The habitual deference towards the King that marks Marvell’s constituency correspondence (and that may, for all its formal eloquence, have been no more than politic) is noticeably absent from his letter to Will Popple. On the contrary, he was clearly annoyed by the attitude of the King who, before Christmas, had been voted £400,000 but now demanded even more. From the end of the session on 1 December to 14 February, when the House resumed, there had been ‘great and numerous Caballing among the Courtiers’, the upshot of which was that the King, ‘being exceedingly necessitous for Money’, addressed the House ‘Stylo minaci & imperatorio’ (in an imperious and threatening manner) to warn that failure to agree to his supply would have all sorts of dread consequences. Because of a failure on the part of ‘the Country Gentlemen’ to get themselves to Westminster in sufficient numbers for the first session, the King won the votes that he needed. One of these ensured that ‘The terrible Bill against Conventicles is sent up to the Lords’, a measure for suppressing nonconformist meetings that Marvell described to Will as ‘the Quintessence of arbitrary Malice’. With the sort of gossipy candour that is wholly absent from his official correspondence, Marvell confided to Will:
It is my opinion that Lauderdale at one Ear talks to the King of Monmouth [the Duke of Monmouth, James Scott, illegitimate son of Charles by Lucy Walters, and captain-general of the King’s forces at this time] and Buckingham at the other of a new Queen. It is also my Opinion that the King was never since his coming in, nay, all Things considered, no King since the Conquest, so absolutely powerful at Home, as he is at present. Nor any Parliament, or Places, so certainly and constantly supplyed with men of the same Temper.
Marvell was describing a Stuart despotism that made a mockery of Parliament and the role of an individual MP like himself. In a heartfelt cry to his nephew that marks something of a turning point in Marvell’s politics he asked: ‘In such a Conjuncture, dear Will, what Probability is there of my doing any Thing to the Purpose?’ Marvell wanted to believe in constitutional monarchy and be a loyal servant of the state, but the abuse of power by the court was making it impossible for him to practise that loyalty with any conscience. His disillusion with power would reinforce his belief in the need for religious toleration, for the individual conscience to have some space to flourish and not to be ordered by the state in a polity where dissent was increasingly being outlawed. He concluded his letter with a Latin quotation, from the sombre words addressed by Aeneas to his son Ascanius just before Aeneas goes out to battle in the closing book of Virgil’s Aeneid: ‘Disce, puer, Virtutem ex me verumque Laborem,/Fortunam ex aliis’ (Learn from me, child, the meaning of true labour, and from others the meaning of fortune). Marvell had devoted his life to politics and had no other avocation apart from his writing, in an age when professional writers did not exist. Had it been worth it? Will was fortunate in having established a successful business career. He was not dependent on the vagaries of men of power. His uncle, however, must stick with it, increasingly conscious that this might be a labour in vain.
Marvell’s parallel letters to Hull during this first session of 1670 deal with the matters that would naturally concern them – customs duties and taxes on wine – but when he comes to recount, in detail, the progress of the conventicles bill his account is descriptive rather than opinionative. The strong feelings on the issue expressed to Will are absent from the Hull chronicle. On the contrary, Marvell sounds like a supporter of the measure when he reports the activities of ‘one Fox a teacher of some fanaticall people in Wiltshire’4 who was said to have organised a conventicle at which some of these ‘fanaticall’ people ‘had said they owned no King but that the King & the Duke his brother (they are words so odious as scarse to be written) were both bastards…’ It was clear that it was the political as much as the religious freedom of the conventicles that affronted the government ‘because seditious Sectaryes, under pretense of tender consciences do contrive insurrections at their meetings’. Soon, in his clash with the ultra-orthodox cleric Samuel Parker, Marvell would find himself arguing passionately in defence of that ‘tender conscience’ that the ruling party despised. The House, meanwhile, with the bit between its teeth, decided to extend the repressive measures to ‘Popish recusants’ as well as nonconformists. Marvell itemised in detail how the new act against conventicles, passed by 138 votes to 78, would work. Anyone over the age of sixteen attending a meeting ‘under pretense of religion in other manner then allowd by the liturgy & practise