The short second session of the Parliament, with its difficult experiment of the two Houses once more, and the angry dispute of the Commons whether the name of "Lords" should be allowed to the Other House, had come and gone (Jan. 20—Feb. 4, 1657-8), and of Milton or his thoughts and doings through that crisis we have no trace whatever. Our next glimpse of him is just after the moment of the abrupt dissolution of the Parliament, when Cromwell was addressing himself again, single-handed, to the task of grappling with the double danger of anarchy within and a threatened invasion from without. The glimpse is a very sad one.
"Feb. 10, 1657-8, Mrs. Katherin Milton," and again "March, 20, 1657-8, Mrs. Katherin Milton," are two entries, within six weeks of each other, in the burial registers of St, Margaret's, Westminster. They are the records of the deaths of Milton's second wife and the little girl she had borne him only in October last. Which entry designates the mother and which, the child we should not know from the entries themselves; but a sentence in Phillips's memoir of his uncle settles the point. "By his second wife; Katharine, the daughter of Captain Woodcock of Hackney," says Phillips, "he had only one daughter, of which the mother, the first year after her marriage, died in childbed, and the child also within a month after." The first entry, therefore, is for the mother, and the second for the child. The mother died exactly at the time of the dissolution of the Parliament, and not in child-birth itself, but nearly four months after child-birth; and the little orphan, outliving the mother a short while, died at the age of five months. And so Milton was again left a widower, with his three daughters by the first marriage, the eldest in her twelfth year. His private life, for eighteen years now, had certainly not been a happy one; but this death of his second wife seems to have been remembered by him ever afterwards with deep and peculiar sorrow. She had been to him during the short fifteen months of their union, all that he had thought saintlike and womanly, very sympathetic with himself, and maintaining such peace and order in his household as had not been there till she entered it. And now once more it was a dark void, in which he must grope on, and in which things must happen as they would.
Small comfort at this time can Milton have had from either of his nephews. Not that they had openly separated themselves from him, or even ceased to be deferential to him and proud of the relationship, but that they had more and more gone into those courses of literary Bohemianism those habits of mere facetious hack-work and balderdash, which he must have noted of late as an increasing and very ominous form of protest among the clever young Londoners against Puritanism and its belongings. The Satyr against Hypocrites by his younger nephew in 1655 had been, in reality, an Anti-Puritan and Anti-Miltonic production; and, since the censure of that younger nephew by the Council in 1656 for his share in The Sportive Wit or Muses' Merriment, he had naturally stumbled farther and farther in the same direction. By the year 1658, I should say, John Phillips had entirely given up his uncle's political principles, and was known among his tavern-comrades as an Anti-Oliverian. We have no express publications in his name of this date, but he seems to have been scribbling anonymously. Of the literary industry of his more sedate and likeable elder brother, Edward, there is authentic evidence. A New World of Words, or a General Dictionary, containing the Terms, Etymologies, Definitions, and Perfect Interpretations, of the proper Significations of hard English words throughout the Arts and Sciences: such is the title of a folio volume published by him in 1657, and for the purposes of which he was afterwards accused of having plagiarized largely from the Glossographia of one Thomas Blount, published in the preceding year. In this piece of labour, which was doubtless a bookseller's commission, he must have had, the question of plagiarism apart, his uncle's thorough good-will; but it cannot have been the same with his Mysteries of Love and Eloquence: or the Arts of Wooing and Complimenting, as they are managed in the Spring Garden, Hide Park, the New Exchange, and other eminent Places. That performance, which appeared in August 1658, with a Preface "To the Youthful Gentry," and which must have been in progress at our present date, was much more in