CHAPTER III.

MILTON'S LIFE FROM 1661 To 1667:

WITH

PARADISE LOST.

How long Milton remained in his temporary house in Holborn, near Red Lion Fields, is uncertain. We have supposed him to have been still there at the coronation of Charles in May 1661; and he may have remained there for some months longer. Hardly, however, to the end of 1661; for Phillips's words are that he "staid not long in his Holborn house before, "his pardon having passed the seal, he removed to Jewin Street." It is not difficult to account for the choice so made of a new place of residence. If a bustling thoroughfare like Holborn was unsuitable for the blind ex-Secretary of the Commonwealth, much less could he return to Petty France, or to any other purlieu of Westminster. He remembered therefore that quiet quarter of the City, just beyond the walls, and not far from his native Bread Street, where he had first set up as a householder on his own account one-and-twenty years ago, and where he had spent seven of the busiest years of his private life, when he was a zealous adherent of the Long Parliament through the Civil Wars and a pamphleteer in that interest, but did not foresee his more intimate official connexions with the governments that were to succeed. He would go back now to that neighbourhood, and be again well at a distance from Whitehall and its associations.

Jewin Street, where a house was accordingly found for him, still exists. It is a narrowish, slightly winding, and not untidy street, going off from Aldersgate Street on the right as you leave the City, and connecting that street with Red Cross Street and the vicinity of Cripplegate church. It goes off from Aldersgate Street only a few paces from the site of the "pretty garden house" there, "at the end of an entry," where Milton had lived between 1640 and 1645, and into which he had brought Mary Powell for her short stay with him. after their marriage; and the very next turn out of Aldersgate Street, on the same side farther up, is Barbican, where he had resided from 1645 to 1647, in the larger house he had taken for the purposes of pedagogy after his wife had gone back to him, and in which his father-in-law and his own father had died. In Jewin Street, therefore, Milton was beside those two former houses of his, and so close to either that, but for his blindness, he could have passed from one to the other in a few minutes, and revived his recollections of them by looking at their doors and windows. As it was, he could but be led

about in the space between them.

No house extant in the present Jewin Street is remembered as that once occupied by Milton. We can fix approximately, however, the part of Jewin Street in which the house stood. Though the street is by no means a long one, it is not all included in one and the same city parish, or even in one and the same city ward. The part of Jewin Street. nearest Aldersgate Street is in the parish of St. Botolph, in the ward of Aldersgate; but the rest of Jewin Street, or the part nearest Red Cross Street, is in the parish of St. Giles, in the ward of Cripplegate. If, therefore, the house to which Mr. ex-Secretary Milton removed in 1661 had been in the part of Jewin Street nearest Aldersgate Street, he would have become once more a parishioner of St. Botolph's, Aldersgate, the same parish to which he had belonged when he was first a London householder; but, if the house was towards the Red Cross Street end of Jewin Street, then he became again a parishioner of St. Giles's, Cripplegate, as he had been when living in Barbican. The latter was the fact.

The part of Jewin Street to which Milton removed was the inner end, where there are still some remaining houses of his date, which at that time may have had more of garden ground behind them than now; and for all the rest of his life, first in this house and then in another, he was to be a parishioner of St. Giles's, Cripplegate. The vicar of the parish at that date was a certain popular and energetic Dr. Samuel Annesley. He was of Oxford training, and of Presbyterian antecedents, about forty years of age, first cousin to the Earl of Anglesey, and of much distinction recently among the clergy of Oliver's established church, though perhaps better likely to be remembered now by the fact that, through his youngest daughter, yet to be born, he was the grandfather of John and Charles Wesley1.

IN JEWIN STREET: 1661-1664.

One remembers the predictions of the consequences of the Restoration so boldly hazarded by Milton in his great pamphlet of warning published on the eve of that event (ante, V. pp. 645-655, 677-688). So far as those predictions had not already been fulfilled by the incidents of the first year of the Restoration, they were fulfilled to the letter, as we know, during the next three years, when Clarendon and the Bishops were no longer checked by the Presbyterianism of the Convention Parliament, but had an instrument more to their mind in the succeeding Cavalier Parliament. Of the incidents of the continued Clarendonian administration during those three years Milton, in his retirement in Jewin Street, can have been no uninterested observer. The first batch of Acts passed by the Cavalier Parliament in July 1661,-their Act for the suppression of all questioning of the Established Government or assertion of the legality of the Long Parliament and the Solemn League and Covenant, their Act for repealing the disqualification of persons in holy orders for civil offices

