1: "Joanni Portugallioe Regi" is the heading in Mr. Hamilton's copy from the Skinner Transcript; but this is a mistake (see ante p. 576, note).
(CXLVII.) To CHARLES GUSTAVUS, KING OF SWEDEN, April 1659:—David Fithy, merchant, informs the Protector that, about a month ago, he contracted to supply to the Navy 150 sacks of hemp. He has the hemp now at Riga, and a ship ready to bring it thence for the use of the fleet—"part of which," the Protector skilfully adds, "has just sailed for the Baltic for your protection" (i.e. Montague's fleet, despatched this very month: see ante p. 435). It appears, however, that his Swedish Majesty has forbidden the exportation of hemp from his port of Riga without special permission. His Majesty is requested to give Fithy this permission, that he may be able to fulfil his contract. The Protector will consider himself much obliged by the kindness.
No more letters was poor Richard to write to crowned heads. On the very day on which the two first of the foregoing were written, he appeared in Wallingford House, and ordered the dissolution of the Council of Officers according to the edict of the Parliament. Next day it was known through all London that the question was between a dissolution of this Council of officers and a dissolution of the Parliament itself. The day after, Thursday, April 21, there was the famous double rendezvous of the two masses of soldiery round Whitehall to try the question, the rendezvous for Richard and the Parliament utterly failing, while that for Fleetwood, Desborough, and the other rebel chiefs, flooded the streets and St. James's Park. That night, quailing before the rough threats of Desborough, Richard and his Council yielded; and on Friday, the 22nd, the indignant Parliament knew itself to be dissolved, and Richard's Protectorate virtually at an end. Nominally, it dragged on for a month more.
On Thursday, April 21, the day of the dreadful double rendezvous, and of Desborough's stormy interview with Richard in Whitehall to compel the dissolution of the Parliament, Milton, in his house in Petty France, on the very edge of the uproar, was quietly dictating a private letter. It is that numbered 28 among his Epistoloe Familiares, and headed "Joanni Badioeo, Pastori Arausionensi," i.e. "To John Badiaeus, Pastor of Orange." With some trouble, I have identified this "Badiaeus" with a certain French JEAN LABADIE, who is characterized by Bayle as a "schismatic minister, followed like an apostle," and by another authority as "one of the most dangerous fanatics of the seventeenth century." The facts of his life, to the moment of our present concern with him, are given in the accepted French authorities thus:—Born in 1610 at Bourg-en-Guyenne, the son of a soldier who had risen to be lieutenant, he had received a Jesuit education at Bordeaux, had entered the Jesuit order at an early age, and had become a priest. For fifteen years he had remained in the order, preaching, and also teaching rhetoric and philosophy, reputed "a prodigy of talent and piety," but also a mystic and enthusiast, with fancies that he must found a new religious sect. While preaching orthodox Catholicism in public, he had been indoctrinating disciples in private with his peculiarities; and, when they were numerous enough, he wanted to leave the Jesuits. By reasonings and kindness, they managed to retain him for a while; but he grew more odd and visionary, fasting often, eating only herbs, and having divine revelations. After a dangerous illness, which brought him to death's door, he did obtain his dismissal from the Jesuit order in April 1639, and went over France propagandizing. The Bishop of Amiens, caught by his eloquence, made him prebendary of a collegiate church in that town; in connexion with which, and with the Bishop's approval, he founded a religious association of young women, called St. Mary Magdalene. All seemed to go well for a time; but at length there was a scandal about him and a girl in Abbeville, with a burst of similar scandals about his abuse of the confessional for vicious purposes. To avoid arrest, he absconded to Paris in August 1644, and thence to Bazas, where he lived under a feigned name. But the Bishop of Bazas took him up; he cleared himself to the Bishop and others, and defied his calumniators. Only for a time; for again there were scandals, and he was expelled the diocese. Going then to Toulouse, he gained the confidence of the Archbishop there, who gave him charge of a convent of nuns. In this post he developed more systematically his notions of the religious life, described as a compound of Quietism and Antinomianism, after the fashion of sects already known in France and Germany, but with sexual extravangances which, when divulged, raised an indignant storm. In November 1649, he had to abscond from Toulouse; and, after various wanderings, in which he called himself "Jean de Jesus Christ" and obtained popularity as a prophet, he came to Montauban, and there publicly abjured Roman Catholicism in October 1650. Elected minister of the Protestant church of that town in 1652, he lived there for some years in great esteem among the Protestants, but in deadly feud with the Roman Catholics. The schism was such that at last the magistrates had to banish him from the town as a disturber of the peace. Then he had found refuge in Orange; and he was in some kind of temporary Protestant pastorship in that town of south-east France when there was this communication between him and Milton.1
1: Article LABADIE in Nouvelle Biographie Générale (1859), with additional information from Article on him in the Biographie Universelle (edit. 1819), and from La Vie du Sieur Jean Labadie by Bolsec (Lyon, 1664), and some passages in Bayle's Dictionary (e.g. in Article Mamillaires). It is from the additional authorities that I learn the fact of the removal of Labadie from Montauban to Orange; the Article in the N. Biog. Gen. omits it.—I have seen two publications of Labadie at Montauban—one of 1650, entitled Declaration de Jean de L'Abadie, cydevant prestre, giving his reasons for quitting the Church of Rome; the other of 1651, entitled Lettre de J. de L'Abadie à ses amis de la Communion Romaine touchant sa Declaration.
