Book 2 — CHAPTER II.

Third Section.

MILTON THROUGH MONK'S DICTATORSHIP. FEB. 1659-60—MAY 1660.

FIRST EDITION OF MILTON'S READY AND EASY WAY TO ESTABLISH A FREE COMMONWEALTH: ACCOUNT OF THE PAMPHLET, WITH EXTRACTS: VEHEMENT REPUBLICANISM OF THE PAMPHLET, WITH ITS PROPHETIC WARNINGS: PECULIAR CENTRAL IDEA OF THE PAMPHLET, VIZ. THE PROJECT OF A GRAND COUNCIL OR PARLIAMENT TO SIT IN PERPETUITY, WITH A COUNCIL OF STATE FOR ITS EXECUTIVE: PASSAGES EXPOUNDING THIS IDEA: ADDITIONAL SUGGESTION OF LOCAL AND COUNTY COUNCILS OR COMMITTEES: DARING PERORATION OF THE PAMPHLET: MILTON'S RECAPITULATION OF THE SUBSTANCE OF IT IN A SHORT PRIVATE LETTER TO MONK ENTITLED PRESENT MEANS AND BRIEF DELINEATION OF A FREE COMMONWEALTH: WIDE CIRCULATION OF MILTON'S PAMPHLET: THE RESPONSE BY MONK AND THE PARLIAMENT OF THE SECLUDED MEMBERS IN THEIR PROCEEDINGS OF THE NEXT FORTNIGHT: DISSOLUTION OF THE PARLIAMENT AFTER ARRANGEMENTS FOR ITS SUCCESSOR: ROYALIST SQUIB PREDICTING MILTON'S SPEEDY ACQUAINTANCE WITH THE HANGMAN AT TYBURN: ANOTHER SQUIB AGAINST MILTON, CALLED THE CENSURE OF THE ROTA UPON MR. MILTON'S BOOK: SPECIMENS OF THIS BURLESQUE: REPUBLICAN APPEAL TO MONK, CALLED PLAIN ENGLISH: REPLY TO THE SAME, WITH ANOTHER ATTACK ON MILTON: POPULAR TORRENT OF ROYALISM DURING THE FORTY DAYS OF INTERVAL BETWEEN THE PARLIAMENT OF THE SECLUDED MEMBERS AND THE CONVENTION PARLIAMENT (MARCH 16, 1659-60—APRIL 25, 1660): CAUTION OF MONK AND THE COUNCIL OF STATE: DR. MATTHEW GRIFFITH AND HIS ROYALIST SERMON, THE FEAR OF GOD AND THE KING: GRIFFITH IMPRISONED FOR HIS SERMON, BUT FORWARD REPUBLICANS CHECKED OR PUNISHED AT THE SAME TIME: NEEDHAM DISCHARGED FROM HIS EDITORSHIP AND MILTON FROM HIS SECRETARYSHIP: RESOLUTENESS OF MILTON IN HIS REPUBLICANISM: HIS BRIEF NOTES ON DR. GRIFFITH'S SERMON: SECOND EDITION OF HIS READY AND EASY WAY TO ESTABLISH A FREE COMMONWEALTH: REMARKABLE ADDITIONS AND ENLARGEMENTS IN THIS EDITION: SPECIMENS OF THESE: MILTON AND LAMBERT THE LAST REPUBLICANS IN THE FIELD: ROGER L'ESTRANGE'S PAMPHLET AGAINST MILTON, CALLED NO BLIND GUIDES: LARGER ATTACK ON MILTON BY G.S., CALLED HE DIGNITY OF KINGSHIP ASSERTED: QUOTATIONS FROM THAT BOOK: MEETING OF THE CONVENTION PARLIAMENT, APRIL 25, 1660: DELIVERY BY GREENVILLE OF THE SIX ROYAL LETTERS FROM BREDA, APRIL 28—MAY 1, AND VOTES OF BOTH HOUSES FOR THE RECALL OF CHARLES; INCIDENTS OF THE FOLLOWING WEEK: MAD IMPATIENCE OVER THE THREE KINGDOMS FOR THE KING'S RETURN: HE AND HIS COURT AT THE HAGUE, PREPARING FOR THE VOYAGE HOME: PANIC AMONG THE SURVIVING REGICIDES AND OTHER PROMINENT REPUBLICANS: FLIGHT OF NEEDHAM TO HOLLAND AND ABSCONDING OF MILTON FROM HIS HOUSE IN PETTY FRANCE: LAST SIGHT OF MILTON IN THAT HOUSE.

The Parliament of the Secluded Members and Residuary Rumpers had been sitting for a few days, had confirmed Monk in the Dictatorship by formally appointing him Captain-General and Commander-in-chief (Feb. 21), and had also (Feb. 22) intimated their resolution to devolve all really constitutional questions on a new "full and free Parliament," when Milton did send forth the pamphlet he had written. It was a small quarto of eighteen pages with this title-page: "The Readie and Easie Way to Establish a Free Commonwealth, and the Excellence therof compar'd with the inconveniences and dangers of readmitting kingship in this nation. The author J.M., London, Printed by T.N., and are to be sold by Livewell Chapman at the Crown in Popes-Head Alley. 1660." Copies seem to have been procurable before the end of February 1659-60, but Thomason's copy bears date "March 3."¹ That was the day of the order of Parliament for the release of the last remaining Scottish captives of Worcester Battle.

The pamphlet opens thus:—

"Although, since the writing of this treatise, the face of things hath had some change, writs for new elections [by the late Rump] have been recalled, and the members at first chosen [for the original Long Parliament] readmitted from exclusion to sit again in Parliament, yet, not a little rejoicing to hear declared the resolutions of all those who are now in power, jointly tending to the establishment of a Free Commonwealth, and to remove, if it be possible, this unsound humour of returning to old bondage instilled of late by some cunning deceivers, and nourished from bad principles and false apprehensions among too many of the people, I thought best not to suppress what I had written, hoping it may perhaps (the Parliament now sitting more full and frequent) be now much more useful than before: yet submitting what hath reference to the state of things as they then stood to present constitutions, and, so the same end be pursued, not insisting on this or that means to obtain it. The treatise was thus written as follows."

This is an attempt by Milton even yet to disguise his despondency. He had written the pamphlet while the late Rump was still sitting, while the conjunction between them and Monk was unbroken, and when the last news was that they had issued, or were about to issue, writs for the recruiting of their body by a large number of like-minded additional members; but he will assume that the pamphlet may yet answer its purpose, with hardly a change of phraseology. No longer, it is true, does the power lie with the Rump, recruited or unrecruited; it lies now in the unexpected Parliament of the Residuary Rumpers plus Monk's restored representatives of the pre-Commonwealth period of the Long Parliament. But he will suppose the best even after that surprise. There is, at any rate, a more "full and frequent" Parliament than before: and there has been no declaration hitherto of any intention to subvert the Commonwealth. On the contrary, had not Monk, both in his speech to the Secluded Members before readmitting them, and also in his Declaration or Address to the Army published after their re-admission, used the language of a true Commonwealth's-man, and even called God to witness that his only aim was "God's glory and the settlement of these nations upon Commonwealth foundations"? Had not the Secluded Members virtually made a compact with Monk upon these terms? Milton will not, for the present, suppose either Monk or the Parliament false in the main matter. He will only suppose that they have perceived, with himself, the infatuated drift of the popular humour towards a restoration of Royalty, and will themselves listen, and allow the country to listen, to what he had written on that subject two or three weeks ago.

The despondency which he disguises in the preface appears in the pamphlet itself. Or rather it is a despondency dashed with a sanguine remnant of faith that all might yet be well, and that the means of perpetuating a Republic, all contrary appearances notwithstanding, might yet be shown to be "ready and easy." The use of these two words in the title of such a pamphlet at such a time is very characteristic. It was the public theorist, however, that ventured on them, rather than the secret and real man. Throughout the pamphlet there is a sad and fierce undertone, as of one knowing that what he is prophesying as easy will never come to pass.

About half of the pamphlet consists of a declamation in general on the advantages of a Commonwealth Government over a Kingly Government, and on the dishonour, inconveniences, and dangers, to the British Islands in particular, if they should relapse into the one form of Government after having had so much prosperous experience of the other. In the following specimen of the declamation the reader will note the prophecy of actual events as far as to the Revolution of 1688:—

