World Enough and Time

by Nicholas Murray

  Edward Hyde, the first Earl of Clarendon, was a lawyer by profession and had been a friend of the poets Ben Jonson and Edmund Waller. He was always opposed to what he called ‘the rebellion’ and advised Charles I on legal and constitutional matters, as well as serving as Charles II’s closest adviser both before and after the Restoration. From 1660 onwards he was probably the most powerful figure in the government, but by 1667 his dominance was nearly over. Court intrigue and the hostility of Parliament – which Marvell naturally shared – led to his dismissal as Chancellor in 1667 and subsequent impeachment. Before he could be imprisoned he fled to France where, after completing his History of the Rebellion and his autobiography, he died at Rouen in 1674.

  In 1664 Clarendon had begun building an impressive house near St James. Its grandeur and pretension, and the soaring bill for its construction, became notorious; it ended up costing three times the original estimate. It was from here that Clarendon fled to France. On the eve of his departure he was visited by the diarist John Evelyn who described the great, gouty English conservative ‘in his garden at his new-built palace, sitting in his gout wheel-chair, and seeing the gates setting up towards the north and the fields. He looked and spoke very disconsolately … Next morning he was gone.’10 Clarendon himself was to confess that the building project had ‘infinitely discomposed his whole Affairs and broken his estate’.11 Because of his involvement in the controversial sale of Dunkirk in 1662 for 500,000 pistoles it was nicknamed Dunkirk House. On 14 June, Pepys wrote in his diary that: ‘some rude people have been … at my Lord Chancellor’s where they have cut down the trees before his house and broke his windows; and a gibbet either set up before or painted upon his gate, and these words writ: “Three sights to be seen: Dunkirk, Tangier, and a barren Queen.”’12 (Tangier was part of the dowry of Catherine of Braganza whom the King had married in 1661 hoping that she would bring him an heir, but she proved barren.) Clarendon, unpopular and widely blamed for more than he was actually culpable, was thus a soft target for a satirist.

  Marvell’s poem – if it was his – was written between the summoning of Parliament on 25 June and its first meeting on St James’s Day, 25 July. The underlying theme is that Clarendon House has been built on the spoils of a corrupt political career – ‘His Friends in the Navy would not be ingrate,/To grudge him some Timber who fram’d them the War’ – and the satire is generally unsophisticated, mildly scatological, and little more than routinely derisive. Formally, it is crude in its jogging rhythms and sometimes laboured rhymes. There is no trace of the playful wit, inventive imagery, verbal felicity, or political insight that characterised the great political poems Marvell wrote in the 1650s. Far more considerable as a poem is ‘The last Instructions to a Painter’ which Marvell – again, if he was truly its author – wrote later in the summer, between 30 August when Clarendon resigned his seals, and 29 November when he fled to France.

  On 26 June 1656, elated by a naval victory over the Turks in a war that had dragged on for ten years, the Venetians threw themselves into a frenzy of celebration. The city rulers appointed a committee to choose a painter to record the scene. The successful candidate was Pietro Liberi, whose work was to be displayed in the Sala dello Scrutino in the Doges’ Palace where it can still be seen. It is entitled Battaglia dei Dardanelli or, more familiarly, Lo Schiavo because of the large nude figure of a slave that dominates the picture. The poet Giovanni Francesco Busenello, also greatly excited by the victory in the Dardanelles and eager to celebrate the victory, addressed a poem to Liberi, either to help him secure the commission or to congratulate him on his success. It was a novel idea for a poem to be designed in the form of instructions to a painter on the elements and proportion of a picture. Two years later the poem was translated by Sir Thomas Higgons, a diplomat and man of letters, as ‘A Prospective of the Naval Triumph of the Venetians over the Turk: To Signor Pietro Liberi that Renowned and famous Painter by Gio. Francesco Busenello’. The Italian original was a revision and expansion of a poem written immediately after the naval victory by Busenello, initially in the Venetian dialect.

