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two phases. Till May 1657 Cromwell was still in a manner but the elected head of a Republic; but thence to his death, Sept. 3, 1658, he was virtually King.

Though all England, Scotland, and Ireland were obliged to acquiesce in Cromwell's supremacy, and though in the course of his powerful rule he succeeded in winning general respect, and especially in making the entire population of the British Islands proud of the position asserted for them in Europe by his magnanimous foreign policy, yet the Oliverians, as his more express and thorough adherents were called, were but a section of the former Army-men and Republicans. A considerable proportion of the old Republicans, with such men as Bradshaw and Vane as their chiefs, remained resolute in their objection to Single-Person Sovereignty of any kind, and resented privately, and publicly opposed on occasion, even Cromwell's assumption of such Single-Person Sovereignty, condemning it as an infidelity to the principles of pure Republicanism. Milton, whose admiration for Cromwell had all along been immense, was decidedly, on the whole, one of the Oliverians, though not without some friendly sympathy with Bradshaw and Vane, and not without some reserves and dissents of his own, appertaining chiefly to that part of Oliver's policy which refused an absolute separation of Church and State, and persisted in the preservation and extension of a Church Establishment and State-paid clergy. He had approved even of Cromwell's forcible dissolution of the Parliament and the Council of State which he himself served; and he regarded Cromwell's Dictatorship and Protectorate as the best effective embodiment for the time of the principles of real Republicanism. It need be no matter for surprise, therefore, that Milton was continued in his Latin Secretaryship. There was conjoined with him, indeed, in 1653, a Philip Meadows, entitled also "Latin Secretary"; Milton's friend Andrew Marvell was brought in at a later time (Sept. 1657) to give some assistance; and there was some fluctuation of Milton's salary in the course of the Protectorate. In 1655, on a general reduction of official salaries, it was ordered that Milton's should be reduced to £150 per annum, but that the same should be settled on him for his life. Actually, however, this sum was raised to £200 a year (worth about £700 a year now); with which salary, and with Meadows,

and latterly Marvell, as his coadjutor, doing all the routine work, Milton remained the Latin Secretary Extraordinary.

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Among his preserved Latin State Letters, besides about half a dozen written in the latter part of 1653 for Cromwell's Council of Officers or the Barebones Parliament, there are as many as eighty belonging to the Protectorate itself, and despatched as Cromwell's own letters, with his signature, 'OLIVERIUS, Angliæ, Scotia, Hiberniæ, &c., Protector." Most famous, perhaps, among these now are the Letters written in 1655 on the subject of the massacre of the Vaudois Protestants. See an account of them in the Introduction to Sonnet XVIII. All in all, though Milton's secretarial services under the Protectorate must have been confined mainly to such eloquent expression in Latin of the Protector's more important messages to Foreign Powers, it is a memorable fact in the history of England that he was one of Cromwell's faithful officials to the last, often in colloquy with him, and sometimes in ceremonial attendance at his Court. For any colloquy, Milton, with his clear blind eyes, would be led into the room where Cromwell was; and at any Court concert or the like, Milton, if he came, would be conducted gently to a seat. More and more, however, there is evidence of Milton's continued dissatisfaction with Cromwell's very conservative Church policy. While Cromwell, who had set up a Church Establishment on the broad basis of a comprehension of all the English Evangelical sects, regarded the sustentation and perpetuation of such an Established Church in the nation as the very apple of his eye, though equally resolute also in his other principle that there should be an ample toleration of dissent from that Church and liberty beyond its bounds,-Milton had settled more and more into the theory of absolute religious voluntaryism, regarding a State Church with a toleration as only a deceptive compromise, and thinking real religious liberty incompatible with the existence of a State Church on any basis whatever. The Protector must have been aware of these differences from himself in the mind of his blind Latin Secretary, and they may have somewhat affected their personal relations.