"After our liberty thus successfully fought for, gained, and many years possessed (except in those unhappy interruptions which God hath removed), ... to fall back, or rather to creep back, so poorly as it seems the multitude would, to their once abjured and detested thraldom of kingship, not only argues a strange degenerate corruption suddenly spread among us, fitted and prepared for new slavery, but will render us a scorn and derision to all our neighbours. And what will they say of us but scoffingly as of that foolish builder mentioned by our Saviour, who began to build a tower and was not able to finish it: 'Where is this goodly Tower of a Commonwealth, which the English boasted they would build to overshadow Kings and be another Rome in the West? The foundation indeed they laid gallantly; but fell into a worse confusion, not of tongues but of factions, than those at the Tower of Babel, and have left no memorial of their work behind them remaining but in the common laughter of Europe.' Which must needs redound the more to our shame if we but look on our neighbours THE UNITED PROVINCES, to us inferior in all outward advantages; who, notwithstanding, in the midst of great difficulties, courageously, wisely, constantly, went through with the same work, and are settled in all the happy enjoyments of a potent and flourishing Republic to this day.—Besides this, if we return to kingship, and soon repent (as undoubtedly we shall, when we begin to find the old encroachments coming on by little and little upon our consciences, which must needs proceed from King and Bishop united inseparably in one interest), we may be forced perhaps to fight over again all that we have fought and spend over again all that we have spent, but are never likely to attain, thus far as we are now advanced to the recovery of our freedom, never likely to have it in possession as we now have it,—never to be vouchsafed hereafter the like mercies and signal assistance from Heaven in our cause, if by our ingrateful backsliding we make these fruitless to ourselves, all His gracious condescensions and answers to our once importuning prayers against the tyranny which we then groaned under to become now of no effect, by returning of our own foolish accord, nay running headlong again with full stream wilfully and obstinately, into the same bondage: making vain and viler than dirt the blood of so many thousand faithful and valiant Englishmen, who left us in this liberty bought with their lives; losing by a strange after-game of folly all the battles we have won, all the treasure we have spent (not that corruptible treasure only, but that far more precious one of all our late miraculous deliverances), and most pitifully depriving ourselves the instant fruition of that Free Government which we have so dearly purchased,—a Free Commonwealth: not only held by wisest men in all ages the noblest, the manliest, the equalest, the justest Government, the most agreeable to all due liberty, and proportioned equality both human, civil, and Christian, most cherishing to virtue and true religion, but also, (I may say it with greatest probability) plainly commended or rather enjoined by our Saviour Himself to all Christians, not without remarkable disallowance and the brand of Gentilism upon Kingship [quotation here of Luke XXII. 25, 26]¹ ... And what Government comes nearer to this precept of Christ than a Free Commonwealth? Wherein they who are greatest are perpetual servants and drudges to the public at their own costs and charges,—neglect their own affairs, yet are not elevated above their brethren,—live soberly in their families, walk the streets as other men, may be spoken to freely, familiarly, friendly, without adoration: whereas a King must be adored like a demigod, with a dissolute and haughty Court about him, of vast expense and luxury, masques and revels, to the debauching of our prime gentry both male and female,—nor at his own cost, but on the public revenue,—and all this to do nothing but bestow the eating and drinking of excessive dainties, to set a pompous face upon the superficial actings of State, to pageant himself up and down in progress among the perpetual bowings and cringings of an abject people."

Having thus expressed his belief that "a Free Commonwealth, without Single Person or House of Lords, is by far the best government, if it can be had," Milton glances at the objection that recent experience in England has shown such government to be practically unattainable. He denies this, alleging that all disappointment hitherto "may be ascribed with most reason to the frequent disturbances, interruptions, and dissolutions which the Parliament hath had, partly from the impatient or disaffected people, partly from some ambitious leaders in the Army"; and he declares that the present time is peculiarly favourable for one more vigorous effort. "Now is the opportunity, now the very season, wherein we may obtain a Free Commonwealth, and establish it for ever in the land without difficulty or much delay." He had written this when the Rump was sitting, and when he had in view the new elections that were to recruit that "small remainder of those faithful worthies who at first freed us from tyranny and have continued ever since through all changes constant to their trust"; but he lets it stand now, as not inapplicable to the new condition of things brought in by the sudden mixture of the Secluded with the Rumpers. The "Ready and Easy Way," however, has still to be explained; and to that he proceeds.

The central idea of the pamphlet, and practically its backbone, is One and the same Parliament in Perpetuity or Membership for Life. This may be a surprise, not only to those who, knowing that Milton was a Republican, conceive him therefore to have held necessarily the exact modern theory of Representative Government, but also to those who understand Milton better, and who may remember at this point his somewhat contemptuous estimates on previous occasions of the value of the bodies called Parliaments. If those previous passages of his writings are studied, however, it will be found that he is not now so inconsistent as he looks. He had always thought a broad general council of fit men in the centre of a nation the essential of good government; and his chief recommendation to Cromwell, even when approving of his exceptional Sovereignty, had been that he should keep round him such a general Council. Further, it will be found that permanence of the same men at the centre of affairs had always been his implied ideal, whether permanence of an exceptional Single-Person sovereignty surrounded by a Council, or permanence of a Council without a Single-Person sovereignty. His real objection to so-called Parliaments, it will be found, lay in the association with them of the ideas of shiftingness, interruptedness, successiveness, the turmoil and debauchery of successive general elections. So possessed was he with the notion of permanence of tenure as desirable in the governing agency, whatever it might be, that he had even modified the notion, as we have seen, to suit the anomalous conditions of that stage of the Anarchy which we have called the Wallingford-House Interruption, He had recommended then the experiment of a duality of life-aristocracies, one civil and the other military. And now, the turn of circumstances and of his speculations shutting him up once more to a single Civil Parliament of the ordinary size and kind, he will insist on the quality of permanence or perpetuity as that which alone will make it answer the purpose. But, the very name "Parliament" having been vitiated so as to make a permanent Parliament a difficult conception for most people, he would rather get rid of the name altogether, and call the central governing body simply THE GENERAL OR GRAND COUNCIL OF THE NATION.

All this appears in Milton's own words, as follows:—

"The ground and basis of every just and free Government (since men have smarted so oft for committing all to one person) is a GENERAL COUNCIL OF ABLEST MEN, chosen by the people to consult of public affairs from time to time for the common good. This Grand Council must have the forces by sea and land in their power, must raise and manage the public revenue, make laws as need requires, treat of commerce, peace, or war, with foreign nations; and, for the carrying on some particular affairs of State with more secrecy and expedition, must elect, as they have already, out of their own number and others, a Council of State, And, although it may seem strange at first hearing, by reason that men's minds are prepossessed with the conceit of successive Parliaments, I affirm that the GRAND OR GENERAL COUNCIL, being well chosen, should sit perpetual: for so their business is, and they will become thereby skilfullest, best acquainted with the people, and the people with them. The Ship of the Commonwealth is always under sail: they sit at the stern; and, if they steer well, what need is there to change them, it being rather dangerous? Add to this that the GRAND COUNCIL is both foundation and main pillar of the whole State, and to move pillars and foundations, unless they be faulty, cannot be safe for the building. I see not therefore how we can be advantaged by successive Parliaments, but that they are much likelier continually to unsettle rather than to settle a free Government, to breed commotions, changes, novelties, and uncertainties, and serve only to satisfy the ambition of such men as think themselves injured and cannot stay till they be orderly chosen to have their part in the Government. If the ambition of such be at all to be regarded, the best expedient will be, and with least danger, that every two or three years a hundred or some such number may go out by lot or suffrage of the rest, and the like number be chosen in their places (which hath been already thought on here, and done in other Commonwealths); but in my opinion better nothing moved, unless by death or just accusation.... [Farther argument for the permanence of the Supreme Governing Body, with illustrations from the Sanhedrim of the Jews, the Areopagus of Athens, the Senates of Lacedaemon and Home, the full Venetian Senate, and the States-General of the United Provinces]. I know not therefore what should be peculiar in England to make successive Parliaments thought safest, or convenient here more than in all other nations, unless it be the fickleness which is attributed to us as we are Islanders. But good education and acquisite wisdom ought to correct the fluxible fault, if any such be, of our watery situation. I suppose therefore that the people, well weighing these things, would have no cause to fear or murmur, though the Parliament, abolishing that name, as originally signifying but the parley of our Commons with their Norman King when he pleased to call them, should perpetuate themselves, if their ends be faithful and for a free Commonwealth, under the name of a GRAND OR GENERAL COUNCIL: nay, till this be done, I am in doubt whether our State will be ever certainly and thoroughly settled.... The GRAND COUNCIL being thus firmly constituted to perpetuity, and still upon the death or default of any member supplied and kept in full number, there can be no cause alleged why peace, justice, plentiful trade, and all prosperity, should not thereupon ensue throughout the whole land, with as much assurance as can be of human things that they shall so continue (if God favour us and our wilful sins provoke Him not) even, to the coming of our true and rightful and only to be expected King, only worthy as He is our only Saviour, the Messiah, the Christ, the only heir of his Eternal Father, the only by Him anointed and ordained, since the work of our redemption finished, Universal Lord of all mankind. The way propounded is plain, easy, and open before us, without intricacies, without the mixture of inconveniences, or any considerable objection to be made, as by some frivolously, that it is not practicable. And this facility we shall have above our next neighbouring Commonwealth (if we can keep us from the fond conceit of something like a Duke of Venice, put lately into many men's heads by some one or other subtly driving on, under that pretty notion, his own ambitious ends to a crown),¹ that our liberty shall not be hampered or hovered over by any engagement to such a potent family as the House of Nassau, of whom to stand in perpetual doubt and suspicion, but we shall live the clearest and absolutest free nation, in the world."

In effect, therefore, Milton's Ready and Easy Way, recommended to the mixed Parliament of Residuary Rumpers and their reseated Presbyterian half-brothers of March 1659-60, is that this Parliament, nailing the Republican flag to the mast, should make itself, or some enlargement of itself, the perpetual supreme power under the name of THE GRAND COUNCIL OF THE COMMONWEALTH, appointing a smaller Council of State, as heretofore, to be the working executive, but plainly intimating to the people that there are to be no more general Parliamentary elections, but only elections to vacancies as they may occur in the Grand Council by death or misdemeanour. He is himself against the adoption of Harrington's principle of rotation to any extent whatever; but, if it would reconcile people to his scheme, he would concede rotation so far as to let a portion of the Grand Council go out every second or third year to admit new men.

