Book 1 — CHAPTER II. (continued 3)

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It has been argued that the last two of these Sonnets must be out of their proper chronological places in the printed editions. They must have been written, it is said, before Milton lost his sight: for how are such invitations to mirth and festivity reconcileable with Milton's circumstances in the third or fourth year of his blindness? There is no mistake in the matter, however. In Milton's own second or 1673 edition of his Minor Poems the sonnets, in the order in which we have printed them,—with the exception of No. 2, which had then to be omitted on account of its political point,—come immediately after the sonnet on the Piedmontese Massacre; and there are other reasons of external evidence which assign Nos. 1, 3, and 4, distinctly to about the same date as No. 2, the opening—words of which date it near the middle of 1655. But, indeed, we should miss much of the biographic interest of the last two sonnets by detaching them from the two first. In No. 1 we have a plaintive soliloquy of Milton on his blind and disabled condition, ending with that beautiful expression of his resignation to God's will in which, under the image of the varieties of service that may be required by some great monarch, he contrasts his own stationariness and inactivity with the energy and bustle of so many of his contemporaries. In No. 2, addressed to Cyriack Skinner, he treats of the same topic, only reverting with pride, as he had done several times in prose, to the literary labour that had brought on his calamity. In both the intimation is that he has disciplined himself to live on as cheerfully as possible, taking daily duties, and little pleasures too, as they come. What more natural, therefore, than that, some little while after those two affecting sonnets on his blindness had been written, there should be two others, in which not a word should be said of his blindness, but young Lawrence and Cyriack Skinner should find themselves invited, in a more express manner than usual, to a day in Milton's company? For that is the proper construction of the Sonnets. They are cards of invitation to little parties, perhaps to one and the same little party, in Milton's house in the winter of 1655-6. It is dull, cold, weather; the Parks are wet, and the country-roads all mire; and for some days Milton has been baulked of his customary walk out of doors, tended by young Lawrence or Cyriack. To make amends, there shall be a little dinner in the warm room at home—"a neat repast" says Milton temptingly, adding "with wine," that there may be no doubt in that particular—to be followed by a long talk and some choice music. So young Lawrence is informed in the metrical missive to him; and the same day (unless, as we may hope, the little dinner became a periodical institution in Milton's house), Cyriack is told to come too. Altogether they are model cards of invitation.¹

We are now in the winter of 1655-6, and we have seen no Secretarial work from Milton since his letters and other documents in the business of the Piedmontese Protestants in May, June, and July, 1655. Officially, therefore, he had had another relapse into idleness. Not, however, into total idleness. "Scriptum Dom. Protectoris Reipublicæ Anglicæ, Scotiæ, Hiberniæ, &c., ex Consensa atque Sententia Concilii Sui Edictum, in quo Hujus Reipublicæ Causa contra Hispanos justa esse demonstratur, 1655" ("Manifesto of the Lord Protector of the Commonwealth of England, Scotland. Ireland, &c., put forth by the consent and advice of his Council, in which the justice of the cause of this Commonwealth against the Spaniards is demonstrated, 1655"), is the title of a Latin document, of the length of about twenty such pages as the present, now always included in editions of Milton's prose-writings, on the probability, though not quite the certainty, that it was Milton's performance. If so, it was the third great document in the nature of a Declaration of War furnished by Milton for the Commonwealth, the two former having been his Latin version of the Declaration of the Causes of War against the Scots in June 1650 (IV. 228) and his similar version of the Declaration against the Dutch in July 1652 (IV. 482-483). The present manifesto was perhaps a more difficult document to draft than either of those had been, inasmuch as Cromwell had to justify in it his recent attack upon the Spanish possessions in the West Indies. Accordingly, the manifesto had been prepared with some pains. It passed the Council finally on the 26th of October, 1655, four days after the Spanish ambassador Cardenas had left England, and two days after the Treaty between Cromwell and France had been signed;¹ and the Latin copies of it were out in London on the 9th of November.² Unlike the previous Declarations against the Scots and the Dutch, which had been printed in several languages, it appears to have been printed in Latin only.

A general notion of the document will be obtained from, an extract or two in translation. The opening is as follows:—

"That the causes that induced us to our recent attack on certain Islands in the West Indies, now for some time past in the possession of the Spaniards, are just and in the highest degree reasonable, there is no one but will easily understand if only he will reflect in what manner that King and his subjects have always conducted themselves towards the English nation in that tract of America ... Whenever they have opportunity, though without the least reason of justice, and with no provocation of injury, they are incessantly killing, murdering, nay butchering in cold blood, our countrymen there, as they think fit, seizing their goods and fortunes, destroying their plantations and houses, capturing any of their vessels they may meet on those seas, and treating their crews as enemies and even pirates. For they call by that opprobrious name all of any nation, themselves alone excepted, who dare to navigate those waters. Nor do they profess to have any other or better right for this than reliance on some ridiculous donation of the Pope, and the fact that they were the first discoverers of some parts of that western region ... Certainly it would have been disgraceful and unworthy in us, in possession as we were, by God's bounty, of so many ships, furnished, equipped, and ready for every use of maritime warfare, to have chosen to let them rot idly at home, rather than employ them in those parts in avenging the blood of the English, so unjustly, so inhumanly, and so often, shed by the Spaniards there,—nay, the blood too of the Indians, inasmuch as God 'hath made of one blood all nations of men for to dwell on all the face of the earth, and hath determined the times before appointed, and the bounds of their habitation' [Acts xvii. 26] ... Our purpose, however, is to show the right and equity of the transaction itself, rather than to state all our several reasons for it. And, that we may do this the more clearly, and explain general assertions by particulars, it will be proper to cast our eyes back a little into the past, and to run strictly over the transactions between the English and the Spaniards, observing the state of affairs on both sides, as far as mutual relations were concerned, from the time of the first discovery of the West Indies and of the Reformation of Religion. For those two great events, as they were nearly contemporary, occasioned everywhere in the world vast changes, but especially as between the English and the Spaniards; which two nations have from that time followed diverse and almost opposite methods and principles in the management of their affairs."

The manifesto, accordingly, then reviews the history of the relations between Spain and England from the time of Henry VIII., appending at last a long list of more recent outrages by the Spaniards on English ships and settlements in the West Indies, the dates all duly given, with the names of the ships and their captains, and the values of the cargoes. After which, returning to more general considerations, it discusses the two pretexts of the Spaniards for their sole sovereignty in the West Indies,—the Papal donation, and the right of first discovery. Both are dismissed as absurd; and the document ends with an appeal to the common interests of Protestantism throughout Europe. Even the recent massacre of the Vaudois Protestants is brought into the plea. Thus:—

"If meanwhile we suffer such grievous injuries to be done to our countrymen in the West Indies without any satisfaction or vengeance; if we consent to be all excluded from that so important part of the world; if we permit our bitter and inveterate enemy (especially now that peace has been made with the Dutch) to carry home unmolested those huge treasures from the West Indies, by which he can repair his present losses, and restore his affairs to such a condition that he shall be able again to betake himself to that deliberation of his in 1588 'whether it would be more prudent to begin with England for the recovery of the United Provinces of Holland, or to begin with them for the subjugation of England';—beyond a doubt he will find for himself not fewer, but even more reasons, why the beginning should now be made with England. And, should God permit him ever to carry out these designs, then we should have good grounds for expecting that on us first, but eventually on all Protestants wheresoever, there would be wreaked the residue of that most brutal massacre suffered lately by our brothers in the Alpine valleys: which massacre, if credit is to be given to the published complaints of those poor orthodox Christians, was originally schemed and appointed in the secret councils of the Spanish Court, through the agency of those paltry friars whom they call missionaries (per illos fraterculos missionarios quos vacant Hispanicæ aulæ consiliis intimis informata primitus ac designata erat)."

How far Milton's hand helped in this important document of the Protectorate may fairly be a question. The substance was probably drafted by the Council and Thurloe, and only handed to Milton for re-expression and translation; nay, it is possible that even in the work of translation, to save time, Milton and Meadows may have been partners. All in all, however, as the proofs are all but certain that Milton's hand was to some extent employed in the document, it may mark his return to ordinary official work in Oct.-Nov. 1655, after three months of renewed exemption from such work, following his batch of state-letters on the subject of the Massacre in Piedmont.¹

What adds to the probability that Cromwell's Manifesto against Spain, dated Oct. 26, 1655, and published Nov. 9, was partly of Milton's composition, is the fact, to which we have now to request attention, that he did about this time resume ordinary office-work to an extent beyond expectation. The following is a list of Letters to Foreign States and Princes written by him for Cromwell from Dec. 1655 to May 1656 inclusively. Two or three of them are important Cromwellian documents, and require elucidation:—

(LXV.) TO THE DOGE OF VENICE, Dec. 1655:—His Highness congratulates the Venetians upon their recent naval victory over the Turks, but brings to their notice the fact that among the ships they had taken in that victory there was an English one, called The Great Prince, belonging to William and Daniel Williams and Edward Beal, English merchants. She had been pressed by the Turks at Constantinople, and employed as a transport for Turkish soldiers and provisions to Crete. The crew had been helpless in the affair, and the owners blameless; and his Highness does not doubt that the Doge and Senate will immediately give him a token of their friendship by causing the ship to be restored.—The naval victory of the Venetians was, doubtless, that which Morus had celebrated In the Latin poem for which he received his gold chain (ante pp. 212-213).

