LATIN SECRETARYSHIP COMES TO AN END--MILTON'S FRIENDS.
It is no part of Milton's biography to relate the course of public
events in these momentous years, merely because as Latin secretary
he formulated the despatches of the Protector or of his Council, and
because these Latin letters are incorporated in Milton's works. On the
course of affairs Milton's voice had no influence, as he had no part
in their transaction. Milton was the last man of whom a practical
politician would have sought advice. He knew nothing of the temper of
the nation, and treated all that opposed his own view with supreme
disdain. On the other hand, idealist though he was, he does not
move in the sphere of speculative politics, or count among those
philosophic names, a few in each century, who have influenced, not
action but thought. Accordingly his opinions have for us a purely
personal interest. They are part of the character of the poet Milton,
and do not belong to either world, of action or of mind.
The course of his political convictions up to 1654 has been traced in
our narrative thus far. His breeding at home, at school, at college,
was that of a member of the Established Church, but of the Puritan and
Calvinistic, not of the Laudian and Arminian, party within its
pale. By 1641, we find that his Puritanism has developed into
Presbyterianism; he desires, not to destroy the Church, but to reform
it by abolishing government by bishops, and substituting the Scotch or
Genevan discipline. When he wrote his _Reason of Church Government_
(1642), he is still a royalist; not in the cavalier sense of a person
attached to the reigning sovereign, or the Stuart family, but still
retaining the belief of his age that monarchy in the abstract had
somewhat of divine sanction. Before 1649, the divine right of
monarchy, and the claim of Presbytery to be scriptural, have yielded
in his mind to a wider conception of the rights of the man and the
Christian. To use the party names of the time, Milton the Presbyterian
has expanded into Milton the Independent. There is to be no State
Church, and instead of a monarchy there is to be a commonwealth.
Very soon the situation developes the important question how this
commonwealth shall be administered--whether by a representative
assembly, or by a picked council, or a single governor. This question
was put to a test in the Parliament of 1654. The experiment of a
representative assembly, begun in September 1654, broke down in
January 1655. Before it was tried we find Milton in his _Second
Defence_, in May 1654, recommending Cromwell to govern not by a
Parliament, but by a council of officers; i.e. he is a commonwealth's
man. Arrived at this point, would Milton take his stand upon
doctrinaire republicanism, and lose sight of liberty in the attempt
to secure equality, as his friends Vane, Overton, Bradshaw would have
done? Or would his idealist exaltation sweep him on into some one of
the current fanaticisms, Leveller, Fifth Monarchy, or Muggletonian?
Unpractical as he was, he was close enough to State affairs as Latin
Secretary, to see that personal government by the Protector was,
at the moment, the only solution. If the liberties that had been
conquered by the sword were to be maintained, between levelling chaos
on the one hand, and royalist reaction on the other, it was the
Protector alone to whom those who prized liberty above party names
could look. Accordingly Milton may be regarded from the year 1654
onwards as an Oliverian, though with particular reservations. He
saw--it was impossible for a man in his situation not to see--the
unavoidable necessity which forced Cromwell, at this moment, to
undertake to govern without a representative assembly. The political
necessity of the situation was absolute, and all reasonable men who
were embarked in the cause felt it to be so.
Through all these stages Milton passed in the space of twenty
years--Church-Puritan, Presbyterian, Royalist, Independent,
Commonwealth's man, Oliverian. These political phases were not the
acquiescence of a placeman, or indifferentist, in mutations for which
he does not care; still less were they changes either of party or of
opinion. Whatever he thought, Milton thought and felt intensely, and
expressed emphatically; and even his enemies could not accuse him of
a shadow of inconsistency or wavering in his principles. On the
contrary, tenacity, or persistence of idea, amounted in him to a
serious defect of character. A conviction once formed dominated him,
so that, as in the controversy with Morus, he could not be persuaded
that he had made a mistake. No mind, the history of which we have an
opportunity of intimately studying, could be more of one piece and
texture than was that of Milton from youth to age. The names, which
we are obliged to give to his successive political stages, do not
indicate shades of colour adopted from the prevailing political
ground, but the genuine development of the public consciousness of
Puritan England repeated in an individual. Milton moved forward, not
because Cromwell and the rest advanced, but with Cromwell and the
rest. We may perhaps describe the motive force as a passionate
attachment to personal liberty, liberty of thought and action. This
ideal force working in the minds of a few, "those worthies which
are the soul of that enterprise" (_Tenure of Kings_), had been the
mainspring of the whole revolution. The Levellers, Quakers, Fifth
Monarchy men, and the wilder Anabaptist sects, only showed the
workings of the same idea in men, whose intellects had not been
disciplined by education or experience. The idea of liberty,
formulated into a doctrine, and bowed down to as a holy creed, made
some of its best disciples, such as Harrison and Overton, useless at
the most critical juncture. The party of anti-Oliverian republicans,
the Intransigentes, became one of the greatest difficulties of the
Government. Milton, with his idealism, his thoroughness, and obstinate
persistence, was not unlikely to have shipwrecked upon the same rock.
