Milton’s escape from punishment at the Restoration is one of the puzzles of English history. How was it effected—by what combination of political influences—who, in fact, pulled the wires? Parliament has always been very clever in engineering itself, more or less constitutionally, out of its own tight corners; but there has never been a cleverer piece of parliamentary engineering than the way in which Milton was brought off at the Restoration. When, after Cromwell’s death, Lady Ranelagh returned from Ireland to her house in the Mall, Milton was still living, almost a neighbour, in his garden-house in Petty France; still in correspondence with her boy Dick Jones and his tutor Oldenburg, in Paris; still Latin Secretary to the Council, with Andrew Marvell as his loyal assistant; and the uneasy dawn of the New Year 1660 had found him, despondent but undaunted, still fighting hard, by tract-warfare, for a doomed Republic. Milton the Pamphleteer and Lambert the General are to be remembered together as the last two opponents of the Restoration. But in March, after Milton’s printed exhortations to the Council and to Monk himself, the blind secretary had been discharged from his office, and an order issued for the arrest of Milton’s publisher. And on May 7—the very day before Charles II was proclaimed in London—Milton had disappeared from the garden-house in Petty France. Nobody knows what had been done about his children, or whose friendly hand guided the blind man’s steps into his hiding-place. “In the house of a friend in Bartholomew Close”—a narrow passage, entered from West Smithfield under an archway that was very old even in Milton’s day[257]—Milton was to lie concealed for more than three months. His case and Goodwin’s[258] came up together before the House on June 16, and it was ordered that their books were to be called in and burnt, and that the men themselves were to be “forthwith sent for in custody.” But both men were in hiding, and somehow it was August 13 before the two names came up again; and at that moment the Indemnity Bill was hanging in mid-air between the Lords and Commons. Neither of the two men had been found; and though the Proclamation calling in all copies of their books for burning by the hangman was then duly placarded all over London, there was no further order for the arrest of the two men themselves. On August 28 the Indemnity Bill had passed both Houses; on August 29 it had received the King’s assent, the Act of Indemnity and Oblivion was on the Statute Book, _and there was no mention of Milton in it from first to last_. Goodwin’s name appeared; he was incapacitated for life for any public trust. But of Milton, the Republican pamphleteer, Cromwell’s Latin secretary, who had done so incalculably much more, nothing—his name had somehow dropped out. Milton was saved—“to the surprise of all people,” says Bishop Burnet.[259]