withdrew with him for the vain pretence of tumults, were counted deserters; therefore those many must be also deserters, who withdrew afterwards from real tumults: as if it were the place that made a parliament, and not the end and cause. Because it is denied that those were tumults, from which the king made show of being driven, is it therefore of necessity implied, that there could be never any tumults for the future? If some men fly in craft, may not other men have cause to fly in earnest? But mark the difference between their flight and his; they soon returned in safety to their places, he not till after many years, and then a captive to receive his punishment. So that their flying, whether the cause be considered, or the event, or both, neither justified him, nor condemned themselves. 336. But he will needs have vengeance to pursue and overtake them; though to bring it in, it cost him an inconvenient and obnoxious comparison, "As the mice and rats overtook a German bishop." (91) (91) I have been unable to discover the story here alluded to, which would no doubt have proved of a laughable character. Mice and rats, however, in the legendary history of mankind, have sometimes been employed on still more useful and important services than demolishing a German bishop. Herodotus, on the authority of the Egyptian priests, attributes to those warlike little vermin the destruction of Sennacherib's army at Pelusium; where a prodigious multitude of field-mice invading the Assyrian camp by night, ate up their quivers, bowstrings, and shield-thongs, so that, in the morning, finding themselves disarmed, they immediately took to flight, pursued and slaughtered by the Egyptians. In gratitude for this deliverance, Sethos (then king of Egypt) erected in the temple of Vulcan his own statue, I would our mice and rats had been as orthodoxal here, and had so pursued all his bishops out of England; then vermin had rid away vermin, which now hath lost the lives of too many thousand honest men to do. 337. "He cannot but observe this divine justice, yet with sorrow and pity." But sorrow and pity in a weak and overmastered enemy is looked upon no otherwise than as the ashes of his revenge burnt out upon himself, or as the damp of a cooled fury, when we say, it gives. But in this manner to sit spelling and observing divine justice upon every accident and slight disturbance, that may happen humanly to the affairs of men, is but another fragment of his broken revenge; and yet the shrewdest and the cunningest obloquy, that can be thrown upon their actions. For if he can persuade men, that the parliament and their cause is pursued with divine vengeance, he hath attained his end, to make all men forsake them, and think the worst that can be thought of them. 338. Nor is he only content to suborn divine justice in his censure of what is past, but he assumes the person of Christ himself, to prognosti holding a mouse in its hand, with this inscription-" Regard me, and be pious." (Euterpe. 140.) Josephus attributes the destruction of this vast army to a plague, by which they perished in one night. (Antiq. x. 2.) See Bochart, (Hierozoic. Compend. iii. 34.) Byron, in his Hebrew Melodies, has adhered to the account of Scripture: "For the Angel of Death spread his wings in the blast, And the eyes of the sleepers waxed deadly and chill, And their hearts heaved but once, and for ever grew still!" cate over us what he wishes would come. So little is any thing or person sacred from him, no not in heaven, which he will not use, and put on, if it may serve him plausibly to wreak his spleen, or ease his mind upon the parliament. Although, if ever fatal blindness did both attend and punish wilfulness, if ever any enjoyed not comforts for neglecting counsel belonging to their peace, it was in none more conspicuously brought to pass than in himself: and his predictions against the parliament and their adherents have for the most part been verified upon his own head, and upon his chief counsellors. 339. He concludes with high praises of the army. But praises in an enemy are superfluous, or smell of craft; and the army shall not need his praises, nor the parliament fare worse for his accusing prayers that follow. Wherein, as his charity can be no way comparable to that of Christ, so neither can his assurance, that they whom he seems to pray for, in doing what they did against him, "knew not what they did." It was but arrogance therefore, and not charity, to lay such ignorance to others in the sight of God, till he himself had been infallible, like him whose peculiar words he overweeningly assumes. CHAPTER XXVII. Entitled, To the Prince of Wales. 340. WHAT the king wrote to his son, as a father, concerns not us; what he wrote to him as a king of England, concerns not him; God and the parliament having now otherwise disposed of England. But because I see it done with some artifice and labour, to possess the people, that they might amend their present condition, by his, or by his son's restorement, I shall show point by point, that although the king had been reinstalled to his desire, or that his son admitted should observe exactly all his father's precepts, yet that this would be so far from conducing to our happiness, either as a remedy to the present distempers, or a prevention of the like to come, that it would inevitably throw us back again into all our past and fulfilled miseries; would force us to fight over again all our tedious wars, and put us to another fatal struggling for liberty and life, more dubious than the former. (9) In which, as our success hath been no other than our cause; so it will be evident to all posterity, that his misfortunes were the mere consequence of his perverse judgment. (92) Here Milton wrote like a prophet; for the Restoration, which he lived to groan under, brought back, as he foresaw, tyranny and persecution, and a second struggle. But the issue was more glorious: the establishment of the present constitution in 1688, fourteen years after he had been gathered to his fathers. 341. First, he argues from the experience of those troubles, which both he and his son have had, to the improvement of their piety and patience; and by the way bears witness in his own words, that the corrupt education of his youth, which was but glanced at only in some former passages of this answer, was a thing neither of mean consideration, nor untruly charged upon him or his son: himself confessing here, that court-delights are prone either to root up all true virtue (93) and honour, or to be contented only with some leaves and withering formalities of them, without any real fruits tending to the public good." Which presents him still in his own words another Rehoboam, softened by a far worse court than Solomon's, and so corrupted by flat 66 (93) Mrs. Macauley was right when she said of Charles I., that "his manners partook of dissipation, and his conversation of the indecency of a court;" for, notwithstanding the panegyrics of Clarendon and Hume, Milton's view of his private character is proved to be strictly consonant with the truth of history. In his "Pro Populo Anglicano Defensio," he speaks out more clearly, charging Charles with the grossest libertinism. "Castimoniam tu ejus et continentiam laudes, quem cum Duce Buckinghamio flagitiis omnibus coopertum novimus? secretiora ejus et recessus perscrutari quid attinet, qui in theatro medias mulieres petulanter amplecti, et suaviari, qui virginum et matronarum papillas, ne dicam cætera, pertractare in propatulo, consueverat ?" (c. iv. see also c. 12.) But this, it may be said, is the account of an enemy. Then let us hear his friends: "Lady Leicester says to her husband, in 1636, 'I have been at court. In his majesty (Charles I.) I found an inclination to show me some kindness, but he could not find the way: at last he told me, that he perceived I was very kind to my husband when he was with me, which kept me very lean, for he thought me much |
