I said to him: “Husband, this is truly hard. My mother is a widow with four orphaned children wholly dependent upon her.”
“Aye, you are right,” he answered. “They are the widow and orphans of a fraudulent Welsh rascal.”
“My father was a good father to me,” I answered. “I love his memory and will not hear it defamed.”
“Ah, will you not?” said he. “Then I wish you were as loyal and loving a wife as you are daughter!”
“These thirds are the only money upon which my poor mother can depend for her livelihood,” said I, “and it is unreasonable to expect the Commissioners to make mention of them; for it is not yourself that pays the fine, but the estate; you will not be the loser in the end. They fix the fine upon you, for why? Because you are in possession; and, whereas you can afford her this pittance, she cannot live without it.”
“How do you know that I can afford it?” he asked. “What if I say that I cannot so? I wish to hear nothing more upon the matter. My answer to your mother is a plain ‘No.’”
When I told my mother what he had replied, she was near frantic, having counted upon the £26 13s. 4d. as a means of securing £500. For with a loan of £25 promised by my Aunt Moulton, who though living in poverty still had a few jewels to sell, this sum would have been sufficient to pay the remainder of the fine and also her coach fare to Forest Hill, where she might then reclaim all her goods and sell them at a fair price. But now, until the fine were paid, what could she do? Acting upon my brother Richard’s advice—for Mr. Christopher Milton would have no finger in this pie—she presented a petition to the Commissioners, praying them to order my husband to pay the thirds, to keep her and her children from starving.
The Commissioners, examining their former decision, found that there had been no order made to my husband to pay the thirds, and instructed her to go to Law with him if she were not satisfied. This she could not do, for she had no money wherewith to prosecute, and besides, she feared what my husband might do to me in revenge. Thus she continued in poverty, and so continues to-day. It is very hard, as I have plainly told my husband. I have even dared remind him of the duty owed to the fatherless and the widow; and all he answers is that the scripture forbids him to defraud any such, but does not order him to defraud himself on their account.
Of what has happened to my brothers and sisters since 1646, the year in which I last wrote of them, I will say no more than that I have lost my brother William, a captain in the Parliamentary service under General Monck, who was killed in Scotland by a musket shot, I know not at what place; and that my dear brother James writes for a diurnal that is very bitterly set against the Government, and I fear daily to have news of his imprisonment; and that my sister Zara is married. During her poverty Zara became the saintliest of women, and one day implored my forgiveness for all the unkindness that she had done me; which I granted willingly, for I had been no good sister to her, I fear. Then she asked leave from my mother to go to France and there seek a nunnery, which my mother, however, would not grant; and Zara resigned herself in obedience. But a captain who had been blinded in the war, Richard Pearson, a Papist, fell in love with her gentle voice and good deeds, and married her; he has but £100 per annum, but we consider it a fortunate match indeed, for he is a gentleman of nine or ten descents, and of a cheerful heart.
For myself, I am not the same woman that I was before the birth of my son, and so great a harm the little rogue did me in his coming forth that Trunco, who was my midwife, told my husband bluntly that if ever he companied with me again, and got me with child, he would find himself a widower when my nine months were out. I cannot walk now but with a stick, and to drag myself upstairs and down again is a misery. Yet I will not pretend to unhappiness. My husband has hired a good country woman to help me with the children; and he is contented with the love that I bear for our son John, whom oftentimes he dandles upon his knee, singing quaint songs to him; and at the same time as he bought a coral for John, with silver bells, to cut his teeth upon, he gave me as a gift a gold ring with three pearls in it.
