Skinner Transcript as No. 120 with the title _Duci Subaudiæ_,
and printed thence by Mr. Hamilton in his _Milton Papers_ (pp.
11-12). No date is given in the Skinner Transcript; and the insertion
of the letter here is a mere guess. The place where it occurs in the
Skinner Transcript suggests that it came rather late in the
Protectorate, perhaps even after the present point. The years 1656
and 1657 seem the likeliest.]
(CXI.) TO THE MARQUIS OF BRANDENBURG, _Sept._ 1657:--This is
an important letter. "By our last letter to your Highness," it
begins, "either already delivered or soon to be delivered by our
agent WILLIAM JEPHSON, we have made you aware of the legation
intrusted to him; and we could not but there make some mention of
your high qualities and signification of our goodwill towards you.
Lest, however, we should seem only cursorily to have touched on
your superlative services in the Protestant cause, celebrated so
highly in universal discourse, we have thought it fit to resume
that subject, and to offer you our respects, not indeed more
willingly or with greater devotion, but yet somewhat more at large.
And justly so, when news is brought to our ears every day that your
faith and constancy, though tempted by all kinds of intrigues,
solicited by all contrivances, yet cannot by any means be shaken,
or diverted from the friendship of the brave King your ally,--and
that too when the affairs of the Swedes are in such a posture that,
in preserving their alliance, it is manifest your Highness is led
rather by regard to the common cause of the Reformed Religion than
by your own interests; when we know too that, though surrounded on
all sides, and all but besieged, either by hidden or nearly
imminent enemies, you yet, with your valiant but far from large
forces, stand out with such firmness and strength of mind, such
counsel and prowess of generalship, that the sum and weight of the
whole business seems to rest, and the issue of this war to depend,
mainly on your will." The Protector goes on to say that, in such
circumstances, he would consider it unworthy of himself not to
testify in a special manner his sympathy with the Elector and
regard for him. He apologizes for delay hitherto in treating with
the Elector's agent in London, JOHN FREDERICK SCHLEZER, on the
matters about which he had been sent; and he closes with fervent
good wishes.--Evidently, the recognition of the importance of the
Elector, and anxiety as to the part he might take in the war now
involving Sweden, Denmark, Poland, and part of Germany, had been
growing stronger in Cromwell's mind within the last few weeks. From
the language of the letter one would infer either that Cromwell did
not yet fully know of that treaty of Nov. 1656 by which the Polish
King had bought off the Elector from the Swedish alliance by ceding
to him the full sovereignty of East Prussia, or else that since
then the Elector had been oscillating back to the
alliance.--SCHLEZER had been in London since 1655, and had lodged
at Hartlib's house in the end of that year.[1]
[Footnote 1: Letter of Hartlib's in Worthington's Diary and
Correspondence, edited by Crossley (I, 66).]
Ten Latin State-letters nearly all at once, implying as they do
consultations with Thurloe, if not also interviews with the Protector
and the Council, argue a pretty considerable demand upon Milton at
this date for help again in the Foreign Secretaryship.
It would seem, however, that it had occurred to the Protector and the
Council that they were again troubling Mr. Milton too much or left
too dependent on him, and that, with the increase of foreign business
now in prospect in consequence of the Swedo-Danish war and its
complications, it would be well to have an assistant to him, such as
Meadows had been. Accordingly, at a meeting of the Council on Tuesday
Sept. 8, 1657, Cromwell himself present, with Lawrence, Fleetwood,
Lord Lisle, Strickland, Pickering, Sydenham, Wolseley, and Thurloe,
there was this minute: "Ordered by his Highness the Lord Protector,
by and with the advice of the Council, that MR. STERRY do, in the
absence of Mr. Philip Meadows, officiate in the employment of Mr.
Meadows under Mr. Secretary [Thurloe], and that a salary of 200 merks
_per annum_ be allowed him for the same."[1] Whether this Mr.
Sterry was the preacher Mr. Peter Sterry, already employed and
salaried as one of the Chaplains to the Council, or only a relative
of his, I have not ascertained; but it is of the less consequence
because the appointment did not take effect. The person actually
appointed was MR. ANDREW MARVELL at last. We say "at last," for had
he not been recommended for the precise post by Milton four years and
a half before under the Rump Government? Milton may have helped now
to bring him in, or it may have been done by Oliver himself in
recognition of Marvell's merits in his tutorship of young Dutton and
of his Latin and English Oliverian verses. There seems to be no
record of Marvell's appointment in the Order Books; but he tells us
himself it was in the year 1657. "As to myself," he wrote in 1672,
"I never had any, not the remotest, relation to public matters, nor
correspondence with the persons then predominant, until the year
1657, when indeed I entered into an employment for which I was not
altogether improper." When Marvell wrote this, he was oblivious of
some particulars; for, though it is true that he was in no public
employment under the Protectorate till 1657, it can hardly be said
that he had not "the remotest relation" till then to public matters,
nor any "correspondence with the persons then predominant." Enough
for us that, from the year he specifies, and precisely from September
in that year, he was Milton's colleague in the Foreign or Latin
Secretaryship. "_Colleague_" we may call him, for his salary was
to be £200 a year (not 200 merks, as had been proposed for Sterry),
the same as Milton's was, and the same as Meadows's had been; and yet
not _quite_ "colleague," inasmuch as Milton's £200 a year was a
life-pension, and also inasmuch as, in stepping into Meadows's place,
Marvell became one of Thurloe's subordinates in the office, while
something of the original honorary independence of the Foreign
Secretaryship still encircled Milton.--Just as Marvell had for some
time been wistful after a place in the Council Office, suitable for a
scholar and Latinist, so there was another person now in the same
condition of outside waiting and occasional looking-in. "Received
then of the Right honble. Mr. Secretary Thurloe the sume of fifty
pounds: £50: _by mee_, JOHN DRIDEN" is a receipt, of date "19
October 1657," among Thurloe's papers in the Record Office--the words
"_by mee_, JOHN DRIDEN" in a neat slant hand, different from the
body of the receipt. The poet Dryden, it may be remembered, was the
cousin and client of Sir Gilbert Pickering, one of the most important
men in the Council and one of the most strongly Oliverian. The poet
left Cambridge, his biographers tell us, without his M.A. degree,
"about the middle of 1657," and it was a taunt against him afterwards
that he had begun his London life as "clerk" to Sir Gilbert. As he
cannot have got the £50 from Thurloe for nothing, the probability is
that he had been employed, through Sir Gilbert, to do some clerkly
or literary work for the Council. No harm, at all events, in
remembering the ages at this date of the three men of letters thus
linked to the Protectorate at its centre. Milton was in his
forty-ninth year, Marvell in his thirty-eighth, Dryden in his
twenty-seventh.[2]
[Footnote 1: Council Order Books of date.]
[Footnote 2: Marvell's _Rehearsal Transprosed_ (in Mr. Grosart's
edition of Marvell's Prose Works), I. 322; Receipt in Record Office
as quoted; Christie's Memoir of Dryden prefixed to Globe edition of
Dryden's Poetical Works.--That Marvell was appointed Milton's
colleague or assistant precisely in September 1657 is proved by the
fact that his first quarter's salary appears in certain accounts as
due in the following December (see Thurloe, VII. 487).]
On the day on which Dryden received his fifty pounds from Thurloe
there was this entry in the birth-registers of the parish of St.
Margaret's, Westminster: "October 19, 1657, _Katherin Milton, d. to
John, Esq., by Katherin_." The entry may be still read in the
book, with these words appended in an old hand some time afterwards:
"_This is Milton, Oliver's Secretary_." It is the record of the
birth of a daughter to Milton by his second wife, Katharine Woodcock,
in the twelfth month of their marriage. The little incident reminds
us at this point of the domestic life in Petty France; but it need
not delay us. We proceed with the Secretaryship.
Whatever share of the regular work of the Foreign Department may have
been now allotted to Marvell, an occasional letter was still required
from Milton. The following Latin dispatches were written by him
between September 1657 and Jan. 1657-8, when the Protector's Second
Parliament reassembled for its second session, as a Parliament of two
Houses:--
(CXII.) TO M. DE BORDEAUX, THE FRENCH AMBASSADOR, _Oct._
1657:--This is not in the Protector's name, but in that of the
President of the Council. It is about the case of a Luke Lucy
(_Lucas Lucius_) a London merchant. A ship of his, called
_The Mary_, bound from Ireland to Bayonne, had been driven by
tempest into the port of St. Jean de Luz, seized there at the suit
of one Martin de Lazon, and only discharged on security given to
abide a trial at law of this person's claim. Now, his claim was
preposterous. It was founded on an alleged loss of money as far
back as 1642 by the seizure by the English Parliament of goods on
board a ship called _The Santa Clara_. He was not the owner of
the goods, but only agent, with a partner of his, called Antonio
Fernandez, for the real owners; there had been a quarrel between
the partners; and the Parliament had stopped the goods till it
should be decided by law who ought to have them. Fernandez was
willing to try the action in the English Courts; but De Lauzon had
made no appearance there. And now De Lauzon had hit on the
extraordinary expedient of seizing Lucy's ship and dragging the
totally innocent Lucy into an action in the French Courts. All
which having been represented to the Protector by Lucy's petition,
it is begged that De Lauzon may be told he must go another way to
work.
(CXIII.) TO THE DOGE AND SENATE OF VENICE, _Oct._ 1657:--A
rather long letter, and not uninteresting. First the Protector
congratulates the Venetians on their many victories over the Turks,
not only because of the advantage thence to the Venetian State, but
also because of the tendency of such successes to "the liberation
of all Christians under Turkish servitude." But, under cover of
this congratulation, he calls to their attention again the case of
a certain brave ship-captain, Thomas Galilei (_Thomam
Galileum_). He had, some five years ago, done gallant service
for the Venetians in his ship called _The Relief_, fighting
alone with a whole fleet of Turkish galleys and making great havoc
among them, till, his own ship having caught fire, he had been
taken and carried away as a slave. For five years he had been in
most miserable captivity, unable to ransom himself because he had
no property in the world besides what might be owing to him for his
ship and services by the Venetian Government. He had an old father
still alive, "full of grief and tears which have moved Us
exceedingly"; and this old man begs, and His Highness begs, that
the Doge and Senate will arrange for the immediate release of the
captive. They must have taken many Turkish prisoners in their late
victories, and it is understood that those who detain the captive
are willing to exchange him for any Turk of equal value. Also his
Highness hopes the Doge and Senate will pay at once to the old man
whatever may be due to his captive son. This, his Highness
believes, had been arranged for after his former application on the
subject; but probably, in the multiplicity of business, the matter
had been overlooked. May the Republic of Venice long flourish, and
God grant them victories over the Turks to the very end!
(CXIV.) TO THE HIGH AND MIGHTY LORDS, THE STATES GENERAL OF THE
UNITED PROVINCES, _Nov._ 1657:--This is a letter of
commendation of the Dutch Ambassador William Nieuport on his
temporary return home on private affairs (see ante p. 312). Through
the "several years" of His Highness's acquaintance with him, he had
found him of "such fidelity, vigilance, prudence, and justice, in
the discharge of his office" that he could not desire a better
Ambassador, or believe their High Mightinesses could find a better
one. He cannot take leave of him, though but for a short time,
without saying as much. Throughout his embassy, his aim had been,
"without deceit or dissimulation," to preserve the peace and
friendship that had been established; and, so long as he should be
Dutch Ambassador in London, his Highness did not see "what occasion
of offence or scruple could rankle or sprout up" between the two
States. At the present juncture he should regret his departure the
more if he were not assured that no man would better represent to
their High Mightinesses the Protector's goodwill to them and the
condition of things generally. "May God, for His own glory and the
defence of the Orthodox Church, grant prosperity to your affairs
and perpetuity to our friendship!"--In writing this letter, Milton
must have remembered Nieuport's interference in behalf of Morus,
for the suppression at the last moment, if possible, of the
_Defensio Secunda_. He had not quite relished that
interference, or the manner of it. See Vol. IV, pp. 631-633, and
ante p. 202-203.