He was saved by his constancy to the principle of religious liberty,
which was found with the party that had destroyed the King because he
would not be ruled by a Parliament, while in 1655 it supported the
Protector in governing without a Parliament. Supreme authority
in itself was not Cromwell's aim; he used it only to secure the
fulfilment of those ideas of religious liberty, civil order, and
Protestant ascendancy in Europe, which filled his whole soul. To
Milton, as to Cromwell, forms, whether of worship or government, were
but means to an end, and were to be changed whenever expediency might
require.
In 1655, then, Milton was an Oliverian, but with reservations. The
most important of these reservations regarded the relation of the
state to the church. Cromwell never wholly dropped the scheme of a
national church. It was, indeed, to be as comprehensive as possible;
Episcopacy was pulled down, Presbytery was not set up, but individual
ministers might be Episcopalian or Presbyterian in sentiment, provided
they satisfied a certain standard, intelligible enough to that
generation, of "godliness". Here Milton seems to have remained
throughout upon the old Independent platform; he will not have the
civil power step over its limits into the province of religion at all.
Many matters, in which the old prelatic church had usurped upon the
domain of the state, should be replaced under the secular authority.
But the spiritual region was matter of conscience, and not of external
regulation.
A further reservation which Milton would make related to endowments,
or the maintenance of ministers. The Protectorate, and the
constitution of 1657, maintained an established clergy in the
enjoyment of tithes or other settled stipends. Nothing was more
abhorrent to Milton's sentiment than state payment in religious
things. The minister who receives such pay becomes a state pensioner,
"a hireling." The law of tithes is a Jewish law, repealed by the
Gospel, under which the minister is only maintained by the freewill
offerings of the congregation to which he ministers. This antipathy to
hired preachers was one of Milton's earliest convictions. It thrusts
itself, rather importunately, into _Lycidas_ (1636), and reappears
in the Sonnet to Cromwell (_Sonnet_ xvii., 1652), before it is
dogmatically expounded in the pamphlet, _Considerations touching means
to remove Hirelings out of the Church_ (1659). Of the two corruptions
of the church by the secular power, one by force, the other by pay,
Milton regards the last as the most dangerous. "Under force, though
no thank to the forcers, true religion ofttimes best thrives and
flourishes; but the corruption of teachers, most commonly the effect
of hire, is the very bane of truth in them who are so corrupted."
Nor can we tax this aversion to a salaried ministry, with being a
monomania of sect. It is essentially involved in the conception of
religion as a spiritual state, a state of grace. A soul in this state
can only be ministered to by a brother in a like frame of mind. To
assign a place with a salary, is to offer a pecuniary inducement to
simulate this qualification. This principle may be wrong, but it is
not unreasonable. It is the very principle on which the England of our
day has decided against the endowment of science. The endowment of the
church was to Milton the poison of religion, and in so thinking he was
but true to his conception of religion. Cromwell, whatever may have
been his speculative opinions, decided in favour of a state endowment,
upon the reasons, or some of them, which have moved modern statesmen
to maintain church establishments.
With whatever reservations, Milton was an Oliverian. Supporting the
Protector's policy, he admired his conduct, and has recorded his
admiration in the memorable sonnet xii. How the Protector thought of
Milton, or even that he knew him at all, there remains no evidence.
Napoleon said of Corneille that, if he had lived in his day, he would
have made him his first minister.
