Commonwealth’s men as Bradshaw, Fairfax, Fleetwood, Lambert and Overton, together with a long panegyric on Cromwell himself and his career, which remains to this day unapproached for elaboration and grandeur by any estimate of Cromwell from any later pen.
From about the date of the publication of the Defensio secunda to the beginning of 1655 the only specially literary relics of Milton’s life are his translations of Ps. i.–viii. in different metres, done in August 1654, his translation of Horace’s Ode, i. 5, done probably about the same time, and two of his Latin “Familiar Epistles.” The most active time of his secretaryship for Oliver was from April 1655 onwards. In that month, in the course of a general revision of official salaries under the Protectorate, Milton’s salary of £288 a year hitherto was reduced to £200 a year, with a kind of redefinition of his office, recognizing it, we may say, as a Latin secretaryship extraordinary. Philip Meadows was to continue to do all the ordinary Foreign Office work, under Thurloe’s inspection; but Milton was to be called in on special occasions. Hardly was the arrangement made when a signal occasion did occur. In May 1655 all England was horrified by the news of the massacre of the Vaudois Protestants (Waldenses) by the troops of Emanuele II., duke of Savoy and prince of Piedmont, in consequence of their disobedience to an edict requiring them either to leave 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 Latin pamphlets. It was his Pro se defensio . . . in answer to an elaborate self-defence which More had put forth on the Continent since Milton’s attack on his character. In that year also appeared Milton’s Scriptum domini protectoris . . . contra hispanos.
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 important despatches to foreign powers on behalf of the Protector, then in the height of his great foreign policy; 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 Lawrence, the son of the president of Cromwell’s council, and two of the others to Cyriack Skinner, once his pupil, belong to this time of domestic quiet, as do also no fewer than ten of his Latin “Familiar Epistles.” His marriage with Katherine Woodcock on the 12th of November 1656 brought him a brief period of domestic happiness; but, after only fifteen months, he was again a widower, by her death in childbirth in February 1657/8. 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 sacred tribute to the memory of his second marriage and the virtues of the wife he had so soon lost. Even after that loss we find him still busy for Cromwell. Andrew Marvell, in September 1657 succeeded Meadows, much to Milton’s satisfaction, as his assistant secretary; 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.
There is, unfortunately, no direct record to show what Cromwell thought of Milton; but there is ample record of what Milton thought of Cromwell. “Our chief of men,” 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 conservatism 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-supported, 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 Protectorate, persevered in to the end. This must have been Milton’s deepest disappointment with Cromwell’s rule.
Cromwell’s death on the 3rd of September 1658 left the Protectorship to his son Richard. Milton and Marvell continued in their posts, and a number of the Foreign Office letters of the new Protectorate were of Milton’s composition. In October 1658 appeared a new edition of his Defensio prima, and, early in 1659, a new English pamphlet, entitled Treatise of Civil Power in Ecclesiastical Causes showing that it is not lawful to compel in Matters of Religion, in which he advocated the separation of Church and State. To Richard’s Protectorate also belongs one of Milton’s Latin “Familiar Epistles.”
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 the 15th of May 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 pamphlet entitled Considerations touching 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 to prevent the restoration of the monarchy, to argue against it and fight against it to the last, was the work to which Milton set himself; 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 passionate vehemence which found vent in a pamphlet entitled The Ready and Easy Way to Establish