While expounding his main idea, Milton had intimated that he had another suggestion in reserve, which might help to reconcile reasonable men of democratic prepossessions to the seeming novelty of an irremovable apparatus of Government at the centre. This suggestion he brings forward near the end of the pamphlet. He arrives at it in the course of a demonstration in farther detail of certain superiorities of Commonwealth government over Regal. "The whole freedom of man," he says, "consists either in Spiritual or Civil Liberty." Glancing first at Spiritual Liberty, he contents himself with a general statement of the principle of Liberty of Conscience, as implying the absolute and unimpeded right of every individual Christian to interpret the Scripture for himself and give utterance and effect to his conclusions; and, though he does not conceal that in his own opinion such Liberty of Conscience cannot be complete without Church-disestablishment, he does not press that for the present. Enough that Liberty of Conscience, according to any endurable definition of it, is more safe in a Republic than in a Kingdom,—which, by various instances from history, he maintains to be a fact. Then, coming to Civil Liberty, he propounds his reserved suggestion, or the second real novelty of his pamphlet, thus:—

"The other part of our freedom consists in the civil rights and advancements of every person according to his merit: the enjoyment of those never more certain, and the access to these never more open, than in a free Commonwealth. And both in my opinion may be best and soonest obtained if every county in the land were made a Little Commonwealth, and their chief town a City if it be not so called already; where the nobility and chief gentry may build houses or palaces befitting their quality, may bear part in the [district or city] government, make their own judicial laws, and execute them by their own elected judicatures, without appeal, in all things of Civil Government between man and man. So they shall have justice in their own hands, and none to blame but themselves if it be not well administered. In these employments they may exercise and fit themselves till their lot fall to be chosen into THE GRAND COUNCIL, according as their worth and merit shall be taken notice of by the people. As for controversies that may happen between men of several counties, they may repair, as they now do, to the Capital City. They should have here also [i.e. in their own Cities and Counties] schools and academies at their own choice, wherein their children may be bred up in their own sight to all learning and noble education, not in grammar only, but in all liberal arts and exercises."

This is what would now be called a scheme of Decentralization or Systematic Local Government. The counties, with their chief cities, should be so many little independent communities, each with its legislative council, its law-courts, and its other institutions, employing and tasking the political energies and abilities of the citizens or inhabitants of the district. While this would be advantageous in itself, inasmuch as it would stimulate mental activity and social improvement everywhere, and would relieve the GRAND CENTRAL COUNCIL of much work more properly appertaining to municipalities, it would doubtless reconcile many to the existence of such a GRAND CENTRAL COUNCIL in perpetuity. Energetic and ambitious spirits would have scope and training in their own cities and neighbourhoods, and the hope of being elected to the Central Government when there should be a vacancy there would be a fine incitement to the best to qualify themselves to the utmost for national statesmanship.

The following is the closing passage of the whole pamphlet:—

"With all hazard I have ventured what I thought my duty, to speak in season and to forewarn my country in time; wherein I doubt not but there be many wise men in all places and degrees, but am sorry the effects of wisdom are so little seen among us. Many circumstances and particulars I could have added in those things whereof I have spoken; but a few main matters now put speedily into execution will suffice to recover us and set all right. And there will want at no time who are good at circumstances; but men who set their minds on main matters and sufficiently urge them in these most difficult times I find not many. What I have spoken is the language of the Good Old Cause: if it seem strange to any, it will not seem more strange, I hope, than convincing to backsliders. Thus much I should perhaps have said though I were sure I should have spoken only to trees and stones, and had none to cry to but, with the Prophet, O Earth, Earth, Earth, to tell the very soil itself what God hath determined of Coniah and his seed for ever. But I trust I shall have spoken persuasion to abundance of sensible and ingenuous men,—to some perhaps whom God may raise of these stones to become Children of Liberty, and may enable and unite in their noble resolutions to give a stay to these our ruinous proceedings and to this general defection of the misguided and abused multitude."

To understand fully the tremendous daring of this peroration, one must turn to the passage of Hebrew prophecy which it cites and applies to Charles Stuart. It is Jeremiah XXII. 24-30, where woe is denounced upon Coniah, Jeconiah, or Jehoiachin, the worthless King of Judah, no better than his father Jehoiakim:—"As I live, saith the Lord, though Coniah, the son of Jehoiakim, King of Judah, were the signet upon my right hand, yet would I pluck thee thence. And I will give thee into the hand of them that seek thy life, and into the hand of them whose face thou fearest, even into the hand of Nebuchadnezzar King of Babylon, and into the hand of the Chaldeans. And I will cast thee out, and thy mother that bare thee, into another country, where ye were not born; and there shall ye die. But to the land whereunto they desire to return, thither shall they not return. Is this man Coniah a despised broken idol? is he a vessel wherein is no pleasure? Wherefore are they cast out, he and his seed, and are cast into a land which they know not? O Earth, Earth, Earth, hear the word of the Lord. Thus saith the Lord: Write ye this man childless, a man that shall not prosper in his days; for no man of his seed shall prosper, sitting upon the throne of David and ruling any more in Judah."

A curious supplement to Milton's Ready and Easy Way to establish a Free Commonwealth exists in the shape of a private letter which he addressed to General Monk. It was not published at the time, and bears no date, but must have been written immediately after the publication of the pamphlet, while the Parliament of the Secluded Members and Residuary Rumpers was still sitting. Milton, it would seem, had sent Monk a copy of the pamphlet; and this private letter is nothing but a brief summary of the suggestions of the pamphlet for the General's easier reading, should he think fit. It is entitled, in our present copies, "The Present Means and Brief Delineation of a Free Commonwealth, easy to be put in practice and without delay: In a Letter to General Monk."¹ The whole consists of less than three of the present pages. Believing that all endeavours must now be used "that the ensuing election be of such, as are already firm or inclinable to constitute a Free Commonwealth," Milton appeals to Monk to be himself the man to lead in these endeavours. "The speediest way," he says, "will be to call up forthwith [to London] the chief gentlemen out of every county, [and] to lay before them (as your Excellency hath already, both in your published Letters to the Army and your Declaration recited to the Members of Parliament), the danger and confusion of readmitting kingship in this land." Then let the gentlemen so charged return at once to their counties, and elect or cause to be elected, "by such at least of the people as are rightly qualified," a STANDING COUNCIL in every city and great town, all great towns henceforth to be called Cities. Let it be understood that these councils are to be permanent seats of district and local judicature and of political deliberation; but, while setting up such councils, let the gentlemen also see to the election of "the usual number of ablest knights and burgesses, engaged for a Commonwealth, to make up the PARLIAMENT, or, as it will from henceforth be better called, THE GRAND OR GENERAL COUNCIL OF THE NATION." The local or city councils having meanwhile been set up, and it having been intimated that on great occasions their assent will be required to measures proposed by the Grand Council of the nation, Milton does not anticipate that there will be much opposition "though this GRAND COUNCIL be perpetual, as in that book [his pamphlet] I proved would be best and most conformable to best examples"; but, should there be opposition, "the known expedient may at length be used of a partial rotation." This is all that Milton has to say, with one exception:—"If these gentlemen convocated refuse these fair and noble offers of immediate liberty and happy condition, no doubt there be enough in every county who will thankfully accept them, your Excellency once more declaring publicly this to be your mind, and having a faithful veteran Army so ready and glad to assist you in the prosecution thereof."—What Monk thought of Mr. Milton's Letter, if he ever took the trouble to read it, may be easily guessed. It was at this time that he was so often drunk or nearly so at the dinners given in the City, and that Sir John Greenville, on the part of Charles, was watching for an interview with him at St. James's.

Not one of Milton's pamphlets had a larger immediate circulation or provoked a more rapid fury of criticism than his Ready and Easy Way to establish a Free Commonwealth.

From the Parliament indeed the response was only indirect; but every atom of such indirect response was a dead and contemptuous negative. Though, when Milton published the pamphlet, he was entitled to assume that the compact between Monk and the Secluded Members whom he had restored guaranteed a continuance of the Commonwealth form of Government, the entire tenor of their proceedings during the five-and-twenty days to which they confined their sittings (Feb. 2l-March 16, 1659-60) was such as to undeceive him and others on that point, and to show that, though they abstained from abolishing the Commonwealth themselves, they meant to leave the succeeding full and free Parliament they had called at perfect liberty to do so. No other construction could be put upon their votes even in ecclesiastical matters. Hardly was Milton's pamphlet out when he knew that they had voted the revival of the Westminster Assembly's Confession of Faith as the standard of doctrine in the National Church (March 2), and the revival of the Solemn League and Covenant as a document of perpetual national obligation (March 5). Then followed (March 14) their vote for mapping out all England and Wales according to the strict pattern of the Scottish Presbyterian organization. But, that there might be no mistake, their votes predetermining the composition of the coming Parliament were also in the direction of the admission of Royalists and the exclusion of those that could be called Fanatics for the Republic. The engagement to be faithful to the Commonwealth without King or House of Lords was annulled (March 13); the clauses disqualifying even the active and conspicuous Royalists of the Civil Wars were far from stringent; and the very act by which the House dissolved itself contained a proviso saving the legal and constitutional rights of the old House of Lords and pointing to the restitution of the Peerage. How significant also that scene in the House on the last day of their sittings, Friday, March 16, when Mr. Crewe moved for a vote of execration on the Regicides, and poor Thomas Scott, standing up on the floor, and reckless though the words should seal his doom, declared himself to be one of the blood-stained band and claimed the fact as his highest earthly honour! What Scott did that day in the House Milton had done even more publicly a fortnight before in the daring peroration of his pamphlet. From March 16, 1659-60, Milton and Scott, whoever else, might regard themselves as in the list for the future hangman.

