under notice (Nov. and Dec. 1640) the collective tendency of the party was indubitably to such a total re-organization of the English Church as should bring it into union and correspondence with that of the Scots on the basis of a common Presbyterianism for the whole island.This Radical or Root-and-Branch party was numerically, perhaps, the strongest of the three. Among the Clergy, indeed, it was comparatively very weak. About thirty of the clergy then assembled in Convocation were considered to belong to it or to be tending to it; and, if as many as 1,000 or 1,500 of the more extreme Puritans among the parish clergy of England were considered as either belonging to it or convertible to it by circumstances, that was perhaps an exaggerated calculation. But among the laity it was enormously and growingly powerful. Not without a sprinkling among the nobility and wealthier gentry, it had a large number of adherents among the minor gentry, while in the great body of the people it counted its tens of thousands. London was its stronghold and head-quarters, the traditional Puritanism of that city having now almost avowedly taken the form of a phrenzy for Presbyterianism. Most of the other considerable towns were centres of the same feeling; and there were particular counties, more especially the eastern counties of Essex, Suffolk, Cambridge, Huntingdon and Bedford, and the north-western counties of Lancaster and Chester, where Root-and-Branch principles were distinctly predominant among the farmers and tenantry.2And who were the leaders of this powerful popular party? On first thoughts it might be supposed that those who had done and suffered so much as pioneers of the party during the recent ascendancy of "Thorough "-the Leightons, the Prynnes, the Burtons and the Bastwicks-would now step forth as the leaders. But public feeling is capricious, and at the same time shrewd, in such matters. Though it had been for expressing sentiments which thousands of their fellow

1 Baillie, I. 282: "There is some thirty of them well minded for removing of Episcopacy, and many more for paring of Bishops' nails and arms too:" Dec. 12, 1640.

2 The proofs for these statements are various and scattered. Some exist in the shape of petitions from counties in printed collections of the time, or still in MS. in the S. P. O.

countrymen were now expressing without danger that these men had had their noses slit and their ears cropped off, yet there was a feeling that men who had fared so ignominiously, however it had happened, would not do for leaders. Accordingly, though Prynne continued to be an indefatigable writer of Presbyterian pamphlets, of the heavy and learned sort, in his Lincoln's Inn chambers, and although young Lilburne continued to be a popular favourite under the name of "Free-born John," it was among men of a different stamp that the Root-and-Branch party sought its real chiefs. Quite as unfit for the duty were most of those new pamphleteers who, availing themselves of the sudden liberty of writing by the break-down of the censorship, were now daily venting, and for the most part anonymously, repetitions of Prynne's and Bastwick's arguments. It was among the members of the two Houses, and among such of the Puritan clergy of the most advanced type as had the greatest reputation for sagacity and learning, that the true leaders presented themselves. In the Upper House there were Viscount Saye and Sele, Viscount Mandeville, and Lord Brooke, all three in advance of the Earl of Bedford in their notions of Church-Reform, and in effect, for the present, Presbyterians. In the Lower House, gradually influencing Pym himself, whose constitutional inclinations were more moderate, were men like Hampden, Cromwell, and Vane. Cromwell, we find, was about this time expressing his interest in certain papers which the Scots had put forth, arguing for a conformity of Religion between the two countries. Among the English Puritan clergy were some half-dozen or more, either ministers of London parishes, or then up in London for the Convocation or for other purposes, who formed a kind of working committee of the Root-and-Branch party. A chief man among these was Mr. Cornelius Burges, rector of St. Magnus, London, and vicar of Watford; but also notable individually were these five-Mr. Stephen Marshall, minister of Finchingfield in Essex; Mr. Edmund Calamy, minister of St. Mary Aldermanbury, London; Mr. Thomas Young, vicar of Stow

