The voyage from Gravesend to the port of Archangel took a month, the frigate making much quicker progress than the merchantman which did not arrive until 5 September. Guy Miège described the whole embassy in often very vivid detail in A Relation of Three Embassies from His Sacred Majesty Charles II to the Great Duke of Muscovie, The King of Sweden and the King of Denmark Performed by the Right Ho’ble the Earle of Carlisle in the Years 1663 & 1664, which was published anonymously in 1669, ‘with his Lordships approbation’. It was a popular work that went through several editions and translations. Miège, who was born in Lausanne in 1644, went on to publish in 1691 a New State of England – a sort of anatomy of Britain – and various French dictionaries and grammars. He was a shrewd and observant writer. The purpose of the embassy he described was to bring about the restoration of certain trade privileges that English merchants had previously enjoyed in Russia but which the Tsar had cancelled after the execution of the King. Miège wrote that the present ruler of ‘Moscovy’, Alexey Michailovitz, had a great ‘abhorrency of the murther of King Charles the First’ so the embassy would have its work cut out. Back in England, the King had already held a lavish reception for the Russian ambassadors, but a personal visit of his representatives was necessary. Another aim of the embassy was to restore a special English privilege of paying no impost when using the port of Archangel in recognition of their having originally discovered the port. Two reasons were proffered for winning back these privileges: the fact that the rebellion was over and that ‘these very Priviledges were the basis and foundation, upon which the Amity betwixt the two Crowns of England and Moscovy were superstructures’.
The embassy was led by the dashing young Carlisle, aged thirty-four and with ‘a peculiar grace and vivacity in his discourse’. Throughout, he deployed the maximum amount of display and pomp in order to ingratiate himself with the Duke of Moscovy:
His Train consisted of near fourscore persons, amongst which he had ten Gentlemen, six Pages, two Trumpets, and twelve Footmen. He had also a Chaplain, several Interpreters, a Chirurgeon, six Musicians, besides many Tradesmen that were very necessary in Muscovy.
The ships were weighted down with items of furniture and catering equipment and they had brought also ‘a magnificent canopy of red Damask, surrounded with a gold and silver Fringe, and having on the back in a large circle the Arms of the King of England, richly embroidered with silver’. On arrival at the bar of Archangel on 19 August Carlisle immediately set in train the arrangements for the triumphal entry of this splendid retinue:
He sent Mr Marvel his Secretary, into the Town. Of whose landing the Governour having notice, ordered him to be conducted by six Gentlemen to the Castle, through a Regiment of six hundred men, and the next day he sent sixteen boats guarded by several hundreds of men, under the command of a Collonel, to receive his Excellence, and bring him ashore.
After this display, the ambassador himself, Lord Carlisle, finally entered the town of Archangel on 23 August, though some obscure breach of protocol in this heavy pageantry created some dismay in his hosts. Several English and Dutch merchant ships, happening to be in the harbour, had fired cannon salutes, a practice not approved of by the Russians. Nevertheless, the stay at Archangel augured well and the embassy was treated to ‘all manner of Good entertainment’.
On 12 September the party left Archangel in six barges ‘of which one was set apart for his Kitchin, and a hearth and Chimney contrived in it’. The Earl, an Englishman abroad, had taken great care to bring his creature comforts with him. The barges, hauled by serfs not horses, moved slowly up the Duina and Sucagna rivers via Colmogro, Arsinoa, Yagrish, Ustiga, Tetma and Chousca, reaching Vologda on 17 October. As the Russian winter was setting in Marvell and his compatriots fortified themselves against the cold with furs and sheepskins; there was some anxiety that the rivers might freeze, halting the snail-like progress entirely. To pass the time the English party went ashore to shoot duck and pigeon. On arrival at the small villages the local priest would often come out to the barge with a present of fish or gooseberries in the hope of some reward, which usually turned out to be aqua vitae. The result of this was that he commonly went home again drunk. Feeling colder and colder, they huddled in their furs and now felt that ‘our Voiage began to be grievous and insupportable’. On arrival at Vologda they decided to lodge there for three months until the snow had frozen sufficiently to support sledges. There was some diversion there in the form of music and dancing. Guy Fawkes Night was celebrated on 5 November and ‘The Buttlers wife was brought to bed, having been big with child before she came out of London.’