of the Church of England’ of more than five people, ‘in an house field or place where no family inhabits’, and who could be proved by the magistrates ‘either by confession of the party or oath of witnesses or by notorious euidence or circumstance’ to have done so, or simply being unable to deny the charge by calling witnesses, would be fined five shillings, doubled if they failed to pay the first time. There would be much sterner penalties for anyone preaching at such a meeting or hosting it. It was a witch-hunter’s charter, but Marvell passed no comment to his electors, observing merely that he had gone into such detail ‘that inconveniences might better and in time be prevented’. His inability to enter into frank political dialogue with his constituents is eloquent of the expectations they would have of their MP. He was in the House to perform services for the merchant aristocracy of Hull, not to exercise personal political judgement and discretion. He concluded his long newsletter with the words: ‘I am now tired.’ The letter that followed gave further proof of the growing pressure of Parliamentary business: ‘We are this night upon the report of the City Bill; the crowd of business now toward our rising obliging us to sit both forenoon and afternoon, usually till nine a clock, which indeed is the occasion that I have the less vigor left at night, and cannot write so frequently to you’.5 The work proved too much for some honourable members as the end of the session drew near, and by 7 April Marvell was reporting: ‘Our house is now grown very thinne scarse more then an hundred for the most part.’ On 11 April the House was finally adjourned until 24 October.
Once the recess had begun Marvell was free to write again to Will at Bordeaux. He had been using as postman Edward Nelthorpe, a banker who operated in partnership with his cousin Richard Thompson, both Yorkshiremen connected to Marvell and important players in the tortuous story of his final days. Nelthorpe’s son, Robert, was Popple’s clerk at Bordeaux. Once again, Marvell has more gossip for Will, in particular ‘an extraordinary Thing done’:
The King, about ten a Clock, took Boat, with Lauderdale only, and two ordinary Attendants, and rowed awhile as towards the Bridge, but soon turned back to the Parliament Stairs, and so went up into the House of Lords, and took his Seat. Almost all of them were amazed, but all seemed so; and the Duke of York especially was very much surprized. Being sat, he told them it was a Privilege he claimed from his Ancestors to be present at their Deliberations.6
The King’s tactic was to surprise and undermine the Duke of York’s influence in the Lords. Marvell interpreted it as another sign of the times being out of joint: ‘It is true that this has been done long ago,’ he told Will, ‘but it is now so old, that it is new, and so disused that at any other, but so bewitched a Time, as this, it would have been looked on as a high Usurpation, and Breach of Privilege.’ By these high-handed acts and gestures, Charles was signalling to Parliament that he was not their creature and could do as he pleased. He was reported to have said that what quickly became established as his regular visits to the Lords were ‘better than going to a Play’. On the London stage this year the plays of Dryden and Aphra Behn were being performed, the theatres – closed by the Puritans in 1642 – having now been fully restored. The King’s next move was to persuade the Lords to send down a ‘proviso’ to the Commons ‘that would have restored Him to all civil or eclesiastical Prerogatives which his Ancestors had enjoyed at any Time since the Conquest’. Marvell was horrified at this despotic impudence, telling Will: ‘There was never so compendious a Piece of absolute universal Tyranny.’ The Commons ‘made them ashamed
of it’ however and the Lords withdrew the proviso. For Marvell this was a serious blow to the reputation of Parliament. ‘We are all venal Cowards,’ he wrote in despair. ‘What Plots of State will go on in this Interval I know not.’ The court intriguers would take advantage of Parliament not sitting from April until October to pursue their plotting and caballing. The King’s favourite sister, Henriette, Duchess of Orleans, a Catholic like his brother, was reported to be in Canterbury during the French King’s progress through Flanders. ‘There will doubtless be Family Counsels then,’ observed Marvell, who suspected, like many of his fellow countrymen, that the King was thinking of divorce because he had been given no heir. ‘Some talk of a French Queen to be then invented for our King … The King disavows it; yet he has sayed in Publick, he knew not why a Woman might not be divorced for Barrenness, as a Man for Impotency.’ Alarm at the slide towards royal arrogance if not despotism was inseparable from fears about secret treatying with Catholic powers.
