“With Dangers Compast Round” 1660–1665logical tract and his great poem away during the first year or so after the Restora-
tion when he felt himself in greatest danger, and as time passed began to work on
them again. The near brush with death and his continuing if gradually diminish-
ing sense of danger in the years immediately following the Restoration would
naturally enough prompt Milton to try to give final formulation to his own state-
ment of religious faith, which he also saw as his most important educational project,
De Doctrina Christiana. It would also prompt him to try to finish Paradise Lost as
soon as he could. Both of these works look beyond Milton’s immediate compatri-
ots to address all Christendom, present and future. Sometime during or before
1662 he sent to a friend in Germany, probably Lieuwe van Aitzema, a copy of
Jean Bodin’s Colloquium Heptaplomeres, a rare, boldly speculative, heretical dia-
logue containing forceful arguments for anti-Trinitarianism and divorce by some
of the participants. Several letters exchanged between Baron Joannes Christianus
de Boineburg and Hermann Conring in 1662 recount their efforts to find and
copy for their prince’s library Bodin’s “horrible book” of “impious ravings”; they
lament that the man who had it from Milton will not lend it, and they are also
interested in Milton’s “book about divorce in English” which the same man has.^35
Milton kept up his continental connections, exchanging his suspect books and
theological speculations with European friends as he worked on De Doctrina
Christiana.
He surely followed events in England with mounting distress. On St George’s
Day, April 23, 1661, Charles II was crowned with elaborate pageantry and ritual
anointing, which Milton would have thought idolatrous. The Cavalier Parlia-
ment, which convened on May 8, 1661 and which contained only about fifty
Presbyterians, pressed on vigorously to eradicate Puritanism and settle church and
state as Charles II and his first minister Clarendon desired. On May 27, 1661 the
Solemn League and Covenant was burned by the common hangman; on May 26
all members of parliament were required to receive the sacrament by Anglican rites
or be disqualified; on June 18 bishops were restored to the House of Lords. In
September twenty notables associated with the Puritan regime were dug up from
their burial places in Westminster and thrown into a common pit: among those
well known to Milton were the parliamentarian John Pym, the historian and dip-
lomat Dr Isaac Dorislaus, Stephen Marshall the Smectymnuan, and the wife of
Milton’s friend John Bradshaw, president of the regicide court.^36 Before the first
session of the Cavalier Parliament ended on May 19, 1662, it passed several laws to
repress dissent: an Act targeting Quakers imposed fines, imprisonment, and ban-
ishment on any who refused to take oaths or who held private meetings for wor-
ship; a Press Act required all publications to be licensed by a designated official;
and an Act of Uniformity required clergy to give formal assent to everything in the
Book of Common Prayer, to receive ordination from a bishop if not already so or-
dained, to renounce the Solemn League and Covenant, and (like all civil officials
and military personnel) to swear oaths of allegiance, supremacy, and passive obedi-