Milton's ideas were not such as could have value in the eyes of a
practical statesman. Yet Cromwell was not always taking advice, or
discussing business. He, who could take a liking for the genuine
inwardness of the enthusiast George Fox, might have been expected to
appreciate equal unworldliness, joined with culture and reading, in
Milton. "If," says Neal, "there was a man in England who excelled in
any faculty or science, the Protector would find him out and reward
him." But the excellence which the Protector prized was aptness for
public employment, and this was the very quality in which Milton was
deficient.
The poverty of Milton's state letters has been often remarked.
Whenever weighty negotiations are going on, other pens than his are
employed. We may ascribe this to his blindness. Milton could only
dictate, and therefore everything entrusted to him must pass through
an amanuensis, who might blab. One exception to the commonplace
character of the state papers there is. The massacre of the Vaudois
by their own sovereign, Charles Emanuel II., Duke of Savoy, excited a
thrill of horror in England greater than the massacres of Scio or of
Batak roused in our time. For in Savoy it was not humanity only that
was outraged, it was a deliberate assault of the Papal half of Europe
upon an outpost of the Protestant cause.
One effect of the Puritan revolution had been to alter entirely the
foreign policy of England. By nature, by geographical position, by
commercial occupations, and the free spirit of the natives, these
islands were marked out to be members of the northern confederacy of
progressive and emancipated Europe. The foreign policy of Elisabeth
had been steady adhesion to this law of nature. The two first Stuarts,
coquetting with semi-Catholicism at home, had leaned with all the
weight of the crown and of government towards catholic connexions. The
country had always offered a vain resistance; the Parliament of
1621 had been dismissed for advising James to join the continental
protestants against Spain. It was certain, therefore, that when the
government became Puritan, its foreign policy would again become that
of Elisabeth. This must have been the case even if Cromwell had not
been there. He saw not only that England must be a partner in the
general protestant interest, but that it fell to England to make the
combination and to lead it. He acted in this with his usual decision.
He placed England in her natural antagonism to Spain; he made peace
with the Dutch; he courted the friendship of the Swiss Cantons, and
the alliance of the Scandinavian and German Princes; and to France,
which had a divided interest, he made advantageous offers provided the
Cardinal would disconnect himself from the ultramontane party.
It was in April 1655, that the Vaudois atrocities suddenly added the
impulse of religious sympathy to the permanent gravitation of the
political forces. In all catholic countries the Jesuits had by this
time made themselves masters of the councils of the princes. The aim
of Jesuit policy in the seventeenth century was nothing less than the
entire extirpation of protestantism and protestants in the countries
which they ruled. The inhabitants of certain Piedmontese valleys had
held from time immemorial, and long before Luther, tenets and forms of
worship very like those to which the German reformers had sought to
bring back the church. The Vaudois were wretchedly poor, and had been
incessantly the objects of aggression and persecution. In January
1655, a sudden determination was taken by the Turin government to
make them conform to the catholic religion by force. The whole of the
inhabitants of three valleys were ordered to quit the country within
three days, under pain of death and confiscation of goods, unless they
would become, or undertake to become, catholic. They sent their
humble remonstrances to the court of Turin against this edict. The
remonstrances were disregarded, and military execution was ordered. On
April 17, 1655, the soldiers, recruits from all countries--the Irish
are specially mentioned--were let loose upon the unarmed population.
Murder and rape and burning are the ordinary incidents of military
execution. These were not enough to satisfy the ferocity of the
catholic soldiery, who revelled for many days in the infliction of all
that brutal lust or savage cruelty can suggest to men.
It was nearly a month before the news reached England. A cry of horror
went through the country, and Cromwell said it came "as near his
heart as if his own nearest and dearest had been concerned." A day
of humiliation was appointed, large collections were made for the
sufferers, and a special envoy was despatched to remonstrate with the
Duke of Savoy. Cardinal Mazarin, however, seeing the importance which
the Lord Protector would acquire by taking the lead on this occasion,
stepped in, and patched up a hasty arrangement, the treaty of
Pignerol, by which some sort of fallacious protection was ostensibly
secured to the survivors of the massacre.
All the despatches in this business were composed by Milton. But he
only found the words; especially in the letter to the Duke of Savoy,
the tone of which is much more moderate than we should have expected,
considering that Blake was in the Mediterranean, and master of the
coasts of the Duke's dominions. It is impossible to extract from these
letters any characteristic trait, unless it is from the speech, which
the envoy, Morland, was instructed to deliver at Turin, in which it is
said that all the Neros of all ages had never contrived inhumanities
so atrocious, as what had taken place in the Vaudois valleys. Thus
restricted in his official communications, Milton gave vent to his
personal feelings on the occasion in the well-known sonnet (xviii.)
