son-in-law, £200, to be laid out in the purchase of an annuity for
his life, or some place of employment for his better subsistence,
which shall seem most for his benefit ; wherein I desire my dearly and
entirely beloved and most deserving nephew Mr. Thomas Agar, whom
I declare, nominate, and appoint my executor of this my last will
and testament, to be assistant to him, my said son-in-law, re-
quiring and enjoining him, my said son-in-law, to be ordered and
governed herein by him, my said nephew, who, I am assured, hath
much love and kindness for him : provided that, if before my
.decease I procure the King's Majesty's grant of my office of en-
grossing of appeals to be made and passed under the great seal
of England to him, then this my bequest to him before-mentioned
to cease and be utterly void. — Item, I give and bequeathe unto my
grandson Thomas Moore, to be paid him by my executor at his
full age of one and twenty years, £500 of lawful English money. —
And my intent, wUl, and meaning is that one full moiety of such
my estate as shall remain, besides debts, burial expenses, and what
I have and shall bequeathe by this my last will otherwise, upon
■ a clear and just account thereof, to be made by my executor
within one year next after my decease, shall be paid and disposed
to such trustee or trustees as my dear daughter Mrs. Ann Moore
shall direct and appoint, to remain in his or their hands for the
iiatents and purposes following, — that is to sa,y, for her sole and
THE AGAB BEANCH OF THE MILTONS. 773
separate use, notwithstanding her present coverture with her pre-
sent or any other hushand, wherein her said husband shall not any-
way intermeddle nor have to do, nor any other with whom she
shall happen to intermarry. [This precaution for the independent
use and management of the property by his daughter, to the
exclusion of interference by her present husband Mr. David Moore,
or by any other husband, is drawn out farther at great length,
and with much studied strictness in the phraseology, as if it were a
point on which Mr. Agar felt himself bound to be careful. Mrs.
Moore is not only to»have the sole use and management of the pro-
perty during her life, but may devise it by will as she chooses after
her death ; failing which settlement of it by her will and appoint-
ment, it is to go at her death to her son Thomas Moore, or,
should he be dead, then to Mr. Thomas Agar, the executor of the
present will]. . . . — The other moiety of my said estate I do hereby
give and bequeathe to my said executor, to retain to his own
proper • use and benefit. — Lastly, I may not forget the long-con-
continued love and kindness of my dear brother Doctor Kugeley,
not only to myself, but also to my relations : to whom it never
was nor yet is in my power to make a due and suitable return. I
desire the continuance of his brotherly kindness in" acceptance of a
petty legacy from me of twenty pieces of broad gold, which I
hereby bequeathe to him, to bestow in a ring or any other thing
which may be best to his liking and may remind him of his poor
brother who did truly love and honour hini for his great good-
ness.— In witness whereof," &c.
To this will of June 10, 1671 there was a codicil, dated
Oct. 27, 1673, somewhat modifying its provisions. Instead
of the full moiety of the property remaining after payment
of debts and other legacies, Mrs. Moore is now to receive
"the sum of ,^''1000 and no more in money," together with the
rents and profits of " two houses in London," all Mr. Agar's
estate and interest in which is bequeathed to the executor,
Mr. Thomas Agar, in strict " trust and confidence " that he
will pay such rents and profits of them to her or her order
only, and " not unto the said David Moore," and that, failing
any will of hers, he will pay them to such issue of hers as
shall be alive at her decease, payment wholly to cease should
there be no surviving issue. It is also provided that the
legacy of .^""SOO to the grandson Thomas Moore shall lapse
and not be payable to any representatives of his if he should
die before coming of age. The daughter's husband, Mr. David
Moore, does now receive something ; but it is only .^20, to
774 LIFE OF MILTON AND HISTORY OF HIS TIME.
be paid him within one year after the testator's decease.
The legacy of j^200 to Edward Phillips is undisturbed ; and,
for the rest, the nephew Mr. Thomas Agar is constituted, in
the amplest manner, executor, administrator, and residuary
legatee.
Mr. Agar must have died immediately after having made
this codicil, for the will and codicil together were proved by
the nephew on the 5th of November 1673. Before Milton's
death, in the following November, he must not only have been
aware, therefore, that one of his nephews, Thomas Milton,
the son of his brother ' Christopher, had succeeded Mr. Agar
in his Deputy Clerkship in the Crown Office, but must also
have had the satisfaction of knowing that ^200 of Mr. Agar's
money had come to his other and needier nephew, Edward
Phillips. It must have come very acceptably, for it came
in that blank of Phillips's life which we have noted as occur-
ring between his tutorship in the Pembroke family at Wilton
and the publication of his Theatrum Voetarum. Mr. Agar>
regretting the precariausness of Phillips's means about this
time, and evidently thinking he wais a rather shiftless person,
had been trying to secure for him the succession to one of his
own minor offices in connexion with his Clerkship, but, that
felling, had left him enough to be of some permanent use
to him, if he would be guided by the good sense of the
younger Agar in the mode of its investment ^.
The David Moore whom Mr. Agar's one surviving daughter
had married, and in whom Mr. Agar had shown so little
confidence, is known otherwise as David Moore, of Sayes
House, Chertsey, co. Surrey, Esq.-, a couutry gentleman of
some means, descended from a Robert Moore, who had been
Secretary to Queen Ann Boleyn. He died on the 12th of
January 16&3-4, setat. 74, and was buried in Chertsey church.
His wife Ann Moore was then still alive, b^t renounced
administration of his effects in favour of her son Thomas
Moore, the grandson to whom Mr. Agar had left .^500.
1 will and codicil of Mr. Agar, as some particulars from PhiEips,— who,
seen and copied by me long ago (see though speaking weU of Mr. Agar, does
ante, ^ ol. II. p. 101, footnote) ; -vritii not mention the will or the legacy.
THE AGAR BRANCH OF THE MILTONS. 775
This Thomas Moore, Milton's grandn&phew, and who may-
have seen Milton, was thenceforward the squire of Sayes
House ; and, as he was doubtless the heir of his mother at
her death at some unknown date after 1694, he must have
been a man of very considerable estate altogether. In 1715,
at all events, he received the honour of knighthood and
became Sir Thomas Moore; and he died in 1735, leaving
at least two children by his wife, Elizabeth, sister of William
Blunden of Basingstoke. From the elder of these, Edmund
Moore of Sayes, who was born in 1696 and died in 1756,
have descended a number of persons, Moores, Fitzmoores,
Dashwoods, &c., of high respectability, I believe, to the
present day, chiefly in the southern English counties, and all
having the Milton blood in them, not indeed directly from
Milton himself, but from his sister Anne, the mother of the
" fair infant " whose death he lamented in his juvenile elegy
in the winter of 1625-6. At the date of the elegy, and for
some years after, that sister was Mrs. Phillips ; and it was
the accident of her second marriage with an Agar that sent
on the Milton pedigree in a stock capable of maintaining
itself in the world while the Miltons proper and the Phillipses
showed their faculty of sinking \
INCEBASB OF MILTON'S POETICAL CELEBKITY AND MULTIPLICATION
OF EDITIONS OF HIS POEMS.
With the exception of the sonnets to Fairfax, Cromwell,
and Vane, and the second of the two to Cyriack Skinner, and
with the exception also of the scraps of verse dispersed
through the prose-writings, all Milton's poetry as we now
have it had been left by him before the world in three small
separate volumes. There was the second or 1674 edition of
Paradise Lost, in place of the first edition of 1667, which had
been exhausted in the beginning of 1669; there was the little
volume of 1671 containing Paradise Regained and Samson
1 Manning's History and Antiquities SirCharlesYoung.GarterKingatAnns;
,of Surrey, III. 229 ; Milton Pedigree by and ante. Vol. I. pp. 143—145.
776 LIFE OF MILTON AND HISTOET OF HIS TIME.
Agonistes ; and there was the second or 1673 edition of the
Minor Poems, superseding the original edition of 1645.
By these publications,- but especially by the Paradise Lost,
the reputation of Milton as a great English poet had been
established while he was still alive. The statement, once
customary, and not out of fashion yet, that his poetical fame
did not begin till after his death, is wholly against the evi-
dence. Within eighteen months of the publication oi Paradise
I/ost, as we have seen, the impression made by that poem
on the leaders of critical opinion in London had been such
as not only to startle them into fresh recognition of an author
they had thought defunct, but even to draw some of them
round him personally, Dryden himself for one, in resumed or
newly-formed relations of reverence. Nor even in those days
of scanty apparatus in the form of critical journals had the
admiration of Milton's extraordinary reappearance remained
unrecorded. Edward Phillips's passage about his uncle in
one of the essays subjoined to his edition of Buchlerus in
1669 was the expression indeed of the enthusiasm of a re-
lative, but of one who squared his words to already formed
public opinion; and, with all deduction for the licence of
eulogy allowed to the writers of commendatory verses to be
prefixed to books, no. one can read Dr. Barrow's and Marvell's
verses prefixed to the second edition of Paradise Lost in 1674
without feeling that the writers were all the more in earnest
with their superlatives because they were sure of the general
adherence. But, should farther proof be wanted, it is at hand
in two testimonies to Milton's greatness that were deposited,
one may say, on his grave just after his funeral. — One was
from Dryden, in his preface to that heroic opera of his. The
State of Innocence and Fall of Man, which had been registered
for publication seven months before Milton's death, had been
in circulation in manuscript copies since then, but was not
published, with its dedication to Mary of Modena, Duchess
of York, till 1675. « I cannot, without injury to the de-
" ceased author of Paradise Lost, but acknowledge," Dryden
there writes, " that this poem has received its entire founda-
" tion, part of the design, and many of the ornaments, from.
DEYDBN AND PHILLIPS ON MILTON IN 1675. lit
" him. What I have borrowed will be so easily discerned from
" my mean productioTis that I shall not need to point the reader
" to the places ; and truly I should be sorry^ for my own sake,
" that any one should take the pains to compare them to-
" gether : the original being undoubtedly one of the greatest,
" most noble, and most sublime poems which either this age
" or nation has produced." These words, from one who con-
fessed to the critic Dennis twenty years afterwards that at the
time he wrote them he " knew not half the extent of Milton's v
excellence," are sufficiently strong, and their effect is not
diminished by his half-ironical reference, in the very next
sentences, to the lines of compliment that had been furnished
him by his young friend Nat. Lee, to be prefixed to the v
published opera. Milton had disclosed "the wealthy mine"
and furnished " the golden ore," Lee there told Dryden, but
it had been left " a chaos " till Dryden's " mighty genius "
shone through , the heap ; and Dryden, while thanking his
young friend profusely for his kindness, has no doubt he will
" hear of it " from many of his contemporaries. — Almost
simultaneous with the publication of Dryden's opera in 1675
was that of Edward Phillips's Theatrum Poetarum, where this
is the little article on his uncle : — " John Milton : the author ^
" (not to mention his other works, both in Latin and English,
" both in strict and solute oration, by which his fame is suf-
" ficiently known to all the learned of Europe) of two Heroic
" poems and a Tragedy, na,me\jParadiceIiost, Paradioe Begain'd,
"and Sampson Affonista ; in which how far he hath revived
" the majesty and true decorum of Heroic Poetry and Tragedy
" it will better become a person less related than myself to
" deliver his judgment." This must have been written while
Milton was alive, and is amended in a subsequent article,
which the kindliness of Phillips leads him to give to his
brother John, as entitled to a place among the EngUsh poets
by "his vein of burlesque and facetious poetry" and other
things then less known. In that article John Phillips is
expressly introduced as " the maternal nephew and disciple of
" an author of most deserved fame, late deceased, being the
" exactest of Heroic Poets (if the truth were well examined.
t7% LIFE OF MILTON AND HISTORY OF HIS TIME.
" and it is the opinion of many both learned and judicious
" persons) either of the ancients or moderns, either of our own
" or whatever nation else." Again one feels that Edward
Phillips was expressing a common opinion and using words
that were already stereotyped ^-
It was on the 12th of January 1674-75, before these first
posthumous tributes to Milton had appeared, that the gossip
Aubrey was promising Anthony Wood his notes about Milton,
among others, for Wood's great forthcoming Athenee et Fasti
Oxonienses. In his letter to Wood of that date he had
promised to go to the church of St. Giles, Cripplegate, to see
Milton's grave ; and it was in a later letter, of May 18, 1675,
^ that he sent Wood the interesting intelligence, " Mr. Marvell
has promised me to write minutes for you of Mr. Jo. Milton."
These minutes were never written ; and Marvell, who might
have been the first biographer of Milton, was dead in August
1678. The three intervening years bad but confirmed Mil-
ton's reputed place among English poets, while perhaps bring-
ing out more strongly in certain quarters the two forms of
opposition which, grudged him his full celebrity. One con-
sisted, of course, in the recollection of his dreadful previous
character and career as Revolutionist, Republican, and partisan
of the Regicide ; and the other consisted in repugnance to
that theory of unrhymed verse which he had so daring'ly
propounded and exemplified in his two epics. The Rhymed
Drama of the Restoration had by this time been laughed out
of favour ; but poetry in general without rhyme was still a
stumbling-block. Of the opposition to Milton's growing
poetical fame, on these or on other grounds, there had ap-
peared at least one bold spokesman. He was Thomas Rymer,
immortal afterwards for his great historical eoUection, Rymer's
Fmdera, but as yet known only as a lawyer of Gray's Inn and
a dabbler in polite literature. In 1677, at the age of about
. thirty-nine, he had published a play ; and in 1678 he pub-
lished a critical essay, in the form of a letter to 'Fleetwood
Shepherd, entitled The Tragedies oftfie last age Cmisidered md
1 Scott's Edition of Dryden's Works, arum ; and a note in Godwin's Lives of
V. 103—106 ; Phillips's Theatnm Poet- the Phillipses, p. 143.
THIED EDITION OF PARADISE LOST. 779
Utvamined. In this essay he threatened an attack on Milton,
to appear shortly in " some reflections on that Paradise Lost
of Milton's which some are pleased to call a poem." It never
did appear ; and, as in his next critical essay, in 1693, the
attack was transferred to Shakespeare, with ludicrous conse-
quences to Mr. Rymer himself, it is not probable that Milton
would have suffered much from his expositions^.
It was in 1678, when Mr. Rymer was threatening to blast
Milton into extinction, that there appeared the Third Edition
of Paradise Lost, printed, as the two former had been, "by S.
Simmons, next door to the Golden Lion in Aldersgate Street."
It is a small octavo, printed on the model of the Second
Edition, with the same arrangement of the poem into twelve
Books, but is hardly so good-looking, and is of no independent
value. It is interesting chiefly as marking the fact that 2600,
or perhaps 3000, copies of the poem were by that time disposed
of, and 1300 or 1500 copies more were required. Milton's
widow, still in Lpndon, was then entitled, therefore, by her
husband's original agreement with Simmons, to the 5^5 due
on the complete sale of the Second Edition. For some reason
or other, Simmons was in no hurry, and it was not till the
end of 1680 that he settled with the widow in the manner
explained in the following receipt : —
" I do hereby acknowledge to have received of Samuel Symonds,
Cittizen and Stationer of London, the Sum of Eight pounds :
which is in full payment of all my right, Title, or Interest, which I
have or ever had in the Ooppy of a Poem Intitled Paradise Lost in
Twelve Bookes in 8vo. By John Milton, gent., my late husband.
Wittness my hand this 21st day of December 1680.
"Witness, "William Yapp.
Ann Yapp."
From this receipt it appears that Simmons's settlement
1 Ante, Vol. t. p. ix; and Godwin, onIyatsecondhand,andItakethephrase
p. 143. Kymer's Essay is known to me from it about Milton from Godwin.
780 LIFE OF MILTON AND HISTORY OF HIS TIME.
with the widow was not retrospective only, but prospective
and for ever. He owed her £^ for the Second Edition ; but
the Third Edition had been already out for some time, and for
that edition, when 1300 copies of it had been sold, he would
owe her, by the original agreement, another j^5. As she,
was then about to remove from London to Nantwich, and
anxious therefore to wind up all her concerns in London, it
was convenient for her to compound for the second .^5, not
yet due, by accepting £2> instead ; and hence her complete
acquittance to Simmons for .^8 in one sum. There is indeed
a subsequent document, dated April 29, 1681, probably just
before her actual departure for Nantwich, in which, in the
most formal manner, and with extraordinary surplus of legal
phraseology, she grants Simmons a renewed release from all
obligations to her in the matter of Paradise Lost, and from
all actions or demands in her interest, or that of her heirs,
executors, and administrators, on that account, "from the
beginning of the world unto the date of these presents."
Perhaps she regretted having let Simmons have the 3^% off,
and he feared having farther trouble from her. In any case,
by the original agreement with Milton, Simmons was to be
absolute proprietor &f the copyright after the sale of the then
current or third edition'; The stipulation of Milton, for him-
self, his heirs, and assigns, had been for ^20 only in all, the
first .^5 paid down, and the rest to come in instalments of
£h for each of the first three editions when sold out, at the
ra,te of 1300 copies for each edition; after which the book was
to be Simmons's own. Milton had received ,^10 of the total
price in his life-time; and the payment of the £% to the
widow in 1680 discharged the rest. The composition with
the widow, reducing the stipulated jf 20 for the entire copy-
right oi Paradise Lo^t to an actual payment of ,^18, was as if
nowadays £70 had been the sum agreed for and it had been
reduced to .^63 by composition. The balance of ^-"8 which
the widow took with her to Nantwich was worth what .^28
would be worth now^.