(CXV.) TO THEIR HIGH MIGHTINESSES THE STATES GENERAL OF THE UNITED
PROVINCES, _Dec._ 1657:--A fit sequel to the foregoing, for it
is the Letter Credential to GEORGE DOWNING, just selected to be his
Highness's Resident at the Hague, and so the counterpart of
Nieuport (ante p. 312). "GEORGE DOWNING," it begins, "a gentleman
of rank, has been for a long time now, by experience of him in many
and various transactions, recognised and known by Us as of the
highest fidelity, probity, and ability." He is, accordingly,
recommended in the usual manner; and there is intimation, though
not in language so strong as that of Lockhart's credentials to
France, that "communications" with him will be the same as with his
Highness personally. "Communications" only this case, Downing not
being a plenipotentiary like Lockhart.[1]
[Footnote 1: Downing's father was Emanuel Downing, a settler in
Massachusetts, and his mother was a sister of the celebrated
Governor John Winthrop. Though born in this country (in or near
Dublin in 1623), their son had grown up in New England, much under
the charge of Hugh Peters, who was related to him. He graduated at
Harvard University in 1642. Thence he had come to England, and, from
being a preacher in Okey's regiment of dragoons in the New Model
(1645), had passed gradually into other employments. He had been
Scoutmaster-General to the Army in Scotland (1653), but had been
attached since 1655 to Thurloe's office, and employed, as we have
seen, in diplomatic missions. His appointment to be Cromwell's
minister at the Hague was a great promotion. His salary in the post
was to be £1100 a year, worth nearly £4000 a year now. (Sibley's
_Biographical Sketches of Graduates of Harvard University_. I.
28-53, with corrections at p. 583.)]
(CXVI.) TO THE PROVINCIAL STATES OF HOLLAND, _Dec._
1657:--While recommending DOWNING to the States General, his
Highness cannot refrain from recommending him also specially to the
States of Holland, self-governed as they are internally, and "so
important a part of the United Provinces" besides.
(CXVII.) TO FERDINAND, GRAND DUKE OF TUSCANY, _Dec._
1657:--The Protector's last letter to the Grand Duke (ante 372) had
produced immediate effect. The rascally Englishman Ellis, who, to
the discredit of English and Christian good faith, had run off
with the cargo of rice, sugar, and coffee, belonging to the Sultan
of Turkey, had been arrested in Leghorn. So the Grand Duke had
informed Cromwell in a letter dated Nov. 10. The present is a reply
to that letter, and is very characteristic. "We give you thanks for
this good office; and now we make this farther request,--that, as
soon as the merchants have undertaken that satisfaction shall be
made to the, Turks, the said Master be liberated from custody, and
the ship and her lading be forthwith let off, lest perchance we
should seem to have made more account of the Turks than of our own
citizens. Meanwhile we relish so agreeably your Highness's
singular, conspicuous, and most acceptable good-will towards us
that we should not refuse the brand of ingratitude if we did not
eagerly desire a speedy opportunity of gratifying you in return by
the like promptitude, by means of which we might prove to you in
very deed our readiness also in returning good offices. Your
Highness's most affectionate OLIVER."
To the same month as the last three of these Latin State-Letters
belong two more of Milton's Latin Familiar Epistles. The persons to
whom they are addressed are already known to us:
"To the very distinguished MR. HENRY DE BRASS.
"Having been hindered these days past by some occupations,
illustrious Sir, I reply later than I meant. For I meant to do so
all the more speedily because I saw that your present letter, full
of learning as it is, did not so much leave me room for suggesting
anything to you (a thing which you ask of me, I believe, out of
compliment to me, not for your own need) as for simple
congratulation. I congratulate myself especially on my good fortune
in having, as it appears, so suitably explained Sallust's meaning,
and you on your so careful perusal of that most wise author with so
much benefit from the same. Respecting him I would venture to make
the same assertion to you as Quintilian made respecting
Cicero,--that a man may know himself no mean proficient in the
business of History who enjoys his Sallust. As for that precept of
Aristotle's in the Third Book of his Rhetoric [Chap. XVII] which
you would like explained--'Use is to be made of maxims both in the
narrative of a case and in the pleading, for it has a moral
effect'--I see not what it has in it that much needs explanation:
only that the _narration_ and the _pleading_ (which last
is usually also called the _proof_) are here understood to be
such as the Orator uses, not the Historian; for the parts of the
Orator and the Historian are different whether they narrate or
prove, just as the Arts themselves are different. What is suitable
for the Historian you will have learnt more correctly from the
ancient authors, Polybius, the Halicarnassian, Diodorus, Cicero,
Lucian, and many others, who have handed down certain stray
precepts concerning that subject. For me, I wish you heartily all
happiness in your studies and travels, and success worthy of the
spirit and diligence which I see you employ on everything of high
excellence. Farewell.
"Westminster: December 16, 1657."
"To the highly accomplished PETER HEIMBACH.
"I have received your letter dated the Hague. Dec. 18 [foreign
reckoning: the English would be Dec. 8], which, as I see it
concerns your interests, I have thought I ought to answer on the
very day it has reached me. After thanking me for I know not what
favours of mine,--which, as one who desires everything good for
you, I would were really of any consideration at all,--you ask me
to recommend you, through Lord Lawrence, to our Minister appointed
for Holland [DOWNING, whose credential letters Milton had drawn up
only a day or two before]. I really regret that this is not in my
power, both because of my very few intimacies with the men of
influence, almost shut up at home as I am, and as I prefer to be
(_propter paucissimas familiaritates meas cum gratiosis, qui domi
fere, idque libenter, me contineo_), and also because I believe
the gentleman is now embarking and on his way, and has with him in
his company the person he wishes to be his Secretary--the very
office about him you seek. But the post is this instant going,
Farewell.
"Westminster: December 18, 1657."
Too much is not to be made of certain phrases in this note. Milton
was declining, in as civil terms as possible, a request which might
perhaps have been troublesome even if the Secretaryship to Mr.
Downing had been vacant; and, though it would have been enough, as
far as Heimbach's present application was concerned, to tell him that
Mr. Downing was already provided, the other reason may have been
thrown in by way of discouragement of such applications in future.
We have had proof that Milton liked Heimbach; but we do not know
what estimate he had formed of Heimbach's abilities. Still, any words
used by Milton about himself are always to be taken as in
correspondence with fact; and hence we are to suppose that, at the
time he wrote, he did keep himself as much aloof as possible from the
magnates of the Council, performing the pieces of work required of
him in his own house, rather than making them occasions for visits
and colloquies. His old and intimate friend Fleetwood, and his friend
Lord President Lawrence, with Desborough, Pickering, Strickland,
Montague, and Sydenham, all of whom had been mentioned by him with
more or less of personal regard in the _Defensio Secunda_ in
1654, were still Councillors, and formed indeed more than half the
Council; but his intercourse with some of these individually may have
been less since his blindness. Then, of the rest, Thurloe was the
real man of influence, the real _gratiosus_ who could carry or
set aside a request like Heimbach's; and, though Milton's
communications with Thurloe must necessarily have been more frequent
than with any other person of the Council, one has an indefinable
impression that Thurloe had never taken cordially to Milton or Milton
to Thurloe. At the date of Milton's note to Heimbach, too,
_gratiosi_ were becoming plentiful all round the Council.
Cromwell's sixty-three writs for the new Upper House had gone out, or
were going out, and in a week or two many more "lords" were to be
seen walking in couples in any street in Westminster. Milton, in
_his_ quiet retreat there, may have had something of all this in
his mind when he wrote to young Mr. Heimbach.
The short second session of the Parliament, with its difficult
experiment of the two Houses once more, and the angry dispute of the
Commons whether the name of "Lords" _should_ be allowed to the
Other House, had come and gone (Jan. 20--Feb. 4, 1657-8), and of
Milton or his thoughts and doings through that crisis we have no
trace whatever. Our next glimpse of him is just after the moment of
the abrupt dissolution of the Parliament, when Cromwell was
addressing himself again, single-handed, to the task of grappling
with the double danger of anarchy within and a threatened invasion
from without. The glimpse is a very sad one.
"_Feb._ 10, 1657-8, _Mrs. Katherin Milton_," and again
"_March_, 20, 1657-8, _Mrs. Katherin Milton_," are two
entries, within six weeks of each other, in the burial registers of
St, Margaret's, Westminster. They are the records of the deaths of
Milton's second wife and the little girl she had borne him only in
October last. Which entry designates the mother and which, the child
we should not know from the entries themselves; but a sentence in
Phillips's memoir of his uncle settles the point. "By his second
wife; Katharine, the daughter of Captain Woodcock of Hackney," says
Phillips, "he had only one daughter, of which the mother, the first
year after her marriage, died in childbed, and the child also within
a month after." The first entry, therefore, is for the mother, and
the second for the child. The mother died exactly at the time of the
dissolution of the Parliament, and not in child-birth itself, but
nearly four months after child-birth; and the little orphan,
outliving the mother a short while, died at the age of five months.
And so Milton was again left a widower, with his three daughters by
the first marriage, the eldest in her twelfth year. His private life,
for eighteen years now, had certainly not been a happy one; but this
death of his second wife seems to have been remembered by him ever
afterwards with deep and peculiar sorrow. She had been to him during
the short fifteen months of their union, all that he had thought
saintlike and womanly, very sympathetic with himself, and maintaining
such peace and order in his household as had not been there till she
entered it. And now once more it was a dark void, in which he must
grope on, and in which things must happen as they would.
Small comfort at this time can Milton have had from either of his
nephews. Not that they had openly separated themselves from him, or
even ceased to be deferential to him and proud of the relationship,
but that they had more and more gone into those courses of literary
Bohemianism those habits of mere facetious hack-work and balderdash,
which he must have noted of late as an increasing and very ominous
form of protest among the clever young Londoners against Puritanism
and its belongings. The _Satyr against Hypocrites_ by his
younger nephew in 1655 had been, in reality, an Anti-Puritan and
Anti-Miltonic production; and, since the censure of that younger
nephew by the Council in 1656 for his share in _The Sportive Wit or
Muses' Merriment_, he had naturally stumbled farther and farther
in the same direction. By the year 1658, I should say, John Phillips
had entirely given up his uncle's political principles, and was known
among his tavern-comrades as an Anti-Oliverian. We have no express
publications in his name of this date, but he seems to have been
scribbling anonymously. Of the literary industry of his more sedate
and likeable elder brother, Edward, there is authentic evidence. _A
New World of Words, or a General Dictionary, containing the Terms,
Etymologies, Definitions, and Perfect Interpretations, of the proper
Significations of hard English words throughout the Arts and
Sciences_: such is the title of a folio volume published by him in
1657, and for the purposes of which he was afterwards accused of
having plagiarized largely from the _Glossographia_ of one
Thomas Blount, published in the preceding year. In this piece of
labour, which was doubtless a bookseller's commission, he must have
had, the question of plagiarism apart, his uncle's thorough
good-will; but it cannot have been the same with his _Mysteries of
Love and Eloquence: or the Arts of Wooing and Complimenting, as they
are managed in the Spring Garden, Hide Park, the New Exchange, and
other eminent Places_. That performance, which appeared in August
1658, with a Preface "To the Youthful Gentry," and which must have
been in progress at our present date, was much more in the vein of
his brother John, and indeed was done to the order of Nathaniel
Brooke, the bookseller who had published John's _Satyr against
Hypocrites_, and also the more questionable _Sportive Wit or the
Muses' Merriment_. "The book," says Godwin, "is put together with
conspicuous ingenuity and profligacy, and is entitled to no
insignificant rank among the multifarious productions which were at
that time issued from the press to debauch the manners of the nation
and bring back the King. It consists of imaginary conversations and
forms of address for conversation, poems, models of letters,
questions and answers, an Art of Logic with examples from the poets,
and various instructions and helps to the lover for the composition
of his verses; and, if we could overlook the gross provocations to
libertinism and vice which everywhere occur in the book, it might be
mentioned as no unentertaining illustration of the manners of the men
of wit and gallantry in the time when it was published." To Godwin's
description we may add that the book includes a Rhyming Dictionary,
"useful for that pleasing pastime called Crambo," also a collection
of parlour-games, and a number of other clever things. The poems and
songs interspersed with the prose were mostly old ones reprinted,
some of them chosen with fine taste; but one or two were Phillips's
own. Of the model phrases or set expressions which form one of the
prose parts of the volume, by way of instruction in the language of
gallantry and courtship, specimens are these,--"With your ambrosiac
kisses bathe my lips;" "You are a white enchantress, lady, and can
enchain me with a smile;" "Midnight would blush at this;" "You walk
in artificial clouds and bathe your silken limbs in wanton
dalliance." What could Milton do, so far as such a production came
within his knowledge, but shake his head and mingle smiles with a
frown? Clearly the elder nephew too had slipped the Miltonic
restraints. He had not lapsed, however, so decidedly as his brother;
and we may partly retract in his case the statement that Milton could
have little comfort from him. He still went and came about Milton,
very attentively.[1]
[Footnote 1: Godwin's _Lives of the Phillipses_ (1815), 49-57,
and 139-140; Wood's _Ath._ IV. 760-769. I have not myself
examined Phillips's _New World of Words_; but I have looked at
the Thomason copy of his _Mysteries of Love and Eloquence_,
where the date of publication is given. Perhaps Godwin is a little
too severe in his account of it.]
