of Tacitus concerning Boadicea, the wife of Prasutagus, whose declaration was non ut tantis majoribus ortam regnum et opes, verum ut unam e vulgo libertatem amissam se velle ulcisci. The same Tacitus, in his Life of Agricola, brings before us, a little earlier, domitas in Britannia gentes, captos reges, et monstratum satis Vespasianum. He mentions in the same place Cogidunus, a King of Britain, to whom, he writes, the Romans made a gift of certain cities. Then he adds: 'Is ad nostram usque memoriam fidissimus mansit, vetere ac jampridem recepta Populi Romani consuetudine, ut haberet instrumenta servitutis et regni.' When Domitian was Emperor Arviragus reigned in Britain, as Juvenal testifies:: 'et de temone Britanno Excidit Arviragus.' About that time, having been wholly subdued and reduced to the form of a Province, it was subjected to the Emperors. While it was under the Empire it underwent several mutations, and more than one tyrant tried to throw off the yoke of the Roman Emperor Lollianus, Victorinus, Posthumus, and Terricus, under Gallienus; Bonosus and Proculus, under Aurelian; Carausius under Diocletian. Under the later Emperors it lay open as a prey to very many nations, and experienced the same fate as many other provinces of the Roman Empire. So at length it was seized from the Romans by the Saxons and Angles, and from them by the Danes. Again from the Danes it returned to the Saxons. Finally the Normans took it from the Saxons, under the leadership of William, surnamed the Conqueror; who so subdued it as to make it a kingdom for him and his, who have now governed it for nearly six hundred years." Chapter VIII. NO PARLIAMENT BEFORE THE CONQUEST:-" Under the Kings who reigned in England before William no trace is found of a Parliament. They are wrong who would have it that under King Edgar a Parliament used to be called twice a year, and that there is proof of the fact in his Laws, where, under the heading De Comitiis, one reads that the Oppidan meetings are held thrice a year, but that the most celebrated assembly from the whole Satrapy is held twice in each year. But in that chapter the subject is not the Comitia, in the sense of a General Convention of the Kingdom called by the King, but the Convention of any one Province, or County, or Satrapy, which did then by custom meet twice a year. The sequel shows this plainly, for it orders the Bishop of the Diocese and the Senator, i. e. the Alderman, or Count, or Secular Judge, to be present at that sort of Convention, the one to exercise divine, and the other human, rights. Comitatus Curia, or County Court, this sort of Assembly was commonly called. It was of two kinds. One was properly called by the generic name, and was held every month by the Vice-Count or his deputy; the other was held twice a year, at Easter and Michaelmas. This latter was called in English The Thurne, because it used to meet in rotation in each of the centuries, or groups of a hundred, into which the county was divided. But the Courts of the Centuries, vernacularly called The Hundreds, having been abolished, the meetings, from the time of Edward III., were held in the chief county-town." Chapter VIII. ENGLISH PURITANISM AND ITS SUBDIVISIONS UNDER ELIZABETH AND JAMES." It is time to explain whence and when there burst forth a sect hostile to Kings and impatient of all Government. Those pretty PURITANS, as they were then called, began, in the reign of Elizabeth, to come forth from the darkness of Orcus, and first to disturb the Church. Next, of course, the State. For they are not less pests to the State than to the Church. There were three sorts of them: those who separated themselves entirely from the Church of England; those who did not wholly separate themselves; and those who, though they did not approve of the existing state of the Church, yet accommodated themselves to it. The last were the best of a bad lot; the first the worst. I am ashamed to repeat the names by which they were called, formidable in their very sound: Separatists, Nonconformists, and Conformists. Much against my will I have set down these luminous appellations. The Separatist folk were, moreover, divided into two classes, a stricter and a laxer, called respectively, after the names of their founders, Brownists and Robinsonians. The name of INDEPENDENTS had not yet been ventilated." Chapter X. THE INDEPENDENTS AND THEIR PRINCIPLES :-"Our discourse must now be of this kind of cattle, whence they came, what their way, what their discipline, if indeed words can suffice for the description, when under the one name of INDEPENDENTS there lurks a medley of names and kinds of Sects, Heresies, and Schisms, all sheltered by the dark and spreading shade of saintly Independency. For all who agree in this, that they reject both ecclesiastical and civil magistracy, love that name, and are associated as confederates by this one bond of union, however much they may differ in other things. And no wonder. All denominations that dread public supervision, and know that they cannot be tolerated by the magistrate, conspire naturally for the repudiation of all magistracy, foreseeing therefrom nothing better or milder than their own destruction. The same cause made them persecute the Bishops with a hatred quite Vatinian, and declare everlasting war against them, inasmuch as they knew that under the Episcopal rule they could not continue to exist. This sect, therefore, which wants liberty to be given to all sects, schismatic as well as heretical, glories in the title of THE INDEPENDENTS. I do not stop to make two families of them and distribute the wretched folk into the Orthodox and the Fanatics. Shall