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all other officers in commission on the 20th of March, 1644-5, should continue in the posts they then held.

Thus the year 1645 (beginning, in English reckoning, March 25) opened with new prospects. Essex, Manchester, Waller, and all the officers under them, retired into ordinary life, with thanks and honours-Essex, indeed, with a great pension; and the fighting for Parliament was thenceforward to be done mainly by a re-modelled Army, commanded by Fairfax, Skippon, and officers under them, whose faces were unknown in Parliament, and whose business was to be to fight only and teach the art of fighting.

It was high time! For another long bout of negotiations with the King, begun as early as Nov. 20, 1644, and issuing in a formal Treaty of great ceremony, called "The Treaty of Uxbridge," had ended, as usual, in no result. Feb. 22, it had been broken off after such a waste of speeches and arguments on paper that the account of the Treaty occupies ten pages in Clarendon and fifty-six folio pages in Rushworth. It was clear that the year 1645 was to be a year of continued war.1

PARLIAMENTARY VENGEANCES: DEATH OF LAUD.

Ere we pass out of the rich general history of this year 1644, the year of Marston Moor, we must take note of a few vengeances and deaths with which it was wound up. The long-deferred trial of poor Laud, begun March 12, 1643-4, after he had been more than three years a prisoner in the Tower, and they might have left him there in quiet, had straggled on through the whole of 1644. The interest in it had run, like a red thread, through the miscellany of other events. The temper of the people had been made fiercer by the length of the war, and there was a desire for the old man's blood. The Presbyterian ministers of the Assembly, I find, fostered this desire. In that very sermon of Herbert Palmer's

1 For this story of the Self-denying Ordinance and the New Modelling of the Army authorities are-Rushworth, VI. 1-16; Baillie, II. 247; Carlyle's Cromwell (ed. 1857), I. 160-163. The

Uxbridge Treaty is narrated in Clarendon's Hist. (one-volume ed. 1843), pp. 520-530, and in Rushworth, V. 787842.

2

before Parliament (Aug. 13) in which he had called for the extirpation of heresy and schism, and denounced Milton, there was an express passage on the duty of "doing justice upon "Delinquents impartially and without respect of persons."1 Calamy in his sermon, Oct. 22, followed, and told the Parliament, "All the guilty blood that God requires you in justice "to shed, and you spare, God will require the blood at your "hands." Mr. Francis Woodcock, preaching Oct. 30, was even more decided. His sermon, which was on Rev. xvi. 15, is a very untastefully-worded discourse on the propriety of always being on the watch so as not to be taken by surprise without one's garments; and, among the rather ludicrous images which his literal treatment of the subject suggests, we come upon a passage describing one of four pieces of raiment which the State ought never to be caught without. He calls it the "Robe of Justice," and adds, "Would God "this robe were ofter worn, and dyed of a deeper colour in the blood of Delinquents. It is that which God and man "calls for. God repeats it, Justice, Justice; we, echoing God, "cry Justice, Justice; and let me say, perhaps we should not "see other garments so much rolled in blood, did we not see "these so little." "13 Baillie, I am glad to think, was more tender-hearted. There was, indeed, one Delinquent for whom Baillie would have had no mercy-Dr. Maxwell, the Scottish ex-Bishop of Ross, who had published at Oxford, in the King's interest," a desperately malicious invective" against Scottish Presbytery and its leaders. "However I could hardly con"sent to the hanging of Canterbury himself, or of any Jesuit," Baillie had written, July 16, 1644, after his first indignant sight of this book, "yet I could give my sentence freely against that unhappy liar's [Maxwell's] life." But, indeed, the Scottish Commissioners and the Scottish nation were conjoined as parties with the English Presbyterians and the English Parliamentarians generally (Prynne ruthlessly busy in getting up the evidence) in the long prosecution of Laud. It was all over on the 10th of January, 1644-5. On that

1 Palmer's Sermon, p. 48.

Calamy's Sermon, p. 27.

3 Woodcock's Sermon, pp. 30, 31.

day Laud, aged 72, laid his head upon the block on a scaffold in Tower Hill. Hanging had been commuted, with some difficulty, to beheading. He died brave, raspy, and HighChurch to the last.1 -Minor executions about the same

time were those of Hugh Macmahon and Lord Maguire for their concern in the Irish rebellion and massacre, Sir Alexander Carew for treachery at Plymouth, and the Hothams, father and son, for treachery at Hull. One Roger L'Estrange, a younger son of a Norfolk family, had been condemned to be hanged in Smithfield for an underhand attempt to win the town of Lynn for the King; but he was reprieved, lay in Newgate for some years, and lived for sixty years longer, to be known, even in Queen Anne's time, as Sir Roger L'Estrange, the journalist.

