World Enough and Time

by Nicholas Murray

  Marvell’s reputation continued to be one of honest poverty. A description of him as an MP, which first surfaced in an article in the Gentleman’s Magazine in 1738, although its source is not given, is a memorable one and a telling example of the eighteenth-century construction of a Marvell legend of patriotic sanctity:

  Andrew Marvel, one of the most disinterested patriots in the reign of Charles II, by managing a very narrow patrimony, kept himself above corruption: and there is a story of him which though it may seem but ordinary, deserves to be everlastingly remembered: he dined usually at a great ordinary in the Strand, where having eat heartily of boiled beef, and some roast pigeons and asparagus, he drank his pint of port; and on the coming in of the reckoning, taking a piece out of his pocket, and holding it between his thumb and finger: ‘Gentlemen, said he, who would let himself for hire while he can have such a dinner for half a crown?’19

  Marvell would have received far less as an MP than the £200 he had been receiving as a civil servant before entering Parliament. Some have speculated that his in-laws in Hull – rich merchants and traders who could make good use of a reliable man in London and Westminster – may have offered Marvell an additional stipend even though, as members of the Corporation, they were doing this already. Often in his letters he reports himself as being very busy, sometimes on business ‘out of towne’, yet his Parliamentary activity cannot have been as demanding as it would be for a Hull MP today, with long daily sessions and extensive constituency duties. He spoke rarely in Parliament and, as a member of the Opposition, was not at the centre of the administration, or a holder of posts. It is not clear what this business was (unless it was a reference to his writing) but it could well have been ancillary, and perhaps necessarily discreet, activity carried out on behalf of his friends in Hull. The legend of his poverty may have been no more than a legend.

  12

  A Breach of the Peace

  And if you can but get scent of anything that smells of a Priest, away you run with full Cry and open Mouth.1

  Marvell celebrated his fortieth birthday on 31 March 1661. The following day he was re-elected to what became known as the Cavalier Parliament, where he would achieve a moderately active public profile. Over his seventeen-year career in this Parliament he would be appointed to 120 committees, act as teller in 8 divisions, and make 14 speeches, a diligent enough record for the day.2

  Even before his re-election, Marvell was settling in to a good relationship with the Hull burgesses. His letters continued to be shrewd, attentive and compliant. ‘I have no greater delight than to be serviceable to you,’3 he wrote in one letter, concluding: ‘It is hard for me to write short to you. It seems to me when I haue once begun that I am making a step to Hull & can not easily part from so good company.’ His references to the King are unimpeachable. After ‘an ugly false report’ of an attempt on the life of the King he told the Corporation: ‘I doubt not but the same extraordinary hand that hath hitherto guided him will still be his Protection against all attempts of discontented persons or partyes.’4 The most prominent of those ‘discontented partyes’ was that of the Fifth Monarchy Men. This millenarian sect was at its most powerful in the 1640s and 1650s, when its belief in the revelation of the Book of Daniel that the return of Christ would occur at the overthrow of the last four earthly monarchies (Babylon, Egypt, Rome, and the Pope) captured the imagination of many zealots. They saw the Civil War as enacting the violent end of the fourth monarchy and heralding the arrival of the Fifth Monarch, Jesus. Although their moment had passed, a final attempt at insurrection, led by Thomas Venner, a Fifth Monarchist preacher, took place on 7 January. Ten days later, Marvell reported briefly: ‘The Prisoners of the fift Monarchy men in this late insurrection haue been found guilty today upon their triall … The next week ’tis expected they should all be executed.’5

  After the King’s initial attempts at reconciliation, something like a Royalist backlash against the Presbyterians as well as the sectarians was growing and it would be reflected in the imminent elections, but Marvell continued to work away at the parochial concerns of Hull. In February he requested that he be kept discreetly informed about the interests of the Corporation in terms that suggest he had felt underconsulted by them: ‘Pray let me in all things that are not of too nice a nature be informd somthing particularly & with the first that I may serve you the better.’6 His close relationship with his twenty-seven-year-old nephew, William Popple, is revealed by a request made the next month that the Corporation address Marvell’s correspondence to him, marking the envelope ‘to be left with William Popple Merchant London & not one word more of street signe or lodging’.7 If he was receiving his mail at his nephew’s hands on a regular basis Marvell may thus have been engaged in business with Popple and was in such close contact that doing this meant ‘I can haue them out the first minute the maile comes. Otherwise the seuerall Porters carry them about in their walks & so much time is losst.’

