What a blast this to pursue poor Morus over the Continent! It would seem as if, in expectation of it, he had put himself as far as he could out of hearing. When Milton's Pro Se Defensio appeared, Morus was no longer in France, but in Italy; and it was not till May, 1656, or nine months after, that he reappeared in Holland. Then, as he had outrun by more than a year his formal leave of absence from his Amsterdam professorship, granted Dec, 20, 1654, there seem to have been strict inquiries as to the causes of his long absence. It was explained that he had fallen ill at Florence; it also came out that he had had a very distinguished reception from the Grand Duke of Tuscany, and that the Venetian Senate had presented him with a chain of gold for a Latin poem he had written on a recent defeat of the Turks at sea by the Venetian navy; and, what was most to the point, it appeared, by addresses of his own at Amsterdam, and at a meeting of the Walloon Synod at Leyden, that he had found in Italy great opportunities "for advancing the glory of God by the preaching of the Gospel." We know independently that, while in Italy, he had made acquaintance with some of those wits and scholars among whom Milton had moved so delightfully in his visit of 1638-9, and among whom Heinsius had been back in 1652-3, to find that they still remembered Milton, and could talk about him (Vol. IV. pp. 475-476); and it is even startling to have evidence from Moms himself that he exchanged especial compliments at Rome with Milton's old friend Holstenius, the Vatican librarian, and became so very intimate at Florence with Milton's beloved Carlo Dati as to receive from Dati the most affectionate attention and nursing through his illness. And so, all seeming fully satisfied at Amsterdam, he resumed his duties in the Amsterdam School. Not to be long at peace, however. Hardly had he returned when, either on the old charges, now so terrifically reblazoned through Holland by Milton's perseverance for his ruin, or on new charges arising from new incidents, he and the Walloon church-authorities were again at feud. In this uncomfortable state we must leave him for the present.1
1: Bayle's Dict, Art. Morus, and Bruce's Life of Morus, pp. 142-145 and 204-205. This last book is a curiosity. One hardly sees why the life and character of Morus should have so fascinated the Rev. Archibald Bruce, who was minister of the Associate Congregation at Whitburn, in Linlithgowshire, from 1768 to 1816, and Professor of Theology there for the Associate Presbyterian Synod for nearly all that time. He was a worthy and learned man, for whom Dr. McCrie, the author of the Life of John Knox, and of the same Presbyterian denomination, entertained a more "profound veneration" than for any other man on earth (see Life of McCrie by his son, edit. 1840, pp. 52-57). He was "a Whig of the Old School," with liberal political opinions in the main, but strongly opposed to Roman Catholic emancipation; which brought him into connexion with Lord George Gordon, of the "No Popery Riots" of 1780. He wrote many books and pamphlets, and kept a printer at Whitburn for his own use. He may have been drawn to Morus by his interest in the history of Presbyterianism abroad, especially as Morus was of Scottish parentage, or by his interest in the proceedings of Presbyterian Church Courts in such cases of scandal as that of Morus. At any rate, he defends Morus throughout most resolutely, and with a good deal of scholarly painstaking. Milton, on the other hand, he thoroughly dislikes, and represents as a most malicious and un-Christian man, consciously untruthful, and of most lax theology to boot. To be sure, he was the author of Paradise Lost; but that much-praised poem had serious religious defects too! There is something actually refreshing in the naïveté and courage with which the sturdy Professor of the Associate Synod propounds his own dissent from the common Milton-worship.