In the list for the future hangman! It is a strong expression, but true historically to the very letter. Read the following from a scurrilous pamphlet, of six pages in shabby print, called The Character of the Rump, which was out in London on Saturday the 17th of March, the day after the dissolution of the Parliament:—

"An ingenious person hath observed that Scott is the Rump's man Thomas; and they might have said to him, when he was so busy with the General,

"But John Milton is their goose-quill champion; who had need of a help-meet to establish anything, for he has a ram's head and is good only at batteries,—an old heretic both in religion and manners, that by his will would shake off his governors as he doth his wives, four in a fortnight. The sunbeams of his scandalous papers against the late King's Book is [sic] the parent that begot his late New Commonwealth; and, because he, like a parasite as he is, by flattering the then tyrannical power, hath run himself into the briars, the man will be angry if the rest of the nation will not bear him company, and suffer themselves to be decoyed into the same condition. He is so much an enemy to usual practices that I believe, when he is condemned to travel to Tyburn in a cart, he will petition for the favour to be the first man that ever was driven thither in a wheelbarrow. And now, John, you must stand close and draw in your elbows [the fancy is of Milton standing on the scaffold pinioned], that Needham, the Commonwealth didapper, may have room to stand beside you ... He [Needham] was one of the spokes of Harrington's Rota, till he was turned out for cracking. As for Harrington, he's but a demi-semi in the Rump's music, and should be good at the cymbal; for he is all for wheeling instruments, and, having a good invention, may in time find out the way to make a concert of grindstones."¹

Such was the popular verdict, in March 1660, on Milton and his last pamphlet, and all his deserts and accomplishments in the world he had lived in for one-and-fifty years. More of the like may be found on search; but I will pass to one retort on his Ready and Easy Way, of somewhat higher literary quality than the last, and which retains a certain celebrity yet.

It appeared on March 30, as a small quarto of sixteen pages, with this title: "The Censure of the Rota upon Mr. Milton's Book, entituled 'The Ready and Easie Way to Establish a Free Commonwealth.'" On the title-page is the imprint, "London, Printed by Paul Giddy, Printer to the Rota, at the sign of the Windmill in Turne-againe Lane. 1660," and also a professed extract from the minutes of the Rota Club, "Die Luna 26 Martii 1660," certified by "Trundle Wheeler, Clerk to the Rota," authorizing and ordering Mr. Harrington, as Chairman of the Club, to draw up and publish a narrative of that day's debate of the Club over Mr. Milton's pamphlet, and to transmit a copy of the same to Mr. Milton. The thing, though it has been mistaken by careless people as actually a production of Harrington's, is in reality a clever burlesque by some Royalist, in which, under the guise of an imaginary debate in the Rota over Milton's pamphlet, Milton and the Rota-men are turned into ridicule together. The mock-names on the title-page (Paul Giddy, Trundle Wheeler, &c.) are part of the burlesque; and it is well kept up in the tract itself, which takes the form of a letter gravely addressed to Milton and signed with Harrington's initials, "J. H."¹

Mr. Harrington is supposed to begin by expressing his regret to Mr. Milton that his duty obliges him to make so unsatisfactory a report as to the reception of Mr. Milton's last pamphlet by the Club. "For, whereas it is our usual custom to dispute everything, how plain or obscure soever, by knocking argument against argument, and tilting at one another with our heads (as rams fight) till we are out of breath, and then refer it to our wooden oracle, the Box, and seldom anything, how slight soever, hath appeared without some person or other to defend it, I must confess I never saw bowling-stones run so unluckily against any boy, when his hand has been out, as the ballots did against you when anything was put to the question from the beginning of your book to the end." First, one gentleman had objected to the very name of the book, The Ready and Easy Way, &c., and had remarked that Mr. Milton was generally unlucky in his titles to his pamphlets, most of them having been absurd or fantastic. A second gentleman had been even more impolite. "He wondered you did not give over writing, since you have always done it to little or no purpose; for, though you have scribbled your eyes out, your works have never been printed but for the company of chandlers and tobaccomen, who are your stationers, and the only men that vend your labours. He said that he himself reprieved the whole Defence of the People of England for a groat,... though it cost you much oil and labour and the Rump £300 a year." Then a third gentleman, a member of the Long Robe, had been very severe and sarcastic on Mr. Milton's knowledge of Law; and a fourth, who had travelled much abroad, had followed with an equally severe criticism on Mr. Milton's knowledge of European history. This last speaker was beginning to be prosy, when fortunately some one came into the Club with news that Sir Arthur Hasilrig, "the Brutus of our Republic," had been nearly torn in pieces by a rabble of boys in Westminster Hall, just outside the Club, and had saved himself by taking to his heels. The laughter over this made the last gentleman forget what he was saying; which gave opportunity to a fifth gentleman to rise and discourse at some length on the sophistical and abominable character of Mr. Milton's Political Philosophy:—

"He was of opinion that you did not believe yourself, nor those reasons you give in defence of Commonwealth, but that you are swayed by something else, as either by a stork-like fate (as a modern Protector-Poet calls it, because that fowl is observed to live nowhere but in Commonwealths), or because you have unadvisedly scribbled yourself obnoxious, or else you fear such admirable eloquence as yours would be thrown away under a Monarchy.... All your politics are derived from the works of Declaimers, with which sort of writers the ancient Commonwealths had the fortune to abound ... All which you have outgone (according to your talent) in their several ways: for you have done your feeble endeavour to rob the Church, of the little which the rapine of the most sacrilegious persons hath left, in your learned work against Tithes; you have slandered the dead worse than envy itself, and thrown your dirty outrage on the memory of a murdered Prince, as if the Hangman were but your usher. These have been the attempts of your stiff formal eloquence, which you arm accordingly with anything that lies in your way, right or wrong,—not only begging but stealing questions, and taking everything for granted that will serve your turn. For you are not ashamed to rob O. Cromwell himself, and make use of his canting assurances from Heaven and answering condescensions: the most impious Mahometan doctrine that ever was vented among Christians."...

This speaker having ended with a comment on Mr. Milton's remark that Christ himself had put "the brand of Gentilism" upon Kingship, "a young gentleman made answer that your writings are best interpreted by themselves, and that be remembered, in that book wherein you fight with the King's Picture, you call Sir Philip Sidney's Princess Pamela, who was born and bred of Christian parents in England, 'a heathen woman,' and therefore he thought that by Heathenish you meant English, and that in calling Kingship heathenish you inferred it was the only proper and natural government of the English nation, as it hath been proved in all ages. To which another objected that such a sense was quite contrary to your purpose; to which he immediately replied that it was no new thing with you to write that which is as well against as for your purpose. After much debate, they agreed to put it to the ballot; and the young gentleman carried it without contradiction." Then another critic fell foul of Mr. Milton's Divinity and Church notions,—one of which, he said, was "that the Church of Christ ought to have no head upon earth, but the monster of many heads, the multitude," and another "that any man may turn away his wife, and take another as oft as he pleases": to which last accusation is added the comment, "As you have most learnedly proved upon the fiddle [Tetrachordon], and practised in your life and conversation; for which you have achieved the honour to be styled the founder of a sect." The audience by this time becoming weary, "a worthy knight of this Assembly stood up and said that, if we meant to examine all the particular fallacies and flaws in your writing, we should never have done; he would therefore, with leave, deliver his judgment upon the whole: which in brief was this:—That it is all windy foppery from the beginning to the end, written, to the elevation of that rabble and meant to cheat the ignorant; that you fight always with the flat of your hand like a rhetorician, and never contract the logical fist; that you trade altogether in universals, the region of deceits and fallacy, but never come so near particulars as to let us know which among divers things of the same kind you would be at ... Besides this, as all your politics reach but the outside and circumstances of things, and never touch at realities, so you are very solicitous about words, as if they were charms, or had more in them than what they signify; for no conjuror's devil is more concerned in a spell than you are in a mere word." This last speaker having moved that Mr. Harrington himself, in conclusion, should deliver his opinion on Mr. Milton's book, the result was as follows:—

"I knew not (though unwilling) how to avoid it; and therefore I told them, as briefly as I could, that that which I disliked most in your treatise was that there is not one word of The Balance of Property, nor the Agrarian, nor Rotation, in it from the beginning to the end: without which (together with a Lord Archon) I thought I had sufficiently demonstrated, not only in my writings but public exercises in that coffee-house, that there is no possible foundation of a free Commonwealth. To the first and second of these,—that is, the Balance and the Agrarian,—you made no objection; and therefore I should not need to make any answer. But for the third,—I mean Rotation,—which you implicitly reject in your design to perpetuate the present members, I shall only add this to what I have already said and written on that subject: That a Commonwealth is like a great top, that must be kept up by being whipt round, and held in perpetual circulation; for, if you discontinue the rotation, and suffer the Senate to settle and stand still, down it falls immediately. And, if you had studied this point as carefully as I have done, you could not but know there is no such way under Heaven of disposing the vicissitudes of command and obedience, and of distributing equal right and liberty among all men, as this of Wheeling."...¹

