With what feelings was it that Milton found himself once more in the employment of his old masters, the original Republicans or Commonwealth’s-men?  That there may have been some sense of awkwardness in the re-connexion is not unlikely.  Had he not for six years been a most conspicuous Cromwellian?  Had he not justified again and again in print Cromwell’s coup d’etat of 1653, by which the Rump had been turned out of power, and which the now Restored Rumpers, and especially such of their leaders as Vane, Scott, Hasilrig, and Bradshaw, were bound to remember as Cromwell’s unpardonable sin, and the woeful beginning of an illegitimate interregnum?  He had justified it, hardly anonymously, in his Letter to a Gentleman in the Country, published in May 1653, only a fortnight after the fact (Vol.  IV. pp. 519-523).  He had justified it a year later in his Defensio Secunda of 1654, published some months after the Protectorate had actually begun.  In that famous pamphlet, he had, amid much else to the same effect, made special reference to Cromwell’s Dissolution of the Rump in these words addressed to Cromwell himself:  “When you saw delays being contrived, and every one more intent on his private interests than on the public good, and the people complaining of being cheated of their hopes and circumvented by the power of a few, you did what they themselves had so often declined to do when asked, and put an end to their Government” (Vol.  IV. p. 604).  Rumpers of tenacious memories cannot have forgotten such published utterances of Milton, while the fact that he had for some years past been an Oliverian, a Protectoratist, a Court-official for Oliver and Richard, was patent to all.  Yet, now that the old Rumpers were restored to power, the survivors of the original “few” whose dissolution by Cromwell he had publicly praised and defended, here was Milton still in his secretaryship and writing the first foreign letters they required.

How was this?  It is hardly a sufficient answer to say that it is quite customary for officials to remain in their places through changes of Government.  On the one hand, Milton was not a man to remain in an element with which he could not conscientiously accord; and, on the other, the Rumpers were rather careful in seeking public servants of their own sort.  Thurloe was out of the general Secretaryship; and one of the first acts of the restored House was to punish Mr. Henry Scobell, Clerk of the Parliament, for having entered, the fact of Cromwell’s Dissolution of the House on April 20, 1653, in the Journals tinder that date.  They ordered a Bill to be brought in for repealing the Act by which Scobell held the Clerkship.[1] The truth, then, is that Milton was not, on the whole, displeased by the return of his old friends to power.  Though he had justified Cromwell’s dissolution of the Rump and had become openly an Oliverian at the beginning of the Protectorate, he had never ceased to regard with admiration and affection such