That which astonishes me, and only raises my indignation is, that of all sorts of Men, this kind of Clergy should always be, and have been for the most precipitate, brutish, and sanguinary Counsels. The former Civil War cannot make them wise, nor his Majesties Happy Return, good natured; but they are still for running things up unto the same extreams. The softeness of the Universities where they have been bred, the gentleness of Christianity in which they have been nurtured, hath but exasperated their nature; and they seem to have contracted no Idea of wisdom, but what they learnt at School, the Pedantry of Whipping.11
Certainly, Parker’s clerical garb guarantees him no respect from Marvell who embarks on a mocking summary of Parker’s curriculum vitae. In a sly hint that Parker may have been impotent, he writes: ‘I do not hear for all this that he had ever practised upon the Honour of the Ladies, but that he preserved alwayes the Civility of a Platonic Knight-Errant.’ Brushing aside Parker’s intellectual credentials, Marvell concludes that very early on in his career: ‘He lost all the little remains of his understanding, and his Cerebellum was so dryed up that there was no more brains in a walnut and both their Shells were alike thin and brittle.’ In short: ‘All that rationally can be gathered from what he saith, is, that the Man is mad.’ In matters of Church discipline, Parker was more obsessed with rooting out dissent and enforcing authority than with saving souls. He ‘made the process of Loyalty more difficult than that of Salvation’. Marvell demonstrates his own contrasting commitment to toleration by stating: ‘I think it ought to be highly penal for any man to impose other conditions upon his Majesties good Subjects than the King expects or the Law requires.’ Parker’s own life, Marvell contends, is characterised by oppressive authoritarianism towards people with whom he disagrees, having ‘fed all his life with Vipers instead of Lampreys’. He implies that some of his savagery towards dissenters may be the product of the unnatural reaction of an apostate towards his former associates. By contrast to Parker, Marvell praises the generosity and toleration of the King in bringing in the Act of Oblivion, which, like a truth and reconciliation commission, drew a line under the antagonisms of ‘the late Combustions’. Unfortunately, the Church of England could not learn from this example: ‘For, though I am sorry to speak it, yet it is a sad truth, that the Animosities and Obstinacy of some of the Clergy have in all Ages been the greatest Obstacle to the Clemency, Prudence and good Intentions of Princes, and the Establishment of their Affairs.’ But perhaps the most damning indictment of Parker is provided by his own words, in the preface and in the Discourse, which Marvell (somewhat loosely) quotes back at him, showing that Parker believed in the absolute right of the monarch to lay down the law in matters of religion: ‘The Government of Religion was vested in princes by an antecedent right to Christ.’ One sentence in particular goes to the heart of the fundamental illiberalism of Parker’s position: ‘’tis better to err with Authority than to be in the right against it: not only because the danger of a little error (and so it is if it be disputable) is outweighed by the importance of the great duty of Obedience’. Not merely free thought but morality must be sacrificed to the imperious demands of obedience, in Parker’s eyes, when he writes: ‘Princes may with less hazard give liberty to men’s Vices and Debaucheries than their Consciences.’ Marvell confessed to a concern at the low moral tone of much Restoration living, ‘at such a time, when there is so general a depravation of Manners’. In spite of this reverence for absolutism, however, Parker does not, in Marvell’s view, show sufficient respect for royal authorities because he ‘thinks himself fit to be their Governour’.
When Marvell finally reaches a consideration of the preface itself he finds there ‘scarce anything but slender trifling unworthy of a Logician, and beastly railing unbecoming any man, much more a Divine’. He accuses Parker of wild inconsistencies and impossible logic: ‘In all his Writings he doth so confound terms, he leaps cross, he hath more doubles (nay triples and quadruples) than any Hare, so that he thinks himself secure of the Hunters.’ Coming at last to the point of the preface, Marvell defends the King’s policy of toleration against the oppressive conformity Parker would prefer him to practise, in a passage already quoted above, that salutes the King’s Declaration as the augury of a period of ‘mutual Felicity’ between ruler and believer. In a brief intermission from raillery, Marvell also praises John Hales, his old friend from Eton days, as an exemplar of a more generous spirit in the Church of England, who suffered in the Civil War and exhibited ‘the native simplicity of a Christian spirit’. But there is no escaping the essential formlessness of Marvell’s polemical plan. He admits as much when he describes, about three-quarters of the way through the book, his random method of picking up on Parker’s shortcomings: ‘After this I walked a great way through bushes and brambles before I could find another Flower: but then I met with two upon one stalk.’ This is, too often, how it strikes the reader: as a lazy way of proceeding, leafing through Parker’s words in order to happen on some passage that can be held up to ridicule, before moving on to pluck off another dead-head. At the same time, however, the quotation demonstrates Marvell’s habitually concrete and effective imagery, which is what, in the end, sustains the reader’s interest.