  Both the poem and Higgons’s translation might have remained minor historical curiosities had the poet Edmund Waller not decided to appropriate the genre in his ‘Instructions to a Painter’ of 1666. Between that date and the end of the century the genre had a vigorous flowering. It was seen as a useful device for holding together a great deal of otherwise disparate material. Its uses were satirical rather than celebratory and, according to one historian of the genre, these satires are ‘direct and fierce, marked by a bitter invective, savage indictments, scurrility and coarseness’.13 In December 1666 Samuel Pepys had been presented with an anonymous example of this now flourishing genre which he called ‘the lampoon, or the Mock Advice to a Painter, abusing the Duke of York and my Lord Sandwich, Pen, and everybody, and the King himself, and all the matters of the navy and war’.14 Pepys describes what appears to be a typical product of the genre. It was in fact a follow-up to Waller’s poem, called ‘Second Advice to a Painter, For Drawing the History of our Navall Business; In Imitation of Mr Waller’. The same author produced a ‘Third Advice to a Painter’ early in January 1667, and both these sequels to Waller infuriated the censors of the Stationers’ Company when they were printed by a Francis Smith of the Elephant and Castle in the Strand. Two more followed, the ‘Fourth Advice to the Painter’ and the ‘Fifth Advice’, and all four were published in 1667 as Directions To a Painter For Describing our Naval Business: In Imitation of Mr Waller Being The Last Works of Sir John Denham. The book also appended ‘Clarindon’s House-Warming’ ‘By an Unknown Author’. The attribution to Denham has generally been doubted and may be there simply to lend dignity to an unlicensed publication or distract attention from the true author. Marvell’s contemporaries, John Aubrey and Anthony Wood, believed that the real author of the Advices attributed to Denham was Marvell and some modern editors have agreed with them (at any rate so far as the ‘Second’ and ‘Third’ advices are concerned).15 In his entry on Denham in the Athenae Oxoniensis, Wood says: ‘To which Directions, tho’ sir John Denham’s name is set, yet they were thought by many to have been written by Andr. Marvell, esq. The printer that printed them, being discover’d, stood in the pillory for the same.’16 It is probably prudent to concur with the editors of the standard Oxford edition of the poems that ‘The last Instructions to a Painter’ is the only one of this sequence that is reliably Marvell’s – though they attribute to him also a later poem, of 1671, ‘Further Advice to a Painter’.

  The poem illustrates Marvell’s view of public affairs in the second half of the 1660s, when the excitement of a new dawn felt at the Restoration had begun to evaporate and be replaced by a perspective of political sleaze and national self-doubt. It benefits from his closeness to affairs and is unsparing in the lash of its satire. It recalls the baneful events of 1666 and early 1667, such as the Dutch fleet’s sailing up the Medway and the fall of Clarendon (though written just too early to record his flight). According to Aubrey, Marvell admired the satires of the rakish poet Rochester: ‘I remember I have heard him say that the Earle of Rochester was the only man in England that had the true veine of Satyre.’17 Rochester reciprocated the admiration in his poem ‘Tunbridge-Wells’ in 1675, where he saluted Marvell’s treatment (in prose) of Samuel Parker (‘Tho’ Marvel has enough expos’d his Folly’). The ‘true veine’ in a poem such as Rochester’s ‘A Satyr against Mankind’, where the satire deals not merely with the petty events of the day that clutter the genre of the painter poems but the general human condition, was never quite reached by Marvell in his satires of the reign of Charles II. The gift for generalised observation that marks his finest lyrics seemed to desert him in these late satires, which seldom transcend their specific context. Perhaps Marvell, as a practical politician, was too close to the events he described to stand back and take a more reflective view.

  ‘The last Instructions to a Painter’, however, is vastly superior to
a poem like ‘Clarindon’s House-Warming’ and has many fine satiric touches, such as the portrait of Henry Jermyn, Earl of St Albans, a gambler and bon viveur rumoured to have had an affair with the Queen Mother, Henrietta Maria. John Evelyn observed, many years later, of St Albans that: ‘He ate and drank with extraordinary appetite. He is a prudent old courtier, and much enriched since his majesty’s return.’18 Marvell painted the old rake with relish:

  Paint then St Albans full of soup and gold,

  The new Courts pattern, Stallion of the old.

  Him neither Wit nor Courage did exalt,

  But Fortune chose him for her pleasure salt.

  Paint him with Drayman’s Shoulders, butchers Mien,

  Member’d like Mules, with Elephantine chine.

  Well he the Title of St Albans bore,

  For never Bacon study’d Nature more.

