Bunhill Fields, where he died. His friends must for years have feared
that he might be attacked and perhaps murdered by some drunken Cavalier
revellers accidentally coming across the old regicide. And in spite of
the Act of Indemnity he can hardly have felt absolutely comfortable on
{75} the side of the law when so late as 1664 his _Tenure of Kings_ was
denounced by the censor as still extant and an unfortunate printer was
hanged, drawn and quartered for issuing a sort of new version of it.
Misfortunes without and fears within might be the summing up, if not of
the poet's, at least of the man's life during these first years after
the Restoration. To begin with, he was a much poorer man. His salary
as Secretary was, of course, gone. But besides that he had lost 2000
pounds, equal to about 7000 pounds now, which he had invested in
Commonwealth Securities, as well as some confiscated property he had
bought of the Chapter of Westminster; and he was soon to lose, at least
temporarily, the rent he received from his father's house in Bread
Street which was destroyed by the Fire of London. Masson calculates
that he was left after the Restoration with an income about equal to
700 pounds of our money which his further losses and outlay on his
daughters had reduced to 300 pounds or 350 pounds before his death; not
quite poverty even at the end, but something very different from what
the eldest son of a rich man had been accustomed to. A graver
misfortune was the gout which afflicted him for the rest of his life
and gave him so much pain that he made little of his blindness in {76}
comparison with it. Worst of all was his unhappy relation to his
daughters. That is the ugliest thing in the story of his life. How
things might have gone with his son, if the baby boy had lived, one
does not know; but his oriental views of the moral and intellectual
inferiority of women, which doubled the dangers of their fascinations,
made him certain to be a despotic father to three motherless girls.
And so he was. He had plenty of young men eager for the privilege of
reading to him: but of course they could not be always with him, and
the result was that dreadful picture which comes to us from his nephew,
no unfriendly witness, of the daughters "condemned to the performance
of reading and exactly pronouncing of all the languages of whatever
book he should at one time or other think fit to peruse; viz. the
Hebrew (and, I think, the Syriac), t