The Republican form of Government (my husband wrote) was by God thought more perfect than Monarchy, though He gave leave to the Jews at least to change one form for another and denied not the right to other nations. The Army (he wrote) had shrewder and truer insight into affairs than had the men in Parliament, for they had saved by their arms what the others nearly ruined by their votes. England (he wrote) had never had a King that was not, by Law and Custom, liable to be judged by his people for any crimes committed against them. Thus he concluded:
I have no fear, Slug, of any war or danger that you could contrive to conjure up for us among Foreign Kings with your hasty and insipid eloquence; despite your playful report to them that here we use Kings’ heads for footballs, that we play with crowns as with spinning-tops, and make no more of an imperial sceptre than if it were a fool’s staff. The fool’s staff comes to you, Vain Dolt, for thinking to persuade Kings and princes into war against us by such trumpery argument. You write mighty tragically in your peroration; as Ajax you crack your leathern whip, crying: “Oh, the injustice, the impiety, the perfidy, the cruelty of these men I will proclaim to Heaven and to Earth, and, proving their guilt upon them, will assuredly send them with my curse down to latest posterity.” Ha, ha! Do you, then, a witling, a sot, a mouther, a pettifogger, born only to transcribe or steal from good authors, do you indeed imagine that you are able to write any book of your own acceptable to posterity? Nay, Fool, the coming age will wrap you in a bundle of your own fusty writings and consign you to oblivion: where you shall lie everlastingly, unless perhaps this late book of yours be taken up one day by readers so studious of my Answer to it, that they are led to knock the dust from its covers.
This answer, the Defence of the English People, was published by Mr. Dugard, who had been released from Newgate Jail on condition that he changed his colours and aided the Council. Newgate is an eloquent preacher: she turns hearts to repentance almost more speedily even than that droll prevaricator, the Reverend Hugh Peters, General Cromwell’s chaplain, converts Presbyterians in search of fat livings and University Fellowships to his own reckless form of Independency.
My husband is become friendly enough with Mr. Dugard, an excellent printer, who was also formerly Master of the Merchant Taylors’ School. When another printer stole the copyright of one of Mr. Dugard’s books (upon a disease called the Rickets) my husband brought a complaint before the Council and had justice done. But latterly his friendship for Mr. Dugard, who prints whatever he can sell, has led him into trouble; for, in a heedless mood, he licensed him to print a book which, upon a petition of ministers, a Committee of Parliament examined and found “blasphemous, erroneous and scandalous,” and ordered copies of it to be publicly burned in London and Westminster, under direction of the Sheriffs. This book, which was written in Poland, denies the Trinity, the Divinity of Christ, the Divinity of the Holy Ghost, and the twin doctrines of Atonement and of Original Sin, averring them all to be gross and pernicious fallacies. My husband could not well plead unawareness of what was printed in this blasphemous book, forasmuch as some years beforehand he had made some very sharp observations against such licensers as set their imprimatur upon books they had not read; nor could he approve the doctrine. By what shuffling and compounding he escaped censure I know not, but I believe that he represented this book as a laughable and harmless monstrosity, a signal proof of human aberrancy, a reduction to absurdity of unscholarly speculation. Yet against such opinions as these there had been an Act passed with very severe penalties for their promulgation, banishment if the offence were repeated and death if the banished blasphemer returned to our shores.
To come to the Defence of the English People. It had made a wonderful hit, yet not in England so much as in the Universities of Europe, where the scholars are grown weary of Salmasius (nicknamed by them “The Awful Man”), and rejoice to see him put to shame. For this notable Goliath had by his careless confidence left so many chinks showing in his armour, that my husband scorned the use of a sling-stone to sink him in cowardly fashion after the manner of David; but had come against him armed with the customary weapons of a scholar-warrior and had beaten him at his own sword-play, piercing him through and through; and had, as it were, given the finishing stroke with Goliath’s own tuck. For my husband quoted against Salmasius words published four years before in Salmasius’s renowned book upon the Papacy: there he recommended the rooting out not only of the Pope but of the whole hierarchy of bishops, which had ruined kings and princes with their miserable tyranny; and here for a fee of £100 he execrates the Parliament of England because it has done this very thing—and he even uses the same arguments in favour of Episcopacy that there he confuted: namely, that Bishops are necessary and desirable to prevent the sprouting of a thousand pestiferous sects.
