The Life of John Milton, Volume 5 (of 7), 1654-1660 eBook

This eBook from the Gutenberg Project consists of approximately 998 pages of information about The Life of John Milton, Volume 5 (of 7), 1654-1660.

The Life of John Milton, Volume 5 (of 7), 1654-1660 eBook

This eBook from the Gutenberg Project consists of approximately 998 pages of information about The Life of John Milton, Volume 5 (of 7), 1654-1660.
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.

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The Life of John Milton, Volume 5 (of 7), 1654-1660 from Project Gutenberg. Public domain.