World Enough and Time (34 page)

Marvell's routine dispatches to Hull during this session refer repeatedly to the progress of the anti-Catholic legislation and the new Test aimed at exposing covert Catholic tendencies and confining office-holding to Anglicans. He signs off one letter in June by noting: ‘The Pope hath given a Cardinalls Hat to Father Howard, the Queen's Almoner.'
7
Clearly there could be no let-up in the vigilance against Popery. During this early summer, Marvell may have been approached to write a life of his old friend, John Milton, who had died in November. On 18 May, John Aubrey wrote to Anthony Wood, claiming: ‘Mr Marvell has pmised me to write
minutes
for you of Mr Jo: Milton who lyes buryed in St Giles Cripplegate ch: – I shall tell you where.'
8
Nothing seems to have come of this, though at one time there was speculation that Marvell may have been the author of an anonymous early life of Milton now attributed either to Cyriack Skinner or to Milton's nephew John Phillips.

During the summer, Danby, at his own expense, arranged for the erection of a bronze equestrian statue at Charing Cross, cast by a sculptor called Le Sueur in 1633. The Civil War broke out before it could be erected and Parliament sold it contemptuously to a brazier called Rivet who, after the King's execution, made a profitable sideline in bronze-handled knives and forks that he persuaded ardent Royalists to buy, under the impression that they were purchasing implements made from the very material used to portray the Royal Martyr. In fact, Rivet had kept the statue intact, producing it after the Restoration and eventually selling it to Danby. The poem ‘The Statue at Charing Cross', attributed to Marvell, mocks the statue as a thing put up ‘to comfort the hearts of the poor Cavaleer' and asks: ‘Does the Treasurer think men so Loyally tame/When their Pensions are stopt to be fool'd with a sight?' It advises that the face of Charles I should be arranged to face away from Whitehall lest: ‘Tho of Brass, yet with grief it would melt him away,/To behold every day such a Court, such a son.' Underlying the poem is the conviction that Danby was principally employed in buying votes and bribing support, which it is hard to deny. Abortive moves were made to impeach Danby in April – an allusion is made to this in a poem of doubtful attribution, ‘A Ballad call'd the Chequer Inn' – but Danby survived to go on bribing.

The poem ‘A Dialogue between the Two Horses', written probably in the autumn of this year, has, like most of these late satires, been attributed only with difficulty to Marvell. The possibility must be faced that none of these later satires could have been written by Marvell and certainly none adorn his poetic reputation, though that cannot in itself stand as an argument against his authorship. Critics have been uneasy with the attribution of the ‘Dialogue' because of its marked republicanism and its lack of Marvell's customary tenderness towards Charles, but it is clear that in the last three or four years of his life Marvell had begun to shed the last vestiges of instinctive loyalism towards the ruling power and to view the consequences of ‘His Majesty's happy restoration' in a more jaundiced way.

The two horses in question are the ones in Stocks Market and Charing Cross, supporting Charles I in bronze and Charles II in white marble. After an introduction that muses on precedents in classical literature for animals and inanimate oracles giving speech (though deriding parallel examples from Catholic shrines), the poem fancies a dialogue between the two steeds. They share a mutual dismay at the state of affairs where ‘Church and state bow down to a whore' and where the King's brother, the Duke of York, becomes a Catholic in order to ‘that Church defy/For which his own Father a Martyr did dye'. In spite of the King's greed for revenue the country is impoverished and ‘Our worm-eaten Navy be laid up at Chatham'. Invited to comment on the bronze horse's ‘Royall Rider' – Charles I – the white horse offers a rather more stringent view of Charles I than Marvell once offered in the ‘Horatian Ode'. The indictment suggests once again that the Civil War (‘too good to have been fought for') could have been avoided if it were indeed no more than a dispute about Church ceremonial (‘He that dyes for Ceremonies dyes like a fool') aggravated by Laud:

Thy Priest-ridden King turn'd desperate Fighter

For the Surplice, Lawn-Sleeves, the Cross and the mitre,

Till at last on a Scaffold he was left in the lurch

By Knaves who cry'd themselves up for the Church,

Arch-Bishops and Bishops, Arch-Deacons and Deans.

