World Enough and Time

by Nicholas Murray

  Parker follows Marvell’s polemical method of The Tendentious Curriculum Vitae, mocking him, in passages already quoted, as ‘an Hunger-starved Whelp of a Country Vicar’ whose inherited distaste for church hierarchies makes him go for any clergyman ‘with all the rage of a Phanatick Blood-Hound’. He refers to him as ‘an Urchin’, a ‘boy’ and a ‘young man’ as if he were dealing with a raw provincial youth, not a fifty-year-old MP. He blames Marvell’s coarse language and scurrility on his ‘first unhappy Education among Boat-Swains and Cabin-Boys, whose phrases you learn’d in your Childhood’, that rough education being topped up by consorting with ‘the Boys and Lackeys at Charing-Cross or in Lincoln’s Inn Fields’. Parker hammers away in this fashion for over 500 pages before concluding:

  So that if you must be scribling, betake your self to your own proper trade of Lampoons and Ballads, and be not so unadvised as to talk in publique of such matters as are above the reach of your understanding, you cannot touch Sacred things without prophaning them.11

  Parker may have stung Marvell when he refers to his ‘juvenile Essays of Ballads, Poesies, Anagrams and Acrostics’ (either Parker is misinformed or some interesting lost items of the Marvell canon are being alluded to here). Endorsing the view that Marvell’s true poetic output belonged to the earlier part of his life, the passage goes on to refer to the poet’s apparent desertion by his Muse: ‘your Papers lying useless by you at this time when your Muse began to tire and set’.

  Parker, though he would be silenced by the second part of Marvell’s Rehearsal later in the year, made one more return to his opponent in a posthumously published work (he died, it is said, after a convulsive fit at being instructed by James II to admit nine more Catholic Fellows to Magdalen College, Oxford, where he was President in the 1680s). This was his De Rebus sui Temporis Commentarium (1726), published in an English translation the following year by Thomas Newlin as Bishop Parker’s History of His Own Time. It contains the same blend of personal abuse and slander and alleges that Marvell was close to the Cabal, who met ‘at a tavern at the sign of King Henry the Eighth, against the Temple … when they went abroad, they distinguish’d themselves by a green ribbon round their hats, as a badge of their society’.12 Still nursing his resentment, he went on:

  Amongst these lewd Revilers, the lewdest was one whose name was Marvel. As he had liv’d in all manner of wickedness from his youth, so being of a singular impudence and petulancy of nature, he exercised the province of a Satyrist, for the use of the faction, being not so much a Satyrist thro’ quickness of wit, as sowerness of temper: of but indifferent parts, except it were in the talents of railing and malignity.

  Against the evidence that Marvell, at least until the mid-1670s, was not, in spite of his mounting disillusion, a serious opponent of the King (who had, after all, eased publication of The Rehearsal), Parker makes quite a specific allegation that has no other independent corroboration:

  In all Parliaments he was an enemy to the King’s affairs, being one of those Conspirators, who being sixty in number, of the remains of the Rebellion, had bound themselves by oath, from the beginning, to give all the trouble they could to the King, and especially never to vote for granting any taxes.13

  Parker alleges that Marvell, known to be one of this club of sixty, was treated by his fellow MPs ‘with shame and disgrace’, making it difficult for him to participate in debates ‘for they were hardly ever suffer’d to speak without being hiss’d at; and our Poet could not speak without a sound basting’. Parker concluded that Marvell continuously represented the interests of this secret group of ‘Sectaries’ and that his defence of toleration and dissent was no more than a desire to advance the fortunes of his group. ‘Whether the Conspirators aim’d at tyranny, Marvel himself was certainly a proper person to give testimony, who if he was not their Secretary, was yet admitted into their inmost counsels, for the sake of his ancient friendship with them.’ In his earlier writings Parker had perfected this mode of slanderous insinuation, grounded perhaps in something more than gossip (he clearly knew something about Marvell and his background), but vitiated by the lurid tones of the conspiracy theorist. There is just sufficient mystery in some of Marvell’s political dealings to allow for the possibility that his politics may have been more subtle and dark than they appear in his correspondence, but Parker is the most prejudiced witness of all, and one with obvious motives for wanting to allege the worst about his opponent.

