MEDITATIONS AND OCCUPATIONS IN THE HOUSE IN HIGH HOLBORN: MILTON'S SYMPATHIES WITH THE ARMY CHIEFS AND THE EXPECTANT REPUBLICANS.
When Milton removed to High Holborn, with his wife, their infant daughter, and the two nephews, the King was in the third and least disagreeable stage of his captivity. His detention with the Scots at Newcastle, and his subsequent residence under Parliamentary custody at Holmby House, were affairs of the Barbican period; and, by Joyce's act of the previous June, his Majesty had been for some months in the keeping of the Army, very generously treated, and permitted at last to reside, with much of restored state-ceremony, at his own palace of Hampton Court. Fairfax, Cromwell, Ireton, and the other Army-chiefs, from their head- quarters at Putney, were negotiating with him; and, the march of the Army through London having disabled the ultra-Presbyterians for the moment and transferred the ascendancy to the Independents, people were looking forward to a settlement on the basis of an established Presbyterian Church for the nation at large, but with liberty of conscience and of worship for Dissenters. For Milton, among others, this was a pleasant prospect. His sympathies, nay his personal interests, were wholly with the Independents; all that the Army had done had his approbation; and, whatever he might have had to say now (with the strong new lights he had obtained since 1641) as to the propriety of a Presbyterian Establishment on its own merits, he was probably prepared to accept such an Establishment, if with a sufficient guarantee of Toleration. Now, although he cannot have retained, more than other people, any strong confidence in Charles personally, any real hope of his voluntary and unreserved assent to a system of kingly government limited by great constitutional checks, yet a Treaty with Charles by the Independents rather than the Presbyterians must have seemed to him the most feasible way of reaching the end in view. Hence, while the King was at Hampton Court, and the Army-chiefs, with Cromwell most prominent among them, were plying his royal mind with arguments to bring him round, there can have been no private person more interested in their endeavours, more willing to believe them in the right, than Milton. Hardly had he been settled in his new house in High Holborn, however, when there came the snap of all those negotiations by the King's flight from Hampton Court to the Isle of Wight (Nov. 11, 1647). Then, I conceive, Milton's mood changed, in exact unison with the change of mood at the same time among the Army-chiefs and other leading Independents. For a month or two, indeed, there may have been some interest, some faint prolongation of hope, in attending to the proceedings of Parliament in pursuit of the King, and their attempt to obtain his assent to the Four Bills. But, from the moment when that attempt failed, and the two Houses passed their indignant resolutions that there should be no more communications with the King (Jan. 1647-8), all hesitation must have ceased. From that moment Milton was a Republican at heart. From that moment he was one of those who, with Vane, Marten, Cromwell, Ireton, and the Army officers generally, had forsworn all future allegiance to the Man in the Isle of Wight, and looked forward, through whatever intermediate difficulties, to his deposition and punishment, and the conversion of England iinto some kind of free Commonwealth. In such a matter, it could not, of course, be expected that a private citizen like Milton, who had no ambition to rank with Lilburne and other London Levellers of the coarser order, would anticipate Cromwell, Vane, and Ireton. He expressly says himself that, though he had been so prominent as a speculative politician, had made certain great questions of the time more peculiarly his own, had written largely on them and publicly identified his name with them, yet he had not hitherto taken any direct part in the immediate practical question of the future constitution of the State, but had left it to the appointed authorities [Footnote: Df. Sec. pro Pop. Angl., published in 1654]. Not the less are we to imagine that the time of his residence in High Holborn, while the King was a prisoner in the Isle of Wight, was the time when those high and semi-poetic Republican sentiments which seem always to have been congenial to him, and which his classic readings may have nurtured, took a definite shape applicable to England. From the end of 1647, I should say, Milton has to be reckoned as a foremost spirit in the band of expectant English Republicans.