"Avenge, O Lord, thy slaughtered saints, whose bones Lie scattered on
the Alpine mountains cold."
It has been already said that there remains no trace of any personal
intercourse between Milton and Cromwell. He seems to have remained
equally unknown to, or unregarded by, the other leading men in the
Government or the Council. It is vain to conjecture the cause of this
general neglect. Some have found it in the coldness with which Milton
regarded, parts at least of, the policy of the Protectorate. Others
refer it to the haughty nature of the man, who will neither ask a
favour, nor make the first advances towards intimacy. This last
supposition is nearer the truth than the former. An expression he uses
in a private letter may be cited in its support. Writing to Peter
Heimbach in 1657, to excuse himself from giving him a recommendation
to the English ambassador in Holland, he says: "I am sorry that I am
not able to do this; I have very little acquaintance with those in
power, inasmuch as I keep very much to my own house, and prefer to do
so." Something may also be set down to the character of the Puritan
leaders, alien to all poetry, and knowing no books but the Bible.
The mental isolation in which the great poet lived his life, is
a remarkable feature of his biography. It was not only after the
Restoration that he appears lonely and friendless; it was much
the same during the previous period of the Parliament and the
Protectorate. Just at one time, about 1641, we hear from our best
authority, Phillips, of his cultivating the society of men of his own
age, and "keeping a gawdy-day", but this only once in three weeks or
a month, with "two gentlemen of Gray's Inn." He had, therefore, known
what it was to be sociable. But the general tenour of his life was
other; proud, reserved, self-contained, repellent; brooding over his
own ideas, not easily admitting into his mind the ideas of others. It
is indeed an erroneous estimate of Milton to attribute to him a hard
or austere nature. He had all the quick sensibility which belongs to
the poetic temperament, and longed to be loved that he might love
again. But he had to pay the penalty of all who believe in their own
ideas, in that their ideas come between them and the persons that
approach them, and constitute a mental barrier which can only be
broken down by sympathy. And sympathy for ideas is hard to find, just
in proportion as those ideas are profound, far-reaching, the fruit of
long study and meditation. Hence it was that Milton did not associate
readily with his contemporaries, but was affable and instructive in
conversation with young persons, and those who would approach him in
the attitude of disciples. His daughter Deborah, who could tell so
little about him, remembered that he was delightful company, the life
of a circle, and that he was so, through a flow of subjects, and
an unaffected cheerfulness and civility. I would interpret this
testimony, the authenticity of which is indisputable, of his demeanour
with the young, and those who were modest enough to wait upon his
utterances. His isolation from his coevals, and from those who offered
resistance, was the necessary consequence of his force of character,
and the moral tenacity which endured no encroachment on the narrow
scheme of thought; over which it was incessantly brooding.
Though, as Johnson says "his literature was immense", there was no
humanity in it; it was fitted immovably into a scholastic frame-work.
Hence it was no bond of sympathy between him and other men. We find
him in no intimate relation with any of the contemporary men of
learning, poets, or wits. From such of them as were of the cavalier
party he was estranged by politics. That it was Milton's interposition
which saved Davenant's life in 1651, even were the story better
authenticated than it is, is not an evidence of intimacy. The three
men most eminent for learning (in the usually received sense of the
word) in England at that day were Selden (d. 1654), Gataker (d. 1654),
and Archbishop Usher (d. 1656), all of whom were to be found in
London. With none of the three is there any trace of Milton ever
having had intercourse.
It is probable, but not certain, that it was at Milton's intercession
that the Council proposed to subsidise Brian Walton in his great
enterprise--the Polyglott Bible. This, the noblest monument of the
learning of the Anglican Church, was projected and executed by the
silenced clergy. Fifteen years of spoliation and humiliation thus bore
richer fruit of learning than the two centuries of wealth and honour
which have since elapsed. As Brian Walton had, at one time, been
curate of Allhallows, Bread Street, Milton may have known him, and it
has been inferred that by Twells' expression--"The Council of
state, before whom _some_, having _relation to them_, brought this
business"--Milton is meant.
