The Life of John Milton, Volume 5 (of 7), 1654-1660: Narrated in Connexion with the Political, Ecclesiastical, and Literary History of His TimeMasson, David
History
The Life of John Milton, Volume 5 (of 7), 1654-1660: Narrated in Connexion with the Political, Ecclesiastical, and Literary History of His Time
Masson, David
Milton, John, 1608-1674; Poets, English -- Early modern, 1500-1700 -- Biography
them to account again, which had for some time been growing in
Cromwell's mind; and there can be no doubt that he had suggested
the subject to the Council. But his Highness did not appear in the
meeting himself, and next day Lady Claypole lay dead. Before her
death his grief had passed into an indefinite illness, described as
"of the gout and other distempers"; and, though he was able to come
to London on the 10th of August, on which night Lady Claypole's
remains were interred in a little vault that had been prepared for
them in Henry VIIth's Chapel in Westminster Abbey, he returned to
Hampton Court greatly the worse. But, after four or five days of
confinement, attended by his physicians--on one of which days (the
13th) Attorney General Prideaux and Solicitor General Ellis were made
baronets--he was out again for an hour on the 17th; and thence till
Friday the 20th he seemed so much better that Thurloe and others
thought the danger past. From the public at large the fact of his
illness had been hitherto concealed as much as possible; and hence it
may have been that on two or three of those days of convalescence he
showed himself as usual, riding with his life-guards in Hampton Court
Park. It was on one of them, most probably Friday the 20th, that
George Fox had that final meeting with him which he describes in his
Journal. The good but obtrusive Quaker had been writing letters of
condolence and mystical religious advice to Lady Claypole in her
illness, and had recently sent one of mixed condolence and rebuke to
Cromwell himself; and now, not knowing of Cromwell's own illness, he
had come to have a talk with him about the sufferings of the Friends.
"Before I came to him, as he rode at the head of his life-guard,"
says Fox, "I saw and felt a waft of death go forth, against him; and,
when I came to him, he looked like a dead man." Fox, nevertheless,
had his conversation with the Protector, who told him to come again,
but does not seem to have mentioned the inquiry he had been making,
through his secretary Mr. Malyn, about the state of Fox's
fellow-Quaker, poor James Nayler. Next day, Saturday, Aug. 21, when
Fox went to Hampton Court Palace to keep his appointment, he could
not be admitted. Harvey, the groom of the bedchamber, told him that
his Highness was very ill, with his physicians about him, and must
be kept quiet. That morning his distemper had developed itself
distinctly into "an ague"; which ague proved, within the next few
days, to be of the kind called by the physicians "a bastard tertian,"
i.e. an ague with the cold and hot shivering fits recurring most
violently every third day, but with the intervals also troublesome.
Yet it was on this first day of his ague that he signed a warrant for
a patent to make Bulstrode Whitlocke a Viscount. Whitlocke himself,
though he afterwards declined the honour as inconvenient, is precise
as to the date. The physicians thinking the London air better for the
Public-domain text, read in full here on John Shaqi.
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