"He was of opinion that you did not believe yourself, nor those reasons you give in defence of Commonwealth, but that you are swayed by something else, as either by a stork-like fate (as a modern Protector-Poet calls it, because that fowl is observed to live nowhere but in Commonwealths), or because you have unadvisedly scribbled yourself obnoxious, or else you fear such admirable eloquence as yours would be thrown away under a Monarchy.... All your politics are derived from the works of Declaimers, with which sort of writers the ancient Commonwealths had the fortune to abound ... All which you have outgone (according to your talent) in their several ways: for you have done your feeble endeavour to rob the Church, of the little which the rapine of the most sacrilegious persons hath left, in your learned work against Tithes; you have slandered the dead worse than envy itself, and thrown your dirty outrage on the memory of a murdered Prince, as if the Hangman were but your usher. These have been the attempts of your stiff formal eloquence, which you arm accordingly with anything that lies in your way, right or wrong,—not only begging but stealing questions, and taking everything for granted that will serve your turn. For you are not ashamed to rob O. Cromwell himself, and make use of his canting assurances from Heaven and answering condescensions: the most impious Mahometan doctrine that ever was vented among Christians."...

This speaker having ended with a comment on Mr. Milton's remark that Christ himself had put "the brand of Gentilism" upon Kingship, "a young gentleman made answer that your writings are best interpreted by themselves, and that be remembered, in that book wherein you fight with the King's Picture, you call Sir Philip Sidney's Princess Pamela, who was born and bred of Christian parents in England, 'a heathen woman,' and therefore he thought that by Heathenish you meant English, and that in calling Kingship heathenish you inferred it was the only proper and natural government of the English nation, as it hath been proved in all ages. To which another objected that such a sense was quite contrary to your purpose; to which he immediately replied that it was no new thing with you to write that which is as well against as for your purpose. After much debate, they agreed to put it to the ballot; and the young gentleman carried it without contradiction." Then another critic fell foul of Mr. Milton's Divinity and Church notions,—one of which, he said, was "that the Church of Christ ought to have no head upon earth, but the monster of many heads, the multitude," and another "that any man may turn away his wife, and take another as oft as he pleases": to which last accusation is added the comment, "As you have most learnedly proved upon the fiddle [Tetrachordon], and practised in your life and conversation; for which you have achieved the honour to be styled the founder of a sect." The audience by this time becoming weary, "a worthy knight of this Assembly stood up and said that, if we meant to examine all the particular fallacies and flaws in your writing, we should never have done; he would therefore, with leave, deliver his judgment upon the whole: which in brief was this:—That it is all windy foppery from the beginning to the end, written, to the elevation of that rabble and meant to cheat the ignorant; that you fight always with the flat of your hand like a rhetorician, and never contract the logical fist; that you trade altogether in universals, the region of deceits and fallacy, but never come so near particulars as to let us know which among divers things of the same kind you would be at ... Besides this, as all your politics reach but the outside and circumstances of things, and never touch at realities, so you are very solicitous about words, as if they were charms, or had more in them than what they signify; for no conjuror's devil is more concerned in a spell than you are in a mere word." This last speaker having moved that Mr. Harrington himself, in conclusion, should deliver his opinion on Mr. Milton's book, the result was as follows:—

"I knew not (though unwilling) how to avoid it; and therefore I told them, as briefly as I could, that that which I disliked most in your treatise was that there is not one word of The Balance of Property, nor the Agrarian, nor Rotation, in it from the beginning to the end: without which (together with a Lord Archon) I thought I had sufficiently demonstrated, not only in my writings but public exercises in that coffee-house, that there is no possible foundation of a free Commonwealth. To the first and second of these,—that is, the Balance and the Agrarian,—you made no objection; and therefore I should not need to make any answer. But for the third,—I mean Rotation,—which you implicitly reject in your design to perpetuate the present members, I shall only add this to what I have already said and written on that subject: That a Commonwealth is like a great top, that must be kept up by being whipt round, and held in perpetual circulation; for, if you discontinue the rotation, and suffer the Senate to settle and stand still, down it falls immediately. And, if you had studied this point as carefully as I have done, you could not but know there is no such way under Heaven of disposing the vicissitudes of command and obedience, and of distributing equal right and liberty among all men, as this of Wheeling."...[1]

[Footnote 1: There is a reprint of this Censure of the Rota in the Harleian Miscellany (IV. 179-186). I take the date of publication from the Thomason copy of the original.]

How notoriously Milton had flashed forth as the chief militant Republican of the crisis, how universally he had drawn upon himself in that character the eyes of the Royalists and become the target for their bitterest shafts, may appear from yet another probing among the contemporary London pamphlets.——Perhaps the last formal and collective appeal on behalf of the Republic to Monk and the others in power was a small tract which appeared in the end of March, with this title:—Plain English to his Excellencie the Lord-General Monk and the Officers of his Army: or a Word in Season, not onely to them, but to all impartial Englishmen. To which is added a Declaration of the Parliament in the year 1647, setting forth the grounds and reasons why they resolved to make no further Address or Application to the King. Printed at London in the year 1660. The first part of the tract consists of eight pages addressed to Monk, in the form of a letter dated "March 22," by some persons who do not give their names, but sign themselves "your Excellency's most faithful friends and servants in the common cause"; after which, in smaller type, comes a reprint of the famous reasons of the Long Parliament for their total rupture with Charles I. in January 1647-8 (Vol. III. pp. 584-585). The letter begins thus:—"My Lord and Gentlemen,—It is written The prudent shall keep silence in the evil time; and 'tis like we also might hold our peace, but that we fear a knife is at the very throat not only of our and your liberties, but of our persons also. In this condition we hope it will be no offence if we cry out to you for help,—you that, through God's goodness, have helped us so often, and strenuously maintained the same cause with us against the return of that family which pretends to the Government of these nations ... We cannot yet be persuaded, though our fears and jealousies are strong and the grounds of them many, that you can so lull asleep your consciences, or forget the public interests and your own, as to be returning back with the multitude to Egypt, or that you should with them be hankering after the leeks and onions of our old bondage." There follows an earnest invective against the Stuarts; but the tone of respectfulness to Monk is kept up studiously throughout. There is no sign of Milton in the language, and one guesses on the whole that the tract was a concoction of a few of the City Republicans, with Barebone among them, meeting privately perhaps in the back-parlour of the Republican bookseller who ventured the publication anonymously; but it is possible that Milton may have been consulted, or at least have been cognisant of the affair. The reprinting of the reasons of the Long Parliament for their No-Address Resolutions of January 1647-8 was an excellent idea, inasmuch as it reminded people of that disgust with Charles I., that impossibility of dealing with him even in his captive condition, which had driven the Parliamentarians to the theory of a Republic a year before the Republic had been actually founded; and this feature of the tract may have seemed good to Milton.——The Tract must have annoyed Monk and the other authorities, for it was immediately suppressed. This we learn from a reply to it, which appeared on the 3rd of April, with the title Treason Arraigned, in answer to Plain English, being a Trayterous and Phanatique Pamphlet which was condemned by the Counsel of State, suppressed by Authority, and the Printer declared against by Proclamation ... London, Printed in the year 1660. The reply takes the very curious form of a reproduction of the condemned tract almost textually, paragraph by paragraph, with a running comment of vituperation upon the author or authors. The following sentences, culled from the vituperative comment, will show that the writer suspected Milton as the person chiefly responsible, and will sufficiently represent the entire performance:—

"Some two days since came to my view a bold sharp pamphlet, called Plain English, directed to the General and his Officers.... It is a piece drawn by no fool, and it deserves a serious answer. By the design, the subject, malice, and the style, I should suspect it for a blot of the same pen that wrote Eikonoklastes. It runs foul, tends to tumult; and, not content barely to applaud the murder of the King, the execrable author of it vomits upon his ashes with a pedantic and envenomed scorn, pursuing still his sacred memory. Betwixt him [Milton] and his brother Rabshakeh [Needham?] I think a man may venture to divide the glory of it. It relishes the mixture of their united faculties and wickedness.... Say, Milton, Needham, either or both of you, or whosoever else, say where this worthy person [Monk] ever mixed with you.... Come, hang yourself; beg right; here's your true method of begging:—'O, for Tom Scott's sake, for Hasilrig's sake, for Robinson, Holland, Mildmay, Mounson, Corbet, Atkins, Vane, Livesey, Skippon, Milton, Tichbourne, Ireton, Gordon, Lechmere, Blagrave, Barebone, Needham's sake, and, to conclude, for all the rest of our unpenitent brethren's sake, help a company of poor rebellious devils[1].'"

[Footnote 1: The dates of the two pamphlets, and the extracts, are from copies in the Thomason Collection. Such references to Milton in the pamphlets of March—April 1660 might be multiplied. He was then in all men's mouths.]

We are now, it is to be seen, in the mid-stream of those final forty days which intervened between the self-dissolution of the last fag-end of the Long Parliament and the meeting of the Full and Free Parliament called for the conclusive settlement (March 16, 1659-60-April 25, 1660). Monk was Dictator; the Council of State, with Annesley for President, was the body in charge, along with Monk, keeping the peace; but all eyes were directed towards the coming Parliament, the elections for which were going on. It was precisely in the beginning of April that the popular current towards a restoration of Charles Stuart and nothing else had acquired full force and become a roaring and foaming torrent. They were shouting for him, singing for him, treating his restoration as already certain, though the precise manner and date of it must be left to the Parliament. Only the chiefs, Monk, Annesley, Montague, and the other Councillors, kept up an appearance as if the issue must not be anticipated till the Parliament should have actually met. With letters to and from Charles in their pockets, and each knowing or guessing that the others had such letters, they were trying to look as unpledged and as merely cogitative as they could. It was for the multitude to roar and shout for Charles, and they had now full permission. It was for the chiefs to be silent themselves, only managing and manipulating, and watchful especially against any outbreak of Republican fanaticism even yet that might interfere with the plain course of things and baulk or delay the popular expectation. Wherever they could perceive a likelihood of disturbance, by act or by speech, there they were bound to curb or suppress.

