faction to the King, as if they had been victorious, his Scottish subjects would have pressed upon him more severe terms than before; soon afterwards however arrived the news of the death of the Prince of Orange, which was a heavy blow to the royal cause, as from this time there ceased to be any expectation of assistance from France. From this time forward the King himself began to have a hand in affairs and was treated with more respect by the committee of the Kirk; his coronation was arranged to take place Jan. 1st, 1651, at Scone, near St. Johnston's, where forty-seven monarchs had been crowned before him. One part of the ceremony was a sermon of two hours' duration delivered by Mr. Robert Douglas, moderator of the commission of the general assembly. The text, 2 Kings xi. 12, 17, was singularly appropriate, but the sermon was full of the same vulgarities and personalities which the King had now for some months been accustomed to from the Scotch preachers. The sins of the King, of his father, and all his family were insisted on, and the necessity of extirpating prelacy urged upon him, the preacher condemning his grandfather James I., for having been guilty of a foul defection, having promised to continue steadfast in the Reformation, yet after he had come to the throne of England having forced prelates upon Scotland. After several other ceremonies had been gone through, amongst which was the administering to the King the oath of both covenants, the preacher at intervals twice added a word of exhortation, and the ceremony was concluded with a prayer and a psalm. The political events of the year 1651, so far as they are connected with the history of the Church we shall give in a future number. We now resume our series of original documents, with the two following letters from Hammond to Sheldon. [Harl. 115.] A "Dear Sir,-Yours of Dec. 16th came now to me as soon as those that were written in London on the 15th, therefore methinks our intercourse should not be so much interrupted by my remove. counterpart of Dr. M [aplet's] to you I received also, and gave him an account how much I had been abused in that relation. I do not know any way of reconciling those contraries, his stay, and her satisfaction, and therefore have thus far been fain to neglect the latter, as to tell her openly, but civilly, my sense of the advantages of his stay, though to her I have not taken notice of her dealing with me. In the papers you mention, I have left out all that you saw, and in the preface have nothing of Sal[masius] but magnificent, only in the book I answer some passages of Walo. asked lately, what if Mr. Seld[en] answer his Def[ensio] Reg[ia]: I am not yet permitted to think of returning to my old quarter. But why do you ask? By that time you tell me that, perhaps I I was shall know more of it. I heard by Ro[bert] P[ayne] lately from Dr. New [lyn] of the sad condition he is in by the necessity of keeping close. I answered that if that which I knew of were the only occasion of it, he should appear confidently, and if examined, answer he neither hath them, nor knows where, delivered what he had to the delegates, &c.; and if any danger of confinement follow this, be bound to be forthcoming, and if in fine any great inconvenience approach, which nothing else will avert, he shall promise to endeavour to help them to them, and accordingly R[obert] P[ayne] by W. D[ayrell] help him to perform. If you like, or like not, this answer do you in your next to R[obert] P[ayne] give him your sense of it. The La[dy] P[ackington] hath miscarried three w[eeks] since, and is still weak, but in some hopes of recovering. "Jan. 3, [1650-1.] I am yours, [Henry Hammond.]" "For Dr. Sheldon. [Harl. 117.] "Dear Sir, I received yours of Dec. 30th, within few days, and though I did it last week, must again confirm the news of our hopes of the Lady's recovering to some strength again, with the mention of all their loves to you. I am glad you have sped so well with Mr. A. and shall hope, that if the sums that come in be made use of to the putting out some that are big enough, the annual sums may not for the future be so necessary. I do lately hear nothing from Mr. Rhet [orick] or Philips, although £15 went to them from hence before Christmas, conducted by a letter of mine. Of Mr. Selden's book, my opinion is that he hath done no part of Mr. O[wen]'s boast, yet after his manner used all little advantages to advance his own design, and if your many littles do not make the mickle, I am confident his conclusion is as unproved as any he ever espoused. I know not, but believe the price of the book may be seven or eight shillings. He hath taken no notice of me in it, but being by his method to prove his notion of binding and loosing, which I disproved, he puts it off to another part of the work yet behind. I suppose you will read the book, otherwise I would give you a further account of it. I would S[anderson,] who hath nothing to do, were necessitated to undertake the answering of it, as far as concerns us, I could give him hints enough of advantage in it. Grotius' notes on the Revelations I find of good use to me, for he is on a scheme of the whole, almost perfectly all one with mine, and helps me to some explications of particular places, which I prefer much before what before I had contented myself with, but they are very short. Of Mr. Davis I had heard before, (by Mr. Sudbury who is Chaplain here,) and gave him one recommendation, but it proved successless. I shall, when I hear of an opportunity be mindful of him. G[eorge] M[orley] hath some thoughts of coming over. Tell me what you think of the fitness or safety of it, and whether best attempting it by pass or no. "Farewell, yours truly, "[Henry Hammond.]" "[Westwood, Friday,] Jan. 10, [1651.] "For Dr. Sheldon." The latter of these two letters requires but little explanation, as it alludes to subjects of which we have before spoken. It is curious to observe how Sanderson is always spoken of as having no employment, Hammond and his other friends appearing not to understand why he kept aloof from controversy. If we were to hazard a conjecture it would be that he was occupied with the Calvinistic controversy, and had not yet made up his mind on these points, sufficiently to justify to himself his writing on theological subjects. It was some years after this that he avowed his change of sentiments, after some letters which passed between himself and Dr. Hammond. Of Mr. Davis we can only guess from the manner in which he is spoken of, that he was a young clergyman for whom Hammond and Sheldon were anxious to provide employment. Of Mr. Sudbury we know little more than that he preached the sermon at the consecration of Sheldon and the other four Bishops after the Restoration, and that he soon afterwards succeeded Barwick as Dean of S. Paul's. The casual allusion to Dr. Payne in the former letter falls in with, and is explained by, two letters of his which we have printed