as Dr. Lewis Du Moulin, could Parliament or the Council
of State have shown mercy after such an offence.
As for Milton, the attack on whom ran through the
more general invective, not for “forty thousand
brothers” would he have kept his hands
off Dr. Peter had he known. Providentially, however,
Dr. Peter remained incognito, and it was Morus
that was murdered, Dr. Peter looking on and “softly
chuckling.” Rather, I should say, getting
more and more alarmed, and almost wishing that the
book had never been written, or at all events praying
more and more earnestly that he might not be found
out, and that Morus, murdered irretrievably at any
rate, would take his murdering quietly and hold his
tongue. For the Commonwealth had firmly established
itself meanwhile, and had passed into the Protectorate;
and all rational men in Europe had given up the cause
of the Stuarts, and come to regard pamphlets in their
behalf as so much waste paper; and was it not within
the British Islands after all, ruled over though they
were by Lord Protector Cromwell, that a poor French
divine of talent, tied to England already by various
connexions, had the best chances and outlooks for
the future? So, it appears, Du Moulin had reasoned
with himself, and so he had acted. “After
Ireland was reduced by the Parliamentary forces,”
we are informed by Wood, “he lived there, some
time at Lismore, Youghal, and Dublin, under the patronage
of Richard, Earl of Cork. Afterward, going into
England, he settled in Oxon (where he was tutor or
governor to Charles, Viscount Dungarvan, and Mr. Richard
Boyle his brother); lived there two or more years,
and preached constantly for a considerable time in
the church of St. Peter in the East."[1] His settlement
at Oxford, near his brother Dr. Lewis, dates itself,
as I calculate, about 1654; and it must have been chiefly
thence, accordingly, that he had watched Milton’s
misdirected attentions to poor Morus, knowing himself
to be “the actual turbot.” There
is proof, however, as we shall find, that he was, from
that date onwards, a good deal in London, and, what
is almost startlingly strange, in a select family
society there which must have brought him into relations
with Milton, and perhaps now and then into his company.
Du Moulin could believe in 1670 that Milton even then
knew his secret, and that he owed his escape to Milton’s
pride and unwillingness to retract his blunder about
Morus. We have seen reason to doubt that; and,
indeed, Milton, had, in his second Morus publication,
put himself substantially right with the public about
the extent of Morus’s concern in the Regii
Sanguinis Clamor, and had scarcely anything to
retract. What he could do in addition was Du
Moulin’s danger. He could drag a new culprit
to light and immolate a second victim. That he
refrained may have been owing, as we have supposed
most likely, to his continued ignorance that the Dr.
Du Moulin now going about in Oxford and in London,
so near himself, was the original and principal culprit;
or, if he did have any suspicions of the fact, there
may have been other reasons, in and after 1655, for
a dignified silence.