  Throughout 1673 replies appeared to The Rehearsal. Few of these were of great value in advancing an argument that even the two chief antagonists had allowed to dissolve into personal abuse. The poet Richard Leigh, a young Oxford graduate, published The Transproser Rehears’d: or the Fifth Act of Mr Bayes’s Play. It picks up the abusive tone of the controversy, rehashing many of Parker’s gibes, and it may be no more than this pamphlet convention that is behind its insinuations of sexual oddity in Marvell. In a passage on ‘his Personal Character’ Leigh seems to be implying some anatomical sexual deficiency: ‘Neither would I trumpet the Truth too loudly in your ears, because (’tis said) you are of a delicate Hearing, and a great enemy to noise; insomuch that you are disturb’d with the tooting of a sow-gelder’s Horn.’ A little later, Leigh adds: ‘you may allow him to be an Allegorical Lover at least’.14 And he concludes with a piece of doggerel that implies some unnatural acts between Marvell and Milton:

  O marvellous Fate, O Fate full of marvel;

  That Nol’s Latin Pay two Clerks should deserve ill!

  Hiring a Gelding, and Milton the Stallion;

  His Latin was gelt, and turn’d pure Italian.

  The anonymous S’Too Him Bayes or Some Observations upon the Humour of Writing Rehearsal’s Transpros’d was also published at Oxford and is of even less value, adopting the same dreary blow-by-blow approach of dissecting Marvell’s pamphlet and abusing him in similar terms to those employed by Parker. In a revealing comment that lays bare what was the real argument for many, the anonymous author writes: ‘Thou art the imprudent’st Champion for Forein Jurisdiction or Toleration (chuse you which) that ever I knew.’15 Edmund Hickeringill was another responder, who described himself as ‘merrily disposed’ in Gregory, Father-Greybeard, with his Vizard Off: or, News from the Cabal in Some Reflexions Upon a Late Pamphlet Entituled the Rehearsal Transpros’d. Like the others he indicts the anonymous author for his impudence and ‘fashionable Drolling’ but the new note is the attempt to link Marvell (who, of course, is not named but Hickeringill suggests his name through laboured puns) with a ‘Cabal of wits’ and a ‘company in a coffee-house’. But his principal charge is that the author is a ‘Fanatick’ who has lost his reason in obsessive railing: ‘Name but bayes, he cryes out (like that Hypocondriack that fancied he had Noah’s flood in his belly, and if he piss’d should drown the world).’16 And finally, the anonymous author of A Common Place-Book Out of the Rehearsal Transpros’d Digested Under These Several Heads: viz His Logick, Chronology, Wit, Geography, Anatomy, History, Loyalty attempts to pick apart Marvell’s logical errors and inconsistencies, while conceding that ‘my Author has shewed a kind of Apothegmatical short Wit’.17

  He is particularly angered by Marvell’s censure of Archbishop Laud for helping to bring about the Civil War: ‘Does it (think you) become the Son of a Vicar to prate thus of an Archbishop?’ Marvell is dismissed, in terms that suggest the author was firmly in the orthodox church and court camp, as ‘a little Fellow, who had formerly been a whiffling Clerk to a Usurper, and afterwards turn’d Broker for all Phanatick Ware’. He concludes with an interesting alternative analysis of the causes of the English Civil War: ‘A wanton Pride of the People, bred out of Prosperity and long ease, infected with a touch of Levelling Principles, deriv’d over to their Politicks from the New Models of Church Government.’

  The controversy was now nearly over. In the autumn Marvell would publish the Second Part of The Rehearsal, after which his critics would be silenced.