On 7 January the party moved off again by sledge via Yaroslaf, Rostof, Peroslaf and Troitza, reaching a little village near Moscow called Yawes on 3 February. Various encounters along the way had taught the English party that the Russians were sticklers for protocol, at least in relation to themselves. As they prepared for their entry into Moscow the behaviour of minor local officials sent out to negotiate the arrangements provoked irritation and offered ‘tokens of indignity and contempt’. Carlisle’s patience was becoming exhausted and he instructed Marvell to compose a letter in Latin to the Tsar ‘in which he should inform him of the principal circumstances of this disorder’. The letter complained of the ‘misfortune, if not an indignity’ of their treatment, and complained rather querulously of their sojourn at Yawes ‘in this pitiful village, amidst all kinds of inconveniences, and swarms of troublesome Insects’. Carlisle demanded, through Marvell’s Latin, satisfaction for these ‘barbarous and inhumane’ treatments and was apparently mollified by the response.
On 6 February, almost seven months after leaving England, the embassy entered Moscow in splendour: ‘It was reported every where in the Court that the City of Mosco never saw the Entry of any Ambassador so glorious as this.’ Two hundred sledges made up the procession. A few days later, on 11 February, a formal audience with the Tsar took place, Carlisle arriving in a sledge in which Marvell was also riding: ‘In the Ambassadors sledge there was the Secretary and the chief Interpreter standing and uncovered, the Secretarie carrying in his hands upon a yard of red Damask his Letters of Credence written in parchment, whose Superscription contained all the tiles of the Tzar in letters of Gold.’ The Tsar’s adornment of jewels made him seem ‘like a sparkling Sun’ and the English party coming into his presence were ‘like those who coming suddainly out of the dark are dazled with the brightness of the Sun’. The Tsar, at thirty-four, was the same age as the English Ambassador. His first question was about the Queen Mother: ‘How doth the desolate Widow of that glorious Martyr Charles the First?’ Various florid Latin speeches, composed and delivered by Marvell, were offered from the English side, and gifts were presented, including a gun used by the royal martyr and a pair of pistols worn by Charles II when ‘after so long adversity he rid in his triumphant Entry into His Metropolitan City of London’.
A second audience took place on 13 February at which, in spite of its being the first opportunity to get down to the essential business that had brought them there, the ambassadors were still complaining about the slights they had received from the Russian officials. The Tsar reproved them for these complaints before informing them that he was refusing their substantive request on the grounds that the English Company of Archangel who wished to see their former privileges restored had supported the rebellion. An English informer, Luke. Nightingale, had, the Tsar claimed, been sent by Charles I with this information. He went on to suggest that the English planned to rob him and had abused trading rules to line their own pockets at the expense of the Russians. To cap it all the Tsar then announced that he took grave exception to being described in Marvell’s Latin address as ‘Illustrissime’ rather than ‘Serenissime’.
After this brutal setback, the English returned on 29 Feburary to try to win a change of heart. Still pressing for an apology for the slight given by the Tsar’s officials – apparently not considering it tactful to let this go in the difficult circumstances – Ca
rlisle attempted to demolish the Russian objections. The Tsar was informed smoothly by Carlisle – who had been wounded at the Battle of Worcester fighting for Cromwell – that ‘though all the English were involved in the calamatie of that Rebellion, but the better part alwayes free from the guilt thereof’. This was a very Marvellian argument. Carlisle next attempted to destroy the credibility of Luke Nightingale, calling him ‘a broken merchant, a perjured fellow and a grosse Imposter’. On the impropriety of the Latin address – and speaking no doubt to a learned brief drafted by Marvell, who may have actually delivered all this matter in his own Latin – Carlisle pointed out that ‘the word Serenus signifieth nothing but still & calme’. He added that Cicero had called the night serene, and similar usages could be found in Lucretius. Carlisle’s final riposte was that, if titles were in dispute, why was his king not accorded by the Russians that of Defender of the Faith? On 19 March the Tsar replied that the King offered him no help against his enemies ‘the Pole and the Grim Tartar’. At a final private audience on 22 April that lasted until one o’clock in the morning Carlisle saw defeat staring him in the face. The whole elaborate embassy, with all its pomp and circumstance, had been a total failure.