During the month immediately preceding his wife's death, and the two
months following it, there is a break in the series of Milton's
State-Letters for Cromwell. But he resumed the familiar occupation on
the 30th of March, 1658; and thenceforward to the end of the
Protectorate the series is again pretty continuous. Indeed, of this
period of Milton's life we know little more than may be inferred
from, or associated with, the following morsels of his continued
Secretaryship:--
(CXVIII.) To CHARLES X., KING OF SWEDEN, _March_ 30,
1658:--The occasion of this letter was the receipt of news at last
of the climax of the Swedish-Danish war in a great triumph of the
Swedes. "In January 1658 Karl Gustav marches his army, horse, foot,
and artillery, to the amount of twenty thousand, across the Baltic
ice, and takes an island without shipping,--Island of Fünen,
across the Little Belt; three miles of ice; and a part of the sea
_open_, which has to be crossed on planks. Nay, forward from
Fünen, when he is once there, he achieves ten whole miles more of
ice; and takes Zealand itself--to the wonder of mankind." Such, in
Mr. Carlyle's summary (_History of Frederick the Great, i. 223,
edit._ 1869), was the feat of the Swedish warrior against his
Danish enemy. It was followed almost immediately by a Peace between
the two Powers, called _The Peace of Roeskilde_, by which
Sweden acquired certain territories from Denmark, but very generous
terms on the whole were granted to the Danes. Of all this there had
been news to Cromwell, not only from his own correspondents, but
also in an express letter from Charles Gustavus; and it is to this
letter that Milton now replies in Cromwell's name:--"Most serene
and potent King, most invincible Friend and Ally,--The Letter of
your Majesty, dated from the Camp in Zealand, Feb. 21, has brought
Us all at once many reasons why, both privately on our own account,
and on account of the whole Christian Commonwealth, we should be
affected by no ordinary joy. In the first place, because the King
of Denmark (made your enemy, I believe, not by his own will or
interests, but by the arts of the common foes) has been, by your
sudden advent into the heart of his kingdom, and without much
bloodshed, reduced to such a pass that he has at length, as was
really the fact, judged peace more advantageous to him than the
war undertaken against you. Next, because, when he thought he could
in no way sooner obtain such a peace than by using Our help long
ago offered him for a conciliation, your Majesty, on the prayer
merely of the letters of our Envoy, deigned to show, by such an
easy grant of peace, how much value you attached to Our friendship
and interposed good-will, and chose that it should be My office in
particular, in this pious transaction, to be myself nearly the sole
adviser and author of a Peace which is speedily to be, as I hope,
so salutary to Protestant interests. For, whereas the enemies of
Religion despaired of being able to break your combined strength
otherwise than by engaging you against each other, they will now
have cause, as I hope, thoroughly to fear that this unlooked-for
conjunction of your arms and hearts will turn into destruction for
themselves, the kindlers of this war. Do you, meanwhile, most brave
King, go on and prosper in your conspicuous valour, and bring it to
pass that, such good fortune as the enemies of the Church have
lately admired in your exploits and course of victories against the
King now your ally, the same they may feel once more, with God's
help, in their own crushing overthrow."[1] From this letter it will
be seen that the missions of Meadows and Jephson, but especially
that of Meadows, had been of use. The immediate object of the
missions, a reconciliation of Sweden and Denmark, had been
accomplished; and what remained farther was, as Cromwell hints, the
association of the other Continental Protestant powers with these
two Scandinavian kingdoms in a league against Austria and Spain.
How exactly this idea accorded with reflective Protestant sentiment
everywhere appears from a few sentences in one of Baillie's
letters, commenting on the very occurrences that occasioned
Cromwell's present despatch. "I am glad," writes Baillie, "that by
a Peace, however extorted, the Swedes are free to take course with
other enemies. I wish Brandenburg may return to his old posture,
and not draw on himself next the Swedish armies; which the Lord
forbid! for, after Sweden, we love Brandenburg next best.... Our
wish is that the Muscoviter, for reforming of his churches,
civilizing of his people, and doing some good upon the Turks and
Tartars, were more straitly allied with Sweden, Brandenburg, the
Transylvanian, and other Protestant princes. We should rejoice if,
on this too good a quarrel against the Austrians ... he [Charles
Gustavus] would turn his victorious army upon them and their
associates, with the assistance of France and a good Dutch league.
It seems no hard matter to get the Imperial Crown and turn the
Ecclesiastic Princes into Secular Protestants."[2] Very much in the
direction of Baillie's hopes were Cromwell's envoys, Meadows,
Jephson, Bradshaw, and Downing, to labour for the next few months.
Of their journeys hither and thither, their expectations and
disappointments, there are glimpses in successive letters in
_Thurloe_; from which also it appears that Meadows and Downing
gave most satisfaction, and that, after a while, Jephson was
relieved of the main business of the Swedish mission, and that
mission was conjoined with the Danish in the hands of Meadows
(Thurloe, VII. 63-64).
[Footnote 1: The translation of this letter by Phillips is unusually
careless. It jumbles the tenses in such a manner that the Peace
between Sweden and Denmark does not seem to have yet taken place,
but only to be hoped for by Cromwell. In fact, Phillips's
translation robs the letter of all its meaning and interest.]
[Footnote 2: Baillie, III. 371.]
(CXIX.) TO THE GRAND-DUKE OF TUSCANY, _April_ 7, 1658:--A John
Hosier, master of a ship called _The Lady_, had been swindled
in April 1656 by an Italian named Guiseppe Armani, who has
moreover possessed himself fraudulently of 6000 pieces of eight
belonging to one Thomas Clutterbuck. There is a suit against Armani
at Leghorn; but Hosier, after going to great expenses, is deterred
from appearing there by threats of personal violence. "We therefore
request your Highness both to relieve this oppressed man, and also
to restrain the insolence of his adversary, according to your
accustomed justice."
(CXX.) TO LOUIS XIV. OF FRANCE, _May_ 26, 1658:[1]--This is a
very momentous letter. It is Cromwell's appeal to the French King
in behalf once more of the poor Piedmontese Protestants:--"Most
serene and potent King, most august Friend and Ally,--Your Majesty
may remember that, at the time when there was treaty between us for
the renewing of our League [April 1655]--the highly auspicious
nature of which transaction is now testified by many resulting
advantages to both nations and much damage to the common
enemy--there fell out that miserable massacre of the People of the
Valleys, whose cause, forsaken on all hands and sorely beset, we
commended, with all ardour of heart and commiseration, to your pity
and protection. Nor do we think that your Majesty, of yourself, was
wanting in a duty so pious, nay so human, in as far as, by your
authority or by the respect due to your person, you could prevail
with the Duke of Savoy. We, certainly, and many other Princes and
States, were not wanting, in the matter of embassies, letters,
interposed entreaties, on the subject. After a most bloody
slaughter of both sexes and of every age, Peace was at last
granted, or rather a kind of more guarded hostility clothed with
the name of Peace: the conditions of the Peace were settled in your
town of Pignerol--hard conditions indeed, but in which wretched
and poor people that had suffered all that was dreadful and brutal
might easily acquiesce, if only, hard and unjust as they are, they
were to be stood to. They are _not_ stood to; for the promise
of each and all of them is eluded and violated by false
interpretation and various asides: many are thrown out of their
ancient abodes; many are interdicted from their native religion;
new tributes are exacted; a new citadel is hung over their heads,
whence soldiers frequently break forth, plundering or murdering all
they meet: in addition to all which, new forces of late are
secretly being got ready against them, and those among them who
profess the Roman Religion have warning orders to remove for a
time, so that all things now again seem to point to an
exterminating onslaught on those most miserable creatures who were
left over from that last butchery. That you will not allow this to
be done I beseech and conjure you, Most Christian King, by that
right hand of yours which sealed alliance and friendship with Us,
by that most sacred ornament of the title of _Most Christian_;
that you will not permit such a license of furious raging, I do not
say to any prince (for such furious raging cannot possibly come
upon any prince, much less upon the tender age of that Prince, or
into the womanly mind of his Mother), but to those most holy
assassins, who, while they profess themselves the servants and
imitators of our Saviour Christ, Him who came into this world to
save sinners, abuse His most meek name and institutes for savage
slaughters of innocents. Snatch, thou who art able, and who in such
a towering station art worthy to be able, so many suppliants of
yours from the hands of homicides, who, drunk with gore recently,
thirst for blood again, and consider it most advisable for
themselves to lay at the doors of princes the odium of their own
cruelty. Do not thou, while thou reignest, suffer thy titles or the
territories of thy realm, or the most merciful Gospel of Christ,
to be defiled by that scandal. Remember that these very Vaudois
submitted themselves to your grandfather Henry, that great favourer
of Protestants, when the victorious Lesdiguières, through those
parts where there is even yet the most convenient passage into
Italy, pursued the yielding Savoyard across the Alps. The
instrument of that Surrender is yet extant among the Public Acts of
your Kingdom; in which, among other things, it is expressly
provided and precautioned that the Vaudois should thenceforth be
handed over to no one unless with those same conditions on which,
by that instrument, your most invincible grandfather received them
into his protection. This protection the suppliants now implore;
as pledged by the grandfather, they demand it from you, the
grandson. They would prefer and desire to be your subjects rather
than his to whom they now belong, even by some exchange, if that
could be managed; but, if that cannot be managed, to be yours at
least in as far as your patronage, pity, and shelter can make them
so. There are even reasons of state which might exhort you not to
drive back Vaudois fleeing to you for refuge; but I would not, such
a great King as you are, think of you as moved to the defence of
those lying under calamity by other considerations than the promise
of your ancestors, piety, and kingly benignity and greatness of
soul. So the praise and glory of a most beautiful deed will be
yours unalloyed and entire, and through all your life you will find
the Father of Mercy, and His Son, King Christ, whose name and
doctrine you will have vindicated from a wicked atrocity, more
favouring and propitious to yourself. May God Almighty, for His own
glory, the safeguard of so many innocent Christian human beings,
and your true honour, dispose your Majesty to this resolution!" The
letter was sent to Ambassador Lockhart, then commanding the English
auxiliaries at Dunkirk, with very precise instructions to deliver
it to his French Majesty, and to follow it up energetically by his
own counsels.[2] It may have been delivered to Louis XIV. at or
near Calais. It had, as we have seen, full effect. All in all, it
is one of the most eloquent of the Milton series; and Milton must
have exerted himself in the composition.