At least in one instance they found it necessary to curb a too hasty and impetuous Royalist. This was Dr. Matthew Griffith, a clergyman over sixty years of age, once a protege of the poet Donne. Sequestered in the early days of the Long Parliament from his rectory of St. Mary Magdalen, London, he had taken refuge with the King through the civil wars, and had been made D.D. at Oxford, and one of the King's chaplains. Afterwards, returning to London, he had lived there through the Commonwealth and the Protectorate, one of those that continued the use of the liturgy and other Anglican church-forms by stealth to small gatherings of cavaliers, and that found themselves often in trouble on that account. He had suffered, it is said, four imprisonments. The near prospect of the return of Charles II. at last had naturally excited the old gentleman; and, chancing to preach in the Mercers' Chapel on Sunday the 25th of March, 1660, he had chosen for his text Prov. XXIV. 21, which he translated thus: "My son, fear God and the King, and meddle not with them that be seditious or desirous of change." On this text he had preached a very Royalist sermon. There would have been nothing peculiar in that, as many clergymen were doing the like. But, not content with having preached the sermon, Dr. Griffith resolved to publish it, in an ostentatious manner and with certain accompaniments. "The Fear of God and the King. Press'd in a Sermon preach'd at Mercers Chappell on the 25th of March, 1660. Together with a brief Historical Account of the Causes of our unhappy distractions and the onely way to heal them. By Matthew Griffith, D.D., and Chaplain to the late King. London, Printed for Tho. Johnson at the Golden Key in St. Pauls Churchyard, 1660": such was the name of a duodecimo out in London in the first days of April.[1] The volume consists of three parts,—first, a dedicatory epistle "To His Excellency George Monck, Captain-General of all the Land Forces of England, Scotland, and Ireland, and one of the Generals of all the Naval Forces"; then the sermon itself in fifty-eight pages; and then an addition, in the shape of a directly political pamphlet, headed "The Samaritan Revived." The gem is the dedication to Monk. The substance of that is as follows:—

[Footnote 1: "April" only, without day, is the date in the Thomason copy; but it was registered at Stationers' Hall, March 31, and there is proof that the publication was immediate.]

"My Lord,—If you will be pleased to allow me to be a physician in the same sense that all moral divines do acknowledge the body-politic (consisting of Church and State) to be a patient, then I will now give your Highness a just account both how far and how faithfully I have practised upon it by virtue of my profession. When I first observed things to be somewhat out of order, by reason of a high distemper, which then appeared by some infallible indications, I thought it my duty to prescribe an wholesome electuary (out of the 122nd Psalm at the 6th verse, in a sermon which I was called to preach in the Cathedral Church of Saint Paul's, anno 1642, and soon after published by command under this title: A Pathetical Persuasion to pray for the Public Peace), to be duly and devoutly taken every morning next our hearts: hoping that, by God's blessing on the means, I should have prevented that distemper from growing into a formed disease. Yet, finding that my preventing physic did not work so kindly and take so good an effect as I earnestly desired, but rather that this my so tenderly beloved patient grew worse and worse, as not only being in process of time fallen into a fever and that pestilential, but also as having received divers dangerous wounds, which, rankling and festering inwardly, brought it into a spiritual atrophy and deep consumption, and the parts ill-affected (for want of Christian care and skill in such mountebanks as were trusted with the cure, while myself and most of the ancient orthodox clergy were sequestered and silent) began to gangrene: and, when some of us became sensible thereof, we took the confidence (being partly emboldened by the connivance of the higher powers that then were) to fall to the exercise of our ministerial functions again in such poor parishes as would admit us: Then I saw it was high time not only to prescribe strong purgative medicines in the pulpit (contempered of the myrrh of mortification, the aloes of confession and contrition, the rhubarb of restitution and satisfaction, with divers other safe roots, seeds, and flowers, fit and necessary to help to carry away by degrees the incredible confluence of ill humours and all such malignant matter as offended), but also to put pen to paper and appear in print (as in this imperfect and impolished piece, which as guilty of an high presumption here in all humility begs your Lordship's pardon) wherein my chief scope is to personate the Good Samaritan, that, as he cured the wounded traveller by searching his wounds with wine and suppling them with oil, so I have here both described the rise and progress of our national malady, and also prescribed the only remedy, that I might be in some kind instrumental, under God and your Highness, in the healing of the same ... My Lord, as it must needs grieve you to see these three distressed kingdoms lie like a body without a head, so it may also cheer you to consider that the Comforter hath empowered you (and in this nick of time you only) to make these dead and dry bones live. You may by this one act ennoble and eternize yourself more in the hearts and chronicles of these three kingdoms than by all your former victories and the long line of your extraction from the Plantagenets your ancestors ... It is a greater honour to make a king than to be one. Your proper name minds you of being St. George for England; you surname prompts you to stand for order: then let not panic fears, punctilios of human policy, or state formalities, beguile you (whom we look upon as Jethro's magistrate, who was a man of courage, fearing God, dealing truly, and hating covetousness) of that immarescible crown of glory due to you, whom we hope that God hath designed to be the repairer of the breach and the temporal redeemer of your native country."

Evidently Dr. Griffith was a silly person, more likely to make a cause ridiculous than to help it. There were things in his sermon and its accompaniments, however, that might harm the King's cause otherwise than by the bad literary taste of the defence. There was a tone of that revengeful spirit which it was the policy of all the more prudent Royalists to disown. Hence the publication annoyed even in that quarter. The unpardonable offence, however, was the address to Monk. He was studying to be as secret as the grave, had signified his leanings to the King by not a single public word, and indeed had hardly ceased to swear he stood for the Commonwealth. And here was an impudent Doctor of Divinity spoiling all by openly assuming and announcing the very thing to be concealed. Monk was excessively irritated; the Council of State sympathized with him; and so, "to please and blind the fanatical party" for the moment, Dr. Griffith was sent to Newgate.[1]

[Footnote 1: Wood's Ath. III. 711-713.—Hyde, writing from Breda, April 16, 1660, says to a Royalist correspondent: "This very last post hath brought over three or four complaints to the king of the very unskillful passion and distemper of some of our divines in their late sermons; with which they say that both the General and the Council of State are highly offended, as truly they have reason to be ... One Dr. Griffith is mentioned." Ibid., note by Bliss.]

It was more natural, however, for the General and the Council to take similar precautions against too violent expressions of anti-Royalism, too vehement efforts to stir up the Republican embers. Of their vigilance in this respect we have just seen an instance in their instant suppression of the Republican appeal to Monk and his Officers entitled Plain English, and their procedure by proclamation against the anonymous publisher of that tract. If I am not mistaken, he was Livewell Chapman, of the Crown in Pope's Head Alley, the publisher of Milton's Considerations touching the likeliest means to remove Hirelings out of the Church, and also of his more recent Ready and Easy Way to establish a Free Commonwealth. There was, at all events, a printed proclamation of the Council of State against this person, dated "Wednesday, 28 March, 1660," and signed "William Jessop, Clerk of the Council." It began in these terms:—"Whereas the Council of State is informed that Livewell Chapman, of London, Stationer, having from a wicked design to engage the nation in blood and confusion caused several seditious and treasonable books to be printed and published, doth, now hide and obscure himself, for avoiding the hand of justice"; and it ended with an order that Chapman should surrender himself within four days, and that none should harbour or conceal him, but all, and especially officers, try to arrest him. If he was the publisher of Plain English, there would be additional reason for suspecting that Milton had some cognisance of that anonymous appeal to Monk; but there can be no doubt that among the "seditious and treasonable books" the publication of which constituted Chapman's offence was Milton's own Ready and Easy Way. The authorities had not yet struck at Milton himself, but they were coming very near him. They had ordered the arrest of his publisher.

