“With Dangers Compast Round” 1660–1665knew, as everyone did, the horrific details of those public executions for treason
and he must have recalled them often as he lay hidden in self-imposed imprison-
ment, imagining his friends enduring that fate and fearing it for himself. The sen-
tence soon to be imposed on Harrison is typical:
The Judgment of this Court is... That you be led back to the place from whence you
came, and from thence to be drawn upon an hurdle to the place of execution; and
there you shall be hanged by the neck, and being alive shall be cut down, and your
privy members to be cut off, your entrails to be taken out of your body, and, you
living, the same to be burnt before your eyes, and your head to be cut off, your body
to be divided into four quarters, and head and quarters to be disposed of at the pleas-
ure of the king’s majesty, and the Lord have mercy upon your soul.^4As Michael Lieb observes, it is a sentence that forces the victim to witness his own
emasculation and evisceration, to experience the annihilation of his identity in a
public spectacle.^5 Milton, who so often identified with the archetypal poet Orpheus,
no doubt imagined himself liable to reenact the dismemberment of Orpheus all too
literally. And the polemicist who had so often before constructed himself as a spe-
cies of epic hero in his combat with the king’s book and with Salmasius, now had
to wonder whether he could display the physical courage that ordeal would de-
mand. During those anxious months in hiding, his thin-spun life at the mercy of
the blind Fury with the abhorred shears, he had to wonder whether he would ever
finish the great epic he had begun. There must have been days when the confi-
dence he had sustained through many years of public duties and private troubles in
his God-given vocation as poet was badly shaken, and when, like Samson, he must
have wondered whether God had abandoned him.
On June 8 the Commons decided to select twenty notable non-regicides for
rigorous punishment short of death – a category into which Milton might well fall;
the fierce debates over which persons to choose were fueled by Milton’s old en-
emy, William Prynne. The twenty agreed upon included several of Milton’s friends
and erstwhile associates: Sir Henry Vane, John Goodwin of Coleman Street, Speaker
of the Commons William Lenthall, Major-Generals John Lambert, John Desborough,
and Charles Fleetwood. Milton’s name was floated briefly on June 18 as the possi-
ble twentieth man, but it was not seconded.^6 His early biographers attribute his
remarkable escape to the maneuvers of friends and supporters in parliament and
behind the scenes. Marvell, member of parliament for Hull, was one who, accord-
ing to Edward Phillips, “acted vigorously in his behalf, and made a considerable
party for him” (EL 74). Jonathan Richardson heard at third hand that Secretary of
State William Morrice and the erstwhile Cromwellian statesman Sir Thomas Clarges
“were his friends, and manag’d Matters Artfully in his Favour,” prompted by William
Davenant whose life Milton had helped save in 1651.^7 These men and perhaps also
Sir Arthur Annesley, later a close friend of Milton’s,^8 may have acted in part from