after the fact (Vol. IV. pp. 519-523). He had justified it
a year later in his _Defensio Secunda_ of 1654, published some
months after the Protectorate had actually begun. In that famous
pamphlet, he had, amid much else to the same effect, made special
reference to Cromwell's Dissolution of the Rump in these words
addressed to Cromwell himself: "When you saw delays being contrived,
and every one more intent on his private interests than on the public
good, and the people complaining of being cheated of their hopes and
circumvented by the power of a few, you did what they themselves had
so often declined to do when asked, and put an end to their
Government" (Vol. IV. p. 604). Rumpers of tenacious memories cannot
have forgotten such published utterances of Milton, while the fact
that he had for some years past been an Oliverian, a Protectoratist,
a Court-official for Oliver and Richard, was patent to all. Yet, now
that the old Rumpers were restored to power, the survivors of the
original "few" whose dissolution by Cromwell he had publicly praised
and defended, here was Milton still in his secretaryship and writing
the first foreign letters they required.

How was this? It is hardly a sufficient answer to say that it is
quite customary for officials to remain in their places through
changes of Government. On the one hand, Milton was not a man to
remain in an element with which he could not conscientiously accord;
and, on the other, the Rumpers were rather careful in seeking public
servants of their own sort. Thurloe was out of the general
Secretaryship; and one of the first acts of the restored House was to
punish Mr. Henry Scobell, Clerk of the Parliament, for having
entered, the fact of Cromwell's Dissolution of the House on April 20,
1653, in the Journals tinder that date. They ordered a Bill to be
brought in for repealing the Act by which Scobell held the
Clerkship.[1] The truth, then, is that Milton was not, on the whole,
displeased by the return of his old friends to power. Though he had
justified Cromwell's dissolution of the Rump and had become openly an
Oliverian at the beginning of the Protectorate, he had never ceased
to regard with admiration and affection such of the old Republicans
as Vane, Bradshaw, and Overton. It had probably all along been a
question with him whether the blame of their disablement under the
Protectorate lay more with themselves or with Oliver. Then, as we
have abundantly seen, there is