'^^''^'T*?'^™J^*''J,"^^°J'"^°^y^®22; Cambridge Edition of MUton's Poems
and Jntrodnotipn to Paradise Lost in (1874), 1. 15 17.
BBA.BAZON AYLMEE AND JACOB TONSON. 781
For ten years from 1678 there was no new edition of
Paradise Lost. There are various traces, however, of the
growth of the interest in Milton's poetry through those ten
years.
In 1680 there was a second edition of Paradise Regained
and Samson Agonistes together, published by the same John
Starkey who had published the first. Whether the widow
derived any benefit from this re-issue does not appear ; nor is
it known what copyright Milton had retained in these poems,
or whether any. In the same year 1680, or in 1681, the
printer Simmons, having just acquired the entire copyright of
Paradise Lost, and either thinking he had made as much by
his three editions of the book as he was likely to make, or else
having reasons for converting his property in it into cash,
sold the future copyright for ^''25 to Brabazon Aylmer of the
Three Pigeons in Cornhill, the bookseller who had published
the little volume of Milton's EjpistolcB Familiares and Pro-
lusiones Oratorice in 1674 and his translation of the Declara-
tion of the Election of John III of Poland in the same year.
His acquisition of Paradise Lost may, have been agreeable to
him on personal grounds ; and the book might have fared
well in his hands had it remained there. But there was a
young fellow then in London whose enterprise in bookselling
and publishing was to beat all slower tradesmen out of the
field, and who was already on the alert for all promising
•speculations. This was Jacob Tonson, the third man after
Humphrey Moseley and Henry Herringman in the true
apostolical succession of London publishers. He had begun
business in 1677, when hardly one-and- twenty years of age,
at the sign of the Judge's Head near the Fleet Street end of
Chancery Lane. He was an ungainly enough figure, if we
may trust Dryden's wicked description of him twenty years
afterwards, —
" "With leering looks, bull-faced, and freckled fair,
With two left legs, and Judas-coloured hair,
And frowsy pores that taint the ambient air."
•But he had an able head on his shoulders, and a faculty of
money-inaking, for authors and himself, of which Dryden,
782 LIFE OP MILTON AND HISTOEY OF HIS TIME.
thralled to HerriBgman hitherto, had already taken good
advantage. On the 17th of August 1683, it appears, this
Jacob Tonson bought from Brabazon Aylmer one half of the
copyright in Paradise Lost, at a higher price than Aylmer
had given to Simmons for the whole three years before.
Dryden may have advised him in the transaction ; but there
was no immediate, result. The other half of the copyright
remained with Aylmer, or went elsewhither ; and there was
silence deep as death for a time^.
Not among readers and critics. With the remaining copies
of the third edition of Paradise Lost, the copies of the second
edition of Paradise Regained and Samson Agonistes, and the
copies of the collected Minor Poems in the edition of 1673,
the interest in Milton was going about like a gad-fly.
Mentions of Milton and his poetry are frequent in books
between 1678 and 1688, and some of them have been col-
lected. Todd refers to an examination of the blank verse of
Paradise Lost and a tribute to the language of the same in a
\l Paraphrase upon Canticles, by Samuel Woodford, D.D., pub-
lished in 1679, and to a curious commendation of Milton in
~J religious poems by a Samuel Slater, published in the same
year. He also quotes from the preface to an anonymous
\i translation in 1680 of a poem of the Dutch Jacob Cats, in
which the translator hopes his readers will not reject the
counsel of the book, " though not sung by a Cowley or a
Milton " ; and he adds a quotation from a poetical tribute to
Milton in the same year by an F. C, whom be supposes to
have been Francis Cradock, formerly one of the Rota Club.
It begins —
"0 thou, the wonder of the present age,
An age immersed in luxury and vice,
A race of triflers ! "
In 1682 appeared the first edition of the Essay on Poetry by
Sheflield, Earl of Mulgrave, afterwards Duke of Bucking-
1 Introduction to Parddiae Loei in Christie's Globe edition of Dryden, p.
Cambridge Milton, I. 17—18, with re- 653, and prefixed Memoit, p. xli.
I'eiBuceB there to N«wton ^d Nichols ;
MENTIONS OF MILTON FROM 1678 TO 1688. 783
hamshire, ending with tbe delineation of that impossible
poet who -
" Must above Cowley, nay, and Milton too, prevail, —
Succeed where great Torquato and our greater Spenser fail."
In an anonymous hook of 1683, The Sihiaiion of Paradise) v
Milton, Todd says, is " the admired theme," and is quoted
" with taste and judgment " ; and in the second edition of the
metrical &my on Translated Terse by the Earl of Roscommon, ^
who died in 1684, there is the strange compliment to Milton
of the insertion amid the rhyming couplets of twenty seven
lines of blank verse, ostentatiously adapted from the 6th book
of Paradise Lost and offered as a specimen of the true sublime.
By this time not only had Milton's doctrine of blank verse
gained adherents and his example in that respect been fol-
lowed, but, possibly on account of the drift of affairs to the
Revolution of 1688, the recollection of his politica-l offences
had become weaker. It is still rank indeed in the article on
him in the Lives of the most famous English Poets published in
1687 by a William Winstanley. He had been a barber, had >>
pillaged Edward Phillips's Theatrum Poetarum for the purposes
of his hook, and dismisses Milton thus, in words stolen from
Phillips, with an addition of his own: — "John Milton was
" one whose natural parts might deservedly give him a place
"amongst the_ principal of our English poets, having written
"two heroic poems and a tragedy, namely Paradice Lost,
" Paradice Regain'd, and Sampson Agonista ; but his fame is
"gone out like a candle in a snuff, and his memory will
"always stink, which might have ever lived in honourable
" repute, had he not been a notorious traytor and most
" impiously and villanously bel}''d that blessed martyr King
" Charles the First." Winstanley was but a straw against
the stream. There had already been a German translation of
Paradise Lost, by an Ernst Gottlieb vom Berge, published at v/
Zerbst in 1682 at the translator's own expense ; even before
that year Milton's old friend Theodore Haak, the original^
founder of that London club of which the Royal Society was
a development, and now an aged Fellow of that Society, had
784 LIFE OF MILTON AND HISTORY OF HIS TIME.
translated half the poem on his own account into German
blank verse, with much approbation from the continental
friendfe to whom he had sent specimens of it in manuscript ;
and a Latin translation of the first book of the poem, done
hy several hands, had been published in London in 1686 by-
Thomas Dring, the proprietor of the current edition of Mil-
ton's Minor Poems. Then, as we near the Revolution of
1688, the supremacy of Milton seems an article of universal
belief. From a poem in a collection by various hands pub-
lished that year in honour of Waller, who had died the year
before, Todd quotes the lines : —
"Speak of adventurous deeds in sucli a strain
As all but Milton would attempt in vain ; "
and he quotes also from a tribute to Milton entitled " A pro-
pitiatory sacrifice to the ghost of J.M.hy way of Pastoral, in a
dialogue between Thyrsis and Gorydon" which appeared in 1689
in a volume of pieces " by a late scholar of Eton," but bears
mai-ks of having been written soon after Milton's death.
Milton in his blindness is compared to Homer and Tiresias,
and is apostrophised thus : —
" Daphnis, the great reformer of our isle !
Daphnis, the patron of the Koman style !
Who first to sense converted doggrel rhymes,
The xMuses' bells took off and stopt their chimes;
On surer wings, with an immortal flight.
Taught us how to believe and how to write \"
Into this state of sentiment about Milton, fully formed four-
teen years after his death, came the sumptuous folio volume en-
J ^xiSsATaradiseLost. A Poem in Twelve Books. TheAuthourJoJm
Milton. The Fourth Edition, Adorned with sculptures. London,
Printed ly Miles Flesher,for Jacob Tonson, at the Judge's Head
in Chancery Lane near Meet-street. MDCLXXXFIII." Tonson
must have been engaged in the preparation of this volume
for some time, and must have bestowed much pains upon it.
Not only is the size folio and the type large and open ; but
■■ol '^".^f J.^ll'™ («^'*- 18-'>2\ T. m— stnnlpvU LiVps ; Woort's Ath IV. 2.=n
127, with his bibliographical list at the and 763; Godwin's PhiUipses, 144;
^•1/ A U- '. ^^y Lowndes, Art. Johnson's Lives of Eoscommon and
Mtltm ; Aubrey s Milton Notes ; Win- Sheffield, with Cunningham's Notes.
FOUETH EDITION OF PARADISE LOST. 785
the so-called " sculptures," consisting of twelve plates designed
by John Medina in illustration of the text, a plate for each
of the twelve books, are, though in a bad and gaudy style
of art, elaborate enough. There is also a prefixed portrait
of Milton, inscribed "B. White, sculp." a modification of
Faithorne's original of 1670 by the well known line and
mezzotint engraver Robert White of London, who was born
in 1645 and died in 1704. The most remarkable thing about
the volume, however, is that it had been published by sub-
scription, or that, at all events, a large number of subscrip-
tions had been obtained to secure the venture and add to
Tonson's profits by ordinary sale. The tradition is that the
Whig lawyer and statesman, Mr. Somers, afterwards Lord
Somers, exerted himself greatly for the success of the edition ;
and it is accordingly called sometimes " the Somers edition."
Among others who exerted themselves were Dryden and
young Francis Atterbury, afterwards Bishop Atterbury. At
the end of the volume are printed " the names of the nobility
and gentry that encourag'd, by subscription, the printing of
this edition." They are over 500 in number, and are arranged
alphabetically in six pages of double columns. Among the
nobility one notes Lord Abergavenny, Viscountess Brouncker,
Lord Cavendish, the Earl of Dorset, the Earl of Drumlanrick,
Lord Dungannon, Lord Grey of Ruthen, the Earl of Kent,
the Earl of Kingston, Lord Lexington, Lord Mordaunt, the
Earl of Middleton, the Earl of Ossory, the Earl of Pembroke,
the Earl of Perth, the Duke of Somerset, and the Marquis of
Worcester. Among the rest are Atterbury, Bra;bazon Aylmer,
Betterton, three of Davenant's sons, Dryden, Dr. Eachard,
Flatman, Sir Robert Howard, Sir Roger L'Estrange, Sir Paul
Rycaut, Thomas Southerne, Stillbgfleet, and "Edmund Waller,
Esq.," the last of whom had died before the volume was
ready, Dryden, besides subscribing to the volume and stimu-
lating subscriptions to it, had furnished his famoiis, but some-
what clumsy and indiscriminating, six lines on Milton to be
engraved under the portrait : —
"Three Poets, in three distant ages born,
Greece, Italy, and England did adorn.
VOL, VI, 3 E
786 LIFE OF MILTON AND HISTOKY OF HIS TIME.
The first in loftiness of thought surpass'd;
The next in majesty; in both the last.
The fore? of Nature cou'd no farther goe:
To make a Third she joynd the former two^"
Together with this fourth edition of Paradise Lost in 1688,
and in. the same folio size and the same style of type, as if to
match it and be bound up with it if desired, but without
" sculptures," appeared a third edition of Paradise Regained
and Samson Agonistes, " printed by E. E., and are to be sold
by Randal Taylor near Stationers'-Hall." This Randal Taylor,
therefore, had succeeded John Starkey in the proprietorship
of these two poems, while the Minor Poems in their small
octavo form still belonged to Thomas Bring. Thus Tonson's
property in Milton's poetry was by no means complete in
1688; and, indeed, in some copies of his folio edition of
Paradise Lost of that year he figures in the title-page as only
joint-publisher with a " Richard Bently, at the Post Office
in Russell Street," who perhaps represented the half-copyright
which had been left in the hands of Brabazon Aylmer. But
on March 24, 1690 (1690-1 ?), as we are informed, Tonson
acquired from Brabazon Aylmer the other half of the copy-
right of Paradise Lost, "at an advanced price;" and from
about that date, though we do not know the means, we find
Jacob Tonson in possession of the whole of the poetry, or at
least in the sole management of it. Nor did he let the
property sleep. In 1693 there was a fifth edition of Paradise
Lost, still in folio, bound up with a fourth of Paradise Re-
gained. In 1695 there was a sixth edition of Paradise Lost,
still in folio, with a uniform issue of Paradise Regained,
Samson Agonistes, and the M'nor Poems, so that all might be
bound together and constitute the first collective edition of
' From inspection of a copy of the the subscription had begun nine years
edition ; with information from Mitford, before the publication. L'Bstrange
p. oviii, footnote, and p. clxxv, and among the subscribers is Satan also
reference to the Cambridge Edition of come to worship. There is a " Mr.
Milton, I. 19. Among the subscribers Stephen Marshall " among them, and a
to the Somers folio of 1688 is a "Thomas "Mr. Thomas Woodcock." Was the
Hobbs, Esq." As the philosopher first a son or other relative of the
Hobbes had died in 1679, in his ninety- Smectymnuan, and the second a rela-
second year, this most have been some tive of Milton's second wife ?
one else, unless we can suppose that
THE TONSON COPYRIGHT IN MILTON'S POETET. 787
Milton's Poetical Works ; and a peculiar accompaniment of
this edition, testifying the extraordinary dimensions of Milton's
fame by this time, was an elaborate commentary, or body of
learned annotations on Paradise Lost, in 321 folio pages, by
"P. H.j <|)t\oT7ot^rjjs," i.e. Patrick Hume, a Scotsman, settled
as a schoolmaster somewhere near London, whom Tonson had
employed in the business, or who had undertaken it as a
labour of love. All subsequent commentators have been in-
debted to this commentary of Hume's, and often with far too
little acknowledgment. The folio edition of Milton's Poetical
Works to which it was affixed was undoubtedly the best that
had yet appeared, and sufficed for a while. But Tonson,
having removed in 1697 from the Judge's Head in Chancery
Lane to a shop at Gray's Inn Gate, till then occupied by his
brother, and having assumed that brother's son, Jacob Tonson
junior, as his partner, did not cease, amid all his other under-
takings, to trade in Milton. He published a new edition of
the Poetical Works in 1703 in two volumes large octavo,
another in 1707 in two volumes smaller octavo, and a pocket
duodecimo edition oi Paradise Lost in 1711, completed by an
issue of the other poems in a similar volume in 1713. This
edition of 1711-13 may be called the ninth oi Paradise Lost,
the eighth of Paradise Regained, the seventh of Samson
Agonistes, and the sixth of the Minor Poems. It was while
these more handy editions were running that there appeared
Addison's celebrated series of papers on Paradise Lost in the
Spectator. They began on Jan. 5, 1711-12 and were con-
cluded on May 3, 1712. The statement that it was these
criticisms of Addison that first awoke the English nation to
a sense of Milton's greatness ought to have been exploded
long ago, and owes its continued vitality only to that inherent
sheepishness of human nature which will persist in repeating
anything whatever that has once been strongly said. The
criticisms had no appreciable effect at the time on the demand
for Milton's poetry. It was not, indeed, till 1719 that the
Tonsons, who had meanwhile removed from Gray's Inn Gate
to their last and most famous shop, the Shakespeare's Head
in the Strand, speculated again in Milton, and then only in
3E3
788 LIFE OF MILTON AND HISTORY OF HIS TIME,
another duodecimo edition of Paradise Lost by itself. But in
1720 they published the fine new edition of the Poetical
Works known as Tickell's, in 2 vols, quarto, with Addison's
critique reprinted, and a list of 300 subscribers ; in 1721
another of the same in 2 vols. 12mo. ; in 1725 the first of
the so-called Fenton editions in 2 vols. 8vo. ; and in 1727 and
1730 repetitions of the same. The Tonsons were also part
publishers of Bentley's eccentric edition or mutilation of the
Paradise Lost in 1732. That edition may be called the sixteenth
English edition of Paradise Lost, while Paradise Regained was
in its thirteenth, Samson Agonistes in its twelfth, and the
Minor Poems in their eleventh. There had, however, been
a Dublin edition oi Paradise Lost in 1724, and one hears of a
London edition of the Poetical Works in 1731, not by the
Tonsons. On the whole the Tonsons had then had a virtual
monopoly of Milton's poetry for forty years. It had been very
profitable to them ; and no wonder that, when old Jacob
Tonson had his portrait painted by Sir Godfrey Kneller, as
one of the portraits of the Kit-Cat Club of which he was
secretary, it was with a copy of Paradise Lost in his hand.
He died, at the age of about eighty, on the 18th of March
1735-6, a very wealthy man, with landed estates. His nephew,
Jacob Tonson the younger, had predeceased him about four
months. It might be a consideration in any study of the
law of copyright ihat in 1727, when these Tonsons were
rolling in wealth, a goodly portion of it derived froiii traffic in
Milton's poetry, Milton's widow was alive injrery^traitened
gentility at Nantwich, and Milton's youngest daugher and
her children were in penury in Spitalfields ^.
The old notion being that copyright was perpetual in the
author, his heirs or assigns, and Milton having assigned away
to Simmons all his copyright in Paradise Lost after the third
edition, and the copyrights of the other poems having ap-
parently gone in the same way to the booksellers Starkey
and Dring, the Tonsons, as successors by purchase to the
property of the whole, may have hoped to enjoy it for ever.
1 CambridgeMilton.I.lS— 28,withre- and Todd's Bibliographical List at the
ferences there, including Bohn'sZoiOTirfes end of Vol. IV. of his Milton.