(LXVI.) To LOUIS XIV. OF FRANCE, Dec. 1655:—Samuel Mico, William Cockain, George Poyner, and other English merchants have petitioned his Highness about a ship of theirs, called The Unicorn, which had been seized in the Mediterranean as long ago as 1650 by the Admiral and Vice-Admiral of the French fleet, with a cargo worth £34,000. The capture was originally unfair, as there was then peace between England and France, and express promises had been recently given by Cardinal Mazarin and the French Ambassador, M. de Bordeaux, that amends would be made as soon as the Treaty with France was complete. That happily being now the case, his Highness expects from his Majesty the indemnification of the said merchants as "the first-fruits of the renewed friendship and recently formed alliance."

(LXVII.) To LOUIS XIV. OF FRANCE, Jan. 1655-56:¹—His Highness has been informed of very extraordinary conduct on the part of the French Governor of Belleisle in the Bay of Biscay. On the 10th of December last, or thereabouts, he not only admitted into his port one Dillon, a piratic enemy of the English Commonwealth, and assisted him with supplies, but also prevented the recapture of a merchant ship from the said Dillon by Captain Robert Vessey of the Nightingale war-ship, and further secured Dillon's escape when Vessey had fought him and had him at his mercy. All this is, of course, utterly against the recent Treaty: and his Majesty will doubtless take due notice of the Governor's conduct and give satisfaction.

(LXVIII.) TO THE EVANGELICAL SWISS CANTONS, Jan. 1655-6. To understand this important letter it is necessary to remember that in 1653 there had broken out, for the second or third time, a Civil War of Religion among the Swiss. The Popish Cantons of Schwytz, Uri, Zug, Unterwalden, Luzern, &c., had quarrelled with the Protestant or Evangelical Cantons of Zurich, Basel, Schaffhausen, Bern, Glarus, Appenzell, &c.; and, as the Popish Cantons trusted to help from surrounding Catholic powers, the Confederation and Swiss Protestantism were in peril. It had been to watch events and proceedings in this struggle that Cromwell had sent into Switzerland, early in 1654, Mr. John Pell and Mr. John Durie, as his agents (ante p. 41). Durie had remained only about a year; but Pell was still there, reinforced now by Morland, who, after his special mission to the Duke of Savoy on the business of the Piedmontese Massacre of April 1655, had taken up his abode in Geneva to superintend the distributing of the money collected for the Piedmontese Protestants. That massacre had been ominous to the Swiss, and had complicated the strife between the Popish and the Evangelical Cantons. In the Popish Cantons, especially that of Schwytz, there had been severe persecutions of Protestant Dissenters; the union of these Cantons among themselves and their Anti-Protestant temper had become stronger; and altogether the news from Switzerland was bad. Application had been made by the Evangelical Cantons, through Pell, for help from Cromwell, similar application being made at the same time to the Dutch; and the following is Cromwell's answer:—"Both from your public acts transmitted to us by our Commissioners at Geneva [Pell and Morland], and from your letter dated at Zürich, Dec. 27, we understand abundantly in what condition your affairs are.—too abundantly, since it is none of the best. Wherein, though we grieve to find your peace at an end and so lasting a Confederacy ruptured, yet, as it appears that this has happened by no fault on your part, we trust that hence, from the very iniquity and obstinacy of your adversaries, there is again being furnished you only so much new occasion for displaying your courage and your long-known constancy in the Evangelical Faith. For what the Schwytz Cantoners are driving at in their resolution to make it a capital offence in any one to embrace our Religion, and who they are that have instigated them to proceedings of such a hostile spirit to the Orthodox Faith, no one can avoid knowing who has not yet forgotten that foul slaughter of our brethren in Piedmont. Wherefore, well-beloved friends, as you always have been, be still, by God's help, brave; do not yield your rights and federate privileges, nay, Liberty of Conscience and Religion itself, to be trampled on by worshippers of idols; and so prepare yourselves that you may not only appear the champions of your own liberty and safety, but may be able also to succour and stand by your neighbouring brethren by all means in your power, especially those most sorrow-stricken Piedmontese: firmly persuaded of this, that the intention was to have opened a passage to your persons over their bodies and deaths. For my part, be assured [the expression in the singular: de me scitote] that your safety and prosperity are no less my care and anxiety than if this fire had broken out in this our own Commonwealth, or than if those axes of the Schwytz Cantoners had been sharpened, and their swords drawn (as they veritably are, for all the Reformed are concerned), for our own necks. No sooner, therefore, have we been informed of the state of your affairs, and the obdurate temper of your enemies, than, taking counsel with some very honourable persons, and some ministers of the Church of highest esteem for their piety, on the subject of the assistance it might be possible to send you consistently with our own present requirements, we have come to those resolutions which our agent Pell will communicate to you. For the rest, we cease not to commend to the favour of Almighty God all your plans, and the protection of this most righteous cause of yours, whether in peace or in war."—From a private letter of Thurloe's to Pell, of the same date as this official one, we learn that the persons consulted by Cromwell on the occasion were the Committee for the Piedmontese Collection (ante pp. 40-41), his Highness regarding the Piedmontese business and the Swiss business as radically identical, and desiring to prepare the public mind for exertions, if necessary, in behalf of Swiss Protestantism as extraordinary as those that had been made for the Piedmontese. The conferences on the subject were very earnest, with the result that his Highness instructed Pell to offer the Cantons of Zürich and Bern a subsidy of £20,000, at the rate of £5000 a month, on security for repayment—the first £5000, however, to be sent immediately, without waiting for such security.¹