Now it happened that Salmasius was away from Leyden at this time. He was fallen into disgrace with the Dutch, who now sought an alliance with England and who, upon a complaint of our Council of State, forbade the further publication in their territory of Salmasius’s Royal Defence. Yet he was gone from Leyden haughtily, upon an invitation from Christina, Queen of Sweden, who loves scholars and has made a collection of them at her Court, like so many curious living jewels—Freinsheim, Vossius, Heinsius and the rest. Without Salmasius, her necklace was incomplete; but now that Salmasius was come too, (dressed in scarlet breeches, with a black hat and a white plume) with leave from the Curators at Leyden University, she was well content. She had that year entertained as her tutor in philosophy the most renowned philosopher of the age, Mounseer René Descartes, but he was lately dead, from the inclemency of the Swedish climate. Salmasius, fearing to suffer a like fate with his fellow-countryman, spent most of the winter snug a-bed in a splendid apartment of the Royal Palace at Stockholm, where the Queen frequently visited him, and consulted him upon matters of great importance. Often, when Madame Salmasius was out taking the air, she would shut the doors and wait upon him as a servant, plumping his pillows for him, mending his fire, or warming up a caudle. It is said that one day, coming in suddenly, she saw how the great scholar hastily thrust a little book under his bolster. “Ah, my good Sir Claude,” said she, “do not hide away that precious little book.” He, making some uneasy excuse, denied it to her; but she was a Queen and out from under the bolster it must come. It was a nasty, fribbling, lecherous little book, and the Queen gave it to her Maid of Honour, the Lady Sparra, to read aloud; which she did, stammering and blushing. The Queen laughed heartily the while and complimented Salmasius upon the grand promiscuity of his reading.
It was at Stockholm that Salmasius was shown a copy of my husband’s book, but the Queen had read it beforehand and being highly delighted with it could not satiate herself in praising it to her Court; for she clearly dotes upon the clangor, the sweat and the dust of literate conflict, and cares not who vanquishes whom, so long as lusty blows and keen thrusts be given and exchanged. “I wonder, now,” said she, “whether this regicide Miltonus would consent to tarry awhile in our Court. He would be a great ornament to it, I dare say, for both in learning and invective he seems a match for any man living.”
Yet she continued kind to Salmasius, who was madded with rage and vowed to send Parliament and my husband together to the Devil, so soon as ever he was sufficiently recovered from his long sickness to undertake the task. “That will be delightful, dear Master,” the Queen answered, laughing prettily. “I warrant you will slice that English pig into rashers for broiling on your coals, and my hope is that our town of Stockholm will have the honour to print so splendid a work.”
This account I heard from my brother James. My husband had asserted that Salmasius, when he was publicly humiliated by the Defence (of which several editions have now been sold, and translations published in French and Dutch) was scorned and sent away by the Queen; yet I prefer to believe with my brother that the Queen had pity on him, and that his departure from Stockholm soon afterwards was upon an urgent summons by the Curators of Leyden Universi
ty. He has not yet made an answer, though the book lies upon his stomach like a raw, undigested gobbet of meat. His rivals grin and nudge one another and say: “The Awful Man will never recover from the stroke that the English Regicide dealt him in his guts!” Salmasius at one time gives out that he scorns to answer so currish and scurrilous an upstart, and at another that he will sufficiently demonstrate his absurd pretensions to learning by a mere citation of the errors in quantity and accidence committed by him in his Latin poems.
Every foreigner of note resident in London, whether ambassador, envoy or agent for any foreign Prince or State, has now either called upon my husband to felicitate him upon his wonderful book, or has done so upon a casual meeting. The Council, not to be behindhand in its compliments, voted my husband the sum of £100 as a reward for his labours; but this he refused, lest Salmasius should in his answer reproach him for having accepted the very same fee which he had hypocritically reproached Salmasius for accepting. My husband reckons £100 a paltry recompense of his tremendous labour; he would have either £1,000 or nothing.
While we lodged in these rooms in Whitehall—of which my husband was once nearly dispossessed by an Order from the Council to remove “all unnecessary persons from the Palace”—an allowance was made to him for a weekly table at which to entertain foreign ambassadors and agents. I was never present at these dinners, but my husband gave me leave to save him expense by ordering the drinks myself and dressing the meats in our own kitchen; for the Palace kitchens are sluttishly managed. This contented me, for it was many years since I had dressed delicate food for persons of discerning taste, and I ate and drank plentifully myself of what was left over. My husband won much fame by this table; though to him one dish is hardly to be distinguished from another except by sharp and biting sauces.
Four or five answers were written to my husband’s books. Of one my brother James brought me a copy; it named my husband a frigid and severe Censor for his reproach that his late Majesty had in public touched the naked skins of beautiful women—was the King not handsome and young, and was his touch not also bestowed upon the wretched and scrofulous? The writer sneered at my husband as a sour Puritan who, besides adding “Divorce at Pleasure” to the other scandalous doctrines of the Independents, had put away a sweet wife from jealousy. This stirred my secret laughter; I did not show the book to my husband.
In December last we removed from Whitehall Palace, and took a garden-house in Petty France, in Westminster, next door to the Lord Scudamore’s and opening into St. James’s Park: this was upon a quarrel with our near neighbours in the Palace. The gentleman, an officer of the Life Guards, was exceeding noisy. By day he continually exercised himself with his friends in fencing and wrestling, and by night they sang roaring choruses together, with psalms and drinking songs intermingled. He also had two or three lively and undisciplined children and a wife who twanged a guitar and sang very high and screamingly, quite out of tune. The partition walls being but of lath and plaster, the vexation was great. My husband had also complained of the frequent interruptions of his work by idle persons, come to the Palace upon some other business, who were desirous of meeting and discoursing with him. In our new house, as not in our former lodgings, there is room for Ned Phillips, who has returned from Cambridge dissatisfied with the severe government of his college by the Reverend Goodwin, its new head. My husband has urgent need of Ned, as well as of John, to be hands and eyes for him; for why? My husband is now gone stone blind.