How notoriously Milton had flashed forth as the chief militant Republican of the crisis, how universally he had drawn upon himself in that character the eyes of the Royalists and become the target for their bitterest shafts, may appear from yet another probing among the contemporary London pamphlets.——Perhaps the last formal and collective appeal on behalf of the Republic to Monk and the others in power was a small tract which appeared in the end of March, with this title:—Plain English to his Excellencie the Lord-General Monk and the Officers of his Army: or a Word in Season, not onely to them, but to all impartial Englishmen. To which is added a Declaration of the Parliament in the year 1647, setting forth the grounds and reasons why they resolved to make no further Address or Application to the King. Printed at London in the year 1660. The first part of the tract consists of eight pages addressed to Monk, in the form of a letter dated "March 22," by some persons who do not give their names, but sign themselves "your Excellency's most faithful friends and servants in the common cause"; after which, in smaller type, comes a reprint of the famous reasons of the Long Parliament for their total rupture with Charles I. in January 1647-8 (Vol. III. pp. 584-585). The letter begins thus:—"My Lord and Gentlemen,—It is written The prudent shall keep silence in the evil time; and 'tis like we also might hold our peace, but that we fear a knife is at the very throat not only of our and your liberties, but of our persons also. In this condition we hope it will be no offence if we cry out to you for help,—you that, through God's goodness, have helped us so often, and strenuously maintained the same cause with us against the return of that family which pretends to the Government of these nations ... We cannot yet be persuaded, though our fears and jealousies are strong and the grounds of them many, that you can so lull asleep your consciences, or forget the public interests and your own, as to be returning back with the multitude to Egypt, or that you should with them be hankering after the leeks and onions of our old bondage." There follows an earnest invective against the Stuarts; but the tone of respectfulness to Monk is kept up studiously throughout. There is no sign of Milton in the language, and one guesses on the whole that the tract was a concoction of a few of the City Republicans, with Barebone among them, meeting privately perhaps in the back-parlour of the Republican bookseller who ventured the publication anonymously; but it is possible that Milton may have been consulted, or at least have been cognisant of the affair. The reprinting of the reasons of the Long Parliament for their No-Address Resolutions of January 1647-8 was an excellent idea, inasmuch as it reminded people of that disgust with Charles I., that impossibility of dealing with him even in his captive condition, which had driven the Parliamentarians to the theory of a Republic a year before the Republic had been actually founded; and this feature of the tract may have seemed good to Milton.——The Tract must have annoyed Monk and the other authorities, for it was immediately suppressed. This we learn from a reply to it, which appeared on the 3rd of April, with the title Treason Arraigned, in answer to Plain English, being a Trayterous and Phanatique Pamphlet which was condemned by the Counsel of State, suppressed by Authority, and the Printer declared against by Proclamation ... London, Printed in the year 1660. The reply takes the very curious form of a reproduction of the condemned tract almost textually, paragraph by paragraph, with a running comment of vituperation upon the author or authors. The following sentences, culled from the vituperative comment, will show that the writer suspected Milton as the person chiefly responsible, and will sufficiently represent the entire performance:—

"Some two days since came to my view a bold sharp pamphlet, called Plain English, directed to the General and his Officers.... It is a piece drawn by no fool, and it deserves a serious answer. By the design, the subject, malice, and the style, I should suspect it for a blot of the same pen that wrote Eikonoklastes. It runs foul, tends to tumult; and, not content barely to applaud the murder of the King, the execrable author of it vomits upon his ashes with a pedantic and envenomed scorn, pursuing still his sacred memory. Betwixt him [Milton] and his brother Rabshakeh [Needham?] I think a man may venture to divide the glory of it. It relishes the mixture of their united faculties and wickedness.... Say, Milton, Needham, either or both of you, or whosoever else, say where this worthy person [Monk] ever mixed with you.... Come, hang yourself; beg right; here's your true method of begging:—'O, for Tom Scott's sake, for Hasilrig's sake, for Robinson, Holland, Mildmay, Mounson, Corbet, Atkins, Vane, Livesey, Skippon, Milton, Tichbourne, Ireton, Gordon, Lechmere, Blagrave, Barebone, Needham's sake, and, to conclude, for all the rest of our unpenitent brethren's sake, help a company of poor rebellious devils¹.'"

We are now, it is to be seen, in the mid-stream of those final forty days which intervened between the self-dissolution of the last fag-end of the Long Parliament and the meeting of the Full and Free Parliament called for the conclusive settlement (March 16, 1659-60-April 25, 1660). Monk was Dictator; the Council of State, with Annesley for President, was the body in charge, along with Monk, keeping the peace; but all eyes were directed towards the coming Parliament, the elections for which were going on. It was precisely in the beginning of April that the popular current towards a restoration of Charles Stuart and nothing else had acquired full force and become a roaring and foaming torrent. They were shouting for him, singing for him, treating his restoration as already certain, though the precise manner and date of it must be left to the Parliament. Only the chiefs, Monk, Annesley, Montague, and the other Councillors, kept up an appearance as if the issue must not be anticipated till the Parliament should have actually met. With letters to and from Charles in their pockets, and each knowing or guessing that the others had such letters, they were trying to look as unpledged and as merely cogitative as they could. It was for the multitude to roar and shout for Charles, and they had now full permission. It was for the chiefs to be silent themselves, only managing and manipulating, and watchful especially against any outbreak of Republican fanaticism even yet that might interfere with the plain course of things and baulk or delay the popular expectation. Wherever they could perceive a likelihood of disturbance, by act or by speech, there they were bound to curb or suppress.

At least in one instance they found it necessary to curb a too hasty and impetuous Royalist. This was Dr. Matthew Griffith, a clergyman over sixty years of age, once a protegé of the poet Donne. Sequestered in the early days of the Long Parliament from his rectory of St. Mary Magdalen, London, he had taken refuge with the King through the civil wars, and had been made D.D. at Oxford, and one of the King's chaplains. Afterwards, returning to London, he had lived there through the Commonwealth and the Protectorate, one of those that continued the use of the liturgy and other Anglican church-forms by stealth to small gatherings of cavaliers, and that found themselves often in trouble on that account. He had suffered, it is said, four imprisonments. The near prospect of the return of Charles II. at last had naturally excited the old gentleman; and, chancing to preach in the Mercers' Chapel on Sunday the 25th of March, 1660, he had chosen for his text Prov. XXIV. 21, which he translated thus: "My son, fear God and the King, and meddle not with them that be seditious or desirous of change." On this text he had preached a very Royalist sermon. There would have been nothing peculiar in that, as many clergymen were doing the like. But, not content with having preached the sermon, Dr. Griffith resolved to publish it, in an ostentatious manner and with certain accompaniments. "The Fear of God and the King. Press'd in a Sermon preach'd at Mercers Chappell on the 25th of March, 1660. Together with a brief Historical Account of the Causes of our unhappy distractions and the onely way to heal them. By Matthew Griffith, D.D., and Chaplain to the late King. London, Printed for Tho. Johnson at the Golden Key in St. Pauls Churchyard, 1660": such was the name of a duodecimo out in London in the first days of April.¹ The volume consists of three parts,—first, a dedicatory epistle "To His Excellency George Monck, Captain-General of all the Land Forces of England, Scotland, and Ireland, and one of the Generals of all the Naval Forces"; then the sermon itself in fifty-eight pages; and then an addition, in the shape of a directly political pamphlet, headed "The Samaritan Revived." The gem is the dedication to Monk. The substance of that is as follows:—

"My Lord,—If you will be pleased to allow me to be a physician in the same sense that all moral divines do acknowledge the body-politic (consisting of Church and State) to be a patient, then I will now give your Highness a just account both how far and how faithfully I have practised upon it by virtue of my profession. When I first observed things to be somewhat out of order, by reason of a high distemper, which then appeared by some infallible indications, I thought it my duty to prescribe an wholesome electuary (out of the 122nd Psalm at the 6th verse, in a sermon which I was called to preach in the Cathedral Church of Saint Paul's, anno 1642, and soon after published by command under this title: A Pathetical Persuasion to pray for the Public Peace), to be duly and devoutly taken every morning next our hearts: hoping that, by God's blessing on the means, I should have prevented that distemper from growing into a formed disease. Yet, finding that my preventing physic did not work so kindly and take so good an effect as I earnestly desired, but rather that this my so tenderly beloved patient grew worse and worse, as not only being in process of time fallen into a fever and that pestilential, but also as having received divers dangerous wounds, which, rankling and festering inwardly, brought it into a spiritual atrophy and deep consumption, and the parts ill-affected (for want of Christian care and skill in such mountebanks as were trusted with the cure, while myself and most of the ancient orthodox clergy were sequestered and silent) began to gangrene: and, when some of us became sensible thereof, we took the confidence (being partly emboldened by the connivance of the higher powers that then were) to fall to the exercise of our ministerial functions again in such poor parishes as would admit us: Then I saw it was high time not only to prescribe strong purgative medicines in the pulpit (contempered of the myrrh of mortification, the aloes of confession and contrition, the rhubarb of restitution and satisfaction, with divers other safe roots, seeds, and flowers, fit and necessary to help to carry away by degrees the incredible confluence of ill humours and all such malignant matter as offended), but also to put pen to paper and appear in print (as in this imperfect and impolished piece, which as guilty of an high presumption here in all humility begs your Lordship's pardon) wherein my chief scope is to personate the Good Samaritan, that, as he cured the wounded traveller by searching his wounds with wine and suppling them with oil, so I have here both described the rise and progress of our national malady, and also prescribed the only remedy, that I might be in some kind instrumental, under God and your Highness, in the healing of the same ... My Lord, as it must needs grieve you to see these three distressed kingdoms lie like a body without a head, so it may also cheer you to consider that the Comforter hath empowered you (and in this nick of time you only) to make these dead and dry bones live. You may by this one act ennoble and eternize yourself more in the hearts and chronicles of these three kingdoms than by all your former victories and the long line of your extraction from the Plantagenets your ancestors ... It is a greater honour to make a king than to be one. Your proper name minds you of being St. George for England; you surname prompts you to stand for order: then let not panic fears, punctilios of human policy, or state formalities, beguile you (whom we look upon as Jethro's magistrate, who was a man of courage, fearing God, dealing truly, and hating covetousness) of that immarescible crown of glory due to you, whom we hope that God hath designed to be the repairer of the breach and the temporal redeemer of your native country."