  The physicality of the description (and the recurrence of Marvell’s preoccupation with the human posterior which at least one critic has suggested merits psychoanalytic investigation)19 is even more evident in the lines on Clarendon’s daughter, Anne Hyde, who in a private marriage ceremony at his residence in the Strand, Worcester House, on 3 September 1660 had become Duchess of York. Clarendon, who did not really approve of this match with the King’s brother, James, later attributed to it in part his downfall. Rather like a cartoon strip, or a panning camera, the advice-to-a-painter genre allows the poet to present a series of otherwise unconnected caricatures. Anne Hyde is followed by the King’s mistress, Barbara Villiers, Countess of Castlemaine whose taste for sex with her servants is satirised:

  She through her Lacquies Drawers as he ran,

  Discern’d Love’s Cause, and a new Flame began.

  Her wonted joys thenceforth and Court she shuns,

  And still within her mind the Footman runs:

  His brazen Calves, his brawny Thighs, (the Face

  She slights) his Feet shapt for a smoother race.

  This is all a far cry from the tender verses enfolding Mary Fairfax and the delicate pastoral dialogues of the 1650s.

  After these pen portraits, the painter is invited to imagine the House of Commons in the form of a gaming parlour with the court and country parties no better than a pair of backgammon players in a tavern game in which ‘The Dice betwixt them must the Fate divide.’ Here the ruling party is motivated by avarice using the Excise as its means. The latter is a many-handed, many-eyed devouring monster prowling the streets by day: ‘And flies like Batts with leathern Wings by Night’. In his letters to Hull, Marvell would always reveal himself to be a sworn enemy of the Excise, an essential posture for a member of the country party, opposed to the extravagance and profligacy of the metropolitan court. The poem reels off the names of a catalogue of long-forgotten politicians and makes much of the incompetence of the government in its handling of the Dutch War and its bungled attempts at a peace, which culminated in the shame of the Dutch raid: ‘Ruyter the while, that had our Ocean curb’d,/Sail’d now among our rivers undisturb’d.’ At the heart of the poem is a picture of Archibald Douglas, captain of a Scottish regiment, who refused to desert his ship The Royal Oak when it was burnt in the Dutch attack and who thus died aboard it. The lines that describe him were later excerpted and framed by lines from another hand to appear as a new poem, ‘The Loyall Scot’, in 1697. The panegyric is a shift in tone from the satirical temper of the poem up to this point. Douglas is shown as a paragon of male beauty ‘on whose lovely chin/The early Down but newly did begin;/And modest Beauty yet his Sex did Veil,/While envious Virgins hope he is a Male’. Once again, Marvell’s notion of sexual allure is bound up with innocence and sexlessness.20

  After the account of the Dutch raid the poem turns to the assigning of blame and by a witty play with rhyme mocks the making of a scapegoat out of Peter Pett, Commander of the Naval Dockyard at Chatham. The real culprit, however, turns out to be Clarendon. The poem – by far Marvell’s longest – draws to a close with a dream-sequence in which the King is visited by the shade of his grandfather and then by his father, ‘ghastly Charles’, the latter, ‘turning his Collar low,/The purple thread about his neck does show’. Waking from his dream: ‘The wondrous Night the pensive King revolves,/And rising, straight on Hyde’s Disgrace resolves.’ With a closing reminder that ‘scratching Courtiers undermine a Realm’ the poet appears to advocate, as an alternative to the King’s current cabal, an aristocratic elite of courtiers rich enough to be above venal bribery and genuinely noble (‘large Souls’).

  Whatever part the poem played in the national debate about the events of 1666–7, its desired end came on 29 November when Clarendon, after dark, left London by coach for Erith in Kent. From there, he took a boat to France, landing in Calais after a journey that took three days because the wind was ‘indifferently good’.21 The search for new scapegoats would now begin.

  17

  The Faults and the Person

  The Raising and Destroying of Favourits and Creatures is the sport of Kings not to be medled with by us.1

  Marvell’s involvement in the impeachment of Clarendon was not confined to the composition of nearly 1,000 lines in rhyming couplets. He entered fully into the Commons debate on the matter, and his interventions were marked by a characteristic independence of judgement. He was never wholly predictable as a politician, although he generally came down on the side of the Opposition forming around the figure of Clarendon’s opponent, the Duke of Buckingham, who had married his former pupil Mary Fairfax.

