THE

CENSURE* OF THE ROTA

UPON MR. MILTON'S BOOK,

INTITLED,

The ready and easy Way to establish a free Commonwealth.

Die Lunæ 26, Martii, 1660.

Ordered by the Rota, that Mr. Harrington be desired to draw up a Narrative of this Day's Proceeding upon Mr. Milton's Book, called, "The ready and easy Way, &c." And to cause the same to be forthwith printed and published, and a Copy thereof to be sent to Mr. Milton.

TRUNDLE WHEELER, Clerk to the Rota.

Printed at London by Paul Giddy, Printer to the Rota, at the Sign of the Windmill in Turn-again Lane, 1660. Quarto, containing sixteen pages.

SIR,

IAM commanded, by this ingenious Convention of the Rota, to give you an account of some reflexions that they have lately made upon a treatise of yours, which you call, The ready and easy Way to establish a free Commonwealth; in which I must first bespeak your pardon, for being forced to say something, not only against my own sense, but the interest, which both you and I carry on; for it is enjoined me to acquaint you with all that was said, although I take as little pleasure to repeat it, as you will do to hear it. For whereas it is our usual custom to dispute every thing, how plain or obscure soever, by knocking argument against argument, and tilting at one another with our heads, as rams fight, until we are out of breath, and then refer it to our wooden oracle, the box; and seldom any thing, how slight soever, hath appeared, without some patron or other to defend it: I must confess, I never saw bowling-stones run so unluckily against any boy, when his hand has been out, as the ballots did against you, when any thing was put to the question, from the beginning of your book to the end; for it was no sooner read over, but a gentleman of your acquaintance said, he wished, for your own sake, as well as the cause you contend for, that you had given your book no name, like an anabaptist's child, until it had come to years of discretion, or else that you had got some friend to be gossip, that has a luckier hand at giving titles to books than you have. For it is observed, you have always been very unfortunate that way, as if it were fa

* This is the 26th number in the catalogue of pamphlets in the Harleian Library,

tal to you, to prefix bulls and nonsense to the very fronts of your learned works, as when you call Salmasius, Claudius Anonymus, in the very title of that admired piece, which you writ to confute his wife and his maid. As also in that other learned labour of yours, which you stile Tetrachordon, that is to say, a Fiddle with four Strings; but, as you render it a four-fold cord, with which you undertake (worse than Captain Ottor, and Cuthbert the Barber) not to bind, but, most ridiculously, to unty matrimony. But in this book, he said, you were more insufferable; for you do not only stile your declamation, The ready and easy Way, as if it were the best or only way, to the disparagement of this most ingenious assembly, who are confident, they have proposed others much more considerable; but do very indiscreetly profess, in the same place, to compare the excellencies of a commonwealth with the inconveniencies and dangers of kingship; this, he said, was foul play, and worse logick. For, as all conveniencies, in this world, carry their inconveniencies with them, to compare the best of one thing with the worst of another is a very unequal way of comparison. He had observed, that comparisons were commonly made on the wrong side, and so was this of yours, by your own confession. To this another added, He wondered you did not give over writing, since you have always done it to little or no purpose; for, though you have scribbled your eyes out, your works have never been printed, but for the company of chandlers and tobacco-men, who are your stationers, and the only men that vend your labours. He said, that he himself reprieved the whole defence of the people of England for a groat, that was sentenced to vile Mundungus, and had suffered inevitably, but for him, though it cost you much oil and labour; and the Rump three-hundred pounds a year, to whose service it was more properly intended; although, in the close, you pronounce them to be as very rascals as Salmasius, and all the christian world calls them, if ever they suffered any of their fellow-members to invade the government, as Oliver Cromwell and others have since done, and confess yourself fooled and mistaken, and all you have written to be false, howsoever you give yourself the second lye in writing for them again. After this, a grave gentleman of the long robe said, You had broken the heads of all the sages of the law, and plaid false in the very first word of your treatise. For the parliament of England, as you call the Rump, never consisted of a packed party of one house, that, by fraud and covin, had disseized the major part of their fellows, and forfeited their own right, by abetting the ejectment of the whole house of peers, and the greater part of their own, which was always understood to be the whole house, with whom they had but a joint right. That they had been several times justly dissolved by the army, from whom they really derived their authority; and the general voices of the people, in whom they had declared the supreme power to reside; and their own confession, upon record in their journal-book. But this, he said, you stole from Patriot Whitlock, who began his declaration for a free state with the same