—The authority for Morus's acquaintanceship in Italy with Holstenius and Dati is the collection of his Latin Poems, a thin quarto, published at Paris in 1669, under the title of Alexandri Mori Poemata. It contains his poem, a longish one in Hexameters, on the victory of the Venetians over the Turks; also verses to the Grand-Duke of Tuscany; also obituary elegiacs to Diodati of Geneva, and several pieces to or on Salmasius. One piece, in elegiacs, is addressed "Ad Franciscum Turretinum, raræ indolis ac summæ spei juvenem." This Francis Turretin (so addressed, I suppose, long ago, when he and Morus were in Geneva together) was, if I mistake not, the famous Turretin of Milton's letter about Morus to Ezekiel Spanheim (ante pp. 173-176). Among the other pieces are one to Holstenius and one to Carlo Dati. In the first Morus, speaking of his introduction to Holstenius and to the Vatican library together, says he does not know which seemed to him the greater library. The poem to Dati is of considerable length, in Hexameters, and entitled "Ægri Somnium: ad præstantem virum Carolum Dati" ("An Invalid's Dream: To the excellent Carlo Dati"). It represents Morus as very ill in Florence and thinking himself dying. Should he die in Florence and be buried there, he would have a poetic inscription over his grave to the effect that while alive he also had cultivated the Muses, and begging the passer-by to remember his name ("Qui legis hæc obiter, Morique morique memento"). How kind Dati had been to him—Dati, "than whom there is not a better man, the beloved of all the sister Muses, the ornament of his country, having the reputation of being all but unique in Florence for learning in the vanished arts, siren at once in Tuscan, Latin, and Greek! ... This Dati soothed my fever-fits with the music of his liquid singing, and sat by my bed-side, and spoke words of sweetness, which inhere yet in my very marrow." And so Milton's Italian friend of friends (Vol. III. pp. 551-654 and 680-683) had been charitable to poor Morus, whom he knew to be a fugitive from Milton's wrath, and who could name Milton, if at all, only with tears and cursing.
It is now high time, however, to answer a question which must have suggested itself again and again in the course of our narrative of the Milton and Morus controversy. Who was the real author of the book for which Morus had been so dreadfully punished, and what was the real amount of Morus's responsibility in it?
That Milton's original belief on this subject had been shaken has been already evident. He had written his Defensio Secunda, in firm reliance on the universal report that Morus was the one proper author of the Regii Sanguinis Clamor, or that it had been concocted between him and Salmasius; and, though Morus's denial of the authorship had been formally conveyed to him before the Defensio Secunda left the press, he had let it go forth as it was, in the conviction that he was still not wrong in the main. The more express and reiterated denials of Morus in the Fides Publica, however, with the references there to another person as the real author, though Morus was not at liberty to divulge his name, had produced an effect. The authorship of the Regii Sanguinis Clamor was then indeed a secondary question, inasmuch as in the Fides Publica Morus had interposed himself personally,—not only in self-defence, but also for counter-attack on Milton. Still, as the Fides Publica would never have been written had not Milton assumed Morus to be the author of the Regii Sanguinis Clamor and dragged him before the world solely on that account, Milton had necessarily, in replying to the Fides Publica, adverted to the secondary question. His assertion now, i.e, in the Pro Se Defensio, was a modified one. It was that, whatever facts had yet to be revealed respecting the authorship of the four or five parts of the compound book severally, he yet knew for certain that Morus had been the editor of the whole book, the corrector of the press for the whole, the busy and ostentatious agent in the circulation of early copies, and the writer at least of the Dedicatory Preface to Charles II., put forth in Ulac's name. The question for us now is how far this modified assertion of Milton was correct.