[Footnote 1: The exact day of the month is not given either in the
Printed Collection or in the Skinner Transcript; but it is
determined by a letter of Cromwell's to Ambassador Lockhart on the
same business. The two letters went together (see Carlyle, III.
357-365).]
[Footnote 2: Letter of Cromwell to Lockhart of date May 25, 1658,
printed by Mr. Carlyle, _loc. cit._, from the Ayscough MSS.]
(CXXI.) TO THE EVANGELICAL SWISS CANTONS, _May_ 26,
1658:[1]--On the same great business as the last.--"Illustrious and
most honourable Lords, most dear Friends:--Concerning the Vaudois,
your most afflicted neighbours, what grievous and intolerable
things they have suffered from their Prince for Religion's sake,
besides that the mind almost shrinks from remembering them because
of the very atrocity of the facts, we have thought it superfluous
to write to you what must be much better known to yourselves. We
have also seen copies of the letters which your Envoys, who a good
while since were the advisers and witnesses of the Peace of
Pignerol, have written to the Duke of Savoy and the President of
his Council in Turin; in which they show and prove in detail that
all the conditions of the Peace have been broken, and have been
rather a snare for those miserable people than a security. Which
violation of the conditions, continued from the very date of the
Peace even to this day, and every day growing more grievous, unless
they endure patiently, unless they prostrate themselves and lie
down to be trampled on and pushed into mud, their Religion itself
forsworn, there impends over them the same calamity, the same
havoc, which harassed and desolated them, with their wives and
children, in so miserable a manner three years ago, and which, if
it is to be undergone again, will wholly extirpate them. What can
the poor people do? They have no respite, no breathing-time, as yet
no certain refuge. They have to deal with wild beasts or with
furies, to whom the recollection of the former slaughters has
brought no remorse, no pity for their fellow-countrymen, no sense
of humanity or satiety in shedding blood. These things are clearly
not to be borne, whether we have regard to our Vaudois brethren,
cherishers of the Orthodox Religion from of old, or to the safety
of that Religion itself. We, for our part, removed though we are by
too great an interval of space, have heartily performed all we
could in the way of help, and shall not cease to do the like. Do
you, who are close not only to the torments and almost to the cries
of your brethren, but also to the fury of the same enemies,
consider prospectively, in the name of Immortal God, and that
betimes, what is now _your_ duty; on the question of what
assistance, what protection, you can and ought to give to your
neighbours and brothers, otherwise speedily to perish, consult your
own prudence and piety, but your valour also. It is identity of
Religion, be sure, that is the cause why the same enemies would see
you likewise destroyed, nay why they would, at the same time, in
the same by-past year, _have_ seen you destroyed by an
intestine war against you by members of your Confederacy. Next to
the Divine aid it seems simply to be with you to prevent the very
oldest branch of the purer Religion from being cut down in that
remnant of the primitive faithful: and, if you neglect their
safety, now brought to the extreme crisis of peril, see that the
next turn do not, a little while after, visit yourselves. While we
advise thus fraternally and freely, we are meanwhile not idle on
our own part: what alone it is allowed to us at such a distance to
do, whether for securing the safety of those who are endangered, or
for succouring the poverty of those who are in need, we have taken
all pains in our power to do, and shall yet take all pains, God
grant to us both such tranquillity and peace at home, such a
settled condition of things and times, that we may be able to turn
all our resources and strength, all our anxiety, to the defence of
His Church against the fury and madness of His enemies!"
[Footnote 1: The day of the month not given either in the Printed
Collection or in the Skinner Transcript; but we may date by the last
letter.]
(CXXII.-CXXV.) TO LOUIS XIV. AND CARDINAL MAZARIN: end of
_May_ 1658:[1]--This is a group of four letters, two to the
King and two to the Cardinal, all appertaining to the splendid
embassy of compliment on which Cromwell despatched his son-in-law,
Viscount Falconbridge, in the end of May 1658, when he heard that
the French Court had come so near England as Calais (ante pp.
340-341):--(1.) TO LOUIS XIV. "Most serene and potent King, most
august Friend and Ally,--Thomas, Viscount Falconbridge, my
son-in-law, being on the point of setting out for France, and
desiring to come into your presence, to kiss your royal hand and
testify his veneration and the respect which he cherishes for your
Majesty, though, on account of the great pleasantness of his
society, I am unwilling to part with him, yet, as I do not doubt
but, from the Court of so great a King, in which so many most
prudent and valiant men have their resort, he will shortly return
to us much more accomplished for all honourable occupations, and in
a sense finished, I have not thought it right to oppose his mind
and wish. And, though he is one, if I mistake not, who may seem to
bring his own sufficient recommendations with him wherever he goes,
yet, if he should feel himself somewhat more acceptable to your
Majesty on my account, I shall likewise consider myself honoured
and obliged by that same kindness. May God keep your Majesty safe,
and long preserve our fast friendship for the common good of the
Christian world."--(2.) TO CARDINAL MAZARIN. As his son-in-law Lord
Falconbridge is going into France, recommended by a letter to the
French King, Cromwell cannot but inform his Eminence of the fact,
and give Lord Falconbridge an introduction to his Eminence also.
"Whatever benefit he may receive from his stay amongst you (and he
hopes it will not be small) he is sure to owe most of it to your
favour and kindness, whose mind and vigilance almost singly sustain
and guard such great affairs in that kingdom." (3.) To LOUIS XIV.
"Most serene and potent King, most august Friend and Ally,--As
soon as news had arrived that your Majesty was come into camp, and
was besieging with so great forces that infamous town and asylum of
pirates, Dunkirk, I conceived a great joy, and also a sure hope
that now in a short time, by God's good assistance, the sea will be
less infested with robbers and more safely navigable, and that your
Majesty will soon by your warlike prowess avenge those frauds of
the Spaniard,--one commander corrupted by gold to betray Hesden,
another treacherously taken at Ostend. I therefore send to you the
most noble Thomas, Viscount Falconbridge, my son-in-law, both to
congratulate your arrival in a camp so close to us, and also to
explain personally with what affection we follow your Majesty's
achievements, not only by the junction of our forces, but with all
wishes besides that God Almighty may keep your Majesty's self safe
and long preserve our fast friendship for the common good of the
Christian world." (4.) To CARDINAL MAZARIN. As he is sending his
son-in-law Viscount Falconbridge to congratulate the arrival of his
French Majesty in the camp near Dunkirk, he has commanded him to
convey also salutations and thanks to his Eminence, "by whose
fidelity, prudence, and vigilance, above all, it has been brought
about that French business is so prosperously managed against the
common enemy in so many different parts, and especially in
neighbouring Flanders." It is clear that all these letters cannot
have been sent, but only two of them. The closing words of the two
letters to the King, for example, are identical to an extent
incompatible with the idea that they were both delivered. It may be
guessed by the suspicious that at first the intention was that Lord
Falconbridge should seem to be visiting France for his own
curiosity or pleasure, the Protector only taking advantage of his
whim, and that letters 1 and 2 were then drafted, but that
afterwards it was thought better to send Lord Falconbridge on an
avowed embassy of congratulation in Cromwell's own name, and
letters 3 and 4 were then substituted. Perhaps, however, there was
no duplicity in the affair at all, and the idea of the embassy did
actually originate in a whim of Lord Falconbridge. Anyhow all the
notes were written by Milton, and he kept copies of those not
used.
[Footnote 1: Exact day not given either in Printed Collection or in
Skinner Transcript; but the occasion fixes the time pretty closely.]
(CXXVI.) To THE GRAND DUKE OF TUSCANY, _May_ 1658:--This is
in a very different tone from recent letters of the Protector to
the same Italian Prince (ante p. 372 and p. 378).--His Highness has
been informed of various acts of discourtesy of late to his Fleet
off Leghorn, utterly inconsistent with the terms of friendship on
which he had supposed himself to stand with the Grand Duke.
Accommodation to the ships has been refused, out of deference to
Spain; restrictions have been put on their supplies of fresh water;
English merchants resident in Leghorn, and even the English Consul,
have not been permitted to go on board; shots have actually been
fired; &c. If these things had been done by the Governor of the
Town without orders, let him be punished; but, if otherwise, "let
your Highness consider that, as we have always very highly valued
your good-will, so we have learnt to distinguish open injuries
from-good-will."
(CXXVII.-CXXX.) To LOUIS XIV. AND CARDINAL MAZARIN. _June_
1658:--On the 16th of June there had arrived in London, in rapid
return for the embassy of Viscount Falconbridge to Calais, the
splendid counter-embassy to Cromwell of the Duke de Crequi and M.
Mancini, the Cardinal's nephew (ante pp. 340-341). That in itself
would have been an incident calling for some special acknowledgment
from the Protector; but hardly had the embassy arrived when there
came news of the great event which both Louis XIV. and Cromwell had
for some time been intently expecting--the capture of Dunkirk. On
the 15th of June the keys of the captured town had been handsomely
delivered to Sir William Lockhart by Louis XIV. himself, so that
the Treaty with Cromwell had been fully kept in that particular.
Louis had sent a special Envoy with letters to announce the event
to Cromwell formally; and this Envoy shared in the magnificent
hospitalities which Cromwell showered upon the Duke de Crequi, M.
Mancini, and their retinue. The four following letters all relate
to this glorious occasion, and date themselves between June 16,
when the French ambassadors arrived in London, and June 21, when
they took their departure. (1.) To Louis XIV. "Most serene and
potent King, most august Friend and Ally,--That your Majesty has
so speedily, by the illustrious embassy you have sent, repaid my
mission of respect with interest, besides that it is a proof of
your singular graciousness and magnanimity, comes as a
manifestation also of the degree of your regard for my honour and
dignity, not to myself only, but to the whole English People; on
which account, in their name, I duly return your Majesty my most
cordial thanks. Over the most happy victory which God gave to our
conjoint forces against the enemy [in the Battle near Dunkirk on
June 3, ten days before the surrender of the town: ante p. 340], I
rejoice along with you; and it is very gratifying to me that in
that battle our men were not wanting either to their duty to you,
or to the warlike glory of their ancestors, or to their own valour.
As for Dunkirk, your Majesty's hopes for the near surrender of
which are expressed in your letter, I have the additional joy of
being able so soon to write back that the surrender has now
actually taken place; and my hopes are that the Spaniard will
presently pay for his double treachery by the loss not of one city
only,--the effecting of which result by the capture of the other
town [Bergen, near Dunkirk, now also besieged] I would that your
Majesty may have it in your power to report as quickly. As to your
Majesty's farther promise that my interests shall be your care, in
that matter I have no mistrust, the promise coming from a King of
such worth and friendliness, and having the confirmation of the
word of his Ambassador, the most excellent and accomplished Duke de
Crequi. That Almighty God may be propitious to your Majesty and to
the French State, at home and in war, is my sincere wish." (2.) To
CARDINAL MAZARIN. As we have already seen in Cromwell's
correspondence with France, letters to the King and the Cardinal
then almost always went in pairs, for Louis XIV. was but beginning
his long career of _Grand Monarque_ at the age of twenty,
while the Cardinal, at the age of fifty-six, still retained that
ministerial ascendancy which he had exercised all through the
minority of Louis, and indeed since the death of Richelieu in
1642. This letter of Cromwell's to the Cardinal is even more
interesting than that to the King, and may be given in full:--"Most
Eminent Lord,--While I am thanking by letter your most Serene King,
who has sent such a splendid embassy to return respects and
congratulations and to communicate to me his joy over the recent
most noble victory, I should be ungrateful if I did not at the same
time pay by letter the thanks due also to your Eminence, who, to
testify your good-will towards me, and your regard for my honour in
all possible ways, have sent with the embassy your most worthy and
highly accomplished young nephew, and even write that, if you had
any one nearer akin to you or dearer, you would have sent that
person in preference,--adding a reason which, coming from the
judgment of so great a man, I consider no mean tribute of praise
and distinction: to wit, your desire that those nearest to you in
blood should imitate your Eminence in honouring and respecting me.