  23

  A Shoulder of Mu
tton

  I intend by the end of the next week to betake my selfe some fiue miles of to injoy the spring & my privacy.1

  On 3 May 1673, Marvell wrote to Sir Edward Harley at Brampton Bryan in Herefordshire to bring him up to date with metropolitan gossip and share his thoughts about the Parker controversy. Sir Edward, father of the rather more famous Robert Harley, 1st Earl of Oxford, had been Governor of Dunkirk in 1660–61 and had opposed its sale to the French. Although he had not been a supporter of Cromwell, he belonged to the country party in the Cavalier Parliament and opposed anti-nonconformist legislation, and would naturally be in sympathy with Marvell. In the letter, Marvell revealed that he had been on ‘a sudden journy to Stanton-Harcourt’,2 the seat, near Oxford, of his friend Sir Philip Harcourt, the MP with whom Marvell was, in 1677, to be involved in an incident in the House of Commons which his enemies tried to exploit. Marvell recounted for Harley’s benefit the appearance of S’Too Him Bayes which he thought was written ‘by one Hodges’. Marvell was clearly well informed about the progress of the controversy and what was being planned by his opponents for he wrote: ‘Gregory Gray-Beard is not yet out. Dr Parker will be out the next weeke.’ In some way Marvell had managed to see the first 330 pages of Parker’s work, enough to convince him that it was ‘the rudest book, one or other, that ever was publisht (I may say), since the first invention of printing’. Although it handled him roughly, he told Harley, ‘yet I am not at all amated [cast down] by it’, but he did want to consult his friends about the best strategy for replying to Parker, and indeed whether it was advisable to do so at all. In the end, he concluded that it was right to reply but, with his customary circumspection and subtlety, he asked them to maintain the pretence for the time being that no answer was deserved by ‘so scurrilous a book’. To Harley he disclosed his real intentions:

  However I will for mine own private satisfaction forthwith draw up an answer that shall haue as much of spirit and solidity in it as my ability will afford & the age we liue in will indure. I am (if I may say it with reverence) drawn in, I hope by a good Providence, to intermeddle in a noble and high argument wch therefore by how much it is above my capacity I shall use the more industry not to disparage it.3

  But for the time being, Marvell declared, he would sequester himself some five miles off – presumably a reference to his retreat at Highgate – ‘to injoy the spring & my privacy’. Should Harley wish to contact him, he was instructed to send his letter to Richard Thompson, the businessman with whom Marvell would later become involved in a complicated financial affair. The letter was to be left with Thompson ‘at the Signe of the Golden Cock in Wooll-Church Market’.

  The following month, Thomas Osborne, Earl of Danby, was appointed Lord Treasurer. Some time after this, possibly when Marvell had returned to London in the autumn to oversee publication of the second part of The Rehearsal, an incident is said to have occurred. In Marvell biography it has acquired the status of legend but it has no corroboration whatsoever except in tradition. ‘A Life of Andrew Marvell,’ wrote Grosart drily in 1872, ‘would be as imperfect without it, as a history of King Alfred without the neatherd’s cottage and the burnt cakes.’4 It would be churlish to omit it here. Collating the various accounts,5 the following playlet suggests itself:

  The Incorruptible Member

  The scene is the simple bachelor lodgings of Andrew Marvell, Member of Parliament for Hull, on the morning after the poet and politician has been honoured with an evening’s entertainment by the King. Charmed by Marvell’s easy manners, sound judgement, and keen wit, and delighted to have met the man who settled the hash of the egregious opponent of his policy of toleration, Samuel Parker, the King has despatched no less a figure than the Lord Treasurer, Danby, to visit Marvell. The encounter takes place in Marvell’s second-floor rooms in a court near the Strand, probably in Maiden Lane, Covent Garden.

  MARVELL: (Looking up in surprise as DANBY rather abruptly bursts into the room from the dark and narrow staircase up which he had fumbled, but nonetheless greeting his visitor with a smile.) My Lord, have you not mistaken your way?

  DANBY: (Bowing gracefully.) No, not since I have found Mr Marvell. For my purpose is to bring a message from His Majesty, who wishes, on account of the high opinion he has formed of your merits, to do you some signal service.

  MARVELL: (With an ironic pleasantry.) I think that His Majesty has it not in his power to serve me. (Noticing Danby’s consternation at this last remark.) Forgive me, my Lord, but I know the nature of courts too well not to be sensible that whoever is distinguished by a Prince’s favour is expected to vote in his interest.

  DANBY: But, sir, His Majesty only desires to know whether there be any place at court you would accept.

