TO D 1645.) JOHN SELDEN. JOHN MILTON. 591 sea, from the law of nature or of nations, is not common to all men, but is the subject of property equally with the land In the second, the King of Great Britain is asserted to be lord of the circumfluent sea, as an inseparable and perpetual appendage of the British Empire." In 1640, Selden published an elaborate work on the natural and national law of the Jews – De Jure Naturali et Gentium juxta Disciplinam Ebræorum, and he added to this, in 1646, Uxor Ebraica, which was a work upon the Jewish laws of marriage and divorce. 69. We return now to John Milton, and his argument on a like question. In 1645 he met the religious arguments against his doctrine with a pamphlet called Tetrachordon (that is, "arranged with four chords "): Expositions upon the Four Chief Places in Scripture which treat of Marriage or Nullities in Marriage. To this was added presently Colasterion (ie., "place of punishment"), a reply to an anonymous assailant, with a special word to the Parliament's new licenser, who surpassed the old licenser under the Crown, "for a licenser is not contented now to give his single imprimatur, but brings his chair into the title-leaf, there sits and judges up or judges down what book he pleases." The licenser who cried a book up on its title-page might help the printer to put off wares otherwise unsaleable, which might in time, Milton suggested, bring him in round fees. But upon the subject of divorce, also, Milton had now said what he had to say. Civil war had advanced. English and Scottish armies were besieging York; in June, 1644, Prince Rupert marched to relieve the city. He did so, but marched out again; and on the 2nd of July, at Marston Moor, the charges of Fairfax and Cromwell turned defeat of the Parliamentary army into signal victory. The queen fled to France. On the 10th of January. 1645, the Presbyterians sent Laud to the scaffold-Prynne, his violent opponent, and once his victim, acting as counsel against the helpless old man at his trial. Then followed the failure of an attempt at treaty; and then, on the 14th of June, the battle of Naseby, in which the king's cause was completely lost, and the success again was mainly due to Cromwell and his Ironsides, This ruin of the king's cause brought the Powells into difficulties. John Milton's wife suddenly appeared to him in 1645, when he was paying a visit to a relative named Blackborough, who lived by St. Martin's-le-Grand. She knelt for forgiveness, had it at opce, went back to his home, and we have no reason for He doubting that she learnt to understand his gentle nature. resumed, also, his active good-will to her family, and, with help of his brother Christopher as a lawyer, stood between them and ruin. In the same year, 1645, Milton removed to a larger house in Barbican, and a publisher obtained from him a collected edition of his earlier verse, Poems both Latin and English, by John Milton. In the following year, 1646, Milton's first daughter, Anne, was born. She was lame. In the next year, 1647, his second daughter, Mary, was born, and his father died. He moved in that year to a house in Holborn, looking back on Lincoln's Inn Fields. He published no more pamphlets or books during the Civil Wars. In 1648, Cromwell had defeated, at Darwen Bridge, the Scotch Royalist army brought in by the Duke of Hamilton, and was welcomed in Edinburgh as a deliverer; and after this Milton addressed to him a sonnet as 66 our chief of men," who had prevailed, "guided by faith and matchless fortitude;" but while paying honour to his success in battle, the poet urged that which lay next to his heart "Yet much remains To conquer still; Peace hath her victories No less renown'd than War; new foes arise On the 2nd of May, 1648, the Presbyterians had secured a Parliamentary ordinance enacting that all persons who, "by preaching, teaching, printing, or writing," denied seven specified articles of faith, should, on conviction, if the error were not abjured, "suffer the pains of death, as in the case of felony, without benefit of clergy." To Fairfax, also, Milton wrote his praise for victory; but in each sonnet the praise for prowess in battle is the prelude in the two quatrains to the essential thought in the terzettes. This is the essence of Milton's sonnet to Fairfax: "Oh, yet a noble task awaits thy hand, (For what can war but endless war still breed?) "Till truth and right from violence be freed, And publick faith cleared from the shameful brand While Avarice and Rapine share the land." 70. We look back now with equal reverence to men of all opinion who have been true to the highest life within their souls. Jeremy Taylor ($ 61) was, early in 1644, a chaplain with ro A.D. 1649.1 YOHN MILTON. JEREMY TAYLOR. 593 the Royal army in Wales. He was imprisoned for a time, after the defeat at Cardigan, then married a Welsh lady, Joanna Bridges, who had some property at Llangedock, in Carmarthenshire, and with two companions-William Nicholson, afterwards Bishop of Gloucester, and William Wyatt, afterwards a Prebendary of Lincoln-Jeremy Taylor kept a school, Newton Hall, in Carmarthenshire, at Llanvihangel Aberbythyrch. It lies near Grongar Hill, and the great house of the neighbourhood is Golden Grove, where Lord and Lady Carbery were his warm friends. In this Welsh village Taylor wrote his best works, and first, in 1647, his Liberty of Prophesying (ch. vii. § 33), a plea for freedom to all in the interpretation of the Bible, with one simple standard of external authority, the Apostles' Creed. In this book Jeremy Taylor showed, of course, the natural bent of his mind towards authority in Church and State. He would have a church of every country contained within its political boundaries, and allowed the ruler more power to secure uniformity than would be practically consistent with his theory; but this represents only the form of thought which was as natural to him as his different form of thought to Milton. It was warmed in Jeremy Taylor with true fervour of devotion, and brought home to