Page:Encyclopædia Britannica, Ninth Edition, v. 16.djvu/350

Rh 332 MILTON of England by a Royalist Scottish army, under the command of the duke of Hamilton. It was all over in August 1648, when the crushing defeat of the Scottish army by Cromwell in the three days battle of Preston, and the simultaneous suppression of the English Royalist insur rection in the south-east counties by Fairfax s siege and capture of Colchester, left Charles at the mercy of the victors. Milton s Sonnet to Fairfax was a congratulation to that general-in-chief of the parliament on his success at Colchester, and attested the exultation of the writer over the triumph of the Parliamentary cause. His exultation continued through what followed. After one more dying effort of the parliament at negotiation with Charles, the army took the whole business on itself. The king was brought from the Isle of Wight ; the parliament, manipu lated by the army officers, and purged of all members likely to impede the army s 1 purpose, was converted into an instrument for that purpose ; a court of high justice was set up for the trial of Charles; and on January 30, 1648-49, he was brought to the scaffold in front of Whitehall. By that act England became a republic, governed, without King or House of Lords, by the persever ing residue or &quot; Rump &quot; of the recent House of Commons, in conjunction with an executive council of state, composed of forty-one members appointed annually by that House. The first Englishman of mark out of parliament to attach himself openly to the new republic was John Milton. This he did by the publication of his pamphlet entitled Tenure of Kings and Magistrates, proving that it is laivful, and hath been held so in all ages, for any who have the power, to call to account a Tyrant or wicked King, and, after due conviction, to depose and put him to death, if the ordinary Magistrate have neglected to do it. It was out Avithin a fortnight after the king s death, and was Milton s last performance in the house in High Holborn. The chiefs of the new republic could not but perceive the importance of securing the services of a man who had so opportunely and so powerfully spoken out in favour of their tremendous act, and who was otherwise so distinguished. In March 1648-49, accordingly, Milton was offered, and accepted, the secretaryship for foreign tongues to the council of state of the new Commonwealth. The salary was to be 288 a year, worth about 1000 a year now. To be near his new duties in attendance on the council, which held its daily sittings for the first few weeks in Derby House, close to Whitehall, but afterwards regularly in Whitehall itself, he removed at once to temporary lodgings at Charing Cross. In the very first meetings of council which Milton attended he must have made personal acquaintance with President Bradshaw, Fairfax, Cromwell himself, Sir Henry Vane, Whitlocke, Henry Marten, Hasilrig, Sir Gilbert Pickering, and the other chiefs of the council and the Commonwealth, if indeed he had not known some of them before. After a little while, for his greater convenience, official apartments were assigned him in Whitehall itself. At the date of Milton s appointment to the secretaryship he was forty years ol age. His special duty was the drafting of such letters as were sent by the council of state, or sometimes by the Rump Parliament, to foreign states and princes, with the examination and translation of letters in reply, and with personal conferences, when necessary, with the agents of foreign powers in London, and with envoys and ambassadors. As Latin was the language employed in the written diplomatic documents, his post came to be known indifferently as the secretaryship for foreign tongues or the Latin secretaryship. In that post, however, his duties, more particularly at first, were very light in comparison with those of his official colleague, Mr Walter Frost, the general secretary. Foreign powers held aloof from the English republic as much as they could ; and, while Mr Frost had to be present in every meeting of the council, keeping the minutes, and conducting all the general correspondence, Milton s presence was required only when some piece of foreign business did turn up. Hence, from the first, his employment in very miscel laneous work. Especially, the council looked to him for everything in the nature of literary vigilance and literary help in the interests of the struggling Commonwealth. He was employed in the examination of suspected papers, and in interviews with their authors and printers ; and he executed several great literary commissions expressly entrusted to him by the council. The first of these was his pamphlet entitled Observations on Ormond s Articles of Peace with the Irish Rebels. It was published in May 1649, and was in defence of the republic against a complication of Royalist intrigues and dangers in Ireland. A passage of remarkable interest in it is one of eloquent eulogy on Cromwell. More important still was the Eikonoklastes (which may be translated &quot; Image-Smasher &quot;), published by Milton in October 1649, by way of counterblast to the famous Eikon Basilike (&quot;Royal Image &quot;), which had been in circulation in thousands of copies since the king s death, and had become a kind of Bible in all Royalist households, on the supposition that it had been written by the royal martyr himself. A third piece of work was of a more laborious nature. In the end of 1649 there appeared abroad, under the title of Defensio Regia pro Carolo I., a Latin vindication of the memory of Charles, with an attack on the English Com monwealth, intended for circulation on the Continent. As it had been written, at the instance of the exiled royal family, by Salmasius, or Claude de Saumaise, of Leyden, then of enormous celebrity over Europe as the greatest scholar of his age, it was regarded as a serious blow to the infant Commonwealth. To answer it was thought a task worthy of Milton, and he threw his whole strength into the performance through the year 1650, interrupting himself only by a new and enlarged edition of his Eikonoklastes. Not till April 1651 did the result appear ; but then the suc cess was prodigious. Milton s Latin Pro Populo Anglicano Defensio, as it was called, ran at once over the British Islands and the Continent, rousing acclamation everywhere, and received by scholars as an annihilation of the great Salmasius. Through the rest of 1651 the observation was that the two agencies which had co-operated most visibly in raising the reputation of the Commonwealth abroad were Milton s books and Cromwell s battles. These battles of Cromwell, in the service of the Commonwealth he had founded, had kept him absent from the council of state, of which he was still a member, since shortly after the beginning of Milton s secretaryship. For nearly a year he had been in Ireland, as lord lieutenant, reconquering that country after its long rebellion ; and then, for another year, he had been in Scotland, crushing the Royalist commotion there round Charles II., and annexing Scotland to the English republic. The annexation was complete on the 3d of September 1651, when Cromwell, chasing Charles II. and his army out of Scotland, came up with them at Worcester and gained his crowning victory. The Commonwealth then consisted of England, Ireland, and Scotland, and Cromwell was its supreme chief. Through the eventful year 1651, it has been recently ascertained, Milton had added to the other duties of his secretaryship that of Government journalist. Through the whole of that year, if not from an earlier period, he acted as licenser and superintending editor of the Mercurius Politicoes, a news paper issued twice a week, of which Mr Marchamont Needham was the working editor and proprietor. Milton s hand is discernible in some of the leading articles. About the end of 1651 Milton left his official rooms in