  MARVELL: I could accept nothing with honour, for either I must prove ungrateful to the King in voting against him, or false to my country in giving in to the measures of the court. Therefore, the only favour I beg of His Majesty is that he would esteem me as dutiful a subject as any he has, and one who acts more in his proper interest by refusing his offers than if he had accepted them.

  (DANBY goes to the door, but, turning back at the last minute, addresses MARVELL confidentially.)

  DANBY: His Majesty requests that you accept this sum of 1,000 guineas. (Exit, the Lord Treasurer, having slipped the Treasury order for the amount into MARVELL’s hand at the last moment. Looking down at the piece of paper in his hand, MARVELL rushes out on to the stair to recall DANBY who is now on his way back down to his waiting carriage.)

  MARVELL: My Lord! I request another moment.

  DANBY: (Having now re-entered the room.) Very well, what is it?

  MARVELL: Surely, my good Lord, you do not mean to treat me ludicrously by these munificent offers, which seem to interpret a poverty on my part? Pray, my Lord Treasurer, do these apartments wear in the least the air and mark of need? And as for my living, that is plentiful and good, which you shall have from the mouth of the servant. (Turns to his servant boy.) Jack, child, what had I for dinner yesterday?

  JACK: Don’t you remember, sir? You had the shoulder of mutton that you ordered me to bring from a woman in the market.

  MARVELL: Very right, child. What have I for dinner today?

  JACK: Don’t you know, sir, that you bid me lay by the sweet blade-bone to broil?

  MARVELL: ’Tis so, very right, child, go away. (Turning to DANBY.) My Lord, do you hear that? Andrew Marvell’s dinner is provided. And when your Lordship makes honourable mention of my cook and my diet, I am sure His Majesty will be too tender in future, to attempt to bribe a man with golden apples who lives so well on the viands of his native country. There’s your piece of paper back. I want it not. I knew the sort of kindness you intended. I live here to serve my constituents; the Ministry may seek men for their purpose; I am not one.

  (Exit DANBY for the last time, smiling at the wit and high principle of the poet he has left behind.)

  MARVELL: Jack, hasten along to my bookseller, Mr Nathaniel Ponder, at the sign of the Peacock in Chancery Lane near Fleet Street, and tell him that I must needs borrow a guinea of him.

  (Curtain.)

  The moral drawn by Marvell’s eighteenth- and nineteenth-century biographers was that the poet was of unimpeachable principle. Like Diogenes in his barrel, informing Alexander the Great that the only favour the most powerful man in the world could perform for him was to stand out of his light, Marvell was beyond the reach of worldly suasion. ‘No Roman virtue ever surpassed this temperance,’ intoned Edward Thompson in 1776, ‘nor can gold bribe a mind that is not debauched with luxury.’6 Like the anecdote of his brandishing in triumph the half-crown that sufficed for his dinner ‘at a great ordinary in the Strand’, this story is part of a tradition of Puritan hagiography of Marvell. In his life of the poet in 1833, Hartley Coleridge sensibly described the latter story as: ‘A piece of dry English humour mistaken for a stoical exhibition of virtue.’7

  Life for Marvell at this time was perhaps not quite so easy
and pleasant as these amusing tales imply. His polemic had made him enemies, including the ‘J.G.’ already mentioned (possibly John Gelson, who was known to have been acting as a spy for Secretary of State Williamson in Holland the previous year and who was the brother of the secretary to the Bishop of Oxford), who left a letter for Marvell at the house of a friend on 3 November. It was a death threat informing Marvell: ‘If thou darest to Print or Publish any Lie or Libel against Doctor Parker, by the Eternal God I will cut thy Throat.’8 Fearlessly, Marvell issued his final riposte to Parker, the second part of The Rehearsal, at the end of the year, stating boldly on the title page that it had been occasioned by two letters: the first being Parker’s Reproof (said here to be ‘by a nameles Author’) and the second the letter of J.G. For the first time, Marvell appended his own name to the pamphlet. Six months after Parker defied him to ‘do your worst. You know the Press is open’9 Marvell answered the challenge.