the restored Rump Parliament after Richard's abdication (April 1659), attest the continuance of Milton's Secretaryship into this wretched period. Indeed, as late as October 1659 he and his friend Andrew Marvell are found in receipt of their salaries of £200 a year each, as formally colleagues in the office. But, "a little before the King's coming over," Phillips informs us, he was sequestered from his office and "the salary thereunto belonging." O how Milton had been struggling, and how he struggled to the last to avert that disaster, as he regarded it, of "the King's coming over"! A new and enlarged edition of his Defensio pro Populo Anglicano contra Salmasium had appeared in October 1658. "A Treatise of Civil Power in Ecclesiastical Causes, showing that it is not lawful for any power on earth to compel in matters of Religion," is the title of a pamphlet he had published in Feb. 1658-9, while Richard was still Protector, and addressed indeed to Richard's Parliament, in the hope that the adoption of its ideas, and consequently of a policy less favourable to Church-establishments than that of Oliver, might tend to the popularity of the new Protectorate and to the preservation of the Cromwell Dynasty. Even in that pamphlet, however, it was to be perceived that Milton's sympathies had gone back considerably to the old Republican Party of Vane and the rest, as the likeliest now to avert the dangers imminent since Oliver's death; and this became more apparent after the compelled abdication of Richard, the dissensions of the Army-chiefs among themselves, and the triumph of the old Republicans by the Restoration of the Rump in May 1659. Milton may be said to have then declared himself openly for "the good old cause," as it was fondly called,-i.e. for return to a pure Republic, under Parliamentary management, and liberated from all military control. To this effect, he had addressed to the Restored Rump Parliament, in August 1659, another Disestablishment and Disendowment Tract, more outspoken than the last, entitled "Considerations touching the Likeliest Means to remove Hirelings out of the Church." Like its predecessor, it had fallen dead, the Restored Rump being too busy with other matters to take up the subject. In October 1659, when the Restored Rump was again dispersed by Lambert's coup d'etat, and the Wallingford House Council of Armyofficers, with Fleetwood, Lambert, and Desborough as their -was chiefs, had taken the government into their hands, Milton's political flexibility,—if we may give that name to his willingness to accept, and his anxiety that his countrymen should accept, any form of government whatever that would preserve the Commonwealth and keep out the Stuarts,again manifest. In a private letter, entitled "Letter to a Friend concerning the Ruptures of the Commonwealth,” he severely condemned Lambert's violent suppression of the Rump; but, as the act had been done, he advised the Army men and the civil Republicans or Republicans of the Rump to attempt agreement and co-operation for the future on the basis of a dual system of permanent Councils of State or Central Governing Bodies, one military and the other civil, the members of both to be pledged to the principles of Liberty of Conscience and opposition to Single - Person Sovereignty in any guise. Thenceforward, through the increasing anarchy, Milton is found still in the same mood of passionate anxiety for the preservation of the Republic by any practical compromise whatever. Sinking for the while his own favourite idea of Church - Disestablishment, and addressing himself to the now paramount question of a Republican Constitution of any tolerable sort that would terminate the anarchy and prevent the return of the Stuart Royalty, he is found studying all the numerous models of constitutions that were proposed for that end by Harrington and other theorists, meditating a freer model of his own, and always shaping and modifying that model in order that it might suit the changing circumstances. For the circumstances themselves had been changing most remarkably. The news from Scotland of Monk's determination to be the champion of the deposed Rump, and the expectation of his march out of Scotland for that purpose, had brought the Wallingford House Government of Fleetwood and his colleagues into sudden unpopularity and collapse; and in the end of December 1659 the Rump was again in power by a second reinstatement, and was waiting the arrival of Monk. It was then that Milton, more and more desponding, more and more dreading that the efforts of himself and other Republicans would be in vain, put his thoughts on paper in the form of a pamphlet of warning and advice to be addressed to the Rump. Before it could be published the Rump was no more, its champion Monk having arrived in London, after his ominous march from Scotland, on the 3d of February 1659-60, only to find that the Londoners were sick of the very name of the Rump, and that, unless he were himself to go down in the general roar of execration that was rising round it, he must change his tactics. He did change his tactics; and on the 21st of February 1659-60 he assumed the formal dictatorship by re-admitting to their places in Parliament as many of the "secluded Members," or old Presbyterian members of the late King's time, as chose to come, and so transmuting the Rump into a kind of revival of the original Long Parliament, as it had stood in 1648 before the Regicide and the institution of the Republic. It was at this moment, when the restoration of the Stuarts was virtually involved in what Monk had done, and there were songs and cries in anticipation of that event, but Monk himself persisted in a most cautious silence on the subject, and the open understanding was that the Parliament of the Secluded Members should also refrain from all constitutional questions, and leave them entirely to a new "full and free