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CHAPTER XVII.

MILTON remained securely hidden in the house of that friend in need, whose name has escaped the most careful inquiry,* during the first four months of the Restoration. Safely sheltered himself, he saw with grievous sorrow that the heads of many of his old associates were bared to the pitiless pelting of the storm of persecution.

Meantime a vote of the House of Commons had decreed the public prosecution of the ex secretary, and also ordered that two of his most obnoxious pamphlets, the "Iconoclastes" and the "Defence of the People of England," should be burned by the common hangman. It is not probable that these measures troubled Milton very seriously. He had seen one of these same works publicly burned in the squares of Toulouse and Paris, and yet it had survived. Nor can it be imagined that his serenity was much disturbed by the futile ma

† Symmons' Life, p. 429.

lignity of his oft-beaten enemies, who eagerly seized upon this hour of his political undoing to publish the refuted slanders of the dead Salmasius.

Still Milton ran, through all this period, a fearful personal risk. The proclamation against himself and another of the noted characters of the time, John Goodwin, who had written a tract against the king entitled, "The Obstructers of Justice," issued immediately after the coronation of Charles, was yet out, declaring that "the said John Milton and John Goodwin are so fled or so obscure themselves that no endeavors used for their apprehension can take effect, whereby they may be brought to legal trial and deservedly receive condign punishment for their treasons and offences."*

Some of his friends, esteeming the danger that menaced his life to be imminent, actually bruited it through the streets that he was dead, and they contrived for him a sham funeral.† Afterwards, when matters had been accommodated, Charles laughed heartily at the trick.

* Kennet's Chronicle, p. 189.

† Wharton's Second Ed.'of Milton's Minor Poems, p. 358. Ivimey's Life, p. 218. Todd's Life, p. 101.

"The king," says an old historian, "applauded his policy in escaping the punishment of death by a seasonable show of dying."*

It is also certain that a number of influential gentlemen ardently exerted themselves at this crisis of Milton's life to secure his preservation, and it was probably to this kind intervention that he owed his security, since no keen search for him was ever instituted.

Milton's offence had been more grave than that of the regicides themselves: they had only put one king to death, he had attacked the very office, and memorialized posterity against the idea of kingship, lavishing the most splendid panegyrics upon the rebellion and the most prominent and obnoxious actors in it; and it was well known that with these glowing eulogiums in her hand the muse of history would march proudly down through the ages with the immortal trust. Yet contenting himself with the babble of spiteful words, and the absurd comedy of burning his pamphlets, the king per

*

Cunningham's Hist. of Great Britain, Vol. I., p. 14. † Symmons' Life, pp. 427, 428.

mitted the great architect of the ruin of his house to go untouched. This clemency was due, not to the heart or brain of the effeminate prince who then acted like a puppet the part of king, but to the powerful influence of active friends, whose menacing intercession made it dangerous to punish Milton, and convenient to overlook him.

Andrew Marvell, his old associate in office under the Commonwealth, then member of Parliament for Hull, made all possible influence for him in the House of Commons, while Sir William D'Avenant, one of the most amiable and influential gentlemen of the day, whose life Milton had saved when he had been captured by the fleet of the Commonwealth in his passage from France to America and ordered to his trial before the High Court of Justice, in 1651, now eagerly requited that kind act by one of equal generosity.*

Thus, in one way or another, Milton managed to survive the opening months of the Restoration, until, on the 29th of August, 1660, the "Act of Oblivion" opened the doors of his

* Wood, Athenæ Oxon, Vol. II., p. 412.

asylum, and allowed him safely to emerge from

his secrecy.

The clemency of Charles in the promulgation of the act of oblivion has been the theme not only of lavish contemporary panegyric, but also of later eulogium; but "the time has long elapsed in which praise, unsupported by truth, can be admitted on the plea of passion.'

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It has been well remarked by an able and candid writer,* that "if we reflect that Charles was not now reclaiming his royal right as a conqueror; that the nation was not trembling at his feet, and, like a city taken by storm, in a state to be thankful for every deed of brutal violence which was not committed; but that, in truth, he was an impotent exile, receiving gratuitously a crown from the very hands which had torn it from his family, from a Parliament a great majority of whose members had been active in the overthrow of the monarchy, and from an army which had immediately conducted his father to the scaffold, we may reasonably inquire by what acts he could have dis

* Dr. Symmons, in his Life of Milton, pp. 431, 432, 433, 434, 435, 436.

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