(LXIX.) To CHARLES X., KING OF SWEDEN, Feb. 1655-6:¹—This letter also is very important, though less in itself than in its circumstances; and it requires introduction.—Charles X., or Charles Gustavus (Karl Gustav), the successor of Queen Christina on the Swedish throne, was proving himself a man of energy. Chancellor Oxenstiern, so long the leading statesman of Sweden, had died in Aug. 1654, just after the accession of Charles; and under the new King, with the younger Oxenstiern for his Chancellor, Sweden had entered on a career of war, which was to continue through his whole reign, and the aim of which was little less than the extension of Sweden into an Empire across the Baltic. He had begun with Poland, between which and Sweden there was an old feud, and the King of which then was John Casimir. Other powers, however, had been immediately stirred by the war. Denmark, Russia, and the German empire generally, were interested in saving Poland, and therefore tended to an alliance against Karl Gustav; while, on the other hand, the Great Elector of Brandenburg, Friedrich-Wilhelm, found it convenient for the present, in the interests of his Prussian possessions, to be on the side of Sweden. Cromwell had not been likely at first to interfere directly in such a complicated continental quarrel; and, indeed, as we have seen from a previous letter of his to the Swedish King (ante p. 166), his first feeling on hearing of the Swedish movements on the Continent had been that of regret at the disturbance of the Peace of Westphalia. Still Sweden was a power which commanded Cromwell's respect. Nor was Charles X., on his side, less anxious to retain the friendship of the great English Protector. On succeeding Christina he had accepted and ratified her Treaty with Cromwell—"Whitlocke's Treaty," as it may be called; he had sent a Mr. PETER COYET to be Swedish Resident in London; and, after he had begun his Polish war, there was nothing he desired more than some yet closer partnership between himself and Cromwell, that might unite Sweden and England in a common European policy. Accordingly, in July 1655, Charles X. being then in camp in Poland, there had arrived in London a splendid Swedish embassy extraordinary, consisting of COUNT CHRISTIERN BUNDT, and other noblemen and gentlemen, with attendants, to the number of two hundred persons in all, "generally proper handsome men and fair-haired." Whitlocke, who was naturally called in by the Protector on this occasion, describes with unusual gusto the reception of the Embassy. There was a magnificent torchlight procession of coaches, most of them with six horses, to convey the Ambassador and his suite from Tower Wharf, where they landed, to Sir Abraham Williams's house in Westminster; there were feastings and other entertainments, at the Lord Protector's charge, for three days; and at length on the third day Count Bundt had audience in the Banqueting House at Whitehall, in the midst of a great assembly, with ladies in the galleries. It was difficult to say whether in this audience the Ambassador or the Protector acquitted himself best. "The Ambassador's people," says Whitlocke, "were all admitted into the room, and made a lane within the rails in the midst of the room. At the upper end, upon a footpace and carpet, stood the Protector, with a chair of state behind him, and divers of his Council and servants about him. The Master of the Ceremonies [still Sir Oliver Fleming] went before the Ambassador on the left side; the Ambassador, in the middle, betwixt me and Strickland, went up in the open lane of the room. As soon as they [the Ambassador and his immediate suite] came within the room, at the lower end of the lane, they put off their hats, the Ambassador a little while after the rest; and, when he was uncovered, the Protector also put off his hat, and answered the Ambassador's three salutations in his coming up to him; and on the foot-pace they saluted each other as friends usually do; and, when the Protector put on his hat, the Ambassador put on his as soon as the other. After a little pause, the Ambassador put off his hat, and began to speak, and then put it on again; and, whensoever in his speech he named the King his master, or Sweden, or the Protector, or England, he moved his hat: especially if he mentioned anything of God, or the good of Christendom, he put off his hat very low; and the Protector still answered him in the like postures of civility." The speech, which was in Swedish, but immediately translated into Latin by the Ambassador's secretary, was to the effect that the King of Sweden desired to propound to His Highness some matters for additional treaty. Cromwell's reply, delivered in English, which the Ambassador understood, was to the effect that he was very willing to enter into "a nearer and more strict alliance" with the King of Sweden and would nominate some persons to hear Count Bundt's proposals.—All this had been in the last days of July 1655; but, though there had been subsequent audiences of the Ambassador, and banquets given to him and the other chief Swedes by the Protector himself at Hampton Court, August had passed, and September, and October, and November, and still the actual Treaty had been avoided. Other things engrossed the Protector—the Treaty with France, the West-India Expedition, the beginning of the War with Spain, &c. But in Count Bundt there had been sent to Cromwell perhaps the most high-tempered ambassador he had ever seen. Immediately after the first audience, Dorset House, in Fleet Street, taken and furnished at the Ambassador's own expense, had become the head-quarters of the Embassy; and here, as month after month had passed without approach to real business, his impatience had flashed into fierceness. It broke out in his talk to Whitlocke, who took every opportunity of being with him, the rather because other "grandees" held aloof. "No Commissioners being yet come to the Swedish Ambassador," writes Whitlocke, under date Dec. 1655, "he grew into some high expressions of his sense of the neglect to his master by this delay; which I did endeavour to excuse, and acquainted the Protector with it, who thereupon promised to have it mended." In truth, the warlike Swedish King had become by this time a man whose embassy compelled attention. "Letters of the success of the Swedes in Poland and Lithuania," "Letters of the Swedes' victory against the Muscovites," "The Swedes had good success in Poland and Moscovia," "An Agreement made between the King of Sweden and the Elector of Brandenburg:" such had been pieces of foreign news recently coming in. Accordingly, in January 1655-6, Whitlocke, Fiennes, Strickland, and Sir Gilbert Pickering, had been empowered, on the Protector's part, to treat with Count Bundt, and the Treaty had begun.—There were preliminary difficulties, however. Cromwell wanted a Treaty that should include the Dutch and the King of Denmark, and be, in fact, a League of the chief Protestant Powers of Europe in behalf of general Protestant interests; Count Bundt, on the other hand, pressed that special League between England and Sweden which he had come to propound, arguing that, while it would be more advantageous to both countries in the meantime, it might be extended afterwards. For a while there was danger of wreck on this preliminary difference; and Cromwell even talked of transferring the Treaty to Stockholm and sending Whitlocke thither for the second time as Ambassador-Plenipotentiary—greatly to Whitlocke's horror, who had no desire for another such journey, and a good deal to Count Bundt's displeasure, who thought himself and his mission slighted. At length, the Ambassador having signified that he had received new instructions from his master, which would enable him to meet Cromwell's views in some points, he was allowed to have his own way in the main; and in February 1655-6 the Treaty was on foot, both in the Council meetings at Whitehall, and in meetings of Whitlocke and the other English Commissioners with the Ambassador at Dorset House. "A long debate touching levies of soldiers and hiring of ships in one another's dominions;" "long debates touching contraband goods, in which list were inserted by the Council corn, hemp, pitch, tar, money, and other things:" such are Whitlocke's descriptions of the Dorset House meetings. The Treaty, in fact, was partly commercial and partly political, pointing to new advantages for England, but also to new responsibilities, all round the Baltic and throughout Germany. In the debates no one more resolute, no one more clear-headed, no one more contemptuous when he pleased, than Count Bundt; and he had, it appears, a very able second in his subordinate, the Swedish Resident in ordinary, Mr. Coyet.—In the midst of these laborious debates over the Treaty news had arrived of the birth at Stockholm of a son and heir to the Swedish King. The birth of this Prince, afterwards Charles XI. of Sweden, occasioned a grand display of loyalty at the Swedish Embassy in London. "Feb. 20," writes Whitlocke, "the Swedish Ambassador kept a solemnity this evening for the birth of the young Prince of Sweden. All the glass of the windows of his house, which were very large, being new-built, were taken off, and instead thereof painted papers were fitted to the places, with the arms of Sweden upon them, and inscriptions in great letters testifying the rejoicing for the birth of the young Prince: on the inside of the papers in the rooms were set close to them a very great number of lighted candles, glittering through the painted papers: the arms and colours and writings were plainly to be discerned, and showed glorious, in the street: the like was in the staircase, which had the form of a tower. In the balconies on each side of the house were trumpets, which sounded often seven or eight of them, together. The company at supper were the Dutch Ambassador, the Portugal and Brandenburg Residents, Mynheer Coyet, Resident for Sweden, the Earls of Bedford and Devon, the Lords St. John, Ossory, Bruce, Ogilvie, and two or three other young lords, the Count of Holac (a German), the Lord George Fleetwood, and a great many knights and gentlemen, besides the Ambassador's company. It was a very great feast, of seven courses. The Swedish Ambassador was very courteous to me; but the Dutch and others were reserved towards me, and I as much to them."—Milton's Letter to the Swedish King in Cromwell's name relates itself to this last incident. The King had written specially to Cromwell announcing the happy news of the birth of his son and heir; and Cromwell replies in this fashion:—"As it is universally understood that all concerns of friends, whether adverse or prosperous, ought to be of mutual and common interest among them, the performance by your Majesty of the most agreeable duty of friendship, by vouchsafing to impart to us your joy by express letters from yourself, cannot but be extremely gratifying to us, in regard that it is a sign of singular and truly kingly civility in you, indisposed as you are to live merely for yourself, so to be indisposed even to keep a joy to yourself, without feeling that your friends and allies participate in the same. We duly rejoice, therefore, in the birth of a Prince, to be the son of so excellent a King, and the heir, we hope, of his father's valour and glory; and we congratulate you on the same happy coincidence of domestic good fortune and success in the field with which of old that King of renowned fortitude, Philip of Macedon, was congratulated—the birth of whose son Alexander and his conquest of the powerful nation of the Illyrians are said to have been simultaneous. For we make no question but the wresting of the Kingdom of Poland by your arms from the Papal Empire, as it were a horn from the head of the Beast, and your Peace made with the Duke of Brandenburg, to the great satisfaction of all the pious, though with growls from your adversaries, will be of very great consequence for the peace and profit of the Church. May God grant an end worthy of such signal beginnings; may He grant you a son like his father in virtue, piety, and achievements! All which we truly expect and heartily pray of God Almighty, already so propitious to your affairs,"—It is clear that Cromwell desired to be all the more polite to the Swedish monarch because of the long delay of the Treaty with Count Bundt. That Treaty was going on slowly; and we shall hear more of Milton in connexion with it.²

(LXX.) To FREDERICK III., KING OF DENMARK, Feb. 1655-6(?)¹:—John Freeman, Philip Travis, and other London merchants, have represented to his Highness that a ship of theirs was seized and detained by the Danish authorities in March 1653 because the Captain tried to slip past Elsinore without paying the toll. He was a Dutchman and had done this dishonestly on his own account, that he might pocket the money. There had been negotiations on the subject with the Danish Ambassador when there had been one in London, and redress had been promised; but, though the merchants had since sent an agent to Copenhagen, the only effect had been to add expense to their loss. By the Danish law it is the master of a ship that is punishable for the offence of evading toll, and the ship may be condemned, but not the goods. The offender in this case is now dead, but left a confession; the sum evaded was small; the cargo detained was worth £3000; will his Majesty see that the goods are restored, with reparation?

(LXXI.) TO THE STATES GENERAL OF THE UNITED PROVINCES, April 1, 1656:—A complaint in behalf of Thomas Bussel, Richard Beare, and other English merchants. A ship of theirs, called The Edmund and John, on her voyage from Brazil to Lisbon, was seized long ago by a privateer of Flushing, commanded by a Lambert Bartelson. The ship itself and the personal property of the sailors had been restored; but not the goods of the merchants. The Judges in Holland had not done justice in their case; and now, after long litigation, an appeal is made to the chief authority.

(LXXII.) To Louis XIV. OF FRANCE, April 9, 1656 (?): This is the Credential Letter of LOCKHART, going on his embassy to the French King. As Lockhart was by far the most eminent of the Protector's envoys, it may be translated entire: "WILLIAM LOCKHART, to whom We have given this letter to be carried to your Majesty, is a Scot by nation, of an honourable house, beloved by us, known for his very great fidelity, valour, and integrity of character. He, that he may reside in France, and be with you, so as to be able assiduously to signify to you my singular respect for your Majesty, and my desire not only for the preservation of peace between us but also for the perpetuation of friendship, has received from us the amplest instructions. We request, therefore, that you will receive him kindly, and give him gracious audience as often as there may be occasion, and place absolutely the same trust in whatsoever may be said and settled by him in our name as if the same things had been said and settled by Ourselves in person. We shall hold them all as ratified. Meanwhile we pray all peace and prosperity for your Majesty and your kingdom."