Within a few days after the order for the arrest of Milton's publisher, Livewell Chapman, the authorities signified their displeasure, though in a less harsh manner, with another Republican associate of Milton, his old friend Marchamont Needham.—Not without difficulty had this Oliverian journalist, the subsidized editor since 1655 of the bi-weekly official newspaper of the Protectorate (calling itself The Public Intelligencer on Mondays and Mercurius Politicus on Thursdays), been retained in the service of the Good Old Cause. His Oliverianism having been excessive, to the extent of defending not only Oliver's Established Church, but also all else in his policy that grated most on the pure Republicans, he had been discharged from his editorship on the 13th of May, 1659, by order of the Restored Rump, before it had been six days in power, the place going then to John Canne. But Needham's versatility was matchless, and on the 15th of August the Rump had thought it best to reappoint him to the editorship.[1] Since then, having already in succession been Parliamentarian, Royalist, Commonwealth's man or Rumper, and all but anti-Republican Protectoratist, the world had known him in his fifth phase of Rumper or pure Commonwealth's man again. Not only in his journals, but also in independent pamphlets, he had advocated the Good Old Cause. One such pamphlet, published with his name in August 1659, under the title of Interest will not lie,[2] had been in reply to some Royalist who had propounded "a way how to satisfy all parties and provide for the public good by calling in the son of the late King": against whom Needham's contention was "that it is really the interest of every party (except only the Papist) to keep him out." One can understand now why, in the Royalist squib lately quoted, Needham was named as "the Commonwealth didapper"[3] along with Milton as "their goose-quill champion," and why the public were there promised the pleasure of soon seeing the two at Tyburn together.—But the final performance of Needham's, it is believed, was a tract called News from Brussels, in a Letter from a near attendant on his Majesty's person to a Person of Honour here. It purports to be dated at Brussels, March 10, 1659-60, English style, and was out in London on March 23. The publication is said to have been managed secretly by Mr. Praise-God Barebone; and, though the tract was anonymous, it was attributed at once to Needham. Being "fall of rascalities against Charles II. and his Court," as Wood says, and professing to give private information as to the terrible severities which they were meditating when they should be restored to England, the pamphlet was much resented by the Royalists; and John Evelyn roused himself from a sickbed to pen an instant and emphatic contradiction, called The late News or Message from Brussels unmasked. Needham's connexion, or supposed connexion, with so violent an anti-Royalist tract, and possibly also with the Republican manifesto called Plain English, which appeared in the same week, could not be overlooked; and, accordingly, in Whitlocke, under date April 9, 1660, we find this note: "The Council discharged Needham from writing the Weekly Intelligence and ordered Dury and Muddiman to do it." The Dury here mentioned was not our John Durie of European celebrity, but an insignificant Giles Dury. His colleague Muddiman, the real successor of Needham in the editorship, was Henry Muddiman, an acquaintance of Pepys, who certifies that he was "a good scholar and an arch rogue." He had been connected with the London press for some time (for smaller news-sheets had been springing up again beside the authorized Mercurius and Intelligencer), and had been writing for the Rumpers. He had just been, owning to Pepys, however, that he "did it only to get money," and had no liking for them or their politics.[4]

[Footnote 1: Commons Journals of dates. As only the Intelligencer is named in the orders, one infers that Needham retained the editorship of the Mercurius during his three months of suspension. He may have had more of a proprietary hold on that paper.]

[Footnote 2: Thomason Catalogue: large quartos.]

[Footnote 3: Didapper: a duck that dives and reappears.]

[Footnote 4: Wood's Ath. III. 1180-1190; Whitlocke as cited; Pepys, under date Jan. 9, 1659-60; Evelyn's Diary, Feb. 17, 1659-60 et seq.; Baker's Chronicle continued by Edward Phillips (ed. 1679), pp. 699-700.—It is curious to read Phillips's remarks on the "several seditious pamphlets" put forth by the Republican fanatics "to deprave the minds of the people" and prevent the Restoration. Though he must have remembered well that his uncle's were the chief of these, he avoids naming him. He mentions, however, the News from Brussels, and dilates on the great service done by Evelyn in replying to it. Phillips had meanwhile (1663-1665) been in Evelyn's employment as tutor to his son.]

If they turned Needham out of his editorship, they could hardly do less than turn Milton out of his Latin Secretaryship. About this time, accordingly, he did cease to hold the office which he had held for eleven years. Phillips's words are that he was "sequestered from his office of Latin Secretary and the salary thereunto belonging"; but, unfortunately, though he gives us to understand that this was shortly before the Restoration, he leaves the exact date uncertain.

Though the last of Milton's state-letters now preserved and known as his are the two, dated May 15, 1659, written for the Rump immediately after the subversion of Richard's Protectorate, we have seen him holding his office in sinecure, and drawing his salary of L200 a year, to as late at least as the beginning of the Wallingford-House Interruption in October 1659; and there is no reason for thinking that the Council or Committee of Safety of the Wallingford-House Government, his dissent from their usurpation notwithstanding, thought it necessary to dismiss him. Far less likely is it that the Republican Rumpers, when restored the second time in December 1659, would have parted with a man so thoroughly Republican and so respectful to themselves, even while they dared not adopt his Church-disestablishment suggestions. We may fairly assume, then, that Milton remained Marvell's nominal colleague till Monk's final termination of the tenure of the Rump by re-admitting the secluded members, i.e. till Feb. 21, 1659-60. Had he been then at once dismissed, it would have been no wonder. How could he, the Independent of Independents, the denouncer of every form of State-Church, the enemy and satirist of the Presbyterians, and moreover the author of the Divorce heresy and the founder of a sect of Divorcers, be retained in the service of a re-Presbyterianized Government, founding itself on the Westminster Confession and the Solemn League and Covenant? There is no proof, however, of any such instant dismissal of Milton by the new powers, but rather a shade of proof to the contrary in the phraseology of the preface to his Ready and Easy Way. The probability, therefore, is that it was after March 3, the date of the publication of that pamphlet, that Milton was sequestered, and that it was the pamphlet itself, added to the sum of his previous obnoxiousness to the new powers, that led to the sequestration. Yet, as the new powers were proceeding warily, and keeping up as long as they could the pretence of leaving the Commonwealth an open question, it is quite possible that they were in no haste to discharge Milton, All in all, the most probable time of his dismissal is some time after the dissolution of the Parliament of the Secluded Members on the 16th of March, 1659-60, when Monk and the Council of State were left in the management. As Milton had been originally appointed by the Council of State and not by Parliament, it was in the Council's pleasure to continue him or dismiss him. They were in a severe mood, virtually anti-Republican already, though not yet avowedly so, between March 28, when they ordered Livewell Chapman's arrest, and April 9, when they dismissed Needham; and that or thereabouts may be the date of Milton's discharge.[1]

[Footnote 1: Phillips's narrative of his uncle's dismissal is a blotch of confused wording and pointing:—"It was but a little before the King's Restoration that he wrote and published his book in defence of a Commonwealth; so undaunted he was in declaring his true sentiments to the world; and not long before his Power of the Civil Magistrate in Ecclesiastical Affairs and his Treatise against Hirelings, just upon the King's coming over; having a little before been sequestered from his office of Latin Secretary and the salary thereunto belonging, he was force," &c. This, as it stands, defies interpretation. The Treatise of Civil Power in Ecclesiastical Causes appeared in April 1659, or eight months before the same. There ought, I believe, to have been a full stop after Hirelings, and the rest should have run on thus:—"Just upon the King's coming over, having a little before been sequestered from his office of latin Secretary and the salary therunto belonging, he was force," &c.]

* * * * *

In office or out of office, it was the same to Milton. He had determined that he would not be suppressed, that he would not be silent, till they should tie his hands, or gag his mouth. There is no grander exhibition of dying resistance, of solitary and useless fighting for a lost cause, than in his conduct through April 1680. Alone he then stood, we may say, the last of the visible Republicans. Hasilrig, Scott, Ludlow, Neville, and Vane, had collapsed or were out of sight, the last under ban already by his former brothers of the Commonwealth; Needham was extinguished; most of the Cromwellians had gone over to the enemy, or were hastening to surrender. Blind Milton alone remained, the Samson Agonistes, On him, in the absence of others, the eyes of the Philistine mob, the worshippers of Dagon, had been turned from time to time of late as the Hebrew that could make them most efficient sport; and now it was as if they had all met, by common consent, to be amused by this single Hebrew's last exertions, and had sent to bring him on the stage. They laughed, they shouted, they shrieked, the gathered Philistine thousands:

"He, patient, but undaunted, where they led him Came to the place."

The first of the feats of strength of Milton, thus alone on the stage, and knowing himself to be confronted and surrounded by a jeering multitude, was a somewhat puny and unnecessary one. It was an onslaught on Dr. Matthew Griffith for his Royalist sermon. He wanted some object of attack, and the very notoriety given to Dr. Griffith's performance by the rebuke of the Council of State recommended it for the purpose despite its intrinsic wretchedness. Accordingly, having had Dr. Griffith's Sermon and its accompaniments read over to him, he dictated what appeared some time in April with this title: "Brief Notes upon a late Sermon, titled 'The Fear of God and the King'; Preach'd, and since published, by Matthew Griffith, D.D., and Chaplain to the late King. Wherin many notorious wrestings of Scripture, and other falsities are observed."[1]

[Footnote 1: Original copies of this pamphlet of Milton must be very scarce. I could not find one in the British Museum, and I have looked in vain elsewhere. Probably, at the date when it was published, the Council of State had become very alert in suppressing such things. I take the title and extracts from Pickering's (1851) collective edition of Milton's Works, "printed from the original editions."]

The tract, which is very short, opens thus:—

"I affirmed, in the Preface of a late Discourse, entitled The Ready Way to establish a Free Commonwealth, and the Dangers of readmitting Kingship in this Nation, that 'the humour of returning to our old bondage was instilled of late by some deceivers': and, to make good that what I then affirmed was not without just ground, one of those deceivers I present here to the people, and, if I prove him not such, refuse not to be so accounted in his stead."

The greater part of the pamphlet consists of an examination of the sermon itself, with minute remarks on its wrestings or misinterpretations of Scripture texts, and on the poverty of the preacher's theology and scholarship generally. There is no actual disguise of the fact that Milton has the lowest opinion of the intellectual calibre of his antagonist, whom he once names "a pulpit-mountebank," and of whom he once says that "the rest of his preachment is mere groundless chat," Yet, on the other hand, he would evidently have Dr. Griffith taken as a fair enough specimen of the average Church-of-England clergyman. "O people of an implicit faith, no better than Romish if these be your prime teachers!" he once exclaims, as if Dr. Griffith were a man of some distinction.