My husband is now at once the proudest and most pitiful of men, because of all that has happened to him since he was appointed Secretary for the Foreign Tongues to the Council of State. He writes smooth letters in Latin for the Council in answer to letters addressed to it in the German, Dutch, French, Spanish and Portuguese tongues—for all these tongues he understands well enough to converse in them with Ambassadors on behalf of the Council. Until a few months ago he still examined suspected papers and books for the Council and reported upon them; and for a year or more he wrote anonymously for Mercurius Politicus, a diurnal that comes out on the Thursday of every week, over which he was set as Censor and licenser. There was one piece of his published in this Mercury that made a stir. He wrote it upon the case of the Reverend Love, minister of St. Anne’s in Aldersgate, who last year [1651] plotted with the Scots and the exiled Presbyterians, Colonel Graves and the rest, for the suppression of the Council of State and the proclamation of King Charles of Scotland as King also of England. When he, with his crew, were apprehended and convicted of treason, all the Presbyterial ministers of London pleaded for his pardon. But my husband in this Mercury approved the sentence of death as just and exemplary, and General Cromwell had him executed upon Tower Hill as a scarecrow. Ah, how bitterly poor Tom Tanner must have lamented his godly minister!
The maker of this news-sheet, which flies every week into all parts of the nation, is one Marchamont Needham, a scurrilous fellow, sometime usher at the Merchant Taylors’ School, who scribbled for Parliament against the King, but, when the King was beheaded, against Parliament; he was afterwards put into prison, whither my husband was sent to reason with him and persuade him to change his coat again. The writers for the diurnals are most of them for sale, and at no high price. During the late wars any meritless boasting Falstaff might puff out his own fame by a little money paid to the publisher of a Mercury or Intelligencer. For this practice one Sir John Gell was a bye-word, who kept the diurnal-makers in pension, so that whatever was done against the enemy in his own county of Derbyshire, or in neighbouring counties, was attributed to him as a matter of course. Yet what is read in print is by the vulgar taken for Gospel; wherefore it is the Council’s policy to engage at a good fee all the most industrious writers of the day, even those of scandalous life and conversation, so be it only that they have the knack of persuading the people that white or grey is smutty black; and, on occasion, that smutty black is angelic white. The Council is very lavish with gifts where there are good services to be rewarded: conformably with the proverb that they who steal a sheep will give away the trotters for God’s sake. If a man do but stir his hat to them, he shall not lose his labour. Mr. Needham is become a great crony of my husband’s; I cannot abide the fellow, with his leering looks and faithless heart—for what is to recant but to cant again?—nor can I understand how my husband can be so little squeamish, unless it be that he himself has so often turned cat-in-pan, from Prelatist to Presbyterian, and from Presbyterian to Independent, that he sympathises with all others of restless conscience.
Now both at home and abroad the reputation of the Council has grown prodigiously. The Lord-General Cromwell has subdued Ireland as it never was subdued before, so that whole provinces are now sheer wilderness; and, upon the Scots inviting their new King Charles II into his Kingdom, this same Cromwell invaded Scotland and won the famous battle of Dunbar; and last year, upon King Charles’s conspiring with the English Presbyterians for a revengeful invasion of England, he won the yet more famous battle of Worcester, in which the Scots lost 14,000 slain or captured, against an English loss of no more than 200. Since then it is hard for most Englishmen not to own pride in such an army; and the Princes and States of Europe, that at first abominated the crime of the mad English, have learned a new respect for them; for the Council carries matters with a high hand in all its dealings. However, King Charles escaped from the battle of Worcester, not very gloriou
sly, and while he lives his Cause lives too; though Scotland, having surrendered to General Cromwell’s arms, is now incorporated in the Commonwealth of England, and Sectaries of all sorts flourish like weeds in the gardens of Presbytery.
Aye, General Cromwell is become our chiefest man. The Lord General Fairfax, already before the victory at Dunbar, resigned his Captain-Generalship, for being married to a Presbyterial wife it went against his conscience to invade Scotland, the home of Presbytery: he lives retired among his books and orchard trees on his fair estate of Nun-Appleton in Yorkshire, and I think it will take a sharp and long screw to draw him thence again. Wherefore, as the balladists sing:
Our Oliver is all in all,
Our Oliver is all in all,
And Oliver is here,
And Oliver is there,
And Oliver is at Whitehall.
