As the Restored Rumpers had already decreed that an Established Church should be kept up in England, and had gone no farther on the Tithes question than to say that Tithes must be paid, as by use and wont, until some substitute should be provided, it is not likely that, however long they had sat, Milton's views would have had much countenance from them. There were individuals among them of Milton's way of thinking on the whole; but he had probably made a mistake in fancying that he had materially improved his influence, or the chances of his notions of Church-polity, by his public re-adhesion to the Rump. In fact, the continued existence of the Rump was more precarious than he had thought. In August 1659, while his pamphlet was in circulation, Lambert was away in the north, suppressing the Cheshire Insurrection of Sir George Booth; in the next month discontent with the Rumpers and their rule was rife in Lambert's victorious northern Brigade; and in the beginning of October London was again in agitation with the rupture of the hasty alliance that had been patched up between the Republicans and the Wallingford-House Council of Army Officers. It was on the 12th of October that the Rump defied the Army by cashiering Lambert, Desborough, Berry, and six other officers; and on the 13th Lambert retaliated by his coup d'état, filling the streets with his soldiery, catching the Rumpers one by one as they went to the House, and informing them that it was the will of the Army that they should sit no more. Thus had begun that "Second Stage of the Anarchy" which we have called The Wallingford-House Interruption.
Of Milton's thoughts over the change effected by Lambert's coup d'état we have an authentic record in a letter of his, dated "October 20, 1659" (i.e. just a week after the coup d'état), and addressed to some friend with whom he had been conversing on the previous night. It appears in his works now with the title "A Letter to a Friend, concerning the Ruptures of the Commonwealth: Published from the Manuscript."1 Who the Friend was does not appear; but the words of the Letter imply that he was some one very near the centre of affairs. "Sir," it begins, "upon the sad and serious discourse which we fell into last night, concerning these dangerous ruptures of the Commonwealth, scarce yet in her infancy, which cannot be without some inward flaw in her bowels, I began to consider more intensely thereon than hitherto I have been wont,—resigning myself [i.e. having hitherto resigned myself] to the wisdom and care of those who had the government, and not finding that either God or the Public required more of me than my prayers for those that govern. And, since you have not only stirred up my thoughts by acquainting me with the state of affairs more inwardly than I knew before, but also have desired me to set down my opinion thereof, trusting to your ingenuity, I shall give you freely my apprehension, both of our present evils, and what expedients, if God in mercy regard us, may remove them." At the close of the Letter he says, "You have the sum of my present thoughts, as much as I understand of these affairs, freely imparted, at your request and the persuasion you wrought in me that I might chance hereby to be some way serviceable to the Commonwealth in a time when all ought to be endeavouring what good they can, whether much or but little. With this you may do what you please. Put out, put in, communicate or suppress: you offend not me, who only have obeyed your opinion that, in doing what I have done, I might happen to offer something which might be of some use in this great time of need. However, I have not been wanting to the opportunity which you presented before me of showing the readiness which I have, in the midst of my unfitness, to whatever may be required of me as a public duty." The expressions might suggest that the friend who had been talking with Milton was Vane or some one else of those Councillors of the Rump who still sat on at Whitehall consulting with the Wallingford-House Chiefs as to the form of Government to be set up instead of the Rump (ante pp. 494-495). It may, however, have been some lesser personage, such as Meadows, back from the Baltic this very month. In any case, the letter was meant to be shown about, if not printed. It was, in fact, Milton's contribution, at a friend's request, to the deliberations going on at Whitehall.
1: It was first published in the so-called Amsterdam Edition of Milton's Prose Works (1698); and Toland, who gave it to the publishers of that edition, informs us that it had been communicated to him "by a worthy friend, who, a little after the author's death, had it from his nephew"—i.e. from Phillips.