Around this time, a poem called ‘The Kinges Vowes’ was circulating, anonymously, though it has been attributed tentatively to Marvell. Later additions have made dating and attribution still more complicated. As with so many of the doubtful poems in the Marvell canon there is a strong incentive to discard poems that are palpably not up to the standard of his best, but poor quality alone cannot justify exclusion. Some flavour of both content and poetic quality can be taken from the following excerpt:
I will have a fine Parliament allwayes to Friend,
That shall furnish me Treasure as fast as I spend;
But when they will not, they shall be att an end.
I will have as fine Bishops as were ere made with hands,
With consciences flexible to my Commands;
But if they displease me, I will have all their Lands …
I wholly will abandon State affaires,
And pass my Time with Parrasites and Players,
And Visit Nell when I shold be att Prayers.
Whether Marvell’s growing disillusion with the King had reached the pitch where he would want to compose such a crude ballad is not clear. That such a view of the King as a rake and an unscrupulous manipulator of the constitution was circulating is not at all surprising.
Although Parliament was not sitting through the summer, Marvell was still saddled with the continuing business of the Spurn Head lighthouse and the egregious Philip Frowde, who evidently had not been successfully bribed. Marvell wrote to the Brethren of Trinity House about Frowde’s endless manoeuvrings in some exasperation: ‘as farre as I can observe the Gentleman a litle matter makes him much businesse and he seems to me one of those who thinke it the greatest point of wisdome to make the most scruples’.7 In the middle of June Marvell described him angrily as ‘so various & fickle in handling this businesse all along’8 that he longed for them to find a way of bringing the business to an end. Perhaps out of gratitude for his heroic efforts with the insufferable Frowde, the Wardens of Trinity House now sent him a present of a Yorkshire salmon.
19
Our Mottly Parliament
Thus whilst the King of France with powerfull Armes
Frightens all Christendome with fresh Alarms,
Wee in our Glorious Bacchanals dispose
The humble fate of a Plebeian nose.1
On 24 October 1670 Parliament resumed after its long adjournment. It began, unsurprisingly, with a demand from the King for money. He told a House oblivious of the secret clauses of the Treaty of Dover that it was vital for British defences to be kept up to the mark, given the military build-up both of the King of France and of the United Provinces. The recent duties on wine had not generated the expected amount of revenue and, since 1660, the navy had been costing £500,000 a year. On top of this the King had many debts, and had to strengthen the navy, in part to be able to offer protection to the Mediterranean trade. His demand, in short, was for £800,000 and the paying off of all his debts before Christmas. Into Marvell’s scrupulously neutral tone when reporting all this to Hull there enters just a shadow of irony.
The necessity of raising all this money compelled Parliament to propose various duties on drink and other commodities and they were not especially welcome to the Hull merchants. Duties on foreign imports such as tobacco were also proposed, a shilling per hundred was put on figs and prunes, five shillings on a barrel of foreign soap, and similar impositions on a host of goods such as nutmeg, cinnamon, mace and cloves. A little later in the session duties would be imposed on foreign imports, and an inventory made ‘of all the French curiositys & trinkets of which our people are so new fangled’2 so that punitive duties could be imposed on them. Marvell seems to have been surprised at the readiness of the House to agree to what would be seen in the country as fairly onerous taxes, simply in order to ‘gratify his Majestyes utmost expectation’.3 Nor, in reporting all this, had he lost his odd caution and secretiveness, warning the Corporation yet again to treat his letters as confidential: ‘For I reckon your bench to be all but as one person: whereas others might chance either not to understand or to put an ill construction upon this openness of my writing & simplicity of my expression.’ On reflection, he added: ‘This perhaps is needlesse.’ Given the prevailing caution surrounding accounts of the doings of Parliament – Arlington, for example, had ordered that the King’s recent speeches requesting supply be not printed – the anonymous satires circulating in London may be better understood as a safety valve, letting off dissent and criticism.
