ause of the
Regicide; he had gone back also upon Milton's Divorce Pamphlets and
Anti-Episcopal Pamphlets, and had collected hints to Milton's
detriment out of the attacks made upon him by Bishop Hall and others
during the Smectymnuan controversy. All this acquaintance with
Milton, the phrasing being kept sufficiently indefinite, Du Moulin
could show in the book without betraying himself. That, as he has
told us, would have been his ruin. The book, though shorter than the
_Defensio Regia_ of Salmasius, was even a more impressive and
successful vilification of the Commonwealth than that big
performance; and not even to the son of the respected European
theologian Molinaeus, and the brother of such a favourite of the
Commonwealth as Dr. Lewis Du Moulin, could Parliament or the Council
of State have shown mercy after such an offence. As for Milton, the
attack on whom ran through the more general invective, not for "forty
thousand brothers" would _he_ have kept his hands off Dr. Peter
had he known. Providentially, however, Dr. Peter remained
_incognito_, and it was Morus that was murdered, Dr. Peter
looking on and "softly chuckling." Rather, I should say, getting more
and more alarmed, and almost wishing that the book had never been
written, or at all events praying more and more earnestly that he
might not be found out, and that Morus, murdered irretrievably at any
rate, would take his murdering quietly and hold his tongue. For the
Commonwealth had firmly established itself meanwhile, and had passed
into the Protectorate; and all rational men in Europe had given up
the cause of the Stuarts, and come to regard pamphlets in their
behalf as so much waste paper; and was it not within the British
Islands after all, ruled over though they were by Lord Protector
Cromwell, that a poor French divine of talent, tied to England
already by various connexions, had the best chances and outlooks for
the future? So, it appears, Du Moulin had reasoned with himself, and
so he had acted. "After Ireland was reduced by the Parliamentary
forces," we are informed by Wood, "he lived there, some time at
Lismore, Youghal, and Dublin, under the patronage of Richard, Earl of
Cork. Afterward, going into England, he settled in Oxon (where he was
tutor or governor to Charles, Viscount Dungarvan, and Mr. Richard
Boyle his brother); lived there two or more years, and preached
constantly for a considerable time in the church of St. Peter in the
East."[1] H