  Marvell’s diligence paid off at the general election in April 1661. His fellow MP John Ramsden, who had triumphed so clearly at the election a year previously, sank to the bottom of the poll – his poor attendance record telling against him – and his seat was taken by Anthony Gilby, the Royalist colonel and captain of the Hull garrison. It was an interesting combination, the former Cromwellian and the Royalist representing the town together for the next seventeen years. Both MPs, however, shared a strong anti-Catholicism. Gilby later advocated strong measures against Catholics and supported the bill to exclude them from Parliament ‘that now our laws will be made by those of our own religion’.8 To any Catholic constituents who protested he said bluntly: ‘they may thank themselves for it’. Gilby waived his wages for the first session of the Cavalier Parliament, although the Corporation presented his wife with a piece of plate, but he subsequently agreed, like Marvell, to be paid in cash and ale for his Parliamentary duties.

  Marvell seems to have been very confident of his position as an MP, for his reaction to the news of his re-election bordered on the complacent. ‘I perceive by a letter from Mr Mayor,’ he told the Corporation a few days after the election, almost as an afterthought before signing off, ‘that you have again (as if it were grown a thing of course) made choice of me now the third time, to serve for you in Parlament.’9 Parochial as these letters generally were, Marvell occasionally gestured towards the wider world. On this same occasion he thus reported: ‘’Tis two days news upon the Exchange that some French in the Bay of Canada haue discoverd the long lookd for Northwest passage to the East Indyes.’ Was it Popple who reported the news from the Exchange or was he there himself engaged on business?

  The Cavalier Parliament met for the first time on 8 May 1661. A week later tensions between Marvell and Colonel Gilby began to surface. Marvell’s regular despatches to Hull had always been a joint effort with John Ramsden but, given the latter’s poor attendance record, they were probably the work of Marvell. On 16 May, however, Marvell wrote to Mayor Richardson delicately pointing out that his new partner preferred to make his own line of communication with Hull: ‘I would not haue you suspect any misintelligence between my partner & me because we write not to you joyntly as Mr Ramsden & I used. For there is all civility betwixt us. But it was his sense that we should each be left to his own discretion for writing except upon some answer unto your Letters & that to be joyntly.’10 How far the Corporation believed in that ‘civility’ may be guessed at. They would be fully aware of the sharply contrasting political backgrounds of the two Members. In fact, relations steadily worsened during the first weeks of the new Parliament until, on 1 June, Marvell was forced to write again:

  Gentlemen my worthy friends,

  The bonds of civility betwixt Colonell Gilby and my selfe being unhappily snappd in pieces, and in such manner that I can not see how it is possible euer to knit them again, the onely trouble that I haue, is least by our misintelligence your businesse should receive any disadvantage.11

  Marvell explained that the cause
of the rupture was ‘some crudityes and undigested matter remaining upon the stomach euer since our Election’ and described it as ‘this unlucky falling out’. He regretted that the Corporation’s interests might be adversely affected by this rumpus and pledged: ‘if I wanted my right hand yet I would scribble to you with my left rather then neglect your businesse’. Two days before this, he had already reported to them his profound concern for their affairs when finding himself too busy to give his normal full account: ‘I am something bound up that I can not write about your publick affairs but I assure you they break my sleepe.’12 The major political events of the day, such as the order for the burning of the Covenant by the public hangman on 17 May – the Covenant was the oath to defend the Parliamentary cause and reform the Church of England on anti-episcopalian lines – usually merit a brief reference in Marvell’s letters.