1 Carlyle's Cromwell (edit. 1857), I. 85.

market in Suffolk, once Milton's preceptor; Matthew Newcomen, minister of Dedham in Essex; and Mr. William Spurstow, minister of Hampden in Bucks, the parish of John Hampden. In constant intercourse with these ministers, and with conspicuous London citizens of similarly Presbyterian tendencies, were the clerical members of the Scottish deputation, Henderson, Baillie, Blair, and Gillespie. They shared in all the counsels of the Root-and-Branch party, and were its Scottish advisers and auxiliaries. "The root of Episcopacy," Baillie writes home, in December 1640, to the brethren of his Presbytery in Ayrshire, "will be assaulted "with the strongest blast it ever felt in England. Let your "hearty prayers be joined with mine and of many millions "that the breath of the Lord's nostrils may join with the endeavours of weak men to blow up that old gourd wicked "oak." 1

Properly, I ought now to go on to narrate in this chapter the first efforts made in Parliament and out of it to accomplish the feat which Baillie thought so desirable. That story, however, though chronologically it belongs in part to this chapter, will be best reserved for the chapter after next.

1 Baillie, I. 286-7.

CHAPTER II.

THE HOUSE IN ALDERSGATE STREET.

WITHOUT as yet knowing it, the Root-and-Branch party had a possible leader at hand in one Englishman who, though neither in the Church nor in Parliament, and though with a character and thoughts of his own which might have made his party services at any time difficult either to obtain or to keep, yet did at this time assent with his whole soul to the Anti-Prelatic movement. He hailed that movement among his countrymen, and he was willing to bring to its aid a genius compared with which the utmost clerical abilities of the Burgeses, Calamys and Spurstows, and even the higher and more liberal intellect of the Parliamentary Hampdens and Vanes, were but as honest homely web, or some richer native fabric, compared with cloth of Arras. He was a man well known to Mr. Thomas Young of Stowmarket, for he had been Young's pupil some eighteen years before; and, had it been necessary, Young could have introduced him to his associates in the committee of English Puritan ministers, then acting, along with the Scottish Commissioners, in behalf of Root-and-Branch opinions. Probably no such introduction was necessary. London was a smaller place then than it is now; and John Milton, M.A. of Cambridge, and a Londoner born and bred, was probably, at thirty-two years of age, better known among the clergy and scholars of the city than Young himself.

We left Milton in lodgings in St. Bride's Churchyard near Fleet Street, among his books and papers, with his younger nephew, Johnny Phillips, boarding with him, and the other

nephew, Edward Phillips, coming in for his lessons. But he was now no longer in that locality. "He made no long stay," says Edward Phillips, "in his lodgings in St. Bride's Church'yard: necessity of having a place to dispose his books in, "and other goods fit for the furnishing of a good handsome house, hastening him to take one; and, accordingly, a pretty garden-house he took in Aldersgate Street, at the end of an entry, and therefore the fitter for his turn, besides that there are few streets in London more free from noise than that." Phillips does not give the date of this removal; but, if it was in the winter of 1639-40 that Milton went into his St. Bride's Churchyard lodgings, it is implied that his stay there cannot have extended to the following winter, but that before the opening of the Long Parliament he was in Aldersgate Street. We know, at all events, that he was there, a settled London householder, paying rates and taxes, very shortly after the opening of the Parliament. We know more than this. It is possible to fix with something like precision the part of Aldersgate Street in which Milton lived. Taking a walk in that portion of the present London,-now uninviting enough, given over as it is to second-rate shops of all sorts, with an occasional distillery or other such place of business interspersed, while a ceaseless roll of omnibuses and heavilyloaded waggons proves how irredeemably it is included in the noisiest core of the city,-one can yet, with the aid of the antique houses of Milton's day which still remain in it, realize what it was when Milton liked it for its quiet, aud daily passed through it to or from his dwelling.

From St. Martin's-le-Grand, where the Post Office now. stands, and makes a much clearer space than once existed between Cheapside and Aldersgate, the present Aldersgate Street (thanks to the discretion of the Great Fire) stretches. away northwards very much as the old one did. It stretches away northwards a full fourth of a mile as one continuous thoroughfare, until, crossed by Long Lane and the Barbican, it parts with the name of Aldersgate Street, and, under the new names of Goswell Street and Goswell Road, completes its tendency towards the suburbs and fields about Islington.