And Oliver notes all,
And Oliver votes all,
And claps his hand upon his bilboe
O fine Oliver! etc.
Even to my husband, who is chary in his praises, Captain-General Cromwell appears to be the greatest commander in the history of the world; and Captain-General Cromwell, for his part, has come to think very highly of my husband and has complimented him to his face as the first writer in all Europe: and so he is regarded by very many people besides, since his conquest of the great Salmasius.
Who has not heard of Salmasius, alias Claude de Saumaise, until latterly regarded as the only literate prodigy of his day, the greatest scholar since Aristotle? To deal freely with you, I had never heard of him myself until my husband was commissioned by the Council to write a book against him; but I am a woman and never was sent to the University; and besides, his fame was more resonant on the Continent of Europe than in this island. But I warrant that my husband knew his name and fame: indeed, he had praised him in pamphlets written while he was yet a Presbyterian. Salmasius had published his first treatise in 1608, the year of my husband’s birth, at the age of but twenty. In 1629 came his masterpiece, a folio of eight hundred closely printed pages, being an edition of the encyclopædic history of Solinus Polyhistor, with profuse augmentations, in the form of learned Latin glosses upon every chapter; so that Solinus himself seemed a mere stammering puny by comparison with his new tutor. This book was greeted with such marvellous praise by all the scholars of Europe, or such at least as were not jealous of his reputation, that he was beset by letters from rival Universities, offering him professorships and other honours, with promise of high fees, and drenched with countless panegyrical encomiums. He was sent for by the learned men of Leyden, Utrecht, Padua, Bologna, Upsala and Oxford, and by the Pope himself (though Salmasius was a professed enemy to the Papacy, having been converted in Germany to the Reformed Religion) who wished to redeem him by gifts and flattery; and the French King was also jealous that he should remain in France.
The Dutch won this tug of war, for they made the highest bid at the auction, offering him a professorship which took precedence of all others at the famous University at Leyden, and carried a public salary. At Leyden he would find a better library than in any popish University, and also Messer Elzivir would publish his books, who was the best printer in Europe. Wherefore, Salmasius accepted this offer, writing that there was always greater liberty in a Republic than in a kingdom; and at Leyden for eighteen years or so he continued, writing massive books upon antiquities, religion, philosophy, Law, astrology and I know not what beside. Such admiration did these books excite among the learned that the French King longed to have him return to his dominions at whatever price; and when he courteously declined, yet sent him the badge of knighthood as a free gift and honour. To him, as to the acknowledged oracle of learning, the man of vastest knowledge then living, persons of every condition and quality flocked from all quarters, seeking enlightenment for their doubts and difficulties.
This Salmasius seems to be a man not unlike my husband, fretful, keen-minded, proud, unwearying, subject to headaches, quarrelsome, always crouched before a book with pen and paper beside him, forgetful of nothing that ever he has read, always holding a greater store of book-learning in his mind than he can find time to void out again in the form of other books. In three things only he differs from my husband—he is riot a poet; his fame has made him something careless; and he is ruled by a termagant wife.