Well, they will perhaps, at least, in your love for me, have had no
stinted example of politeness, candour, and friendliness: of worth
and prudence at their highest there are other far more brilliant
examples in you, by which they may learn how to administer kingdoms
and the greatest affairs with glory. With which that your Eminence
may long and prosperously conduct affairs, for the common good of
the French kingdom, yea of the whole Christian Republic, a
distinction properly yours, I promise that my wishes shall not be
wanting." (3.) To LOUIS XIV.[1] A more formal letter than the
last, acknowledging the French King's own intimation that Dunkirk
had been taken, and given into the possession of Lockhart. "That
Dunkirk had surrendered to your Majesty, and that it had been by
your orders immediately put in our possession, we had already heard
by report; but with what a willing and glad mind your Majesty did
it, to testify your good-will towards me in this matter, I have
been especially informed by your royal letter, and have had
abundantly confirmed by the gentleman in whom, from the tenor of
that letter, I have all confidence,--the master in ordinary of your
Palace. In addition to this testimony, though it needs no farther
weight with me, our Ambassador with you [Lockhart], in discharge of
his duty, writes to the same effect, and there is nothing that he
does not ascribe to your most firm steadiness in my favour. Let
your Majesty be assured in turn that there shall be no want of
either care or integrity on our part in performing all that remains
of our agreement with the same faith and diligence as hitherto. For
the rest, I congratulate your Majesty on your successes and on the
very near approach of the capture of Bergen; and may God Almighty
grant that there may be as frequent exchanges as possible of such
congratulations between us." (4.) TO CARDINAL MAZARIN[2]. This is
on the same occasion and in the same strain. One sentence will
suffice. "With what faith and expression of the highest good-will
all was performed by you, though your Eminence's own assurance
fully satisfied me, yet, that I should have nothing more to
desiderate, our Ambassador, in carefully writing to me the details,
had omitted nothing that could either serve for my information or
answer your opinion of him."--It is curious, after these two last
letters, to turn to those letters of Lockhart's to which Cromwell
refers. They quite confirm his words, though they contain
expressions, about both the King and the Cardinal, of which
Cromwell would not perhaps have sent them literal copies. Thus, in
a letter to Thurloe, of June 14, the day before the delivery of
Dunkirk to the English, but when all the arrangements for the
delivery had been made, Lockhart, speaking of the difficulties he
anticipated in so arduous and delicate a post as the Governorship
of Dunkirk, especially with his small supplies and great lack of
money, adds,--"Nevertheless I must say I find him [the Cardinal]
willing to hear reason; and, though the generality of Court and
Army are even mad to see themselves part with what they call _un
si bon morceau_, so delicate a bit, yet he is still constant to
his promises, and seems to be as glad in the general,
notwithstanding our differences in little particulars, to give this
place to his Highness as I can be to receive it: the King is also
exceeding obliging and civil, and hath more true worth in him than
I could have imagined." Next day Lockhart wrote a brief note to
Thurloe announcing himself as actually in possession, "blessed be
God for this great mercy, and the Lord continue his protection to
his Highness"; and there were subsequent longer letters both to
Thurloe and to Cromwell himself[3]. Dunkirk was called "The Key of
Spanish Flanders"; and the conquest of this place for the
Protectorate was, it is to be remembered, among the last of
Cromwell's great acts.
[Footnote 1: This Letter is not to be found in the Printed
Collection or in Phillips; but it is in the Skinner Transcript (No.
102 there), and has been printed by Mr. Hamilton in his _Milton
Papers_, 7-8.]
[Footnote 2: Neither is this Letter in the Printed Collection. It
stands as No. 103 in the Skinner Transcript, and has been printed by
Hamilton, p. 8.]
[Footnote 3: Thurloe, VII. 173 et seq.]
(CXXXI.) TO CHARLES GUSTAVUS, KING OF SWEDEN, _June_
1658:--Since Cromwell's last letter by Milton to this heroic
Scandinavian (March 30), congratulating him on his generous Peace
with Denmark, and urging the policy of a League of all the northern
Protestant Powers for conjoint action against Austria, Poland, and
Catholicism universally, the movements of the Swede had been most
perplexing. Now he had been turning against the Poles and
Austrians; but again Denmark, or even the Dutch, seemed to be the
object of his resentment, while there was very quarrelsome
negotiation between him and the Elector Marquis of Brandenburg, and
every appearance that the Elector might have to bear the next full
burst of his wrath. All this did not seem favourable to the
prospects of a Protestant League, and Cromwell's envoys, Meadows,
Jephson, Bradshaw, and Downing, had been going to and fro with
their wits on the stretch. Such, in general, was the condition of
affairs when Milton for Cromwell wrote as follows:--"Most serene
and potent King, most dear Friend and Ally,--As often as we look
upon the ceaseless plots and various artifices of the common
enemies of Religion, so often our thought with ourselves is how
necessary it is for the Christian world, and how salutary it would
be, for the easier frustration of the attempts of these
adversaries, that the Potentates of Protestantism should be
conjoined in the strictest league among themselves, and principally
your Majesty with our Commonwealth. How much, and with what zeal,
that has been furthered by Us, and how agreeable latterly it would
have been to us if the affairs of Sweden and our own had been in
such a condition and position that the League could have been
ratified heartily by us both, and with all fit aid the one to the
other, We have testified to your agents from the time when they
first treated of the matter with Us. Nor, truly, were they wanting
to their duty; but, as was their custom in other things, in this
matter also they displayed prudence and diligence. But we have been
so exercised at home by the perfidy of wicked citizens, who, though
several times received back into trust, do not yet cease to form
new conspiracies, and to repeat their already often shattered and
routed plots with the exiles, and even with the Spanish enemy,
that, occupied in beating off our own dangers, we have not hitherto
been able, as was our wish, to turn our whole attention and entire
strength to the guardianship of the common cause of Religion. What
was possible, however, to the full extent of our power, we have
already studiously performed; and, whatever for the future in this
direction shall seem to conduce to your Majesty's interests, we
shall not desist not only to desire, but also to co-operate with
you with all our strength in accomplishing where they may be
opportunity. Meanwhile we congratulate, and heartily rejoice in,
your Majesty's most prudent and most valiant actions, and desire
with assiduous prayers that God may will, for the glory of his own
Deity, that the same course of prosperity and victory may be a very
long one."--So far as Milton's state-letters show, this is the last
of the relations between Oliver Cromwell and Karl-Gustav of Sweden.
But, in _Thurloe_ and elsewhere, there are farther traces of
the great Swede in connexion with Cromwell, and of the interest
which the two kindred souls felt in each other. Passing over some
weeks of still uncertain movement of the Swede hither and thither
in his complications with Austria, Poland, Denmark, Muscovy,
Brandenburg, and the Dutch, we may note the sudden surprise of all
Europe when, early in August, he tore up his brief Peace with
Denmark, re-invaded Zealand, and marched straight upon Copenhagen.
His reasons for this extraordinary act he thought it right to
explain to Cromwell in a long letter dated from his quarters near
Copenhagen, August 18, 1658. The letter can have reached Cromwell
only on his death-bed; and, on the whole, Cromwell had to leave the
world with the consciousness that the League of Protestant Powers
for which he had prayed and struggled was apparently as far off as
ever. The election to the vacant Emperorship had already taken
place at last, July 8, 1658, at Frankfort-on-the-Main, and it was
the Austrian Leopold, King of Hungary, and not the French Louis
XIV., after all, that had been proclaimed and saluted _Imperator
Romanorum_.[1]
[Footnote 1: Thurloe, VII., at various points from the beginning,
but especially pp. 338, 342, and 257. Foreign dates in Thurloe
have to be rectified.]
(CXXXII.) TO THE KING OF PORTUGAL, _August_ 1658:--A John
Buffield, merchant of London, has been wronged by the detention of
property of his by a Portuguese mercantile firm, and has been
tossed about in Portuguese law-courts. The Protector requests his
Portuguese Majesty to look into the matter and see justice done.
So ends the series of Milton's Letters for Oliver. As there had been
eighty-eight such in all (XLV.-CXXXII.) during the four years and
nine months of the Protectorate, whereas there had been but
forty-four (I.-XLIV.) similar letters during the preceding four years
and ten months of the Commonwealth proper and Interim Dictatorship,
it will be seen that Milton's industry in this particular form of his
Secretaryship had been just twice as great for Oliver as for the
Governments before the Protectorate.[1] That fact in itself is
rather remarkable, when we remember that Milton came into the
Protector's service totally blind. Of course, whoever had been in the
post would have had more to do in the way of letter-writing for the
Protector than had been required by the preceding Councils of State
in their comparatively thin relations with foreign powers; but that a
blind man in the post should have been so satisfactory for the
increased requirements says something for the employer as well as for
the blind man. Thurloe and others had relieved Milton of much of the
secretarial work; there had also been many breaks in Milton's
secretaryship even in the letter-writing department, occasioned by
ill-health, family-troubles, or occupation with literary tasks which
were really public commissions and were credited to him as such; and
at such times the dependence had been on Meadows or some one else for
the Latin letters necessary. Always, however, when the occasion was
very important, as when there had to be the burst of circular letters
about the Piedmontese massacre, the blind man had to be sent to, or
sent for. And what is worthy of notice now is that this had continued
to be the case to the last. At no time in the Secretaryship had there
been a series of more important letters from Milton's pen than those
just inventoried, written for the Protector in the last five months
of his life, and mostly in the months of May and June, 1658. Two or
three of them are about ships or other small matters, showing that,
even with Marvfell now; at hand for such drudgery, Milton did not
wholly escape it; but the rest are on the topics of highest interest
to Cromwell and closest to his heart. The poor Piedmontese
Protestants are again in danger. Who must again sound the alarm?
Milton. Cromwell's son-in-law, the gallant Falconbridge, starts on
his embassy to Calais. Who must write the letters that are to
introduce him to King Louis and the Cardinal? Milton. The gorgeous
return embassy of the Duke de Crequi and M. Mancini has to be
acknowledged, and the bells rung for the fall of Dunkirk; and with
the congratulations to be conveyed across the Channel on that event
there have to be interwoven Cromwell's thanks to the King and the
Cardinal for having so punctually kept their faith with him by the
delivery of the town to Lockhart. Who shall express the complex
message? None but Milton. Finally, Cromwell would stretch his hand
eastward across the seas to grasp that of the Swedish Charles
Gustavus struggling with _his_ peculiar difficulties, to give
him brotherly cheer in the midst of them, brotherly hope also that
they two, whoever else in a generation of hucksters, may yet live to
lead in a glorious Protestant League for the overthrow of Babylon and
the woman blazing in scarlet. Who interprets between hero and hero?
