To understand fully the tremendous daring of this peroration, one must turn to the passage of Hebrew prophecy which it cites and applies to Charles Stuart. It is Jeremiah XXII. 24-30, where woe is denounced upon Coniah, Jeconiah, or Jehoiachin, the worthless King of Judah, no better than his father Jehoiakim:—"As I live, saith the Lord, though Coniah, the son of Jehoiakim, King of Judah, were the signet upon my right hand, yet would I pluck thee thence. And I will give thee into the hand of them that seek thy life, and into the hand of them whose face thou fearest, even into the hand of Nebuchadnezzar King of Babylon, and into the hand of the Chaldeans. And I will cast thee out, and thy mother that bare thee, into another country, where ye were not born; and there shall ye die. But to the land whereunto they desire to return, thither shall they not return. Is this man Coniah a despised broken idol? is he a vessel wherein is no pleasure? Wherefore are they cast out, he and his seed, and are cast into a land which they know not? O Earth, Earth, Earth, hear the word of the Lord. Thus saith the Lord: Write ye this man childless, a man that shall not prosper in his days; for no man of his seed shall prosper, sitting upon the throne of David and ruling any more in Judah."
A curious supplement to Milton's Ready and Easy Way to establish a Free Commonwealth exists in the shape of a private letter which he addressed to General Monk. It was not published at the time, and bears no date, but must have been written immediately after the publication of the pamphlet, while the Parliament of the Secluded Members and Residuary Rumpers was still sitting. Milton, it would seem, had sent Monk a copy of the pamphlet; and this private letter is nothing but a brief summary of the suggestions of the pamphlet for the General's easier reading, should he think fit. It is entitled, in our present copies, "The Present Means and Brief Delineation of a Free Commonwealth, easy to be put in practice and without delay: In a Letter to General Monk."1 The whole consists of less than three of the present pages. Believing that all endeavours must now be used "that the ensuing election be of such, as are already firm or inclinable to constitute a Free Commonwealth," Milton appeals to Monk to be himself the man to lead in these endeavours. "The speediest way," he says, "will be to call up forthwith [to London] the chief gentlemen out of every county, [and] to lay before them (as your Excellency hath already, both in your published Letters to the Army and your Declaration recited to the Members of Parliament), the danger and confusion of readmitting kingship in this land." Then let the gentlemen so charged return at once to their counties, and elect or cause to be elected, "by such at least of the people as are rightly qualified," a STANDING COUNCIL in every city and great town, all great towns henceforth to be called Cities. Let it be understood that these councils are to be permanent seats of district and local judicature and of political deliberation; but, while setting up such councils, let the gentlemen also see to the election of "the usual number of ablest knights and burgesses, engaged for a Commonwealth, to make up the PARLIAMENT, or, as it will from henceforth be better called, THE GRAND OR GENERAL COUNCIL OF THE NATION." The local or city councils having meanwhile been set up, and it having been intimated that on great occasions their assent will be required to measures proposed by the Grand Council of the nation, Milton does not anticipate that there will be much opposition "though this GRAND COUNCIL be perpetual, as in that book [his pamphlet] I proved would be best and most conformable to best examples"; but, should there be opposition, "the known expedient may at length be used of a partial rotation." This is all that Milton has to say, with one exception:—"If these gentlemen convocated refuse these fair and noble offers of immediate liberty and happy condition, no doubt there be enough in every county who will thankfully accept them, your Excellency once more declaring publicly this to be your mind, and having a faithful veteran Army so ready and glad to assist you in the prosecution thereof."—What Monk thought of Mr. Milton's Letter, if he ever took the trouble to read it, may be easily guessed. It was at this time that he was so often drunk or nearly so at the dinners given in the City, and that Sir John Greenville, on the part of Charles, was watching for an interview with him at St. James's.
1: "Published from the Manuscript" is the addition in all our present reprints. In other words, this Letter to Monk, together with the previous Letter to a Friend concerning the Ruptures of the Commonwealth, came into Toland's hands in the manner described in Note p. 617, and was also given by Toland for use in the 1698 edition of Milton's Prose Works.
Not one of Milton's pamphlets had a larger immediate circulation or provoked a more rapid fury of criticism than his Ready and Easy Way to establish a Free Commonwealth.