  Some time before Parliament met to consider these matters on 10 October 1667, Marvell wrote to Sir John Trott, MP for Andover.2 Trott’s son Edmund had died of smallpox on 11 August, not long after his older brother John, also a young Oxford graduate, had died from the same disease. Since Marvell’s correspondence is mostly about political and business affairs, this letter of condolence is of interest in showing a more human side of the poet. Although placing his sympathy in a stern Christian context of acceptance of ‘your Sons happiness’ (in going to meet his Maker) the letter is one of feeling. ‘I know the contagion of grief,’ Marvell wrote, ‘and infection of Tears, and especially when it runs in a blood. And I my self could sooner imitate then blame those innocent relentings of Nature, so that they spring from tenderness only and humanity, not from an implacable sorrow.’3 In Marvell’s grief, however, there is leisure for fiction, and the letter is a very rhetorical one. It also contains an allusion, masked in a Biblical analogy, to the political situation, and expresses the fear that, in the wake of the Dutch raid, greater calamities were in store for English Protestants from a court that may have done secret deals with the papists. Marvell concludes by enumerating the things that should console a Christian father grieving for his son: ‘The word of God: The society of good men: and the books of the Ancients. There is one way more, which is by diversion, business, and activity; which are also necessary to be used in their season.’ Marvell is aware that in writing to a father about the loss of his son he is writing of a condition he has not experienced and never will experience. With that nuance, but ostensibly writing about their respective public roles, he writes: ‘But I my self, who live to so little purpose, can have little authority or ability to advise you.’ Marvell composed two Latin epitaphs – one for each son, the one to Edmund described in this letter as ‘this sorry Elogie of your Son’ – that are set in tablets in the north wall of the chancel of the old church at Laverstocke in Hampshire, now a mortuary chapel of the Portal family.

  On 10 October 1667 Parliament resumed with a determination to seek redress for the miscarriages of the war and to punish the culprits. As the most powerful man in the government, Clarendon was in everyone’s sights. Burnet wrote: ‘The Parliament were, upon their first opening, set on to destroy Lord Clarendon. And all persons who had heard him say anything that could bear an ill construction, were examined.’4 Marvell, who spoke rarely in the House (by the standards of the time that was normal enough), made four speeches during October and Nov
ember. The first was on 14 October, four days after Clarendon was impeached. ‘There neuer appeared a fairer season for men to obtain what their own hearts could wish either as to redresse of any former grievances or the constituting of good order and justice for the future,’5 Marvell had told Mayor Franke just before Parliament was due to open. Three weeks later he was confessing to him that ‘really we are tired out with publick businesse’.6 On 14 October he rose to intervene in the Clarendon debate in what is in some ways a puzzling speech. Marvell seemed not to have had the gift for plain, forceful speaking when on his feet in the Commons, and his speeches often appeared crabbed and difficult to follow. It was as if he hated having to come down on one side directly, preferring to offer qualifications and hesitations. In this intervention he seemed almost to be speaking up for Clarendon, as a result, perhaps, of some fear on his part that the faction clamouring for the Chancellor’s impeachment might not actually be holding out a better alternative. The clear lines of Parliamentary opposition that came to be called the court and country parties were only emerging at this time, and Parliament did not have the sharply defined and whipped divisions and allegiances that have come to be the norm in the late twentieth century. Marvell’s speech is missing from the official journals but two accounts survive, in the diary of the Derbyshire MP, John Milward, and in some manuscript notes collected by the Tewkesbury MP, Sir Henry Capel, and now preserved in the British Museum. Marvell rose after the Totnes MP, Sir John Maynard, had finished speaking:

  Mr Marvell. The Raising and Destroying of Favourits and Creatures is the sport of Kings, not to be medled with by us. Kings in the Choice of their Ministers move in a Sphear distinct from us. It is said because the people rejoiced at his fall wee must thank the King. The people allso rejoiced at ye Restoration of the Duke of Buckingham the other day obnoxtious. Shall wee not thank ye King for that too? Its said wee hate him not, Would any man in this House be willing to have such a vote pass upon him? Wee are to thank the King for ye matter of his speech. This is not in perticuler any part of it and comes irregularly before us.7