Salmasius had been in no wise unaware of what was passing in England and had inquired closely into our affairs. He was consulted both by Royalists and Parliamentarians upon the differences that divided them, and had pronounced against the intermeddling of Bishops in temporal affairs, though he would not have Bishops abolished, root and branch. However, he was abhorrent of Sectaries and Schismatics, and it was hoped by the Scottish and English Presbyterians, and by the English and Irish Prelatists and Papists now in exile, and by King Charles II himself, that he would write against those who had executed his late Majesty and had seized the government of England and Ireland. A fee of £100 was offered to Salmasius by King Charles from his scanty store, which Salmasius graciously accepted—tempering the wind to the shorn sheep—and by November, 1649, his book was written and printed, with the title, in Latin, of The Royal Defence. It began rantingly thus:
Of late the horrid rumour smote and sorely wounded our ears, but more our minds, of the parricide committed among the English, upon the person of their King, by a nefarious conjuration of sacrilegious persons. Whomsoever this hideous news assailed, on the instant, as if he had been blasted by the stroke of lightning, his hair upstarted and his voice stuck in his gullet…. Ay, the Sun himself in his perennial circling has never looked upon a baser or more atrocious deed… worthy of universal hatred and invective are the authors of this prodigious and unheard-of deed, and most worthy moreover to be pursued with fire and sword, not only by all Kings and Princes in Europe who rule by royal right, but also by the magistrates of every well-framed and honestly-minded republic. For these factious fanatics not only delight in assailing the thrones of Kings, but endeavour to subvert every power not by themselves created, desiring and intending nought else than a revolution and an overturning of all that is fixed as well in the Church as in the State; and with such endless lust of further innovation as may win for themselves the licence to govern all and yield obedience to none…
Salmasius then inquired into the rights of Kings, as written of in the Old and New Testaments, maintaining that even tyrants are sacrosanct and inviolable to their subjects, and answerable to God only; and, with copious citations and quotations, carried the argument through all ancient and modern history. To this he appended a brief history of Kings in England, satisfying himself that they were in no wise dependent upon Parliaments; and at last came to the climax of the work, the horrid trial and execution of King Charles, with a marvellous eulogy of his virtuous life and character. This was his conclusion:
It was the soldiers of the Independents alone, they and their officers, all inhabitants of the Kingdom of England (for this pestilence of Independency is not to be found either in Scotland or in Ireland), and who are in number not one man in a hundred of the English people, these, I say, by a parricide so unutterably violent as never can be expiated, deprived the three Kingdoms of their one King, and him of his life, for no other cause than their whoring after a perverted faith which abhors regal government and detests Kings.
This was the book which the Council called upon my husband to answer, and he was the very man for the purpose; for here was ground that he had long made his own, into which Salmasius had trespassed. When my husband was given this commission, he was like a boy that has been lent an axe by his father, with leave to cut down a certain tall, rotten tree. How he rejoiced, swinging the axe through the air; feeling the blade with his thumb and then grinding it yet sharper at the oiled stone; striking the haft upon the ground to make the head sit the firmer; then tapping the bole of the tree, here and there, for sounds of hollowness, and marking upon it with chalk the line where to make his hacking strokes, so that it would f
all easily and along the very line that he intended for it. Throughout a whole year my husband worked at his answer, in all his leisure time allowed him by the Council, shutting himself in his library, with bread, cheese, beer, tobacco, and candles, and forbidding any disturbance or interruption whatsoever, though the Palace caught fire or villains burst in to ravish me or slay my children. His was no easy task: for, having orders to pursue Salmasius like a beagle through every one of his twelve chapters, not leaving any matter of importance unanswered, he must find and examine the original context of each citation and redargue the opinions derived therefrom, with fresh citations from the same authors and others, ranging from Homer to Hottoman, from Sulpicius Severus to Sichardus, from Gildas to Guiccard.
My husband found this work very hurtful to his eyes, being forced to write the book piece-meal, and to break off almost every hour to rest them a little. Yet never was a man more earnest in a task than he then, faithfully returning clout for clout, objurgation for objurgation, mud-bullet for mud-bullet, filth-ball for filth-ball. Salmasius (he wrote) was a dunce in Latin grammar; he was also a hireling mourner at a funeral, who canted and shed crocodilian tears; he was a beetle, blockhead, liar, slanderer, slave, apostate, devil, turn-coat, sheep, weevil, ignoramus, French vagabond, Judas Iscariot, and a long-eared ass bestridden by a virago. That King, whom Salmasius lamented (he wrote) had been a swinger who used in the playhouse to wanton with the women of his Court, and in public places to fondle the bosoms of virgins and matrons, as also their more secret parts; a monster who had also been nasty with his father’s own catamite, the Duke of Buckingham, the very instrument by which he had poisoned his father; a base pretender, moreover, to royal lineage, forasmuch as his grandfather was David Rizzio, a wanton Italian music-master, the paramour of Mary, Queen of Scots.
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