He does not conceal his strong disapprobation of Lambert's coup d'état. Indeed he takes the opportunity of declaring, even more strongly than he had done two months before, how heartily he had welcomed the restoration of the Rump. Thus:—
"I will begin with telling you how I was overjoyed when I heard that the Army, under the working of God's holy Spirit, as I thought, and still hope well, had been so far wrought to Christian humility and self-denial as to confess in public their backsliding from the good Old Cause, and to show the fruits of their repentance in the righteousness of their restoring the old famous Parliament which they had without just authority dissolved: I call it the famous Parliament, though not the harmless, since none well-affected but will confess they have deserved much more of these nations than they have undeserved. And I persuade me that God was pleased with their restitution, signing it as He did with such a signal victory when so great a part of the nation were desperately conspired to call back again their Egyptian bondage [Lambert's victory over Sir George Booth]. So much the more it now amazes me that they whose lips were yet scarce closed from giving thanks for that great deliverance should be now relapsing, and so soon again backsliding into the same fault, which they confessed so lately and so solemnly to God and the world, and more lately punished in those Cheshire Rebels,—that they should now dissolve that Parliament which they themselves re-established, and acknowledged for their Supreme Power in their other day's Humble Representation: and all this for no apparent cause of public concernment to the Church or Commonwealth, but only for discommissioning nine great officers in the Army; which had not been done, as is reported, but upon notice of their intentions against the Parliament. I presume not to give my censure on this action,—not knowing, as yet I do not, the bottom of it. I speak only what it appears to us without doors till better cause be declared, and I am sure to all other nations,—most illegal and scandalous, I fear me barbarous, or rather scarce to be exampled among any Barbarians, that a paid Army should, for no other cause, thus subdue the Supreme Power that set them up. This, I say, other nations will judge to the sad dishonour of that Army, lately so renowned for the civilest and best-ordered in the world, and by us here at home for the most conscientious. Certainly, if the great officers and soldiers of the Holland, French, or Venetian forces should thus sit in council and write from garrison to garrison against their superiors, they might as easily reduce the King of France, or Duke of Venice, and put the United Provinces in like disorder and confusion."
He adds more in the same strain, and calls upon the Army, as one "jealous of their honour," to "manifest and publish with all speed some better cause of these their late actions than hath hitherto appeared, and to find out the Achan amongst them whose close ambition in all likelihood abuses their honest natures against their meaning to these disorders,"—in other words, to disown and denounce Lambert. But, having thus delivered his conscience on the subject of the second dismission of the Rump, he declares farther complaint to be useless, and proceeds to inquire what is now to be done.
"Being now in anarchy, without a counselling and governing power, and the Army, I suppose, finding themselves insufficient to discharge at once both military and civil affairs, the first thing to be found out with all speed, without which no Commonwealth can subsist, must be a SENATE or GENERAL COUNCIL OF STATE, in whom must be the power first to preserve the public peace, next the commerce with foreign nations, and lastly to raise moneys for the management of these affairs. This must either be the [Rump] Parliament readmitted to sit, or a Council of State allowed of by the Army, since they only now have the power. The terms to be stood on are Liberty of Conscience to all professing Scripture to be the Rule of their Faith and Worship and the Abjuration of a Single Person. If the [Rump] Parliament be again thought on, to salve honour on both sides, the well-affected party of the City and the Congregated Churches may be induced to mediate by public addresses and brotherly beseechings; which, if there be that saintship among us which is talked of, ought to be of highest and undeniable persuasion to reconcilement. If the Parliament be thought well dissolved, as not complying fully to grant Liberty of Conscience, and the necessary consequence thereof, the Removal of a forced Maintenance from Ministers [Milton's own sole dissatisfaction with the Restored Rump], then must the Army forthwith choose a Council of State, whereof as many to be of the Parliament as are undoubtedly affected to these two conditions proposed. That which I conceive only able to cement and unite the Army either to the Parliament recalled or this chosen Council must be a mutual League and Oath, private or public, not to desert one another till death: that is to say that the Army be kept up and all these Officers in their places during life, and so likewise the Parliament or Councillors of State; which will be no way unjust, considering their known merits on either side, in Council or in Field, unless any be found false to any of these two principles, or otherwise personally criminous in the judgment of both parties. If such a union as this be not accepted on the Army's part, be confident there is a Single Person underneath. That the Army be upheld the necessity of our affairs and factions will [at any rate] constrain long enough perhaps to content the longest liver in the Army. And whether the Civil Government be an annual Democracy or a perpetual Aristocracy is not to me a consideration for the extremities wherein we are, and the hazard of our safety from our common enemy, gaping at present to devour us. That it be not an Oligarchy, or the Faction of a few, may be easily prevented by the numbers of their own choosing who may be found infallibly constant to those two conditions forenamed—full Liberty of Conscience and the Abjuration of Monarchy proposed; and the well-ordered Committees of their faithfullest adherents in every county may give this Government the resemblance and effects of a perfect Democracy. As for the Reformation of Laws and the Places of Judicature, whether to be here, as at present, or in every county, as hath been long aimed at, and many such proposals tending no doubt to public good, they may be considered in due time, when we are past these pernicious pangs, in a hopeful way of health and firm constitution. But, unless these things which I have above proposed, one way or other, be once settled, in my fear (which God avert!), we instantly ruin, or at best become the servants of one or other Single Person, the secret author and fomenter of these disturbances."
