The last of Baillie's letters to Henderson, dated Aug. 13, 1646, contains a curious passage. "Ormond's Pacification "with the Irish," writes Baillie, " is very unseasonable; the "placing of Hopes (a professed Atheist, as they speak) about "the Prince as his teacher is ill taken." The Hopes here mentioned is no other than THOMAS HOBBES, then just appointed tutor to the Prince of Wales in Paris. As the letter must have reached Edinburgh after Henderson was dead, he was not troubled with this additional piece of bad news before he left the world. Doubtless, however, he had heard of Hobbes, and formed some imagination of that dreadful person and his opinions. Hobbes indeed was now in his fifty-eighth year, or not much younger than the dying Henderson himself. But he was of slower constitution, and had begun his real work late in life, as if with a presentiment that he had plenty of time before him, and did not need to be in a hurry. He was to outlive Henderson thirty-three

years.

"King's." After all, however, Godwin's sceptical inquiry leaves a shrewd somewhat behind it. For, granted that a written correspondence did take place, "the question remains," as Godwin asserts, "whether the papers now to be "found in King Charles's works are the 66 very papers that were so exchanged "at Newcastle." The suspicion here

suggested tells, in my mind, more against the King's letters as we now have them than against Henderson's. The King's letters, we may be sure, would be pretty carefully edited in 1649; and what may have been the amount and kind of editing thought allowable?

CHAPTER III.

EFFECTS OF MILTON'S AREOPAGITICA-HIS INTENTION OF ANOTHER MARRIAGE: HIS WIFE'S RETURN AND RECONCILIATION WITH HIM -REMOVAL FROM ALDERSGATE STREET TO BARBICAN-FIRST EDITION OF MILTON'S COLLECTED POEMS: HUMPHREY MOSELEY THE BOOKSELLER-TWO DIVORCE SONNETS AND SONNET TO HENRY LAWES-CONTINUED PRESBYTERIAN ATTACKS ON MILTON: HIS ANTI-PRESBYTERIAN SONNET OF REPLY-SURRENDER OF OXFORD: CONDITION OF THE POWELL FAMILY-THE POWELLS IN LONDON: MORE FAMILY PERPLEXITIES: BIRTH OF MILTON'S FIRST CHILD.

THE effect of Milton's Areopagitica, immediately after its publication in November 1644, and throughout the year 1645, seems to have been very considerable. Parliament, indeed, took no formal notice of the eloquent pleading for a repeal of their Licensing Ordinance of June 1643. As a body, they were not ripe for the discussion of the question of a Free Press, and the Ordinance remained in force, at least as an instrument which might be applied in cases of flagrant transgression. But public opinion was affected, and the general agitation for Toleration took more and more the precise and practical form into which Milton's treatise had directed it: viz. an impatience of the censorship, and a demand for the liberty of free philosophising and free printing. "Such was the effect "of our author's Areopagitica," says Toland, in his sketch of Milton's life, "that the following year Mabol, a licenser, offered reasons against licensing, and, at his own request, was dis'charged that office."1 Toland is in a slight mistake here, at least in his dating. The person whom he means-Gilbert 1 Toland's Memoir of Milton prefixed to the Amsterdam (1698) edition of Milton's Prose Works, p. 23.

Mabbott, not 'Mabol'—was Rushworth's deputy in the office of Clerk to the House of Commons, doing duty for him while he was away with the New Model as Secretary to Fairfax; and not only did this Mabbott occasionally license pamphlets and newspapers, as it would have been Rushworth's part to do, through the year 1645, but he was expressly recommended to be licenser of "weekly pamphlets" or newspapers, Sept. 30, 1647, and he continued to act in this capacity till May 22, 1649, at which time it was, and not in 1645, that he was released from the business at his own request.1 The effect of Milton's argument on Mabbott in particular, therefore, was not so immediate as Toland represents. There can be no doubt, however, that as Milton, in his Areopagitica, had tried to make the official licensers of books, and especially those of them who were ministers, ashamed of their office, so his reasons and sarcasms, conjoined with the irksomeness of the office itself, did produce an immediate effect among those gentlemen, and modify their official conduct. Several of them, among whom appears to have been Mr. John Downham, who had licensed Milton's own Bucer Tract (antè, p. 255, note), became more lax in their censorship than the Presbyterians thought right; and there was at least one of them, Mr. John Bachiler, who became so very lax, from personal proclivity to Independency, that he was denounced by the Presbyterians as "the licenser-general not only of "Books of Independent Doctrine, but of Books for a general "Toleration of all Sects, and against Pædo-Baptism."2 The

1 My notes from the Stationers' Registers of 1645 and subsequent years; Lords Journals, Sept. 30, 1647; and Commons Journals, May 22, 1649. There is some evidence, however, that, before this last date, Mabbott had found the duty irksome (see Commons Journals, Aug. 31, 1618).