Evidently Dr. Griffith was a silly person, more likely to make a cause ridiculous than to help it. There were things in his sermon and its accompaniments, however, that might harm the King's cause otherwise than by the bad literary taste of the defence. There was a tone of that revengeful spirit which it was the policy of all the more prudent Royalists to disown. Hence the publication annoyed even in that quarter. The unpardonable offence, however, was the address to Monk. He was studying to be as secret as the grave, had signified his leanings to the King by not a single public word, and indeed had hardly ceased to swear he stood for the Commonwealth. And here was an impudent Doctor of Divinity spoiling all by openly assuming and announcing the very thing to be concealed. Monk was excessively irritated; the Council of State sympathized with him; and so, "to please and blind the fanatical party" for the moment, Dr. Griffith was sent to Newgate.¹

It was more natural, however, for the General and the Council to take similar precautions against too violent expressions of anti-Royalism, too vehement efforts to stir up the Republican embers. Of their vigilance in this respect we have just seen an instance in their instant suppression of the Republican appeal to Monk and his Officers entitled Plain English, and their procedure by proclamation against the anonymous publisher of that tract. If I am not mistaken, he was Livewell Chapman, of the Crown in Pope's Head Alley, the publisher of Milton's Considerations touching the likeliest means to remove Hirelings out of the Church, and also of his more recent Ready and Easy Way to establish a Free Commonwealth. There was, at all events, a printed proclamation of the Council of State against this person, dated "Wednesday, 28 March, 1660," and signed "William Jessop, Clerk of the Council." It began in these terms:—"Whereas the Council of State is informed that Livewell Chapman, of London, Stationer, having from a wicked design to engage the nation in blood and confusion caused several seditious and treasonable books to be printed and published, doth, now hide and obscure himself, for avoiding the hand of justice"; and it ended with an order that Chapman should surrender himself within four days, and that none should harbour or conceal him, but all, and especially officers, try to arrest him. If he was the publisher of Plain English, there would be additional reason for suspecting that Milton had some cognisance of that anonymous appeal to Monk; but there can be no doubt that among the "seditious and treasonable books" the publication of which constituted Chapman's offence was Milton's own Ready and Easy Way. The authorities had not yet struck at Milton himself, but they were coming very near him. They had ordered the arrest of his publisher.

Within a few days after the order for the arrest of Milton's publisher, Livewell Chapman, the authorities signified their displeasure, though in a less harsh manner, with another Republican associate of Milton, his old friend Marchamont Needham.—Not without difficulty had this Oliverian journalist, the subsidized editor since 1655 of the bi-weekly official newspaper of the Protectorate (calling itself The Public Intelligencer on Mondays and Mercurius Politicus on Thursdays), been retained in the service of the Good Old Cause. His Oliverianism having been excessive, to the extent of defending not only Oliver's Established Church, but also all else in his policy that grated most on the pure Republicans, he had been discharged from his editorship on the 13th of May, 1659, by order of the Restored Rump, before it had been six days in power, the place going then to John Canne. But Needham's versatility was matchless, and on the 15th of August the Rump had thought it best to reappoint him to the editorship.¹ Since then, having already in succession been Parliamentarian, Royalist, Commonwealth's man or Rumper, and all but anti-Republican Protectoratist, the world had known him in his fifth phase of Rumper or pure Commonwealth's man again. Not only in his journals, but also in independent pamphlets, he had advocated the Good Old Cause. One such pamphlet, published with his name in August 1659, under the title of Interest will not lie,² had been in reply to some Royalist who had propounded "a way how to satisfy all parties and provide for the public good by calling in the son of the late King": against whom Needham's contention was "that it is really the interest of every party (except only the Papist) to keep him out." One can understand now why, in the Royalist squib lately quoted, Needham was named as "the Commonwealth didapper"³ along with Milton as "their goose-quill champion," and why the public were there promised the pleasure of soon seeing the two at Tyburn together.—But the final performance of Needham's, it is believed, was a tract called News from Brussels, in a Letter from a near attendant on his Majesty's person to a Person of Honour here. It purports to be dated at Brussels, March 10, 1659-60, English style, and was out in London on March 23. The publication is said to have been managed secretly by Mr. Praise-God Barebone; and, though the tract was anonymous, it was attributed at once to Needham. Being "fall of rascalities against Charles II. and his Court," as Wood says, and professing to give private information as to the terrible severities which they were meditating when they should be restored to England, the pamphlet was much resented by the Royalists; and John Evelyn roused himself from a sickbed to pen an instant and emphatic contradiction, called The late News or Message from Brussels unmasked. Needham's connexion, or supposed connexion, with so violent an anti-Royalist tract, and possibly also with the Republican manifesto called Plain English, which appeared in the same week, could not be overlooked; and, accordingly, in Whitlocke, under date April 9, 1660, we find this note: "The Council discharged Needham from writing the Weekly Intelligence and ordered Dury and Muddiman to do it." The Dury here mentioned was not our John Durie of European celebrity, but an insignificant Giles Dury. His colleague Muddiman, the real successor of Needham in the editorship, was Henry Muddiman, an acquaintance of Pepys, who certifies that he was "a good scholar and an arch rogue." He had been connected with the London press for some time (for smaller news-sheets had been springing up again beside the authorized Mercurius and Intelligencer), and had been writing for the Rumpers. He had just been, owning to Pepys, however, that he "did it only to get money," and had no liking for them or their politics.[4

If they turned Needham out of his editorship, they could hardly do less than turn Milton out of his Latin Secretaryship. About this time, accordingly, he did cease to hold the office which he had held for eleven years. Phillips's words are that he was "sequestered from his office of Latin Secretary and the salary thereunto belonging"; but, unfortunately, though he gives us to understand that this was shortly before the Restoration, he leaves the exact date uncertain.

Though the last of Milton's state-letters now preserved and known as his are the two, dated May 15, 1659, written for the Rump immediately after the subversion of Richard's Protectorate, we have seen him holding his office in sinecure, and drawing his salary of £200 a year, to as late at least as the beginning of the Wallingford-House Interruption in October 1659; and there is no reason for thinking that the Council or Committee of Safety of the Wallingford-House Government, his dissent from their usurpation notwithstanding, thought it necessary to dismiss him. Far less likely is it that the Republican Rumpers, when restored the second time in December 1659, would have parted with a man so thoroughly Republican and so respectful to themselves, even while they dared not adopt his Church-disestablishment suggestions. We may fairly assume, then, that Milton remained Marvell's nominal colleague till Monk's final termination of the tenure of the Rump by re-admitting the secluded members, i.e. till Feb. 21, 1659-60. Had he been then at once dismissed, it would have been no wonder. How could he, the Independent of Independents, the denouncer of every form of State-Church, the enemy and satirist of the Presbyterians, and moreover the author of the Divorce heresy and the founder of a sect of Divorcers, be retained in the service of a re-Presbyterianized Government, founding itself on the Westminster Confession and the Solemn League and Covenant? There is no proof, however, of any such instant dismissal of Milton by the new powers, but rather a shade of proof to the contrary in the phraseology of the preface to his Ready and Easy Way. The probability, therefore, is that it was after March 3, the date of the publication of that pamphlet, that Milton was sequestered, and that it was the pamphlet itself, added to the sum of his previous obnoxiousness to the new powers, that led to the sequestration. Yet, as the new powers were proceeding warily, and keeping up as long as they could the pretence of leaving the Commonwealth an open question, it is quite possible that they were in no haste to discharge Milton, All in all, the most probable time of his dismissal is some time after the dissolution of the Parliament of the Secluded Members on the 16th of March, 1659-60, when Monk and the Council of State were left in the management. As Milton had been originally appointed by the Council of State and not by Parliament, it was in the Council's pleasure to continue him or dismiss him. They were in a severe mood, virtually anti-Republican already, though not yet avowedly so, between March 28, when they ordered Livewell Chapman's arrest, and April 9, when they dismissed Needham; and that or thereabouts may be the date of Milton's discharge.¹

In office or out of office, it was the same to Milton. He had determined that he would not be suppressed, that he would not be silent, till they should tie his hands, or gag his mouth. There is no grander exhibition of dying resistance, of solitary and useless fighting for a lost cause, than in his conduct through April 1680. Alone he then stood, we may say, the last of the visible Republicans. Hasilrig, Scott, Ludlow, Neville, and Vane, had collapsed or were out of sight, the last under ban already by his former brothers of the Commonwealth; Needham was extinguished; most of the Cromwellians had gone over to the enemy, or were hastening to surrender. Blind Milton alone remained, the Samson Agonistes, On him, in the absence of others, the eyes of the Philistine mob, the worshippers of Dagon, had been turned from time to time of late as the Hebrew that could make them most efficient sport; and now it was as if they had all met, by common consent, to be amused by this single Hebrew's last exertions, and had sent to bring him on the stage. They laughed, they shouted, they shrieked, the gathered Philistine thousands:

The first of the feats of strength of Milton, thus alone on the stage, and knowing himself to be confronted and surrounded by a jeering multitude, was a somewhat puny and unnecessary one. It was an onslaught on Dr. Matthew Griffith for his Royalist sermon. He wanted some object of attack, and the very notoriety given to Dr. Griffith's performance by the rebuke of the Council of State recommended it for the purpose despite its intrinsic wretchedness. Accordingly, having had Dr. Griffith's Sermon and its accompaniments read over to him, he dictated what appeared some time in April with this title: "Brief Notes upon a late Sermon, titled 'The Fear of God and the King'; Preach'd, and since published, by Matthew Griffith, D.D., and Chaplain to the late King. Wherin many notorious wrestings of Scripture, and other falsities are observed."¹

The tract, which is very short, opens thus:—

"I affirmed, in the Preface of a late Discourse, entitled The Ready Way to establish a Free Commonwealth, and the Dangers of readmitting Kingship in this Nation, that 'the humour of returning to our old bondage was instilled of late by some deceivers': and, to make good that what I then affirmed was not without just ground, one of those deceivers I present here to the people, and, if I prove him not such, refuse not to be so accounted in his stead."

