of

between Milton the thinker and the Political leaders. It is pleasant to be able to add that, as is partly implied in the language of the Order of 1655, Censorship or Licensing of books generally, as distinct from newspapers, all but ceased for the last few years the Commonwealth, to use the ordinary euphemism for the eleven years of constitutional experiments between 1649 and 1660. The seeming hostility then between the theories of Milton and the practice of the great contemporary politicians in reference to the Freedom of the Press to a very large extent vanishes in the light of a little careful enquiry.

But have we any positive signs of Milton's political influence? Few, if any, could be gathered from Carlyle's great work on Cromwell. Much on the other hand, as we should expect, can be learnt from Masson, while Milton himself tells us more than once that this or that one of his Pamphlets was written at the special request of the Commonwealth leaders. During the four years and ten months that elapsed between the Execution of Charles and Cromwell's accession to the Protectorate, Milton wrote forty-four State Letters; during the four years and nine months that elapsed between the latter event and Cromwell's death he wrote eightyeight. As he was a foreign secretary, in considering these numbers we must make allowance for the increasing complications of the relations of this country with others during those nine or ten years. Still it is at least a fair infererence from the two numbers that confidence in Milton grew with the growth of Cromwell's influence. Besides this argument from quantity, there is one of quality: Milton was always selected to write the most important letters. And, as Masson points out, this continued to be the case to the end of Cromwell's lifetime. "At no time in the Secretaryship had there been a series of more important letters from Milton's pen than those written for the Protector in the last five months of his life." Is not this evidence definite and strong enough to justify our incredulity regarding Mr. Pattison's startling theory as to Milton's utter political impotence?

I have spoken of the period between 1649 and 1658 as one of Constitutional experiments. Let me enforce this by recounting the several political changes, which took place during those years.

(1) From January 1648-9 till April 1653, England was under the rule of the Long Parliament, as it remained after the purgations it underwent in 1647 and at the end of 1648. The average number of members that sat was about 50. For some four and a half years then the government of the country was an Oligarchic Republic.

(2) After a short interval the Little or Barebone's Parliament met. This was in no sense representative. As its main business, according to the wishes of its creators, was to summon a Parliament, which should frame a Constitution, we may call this a Provisional Government or a Constituent Assembly. It lasted some six months. As is well known, Cromwell slew the former assembly with his own hand, and this (probably at his suggestion) committed suicide.

(3) Almost immediately afterwards Cromwell was made Protector. During the next six months he and the Council of State ruled. This government may perhaps be best described as that of a Junto.

(4) A parliament was then called which sat for six months. Observe here (a) the qualification for an elector was property real or personal of the value of £200. Respectability was its mark, as Radicalism had been that of the Barebone's Assembly. (b) Ireland and Scotland each sent thirty members. (c) The whole electoral scheme of this parliament is said to have been the same as that contemplated by Vane and his fellow-workers at the time they were so abruptly dismissed by Cromwell. The proportion of county members to borough members was much larger than on the old electoral system, this being the remedy in Vanc's view, as later in Chatham's, for the injustices of rotten boroughs. But despite of this, it is on the whole true that the government of England has seldom been less representative than throughout this period of the so-called Commonwealth. If then we call it a Republic, we must remember that it was an Oligarchic, not a Democratic Republic. The above fact concerning the Franchise is only one out of many illustrations of this truth. The Parliamentary Union of the three countries is, of course, one of the glories of the age. This fourth period is best described as a Presidential Republic.

(5) From Jan. 22, 1654-5, to Sept. 17, 1656, Cromwell with his eleven satellites, the major-generals, ruled. A Dictatorship in

the strict sense of the term; the times are critical, and a single man comes to the front, to protect the state from the danger on the one hand of Anarchy and on the other of Stuart catastrophe.

(6) Another Parliament was called Sept. 1656, the first Session of which was remarkable for its unconscionable mutilation by Cromwell, the second for the presence in it of Peers summoned by Cromwell as somewhat to stand between me and the House of Commons." This Session lasted only sixteen days. Cromwell's power had grown, and the government had become in everything but name a monarchy.

