“With Dangers Compast Round” 1660–1665ence to the monarchy. Clergy who refused were to be ejected and made subject to
fines and imprisonment if they continued to preach or to serve as schoolmasters or
tutors. The terminal date for all this, St Bartholomew’s Day (August 24, 1662),
produced another massacre, though unbloody: some 2,000 clergy were added to
the 500 or so who had already been ejected from their livings. Most of them had
no means of support.
Other revenges continued. On April 19 three more regicides were captured
abroad, brought back to England, and executed in the usual grisly manner. Most
affecting for Milton were the trials of Lambert and Vane: on June 11 both were
convicted of treason with the expectation that the king would keep his promise to
the Convention Parliament to reprieve them from the death sentence. He did so
for Lambert, who behaved with submissiveness and circumspection throughout the
trial. Vane, however, defended himself and the Good Old Cause with boldness and
indignation, and the king reportedly decided he was too dangerous to let live; at the
intercession of his relatives his execution was commuted from the customary hor-
ror to simple beheading on Tower Hill. Milton no doubt heard about his courage
and his eloquent speech before death, and was pleased to have his sonnet to Vane
made the centerpiece of George Sikes’s biography, The Life and Death of Sir Henry
Vane, published almost immediately. Of course, neither the biography nor Milton’s
sonnet could bear the authors’ signatures.^37 Polemicists recounting the punishments
of various regicides often associated Milton with them, pointing to his blindness as
his direct punishment from God.^38
Milton’s new household in Jewin Street would have included his three daugh-
ters, a maidservant, and a mistress to teach the girls; there may have been other
servants who lived in or out. In 1661 Anne, the lame one, was 15, Mary was 13,
and Deborah 9. Except for the brief period of Milton’s second marriage, they had
been motherless for ten years. We know almost nothing about their education save
for Deborah’s later report that they were taught at home by a mistress kept for that
purpose.^39 Such arrangements were probably disrupted while Milton was in hiding
and in prison. Edward Phillips implies that all of them could read, and states that the
two younger were taught (evidently by Milton, for who else could do so?) to read
to him in several languages – Hebrew, Greek, Latin, Italian, Spanish, Dutch, and
French – with exact pronunciation though without understanding what they read,
except in English (EL 76–8). Deborah told later interviewers that they did not learn
those languages because Milton believed and often repeated in their hearing that
“one tongue was enough for a woman.” She also astonished those visitors by recit-
ing from memory the opening verses of Homer, Isaiah, Ovid’s Metamorphoses, and
Euripides – which suggests that the girls were taught pronunciation by often re-
peating those verses.^40 Phillips states that Anne was excused from reading to her
father because of her defective speech;^41 she did not learn to write and signed docu-
ments with her mark. Mary could sign her name and may have been able to write.
Deborah was evidently a competent writer: there were reports that she served at