As well as caution downright suppression featured in Marvell’s Hull letters. On Monday 21 November he spoke in the House in defence of the dissenter Hayes, who had recently been arrested, but there is no mention of it – as was the case with all his previous speeches – in his correspondence.4 He would not speak again in the House until 1677. With his nephew, however, he was always eloquent and Marvell’s letter to Will Popple of 28 November is the nearest we have anywhere in his writing to an endearment, a personal tenderness. ‘I need not tell you I am always thinking of you,’5 wrote the fond bachelor uncle. His news was that the nonconformists had not been cowed by the Conventicle Act: ‘To say Truth, they met in numerous open Assemblys, without any Dread of Government.’ The trained bands in London or the local militia nonetheless ‘harassed and abused’ the dissenters, killing several Quakers. Marvell mentioned the two dissenters Hayes and Jekill who, during one of these clashes, had been picked out of the crowd at random and made an example of, but did not refer to his Parliamentary intervention on their behalf a week earlier. He reported, too, the recent case of the Old Bailey jury who had refused to be intimidated by a capricious and reactionary judge in the trial of the two Quakers William Penn and William Mead and who were committed to Newgate Prison for acquitting the two men. Their defiance has become legendary and today a memorial tablet in the Old Bailey records their courage. In Marvell’s account there is little doubt of what he thought of the episode:
The Jury not finding them guilty, as the Recorder and Mayor would have had them, they were kept without Meat or Drink some three Days, till almost starved, but would not alter their Verdict; so fined and imprisoned. There is a Book out which relates all the Passages, which were very pertinent, of the Prisoners, but prodigiously barbarous by the Mayor and Recorder. The Recorder, among the rest, commended the Spanish Inquisition, saying it would never be well till we had something like it.
Marvell’s frank letter contains no trace of his former conventional loyalty to the monarch, who had been pressing the House hard for his money. ‘The House was thin and obsequious,’ he wrote, adding that when the supply was approved it was with little enthusiasm, ‘few Affirmatives, rather a Silence as of men ashamed and unwilling’. With judges openly advocating the desirability of a Spanish Inquisition to root out dissent, and a Parliament in the King’s pocket, these would indeed seem, to Marvell, dark days for English liberty. ‘There is like to be a terrible Act of Conventicles,’ he concluded.
Not merely did Marvell decline all general
political opinions in his Hull letters, but he never sought any from his correspondents, so his letter to the Corporation on 17 December is unique in suddenly posing the question: ‘What is your opinion at Hull of the bill from the Lords for general naturalization of all forainers that shall take the oaths of allegeance & Supremacy?’6 In the surviving letters this was the first and last time he made such an inquiry. The session that came to an end at Christmas had been a long and gruelling one, as Marvell admitted to the York merchant Edward Thompson, to whom he wrote on the same day, saying he was ‘tired out with sitting daily till nine a clock’.7
When the House returned in January 1671 there was nothing in the political situation to raise Marvell’s spirits. ‘The Court is at the highest Pitch of Want and Luxury, and the People full of Discontent,’8 he reported to Will Popple. Ten years on from the high hopes of the Restoration, all he could see was corruption, extravagance and the erosion of civil liberty. Possibly around this time he wrote the satirical poem ‘Further Advice to a Painter’, which begins:
Painter once more thy Pencell reassume,
And draw me in one Scene London and Rome,
There holy Charles, here good Aurelius Sate,
Weeping to see their Sonns degenerate.
The present King’s father, Charles I, is imagined looking down in dismay on his son’s degenerate reign. The zoom lens then moves in on Parliament itself and its obnoxious (to Marvell) Speaker, Sir Edward Turner ‘Whose life does scarce one Generous Action own’. Sir Thomas Clifford, Sir John Duncombe, and Ashley Cooper, the Treasury commissioners, are represented as ‘This great triumvirate that can devide/The spoyls of England’ and Secretary of State Arlington is painted as holding a drunken meeting of the Council of State: ‘Our mighty Masters in a warme debate;/Capacious Bowles with Lusty wine repleat’. The poet mocks – and in general this poem does little more than mock, a weakness of the ‘painter’ genre, which often uses the instruction conceit to mask a lack of structural dynamic – ‘the five recanters of the Hous/That aime at mountains and bring forth a Mous’. This was a reference to the five defectors from the country party whom Marvell had mentioned in a recent letter to Will: Sir Robert Howard, Sir Edward Seymour, Sir Richard Temple, Sir Robert Carr and Gervase Hollis (or possibly his son, Sir Frescheville).
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