add to all his great military services that of such championship of the religious liberties of his countrymen as the present crisis required. It is worthy of mention that, just before those proceedings of the Parliamentary Committee for the Propagation of the Gospel which gave occasion to Milton's Sonnet, or at all events before May 1652, when the Sonnet was written, the famous Roger Williams of New England, the most ardent propagandist of the Toleration principle and of the Theory of Absolute Religious Voluntaryism then living, had come over from America for some months of residence in London on important colonial business, and had renewed an acquaintanceship with Milton begun in a previous visit. I have ascertained, in fact, that Roger Williams had been the moving spirit in the opposition to the proposals of Owen and his colleagues in the Propagation Committee, and had drafted some of the papers that had been presented to the Committee in the name of Major Butler and others. I have ascertained also that Cromwell's conduct in the Committee had greatly pleased Williams, and had excited his hopes. No need to suppose, however, that Milton's Sonnet was written on suggestion from Williams. The strength of Milton's own feelings and convictions on the question involved, and the fact that Cromwell had been the object of his admiration for years past, sufficiently account for the Sonnet without any such supposition. At the same time it is likely enough that Milton derived from Williams some of his more private information as to what was passing in the Propagation Committee, and that the proceedings there were a subject of talk between them in Milton's house in Petty France.

The closing lines of the Sonnet leave little doubt that it was precisely the policy of Absolute Religious Voluntaryism, entire disconnexion of Church and State, that Milton ventured to recommend to Cromwell. In the vocabulary of Roger Williams and his fellowopinionists hireling was then the common word for a paid clergyman of any sort; and the title of one of the pamphlets which Williams sent forth in London about this time, expounding his Voluntaryism, was "The Hireling Ministry none of Jesus Christ's: or a Discourse on the Propagation of the Gospel." Milton can have intended no other construction of the word by Cromwell when he adjured him :-

"Help us to save free conscience from the paw
Of hireling wolves, whose Gospel is their maw."

What Cromwell may have thought when he read these words we do not know. The GOSPEL PROPAGATION COMMITTEE was to sit on and on for many months yet. What we do know, and what Milton came to know more and more intimately, and more and more to his disappointment, in the course of future years, when the Committee had ceased to exist, and when Cromwell had become supreme in his own person, first as Dictator and then as Protector, is that, though the great man may have been reserving himself on the Church Question in May 1652, and even through the subsequent months of his mere Lord-Generalship and membership of Parliament and its Committees, hesitating then between the alternatives of Owen's Reformed State-Church policy and Williams's theory of Absolute Voluntaryism, he was ultimately to conclude in favour of the former, and with such fervour of conviction and such persistence of effort that History has now to remember the conservation of a Church Establishment in England as one of the distinctions of the Oliverian Protectorate. Indeed, before the date of Milton's Sonnet, it had become tolerably evident that this was the prevailing drift of opinion, if not among the members of the Gospel Propagation Committee itself, at all events in the Parliament. On the 29th of April 1652 it had been resolved in Parliament (1) "That it be referred to the "Committee appointed to receive proposals for the better Propaga"tion of the Gospel to take into speedy consideration how a competent and convenient maintenance for a godly and able Ministry may be settled in lieu of Tithes, and present their opinion thereon to the House," and (2) "That Tithes shall be paid as formerly "until such maintenance be settled." This looked like a vote that abolition of the Church Establishment was not to be thought of, but only a reform of its revenue-system. The Resolutions of the Parliament, as well as the Proposals of Owen and the other ministers in the Propagation Committee, may have been in Milton's mind when he dictated the Sonnet.

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While it has to be repeated that the Sonnet is not Milton's tribute to Cromwell all and in all, but only at a particular moment of his career, and that there were to be more comprehensive expressions of Milton's regard for Cromwell in the coming years of their closer connexion in consequence of Milton's continuance in the Latin Secretaryship, the superlative terms of the eulogy on Cromwell in May 1652 almost justify the omission of those words in the

original title of the Sonnet which record its precise date and occasion. The simple title "TO THE LORD GENERAL CROMWELL " might be sufficient now for most purposes, though not for those of strict history. Little wonder, at all events, that Milton did not dare to print the Sonnet in the 1673 edition of his Minor Poems.

SONNET XVII.: "TO SIR HENRY VANE THE YOUNGER."

(Printed in an anonymous Life of Sir Henry Vane published in 1662 (the author ascertained to have been a certain George Sikes); printed next by Phillips at the end of his Life of Milton in 1694; Copy, from Milton's dictation, among the Cambridge MSS.)