words; and he wondered you would filch and pilfer nonsense and fallacies, that have such plentiful store of your own growth. Yet this was as true as that which follows, that a great number of the faithfullest of the people assisted them in throwing off kingship; for they were a very slight number, in respect of the whole, and none of the faithfullest that forswore themselves, to maintain and defend that which they judged dangerous, and resolved to abolish : And, therefore, they turned regal bondage, as you word it, into a free commonwealth, no more justly and magnanimously, than other knights of the post do their feats, by plain down-right perjury. And the nation had little reason to trust such men with their liberty or property, that had no right to their own ears, but, among the rest of their cheats, had defrauded the very pillory of its due." This, being put to the ballot, was immediately carried on in the affirmative, without a dissenting pellet. When presently a gentle. man, that hath been some years beyond-seas, said, he wondered you would say any thing so false and ridiculous, as that this commonwealth was the terror and admiration of France itself; for, if that were true, the cardinal and council were very imprudent to become the chief promoters of it, and strive, by all means to uphold that, which they judged to be dangerous to themselves, and for the interest of a nation, which they hate and fear so much as they do us; for, if this free state be so terrible to them, they have been very unwise, in assisting it to keep out the king all this while, especially if they saw the people of Parts and Bourdeaux disposed, as you say, to imitate us, which appears very strange; for, by their history, any man would judge, we had catched the disease of them. As for our actions abroad, which you brag of, he said, he never heard of any where he was, until Oliver Cromwell reduced us to an absolute monarchy, under the name of a free state; and then we beat the potent and flourishing republick of the United Provinces, But, for our actions at home, he had heard abroad, that they savoured much of Goth and Vandal barbarism, if pulling down of churches, and demolishing the noblest monuments in the land, both publick and private, beside religion and all laws, human and divine, may amount to so much. And yet, he said, he granted what you affirm, that they were not unbecoming the rising of a glorious commonwealth, for such are usually founded in faction, sedition, rebellion, rapine, and murder. And how much soever you admire the Romans, ab infami gentem deducis Asylo, if you remember, they were, at first, but a refuge for thieves and murderers. In all Asia, Africa, and the New World, there is no such thing as a republick, nor ever was, but only that of Carthage, and some paltry Greek colonics upon the skirts of Asia Minor; and, for one commonwealth, there have been an hundred kingdoms in the world; which argues, they should be the more agreeable to mankind. He added, commonly republicks arise from unworthy causes, not fit to be mentioned in history; and that he had heard many persons of honour, in Flanders, affirm, that' it was not the tyranny of Spain, nor the cruelty of Duke d'Alva,