Meantime the isolation of Cromwell's position is of almost dramatic interest. Royalists hated him as the arch-murderer, Presbyterians as the hierarch of Toleration, Republicans as the most criminal of apostates. When he slew the Long Parliament, Vane, Marten and Haslerig were estranged. Fairfax had been proposed as one of the hundred and thirty-nine, whom Cromwell and his Council of Officers (N.B. not of State) summoned to the Barebone's Parliament, but his name was afterwards omitted, and he was to remain practically a political absentee. The enthusiast Harrison had hoped that the millenium had come, when an Assembly had been called of which Praise-God Barebones was a member, if not a type, and to whom his Excellence had said "Perhaps you are not known by face to one another; indeed I am confident you are strangers, coming from all parts of the Nation as you do ; but we shall tell you that indeed we have not allowed the choice of one person in whom we had not this good hope That there was in him faith in Jesus Christ and love to all His People and Saints."* the assembly reigned for a few months instead of a thousand years. And when shortly afterwards Cromwell was made Protector Harrison and other Fifth Monarchists, who could not recognize in his rule that of Jesus Christ, withdrew-to receive from time to time rough treatment at the hands of Cromwell, whose undoubted sympathy with all genuine religious enthusiasm, whether Fifthmonarchism or Quakerism, was disciplined and restrained by his ever-growing dread of revolutionary views. At the same time the Carlyle's Cromwell, ed. 1871, iii. 223.

But

honest republican Ludlow retired from all share in civil goverment. Bradshaw refused to sign the Recognition of the Government as it is settled in a Single Person and a Parliament, which was made a necessary qualification for a seat in Cromwell's Parliament of 1654. At last even "Lambert's Oliverianism evaporated" during the debates about Cromwell's kingship and in the summer of 1657 he resigned his major-generalship and other offices. Milton's friend Overton had some time before been imprisoned for irrepressible republicanism.

Upon this description of the strictly political history of England between 1649 and 1658, and of the isolation of the Protector, the best comment that can be given is this of Cromwell's own. "It were a happy thing if the Nation would be content with rule, content with rule, if it were but in Civil things, and with those that would rule worst; because misrule is better than no rule; and an ill government, a bad government, is better than none!" The traditional constitution was in abeyance, and the government established in its stead was after all a mere pis-aller.

Dr. Johnson once said in his forcible, if somewhat impolite, manner, that though he was bound to find a disputant in reasons he was not bound to find him in brains to understand them. But a government that has not its roots in the past history of a nation is in the awkward position of having to find it not only in reasons for its existence, but in brains to understand those reasons. Vane, Bradshaw, Ludlow, and other "deep republicans" had, like all such admirable enthusiasts, the profoundest confidence in their reasons, and were perhaps not altogether diffident as to their power to find the brains. Cromwell was an Englishman of Englishmen and knew his countrymen better: he knew he could not find the brains, but as he had an army of more than 30,000 men at his disposal, he was beyond question in possession of the muscle.

Now Milton was a "deep republican." What is peculiar then in his position is that he, unlike all other "deep republicans," remained loyal to Cromwell. How he had admired " our chief of men" in 1652, we all know from the Sonnet addressed to him in that year.

"Help us to save free conscience from the paw of hireling wolves, whose gospel is their maw" was an appeal for protection against Presbyterian intolerance; and Cromwell's conduct on this point must have fully satisfied even Milton's Tolerationst fervour. The man of action had on one fundamental question come up to the standard of the man of thought. On the question nearly allied to this, a Free Press, we have seen that there was at least nothing like antagonism between them. On another crucial question there was agreement. It was a ruling idea with Cromwell that the Civil Wars had been appeals to Heaven, the answers to which had been verdicts in favour of the army-party, and that these verdicts justified the supremacy of that party, or what with him was, of course, the pith of the matter, of their head and representative. This is a view that recurs again and again in Milton's pamphlets. In the "Ready Way to Establish a Free Commonwealth," which written as it was on the eve of the Restoration is a most noble witness of his dauntless courage, he speaks thus plainly on this point.* "They, who past reason and recovery are devoted to kingship, will perhaps answer that a greater part by far of the nation will have it so, the rest therefore must yield. Not so much to convince these, which I little hope, as to confi m them who yield not, I reply that this greatest part have both in reason and the just trial of battle, lost the right of their election what the Government shall be." Cromwell was at the time this passage was written no longer living; but it expresses a view that had been common to him and to Milton. If, too, Milton had long known, as, no doubt, Cromwell's insight soon taught him, that "a greater part by far of the nation" wished for a return of the Stuarts, then his loyalty to the Protector, despite of defections on his part from republicanism, is accounted for. His friend Vane, the sparkling Marten, and Bradshaw, for the last of whom he expresses in his Second Defence such high admiration, might have headed a superlatively enlightened government; but in the face of this inconvenient opposition "of the greater part by far" enlightenment had to be sacrificed to strength. Certain it is, however, that whatever points of agreement there Prose Works Bohn's Ed., ii, 132,