THE TONSON COPYKIGHT IN MILTON's POETBT. 789
But in 1709, just when they had begun to adapt their
editions to the popular market by dropping from the folio
size to smaller sizes, there had been passed the Copyright
Act of Queen Anne, the first general Copyright Act of this
country. By this Act the old notion of perpetual copyright
in books was annulled, and holders of existing copyrights in
England and Scotland were secured undisturbed possession of
them only for twenty-one years after the 10th of April 1710.
Thus the monopoly of the Tonsons in Milton's poetry had
come legally to an end in April 1731. But, though from that
date we do find their monopoly interfered with by the publi-
cation of independent editions, not only from Dublin but soon
also from Glasgow and Edinburgh, English trade-custom still
kept Milton's poetry for another generation substantially in
the possession of the Tonson family. The head of the firm
after the deaths of old Jacob and Jacob secundus, was Dr.
Johnson's friend, Jacob Tonson tertius, the son of Jacob
secundus and the grand-nephew of old Jacob ; and, to the
death of this Jacob Tonson tertius in 1767, the Tonson firm
continued to send forth editions of Milton in various forms,
with hardly any competition except from Scotland and Ireland.
The most important of these was Dr. Newton's edition of
Paradise Lost in two large quarto volumes, with variorum
notes in 1749, completed by his similar edition of Paradise
Regained, Samson Agonistes, and the Minor Poems in another
volume in 1753. This variorum edition of all Milton's poems
by Newton, which became the standard library edition for
a long while, was in its fifth issue in 1763, when Newton
had just become bishop of Bristol. In that year, I calculate,
taking all editions whatever into account. Paradise Lost was
in its forty-sixth edition. Paradise Regained in its thirty-
second, Samson Agonistes in its thirty-first, and the Minor
Poems in their thirtieth. From that year the number and
variety of editions, with the number and variety of the
commentaries, translations, &c. &c., defy calculation. In the
matter of translations it may be noted that before the year
1763 there had been four oi Paradise Lost into German, two
into Dutch, three into French, and two into Italian. There had
790 LIFE OF MILTON AND HISTORY OF HIS TIME.
also been at least one complete translation of it into Latin, by-
William Dobsonj LL.B. Oxon, in two volumes quarto, besides
the eiforts in tbat now obsolete style of labour by the in-
genious and learned William Hog or Gulielmus Hogaeus, a
Scotchman from the Carse of Gowrie, who had " known only
misfortune since he came into England," and whose Para-
phrasis Poetica of Paradise Lost, Paradise Eegainfed, and
Samson Agonistes, published in 1690, his Paraphrasis Lat'ma
of Lyeidas, published in 1694, and his Comxdia (Comus)
Joannis Miltoni, viri clarissimi, parap^rastice Eeddita, published
in 1698, lie in old libraries as records of a wasted life ^
POSTHUMOUS PEOSB PUBLICATIONS OF MILTON AND FATE OF
HIS PAPEES.
There is no reason to believe that Milton left a single scrap
of verse he cared a farthing about that has not come down to
us in our printed editions of his poems. It was otherwise
with his prose^writings. He left masses of misoellaaeous
manuscript, and among them some prose compilations about
the future fate of which he was by no means indifferent ^.
Two of his manuscripts about which, as we know, he was
' Cambridge Milton, I. 28— 33 ; original is a thin manuscript which hail
Todd's List of Editions, &c. been used byMilton at intervals througli
^ Phillips, closing his Life of Milton, his life for receiving references to boolts
says: — "He had, as I remember, pre- hewasreading,audnotesoffact.sorideas
" pared for the press an answerto some that there struck him. The entries are
" little scribbling quack in London, who in English, Latin, French, and Italian,
" had written a scurrilous libel against and are arranged in three sections,— viz.
"him ; but, whether by the dissuasion Index Ethioub, Index OECONOjiicua,
" of friends, as thinking him a fellow not Index Poliiicus,— each entry with a
"worth his notice, or for what other heading denoting the particular sub-
" cause I know not, the answer was jeot. The handwriting in the earlier
" never published." From Phillips's entries is generally Milton's ovrn, most
description one Imagines that it be- of it before his Italian journey ; bat
longed to the Parker -Marvell con- other hands gradually come In, among
troversy, and was provoked by that which have been recognised those of
particular lampoon upon Milton in several of Milton's otherwise known
conjunction with Marvell, called The. amanuenses from 1652 to 1674. The
Transproser 'Rehearsed, the author of chief value of the relic lies in its con-
whioh was Richard Leigh (ante, pp. taining so much of Milton's undoubted
703—706). — An interesting relic from autograph. It contains nothing in the
among the papers left by Milton was shape of original writing. There were
discovered a few years ago at Netherby found witli it, however, a fragment of
inCumberland,theseat of Sir Frederick Latin prose on the subject of early
U. Graham, bart, in the course of re- rising, apparently a Latin prolusion
searchesmadeby Mr.AlfredJ.Horwood of Milton's at Cambridge, not thought
for the Historical Manuscripts Com- worth printing by him with his other
mission, and was edited for the Camden Prolusiones Ointorice in 1674, and also a
Society by Mr. Horwood {Revised Edi- short Latin poem on the same subject,
tion, 1877), under the title A Common mainly in elegiacs. Copies of these are
Place Book of John Milton. The appended to Mr. Horwood's volume.
DANIEL SKINNKK AND THE MILTON MSS. 791
especially anxious just before his death were the small one
containing the fair transcript of his Latin Leiters of State and
the much larger one containing that complete Treatise of
Christian Doctrine or Systematic Body of Divinity, also in Latin,
on which he had so long been engaged. He had attempted
the publication of the former, as we saw, in or about June
1674, through the bookseller Brabazon Aylmer, in conjunction
with his Latin FamiUir Bpistles ; but, that attempt having
failed by the refusal of the necessary licence from L'Estrange
or from higher authorities, the transcript had remained in
Milton's hands. It was left by him, together with the manu-
script of the Theological Treatise, to the charge of the young,
scholar, Daniel Skinner, B.A., of Trinity College, Cambridge,
who had for some time been his amanuensis, and whose chief
employment for him indeed had been the making of the
transcript of the State Letters, and the transcribing alsoj
in his singularly clear and elegant hand, of the first 196
pages of the treatise, with revision of the remaining 540
pages (ante, p. 720). The bequest seems to have been made
on the understanding that Skinner would do his best to have
the two books printed in Holland^ making what he could out
of them for his trouble. At all events; the two manuscripts,
with some other papers of Milton, did come to Skinner by
Milton's directions. "The works of Milton which he left
behind him to me" are Skinner"s own words^.
Skinner, one finds, had been admitted a junior fellow of his
college at Cambridge on the 2nd of October 1674, Dr. Isaac
Barrow being then still master. If the manuscripts came
to him there, lie probably did not show them about in college.
But, in fact, he was tired of Cambridge residence, much fonder
of London, and very anxious to obtain an appointment of
some public kind there or abroad. He had already, by his
own merits, or through his father, Daniel Skinner, senior, one
of a firm of wfill-to-do merchants i» the City, or perhaps even
1 In the introduction to Milton's about 1682, into tlie family of the
CmrnnAmVlMe Booh, described in last Grahams of Nebberby Two of the
note Mr Horwood furnishes very pro- entries in the Common Place Boole, at
bable evidence that Skinner possessed all events, both written apparently in
alsothatmawiSoriptafterMilton'sdeath, 1673, are in Skinners hand,
audi that it was from him that it passed,
793 LIFE OF MILTON AND HISTOKY OP HIS TIME.
througli Milton^ found friends of influence in London ; and it
seems to have been some time in 1675 that he took courage
to introduce himself to Mr. Samuel Pepys, then forty-two
years of age, Secretary to the Admiralty, and M.P, for
Harwich, wealthier and busier than ever, though not a whit
less honest and kindly. Young Skinner found Mr. Pepys so
affable, so " favourable and countenancing," that he could not
express his thank-s sufficiently, and hoped everything from
the influence of " so good and great a patron ;" and he did
not conceal from Mr. Pepys that he had some of the late
Mr. Milton's writings, and had negotiated or was negotiating
;for their publication by the printer Daniel Elzevir of Am-
sterdam. "Whether the negotiation was by letter, or with an
agent of Elzevir in London, or with Elzevir himself, who
is known to have been on a visit to London about this time,
does not appear ; but it is certain that, in or about November
1675, Elzevir had agreed with Skinner to print the two
manuscripts, and that shortly afterwards they were in Elzevir's
possession in Amsterdam.
Months passed, and Skinner was still vainly waiting on in
London for the desired public appointment, or going and
coming between London and Cambridge. One infers that
his father was troubled by his restlessness, and tiying to drive
him back to Cambridge and College routine by stopping sup-
plies. In the course of 1676, at all events, he was in such
straits for money that he made bold to ask Mr. Pepys for .^10.
The good-natured Pepys seems to have signified to the young
man that he was taking a liberty, but to have lent the .^10
nevertheless. After that Mr. Pepys saw no more and heard
no more of Skinner for some time, the reason afterwards
assigned by him to Pepys for such abscondence being his
sorrow and shame, " occasioned on no other account but con-
" tinual and daily hopes of receiving ten pounds of my father,
" whereby I might safely approach and make a grateful
" return of your worship's kindness, not being able to appear
" till I could procure that." While he was in this unhappy
condition, avoiding Pepys, and exhausting his othor shifts,
lo ! in October 1676, the appearance, from some unnamed
DANIEL SKINNEB AND THE MILTON MSS. 793
prmting-press and some unnamed bookseller'& shop in London,
of an edition of those very Latin State Letters of Milton which
he had given to Elzevir to print. The consequences to
Skinner were immediate and serious ; hut, before we tell the
rest of his story, we must describe the little volume itself.
It is a rather neatly printed small duodecimo of 234 pages,
with an anonymous Latin preface, and this title-page :^ — •
" Litem Pseudo-Senatus Anglicani, Cromwellii, reliquorumque
Perduellium nomine acjuasu comcriptce a Joanne Miltono. Im-
presses Anno 1676." (" Letters in the name and by the order
of the Pretended English Parliament, of Cromwell, and of the
rest of the Rebels, written by John Milton, Printed in the
year 1676.") The writer of the anonymous preface introduces
the volume thus : — " When first these papers came to our
" hands, I doubted long whether I should rather commit
" them to the press or to the flames, till, mindful of that mercy
" which had pardoned ihe Author long ago, however foully
" delinquent against his Sacred Majesty, we judged that it
" would be a most foolish act of inclemency not to spare his
" papers to perish naturally. For it has always seemed to the
" majority the most proper course to imitate the actions of
" that Prince, whoever he is, whose injunctions and command
" we ought to obey. Not that we here present you anything
" with which we go about to corrupt the manners and dispo-
" sitions of the younger members of society or to flatter the
" seditious and impotent lust of ruling in others. All we
" commend to you is the ornamental setting of the written
" transactions, and the elegance of the Latin expression j for
" Milton is perhaps a writer most worthy to be read by all,
" had he not stained the eloquence and purity of his style by
" most abominable conduct. But, inasmuch as from these
" letters you may be able perhaps to extract some things which
" may illustrate the annals of the time in which they were
" written, and by which you may detect and explain the
" stubborn malignity of those rebels, on this account have we
" caused them to be given to the light. Meanwhile behold,
" after the expulsion of kings, how gracefully the ass is
" attired with the lion's skin, and how rebels, while commis-
794 LIFE OP MILTON AND HISTORY OP HIS TIME.
" sioniag embassies, sending envoys, undertaking wars, and
" assuming the other prerogatives of Royal Majesty, think
" the power they have unjustly usurped their proper due and
" regularly entrusted to them. Have the letters, therefore,
" Reader, and enjoy them to your own advantage and the
" confusion of bad men." It is difficult to suppose that this
was not written by some one who was more a Miltonist at
heart than he could allow, and who was clever at irony.
The publication of Milton's State Letters would certainly
have attracted the notice of Sir Joseph Williamson, then
Secretary of State, or of some of his colleagues in the Govern-
ment, even if Skinner had not moved in the matter. But,
in his first annoyance at being forestalled in one of his own
intended Milton publications through Elzevir at Amsterdam,
he took a very bold step. Such, at least, is his own account.
" There creeps into the world," he says, " a little imperfect
" book of Milton's State Letters, procured to be printed by
" one Pitts, a bookseller in London, which he had bought
" of a poor fellow that had formerly surreptitiously got them
" from Milton. These coming out so slily, and quite un-
" known to me, and when I had the true and more perfect
" copy, with many other papers, I made my addresses to
" Sir Joseph Williamson, to acquaint him that there was
" a book come out against his authority : that, if his honour
" connived at that, he would please to grant me licence to
" print mine ; if not, that he would either suppress that little
" book, or give me leave to put in the bottom of the Gazette
" that they were printing in Holland in a larger and more
" complete edition." Here Skinner represents himself as the
informer against Pitts, not in dishonourable spite, but in the
interest of his own projected Amsterdam edition of the State
Letters. There has been preserved, however, in the Record
Office, the attestation or abstract, in Skinner's own hand, and
endorsed by the hand of Sir Joseph Williamson's secretary,
of the information actually given to Sir Joseph. It is dated
Oct. 18, 1676, and runs thus :— " That Mr. Pitts, bookseller in
" Paul's Churchyard, to the best of my remembrance about
" four or five months ago, told me he had met withal and
DANIEL SKINNEK AND THE MILTON MSS. 795
" bought some of Mr. Milton's papers, and that, if I would
" procure an agreement betwixt him and Elzeviere at Am-
" sterdam (to whose care I had long before committed the
" true ?tnd perfect copy of the State Letters to be printed), he
"would communicate them to my perusal; if I would not,
" he would proceed his own way, and make the best advantage
" of 'em : so that, in all probability, I not procuring Elzeviere 's
" concurrence with hira (and 'tis impossible it should be other-
" wise), Mr. Pitts has been the man by whose means this late
" imperfect surreptitious copy has been published." In this
attestation there in nothing necessarily inconsistent with
Skinner's own above-quoted account, as given for subsequent
and independent purposes. He had been aware of Mr. Pitts's
possession of the surreptitious copy of the Letters as early as
May or June 1676, and had then been in communication with
him ; but the actual appearance of the edition in October
1676 may have surprised him, and may have been the cause
of his application to Sir Joseph.
Sir Joseph, it seems, took the affair much more seriously
than Skinner had expected. He seems to have been satisfied,
indeed, that Skinner had not been concerned in the publication
of the anonymous London edition of the State Letters ; but
Skinner's information that he had arranged for the publication
of a more perfect edition of the same by Elzevir of Amsterdam,
with the fact that he had other unpublished papers of Milton
in his" charge, suggested only one course. " Little thinking,"
says Skinner, "that Sir Joseph was such an enemy to the
" name of Milton, he told me he could countenance nothing of
" that man's writings." He would give Skinner no licence,
therefore, for an English edition of the State Letters, or for
an advertisement of the Amsterdam Edition in the London
Gazette. That is not surprising; but we should hardly have
been prepared for the sequel. " In this answer," says Skinner,
" I acquiesced. A little while after, his honour sends for me
" to know what papers I had of Milton's by me, and that
" I should oblige him if I would permit them to his perusal ;
" which very readily I did, thinking that it might prove ad-
" vantageous to me ; and, finding upon this so great an access
796 LTPE OF MILTON AND HISTORY OF HIS TIME.
" to his honour, I presented him with a Latin petitionary
" epistle for some preferment, either under him or by his
" means. His honour was pleased graciously to receive it,
" and in a most expressive manner to promise me any advance-
'• ment that might be in his power." Evidently, Sir Joseph,
on the one hand, had taken a liking to the young man, and
was disposed to be his friend after farther probation, and
Skinner, on the other hand, was delighted at having found
such a patron, and was resolved that neither Milton's memory
nor his, manuscripts should stand in the way.
Meanwhile, before those interviews with Sir Joseph which
had changed his plans. Skinner had drafted a Latin prospectus
of his forthcoming edition of Milton's State Letters, to be
inserted in the London Gazette or sent to Elzevir for publication
abroad, warning people against the anonymous London edition
as an abortion and imposition. A copy of it has been pre-
served. " Be it known to all the learned," it begins, " whether
" in the Universities or in London, as well as to booksellers,
" if any there are with more than usual knowledge of Latin,
" and also to all foreigners whatsoever, that the letters of John
" Milton, Englishman, written in the time of the Interregnum,
"which a certain London bookseller, taking counsel with
" himself how much to his profit and reputation might be
" yielded him by anything, however imperfect and crude, from
" among the works of so great a man, has lately caused
" to creep to light, besides being," &c. ; and it goes on to
denounce the obscure bookseller, the beggarly wretch who had
sold him the papers, the mutilated and untrustworthy cha-
racter of the edition, the confused arrangement of its contents,
and the meanness and dishonesty of the preface to it, an-
nouncing at the same time the speedy appearance of the full,
true, and perfect edition in elegant type, now at press in
Holland, and to be accompanied by copies of the Spanish,
Portuguese, French, and Dutch Treaties, and by other illus-
trative documents, German, Danish, and Swedish.