In charging Parker with raising false fears about the threat posed by the return of popery, Marvell is on stronger ground, although this was a cause he would take up himself later in the decade. He regarded this argument against toleration as irresponsible: ‘he is an Enemy to the State, whoever shall foment such discourses without any likelyhood or danger’. He reminds Parker of the role of the clergy in whipping up anti-Catholic feeling in the wake of the Declaration: ‘For I suppose you cannot be ignorant that some of your superiors of your Robe did, upon the publishing that Declaration, give the Word, and deliver Orders through their Ecclesiastical Camp, to beat up the Pulpit-drums against Popery.’
In one of those rare autobiographical passages in his writing, Marvell reveals at one point that he used to play picquet with a clergyman whom he describes as ‘a Dignitary of Lincoln’ (possibly Francis Drope, prebendary of Lincoln, or William Reresby, prebendary of Brampton).12 This clergyman was ‘very well known and remembred in the Ordinaries’ and seems to have cheated at the game by making some form of hand signal, an experience that did nothing to diminish Marvell’s suspicion of the clergy. As a result of this, ‘of all the money that ever I was cheated of in my life, none ever vexed me so, as what I lost by his occasion. And ever since, I have born a great grudge against their fingring of anything that belongs to me.’ In order to press home this notion of clerical cupidity and crookedness, he then recounts the story of the notorious highwayman of the reign of Charles I who practised his profession near Hampton Court dressed up as a bishop. Marvell implies strongly that the principal motive for the hostility shown towards the Puritans by the Church of England was that they had deprived the clergy of their pre-Reformation luxury by obstructing ‘that laziness and splendor which they injoyed under the Popes Supremacy, and the Gentry had (sacrilegiously) divided the Abbey-Lands [as at Nun Appleton], and other fat morsels of the Church at the Dissolution, and now was the time to be revenged on them’.
After accusing Parker in sum of ‘making all Religion ridiculous’, Marvell concludes by saying he wrote the pamphlet because he was ‘offended at the presumption and arrogance’ of Parker’s style. He adds, however, one more interesting detail, confessing that Parker’s habit of inveighing ‘against the Trading-part of the Nation’ was an added goad. Throughout his life, Marvell remained loyal to the commercial culture of Hull, with which he was connected by family ties, childhood memories, and professional responsibility. The fierce anticlericalism of The Rehearsal was intrinsic to his notion of English patriotism, to the defence of hard-working, anti-Establishment, provincial society to whom pompous and self-advancing prelates like Parker were an unwanted burden. The immediate battle, however, was not yet over. Parker would be unlikely to let this witty onslaught go unanswered. Lacking the sel
f-knowledge to realise that it would do his reputation no good, he began to prepare an immediate riposte, but not before others had jumped into the fray. Marvell’s goal of silencing Parker would not be attained for at least another year.
22
Rosemary and Bays
And if we take away some simpering phrases, and timorous introductions, your Collection will afford as good Precedents for Rebellion and King-Killing as any we meet with in the writings of J.M. in defence of the Rebellion and the Murther of the King.