Whether the issue was to be a Republic or not was a question which Milton had to leave in the hands of the Army and Parliament. While they were slowly working it out, what could he do but occupy himself, as patiently as possible, with his books and studies? There is evidence, accordingly, that three pieces of work, already begun or projected by him in Aldersgate Street or Barbican, were prosecuted with some increased diligence in his house in High Holborn. One of these was the collection of materials for a Thesaurus Linguæ Latinæ, or Latin Dictionary, which he hoped some time to complete. Another was the composition of a History of England, or History of Britain, from the earliest times to the Norman Conquest:—nay, though that was the form it ultimately took, the original project was nothing less than Hume anticipated, or a complete History of England, brought down in a continuous thread from the remotest origins of the nation to Milton's own time. The third was the long-meditated Body of Divinity, or Methodical Digest of Christian Doctrine. Here, surely, were three huge enough tasks of sheer hackwork hung round the neck of a poet! Milton's liking all his life for such labours of compilation, however, is as remarkable as his liking for pedagogy. Nor, though we may regard the tasks as hackwork now, were they so regarded by Milton. To amass gradually by readings in the Latin classics a collection of idioms and choice references, with a view to a Dictionary that should be an improvement even on that of Stephanus, was a side-labour to which a scholar, who was also a poet, might well dedicate a bit of each day or a week or two at intervals. To write a complete History of England, or even to compile, from Geoffrey of Monmouth, Bede, and the old chroniclers, a popular summary of the early legendary History of Britain, and of the History of the Saxon Kings and Church, was a blending of daily recreation with useful labour. Above all, the compilation of a System of Divinity was no mere dry drudgery for Milton, but a business of serious personal interest. From an early date he had resolved on some such compendium for his own use; he had ever since kept it in view and made notes for it; but his notions of the form it should take had undergone a change. "I entered," he says, "upon an assiduous course of study in my youth, beginning with the books of the Old and New Testament in their original languages, and going diligently through a few of the shorter Systems of Divines, in imitation of whom I was in the habit of classing under certain heads whatever passages of Scripture occurred for extraction, to be made use of hereafter as occasion might require. At length I resorted with increased confidence to some of the more copious Theological Treatises, and to the examination of the arguments advanced by the conflicting parties respecting certain disputed points of faith." Apparently he was still in this stage of his design in the Aldersgate period; for then, as we have seen (antè, pp. 254-5), one of his exercises with his pupils on Sundays was the dictation to them of a Tractate on Christian Divinity digested from such approved Protestant Divines as Amesius and Wollebius. But this method, he tells us, had ceased to satisfy him. Often he had found the theologians quibbling and sophistical, more anxious to "evade adverse reasonings" and establish foregone conclusions than to arrive at the truth. "According to my judgment, therefore," he adds, "neither my creed nor my hope of salvation could be safely trusted to such guides; and yet it appeared highly requisite to possess some methodical Tractate of Christian Doctrine, or at least to attempt such a disquisition as might be useful in establishing my faith or assisting my memory. I deemed it therefore safest and most advisable to compile for myself, by my own labour and study, some original treatise which should be always at hand, derived solely from the Word of God itself, and executed with all possible fidelity, seeing I could have no wish to practise any imposition on myself in such a matter." In all probability the preparations for the work on this new plan began in the house in High Holborn. For some years England had been in such a state of theological ferment that it was impossible not to inquire how much of the traditional Orthodoxy had real warrant in the Bible and how much was mere matter of inveterate opinion; in one important particular Milton, to his own surprise, had found himself standing out publicly as the champion of what was thought a horrible heresy; might it not be well to go over the whole ground, and fix one's whole Christian creed so as to be able to give an account of it, when called upon, in every other particular? The Westminster Assembly, like other Assemblies before it, had laboured out a Confession of Faith which it wished to impose on the entire community; but, as "it was only to the individual faith of each man that God had opened up the way of eternal salvation," was it not the duty of every Englishman to examine that Confession before accepting it as his own, or even to compile his own private Confession first and let the comparison follow at leisure? [Footnote: Phillips's Memoir at several points; Milton's Def. Sec.; and Preface to his posthumous "Treatise on Christian Doctrine" (Sumner's Translation, 1825). Phillips mentions expressly the History of England as occupying Milton in High Holborn; but the most interesting allusion to it is Milton's own in his Def. Sec., where the words are "Ad historiam gentis, ab ultimâ origine repetitam, ad hæc usque tempora, si possem, perpetuo filo deduoendam, me converti.">[