Precisely at this point in the business news came to
Skinner in London so good that, in his own words, he
" leaped at it." What had seemed most feasible, and what he
DANIEL SKINNEK AND THE MILTON MSS. 797
had for some time desired most, was an appointment in the
English embassy at Nimeguen in Guelderland, East Holland,
already the head-qnarters for some time, and to continue sueh
for a year or two more, of the complex negotiations going on in
the great Spanish Succession cause between Louis XIV. on the
one hand and the Spanish and Dutch on the other, with Eng-
land intervening. The English plenipotentiary or Lord Am-
bassador at Nimeguen was then Sir Leoline Jenkins, the same
who had been Judge of the Prerogative Court of Canterbury
when Milton's nuncupative will was tried in that Court ; and
one of Mr. Pepys's kindnesses to young Skinner had been
a hearty recommendation of him, with a " good and gracious
character," to this Sir Leoline. Nothing had come of the
recommendation till now, when, says Skinner, " heaven was
" so propitious as to cause a letter to be sent from Nimeguen
" to know whether I would embrace the opportunity of being
" under Mr. Chudleigh, Secretary to the Embassy, the same
*' I had hopes of long ago." He prepared to start for
Nimeguen immediately ; and,' on the day before he left,
waited on Sir Joseph Williamson to take his leave, and beg
the favour of "some recommendations" that might assist
him in his journey. Sir Joseph then returned him his Milton
papers, whatever they were, " with many thanks," and " was
pleased," adds Skinner, " to give me a great deal of advice
" not to proceed in the printing of my papers at Amsterdam ;
" and this, he said, he spoke out of mere kindness and aifec-
" tion to me." Skinner tendered Sir Joseph the profoundest
thanks in return, and assured him that, as soon as he got to
Amsterdam, which he would purposely take on his way to
Nimeguen, he would recover the two Milton manuscripts
from Elzevir " and suppress them for ever." He had hardly
gone when Sir Joseph sat down and wrote the following
note to Sir Leoline Jenkins, dated " Whitehall, 31st Octob.,
1676" :—
"I come casually to know that Mr. Chudleigh is taking one
Mr. Skinner, a young man of Cambridge, to be his Secretary. The
person is a very pretty young man, writes Latin very well, and
a fine character. But he is most unfortunately fallen into an ugly
798 LIFE OF MILTON AND HISTOEY OF HIS TIME.
business now freslily, he, it seems, being the party that hath put
out Milton's works to be printed by tlie Elzevirs in Holland, and
among other papers his Letters of State written for the Usurpers
as their Latin Feoretary. I have told the young man plainly what
I thought of his mixing with that sort of men, and how taking
such pitch is, and that indeed, till he had very well aired himself
from such infectious a commerce as the friendship of Milton is, lie
could not be at all proper to touch any degree in the King's service.
And I pray your Excellency to say so much to Mr. Chudleigh,
if you please, to prevent his making so ill a step."
Little knowing what missive to Sir Leoline Jenkins was
crossing' the seas with himself, Mr. Skinner duly presented
himself at Nimeguen, with the result he has left described in
a very long and pitiful letter, of date " Nov. 19, 1676,"
written from Rotterdam, and addressed to Mr. Samuel Pepys.
The first part of the letter is taken up with a statement of
his past relations and obligations to Mr. Pepys, expressions
of boundless gratitude to him, and apologies for having kept
away from Mr. Pepys. so long and even left England without
paying his respects, all from shamefacedness on account of
the borrowed ^^''10. Then he reminds Mr. Pepys of the two
Milton manuscripts which Mr. Pepys knew to have been in .
his possession some time ago, and tells the story of his recent
interviews with Sir Joseph Williamson concerning those
manuscripts, and of his journey to Nimeguen in secure hope
at last of the very post which Mr. Pepys had tried to obtain
for him : —
" After a hazardous passage cross the seas, though first a gteat
expense in clothing myself for so great an appearance as this at
Nimeguen, and a long, tedious, and mighty chargeable journey
through all the parts of Holland (a country serving only to set
a greater value on our own), I at last arrived at Nimeguen, meeting
with a very kind and .beyond expectation fair reception from Mr.
Chudleigh, though (which is the misfortune I am telling you of)
I was surprised with an unkind letter which his honour Sir Joseph
Wilhanison had conveyed before my arrival to my Lord Jenkyng
concerning me . . . His honour was pleased (whether I shall term
It unkmdiy or unnaturally) to despatch a letter after me to my lord
Jenkyns, to acquaint his Lordship that I was printing Milton's
works, and wished them to have a care of me in the King's service;
whxh has put a little stop to my being employed as yet, till I can
DANIEL SKINNER AND THE MILTON MSS. 799
■write to England and procure So much interest as to clear Sir
Joseph "Williamson's jealousy of my being yet engaged in the print-
ing of these papers ; though my Lord Jenkyns and Mr. Chudleigh
are so well satisfied, after my giving them a full account of the
business, and bringing my copies with me to Nimeguen, ready to
dispose of them where Sir Joseph shall think fit, that they seem as
■much concerned at Sir Joseph's letter as I do, and have sent me
here to Rotterdam at their charge (so kind they are), to remain
here till I can write to England and they have an answer from Sir
Joseph "Williamson how that his honour is satisfied . . . Now, may
it please your worship, having given you a full and true account of
the whole affair, seeing the fortune of a young man depends upon
this small thing, either perpetual ruin or a fair and happy way
to future advancement, pray give me leave to beg of you, which
I most humbly and submissively do, that you would please instantly
to repair to his honour Sir Joseph, and acquaint him that I am so
far from printing anything of Milton's now that I have followed
his honour's advice, and, upon due pensitation with myself, have
nulled and made void my contract with Elzevier at Amsterdam,
have returned my copies to myself, and am ready to dispose of
them where his honour pleases, either into the hands of my Lord
Jenkyns, or into his own for better satisfaction ; and am so far
from ever procuring a line from Milton printed that, if his honour
pleases, he shall command my copies and all my other papers to
the fire. And, though I happened to be acquainted with Milton
in his lifetime (which out of mere love to learning I procured, and
no other concerns ever passed betwixt us but a great desire and
ambition of some of his learning), I am, and ever was, so far from
being in the least tainted with any of his principles that I may
boldly say none has a greater honour and loyalty for his Majesty,
more veneration for the Church of England, and love for his
country, than I have. Once more I beg your worship, and, with
tears instead of ink that might supply my pen, I implore that
you would prevail with Sir Joseph to write another letter to my
Lord Jenkyns and to Mr. Chudleigh and to recall his former ....
Lest I should leave any stone unturned, I have penned out a letter
to his honour myself, wherein I have humbly and with great sub-
mission cleared myself. Likewise Elzevier the printer has written
to him by this post. Here at Kotterdam I shall stay till his honour
is pleased to send to my Lord Jenkyns ; which I pray your worship
may be the next post after the receipt of this letter, which is next
Friday, which will arrive at • Nimeguen the Tuesday after, God
willing, when I shall be sent for from hence and be received under
Mr. Chudleigh, with all imaginable kindness, as soon as Sir Joseph's
letter arrives."
Elzevir's letter to Sir Joseph Williamson, here mentioned
by Skinner as despatched by the same post as his own, is still
800 LIFE OF MILTON AND HISTORY OF HIS TIME.
extant. It is dated " from Amsterdam the 20th November
1676/' the post from Amsterdam to England being then a
day later, I suppose, than the post from Rotterdam. It is in
French, as follows : —
" Sir, — It is about a year since I agreed with Mr. Skinner to
print the Letters of Milton and another manuscript on Theology ;
but, having received the said manuscripts, and having found there
things which I judged fitter to be suppressed than published,
I resolved to print neither the one nor the other. I wrote to that
effect to Mr. Skinner at Cambridge ; but, as he has not been there
for some time, my letter did not reach him. Since then he has
been in this town, and was delighted to hear that I have not begun
to print the said treatises, and has taken back his papers. He
told me that you were informed, Sir, that I was going to print all
the works of Milton collectively. I can assure you that I never
had such a thought, and that I should have a horror of printing
the treatises which he made for the defence of so wicked and
abominable a cause, even if it were not independently unbecoming
for the son of him who first printed the Defensio Begia of Sal-
masius, and who would have given his life if he could have saved
the late King of glorious memory, to print a book so detested
by all honest people. I am bound to tell you. Sir, that Mr. Skinner
expressed to me very great joy over the fact that I had not begun
the printing of the said works, and told me it was his intention, in
case the said book had been begun, to buy up the sheets for the
purpose of suppressing them, and that he had taken a firm reso-
lution so to dispose of the said manuscripts that they should never
appear ; and I shall venture to be answerable to you, Sir, for the
strong resolution I have seen in him so to dispose of them, and
chiefly since he has had the honour to speak with you, and you
have shown him that you would not quite like the said manu-
scripts to appear ; and, as he expects his advancement from you,
one need not doubt that he will keep his word. Sir, I. cannot
conclude without expressing my acknowledgements for your good-
ness to me when I was in London ; and I should desire to have
occasion to be able to serve you in anything that would show
with how much respect I am. Sir, your very humble and very
obedient Servant, — Daniel Elzbvier.
P.S. I forgot to say. Sir, that neither Mr. Skinner nor I had any
part in what has of late appeared of the said Milton, and that I
never heard tell of it till Mr. Skinner told me here. He had
indeed informed me before that a certain bookseller of London had
received some letters from some one who had stolen them from the
late Milton ; but neither he nor I have had any connexion with
that impression,— of which I pray you will be persuaded."
DANIEL SKINNER AND THE MILTON MSS. 801
It may be doubted whetber Mr. Chudleigh was as anxious
to have Mr. Skinaer for his under-secretary as he led Mr.
Skinner to believe. This is the impression, at all events, from
Sir Joseph Williamson's single preserved note of response
to all the letters with which he had been assailed from
Nimeguen, Rotterdam, and Amsterdam, and also to any
pressure that had been brought to bear upon him in White-
hall by Mr. Pepys. It is to Mr,. Chudleigh, is dated " White-
hall, the 28th Nov. 1676," and begins, "Mr. Chudleigh,—
" Sir, I have the favour of yours of the 14th and 30th." It
then continues : — " I should have been very glad to have had
"in my eye any youth that I could have said had been fit
"for you as secretary. But indeed at present I have none
" such : I mean not exactly such as I could wish. And surely,
" if the young man we last spoke of, — I mean Mr. Skinner, —
" had French perfectly, and that he were a little aired from
"the ill name Mr. Milton's friendship ought to leave upon
" one, there were not many more hopeful young men to be
"found of that rank." One construes this into a renewed
hint to Mr. Chudleigh that it would be better not to employ
Skinner just yet, both on account of his Milton associations
and because of his deficiency in French. Skinner, therefore,
who had been waiting in Rotterdam, " at one Mr. Shepherd's
house," was not recalled to Nimeguen.
At this point, however. Skinner's father, Mr. Daniel Skinner,
senior, merchant, of Mark Lane and Crutehed Friars, comes
to the rescue. He had probably been advised to keep his
son abroad for some time, that he might learn French and be
" a little aired " otherwise for such employment as Sir Joseph
was very willing to find for him in time. When we next
hear from young Skinner, accordingly, it is from Paris. On
the 20th of January 1676-7 he writes from that city to
Mr. Pepys as follows :—
" Most honoured and worthy, — Since my late and most unfortu-
nate repulse at Nimeguen, caused by the groundless and severe
jealousies of Sir Joseph Williamson (for, invocato Beo, never had I
the least thought of prejudicing either King or State, being in-
finitely loyal to one and mighty zealous for the other, all the
VOL. yi. 3 F
803 LIFE OP MILTON AND HISTOBY OF HIS TIME.
concerns I ever had with Milton or his works being risen from a
foolish, yet a plausible, ambition to learning), being at Kotterdam,
in expectation of returning into England, my father by his letters
commanded me instantly to repair to Prance, there to retire
privately and complete myself in the French tongue. "Which
having no sooner done, arriving in France and being commodiously
settled at Paris, I received a whole packet of letters from Holland :
amongst the rest one from your most worthy self,— a letter so
beyond expression kind and favourable, so infinitely obliging, that
1 may safely declare you to be one of the worthiest, most generous,
persons living. I see, Sir, my unhandsome departure out of England
has not quite ruined the friendship and inclination that your noble
breast entertains for me, . - . Flease give me leave to salute you in
French very speedily, and to give you testimony of my advancement
that T make here, hoping in six months' time to return to England
with those advantages that few English gentlemen here make in
twelve, and withal to be more deserving of yours and Sir Joseph
Williamson's favours : whom, pray, Sir, let me beg of you to certify
that, though 'twas his pleasure to shipwrack me in the very port
of Nimeguen, merely out of jealousy, I hope he will be so com-
passionate as to give me another vessel when I come to London.
Assure him also that, as for Milton or his works or papers, 1 have
done withal, and never had had to do with him had not ambition
to good literature made me covet his acquaintance. Pray tell him,
Sir, that all his papers will be very suddenly in his hands, as soon
as the printer Elzevir at Amsterdam can find an opportunity of
sending them over, and that I am here indefatigably studying the
French tongue, only to render myself more capable of serving him
and yourself, intending ever to acknowledge you for my grand
patron. — I am, Sir, with all imaginable gratitude, your most obliged
and devoted servant, Daniel Skinwee. — A mon log% ehez Mad.
Albert, d, la porte St. Germain, proche la Fountain, d, Paris''
There is still a little mystery about the two Milton manu-
scripts. Unless Skinner had prevaricated in his former letter
to Pepys, he had taken them out of the hands of Elzevir in
Amsterdam on his way to Nimeguen, carried them with him
to Nimeguen, and exhibited them there ; and Elzevir's letter
at the same time to Sir Joseph Williamson was to the same
effect. Yet now, it seems, two months later, the MSS. are
still in Elzevir's hands. One has an impression that Skinner,
after all, was unwilling to part with them until he had some
guarantee of the quid pro quo. They were worth money ;
and, if Sir Joseph Williamson remained obdurate, might they
not be published abroad in spite of him ?
DANIEL SKINNEB AND THE MILTON MSS. 803
Sir Joseph must have suspected some sulky reserve of this
kind in young Skinner's mind, and was angry, at all events,
at the continued detention of the manuscripts. He must
have conveyed the fact to Mr. Skinner senior ; for on the 2nd
of February 1676-7 that gentleman wrote to Elzevir. His
letter has not been preserved ; but the following was Elzevir's
reply, sent in French, and dated Amsterdam, Feb. 19, 1676-7.
" Sir, — The honour of yours of the 2nd of this month has duly
reached me. It is very true that I received by Symon Heere the
two manuscripts of Milton, — to wit, his work on Theology and
his Letters to Princes ; which are still in the same state in which
I received them, not having found it convenient to print them.
You will know, doubtless, that Monsieur your son did me the honour
to come to see me, — who was greatly satisfied when he saw that I
had not printed the said works, and begged me to send them by the
first opportunity to Nimegiien to the Secretary of the Embassy.
But it began to freeze before I could carry out his orders, and I
have since received your said son's order from Paris to send them
to you by the first shipping opportunity ; which commission I will
not fail to execute, and shall give them, well packed, to Jacob
Hendrincx, who will be the first to leave this for your city. I
have been much vexed at not being able to execute his orders
sooner ; but the frost, which has lasted here more than three
months, has prevented the vessels from leaving. At the request of
your son I wrote a letter to Sir Joseph Williamson, Secretary of
State, in which I assured that gentleman that the said books were
still in my hands, that I had no intention to print them, and that
Monsieur your son would place them in his hands. Thus, Sir, you
have no cause to trouble yourself on this account ; for, in the first
place, I am sure that your son has no intention to cause them to
be printed, but on the contrary to place them in the hands of the
gentleman above named, and, for my own part, I would not print
them though one were to make me a present of £1000 sterling,
and this for various reasons. I pray you, Sir, to believe that the
said books will be sent you through Jacob Hendrincx, and will be
forwarded to you at his leisure."
Before Elzevir's re-assuring letter had been des^patched. Sir
Joseph Williamson, in his impatience, had brought stronger
means to bear upon young Skinner in his Paris retreat. It
was on the 13th of February 1676-7 that Dr. Isaac Barrow,
master of Trinity College, sent a letter from Cambridge to
his reverend friend "Mr. George Seignior, at Ely House,
Holborn, London," enclosing a note to be forwarded to young
3F3
804 LIFE OF MILTON AND HISTORY OF HIS TIME.
Skinner. " I am sorry for the miscarriages of that wild young
man to whom I have written the enclosed, which you may
please to seal and send," was Dr. Barrow's message to Mr,
Seignior. That gentleman does not seem to have known how
to communicate with young Skinner directly; for it was
after some delay, and through Sir Joseph Williamson's own
secretary in the Foreign Office, Mr. Bridgeman, that Dr.
Barrow's note did reach young Skinner. It was delivered to
him by a Mr. Perwich, who took the precaution, as instructed
by Mr. Bridgeman, of doing so " before witness," on or before
the 15th of March 1676-7. It was as follows : —
"Trin. Coll., Feb. 13, 1676-7.
Sir, — By order of a meeting you are enjoined, immediately
without delay, upon the receiving this, to repair hither to the
college, no further allowance to discontinue being granted to you.
This you are to do upon penalty of the Statute ; which is expulsion
from the College if you disobey. We do also warn you that, if you
shall publish any writihg mischievous to the Church or State, you
will thence incur a forfeiture of your interest here. I hope God
will give you the wisdom and grace to take warning. So I rest
your loving friend, — Isaac Baekow.
For Mr. Daniel Skinner."
How Skinner received this peremptory order from the head
of his college we learn only from Mr. Perwich's report to
Mr. Bridgeman. " I found him much surprised," Mr. Perwich
writes, "and yet at the same time slighting any constraining
"orders from the superior of his college, or any benefit he
" expected thence ; but, as to Milton's works he intended to
" have printed, — though he saith that part which he had in
" MSS. are no way to be objected against, either with regard
" to royalty or government, — he hath desisted from causing
" them to be printed, having left them in Holland ; and that
" he intends, notwithstanding the college summons, to go for
"Italy this summer. This is all I can say in that affair."