1 Stow's London by Strype (1730), Book III. pp. 70-123 (Cripplegate Ward and Aldersgate Ward); Faithorne's Map of London in 1658 (reprinted 1878); Visits to Jewin Street and its neighbourhood; Wood, by Bliss,

Ath. IV. 509-514, and Fasti, II. 114; Tombstone of Mrs. Susanna Wesley, mother of the Wesleys, in Bunhill Fields Burying Ground; Calamy's Nonconformists' Memorial (edit. 1802), I. 124-128.

and dignities, their Act for curtailing the right of petitioning Parliament or the King, their Act restoring the power of the Militia to the King, and their Act of farther penalties against the surviving Regicides and others,-must have prepared him for such later Acts of their First Session as the Corporations Act of December 1661, and the Act against Quakers, the Act of Uniformity, the Counties Militia Act, and the new Press. Act, all of May 1662. These pieces of legislation, with such contemporary proofs of the ruthless mood of the Court and the executive as were furnished by the disinterring of the dead Commonwealth's men and Cromwellians from their graves in Westminster Abbey, the hanging and quartering of the Baptist preacher John James for imprudent speaking in his pulpit, the carting of three of the spared Regicides from the Tower to Tyburn and back with ropes round their necks, and the hanging and quartering at Tyburn of the three fugitive Regicides, Barkstead, Corbet, and Okey, that had been captured in Holland, verified to the utmost those parts of Milton's predictions which had prophesied bloody personal revenges, a general policy of Absolutism, a miserable disappointment of the hopes of the Presbyterians, and the reinstitution. in England of unmitigated Prelacy, with liberty or breathingroom for nothing else. The Act of Uniformity by itself, cancelling at one stroke the King's Declaration from Breda. and his subsequent promises, and turning into ridicule all the dreams of the Baxters, Calamys, Mantons, and others, and all their exertions in behalf of a limited Episcopacy that should comprehend the Presbyterians and the old Anglicans in one establishment, was a sufficient vindication of Milton's foresight in that particular. Then, in the interval between the passing of that Act and its fatal execution on St. Bartholomew's day in the same year, there was the arrival of the prophesied Queen, "outlandish and a Papist," in the person of the Portuguese Catharine, to add to the foreign and Roman Catholic influence at Court already represented by the Queenmother, and to complicate the King's relations with Lady Castlemaine. There was also the trial of Vane and Lambert, with the beheading of Vane, Milton's admired friend of many

years. The terrible St. Bartholomew's day itself came at last, Aug. 24, 1662. Then Milton knew of the wrench to English society for generations yet to come, occasioned by the ejection or silencing of more than 2000 parish-pastors, University men, and lecturers, mostly Presbyterians, but some of them Baptists, that had held livings in Oliver's broad Church of the Commonwealth, and had hoped to retain them in the moderate Episcopal Church promised at the Restoration. He could think of those 2000 men, in their new condition of Nonconformists, at a loss what to do for the future support of themselves and their families, many of them trying still to subsist by private preaching and ministration to adherents from among their flocks, but many scattering themselves hither and thither on the hard chance of other occupations. The question of comprehension of even moderate dissenting orthodoxy within the Established Church was then at an end, and the only remaining question was whether there should be anything like a toleration or indulgence for the ejected and for their opinions and worship outside of the Establishment. Or, rather, that question also was practically decided. By the Act of Uniformity itself it was regulated that all persons ejected by the Act should cease from public preaching anywhere or in any manner under the penalty of three months' imprisonment for each offence, and should also be incapacitated for schoolmastering or private tutorship anywhere under severer penalties; the old Acts enforcing attendance at the established worship in the regular churches were still available when necessary; and had not the special Act called the Act against Quakers, passed in the same month with the Act of Uniformity, prohibited, not only for Quakers, but also for all who should refuse oaths tendered by the existing authorities, or should persuade others to such refusal, the right of meeting even in small private conventicles, under pain of fine, imprisonment, and ultimate banishment to the plantations? One had not to wait for the general Conventicles Act of May 1664, expressly extending to all Nonconformists whatever this prohibition of private meetings for worship already operative against Quakers and other extreme sectaries.