“The So-called Council of State” 1649–1652arts and to men of learning has never been surpassed) and had gone thither, there in
the very place where he was living as a highly honored guest, he was overtaken by my
Defence, while he was expecting nothing of the kind. Nearly everyone read it imme-
diately, and the Queen herself... [I]f I may report what is frequently mentioned and
is no secret, so great a reversal of opinion suddenly took place that he who the day
before had flourished in the highest favor now all but withered away. (CPW IV.1,
556–7)Milton also took pride in receiving recognition, congratulations, and visits from
distinguished Europeans:
I can truthfully assert that from the time when my Defence was first published, and
kindled the enthusiasm of its readers, no ambassador from any prince or state who was
then in the city failed to congratulate me, if we chanced to meet, or omitted to seek
an interview with me at his own house, or to visit me at mine.^119One of these was Christopher Arnold, a traveler from Germany, who described
Milton as a “strenuous defender” of the republic, praised his Areopagitica, and ob-
served that he “enters readily into talk; his style is pure and his writing most terse.”^120
On November 19, 1651 Milton dictated an entry for Arnold’s autograph book,
which included a laudatory address in Latin to this “most learned man” and, as his
own motto, a modified Greek quotation from 2 Corinthians 12:9: “I am perfected
in weakness.”^121 He signed it himself.
Yet Milton’s new fame did not shield him from mundane problems. In April,
1651 a parliamentary committee, charged to give members of parliament priority in
the assignment of rooms in Whitehall, tried to eject the Milton family, but the
Council of State managed to stay the order, clearly valuing Milton’s service and
sensitive to his needs as his vision deteriorated (LR III, 20). In June, responding to
another order for Milton’s “speedie remove out of his lodgings,” four council mem-
bers met with the committee, “to acquaint them with the Case of Mr. Milton...
and to endeavour with them that the said Mr. Milton may bee Continued where
hee is in regard of the employment which he is in to the Councel, which necessi-
tates him to reside neere the Councel” (LR III, 42). He was again reprieved, but
the uncertainty was surely unsettling.
He had legal and financial concerns as well, arising chiefly from the Wheatley
properties he held from the Powells, as a means to recover debts they owed him.^122
In 1649 Milton’s mother-in-law Anne Powell began a long series of protests and
petitions to obtain redress for the illegal seizure and sale of personal property and
timber from the Forest Hill estate; she won judgments in her favor but could not
get them enforced.^123 Her problems, and Milton’s, were exacerbated by a law passed
August 1, 1650, designed to keep royalists from evading composition by fictional
transfers of property to parliamentarian friends: it required all who held royalist
property to compound for it. Milton petitioned to compound for Wheatley but