The date of this report was March 15, 1676-7. Skinner did
go to Italy ; and we hear nothing more of him till May 23,
1679, on which day the registers of Trinity College, Cambridge,
show that he was « sworn and admitted as a major fellow."
The college was then under a new master, Barrow having
DANIEL SKINNER AND THE MILTON MSS. 805
died in May 1677, hardly three months after he had sent his
threatening note to Skinner; but, as Skinner's admission to
the major fellowship was after an unusual interval from his
admission to the minor fellowship, and also on an irregular
day, the conclusion is that he was completely forgiven and
restored to favour. In other words, the Milton manuscripts
had been surrendered to Sir Joseph Williamson.
They had been sent to London by Elzevir, in all probability,
shortly after the date of that letter of his, of Feb. 19, 1676-7,
to Mr. Daniel Skinner, senior, in which he had so punctually
promised them through Skipper Jacob Hendrincx. They
came to London, it is quite certain, wrapped up in a paper
parcel, addressed on the outside " To Mr. Skinner, mercM. ;"
and it was this Mr. Skinner, the father of the culprit, that
delivered them, wrapped up as they had come, and with that
address still on the outside, into Sir Joseph Williamson's
possession. The parcel was put into a press in the old State
Paper Office in Whitehall, and was to be heard of or looked
at no more for nearly a hundred and fifty years ^.
Meanwhile, though not by Daniel Skinner's means, there
had been given to the world, in that surreptitious London
edition of the State Letters in October 1676 which Skinner
had reviled so much, one most important publication from
Milton's posthumous papers. Notwithstanding Skinner's de-
nunciations of it for incompleteness and inaccuracy, it was, in
the main, a perfectly authentic collection of the State Letters,
1 The authorities for this story of 20, 1676-7. These interesting docu-
Danlel Skinner and the manuscripts of jnents in the series are from the MSS.
Milton's State Letters and his Treatise in the Bodleian (Eawl. A. 352 and Bawl.
of Christian Doctrine are the letters and A. 185). I know not whether they have
other documents that have been men- been printed before. — One or two of the
tioned and quoted. Perwich's note was facts about Skinner are from Bishop
printed in 1825 by the Eev. C. E. Sumner, Sunmer's " Pi'eliminary Observations "
afterwards Bishop Sumner, in his " Pre- just mentioned ; but he and others
liminary Observatiohs " to his transla- were totally in the dark on the whole
tion of the Treatise of ChristlanDoctrine. subject when those " Observations " were
The other 'letters and documents were written. — Todd notes that, at the. very
printed in full by Mr.W. Douglas Hamil- time when Daniel Bkevir was expressing
ton in 1869 in his Milton Papers for the his virtuous horror of Milton's writings
Camden Society, — with the exception of to Sir Joseph Williamson, he had copies
Sir Joseph "Williamson's Letter to Sir of Milton's Befensio Prima and D«-
Leoline Jenkins of Oct. 31, 1676, Sir fensio Seeunda on sale in Amsterdam.
Joseph's Letter to Mr. Chudleigh of The proof exists in his Latin trade-
Nov. 28, 1676, and young Skinner's catalogue for 1674.
second letter to Mr. Pepys, of date Jan.
806 LIFE OF MILTON AND HISTOBT OF HIS TIME.
with only about a dozen, omitted that were in Skinner's own
transcript. At all events it is that so-called surreptitious
edition of the State Letters that has served as the substantive
edition to this day. I have little doubt that Edward Phillips
was the person who conveyed them into the publisher's
hands, if he did not also write the Latin preface for him.
Aubrey distinctly records, on information from Milton's widow
before 1681, that she had given " all his papers " to Edward
Phillips ; and to this statement in Aubrey's jottings there
is the marginal note " In the lands of Mouses Pitt." The
inference is that Phillips, examining Milton's papers in 1676,
found those drafts of the State Letters from which Skinner
had made his transcripts in 1674, and sold, them and other
things to the bookseller Pitts of St. Paul's Churchyard. No
steps seem to have been taken to suppress the book. I have
a copy before me which has been in the Library of Edin-
burgh University since 1678, "ex dono B. B. Jacoli. Nairn."
The next posthumous publication in Milton's name is
" Mr. John Milton's Character of the Long Parliament and
Assembly of Divines. In MBCXLI. Omitted in his other Works,
and never before Printed, And very seasonable for these times.
London: Printed for Henry Brorae, at the Gun at the West-end-
of St. Paul's, 1681." It is a thin small quarto, of eleven
pages of text, the gist of which was as follows : —
" Of these who swayed most in the late troubles few words as
to this point may suffice. ... A Parliament being called, to address
many things, as it was thought, the people, with great courage, and
expectation to be eased of what discontented them, chose to their
behoof in Parliament such as they thought best affected to the
public good, and some indeed men of wisdom and integrity, the
rest (to be sure the greater part) whom wealth or ample possessions
or bold and active ambition, rather than merit, had commended
to the same place. But, when once the superficial zeal and popular
fumes that acted their new magistracy were cooled and spent in
them, straight every one betook himself (setting the Commonwealth
behind, his private ends before) to do as his own profit or ambition
led him. Then was justice delayed, and soon after denied ; spite
and favour determined all : hence faction ; thence treachery, both
at home and in the field ; everywhere wrong and oppression ;
foul and horrid deeds committed daily, or maintained in secret
"CHAEACTEE OF THE LONG PAELIAMBNT." 807
or in open. Some who had been called from shops and ware-
houses, without other merit, to sit in supreme councils and com-
mittees, as their breeding was, fell to huckster the Common-
wealth; others did thereafter as men could soothe and humour
them best Their votes and ordinances, which men looked
should have contained the repealing of bad laws and the im-
mediate constitution of better, resounded with nothing else but
new impositions, taxes, excises, yearly, monthly, weekly. Mot to
reckon the offices, gifts, and preferments bestowed and shared
among themselves, they in the meanwhile who were ever faithfulest
to this cause, and freely aided them in person or with their sub=-
stance when they durst not compel either, slighted and bereaved
after of their just debts by greedy sequestrations, were tossed up
and down after miserable attendance from one committee to another
with petitions in their hands. . . , And, if the State were in this
plight. Religion was not in much better. To reform which a
certain number of divines were called, neither chosen by any rule
or custom ecclesiastical, nor eminent for either piety or knowledge
above others left out, — only, as each member of Parliament in his
private fancy thought fit, so elected one by one. The most part
of them were such as had preached and cried down, with great
show of zeal, the avarice and pluralities of bishops and prelates
. . . ; yet these conscientious men, ere any part of the work done
for which they came together, and that on the public salary, wanted
not boldness, to the ignominy and scandal of their pastorlike pro-
fession, and especially of their boasted B^eformation, to seize into
their hands, or not unwillingly to accept, (besides one, sometimes
two or more, of the best livings) collegiate masterships in the Uni-
versities, rich' lectures in the city, setting sail to all winds that
might blow gain into their covetous bosoms. . . . Thus they who
of late were extolled as our greatest .deliverers, and had the people
wholly at their devotion, by so discharging their trust as we see,
did not only weaken and unfit themselves to he dispensers of what
liberty they pretended, but unfitted also the people, now grown
worse and more disordinate, to receive or digest any. liberty at all.
. . . But, on these things and this parallel having enough insisted,
I return to the story which gave us matter of this digression."
Appended to the eleven pages of text thus given to the
world in 1681 were two pages of advertisement "To the
Reader " ty the editor or publisher, as follows : —
" The Reader may ta;ke notice that this Character of Mr. Milton's
was a part of his Hist<)ry of Britain, and .by him designed to be
printed. But, out of tenderness to a party (whom neither this nor
much more lenity has had the luck to oblige), it was struck out for
some harshness, being only such a digression as the History itself
would not be discomposed by its omission ; which, I suppose, will
808 LIFE OF MILTON AND HISTORY OF HIS TIME.
be easily discerned by reading over the beginning of the Third
Book of the said- History, very near which pliace this Character
is to come in. It is reported (and from the foregoing Character
it seems probable) that Mr. Milton had lent most of his personal
estate upon the public faith ; which when he somewhat earnestly
and warmly pressed to have restored (observing how all in offices
had not only feathered their own nests, but had enriched many of
their relations and creatures, before the public debts were dis-
charged), after a long and chargeable attendance, met with very
sharp rebukes ; upon which at last, despairing of any success in
this affair, he was forced to return from them poor and friendless,
having spent all his money and wearied all his friends. And he
had not probably mended his worldly condition in those days but
by performing such service for them as afterwards he did; for
which scarce anything would appear too great."
The Character of the Long Parliament and Assemlly of
Divmes, so introduced to the public as Milton's seven years
after Milton's death, is now always inserted, on the faith of
this tract, in Milton's History of Britain, at the point indi-
cated, i.e. imttiediately after the first paragraph of the Third
Book, It forms eleven paragraphs of the text from that
point ; and the only caution against these eleven paragraphs
in modern editions of the History is that they are enclosed
within brackets, to denote that they are an insertion of
matter first made public in 1681 into the text of the original
edition as published in 1670. It may be a question, how-
ever, whether they ought to have been- adopted into the
History at all and ought not now to be turned out. They
are an attack upon the memory of the Long Parliament
and the Westminster Assembly ; and, though the part of the
attack that concerns the Westminster Assembly corresponds
closely enough, in parts of the wording, with what Milton
had written in his wrath, more than once, against the Presby-
terian Divines, or indeed against Divines generally, the part
about the Long Parliament seems positively renegade from
his previous testimonies of reverence for the persons and
acts of that body, and from all that we now remember as
historically Miltonic. • Can Milton have either dictated such
an insertion in 1670 into the previous manuscript of his
History, or allowed it then to- stand there for publication if
it was already written? Can we imagine such a semblance
" CHABACTEE OF THE LONG PARLIAMENT." 809
of approach to time-serving on his part in a prose book, at
the very moment when he was chaunting to himself the
great anti-Restoration song of his Samson Agonistes, with its
passages of regret and moralizing over the fates of so many
of his comrades, the flower of the Parliamentary and Re-
publican faithful?
It is not the mere irrelevancy of the diatribe to the context
in which it is imbedded that ought to make us sceptical.
True, there is a look of oddity in such a " digression," foisted
in at that point of the History where the ancient Britons are
left to anarchy after the departure of the Roman governors
and garrisons from the Island. But, as we saw at the time,
one of the very characteristics of the book, as published by
Milton in 1670, was that it seemed to delight in such
parallelisms and modern applicaitions. Farther, the general
Miltonism of the style of the new paragraphs cannot be
denied. What causes us to pause is rather the anti-Miltonism
of the sentiments conveyed in a style so generally Miltonic.
The doctrine that pervades the whole diatribe, for example,
the very " point " that starts Milton on his supposed " digres-
sion," is the natural unfitness of the British genius and
temper, as proved in all ages, for real liberty or any high
political undertaking; and no one can read the sarcastic
language in which this doctrine is asserted without remember-
ing on the instant that extraordinary passage in the Areo-
jpagitica of 1644 in which Milton had asserted the dead
opposite, declaring it, on the evidence of all British history,
to be God's established manner, when He had any great new
design in hand for the whole world, invariably to move it
first among His own Englishmen.
The statement of the editor of the recovered fragment in
1681 was that it had actually stood in the manuscript of
Milton's History of Britain in 1670, but had, "out of tender-
ness to a party," — i.e. to the Presbyterians and other old
Parliamentarians, — been "struck out for some harshness."
The statement must be taken in connexion with the inde-
pendent tradition which comes to us through Phillips and
Toland. Phillips, writing in 1694, says that the History, as
810 LIFE OF MILTON AND HISTORY OF HIS TIME.
published by his uncle in 1670, was complete as it had been
written, "some passages only excepted, which, being thought
" too sharp against the clergy, could not pass the hand of
" the liceneer, [and] were in the hands of the late Earl of
" Anglesey while he lived [i.e. till 1686]: where at present
" is uncertain." In the same page Phillips says, more ex-
plicitlyj that it was his uncle himself that presented the Earl,
who was his frequent visitor, " with a copy of the unlicensed
papers of his History" Toland, writing in 1698, somewhat
amplifies the tradition, and doubtless on good authority. Of ■
the History he says that "the licencers, those sworn officers
" to destroy learning, liberty, and good sense, expunged several
" passages of it wherein he exposed the superstition, pride,
" and cunning of the Popish monks in the Saxon times, but
" which were applied by the sagacious licencers to Charles the
" Seconds bishops." Now, most obviously, the Character of
the Long Parliament and Assembly of Divines, published in 1681,
'does not answer to either Phillips's or Toland's description
of the passages that were suppressed in 1670 ; nor is it such
a thing as any liceneer of that date would have been likely
to suppress. It is the very reverse. It is precisely such a
passage as the licencers in 1670 would have been glad to
keep in a book of Milton's and to send forth with his name.
No one can imagine Roger L'Estrang«, who seems to have
been the liceneer in question, expunging such a passage " out
of tenderness " to the old Parliamentarians and Presbyterians.
The difficulty, therefore, still remains. Two hypotheses
occur to me : — (1) Such a passage may have been written by
Milton just before the abolition of the Monarchy and the
institution of the Republic in 1648-9, when he was leading
a private life' in his house oflF High Holborn, and had
brought down the manuscript of his History to the end of
the fourth book. In the very sentences where he gives us
this information, already quoted at p. 78 of Vol. IV., he hints
that he might then have had reasons for personal complaint
against the ruling powers, not unlike those supposed for him
in the bookseller's advertisement appended to the Character
of the Long Parliament and Assembly; though, by lucky
"CHARA.CTEE OP THE LONG PABLIAMENT." 811
anticipation, lie had at the same time given the lie direct
to the present vulgar invention of 1681 by expressly de-
claring that he then bore his personal grievances in perfect
silence, never went about troubling people with suits and
petitions, never asked anything from anybody. Add this
to the larger fact that the two years or so before 1648-9
were precisely that period in the history of the Long Parlia-
ment with which Milton, like all the other forward spirits,
was most dissatisfied and disgusted on public grpunds, — the
period of renewed Presbyterian obstinacy, — and it will not
appear so very surprising if Milton did, in 1648, or a year
or two later, put on paper the disappointment of his C-rlier
hopes of the Parliament. In that case, the old date of the
writing has to be distinctly remembered, and the diatribe
has to be read as nothing more than Milton's animadversion
on the wretched state of things in England just befr^
Pride's Purge and the happy establishment of the RepuMe.
In that case also it must be part of the hypothesis that thjs
portion of his manuscript of the History of Britain had long
become obsolete in his regards in its existing form, and
that it was he himself, and not the licenser, who cancelled
it on the publication of the History in 1670, perhaps modify-
ing the preceding sentences so as to indicate that there was
a gap. (2) Should this hypothesis fail, we may revert to
the suspicion, already hinted at page 647, that the liberties
taken by the licenser with Milton's manuscript in 1670 did
not consist merely in the excision of passages, but included
also doctorings of some passages so as to give them a new
significance. May not Milton, while submitting to some of
the slighter interpolations or changes of wording, as well as
to the excisions, have rebelled against the more serious
doctorings ? May not the doctored passages which he refused
to accept, as well as the passages suppressed by the licenser,
have been among the curiosities given to the Earl of
Anglesey, and may not the Character of the Long Parliament
and Assernbly of Divines, as published in Brome's catch-
penny tract of 1681, have been one of them? One cannot
suppose, indeed, that the Earl, who was then still alive, had
812 LIFE OF MILTON AND HISTOKT OF HIS TIME.
anything to do with the affair. L'Estrange himself might
he suspected, were it not that the title-page and the ad-
vertisement betray the hand of some still coarser and less
informed hack. He commits the blunder of giving 1641,
instead of 1643, as the date of the Westminster Assembly.
There is no doubt whatever as to the authenticity of the
next of the posthumous Milton publications. It was "A Brief
History Of Moscovia and of other less known Countries lying
eastward of Russia as far as Cathay. Gathered from the
Writings of several I^e-witnesses. By John Milton. London,,
Prinfsd hy M. Flesher, for Bralazon Aylmer at the Three
Pigeons against the Boyal Exchange, 1682." The printer,
Miles Flesher, was the same who afterwards printed for
Tonson the great fourth or 1688 edition of Paradise Lost,
(billed the Somers Edition ; and Brabazon Aylmer is known
tc/ms already as not only Milton's last publisher in his life,
bat also in this very year 1682 the proprietor of the copy^
right in Paradise Lost by purchase from Simmons, though
about to transfer half of it to Tonson. It may have been this
interim proprietorship of Paradise Lost that reminded him of
a manuscript of Milton's that had been put into his hands by
Milton himself about the same time as those of the Epistola
Familiares and Prolusiones Oratorim, but bad remained un-
published. The following, at all events, is Aylmer's adver-
tisement, inserted between Milton's preface to the History of
Moscovia, which is signed " J. M./' and the text of the book : —
" This Book was writ by the authour's own hand, before he lost
his sight. And some time before his death dispos'd of it [sic] to be
printed. But it being small, the Bookseller try'd to have pro-
cured some other' suitable Piece of the same Authour's to have
joyn'd with it, or else it had been publish'd ere now."
