[Footnote 2:  The uniformly Miltonic style of the greater letters for the Protector, the same style as had been used in the more important letters for the Commonwealth, utterly precludes the idea that Milton was only the translator of drafts furnished him.  In the smaller letters, about ships wrongfully seized and other private injuries, the case may have been partly so, though even there Milton must have had liberty of phraseology, and would imbed the facts in his own expressions.  But there was not a man about the Council that could have furnished the drafts of the greater letters as we now have them.  My idea as to the way in which they were composed is that, on each occasion, Milton learnt from Thurloe, or even in a preappointed interview with the Council, or with Cromwell himself, the sort of thing that was wanted, and that then, having himself dictated and sent in an English draft, he received it back, approved or with corrections and suggested additions, to be turned into Latin.  Special Cromwellian hints to Milton for the letter to Louis XIV, on the alarm of a new persecution of the Piedmontese (ante pp. 387-9) must have been, I should say, the causal reference to a certain pass as the best military route yet into Italy from France, and the suggestion of an exchange of territories between Louis and the Duke of Savoy so as to make the Vaudois French subjects.  The hints may have been given to Milton beforehand, or they may have been [n]otched in by Cromwell in revising Milton’s English draft.]

The last letters to Louis XIV., Mazarin, and Charles Gustavus of Sweden, bring us to within about two months of Cromwell’s death, and the last one of all, that to the King of Portugal, to within less than a single month of the same.  We have yet a farther trace of the diplomacies proper to Milton’s office round the dying Protector.  Here, however, it is not Milton that comes into view, but his colleague or assistant, Andrew Marvell.

The Dutch Lord-Ambassador Nieuport, after having been absent in Holland since November 1657, had been sent back by their High Mightinesses, the States-General, to resume his post.  The complication of affairs in northern Europe by the movements of Charles Gustavus, and the menacing attitude of that King not only pretty generally all round the Baltic, but also towards the Dutch themselves, had rendered Nieuport’s renewed presence in London very necessary.  Newly commissioned and instructed, he made his voyage, and was in the Thames on the night of the 23rd of July, though too late to reach Gravesend that night.  The arrival of an ambassador being then an affair of much punctilio, he sent his son up the river in a shallop, to inform Mr. Secretary Thurloe and Sir Oliver Fleming, the master of the ceremonies, and to deliver to Thurloe a letter requesting that the pomp of a public reception might be waived and he might be permitted to take up his quarters quietly in the Dutch Embassy, still furnished and ready, just as he had left it.  Young