Almost to a tittle, it was. That Morus was the editor of the book, the corrector of the press, and the active agent in the circulation of early copies, may be taken as established by the documentary proofs furnished by Milton, and is corroborated by independent evidence known to ourselves long ago (Vol. IV. pp. 459-465). But was he also partially the author? Here too Milton's evidence may be taken as conclusive, so far as respects the Dedicatory Epistle to Charles II. That Epistle, with its enormous praises of Salmasius, and its extremely malignant notice of Milton, was undoubtedly by Morus, for copies of it signed by himself were still extant. So far, therefore, Milton was right in saying that Morus's denial of the authorship of the Regii Sanguinis Clamor was an equivocation, resting on a tacit distinction between the body of the book and the additional or editorial matter. In several passages Morus himself had betrayed this equivocation, but in none so remarkably as in a sentence to the peculiar phrasing of which we called attention in quoting it (ante p. 159). Protesting that he had not so much as known the fact of Milton's blindness at the time of the publication of the Regii Sanguinis Clamor, and therefore could not have been guilty of the heartless allusion to it in the Dedicatory Epistle, he there said, "If anything occurred to me that might seem to look that way, I referred to the mind,"—a phrase which it is difficult to construe otherwise than as an admission that he had written the Dedicatory Epistle, but had employed the familiar quotation there ("monstrum horrendum, informe, ingens, cui lumen ademptum") only metaphorically. All in all, then, the authorship of the Dedicatory Epistle, as well as the editorship and adoption of the whole anonymous book, is fastened upon Morus. With this amount of responsibility fastened upon him, however, Morus must be dismissed, and another person brought to the bar. He was the Rev. DR. PETER DU MOULIN the younger.
The Du Moulins were a French family, well known in England. The father, Dr. Peter Du Moulin the elder (called Molinæus in Latin), was a French Protestant theologian of great celebrity. He had resided for a good while in England in the reign of James I., officiating as French minister in London, and in much credit with the King and others; but, on the death of James, he had returned to France. At our present date he was still alive at the age of eighty-seven, and still not so much out of the world but that people in different countries continued to think of him as a contemporary and to quote his writings. There are references to him, far from disrespectful, in one of Milton's Anti-Episcopal Pamphlets in reply to Bishop Hall.1 Two of his sons, both born in France, had settled permanently in England, and had become passionately interested in English public affairs, though in very different directions.—The younger of these, LEWIS DU MOULIN, born 1606, having taken the degree of Doctor of Physic at Leyden, had come to England when but a young man, and, after having been incorporated in the same degree at Cambridge (1684), had been in medical practice in London. At the beginning of the Long Parliament, he had taken the Parliamentarian side, and had written, under the name of "Irenæus Philalethes," two Latin pamphlets against Bishop Hall's Episcopacy by Divine Right—pamphlets very much in the same vein of root-and-branch Church Reform as those of the Smectymnuans and Milton at the same time. Since then, still adhering to the Parliament through the Civil War, he had become well known as an Independent—much, it is said, to the chagrin of his old father, who was a Presbyterian, with leanings to moderate Episcopacy; and in 1647, in the Parliamentary visitation of the University of Oxford, he had been rewarded with the Camden Professorship of History in that University. He had been made M.D. of Oxford in 1649. At least three publications had come from his pen since his appointment to the Professorship, one of them a Translation into Latin (1650) of the first chapter of Milton's Eikonoklastes. From this we should infer, what is independently likely, that he was acquainted with Milton personally.2—Very different from the Independent and Commonwealth's man Lewis Du Monlin. M.D. and History Professor of Oxford, was his elder brother PETER DU MOULIN, D.D. Born in 1600, he had been educated, like his brother, at Leyden, and had taken his D.D. degree there. He is first heard of in England in 1640, when he was incorporated in the same degree at Cambridge; and at the beginning of the Civil War he was so far a naturalised Englishman as to be Rector of Wheldrake, near York. From that time, though a zealous Calvinist theologically, he was as intensely Royalist and