The only portions of the Notes of interest now are those that bear on the historical situation at the moment. Thus, in the notice of the Dedicatory Epistle to Monk prefixed to Dr. Griffith's sermon, there is an evident struggle on Milton's part to speak as if one might still have faith in the General. It is possible that the censure of Dr. Griffith by the Council of State, intended as it was "to please and blind the fanatical party," may have had some such temporary effect on Milton. At all events, he refers to Monk as one "who hath so eminently borne his part in the whole action," and he characterizes one portion of the Dedicatory Epistle, where Monk is prayed "to carry on what he had so happily begun," as nothing less than "an impudent calumny and affront to his Excellence." It charges him, says Milton, "most audaciously and falsely, with the renouncing of his own public promises and declarations both to the Parliament and the Army; and we trust his actions ere long will deter such insinuating slanderers from thus approaching him for the future." Throughout the Notes, however, one sees that even this small lingering of confidence in Monk is forced, and that Milton is too sadly convinced of the probable predetermination of all now in power to fulfil the general expectation and bring in Charles. In the following passage there is a half-veiled intimation that, rather than see that ignominious conclusion, Milton would reconcile himself to Monk's own assumption of the Crown:—

"Free Commonwealths have been ever counted fittest and properest for civil, virtuous, and industrious nations, abounding with prudent men worthy to govern; Monarchy fittest to curb degenerate, corrupt, idle, proud, luxurious people. If we desire to be of the former, nothing better for us, nothing nobler, than a Free Commonwealth; if we will needs condemn ourselves to be of the latter, despairing of our own virtue, industry, and the number of our able men, we may then, conscious of our own unworthiness to be governed better, sadly betake us to our befitting thraldom: yet, choosing out of our own number one who hath best aided the people and best merited against tyranny, the space of a reign or two we may chance to live happily enough, or tolerably. But that a victorious people should give up themselves again to the vanquished was never yet heard of, seems rather void of all reason and good policy, and will in all probability subject the subduers to the subdued,—will expose to revenge, to beggary, to ruin and perpetual bondage, the victors, under the vanquished: than which what can be more unworthy?"

Of far more moment than the Brief Notes on Dr. Griffith's Sermon was a second and enlarged edition of the Ready and Easy Way to establish a Free Commonwealth.

Though it is announced distinctly and emphatically in the opening paragraph that this edition is a "revised and enlarged" one, not till after a careful comparison with the former edition is it seen how much the announcement implies. There are large additions; there are omissions; there are changes of phraseology in every page. The new pamphlet, were it nothing else, would be an interesting study of Milton's art in authorcraft, of the expertness he had acquired in recasting a composition of his, ingeniously dove-tailing passages into it without spoiling the connexion, and ejecting phrases that had ceased to be relevant or vital, all under the difficulties of his blindness, when his ear listening to some mouth beside him and his own mouth interrupting and replying were his sole instruments. But there is much more than this. The later edition is Milton about a month farther down the torrent than the first, a month nearer the falls; and the additions, omissions, and alterations, convey what had passed in his mind through that month. The second edition of the Ready and Easy Way to establish a Free Commonwealth is to be taken, in short, for Milton's Biography at least, as an important new publication. Only the essential additions and omissions can be here noticed.[1]

[Footnote 1: The fact that there are two editions of the Ready and Easy Way, though Milton calls express attention to it in the second, seems to have escaped all the bibliographers. There is no note of it in Lowndes. What is most curious, however, is that, while it is the second or enlarged edition alone that is now accessible to everybody in the collective editions of Milton's Prose Works, from the so-called Amsterdam edition of 1898 to Pickering's and Bonn's, yet original copies of this second edition seem, to have wholly disappeared. There are several original copies of the Ready and Easy Way in the British Museum, but all of the first edition, not one of the second; the Bodleian has no copy of the second; every original copy of the tract that I have been able to see or hear of anywhere else has always turned out to be one of the first edition. In my perplexity, I began to ask myself whether this was to be explained by supposing that Milton, after he had prepared the second edition for the press, did not succeed in getting it published, and so that it was not till 1698 that it saw the light, and then by the accident that his enlarged press-copy had survived, and come (through Toland or otherwise) into the hands of the printers of the Amsterdam edition of the Prose Works. But, though several pieces in that edition are expressly noted as "never before published" (see notes ante, p. 617 and p. 656), there is no such editorial note respecting The Ready and Easy Way, but every appearance of mere reprinting from a previously published copy of 1660. On the whole, therefore, I conclude that Milton did publish his second and enlarged edition some time in April 1660; and I account for the rarity of original copies of this second edition by supposing that either the impression was seized before many copies had got about, or the Restoration itself came so rapidly after the publication as to make it all but abortive. Original copies of Milton's contemporary Notes on Dr. Griffith's Sermon seem, as I have mentioned (ante p. 675, note), to be equally scarce with original copies of the second edition of the Ready and Easy Way. They were the two last utterances of Milton before the Restoration, and so close to that event as perhaps to be sucked down in the whirlpool. Yet, as we know for certain that the Notes on Dr. Griffith's Sermon did appear, there is no need for a contrary supposition respecting the other. Very possibly original copies of both have survived somewhere; and I should be glad to hear of the fact. As it is, I have had to take my descriptions of both from the copies in the collective Prose Works. By the bye, it is an error in bibliographers and editors to give only the titles of old books from the original title-pages, without adding the imprints of the publishers. Much historical and biographical information lies in such imprints. In the present instance, for example, I should have liked very much to know whether Livewell Chapman was nominally the publisher of the second edition as well as of the first, or whether Milton was obliged to put forth the second edition without any publisher's name.]

Among the additions the most prominent is this motto (an extension of Juvenal I. 15, 16) prefixed to the whole:—

"Et nos Consilium dedimus Syllae: demus Populo nunc";

which may be translated:—

"We have advised Sulla himself: advise we now the People."

Had this been prefixed to the first edition, the inevitable conclusion would have been that Sulla stood for Oliver Cromwell, and that Milton meant that, having taken the liberty in his Defensio Secunda of tendering wholesome advices even to the great Protector in the height of his power, it might be allowed to him now to advise the general body of his countrymen. Much would have depended then on Milton's estimate of the character of the real or Roman Sulla. That seems to have been the ordinary and traditional one, for in one of the smaller insertions in the text of the present edition he speaks of the Roman People as having been brought, by their own infatuation, "under the tyranny of Sulla." Now, though we have seen that Milton had modified his opinion of the worth of Cromwell's Government all in all, we should have been shocked by an epithet of posthumous opprobrium applied to the man he had so panegyrized while living. Fortunately, we are spared the shock. Monk, not Cromwell, is the military dictator that Milton has in view in the metonymy Sulla. He is thinking of his Letter to Monk only the other day, containing that specific suggestion of a PERPETUAL NATIONAL COUNCIL in the centre and CITY COUNCILS in all the counties which he developes more at large in his pamphlet. Perhaps he is thinking also of the more recent remonstrance, called Plain English, addressed by some London Republicans, of whom he may have been one, to Monk and his Officers. He has now done with Monk; he knows that the suggestions have taken no effect in that quarter, perhaps have been rebuffed; he will therefore dedicate them afresh to the people at large, for whom they were first written. The translation, accordingly, may run definitely thus:—

"This advice we have given Sulla himself: 'tis for the People now."

In one or two of the added passages, or modifications of phraseology, we note reference to the course of events since the publication of the former edition. Compare, for example, the following portion of the prefatory paragraph with the corresponding portion of the same paragraph as it first stood (p. 645):—

... "I thought best not to suppress what I had written, hoping that it may now be of much more use and concernment to be freely published in the midst of our elections to a Free Parliament, or their sitting to consider freely of the Government; whom it behoves to have all things represented to them that may direct their judgment therein: and I never read of any state, scarce of any tyrant, grown so incurable as to refuse counsel from any in a time of public deliberation, much less to be offended. If their absolute determination be to enthral us, before so long a Lent of servitude they may permit us a little Shroving-time first, wherein to speak freely and take our leaves of Liberty, And, because in the former edition, through haste, many faults escaped, and many books were suddenly dispersed ere the note to mend them could be sent, I took the opportunity from this occasion to revise and somewhat to enlarge the whole discourse, especially that part which argues for a Perpetual Senate. The treatise, thus revised and enlarged, is as follows."

Again, the renewal of the Solemn League and Covenant by the late Parliament of the Secluded Members furnishes Milton with a fresh text. He does not, as might have been expected, and as he certainly would have done on another occasion, upbraid the Parliament with the fact, or denounce the return to Presbyterian strictness of which it was a signal: on the contrary, he presses the fact into his service as a new argument against the recall of Charles. The first of the following sentences had appeared in the former edition; but the rest is suggested by the revival of the Covenant in the interim:—

"What Liberty of Conscience can we then expect of others [even the good and great Queen Elizabeth, he has just said, had thought persecution necessary to preserve royal authority], far worse principled from, the cradle, trained up and governed by Popish and Spanish counsels, and on such depending hitherto for subsistence? Especially, what can this last Parliament expect, who, having revived lately and published the Covenant, hare re-engaged themselves never to readmit Episcopacy? Which no son of Charles returning but will most certainly bring back with him, if he regard the last and strictest charge of his father, to persevere in not the Doctrine only, but Government, of the Church of England, [and] not to neglect the speedy and effectual suppressing of Errors and Schisms,—among which he accounted Presbytery one of the chief. Or, if, notwithstanding that charge of his father, he submit to the Covenant, how will he keep faith to us with disobedience to him, or regard that faith given which must be founded on the breach of that last and solemnest paternal charge, and the reluctance, I may say the antipathy, which is in all kings against Presbyterian and Independent Discipline?"

