which was to sweep away the men and the cause to which Milton had
devoted himself. Milton's pen thus accompanied the whole of the
Puritan revolution from the modest constitutional opposition in
which It commenced, through its unexpected triumph, to its crushing
overthrow by the royalist and clerical reaction.

The autumn of 1641 brought with it a sensible lull in the storm of
revolutionary passion. Indeed, there began to appear all the symptoms
of a reaction, and of the formation of a solid conservative party,
likely to be strong enough to check, or even to suppress, the
movement. The impulse seemed to have spent itself, and a desire for
rest from political agitation began to steal over the nation. Autumn
and the harvest turn men's thoughts towards country occupations and
sports. The King went off to Scotland in August; the Houses adjourned
till the 20th October. The Scottish army had been paid off, and had
repassed the border; the Scottish commissioners and preachers had left
London.

It was a critical moment for the Puritan party. Some very considerable
triumphs they had gained. The archenemy Strafford had been brought to
the block; Laud was in the tower; the leading members of Convocation,
bishops, deans, and archdeacons, had been heavily fined; the Star
Chamber and the High Commission Court had been abolished; the Stannary
and Forestal jurisdictions restrained. But the Puritan movement aimed
at far more than this. It was not only that the root-and-branch men
were pushing for a generally more levelling policy, but the whole
Puritan party was committed to a struggle with the hierarchy of the
Established Church. It was not so much that they demanded more and
more reform, with the growing appetite of revolution, but that as
long as bishops existed, nothing that had been wrested from them was