“With Dangers Compast Round” 1660–1665seemed to promise. Six other regicides were to be punished by all means except
death. The non-regicides Vane and Lambert were condemned to execution, but
on the understanding that parliament would petition that their lives be spared. The
stalwart republican Arthur Haselrigg was to be imprisoned for life, and twenty
others were incapacitated for life from holding any civil, military, or ecclesiastical
office.^13 The disposition of many cases, including Milton’s, depended more on their
connections and their friends than on their records.
When Milton was not excepted from the Act of Pardon, he had reason to sup-
pose himself fully comprehended in it – “pardoned, released, indempnified, dis-
charged, and put in utter Oblivion” for all offenses during the civil wars and
Interregnum.^14 Bishop Burnet, like many others, was surprised by his escape:
Milton had appeared so boldly, tho’ with much wit and great purity and elegancy of
style, against Salmasius and others, upon that Argument of the putting the King to
death, and had discovered such violence against the late King and all the Royal family,
and against Monarchy, that it was thought a strange omission if he was forgot, and an
odd strain of clemency, if it was intended he should be forgotten. He was not ex-
cepted out of the act of indemnity.^15His escape is the more surprising given the barrage of polemic denunciations that
linked him with the worst of the offenders. A satiric poem, Britain’s Triumph (c.
May 14) denounced Milton the “Image-breaker” along with Bradshaw, Nedham,
Harrington, and other Commonwealthsmen, claiming that Milton’s best “divorce”
would be to commit suicide: “stabb’d, hang’d, or drown’d” he would “rail no
more against his King.”^16 A satiric dialogue between Cromwell and Hugh Peters (c.
May 17) portrays the indignities and disgraces imposed on the king’s family and the
nobility and gentry of three nations as the invention of “Milton, and Nedham, with
the help of Jack Hall, and the Devill to boot.”^17 David Lloyd (c. July 26) described
him as “a blind Beetle that durst affront the Royal Eagle.”^18 A satiric poem (c. August
17) places Milton in Pluto’s court along with Goodwin and Hugh Peters, all of
them fit to write for the devil as they did for Cromwell.^19
Rejoicing in his happy escape, Milton came out of hiding, ready to reclaim his
life and his independence, and to walk about in the sunshine. In early September,
probably, his friends arranged a temporary lodging near the bustling Red Lion
Inn in what is now Red Lion Square in Holborn, near Bloomsbury. Almost
immediately he was confronted with a pseudo-Salmasius publication, Joseph Jane’s
answer to Eikonoklastes, Eikon Aklastos (1651), republished as if it were a long-
suppressed response by Salmasius. It was dedicated to Charles II by one John
Garfeild, who refers to Milton as “one of your Majesties grand enemies,” against
whom God had evidenced “his particular judgment by striking him with blind-
ness.”^20 On September 5/15 the real Salmasius posthumous appeared: Salmasius’s
son published in Dijon, and soon after in London, Salmasius’s partial response to