MILTON THROUGH THE SECOND CIVIL WAR: HIS PERSONAL INTEREST IN IT, AND DELIGHT IN THE ARMY'S TRIUMPH: HIS SONNET TO FAIRFAX.
While these translations were being written, there was the ominous rumour of the Engagement between the Scots and the King in the Isle of Wight, terrifying all men's minds with the prospect of a Second Civil War. We have seen what effects this prospect had on the English Parliament—how the resolute mood of the winter of 1647-8 was changed into a mood of timidity; how negotiations with the King were again talked of; how the Presbyterians recovered from their temporary submission to the Independents, and began to turn on them rather than on the King; how, in order to repudiate the Republican sentiments appearing in the Army and elsewhere, the Commons pledged themselves to a continuance of Royalty and the House of Lords, and, in order to please the English Presbyterians and the Scots, the two Houses passed at length the tremendous Ordinance against Heresies and Blasphemies, making the least of them punishable with imprisonment and the graver punishable with death. This last Ordinance, passed May 2, 1648, the very day before the meeting of the Third Provincial Synod of London in Sion College, must have given great satisfaction to that body, but may well have spread alarm through general society. Beyond a doubt, most of those persons who had been denounced as notorious heretics and blasphemers in the Sion College manifesto of the preceding December were, by this Ordinance, liable to death if they did not recant. With due zeal on the part of the prosecution, nothing could have saved from the scaffold such of Milton's co-heretics as Biddle, Paul Best, the anonymous Mortalist R. 0. (Richard Overton, or Clement Wrighter?), or even perhaps John Goodwin. Milton's particular heresy not being specifically named in the Ordinance, it would have been more difficult to apply it to him; but, if the terrible Presbyterian discipline which the Ordinance favoured were once imposed upon London, there would have been ingenuity enough to include Milton somehow among those worthy of minor punishment.
The comfort was that, before the Ordinance could come into real effect, before the terrible Presbyterian discipline it promised could be set up, the SECOND CIVIL WAR had to be fought through. How would that war end? Would it end in a triumph of Presbyterianism in hypocritical reconciliation with Royalty; or, despite the ugly mustering of forces in all parts of England to aid Duke Hamilton and his Scottish invasion, would it end, after all, in the triumph of that little English Army of Independents and Sectaries which had always beaten before, and might now, though distrusted and discountenanced by its own masters, prove once more its matchless mettle? With what anxiety, through May, June, July, and August 1648, must Milton, with myriads of other Englishmen, have revolved these questions! With what anxiety must he have watched Fairfax's movements round London, his preliminary smashings of the Royalist Insurrection in Kent and Essex, and then the concentration of his efforts (June 12) on the siege of Colchester! With what anxiety must he have followed Cromwell into Wales, heard of his doings against the insurgents there, and then of his rapid march into the north (Aug. 3—10), to meet the invading Scottish Army under Duke Hamilton! But O the relief at last! O the news upon news of that glorious month of August 1648! Hamilton and the Scots utterly routed by Cromwell in the three days' battle of Preston (Aug. 17-19); Colchester at last surrendered to Fairfax (Aug 28); the Prince of Wales a fugitive back to Holland with his useless fleet (Aug. 28); the little English Army of Independents and Sectaries were more everywhere the victor, and the Parliament and the Presbytery-besotted Londoners ruefully accepting the victory when they would have been nearly as glad of a defeat! No fear now of any very violent execution of the Ordinance against Heresies and Blasphemies, or of a Presbyterian discipline of absolutely intolerable stringency! The Army and the Independents were once more supreme.
The sole piece of Milton's verse that has come down to us from the time of the Second Civil War is an expression of his joy at its happy conclusion. It is in the form of a Sonnet to Fairfax. The Sonnet is generally printed with the mere heading "To the Lord General Fairfax;" but in the original in Milton's own hand among the Cambridge MSS. one reads this heading through a line of erasure; "On ye Lord Gen. Fairfax at ye seige of Colchester." This assigns the Sonnet to the end of August, or to September, 10-48.
"Fairfax, whose name in arms through Europe rings,
And fills all mouths with envy or with praise,
And all her jealous monarchs with amaze,
And rumours loud that daunt remotest kings,
Thy firm unshaken virtue ever brings
Victory home, though new rebellions raise
Their Hydra-heads, and the false North displays
Her broken League to imp their serpent wings:
O yet a nobler task awaits thy hand,
For what can War but endless war still breed,
Till Truth and Right from Violence be freed,
And public Faith cleared from the shameful brand
Of public Fraud! In vain doth Valour bleed,
While Avarice and Rapine share the land."
[Footnote: For obvious reason, Milton could not print this Sonnet in the
Second or 1673 Edition of his Minor Poems. It was first printed by
Phillips at the end of his Memoir of Milton prefixed to the English
translation of Milton's State Letters in 1688; and Toland inserted it in
his Life of Milton in 1698.]
Through the later months of 1648 Milton's heart must have been wholly with Fairfax and the other Army-chiefs, as he saw them driving things, cautiously at first, but more and more boldly by degrees, into the exact course marked out by this Sonnet. Their very professions were that, having finished the war and crushed the Hydra-heads of the new rebellions, they must and would proceed to the yet nobler task of preventing future wars, by freeing Truth and Right once for all from Violence, and clearing the public Faith of England from the brand of public Fraud. Hence, from September to December, the adoption by the Army of that peculiarly intrepid policy which has been described in our last chapter. Though the Parliament began their new Treaty with the King in the Isle of Wight, there were significant signs from the first that the Army regarded the Treaty with utter disdain; as the Treaty proceeded, regiment after regiment spoke out, each with its manifesto calling for justice on the King, and otherwise more or less democratic; and so till the Army rose at last collectively, issued its great Remonstrance and programme of a Democratic Constitution (Nov. 16), dragged the King from his unfinished Treaty at Newport to safer keeping in Hurst Castle (Dec. 1), and itself marched into London to superintend the sequel (Dec. 2). Nominally in the centre of all this was the Lord General Fairfax, with Ireton as his chief adviser. Cromwell had not yet returned from his work in the north.