(LXXIII.) To CARDINAL MAZARIN, April 9, 1656 (?):—A Letter accompanying the above, and introducing LOCKHART specially to the Cardinal. It is also worth translating entire: "Seeing the affairs of France most happily administered by your counsels, and daily increasing in prosperity to such a degree that your high popularity and high authority in government are justly increased and enlarged accordingly, I have thought it fit, when sending an ambassador to your King with letters and instructions, to recommend him also most expressly to your Eminence: to wit, WILLIAM LOCKHART, a man of honourable family, closely related to us, and respected by us besides for his singular trustworthiness. Wherefore your Eminence may receive as our own whatsoever shall be communicated by him in our name, and may also freely commit and entrust to him in my confidence whatever you shall think fit to communicate in return. From him too you will learn more at large, what I now again profess, as more than once already, how high is my feeling of your great services to France, and what a well-wisher I am to your reputation and dignity."¹

(LXXIV.) To CHARLES X., KING OF SWEDEN, April 17, 1656:—Another extremely polite letter of the Protector to his Swedish Majesty, marking a farther stage in the proceedings of the Swedish Treaty.—That Treaty had been going on at Dorset House, the Swedish Ambassador and the Swedish Resident, continuing their colloquies with Whitlocke. Fiennes, and Strickland, about pitch, tar, hemp, mutual privileges of trade between England and Sweden, trade also with Prussia, Poland, and Russia, and all the other items of the Treaty, and the Ambassador always pushing on the business and chafing at the slow progress made. Again and again he had taken serious offence at something. Once it was because, waiting on the Protector at Whitehall, he had been kept half-an-hour before the Protector appeared. It was with difficulty he was prevented from going away without seeing his Highness; "he durst not for his head," he said, "admit of such dishonour to his master"; he had to be pacified by an apology. Then, when he did see the Protector, he had fresh cause for dissatisfaction. The propositions of the Treaty, as agreed upon so far between the Commissioners and the Ambassador, having been reported to the Council, and there having been a discussion on them there, Thurloe taking a chief part, new hesitations and difficulties had arisen, so that, when Cromwell conversed with Count Bundt, the Count was amazed to find his Highness cooler about the Treaty altogether than he had expected, and again harping on Protestant interests and the necessity of including the Dutch. The Count seems then to have broken bounds in his talk about the Protector to Whitlocke and others. In his own country, Sweden, he said, "when a man professed sincerity, they understood it to be plain and clear dealing"; if a man meant Yea he said Yea, and if he meant No he said No; but in England it seemed to be different. The explanations and soft words of Whitlocke and the rest having calmed him down again, the Treaty proceeded.—One of the most important meetings at Dorset House, by Whitlocke's account, was on the 8th of April. Mr. Jessop, as one of the Clerks of the Council, was there by appointment, and read "the new Articles in English as they were drawn up according to the last resolves of the Council." A long debate on the Articles followed. The Ambassador begged "to be excused if he should mistake anything of the sense of them, they being in English, which he could not so well understand as if they had been in Latin, which they must be put into in conclusion; but he did observe," &c. In fact, he restated his objections to making pitch, tar, hemp, flax, and sails, contraband, as they were the staple produce of Sweden. Lord Fiennes, in reply, premised: "that the Articles were brought in English for the saving of time, and they should be put in Latin when his Excellency should desire," and then discussed the main subject. Whitlocke followed, and the Ambassador again, and Fiennes again, all in English; and "Mynheer Coyet then spake in Latin, that pitch, tar, and hemp were not in their own nature, nor by the law of nations, esteemed contraband goods," &c. Strickland said a few words in reply, and then Whitlocke made a longer and more lawyer-like answer to Mynheer Coyet,—also, as he takes care to tell us, speaking in Latin. The discussion, which was long protracted, and extended to other topics, was closed by the Ambassador; who said "he desired a copy of these Articles now debated, and, if they pleased, that he might have it in Latin, which he would consider of." This was promised.—The meeting so described was nearly the last in which the Swedish Resident, M. Coyet, took part. He was on the eve of his departure from England, leaving his principal, Count Bundt, to finish the Treaty; and the present brief letter of Milton for Cromwell to his Swedish Majesty has reference to that fact. "Peter Julius Coyet," it begins, "having performed his mission to us, and so performed it that he ought not to be dismissed by us without the distinction of justly earned praise, is on the point of returning to your Majesty"; and in three sentences more very handsome testimony is borne to Coyet's ability and fidelity in the discharge of his duty, and his Swedish Majesty is again assured of the Protector's high regard for himself. "A constant course of victories against all enemies of the Church" is the Protector's wish for him.—Evidently, again, Cromwell, whatever might be the issue of the Treaty, was anxious to stand well with the Scandinavian; in corroboration of which we have this special paragraph in Whitlocke under date May 3: "This day the Protector gave the honour of knighthood to MYNHEER COYET, the King of Sweden's Resident here, who was now SIR PETER COYET, and gave him a fair jewel, with his Highness's picture, and a rich gold chain: it cost about £400." Coyet, therefore, had remained in London a fortnight after the date of Milton's letter.¹ Indeed he remained a few days longer, assisting in the Treaty to the last.

(LXXV.) To Louis XIV. OF FRANCE, May 14, 1656:¹—John Dethicke, Merchant, at present Lord Mayor of the City of London, and another merchant, named William Wakefield, have represented to his Highness that, as long ago as October 1649, a ship of theirs, called The Jonas of London, was taken at the mouth of the Thames by one White of Barking, acting under a commission from the son of the late King, and taken into Dunkirk, then governed for the French King by M. L'Estrades. They had applied for satisfaction at the time, but had received a harsh answer from the governor. Perhaps his French Majesty, on receipt of this letter, will direct justice to be done.

(LXXVI.) TO THE STATES-GENERAL OF THE UNITED PROVINCES, May 1656:—Also about a ship, but this time for the recovery of insurance on one. She was The Good Hope of London, belonging to John Brown, Nicholas Williams, and others; she had been insured in Amsterdam; she had been taken by a ship of the Dutch East India Company on her way to the East Indies; the insurers had refused to pay the sum insured for; and for six years the poor owners had been hopelessly fighting the case in the Dutch courts. It is a case of real hardship.

(LXXVII.) TO THE SAME, May 1656:—Three times before letters have been written to the States-General in the interest of Thomas and William Lower, who had been left property in Holland by their father's will, but have been unjustly kept out of the same by powerful persons there, and tossed from law-court to law-court. This fourth application, it is hoped, may be more successful.

These thirteen State Letters, were there nothing else, would prove that in and after the winter of 1655-6 Milton's services were again in request for ordinary office-work. But they do not represent the whole of his renewed industry in that employment.

The tremendous Swedish ambassador, Count Bundt, whose energy in his master's interests had swept through Whitehall like a storm, searching out flaws, waking up Thurloe and the Council, and obliging Cromwell himself to be more circumspect, had made his influence felt, it seems, even in the house of the blind Secretary-Extraordinary. It was on the 8th of April, 1656, as we have just learnt from Whitlocke, that the Ambassador, in one of his conferences with Whitlocke, Fiennes, and Strickland, in Dorset House, M. Coyet also being present, had rather objected to the fact that the new Articles of the Treaty, drafted for his consideration by the Council, and brought to the conference by Mr. Jessop, had been brought in English, and not in Latin, as would have been business-like. Latin or English, as the Commissioners knew, it would have been all the same to Count Bundt, inasmuch as it was the matter of the Articles that displeased him; but they had promised that he should have them in Latin, and Whitlocke had judiciously taken the opportunity of speaking in Latin, in reply to some of M. Coyet's observations in the same tongue, as if to show the Ambassador that Latin was by no means so scarce a commodity as he seemed to suppose about the Protector's Court. There had been delay, however, in furnishing the promised Latin translation; and Count Bundt, glad of that new occasion for fault-finding, did not let it escape him. "The Swedish Ambassador," relates Whitlocke under date May 6, 1656, "again complained of the delays in his business, and that, when he had desired to have the Articles of this Treaty put into Latin, according to the custom in Treaties, it was fourteen days they made him stay for that translation, and sent it to one MR. MILTON, a blind man, to put them into Latin, who, he said, must use an amanuensis to read it to him, and that amanuensis might publish the matter of the Articles as he pleased; and that it seemed strange to him there should be none but a blind man capable of putting a few Articles into Latin: that the Chancellor [the late Oxenstiern] with his own hand penned the Articles made at Upsal [in Whitlocke's Treaty], and so he heard the Ambassador Whitlocke did for those on his part. The employment of MR. MILTON was excused to him, because several other servants of the Council, fit for that employment, were then absent."¹ If this is exact, Count Bundt, having been promised the Latin translation on the 8th of April, did not receive it till about the 22nd, and he had been nursing his wrath on the subject for a fortnight more before it exploded. In the delay itself he had certainly good ground for complaint. There was reason also in the complaint that important secret documents had gone to a blind man, who must employ an amanuensis, unless the Commissioners could have replied that the Protector and the Council had thoroughly seen to that matter, and that Milton's amanuensis on such occasions was always a sworn clerk from the Whitehall office. On the whole, the Commissioners seem to have taken more easily than became their places, or than the Protector would have liked, the insinuation of the imperious Count that the Protector's official retinue must be a ragged and undisciplined rout, not to be compared with Karl Gustav's. May not Whitlocke himself, however, thinking at that moment of his own Latin sufficiency, have sharpened the point of the insinuation?²

The excuse of the Commissioners to Count Bundt for having sent the Articles to Milton for translation was that "several other servants of the Council, fit for that employment, were then absent." They mast have referred, in particular, to Mr. Philip Meadows, the Latin Secretary in Ordinary. He had, we find, taken some part in the negotiation in its earlier stage;¹ but, before it had proceeded far, he had been selected for a service which took him out of England. In December 1655 it had been resolved to send a special agent to Portugal; and on the 19th of February, 1655-6, at a Council meeting at which Cromwell himself was present, Meadows, thought of from the first, was formally nominated as the fit person. It was a great promotion for Meadows; for, whereas his salary hitherto in the Latin Secretaryship had been £200 a year, his allowance for the Portuguese agency was to be £800 a year or more. On the 21st of February he had £300 advanced to him for his outfit; on the 28th he was voted £100, being for two quarters of his Secretarial salary due to him, with £50 more for the quarter then current but not completed; and within a few days afterwards he was on his way to Lisbon.² His departure, I should say—preceded perhaps by a week or two of cessation from office duty in preparation for it—was the real cause of the re-employment of Milton at this time in such routine work as we have seen him engaged in. All or most of his former letters for the Protector, it may have been noticed, e.g. those on the Piedmontese business, had been on important occasions, such as might justify resort to the Latin Secretary Extraordinary; but in the batch written since Dec. 1655, when Meadows's Portuguese mission had been resolved on, the ordinary and the extraordinary come together, and Milton, in writing letters about ships, as well as in translating draft articles, does work that would have been done by Meadows. And this arrangement, we may add, was to continue henceforth. For, despite the sneers of Count Bundt as to the poverty of the Protector's official staff, the Protector and Council, we shall find, were in no hurry to fill up the place left vacant by Meadows, but were quite satisfied that Mr. Milton should go on doing his best alone, with Thurloe to instruct him, and with the help of such underlings in Latin as Thurloe could put at his disposal. My belief is that Milton was pleased at this trust in his renewed ability for ordinary business.