Perhaps the most striking instance of omission in the new edition of matter that had appeared in the first is in the paragraph on the subject of Spiritual Liberty to which reference has been made at p. 653. He retains in that paragraph nearly all that related to Liberty of Conscience generally, but he carefully removes the two or three sentences in which he had intimated his individual opinion that there could be no perfect Liberty of Conscience without abolition of Church Establishments and dissolution of every form of connexion between Church and State. There was practical sagacity in this omission at the moment at which he was re-issuing his pamphlet. It was no time then to be obtruding upon the public, or upon the Presbyterians that were flocking in to the new Parliament, his peculiar Disestablishment notion, however precious it might be to himself. His real business was to stir up all, by any means, to the defence even yet of the Republican form of Government; in such an argument, addressed mainly to Presbyterians and other zealots for a State Church, the question of Disestablishment was rather to be avoided; nay, for himself, that question had faded into insignificance for the time in comparison with the vaster question whether the Republic should be preserved or the Stuarts brought back, and most willingly would he have been, assured of the preservation of the Republic even though a State Church should continue to be part and parcel of it, and the special battle of Disestablishment should have to be postponed. To keep out the Stuarts, to rouse dread and disgust even yet at the idea that the Stuarts should return, was the single all-including possibility, or impossibility, for which he was now striving. To this end it is that again and again in the course of the pamphlet he inserts new passages heightening the contrast between the glories and advantages of free Republican Government and the miseries and degradation of subjection to a Monarchy. Near the beginning there is an enlargement of this kind, to the extent of three pages, in which he reviews, in greater detail than before, the steps that had led to the establishment of the English Commonwealth; and appeals to his countrymen whether their experience of Commonwealth government had not been on the whole satisfactory. Had not the very speeches and writings of that period, he had asked in his first edition, "testified a spirit in this nation no less noble and well-fitted to the liberty of a Commonwealth than in the ancient Greeks or Romans"? In returning to that topic now, he cannot refrain from breaking out once more, though it should be the last time, in his characteristic vein of self-appreciation. "Nor was the heroic cause," he adds, "unsuccessfully defended to all Christendom against the tongue of a famous and thought invincible adversary, nor the constancy and fortitude that so nobly vindicated our liberty, our victory at once against two the most prevailing usurpers over mankind, Superstition and Tyranny, unpraised or uncelebrated in a written monument likely to outlive detraction, as it hath hitherto convinced or silenced not a few detractors, especially in parts abroad." Readers who may think that we are already too familiar with this strain may be reminded that Milton was here taking account of the contemptuous notices of his Defences of the Commonwealth in some of the recent Royalist pamphlets, and also that, as he dictated, the thought must have been passing in his mind that very probably his days were numbered, and those Defences of the Commonwealth would have to remain, after all, his last important bequest to the world.

There is proof that Milton had read the burlesque Censure of the Rota on the first edition. Not only are two or three sentences omitted or modified in consequence of remarks there made; but, in the considerable enlargements he thinks necessary for the support of his main notion of PERPETUITY OF THIS NATIONAL GREAT COUNCIL, he takes care to extend also his former references to Harrington's principle of Rotation and other doctrines. Of course, he was well aware that it was not Harrington himself that had complained of the slightness of the former references, but only some Royalist wit caricaturing Harrington together with himself. While disagreeing with Harrington, he shows his respect for him. The following are specimens of these particular enlargements:—

The Rotation Principle:—"But, if the ambition of such as think themselves injured that they also partake not of the Government, and are impatient till they be chosen, cannot brook the perpetuity of others chosen before them, or if it be feared that long continuance of power may corrupt sincerest men, the known expedient is, and by some lately propounded, that annually (or, if the space be longer, so much perhaps the better) the third part of Senators may go out, according to the precedence of their election, and the like number be chosen in their places, to prevent the settling of too absolute a power if it should be perpetual: and this they call Partial Rotation. But I could wish that this wheel or partial wheel in State, if it be possible, might be avoided, as having too much, affinity with the Wheel of Fortune. For it appears not how this can be done without danger and mischance of putting out a great number of the best and ablest; in whose stead new elections may bring in as many raw, unexperienced, and otherwise affected, to the weakening and much altering for the worse of public transactions. Neither do I think a Perpetual Senate, especially chosen and entrusted by the people, much in this land to be feared, where the well-affected, either in a Standing Army or in a Settled Militia, have their arms in their own hands. Safest therefore to me it seems, and of least hazard or interruption to affairs, that none of the Grand Council be moved, unless by death or just conviction of some crime; for what can be expected firm or stedfast from a floating foundation? However, I forejudge not any probable expedient, any temperament that can be found in things of this nature, so disputable on either side."

Contrast of Harrington's Model with Milton's, and a Suggestion for the mode of Elections:—"And this annual Rotation of a Senate to consist of 300, as is lately propounded, requires also another Popular Assembly upward of 1000, with an answerable Rotation. Which, besides that it will be liable to all those inconveniencies found in the foresaid remedies, cannot but be troublesome and chargeable, both in their motion and their session, to the whole land,—unwieldy with their own bulk: unable in so great a number to mature their consultations as they ought, if any be allotted to them, and that they meet not from so many parts remote to sit a whole year leaguer in one place, only now and then to hold up a forest of fingers, or to convey each man his bean or ballot into the box, without reason shown or common deliberation; incontinent of secrets, if any be imparted to them; emulous and always jarring with the other Senate. The much better way doubtless will be, in this wavering condition of our affairs, to defer the changing or circumscribing of our Senate, more than may be done with ease, till the Commonwealth be thoroughly settled in peace and safety and they themselves give us the occasion.... Another way will be to well qualify and refine Elections: not committing all to the noise and shouting of a rude multitude, but permitting only those of them who are rightly qualified to nominate as many as they will; and out of that number others of a better breeding to choose a less number more judiciously; till, after a third or fourth sifting and refining of exactest choice, they only be left chosen who are the due number, and seem by most voices the worthiest.... But, to prevent all mistrust, the People then will have their several Ordinary Assemblies (which will henceforth quite annihilate the odious power and name of Committees) in the chief towns of every County,—without the trouble, charge, or time lost, of summoning and assembling from so far, in so great a number, and so long residing from their own houses, or removing of their families,—to do as much at home in their several shires, entire or subdivided, towards the securing of their liberty, as a numerous Assembly of them all formed and convened on purpose with the wariest rotation."

Glance at some of Harrington's other notions:—"The way propounded [Milton's] is plain, easy, and open before us: without intricacies, without the introducement of new or obsolete forms or terms, or exotic models,—ideas that would effect nothing, but with a number of new injunctions to manacle the native liberty of mankind; turning all virtue into prescription, servitude, and necessity, to the great impairing and frustrating of Christian Liberty."

As if the very closeness of the vision of returning Royalty had rendered Milton's defiance of it more desperate and reckless, he inserts, wherever he can, some new expression of his contempt for Charles and all his family, and of his prophetic horror of the state of society they will bring in. Thus:—

"There will be a Queen of no less charge, in most likelihood outlandish and a Papist, besides a Queen-Mother, such already, together with both their Courts and numerous Train: then a Royal issue, and ere long severally their sumptuous Courts, to the multiplying of a servile crew, not of servants only, but of nobility and gentry, bred up then to the hopes not of public, but of court offices, to be Stewards, Chamberlains, Ushers, Grooms."

But the most terrific new passage in prediction of the Restoration and its revenges is the following: in which the reader will observe also the recognition, as in one spurn of boundless scorn, of the Royalist scurrilities against himself:—

"Admit that Monarchy of itself may be convenient to some nations; yet to us who have thrown it out, received back again, it cannot but prove pernicious. For Kings to come, never forgetting their former ejection, will be sure to fortify and arm themselves sufficiently for the future against all such attempts hereafter from the People; who shall be then so narrowly watched and kept so low that, though they would never so fain, and at the same rate of their blood and treasure, they never shall be able to regain what they now have purchased and may enjoy, or to free themselves from any yoke imposed upon them. Nor will they dare to go about it,—utterly disheartened for the future, if these their highest attempts prove unsuccessful: which will be the triumph of all Tyrants hereafter over any People that shall resist oppression; and their song will then be to others How sped the Rebellious English?, to our posterity How sped the Rebels your fathers?.... Yet neither shall we obtain or buy at an easy rate this new gilded yoke which thus transports us. A new Royal Revenue must be found, a new Episcopal,—for those are individual: both which, being wholly dissipated or bought by private persons, or assigned for service done, and especially to the Army, cannot be recovered without a general detriment and confusion to men's estates, or a heavy imposition on all men's purses,—benefit to none but to the worst and ignoblest sort of men, whose hope is to be either the ministers of Court riot and excess or the gainers by it. But, not to speak more of losses and extraordinary levies on our estates, what will then be the revenges and offences remembered and returned, not only by the Chief Person, but by all his adherents: accounts and reparations that will be required, suits, indictments, inquiries, discoveries, complaints, informations,—who knows against whom or how many, though perhaps neuters,—if not to utmost infliction, yet to imprisonment, fines, banishment, or molestation. If not these, yet disfavour, discountenance, disregard, and contempt on all but the known Royalist, or whom he favours, will be plenteous. Nor let the new-royalized Presbyterians persuade themselves that their old doings, though, now recanted, will be forgotten, whatever conditions be contrived or trusted on. Will they not believe this, nor remember the Pacification how it was kept to the Scots, how other solemn promises many a time to us? Let them but now read the diabolical forerunning libels, the faces, the gestures, that now appear foremost and briskest in all public places as the harbingers of those that are in expectation to reign over us; let them but hear the insolencies, the menaces, the insultings of our newly animated common enemies, crept lately out of their holes, their Hell I might say, by the language of their infernal pamphlets, the spew of every drunkard, every ribald: nameless, yet not for want of licence, but for very shame of their own vile persons; not daring to name themselves while they traduce others by name, and give us to foresee that they intend to second their wicked words, if ever they have power, with more wicked deeds. Let our zealous backsliders [the Presbyterians] forethink now with themselves how their necks, yoked with these tigers of Bacchus,—these new fanatics of not the preaching but the sweating tub, inspired with nothing holier than the venereal pox,—can draw one way, under Monarchy, to the establishing of Church-Discipline with these new-disgorged Atheisms. Yet shall they not have the honour to yoke with these, but shall be yoked under them: these shall plough on their backs. And do they among them who are so forward to bring in the Single Person think to be by him trusted or long regarded? So trusted they shall be and so regarded as by Kings are wont reconciled enemies,—neglected and soon after discarded, if not prosecuted for old traitors, the first inciters, beginners, and more than to the third part actors, of all that followed."