The physicians warned him, when he consulted them upon the dimming of the sight of his left eye, that if he would not leave off reading for a year at least, he would lose the sight of the other also. But, being ordered by the Council to write against Salmasius, he would not heed them, thinking it a fair bargain to purchase the applauses of all Europe at the price of his remaining eye. This eye he doctored with lotions and issues and seatons recommended to him, which made the matter worse: for there was a running between the nose and the corner of the eye which seemed to betoken an Ægilops, but proceeded doubtless from weakness, not from any purulence. Things that he looked upon began to swim to the right and left so that he stumbled upon his feet like a drunken man; and at night, when he lay down to rest, a copious light dazzled into his head out of his shut eyes. Now, he says, there is a constant and settled darkness before him, by day as well as by night, of the colour of wetted wood ashes. Only by rolling his eyes can he let in a little chink of light at the corners. It is hard to believe him sightless, for his eyes are not changed in aspect, though they stare horribly. Nor does he complain, for he declares his conscience clean of any sin, the atrocity of which might have brought this calamity upon him; and he has won the fame he sought—for, if Salmasius were before the greatest scholar of Europe, it follows that the conqueror of Salmasius must be the greatest scholar of the whole round world.
The other day by chance I espied the Reverend Robert Pory walking in the street. He limped from a wound that he had got in the siege of Colchester. I know not what his business or profession may now be, but he was not in black clergy apparel. He seemed prosperous enough and was still much of a chuckler. When I told him, “My husband, John Milton, is blind,” he answered, not unkindly, “Why, I am sorry for that. Yet John will not consider himself beyond measure afflicted, for as a poet he will find himself in choice company. And, now I think on it, this fate was not obscurely prophesied him by some Angel or other spirit whom at Cambridge he ceremoniously invocated: namely, that in the noon-day of life he would make one with Homer and Tiresias.”
I asked: “What? Did my husband truly invocate Angels? Was that not superstitious in him?”
“Nay,” he answered, “for the Collect that is read upon Michaelmas Day allows of praying to Angels.”
My husband comforts himself philosophically that God looks with particular care and favour upon the blind; and that He is wont to illuminate their gross darkness by an inner and far more excelling light; and that He curses all who mock or hurt them. Now is come the time to win that epical fame which he has so long coveted and brooded upon. Even my continuance with him will not, I believe, restrain him from his project: for to-day he called John Phillips to read out to him the opening lines of Adam Unparadised and mended a word or two, to keep his hand in. (Johnny is become a great rogue and rake-hell, now that his uncle cannot well control his goings-out and comings-in, but that is no business of mine, for he does not pester me at least.)
I have had three children by my husband and the fourth is in my womb, which will be born in a month’s time from now. The third child, the boy, he has never seen since he was a few months old, and then only dimly. This is well, for little John is no Milton (or Melton) either in body or in feature: nay, upon my word he is pure Verney, he is the very spit and image of my poor murdered Mun!
How came this about? For I never lay carnally with my love. There are Doctors who hold that in the third or fourth month of gestation the child’s soul is born. Think you it possible that Mun, dying, bequeathed his soul to my child—to the end that he might continue with me, and love me legitimately and be by me cherished and beloved? Yet what you think I care not.
Yesterday, my husband sent for the little boy, who is now near two years of age. He talked to him in simple words and said merrily: “How are you named, my little one? Let me tell you! You are not Jeremiah nor Jeroboam nor Jehoiakim nor yet Jambonius Justinianus: you are my son John.”
J is a hard letter for a prattler’s mouth, and when my husband said: “John! Repeat it after me: ‘Hey Diddle Dumpling, my son John!’” the child looked up into his face and answered: “Son Mun.”
“Nay, Child, not ‘Mun,’” cried my husband, “Mun is nothing. Say ‘My son John!’”
The child looked earnestly at him, hunched his shoulders, straddled his feet apart, and with very great fury and boldness shouted out again: “Son Mun!”
My husband was vexed and cried again: “Nay, nay, Child, you must obey your Father. You must say the word aright aft
er me. You are named John after your father John, who was named after his father John. What is your grandfather’s name? What is your father’s name? What is your own name? They are all the same—John! Say ‘John!’”
The child, seeing how my husband stretched forth his hands to seize him, escaped and ran away from him shouting: “Son Mun, Son Mun!” and held out his arms to me to be kissed.
THE END
Epilogue
Milton wrote in his family Bible (now in the British Museum), on the blank page opposite the first chapter of Genesis, where he had recorded the births of his first three children:
“My daughter Deborah—”
Then another hand added to his dictation:
“—was born the 2d day of May being Sunday somewhat before 3 of the clock in the morning 1652, my wife hir mother dyed about 3 days after. And my son about 6 weeks after his mother.”
Wife to Mr. Milton Page 44