Among the matters that occupied the attention of the Protector's Government about this time was the state of Popular Literature.

It is a fact, easily explained by the laws of human nature, and capable of being proved statistically, that since the strong government of Cromwell had come in, and something like calm and leisure had become possible, there had been a return of people's fancies to the lighter Muses. Nothing strikes one more, in turning over the Registers of the old London Book-trade, than the steady increase through the Protectorate of the proportion of books of secular and general interest to those of controversy and theology. One feels oneself still in the age of Puritanism, it is true, but as if past the densest and most stringent years of Puritanism and coming once more into a freer and merrier air. Poems, romances, books of humour, ballads and songs, reprints of Elizabethan tragedies and comedies, reprints of such pieces as Shakespeare's Venus and Adonis, collections of facetious extracts from the wits and poets of the reigns of James and Charles I., are now not uncommon. Humphrey Moseley, Milton's publisher of 1645, faithful to his old trade-instinct for poetry and the finer literature generally, was still at the head of the publishers in that line; but Henry Herringman, who had published Lord Broghill's Parthenissa, had begun to rival Moseley, and there were other caterers of amusing and humorous books. Publishers imply authors; and so in the London of the Protectorate, apart from stray survivors from among the wits of King Charles's reign, there were men of a younger sort, bred amid the more recent Puritan conditions, but with literary zests that were Bohemian rather than Puritan, Among these, as we have hinted, and as we may now state more distinctly, were Milton's nephews, Edward and John Phillips.¹

Such Popular Literature as we have described had been left perfectly free. Indeed Censorship or Licensing of books generally, as distinct from newspapers, had all but ceased. Since Bradshaw's Press-Act of 1649, it had been rather rare for an author or bookseller to take the trouble, in the case of a non-political book, to procure the imprimatur of any official licenser in addition to the ordinary trade-registration; and in this, as an established custom, Cromwell's Government had acquiesced. Only in one particular, apart from politics, was there any disposition to interfere with the liberty of printing. This was where popular wit, humour, or poetry might pass into the ribald, profane, or indecent. Vigilance against open immorality had from the first appeared to Cromwell one of the chief duties of his Government; and he seems to have been unusually attentive to this duty in 1655-6, when he had just put the country under the military police of his Major-Generals and their subordinates. Then it is that we hear most of the suppressing of horse-races and the like, and that we are least surprised at encountering such a piece of information as that "players were taken in Newcastle and whipped for rogues." Now, though by this time there had already, by previous care on the part of Government, been a considerable cleansing of the Popular Literature of London, yet something or other in the state of the book-world about 1655-6 seems to have occasioned new and more special interference. I believe it to have been the increased frequency of ballads, facetiæ, and reprints, of higher literary character than the coarse pamphlets that had been suppressed, but objectionable on the same moral grounds. At all events, all but simultaneously with the Order of the Protector and his Council, of Sept. 5, 1655, concentrating the whole newspaper press in the hands of Needham and Thurloe (see ante pp. 51-52), there had been a new general Ordinance "against Scandalous Books and Pamphlets and for the Regulation of Printing" (Aug. 18, 1655), and it was not long before this Ordinance was put in operation in one or two cases of the kind indicated. Here are some extracts from the Order Books of the Council in April and May 1656:—

Tuesday, April 1656:—"That it be referred to the Earl of Mulgrave, Colonel Jones, and Lord Strickland, or any two of them, to examine the business touching the book entitled Sportive Wit or the Muses' Merriment, and to send for the author and printer, and report the same to the Council."

Friday, April 25, 1656:—Present: the Lord President Lawrence, the Earl of Mulgrave, Lord Lambert, Sir Gilbert Pickering, Colonel Sydenham, Colonel Jones, the Lord Deputy of Ireland (Fleetwood), Lord Viscount Lisle, Mr. Rous, Major-General Skippon, and Lord Strickland. "Colonel Jones reports from the Committee of the Council to whom was referred the consideration of a book entitled Sportive Wit or the Muses' Merriment, that the said book contains in it much scandalous, lascivious, scurrilous, and profane matter. Ordered by his Highness the Lord Protector, by and with the advice of the Council, That the Lord Mayor of the City of London and the rest of the Committee for the regulation of Printing do cause all such [copies] of the said book as are not already seized to be forthwith seized on, wherever they shall be found, and cause the same, together with those already seized, to be delivered to the Sheriffs of London and Middlesex, who are to cause the same to be forthwith publicly burnt.—He further reports that Nathaniel Brookes, Stationer, at the Angel in Cornhill, caused the said book to be printed; that the printers thereof were John Grismond, living in Ivy Lane, and James Cotterill, living in Lambeth Hill; and that JOHN PHILLIPS, of Westminster, was the author of the Epistle Dedicatory. Ordered, That it be referred to Sir John Barkstead, Knight, Lieutenant of the Tower [and Major-General for Westminster and Middlesex], to cause the fines to be levied on the said persons according to law: [also] that the said persons do attend the Council on Tuesday next."—Milton's younger nephew, therefore, had been the editor of the offending volume. Of the eleven members of Council present when this fact came out, six were among those friends of Milton whom he had specially mentioned in his Defensio Secunda: viz. Fleetwood, Lambert, Lawrence, Pickering, Sydenham, and Strickland.

Saturday, April 26, 1656:—His Highness the Lord Protector approves of a great many recent Orders of Council presented to him all at once by Mr. Scobell, the Clerk of the Council. Among them is the order "for burning the book called Sportive Wit."

Friday, May 9, 1656:—His Highness the Lord Protector present in person, with Lord President Lawrence, Lambert, Fleetwood, Sir Gilbert Pickering, Strickland, Sydenham, and Jones:—Ordered, &c. "That the Lord Mayor of the City of London and the rest of the Committee for regulating Printing do cause all the books entitled Choice Droliery, Songs and Sonnets (being stuffed with profane and obscene matter, tending to the corruption of manners), to be seized wherever the same shall be found, and cause the same to be delivered to the Sheriffs of London and Middlesex, who are required to give order that the same be burnt."

Copies of the second of the two books thus condemned by Cromwell and his Council have, I believe, survived the burning, The publisher was a John Sweeting, who had duly registered the book on the 9th of February 1655-6, shortly after which date it had appeared with this full title, Choice Drollery, Songs and Sonnets: being a Collection of Divers Eminent Pieces of Poetry of several Eminent Authors, never before printed. I have not seen any copy of the other book bearing the precise title Sportive Wit, or the Muses' Merriment; but there are surviving copies of what may be the same with an alternative title, viz. Wit and Drollery: Jovial Poems, never before printed, by Sir J.M., Jas. S., Sir W.D., J.D., and other admirable wits. It had been out in London since. Jan. 18, 1655-6, had been registered on the 30th of that month, and is a respectably printed little book of 160 pages, with the motto "Ut nectar ingenium" under the title, and with, the imprint London. Printed for Nath. Brook, at the Angel in Cornhill, 1656. It contains moreover a Dedication "To the truly noble Edward Pepes, Esq.," and an Epistle "To the Courteous Reader," both signed with the initials J.P. Either, therefore, this is the same book as the Sportive Wit or the Muses' Merriment which, figures in the Orders of the Council, or John Phillips had edited simultaneously for Nathaniel Brooke (who had been the publisher of his Satyr against Hypocrites in the preceding August) two books of the same general character. Even on the latter supposition, Wit and Drollery, in the absence of Sportive Wit, may serve as a representative of that production of the same editor and the same publisher. The substance of Phillips's Epistle to the Reader in Wit and Drollery is as follows:—

"Reader,—To give thee a broadside of plain dealing, this Wit I present thee with is such as can only be in fashion, invented purposely to keep off the violent assaults of melancholy, assisted by the additional engines and weapons of sack and good company... What hath not been extant of Sir J. M., of Ja. S., of Sir W. D., of J. D., and other miraculous muses of the times, are here at thy service; and, as Webster, at the end of his play called The White Devil, subscribes that the action of Perkins crowned the whole play, so, when thou viewest the title, and readest the sign of 'Ben Jonson's Head, in the backside of the Exchange, and the Angel in Cornhill,' where they are sold, enquire who could better furnish thee with such sparkling copies of wit."