Episcopalian as his brother was Parliamentarian and Independent. So we learn most distinctly from a brief MS. sketch of his life through the Civil Wars and the Commonwealth, written by himself after the Restoration, for insertion into a copy of the second edition of one of his books, of date 1660, presented by him to the library of Canterbury Cathedral. "Our gracious King and now glorious Martyr, Charles the First, he there says, finding that his rebellious subjects, not content to make war against him in his kingdom, assaulted him with another war out of his kingdom with their tongues and pens, he set out a Declaration to invite all his loving subjects and friends that could use the tongues of the neighbouring states to represent with their pens the justice of his cause, especially to Protestant Churches abroad. That Declaration smote my heart, as particularly addressed to me; and I took it as a command laid upon me by God himself. Whereupon I made a solemn vow to God that, as far as Latin and French could go in the world, I would make the justice of the King's and the Church's cause to be known, especially to the Protestants of France and the Low Countries, whom the King's enemies did chiefly labour to seduce and misinform. To pay my vow, I first made this book" [entitled originally "Apologie de la Religion Reformée, et de la Monarchie et de I'Église d'Angleterre, contre les Calomnies de la Ligue Rebelle de quelques Anglois et Écossois"; but in an imperfect English translation the title was afterwards changed into "History of the Presbyterians", and in the second French edition, on a copy of which Du Moulin was now writing, it became "Histoire des Nouveaux Presbytériens, Anglois et Écossois">[—which was begun "at York, during the siege [i.e. June 1644, just before Marston Moor], in a room whose chimney was beaten down by the cannon while I was at my work; and, after the siege and my expulsion from my Rectory at Wheldrake, it was finished in an underground cellar, where I lay hid to avoid warrants that were out against me from committees to apprehend me and carry me prisoner to Hull. Having finished the book, I sent it to be printed in Holland by the means of an officer of the Master of the Posts at London, Mr. Pompeo Calandrini, who was doing great and good services to the King in that place. But, the King being dead, and the face of public businesses altered, I sent for my MS. out of Holland, and reformed it for the new King's service. And it was printed, but very negligently, by Samuel Browne at the Hague [1649?] ... Much about the same time I set out my Latin Poem, Ecclesiæ Gemitus ('Groans of the Church'), with, a long Epistle to all Christians in the defence of the King and the Church of England; and, two years after [1652], Clamor Regii Sanguinis ad Coelum. God blessed these books, and gave them the intended effect, the disabusing of many misinformed persons. And it was so well resented by his Majesty, then at Breda, that, being showed my sister Mary among a great company of ladies, he brake the crowd to salute her, and tell her that he was very sensible of his obligations to her brother, and that, if ever God settled him in his kingdom, he would make him know that he was a grateful prince." Here, then, in Dr. Peter Du Moulin's own hand, though not till after the Restoration, we have the Regii Sanguinis Clamor claimed as his, with the information that it was one of a series of books written by him with the special design of maintaining the cause of Charles II. and discrediting the Commonwealth among Continental Protestants.3
1: See close of Animadversions on the Remonstrant's Defence.
2: Wood's Fasti, II. 125-126; Whitlocke, II. 290. The writings of Lewis Du Moulin I have here mentioned are known to me only by the titles and descriptions given by Wood and his annotator Dr. Bliss.
3: Wood's Fasti, II. 195; and Gentleman's Magazine for 1773, pp. 369-370. In the last is given the autobiographic sketch of Du Moulin, transcribed from the copy of his Histoire des Nouveaux Presbytériens (edit. 1660) in the Canterbury Library.—The Mary du Moulin, the sister of Peter and Lewis, mentioned in the autobiographic sketch, died at the Hague in Feb. 1699, having, like most of the Du Moulins, attained a great age. The father, Dr. Peter the elder, died in 1658 at the age of ninety; Lewis died in 1683 at the age of seventy-seven; and Peter the younger, of the Regii Sanguinis Clamor, died in 1684 at the age of eighty-four.—The reader will have noted the Pompeo Calandrini mentioned as an official in the London Post Office in the time of the Civil War, and as secretly aiding Charles I. in his correspondence. He was, doubtless, of the Italian-Genevese family of Calandrinis already mentoned, ante pp. 172-173 and footnote.