Milton, does not deny that the vast majority of the nation desire the restoration of the King. He admits the fact and scouts it. He asserts that by "the trial of just battle" the larger part of the population of England long ago "lost the right of their election what the form of Government shall be," and that, if even a majority of the rest would now vote for Kingship, their wishes must go for nothing. "Is it just or reasonable that most voices, against the main end of Government, should enslave the less number that would be free? More just it is, doubtless, if it come to force, that a less number compel a greater to retain (which can be no wrong to them) their liberty than that a greater number, for the pleasure of their baseness, compel a less most injuriously to be their fellow-slaves." When he wrote this, he must have known well enough that he was writing in vain. He confesses as much in his peroration. He confesses it there even by that single modification of the language which might seem at first sight the only sign of prudential concession and anticipation of personal consequences throughout the whole pamphlet. In citing the prophecy of Jeremiah he omits the passage exulting in God's decree of exile against Coniah and his seed for ever (ante p. 654-655). But this is no prudential concession, no softening down in anticipation that the passage might be produced against him. Of that state of mind, of any fear of consequences whatever, there is not a trace throughout the recast of his pamphlet. He is defying and daring the worst, and has thrown in already every possible addition of matter of insult to the coming Charles. He omits the passage about Coniah precisely because its application to Charles is unfortunately no longer possible; and the peroration for the rest is modified by the sorrow that so it should be. He will exhort against the Restoration to his latest breath; but he is looking across the Restoration now, and sending his words on to an unknown posterity.

"What I have spoken is the language of that which is not called amiss The Good Old Cause: if it seem strange to any, it will not seem more strange, I hope, than convincing to backsliders. Thus much I should perhaps have said though I were sure I should have spoken only to trees and stones, and had none to cry to but, with the Prophet, O Earth, Earth, Earth!, to tell the very soil itself what her perverse inhabitants are deaf to. Nay, though what I have spoken should happen (which Thou suffer not who didst create Mankind free, nor Thou next who didst redeem us from being servants of men!) to be the last words of our expiring Liberty. But I trust I shall have spoken persuasion to abundance of sensible and ingenuous men,—to some perhaps whom God may raise up of these stones to become children of reviving Liberty, and may reclaim, though they seem now choosing them a Captain back for Egypt, to bethink themselves a little and consider whither they are rushing; to exhort this torrent also of the people not to be so impetuous, but to keep their due channel; and, at length recovering and uniting their better resolutions, now that they see already how open and unbounded the insolence and rage is of our common enemies, to stay these ruinous proceedings, justly and timely fearing to what a precipice of destruction the deluge of this epidemic madness would hurry us, through the general defection of a misguided and abused multitude."

To exhort a torrent! The very mixture and hurry of the metaphors In Milton's mind are a reflex of the facts around him. Current, torrent, rush, rapid, avalanche, deluge hurrying to a precipice: mix and jumble such figures as we may, we but express more accurately the mad haste which London and all England were making in the end of April 1660 to bring Charles over from the Continent. Of the only important relic of opposition, the Republicanism of the Army, and how that had been already managed by Monk, and was still being managed by him, we have taken account. Its dying effort, as we saw, took the form of Lambert's escape from the Tower on the 9th of April, and his thirteen days of wild wandering and skulking on the chance of bringing the dispersed remains of Republicanism to a rendezvous. That was over on Easter-Sunday, April 22, when Dick Ingoldsby, with flushed face, and pistol in hand, collared the fugitive Lambert on his horse in a field near Daventry, and brought him back, with others, to his prison in the Tower. Strange that it should have been Lambert after all that Milton found maintaining last by arms the cause which he was himself maintaining last by the pen. Lambert was the Republican he least liked, hardly indeed a genuine Republican at all, though driven to a desperate attempt for Republicanism as his final shift, So it had happened, however. Milton and Lambert may be remembered together as the last opponents of the avalanche. Lambert had fronted it with a small rapier; Milton had wrestled with it in a grand exhortation.[1]

[Footnote 1: As the date of the second edition of Milton's Ready and Easy Way is a matter of real interest, it may be well to note here the evidence on the point furnished by the extracts that have been made. In the second extract the phrase "What can this last Parliament expect, who, having revived lately and published the Covenant &c.?" seems distinctly to certify that Milton was writing after the 16th of March, when the Parliament of the Secluded Members had dissolved itself. The first extract, giving the new and enlarged form of the opening paragraph, farther indicates that, while Milton was writing, the country was in the midst of the elections for the new "free and full" Parliament which had been called,—i.e. what is now known as The Convention Parliament. He thinks that his pamphlet, as modified, "may now be of much more use and concernment to be freely published in the midst of our elections to a Free Parliament or their sitting to consider freely of the Government." Now, the elections went on from the end of March to about the 20th of April, and Milton's words almost imply that he expected them to be pretty well advanced before his second edition was in circulation, so that the effect of that new edition, if it had any, would rather be on the Parliament itself after its meeting on April 25. The passages referring to Harrington, and which seem to imply that Milton had read the Censure of the Rota on his first edition, would also bring the second edition into the month of April, inasmuch as the Censure was not out till March 30. Finally, the whole tone of the added passages implies, as we have already said, that Milton was at least a month farther down the stream towards the Restoration than when the first edition appeared, and the fact that in this second edition he utterly cancels and withdraws the small lingering of faith in Monk which he had expressed in his Notes to Dr. Griffith's Sermon seems more particularly to certify that those Notes preceded the new edition of the Ready and Easy Way by a week or more. On the whole, I do not think I am wrong in regarding the new edition as Milton's very last performance before the Restoration, and in dating it somewhere between April 9, the day of Lambert's escape from the Tower, and April 24, when Lambert was brought back a prisoner to London and the members of the Convention Parliament were already gathered in town. As Thomason's copy of the first edition is marked "March 3," this would make the interval between the two editions about a month and a half.]

The wrestlings now were ended. All that remained for the blind Samson was to listen, with bowed head, to the renewed burst of Philistine hissings, howlings, and execrations, against him, before they would let him retire. It came from all quarters; but at least two persons stepped out from the crowd to convert the mere inarticulate uproar into distinct invective and insult.

"No Blinde Guides: in answer to a seditious Pamphlet of J. Milton's entituled 'Brief Notes on a late Sermon, &c.' Addressed to the Author.—'If the Blinde lead the Blinde, both shall fall into the ditch.'—London, Printed for Henry Brome, April 20, 1660." This was the title of a tract, of fourteen small quarto pages, which was out on April 25. The author does not give his name; but he was Roger L'Estrange, the Royalist pamphleteer.[1] The following specimen will represent the rest:—

[Footnote 1: Wood's Ath. III. 712. The date of the actual appearance of the tract is from the Thamason copy.]

"Mr. Milton,

"Although in your life and doctrine you have resolved one great question, by evidencing that devils may indue human shapes and proving yourself even to your own wife an incubus, you have yet started another; and that is whether you are not of that regiment which carried the herd of swine headlong into the sea, and moved the people to beseech Jesus to depart out of their coasts. (This may be very well imagined from your suitable practices here.) Is it possible to read your Proposals of the benefits of a Free State without reflecting upon your tutor's 'All this will I give thee if thou wilt fall down and worship me'? Come, come, Sir: lay the Devil aside; do not proceed with so much malice and against knowledge. Act like a man, that a good Christian may not be afraid to pray for you. Was it not you that scribbled a justification of the murder of the King against Salmasius, and made it good too thus: that murder was an action meritorious compared with your superior wickedness? 'Tis there (as I remember) that you commonplace yourself into set forms of railing, two pages thick; and, lest your infamy should not extend itself enough within the course and usage of your mother-tongue, the thing is dressed up in a travelling garb and language, to blast the English nation to the universe, and give every man a horror for mankind when he considers you are of the race. In this you are above all others; but in your Eikonoklastes you exceed yourself. There, not content to see that sacred head divided from the body, your piercing malice enters into the private agonies of his struggling soul, with a blasphemous insolence invading the prerogative of God himself (omniscience), and by deductions most unchristian and illogical aspersing his last pieties (the almost certain inspirations of the Holy Spirit) with juggle and prevarication. Nor are the words ill-fitted to the matter, the bold design being suited with a conform irreverence of language. But I do not love to rake long in a puddle. To take a view in particular of all your factious labours would cost more time than I am willing to afford them. Wherefore I shall stride over all the rest and pass directly to your Brief Notes upon a late Sermon ... Any man that can but read your title may understand your drift, and that you charge the royal interest and party through the Doctor's sides. I am not bold enough to be his champion in all particulars, nor yet so rude as to take an office most properly to him belonging out of his hand. Let him acquit himself in what concerns the divine; and I'll adventure upon the most material parts of the rest." [Extracts from Milton's Notes on Dr. Griffith's Sermon follow, with brief comments, of no interest, and showing no ability.]

