Page:Encyclopædia Britannica, Ninth Edition, v. 16.djvu/349

Rh MILTON 331 been sufficiently beaten, even for the general purposes of the war, and was resolved that the war should be pushed on to a point at which a Presbyterian settlement should be impossible without guarantees for liberty of conscience and a toleration of non-Presbyterian sects. Through the latter part of 1644, accordingly, Milton had been saved from the penalties which his Presbyterian opponents would have inflicted on him by this general championship of liberty of opinion by Cromwell and the army Independents. Before the middle of 1645 he, with others who were on the black books of the Presbyterians as heretics, was safer still. Though the parliament had voted, in January 1644-45, that the future national church of England should be on the Presbyterian system, Cromwell and the Inde pendents had taken care to have the question of tolera tion left open ; and, within the next month or two, by Cromwell s exertions, a completely new face was put upon the war by the removal of all the chief officers that had been in command hitherto, and the equipment of the New Model army, with Fairfax as its commander-in-chief and Cromwell himself as lieutenant-general. The Scots and the stricter English Presbyterians looked on malignantly while this army took the field, calling it an &quot; Army of Sectaries,&quot; and almost hoping it would be beaten. On June 14, 1645, however, there was fought the great battle of Naseby, utterly ruining the king at last, and leaving only relics of his forces here and there. Milton s position then may be easily understood. Though his first tendency on the church question had been to some form of a Presbyterian constitution for the church, he had parted utterly now from the Scots and Presbyterians, and become a partisan of Independency, having no dread of &quot; sects and schisms,&quot; but regarding them rather as healthy signs in the English body-politic. He was, indeed, himself one of the most noted sectaries of the time, for in the lists of sects drawn out by contemporary Presbyterian writers special mention is made of one small sect who were known as Miltonists or Divorcers. So far as Milton was concerned personally, his interest in the divorce speculation came to an end in July or August 1645, when, by friendly interference, a reconcilia tion was effected between him and his wife. The ruin of the king s cause at Naseby had suggested to the Powells that it might be as well for their daughter to go back to her husband after their two years of separation. It was not, however, in the house in Aldersgate Street that she rejoined him, but in a larger house, which he had taken in the adjacent street called Barbican, for the accommodation of an increasing number of pupils. The house in Barbican was tenanted by Milton from about August 1645 to September or October 1647. Among his first occupations there must have been the revision of the proof sheets of the first edition of his collected poems. It appeared as a tiny volume, copies of which are now very rare, with the title Poems of Mr John Milton, both English and Latin, composed at several times. The title-page gives the date 1645, but January 1645-46 seems to have been the exact month of the publication. The appearance of the volume indicates that Milton may have been a little tired by this time of his notoriety as a prose-polemic, and desirous of being recognized once more in his original character of literary man and poet. But, whether because his pedagogic duties now engrossed him or for other reasons, very few new pieces were added in the Barbican to those that the little volume had thus made public. In English, there were only the four sonnets now numbered xi.-xiv., the first two entitled &quot; On the Detraction which followed upon my writing certain Treatises,&quot; the third &quot;To Mr Henry Lawes on his Airs,&quot; and the fourth &quot;To the Religious Memory of Mrs Catherine Thomson,&quot; together with the powerful anti-Presbyterian invective or &quot; tailed sonnet &quot; entitled &quot; On the New Forcers of Conscience under the Long Parliament &quot; ; and in Latin there were only the ode Ad Joannem Rousium, the trifle called Apologus de Rustico et Hero, and one interesting Familiar Epistle addressed to his Florentine friend Carlo Dati. Some family incidents of importance, however, appertain to this time of residence in Barbican. Oxford having surrendered to Fairfax in June 1646, the whole of the Powell family had to seek refuge in London, and most of them found shelter in Milton s house. His first child, a daughter named Anne, was born there on the 29th of July that year; on the 1st of January 1646-47 his father-in-law Mr Powell died there, leaving his affairs in confusion ; and in the following March his own father died there, at the age of eighty-four, and was buried in the adjacent church of St Giles, Cripplegate. For the rest, the two years in Barbican are nearly blank in Milton s biography. The great Revolution was still running its course. For a time Charles s surrender of himself, in May 1646, to the auxiliary Scottish army rather than to Fairfax and Cromwell, and his residence with that Scottish army at Newcastle in negotiation with the Scots, had given the Presbyterians the advantage ; but, after the Scots had evacuated England in January 1646-47, leaving Charles a captive with his English subjects, and especially after the English army had seized him at Holmby in June 1647 and undertaken the further management of the treaty with him, the advantage was all the other way. It was a satisfaction to Milton, and perhaps still a protection for him, that the &quot; Army of Independents and Sectaries&quot; had come to be really the masters of England. From Barbican Milton removed, in September or October 1647, to a smaller house in that part of High Holborn which adjoins Lincoln s Inn Fields. His Powell relatives had now left him, and he had reduced the number of his pupils, or perhaps kept only his two nephews. But, though thus more at leisure, he did not yet resume his projected poem, but occupied himself rather with three works of scholarly labour which he had already for some time had on hand. One was the com pilation in English of a complete history of England, or rather of Great Britain, from the earliest times ; another was the preparation in Latin of a complete system of divinity, drawn directly from the Bible ; and the third was the collection of materials for a new Latin dictionary. Milton had always a fondness for such labours of scholar ship and compilation. Of a poetical kind there is nothing to record, during his residence in High Holborn, but an experiment in psalm-translation, in the shape of Psalms Ixxx.-lxxxviii. done into service-metre in April 1648, and the Sonnet to Fairfax, written in September of the same year. This last connects him again with the course of public affairs. The king, having escaped from the custody of the army chiefs, and taken refuge in the Isle of Wight, had been committed to closer custody there ; all negotia tion between him and parliament had been declared at an end ; and the result would probably have been his deposi tion, but for the consequences of a secret treaty he had contrived to make with the Scots. By this treaty the Scots engaged to invade England in the king s behalf, rescue him from the English parliament and army, and restore him to his full royalty, while he engaged in return to ratify the Covenant, the Presbyterian system of church government, and all the other conclusions of the West minster Assembly, throughout England, and to put down Independency and the sects. Thus, in May 1648, began what is called the Second Civil War, consisting first of new risings of the Royalists in various parts of England, and then of a conjunction of these with a great invasion