TO JEAN LABADIE, MINISTER OF ORANGE.
"If I answer you rather late, distinguished and reverend Sir, our common friend Durie, I believe, will not refuse to let me transfer the blame of the late answer from myself to him. For, now that he has communicated to me that paper which you wished read to me, on the subject of your doings and sufferings in behalf of the Gospel, I have not deferred preparing this letter for you, to be given to the first carrier, being really anxious as to the interpretation you may put upon my long silence. I owe very great thanks meanwhile to your Du Moulin of Nismes [not far from Orange], who, by his speeches and most friendly talk concerning me, has procured me the goodwill of so many good men in those parts. And truly, though I am not ignorant that, whether from the fact that I did not, when publicly commissioned, decline the contest with an adversary of such name [Salmasius], or on account of the celebrity of the subject, or, finally, on account of my style of writing, I have become sufficiently known far and wide, yet my feeling is that I have real fame only in proportion to the good esteem I have among good men. That you also are of this way of thinking I see plainly—you who, kindled by the regard and love of Christian Truth, have borne so many labours, sustained the attacks of so many enemies, and who bravely do such actions every day as prove that, so far from seeking any fame from the bad, you do not fear rousing against you their most certain hatred and maledictions. O happy man thou! whom God, from among so many thousands, otherwise knowing and learned, has snatched singly from the very gates and jaws of Hell, and called to such an illustrious and intrepid profession of his Gospel! And at this moment I have cause for thinking that it has happened by the singular providence of God that I did not reply to you sooner. For, when I understood from your letter that, assailed and besieged as you are on all hands by bitter enemies, you were looking round, and no wonder, to see where you might, in the last extremity, should it come to that, find a suitable refuge, and that England was most to your mind, I rejoiced on more accounts than one that you had come to this conclusion,—one reason being the hope of having you here, and another the delight that you should have so high an opinion of my country; but the joy was counterbalanced by the regret that I did not then see any prospect of a becoming provision for you among us here, especially as you do not know English. Now, however, it has happened most opportunely that a certain French minister here, of great age, died a few days ago. The persons of most influence in the congregation, understanding that you are by no means safe where you are at present, are very desirous (I report this not from vague rumour, but on information from themselves) to have you chosen to the place of that minister: in fact, they invite you; they have resolved to pay the expenses of your journey; they promise that you shall have an income equal to the best of any French minister here, and that nothing shall be wanting that can contribute to your pleasant discharge of the pastoral duty among them. Wherefore, take my advice, Reverend Sir, and fly hither as soon as possible, to people who are anxious to have you, and where you will reap a harvest, not perhaps so rich in the goods of this world, but, as men like you most desire, numerous, I hope, in souls; and be assured that you will be most welcome here to all good men, and the sooner the better. Farewell.
"Westminster: April 21, 1659."
