“With Dangers Compast Round” 1660–1665Milton moved to a new house in Jewin Street soon after his release, probably as
soon as friends found one suitable for him.^31 This move took him back to a familiar
neighborhood: Jewin Street goes off from Aldersgate Street where he had lived in a
“pretty garden house” between 1640 and 1645 and, like his next house in the
Barbican, it was in the parish of St Giles Cripplegate. But he may still have been in
Holborn for the gruesome events of January 30, 1661, marking the anniversary of
Charles I’s execution. The newsbooks describe how the “odious carcasses” of
Cromwell, Ireton, and Milton’s friend Bradshaw, who had presided at the king’s
trial, were disinterred from their burial places in Westminster Abbey:
On Munday night Cromwell and Ireton, on two several Carts were drawn to Holborn
from Westminster, after they were digged up on Saturday last, and the next morning
Bradshaw; Today [Wednesday] they were drawn upon Sledges to Tyburn, all the way
(as before from Westminster) the universal outcry of the people went along with them.
When these their Carcases were at Tyburn, they were pulled out of their Coffines, and
hang’d at the several angles of that Triple Tree, where they hung till the Sun was set;
after which they were taken down, their heads cut off, and their loathsome Trunks
thrown into a deep hole under the Gallows.^32Afterwards, the three heads were placed by the hangman on poles on the top of
Westminster Hall, where they were to remain until 1684. If Milton were still in
Holborn, he had some cause to fear for his safety as he heard the mob raging for two
days around the Red Lion Inn, where the bodies were deposited on hurdles to
await the January 30 degradations. If he had already moved, he surely heard about
and lamented the violations visited upon his former associates.
He had further cause to reflect on his vulnerability as polemic attacks on him
continued in 1661: a reprint of Ephraim Pagitt’s denunciation of him as a divorcer;
a reprint of Starkey’s Dignity of Kingship answering his Readie & Easie Way; a new
edition of the Regii Sanguinis Clamor which Pierre Du Moulin now owned to, and
for which he received the reward of some choice ecclesiastical appointments; and a
polemic by George Bate castigating Milton as “a musty pedant” whose tongue was
“dipt in the blackest and basest venom” in his Eikonoklastes and Defensio.”^33 Twice
in January, 1662, his polemic antagonist Alexander More preached before the king
and court at St James’s Chapel and there was talk of attaching this eloquent preacher
to the English court, though he was soon back in Paris and again in trouble.^34
Richardson heard that Milton in these first Restoration years “was in Perpetual
Terror of being Assassinated” by some irate royalist enemy, and that “He then kept
Himself as Private as he could” (EL 276). He had been released from prison but felt
he had to keep himself shut up. No doubt he hated his special vulnerability: a blind
man could not even recognize the approach of an assassin, let alone ward off an
attack.
In Jewin Street Milton began to feel more secure. He may have put his theo-