Not with John Hales, Cudworth, Whichcote, Nicholas Bernard, Meric
Casaubon, nor with any of the men of letters who were churchmen, do
we find Milton in correspondence. The interest of religion was
more powerful than the interest of knowledge; and the author of
_Eikonoklastes_ must have been held in special abhorrence by the loyal
clergy. The general sentiment of this party is expressed in Hacket's
tirade, for which the reader is referred to his Life of Archbishop
Williams.
From Presbyterians, such as Theophilus Gale or Baxter, Milton was
equally separated by party. Of Hobbes, Milton's widow told Aubrey
"that he was not of his acquaintance; that her husband did not like
him at all, but would acknowledge him to be a man of great parts."
Owing to these circumstances, the circle of Milton's intimates
contains few, and those undistinguished names. One exception there
was. In Andrew Marvel Milton found one congenial spirit, incorruptible
amid poverty, unbowed by defeat. Marvel was twelve years Milton's
junior, and a Cambridge man (Trinity), like himself. He had had better
training still, having been for two years an inmate of Nunappleton, in
the capacity of instructor to Mary, only daughter of the great Lord
Fairfax. In 1652, Milton had recommended Marvel for the appointment of
assistant secretary to himself, now that he was partially disabled
by his blindness. The recommendation was not effectual at the time,
another man, Philip Meadows, obtaining the post. It was not till 1657,
when Meadows was sent on a mission to Denmark, that Marvel became
Milton's colleague. He remained attached to him to the last. It were
to be wished that he had left some reminiscences of his intercourse
with the poet in his later years, some authentic notice of him in his
prose letters, instead of a copy of verses, which attest, at least,
his affectionate admiration for Milton's great epic, though they are a
poor specimen of his own poetical efforts.
Of Marchmont Needham, and Samuel Hartlib mention has been already
made. During the eight years of his sojourn in the house in Petty
France, "he was frequently visited by persons of quality," says
Phillips. The only name he gives is Lady Ranelagh. This lady, by birth
a Boyle, sister of Robert Boyle, had placed first her nephew, and then
her son, under Milton's tuition. Of an excellent understanding, and
liberally cultivated, she sought Milton's society, and as he could
not go to visit her, she went to him. There are no letters of Milton
addressed to her, but he mentions her once as "a most superior woman,"
and when, in 1656, she left London for Ireland, he "grieves for the
loss of the one acquaintance which was worth to him all the rest."
These names, with that of Dr. Paget, exhaust the scanty list of
Milton's intimates during this period.
To these older friends, however, must be added his former pupils, now
become men, but remaining ever attached to their old tutor, seeing him
often when in London, and when absent corresponding with him. With
them he was "affable and instructive in conversation." Henry Lawrence,
son of the President of Oliver's Council, and Cyriac Skinner,
grandson, of Chief Justice Coke, were special favourites. With these
he would sometimes "by the fire help waste a sullen day;" and it was
these two who called forth from him the only utterances of this time
which are not solemn, serious, or sad. Sonnet XVI is a poetical
invitation to Henry Lawrence, "of virtuous father virtuous son," to a
"neat repast," not without wine and song, to cheer the winter season.
Besides these two, whose names are familiar to us through the Sonnets,
there was Lady Ranelagh's son, Richard Jones, who went, in 1656, to
Oxford, attended by his tutor, the German Heinrich Oldenburg. We have
two letters (Latin) addressed to Jones at Oxford, which are curious
as showing that Milton was as dissatisfied with that university even
after the reform, with Oliver Chancellor, and Owen Vice-Chancellor, as
he had been with Cambridge.
His two nephews, also his pupils, must have ceased at a very early
period to be acceptable either as friends or companions. They
had both--but the younger brother, John, more decidedly than
Edward--passed into the opposite camp. This is a result of the uncle's
strict system of Puritan discipline, which will surprise no one who
has observed that, in education, mind reacts against the pressure of
will. The teacher who seeks to impose his views raises antagonists,
and not disciples. The generation of young men who grew up under the
Commonwealth were in intellectual revolt against the constraint of
Puritanism, before they proceeded to political revolution against its
authority. Long before the reaction embodied itself in the political
fact of the Restoration, it had manifested itself in popular
literature. The theatres were still closed by the police, but Davenant
found a public in London to applaud an "entertainment by declamations
and music, after the manner of the ancients" (1656). The press began
timidly to venture on books of amusement, in a style of humour which
seemed ribald and heathenish to the staid and sober covenanter.