After a final public audience on 24 June, the party finally left Moscow, having witnessed the exchange of coloured eggs at the Orthodox Easter. Carlisle wrote a letter to Secretary of State Henry Bennet, later Earl of Arlington, a member of the Cabal, after the final private audience in which he expressed his irritation: ‘What else was to be expected in a country where all other beasts change their colours twice a yeare but the rationall beasts change their soules thrice a day.’5
On 3 August the ambassadors arrived at Riga on the next leg of their journey to Sweden. They travelled on horseback, with three coaches and 200 waggons, in more clement weather, but they were still complaining. This time it was the hard Russian saddles, the tents in which they had to sleep, the restricted diet – ‘nothing but Beef and Mutton’ – and the ‘persecution of the flies’. But at least the passing scenery diverted them. They were forced to concede ‘the delight of beholding the Rivers gliding through these vast wildernesses’. And the natives were a pleasant curiosity:
Our habits appeared so unusual to the Peasants, that they no sooner saw two or three of my Lord’s Servants on horse-back, but away they run in all haste to their houses, clapping their doors after them, as if we had been so many ominous Birds, or Spirits come on purpose to fright them.
But, generally speaking, ‘the small civility we found in this barbarous Nation, and the natural disposition each of us had to be returning towards his own Country, prevailed with us to leave Moscovy with much pleasure and satisfaction’. They rested for fifteen days in Riga until on 22 August they set sail in a man-of-war via the Baltic to Stockholm, nearly running short of provisions on the voyage. Arriving at Stockholm, Carlisle ‘dispatched Mr Marvel his Secretary, and Mr Taylor his Steward in the Boat … The Secretary was sent to give notice of the Ambassadors arrival and to inform himself at what time he was to make his Entry into the Town.’ The reception of the embassy by the Swedes on 8 September was less extravagant than that offered by the Russians but had, they felt, more genuine civility. They spent five weeks in Stockholm at the court of the nine-year-old King Charles XI, to whom Marvell delivered a Latin address after Carlisle had delivered it in English. Marvell then offered it in French to the Queen Mother. Guy Miège was impressed by Marvell’s artfulness as a rhetorician for, in delivering his farewell address to the Queen Mother, Carlisle said at one point ‘That the boldest eloquence would lose its speech’ then paused as if he was genuinely lost for words in praising her excellence. When Marvell delivered the same speech in French, Miège noticed that he also paused in the same place and realised that this was in fact a carefully contrived effect. In spite of all these arts, however, the Swedish mission, diplomatically speaking, was as fruitless as the Russian one and the hapless embassy set sail on a ship called the Centurion on 13 October for Denmark, arriving at Copenhagen two weeks later. During the voyage they had been entertained by two tame bears from Moscow which wrestled playfully and sucked the fingers of anyone who dared.
On arrival at Copenhagen, Marvell was despatched, as usual, to give notice of Carlisle’s arrival ‘and to carry his Credentials to the Chancellor’. On 27 October Carlisle made his solemn entry into the town where ‘The King of Denmark appeared to us very grave and Majestick.’ Soon after this Carlisle’s wife gave birth to a son. They left – again failing in their mission to secure Danish support in preparations for war against the United Provinces – on 15 December. The sea being frozen, they travelled by land, after an initial attempt to go by sea from Elsinore had failed. Their numbers were now thinned out as they pressed on home overland, a little anxious because the hostilities of the Dutch War were just beginning, passing through the town of Bockstoud near Hamburg where another incident displayed Marvell’s hot temper. It was in the first days of January, just after dinner, when the party was due to set off to complete a further three or four leagues that night. Marvell’s waggoner said he would not go unless a friend of his, another waggoner, went along with him. Marvell was having none of this:
The secretary not able to bring them to reason by fair means, tried what he could by foul, and by clapping a pistol to his head would have forced him along with him. But immediately his pistol was wrested from him, and as they were putting themselves into a posture to abuse him, we interposed so effectually that he was rescued out of their hands.
