a Free Commonwealth, and the Excellence thereof compared with the Inconveniences and Dangers of readmitting Kingship to this Nation. An abridgment of this pamphlet was addressed by him to General Monk in a letter entitled “The Present Means and Brief Delineation of a Free Commonwealth” (March 1660). Milton’s proposal was that the central governing apparatus of the British Islands for the future should consist 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.
Not even when the king’s cause was practically assured would Milton be silent. In Brief Notes upon a late Sermon, published in April 1660, in reply to a Royalist discourse by a Dr Matthew 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 Convention Parliament met; on the 1st of May they resolved unanimously that the government by King, Lords and Commons 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 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. The Commons voted that he should be taken into custody by the serjeant-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 a story that Milton had once protected Davenant and now owed his immunity to him; but it is more likely that he was protected by the influence of Marvell, by Arthur Annesley, afterwards earl of Anglesey, and by other friends who had influence at court. At all events, on the 29th of August 1660, when the Indemnity Bill did come out complete, with the king’s assent, 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. 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. Though the special prosecution ordered against him by the Commons had been quashed by the subsequent Indemnity Bill, the serjeant-at-arms had taken him into custody. Entries in the Commons journals of the 17th and 19th of December show that Milton complained of the exorbitant fees charged by the serjeant-at-arms for his release, and that the matter was referred to a committee at the instance of Andrew Marvell.
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, Holborn. 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. This is the time of which he says:—
| “ . . . though fallen on evil days, |
| On evil days though fallen, and evil tongues, |
| In darkness, and with dangers compassed round, |
| And solitude.” |
The “evil days” 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 Restoration 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, Independents, 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 a Quaker youth, named Thomas Ellwood. With all this genuine attachment to him of a select few, Milton could truly enough describe his condition after the Restoration as one of “solitude.” Nor was this the worst. His three daughters, on whom he ought now to have been able principally to depend, were his most serious domestic trouble. The poor motherless girls, the eldest in her seventeenth year in 1662, the second in her fifteenth and the youngest in her eleventh, had grown up, in their father’s blindness and too great self-absorption, ill-looked-after and but poorly educated; and the result now appeared. They “made nothing of neglecting him”; they rebelled against the drudgery of reading to him or otherwise attending on him; they “did combine together and counsel his maid-servant to cheat him in her marketings”; they actually “had made away some of his books, and would have sold the rest.”
It was to remedy this state of things that Milton consented to a third marriage. The wife found for him was Elizabeth Minshull, of a good Cheshire family, and a relative of Dr Paget. They were married on the 24th of February 1662/3, the wife being then only in her twenty-fifth year, while Milton was in his fifty-fifth. She proved an excellent wife; and the Jewin Street household, though the daughters remained in it, must have been under better management from the time of her entry into it. Meanwhile, he had found some solace in renewed industry of various kinds among his books and tasks of scholarship, and more particularly he had been building up his Paradise Lost. He had begun the poem in earnest, we are told, in 1658 at his house in Petty France, not in the dramatic form contemplated eighteen years before, but deliberately in the epic form. He had made but little way when there came the interruption of the anarchy preceding the Restoration and of the Restoration itself; but the work had been resumed in Jewin Street and prosecuted there steadily, by dictations of twenty or thirty lines at a time to whatever friendly or hired amanuensis chanced to be at hand. Considerable progress had been made in this way before his third marriage; and after that the work proceeded apace, his nephew, Edward Phillips, who was then out in the world on his own account, looking in when he could to revise the growing manuscript.
It was not in the house in Jewin Street, however, that Paradise Lost was finished. Not very long after the third marriage, probably in 1664, he removed to another house, with a garden, in “Artillery Walk, leading to Bunhill Fields.” Here Paradise Lost was certainly finished before July 1665—Aubrey says in 1663—for when Milton and his family, to avoid the Great Plague of London, went into temporary country-quarters in a cottage in Chalfont St Giles, Buckinghamshire,[1] the finished manuscript was taken with him, in probably more than one copy. This we learn from Thomas Ellwood, who had taken the cottage for him, and was allowed to take a copy of the manuscript way with him for perusal, during Milton’s stay at Chalfont (Life of Thomas Ellwood, 1714). The delay in the publication of the poem may be explained partly by the fact that the official licenser hesitated before granting the necessary imprimatur to a book by a man of such notorious republican antecedents, and partly by the paralysis of all business in London by the Great Fire of September 1666. It was not till the 27th of April 1667 that Milton concluded an agreement, still preserved in the British
- ↑ Milton’s cottage here is still standing, and is open to visitors.