The volume is a very neatly printed duodecimo or small octavo,
with five unnumbered pages of preface and 109 pages of
text. Aylmer's information that the original was in Milton's
own hand is interesting. One might else have referred
it to about the year 1657, when Russia came a good deal
into Oliver's calculations of foreign politics and one of
Milton's history of moscovia, etc. 813
Milton's state-letters for him was to the Czar. As it is, one
must refer the compilation to the early years of Milton's
Secretaryship, between 1649 and 1652, or possibly to his
days of private study and pedagogy. He seems to have had
a special fondness for geographical readings and compilations,
and he has dashed some of the most sounding geographical
names from this prose performance into his epic verse. He
had taken considerable pains with it, and has appended a li st
of his authorities.
What of Milton's almost life-long compilations towards
a Latin Dictionary ? They were, Aubrey tell us, among the
papers given by his widow to Edward Phillips ; and we have
seen Wood's statement that Phillips made large use of them
for his Enchiridion Lmguce Latince and his Speculum, Lingua
Latiim of 1684!. But that was not the last use of them.
Till 1693 the latest and most popular Latin Dictionary in
England was that by Dr. Adam Littleton; but in 1693 there
appeared " The Cambridge Dictionary " or " Lingua: Romanee
JHctionaniim, Luculentum Novum," described as "made by
several persons, whose names have been concealed from public
knowledge." The words are from the preface to the sub-
sequent and more famous Latin Dictionary of Robert Ains-
worth, the first edition of which appeared in 1736. Giving an
account of all the Latin Dictionaries of this country previous
to his own, Ainsworth, after mentioning the use made by the
Cambridge Editors of 1693 of preceding printed Dictionaries,
adds that " they likewise used a manuscript collection in
" three large folios, digested into an alphabetical order, made
" by Mr. John Milton out of all the best and purest Roman
" authors." As Ainsworth incorporated the Cambridge Dic-
tionary, and as all subsequent Latin Dictionaries have in-
corporated Ainsworth, something of Milton's Latinity must
be flowing latently still in every schoolbojr's veins.
The Revolution of 1688 had, of course, removed much of the
obloquy attached to the recollection of Milton's prose-writings.
The very fact of the conspicuous mention of them, together
with those of Knox and Buchanan, Owen, Baxter, and others,
in that famous Decree of the University of Oxford, of July 31,
814 LIFE Op MILTON AND HISTORY OF HIS TIME.
1683, by which the High Church party had sought to back
up the then tottering system of English Absolutism, had
again recommended them to general attention. The Decree
had enumerated certain " damnable doctrines " of anti-monar-
chical tendency to be found in various ancient and modern
books, and had ordered copies of the books to be publicly
burnt in Oxford by the hands of the University marshal ; and
in an academic poem on the occasion there had been these
lines of delight over the burning of Milton in particular : —
"In media videas flamma crepitants cremari
MiLTONUM, coelo terrisque inamabile nomen."
So much less inamabile had the name become before the
close of the century, so eflBciently had the events and con-
sequences of the Revolution concurred with the now fully
established celebrity of Milton's poetry in bringing his prose-
writings back into fashion, that one is not surprised at
having to note the publication of the first collective edition
of Milton's prose-works as an incident of the reign of King
William. It appeared in 1698, in two volumes folio, under
the superintendence of Toland, and with Toland's Life of
Milton prefixed; and that the publication was even then
deemed somewhat venturesome is proved by the fact that the
volumes, though really printed in London, purported to have
been printed at Amsterdam. This first edition of the prose-
works, the predecessor of Birch's editions of 1738 and 1753,
carries us into the eighteenth century.
In 1743 was published a very remarkable thin folio volume
of 180 pages, entitled " Original Letters and Papers of State,
addressed to Oliver Cromwell ; concerning the affairs of Great
Sriiainfrom the year 1649 to 1658. Vound among the Political
collections of Mr. John Milton. Now first published from, the
Originals. By John Nickolls, Jun., member of the Society of
Antiquaries, London." The volume consists of a large number of
the most private documents in Cromwell's correspondence and
relating to his affairs through the time indicated. There are
letters of secret military intelligence and political information
received by him during his campaigns in Ireland and Scotland,
some of them in cipher ; there are admiring and enthusiastic
MILTON AND THE CROMWELL PAPERS. 815
letters to him through that military part of his career from
Bradshaw, Harrison, St. John, Vane, and others of the chiefs
of the Commonwealth, varying in their style of address from
" Honest Noll " to " My Lord " or " My dear Lord " ; there
are familiar family letters, including one from Cromwell's
wife to him, the only letter of hers known to have survived ;
and about half of the volume is filled with those letters
and addresses to Cromwell, through his Protectorate, from
individuals, corporations, churches, counties, and councils of
ojEeers, which he valued so much as to refer to them in his
speeches as " witnesses " to his Government. That Milton
should have been in possession of such a quantity of intimate
Cromwellian papers, the very papers that Cromwell himself
must have kept in a locked cabinet, is somewhat surprising,
and the rather when we consider that more than half of them
were written after Milton had become blind, and that they were
not such as could have been required by him for the purposes
of his Secretaryship. Yet Milton had certainly possessed and
treasured them. " From him they came into the possession of
" Thomas EUwood," says the editor in his preface ; who then
recapitulates the story of Ellwood^s connexion with Milton as
told in Ell wood's History of his own Life, and continues,
" That history aforesaid of Thomas EUwood's life, written by
" himself to the year 1683, was published in octavo 1714,
" a year after his death, with a supplement concerning his
" writings and the remainder of his life by J. W. ; who was
"Joseph Wyeth, citizen and merchant of London, and for
" several years intimate with him ; into whose hands, among
" the other papers of the said EUwood, these letters fell ; and
" through the hands of /. WyetKs widow they came into the
« possession of the present editor." The pedigree is perfect,
and the only question is how Milton became possessed of the
papers. The likelihood, almost the certainty, is that he had
contemplated a Life of Cromwell or some History of Crom-
well's Time, and that the papers had been entrusted to him
confidentially for that purpose. As the last of them is an
address to Richard Cromwell after his accession to the Protec-
torate, the conjecture may be that they were entrusted to
816 LIFE OF MILTON AND HISTOBY OF HIS TIME.
Milton about that time. They had never been reclaimed;
and Ellwood may have appeared to Milton a more trust-
worthy custodian for papers of that class after his own death
than either Phillips or Skinner.
Phillips was dead. Skinner was dead, Sir Joseph Williamson
and all that generation were dead, and there had been the
lapse of those four eventful generations more which made the
British world of the Four Georges, when, one day in the
year 1823, Mr. Robert Lemon, Deputy Keeper of the State
Papers, had occasion to search one of the presses of the Old
State Paper OflBce, then still in the Middle Treasury Gallery,
Whitehall. Among other things there that had not seen the
light for many a day, he came upon the identical parcel, with
the words " To Mr. Skinner, mercM." on its wrapper, which
had been deposited there by Sir Joseph Williamson or his
Secretary in 1677, and which contained the long-lost Skinner
Transcript of Milton's Latin State Letters and the manu-
script of his Latin Treatise of Christian Doctrine. The Latin
State Letters having already been before the world since
1676, there seemed no particular need for publishing the
recovered Skinner transcript of them ; and that elegant little
manuscript still remains in the State Pap^,Dffice, now part
of the hew Record Office between Fetter ^^le and Chancery
Lane. The manuscript of the Treatise o||miristian Doctrine
is also, of course, there now ; but it was jiignght that such a
Treatise, a totally new revelation of jtlffcon, ought not to
remain in manuscript. Accordingly,' by command of George
IV., the Rev. Charles Richard Sumner, M.A., then Keeper of
the King's Library, afterwards Bishop of Winchester, under-
took to edit it.. His edition of the original Latin appeared
m 1835, in the form of a handsome quarto volume from the
Cambridge University Press, with the title Joannis Miltoni
Angli Be Doctrina Christiana Libri Duo Posthumij and in the
same year appeared his English Translation of the work, with
the title A Posthumous Treatise on The Christian Doctrine,
compiled from the Holy Scriptures alone, in two Books : By John
Milton.
Milton's treatise of christian doctrine. 817
MILTOIf'S TREATISE 0¥ CHRISTIAN' DOCTRINE.
The Treatise on Christian Doctrine is a very important and
very curious book. Had it been published while Milton was
alive, or shortly after his death, it would certainly have
become notorious, and would probably have exerted very
considerable influence on the course of English theological
thought through the last two centuries, as well as on the
traditional reputation of Milton himself. As it is, though it
has been fifty years before the world, it seems to have found
few real readers. Our interest in it here is purely biographical ;
and in that respect, at all events, it is not to be over-
looked or dismissed carelessly. Nat only does it throw light
upon Paradise Lost, not only does it form an indispensable
commentary to some obscure parts of that poem by presenting
in explicit and categorical prose what is there imaginatively
assumed and even veiled ; but it tells us a good deal about
Milton and his opinions besides, peculiarly and even oddly
characteristicj that we should not have known otherwise, or
should have known but vaguely.
Milton's fundamental idea in the treatise is that, though
the belief in a God is impressed on all men by the wonders
of the universe and by the phenomenon of conscience, and
though every sane man must be naturally a theist, yet no
one can have right thoughts of God by natural reason alone,
and the condition of mankind as respects matters supernatural
would have been that of almost complete agnosticism but for
the divine revelation contained in the Christian Scriptures.
The divine origin and inspiration of these Scriptures, defined
as comprising only and precisely those books of the Old and
•New Testaments which Protestants have accepted as canonical^
is Milton's assumption throughout. His assumption we say ;
for the most extraordinary thing about the treatise, the thing
that must strike every modern critic of it most strongly, is
that no proof whatever is attempted or thought necessary on
that subject of the divine inspiration and authority of the
Bible which might seem to underlie all the rest. There is no
(discussion of the credibility of a direct or miraculous revela^
VOL. VI. 3 G
818 LIJ*E 01* MILTON AND HIST^OBT OP HIS TIME,
tion from God to the human race at any place or in afiiy time,
or of the special claims of the Hebrew books of the Old
Testament and the Greek books of the New to be regarded
as the unique revelation of the kind hitherto in the history
of the human race, or of the meaning of inspiration, its
modes, or the variety of its degrees; and this is the more
remiarkable because the dates and authorship of some of the
canonical books are admitted to be uncertain, and discrepancies
among them in various particulars and corruptions and falsi-
fications of the teit are also confessed. It is as if Milton's
own regard for the Bible was so settled and profound, as if
its divine and radical distinctness from all the other books of
the world was so much of an axiom with himself, that he
had no patience for argutUent on the subject, little beUef that
argunient could be of use, and would only rest in the cer-
tainty that, wherever the Bible penetrated, it would carry
its own fire and prove itself. Partly, however, the omission
of an argument which seems now so vital may have been
owing to the fact that his treatise was not a discourse on the
Christian evidences addressed to unbelievers, but a compendium
of Christian doctrine addressed to believers, not an examina-
tion of the Vouchers of the Bible so much as an exposition
of its contents. On that understanding he has only to ask
the assent of his readers to one or two propositions as to the
mode of dealing with the Scriptures.
One is that the plain sense of Scripture is always to be
taken boldly, without reserve and without sophistication. As
we should have been all agnostics in things supernaturd
without the Bible, so let us not shrink from anything the
Bible plainly tells us because it may seem strange to our
reason. For example, in such a high and abstruse matter as
the nature of God, while we may know that God as he really
is in himself is incomprehensible and unimaginable, by us,
yet " our safest way is to form in our minds sucli a conception
"of God as shall correspond with his own delineation and
" representation of himself in the sacred writings." If it is
there said on any occasion that God " repented," let us believe
that he did repent; if it is said that he "grieved," let us
Milton's treatise of christian doctrine. 819
believe that he did grieve ; if it is said that he " feared,"
let us believe that he did fear ; if it is said that he " rested
and was refreshed," let us believe that it was so ; if anything
even of the outward corporeal form of man is attributed in
any place to God, let us not avoid the distinct conception so
suggested. They may or may not be figurative expressions :
that is no business of ours ; they are at all events the ex-
pressions by which God himself has chosen to intimate to us
how he would have himself conceived, and it is not for us to
refuse them or turn them into mist. The cautions of theo-
logians against what they call anthropomorphism or an-
thropopathy in our notions of Deity have been excessive, and
may have done harm. God, we may be sure, has taken care
of his own dignity in his representations of himself in the
Scriptures ; and to avoid these representations, or tamper with
them, or attenuate them, or do anything else than accept
them plainly and thankfully, is to frustrate the very intention
with which the Scriptures were given. On this point Milton
solicits the agreement of his readers at the outset. Another
point, stipulated generally at the outset, but insisted on more
particularly in the course of the treatise, is the right of in-
dividual interpretation of the Scriptures. No one can safely
depute the formation of his Christian creed from! the Scrip-
tures to any other person, or to any body of persons, whether
called The Church or by any other name. Diligent perusal
of the Scriptures, with collection out of them of the exact
doctrines which they contain, is the duty of every professing
Christian. In all essential matters the Scriptures are plain
to the simplest understanding; and, though there will be
differences of interpretation among the most honest students
of the Bible, the fact that those who so differ all equally
found on the Bible and appeal to the Bible is to be taken
as an assurance that, as the differences cannot be vital,
so they are to be tolerated and respected by Christians
among themselves. Hardly have we become accustomed,
however, to Milton's resoluteness in his fundamental prin-
ciple that the Scripture alone is the rule and canon of
religious faith when we are startled by the recognition of
3G3
820 LIFE OF MILTON AND HISTORY OF HIS TIME.
another principle, which might seem incompatible with the
supreme authority assigned to the written Bible. " Under
" the Gospel," he says in one place, " we possesSj as it were,
" a twofold Scripture : one external, which is the written
" word, and the other internal, which is the Holy Spirit,
" written in the hearts of believers, according to the promise
" of God; " after which he adds, " Hence, although the
■'external ground which we possess for our belief at the
" present day in the written word is highly important, and,
" in most instances at least, prior in point of reception, yet
"that which is internal and the peculiar possession of each
"believer is far superior to all, namely the Spirit itself."
Again, after dwelling on the fact that the New Testament
has not come down to us pure and perfect, but with cor-
ruptions, falsifications, and mutilations, he remarks, "It is
" difficult to conjecture the purpose of Providence in com-
" mitting the writings of the New Testament to such un-
" certain and variable guardianship, unless it were to teach us
" by this very circumstance that the Spirit which is given to
*' us is a more certain guide than Scripture ; whom therefore
" it is our duty to follow." But, though thus apparently at
one with the Quakers and some other sects in the theory of
a mystic inner revelation over and above the Bible, Milton
hardly gives the same practical prominence to the doctrine
of the inner light that it receives in the system of the
Quakers. Whether because he regards the inner spiritual
apprehensions of the believer as things incalculable in the
general account, or because he conceives that they come
always or chiefly in the act of commerce with the written
Scriptures and are inscrutably imbedded in that act, it is to
this commerce with the written Scriptures that he assigns
the practical supremacy throughout his treatise.
His treatise, he explains, had been prepared strictly by
this method in his own ease. Having in early life resolved
not to take his religion on trust, but to derive it directly
" from divine revelation alone," he had begun an assiduous
and systematic study of the Old and New Testaments in the
original languages, extracting passages and arranging them
miltoh's treatise of cheistias doctbixe. 821
under heads; and, though he had agisted himself at first by
a few of the shorter systems of theology written by approv^
Protestant divines, and had afterwards resorted to more
copious theological works, the result had been an increasing
dissatis&etion with all previous attempts of that kind, and
a conviction that^ if he would have a system of divinity
genuinely Biblical, free from shifts and evasions, he must
persevere in compiling his own. It was by such perseverance
for years that the present treatise had grown on his hands ;
and, as he had found it a treasure to himself, he gives it to
the world in the hope that it may be usefbl to others. It
is addressed to the learned and to those of manly understand*
ing. One particular in which it will be found to differ from
previous works of the kind is that it does not merely cite
texts or give references to them in the margin, but quotes
them in full in the pages themselves, quotes them in abund-
ance and what may seem over-abundance, never advancing
any proposition or indulging in any exposition except in
connexion with a complete conspectus of all the texts of
Scripture bearing on the point jpro or con. He does not
expect immediate or universal agreement with him on all
points, and indeed advises his readers to exercise their own
judgments freely; but he requests a candid hearing, with
abstinence from bad temper or outcry of heresy where any-
thing may seem new or unusual. He can assure them that
he had not read the works of some so-called heretics with
whose opinions he may be found to be here and there in
unison till he had himself worked out those opinions in-
dependently from Scripture. All this, with more to the
like effect, is contained in the preliminary address which
introduces the treatise; and the highly ceremonious form
of that preliminary address proves Milton's belief that the
treatise would be found unusually important. It is no
ordinary preface by an author to his readers, but a kind of
ApostoUc Epistle or Dedication to all Christendom, headed
with this benediction : — " John Miltos, Engushmah, to all
THE ChUKCHES of ChKIST, AND AISO TO ALL EVEETWHEKE OK
Eaeth pbofessisg THE Chkistiah Faith, Peace and Know-
822 LIFE OF MILTON AND HISTOKY OF HIS TIME.
LEDGE OF THE TRUTH, AND EtEKNAL SaLVATION IN GoD THE
Father and in our Lord Jesus Christ." Milton clearly
expected that his treatise would become notorious.