The circumstances in Miège’s account are not clear enough to be certain who the aggressor was on this occasion, but once again Marvell seems to have been prone to getting himself into a violent incident. Perhaps tempers were frayed after the strain of this long, fruitless mission. After Marvell was rescued ‘out of the hands of a barbarous rout of Peasants and Mechanicks’ he set off to protest to the governor of the town about the disorder. While he was gone his companions found themselves ‘beset by above a hundred of them endeavouring to rob us of our goods, and others to do violence to our persons’. In the fracas ‘a Page lost his Periwig’ and ‘the rabble took particular delight to toss him up and down with his Furs in the snow’. At this point Carlisle returned and order was quickly restored.
The embassy arrived back in England on 30 January 1665 – the anniversary of the King’s execution – having returned via Munster, Cologne, Malines, Brussels, Calais, and Gravesend. Charles II asked Carlisle to record in full what had happened in order to enable him to challenge the accounts arriving from the Russian ambassadors, who were complaining of the insolence of the English mission. Miège was commissioned to perform the task. That he did so with such competence has provided Marvell’s biographers with an account of a period of nearly eighteen months that would otherwise have remained teasingly blank, for Marvell himself left no record of the trip.
15
Sober English Valour
Holland, that scarce deserves the name of Land,
As but th’Off-scouring of the British Sand.
During Marvell’s absence in Russia the threat of naval war with the Dutch had become an imminent reality. The Commons had voted £2.5 million for the war and shortly after Marvell returned to England the Second Dutch War began in March 1665. He had also missed the first attempts to impeach the Lord Chancellor, Clarendon. Both events would loom large in the satires Marvell began to write in the mid-1660s, prompted by disillusion with the government of Charles II and its growing intolerance of dissent. The dislocations and turbulence of war and an unsettled national politics would be accompanied in 1665 by a major outbreak of bubonic plague, followed in turn by the Great Fire that ravaged London in 1666. For a poet who had always displayed a satiric vein and who was at the heart of the political world and keenly attentive to its every nuance, Marvell’s shift to satire at this time is wholly unsurprising.
Marvell plunged straight back into political business in February 1665. His signature appears on the 4th, tog
ether with that of Colonel Gilby, John Ramsden and John Cresset, witnessing a Trinity House document.1 A month later the Hull Bench Books record that an order was made on 16 March for the payment to him of £10 6s 8d for thirty-one days’ attendance at the last session of Parliament.2 Marvell would have been kept at the government’s expense throughout the latter half of 1663 and 1664 (he was officially noted as a court dependant)3 but the Parliamentary wages would now be needed to enable him to survive back in London. He was in the habit of occasionally handing over his wages to his brother-in-law Edmund Popple, who acted as banker, investment adviser and general man of business for him. The Bench Books record such payments being made on 2 March 1661, 3 December 1663 (when Marvell was riding out the Russian winter at Vologda), 14 December 1665 and 21 April 1670.4
The outbreak of plague in London forced the Cavalier Parliament to meet for a short fifth session at Oxford in the autumn of 1665. It was from there that Marvell wrote the first letter to the Hull Corporation and its latest mayor, Robert Bloome, since his return from Russia, though he had been back in London for seven or eight months now. During the spring someone had arranged for the publication of part of the poem he had written during an earlier engagement with the Dutch in 1653, ‘The Character of Holland’. The first 100 lines, with a further eight-line conclusion bolted on to make the poem relate to the moment, were entered on the Stationers’ Register on 13 June, ten days after the English victory under the Duke of York at Solebay. This original pamphlet, printed for Robert Horn, at the sign of the Angel in Pope’s Head Alley, has disappeared, but it was issued again by Horn in 1672, once more for topical reasons, and is in the collection of manuscripts and pamphlets assembled by Robert Harley and printed in the eighteenth century as The Harleian Miscellany. According to an early editor of Marvell’s work, G.A. Aitken, ‘a printer, on the side of the Court, impudently adapted Marvell’s poem to the occasion’.5 The deeds of the early commanders of 1653, Deane, Blake, and Monck, were edited out and replaced with what Aitken rightly calls eight lines of ‘doggerel’ in praise of the Duke of York and the heroes of 1665:
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