Almost immediately there followed "The Dignity of Kingship Asserted: in answer to Mr. Milton's 'Ready and Easie Way to establish a Free Commonwealth.' Proving that Kinqship is both in itself and in reference to these nations farre the most Excellent Government, and the returning to our former Loyalty or Obedience thereto is the only way under God to restore and settle these three once flourishing, now languishing, broken, and almost ruined nations. By G. S., a Lover of Loyalty. Humbly Dedicated and Presented to his most Excellent Majesty Charles the Second, of England, Scotland, France, and Ireland, true Hereditary King. London, Printed by E.C. for H. Seile, over against St. Dunstan's Church in Fleet-street, and for W. Palmer at the Palm-Tree over against Fetter-lane end in Fleet Street. 1660." It is a duodecimo volume, the dedication to Charles occupying twenty-one pages, and the main body of the text 177 pages, with a peroration in thirty-nine additional pages addressed to Monk and his Officers and to the two Houses of Parliament about to meet, and then three pages more of concluding address to his Majesty. Though the author does not give his name, he hints in the course of the volume that he may "be inquired after and perhaps soon found out." He says also that his profession "much differs from politics." Hence it may be doubted whether the conjecture is right which assigns the book to a George Searle, who had been an original member of the Long Parliament for Taunton, and had been one of the Secluded. One might venture rather on the query whether the author may not have been Dr. Gilbert Sheldon, soon to be Bishop of London and Archbishop of Canterbury, but for the present waiting with anxiety for the certainty of Charles's recall, and doing all he could, with other divines, to hasten it.[1]

[Footnote 1: The Thomason copy gives "May," without any day, as the date of publication; but I find the book entered in the Stationers' Registers as early as March 31, 1660. The writing had been then begun, and the printing of the book had been going on through April. There is internal evidence that the new Parliament had not met, or at least that the Restoration was not positively resolved on, when the book was finished. Both in the dedication and in the peroration, the parts last written, the event is spoken of as only in near prospect.—Sheldon, though a man of public distinction in his time, has left hardly any writings by which his style could be ascertained. I think the guess worth risking that the present performance may have been his, if only because the offer of the guess may lead to its confutation. George Searle is the man proposed by the bibliographers (see Bohn's Lowndes, Art. Milton, and note p. 108 of Todd's Life of Milton, edit. 1852); but I know not on what authority except that his initials are "G.S." and that he was "a writer."—As far as I have observed, it was the first edition of Milton's pamphlet only that G.S. had before him as he wrote.]

Whoever wrote the book must have had a touch of scholarly candour in his nature. Though there is plenty of abuse of Milton, with the stereotyped allusions to his Divorce Doctrine and its effects, and with such occasional phrases as "your wind-mill brain," "the unpracticableness of these your fanatic state-whimsies," and though there is abuse also, in the coarse familiar strain, of the Rumpers and Commonwealths-men generally, and of "Oliver, the copper-nosed saint," we come upon such passages as the following, appreciative at least of Milton's literary power:—

"I am not ignorant of the ability of Mr. Milton, whom the Rump (which was well-stored with men of pregnant though pernicious wits) made choice of before others to write their Defence against Salmasius; one of the greatest learned men of this age, both for reality and reputation."

"... made choice of Mr. Milton to be their champion to answer Salmasius; who, as may be conceived, not vulgarly rewarded for this service, undertakes it with as much learning and performance as could be expected from the most able and acute scholar living: concerning whose answer thus much must be confessed,—that nothing could be therein desired which either a shrewd wit could prompt or a fluent elegant style express. And, indeed, to give him his due, in whatever he vomited out against his Majesty formerly, or now declaims against Monarchy in behalf of a Republic, he then did, and doth now, want nothing on his side but truth."

These are casual expressions in the course of the argumentation with Milton; and, as there is no need to exhibit the argumentation itself, a single quotation more will suffice. It is from the Dedication to Charles II. That, though coming first in the book, was probably written last, when the writer could exult in the idea that his Majesty was so soon to land on the British shores, and could have pleasure in being one of the first to address him ceremoniously and in public with all his royal titles. Let it be remembered that, by the introduction of Milton into this Dedication, not only prominently, but even singly and exclusively, it was as if pains were taken to remind Charles, just as he was preparing to step into the ship that was to convey him to England, of the name of that one man among his subjects who had done more to keep him out, and had attacked him and his more ferociously, more relentlessly, and more successfully, than any other living. Suppose that his Majesty, waiting at Breda, was curious to know already, for certain reasons, what person, not on the actual list of those who had signed his father's death-warrant, would be designated to him by universal opinion at home as the least pardonable traitor; and read this as the answer of G.S.:—

This detestable, execrable murder, committed by the worst of parricides, accompanied with the disclaiming of your whole royal stock, disinheriting your Majesty's self and the rest of the royal branches, driving you and them into exile, with endeavouring to expunge and obliterate your never-to-be-forgotten just title; tearing up and pulling down the pillars of Majesty, the Nobles; garbling and suspending from the place of power all of the Commons House that had anything of honesty or relenting of spirit toward the injured Father of three Nations and his royal posterity: acts horrible to be imagined, and yet with high hand most villainously, perfidiously, and perjuriously perpetrated by monsters of mankind, yet blasphemously dishonourers of God in making use of His name and usurping the title of Saints in their never-before-paralleled nor ever-sufficiently-to-be-lamented-and-abhorred villanies:—this Murder, I say, and these Villainies, were defended, nay extolled and commended, by one MR. JOHN MILTON, in answer to the most learned Salmasius, who declaimed against the same with most solid arguments and pathetical expressions; in which Answer he did so bespatter the white robes of your Royal Father's spotless life (human infirmities excepted) with the dirty filth of his satirical pen that to the vulgar, and those who read his book with prejudice, he represented him a most debauched, vicious man (I tremble, Royal Sir, to write it), an irreligious hater and persecutor of Religion and religious men, an ambitious enslaver of the nation, a bloody tyrant, and an implacable enemy to all his good subjects; and thereupon calls that execrable and detestable horrible Murder a just Execution, and commends it as an heroic action: and, in a word, whatever was done in prosecution of their malice toward your Royal Progenitor and his issue, or relations, or friends and assistants, he calls Restoring of the nation to its Liberty. Yea! to make your illustrious Father more odious in their eyes where he by any means could fix his scandals, he would not spare that incomparable piece of his writing, his Eikon Basilike, but in a scurrilous reply thereto, which he entitled Eikonoklastes, he would not spare his devout prayers (which no doubt the Lord hath heard and will hear): in all which he expressed, as his inveterate and causeless malice, so a great deal of wicked, desperate wit and learning, most unworthily misbestowed, abused, and misapplied, to the reviling of his Prince, God's vice-gerent on Earth, and the speaking ill of the Ruler of the People. Now, although your Majesty, nor your Royal Father, neither of you, need vindication (much less that elaborate work of his), nor doth anything he hath written in aspersion of his Sovereign deserve answer (absolutely considered), yet, forasmuch as he hath in both showed dangerous wit and wicked learning, which together with elegance in expression is always (in some measure at least) persuasive with some, and because in these last and worst days those dangerous times are come in which many account Treason to be Saintship, and the madness of the people, like the inundation of waters, hath for many years overflowed all the bounds, &c ... [The writer, in continuation, refers to the assiduity of the fanatical enemies of Charles, still working, though at the end of their wits, to keep him out.] Among many of whom MR. MILTON comes on the stage in post haste and in this juncture of time, that he may, if possible, overthrow the hopes of all good men, and endeavours what he can to divert those that at present sit at the helm, and by fair pretences and sophisticate arguments would, &c ... Which I taking notice of, and meeting with this forementioned pamphlet of MR. MILTON'S, and upon perusal of it finding it dangerously ensnaring, the fallacy of the arguments being so cunningly hidden as not to be discerned by any nor every eye,—observing also the language to be smooth and tempting, the expressions pathetical and apt to move the affections, ... I thought it my duty, &c.

Before this salutation of his returning Majesty was visible on the book-stalls the great event which it anticipated was as good as accomplished.

The two Houses of Parliament had met on Wednesday, the 25th of April. There was not only the "full and free" House of Commons for which writs had been issued, but a House of Lords also, assembled by its own will and motion. In the Commons, where Sir Harbottle Grimstone was elected Speaker, there were present over 400 out of the total of 500 and more that were actually due; in the Lords, where the Earl of Manchester was chosen Speaker pro tem., there were present on the first day only nine peers besides himself: viz. the Earls of Northumberland, Lincoln, Denbigh, and Suffolk, Viscount Say and Sele, and Lords Wharton, Hunsdon, Grey of Wark, and Maynard. It was for these two bodies to execute between them the task appointed.[1]

[Footnote 1: Commons Journals and Parl. Hist., for the opening of the Convention Parliament.]