Always and only the blind Milton. Positively, in reading Milton's
despatches for Cromwell on such subjects as the persecutions of the
Vaudois and the scheme of a Protestant European League, one hardly
knows which is speaking, the secretary or the ruler. Cromwell melts
into Milton, and Milton is Cromwell eloquent and Latinizing.[2]
[Footnote 1: With one exception, all the State-letters of Milton,
from the beginning of his Secretaryship to the death of Cromwell,
that have been preserved either in the Printed Collection or in the
Skinner Transcript, have now been inventoried, and, as far as
possible, dated and elucidated in the text of these volumes. The
exception is a brief scrap thrown in at the end of the Letters for
Cromwell both in the Printed Collection and in the Skinner
Transcript, but omitted by Phillips in his translation as not
worthwhile. It was not written for Cromwell or his Council, but
only for the Commissioners of the Great Seal--whether for those
under the Protectorate, or for their predecessors, does not appear,
though perhaps that might be ascertained. The scrap may be numbered
at this point, though inserted only as a note:--(CXXXIII.) "We,
Commissioners of the Great Seal of England, &c., desire that the
Supreme Court of the Parliament of Paris will, on request, take such
steps that Miles, William, and Maria Sandys, children of the lately
deceased William Sandys and his wife Elizabeth Soame, English by
birth and minors, may be able, from Paris, where they are now under
protection of the said Court, to return to us forthwith, and will
deliver the said children into the charge of the Scotchman James
Mowat, a good and honest man, to whom we have delegated this charge,
that he may receive them where they are and bring them to us; and we
engage that, on opportunity of the same sort offered, there will be a
return from this Court of the like justice and equity to any subjects
of France."]
[Footnote 2: The uniformly Miltonic style of the greater letters for
the Protector, the same style as had been used in the more
important letters for the Commonwealth, utterly precludes the idea
that Milton was only the translator of drafts furnished him. In
the smaller letters, about ships wrongfully seized and other private
injuries, the case may have been partly so, though even there
Milton must have had liberty of phraseology, and would imbed the
facts in his own expressions. But there was not a man about the
Council that could have furnished the drafts of the greater letters
as we now have them. My idea as to the way in which they were
composed is that, on each occasion, Milton learnt from Thurloe, or
even in a preappointed interview with the Council, or with Cromwell
himself, the sort of thing that was wanted, and that then, having
himself dictated and sent in an English draft, he received it back,
approved or with corrections and suggested additions, to be turned
into Latin. Special Cromwellian hints to Milton for the letter to
Louis XIV, on the alarm of a new persecution of the Piedmontese
(ante pp. 387-9) must have been, I should say, the causal reference
to a certain pass as the best military route yet into Italy from
France, and the suggestion of an exchange of territories between
Louis and the Duke of Savoy so as to make the Vaudois French
subjects. The hints may have been given to Milton beforehand, or
they may have been [n]otched in by Cromwell in revising Milton's
English draft.]
The last letters to Louis XIV., Mazarin, and Charles Gustavus of
Sweden, bring us to within about two months of Cromwell's death, and
the last one of all, that to the King of Portugal, to within less
than a single month of the same. We have yet a farther trace of the
diplomacies proper to Milton's office round the dying Protector.
Here, however, it is not Milton that comes into view, but his
colleague or assistant, Andrew Marvell.
The Dutch Lord-Ambassador Nieuport, after having been absent in
Holland since November 1657, had been sent back by their High
Mightinesses, the States-General, to resume his post. The
complication of affairs in northern Europe by the movements of
Charles Gustavus, and the menacing attitude of that King not only
pretty generally all round the Baltic, but also towards the Dutch
themselves, had rendered Nieuport's renewed presence in London very
necessary. Newly commissioned and instructed, he made his voyage, and
was in the Thames on the night of the 23rd of July, though too late
to reach Gravesend that night. The arrival of an ambassador being
then an affair of much punctilio, he sent his son up the river in a
shallop, to inform Mr. Secretary Thurloe and Sir Oliver Fleming, the
master of the ceremonies, and to deliver to Thurloe a letter
requesting that the pomp of a public reception might be waived and he
might be permitted to take up his quarters quietly in the Dutch
Embassy, still furnished and ready, just as he had left it. Young
Mynheer Nieuport, coming to London on this errand, found things there
in unexpected confusion,--the Lord Protector at Hampton Court,
attending the death-bed of his daughter Lady Claypole, and leaving
business to itself, and Secretary Thurloe also out of town.
Fortunately, Thurloe was not then at Hampton Court, but only at his
own country-house two miles off. Thither young Nieuport rode at once.
He met Thurloe coming in his coach to Whitehall; whereupon Thurloe,
after all proper salutations, informed him that his Highness had
already heard of his father's arrival and had given orders for his
suitable reception. Meanwhile, would young Mr. Nieuport come into the
coach, so that they might drive back to Whitehall together? Arrived
at Whitehall, Thurloe immediately gave orders for the preparation of
one of his Highness's barges to be sent down to Gravesend, "with a
gentleman called Marvell, who is employed in the despatches for the
Latin tongue." Apparently this gentleman was on the spot, and was at
once introduced by Thurloe to young Nieuport. Then young Nieuport
went down the river by himself, rejoining his father at Gravesend,
and bringing him a letter from Thurloe, to the effect that his
Highness was very anxious that his reception should be in all points
such as became the respect due to himself and his office, but that
Mr. Marvell would come expressly to discuss and arrange particulars
and that whatever Lord Nieuport should finally judge fitting should
also be satisfactory to his Highness. That was on the night of
Saturday, the 24th. Next day, Sunday the 25th, Marvell was duly down
at Gravesend in the barge, actually before morning-sermon, as the
Ambassador himself informs us, bidding the Ambassador formally
welcome in the Lord Protector's name, and sketching out for him "a
public reception, with barges and coaches, and also an entertainment,
such as is usually given to the chiefest Ambassadors." Lord Nieuport
still preferring less bustle on his own account, and thinking also
that a great public reception would be unseemly at a time when "the
Lord Protector and the whole Court were in great sadness for the
mortal distemper of the Lady Claypole," Marvell remained in waiting
on him at Gravesend that day, and in the night brought him up to town
in his barge _incognito_. It was thought that his Highness might
possibly be able to come from Hampton Court to Whitehall the next day
or the next; but, that chance having passed, it was arranged that the
Ambassador should himself go to Hampton Court, and have an audience
with the Protector at three o'clock in the afternoon of Thursday the
29th. Accordingly, at eleven o'clock on that day the master of the
ceremonies was at the Dutch Embassy, with three six-horse coaches;
and, having been driven to Hampton Court, the Ambassador was received
by Thurloe "at the second gate of the first court," and taken to his
Highness's room. After interchange of compliments, his Highness
expressed his regret "that his own indisposition, and other domestic
inconveniencies, had hindered him from coming to London"; and then,
the general company having been dismissed, and only Lord President
Lawrence, Lord Strickland, and Thurloe, remaining in the room, there
was some talk on business. Various matters were mentioned, but only
generally, Nieuport not thinking it fit to trouble his Highness with
"a large discourse," and his Highness indeed intimating that he did
not find himself well enough to talk much. But all was very amicable,
and at the end of the interview Cromwell, saying he hoped to be in
London next week, insisted on conducting the Ambassador to the door
of the antechamber, leaving Lawrence, Strickland, and Thurloe, to do
the rest by attending him through the galleries back to the coaches.
On that same day there had been a Council-meeting at Hampton Court,
the last at which Cromwell was present. Possibly Dutch business was
discussed there, and also at the next meeting of Council, which was
at Whitehall on the 3rd of August, and without Cromwell. On the 5th,
at all events, when the Council again met at Hampton Court, Cromwell
not present, there was, as we have seen (ante, p. 355), a minute on
Dutch business of a very ominous character. Cromwell's heart was now
with the magnanimous Swede rather than with the merchandizing Dutch;
and, in all probability, had he lived longer, Ambassador Nieuport
would have had to send home news that might not have been pleasant to
their High Mightinesses. But the next day (August 6) Lady Claypole
was dead; and from that day, through the remaining four weeks of
Cromwell's life, the concerns of the foreign world grew dimmer and
dimmer in his regards. Perhaps to the last moment of his
consciousness what did most interest him in that foreign world was
the great new commotion round the Baltic in which his Swedish brother
was the central figure, and in which both the Dutch and the
Brandenburg Elector were playing anti-Swedish parts, the Elector
avowedly, the Dutch more warily, "The King of Sweden hath again
invaded the Dane, and very probably hath Copenhagen by this time,"
wrote Thurloe from Whitehall to Henry Cromwell at two o'clock in the
morning of August 27. Cromwell, therefore, had learnt that fact
before his death, and it must have mingled with his thoughts in his
dying hours. In these very hours, we find, not only was Ambassador
Nieuport close at hand again, for Dutch negotiations in which the
fact would naturally be of high moment, but Herr. Schlezer also, the
London agent of the Brandenburg Elector, was at the doors of the
Council office, with express letters from the Elector, which he was
anxious to deliver to Thurloe himself, in case even at such a time
some answer might be elicited. Thurloe choosing to be inaccessible,
he had left the letters with Mr. Marvell. Thus, twice in the last
weeks of Oliver's Protectorate we have a distinct sight of Marvell in
his capacity of substitute for Milton. He barges down the Thames very
early on a Sunday morning to salute an Ambassador in the name of the
Protector and bring him up to town in a proper manner; and he
receives in the Whitehall office a troublesome diplomatic agent, who
has come with important despatches.[1]
[Footnote 1: Thurloe, VII 286 and 298-299 (Letters of Nieuport to
the States-General), 362 (Letter of Thurloe to Henry Cromwell), and
373-374 (Latin letter of Schlezer to Thurloe, two days after
Cromwell's death).]
Thirty-three Latin State-Letters and five Latin Familiar Epistles are
the productions of Milton's pen we have hitherto registered as
belonging to the Second Protectorate of Oliver. Two or three
incidents, appertaining more properly to his Literary Biography, have
yet to be noticed before we leave the period.
Here is the title of a little foreign tract of which I have seen a
solitary, and perhaps unique, copy:-"_Dissertationis ad quoedam
loca Miltoni Pars Posterior; quam, adspirante Deo, Præsids Dn. Jacobo
Schallero, S.S, Theol. Doct, et Philos. Pract. Prof., ad. h.t.
Facult. Phil. Decano, solenniter defendet die[17] mens. Septemb.
Christophorus Güntzer, Argentorat. Argentorati, Typis Friderici
Spoor, 1657_" ("Second Part of a Dissertation, on certain Passages
of Milton; which, with God's favour, and tinder the presidency of
James Schaller, Doctor of Divinity and Professor of Practical
Philosophy, acting as Dean of the Faculty of Philosophy for the
occasion, Christopher Güntzer of Strasburg will solemnly defend on
the 17th of September. Strasburg, Printed by Frederic Spoor, 1657").
Of the Schaller here mentioned we have heard before in connexion with
a publication of his in 1653, also entitled _Dissertatio ad loca
quædam Miltoni_, and appended then to certain
_Exercitationes_ concerning the English Regicide by the Leipsic
jurist Caspar Ziegler (Vol. IV. pp. 534-535). He seems to have
retained an interest in the subject, and to have kept it up among
those about him; for here, four years after his own Dissertation, he
is to preside at the academic defence of another on the same subject
by a Christopher Güntzer, who was probably one of his pupils. Young
Güntzer, it seems, had been trying his hand on the subject already;
for this is but the "second part" of his performance. The "first
part" I have not seen, though it seems to have been published. The
"second part" is a thin quarto, paged 45-92, as if to be bound with
the first. It is in a juvenile and dry style of quotation and
academic reasoning, modelled after Schaller's older Dissertation, and
not worth an abstract. More interesting than itself are eleven pieces
of congratulatory Latin verse prefixed to it by college friends of
the disputant. In more than one of these Milton is mentioned; but the
liveliest mention of him is in a set of Phalæcians signed
"Christianus Keck." Phalæcians are not to be attempted in English;
but, as the semi-absurd relish of the thing would be lost in prose,
the first few lines may run into a kind of equivalent doggrel:--
"What Salmasius, he whom all men hailed as
Learning's prodigy, Phoenix much too big for
His own late generation, ay or any old one,
Wrote so bravely against the sin of Britain,
Then all wet with the royal bloodshed in her,
Milton answered with pen that, be it granted,
Showed vast genius, nor a mind without some
Real marks of artistic cultivation,
Though, O shame! patronizing such an outrage.
