“The So-called Council of State” 1649–1652me; finally, without doubt, comes my shame at having nothing to tell you about your
business which I thought would please you. For when, the day after, I chanced to
meet Mr. Frost, and inquired carefully of him whether any answer to you was decided
upon (for, being ill, I myself was often absent from the Council), he replied, rather
disturbed, that nothing was yet decided.... [T]oday, I hope, I have accomplished
[something]; for when in the Council I had twice reminded Lord President Whitelocke
of your business, he brought it up at once: with the result that consideration of a
prompt answer to you is set for tomorrow.^145On January 3, 1652 Mylius at last had a private conference with Milton, who was
either given permission for that or else decided to bend a rule or two.^146 Mylius’s
diary records that Milton was again suffering greatly “from headache and suffusion
in the eyes,” that they discussed the constitutions of England and Rome and Milton’s
Defensio, and that Milton gave him a copy of John Phillips’s Responsio, asking his
opinion of it. Milton had to report, however, that other business had prevented the
council from acting on the Safeguard.^147
As the year turned, the council had more work for Milton. The Tuscan ambasssdor,
in London since May, was carrying on protracted negotiations about the seizure of
Tuscan goods on French and Portuguese ships captured by the English; on January
2 the council approved papers dealing with that matter and ordered Milton to draft
“a Letter in Latine of the Substance of what was now here read in English” to
Ferdinand II, Grand Duke of Tuscany, requesting and promising the continuation
of cordial relations (LR III, 133). In that letter, dated January 20, Milton used the
leeway given him in this directive to make a quasi-autobiographical allusion to the
happy experience in Florence of “certain youths, the noblest and most honorable of
our nation, who either journey through your cities or sojourn there to improve
their studies.”^148 On January 30, 1652 he had to write for the council to the Spanish
ambassador to protest that an “argument drawn from religion” (the resort of Ascham’s
murderers to sanctuary) had thus far prevented revenge for that “abominable mur-
der.”^149 He was also busy with letters and translations pertaining to negotiations
with the Dutch ambassadors over the Navigation Act and over seizures of Dutch
ships carrying French cargo. The most important of those letters (dated January 30)
declined the Dutch request to reopen negotiations for a closer alliance of the two
republics (the previous year the Dutch had refused England’s proposals to that end),
refused to rescind or modify the Navigation Act, and asserted the justice of the
seizures.^150 On March 12 he again wrote to Hamburg about the Merchant Adven-
turers’ problems, demanding much-delayed justice for the kidnapping of some
merchants and an assault on their preacher, as well as reparations for new vexations
(CPW V.2, 584–7).
Along with all this Milton tried during January and February to help poor Mylius.
On January 7 Mylius visited Milton, then busy with a Tuscan letter, and urged
Milton to show him the version of the Safeguard that he was sending to the coun-
cil.^151 The next day Milton stretched a point and did so, explaining, with irony