BOOK 1655. Reflections. We shall have a juster conception of the prodigious capacity of Cromwel, if we recollect that the various measures treated of in the four preceding Chapters were nearly all of them commenced, either before, or within three months after the dissolution of that parliament, whose purpose was the style and composition they are certainly remarkably perspicuous; but it may be doubted whether Milton would have admitted such a phrase as, "In illo tamen Hispaniæ regis embargo." There is also considerable subtlety and closeness of logical deduction in this paper; and so far it savours of Milton: but it wants something of Milton's fervour and dignity. It may be suspected that, when the writer came to speak of the enormities perpetrated by the Spaniards at their first establishment in the New World, he would, if it had been Milton, have given a greater loose to the indignation of a virtuous and generous mind. rentur. We must also recollect the care with which Milton published or preserved all his genuine writings. One of the latest of his publications is, Joannis Miltonii Angli Epistolarum Familiarium Liber Unus, in 1674, the year of his death; and, in the Bookseller's Address to the Reader prefixed to this volume, he says: "Facta spes erat aliquamdiu, lector benevole, fore ut hujus authoris Epistola, cum Publicæ tum Familiares, uno volumine excudendæ mihi permitteVerum de Publicis, postquam eos per quos solos licebat, certas ob causas id nolle cognovi, concessa parte contentus, Familiares tantum in lucem emittere satis habui." A surreptitious copy of the Public Letters was printed in 1676; but a copy has since been discovered in the same chest or case with Milton's treatise, De Doctrina Christiana, accompanied with a printed Latin Advertisement. It seems therefore that these Letters of State have the express sanction of the author, and are to be admitted as his genuine productions: at the same time that there arises a presumption against any State Paper not in this collection, that it was written by some other person. The remark of Birch, that the Declaration against Spain is XV. 1655. essentially to fetter and abridge, if not to annihi- CHAP. late, his authority as chief magistrate. With what energy must that mind have been gifted, which, at so perilous a crisis, entered on such a multiplicity of plans, as scarcely any other sovereign would have ventured on under the most auspicious circumstances, and at a period of the greatest tranquillity! He parted with the parlia further to be considered as Milton's, "because it was his province to write such things as Latin Secretary," is also liable to considerable exception. On the third of February 1654, a few weeks after Cromwel's accession to the protectorate, Philip Meadows was expressly appointed Latin secretary to the council, with a salary of two hundred pounds per annum; and Milton's name occurs in the same memorandum, but with a blank after it, thus specifying no particular appointment. (See above, p. 30.) This was probably owing to his blindness. Weckerlin, his predecessor in office, had been appointed assistant Latin secretary, on the eleventh of March 1652, with the same salary as Meadows (Order Book); and, on the death of Weckerlin, Milton, in a letter to Bradshaw, 21 February 1653, (Todd, Life of Milton, 1826, p. 163, 164,) recommended Marvel to succeed him, "if the council shall think that I need any assistant." But this recommendation seems to have produced no effect. Meadows was now (February 1654) expressly appointed to Milton's office. Milton however continued to be employed occasionally. On the seventeenth of April in the present year certain reductions of salary appear to have taken place: Walter Frost, treasurer of the council's contingencies, was reduced from four to three hundred pounds per annum; and Milton's salary, which, from the third of February 1654, had been £288. 18. 6 per annum (at the rate of 15s. 101d. per diem) was now fixed at £150 per annum, and that to be paid him during his life, partaking therefore in some degree of the nature of a retiring pension (Order Book). IV. 1655. BOOK ment, without one law having been made during their whole session, without one tax having been passed to defray the expences of the government. His power seemed to hang by a thread. His authority plainly rested upon nothing but that instrument, the Government of the Commonwealth, which had been voted by a council of officers. The lawyers, and the community were prepared to dispute the legality of his proceedings at every step. He was indeed captain general of an army, numerous and well disciplined; but that army was divided within itself, consisting, perhaps in equal parts, of his supporters and his adversaries. He derived the strength of his authority purely from the character he had acquired by his actions, and from the personal qualities by which he was enabled to assert and to maintain the station he had seized. 221 CHAPTER XVI. INSTITUTION ALARM.-NUMEROUS ARRESTS OF ROYALISTS. PROTECTOR. CLEVELAND AND JEREMY TAYLOR IMPRI SONED. XVI. THE next measure we have to record is much CHAP. less creditable to Cromwel, than any of those that preceded from his accession to the protectorate. It appears to have originated in the ques- of major tion of revenue. He had no proper and legiti mate means of imposing taxes on the nation; and it would have been dangerous, in a country where the questions of law and justice had so long held a paramount authority, to have attempted any thing in that nature, beyond the mere continuance of the burthens already existing. 1655. Institution generals. question of revenue. of supplies. Cromwel in his personal habits was the most Necessity inexpensive sovereign that ever sat on the English throne. But his ideas as to public affairs were BOOK miscellaneous and vast. IV. 1655. Determination to throw the burthen on the royal ists. False alarm. He could not keep up a large army and a formidable navy; he could not enter into confederacies with some foreign powers, and awe others into compliance, and make conquests in the West Indies, without great expence, and an abundant treasury. He had resolved to make the name of an Englishman as much respected and formidable as ever that of a Roman had been ". In this emergency the idea occurred to him that he would make the English royalists defray the expence, which their disaffection had originally caused, and that, as those who resisted the encroachments of despotism had at first almost exclusively borne the disbursements of the war in the sacred cause of liberty, so the royalists might now be brought at least equally to meet the demands of the national treasury. As the idea was critical and daring, so the first step that Cromwel took towards the carrying it into execution was unjustifiable and crooked. Previously to the entering on the execution of his project, he determined to excite a false alarm. In the spring of the present year a formidable tion in the insurrection had been organised against his government; preliminary steps had been entered upon in almost every part of England; and the king had taken up his abode at Middleburg in Insurrec beginning defeated. |