been some other member of Council, who knew Milton, and had just read his Tenure of Kings and Magistrates.1 It is certain, at all events, that Cromwell must have approved of the application to Milton. It was by his extraordinary exertions that the Council of State had been brought into working order; he had presided at its first meetings, and at most of the subsequent ones, till Bradshaw's appointment relieved him; the Council was not yet a month old; not an act it did but was of interest to Cromwell. The deputation that waited on Milton, however, in his house in High Holborn, to convey to him the desire of the Council, must have been one or two of the members that had just been appointed a Committee of Council for that very business of Foreign Embassies and Correspondence in connexion with which Milton's services were wanted; and of these one guesses Whitlocke or Vane, or both. Their interview with Milton must have been the very next day, Wednesday, March 14. What passed we can also guess generally.

The proposal, as Milton informs us, took him quite by surprise. He was settling himself down again to purely literary work, hoping for undisturbed leisure under the Commonwealth to which he had given in his adhesion. The interruption or farther postponement of such work was a serious matter. Then there was the objection of his health. It had never been robust, and for the last few years it had been a constant source of trouble. Especially alarming was a growing weakness or dimness of sight, from no explicable cause, and with no external sign, but affecting the left eye already almost to its total disuse by candle-light, and making his first readings every morning painful or difficult. How would that infirmity suit with the official duties expected of him? Farther, of what were called business habits he was perfectly innocent, never having seen anything of office-work, the routine of committee-meetings, and such like, though perhaps, after all, there was no such mystery about these

1 Wood (Fasti, I. 484) says, "He was, "without any seeking of his, by the "endeavours of a private acquaintance,

"who was one of the new Council of "State, chosen Latin Secretary".

things but that one might have imagined them correctly enough. All this, with perhaps more, having been stated by Milton, and having been met with such answers as suggested themselves to his visitors (one of them, I fancy, being that the whole of Mr. Milton's time would bý no means be required for the duties of the Secretaryship) Milton did give his consent. The question of salary, I should say, was the last likely to be mentioned at the interview, and may not then have been mentioned at all. From the state of Milton's circumstances, indeed, that question cannot have been absolutely indifferent. The property left him by his father, consisting as it did of his native house, the Spread Eagle in Bread Street, and of one or two other London houses, besides something in money, and probably in some country bits of real estate, cannot have been altogether inconsiderable; and, shortly after the death of his father-in-law, Mr. Powell, in 1647, he had, in virtue of his claim on the Powell property for the residue of a debt of £500 due since 1627 (Vol. II. pp. 494-496), entered, by the legal process called "extent," into possession of certain cottages and small pieces of land, at Wheatley in Oxfordshire, that had belonged to Mr. Powell, with a title to hold the same till his debt, with damages and costs, should be satisfied. Out of these Wheatley revenues, however, he was making an allowance to Mrs. Powell of the thirds to which she was entitled by her widowhood; and, as he himself explains, there were other drawbacks, in the shape of rents actually intercepted by the deranged state of the country, heavy taxes, and other burdens, which reduced his income for the time to a simple sufficiency. No consideration of income, however, can have been his real inducement to accept the offered Secretaryship. That inducement, I believe, was a sudden exultation of spirit at the thought of being called to serve the great new Commonwealth in a place of trust, near its very centre, and seated in the very Councilroom with its founders and chiefs.1

1 The particulars as to the state of Milton's income in 1649 are inferred from Aubrey's Notes, Phillips's Life, VOL. IV.

G

and documents in Mr. Hamilton's Milton Papers. We shall hear more about the Wheatley property.

On Thursday, March 15, there were again two meetings of the Council. At the morning meeting, besides Bradshaw in the Chair, there were present Cromwell, Fairfax, Whitlocke, Vane, Lord Lisle, Masham, Ludlow, Holland, Mildmay, Heveningham, Colonel Hutchinson, and, rather later, Robinson, Mr. Lisle, and Colonel Walton; and, inter alia, there was this order: "That MR. JOHN MILTON be employed as Secretary for Foreign Tongues to this Council, and that he "have the same salary which Mr. Weckherlyn formerly had "for the said service". This Mr. Weckherlyn, or more properly and, fully Mr. George Rodolph Weckherlin, a German by birth, and now an oldish man, had been in official employment under Charles I. since the year 1628, if not earlier, but had passed into the service of the Parliament, and been Secretary for Foreign Tongues to the Joint Committee for the Two Kingdoms, established in February 1643-4.1 His salary in the latter capacity had been, it seems, 158. 10d. a day, or £288 138. 6d. a year. That sum, therefore, equivalent to about £1000 a year now, was to be Milton's salary in his new post. The Council of State had in fact engulphed the Committee of the Two Kingdoms, and the work proposed for Milton under the Council was much the same as Weckherlin's had been under the former body. Milton does not seem to have been present when he was so appointed by the Council and his salary fixed his consent to take the office had been

