A CIVIL SERVANT IN THE TIME OF THE COMMONWEALTH


When Andrew Marvell first made John Milton's acquaintance is not known.
They must both have had common friends at or belonging to Cambridge.
Fairfax may have made the two men known to each other, although it is
just as likely that Milton introduced Marvell to Fairfax. All we know is
that when the engagement at Nunappleton House came to an end, Marvell,
being then minded to serve the State in some civil capacity, applied to
the Secretary for Foreign Tongues for what would now be called a
testimonial, which he was fortunate enough to obtain in the form of a
letter to the Lord-President of the Council, John Bradshaw. Milton seems
always to have liked Bradshaw, who was not generally popular even on his
own side, and in the _Defensio Secunda pro populo Anglicano_ extols his
character and attainments in sonorous latinity. Bradshaw had become in
February 1649 the first President of the new Council of State, which,
after the disappearance of the king and the abolition of the House of
Lords, took over the burden of the executive, and claimed the right to
scrape men's consciences by administering to anybody it chose an oath
requiring them to approve of what the House of Commons had done against
the king, and of their abolition of kingly government and of the House
of Peers, and that the legislative and supreme power was wholly in the
House of Commons.

Before the creation of this Council the duties of Latin Secretary to the
Parliament had been discharged by Georg Rudolph Weckherlin, a German
diplomat who had married an Englishwoman. He retired in bad health at
this time, and Milton was appointed to his place in 1649. When, later
on, the sight of the most illustrious of all our civil servants failed
him, Weckherlin returned to the office as Milton's assistant. In