the vein of his brother John, and indeed was done to the order of Nathaniel Brooke, the bookseller who had published John's Satyr against Hypocrites, and also the more questionable Sportive Wit or the Muses' Merriment. "The book," says Godwin, "is put together with conspicuous ingenuity and profligacy, and is entitled to no insignificant rank among the multifarious productions which were at that time issued from the press to debauch the manners of the nation and bring back the King. It consists of imaginary conversations and forms of address for conversation, poems, models of letters, questions and answers, an Art of Logic with examples from the poets, and various instructions and helps to the lover for the composition of his verses; and, if we could overlook the gross provocations to libertinism and vice which everywhere occur in the book, it might be mentioned as no unentertaining illustration of the manners of the men of wit and gallantry in the time when it was published." To Godwin's description we may add that the book includes a Rhyming Dictionary, "useful for that pleasing pastime called Crambo," also a collection of parlour-games, and a number of other clever things. The poems and songs interspersed with the prose were mostly old ones reprinted, some of them chosen with fine taste; but one or two were Phillips's own. Of the model phrases or set expressions which form one of the prose parts of the volume, by way of instruction in the language of gallantry and courtship, specimens are these,—"With your ambrosiac kisses bathe my lips;" "You are a white enchantress, lady, and can enchain me with a smile;" "Midnight would blush at this;" "You walk in artificial clouds and bathe your silken limbs in wanton dalliance." What could Milton do, so far as such a production came within his knowledge, but shake his head and mingle smiles with a frown? Clearly the elder nephew too had slipped the Miltonic restraints. He had not lapsed, however, so decidedly as his brother; and we may partly retract in his case the statement that Milton could have little comfort from him. He still went and came about Milton, very attentively.1
1: Godwin's Lives of the Phillipses (1815), 49-57, and 139-140; Wood's Ath. IV. 760-769. I have not myself examined Phillips's New World of Words; but I have looked at the Thomason copy of his Mysteries of Love and Eloquence, where the date of publication is given. Perhaps Godwin is a little too severe in his account of it.
During the month immediately preceding his wife's death, and the two months following it, there is a break in the series of Milton's State-Letters for Cromwell. But he resumed the familiar occupation on the 30th of March, 1658; and thenceforward to the end of the Protectorate the series is again pretty continuous. Indeed, of this period of Milton's life we know little more than may be inferred from, or associated with, the following morsels of his continued Secretaryship:—
(CXVIII.) To CHARLES X., KING OF SWEDEN, March 30, 1658:—The occasion of this letter was the receipt of news at last of the climax of the Swedish-Danish war in a great triumph of the Swedes. "In January 1658 Karl Gustav marches his army, horse, foot, and artillery, to the amount of twenty thousand, across the Baltic ice, and takes an island without shipping,—Island of Fünen, across the Little Belt; three miles of ice; and a part of the sea open, which has to be crossed on planks. Nay, forward from Fünen, when he is once there, he achieves ten whole miles more of ice; and takes Zealand itself—to the wonder of mankind." Such, in Mr. Carlyle's summary (History of Frederick the Great, i. 223, edit. 1869), was the feat of the Swedish warrior against his Danish enemy. It was followed almost immediately by a Peace between the two Powers, called The Peace of Roeskilde, by which Sweden acquired certain territories from Denmark, but very generous terms on the whole were granted to the Danes. Of all this there had been news to Cromwell, not only from his own correspondents, but also in an express letter from Charles Gustavus; and it is to this letter that Milton now replies in Cromwell's name:—"Most serene and potent King, most invincible Friend and Ally,—The Letter of your Majesty, dated from the Camp in Zealand, Feb. 21, has brought Us all at once many reasons why, both privately on our own account, and on account of the whole Christian Commonwealth, we should be affected by no ordinary joy. In the first place, because the