Among the included pieces are the younger Alexander Gill's lampoon on Ben Jonson for his Magnetic Lady and Ben Jonson's reply to the same (ante Vol. I. pp. 528-529); there are also several pieces of Suckling; but, for the rest, as the title-page bears, the volume consists chiefly of specimens of "Sir J. M." (Sir John Mennes), "Jas. S." (James Smith), "Sir W. D" (Sir William Davenant), and "J. D." (Dr. Donne), professing not to have been before in print. Whether this was so, and whether the pieces were all authentically by these poets, need not here concern us. It is enough to say that many of the pieces are decidedly, and some very grossly, of the improper kind. The reader will not expect to have this proved by extract; but of the more innocent "drollery" the following stanzas from a poem entitled "Nonsense" may be a sample:—

At worst, the volume was but a catchpenny collection of pieces of a kind of which there was plenty already dispersed in print under the names of the same authors, or of others as classical; and, if this was the same book as the Sportive Wit, or at all like that book, it may have been some mere accident of the moment that brought Government censure upon Phillips's volume, while others, as had, escaped. But how annoying the whole occurrence to Milton!¹

Less unsatisfactory to Milton, must hare been the literary appearances about the same time of his elder nephew, Edward Phillips. On the same day on which the stationer Nathaniel Brooke had registered Wit and Drollery edited by John Phillips, i.e. on Jan. 30, 1655-6, he had registered two tales or small novels called "The Illustrious Shepherdess" and "The Imperious Brother" both "written originally in Spanish and now Englished by Edward Phillips, Gent."¹ The first of these translations, both from the Spanish of Juan Perez de Montalvan (1602-1638), is dedicated by Phillips to the Marchioness of Dorchester, in what Godwin calls "an extraordinary style of fustian and bombast."² With the exception, of such affectation in style, which Phillips afterwards threw off, there is nothing ill to report of these early performances of his; and two translations from the Spanish were a creditable proof of accomplishment. But still more interesting was another literary performance of Edward Phillips's of the same date. This was his edition of the Poems of Drummond of Hawthornden.

Drummond had died in 1649, leaving in manuscript, at Hawthornden or in Edinburgh, not only his History of Scotland from 1423 to 1542, or through the Reigns of the Five Jameses, but also various other prose-writings, and a good deal of verse in addition to what he had published in his life-time. Drummond's son and heir being under age, the care of the MSS. had devolved chiefly on Drummond's brother-in-law, Sir John Scot of Scotstarvet, a well-known Scottish judge, antiquary, and eccentric. Hitherto the troubles in Scotland had prevented the publication by Sir John of these remains of his celebrated relative, the only real Scottish poet of his generation. With the other Scottish dignitaries and officials who had resisted the English invasion, Sir John himself had been turned out of his public posts, heavily fined, and remitted into private life (Vol. IV. p. 561). Gradually, however, as Scotland had become accustomed to her union with England, things had come round again for the old ex-Judge, as well as for others. There is reason to believe that he was in London for some time in 1654-5, soliciting the Protector and the Council for favour in the matter of his fine, if not for restoration to one of his former offices, the Director of the Scottish Chancery. The case of Scot of Scotstarvet, at all events, was then under discussion in the Council, with the result that his fine, which had been originally £1500, but had been reduced to £500, was first reduced farther to £300, and next, apparently by Cromwell's own interposition, altogether "discharged and taken off, in consideration of the pains he hath taken and the service he hath done to the Commonwealth."¹ If Scotstarvet himself, then seventy years of age, had come to London on the business, he must have brought Drummond's MSS., or copies of them, with him. On the 16th of January 1854-5 there had been registered at Stationers' Hall, as forthcoming, Drummond's History of Scotland through the Reigns of the Five Jameses, with a selection of other prose-writings of his, chiefly of a political kind; and the volume did appear immediately, as a handsome small folio, bearing date 1655, and "printed by Henry Hills for Rich. Tomlins and himself." As Henry Hills was one of the printers to his Highness and the Council, the appearance from his press of a volume so full of conservative doctrine, inculcating so strongly the duty of submission to kingly prerogative and to constituted authority, may not be without significance. Another interesting circumstance about it is that it had appeared under the charge of a London editor, "Mr. Hall of Gray's Inn,"—i.e., unless I am mistaken, that Mr. John Hall whom we saw brought in, at £100 a year, to do pieces of literary hackwork for the Council under Milton as long ago as May 1649, and who had been in some such employment for the Council, at least occasionally, ever since (ante p. 177). Accidental or not, the fact that the editor of Drummond's Prose Writings, selected by Scotstarvet or by the printer Hills, should have been a servant of the Council of State, and a kind of underling of Milton in that capacity, is at least curious. But it becomes more curious when taken in connexion, with the fact that the editor of the companion volume, containing the first professedly complete edition of Drummond's Poems, was Milton's elder nephew. This volume, though announced by Mr. Hall in his Introduction to the Prose Volume, did not appear till about a year afterwards, and then as an octavo of 224 pages, with this title, "Poems by that most famous Wit, William Drummond of Hawthornden ... London, Printed for Rickard Tomlins, at the Sun and Bible, neare Pye-Corner, 1656." The volume is dedicated to Sir John Scot of Scotstarvet, and includes about sixty small pieces of Drummond never before published, which Sir John had supplied from the Hawthornden MSS. Apart from revision of the proofs, Phillips's editorship consisted in a prose preface, signed "E.P.," and a set of commendatory verses, signed in full "Edward Phillips."

Drummond's Poetry had long been known to Milton in the fragmentary state in which alone it had been till then accessible, i.e. in the successive instalments of it published by Drummond himself in Edinburgh between 1613 and 1638. There might be proof also that Drummond was one of Milton's favourites, and regarded by him as one of the sweetest and truest poets that there had been in Great Britain through that age of miscellaneous metrical effort, much of it miscalled Poetry, which included the whole of the laureateship of Ben Jonson and the beginning of that of Davenant. Accordingly, it is not difficult to suppose that phrases about Drummond from Milton's own mouth were worked by Phillips into his prose preface to the London edition of the Poems of Drummond. There is a little hyperbolism in that preface; but the opening definition of Drummond's genius is exact, and the fitness of some of the phrases quite admirable. Thus:—

"To say that these Poems are the effects of a genius the most polite and verdant that ever the Scottish nation produced, although it he a commendation not to be rejected (for it is well known that that country hath afforded many rare and admirable wits), yet it is not the highest that may be given him; for, should I affirm that neither Tasso, nor Guarini, nor any of the most neat and refined spirits of Italy, nor even the choicest of our English Poets, can challenge to themselves any advantage above him, it could not be judged any attribute superior to what he deserves ... And, though he hath not had the good fortune to be so generally famed abroad as many others, perhaps of less esteem, yet this is a consideration that cannot diminish, but rather advance, his credit; for, by breaking forth of obscurity, he will attract the higher admiration, and, like the sun emerging from a cloud, appear at length with so much the more forcible rays..."

Milton's interesting German friend, Henry Oldenburg, had recently removed from London to Oxford. "In the beginning of this year," says Wood in his Fasti for 1656, "studied in Oxon, in the condition of a sojourner, HENRY OLDENBURG, who wrote himself sometimes GRUBENDOL [anagram of OLDENBUBG]; and in the month of June he was entered a, student by the name of 'Henricus Oldenburg, Bremensis, Nobilis Saxo': at which time he was tutor to a young Irish nobleman, called Henry O'Bryen [son of Henry, Earl of Thomond], then also a student there."¹ As we construe the case, Oldenburg, having been for some years in England as agent for Bremen, had begun to see that he was likely to remain in England permanently; and he had gone to Oxford for the benefit of a year of study there with readings in the Bodleian, and the society more especially of Robert Boyle, Wilkins, Wallis, Petty, and the rest of the Oxford colony or offshoot from the Invisible College of London. Desirable on its own account, this migration to Oxford had been made easier to him financially, if it had not been, occasioned, by the arrangement that he should be tutor there to the young Irish nobleman whom Wood names. But this young nobleman was not to be Oldenburg's only pupil at Oxford. Though Wood does not mention the fact, there went with him thither, or there speedily followed him thither, to be also under his charge, another young Irish nobleman. This was no other than, our own Richard Jones, son of Viscount and Lady Ranelagh, the Benjamin among Milton's pupils. Whatever had been the nature of Milton's recent instructions of the youth, they had now ceased, and Oldenburg was to be thenceforward the youth's more regular tutor. It does not seem to have been intended that young Ranelagh should formally enter a college, so as to receive the usual education at the University, but only that he should obtain some acquaintance with Oxford and its ways, and be for a while in the society of his uncle Boyle, and of his two cousins, Viscount Dungarvan and Mr. Richard Boyle. If these two sons of the Earl of Cork were still under the tutorship of Dr. Peter Du Moulin, Oldenburg and Jones at Oxford must have come necessarily also into constant intercourse with that very secret admirer of Milton. Oxford, we do gather, was still Du Moulin's head-quarters; but he was so much on the wing thence that Oldenburg might expect to succeed him in the tutorship of at least one of the young Boyles. Oldenburg was then thirty years of age, and young Ranelagh about sixteen.

Among four letters to young Jones or Ranelagh included in Milton's Latin Familiar Epistles one is undated. It is put second of the four in the printed collection, but it ought to have been put first. It is Milton's first letter to the youth in his new position at Oxford under Henry Oldenburg's charge. The date may be in or about May 1636:—

"To the Noble Youth, RICHARD JONES.