In 1653 or 1654 Milton's wife died, still a very young woman, leaving him, at the age of forty-five, a widower with three daughters, Anne, Mary, and Deborah. The eldest,

who was somewhat deformed, was but in her eighth year; the second was in her sixth; the youngest was a mere infant. A son, born in Scotland Yard between the second daughter and the third, had not survived. How the motherless little creatures were brought up in the house in Petty France, under the charge of their blind father, no one knows. It may have been a happy chance for them when he married again, Nov. 12, 1656. But the second wife, known merely as Catherine Woodcock, daughter of a Captain Woodcock of Hackney, died in childbirth Feb. 10, 1657-8, only fifteen months after the marriage, the child dying also; and thus, in the last year of Cromwell's Protectorate, Milton, in his fiftieth year, was again a widower, with his three motherless girls, the eldest not twelve years old. One can fancy, in the house in Petty France, the blind father, a kind of stern King Lear, mostly by himself, and the three young things pattering about as noiselessly as possible, at their own will or in the charge of It was to be tragic in the end, both for him

some servant.

and for them.

What of Milton's independent literary activity through the five years of Cromwell's Protectorate? For a blind man it was considerable. Besides fourteen of his Latin Familiar Epistles, most of them to foreign friends, there belong to the period of the Protectorate two of Milton's most substantial Latin pamphlets. The first, which appeared in 1654, was his Reply to that attack upon him, already mentioned, which had been published at the Hague in 1652 by some anonymous friend of Salmasius. While defending his own character in this Reply, Milton made it also a new defence of the English nation; and hence it was entitled

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Joannis Miltoni Angli pro Populo Anglicano Defensio Secunda" ("Second Defence of John Milton, Englishman, for the English People"). Both historically and autobiographically it is one of the most interesting of Milton's pamphlets. It contains his splendid and most memorable panegyric on Cromwell, with notices of Fairfax, Bradshaw, Fleetwood, Lambert, Whalley, Overton, and others. Milton assumes throughout that the author of the book to which he was replying was a certain Alexander More or Morus, a Frenchman of Scottish descent then settled in Holland; and the license he gives himself in his personal abuse of this Morus is something frightful. Morus, who had only had a hand in

the publication of the book that had given the offence,—the real author of which was Peter du Moulin, afterwards prebendary of Canterbury,―replied to Milton's attack, and so drew from him in 1655 another pamphlet entitled "Joannis Miltoni Angli pro se Defensio contra Alexandrum Morum" ("Defence of John Milton, Englishman, for himself, against Alexander More"), to which was annexed "Authoris ad Alexandri Mori Supplementum Responsio" ("The Author's Reply to Alexander More's Supplement"). This closed the controversy; and the only other known publication of Milton in Oliver's life-time was an edition, in May 1658, of a treatise of Sir Walter Raleigh, entitled The Cabinet Council, from a manuscript which had come into his possession.——In the shape of Verse we have from Milton, through the time of Cromwell's rule, the following:

Eight of the Psalms (Psalms 1.-VIII.) done into Verse. Aug. 1653. The Fifth Ode of Horace, Lib. I., translated.

De Moro (Scrap from the Defensio Secunda, now appended to Elegiarum Liber; though not really Milton's). 1654.

In Salmasium (another scrap from the Defensio Secunda, now appended to the Sylva).

1654.

Ad Christinam, Suecorum Reginam, nomine Cromwelli (appended to the Elegiarum Liber, as attributed to Milton; but almost certainly by Andrew Marvell). 1654.

Sonnet "On the late Massacre in Piedmont " (Sonnet XVIII.) 1655.
Sonnet on his Blindness (Sonnet XIX.)
Sonnet to Mr. Lawrence (Sonnet xx.)
Sonnet to Cyriack Skinner (Sonnet XXI.)
Sonnet to the Same (Sonnet XXII.) 1655.

Sonnet to the memory of his Second Wife (Sonnet XXIII.) 1658.

A fact of special interest, for which there is very good authority, is that the actual composition of Paradise Lost was begun in the last year of Cromwell's Protectorate, i.e. in 1658, about the date of the last of Milton's Sonnets. In resuming the subject, first projected in 1639 or 1640, Milton abandoned the dramatic form then contemplated, and settled on the epic.

PROTECTORATE OF RICHARD CROMWELL, AND ANARCHY PRECEDING THE RESTORATION (Sept. 1658-May 1660): Eleven printed Latin Letters by Milton in the name of the Protector Richard, and two written by him for

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

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