  Around this time Marvell wrote his first recorded letter to the Trinity House Corporation in Hull. Trinity House had developed out of an amalgamation of the mediaeval guild of the Holy Trinity and the Shipman’s Guild and consisted of twelve Elder Brethren, six Assistants, and an unlimited number of Younger Brethren. The Elder Brethren chose two Wardens and one of these was Edmund Popple, Marvell’s brother-in-law, to whom he also wrote from time to time in a personal capacity. Marvell himself was never chosen as an Elder Brother. Trinity House was the chief authority for the port of Hull and maintained charities for ‘decayed’ seamen. Its income came from endowments and from the levying of primage on vessels using the port, a right abolished in the nineteenth century.13 Marvell would be as assiduous in his pursuit of the interests of Trinity House – particularly in relation to a long drawn-out wrangle over the erection of a lighthouse at Spurn Head in the 1670s – as he was of the interests of the city Corporation. Sixty-nine letters to the Brethren have survived. In 1674 Marvell also became a member of a similar body on the Thames, Trinity House at Deptford, which had jurisdiction over pilotage for the Port of London. As the chief authority for lighthouses in England and Wales, it caused some degree of conflict of interest to Marvell over the Spurn Head project. On 18 May, Marvell – this time securing the joint signature of his reluctant partner Gilby – wrote his first letter to Trinity House, indicating his willingness to be of assistance and flattering the House as ‘so considerable a body in your selues and so honourable a limbe of the Towne’.14

  Although Marvell flattered the Corporation excessively (‘I account all things I can do for your service to be meere trifles & not worth taking notice of in respect of what I ow you … I haue in the things concerning your town no other sense or affection but what is yours as farr as I can understand it’15) he could handle the burgesses firmly when it was needed. ‘Be pleased to let me distinctly & fully know your minds in these points so materiall that I may not for want of resolution from you to be exposed when it comes to the pinch,’16 he demanded on one occasion. On another he reprimanded them: ‘It would behoue you to be speedy and punctuall in your correspondence.’17 There is a note of impatience here with his provincial masters. But the prevailing note was unctuous courtesy and high sentiment. Reporting a bill being brought in by King Charles which would allow him to appoint and dismiss magistrates in the Corporations and one that would give him the sole right to command the militia and armed forces, Marvell intones as a loyal subject and a mere weak member of the House: ‘I hope his Majesty will as he has done hitherto help us out of these straits of our own minds; otherwise we may stick in the Briars.’18

  On 16 June Marvell supported the first reading of a bill to make Holy Trinity Church, Hull a separate parish from its mother church of Hessle, reserving the advowson (right of patronage) for the Corporation. At first that right was not granted, so Marvell said he could not support the second reading, ticking off the Corporation for not giving him clearer instructions about how he should vote. The bill was eventually passed on 29 June.

  Marvell’s secure position with his constituency base was important for his political survival. During the early summer of 1661, in a House where the court party was becoming increasingly confident that the tide was running in its direction, the underlying mistrust that existed towards people with Marvell’s political history increased. On 20 June he wrote to Hull: ‘I must beseech you also to listen to no little storyes concerning my selfe. For I belieue you know by this time that you haue lately heard some very false concerning me.’19 It is not clear what these rumours were but they were plainly more than grumbles from Gilby and were widespread enough that Marvell could take it for granted they had independently reached the ears of the Corporation.

  Nothing more is heard of these rumours for the remainder of the year (although there is an eight-month gap in Marvell’s surviving correspondence between June 1661 and February 1662, the month in which he acted as a teller for a proviso to the poor bill on behalf of garrison towns, which was lost). But early in 1662, a more serious incident occurred in the House of Commons, reported in the Journals of the House for 18 March 1662:

  Ordered, That the Difference between Mr Marvell and Mr Clifford, Two Members of this House, be referred to Mr Speaker, to examine; and, to that End, to hear Mr Scott, another Member of this House, who was present when this Difference did happen; and to mediate and reconcile the same between them if he can; or else to report it to the House, with his Opinion therein.20