in Vol. VI. page 220, 221. The ejected members of the University were giving all the trouble they could to their usurping successors, who found it very difficult to get comfortably into the berths they had selected for themselves. The University chest with its plate, seals, and keys, and beadles' staves, seems to have changed hands frequently in order to evade its being given up. Probably neither Mrs. Fell, nor Dr. Potter, nor Dr. Newlyn, knew where they were, yet doubtless they were not very anxious to inquire, and perhaps chose to remain in ignorance that they might not be able to give the information required. However, it appears that before February 24th, Dr. Newlyn was obliged to surrender the keys and seal, though the beadles' staves were not even then forthcoming. Hammond's reason for sparing Salmasius, was on account of the good service he had done the royal cause, by the publication of his "Defensio Regia," in 1649. We have before alluded to this work as well as to Milton's reply to it, but a brief account of the contents of them may not be uninteresting. Salmasius' book is divided into twelve chapters, to which his antagonist replies in as many. From the date of its publication, it is plain that it must have been hastily written, and there are evident marks of carelessness in the composition, not only in several inconsistencies of ex pression which Milton exposes, but in the confused arrangement of the subject. He professes to treat first of the fact, and then of the law or right by which the King was executed. This he does by an examination, first of all passages in the Old Testament which appear to bear on the subject, and then by reference to the New Testament, and justifies his conclusion by innumerable references to heathen authors, as well as by various quotations from the Latin and some from the Greek Fathers. From this he proceeds to examine whether the actual practices of the Jews and of the early Christians corresponded to the law. So far his arguments, if good, might be supposed to have some weight, but neither the writer nor his antagonist produce anything but commonplace statements or arguments. But when Salmasius in his fifth chapter proceeds to examine the sentiments of heathen nations of antiquity, Egyptians, Ethiopians, Persians, Medes, &c., with regard to the authority of kings; his readers must have judged this to be rather a display of learning, than an argument likely to promote the king's cause. Milton contemptuously replies to this by asking, What do we care about the opinions of the nations of antiquity? and meets the two following chapters which treat on the inviolability of the person of kings, by counter-statements taken from the same authors, and some arguments deduced from the same passages which Salmasius quotes, mixed up, as indeed the whole "Apologia" is, with the most violent abuse both of Charles I. and of his literary antagonist; and this couched in most profane and sometimes blasphemous language. The following may be taken as a specimen of Milton's contempt for Salmasius, and his power of writing Latin verse. It is almost needless to say that it is a parody on the prologue to Persius' satires-or to call attention to the fact that there are nearly as many mistakes as there are lines in the composition. "Quis expedivit Salmasio suam Hundredam ? Picumque docuit verba nostra conari ? Magister artis venter et Jacobæi Centum, exulantis viscera marsupii regis: Quod si dolosi spes refulserit nummi Ipse Antichristi qui modo Primatum Papæ Cantabit ultro Cardinalitium melos." Milton here refers to Salmasius' Anglicisms, one of which was the word Hundreda, and the subject of the joke is the sum of a hundred Jacobuses which the author was said to have received in payment from the young king. After discussing the subject of the rights of kings in general, the author proceeds to make a particular application to the case of the King and Parliament of England, and here the reader who will take the trouble to wade through both these dreary volumes, will find the well known arguments on the theory of conquest and an original compact, the coronation oath, &c. discussed with perhaps more than the usual amount of unfairness and certainly with much more weakness than has been usually displayed by writers on these subjects. Towards the conclusion of the treatise, is discussed the share which the Presbyterians and Independents respectively had taken in the king's death; and the twelfth and last chapter is occupied with an elaborate repetition of the charges brought against Charles. Milton throughout his volume is continually insinuating charges against the king, particularly as respecting his private character, charging him with the grossest libertinism; but the accusation is so vague that we are forced to conclude that the author had no evidence for what he asserts, as he is very unscrupulous in stating what may tend to the dishonour of the king, whose memory, now that he was dead, he sometimes affects to respect. There is one point in which Milton certainly has the advantage of his antagonist. He had it in his power to reproach him with inconsistency, and he unscrupulously uses this power. Salmasius even in this volume makes many statements that it is difficult to reconcile with each other, and unquestionably it will not be to his credit to compare this publication with his previous work de Primatu Papæ. Whether his avowed change of sentiment were from conviction it may be impossible now to determine, but Milton had certainly some show of reason on his side when he accused him of altering his tone on the subject of Episcopacy, because he had been bribed by the king to write in its defence. In fact, as his antagonist charges him, he had written for the expulsion of Bishops from the Church, and was now reprobating their exclusion from the House of Lords. From several allusions to this controversy which occur in Burman's Sylloge Epistolarum, it is plain that Milton's name was as yet but little known on the continent. His Iconoclastes must therefore have had a very small circulation in comparison with that of the Eixav Barix. But his Apologia had a most rapid sale. It came out quite at the beginning of the year 1651, for a copy of it had reached Stockholm on the 11th of April,* and on the 8th of May it had passed through five editions, and was being translated into Dutch and French. Salmasius began his reply almost immediately: another answer was in preparation by a Dutch lawyer named Graswinckel, but was stopped by the interference of the States. The printing of Salmasius' reply had been commenced in January, 1653, and the volume was published in its incomplete state by his son after the Restoration. But Milton was attacked in the same year 1651, in a volume published anonymously called "Apologia pro rege et populo Anglicano contra Johannis Polypragmatici (alias Miltoni) defensionem • Burmanni Sylloge, iii. p. 594. Ibid, p. 600. Ibid, p. 663. |