The expectation cannot have been founded on anjrthiug
extraordinary or stimulating in the style of the treatise. It
is written throughout in the calmest and most prosaic mood,
with a rigid suppression of the imaginative, not a single out-
break of rage or real anger, and hardly a flower or nettle of the
peculiar Miltonic rhetoric of the prose pamphlets. Consisting,
to so large an extent, of mere collections of texts from
Scripture, all duly cited, it is not even continuously fluent
as any ordinary book is, but breaks itself, as it were, into a
maze of expository rivulets trickling among banks of Biblical
quotations. It is these expositions, winding among the banks
of texts, and professing wholly to be washings from them,
that contain the substance of the treatise. That is Miltonic
enough. Though professing only to be Milton's Christian
theology as derived from the Bible, it involves at the same time
his physics, his metaphysics, his ethics, the entire system of
his speculative notions and beliefs. The Miltonic philosophy,
presented to us in the other writings only in dispersed poetic
gleams or in diffused living glow and fervour, is here ex-
hibited coolly and connectedly, as we have already said, in its
driest bones of abstract thesis and proposition. This is done
in two Books or divisions, the first theoretical, or treating
of Christian Knowledge, the second practical, or treating of
Christian Duty.
The theoretical part begins with a disquisition on the
Nature and Attributes of God. After Milton's characteristio
advice to his readers to receive frankly whatever Scripture
teaches on this subject, and not to be alarmed by the bug-
bears of anthropomorphism and anthropopathy, he proceeds to
define or describe God, the Jehovah or Jah or Ehie of the
Hebrews, as an infinite, eternal, immutable, incorruptible,
omnipresent, omnipotent, single, living, omniscient, all-holy,
most gracious, true, just, incomprehensible, self- subsisting
Spirit. There is nothing so far in the description that is not
Milton's treatise of christian doctrine. 823
at least generally orthodox. Nor iu the next two chapters,
treating of what is called " the internal efEciency " of God,
or the Divine Decrees in general and Predestination in par-
ticular, is there anything specially heterodox, unless a refusal
of strict Calvinistic doctrine on those subjects, and an ac-
cordance rather with the Arminian doctrine, is to be regarded
as heterodoxy. Milton is no necessitarian, but holds that,
though God foreknew and foreknows all events, he "has not
decreed them all absolutely," but has left all his reasonable
creatures, whether angels or men, perfectly free agents, sub-
ject only to " contingent decrees," or decrees that if they
act thus or thus then such or such will be the consequence.
" I allow," he says, " that future events which God has fore-
" seen will happen certainly, but not of necessity. They will
"happen certainly, because the divine prescience cannot be
" deceived ; but they will not happen necessarily, because pre-
" science can have no influence on the object foreknown, in-
" asmuch as it is only an intransitive ajction." So, he main-
tains, "there is no particular predestination or election, but
only general : " i. e, John or Peter is not predestined to be
saved as John or Peter, but believers are predestined to be
saved, and John and Peter will be saved if they are in the
class of believers. So, on the other hand, "there can be no
reprobation of individuals from all eternity." The rejection
of the fundamental doctrine of Calvinism thus distinctly
declared at the outset of the treatise had already been in-
timated in various passages of paradise Lost,
It is, however, when we come to the discussion of the
" external efficiency" of God, or the execution of His decrees,
that Milton's heterodoxy first, becopies flagrant. The first
and most importjant of God's efiected decrees, as revealed
in Scripture, was, he says, the generation of the Son ; and
he goes on to propound in a- long chapter views about the
nature of Christ which are expressly and emphatically those
of high Arianism. The Son of God, he concludes from an
examination of all the relevant Scripture texts, did not exist
from all eternity, is not coeval, or co-essential, or co-equal
with the Father, but cawe into existence by the will of the
824 LIFE OF MILTON AND HISTORY OF HIS TIME".
Father, to be the next teing^ in the universe to Himself, the
first-born and best-beloved, the Logos or Word through whom
all creation should take its beginnings. But, though thus in-
ferior to the supreme Godhead, the Son is, in a certain grand
sense, divine. We are to believe that "God imparted to the
" Son as much as He pleased of the divine natute, nay, of the
" divine substance itself, care being taken not to confound the
" substance with the whole essence." The Anti-Trinitarianism
apparent in this representation of Christ pervades also that
of the third person of the Trinity in the orthodox system.
The doctrine of Scripture respecting the nature of the Holy
Spirit, says Milton, is altogether very shadowy and uncertain ;
but, on the whole, the Holy Spirit may be regarded as a
person, and it may be collected that, " inasmuch as he is a
" minister of God, and therefore a creature, he was created
" and produced of the substance of God, not by natural neees-
" sity, but by the free-will of the agent, probably before the
" foundations of the world were laid, but later than the Son,
" and far inferior to Him." It is even hinted as Milton's
belief that the Holy Spirit is of more limited relations in the
total purposes and operations of Deity than the Son, less
all-filling or omnipresent, perhaps a being whose functions
do not extend beyond that fabric of things which we know
as our heavens and earth.
To this subject of the Creation of the Universe Milton passes,
as being " the second species " of God's external efficiency or
known operations after the generation of the Son. What
Deity may have been doing through all eternity is a mystery,
though it is "not imaginable" that He should have been
wholly occupied from all eternity in forethinking the single
creation of the six days and the brief history of mankind.
In other words, there may have been universes and universes
that are out of our ken. All created existence over and above
our visible mundane universe is summed up for us by Scripr
ture, however, in the conception of a single other universe,
higher and invisible, consisting of the Heaven of Heavens,
the throne and habitation of God, and the realm of the
heavenly powers or angels. It is, on all grounds, most probable
Milton's treatise of christian doctrine. 825
that this Heaven of Heavens, if not eternal, was formed long
before the beginnings of our world, and also that the creation
of the Angels; was long antecedent to that of Man. Even the
apostasy of a portion of the Angels and their expulsion from
Heaven were probably antecedent. Already, before this point,
Milton has introduced the idea of Matter, in the supposed
form of a prime or original matter which may have been used
even in the formation of the Heaven of Heavens, and in that
of the Hell into which the fallen angels were driven. In speak-
ing of this original matter he attaches much importance to the
notion that matter cannot have been created out of nothing, as
most of the moderns had maintained, but must be regarded as
a phenomenon or efflux of God Himself, a something produced
out of his own substance. One consequence of this view is
that, the material used in creation being thus not only from
God but actually of the substance of God, " no created thing
can be finally annihilated." Another is that there is serious
error in the common antithesis which opposes matter so
persistently to spirit^ as if the former were something
intrinsically brute, bad, and despicable, and goodness or di-
vinity resided only in the latter. " The original matter of
" which we speak is not to be looked upon as an evil or trivial
" thing, but as intrinsically good, and the chief productive
" stock of every subsequent good. It was a substance, and
" derivable from no other source than the fountain of every
" substance, though at first confused and formless, being after-
" wards adorned and digested into order by the hand of God."
This view of Matter as originally nothing else than an efflux
from the very substance of Deity places Milton, it can hardly
be doubted, in the company of the Pantheists. There is no
evidence, inde^, of any approach on his part to such thorough
and systematized Pantheism as that of his junior contem-
porary, Spinoza ; but the inference from his language is that
his mode of imagining Nature had come to be that of a
modified or arrested Pantheism, stopping short of Spinoza's
mainly by a strong prior reservation of that freedom of will
for all rational intelligences which Spinoza denied. The
prime matter of all finite exi&tence,^ Milton seems to have
826 LIFE OF MILTON A.ND HISTORY OF HIS TIME.
held, was an emanation or production from the substance of
God ; but God had voluntarily loosened his hold, as it were,
on those living' portions or centres of finite existence which
he had endowed with free will, so that their independent
actions might originate consequences not morally referable
to Himself. This seems also the doctrine hinted in Raphael's
words to Adam, Paradise Lost, V. 469— 471 : —
"0 Adam, one Almighty is, from whom
All things proceed, and up to him return,
If not depraved from good."
Milton, it will have been seen, propounds in his treatise for
actual belief a conception of the invisible universe of pre-human
existence corresponding most closely with that adopted for his
Paradise Lost. There was the one eternal, infinite, and incom-
prehensible God J there was the divinely-generated Son, inferior
to the Father, but His delegate and representative for all the
worlds ; there was the Heaven of Heavens, framed mysteriously
for the more immediate dwelling of Paternal Deity and of the
Divine Son ; there were the hosts of angelic spirits, ranged
round the throne in this Heaven of Heavens or dispersed innu-
merably through its boundless depths ; there was already the
Hell that had been formed for the reception of the apostate
angels and was now populous with them ; and there was also
Chaos, or that aggregate of prime matter which remained
unabsorbed into either the everlasting Heaven of Heavens
or the more recently formed Hell. Only in one point does
the treatise seem to convey an impression different from that
conveyed in the poem. In the treatise Christ, the Logos,
is distinctly antecedent to the angelic world, and is repre-
sented indeed as the energy by which that world had come
into existence, while in the poem we read, in one passage
(V. 600-605), of the presentation of Christ to the assembled
angels as a kind of epoch or novelty in the history of the
Empyrean, announced to the angels by Paternal Deity thus :—
" TMs day I have begot whom I declare
My only Son, and on this holy hill
Him have anointed."
The impression, however, is corrected for us in another passage
Milton's treatise of ohbistian doctrine. 827
(III. 383-391), where the angelic hosts themselves adopt the
doctrine of the treatise in their song-, saluting Christ as " of
all creation first," the unclouded image of the Almighty
Father, and expressly adding : —
"He Heaven of Heavens, and all the powers therein,
By thee created."
In the account given in the treatise of the Creation of the
Visible or Mundane Universe, and of Man at the centre of it,
there is no deviation from the orthodox view of the work
of the six days, except in so far as a deviation may be already
involved in the notion that the creation was not out of
nothing, but out of pre-existing chaotic matter, and except
in so far as there may he a peculiarity in Milton's doctrine
as to the body and soul of the human being. As he has
protested against too strong a distinction between mStter and
spirit, so he does not like the common distinction between
body and soul. " Man is a living being, intrinsicfiUy and
"properly one and individual, not compound or sl^parable,
" not, according to the common opinion, made up and framed
" of two distinct and different natures, as of soul and body,"
but so that "the whole man is soul and the soul jm,a, —
" that is to say, a body or substance, individual, animated,
" sensitive and rational." Again, " That the spirit of man
" should be separate from the body, so as to have a perfect
" and intelligent existence independently of it, is nowhere
" said in Scripture, and the doctrine is evidently at variance
" both with nature and reason." Milton here, therefore, re-
pudiates that doctrine of the immateriality of the soul which
Descartes had so vigorously maintained, and which had
become generally the doctrine of orthodox theology, and
reverts to the older notion of a certain corporeity of the
soul, a certain rooted inherence of mind and thought some-
how in the network of the bodily organism. The dust-
formed man of the sixth day of creation, Milton held, was
not a shaped material clod or mechanism with an independent
soul put into it from without itself, but was actually the
whole man, body and soul together, or rather soul because
and by virtue of that divinely formed and organised body.
838 LIFE OP MILTON AND HISTORY OP HIS TIME.
That " breath of life " which is said in Genesis to have been
breathed by God into the dust-formed man is explained as
Hot having been the soul at all, but a certain something
else, in the nature of a mere initial quickening or impulse.
It v\rill have been noted even that, in defining man as " a
body or substance, individual, animated, sensitive, rational,"
Milton uses words almost identical with those of Hobbes in
the same connexion (see ante, p. 283) ; and, though the dif-
ference between Milton's general system of thought and that
of Hobbes is enormous, inasmuch as Milton starts avowedly
from pure Theistic Spiritualism, and treats matter as secondary
or derivative, yet there is so far an agreement with Hobbes
that Milton's cosmologieal conception, his conception of the
processes of the visible world, those of mind inelucied, is un-
doubtedly materialistic. All cosmical life, he holds, is but a
diversified organization of that common matter which was
originalw an efflux or production out of the substance of God.
So in tHti very subtle continuation of the last passage we have
quoted/ from Paradise Lost. The whole world of God, animate
and inanimate, angels and men as well as the brute creatures,
consists, Raphael there informs Adam, of —
"One first matter all,
Endued with various forms, various degrees
Of substance, and, in things that live, of life.
But more refined, more spiritous and pure,
< As nearer to Him placed, or nearer tending,
Each in their several active spheres assigned.
Till body up to spirit work";
and the possibility of such a gradual evolution of the common
matter of all things from lower to higher is farther in-
timated by the conjecture that the bodies of men, though
fed from corporal nutriments,
"May at last turn all to spirit,
Improved by tract of time, and wing'd ascend
Ethereal, as we."
Without venturing on this evolution hypothesis in his
treatise, Milton is content with impressing there as strongly
as he can his theory of the evident materiality of the human
Milton's teeatise op chkistian doctrine, 829
soul at present. Important consequences are to follow from it ;
but meanwhile he insists chiefly on one. It is that soul and
body are propagated together from fathers to children by
natural descent, and that there is no foundation for the
opinion that G-od creates a new soul immediately and super-
naturally for every person that comes into the world. That
opinion, he says, must be rejected as degrading to God when
we think what horrible sorts of souls there are and how im-
perfect are even the best of them. Man is a body-and-soul,
or a soul-body, and transmits himself as such.
From Creation Milton passes on to " the remaining species
of God's external efficiency," viz. his Providence, or Govern-
ment of the whole Creation. After a general chapter on the
subject, recognising a certain fixed or immutable order of
nature arising from God's absolute decrees, but leaving
abundant room for the free will of all rational creatures
in matters decreed only contingently, and room also for
miracles or extraordinary providences, he discusses the special
government of the Angels. Here he is quite at one with
himself in Paradise Lost. He believes not only in the exist-
ence of Angels, and their distribution into good and bad,
but also in the organization of both varieties into ranks and
degrees, with archangels and princes among them, separate
provinces and ministries, and permitted powers of transit
from their native habitations, whether in the Empyrean or
in Hell, into and through the Mundane Universe. Thus we
arrive at a chapter entitled " Of the special Government of
Man before the Fall, including the institutions of the Sabbath
and of Marriage." Acknowledging that God hallowed the
seventh day to Himself and consecrated it to rest in re-
membrance of the consummation of His work, and referring
for proof to Gen. ii. 2, 3, and Exod. xxxi. 17, he maintaiuis
that there is no evidence whatever that the Sabbath was a
Paradisaic institution, or known to Adam, or to the Israelites
before the delivery of the law on Mount Sinai, and thinks
it most probable that Moses, " who seems, to have written
the book of Genesis much later than the promulgation of
the Law," took the words out of the Fourth Commandment
830 LIFE OP MILTON AND IIISTOBY OF HlS TIME.
relating to God's rest on the seventh day and inserted them in
what appeared suitable places, for the purpose of additionally
fortifying the commandment then newly given. The institu-
tion of Marriage is discussed more at large, and in a manner
more shocking to common opinion. Not only is the Miltonic
Doctrine of Divorce fully re-usserted and re-argued from Scrip-
ture, with a reference to one of Milton's previous writings
on the subject ; but there is a grave and elaborate argument
for the lawfulness of Polygamy. As a plurality of wives
was allowed to the Hebrew patriarchs and saints, so Miltoa
sees no reason for concluding that the liberty is abrogated
under the Gospel, or should now be considered dishonom'-
able or shameful. This defence of Polygamy is one of the
novelties of the Treatise. There is a slight hint in the
direction in one passage in the History of Britain, and it
may have been known to Milton's contemporaries that he
entertained the Polygamy heresy as well as the Divorce
heresy ; but only in the Treatise is the matter clearly divulged.
Of course, the polygamy contemplated by Milton is for men
only. While arguing for the man's right to a plurality of
wives, he does not even glance at the possibility of a counter-
part claim on behalf of women for a plurality of husbands.
The necessary subjection of woman to man, indeed, is explicitly
re-affirmed in the Treatise, and is a permanent Miltonism.
The Fall of Man, Sin, and the consequences of Sin in death
and all the other evils that have ruined the once fair world,
are the topics leading Milton naturally to that part of his
exposition of God's special Providence for the human race
which treats of the Christian scheme of Redemption and
Renovation. It occupies a series of closely arranged chapters,
the nature of which may be gathered from the following main
propositions : —
" Eedemption is that act whereby Christ, being sent in the ful-
ness of time, redeemed all believers at the price of his own blood,
by his voluntary act, conformably to the eternal counsel and grace
of God the Father."
" The Humiliation of Christ is that state in which, under the
character of God-Man, he voluntarily submitted himself to the
MTLTOS'S TBEATISi: OP CHEISTIAX DOCTEINE. 831
dmne jtistice, as well in life as in death, for the purpose of
undergoing all things requisite to accomplish our redemption."
" The Exaltation of Christ is that by which, having triumphed
over death, and laid aside the form of a servant, he was exalted
by God the Father to a state of immortality and the highest glory,
partly by his own merits, partly by the gift of the Father, for the
benefit of mankind; wherefore he rose again from the dead,
ascended into Heaven, and sitteth on the right hand of God."
" B^ieneration is that change operated by the Word and Spirit
whereby, the old man being destroyed, the inward man is r^ene-
rated by God after his own image in all the faculties of his mind,
insomuch that he becomes as it were a new creature, and the whole
man is sanctified both in body and soul for the service of God and
the performance of gowl works."
" Justification is the gratuitous purpose of God whereby those
who are regenerated and ingrafted in Christ are absolved from sin
and death through his most perfect satisfaction, and accounted just
in the sight of God, not by the works of the law, but through
feith."
