2: Whitlocke, from his interest in Swedish affairs, had taken ample notes of the negotiations with Count Bundt; and his story of them is unusually minute. One observes that more than once in the course of it he dwells on the fact that, though employed by the Protector in this business, and taking the lead in it, he was still not one of the Council.
The excuse of the Commissioners to Count Bundt for having sent the Articles to Milton for translation was that "several other servants of the Council, fit for that employment, were then absent." They mast have referred, in particular, to Mr. Philip Meadows, the Latin Secretary in Ordinary. He had, we find, taken some part in the negotiation in its earlier stage;1 but, before it had proceeded far, he had been selected for a service which took him out of England. In December 1655 it had been resolved to send a special agent to Portugal; and on the 19th of February, 1655-6, at a Council meeting at which Cromwell himself was present, Meadows, thought of from the first, was formally nominated as the fit person. It was a great promotion for Meadows; for, whereas his salary hitherto in the Latin Secretaryship had been £200 a year, his allowance for the Portuguese agency was to be £800 a year or more. On the 21st of February he had £300 advanced to him for his outfit; on the 28th he was voted £100, being for two quarters of his Secretarial salary due to him, with £50 more for the quarter then current but not completed; and within a few days afterwards he was on his way to Lisbon.2 His departure, I should say—preceded perhaps by a week or two of cessation from office duty in preparation for it—was the real cause of the re-employment of Milton at this time in such routine work as we have seen him engaged in. All or most of his former letters for the Protector, it may have been noticed, e.g. those on the Piedmontese business, had been on important occasions, such as might justify resort to the Latin Secretary Extraordinary; but in the batch written since Dec. 1655, when Meadows's Portuguese mission had been resolved on, the ordinary and the extraordinary come together, and Milton, in writing letters about ships, as well as in translating draft articles, does work that would have been done by Meadows. And this arrangement, we may add, was to continue henceforth. For, despite the sneers of Count Bundt as to the poverty of the Protector's official staff, the Protector and Council, we shall find, were in no hurry to fill up the place left vacant by Meadows, but were quite satisfied that Mr. Milton should go on doing his best alone, with Thurloe to instruct him, and with the help of such underlings in Latin as Thurloe could put at his disposal. My belief is that Milton was pleased at this trust in his renewed ability for ordinary business.
1: Whitlocke, IV. 218; where it is mentioned that in Dec. 1655 Meadows communicated with Whitlocke on the subject of the Treaty by Thurloe's orders.
2: Council Order Books of dates. It is curious that Whitlocke, noting the new appointment of Meadows, under March 1655-6, enters it thus: "Mr. Meadows was going for Denmark, agent for the Protector." Meadows did go to Denmark, but not till a good while afterwards; and the blunder of Denmark at this date for Portugal is one of the many proofs that Whitlocke's memorials are not all strictly contemporary, but often combinations of reminiscences and afterthoughts with the materials of an actual diary.
Among the matters that occupied the attention of the Protector's Government about this time was the state of Popular Literature.
It is a fact, easily explained by the laws of human nature, and capable of being proved statistically, that since the strong government of Cromwell had come in, and something like calm and leisure had become possible, there had been a return of people's fancies to the lighter Muses. Nothing strikes one more, in turning over the Registers of the old London Book-trade, than the steady increase through the Protectorate of the proportion of books of secular and general interest to those of controversy and theology. One feels oneself still in the age of Puritanism, it is true, but as if past the densest and most stringent years of Puritanism and coming once more into a freer and merrier air. Poems, romances, books of humour, ballads and songs, reprints of Elizabethan tragedies and comedies, reprints of such pieces as Shakespeare's Venus and Adonis, collections of facetious extracts from the wits and poets of the reigns of James and Charles I., are now not uncommon. Humphrey Moseley, Milton's publisher of 1645, faithful to his old trade-instinct for poetry and the finer literature generally, was still at the head of the publishers in that line; but Henry Herringman, who had published Lord Broghill's Parthenissa, had begun to rival Moseley, and there were other caterers of amusing and humorous books. Publishers imply authors; and so in the London of the Protectorate, apart from stray survivors from among the wits of King Charles's reign, there were men of a younger sort, bred amid the more recent Puritan conditions, but with literary zests that were Bohemian rather than Puritan, Among these, as we have hinted, and as we may now state more distinctly, were Milton's nephews, Edward and John Phillips.1
1: My notes from the Stationers' Registers, from 1652 to 1656.