The meetings of the first three days were but preliminary, and not a word passed in either House to signify what was coming. On Friday, the 27th of April, there was an adjournment of both Houses to Tuesday, the 1st of May. During that breathless interval it was as when a mine is ready, the gunpowder and other explosives all stored, the train laid, and what is waited for is the application of the lighted match. That duty fell to Sir John Greenville, and the mode in which it should be performed was settled privately between him and wary Old George.

On Saturday, April 28, the Council of State are met at Whitehall, Annesley in the chair as usual. Colonel Birch, one of the members, entering late, informs General Monk that there is a gentleman at the door who desires to speak with him. Monk goes to the door, finds Sir John Greenville there, and receives him as a perfect stranger, the guards looking on. Sir John delivers to him a letter, and tells him that he does so by command of his Majesty. Monk orders the guards to detain this gentleman, and returns to the Council-room with the letter. Having broken the seal, but not opened the letter, he hands it to the President, intimating from whom it has come. The superscription itself leaves no doubt on that point. The letter is one of the six, dated "At our Court at Breda this 4/14th of April 1660, in the twelfth year of Our Reign," which Sir John Greenville had brought over to be used by Monk at his discretion, and which Monk had given back into Greenville's custody till the proper moment for using them should arrive. It was that particular one of the six which was addressed to Monk himself, to be communicated by him to the Council of State and the Officers of the Army. There was much surprise in the Council, real or affected, Colonel Birch protesting that he knew nothing of the business, but had merely found a gentleman at the door inquiring for General Monk and had brought in his message to the General. That gentleman was sent for and asked how he came by the letter. "It was given to me by his Majesty with his own hand," said Sir John. Altogether the Council were at a loss how to act; but finally it was agreed that they dared not read the letter without leave from Parliament. There was some question of sending Greenville into custody meanwhile; but Monk said he was a kinsman of his and he would be answerable for his appearance. In short, this attempt to apply the match in the Council had not sufficiently succeeded, and Sir John knew that he must be forthcoming in the two Houses themselves.

Sir John was equal to the occasion. Early in the morning of Tuesday, the 1st of May, he was at the door of the House of Lords with that one of the six Letters from Breda which was addressed to their Lordships. There were now forty-two peers present. By one of these Greenville sent in his name to Speaker the Earl of Manchester, with an intimation of the nature of his message. The Earl had no sooner informed the House who and what were at the door than it was voted that the Earl should walk down the floor, all present attending him, to receive his Majesty's letter. Sir John having thus got rid of two of his documents, presented himself next at the door of the Commons, to try his chance with a third. He had already conveyed to Speaker Sir Harbottle Grimstone the fact that he was in attendance with a letter from his Majesty. He came now at the most fit moment, for the House had just received a report from the Council of State of what had happened at the sitting of the Council on the preceding Saturday. The scene will be best imagined from the record in the Journals of the House:—"Tuesday, May the 1st, 1660. PRAYERS. Mr. Annesley reports from the Council of State a Letter from the King, unopened, directed 'To our trusty and well-beloved General Monk, to be communicated to the President and Council of State, and to the Officers of the Armies under his command,' being received from the hands of Sir John Greenville. The House, being informed that Sir John Greenville, a messenger from the King, was at the door, Resolved, &c. That Sir John Greenville, a messenger from the King, be called in. He was called in accordingly, and, being at the bar, after obeisance made, said: 'Mr. Speaker, I am commanded by the King, my master, to deliver this Letter to You, and he desires that You will communicate it to the House.' The Letter was directed 'To Our trusty and well-beloved the Speaker of the House of Commons'; which, after the messenger was withdrawn, was read to the House by the Speaker." The bold Sir John had now got rid of three of his six documents. Nay, he had got rid of four; for in each of the three there had been enclosed a copy of his Majesty's general Declaration, or Letter to "all Our Loving Subjects of what degree or quality soever." It was for the Parliament to determine what should be done with this Declaration, as well as with the other two remaining Letters, one of them addressed to Generals Monk and Montague for communication to the Fleet, and the other to the Lord Mayor, Aldermen, and Common Council of the City of London. The train had been sufficiently fired already by the delivery of four of the Breda documents.[1]

[Footnote 1: Lords and Commons Journals of dates; Parl. Hist. IV. 10-25; Phillips (continuation of Baker), 701-705; Skinner's Life of Monk, 297-302; Whitlocke, IV. 409-411.]

The explosion was over and the air cleared, and all pretence was at an end at last. In the Commons, a few minutes after Sir John Greenville had left the House, it was "RESOLVED, nemine contradicente, That an answer be prepared to his Majesty's Letter, expressing the great and joyful sense of this House of His gracious offers, and their humble and hearty thanks to his Majesty for the same, and with professions of their loyalty and duty to his Majesty." The Lords had already passed an equivalent resolution, and had recalled Sir John Greenville to receive their hearty thanks for his care in the discharge of his duty. The rest of that day was spent in a conference between the two Houses, and in farther resolutions and arrangements in each, subsidiary to those two resolutions of the forenoon which had virtually decreed the Restoration. Thus, in the Commons, still in the forenoon, "RESOLVED, nemine contradicente, that the sum of L50,000 be presented to the King's Majesty from this House," and "RESOLVED, nemine contradicente, that the Letters from His Majesty, both that to the House and that to the Lord General, and his Majesty's Declaration which came enclosed, be entered at large in the Journal Book of this House"; and, again, at an afternoon sitting, the conference with the Lords having meanwhile been held, "RESOLVED, That this House doth agree with the Lords, and do own and declare that, according to the ancient and fundamental laws of this kingdom, the Government is, and ought to be, by King, Lords, and Commons." The news of what was doing in Parliament was already rushing hither and thither among the Londoners; the day ended among them, of course, with bonfires and ringing of bells and the roar of rejoicing cannon; in the boom of the cannon, and in whatever form of rude telegraph or of horsemen at the gallop along the four great highways, London was shaking the message from itself in palpitations through all the land; nor among the galloping horsemen were those the least fleet that were spurring through Kent to the seaside to unmoor the packet-boats and convey the tidings to Charles. On the 1st of May, 1660, the English Commonwealth was no more.[1]

[Footnote 1: Commons Journals and Parl. Hist. of dates; Whitlocke, IV. 411.]

Yet another week for the formalities of its burial. A few of the leading incidents of that week may be presented in abstract:—

May 2:—Ordered by the Lords "that the statues of the late King's Majesty be set up again in all the places from whence they were pulled down, and that the Arms of the Commonwealth be demolished and taken away wherever they are, and the King's Arms be put up in their stead." Same day in the Commons:—Leave given to the Lord Mayor, Aldermen, and Common Council of the City of London, to return an answer to his Majesty's Letter addressed to them. This was the fifth of the Breda documents. Also leave given to Dr. Clarges, a member of the House, to go at once to Breda, with Monk's answer to the letter he had received.

May 3:—Sir John Greenville brought into the House of Commons to receive thanks, and the information that the House had voted him L500 to buy a jewel. The Speaker, Sir Harbottle Grimstone, addressed him as follows:—"Sir John Greenville, I need not tell you with what grateful and thankful hearts the Commons now assembled in Parliament have received his Majesty's gracious Letter. Res ipsa loquitur: you yourself have been ocularis et auricularis testis de rei veritate: our bells and our bonfires have already proclaimed his Majesty's goodness and our joys. We have told the people that our King, the glory of England, is coming home again; and they have resounded it back again in our ears that they are ready, and their hearts open, to receive him. Both Parliament and People have cried aloud to the King of Kings in their prayers Long live King Charles the Second." The rest of the speech was compliment to Sir John himself.

Same day, in Montague's Fleet in the Downs:—His Majesty's letter to Monk and Montague, intended to be communicated to the Fleet, having been sent by express from Monk, reached Montague that morning on board his flagship the Naseby. His secretary Pepys describes what followed: "My Lord summoned a Council of War, and in the meantime did dictate to me how he would have the vote ordered which he would have pass this Council. Which done, the Commanders all came on board, and the Council sat in the coach [Council cabin], the first Council of War that had been in my time; where I read the Letter and Declaration; and, while they were discoursing upon it, I seemed to draw up a vote, which, being offered, they passed. Not one man seemed to say No to it, though I am confident many in their hearts were against it. After this was done, I went up to the quarterdeck with my Lord and the Commanders, and there read both the papers and the vote; which done, and demanding their opinion, the seamen did all of them cry out God save King Charles." Pepys then made a circuit of the other ships with the same great news. "Which was a very brave sight, to visit all the ships, and to be received with the respect and honour that I was on board them all, and much more to see the great joy that I brought to all men, not one through the whole fleet shewing the least dislike of the business. In the evening, as I was going on board the Vice-Admiral, the General began to fire his guns, which he did, all that he had in his ship, and so did all the rest of the Commanders; which was very gallant, and to hear the bullets go hissing over our heads as we were in the boat! This done, and finished my proclamation, I returned to the Naseby, where my Lord was much pleased to hear how all the fleet took it in a transport of joy, and shewed me a private letter of the King's to him, and another from the Duke of York, in such familiar style as their common friend, with all kindness imaginable. And I found by the letters, and so my Lord told me too, that there had been many letters passed between them for a great while, and I perceive unknown to Monk."