The return of the Stuarts shattered all his hopes, religious and political. He seemed to see in the Stuart restoration the first gathering gloom of a darkness which should overwhelm himself, England, and all the earth. Subjectively this was true. Milton never saw beyond that gathering cloud; and when the culminant blackness of his own blindness closed in upon him, then, too, into a common gloom sank Milton, England and all the earth.
“And darkness shows us worlds by night
We never see by day.”
Would Paradise Lost have been born into literature if Milton had not become blind?
Would we of today find congenial that Milton of the old Puritanical day? Do we admire the Miltonic God? Milton liked best his Lucifer, and that liking elusively throbs through Paradise Lost and elicits response.
Charles II.
There must have been a great measure of compensation to Charles I. in the filial devotion of his household. It is related that Prince Charles, eldest son, and heir apparent to the throne, sent to his father, when in prison, a document carte blanche signed with his name. And in a letter enclosed the Prince assured his father that whatever conditions he should see fit to make with Cromwell and his followers relative to the succession would be agreeable to him, in token whereof he had signed his name to the document. There was something heroic in that, and something even more magnanimously heroic in the response of Charles I. He at once tore the document to pieces, fearing that the enemy might get possession of it and make use of it against Prince Charles. He wrote tenderly to his son, admitting the pleasure his generous offer had given, but declaring that death would be preferable to any act whereby the rights of his children should be tampered with or signed away.
It is well to note these nobler actions and emotions in the lives of kings: the ambitious selfishness and cruelty of a Macbeth, a King John, a Richard III. are pedestaled for all the world to see; why not the mutual magnanimity of the Stuarts? Truly the evil that men do lives after them, the good is oftimes interred with their bones.
At the death of Cromwell, after a five years’ stormy reign as Lord Protector of England, and after a twelve years’ exile of the family of Charles I., the people of England unanimously welcomed the restoration of the Stuarts. Charles II.—known in France under this title since the death of Charles I.—was crowned King of England.