How Milton stood related to this controversy is a matter rather of inference than of direct information.  Having been a faithful adherent and official of Oliver through his whole Protectorate, and still holding his official place under Richard’s Government, there is little doubt that, if he had been obliged to post himself publicly on either of the two sides, he would have gone among the Cromwellians.  Nay, if he had been obliged to choose between the two subdivisions of this body, known as the Court Party (supporting Richard absolutely) and the Wallingford-House Party (supporting Richard’s civil Protectorate, but wanting to transfer the military power to the Army-chiefs), there can be little doubt that he would have gone with the former.  Had he been in the House of Commons, like his colleague Andrew Marvell, his duty there, like Marvell’s, would have been that of a ministerial member, assisting Thurloe and voting with him in all the divisions.  But for his blindness, we may here say, the chances are that he would long ere now have been a known Parliamentary man, and that, after having been a Cromwellian leader in Oliver’s second Parliament, he might have been now in Thurloe’s exact place in Richard’s present Parliament, or beside Thurloe as a strangely different chief.  This, or that other alternative of a foreign ambassadorship or residency, which must have suggested itself again and again to the reader in the course of our narrative, might have been the natural career of Milton through the rule of the Cromwells, had not blindness disabled him.  For, if Meadows, his former mere assistant in the Foreign Secretaryship, had been for some time in the one career with increasing distinction, and if an opening had been easily found for Marvell in the other, why may not imagination trace either career, or a combination of the two, had physical infirmity not prevented, for the greater Cromwellian of whom these were but satellites?  It is imagination only, and would not be worth while, were it not for one important biographical question which it brings forward.  Had Milton remained capable of any such practical career under the Cromwells, would he have retained, to the same extent as he had done through his blindness, the necessary qualification of being an Oliverian or Cromwellian?  How far was his present Cromwellianism the actual consequence of his blindness, the mere submissiveness of a blind man to what he had no power to disturb?  It is partly an answer to this question to remember again his Defensio Secunda of 1654, with its great panegyric on Cromwell.  Milton had been but two years blind when that was published, and had not lost aught of the vehemence of his Republican convictions.  Not without deliberation, therefore, had he given up the first form of the Commonwealth, consisting in a single supreme House of Parliament and an annual Council of State chosen by the same, and accepted the later or Protectoral form, with Cromwell