Milton's pen is refuted next by Schaller's,--
Quite a different pen and more respected."
Young Keck then goes on to assure his fellow-students that, if their
eminent Professor Schaller's Dissertation of 1653 in reply to Milton
had been duly read and pondered in Great Britain, it would have been
of far more use towards a restoration of the Stuarts than camps and
cannon; and he ends by congratulating the world on the fact that now
young Güntzer, the accomplished young Güntzer, has placed himself by
the side of the learned Professor, to wave the same inextinguishable
torch of truth.[1]--In all probability, Milton never heard of such a
trifle. It illustrates, however, the kind of rumour of himself and
his writings that was circling, in the year 1657, in holes and
corners of German Universities. Strasburg, with Elsatz generally, was
then within the dominions of Austria; and it was naturally less in
Austrian Germany than in other parts of the Continent that there was
that especial admiration of Milton which had been growing since the
publication of his _Defensio Prima_, but which, as Aubrey tells
us, had reached its height under the Protectorate. "He was mightily
importuned," says Aubrey, "to go into France and Italy. Foreigners
came much to see him, and much admired him, and offered to him great
preferments to come over to them; and the only inducement of several
foreigners that came over into England was chiefly to see O.
Protector and Mr. J. Milton; and [they] would see the house and
chamber where he was born. He was much more admired abroad than at
home." This corresponds with all our own evidence hitherto, though we
have heard nothing of those invitations and offers of foreign
preferment of which Aubrey speaks.
[Footnote 1: The copy I have seen of Güntzer's _Dissertatio_ is
in the British Museum Library. The figure "17" is inserted in MS.
after the word "_die_" in the title-page.]
In May 1658, three or four months before Cromwell's death, there was
published in London a little volume of about 200 pages, with this
title-page: "_The Cabinet Council; Containing the chief Arts of
Empire, and Mysteries of State; Discabineted in Political and
Polemical Aphorisms, grounded, on Authority, and Experience; And
illustrated with the choicest Examples and Historical Observations.
By the Ever-renowned Knight, Sir Walter Raleigh, published by John
Milton Esq._-Quis Martem tunicâ tectum Adamantinâ digne
scripserit?-_London, Printed by Tho. Newcomb for Tho. Johnson at
the sign of the Key in St. Pauls Churchyard, near the West-end,
1658."_ Prefixed to the body of the volume, which is divided into
twenty-six chapters, is a note "_To the Reader,"_ as follows:
"Having had the manuscript of this Treatise, written by Sir Walter
Raleigh, many years in my hands, and finding it lately by chance
among other books and papers, upon reading thereof I thought it a
kind of injury to withhold longer the work of so eminent an author
from the public: it being both answerable in style to other works of
his already extant, as far as the subject would permit, and given me
for a true copy by a learned man at his death, who had collected
several such pieces.-JOHN MILTON."[1]
[Footnote 1: There were subsequent reprints of Raleigh's _Cabinet
Council_ from this 1658 edition by Milton, with changes of
title. See Bohn's Lowndes under _Raleigh_]
By far the most interesting fact, however, in Milton's literary life
under the Second Protectorate is that he had certainly, before its
close, resumed his design of a great English poem, to be called
Paradise Lost. Phillips's words might even imply that he had resumed
this design before the end of the First Protectorate. For, after
having mentioned that, in the comparative leisure in which he was
left by the conclusion of his controversy with Morus (Aug. 1655), he
resumed those two favourite hack-occupations on which he always fell
back when he had nothing else to do,--his History of England and his
compilations for a Latin Dictionary,--Phillips adds, "But the highth
of his noble fancy and invention began now to be seriously and mainly
employed in a subject worthy of such a muse: viz. a Heroic Poem,
entitled _Paradise Lost_, the noblest," &c. In this passage,
however, Phillips is throwing together, in 1694, all his
recollections of the four years of his uncle's life between Aug. 1655
and Aug. 1659; and Aubrey's earlier information (1680), originally
derived from Phillips himself, is that _Paradise Lost_ was begun
"about two years before the King came in," i.e. about May 1658. This
would fix the date somewhere in the two or three months immediately
following the death-of Milton's second wife. In such a matter exact
certainty is unattainable; and it is enough to know for certain that
the resumption of _Paradise Lost_ was an event of the latter
part of Cromwell's Second Protectorate, and that some portion of the
poem was actually written in the house in Petty France, Westminster,
while Milton was in communication with Cromwell and writing letters
for him. In the rooms of that house, or in the garden that stretched
from the house into St. James's Park across part of what is now the
ground of Wellington Barracks, the subject of the epic first took
distinct shape in Milton's mind, and here he began the great
dictation.
Eighteen years had elapsed since Milton, just settled in London after
his return from Italy, had first fastened on the subject, preferred
it by a sure instinct to all the others that occurred in competition
with it, and sketched four plans for its treatment in the form of a
sacred tragedy, one with the precise title _Paradise Lost_, and
another with the title _Adam Unparadised_ (Vol. II. pp. 106-108,
and 115-119). Through all the distractions of those eighteen years
the grand subject had not ceased to haunt him, nor the longing to
return to it and to his poetic vocation. Nay there had hung in his
memory all this while certain lines he had actually written and
destined for the opening of the intended tragedy. They were the ten
lines that now form lines 32-41 of the fourth book of our present
_Paradise Lost_. He had imagined, for the opening of his
tragedy, Satan already arrived within our Universe out of Hell, and
alighted on our central Earth near Eden, and gazing up to Heaven and
the Sun blazing there in meridian splendour. He had imagined Satan,
in this pause of his first advent into the Universe he was to ruin,
thus addressing the Sun as its chief visible representative:--
"O thou that with surpassing glory crowned,
Look'st from thy sole dominion like the god
Of this new World,--at whose sight all the stars
Hide their diminished heads,--to thee I call,
But with no friendly voice, and add thy name,
O Sun, to tell thee how I hate thy beams,
That bring to my remembrance from what state
I fell, how glorious once above thy sphere,
Till pride and worse ambition threw me down,
Warring in Heaven against Heaven's matchless King!"
And now, after eighteen years, the poem having been resumed, but with
the resolution, made natural by Milton's literary observations and
experiences in the interval, that the dramatic form should be
abandoned and the epic substituted, these ten lines, written
originally for the opening of the Drama, were to be the nucleus of
the Epic.[1] With our present _Paradise Lost_ before us, we can
see the very process of the gradual reinvention. In the epic Satan
must not appear, as had been proposed in the drama, at once on our
earth or within our universe. He must be fetched from the
transcendental regions, the vast extra-mundane spaces, of his own
prior existence and history. And so, round our fair universe,
newly-created and wheeling softly on its axle, conscious as yet of no
evil, conscious only of the happy earth and sweet human life in the
midst, and of the steady diurnal change from day and light-blue
sunshine into spangled and deep-blue night, Milton was figuring and
mapping out those other infinitudes which outlay and encircled his
conception of all this mere Mundane Creation. Deep down beneath this
MUNDANE CREATION, and far separated from it, he was seeing the HELL
from which was to come its woe; all round the Mundane Creation, and
surging everywhere against its outmost firmament, was the dark and
turbid CHAOS out of which its orderly and orbicular immensity had
been cut; and high over all, radiant above Chaos, but with the
Mundane Universe pendent from it at one gleaming point, was the great
EMPYREAN or HEAVEN of HEAVENS, the abode of Angels and of Eternal
Godhead. Not to the mere Earth of Man or the Mundane Universe about
that Earth was Milton's adventurous song now to be confined,
representing only dramatically by means of speeches and choruses
those transactions in the three extramundane Infinitudes that might
bear on the terrestrial story. It must dare also into those
infinitudes themselves, pursue among them the vaster and more general
story of Satan's rebellion and fall, and yet make all converge,
through Satan's scheme in Hell and his advent at last into our World,
upon that one catastrophe of the ruin of infant Mankind which the
title of the poem proclaimed as the particular theme.
[Footnote 1: Phillips's words in quoting these lines are, "In the
Fourth Book of the Poem there are six [he says _six_, but quotes
all the _ten_] verses which, several years before the Poem was
begun, were shown to me and some others as designed for the very
beginning of the said Tragedy." These words, if the Epic was begun in
1658, might carry us back at farthest to about 1650 as the date when
the ten lines were in existence; but, besides that Phillips's
expression is vague, we have Aubrey's words in 1680 as follows:--"In
the [4th] Book of _Paradise Lost_ there are about six verses of
Satan's exclamation to the Sun which Mr. E. Phi. remembers about
fifteen or sixteen years before ever his Poem was thought of; which
verses were intended for the beginning of a Tragoedie, which he had
designed, but was diverted from it by other business." This, on
Phillips's own authority, would take the lines back to 1642 or
1643; and that, on independent grounds, is the probable date.
Hardly after 1642 or 1643 can Milton have adhered to his original
intention of writing _Paradise Lost_ in a dramatic form.]
"Of Man's first disobedience, and the fruit
Of that forbidden tree whose mortal taste
Brought death into the World, and all our woe,
With loss of Eden, till one greater Man
Restore us and regain the blissful seat,
Sing, Heavenly Muse"--
Such might be the simple invocation at the outset; but, knowing now
all that the epic was really to involve, and how far it was to carry
him in flight above the Aonian Mount, little wonder that he could
already promise in it
"Things unattempted yet in prose or rhyme."
It may have been in one of the nights following a day of such
meditation of the great subject he had resumed, and some considerable
instalment of the actual verse of the poem as we now have it may have
been already on paper, or in Milton's memory for repetition to
himself, when he dreamt a memorable dream. The house is all still,
the voices and the pattering feet of the children hushed in sleep,
and Milton too asleep, but with his waking thoughts pursuing him into
sleep and stirring the mimic fancy. Not this night, however, is it of
Heaven, or Hell, or Chaos, or the Universe of Man with its
luminaries, or any other of the objects of his poetic contemplation
by day, that dreaming images come. Nor yet is it the recollection of
any business, Piedmontese, Swedish, or French, last employing him
officially, that now passes into his involuntary visions. His mind is
wholly back on himself, his hard fate of blindness, and his again
vacant and desolate household. But lo! as he dreams, that seems
somehow all a mistake, and the household is _not_ desolate. A
radiant figure, clothed in white, approaches him and bends over him.
He knows it to be his wife, whom he had thought dead, but who is not
dead. Her face is veiled, and he cannot see that; but then he had
never seen that, and it was not so he could distinguish her. It was
by the radiant, saintlike, sweetness of her general presence. That is
again beside him and bending over him, the same as ever; and it was
certainly she! So for the few happy moments while the dream lasts;
but he awakes, and the spell is broken. So dear has been that dream,
however, that he will keep it as a sacred memory for himself in the
last of all his Sonnets:--
"Methought I saw my late espoused saint
Brought to me like Alcestis from the grave,
Whom Jove's great son to her glad husband gave,
Rescued from Death by force, though pale and faint.
Mine, as whom washed from spot of child-bed taint
Purification in the Old Law did save,
And such as yet once more I trust to have
Full sight of her in Heaven without restraint,
Came vested all in white, pure as her mind.
Her face was veiled; yet to my fancied sight
Love, sweetness, goodness, in her person shined
So clear as in no face with more delight.
But oh! as to embrace me she inclined,
I waked, she fled, and day brought back my night."[1]
[Footnote 1: We do not know the exact date of this Sonnet; but the
internal evidence decidedly is that it was written not very long
after the second wife's death, and probably in 1658. The manuscript
copy of it among the Milton MSS. at Cambridge is in the hand of a
person who was certainly acting as amanuensis for Milton early in
1660 and afterwards.]