1 Weckherlin's earlier career in England is to be traced through the published Calendars of State Papers from Feb. 1628-9, when he was Secretary to Lord Conway, then Chief Secretary of State, on to 1639, when he was in attendance on Secretary Coke in Charles's Expedition against the Scots. The most. interesting entry concerning him I have found in these volumes is one of date Feb. 20, 1630-1. He then petitioned the King to "vouchsafe gracious ac"knowledgment of his service, lest he "undo himself and his family thereby," and suggested, as one way of "refresh"ing" for him meanwhile "in his hard "time," that the King might grant him the reversion of a patent which King James, in the eleventh year of his reign, had given to one of his footmen. It was a patent of the exclusive right to

print Cicero's works in Latin, Virgil, Terence, Ovid, the Colloquies of Corderius, and certain other books. The patent to the footman had been for twenty-one years, and was about to expire; and Weckherlin petitions that it should be continued to him for thirtyone years more, and that three other books, which he names, should be included in it: "whereby he may get some small competence, as the foot'man did, by letting his grant to the "Stationers' Company." He did obtain the patent, March 28, 1631. Weckherlin had published at Stuttgart, in 1619, "A Panegyricke to the Lord Hays, "Viscount Dorchester, his Majesties of "Great Britaine Ambassadour in Germany, sung by the Rhine;" and he had continued to dabble in authorship.

66

simply reported by Vane or Whitlocke. It is memorable, however, that the day of Milton's appointment to be Secretary for Foreign Tongues to the Council was also the day of Cromwell's nomination to the command-in-chief in Ireland. The nomination was made by the Council at their afternoon sitting.

Tuesday, March 20, was the day of Milton's induction into his office. The Council of State had held no meeting in the interim; and at the meeting this day, Bradshaw not being able to be present at first, the sederunt began with only Sir William Armyn (probably voted into the chair), Whitlocke, Mildmay, Holland, Danvers, Scott, Jones, the Earl of Salisbury, Masham, and Constable, though ere long Bradshaw, Cromwell, the Earl of Denbigh, Sir James Harrington, Mr. Lisle, and Heveningham, also made their appearance. It was ordered at the meeting "That the Lord President "and any four members of this Council shall be a Committee "to administer the oath of secrecy unto such as shall be employed as secretaries to attend this Council"; and, as the Chief or General Secretary, Mr. Walter Frost, sen., and his son, Mr. Walter Frost, jun., the Assistant Secretary, had already given their promises of secrecy a month before (February 22), and had been acting in their posts ever since, I infer that the order related to Milton, who had come to Derby House for the first time, and whose arrival had probably been announced by the door-keeper. On this supposition we can see Bradshaw and some four others of those present going out to receive Milton in the outer room where he was waiting, administering the oath to him there, and then returning and introducing the new Secretary to the Council. On that occasion, if not before, Milton may have first shaken hands with Cromwell.

Among the items of business at that meeting were instructions for two letters to be written, one to the Senate of Hamburg, and the other to Mr. Strickland, the English Resident at the Hague. These instructions, if I judge rightly from the entry of them in the Council Order Book, had been given before Milton came in; but he probably

learnt at the meeting that the letter to the Senate of Hamburg would be in his department. So, at all events, it proved. At the Council meeting of Thursday, March 22 (one meeting having intervened), it was ordered "That the "letters now read, to be sent to Hamburg on behalf of the "Company of Merchant Adventurers, be approved, and that they be translated into Latin by MR. MILTON." Frost, or some member of the Council, had drafted the letters in English, and Milton's first work in his Secretaryship was to be the translation of them into Latin.

66

When Milton became Secretary for Foreign Tongues to the Council of State, he had just entered on his forty-first year. The routine of his daily life was now to be regulated pretty much by the requirements of his office. When the Council had a morning meeting, it was generally at an early hour. Thus at the meeting at which Milton first appeared it was ordered "That this Council do meet to-morrow morning "at seven of the clock." Eight or nine o'clock seems to have been more common; but indeed the hours and times of the Council were very irregular. Some days there was no meeting at all; on others there were two, that of the afternoon protracted now and then to midnight. Early hours were no terror to Milton; but late and irregular hours may have been disturbing to his habits. He was not inconvenienced in this respect, however, so much as his two colleagues, Mr. General Secretary Frost and Mr. Assistant Secretary Frost. While their duties required them to be always present at the Council-meetings and during the whole sittings, Milton's were such that it would be enough if he were present at the beginning of each meeting, or looked in at each when he had reason to think his services might be wanted, always taking care to be at hand in case of a sudden summons. There are indications in the Order Books that, though Milton's attendance was very constant at first, matters gradually arranged themselves on some such understanding. Moreover, though the Council were very jealous as to any divulging of their proceedings, and Milton therefore may have had to