"I received your letter much after its date,—not till it had lain, I think, fifteen days, put away somewhere, at your mother's. Most gladly at last I recognised in it your continued affection for me and sense of gratitude. In truth my goodwill to you, and readiness to give you the most faithful admonitions, have never but justified, I hope, both your excellent mother's opinion of me and confidence in me, and your own disposition. There is, indeed, as you write, plenty of amenity and salubrity in the place where you now are; there are books enough for the needs of a University: if only the amenity of the spot contributed as much to the genius of the inhabitants as it does to pleasant living, nothing would seem wanting to the happiness of the place. The Library there, too, is splendidly rich; but, unless the minds of the students are made more instructed by means of it in the best kinds of study, you might more properly call it a book-warehouse than a Library. Most justly you acknowledge that to all these helps there must be added a spirit for learning and habits of industry. Take care, and steady care, that I may never have occasion to find you in a different state of mind; and this you will most easily avoid if you diligently obey the weighty and friendly precepts of the highly accomplished Henry Oldenburg beside you. Farewell, my well-beloved Richard; and allow me to exhort and incite you to virtue and piety, like another Timothy, by the example of that most exemplary woman, your mother.

"Westminster."

In this letter one observes the rather strict tone of Mentorship assumed towards young Ranelagh, as if Milton was aware of something in the youth, that needed checking, or as if Lady Ranelagh, with her motherly knowledge, had given Milton a hint that the strict tone with him would be generally the best. The tendency to a depreciation of Oxford, which is also visible in the letter, is no surprise from Milton.

The Anti-Oxonian feeling, if that is not too strong a name for it after all, is even more apparent in Milton's next letter, addressed not to young Ranelagh, but to his tutor. Young Ranelagh, it appears, not long after the receipt of the foregoing, had run up to London on a brief visit to his mother, and had brought Milton a letter from Oldenburg. To this Milton replies as follows:—

"To HENRY OLDENBURG, Agent for Bremen with the English Government.

"Your letter, brought by young Ranelagh, has found me rather busy; and so I am forced to be briefer than I should wish. You have certainly kept your departing promise of writing to me, and that with a punctuality surpassed. I believe, by no one hitherto in the payment of a debt. I congratulate you on your present retirement, to my loss though it be, since it gives pleasure to you; I congratulate you also on that happy state of mind which enables you so easily to set aside at once the ambition and the ease of city-life, and to lift your thoughts to higher matters of contemplation. What advantage that retirement affords, however, besides plenty of books, I know not; and those persons you have found there as fit associates in your studies I should suppose to be such rather from their own natural constitution than from the discipline of the place,—unless perchance, from missing you here, I do less justice to the place for keeping you away. Meanwhile you yourself rightly remark that there are too many there whose occupation it is to spoil divine and human things alike by their frivolous quibblings, that they may not seem to be doing absolutely nothing for those many endowments by which they are supported so much to the public detriment. All this you will understand better for yourself. Those ancient annals of the Chinese from the Flood downwards which you say are promised by the Jesuit Martini¹ are doubtless very eagerly expected on account of the novelty of the thing; but I do not see what authority or confirmation they can add to the Mosaic books. Our Cyriack, whom you bade me salute, returns the salutation. Farewell.

"Westminster: June 25, 1656."

That Count Bundt's remonstrance on the employment of a blind man in the Protector's diplomatic business had had no effect will be proved by the following list of state-letters written by Milton immediately after that remonstrance. We bring the list down to Sept. 1656, the month in which the Second Parliament of the Protectorate met:

(LXXVIII.) To KINGS AND FOREIGN STATES GENERALLY, June 1656:¹—This is a Passport by the Protector in favour of PETER GEORGE ROMSWINCKEL, Doctor of Laws. He had been born and bred in the Roman Catholic Church, and had held high offices in that Church at Cologne, but had become an ardent Protestant, and had been for some time in England. He was now on his way back to Germany, to assume the post of Councillor to the widowed Duchess of Symmeren (?); and the Protector desires all English officers, consuls, agents, &c., and also all foreign Governments, to give him free passage and handsome treatment. The tone of the letter is even haughtily Protestant. On the ground that "most people think in Religion with easy acquiescence in exactly what they have received from their forefathers, and not what they themselves, after imploring divine help, have learnt to be true by their own perception and knowledge," the case of Romswinckel is represented as peculiarly interesting; and such phrases as "the Papal superstition" are not spared. The passport was probably expected to come only into Protestant hands.

(LXXIX.) To CHARLES X., KING OF SWEDEN, June 1656:¹—A special recommendation of the above Romswinckel to the Swedish King, in the same high Protestant tone.

(LXXX.) TO THE KING OF PORTUGAL, July 1656:—The Portuguese merchants of the Brazil Company owe certain English merchants a considerable sum of money on shipping accounts since 1649 and 1650. The English merchants, understanding that, by recent orders of his Portuguese Majesty, they are likely to lose the principal of the debt, and be put off with the bare interest, have applied to the Protector. He thinks it a hard case, and begs the King to let the debt be paid in full, principal and five years of interest.

(LXXXI.) To CHARLES X., KING OF SWEDEN, July 1656:—After more than two months of farther debating between Count Bundt and the English Commissioners, in the course of which there had been frequent new displays of the Count's high temper, the Treaty between the Protector and Charles Gustavus had at last been happily finished on the 17th of July. On that day, Whitlocke tells as, he and Lords Fiennes and Strickland had their long final meeting over the Treaty with the Ambassador, ending; in formal signing and sealing on both sides. The main difficulty had been got over thus: "Concerning the carrying of pitch, tar, &c. to Spain, during our war with them [the Spaniards], there was a single Article, that the King of Sweden should be moved to give order for the prohibiting of it, and a kind of undertaking that it should be done." On the whole, the Protector was satisfied; and, as he had contracted some admiration and liking for the Ambassador, precisely on account of his unusual spirit and stubbornness, he marked the conclusion of the Treaty by special compliments and favours. "The Swedish Ambassador," says Whitlocke under date July 25, "having taken his leave of the Protector, received great civilities and respects from him, and afterwards dined with him at Hampton Court, and hunted with him. The Protector bestowed the dignity of knighthood upon one of his [the Ambassador's] gentlemen, Sir Gustavus Duval, the mareschal." The present Latin letter by Milton, accordingly, was the letter of honourable dismissal which the Swede was to take back to his master. Perhaps the Swede knew that even this was written by the Protector's blind Latinist.—"Oliver, Protector of the Commonwealth of England, Scotland, Ireland, &c., to the most Serene Prince, Charles Gustavus, King of the Swedes, Goths, and Vandals, &c." is the heading of the letter; which proceeds thus:—"Most Serene King,—As we have justly a very high regard for the friendship of so great a Prince as your Majesty, one so famous for his achievements, so necessarily should that most illustrious Lord, CHRISTIERN BUNDT, your Ambassador Extraordinary, by whose endeavours a Treaty of the closest alliance has just been ratified between us, have been to as, were it but on this pre-eminent account, an object of favour and good report. We have accordingly judged it fit that he should be sent back to you after his most praiseworthy performance of this Embassy: but not without the highest acknowledgment at the same time of his other excellent merits, to the end that one who has been heretofore in esteem and honour with you may now feel that he is indebted to this our commendation for yet more abundant fruits of his assiduity and prudence. As for the transactions that yet remain, we have resolved shortly to send to your Majesty a special Embassy for those; and meanwhile may God preserve your Majesty safe, to be a pillar in His Church's defence and in the affairs of Sweden!—From our Palace of Westminster,—July 1656. Your Majesty's most affectionate, OLIVER, Protector &c."—Count Bundt, we may add, remained in England a month more after all, receiving farther attentions and entertainments; and not till Aug. 23 did he finally depart, taking with him not only Milton's Letter, but also a present from the Protector of £1200 worth of "white cloth" and a magnificent jewel. It was because this jewel could not be got ready at once that he had staid on; and it was worth waiting for. "The jewel was his Highness's picture in a case of gold, about the bigness of a five-shillings piece of silver, set round the case with sixteen fair diamonds, each diamond valued at £60: in all worth about £1000." The Count wore the jewel tied with a blue ribbon to his breast so long as he was in sight, barging down the Thames.¹

(LXXXII.) To the King of Portugal, Aug. 1656:—Mr. Philip Meadows has been in Lisbon since March, busy in the duties of his mission, and sending letters and reports home. There was still danger, however, in being an agent for the English Commonwealth in a Roman Catholic country; and Meadows had nearly shared the fate of Dorislaus and Ascham. On the 11th of May, as he was returning at night to his lodgings in Lisbon, carried in a litter, he was attacked by two horsemen, who "discharged two pistols into the litter and shot him through the left hand."¹ The wound was not serious; but the King of Portugal was naturally in great concern. He offered a large reward for the discovery of the criminals; and, in a Latin letter to Cromwell, dated "Alcantara, May 26, N.S.," he professed his desire to have them punished, whether they were English refugees or native Portuguese.² The present Letter by Milton is the Protector's reply. Though there has been some interval since the receipt of his Majesty's letter, his Highness has not yet heard that the criminals have been apprehended; and he insists that there shall be a vigorous prosecution of the search and recommends that it should be put into the hands of "some persons of honesty and sincerity, well-wishers to both nations."

