Chapter II: Third Section (1)

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.

[Footnote 1: In Wood's Fasti (I. 485) the pamphlet is mentioned as "published in Feb." The publication, we learn from subsequent words of Milton himself, was very hurried, and copies got about without his press-corrections. I find no entry of the pamphlet in the Stationers' Registers.--It is particularly necessary to remember that this was but the _first edition_ of the pamphlet. Another was to follow. In all the editions of Milton's collected works, from that of 1698 onwards, the reprint is from the later edition, without notice of the first; but I hardly know a case in which the distinction between two editions is more important.]

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."

[Footnote 1: This is one of Milton's very long sentences; and the length shows, I think, the glow and rapidity of the dictation.]

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."

[Footnote 1: The allusion here is vague.]

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.

[Footnote 1: "_Published from the Manuscript_" is the addition in all our present reprints. In other words, this Letter to Monk, together with the previous _Letter to a Friend concerning the Ruptures of the Commonwealth_, came into Toland's hands in the manner described in Note p. 617, and was also given by Toland for use in the 1698 edition of Milton's Prose Works.]

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,

"Peace, for the Lord's sake, Thomas! lest Monk take us,
And drag us out, as Hercules did Cacus.

"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]

[Footnote 1: Pamphlet, of title and date given, in the Thomason Collection. I have mended the pointing, but nothing else.]

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]

[Footnote 1: The Rota Club, as we already know (ante p. 555), can have had no meeting on the day supposed in the burlesque, having disappeared, with all its appurtenances, ballot-box included, at or immediately after the swamping of the old Rump by the readmission of the secluded members. The last glimpses we have of it are these from Pepys's Diary:--_Jan._ 10, 1659-60. "To the Coffee-house, where were a great confluence of gentlemen: viz. Mr. Harrington, Poulteney (chairman), Gold, Dr. Petty, &c.; where admirable discourse till 9 at night."--_Jan._ 17. "I went to the Coffee Club, and heard very good discourse. It was in answer to Mr. Harrington's answer, who said that the state of the Roman government was not a settled government, and so it was no wonder that the balance of property was in one hand and the command in another, it being therefore always in a posture of war; but it was carried by ballot that it was a steady government, though it is true by the voices it had been carried before that it was an unsteady government: so to-morrow it is to be proved by the opponents that the balance lay in one hand and the government in another."--_Feb._ 20 (day before Restitution of the Secluded). "I to the Coffee-house, where I heard Mr, Harrington and my Lord Dorset and another Lord talking of getting another place [for the Club meetings] at the Cockpit, and they did believe it would come to something." Had there been an express order for closing the Club?]

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]

[Footnote 1: There is a reprint of this _Censure of the Rota_ in the Harleian Miscellany (IV. 179-186). I take the date of publication from the Thomason copy of the original.]

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:--