2 Gangrana: Part I. (ed. 1646), pp. 38, 39. In Part III. Edwards devotes three pages (102-105) to a castigation of Mr. Bachiler for his offences as a licenser. Bachiler, he says, "hath been a man-midwife to bring forth more monsters begotten by the Devil and born of the Sectaries within the last three years than ever were brought into the light in England by all the former

licensers, the Bishops and their Chaplains, for fourscore years." He was in the habit, Edwards adds, of not only licensing sectarian books, but also recommending them; and among the Toleration pamphlets he had licensed was the reprint of Leonard Busher's tract of 1614 called Religious Peace (see antè, p. 102). "I am afraid," says Edwards, that, if the Devil himself should make a book and give it the title A Plea for Liberty of Conscience, with certain Reasons against Persecution for Religion, and bring it to Mr. Bachiler, he would license it, and not only with a bare imprimatur, but set before it the commendations of a useful treatise' of 'a sweet and excellent book,'”

"If

Areopagitica, in fact, found out, even among the official licensers of books, men who sympathised with its views; and it established prominently, as one of the practical questions between the Independents and the Presbyterians, the question of the liberty of Unlicensed Printing. It was Milton that had taught the Independents, and the Anti-Presbyterians generally, to bring to the front, for present purposes, this form of the Toleration tenet. For example, one finds that John Lilburne had been a reader of the Areopagitica, and had imbibed its lesson, and even its phraseology. "you had not been men that had been afraid of your "cause," is one of Lilburne's addresses to the Presbyterians and the Westminster Assembly Divines, "you would have "been willing to have fought with us upon even ground and "equal terms—namely, that the Press might be as open for "us as for you, and as it was at the beginning of this Par"liament; which I conceive the Parliament did of purpose, "that so the free-born English subjects might enjoy their Liberty and Privilege, which the Bishops had learnt of "the Spanish Inquisition to rob them of, by locking it up "under the key of an Imprimatur." There is proof, in the writings of other Independents and Sectaries, that Milton's jocular specimens of the imprimaturs in old books had taken hold of the popular fancy. It became a common form of jest, indeed, in putting forth an unlicensed pamphlet, to prefix to it a mock licence. Thus, at the beginning of the anonymous Arraignment of Persecution, the author of which was a Henry Robinson (antè, p. 387), there is a mock order by the Westminster Assembly, with the names of the two Scribes appended, to the effect that the author, "Young Martin Mar-Priest," be thanked for his excellent treatise, and authorized to publish it, and that no one except "Martin Claw-Clergy," appointed by the author to print the same, presume to do so.2 Prynne quotes this as an example of the contempt into which the Ordinance for Licensing had fallen with the Sectaries, and of their supreme effrontery. Robin

1 Lilburne, as quoted by Prynne in his Fresh Discovery of Blazing Stars, p. 8. 2 Quoted by Prynne in his Fresh Discovery, p. 8.

son, he says, was one of the chief publishers of scandalous libels, having brought printers from Amsterdam, and set up a private printing press for the purpose.1

On the whole, then, Milton's position among his countrymen from the beginning of 1645 onwards may be defined most accurately by conceiving him to have been, in the special field of letters, or pamphleteering, very much what Cromwell was in the broader and harder field of Army action, and what the younger Vane was, in Cromwell's absence, in the House of Commons. While Cromwell was away in the Army, or occasionally when he appeared in the House and his presence was felt there in some new Independent motion, or some arrest of a Presbyterian motion, there was no man, outside of Parliament, who observed him more sympathetically than Milton, or would have been more ready to second him with tongue or with pen. Both were ranked among the Independents, as Vane also was; but this was less because they were partisans of any particular form of Churchgovernment, than because they were agreed that, whatever form of Church-government should be established, there must be the largest possible liberty under it for nonconforming consciences. If this was Independency, it was a kind of large lay Independency; and of Independency in this sense Milton was, undoubtedly, the literary chief. Only, when he was thought of by the Independents as one of their champions, it was always with a recollection that his championship of the common cause was qualified by a peculiar private crotchet. He figured in the list of the chiefs of Independency, if I may so express it, with an asterisk prefixed to his name. That asterisk was his Divorce Doctrine. was an Independent with the added peculiarity of being the head of the Sect of Miltonists or Divorcers.

He

self afterwards an official censor of the Press. He was one of the licensers of newspapers through 1651 and a portion of 1652, doing the very work from which Mabbott had begged to be excused. The fact, however, is suscep tible of an easy explanation, which will save Milton's consistency.