Page:Encyclopædia Britannica, Ninth Edition, v. 16.djvu/353

Rh MILTON 335 February 1659-60), issued in Monk s march from Scotland, assumption of the dictatorship in London, and recall of all the survivors of the original Long Parliament to enlarge the Hump to due dimensions and assist him in further delibera tions. Through all this anarchy the Royalist elements had been mustering themselves, and the drift to the restoration of the Stuart dynasty, as the only possible or feasible con clusion, had become apparent. To prevent that issue, to argue against it and fight against it to the last, was the work to which Milton had then set himself. His dis establishment notion and all his other notions had been thrown aside ; the preservation of the republic in any form, and by any compromise of differences within itself, had become his one thought, and the study of practical means to this end his most anxious occupation. In a Letter to a Friend concerning the Ruptures of the Commonwealth, written in October 1659, he had propounded a scheme of a kind of dual government for reconciling the army chiefs with the Rump ; through the following winter, marked only by two of his Latin Familiar Epistles, his anxiety over the signs of the growing enthusiasm throughout the country for the recall of Charles II. had risen to a kind of agony ; and early in_ March 1659-60 his agony found vent in a pamphlet of the most passionate vehemence entitled The Ready and Easy Way to Establish a Free Commomvealth, and the Excellence thereof compared with the Inconveniences and Dangers of readmitting Kingship in this Nation. An abridgment of the practical substance of this pamphlet was addressed by him to General Monk in a letter entitled The Present Means and Brief Delineation of a Free Common wealth. Milton s proposal was that the central governing apparatus of the British Islands for the future should con sist of one indissoluble Grand Council or parliament, which should include all the political chiefs, while there should be a large number of provincial councils or assemblies sitting in the great towns for the management of local and county affairs. The scheme, so far as the public attended to it at all, was received with laughter; the Royalist demonstrations were now fervid and tumultuous; and it remained only for the new and full parliament of two Houses which had been sum moned under Monk s auspices, and which is now known as the Convention Parliament, to give effect to Monk s secret determination and the universal popular desire. Not even then would Milton be silent. In Brief Notes on a late Sermon, published in April 1660, in reply to a Royalist dis course by a Dr Griffith, he made another protest against the recall of the Stuarts, even hinting that it would be better that Monk should become king himself ; and in the same month he sent forth a second edition of his Ready and Easy Way, more frantically earnest than even the first, and containing additional passages of the most violent denunciation of the royal family, and of prophecy of the degradation and disaster they would bring back with them. This was the dying effort. On the 25th of April the Con vention Parliament met ; on the 1st of May they resolved unanimously that the government by King, Lords, and Com mons should be restored ; and on the 29th of May Charles II. made his triumphal entry into London. The chief republicans had by that time scattered themselves, and Milton was in hiding in an obscure part of the city. How Milton escaped the scaffold at the Restoration is a mystery now, and was a mystery at the time. Actually, in the terrible course through the two Houses of the Con vention Parliament of that Bill of Indemnity by which the fates of the surviving regicides and of so many others of the chief republican culprits were determined, Milton was named for special punishment. It was voted by the Commons that he should be taken into custody by the sergeant-at-arms, for prosecution by the attorney- general on account of his Eikonoklastes and Defensio Prima, and that all copies of those books should be called in and burnt by the hangman. There was, however, some powerful combination of friendly influences in his favour, with Monk probably abetting. At all events, on the 29th of August 1660, when the Indemnity Bill did come out complete, with the king s assent, granting full pardon to all for their past offences, with the exception of about a hundred persons named in the bill itself for various degrees of punishment, thirty-four of them for death and twenty- six for the highest penalty short of death, Milton did not appear as one of the exceptions on any ground or in any of the grades. From that moment, therefore, he could emerge from his hiding, and go about as a free man. Not that he was yet absolutely safe. During the next two or three months London was in excitement over the trials of such of the excepted regicides and others as had not succeeded in escaping abroad, and the hangings and quarterings of ten of them ; there were several public burnings by the hangman at the same time of Milton s condemned pamphlets ; and the appearance of the blind man himself in the streets, though he was legally free, would have caused him to be mobbed and assaulted. Nay, notwithstanding the Indemnity Bill, he was in some legal danger to as late as December 1660. Though the special prosecution ordered against him by the Commons had been quashed by the subsequent Indemnity Bill, the sergeant-at- arms had taken him into custody. Entries in the Com mons journals of December 17 and 19 show that Milton complained of the sergeant-at-arms for demanding exorbi tant fees for his release, and that the House arranged the matter. Milton did not return to Petty France. For the first months after he was free he lived as closely as possible in a house near what is now Red Lion Square, Hoi born. Thence he removed, apparently early in 1661, to a house in Jewin Street, in his old Aldersgate-Street and Barbican neighbourhood. In Jewin Street Milton remained for two or three years, or from 1661 to 1664. They were the time of his deepest degradation, that time of which he speaks when he tells us how, by the Divine help, he had been able to persevere undauntedly &quot;though fallen on evil days, On evil clays though fallen, and evil tongues, In darkness, and with dangers compassed round, And solitude.&quot; The &quot;evil days&quot; were those of the Restoration in its first or Clarendonian stage, with its revenges and reactions, its return to high Episcopacy and suppression of every form of dissent and sectarianism, its new and shameless royal court, its open proclamation and practice of anti- Puritanism in morals and in literature no less than in politics. For the main part of this world of the Restora tion Milton was now nothing more than an infamous outcast, the detestable blind republican and regicide who had, by too great clemency, been left unhanged. The friends that adhered to him still, and came to see him in Jewin Street, were few in number, and chiefly from the ranks of those nonconforming denominations, Independ ents, Baptists, or Quakers, who were themselves under similar obloquy. Besides his two nephews, the faithful Andrew Marvell, Cyriack Skinner, and some others of his former admirers, English or foreign, we hear chiefly of a Dr Nathan Paget, who was a physician in the Jewin- Street neighbourhood, and of several young men who would drop in upon him by turns, partly to act as his amanuenses, and partly for the benefit of lessons from him, one of them an interesting Quaker youth, named Thomas Ellwood. With all this genuine attachment to him of a select few, Milton could truly enough describe his condition after