King of Denmark (made your enemy, I believe, not by his own will or interests, but by the arts of the common foes) has been, by your sudden advent into the heart of his kingdom, and without much bloodshed, reduced to such a pass that he has at length, as was really the fact, judged peace more advantageous to him than the war undertaken against you. Next, because, when he thought he could in no way sooner obtain such a peace than by using Our help long ago offered him for a conciliation, your Majesty, on the prayer merely of the letters of our Envoy, deigned to show, by such an easy grant of peace, how much value you attached to Our friendship and interposed good-will, and chose that it should be My office in particular, in this pious transaction, to be myself nearly the sole adviser and author of a Peace which is speedily to be, as I hope, so salutary to Protestant interests. For, whereas the enemies of Religion despaired of being able to break your combined strength otherwise than by engaging you against each other, they will now have cause, as I hope, thoroughly to fear that this unlooked-for conjunction of your arms and hearts will turn into destruction for themselves, the kindlers of this war. Do you, meanwhile, most brave King, go on and prosper in your conspicuous valour, and bring it to pass that, such good fortune as the enemies of the Church have lately admired in your exploits and course of victories against the King now your ally, the same they may feel once more, with God's help, in their own crushing overthrow."1 From this letter it will be seen that the missions of Meadows and Jephson, but especially that of Meadows, had been of use. The immediate object of the missions, a reconciliation of Sweden and Denmark, had been accomplished; and what remained farther was, as Cromwell hints, the association of the other Continental Protestant powers with these two Scandinavian kingdoms in a league against Austria and Spain. How exactly this idea accorded with reflective Protestant sentiment everywhere appears from a few sentences in one of Baillie's letters, commenting on the very occurrences that occasioned Cromwell's present despatch. "I am glad," writes Baillie, "that by a Peace, however extorted, the Swedes are free to take course with other enemies. I wish Brandenburg may return to his old posture, and not draw on himself next the Swedish armies; which the Lord forbid! for, after Sweden, we love Brandenburg next best.... Our wish is that the Muscoviter, for reforming of his churches, civilizing of his people, and doing some good upon the Turks and Tartars, were more straitly allied with Sweden, Brandenburg, the Transylvanian, and other Protestant princes. We should rejoice if, on this too good a quarrel against the Austrians ... he [Charles Gustavus] would turn his victorious army upon them and their associates, with the assistance of France and a good Dutch league. It seems no hard matter to get the Imperial Crown and turn the Ecclesiastic Princes into Secular Protestants."2 Very much in the direction of Baillie's hopes were Cromwell's envoys, Meadows, Jephson, Bradshaw, and Downing, to labour for the next few months. Of their journeys hither and thither, their expectations and disappointments, there are glimpses in successive letters in Thurloe; from which also it appears that Meadows and Downing gave most satisfaction, and that, after a while, Jephson was relieved of the main business of the Swedish mission, and that mission was conjoined with the Danish in the hands of Meadows (Thurloe, VII. 63-64).
1: The translation of this letter by Phillips is unusually careless. It jumbles the tenses in such a manner that the Peace between Sweden and Denmark does not seem to have yet taken place, but only to be hoped for by Cromwell. In fact, Phillips's translation robs the letter of all its meaning and interest.
2: Baillie, III. 371.
(CXIX.) TO THE GRAND-DUKE OF TUSCANY, April 7, 1658:—A John Hosier, master of a ship called The Lady, had been swindled in April 1656 by an Italian named Guiseppe Armani, who has moreover possessed himself fraudulently of 6000 pieces of eight belonging to one Thomas Clutterbuck. There is a suit against Armani at Leghorn; but Hosier, after going to great expenses, is deterred from appearing there by threats of personal violence. "We therefore request your Highness both to relieve this oppressed man, and also to restrain the insolence of his adversary, according to your accustomed justice."