Samuel Parker1
On 6 November 1672, with The Rehearsal having been well launched and his enemies sharpening their quills to reply, Marvell received one of his regular gifts from Hull, a 32-gallon barrel of the local autumn ale. Though Aubrey alluded to Marvell’s alleged habit of solitary drinking ‘to refresh his spirits, and exalt his Muse’,2 little activity on the part of his Muse was noticeable at this time. Several more verse satires were to come but nothing could for a moment compare with what he had already produced. His literary energies at this time were focused entirely on prose polemic. But, vigorous and scurrilous as the pamphlet wars could be, his clashes with Parker were not confined to the page. The two men had first met at Milton’s house in London shortly after the Restoration – an acquaintanceship Parker would be keen to forget – but now, in the wake of Marvell’s onslaught, they met in a London street. Parker, in the account of the incident first recounted by Thompson in 1776,3 ‘rudely attempted to take the wall’ – as we might say ‘elbowed him into the gutter’, an even less savoury place in Restoration London than it would be today. Marvell, always ready to look after himself in a physical encounter, placed his foot and arm in such a way that Parker fell into the gutter. Leaning over him as he lay sprawled in the dirt, Marvell said ‘with his usual pleasantry’ to the clergyman: ‘Lie there for a son of a whore.’ Parker later complained to the Bishop of Rochester, who employed him as a chaplain at the time, about this treatment. The Bishop summoned Marvell, who asked politely why he had been called. The Bishop replied that it was his ‘abusive usage’ of his chaplain that had given offence, and in particular his ‘foul language’. Unless Marvell made adequate satisfaction, the Bishop would prosecute and ‘he would see justice done Dr Parker’. Marvell coolly replied that the Bishop’s chaplain had been ‘impudent’ in demanding the wall from a member of the House of Commons. Besides, Marvell added wittily, ‘he had only given him the reproachful name he had given himself’. Perplexed, the bishop demanded to know Marvell’s meaning and the following dialogue ensued:
‘Have you not, my lord Bishop, such a book which he hath lately written?’
‘Yes.’
‘Please to produce it. There, my lord, look over that page of the preface!’
‘Well, what of this?’
‘Why, my lord, does he not say he is “a true son of his mother the church of England”?’
‘Well, and what of that?’
‘Read further on, my lord: “The church of England has spawned two bastards, the Presbyterians and the Congregationals”. Ergo, my lord, he expressly declares that he is the son of a whore.’
‘You are very witty, indeed, Mr Marvell but let me intreat you in future time to show more reverence to the cloth.’
That Marvell declined to obey the Bishop’s injunction is evident from his subsequent writings. Six printed replies to The Rehearsal appeared rapidly to provoke him further. The first of these was Rosemary & Bayes: or Animadversions Upon a Treatise Called, The Rehearsal Transprosed. In a Letter to a Friend in the Country. This short, twenty-two-page pamphlet was the first reply and must have been published within weeks of Marvell’s work appearing, because it is dated 1672. The anonymous author was Henry Stubbe, described by Wood as ‘the most noted Latinist and Grecian of his age … a singular mathematician, and thoroughly read in all poetical matters, councils, ecclesiastical and profane histories’.4 Yet in spite of these accomplishments, Wood went on, Stubbe ‘became a ridicule, and undervalued by sober and knowing scholars’. He was an intimate friend of the political philosopher Thomas Hobbes. His reply, ‘written in haste’ in the form of a letter to a friend in the country, reassures that person on its first page: ‘Honoured Sir, Do not wonder that you so little understand the Rehearsal Transpros’d; I believe the Author himself never did.’5 Stubbe’s attempt at a riposte is, for the most part, footling and pedantic although he does not set out automatically to defend Parker and concedes: ‘There are in it several Periods, which shew the Author to have had some Intervals of SENSE and WIT’, though these are such as ‘you may find in the Harrangues of Enthusiasts, and Madmen’. Stubbe claimed that Parker was not generally approved of: ‘As to the Church of England few of them approved the Style of Mr Bayes, and fewer his Doctrines: He was in the Pulpit declaimed against as the young Leviathan.’ But he feared that if the clergy were held up to ridicule and were ‘inodiated’ civil peace would be threatened. Stubbe concluded by rejecting Marvell’s analysis of the origins of the Civil War, arguing that no single cause could be adduced unless it were that ‘the Lawyers (finding themselves too numerous, odious, burthensome and disrespected by the people) would indear themselves to the Nation, and make work for their profession, by seeming Assertions of the Laws, Rights and freedom of the Subject’.