Something of the jollity and merriment of old Elisabethan days seemed
to be in the air. But with a vast difference. Instead of "dallying
with the innocence of love," as in _England's Helicon_ (1600), or
_The Passionate Pilgrim_, the sentiment, crushed and maimed by unwise
repression, found a less honest and less refined expression. The
strongest and most universal of human passions when allowed freedom,
light, and air, becomes poetic inspiration. The same passion coerced
by police is but driven underground.
So it came to pass that, in these years, the Protector's Council of
state was much exercised by attempts of the London press to supply the
public, weary of sermons, with some light literature of the class now
(1879) known as facetious. On April 25, 1656, the august body which
had upon its hands the government of three kingdoms and the protection
of the protestant interest militant throughout Europe, could find
nothing better to do than to take into consideration a book entitled
_Sportive Wit, or The Muse's Merriment_. Sad to relate, the book
was found to contain "much lascivious and profane matter." And the
editor?--no other than John Phillips, Milton's youngest nephew! It is
as if nature, in reasserting herself, had made deliberate selection of
its agent. The pure poet of _Comus_, the man who had publicly boasted
his chastity, had trained up a pupil to become the editor of an
immodest drollery! Another and more original production of John
Phillips, the _Satyr against Hypocrites_, was an open attack, with
mixed banter and serious indignation, on the established religion. "It
affords," says Godwin, "unequivocal indication of the company now kept
by the author with cavaliers, and _bon vivans_, and demireps, and men
of ruined fortunes." Edward Phillips, the elder brother, followed suit
with the _Mysteries of Love and Eloquence_ (1658), a book, according
to Godwin, "entitled to no insignificant rank among the multifarious
productions issued from the press, to debauch the manners of the
nation, and to bring back the King." Truly, a man's worst vexations
come to him from his own relations. Milton had the double annoyance
of the public exposure before the Council of State, and the private
reflection on the failure of his own system of education.
The homage which was wanting to the prophet in his own country was
more liberally tendered by foreigners. Milton, it must be remembered,
was yet only known in England as the pamphleteer of strong republican,
but somewhat eccentric, opinions. On the continent he was the answerer
of Salmasius, the vindicator of liberty against despotic power.
"Learned foreigners of note," Phillips tells us, "could not part
out of this city without giving a visit" to his uncle. Aubrey even
exaggerates this flocking of the curious, so far as to say that some
came over into England only to see Oliver Protector and John Milton.
That Milton had more than he liked of these sightseers, who came to
look at him when he could not see them, we can easily believe. Such
visitors would of course be from protestant countries. Italians,
though admiring his elegant Latin, had "disliked him on account of
his too severe morals." A glimpse, and no more than a glimpse, of
the impression such visitors could carry away, we obtain in a letter
written, in 1651, by a Nüremberg pastor, Christoph Arnold, to a friend
at home:--"The strenuous defender of the new _régime_, Milton, enters
readily into conversation; his speech is pure, his written style very
pregnant. He has committed himself to a harsh, not to say unjust,
criticism of the old English divines, and of their Scripture
commentaries, which are truly learned, be witness the genius of
learning himself!" It must not be supposed from this that Milton had
discoursed with Arnold on the English divines. The allusion is to that
onfall upon the reformers, Cranmer, Latimer, &c., which had escaped
from Milton's pen in 1642 to the great grief of his friends. If
the information of a dissenting minister, one Thomas Bradbury, who
professed to derive it from Jeremiah White, one of Oliver's chaplains,
may be trusted, Milton "was allowed by the Parliament a weekly table
for the entertainment of foreign ministers and persons of learning,
such especially as came from protestant states, which allowance was
also continued by Cromwell."
Such homage, though it may be a little tiresome, may have gratified
for the moment the political writer, but it would not satisfy the poet
who was dreaming of an immortality of far other fame--
Two equal'd with me in fate,
So were I equal'd with them in renown.
And to one with Milton's acute sensibility, yearning for sympathy and
love, dependent, through his calamity, on the eyes, as on the heart,
of others, his domestic interior was of more consequence than outside
demonstrations of respect. Four years after the death of his first
wife he married again. We know nothing more of this second wife,
Catharine Woodcock, than what may be gathered from the Sonnet XIX,
in which he commemorated his "late espoused saint," in whose person
"love, sweetness, goodness shin'd." After only fifteen months union
she died (1658), after having given birth to a daughter, who lived
only a few months. Milton was again alone.
