Page:Encyclopædia Britannica, Ninth Edition, v. 16.djvu/352

Rh 334 MILTON their native valleys or to conform to the Catholic religion. Cromwell and his council took the matter up with all their energy ; and the burst of indignant letters on the subject despatched in that month and the next to the duke of Savoy himself, Louis XIV. of France, Cardinal Mazarin, the Swiss cantons, the States-General of the United Provinces, and the kings of Sweden and Denmark, were all by Milton. [ His famous sonnet On the late Massacre in Piedmont was his more private expression of feeling on the same occasion. This sonnet was in circulation, and the case of the Vaudois Protestants was still occupying Cromwell, when, in August 1655, there appeared the last of Milton s great Latin pamphlets. It was his Pro Se Defensio, in answer to an elaborate self-defence which Morus had put forth on the Continent since Milton s attack on his character, and it con sisted mainly of a re-exposure of that unfortunate clergy man. Thence, through the rest of Cromwell s Protectorate, Milton s life was of comparatively calm tenor. He was in much better health than usual, bearing his blindness with courage and cheerfulness ; he was steadily busy with such more important despatches to foreign powers as the Pro tector, then in the height of his great foreign policy, and regarded with fear and deference by all European monarchs and states from Gibraltar to the Baltic, chose to confide to him ; and his house in Petty France seems to have been, more than at any previous time since the beginning of his blindness, a meeting-place for friends and visitors, and a scene of pleasant hospitalities. The four sonnets now numbered xix.-xxii., one of them to young Mr Lawrence, the son of the president of Cromwell s council, and two of the others to Cyriack Skinner, belong to this time of domestic quiet, as do also no fewer than ten of his Latin Familiar Epistles. His second marriage belongs to the same years, and gleams even yet as the too brief consummation of this happiest time in the blind man s life. The name of his second wife was Katharine Woodcock. He married her on the 12th of November 1656 ; but, after only fifteen months, he was again a widower, by her death in childbirth in February 1657-58. The child dying with her, only the three daughters by the first marriage remained. The touching sonnet which closes the series of Milton s Sonnets is his sacred tribute to the memory on his second marriage and to the virtues of the wife he had so soon lost. Even after that loss we find him still busy for Cromwell. Mr Meadows having been sent off on diplomatic missions, Andrew Marvell had, in September 1657, been brought in, much to Milton s satisfaction, as his assistant or colleague in the Latin secretaryship ; but this had by no means relieved him from duty. Some of his greatest despatches for Cromwell, including letters, of the highest importance, to Louis XIV., Mazarin, and Charles Gustavus of Sweden ; belong to the year 1658. One would like to know precisely in what personal relations Milton and Cromwell stood to each otbor. There is, unfortunately, no direct record to show what Cromwell thought of Milton ; but there is ample record of what Milton thought of Cromwell. &quot;Our chief of men,&quot; he had called Cromwell in his sonnet of May 1652 ; and the opinion remained unchanged. He thought Cromwell the greatest and best man of his generation, or of many generations ; and he regarded Cromwell s assumption of the supreme power, and his retention of that power with a sovereign title, as no real suppression of the republic, but as absolutely necessary for the preservation of the republic, and for the safeguard of the British Islands against a return of the Stuarts. Nevertheless, under this prodigious admiration of Cromwell, there were political doubts and reserves. Milton was so much of a modern radical of the extreme school in his own political views and sympathies that he cannot but have been vexed by the growing con servatism of Cromwell s policy through his Protectorate. To his grand panegyric on Oliver in the Defensio Secunda of 1654 he had ventured to append cautions against self-will, over-legislation, and over-policing ; and he cannot have thought that Oliver had been immaculate in these respects through the four subsequent years. The attempt to revive an aristocracy and a House of Lords, on which Cromwell was latterly bent, cannot have been to Milton s taste. Above all, Milton dissented in toto from Cromwell s church policy. It was Milton s fixed idea, almost his deepest idea, that there should be no such thing as an Established Church, or state-paid clergy, of any sort or denomination or mixture of denominations, in any nation, and that, as it had been the connexion between church and state, begun by Constantine, that had vitiated Christianity in the world, and kept it vitiated, so Christianity would never flourish as it ought till there had been universal disestablishment and disendowment of the clergy, and the propagation of the gospel were left to the zeal of voluntary pastors, self-sup ported, or supported modestly by their flocks. He had at one time looked to Cromwell as the likeliest man to carry this great revolution in England. But Cromwell, after much meditation on the subject in 1652 and 1653, had come to the opposite conclusion. The conservation of the Established Church of England, in the form of a broad union of all evangelical denominations of Christians, whether Presbyterians, or Independents, or Baptists, or moderate Old Anglicans, that would accept state-pay with state- control, had been the fundamental notion of his Protec torate, persevered in to the end. This must have been Milton s deepest disappointment with the Oliverian rule. Cromwell s death on the 3d of September 1658 left the Protectorship to his son Richard. Milton and Marvel! continued in their posts, and a number of the Foreign Office letters of the new Protectorate were of Milton s composition. Thinking the time fit, he also put forth, in October 1658, a new edition of his Defensio Prima, and, early in 1659, a new English pamphlet, entitled Treatise of Civil Power in Ecclesiastical Caiises, ventilating those notions of his as to the separation of church and state which he had been obliged of late to keep to himself. To Richard s Protectorate also belongs one of Milton s Latin Familiar Epistles. Meanwhile, though all had seemed quiet round Richard at first, the jealousies of the army officers left about him by Oliver, and the conflict of political elements let loose by Oliver s death, were preparing his downfall. In May 1659 Richard s Protectorate was at an end. The country had returned with pleasure to what was called &quot; the good old cause &quot; of pure republicanism ; and the government was in the hands of &quot;the Restored Rump,&quot; consisting of the reassembled remains of that Rump Parlia ment which Cromwell had dissolved in 1653. To this change, as inevitable in the circumstances, or even promis ing, Milton adjusted himself. The last of his known official performances in his Latin secretaryship are two letters in the name of William Lenthall, as the speaker of the restored Rump, one to the king of Sweden and one to the king of Denmark, both dated May 15, 1659. Under the restored Rump, if ever, he seemed to have a chance for his notion of church-disestablishment ; and, accordingly, in August 1659, he put forth, with a prefatory address to that body, a large pamphlet entitled Considerations toiichiny the likeliest means to remove Hirelings out of the Church. The restored Rump had no time to attend to such matters. They were in struggle for their own existence with the army chiefs ; and the British Islands were in that state of hopeless confusion and anarchy which, after passing through a brief phase of attempted military government (October to December 1659), and a second revival of the purely republican or Rump government (December 1659 to