" Adoption is that act whereby God adopts as his children those
who are justified through faith."
" Imperfect glorification is that state wherein, being justified and
adopted by Gtod the Father, we are fiUed with a consciousness of
present grace and excellency, as well as with an expectation of
future glory, insomuch that om- blessedness is in a manner already
begun."
"Assurance of Salvation is a certain degree or gradation of Faith,
whereby a man has a firm persuasion and conviction, founded on
the testimony of the Spirit, that, if he believe and continue in faith
and love, having been justified and adopted, and partly glorified by
union and fellowship with Christ and the Father, he will at length
most certainly attain to everlasting life and the consummation of
glory."
These propositions, and the entire texture of the chapters
which contain them, are sufficiently in accord with the most
evangelical Christian orthodoxy, save in so far as the form of
statement here and there may betray a tinge of Milton's Ar-
minianism or of his Atianism. At all events, Bishop Sumner,
833 LIFE OF MILTON AND HISTORY OF HIS TIME.
the editor and translator "of the Treatise, "rejoices in being
able to state that the doctrine of the satisfaction of Christ is
so scripturally and unambiguously enforced as to leave, on that
point, nothing to be desired." The Bishop may have found
some compensation for Milton's Arianism in the resoluteness
with whichj in this part of his treatise, he rejects that lower
Unitarian or Socinian view of the person of Christ which
would deny his divinity in any real sense. In opposition to
" those who contend for the merely human nature of Christ,"
he maintains the doctrine of the union of the two natures
in Christ, holding that no name short of The • Antkropos or
God-Man adequately describes the Christ who walked and
suffered on our earth, inasmuch as that very mystery of
mysteries which we are told to believe, though we cannot
explain it, is that somehow the Divine Logos or Filial Divinity
which pre-existed all created things, and stood alone with
God the Father ere angels or men were in the universe,
became incarnate at a particular point of historical time in
the man Jesus, the son of Mary.
But, while this acknowledgment of the mystery of the In-
carnation may be a compensation with orthodox theologians for
much that has preceded in the Treatise, there runs through all
Milton's account of Christ's ministry and its effects a surprise
of another kind, which the commentators hitherto have shrunk
from bringing out. Milton himself introduces it cautiously.
It grows out of his doctrine of the radical unity of the soul
and body in man, their necessary inseparability. Applying
this doctrine to the consideration of Death as brought into
the world by the first sin, and as part of the decreed punish-
ment for sin, he has to ask what Death really is. The
common notion, which defines it as the separation of soul
and body, is of course inadmissible in his theory. " Here
"then," he says, "arises an important question, which,
"because of the prejudice of divines in behalf of their pre-
" conceived opinions, has usually been dismissed without
" examination, instead of being treated with the attention it
" deserves. Is it the whole man, or the body alone, that is
"deprived of vitality? As this is a subject which maybe
Milton's treatise of christian DOCTRiNsr" 833
"discussed without endangering our faith or devotion, I
" shall declare freely what seems to me the true doctrine,
" as collected from numberless passages of Scripture." The
result is uncommon. Whereas the orthodox Protestant notion
is that at the death ^of every human being the soul takes
flight at once to Heaven or to Hell, leaving the body in the
grave till the Resurrection, Milton's conclusion is that, at
the last gasp of breath, the whole man dies, soul and body
together, and that not till the Resurrection, when the body
is revived, does the soul live again, does the man or woman
live again in any sense or way, whether for happiness or
misery. This, if I mistake not, is the heresy of the Soul'-
Sleepers or Mortalists, of whom we had to take account among
the English sects of 1644 (Vol. III. 156-157), when there
was no sign that Milton was one of them or would ever be
one of them. In his present treatise, though he tries not to
obtrude his view too violently, he leaves no doubt what it is.
Are the souls of the millions on millions of human beings
who have died since Adam, are these souls already either with
God and the Angels in Heaven or down in the diabolic world,
waiting to be rejoined to their bodies on the Resurrection
Day? They are not, says Milton; but souls and bodies
together, he says, are dead alike, sleeping alike, defunct alike,
till that day come. There they lie, is Milton's vision of the
dead of the world before his own time — there they lie, all
really dead, all feelingless, all silent, the millions and millions
of them, thick and sere as the autumnal leaves in Vallom-
brosa, till the last trump shall stir their multitudes. When
he himself lay down to die, what he felt in Jiis pillowed blind-
ness was that he too was about to become one of the sleepers,
wholly at rest, wholly extinct, hearing nothing, knowing
nothing, till the great reawakening. What matter for regret
or disappointment, he virtually asks, is there in this view of
the Scripture doctrine of immortality? If those who fell
asleep in the temples of the heroes were fabled to have no
sense, when they awoke, after however long an interval, that
they had slept more than an instant, how much more would
intervening time be annihilated for those who sleep in Jesus ?
VOL. VI. 3 ^
834 LIFE OF MILTON AND HISTOEY OF HIS TIME.
They die ; they awake to be with. Christ : to them, though
there may have been hundreds or thousands of years of a
noisy world meanwhile, will not the dying and the awakening
seem to be in one and the same moment ? Would there be
any degradation of Christianity, he virtually asks, in such, an
interpretation of tbe effects of Christ's mission and ministry
on earth ? What greater boon could there be to a world of
fallen and sinfid. humanity than a religion offering redemp-
tion and pardon through Christ, renovation of nature, adoption
by God, the imperfect glorification possible in this life, and
the assured hope at last of perfect glorification when body
and soul shall be revivified together and there shall be the
call into God's presence and the life everlasting ?
This Religion, or Covenant of Grace, Milton goes on to
say, had passed through two dispensations, that of the Law
and that of the Gospel. Under the Gospel the Mosaic Law is
abolished in all its parts, even the Decalogue included. After
a chapter on this subject, he proceeds to such matters as
" the external sealing of the Covenant of Grace " by sacra-
ments, the constitution of the Visible Church universal, the
use of the Holy Scriptures, the constitution of particular
churches, church-discipline, forms of worship, &c. It is here
that we learn definitely that Milton agreed with the Baptists
in rejecting Infant Baptism and in holding immersion in
water to be the proper form of the rite, and that we have also
the formal repetition that was to be expected of such old
Miltonisms as his life-long principle of Protestant indi-
vidualism, his preference for Congregationalism or Indepen-
dency over Prelacy or Presbyterianism as a form of church-
organization, his antipathy to a State Church or professional
and paid clergy, and his detestation of the interference of the
State or Civil Magistrate in any way in matters of religious
belief. On the details of these repetitions we need not dwell,
but may pass to the concluding chapter of the theoretical di-
vision (rf the Treatise. It is entitled « Of Perfect Glorification,
including the Second Advent of Christ, the Resurrection of the
Dead, and the General Conflagration," and exhibits Milton as
an enthusiastic Millennarian. He expected, it appears, a real
Milton's teeatise of oheistian doctrine. 835
second coming of the Lord Jesus Christ, suddenly and glo-
riously, at some future moment of historical time, with the
rousing then of the sleeping dead, and with some wondrous
change also in those that should be alive on the earth to
behold the advent. At this point he becomes rather obscure
or uncertain in his interpretations of Scripture ; but he ex-
pected, it seems, not a single Day of Judgment, but a slow
process of judgment, to be prolonged perhaps through the
thousand years of Christ's predicted terrestrial reign, and to
be wound up by a new revolt of Satan and his confederates,
their final overthrow, the sentencing, equally of the devils
and bad men, the destruction by fire of the present Mundane
World, the departure of bad mea and devils into their £xtra-
mundane Hell of eternal torments, and the exaltatien of the
Saints into a perpetuity of happiness in. the Heaven of
Heavens, or in a new Heavens and Earth created foit- their
enjoyment.
Of the second or practical part of the Treatise, entitled
" Of the Woeship oe Love of God," less needs be said here
than of the theoretical. It is an Essay on Christian Ethics
and Casuistry, and is, in the main, serious and sensible,
rather than powerful or exciting. It first expotands Milton's
notions of duty towards God, or of the duties and forms of
reli^on, and then his notions of the duties of man to himself
and to his neighbour^ or the virtues that go to constitute ideal
character and citizenship. As duties to oneself he recommends
temperance in its two foi-ms of sobriety and chastity, modesty,
decorum, contentment, frugality, industry, liberality, humility,
magnanimity, fortitude, and patience; and through his exposi-
tions of these duties, and of the corresponding duties to our
neighbours, there runs, with all the strength and strictness, an
uumistakeable vein of high manner or gentlemanlike habit.
Thus, when he defines the virtue of "liberality" to be "a, tem-
perate use of our honest acquisitions in the provision of food
and raiment and of the elegancies of life," and proceeds to
include among the comforts or elegancies of life authorized by
Scripture such things as occasional gaieties, wine, ointment
3H3
836 LIFE OF MILTON AND HISTOEY OF HIS TIME.
and fragrances, gold ornaments and jewels, tapestry and other
furnishings, and when again he rehukes churlishness of any
Isind and makes the special virtue of urbanity to comprehend
" not only the innocent refinements and elegancies of con-
"Tersation," but also wit, grace, and sprightliness in reply,
we seem to be reminded of the handsome young Milton of
Cambridge, the Milton of L Allegro, IlPenseroso, and Comus in
the Horton days, the later Milton who could dictate a sonnet
ia his blindness inviting a friend to a neat repast, light and
choice, of Attic taste, with wine and music, and the still
more aged Milton, of whom the uniform report, by those who
saw him as he walked about in his grey suit with his silver-
hilted sword, or sat at home in black, was of his distinguished
politeness and afiability in combination with dignity of bear-
ing. One may be a little surprised at finding the Milton of
the controversial pamphlets reprehending " evil speaking,"
" malicious construction of the motives of others," " con-
tumely and personal abuse," " hasty anger " and " revenge " ;
but, as he recommends also "veracity," freedom of speech
even to boldness, and a "spirit of admonition," we can
imagine the compromise. In speaking of the duties of
citizens to magistrates or the constituted authorities he
does not forget his old doctrine of the right of resistance to
usurped or unjust rule ; but, on the whole, he handles that
topic cautiously, inserting also a sentence which seems in-
tended to describe his own fourteen years of compelled ac-
quiescence with the state of things in England after the
Restoration. "That it may be the part of prudence," he
says, " to obey the commands even of a tyrant in lawful
"things, or^ more properly, to comply with the necessity
" of the times, for the sake of public peace, as well as of
" personal safety, I am far from denying " ; and so he dis-
misses that subject. Whatever his sympathies \i?ith the
Quakers, he is no Quaker in the matter of war. " There
" seems no reason," he says, " why war should be unlawful
" now any more than in the time of the Jews, nor is it any-
" where forbidden in the New Testament." He is equally
astray from the Quakers in the matter of the lawfulness of
Milton's treatise of cheistian doctrine. 837
oaths; and in treating of oaths and also generally of the
virtue of veracity he is, even on this side of Quakerism, far
less rigid than might have been expected. An oath sworn to
a robber, or otherwise exacted by compulsion, is not binding ;
" no rational person will deny that there are certain indi-
viduals," e.g. madmen, children in certain circuipstances,
people in sickness or in a state of intoxication, and enemies,
" whom we are fully justified in deceiving " ; feints and
stratagems in war, even when they are " the greatest un-
truths and with the indisputable intention of deceiving,"
are perfectly legitimate, if unaccompanied by perjury or
breach of faith. These relaxations of the rule of veracity
were probably intended as common-sense answers to questions
of casuistry discussed in Milton's day ; and they are less after
Milton's own heart than another oddity of opinion or senti-
ment, which occurs in his dissertation on Prayer. While we
are commanded to pray not for ourselves only, but for all
mankind, even our enemies, we are also commanded, Milton
holds, " to call down curses publicly on the enemies of God
" and the Church, as also on false brethren, and on such as
" are guilty of any grievous oflfence against God, or even
" against ourselves,"— -the same being lawful in private prayer,
" after the example of some of the holiest of men." For the
rest, about times and places of prayer, and the other forms and
ordinances of public worship, Milton is very latitudinarian.
Church-going is good; fasting and the like are good; a
moderate attention to ceremonial in worship is good; but a
devout heart is the main thing. Times and places for prayer
are indificrent ; liturgies and set forms of prayer are bad ; the
Lord's Prayer itself was not meant as a formula for incessant
repetition ; and prayer need not even be audible to be real and
efficient. The most pronounced feature of this part of the
treatise, however, is its Anti- Sabbatarianism. Milton is an
Anti-Sabbatarian thoroughly and to the last extreme. The
Mosaic Law having been abolished under the Christian dis-
pensation, and the Decalogue as part of it, the Jewish Sabbath
has vanished ; nor is there any shade of divine authority for
the substitution of the first day of the week for equivalent
838 LIFE OF MILTON AND HI8T0KT OF HIS TIME.
or corresponding observance by Christians. It is uncertain
whether the festival of " the Lord's Day," which is men-
tioned but once by that name in Scripture, was weekly or
annual ; and the sole reasons for observing Sunday as a day
of rest and of public worship are that one day in seven seems
convenient for those purposes and that the Sunday has been
generally selected. One must be careful, he says, to allow no
more than this,— which he perceives to be very much the view
of Calvin, Bucer, and others he names, — and to protest against
the allegation of a divine commandment for Sunday observ-
arice, and also against any edlcft of magistrates requiring such,
observance. It is even a sin to keep Sunday if by keeping it
one should seem to acknowledge, or should encourage, the
notion of its Sabbatic obligation, inasmuch as it is always a
sin to limit Christian liberty by inventing imagina;ry sins, or
to burden human life with laws and prohibitions not imposed
by the Gospel.
With various classes of personis, on very various grounds, it
may be matter for regret that such a treatise as that of which
we have thus given a summary was ever written by Milton
or has come down with his name attached. That is no concern
of ours. The book exists ; it is Milton's, and was hie solemn
and last bequest to all Christendom; and, having done our
proper duty by it in the preceding summaryj we have only to
append such remarks as seem requisite historically. These
are three : — (1) Milton's theological views had been progres-
sive and had undergone changes. He certainly was not an
Arian or Anti-Trinitarian of any kind in 1629, when, he wrote
the Ode on tJie Nativity, and there spoke of Christ as having
sat from all eternity as " i^e midst of Trinal ITnity," nor as late
as 1641, when he closed his. first prose-pamphlet, Of Reforma-
tion, with the tremendous prayer in which he invoked Father,
Son, and Holy Spirit, as " one Tri-personal Godhead," to look
down with pity on the afflicted Church and State of England.
As certainly, he did not hold the doctrine of soul-sleeping or
the suspension of personal consciousness between death and
the Resurrection when he wrote lines 85-92 of his Penseroso,
Milton's tbeatise of christian doctrine. 839
or the ecfstatic conclusions of hie Lycidas and UpltapMum
Damonis in 1637 and 1639. Nor was he an Ai-minian or
Anti-Calvinist on the subject of Predestination and Free Will
in 1644, when he spoke in his Areopagitica of " the acute and
distinct Arminius " as having been " perverted " by reading an
anonymous book. Similarly, his Metaphysical Pantheism, his
Cosmological Materialism, and even his Anti-Sabbatarianism,
may have been opinions of comparatively late formation. His
drift into these and other heterodoxies may have begun about
1644, when he exchanged his temporary Presbyterianism or
semi-Presbyterianism in Church-government for Independency
or Congregationalism, breaking off also from the Presbyterians
and associating himself rather with the freer Independents and
miscellaneous sects in the interest of his special Divorce con-
troversy. Most probably the definite formation of the system
of views propounded -in his posthumous treatise is to be ascribed
to the time of his Secretaryship to the Commonwealth and
the Protectorate between 1649 and 1660; but it is possible
enough that the system was not finally consolidated and did
not receive some of its most characteristic peculiarities till
after the Restoration. (2) Milton cannot be identified, by
the sum-total of his theological views at the last, with any
one ■of the English sects or denominations of his time. A
professed Cong^regationalist in Church-polities, though with a
tendency to absolute Individualism, a strenuous Protestant in
■ the main principle of reverence for no other external authority
in religion than that of the Bible, and a confirmed anti-
Prelatist and Anti-State-Church-man, he had manifest points
of sympathy theologically with several of the massive sects of
English Nonconformists, but complete agreement with none
of them. The Baptists, and especially the General Baptists,
might have claimed him for some of his views, but would
have repudiated him for others ; he had a liking for the
Quakers, and for some of their habits and principles, but no
patience for their Peace and Non-interference notions, their
rigidity in trifles, and their proscription of the graces ; and,
while he acknowledged the Socinians as honest and very
tolerable Christians, he thought them too low and merely
840 LIFE OF MILTON AND HISTOBT OF HIS TIME.
rationalistic in their version of Christianity, too incapable oi
the Biblical mysteries and grandeurs. (3) It would be a
mistake to say of Milton, on any of these accounts, or on
account of his Anti- Sabbatarianism and Latitudinarianism
generally, or on account of the extreme boldness and hetero-
doxy of some of his speculations, that he did not beloDg
most truly and properly to the great Puritan body of
his countrymen. We have seen sufficiently in these pages
what English Puritanism really was, through what phases it
passed, what multiform varieties of thinking and of free-
thinking it included. Only an unscholarly misconception
of Puritanism, a total ignorance of the actual facts of its
history, will ever seek, now or henceforward, to rob English
Puritanism of Milton, or Milton of his title to be remembered
as the genius of Puritan England.
THE END.