  Thomas Clifford was the MP for Totnes in Devon, a closet Catholic, and later stalwart of the court party granted estates by Charles II as a reward for supporting his plans to establish Catholicism in England in 1669. He became Lord Clifford of Chudleigh in 1672, his initial ‘C’ contributing to the famous ‘Cabal’ administration of Clifford, Ashley, Buckingham, Arlington and Lauderdale between 1670 and 1673. He eventually resigned as Lord Treasurer in 1673 rather than sign the Test Act. Two obvious reasons for a clash with Marvell were his crypto-Catholicism and his aggression; Pepys refers to ‘his rudeness of tongue and passions when angry’.21 But Marvell also, in spite of his quietness and reserve, seems to have had a quick temper. During the nineteen years of Marvell’s Parliamentary career from 1659 to 1678 only six such quarrels are noted in the Parliamentary records so the incident was a serious one. After the Speaker’s investigation the matter was resolved, with Marvell having been found guilty of the first provocation and being instructed, in spite of his reluctance, to apologise:

  Mr Speaker reports, That he had examined the matter of difference between Mr Marvell and Mr Clifford; and found that Mr Marvell had given the first provocation that begot the difference: and that his opinion was that Mr Marvell should declare his sorrow for being the first occasion of the difference; and then Mr Clifford to declare, that he was sorry for the consequences of it: And that Mr Clifford was willing to yield to this determination, but that Mr Marvell refused.

  And the House thereupon directing the said Mr Marvell and Mr Clifford to withdraw; and taking the matter into debate;

  Resolved, That the said Mr Marvell and Mr Clifford be called into their places: and that each of them shall have a reprehension from Mr Speaker, for breach of the peace and privilege of the House; and according to Mr Speaker’s report, be enjoined to declare their sorrow for it; and to crave the pardon of the House.

  And the said Mr Marvell and Mr Clifford being accordingly called in to their places; and having received a grave reprehension from Mr Speaker, and Mr Marvell declaring that he was sorry, that he should give the first provocation of the difference; and Mr Clifford acknowledging that he was sorry for what ensued; and both of them engaged to keep the peace and privilege of the House for the future; and not to renew this difference, but to have the same correspondence they had before it did happen: with which the House was well satisfied; and did remit the breach of privilege.22

  This was not, however, to be Marvell’s last physical encounter with another Member in the House, nor was Clifford to be allowed to get away with a formal rebuff from the Speaker. In his satire written five years later, ‘The last Instructions to a
Painter’, Marvell has a portrait of Clifford, by then the Comptroller of the Household: ‘With Hook then, through the microscope, take aim/Where, like the new Controller, all men laugh/To see a tall Lowse brandish the white Staff.’ In another poem of 1673 attributed to Marvell, ‘An Historicall Poem’, there is an allusion to his tragic end: ‘Clifford and Hide before has lost the day,/One hang’d himself, the other fled away.’

  The Speaker, Sir Edward Turner, was not forgiven either for this humiliation. He appears in ‘The last Instructions’, mercilessly cast:

  Paint him in Golden Gown, with Mace’s Brain:

  Bright Hair, fair Face, obscure and dull of Head;

  Like Knife with Iv’ry haft and edge of Lead.

  At Pray’rs, his Eyes turn up the Pious white,

  But all the while his Private-Bill’s in sight.

  In Chair, he smoaking sits like Master-Cook,

  And a Poll-Bill does like his Apron look.

  Well was he skill’d to season any question,

  And make a sawce fit for Whitehall’s digestion:

  Whence ev’ry day, the Palat more to tickle;

  Court-mushrumps ready are sent in in pickle.

  When Grievance urg’d he swells like squatted Toad,

  Frisks like a Frog to croak a Taxes load.

  His patient Piss, he could hold longer then

  An Urinal, and sit like any Hen.

  At Table, jolly as a Country-Host,

  And soaks his Sack with Norfolk like a Toast.

  At night, than Canticleer more brisk and hot,