(CXX.) TO LOUIS XIV. OF FRANCE, May 26, 1658:1—This is a very momentous letter. It is Cromwell's appeal to the French King in behalf once more of the poor Piedmontese Protestants:—"Most serene and potent King, most august Friend and Ally,—Your Majesty may remember that, at the time when there was treaty between us for the renewing of our League [April 1655]—the highly auspicious nature of which transaction is now testified by many resulting advantages to both nations and much damage to the common enemy—there fell out that miserable massacre of the People of the Valleys, whose cause, forsaken on all hands and sorely beset, we commended, with all ardour of heart and commiseration, to your pity and protection. Nor do we think that your Majesty, of yourself, was wanting in a duty so pious, nay so human, in as far as, by your authority or by the respect due to your person, you could prevail with the Duke of Savoy. We, certainly, and many other Princes and States, were not wanting, in the matter of embassies, letters, interposed entreaties, on the subject. After a most bloody slaughter of both sexes and of every age, Peace was at last granted, or rather a kind of more guarded hostility clothed with the name of Peace: the conditions of the Peace were settled in your town of Pignerol—hard conditions indeed, but in which wretched and poor people that had suffered all that was dreadful and brutal might easily acquiesce, if only, hard and unjust as they are, they were to be stood to. They are not stood to; for the promise of each and all of them is eluded and violated by false interpretation and various asides: many are thrown out of their ancient abodes; many are interdicted from their native religion; new tributes are exacted; a new citadel is hung over their heads, whence soldiers frequently break forth, plundering or murdering all they meet: in addition to all which, new forces of late are secretly being got ready against them, and those among them who profess the Roman Religion have warning orders to remove for a time, so that all things now again seem to point to an exterminating onslaught on those most miserable creatures who were left over from that last butchery. That you will not allow this to be done I beseech and conjure you, Most Christian King, by that right hand of yours which sealed alliance and friendship with Us, by that most sacred ornament of the title of Most Christian; that you will not permit such a license of furious raging, I do not say to any prince (for such furious raging cannot possibly come upon any prince, much less upon the tender age of that Prince, or into the womanly mind of his Mother), but to those most holy assassins, who, while they profess themselves the servants and imitators of our Saviour Christ, Him who came into this world to save sinners, abuse His most meek name and institutes for savage slaughters of innocents. Snatch, thou who art able, and who in such a towering station art worthy to be able, so many suppliants of yours from the hands of homicides, who, drunk with gore recently, thirst for blood again, and consider it most advisable for themselves to lay at the doors of princes the odium of their own cruelty. Do not thou, while thou reignest, suffer thy titles or the territories of thy realm, or the most merciful Gospel of Christ, to be defiled by that scandal. Remember that these very Vaudois submitted themselves to your grandfather Henry, that great favourer of Protestants, when the victorious Lesdiguières, through those parts where there is even yet the most convenient passage into Italy, pursued the yielding Savoyard across the Alps. The instrument of that Surrender is yet extant among the Public Acts of your Kingdom; in which, among other things, it is expressly provided and precautioned that the Vaudois should thenceforth be handed over to no one unless with those same conditions on which, by that instrument, your most invincible grandfather received them into his protection. This protection the suppliants now implore; as pledged by the grandfather, they demand it from you, the grandson. They would prefer and desire to be your subjects rather than his to whom they now belong, even by some exchange, if that could be managed; but, if that cannot be managed, to be yours at least in as far as your patronage, pity, and shelter can make them so. There are even reasons of state which might exhort you not to drive back Vaudois fleeing to you for refuge; but I would not, such a great King as you are, think of you as moved to the defence of those lying under calamity by other considerations than the promise of your ancestors, piety, and kingly benignity and greatness of soul. So the praise and glory of a most beautiful deed will be yours unalloyed and entire, and through all your life you will find the Father of Mercy, and His Son, King Christ, whose name and doctrine you will have vindicated from a wicked atrocity, more favouring and propitious to yourself. May God Almighty, for His own glory, the safeguard of so many innocent Christian human beings, and your true honour, dispose your Majesty to this resolution!" The letter was sent to Ambassador Lockhart, then commanding the English auxiliaries at Dunkirk, with very precise instructions to deliver it to his French Majesty, and to follow it up energetically by his own counsels.2 It may have been delivered to Louis XIV. at or near Calais. It had, as we have seen, full effect. All in all, it is one of the most eloquent of the Milton series; and Milton must have exerted himself in the composition.
1: The exact day of the month is not given either in the Printed Collection or in the Skinner Transcript; but it is determined by a letter of Cromwell's to Ambassador Lockhart on the same business. The two letters went together (see Carlyle, III. 357-365).