Charles II's mount declares that he prefers Cromwell to either of these kings, notwithstanding his despotic tendencies, because at least the country was not a laughing-stock: ‘Tho' his Government did a Tyrants resemble,/Hee made England great and it's enemies tremble.' Marvell – if the poem is truly his – is thus revising his earlier poetic estimates of Cromwell as much as those of Charles I, for in the poems of the 1650s he came closer to glorifying rather than expressing doubts about Cromwell's autocracy. Faced with the prospect of the Duke of York, the white horse cries out: ‘A Tudor a Tudor! wee've had Stuarts enough;/None ever Reign'd like old Besse in the Ruffe.' His last word is: ‘A Commonwealth a Common-wealth wee proclaim to the Nacion;/The Gods have repented the King's Restoration.' Although this poem cannot be mentioned in the same breath as the great ‘Ode', its politics are quite without ambiguity and would fit the outlook of a fundamentally democratic, anticlerical politician, looking out with dismay at the contemporary political scene of duplicity, jobbery, bribery and corruption.

Marvell mentioned the Charing Cross statue in a letter to Will Popple on 24 July. In addition to its jaundiced view of the political world, the letter betrays Marvell's desire to find some calm, reflective time to address his nephew away from the increasingly unsympathetic atmosphere of Westminster:

Being resolved now to sequester myself one whole Day at
Highgate,
I shall write four whole Sides (if my Spirit will hold out) in Answer to your kind Letter, and to attone for my so long unaffected Silence.
9

The letter mirrors the attitude to the King found in the contemporary satires. Marvell does not dress up the reasons for this Parliament being called: ‘It seemed necessary for the King's Affairs, who always, but now more, wants Mony, the Parliament should meet.' He describes to Will the emergence in this session of an ‘Episcopal Cavalier Party' as the dominant influence on the King and reports the erection of the statue at Charing Cross ‘for more Pageantry'. Further ideas were being discussed to cement public loyalty to the monarch, including digging up the body of Charles I ‘to make a perfect resurrection of Loyalty, and to be reinterred with great Magnificence'. He reports both the attempts to impeach the King's favourite minister Lauderdale and the general disorder of the House. One day it erupted into chaos on the floor of the Commons with ‘every Man's Hand on his Hilt'. In a concluding remark to Will, Marvell seems to be trying to express some wish for his nephew to be emancipated from the press of business and to find something more worthwhile as a focus of his energies, projecting on to him, perhaps, some of his own anxieties about the futility of his life as a politician in this ‘odiously ridiculous' Parliament: ‘O when will you have arrived at what is necessary? Make other serviceable Instruments that you may not be a Drudge, but govern all your Understanding.'

‘The times are something critical,'
10
Marvell wrote to Hull on 21 October, explaining why he was once again counselling the Corporation to be cautious about circulating too much of what he told them in confidence, ‘beside that I am naturally and now more by my Age inclined to keep my thoughts private'. Marvell's reserve, his caution, his lack, in Aubrey's words, of ‘a generall acquaintance', may have conspired to bring about a certain increase in withdrawal, perhaps even a renewed anxiety about his personal safety in an unscrupulous political culture, where means could be found for most of the ends politicians sought. There would be plenty of reasons to want this lethal satirist silenced, but withdrawal would hardly be conducive to effectiveness as a practical politician in the House of Commons. If he felt, at fifty-four, he was getting old, the spectacle of his friend Jeremy Smith's approach to death that autumn would have been chastening. On 13 October, Marvell witnessed Smith's will, having already been appointed a trustee on 12 June with three others, all of whom received forty shillings. This would result in his having to take some responsibility for the funeral and settling the estate.