they be Orthodox to me who treat the Fanatics as their own people, not only tolerating them, but cherishing them as bosom friends? Whoever permits heresy perpetrates it. For what does it matter, I ask, whether one walks amiss in the doctrine of the faith or gives free scope to the wolves who are perverting the ways of God and depopulating the fold of Christ? . . . . Those truly cannot be called Orthodox who desire impunity for so many who have lapsed from rule, so many blasphemers, so many atheists, to whom also they concede the power of freely emitting their blasphemies, opposing Christianity, denying God himself. Only the other day the King of the Independents, the Tyrant of England, the enemy and parricide of his King [i. e. Cromwell], when he was setting out with his army from England to Ireland, would not let sail be set till, through a partner in his rebellion and accomplice in the parricide, he had caused public and free profession of their irreligion to be granted by Edict of Parliament to all the sects and heresies and schisms with which Britain now swarms. The Prelatists alone are excluded from this liberty, which is conceded to Antinomians, who repudiate the Law and the Prophets, to Arians, to Photinians, to Chiliasts, and a thousand such fanatical oddities." Chapter X. THE REAL REGICIDES." Thus was the King of three Kingdoms perfidiously, wickedly, and parricidally beheaded, on judicial sentence, by the executioner, two of the Kingdoms wholly dissenting, and nine-tenths of the third repudiating the act, among whom were the ministers of the Church, all the Presbyterians, all the nobles, and the sounder and larger part of the people. It was the soldiers of the Independents alone, with their officers, inhabitants of the one English Kingdom (for this pestilence of Independency is absent from the other two), and who make hardly a hundredth part of the English people, that, with inexpiable criminality and by a parricide of unutterable violence, deprived the three Kingdoms of their one King, and him of his life, for no other cause than their attachment to a sect in religion which abhors royal government, and detests Kings." Chapter XI. Such was the book which Milton had been unanimously deputed to answer on behalf of the Commonwealth. It was not that it could do much harm at home. There was no English translation of it; 1 and for those who could read the Latin there was nothing very new in the argument. Moreover, the ignorance of English affairs shown in several parts of it must have detracted considerably from its value in the eyes even of Royalists, while the absoluteness of its doctrine of Royal Prerogative, and its apologies for Prelacy, in recanta 1 There was a contemporary edition in French (Apologie Royale pour Charles I. par Claude de Saumaize, Paris, 1650, 12mo.); but I am not aware that to this day there has been any English translation. Lowndes mentions none. tion of all the author's previous utterances on that subject, must have greatly vexed the Presbyterians. It was abroad that there would be the mischief. Even there, and especially in the Dutch Republic where it had been written, there must have been many to whom the slavish doctrine of the book, its advocacy of Absolute Kingship, was positively offensive, and others who would note, with small respect for Salmasius, his wheel of opinion on the Episcopacy question. All in all, however, circulating in Courts and among those predisposed against the English Commonwealth, the book was calculated to increase and intensify the foreign antipathy with which the Commonwealth had to contend. To answer it effectively, therefore, might be no unworthy work for Milton; and he was willing to take all pains. The mere reading of the Defensio Regia would furnish him with the first necessary impressions; but deliberation would be useful, and some larger acquaintance with the other writings of the famous man.1 His De Primatu Pape, we may be sure, and any other of his books in which he had written against Prelacy, would be on Milton's writing table, and doubtless also, if but for an hour's inspection, a copy of the Exercitationes in Solinum. In fact, the great Salmasius might expect soon to hear a new opinion. about himself and about his writings generally from this English critic. From Jan. 1649-50 onwards, I seem to see Milton's arm stretching itself, at every leisure moment, through the air towards Leyden, the hand moving quietly as if engaged in fingering, with more and more of interest, the cranium of the great Salmasius. 1 Salmasins, it may be mentioned, was not quite a stranger to Milton even before the present book. In the sixth chapter of Book I. of the Reason of Church Government (1641-2) there is a complimentary reference to Salmasius. The subject of that chapter was the assertion of moderate Episcopalians that Episcopacy had been originally set up in the Church for the prevention of schisms; and Milton, in his discussion, after arguing that there had been schism in abundance in the Church of Corinth in St. Paul's time and in the next age, and yet that neither St. Paul nor his followers had set up any government there but that of Presbytery, had added, "And the same of other churches, out "of Hermas and divers other the "scholars of the Apostles, by the late industry of the learned Salmasius "appears." The reference is to the Dissertatio de Episcopis et Presbyteris of Salmasius, published in 1611 in reply to the Jesuit Petavius. CHAPTER III. ANNALS OF THE COMMONWEALTH SECOND YEAR. FEB. 18, 1649-50-FEB. 18, 1650-51. CHANGES IN THE COMPOSITION OF THE COUNCIL: ENFORC- OF CHARLES: COALITION OF THE GOVERNMENT PARTY |