Meanwhile, the government was considering its reaction to Marvell’s talked-about work. On 23 January 1673, the Secretary of State, Henry Coventry, called in the Surveyor of the Press, Sir Roger L’Estrange, to find out how this unlicensed work had managed to escape the censor. L’Estrange, under examination, told Coventry that he ‘neither knew, nor heard of’6 The Rehearsal until the first impression had been distributed by the printer, whom he assumed to be Nathaniel Ponder. L’Estrange advised that ‘if the Book were Questioned, there were those would Justify it’ and a prosecution of the printer would very probably fail. Nonetheless, the Stationers’ Company officials seized the sheets of a second impression at the printer, behaving with their customary selective zeal. Only about half of the pamphlet literature published between 1662 and 1679 was licensed, because L’Estrange was easily bribed and the Stationers’ Company acted in a wholly arbitrary fashion. Strictly, all ‘seditious’ books (which included anything critical of Church or State) should have been licensed but the printer – probably, from the initials ‘A.B.’, Anne Brewster, widow of the printer for Cromwell’s Council of State and later printer of Marvell’s Account of the Growth of Popery – was one of a number who took advantage of the ineptness of the censors to evolve an efficient system of printing and distribution. Coventry’s examination revealed that L’Estrange had been summoned by the Earl of Anglesey to his house in Drury Lane. On arrival, the Earl made clear that the book had met with approval in the very highest quarters. He told the censor:
Look you, Mr L’Estrange, there is a Book come out … [The Rehearsal] I presume you have seen it. I have spoken to his Majesty about it and the King says he will not have it supprest, for Parker has done him wrong, and this man has done him Right.7
Thus informed by the Earl that ‘the King will have the Book to passe’, L’Estrange accepted instructions to license it, preserving his amour-propre by making some quibbles about one or two passages ‘not fit to be Licensed’. No sooner had Anglesey agreed to this than L’Estrange primly asserted ‘that he did not love to tamper with other mens Copyes, without the Privity and Allowance of the Author’. Anglesey replied with evident impatience that ‘he could not say anything of the Author, but that such alterations might be made without him’ and L’Estrange was sent away to license the book. The Clerk of the Stationers’ Company now announced that he would not enter it. L’Estrange wrote and asked why, ‘saying that he disliked the thing as much as anybody, but being over-ruled he expected the Company’s officer should likewise conform’.8 The clerk was adamant and the book was never entered on the Stationers’ Register.
Events, however, were proceeding quickly and by the time Parker came to register his Reproof to the Re
hearsal Transprosed in March 1673 with the Stationers’ Company – it appeared in May – the political situation had changed significantly. The King had been forced to cancel his Declaration of Indulgence after the Commons had voted it down. Marvell had thus failed in his political aim and Parker was able to turn the tables on him, accusing the poet of being opposed to the will of Parliament. Parker, taking his cue from Marvell, plunges directly ad hominem, rather than addressing the argument, into a tirade of personal abuse, in an attempt to demonstrate to the world, he says, that Marvell’s literary accomplishments, foreign travels, linguistic skills and his ‘being a cunning Gamester’ fail to qualify him ‘to discourse of Conscience and Ecclesiastical Policy’.9 Marvell in fact is ‘a Clown’, ‘a Buffoon’ a ‘Trifler’, and ‘as despicable a Scribbler as ever blotted paper’. Parker claims, however, to have a more serious purpose. What he calls ‘my old War against Faction and Non-conformity’ has been designed to expose ‘that certain and inviolable confederacy that there has always been between Non-conformity and the Good old Cause’.
The history of polemic is generally written by the victors. Although the conventional assumption that Marvell won the argument is justified – for who is Parker to posterity compared with a major poet like Marvell? – it should not be overlooked that here and there, amid the ineffable splutter and bluster, Parker hits home. But, for the most part, Parker conducts himself like a pompous ass, rearing himself up in the opening pages to rebuke Marvell for ‘acosting me in such a clownish and licentious way of writing, as you know to be unsuitable both to the Civility of my Education, and the Gravity of my Profession’. Trying to match his opponent for wit, he claims to have a further aim: ‘to convince the world how little Wit is requisite to prove that you have none at all’. He claims, with some measure of justification, that Marvell makes no serious attempt in The Rehearsal to refute his thesis about the nature of ecclesiastical authority and the proper field of the individual conscience. He accuses his opponent of masking a lack of knowledge and a shortage of theological rigour under a cover of sportive mockery: ‘it is in the nature of some Vermine to be nibbling though they have no Teeth’. Parker also correctly identifies Marvell’s fervent anticlericalism: ‘And if you can but get scent of anything that smells of a Priest, away you run with full Cry and open Mouth.’10
World Enough and Time Page 22