(LXXXIII.) To Louis XIV. of France, Aug. 1656:—Again about a ship, but this time in a peremptory strain.—Richard Baker and Co. of London have complained to the Protector that a ship of theirs, called The Endeavour, William Jopp master, laden at Teneriffe with 300 pipes of rich Canary wine, had, in November last, been seized by four French privateer vessels under command of a Giles de la Roche, who had carried ship, cargo, and most of the crew away to the East Indies, after landing fourteen of the crew on the Guinea coast. For this daring act he had pleaded no excuse, except that his own fleet wanted provisions and that he believed the owners of his fleet would make good the loss. The Protector now demands that £16,000 be paid to Messrs. Baker and Co., and also that Giles de la Roche be punished. It concerns his French Majesty's honour to see to this, after that recent League with the English Commonwealth to which his royal oath is pledged. Otherwise all faith in Leagues will be at an end.

(LXXXIV.) TO CARDINAL, MAZARIN, Aug. 1656:—On the same subject as the last. While writing to the King about such an outrage, the Protector cannot refrain from imparting the matter also to his Eminence, as "the sole and only person whose singular prudence governs the most important affairs of the French and the chief business of the kingdom, with equal fidelity, counsel, and vigilance."

(LXXXV.) TO THE STATES-GENERAL OF THE UNITED PROVINCES, Aug. 1656. A Letter of some length, and very important. "We doubt not," It begins, "but all will bear us this testimony—that no considerations have ever been stronger with us in contracting foreign alliances than, the duty of defending the Truth of Religion, and that we have never accounted anything more sacred than the union and reconciliation of those who are either the friends and defenders of Protestants, or at least not their enemies." With what grief, then, does his Highness hear of new dissensions breaking out among Protestant powers, and especially of signs of a rupture between the United Provinces and Sweden! Should there be war between those two great Protestant powers, how the common enemy will rejoice! "To the Spaniard the prospect has already brought such an access of spirit and confidence that he has not hesitated, through his Ambassador residing with you, to obtrude most audaciously his counsels upon you, and that about the chief concerns of your Republic: daring even partly to terrify you by throwing in threats of a renewal of war, partly to solicit you by setting forth a false show of expediency, to the end that, abandoning by his advice your old and most faithful friends, the French, the English, and the Swedes, you would be pleased to form a close alliance with your former enemy and tyrant, pacified now forsooth, and, what is most to be feared, quite fawning." The Protector earnestly adjures their High Mightinesses the States to be on their guard. "We are not ignorant that you, in your wisdom, often revolve in your minds the question of the present state of Europe in general, and especially the condition of the Protestants: how the Cantons of the Swiss following the orthodox faith are kept in suspense by the expectation from day to day of new commotions to be stirred up by their countrymen following the faith of the Pope, and this while they have hardly emerged from that war which, plainly on account of Religion, was blown and kindled by the Spaniard, who gave their enemies leaders and supplied the money; how for the inhabitants of the Alpine Valleys the designs of the Spaniards are again contriving the same slaughter and destruction which they most cruelly inflicted on them last year; how the German Protestants are most grievously troubled under the rule of the Kaiser, and retain their paternal homes with difficulty; how the King of Sweden, whom God, as we hope, has raised up as a valiant champion of the Orthodox Religion, is carrying on with the whole strength of his kingdom a doubtful and most severe war with the most powerful enemies of the Reformed Faith; how your own Provinces are threatened by the ominous league lately struck up among your Papist neighbours, of whom a Spaniard is the Prince; how we here, finally, are engaged in a war declared against the Spanish King." What an aggravation of this condition of things if there should be an actual conflict between their High Mightinesses and Sweden! Will not their High Mightinesses lay all this to heart, and come to a friendly arrangement with Charles Gustavus? The Protector hardly understands the causes of the disagreement; but, if he can be of any use between the two powers, he will spare no exertion. He is about to send an embassy to the Swedish King, and will convey to him also the sentiments of this letter.—That the preparation of this Letter to the States-General had been very careful appears from the following minute relating to it in the Council Order-Books for Tuesday Aug. 19:—"Mr. Secretary [Thurloe] reports the draft of a letter to the States-General of the United Provinces; which was read, and committed to Sir Charles Wolseley, with the assistance of the Secretary, to amend the same, in pursuance of the present debate, and report it again to the Council." Cromwell was himself present at this meeting of the Council, with Lawrence, Lambert, Wolseley, Strickland, Rous, Jones, Skippon, and Pickering. The draft read was most probably the English that was to be turned into Latin by Milton: but this does not preclude the idea that the document itself was substantially Milton's. Thurloe can hardly have drafted such a document. He may have gone to Milton first.

(LXXXVI.) To The King of Portugal, Aug. 1656:—The Protector has received his Portuguese Majesty's Ratification of the Peace negotiated in London by his Extraordinary Ambassador Count Sa in 1654, and also of the secret and preliminary articles of the same; and he has received letters from Philip Meadows, his agent at Lisbon, informing him that the counterpart Ratification on the English side had been duly delivered to his Majesty. There being now therefore a firm and settled Peace between the two nations, dating formally from June 1656, the Protector salutes his Majesty with all cordiality. As to his Majesty's letters of June 24th, mentioning some clauses of the League a slight alteration of which would be convenient for Portugal, the Protector is willing to have these carefully considered, but suggests that the whole Treaty may be perilled by tampering with any part of it.

(LXXXVII.) To THE COUNT OF ODEMIRA, Aug. 1656:—This is a letter to the Prime Minister of Portugal, to accompany the foregoing to the King. The Protector acknowledges the Count's zeal and diligence in promoting the Peace now concluded, and takes the opportunity of pressing upon him, rather than again upon the King, relentless inquiry into the late attempt to assassinate Meadows.

(LXXXVIII.) To CHARLES X., KING OF SWEDEN, Aug. 1656:—A letter very much in the strain of that just sent to the States-General of the United Provinces. Although, knowing what a champion the Protestant Faith has in his Swedish Majesty, the Protector cannot but rejoice in the news of his successes, there is one drawback. It is the accompanying news of the misunderstanding between his Majesty and the Dutch, now come to such a pass, he hears, that open conflict is likely, especially in the Baltic. The Protector is in the dark as to the causes, but ventures to press on his Majesty the views he had been pressing, but a few days ago, upon the Dutch. Let him think of the perils of Protestantism; let him think of Piedmont, of Austria, of Switzerland! "Who is ignorant that the counsels of the Spaniards and of the Roman Pontiff have, for two years past, filled all those places with conflagrations, slaughters, and troubles to the orthodox? If to these evils, so many already, there shall be added an outbreak of bad feeling among Protestant brethren themselves, and especially between two powers in whose valour, resources, and constancy lies the greatest safeguard of the Reformed Churches, so far as human means avail, the Reformed Religion itself must be endangered and brought to an extreme crisis. On the other hand, were all of the Protestant name to cultivate perpetual peace with that brotherly unanimity which becomes them, there will be no reason at all to be very much afraid of inconvenience to us from all that the arts or force of our enemies can do." O that his Majesty may see his way to a pacific settlement of his differences with the Dutch! The Protector will gladly do anything to secure that result.

(LXXXIX.) TO THE STATES OF HOLLAND, Sept. 1856:—William Cooper, a London minister, has represented to the Protector that his father-in-law, John le Maire of Amsterdam, invented, about thirty-three years ago, a certain device by which much revenue was brought in to the States of Holland, without any burden to the people. It was the settling of a certain small seal or stamp to be used in the Provinces ("id autem erat parvi sigilli in Provinciis constitutio"). For the working this invention he had taken into partnership one John van den Brook; and the States of Holland had promised the partners 3000 guilders yearly, equal to about £300 English, for the use of the thing. Not a farthing, however, had they ever received, though the States had benefited so much; and now, as they are both tired out, they have transferred their right to William Cooper, who means to prosecute the claim. The States are prayed to look into the matter, and to pay Cooper the promised annual pension, with arrears.

(XC.) To LOUIS XIV. of FRANCE, Sept. 1656:—His Highness is sorry to trouble his Majesty so often; but the grievances of English subjects must be attended to. Now a London merchant, called Robert Brown, who had bought 4000 hides, part of the cargo of a Dieppe ship, legally taken before the League between France and Britain, had sold about 200 of them to a currier in Dieppe, but; instead of receiving the money, had found it attached and stopped in his factor's hands. He could have no redress from the French court of law to which the suit had been referred; and the Protector now desires his Majesty to bring the matter before his own Council. If acts done before the League are to be called in question, Leagues will be meaningless; and it would be well to make an example or two of persons causing trouble of this kind.

Six of these thirteen State-Letters, it ought to be observed, belong to the single month of August 1656. They form Milton's largest contribution of work of this kind in any one month since the very beginning of his Secretaryship, with the exception of his burst of letters on the news of the Piedmontese Massacre in May 1655. Nor ought it to escape notice that some of the letters of Aug. 1656 are particularly important, and that two of them are manifestos of that passionate Protestantism of the Protector which had prompted his bold stand in the matter of the Piedmontese Persecution, and which had matured itself politically since then into the scheme of an express League or Union of all the Protestant Powers of Europe. It cannot be by mere accident that, when Cromwell wanted letters written in the highest strain of his most characteristic passion, they should have always been supplied by Milton. Whatever might be done by the office people that Thurloe had about him, it must have been understood that, for things of this sort, there was always to be recourse to the Latin Secretary Extraordinary.