the sympathies of men by a pure spirit of Christian charity. The mischiefs of prevailing discord came, he said, "not from this, that all men are not of one mind, for that is neither necessary nor possible, but that every opinion is made an article of faith, every article is a ground of quarrel, every quarrel makes a faction, every faction is zealous, and all zeal pretends for God, and whatsoever is for God cannot be too much. We by this time are come to that pass, we think we love not God except we hate our brother." And these were the last words in the book: "I end with a story which I find in the Jews' books :When Abraham sat at his tent door, according to his custom, waiting to entertain strangers, he espied an old man stooping and leaning on his staff, weary with age and travel, coming towards him, who was an hundred years of age; he received him kindly, washed his feet, provided supper, and caused him to sit down; but observing that the old man ate and prayed not, nor begged for a blessing on his meat, asked him why he did not worship the God of heaven. The old man told him that he worshipped the fire only, and acknowledged no other god; at which Abraham grew so zealously angry that he thrust the old man out of his tent, and exposed him to all the evils of the night and an unguarded condition. When the old man was gone, God called to Abraham and asked him where the stranger was? He replied, 'I thrust him away because he did not worship thee.' God answered him, 'I have suffered him these hundred years, although he dishonoured me; and couldst thou not endure him one night, when he gave thee no trouble?' Upon this, saith the story, Abraham fetched him back again, and gave him hospitable entertainment and wise instruction. 'Go thou and do likewise,' and thy charity will be rewarded by the God of Abraham." CHAPTER IX. THE COMMONWEALTH. 1. ON the 30th of January, 1649, in weather so cold that the Thames was frozen over, King Charles I., after trial by a High Court of Justice constituted by authority of the House of Commons, was publicly executed at Whitehall. On the 7th of February, the House of Commons abolished the office of King in this nation, and soon afterwards a Council of State was appointed, consisting of forty-one persons, of whom twenty-two, including Sir Henry Vane, refused to sign a document expressing their approval of the proceedings by which monarchy had been overthrown. It was agreed to let the past be, and take only a pledge of fidelity for the future. To this Council John Milton was appointed Secretary for Foreign Tongues. With much weakness of character, through which he fell, the king had many merits, and he died asserting that his people mistook the nature of government, for that men were free under a government not by being sharers in it, but by due administration of its laws. He did not understand that form of government towards which England was now tending, as, with advance of civilisation, the old controversy on the limit of authority (ch. iii. § 11) advanced its ground. Some who condemned the king did so in cruelty of zeal; with others, trial, sentence, and execution of a king by his people, for the first time in the history of man, was a blow struck at the doctrine of an irresponsible monarchy. But thousands had taken the Parliament's side in the Civil Wars who would not have assented to this act. John Gauden published about a fortnight before the execution Dr. A.D. 1649) EIKON BASILIKE. 595 his Religious and Loyal Protestation against the present Declarca Purposes and Proceedings of the Army and others, about the Trying and Destroying our Sovereign Lord the King. Sent to a Colloneil to bee presented to the Lord Fairfax, and his Generall Councell of Officers, the fifth of January, 1648 (New Style, 1649). This was "Printed for Richard Royston;" and Richard Royston was then printing another work of Gauden's, which was not issued until a few days after the execution, but its appearance at such a time made it a power. It was called “Eikwv Baσiλikǹ” (Eikōn Basilikē, the Royal Image), The Portraicture of His Sacred Majesty in his Solitudes and Sufferings. It was written in the first person professing to be the work of Charles himself, displaying his piety while it set forth an explanation of his policy. It was in 28 sections, as : 1. Upon His Majesties calling the last Parliament. 2. Upon the Earl of Strafford's Death; and so forth, usually giving, as from the king's own lips, a popular interpretation of his actions, and each section ending with a strain of prayer. One section, the 25th, consisted wholly of "Penitential Meditations and Vows in the King's Solitude at Holmby;" the 27th was fatherly counsel "To the Prince of Wales ;" and the 28th closed the series with "Meditations upon Death, after the Votes of Non-Addresses, and His Majestie's closer Imprisonment in Carisbrook Castle." The writer of this book (except two of its sections) had, as John Gauden, B.D., preached before the Parliament, in November, 1640, to its great satisfaction, on The Love of Truth and Peace. He was chaplain to the Earl of Warwick, a Presbyterian leader, and afterwards held under the Parliament the living of Bocking, in Essex. When he was at work upon his book for the king, he showed his design to Anthony Walker, Rector of Fifield, who agreed with his strong desire to aid the king, but doubted the morality of personating him, to which Gauden replied, "Look on the title, 'tis The Portraicture, &c., and no man draws his own picture." Dr. Walker was with Gauden when he called on the Bishop of Salisbury (Dr. Duppa), left Gauden and the bishop to a private talk, and was told afterwards that the bishop had liked the work, but thought there should be sections added on 'The Ordinance against the Common Prayer Book," and "Their Denying his Majesty the attendance of his Chaplains." As bishop and as chaplain to the king, Duppa felt strongly on these points, and he had agreed to write the sections upon them (16th and 24th in the printed book). The book being finished, a copy |