It is now high time, however, to answer a question which must have suggested itself again and again in the course of our narrative of the Milton and Morus controversy. Who was the real author of the book for which Morus had been so dreadfully punished, and what was the real amount of Morus’s responsibility in it?
That Milton’s original belief on this subject had been shaken has been already evident. He had written his Defensio Secunda, in firm reliance on the universal report that Morus was the one proper author of the Regii Sanguinis Clamor, or that it had been concocted between him and Salmasius; and, though Morus’s denial of the authorship had been formally conveyed to him before the Defensio Secunda left the press, he had let it go forth as it was, in the conviction that he was still not wrong in the main. The more express and reiterated denials of Morus in the Fides Publica, however, with the references there to another person as the real author, though Morus was not at liberty to divulge his name, had produced an effect. The authorship of the Regii Sanguinis Clamor was then indeed a secondary question, inasmuch as in the Fides Publica Morus had interposed himself personally,—not only in self-defence, but also for counter-attack on Milton. Still, as the Fides Publica would never have been written had not Milton assumed Morus to be the author of the Regii Sanguinis Clamor and dragged him before the world solely on that account, Milton had necessarily, in replying to the Fides Publica, adverted to the secondary question. His assertion now, i.e, in the Pro Se Defensio, was a modified one. It was that, whatever facts had yet to be revealed respecting the authorship of the four or five parts of the compound book severally, he yet knew for certain that Morus had been the editor of the whole book, the corrector of the press for the whole, the busy and ostentatious agent in the circulation of early copies, and the writer at least of the Dedicatory Preface to Charles II., put forth in Ulac’s name. The question for us now is how far this modified assertion of Milton was correct.