His public functions as Latin Secretary had been contracted within
narrow limits by his blindness. The heavier part of the duties had
been transferred to others, first to Weckherlin, then to Philip
Meadows, and lastly to Andrew Marvel. The more confidential diplomacy
Thurloe reserved for his own cabinet. But Milton continued up to the
last to be occasionally called upon for a Latin epistle. On September
3, 1658, passed away the master-mind which had hitherto compelled the
jarring elements in the nation to co-exist together, and chaos was let
loose. Milton retained and exercised his secretaryship under Richard
Protector, and even under the restored Parliament. His latest Latin
letter is of date May 16, 1659. He is entirely outside all the
combinations and complications which filled the latter half of that
year, after Richard's retirement in May. It is little use writing to
foreign potentates now, for, with one man's life, England has fallen
from her lead in Europe, and is gravitating towards the catholic and
reactionary powers, France or Spain. Milton, though he knows nothing
more than one of the public, "only what it appears to us without
doors," he says, will yet write about it. The habit of pamphleteering
was on him, and he will write what no one will care to read. The
stiff-necked commonwealth men, with their doctrinaire republicanism,
were standing out for their constitutional ideas, blind to the fact
that the royalists were all the while undermining the ground beneath
the feet alike of Presbyterian and Independent, Parliament and army.
The Greeks of Constantinople denouncing the Azymite, when Mohammed II.
was forming his lines round the doomed city, were not more infatuated
than these pedantic commonwealth men with their parliamentarianism
when Charles II. was at Calais.
Not less inopportune than the public men of the party, Milton chooses
this time for inculcating his views on endowments. A fury of utterance
was upon him, and he poured out, during the death-throes of the
republic, pamphlet upon pamphlet, as fast as he could get them written
to his dictation. These extemporised effusions betray in their style,
hurry and confusion, the restlessness of a coming despair. The
passionate enthusiasm of the early tracts is gone, and all the old
faults, the obscurity, the inconsecutiveness, the want of arrangement,
are exaggerated. In the _Ready Way_ there is a monster sentence of
thirty-nine lines, containing 336 words. Though his instincts were
perturbed, he was unaware what turn things were taking. In February
1660, when all persons of ordinary information saw that the
restoration of monarchy was certain, Milton knew it not, and put out a
tract to show his countrymen a _Ready and easy way to establish a free
Commonwealth_. With the same pertinacity with which he had adhered
to his own assumption that Morus was author of the _Clamor_, he now
refused to believe in the return of the Stuarts. Fast as his pen
moved, events outstripped it, and he has to rewrite the _Ready and
easy way_ to suit their march. The second edition is overtaken by the
Restoration, and it should seem was never circulated. Milton will ever
"give advice to Sylla," and writes a letter of admonition to Monk,
which, however, never reached either the press or Sylla.
The month of May 1660, put a forced end to his illusion. Before the
29th of that month he had fled from the house in Petty France, and
been sheltered by a friend in the city. In this friend's house, in
Bartholomew Close, he lay concealed till the passing of the Act of
Oblivion, 29th August. Phillips says that he owed his exemption from
the vengeance which overtook so many of his friends, to Andrew Marvel,
"who acted vigorously in his behalf, and made a considerable party for
him." But in adding that "he was so far excepted as not to bear any
office in the commonwealth," Phillips is in error. Milton's name does
not occur in the Act. Pope used to tell that Davenant had employed his
interest to protect a brother-poet, thus returning a similar act of
generosity done to himself by Milton in 1650. Pope had this story from
Betterton the actor. How far Davenant exaggerated to Betterton his own
influence or his exertions, we cannot tell. Another account assigns
the credit of the intervention to Secretary Morris and Sir Thomas
Clarges. After all, it is probable that he owed his immunity to his
insignificance and his harmlessness. The formality of burning two of
his books by the hands of the hangman was gone through. He was
also for some time during the autumn of 1660 in the custody of the
serjeant-at-arms, for on 15th December, there is an entry in the
Commons journals ordering his discharge. It is characteristic of
Milton that, even in this moment of peril, he stood up for his rights,
and refused to pay an overcharge, which the official thought he might
safely exact from a rebel and a covenanter.
THIRD PERIOD, 1660-1674.