the form of a largish Council of State, the other a military aristocracy composed of the great Army Officers,—­these two aristocracies to be pledged to each other by oath, and sworn also to the two great principles of Liberty of Conscience and resistance to any attempt at Single Person sovereignty.  What communication between the Central Government so constituted and the body of the People might be necessary for the free play of opinion might be sufficiently kept up, he hints, by the machinery of County Committees.  The entire scheme may seem strange to those whose theory of a Republic refuses the very imagination of an aristocracy or of perpetuity of power in the same hands; but both, notions, and especially that of perpetuity of power in the same hands, had been growing on Milton, and were not inconsistent with his theory of a Republic.  Nor was his present scheme, with all its strangeness, the least practical of the many “models” that theorists were putting forth.  It would, doubtless, have failed in the trial,—­for the conception of a perpetual Civil Council at Whitehall always in harmony with a perpetual Military Council in Wallingford House presupposed moral conditions in both bodies less likely to be forthcoming in themselves than in Milton’s thoughts about them.  But everything else would have failed equally, and some of the “models” perhaps more speedily.  Since the subversion of Richard’s Protectorate by Fleetwood and Desborough there had been no possible stop-gap against the return of the Stuarts.

The consulting authorities at Whitehall and Wallingford House did adopt a course having some semblance of that suggested by Milton.  Before the 25th of October, or within six days after the date of Milton’s letter, the relics of the Council of State of the Rump agreed to be transformed, with additions nominated by the Officers, into the new Supreme Executive called The Committee of Safety; and, as The Wallingford-House Council of Officers still continued to sit in the close vicinity of this new Council at Whitehall, the Government was then vested, in fact, in the two aristocracies, with Fleetwood, Lambert, Desborough, Berry, and others, as members of both, and connecting links between them.  But the new Committee of Safety was not such a Senate or Council as Milton had imagined.  For one thing, it consisted but of twenty-three persons (see the list ante p. 494), whereas Milton would have probably liked to see a Council of twice that size or even larger.  For another, it was not composed of persons perfectly sound on Milton’s two proposed fundamentals of Liberty of Conscience and Abjuration of any Single Person.  Vane, to be sure, was on the Committee, and a host in himself for both principles; and there were others, such as Salway and Ludlow, that would not flinch on either.  But Whitlocke, Sydenham, and the majority, were but moderately for Liberty of Conscience, and certainly utterly against that Miltonic