No more letters was poor Richard to write to crowned heads. On the
very day on which the two first of the foregoing were written, he
appeared in Wallingford House, and ordered the dissolution of the
Council of Officers according to the edict of the Parliament. Next
day it was known through all London that the question was between a
dissolution of this Council of officers and a dissolution of the
Parliament itself. The day after, Thursday, April 21, there was the
famous double rendezvous of the two masses of soldiery round
Whitehall to try the question, the rendezvous for Richard and the
Parliament utterly failing, while that for Fleetwood, Desborough, and
the other rebel chiefs, flooded the streets and St. James's Park.
That night, quailing before the rough threats of Desborough, Richard
and his Council yielded; and on Friday, the 22nd, the indignant
Parliament knew itself to be dissolved, and Richard's Protectorate
virtually at an end. Nominally, it dragged on for a month more.

On Thursday, April 21, the day of the dreadful double rendezvous, and
of Desborough's stormy interview with Richard in Whitehall to compel
the dissolution of the Parliament, Milton, in his house in Petty
France, on the very edge of the uproar, was quietly dictating a
private letter. It is that numbered 28 among his _Epistoloe
Familiares_, and headed "_Joanni Badioeo, Pastori
Arausionensi_," i.e. "To John Badiaeus, Pastor of Orange." With
some trouble, I have identified this "Badiaeus" with a certain French
JEAN LABADIE, who is characterized by Bayle as a "schismatic
minister, followed like an apostle," and by another authority as "one
of the most dangerous fanatics of the seventeenth century." The facts
of his life, to the moment of our present concern with him, are given
in the accepted French authorities thus:--Born in 1610 at
Bourg-en-Guyenne, the son of a soldier who had risen to be
lieutenant, he had received a Jesuit education at Bordeaux, had
entered the Jesuit order at an early age, and had become a priest.
For fifteen years he had remained in the order, preaching, and also
teaching rhetoric and philosophy, reputed "a prodigy of talent and
piety," but also a mystic and enthusiast, with fancies that he must
found a new religious sect. While preaching orthodox Catholicism in
public, he had been indoctrinating disciples in private with his
peculiarities; and, when they were numerous enough, he wanted to
leave the Jesuits. By reasonings an