“Between Private Walls” 1645–1649scribes and Pharisees who wear phylacteries to display their religion before men but
bind “heavy burdens and grevious to be borne... on men’s shoulders.” Parlia-
ment, similarly warned, should cut off the Presbyterians’ efforts to impose their
ways on others, but (in a spirit very different from the persecuting Laudians or
Presbyterians) should refrain from persecuting them. The specific allusion is to Prynne,
now a would-be persecutor himself though his own ears had been forfeit to earlier
persecutors.^42 The witty, epigrammatic final line makes the point that Laudian priest
and Presbyterian presbyter are interchangeable even as the names for them are
identical in meaning: “New Presbyter is but old Preist writt large.”
During the first months of 1646 the king had been intriguing with the Irish and
the French to land troops in England, and tried to engage the pope to promote an
uprising of English Roman Catholics. But with defeat looming, on April 27 he
escaped from Oxford disguised as a servant and sought protection from the Scots,
who withdrew with him to Newcastle on May 13. On June 10 the king ordered his
commanders to surrender, Oxford did so on June 24, and by August the first Civil
War was over. For the rest of the year the king engaged in protracted negotiations
with various factions – the Scots forces, the English parliament, and assorted Pres-
byterians and Independents – playing those entities and their interests off against
each other. Parliament sent “Nineteen Propositions” to the king in July, demand-
ing that he take the Covenant, consent to the abolition of episcopacy Root and
Branch in England, Wales, and Ireland, approve the proceedings of the West-
minster Assembly, and surrender control of the army to parliament for 20 years. In
his counterproposals the king sought to avoid taking the Covenant, to preserve
episcopacy in some fashion in England, and to regain power over the army more
quickly.
The war’s ending had immediate consequences for Milton. By late April his
royalist brother Christopher was back in London with his wife and children. He
took the Covenant as required and compounded for his sequestered property on
August 25, aided, Edward Phillips claims, by “his brother’s interest with the then
prevailing party.”^43 When the surrender of Oxford reclaimed that city from the
royalists and opened it to travel, Milton was able to send a full set of his prose
pamphlets and his recently published Poems to John Rouse, librarian of the Bodleian,
who had requested them.^44 Rouse probably knew Milton when he lived at Horton
and used the library’s collections. Milton’s respectful inscription – “To the most
learned man, and excellent judge of books” – indicates mutual scholarly interests
rather than a close friendship; thanks to Rouse, Milton rejoices, his books will live
forever in this celebrated library where envy and calumny are driven far off.^45 He
was clearly delighted that such immortality was now assured for the work of both
his right and his left hands.
Much less happily, Oxford’s surrender subjected Milton to an inundation of his
Powell in-laws: by early July at least five Powell children under sixteen, their par-
ents, and perhaps some older children came to take up residence with the Miltons