r was his
present Cromwellianism the actual consequence of his blindness, the
mere submissiveness of a blind man to what he had no power to
disturb? It is partly an answer to this question to remember again
his _Defensio Secunda_ of 1654, with its great panegyric on
Cromwell. Milton had been but two years blind when that was
published, and had not lost aught of the vehemence of his Republican
convictions. Not without deliberation, therefore, had he given up the
first form of the Commonwealth, consisting in a single supreme House
of Parliament and an annual Council of State chosen by the same, and
accepted the later or Protectoral form, with Cromwell for its head, a
permanent Council of State round Cromwell, and Parliaments on
occasion. But, underneath this general adhesion to the Protectorate,
there had been even then certain Miltonic reserves, and especially
the reserve of a protest against the continuance of a State Church.
Now, had Milton been in a condition to act the part of a practical
statesman through Oliver's Protectorate, might not some extraordinary
development have been given to those reserves? With his boundless
courage and the non-conforming habits of his genius, would he ever
have been the Parliamentary servant of a Government from which he
differed at all,--from which he differed so vitally on the question
of Church Establishment? Probably in nothing else had Cromwell wholly
disappointed him. Through the Protectorate there had been all the
toleration of religious differences that could be desired, or what
shortcoming there had been had hardly been by Cromwell's own fault;
the other interferences with liberty had hardly perhaps, in Milton's
estimation, gone beyond the necessities of police; and in Cromwell's
foreign policy, with its magnificent championship of Protestantism
abroad, what man in England was more ardently at one with him than
the draftsman of his great foreign despatches? At the time of the
proposal of Cromwell's Kingship, and generally at the time of the
transition out of his first Protectorate into his second, with the
resuscitation then of so many aristocratic forms and the attempt to
reinstitute a house of peers, there may have been, as we have already
hinted, an uprising in Milton's mind of democratic objections, and
the effect may have been that Milton before the end of Oliver's
Protectorate was less of an Oliverian than he had been at the
beginning. Still, precluded from any active co