There is considerable boldness in these proposals of Milton, and yet a cast of practicality which is unusual with him. They prove again, if new proof were needed, that he was not a Republican of the conventional sort. He glances, indeed, at the possibility of an "Annual Democracy," i.e. a future succession of annual Parliaments, or at least of annual Plebiscites for electing the Government. But he rather dismisses that possibility from his calculations; and moreover, even had he entertained it farther, we know that the Parliaments or Plebiscites he would have allowed would not have been "full and free," but only guarded representations of the "well-affected" of the community,—to wit, the Commonwealth's-men. But the Constitution to which he looks forward with most confidence, and which he ventures to think might answer all the purposes of a perfect democracy, is one that should consist of two perpetual or life aristocracies at the centre,—one a civil aristocracy in the form of a largish Council of State, the other a military aristocracy composed of the great Army Officers,—these two aristocracies to be pledged to each other by oath, and sworn also to the two great principles of Liberty of Conscience and resistance to any attempt at Single Person sovereignty. What communication between the Central Government so constituted and the body of the People might be necessary for the free play of opinion might be sufficiently kept up, he hints, by the machinery of County Committees. The entire scheme may seem strange to those whose theory of a Republic refuses the very imagination of an aristocracy or of perpetuity of power in the same hands; but both, notions, and especially that of perpetuity of power in the same hands, had been growing on Milton, and were not inconsistent with his theory of a Republic. Nor was his present scheme, with all its strangeness, the least practical of the many "models" that theorists were putting forth. It would, doubtless, have failed in the trial,—for the conception of a perpetual Civil Council at Whitehall always in harmony with a perpetual Military Council in Wallingford House presupposed moral conditions in both bodies less likely to be forthcoming in themselves than in Milton's thoughts about them. But everything else would have failed equally, and some of the "models" perhaps more speedily. Since the subversion of Richard's Protectorate by Fleetwood and Desborough there had been no possible stop-gap against the return of the Stuarts.
The consulting authorities at Whitehall and Wallingford House did adopt a course having some semblance of that suggested by Milton. Before the 25th of October, or within six days after the date of Milton's letter, the relics of the Council of State of the Rump agreed to be transformed, with additions nominated by the Officers, into the new Supreme Executive called The Committee of Safety; and, as The Wallingford-House Council of Officers still continued to sit in the close vicinity of this new Council at Whitehall, the Government was then vested, in fact, in the two aristocracies, with Fleetwood, Lambert, Desborough, Berry, and others, as members of both, and connecting links between them. But the new Committee of Safety was not such a Senate or Council as Milton had imagined. For one thing, it consisted but of twenty-three persons (see the list ante p. 494), whereas Milton would have probably liked to see a Council of twice that size or even larger. For another, it was not composed of persons perfectly sound on Milton's two proposed fundamentals of Liberty of Conscience and Abjuration of any Single Person. Vane, to be sure, was on the Committee, and a host in himself for both principles; and there were others, such as Salway and Ludlow, that would not flinch on either. But Whitlocke, Sydenham, and the majority, were but moderately for Liberty of Conscience, and certainly utterly against that Miltonic interpretation of it which implied Church-disestablishment, while one at least, the Scottish Johnstone of Warriston, was positively against Liberty of Conscience beyond very narrow Presbyterian limits. Nor, though probably all would have assented at that time to an oath abjuring Charles Stuart, were they all without taint of the Single Person heresy in other forms. Some of them, including Whitlocke and Berry, would have liked to restore Richard; and Fleetwood and Lambert were not wrongly suspected of seeing the most desirable Single Person every morning in the looking-glass. Milton's former regard for Fleetwood must have suffered considerably by recent events; and he thought of Lambert as the very "Achan" to be dreaded. But, farther, even had the two aristocracies been of perfectly satisfactory composition, they had abandoned that idea of their own permanence which Milton had made all but essential. They had agreed that their chief work should consist in shaping out a fit constitution for the Commonwealth, and that the Committee of Safety should continue in power only till that should be done and the new Constitution should come into operation.
Such as it was, the new Government of the Wallingford-House Interruption had no objection to retaining Mr. Milton in the Latin Secretaryship if he cared to keep it. That he had held the post throughout the whole of the Government of the Restored Rump (though all but in sinecure, as we must conclude from the cessation of the series of his Latin Letters in the preceding May) appears from a very interesting document in the Record Office. The Council of State of the Rump, it is to be remembered, had not vanished with the Rump itself on Oct. 13, but had sat on for twelve days more, though with its number reduced by the secession of Hasilrig, Scott, Neville, and other very vehement Rumpers,—the object being to maintain the continuity of the public business and to make the most amicable arrangement possible with the Army-officers. That object having been accomplished by the institution, of the new Committee of Safety, the Council of the Rump, before demitting its powers to this new body, which was to meet on the 28th of October, held its own last meeting at Whitehall on the 25th. At such a last meeting it was but business-like to clear off all debts due by the Council; and, accordingly, this was done by the issue of the following comprehensive money-warrant, signed by Whitlocke as President, and by four others of those present.