Cromwell's death on Sept. 3, 1658 left the Protectorship to his son Richard. Milton and Marvell, now his assistant secretary, continued in their posts, and a number of the Foreign Office letters of the new Protectorate were of Milton's composition. In Oct. 1658 appeared a new edition of his Defensio prima, and, early in 1659, a new English pamphlet, entitled Treatise of Civil Power in Ecclesiastical Causes showing that it is not lawful to compel in Matters of Religion, in which he advocated the separa tion of Church and State. To Richard's Protectorate also be longs one of Milton's Latin "Familiar Epistles." His last work for the Commonwealth was a desperate struggle to avert the restoration of the monarchy. In a Letter to a Friend concerning the Ruptures of the Commonwealth, written in Oct. 1659, he had propounded a scheme of a kind of dual government for reconciling the army chiefs with the Rump; through the following winter, marked only by two of his Latin "Familiar Epistles," his anxiety over the signs of the growing enthusiasm throughout the country for the recall of Charles II. had risen to a passionate vehemence which found vent in a pamphlet entitled The Ready and Easy Way to Establish a Free Common wealth, and the Excellence thereof compared with the Incon veniences and Dangers of readmitting Kingship to this Nation. An abridgment of this pamphlet was addressed by him to General Monk in a letter entitled "The Present Means and Brief Delinea tion of a Free Commonwealth" (March 166o). Milton's pro posal was that the central governing apparatus of the British Islands for the future should consist of one indissoluble grand council or parliament, which should include all the political chiefs, while there should be a large number of provincial councils or assemblies sitting in the great towns for the management of local and county affairs.
Not even when the king's cause was practically assured would Milton be silent. In Brief Notes upon a late Sermon (April 166o) he made another protest against the recall of the Stuarts, and in the same month he sent forth a second edition of his Ready and Easy Way, containing additional passages of the most violent denunciation of the royal family, and of prophecy of the deg radation and disaster they would bring back with them. This was the dying effort. Charles II. returned to London on May 29, and by then the chief republicans had scattered themselves, and Milton was hiding in an obscure part of the city.
demnity Bill did come out complete, with the king's assent, Mil ton did not appear as one of the exceptions on any ground or in any of the grades. He was actually taken into custody, though the prosecution was quashed by the Indemnity Bill, and corn plained to the Commons of the fee charged for his release.
Milton did not return to Petty France. For the first months after he was free he lived as closely as possible in a house near what is now Red Lion square, Holborn. Thence he removed, ap parently early in 1661, to a house in Jewin street, in his old Aldersgate street neighbourhood. In Jewin street Milton re mained for two or three years, or from 5661 to 1664. This is the time of which he says :— The "evil days" were those of the Restoration in its first or Clarendonian stage, with its revenges and reactions, its open proclamation and practice of anti-Puritanism in morals and in literature no less than in politics. His few friends were mostly Nonconformists of some denomination, who were themselves under similar obloquy. Besides his two nephews, the faithful Andrew Marvell, Cyriack Skinner and some others of his former ad mirers, we hear chiefly of a Dr. Nathan Paget and of several young men who would drop in upon him by turns, partly to act as his amanuenses, and partly for the benefit of lessons from him —one of them a Quaker youth, named Thomas Ellwood. His three daughters, on whom he ought now to have been able prin cipally to depend, were his most serious domestic trouble. The poor motherless girls, the eldest in her 17th year in 5662, the sec ond in her 15th and the youngest in her nth, had grown up, in their father's blindness and too great self-absorption, ill-looked after and but poorly educated; and the result now appeared. They "made nothing of neglecting him"; they rebelled against the drudgery of reading to him or otherwise attending on him; they "did combine together and counsel his maid-servant to cheat him in her marketings"; they actually "had made away some of his books, and would have sold the rest." It was to remedy this state of things that Milton consented to a thiru marriage. On Feb. 24, 1662/3 he married Elizabeth Minshull, a relative of Dr. Paget. She proved an excellent wife; and the Jewin street household, though the daughters remained in it, must have been under better management from the time of her entry into it. Meanwhile, he had been building up his Paradise Lost. He had begun the poem in earnest, we are told, in 1658 at his house in Petty France. He had made but little way when there came the interruption of the Restoration; but the work had been resumed in Jewin street and prosecuted there steadily, by dictations of 20 or 30 lines at a time to whatever friendly or hired amanuensis chanced to be at hand. Considerable progress had been made in this way before his third marriage ; and after that the work proceeded apace, his nephew, Edward Phillips, who was then out in the world on his own account, looking in when he could to revise the growing manuscript.