In the anonymous Life of Sir Henry Vane mentioned in the heading these words occur: "The character of this deceased statesman . . . I shall exhibit to you in a paper of verses composed by a learned gentleman, and sent him July 3, 1652"; after which comes Milton's Sonnet in full. It must have been written, therefore, not long after the Sonnet to Cromwell.—In 1652 Vane was in his fortieth year and was one of the Council of State of the Commonwealth; but, as his father was still alive, he was always known as the Younger Vane. It was recollected, moreover, how he had entered the Long Parliament at the age of twenty-seven, having already distinguished himself in America, and how all through the Parliament he had acted, and been regarded, as one of the subtlest and boldest theorists of the extreme Revolutionary party. In his style of mind he was what would now be called a doctrinaire, or abstract thinker, with perhaps a dash of the fanatic; and, as Milton hints, he had exercised himself very particularly on the question of the relations and mutual limits of Church and State, having had practical occasion to consider that question as early as 1636, when he was governor of Massachusetts. After the Restoration he was brought to the scaffold, June 14, 1662.Though Milton's Sonnet to him, as we have seen, was printed in the anonymous biography of Vane just after his death, Milton himself did not venture to reprint it among his Minor Poems in 1673. The tenor of it explains this. It breathes the same spirit as the Sonnet to Cromwell, with even more of certainty than in Cromwell's case that the Church theories of the person addressed accorded with those of the writer. Milton, who had

formed a high opinion of Vane from observations of his career in the Long Parliament and in the successive Councils of State of the Commonwealth, must have been well acquainted with him personally. It is worthy of note also that, at the time the Sonnet was written, Roger Williams (see Introduction to preceding Sonnet) was much in Vane's company. Letters for him were received at Vane's apartments in Whitehall.

SONNET XVIII.: “ON THE LATE MASSACRE IN PIEDMONT.”

(Edition of 1673.)

This, the most powerful of the political Sonnets, was written in 1655, and refers to the persecution instituted, in the early part of that year, by Charles Emmanuel II., Duke of Savoy and Prince of Piedmont, against his Protestant subjects of the valleys of the Cottian Alps. This Protestant community, half French and half Italian, and known as the Waldenses or Vaudois, were believed to have kept up the tradition of a primitive Christianity from the time of the Apostles. At all events, the general European Reformation had found them already in possession of tenets and forms of Church observance such as the Reformation proposed for all, and ready to acquiesce in the new Reformation teachings. There had been various persecutions of them since the Reformation; but that of 1655 surpassed all. By an edict of the Duke, dated 25th January in that year, they were required to part with their property and leave his dominions within twenty days, or else become Roman Catholics. On their resistance, forces were sent into their valleys, and the most dreadful atrocities followed. Many were butchered; others were taken away in chains; and hundreds of families were driven for refuge to the snow-covered mountains, to live there miserably, or perish with cold and hunger. Among the Protestant nations of Europe, and especially in England, the indignation was immediate and vehement. Cromwell, who was then Lord Protector, took up the matter with his whole strength. He caused Latin letters, couched in the most emphatic terms, to be immediately sent, not only to the offending Duke of Savoy, but also to the chief Princes and Powers of Europe. These Letters were all

of Milton's drafting or composition, and may be read among his

PIEDMONTESE SONNET, AND SONNET XIX 231

Letters of State. An ambassador was also sent to Turin to collect information; a Fast Day was appointed; a subscription of £40,000 was raised for the sufferers, £2000 of that sum being from Cromwell's own purse; and, altogether, Cromwell's remonstrances were such that, backed as they would have been, if necessary, by the despatch of an armed force to Italy, the cruel edict was withdrawn, and a convention was made with the Vaudois in August 1655, allowing them the exercise of their worship. Milton's Sonnet is his private and more tremendous expression in verse of the feeling he expressed publicly, in Cromwell's name, in the special series of his Latin State Letters on the Piedmontese business in May, June, and July, 1655. Every line labours with wrath.

SONNET XIX.: ON HIS BLINDNESS.

(Edition of 1673.)

The Piedmontese Sonnet certainly, and probably also the preceding Sonnets to Cromwell and Vane, had been written by Milton after he had lost his sight. His blindness, which had been coming on slowly for ten years, and had been hastened by his labour in writing his Defensio Prima pro Populo Anglicano in answer to Salmasius (1651), appears to have been complete before the middle of 1652, when he was only forty-four years of age. This appears from a statement of his nephew Phillips in his Life of Milton; from one of Milton's own Familiar Epistles, giving an exact account of his blindness and of its first symptoms (dated Sept. 28, 1654, and addressed Leonardo Philare, Atheniensi); from passages in Milton's prose pamphlets; and from the second of the two subsequent Sonnets to Cyriack Skinner. The fact is corroborated by a minute of the Council of State, of date March 11, 1651-2, appointing Mr. Weckherlin to be assistant to Milton in his Foreign Secretaryship to the Council. At this last date Milton was not quite blind, for there are signatures of his to nearly as late a date; but his blindness was then such at least as to require assistance to him in his official duties. April, May and June 1652 appear to have finished the disaster. Milton, therefore, we are to imagine, after having been Secretary to the Council of State for a year or two with his sight failing, continued to act as Secretary