nor the blood of their nobility, nor religion, nor liberty, that made the Dutch cast off their obedience to their prince, but one-penny excise laid upon a pound of butter, that made them implacably declare for a commonwealth. That the Venetians were banished into a free state by Atyla, and their glorious liberty was, at first, no other, than he may be said to have that is turned out of his house. That the Romans were cuckolded into their freedom, and the Pisans trapanned into theirs, by Charles the Eighth. That, as commonwealths sprung from base originals, so they have ruined upon as slight occasions. That the same Pisans, after they had spent all they had upon a freak of liberty, were sold, like cattle, by Lewis the Twelfth. The Venetians hectored, and almost ruined, by Maximilian the First, a poor prince, for refusing to lend him money, as they were not long before, by Francesco Sforza, about a bastard. The Florentines utterly enslaved, for spoiling an ambassador's speech, and disparaging Pedro de Medici's fine liveries. The Genoese But, as he was going on, he was interrupted by a gentleman that came in, and told us, That Sir Arthur Hazlerig, the Brutus of our republick, was in danger to be torn to pieces, like a Shrovetuesday bawd, by the boys in Wesminster-Hall; and, if he had not shewn himself as able a footman as he that cudgelled him, he had gone the way of Dr. Lamb infallibly. This set all the company a laughing, and made the traveller forget what he was saying. After a little pause, a learned gentleman of this society stood up, and said, he could not but take notice of one absurdity in your discourse, and that is, where you speak of liberty gloriously fought for, and kingly thraldom abjured by the people, &c. for, if by liberty you mean commonwealth, as you do, there was never any such thing, as either the one or the other; unless you will state the quarrel at the end of the war, which is very senseless, and directly contrary to all oaths and engagements; or can prove that hanging, drawing, and quartering of some of the people, and selling others as slaves, for taking up arms, in all parts of the nation, for the king, are abjurations of his authority. And he wondered you could be so weak, or impudent, to play foul in matters of fact, of which there are so many thousand witnesses to disprove you. But he was of opinion, that you did not believe yourself, nor those reasons you give, in defence of commonwealth; but that you are swayed by something else, as either by a storklike fate (as a modern protector-poet calls it, because that fowl is observed to live no where but in commonwealths) or, because you have unadvisedly scribbled yourself obnoxious, or else you fear, such admirable eloquence, as yours, would be thrown away under a monarchy, as it would be, though of admirable use in a popular government, where orators carry all the rabble before them. For who knows to how cheap a rate this goodly eloquence of yours, if well managed, might bring the price of sprats; as no wiser orators than yourself have done heretofore, in the petty factions, Greek republicks, whom you chiefly imitate; for all your poli. ticks are derived from the works of declaimers, with which sort of

writers, the ancient commonwealths had the fortune to abound, who left many things behind them, in favour or flattery of the governments they lived under, and disparagement of others, to whom they were in opposition, of whom we can affirm nothing certain, but that they were partial, and never meant to give a true account of things, but to make them finer or worse than they really are'; of which men, one of their own commonwealth poets gives a just character, by sorting them amongst the worst of men:

—Ιερόσυλοι ρήτορες,

Καὶ συκοφάνται, καὶ πονηροί.

He

All which you have outgone (according to your talent) in their several ways, for you have done your feeble endeavour to rob the church of the little which the rapine of the most sacrilegious persons hath left, in your learned work against tithes; you have slandered the dead, worse than envy itself, and thrown your dirty outrage, on the memory of a murdered prince, as if the hangman were but usher. These have been the attempts of your stiff, foryour mal eloquence, which you arm accordingly, with any thing that lies in your way, right or wrong, not only begging, but stealing questions, and taking every thing for granted, that will serve your turn; for you are not ashamed to rob Oliver Cromwell himself, and make use of his canting, with signal assistances from heaven, and answering condescensions; the most impious Mahometan doctrine, that ever was invented among christians, and such as will serve as well to justify any prosperous villainy amongst men. said, when God punishes a nation for sin, the executioners of his judgments are commonly but malefactors reprieved, as they are usually among men; for when he punished the Israelites for idolatry, he made use of greater idolaters then themselves: And when he afflicts a people for their disobedience to a just government, and fantastick longing after imaginary liberty, it is with infallible slavery, for their deliverers always prove their tyrants. This the Romans found true, for they had no sooner banished their kings, but they were, in few years, glad to banish themselves, from the tyranny and oppression of their patriots, the assertors of their liberty; and that very contest furnished their free state with sedition, and civil war, for 500 years, and never ended, until they were reduced to an absolute tyranny, under the power of that faction, that took upon it to vindicate their liberty. He added, that he could not but smile at one thing you said, and that is, that king and bishops will incroach upon our consciences, until we are forced to spend over again all that we have spent, and fight over again all that we have fought, &c. For if you did not look very like a cunning man, no body would believe you, nor trust your predic-, tions of the future, that give so ill an account of things past. But he held you very unwise to blab any such thing; for that party you call We have gained so abundantly much more than they have spent, that they desire nothing more, than to fight over the same fights again, at the same rate; and if you could but make your words