From the Parliament indeed the response was only indirect; but every atom of such indirect response was a dead and contemptuous negative. Though, when Milton published the pamphlet, he was entitled to assume that the compact between Monk and the Secluded Members whom he had restored guaranteed a continuance of the Commonwealth form of Government, the entire tenor of their proceedings during the five-and-twenty days to which they confined their sittings (Feb. 2l-March 16, 1659-60) was such as to undeceive him and others on that point, and to show that, though they abstained from abolishing the Commonwealth themselves, they meant to leave the succeeding full and free Parliament they had called at perfect liberty to do so. No other construction could be put upon their votes even in ecclesiastical matters. Hardly was Milton's pamphlet out when he knew that they had voted the revival of the Westminster Assembly's Confession of Faith as the standard of doctrine in the National Church (March 2), and the revival of the Solemn League and Covenant as a document of perpetual national obligation (March 5). Then followed (March 14) their vote for mapping out all England and Wales according to the strict pattern of the Scottish Presbyterian organization. But, that there might be no mistake, their votes predetermining the composition of the coming Parliament were also in the direction of the admission of Royalists and the exclusion of those that could be called Fanatics for the Republic. The engagement to be faithful to the Commonwealth without King or House of Lords was annulled (March 13); the clauses disqualifying even the active and conspicuous Royalists of the Civil Wars were far from stringent; and the very act by which the House dissolved itself contained a proviso saving the legal and constitutional rights of the old House of Lords and pointing to the restitution of the Peerage. How significant also that scene in the House on the last day of their sittings, Friday, March 16, when Mr. Crewe moved for a vote of execration on the Regicides, and poor Thomas Scott, standing up on the floor, and reckless though the words should seal his doom, declared himself to be one of the blood-stained band and claimed the fact as his highest earthly honour! What Scott did that day in the House Milton had done even more publicly a fortnight before in the daring peroration of his pamphlet. From March 16, 1659-60, Milton and Scott, whoever else, might regard themselves as in the list for the future hangman.
In the list for the future hangman! It is a strong expression, but true historically to the very letter. Read the following from a scurrilous pamphlet, of six pages in shabby print, called The Character of the Rump, which was out in London on Saturday the 17th of March, the day after the dissolution of the Parliament:—
"An ingenious person hath observed that Scott is the Rump's man Thomas; and they might have said to him, when he was so busy with the General,
"Peace, for the Lord's sake, Thomas! lest Monk take us,
And drag us out, as Hercules did Cacus.
"But John Milton is their goose-quill champion; who had need of a help-meet to establish anything, for he has a ram's head and is good only at batteries,—an old heretic both in religion and manners, that by his will would shake off his governors as he doth his wives, four in a fortnight. The sunbeams of his scandalous papers against the late King's Book is [sic] the parent that begot his late New Commonwealth; and, because he, like a parasite as he is, by flattering the then tyrannical power, hath run himself into the briars, the man will be angry if the rest of the nation will not bear him company, and suffer themselves to be decoyed into the same condition. He is so much an enemy to usual practices that I believe, when he is condemned to travel to Tyburn in a cart, he will petition for the favour to be the first man that ever was driven thither in a wheelbarrow. And now, John, you must stand close and draw in your elbows [the fancy is of Milton standing on the scaffold pinioned], that Needham, the Commonwealth didapper, may have room to stand beside you ... He [Needham] was one of the spokes of Harrington's Rota, till he was turned out for cracking. As for Harrington, he's but a demi-semi in the Rump's music, and should be good at the cymbal; for he is all for wheeling instruments, and, having a good invention, may in time find out the way to make a concert of grindstones."1
1: Pamphlet, of title and date given, in the Thomason Collection. I have mended the pointing, but nothing else.
Such was the popular verdict, in March 1660, on Milton and his last pamphlet, and all his deserts and accomplishments in the world he had lived in for one-and-fifty years. More of the like may be found on search; but I will pass to one retort on his Ready and Easy Way, of somewhat higher literary quality than the last, and which retains a certain celebrity yet.
It appeared on March 30, as a small quarto of sixteen pages, with this title: "The Censure of the Rota upon Mr. Milton's Book, entituled 'The Ready and Easie Way to Establish a Free Commonwealth.'" On the title-page is the imprint, "London, Printed by Paul Giddy, Printer to the Rota, at the sign of the Windmill in Turne-againe Lane. 1660," and also a professed extract from the minutes of the Rota Club, "Die Luna 26 Martii 1660," certified by "Trundle Wheeler, Clerk to the Rota," authorizing and ordering Mr. Harrington, as Chairman of the Club, to draw up and publish a narrative of that day's debate of the Club over Mr. Milton's pamphlet, and to transmit a copy of the same to Mr. Milton. The thing, though it has been mistaken by careless people as actually a production of Harrington's, is in reality a clever burlesque by some Royalist, in which, under the guise of an imaginary debate in the Rota over Milton's pamphlet, Milton and the Rota-men are turned into ridicule together. The mock-names on the title-page (Paul Giddy, Trundle Wheeler, &c.) are part of the burlesque; and it is well kept up in the tract itself, which takes the form of a letter gravely addressed to Milton and signed with Harrington's initials, "J. H."1