It is clear from this letter that Milton had never heard of the scandals against M. Labadie's moral character, or, if he had, utterly disbelieved them, and regarded him simply as a convert from Roman Catholicism whose passionate and aggressive Protestant fervour had brought intolerable and unjust persecution upon him in France. Durie was his informant; and, for all we can now know, Milton's judgment about Labadie may have been the right one, and the traditional French account of him to this day may be wrong. It is certainly strange, however, to find Milton befriending with so much readiness and zeal this French Protestant minister, against whom there were exactly such scandals abroad as those which he had himself believed and blazoned about Morus, for the murder of Morus's reputation over Europe, and his ruin in the French Protestant Church in particular. Nor does the reported sequel of Labadie's life, in the ordinary accounts of him, lessen the wonder.—Labadie did not come to London, as Milton had hoped. When he received Milton's letter, he was on the wing for Geneva, where he arrived in June 1659, and where he continued his preaching. Here, in the very city where Morus had once been, there still were commotions round him; and, after new wanderings in Germany, we find him at Middleburg in Holland in 1666, thus again by chance in a town where Morus had been before him. At Middleburg he seems to have attained his widest celebrity, gathering a body of admirers and important adherents, the chief of whom was "Mademoiselle Schurmann, so versed in the learned languages." At length a quarrel with M. de Wolzogue, minister of the Walloon church at Utrecht, brought Labadie into difficulties with the Walloon Synod and with the State authorities, and he migrated to Erfurt, and thence to Altona, where he died in 1674, "in the arms of Mademoiselle Schurmann," who had followed him to the last. He left a sect called The Labadists, who were strong for a time, and are perhaps not yet extinct. Among the beliefs they inherited from him are said to have been these:—(1) That God may and does deceive man; (2) That Scripture is not necessary to salvation, the immediate action of the Spirit on souls being sufficient; (3) That there ought to be no Baptism of Infants; (4) That truly spiritual believers are not bound by law and ceremonies; (5) That Sabbath-observance is unnecessary, all days being alike; (6) That the ordinary Christian Church is degenerate and decrepit. One sees here something like a French Quakerism, but with ingredients from older Anabaptism. Had Milton's letter had the intended effect, the sect might have had its home in London.1
1: Nouvelle Biographie Générale, as before.—It is to be remembered that Milton himself authorized the publication of his letter to Badiaeus with his other Latin Familiar Epistles in 1674 (see Vol. I. p. 239). By that time he must have known the whole subsequent career of Labadie and all the reports about him; and he cannot even then have thought ill of him or of Mad'lle Schurmann. To the end, he liked all bold schismatics and sectaries, if they took a forward direction.
Virtually at an end on the 22nd of April by the enforced dissolution of the Parliament, Richard's Protectorate was more visibly at an end on the 7th of May, when the Wallingford-House chiefs agreed with the Republicans in restoring the Rump. Eight days after that event Milton was called on to write two letters for the new Republican authorities. They were as follows:—
(CXLVIII.) TO CHARLES GUSTAVUS, KING OF SWEDEN, May 15, 1659:—"Most serene and most potent King, and very dear Friend: As it has pleased God, the best and all-powerful, with whom alone are all changes of Kingdoms and Commonwealths, to restore Us to our pristine authority and the supreme administration of English affairs, we have thought it good in the first place to inform your Majesty of the fact, and moreover to signify to you both our high regard for your Majesty, as a most potent Protestant prince, and also our desire to promote to the utmost of our power such a peace between you and the King of Denmark, himself likewise a very potent Protestant prince, as may not be brought about without our exertions and most willing good offices. Our pleasure therefore is that our internuncio extraordinary, Philip Meadows, be continued in our name in exactly the same employment which he has hitherto discharged with your Majesty for this Commonwealth; and to that end we, by these presents, give him the same power of making proposals and of treating and dealing with your Majesty which he had by his last commendatory letters. Whatever shall be transacted and concluded by him in our name, the same we pledge our promise, with God's good help, to confirm and ratify. May God long preserve your Majesty as a pillar and defence of the Protestant cause.—WILLIAM LENTHALL, Speaker of the Parliament of the Commonwealth of England."
(CXLIX) To FREDERICK III., KING OF DENMARK, May 15, 1659:—The counterpart of the foregoing. His Danish Majesty, addressed as "most serene King and very dear Friend" is informed by Lenthall of the change in English affairs, and of the sympathy the present English Government feels with him in his adversity. They will do their utmost to secure a peace between him and the King of Sweden; and Philip Meadows, their Envoy Extraordinary to the King of Sweden, has full powers to treat with his Danish Majesty too for that end. "God grant to your Majesty, as soon as possible, a happy and joyful outcome from all those difficulties of your affairs in which you behave so bravely and magnanimously!"