Yet farther proof on the subject, also from Dr. Peter's own hand. In the Library of Canterbury Cathedral there is, or was, his own copy of the original edition of the Regii Sanguinis Clamor; and in that copy the preliminary Dedicatory Epistle in Ulac's name to Charles II. is marked for deletion, and has these words prefixed to it in Du Moulin's hand; "Epistola, quam aiunt esse Alexandri Mori, quæ mihi valde non probatur" ("Epistle which they say is by Alexander Morus, and which is not greatly to my taste"),1 All the rest, therefore, was his own. But, to remove all possible doubt, we have the still more complete and exact information furnished by him in 1670, Milton then still alive and in the first fame of his Paradise Lost. In that year there appeared from the Cambridge University Press a volume entitled Petri Molinæi P. F. [Greek: Parerga]: Poematum Libelli Tres. It was a collection of Dr. Peter Du Moulin's Latin Poems, written at various times of his life, and now arranged by him in three divisions, separately title-paged, entitled respectively "Hymns to the Apostles' Creed," "Groans of the Church" (Ecclesiæ Gemitus), and "Varieties." In the second division were reprinted the two Latin Poems that had originally formed part of the Regii Sanguinis Clamor, with their full titles as at first: to wit, the "Eucharistic Ode," to the great Salmasius for his Defensio Regia, and the set of scurrilous Iambics "To the Bestial Blackguard John Milton, Parricide and Advocate of the Parricide." With reference to the last there are several explanations for the reader in Latin prose at different points in the volume. At one place the reader is assured that, though the Iambics against Milton, and some other things in the volume, may seem savage, zeal for Religion and the Church, in their hour of sore trial, had been a sufficient motive for writing them, and they must not be taken as indicating the private character of the author, as known well enough to his friends. At another place (pp. 141-2 of the volume) there is, by way of afterthought or extension, a larger and more express statement about the Iambics against Milton, which must here be translated in full: "Into what danger I was thrown," says Du Moulin, "by the first appearance of this Poem in the Clamor Regii Sanguinis would not seem to me worthy of public notice now, were it not that the miracle of divine protection by which I was kept safe is most worthy of the common admiration of the good and the praise of the Supreme Deliverer. I had sent my manuscript sheets to the great Salmasius, who entrusted them to the care of that most learned man, Alexander Morus. This Morus delivered them to the printer, and prefixed to them an Epistle to the King, in the Printer's name, exceedingly eloquent and full of good matter. When that care of Morus over the business of printing the book had become known to Milton through the spies of the Regicides in Holland, Milton held it as an ascertained fact that Morus was the author of the Clamor; whence that most virulent book of Milton's against Morus, entitled Defensio Secunda pro Populo Anglicano. It had the effect, moreover, of making enemies for Morus in Holland; for at that time the English Tyrants were very much feared in foreign parts. Meanwhile I looked on in silence, and not without a soft chuckle, at seeing my bantling laid at another man's door, and the blind and furious Milton fighting and slashing the air, like the hoodwinked horse-combatants in the old circus, not knowing by whom he was struck and whom he struck in return. But Morus, unable to stand out against so much ill-will, began to cool in the King's cause, and gave Milton to know who the author of the Clamor really was (Clamoris authorem Miltono indicavit). For, in fact, in his Reply to Milton's attack he produced two witnesses, of the highest credit among the rebels, who might have well known the author, and could divulge him on being asked. Thus over me and my head there hung the most certain destruction. But that great Guardian of Justice, to whom I had willingly devoted both my labour and my life, wrought out my safety through Milton's own pride, as it is customary with His Wisdom to bring good out of evil, and light out of darkness. For Milton, who had gone full tilt at Morus with his canine eloquence, and who had made it almost the sole object of his Defensio Secunda to cut up the life and reputation of Morus, never could be brought to confess that he had been so grossly mistaken: fearing, I suppose, that the public would make fun of his blindness, and that grammar-school boys would compare him to that blind Catullus in Juvenal who, meaning to praise the fish presented to Domitian,