BOOK III.
SEPTEMBER 1660--MAY 1660.
HISTORY:--THE PROTECTORATE OF RICHARD CROMWELL, THE ANARCHY,
MONK'S MARCH AND DICTATORSHIP, AND THE RESTORATION.
RICHARD'S PROTECTORATE: SEPT. 3, 1658--MAY 25, 1659.
THE ANARCHY:--
STAGE I.:--THE RESTORED RUMP: MAY 25, 1659--OCT. 13, 1659.
STAGE II.:--THE WALLINGFORD-HOUSE GOVERNMENT: OCT. 13, 1659--DEC.
26, 1659.
STAGE III.:--SECOND RESTORATION OF THE RUMP, WITH MONK'S MARCH
FROM SCOTLAND: DEC. 26, 1659--FEB. 21, 1659-60.
MONK'S DICTATORSHIP, THE RESTORED LONG PARLIAMENT, AND THE
RESTORATION.
BIOGRAPHY:--MILTON'S LIFE AND SECRETARYSHIP THROUGH RICHARD'S
PROTECTORATE, THE ANARCHY, AND MONK'S DICTATORSHIP.
CHAPTER I.
First Section.
THE PROTECTORATE OF RICHARD CROMWELL: SEPT. 3, 1658--MAY 25, 1659.
PROCLAMATION OF RICHARD: HEARTY RESPONSE FROM THE COUNTRY AND FROM
FOREIGN POWERS: FUNERAL OF THE LATE PROTECTOR: RESOLUTION FOR A NEW
PARLIAMENT.--DIFFICULTIES IN PROSPECT: LIST OF THE MOST CONSPICUOUS
PROPS AND ASSESSORS OF THE NEW PROTECTORATE: MONK'S ADVICES TO
RICHARD: UNION OF THE CROMWELLIANS AGAINST CHARLES STUART: THEIR
SPLIT AMONG THEMSELVES INTO THE COURT OR DYNASTIC PARTY AND THE ARMY
OR WALLINGFORD-HOUSE PARTY: CHIEFS OF THE TWO PARTIES: RICHARD'S
PREFERENCE FOR THE COURT PARTY, AND HIS SPEECH TO THE ARMY OFFICERS:
BACKING OF THE ARMY PARTY TOWARDS REPUBLICANISM OR ANTI-OLIVERIANISM:
HENRY CROMWELL'S LETTER OF REBUKE TO FLEETWOOD: DIFFERENCES OF THE
TWO PARTIES AS TO FOREIGN POLICY: THE FRENCH ALLIANCE AND THE WAR
WITH SPAIN: RELATIONS TO THE KING OF SWEDEN.--MEETING OF RICHARD'S
PARLIAMENT (JAN. 27, 1658-9): THE TWO HOUSES: EMINENT MEMBERS OF THE
COMMONS: RICHARD'S OPENING SPEECH: THURLOE THE LEADER FOR GOVERNMENT
IN THE COMMONS: RECOGNITION OF THE PROTECTORSHIP AND OF THE OTHER
HOUSE, AND GENERAL TRIUMPH OF THE GOVERNMENT PARTY: MISCELLANEOUS
PROCEEDINGS OF THE PARLIAMENT.--DISSATISFACTION OF THE ARMY PARTY:
THEIR CLOSER CONNEXION WITH THE REPUBLICANS: NEW CONVENTION OF
OFFICERS AT WALLINGFORD-HOUSE: DESBOROUGH'S SPEECH: THE CONTENTION
FORBIDDEN BY THE PARLIAMENT AND DISSOLVED BY RICHARD: WHITEHALL
SURROUNDED BY THE ARMY, AND RICHARD COMPELLED TO DISSOLVE THE
PARLIAMENT.--RESPONSIBLE POSITION OF FLEETWOOD, DESBOROUGH, LAMBERT,
AND THE OTHER ARMY CHIEFS: BANKRUPT STATE OF THE FINANCES: NECESSITY
FOR SOME KIND OF PARLIAMENT: PHRENZY FOR "THE GOOD OLD CAUSE" AND
DEMAND FOR THE RESTORATION OF THE RUMP: ACQUIESCENCE OF THE ARMY
CHIEFS: LENTHALL'S OBJECTIONS: FIRST FORTNIGHT OF THE RESTORED RUMP;
LINGERING OF RICHARD IN WHITEHALL: HIS ENFORCED ABDICATION.
OLIVER was dead, and Richard was Protector. He had been nominated, in
some indistinct way, by his father on his death-bed; and, though
there was missing a certain sealed nomination paper, of much earlier
date, in which it was believed that Fleetwood was the man, it was the
interest of all parties about Whitehall at the moment, Fleetwood
himself included, to accept the death-bed nomination. That having
been settled through the night following Oliver's death, Richard was
proclaimed in various places in London and Westminster on the morning
of September 4, amid great concourses, with firing of cannon, and
acclamations of "_God save His Highness Richard Lord
Protector!_" It was at once intimated that the Government was to
proceed without interruption, and that all holding his late
Highness's commissions, civil or military, were to continue in their
appointments.
Over the country generally, and through the Continent, the news of
Oliver's death and the news that Richard had succeeded him ran
simultaneously. For some time there was much anxiety at Whitehall as
to the response. From all quarters, however, it was reassuring.
Addresses of loyal adhesion to the new Protector poured in from
towns, counties, regiments, and churches of all denominations; the
proclamations in London and Westminster were repeated in Edinburgh,
Dublin, and everywhere else; the Armies in England, Scotland, and
Ireland were alike satisfied; the Navy was cordial; from Lockhart, as
Governor of Dunkirk, and from the English Army in Flanders, there
were votes of confidence; and, in return for the formal intimation
made to all foreign diplomatists in London of the death of the late
Protector and the accession of his son, there came mingled
condolences on the one event and congratulations on the other from
all the friendly powers. Richard himself, hitherto regarded as a mere
country-gentleman of simple and jolly tastes, seemed to suit his new
position better than had been expected. In audiences with deputations
and with foreign ambassadors he acquitted himself modestly and
respectably; and, as he had his father's Council still about him,
with Thurloe keeping all business in hand in spite of an inopportune
illness, affairs went on apparently in a satisfactory course.--A
matter which interested the public for some time was the funeral of
the late Protector. His body had been embalmed, and conveyed to
Somerset House, there to lie in open state, amid banners,
escutcheons, black velvet draperies and all the sombre gorgeousness
that could be devised from a study of the greatest royal funerals on
record, including a superb effigy of his Highness, robed in purple,
ermined, sceptred, and diademed, to represent the life; and not till
the 23rd of November was there an end to these ghastly splendours by
a great procession from Somerset House to Westminster Abbey to
deposit the effigy in the chapel of Henry VII., where the body itself
had already been privately interred.--A week after this disappearance
of the last remains of Oliver (Nov. 29, 1658) it was resolved in
Council to call a Parliament. This, in fact, was but carrying out the
intention formed in the late Protectorate; but, while the cause that
had mainly made another Parliament desirable to Oliver was still
excruciatingly in force,--to wit, the exhaustion of funds,--it was
considered fitting moreover that Richard's accession should as soon
as possible pass the ordeal of Parliamentary approval. Thursday, Jan.
27, 1658-9, was the day fixed for the meeting of the Parliament.
Through the intervening weeks, while all the constituencies were
busy with the canvassing and the elections, the procedure of Richard
and his Council at Whitehall seemed still regular and judicious.
There was due correspondence with foreign powers, and there was no
interruption of the home-administration. The Protector kept court as
his father had done, and conferred knighthoods and other honours,
which were thankfully accepted. Sermons were dedicated to him as "the
thrice illustrious Richard, Lord Protector." In short, nearly five
months of his Protectorship passed away without any tumult or
manifest opposition.[1]
[Footnote 1: _Merc. Pol._, from Sept. 1658 to Jan. 1658-9, as
quoted in _Cromwelliana_, 178-181; Thurloe, VII. 383-384, _et
seq._ as far as 541; Whitlocke, IV. 335-339; Phillips (i.e.
continuation of Baker's Chronicle by Milton's nephew, Edward
Phillips), ed. 1679, pp. 635-639; _Peplum Olivarii_, a funeral
sermon on Oliver, dated Nov. 17, 1658, among Thomason
Pamphlets.--Knights of Richard's dubbing in the first five months of
his Protectorate were--General Morgan (Nov. 26), Captain Beke (Dee.
6), and Colonel Hugh Bethel (Dee. 26). There may have been others.]
Appearances, however, were very deceptive. The death of Cromwell had,
of course, agitated the whole world of exiled Royalism, raising sunk
hopes, and stimulating Charles himself, the Queen-Mother, Hyde,
Ormond, Colepepper, and the other refugees over the Continent, to
doubled activity of intrigue and correspondence. And, though that
immediate excitement had passed, and had even been succeeded by a
kind of wondering disappointment among the exiles at the perfect calm
attending Richard's accession, it was evident that the chances of
Charles were immensely greater under Richard than they had been while
Oliver lived. For one thing, would the relations of Louis XIV. and
Mazarin to Richard's Government remain the same as they had been to
Oliver's? There was no disturbance of these relations as yet. The
English auxiliaries in Flanders were still shoulder to shoulder with
Turenne and his Frenchmen, sharing with them such new successes as
the capture of Ypres, accomplished mainly by the valour of the brave
Morgan. But who knew what might be passing in the mind of the crafty
Cardinal? Then what of the Dutch? In the streets of Amsterdam the
populace, on receipt of the news of Cromwell's death, had gone about
shouting "The Devil is dead"; the alliance between the English
Commonwealth and the United Provinces had recently been on strain
almost to snapping; what if, on the new opportunity, the policy of
the States-General should veer openly towards the Stuart interest?
All this was in the calculations of Hyde and his fellow-exiles, and
it was their main disappointment that the quiet acceptance and
seeming stability of the new Protectorate at home prevented the
spring against it of such foreign possibilities. "I hope this young
man will not inherit his father's fortune," wrote Hyde in the fifth
month after Richard's accession, "but that some confusion will fall
out which must make open a door for us." The speculation was more
likely than even Hyde then knew. Underneath the great apparent calm
at home the beginnings of a confusion at the very centre were already
at work.[1]
[Footnote 1: Thurloe, VII. 405 and 414; Guizot's _Richard Cromwell
and the Restoration_ (English edition of 1856), I. 6-11.]
It will be well at this point to have before us a list of the most
conspicuous props and assessors of the new Protectorate. The name
_Oliverians_ being out of date now, they may be called _The
Cromwellians_. We shall arrange them in groups:--
I. THE COUNCIL.
Lord President Lawrence.
Lord Lieutenant-General Fleetwood (his Highness's brother-in-law).
Lord Major-General Desborough (his Highness's uncle-in-law).
Lord Sydenham (Colonel).
Lord Pickering (_Chamberlain of the Household_).
Lord Strickland.
Lord Skippon.
Lord Fiennes (_one of the Commissioners of the Great Seal_).
Lord Viscount Lisle.
Lord Admiral Montague.
Lord Wolseley.
Lord Philip Jones (_Comptroller of the Household_).
Mr. Secretary Thurloe.[1]
[Footnote 1: On comparing this list of Richard's Council with the
list of the Council in Oliver's Second Protectorate (ante p. 308) two
names will be missed--those of the EARL of MULGRAVE and old FRANCIS
ROUS. The Earl of Mulgrave had died Aug. 28, 1658, five days before
Cromwell himself. The venerable Rous only just survived. He died
Jan. 7, 1658-9, and is hardly to be counted in the present list.
Richard's father-in-law, RICHARD MAYOR, though still alive and
nominally in the Council, had retired from active life.]
II. NEAR ADVISERS, NOT OF THE COUNCIL.