“With Dangers Compast Round” 1660–1665abroad if occasion should offer. In Restoration England publication would have
been impossible.
There are numerous stories and anecdotes about Milton during this period, some
of questionable reliability, some containing a kernel of truth. Many were recounted
long after the fact by persons whose memories might be faulty, who may not have
heard or understood Milton properly, or who, like Milton’s daughter and grand-
daughter, wanted to make themselves interesting to later biographers and scholars
seeking personal tidbits about the great Milton. The most reliable witnesses are
Milton’s widow, Elizabeth Minshull, his nephew Edward Phillips, and his student
and friend, Cyriack Skinner.
“Fall’n On Evil Days... and Evil Tongues”
Milton’s fate, like that of the regicides and other prominent supporters of the revo-
lution, depended on whether he would be excepted by name from the general
pardon the king promised at Breda, at which time he left it to parliament to decide
upon the exceptions. From May 9 onward parliament debated about who should
be punished and how. Milton thought himself in imminent danger as he hid for
more than three months at an unidentified friend’s house in Bartholomew Close.^1
He had reason to worry: he was closely associated in royalists’ minds with Cromwell’s
government and Nedham’s notorious news magazines; he had been the first to
justify the regicide in Tenure; to the very end he had fiercely opposed the king’s
return; and his Eikonoklastes and Defensio were still primary targets of royalist out-
rage. Throughout the summer his emotions were surely on a roller-coaster as every
few days friends brought news of debates and decisions about particular persons to
be punished. He would also have been dismayed to hear about the deluge of po-
ems, letters, broadsides, petitions, sermons, and tracts celebrating the king’s return,
and perhaps especially, if he encountered it, the fulsome panegyric, Astraea Redux,
by his erstwhile colleague in Cromwell’s Secretariat, John Dryden, who would
soon become the laureate of the new age.^2
The week of June 11–18 was a period of particular danger for Milton. By then
the Commons had voted to exclude a large number of persons from the Indemnity
Bill. The most notorious regicides – Cromwell, Bradshaw, Ireton, and Pride –
were posthumously attainted of treason on May 14. All the living regicides – not
only the signers of the king’s death warrant but others instrumental in his trial and
execution – were made subject to punishment, ten of them capitally – including
Milton’s erstwhile associates Major-General Thomas Harrison, Thomas Scott, and
Edward Dendy the council’s sergeant-at-arms. Cromwell’s adviser Hugh Peters
was also made subject to death as a regicide because he had promoted the regicide
before the fact – a dangerous precedent for Milton who also did so in Tenure,
largely written before though published only after the king’s execution.^3 Milton