Such Popular Literature as we have described had been left perfectly free. Indeed Censorship or Licensing of books generally, as distinct from newspapers, had all but ceased. Since Bradshaw's Press-Act of 1649, it had been rather rare for an author or bookseller to take the trouble, in the case of a non-political book, to procure the imprimatur of any official licenser in addition to the ordinary trade-registration; and in this, as an established custom, Cromwell's Government had acquiesced. Only in one particular, apart from politics, was there any disposition to interfere with the liberty of printing. This was where popular wit, humour, or poetry might pass into the ribald, profane, or indecent. Vigilance against open immorality had from the first appeared to Cromwell one of the chief duties of his Government; and he seems to have been unusually attentive to this duty in 1655-6, when he had just put the country under the military police of his Major-Generals and their subordinates. Then it is that we hear most of the suppressing of horse-races and the like, and that we are least surprised at encountering such a piece of information as that "players were taken in Newcastle and whipped for rogues." Now, though by this time there had already, by previous care on the part of Government, been a considerable cleansing of the Popular Literature of London, yet something or other in the state of the book-world about 1655-6 seems to have occasioned new and more special interference. I believe it to have been the increased frequency of ballads, facetiæ, and reprints, of higher literary character than the coarse pamphlets that had been suppressed, but objectionable on the same moral grounds. At all events, all but simultaneously with the Order of the Protector and his Council, of Sept. 5, 1655, concentrating the whole newspaper press in the hands of Needham and Thurloe (see ante pp. 51-52), there had been a new general Ordinance "against Scandalous Books and Pamphlets and for the Regulation of Printing" (Aug. 18, 1655), and it was not long before this Ordinance was put in operation in one or two cases of the kind indicated. Here are some extracts from the Order Books of the Council in April and May 1656:—
Tuesday, April 1656:—"That it be referred to the Earl of Mulgrave, Colonel Jones, and Lord Strickland, or any two of them, to examine the business touching the book entitled Sportive Wit or the Muses' Merriment, and to send for the author and printer, and report the same to the Council."
Friday, April 25, 1656:—Present: the Lord President Lawrence, the Earl of Mulgrave, Lord Lambert, Sir Gilbert Pickering, Colonel Sydenham, Colonel Jones, the Lord Deputy of Ireland (Fleetwood), Lord Viscount Lisle, Mr. Rous, Major-General Skippon, and Lord Strickland. "Colonel Jones reports from the Committee of the Council to whom was referred the consideration of a book entitled Sportive Wit or the Muses' Merriment, that the said book contains in it much scandalous, lascivious, scurrilous, and profane matter. Ordered by his Highness the Lord Protector, by and with the advice of the Council, That the Lord Mayor of the City of London and the rest of the Committee for the regulation of Printing do cause all such [copies] of the said book as are not already seized to be forthwith seized on, wherever they shall be found, and cause the same, together with those already seized, to be delivered to the Sheriffs of London and Middlesex, who are to cause the same to be forthwith publicly burnt.—He further reports that Nathaniel Brookes, Stationer, at the Angel in Cornhill, caused the said book to be printed; that the printers thereof were John Grismond, living in Ivy Lane, and James Cotterill, living in Lambeth Hill; and that JOHN PHILLIPS, of Westminster, was the author of the Epistle Dedicatory. Ordered, That it be referred to Sir John Barkstead, Knight, Lieutenant of the Tower [and Major-General for Westminster and Middlesex], to cause the fines to be levied on the said persons according to law: [also] that the said persons do attend the Council on Tuesday next."—Milton's younger nephew, therefore, had been the editor of the offending volume. Of the eleven members of Council present when this fact came out, six were among those friends of Milton whom he had specially mentioned in his Defensio Secunda: viz. Fleetwood, Lambert, Lawrence, Pickering, Sydenham, and Strickland.
Saturday, April 26, 1656:—His Highness the Lord Protector approves of a great many recent Orders of Council presented to him all at once by Mr. Scobell, the Clerk of the Council. Among them is the order "for burning the book called Sportive Wit."
Friday, May 9, 1656:—His Highness the Lord Protector present in person, with Lord President Lawrence, Lambert, Fleetwood, Sir Gilbert Pickering, Strickland, Sydenham, and Jones:—Ordered, &c. "That the Lord Mayor of the City of London and the rest of the Committee for regulating Printing do cause all the books entitled Choice Droliery, Songs and Sonnets (being stuffed with profane and obscene matter, tending to the corruption of manners), to be seized wherever the same shall be found, and cause the same to be delivered to the Sheriffs of London and Middlesex, who are required to give order that the same be burnt."
Copies of the second of the two books thus condemned by Cromwell and his Council have, I believe, survived the burning, The publisher was a John Sweeting, who had duly registered the book on the 9th of February 1655-6, shortly after which date it had appeared with this full title, Choice Drollery, Songs and Sonnets: being a Collection of Divers Eminent Pieces of Poetry of several Eminent Authors, never before printed. I have not seen any copy of the other book bearing the precise title Sportive Wit, or the Muses' Merriment; but there are surviving copies of what may be the same with an alternative title, viz. Wit and Drollery: Jovial Poems, never before printed, by Sir J.M., Jas. S., Sir W.D., J.D., and other admirable wits. It had been out in London since. Jan. 18, 1655-6, had been registered on the 30th of that month, and is a respectably printed little book of 160 pages, with the motto "Ut nectar ingenium" under the title, and with, the imprint London. Printed for Nath. Brook, at the Angel in Cornhill, 1656. It contains moreover a Dedication "To the truly noble Edward Pepes, Esq.," and an Epistle "To the Courteous Reader," both signed with the initials J.P. Either, therefore, this is the same book as the Sportive Wit or the Muses' Merriment which, figures in the Orders of the Council, or John Phillips had edited simultaneously for Nathaniel Brooke (who had been the publisher of his Satyr against Hypocrites in the preceding August) two books of the same general character. Even on the latter supposition, Wit and Drollery, in the absence of Sportive Wit, may serve as a representative of that production of the same editor and the same publisher. The substance of Phillips's Epistle to the Reader in Wit and Drollery is as follows:—