The greater part of the pamphlet consists of an examination of the sermon itself, with minute remarks on its wrestings or misinterpretations of Scripture texts, and on the poverty of the preacher's theology and scholarship generally. There is no actual disguise of the fact that Milton has the lowest opinion of the intellectual calibre of his antagonist, whom he once names "a pulpit-mountebank," and of whom he once says that "the rest of his preachment is mere groundless chat," Yet, on the other hand, he would evidently have Dr. Griffith taken as a fair enough specimen of the average Church-of-England clergyman. "O people of an implicit faith, no better than Romish if these be your prime teachers!" he once exclaims, as if Dr. Griffith were a man of some distinction.

The only portions of the Notes of interest now are those that bear on the historical situation at the moment. Thus, in the notice of the Dedicatory Epistle to Monk prefixed to Dr. Griffith's sermon, there is an evident struggle on Milton's part to speak as if one might still have faith in the General. It is possible that the censure of Dr. Griffith by the Council of State, intended as it was "to please and blind the fanatical party," may have had some such temporary effect on Milton. At all events, he refers to Monk as one "who hath so eminently borne his part in the whole action," and he characterizes one portion of the Dedicatory Epistle, where Monk is prayed "to carry on what he had so happily begun," as nothing less than "an impudent calumny and affront to his Excellence." It charges him, says Milton, "most audaciously and falsely, with the renouncing of his own public promises and declarations both to the Parliament and the Army; and we trust his actions ere long will deter such insinuating slanderers from thus approaching him for the future." Throughout the Notes, however, one sees that even this small lingering of confidence in Monk is forced, and that Milton is too sadly convinced of the probable predetermination of all now in power to fulfil the general expectation and bring in Charles. In the following passage there is a half-veiled intimation that, rather than see that ignominious conclusion, Milton would reconcile himself to Monk's own assumption of the Crown:—

"Free Commonwealths have been ever counted fittest and properest for civil, virtuous, and industrious nations, abounding with prudent men worthy to govern; Monarchy fittest to curb degenerate, corrupt, idle, proud, luxurious people. If we desire to be of the former, nothing better for us, nothing nobler, than a Free Commonwealth; if we will needs condemn ourselves to be of the latter, despairing of our own virtue, industry, and the number of our able men, we may then, conscious of our own unworthiness to be governed better, sadly betake us to our befitting thraldom: yet, choosing out of our own number one who hath best aided the people and best merited against tyranny, the space of a reign or two we may chance to live happily enough, or tolerably. But that a victorious people should give up themselves again to the vanquished was never yet heard of, seems rather void of all reason and good policy, and will in all probability subject the subduers to the subdued,—will expose to revenge, to beggary, to ruin and perpetual bondage, the victors, under the vanquished: than which what can be more unworthy?"

Of far more moment than the Brief Notes on Dr. Griffith's Sermon was a second and enlarged edition of the Ready and Easy Way to establish a Free Commonwealth.

Though it is announced distinctly and emphatically in the opening paragraph that this edition is a "revised and enlarged" one, not till after a careful comparison with the former edition is it seen how much the announcement implies. There are large additions; there are omissions; there are changes of phraseology in every page. The new pamphlet, were it nothing else, would be an interesting study of Milton's art in authorcraft, of the expertness he had acquired in recasting a composition of his, ingeniously dove-tailing passages into it without spoiling the connexion, and ejecting phrases that had ceased to be relevant or vital, all under the difficulties of his blindness, when his ear listening to some mouth beside him and his own mouth interrupting and replying were his sole instruments. But there is much more than this. The later edition is Milton about a month farther down the torrent than the first, a month nearer the falls; and the additions, omissions, and alterations, convey what had passed in his mind through that month. The second edition of the Ready and Easy Way to establish a Free Commonwealth is to be taken, in short, for Milton's Biography at least, as an important new publication. Only the essential additions and omissions can be here noticed.¹

Among the additions the most prominent is this motto (an extension of Juvenal I. 15, 16) prefixed to the whole:—

which may be translated:—

Had this been prefixed to the first edition, the inevitable conclusion would have been that Sulla stood for Oliver Cromwell, and that Milton meant that, having taken the liberty in his Defensio Secunda of tendering wholesome advices even to the great Protector in the height of his power, it might be allowed to him now to advise the general body of his countrymen. Much would have depended then on Milton's estimate of the character of the real or Roman Sulla. That seems to have been the ordinary and traditional one, for in one of the smaller insertions in the text of the present edition he speaks of the Roman People as having been brought, by their own infatuation, "under the tyranny of Sulla." Now, though we have seen that Milton had modified his opinion of the worth of Cromwell's Government all in all, we should have been shocked by an epithet of posthumous opprobrium applied to the man he had so panegyrized while living. Fortunately, we are spared the shock. Monk, not Cromwell, is the military dictator that Milton has in view in the metonymy Sulla. He is thinking of his Letter to Monk only the other day, containing that specific suggestion of a PERPETUAL NATIONAL COUNCIL in the centre and CITY COUNCILS in all the counties which he developes more at large in his pamphlet. Perhaps he is thinking also of the more recent remonstrance, called Plain English, addressed by some London Republicans, of whom he may have been one, to Monk and his Officers. He has now done with Monk; he knows that the suggestions have taken no effect in that quarter, perhaps have been rebuffed; he will therefore dedicate them afresh to the people at large, for whom they were first written. The translation, accordingly, may run definitely thus:—

In one or two of the added passages, or modifications of phraseology, we note reference to the course of events since the publication of the former edition. Compare, for example, the following portion of the prefatory paragraph with the corresponding portion of the same paragraph as it first stood (p. 645):—

... "I thought best not to suppress what I had written, hoping that it may now be of much more use and concernment to be freely published in the midst of our elections to a Free Parliament, or their sitting to consider freely of the Government; whom it behoves to have all things represented to them that may direct their judgment therein: and I never read of any state, scarce of any tyrant, grown so incurable as to refuse counsel from any in a time of public deliberation, much less to be offended. If their absolute determination be to enthral us, before so long a Lent of servitude they may permit us a little Shroving-time first, wherein to speak freely and take our leaves of Liberty, And, because in the former edition, through haste, many faults escaped, and many books were suddenly dispersed ere the note to mend them could be sent, I took the opportunity from this occasion to revise and somewhat to enlarge the whole discourse, especially that part which argues for a Perpetual Senate. The treatise, thus revised and enlarged, is as follows."

Again, the renewal of the Solemn League and Covenant by the late Parliament of the Secluded Members furnishes Milton with a fresh text. He does not, as might have been expected, and as he certainly would have done on another occasion, upbraid the Parliament with the fact, or denounce the return to Presbyterian strictness of which it was a signal: on the contrary, he presses the fact into his service as a new argument against the recall of Charles. The first of the following sentences had appeared in the former edition; but the rest is suggested by the revival of the Covenant in the interim:—

"What Liberty of Conscience can we then expect of others [even the good and great Queen Elizabeth, he has just said, had thought persecution necessary to preserve royal authority], far worse principled from, the cradle, trained up and governed by Popish and Spanish counsels, and on such depending hitherto for subsistence? Especially, what can this last Parliament expect, who, having revived lately and published the Covenant, hare re-engaged themselves never to readmit Episcopacy? Which no son of Charles returning but will most certainly bring back with him, if he regard the last and strictest charge of his father, to persevere in not the Doctrine only, but Government, of the Church of England, [and] not to neglect the speedy and effectual suppressing of Errors and Schisms,—among which he accounted Presbytery one of the chief. Or, if, notwithstanding that charge of his father, he submit to the Covenant, how will he keep faith to us with disobedience to him, or regard that faith given which must be founded on the breach of that last and solemnest paternal charge, and the reluctance, I may say the antipathy, which is in all kings against Presbyterian and Independent Discipline?"

