“With Dangers Compast Round” 1660–1665in an argument urging more rigorous and comprehensive regulation of the press, he
cited that work as a conspicuous instance of the continuing traffic in reprints or
copies of treasonous republican and regicide tracts.^69 In August L’Estrange was ap-
pointed one of the licensers of books, granted sole right to publish newsbooks, and
given oversight over all publications.^70 He brought to trial several members of the
book trade, among them the printer John Twyn for producing a book that draws
on Milton’s Tenure to argue the people’s right to execute a monarch, and to urge
the assassination of Charles II and members of the royal family in retaliation for the
execution of the regicides.^71 When Twyn was convicted of high treason and hanged,
drawn, and quartered in February, 1664, Milton must again have been acutely
sensible of his danger and his lucky escape.
In the summer of 1665 a threat far greater than royalist polemics forced Milton to
move to the country. Around the turn of that year the Great Plague, so termed
because of its virulence and terrible mortality rates, began to show itself in scattered
parishes in Holborn, Westminster, and the City. No doubt Milton, like Samuel
Pepys and many others, soon started to keep careful track of the escalating plague
bills and the route of the disease. Overall, about one-fifth of the population of
London and its Liberties and surrounding parishes died, with Milton’s parish, St
Giles Cripplegate, one of the hardest hit.^72 By mid-July it was taking a harsh toll in
Cripplegate: 421 in the third week of July and 554 the next week.^73 On June 21
Pepys reported a mass exodus: “I find all the town almost going out of town, the
coaches and waggons being all full of people going into the country” – leaving in
place mostly magistrates and servants.^74 Social ties and duties collapsed: only a few
doctors remained in London and only a few pastors, despite pleas to them from the
Bishop of London.^75 Milton could not, as Pepys did, observe the fearful signs in the
streets as the infection spread like wildfire with the extraordinarily hot weather of
June and July, but his friends surely described them to him: neighbors shunning
each other, the court removed to Oxford and the Inns of Court shut up, trade all
but stopped, houses boarded up with red crosses painted on them and plague vic-
tims with their entire households quarantined inside, cemeteries filled to overflow-
ing, plague pits for the reception of corpses that could not be buried individually.
Milton’s own area, Bunhill, echoed with alarming sounds: dead carts moving through
the streets at night to the cry “bring out your dead,” church bells tolling steadily
and unable to keep up with the numbers of the dying, women and children shriek-
ing as loved ones died, the cries of victims in intolerable pain from the characteristic
black buboes or swellings.^76 Defoe writes that the single pest-house in London, to
which the first victims were taken, lay just beyond Bunhill Fields and that one of
the massive common burial pits for victims was in Bunhill Fields, into which also
some “that were infected and near their end, and delirious also, would run... and
throw themselves.”^77
As a student, Milton had lived through less serious plagues, when Cambridge
University was closed and he retreated with his family to the country. He now