Rumpers of tenacious memories cannot have forgotten such published utterances of Milton, while the fact that he had for some years past been an Oliverian, a Protectoratist, a Court-official for Oliver and Richard, was patent to all.

Yet, now that the old Rumpers were restored to power, the survivors of the original "few" whose dissolution by Cromwell he had publicly praised and defended, here was Milton still in his secretaryship and writing the first foreign letters they required.
How was this?
It is hardly a sufficient answer to say that it is quite customary for officials to remain in their places through changes of Government.

On the one hand, Milton was not a man to remain in an element with which he could not conscientiously accord; and, on the other, the Rumpers were rather careful in seeking public servants of their own sort.

Thurloe was out of the general Secretaryship; and one of the first acts of the restored House was to punish Mr.Henry Scobell, Clerk of the Parliament, for having entered, the fact of Cromwell's Dissolution of the House on April 20, 1653, in the Journals tinder that date.

They ordered a Bill to be brought in for repealing the Act by which Scobell held the Clerkship.[1] The truth, then, is that Milton was not, on the whole, displeased by the return of his old friends to power.