Parliament," to be called for the purpose,-it was at this moment that Milton, trying to hope against hope, did publish, with the final modifications rendered thus necessary, the pamphlet he had prepared. "The Ready and Easy Way to establish a Free Commonwealth, and the Excellence thereof compared with the inconveniences and dangers of re-admitting Kingship in this Nation": such was the title of this pamphlet of the first week of March 1660, perhaps the boldest and most powerful of all Milton's English pamphlets since those he had published in the first years of the Revolution. Full of the undying Republican fervour, and of the unmitigated hatred and contempt of the Stuart Dynasty in particular, that had characterised all his intermediate pamphlets, in English or in Latin, it is peculiar from the wailing and mournful earnestness, the desperate secret sense of a lost cause, that runs through its assumed hopefulness and its dauntless personal courage. Of the "ready and easy way" recommended in it to the Parliament and the public in general, and recommended also to Monk privately at the same time by Milton in the short summary now printed in his Works under the title "The Present Means and Brief Delineation of a Free Commonwealth, easy to be put in practice and without delay, in a Letter to General Monk,” the universal 6. easy," but a Mr. Milton. opinion was that it was neither "ready" nor mere wild and inpracticable dream of blind In substance, Milton's plan was that the existing Parliament of mixed Rumpers and reinstated Presbyterians should declare itself perpetual, under the name of the Grand or General Council of the Nation, appointing a smaller number of its members to be a Council of State or Executive, and intimating that for the future there should be no dissolutions of Parliaments and no general elections, but only elections to supply incidental vacancies in the Grand Council by death or misdemeanour, or at the utmost to supply the places of a certain definite proportion of the members going out by rotation every second or third year, this perpetual and indissoluble Grand Council to manage all supreme affairs, while local affairs should be left to the independent management of County Committees or Deliberative Assemblies in all the chief cities. Amid the Royalist pamphlets that were then flying about, some of the cleverest were in express burlesque of this project of Milton's, with bitter attacks on himself, and predictions that he would soon have his deserts and be seen going to Tyburn in a cart. In fact, in April 1660, the torrent of Royalist enthusiasm, of popular clamour and impatience for the recall of the exiled Stuarts, had become irresistible and ungovernable: the Londoners and the multitude everywhere were shouting for King Charles. Not even then would Milton be silent. In that very month of April he still wrestled twice, though as at the last gasp, with what he called the "general defection" of his "misguided and abused" countrymen. In Brief Notes on a late Sermon, he replied to a Royalist oration recently preached and published by a Dr. Matthew Griffith; and in a second edition of his Ready and Easy Way to Establish a Free Commonwealth he sought another chance of a hearing for his derided project of a Republican Grand Council of the Nation in perpetuity. It contained new passages of frantic vehemence, in which he adjured his countrymen, unless they were fools and God-abandoned slaves, even yet to listen to him, and prophesied woes, and bloody revenges, and a long degradation of the British Islands, from the Restoration that was coming. His voice was drowned in hissing and laughter, the final answer to him being "No Blind Guides,' a pamphlet by Roger L'Estrange. On the 25th of April 1660 the new "full and free Parliament," called the Convention Parliament, met in Westminster; on the 1st of May, the negotiations between Monk and the exiled King Charles having been completed, Kingship was restored and the Commonwealth declared at an end; on the 25th of May Charles II., fetched over from Holland by the fleet that had been sent for his convoy, landed at Dover; and on the 29th of May he made his triumphant entry into London and Westminster. No piece of verse of any kind came from Milton through this time of incessant vicissitude and political confusion intervening between Oliver's death and the Restoration. It contains, however, three of his Latin Familiar Epistles. IN HIDING AND IN CUSTODY. The wonder is that, at the Restoration, Milton was not hanged. At a time when they brought to the scaffold all the chief living Regicides and their accomplices that were within reach, including even Hugh Peters, and when they dug up Cromwell's body and hanged it at Tyburn, and tore also from the earth at Westminster the body of Cromwell's mother and other "Cromwellian bodies" that had been buried there with honour, the escape of Milton, the supreme defender of the Regicide through the press, the man who had attacked the memory of Charles I. with a ferocity which even some of the actual Regicides must have thought unnecessary and outrageous, is all but inexplicable. He was for some time in real danger. Having absconded from his house in Petty France, just in time to avoid apprehension, he lay concealed, his nephew tells us, in a friend's house in Bartholomew Close, near Smithfield, during those months, from May to August 1660, in which the two houses of the Convention Parliament (first before the arrival of the King, but for the most part after he had arrived and had taken up his residence in Whitehall) were discussing the question of the vengeances to be inflicted on the Regicides and on other conspicuous Anti-Royalists of the late Interregnum. The question took the form of a protracted debate in the two Houses, with excited conferences between them, as to the precise persons, and the precise number of persons, that VOL. I. d |