Holborn, not since identified; the Powells also removing to another dwelling.  “No one,” he says of himself at this period, “ever saw me going about, no one ever saw me asking anything among my friends, or stationed at the doors of the Court with a petitioner’s face.  I kept myself almost entirely at home, managing on my own resources, though in this civil tumult they were often in great part kept from me, and contriving, though burdened with taxes in the main rather oppressive, to lead my frugal life.”  The traces of his literary activity at this time are few—­preparations for a history of England, published long afterwards, an ode, a sonnet, correspondence with Dati, some not very successful versions of the Psalms.  He seems to have been partly engaged in preparing the treatise on Christian Doctrine, which was fortunately reserved for a serener day.  In undertaking it at this period he was missing a great opportunity.  He might have been the apostle of toleration in England, as Roger Williams had been in America.  The moment was most favourable.  Presbyterianism had got itself established, but could not pretend to represent the majority of the nation.  It had been branded by Milton himself in the memorable line:  “New Presbyter is but old Priest writ large.”  The Independents were for toleration, the Episcopalians had been for the time humbled by adversity, the best minds in the nation, including Cromwell, were Seekers or Latitude men, or sceptics.  Here was invitation enough for a work as much greater than the “Areopagitica” as the principle of freedom of thought is greater than the most august particular application of it.  Milton might have added the better half of Locke’s fame to his own, and compelled the French philosophers to sit at the feet of a Bible-loving Englishman.  But unfortunately no external impulse stirred him to action, as in the case of the “Areopagitica.”  Presbyterians growled at him occasionally; they did not fine or imprison him, or put him out of the synagogue.  Thus his pen slumbered, and we are in danger of forgetting that he was, in the ordinary sense of that much-abused term, no Puritan, but a most free and independent thinker, the vast sweep of whose thought happened to coincide for a while with the narrow orbit of so-called Puritanism.

Impulse to work of another sort was at hand.  On January 30, 1649, Charles the First’s head rolled on the scaffold.  On February 13th was published a pamphlet from Milton’s hand, which cannot have been begun before the King’s trial, another proof of his feverish impetuosity when possessed by an overmastering idea.  The title propounds two theses with very different titles to acceptance.  “The Tenure of Kings and Magistrates proving that it is lawful, and hath been held so through all ages, for any who have the power to call to account a tyrant or wicked king, and after due conviction to depose and put him to death:  if the ordinary magistrate have neglected or denied to do it.”