Perhaps the most striking instance of omission in the new edition of matter that had appeared in the first is in the paragraph on the subject of Spiritual Liberty to which reference has been made at p. 653. He retains in that paragraph nearly all that related to Liberty of Conscience generally, but he carefully removes the two or three sentences in which he had intimated his individual opinion that there could be no perfect Liberty of Conscience without abolition of Church Establishments and dissolution of every form of connexion between Church and State. There was practical sagacity in this omission at the moment at which he was re-issuing his pamphlet. It was no time then to be obtruding upon the public, or upon the Presbyterians that were flocking in to the new Parliament, his peculiar Disestablishment notion, however precious it might be to himself. His real business was to stir up all, by any means, to the defence even yet of the Republican form of Government; in such an argument, addressed mainly to Presbyterians and other zealots for a State Church, the question of Disestablishment was rather to be avoided; nay, for himself, that question had faded into insignificance for the time in comparison with the vaster question whether the Republic should be preserved or the Stuarts brought back, and most willingly would he have been, assured of the preservation of the Republic even though a State Church should continue to be part and parcel of it, and the special battle of Disestablishment should have to be postponed. To keep out the Stuarts, to rouse dread and disgust even yet at the idea that the Stuarts should return, was the single all-including possibility, or impossibility, for which he was now striving. To this end it is that again and again in the course of the pamphlet he inserts new passages heightening the contrast between the glories and advantages of free Republican Government and the miseries and degradation of subjection to a Monarchy. Near the beginning there is an enlargement of this kind, to the extent of three pages, in which he reviews, in greater detail than before, the steps that had led to the establishment of the English Commonwealth; and appeals to his countrymen whether their experience of Commonwealth government had not been on the whole satisfactory. Had not the very speeches and writings of that period, he had asked in his first edition, "testified a spirit in this nation no less noble and well-fitted to the liberty of a Commonwealth than in the ancient Greeks or Romans"? In returning to that topic now, he cannot refrain from breaking out once more, though it should be the last time, in his characteristic vein of self-appreciation. "Nor was the heroic cause," he adds, "unsuccessfully defended to all Christendom against the tongue of a famous and thought invincible adversary, nor the constancy and fortitude that so nobly vindicated our liberty, our victory at once against two the most prevailing usurpers over mankind, Superstition and Tyranny, unpraised or uncelebrated in a written monument likely to outlive detraction, as it hath hitherto convinced or silenced not a few detractors, especially in parts abroad." Readers who may think that we are already too familiar with this strain may be reminded that Milton was here taking account of the contemptuous notices of his Defences of the Commonwealth in some of the recent Royalist pamphlets, and also that, as he dictated, the thought must have been passing in his mind that very probably his days were numbered, and those Defences of the Commonwealth would have to remain, after all, his last important bequest to the world.

There is proof that Milton had read the burlesque Censure of the Rota on the first edition. Not only are two or three sentences omitted or modified in consequence of remarks there made; but, in the considerable enlargements he thinks necessary for the support of his main notion of PERPETUITY OF THIS NATIONAL GREAT COUNCIL, he takes care to extend also his former references to Harrington's principle of Rotation and other doctrines. Of course, he was well aware that it was not Harrington himself that had complained of the slightness of the former references, but only some Royalist wit caricaturing Harrington together with himself. While disagreeing with Harrington, he shows his respect for him. The following are specimens of these particular enlargements:—

The Rotation Principle:—"But, if the ambition of such as think themselves injured that they also partake not of the Government, and are impatient till they be chosen, cannot brook the perpetuity of others chosen before them, or if it be feared that long continuance of power may corrupt sincerest men, the known expedient is, and by some lately propounded, that annually (or, if the space be longer, so much perhaps the better) the third part of Senators may go out, according to the precedence of their election, and the like number be chosen in their places, to prevent the settling of too absolute a power if it should be perpetual: and this they call Partial Rotation. But I could wish that this wheel or partial wheel in State, if it be possible, might be avoided, as having too much, affinity with the Wheel of Fortune. For it appears not how this can be done without danger and mischance of putting out a great number of the best and ablest; in whose stead new elections may bring in as many raw, unexperienced, and otherwise affected, to the weakening and much altering for the worse of public transactions. Neither do I think a Perpetual Senate, especially chosen and entrusted by the people, much in this land to be feared, where the well-affected, either in a Standing Army or in a Settled Militia, have their arms in their own hands. Safest therefore to me it seems, and of least hazard or interruption to affairs, that none of the Grand Council be moved, unless by death or just conviction of some crime; for what can be expected firm or stedfast from a floating foundation? However, I forejudge not any probable expedient, any temperament that can be found in things of this nature, so disputable on either side."

Contrast of Harrington's Model with Milton's, and a Suggestion for the mode of Elections:—"And this annual Rotation of a Senate to consist of 300, as is lately propounded, requires also another Popular Assembly upward of 1000, with an answerable Rotation. Which, besides that it will be liable to all those inconveniencies found in the foresaid remedies, cannot but be troublesome and chargeable, both in their motion and their session, to the whole land,—unwieldy with their own bulk: unable in so great a number to mature their consultations as they ought, if any be allotted to them, and that they meet not from so many parts remote to sit a whole year leaguer in one place, only now and then to hold up a forest of fingers, or to convey each man his bean or ballot into the box, without reason shown or common deliberation; incontinent of secrets, if any be imparted to them; emulous and always jarring with the other Senate. The much better way doubtless will be, in this wavering condition of our affairs, to defer the changing or circumscribing of our Senate, more than may be done with ease, till the Commonwealth be thoroughly settled in peace and safety and they themselves give us the occasion.... Another way will be to well qualify and refine Elections: not committing all to the noise and shouting of a rude multitude, but permitting only those of them who are rightly qualified to nominate as many as they will; and out of that number others of a better breeding to choose a less number more judiciously; till, after a third or fourth sifting and refining of exactest choice, they only be left chosen who are the due number, and seem by most voices the worthiest.... But, to prevent all mistrust, the People then will have their several Ordinary Assemblies (which will henceforth quite annihilate the odious power and name of Committees) in the chief towns of every County,—without the trouble, charge, or time lost, of summoning and assembling from so far, in so great a number, and so long residing from their own houses, or removing of their families,—to do as much at home in their several shires, entire or subdivided, towards the securing of their liberty, as a numerous Assembly of them all formed and convened on purpose with the wariest rotation."

Glance at some of Harrington's other notions:—"The way propounded [Milton's] is plain, easy, and open before us: without intricacies, without the introducement of new or obsolete forms or terms, or exotic models,—ideas that would effect nothing, but with a number of new injunctions to manacle the native liberty of mankind; turning all virtue into prescription, servitude, and necessity, to the great impairing and frustrating of Christian Liberty."

As if the very closeness of the vision of returning Royalty had rendered Milton's defiance of it more desperate and reckless, he inserts, wherever he can, some new expression of his contempt for Charles and all his family, and of his prophetic horror of the state of society they will bring in. Thus:—

"There will be a Queen of no less charge, in most likelihood outlandish and a Papist, besides a Queen-Mother, such already, together with both their Courts and numerous Train: then a Royal issue, and ere long severally their sumptuous Courts, to the multiplying of a servile crew, not of servants only, but of nobility and gentry, bred up then to the hopes not of public, but of court offices, to be Stewards, Chamberlains, Ushers, Grooms."

But the most terrific new passage in prediction of the Restoration and its revenges is the following: in which the reader will observe also the recognition, as in one spurn of boundless scorn, of the Royalist scurrilities against himself:—

"Admit that Monarchy of itself may be convenient to some nations; yet to us who have thrown it out, received back again, it cannot but prove pernicious. For Kings to come, never forgetting their former ejection, will be sure to fortify and arm themselves sufficiently for the future against all such attempts hereafter from the People; who shall be then so narrowly watched and kept so low that, though they would never so fain, and at the same rate of their blood and treasure, they never shall be able to regain what they now have purchased and may enjoy, or to free themselves from any yoke imposed upon them. Nor will they dare to go about it,—utterly disheartened for the future, if these their highest attempts prove unsuccessful: which will be the triumph of all Tyrants hereafter over any People that shall resist oppression; and their song will then be to others How sped the Rebellious English?, to our posterity How sped the Rebels your fathers?.... Yet neither shall we obtain or buy at an easy rate this new gilded yoke which thus transports us. A new Royal Revenue must be found, a new Episcopal,—for those are individual: both which, being wholly dissipated or bought by private persons, or assigned for service done, and especially to the Army, cannot be recovered without a general detriment and confusion to men's estates, or a heavy imposition on all men's purses,—benefit to none but to the worst and ignoblest sort of men, whose hope is to be either the ministers of Court riot and excess or the gainers by it. But, not to speak more of losses and extraordinary levies on our estates, what will then be the revenges and offences remembered and returned, not only by the Chief Person, but by all his adherents: accounts and reparations that will be required, suits, indictments, inquiries, discoveries, complaints, informations,—who knows against whom or how many, though perhaps neuters,—if not to utmost infliction, yet to imprisonment, fines, banishment, or molestation. If not these, yet disfavour, discountenance, disregard, and contempt on all but the known Royalist, or whom he favours, will be plenteous. Nor let the new-royalized Presbyterians persuade themselves that their old doings, though, now recanted, will be forgotten, whatever conditions be contrived or trusted on. Will they not believe this, nor remember the Pacification how it was kept to the Scots, how other solemn promises many a time to us? Let them but now read the diabolical forerunning libels, the faces, the gestures, that now appear foremost and briskest in all public places as the harbingers of those that are in expectation to reign over us; let them but hear the insolencies, the menaces, the insultings of our newly animated common enemies, crept lately out of their holes, their Hell I might say, by the language of their infernal pamphlets, the spew of every drunkard, every ribald: nameless, yet not for want of licence, but for very shame of their own vile persons; not daring to name themselves while they traduce others by name, and give us to foresee that they intend to second their wicked words, if ever they have power, with more wicked deeds. Let our zealous backsliders [the Presbyterians] forethink now with themselves how their necks, yoked with these tigers of Bacchus,—these new fanatics of not the preaching but the sweating tub, inspired with nothing holier than the venereal pox,—can draw one way, under Monarchy, to the establishing of Church-Discipline with these new-disgorged Atheisms. Yet shall they not have the honour to yoke with these, but shall be yoked under them: these shall plough on their backs. And do they among them who are so forward to bring in the Single Person think to be by him trusted or long regarded? So trusted they shall be and so regarded as by Kings are wont reconciled enemies,—neglected and soon after discarded, if not prosecuted for old traitors, the first inciters, beginners, and more than to the third part actors, of all that followed."