At the end of the month, during a brief adjournment of the House, Marvell went over to Sir Jeremy's house at Clapham and spent the night at his deathbed. On the night of 3 November his ‘very cordiall friend' died. In a letter to Mayor Shires of Hull the next day Marvell wrote: ‘I was yesternight againe with Sr Jer: and saw him expire at eleuen a clock at night dying very peacably and with perfect understanding memory and speeche to the last gaspe.'
11
The death of a good man at such a moment was peculiarly affecting, ‘such breaches being in these times very difficult to be repaired'. Marvell was worried at this time that there might be some sort of surveillance of his letters – a possibility hinted at in some of his correspondence with Hull. He warned the Mayor: ‘it seemes therefore that there is some sentinell set both upon you and me. And to know it therefore is a sufficient caution.' In this fraught, threatening atmosphere the King himself was not free from a sense of menace. Marvell reported to Sir Henry Thompson in York: ‘I heare that two ugly distichs haue been pasted up at the Kings Bedchamber doore. I am sorry that they should haue so much effect as to make the King distrust his Safety and walk with guards.'
12
This was a reference to some rather ungrammatical doggerel found pinned to the King's bedchamber door on 27 November: ‘in vaine for help to your old friends you call, when you like pittied them they must fall[
sic
]'.
13
The growing political tension had evidently generated a sense of danger among all those in public life. Marvell's early biographers frequently alluded to the threats he faced during this time. ‘He was often in such danger,' wrote Thomas Cooke, ‘that he was forced to have his letters directed to him in another name, to prevent any discovery that way.'
14
Thompson likewise claimed: ‘He was frequently threatened with murder, and way-laid in his passing to and from Highgate, where he was fond of lodging.'
15
Marvell would have been an attractive target – he was an irritant to the court and the suspected author of offensive satires – as well as being an easy one. Living in isolation, frequently alone, he could easily have been picked off by some hired assassin. Both Cooke and Thompson, keen to portray Marvell as a martyr in the cause of religious freedom and conscience, no doubt exaggerated his ‘life of perpetual danger' and his ‘fear of losing his life by treachery' but the likelihood is that he would have had to exercise caution at this period in his political life.

On 22 November the King prorogued Parliament for fifteen months until 15 February 1677. The Member for Hull, however, was not idle, for early in the new year he would once again enter the field of religious controversy. He had not yet done with the Church of England hierarchy and its more disputatious members.

26

Divines in Mode

As the arts of glass coaches and perriwigs illustrate this Age, so by their trade of Creed-making, then first invented, we may esteem the wisdom of Constantine's and Constantius his empire.
1

Parliament had been prorogued as a result of a secret agreement between the King and Louis XIV which meant that Charles received £100,000 a year from the King of France. He had his money and therefore had no need of Parliament. Danby was not party to this agreement and continued to wage war against Catholics and dissenters by strengthening the power of the Anglican establishment. In so doing he was accused of reopening the wounds of the Civil War and at the very least provoking conflict between the liberals and the hardliners within the Church of England. Marvell's interpretation of these events – or those of which he would have been aware – was that the power of Parliament to resist popery and absolutism was being weakened by Lord Treasurer Danby's regime of bribery and corruption.

The publication, in 1676, of a book called
Animadversions Upon a Late Pamphlet Entitled The Naked Truth,
written by the Reverend Francis Turner, Master of St John's College, Cambridge, gave Marvell his opening for a new polemic in defence of toleration. The object of Turner's ‘animadversions' was a work published by the Bishop of Hereford, Herbert Croft, in the spring of 1675.
The Naked Truth. Or, the true state of the Primitive Church
was Croft's attempt to argue that the enforcement of conformity in the Church of England by penalties and persecution was not the way forward. Croft was a vigorous opponent of Catholicism and, according to Burnet (who was one of several who responded in print to
The Naked Truth
), he was not a diplomat: ‘Croft was a warm, devout man, but of no discretion in his conduct: so he lost ground quickly. He used much freedom with the King: but it was in the wrong place, not in private, but in the pulpit.'
2
Anthony Wood observed that ‘the appearance of this book' – which came out first as a privately printed appeal to Parliament and which was then taken up by a bookseller – ‘at such a time was like a comet'.
3
Croft, like Marvell, had an early, but in his case rather more substantial, flirtation with Catholicism. The son of Sir Herbert Croft, of Croft Castle in Herefordshire, Croft had been educated by Jesuits and had attended the English College in Rome in 1626 under the assumed name of James Harley. Converted to Anglicanism in the 1630s and later a chaplain to Charles I, his fortunes naturally dipped during the Civil War. After the taking of Hereford, the Parliamentary commander, Colonel Birch, had to restrain a guard of musketeers from seizing him. Famously, he preached at the Roundheads as they entered his cathedral when he was still only Dean, the pulpit from which he did so still on display at Hereford in the south-east transept. After the Restoration, however, he was made Bishop of Hereford where, in one of the most touching of English church monuments, in Hereford Cathedral, he can be seen holding hands with his lifelong friend Dean George Benson, who is buried beside him. A Latin inscription reads:
‘In Vita conjuncti In Morte non divisi'
(Together in life, undivided in death).