1 Rushworth's main account of the trial and last days of Laud is in Vol.

V. pp. 763-786. The "History of the

Troubles and Tryal of William Laud," edited by Wharton, in two vols. folio, appeared in 1695-1700.

CHAPTER II.

66

:

MILTON AMONG THE SECTARIES, AND IN A WORLD OF DISESTEEM STORY OF MRS. ATTAWAY-SAMUEL HARTLIB, JOHN DURIE, AND JOHN AMOS COMENIUS: SCHEMES OF A REFORMED EDUCATION, AND PROJECT OF A LONDON UNIVERSITY-MILTON'S TRACT ON EDUCATION, AND METHOD WITH HIS PUPILS-HIS SECOND DIVORCE TRACT, OR COMPILATION FROM BUCER-MR. HERBERT PALMER'S ATTACK ON MILTON FROM THE PULPIT-MILTON AND THE STATIONERS' COMPANY: THEIR ACCUSATION OF HIM IN A PETITION TO THE COMMONS HIS AREOPAGITICA, OR SPEECH FOR THE LIBERTY OF UNLICENSED PRINTING-ANGER OF THE STATIONERS, AND THEIR COMPLAINT AGAINST MILTON TO THE LORDS: CONSEQUENCE OF THE COMPLAINT THE DIVORCE QUESTION CONTINUED: PUBLICATION OF MR. HERBERT PALMER'S SERMON, AND FARTHER ATTACKS ON MILTON BY PRYNNE, DR. PAMPHLETEER-TETRACHORDON

FEATLEY, AND AN ANONYMOUS

AND COLASTERION: THEIR REPLIES TO THE ASSAILANTS.

EVER since August 1643, when Milton had published his extraordinary Doctrine and Discipline of Divorce, but more especially since Feb. 1643-4, when he had published the second and enlarged edition of it, with his name in full, and the dedication to Parliament and the Westminster Assembly, his reputation with orthodox English society had been definite enough. He was one of those dreadful Sectaries! Nay he was a Sectary more odious than most; for his was a moral heresy. What was Independency, what was Anabaptism, what was vague Antinomianism, compared with this heresy of the household, this loosening of the holy relation on which all civil society depended? How detestable the doctrine that, when two married people found they had made a mistake in coming together, or at least when the husband could declare before God and human witnesses his irrecon

cilable dissatisfaction with his wife, then it was right that the two should be separated, with liberty to each to find a new mate! True, it was an able man who had divulged this heresy, one who had brought applauses from Cambridge, who was said to have written beautiful English poems, who had served the cause of Parliament by some splendid pamphlets for Church-reformation and against Episcopacy, and who had in these pamphlets encountered even the great Bishop Hall, All this only made the doctrine more dangerous, the aberration more lamentable. This Mr. Milton must be avoided, and denounced as a Sectary of the worst kind! Some said it was all owing to the conduct of his wife, a rank Royalist, who had deserted him and gone back to her friends! If that were the case, he was to be pitied; but perhaps there were two sides to that story too!

There must have been much gossip of this kind, about Milton and his Divorce Treatise, in the booksellers' shops. near St. Paul's, and even round the Parliament in Westminster, in the early months of 1644. The gossip may have affected Milton's relations with some of his former friends and acquaintances. If Bishop Hall, when he first saw the treatise, and perceived its literary ability, "blushed for his age" that so "scandalous" a thing should have appeared, and if even Howell the letter-writer, in his prison, thought it the impudent production of "a poor shallow-brained puppy," what could Milton's orthodox and reverend Smectymnuan friends-Marshall, Calamy, Young, Newcomen, and Spurstowthink or say about it? Shocked they must have been; and, knowing Milton's temper, and with what demeanour he would front any remonstrances of theirs, they probably left him alone, and became scarcer in their visits to Aldersgate Street. It would not do to keep up the Smectymnuan connexion too visibly after what had happened. Or, if Young could not break off so easily, but would still call to see his old pupil, and to talk with old Mr. Milton about the Bread Street days, how the good man must have yearned to speak sometimes when the old gentleman was out of the way, and he and Milton were alone. "O my dear Mr. Milton, how much we

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