CHAPTER XXVII.

Entitled, To the Prince of Wales.

340. WHAT the king wrote to his son, as a father, concerns not us; what he wrote to him as a king of England, concerns not him; God and the parliament having now otherwise disposed of England. But because I see it done with some artifice and labour, to possess the people, that they might amend their present condition, by his, or by his son's restorement, I shall show point by point, that although the king had been reinstalled to his desire, or that his son admitted should observe exactly all his father's precepts, yet that this would be so far from conducing to our happiness, either as a remedy to the present distempers, or a prevention of the like to come, that it would inevitably throw us back again into all our past and fulfilled miseries; would force us to fight over again all our 7 tedious wars, and put us to another fatal struggling for liberty and life, more dubious than the former. (9) In which, as our success hath been no other than our cause; so it will be evident to all posterity, that his misfortunes were the mere consequence of his perverse judgment.

(92) Here Milton wrote like a prophet; for the Restoration, which he lived to groan under, brought back, as he foresaw, tyranny and persecution, and a second struggle. But the issue was more glorious: the establishment of the present constitution in 1688, fourteen years after he had been gathered to his fathers.

341. First, he argues from the experience of those troubles, which both he and his son have had, to the improvement of their piety and patience; and by the way bears witness in his own words, that the corrupt education of his youth, which was but glanced at only in some former passages of this answer, was a thing neither of mean consideration, nor untruly charged upon him or his son: himself confessing here, that "court-delights are prone either to root up all true virtue (93) and honour, or to be contented only with some leaves and withering formalities of them, without any real fruits tending to the public good." Which presents him still in his own words another Rehoboam, softened by a far worse court than Solomon's, and so corrupted by flat

(93) Mrs. Macauley was right when she said of Charles I., that "his manners partook of dissipation, and his conversation of the indecency of a court;" for, notwithstanding the panegyrics of Clarendon and Hume, Milton's view of his private character is proved to be strictly consonant with the truth of history. In his "Pro Populo Anglicano Defensio," he speaks out more clearly, charging Charles with the grossest libertinism. "Castimoniam tu ejus et continentiam laudes, quem cum Duce Buckinghamio flagitiis omnibus coopertum novimus? secretiora ejus et recessus perscrutari quid attinet, qui in theatro medias mulieres petulanter amplecti, et suaviari, qui virginum et matronarum papillas, ne dicam cætera, pertractare in propatulo, consueverat ?" (c. iv. see also c. 12.) But this, it may be said, is the account of an enemy. Then let us hear his friends: "Lady Leicester says to her husband, in 1636, 'I have been at court. In his majesty (Charles I.) I found an inclination to show me some kindness, but he could not find the way: at last he told me, that he perceived I was very kind to my husband when he was with me, which kept me very lean, for he thought me much

teries, which he affirms to be unseparable, to the overturning of all peace, and the loss of his own honour and kingdoms.

342. That he came therefore thus bred up and nurtured to the throne far worse than Rehoboam, unless he be of those who equalized his father to king Solomon, we have here his own confession. And how voluptuously, how idly reigning in the hands of other men, he either tyrannized or trifled away those seventeen years of peace, without care or thought, as if to be a king had been nothing else in his apprehension, but to eat and drink, and have his will, and take his pleasure; though there be who can relate his domestic life to the exactness of a diary, there shall be here no mention made. This yet we might have then foreseen, that he who spent his leisure so remissly and so corruptly to his own pleasing, would one day or other be worse busied and employed to our sorrow. And that he acted in good earnest what Rehoboam did but threaten, to make his little finger heavier than his father's loins, and to whip us up with two twisted scorpions, both temporal and spiritual

fatter than I used to be. This short speech was worse to me than absolute silence, for I blushed, and was so extremely out of countenance, that all the company laughed at me.'"-(Sidney Papers, ii. 472.) And young Lord Sunderland, in the camp, 1642, to his wife: "I never saw the king look better; he is very cheerful, and by the bawdy discourse I thought I had been in the drawing-room." (Sidney Papers, ii. 668.) Warburton has quoted these passages in his Notes on Clarendon. (History, vii. 629.) So that, after all, the court of Charles II. sprang naturally enough from that of Charles I.

tyranny, all his kingdoms have felt. What good use he made afterwards of his adversity, both his impenitence and obstinacy to the end, (for he was no Manasseh,) and the sequel of these his meditated resolutions, abundantly express: retaining, commending, teaching to his son all those putrid and pernicious documents, both of state and of religion, instilled by wicked doctors, and received by him as in a vessel nothing better seasoned, which were the first occasion both of his own and all our miseries.

343. And if he, in the best maturity of his years and understanding, made no better use to himself or others of his so long and manifold afflictions, either looking up to God, or looking down upon the reason of his own affairs; there can be no probability, that his son, bred up, not in the soft effeminacies of a court only, but in the rugged and more boisterous licence of undisciplined camps and garrisons, for years unable to reflect with judgment upon his own condition, and thus illinstructed by his father, should give his mind to walk by any other rules than these, bequeathed him as on his father's death-bed, and as the choicest of all that experience, which his most serious observation and retirement in good or evil days had taught him. David indeed, by suffering without just cause, learned that meekness and that wisdom by adversity, which made him much the fitter man to reign. But they who suffer as oppressors, tyrants, violators of law, and persecutors of reformation, without appearance of repent

ing; if they once get hold again of that dignity and power, which they had lost, are but whetted and enraged by what they suffered, against those whom they look upon as them that caused their sufferings. (94)

344. How he hath been "subject to the sceptre of God's word and Spirit," though acknowledged to be the best government; and what his dispensation of civil power hath been, with what justice, and what honour to the public peace; it is but looking back upon the whole catalogue of his deeds, and that will be sufficient to remember us. "The cup of God's physic," as he calls it, what alteration it wrought in him to a firm healthfulness from any surfeit, or excess whereof the people generally thought him sick, if any man would go about to prove, we have his own testimony following here, that it wrought none at all.

345. First, he hath the same fixed opinion and esteem of his old Ephesian goddess, called the Church of England, as he had ever; and charges 1 strictly his son after him to persevere in that antipapal schism, (for it is not much better,) as that which will be necessary both for his soul's and the kingdom's peace. But if this can be any foundation of the kingdom's peace, which was the

(94) How exactly was this verified upon the Restoration! For an account of the public actions of Charles II., we need refer no farther than to the common page of history; but nowhere, perhaps, except in the "Memoires de Grammont," can we find a faithful picture of his private career, soiled by every vice, and dishonoured by every meanness, incident to human nature.