hat circumstances allowed, and saw no course left them
but to cooperate with the majority of their countrymen in confirming
Richard's rule.

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 fa