On 29 October 1674, the King attended a City of London banquet at which the new Lord Mayor, Sir Robert Viner, a prominent goldsmith, was installed. On 18 December the aldermen presented him with the Freedom of the City in a golden box valued at £1,000. The poem ‘Upon his Majesties being made free of the Citty’ satirises the event by representing the King as a feckless and idle apprentice who should not have been honoured by a company of hardworking citizens and merchants. The sheer awfulness of the verse is explained in part by its probable intended use as one of the rough songs sung at the Lord Mayor’s table during the annual festivities in the City:
He spends all his Days
In runing to Plays,
When in his Shop he shou’d be poreing;
And wastes all his Nights
In his constant Delights
Of Revelling, Drinking and Whoreing.
More particularly, the poem makes the direct accusation that Charles ‘still doth advance/The Government of France/With a Wife of Religion Italian’. If this poem is by Marvell it gives a truer picture of his view of the monarchy and its trustworthiness at the end of 1674 than the pious declarations of loyalty in works like The Rehearsal. Sir Robert Viner, before being made Lord Mayor, had presented to the King on his birthday on 29 May 1672 a white marble equestrian statue of his monarch, which he had erected in Stocks Market, the site of the present-day Mansion House, though the statue was later removed to Newby Hall, Ripon, in 1734. The statue was in fact a recycled figure of the King of Poland, John Sobieski, altered to represent Charles. The poem is thought to have been written in the autumn of 1674, after the statue had been covered up for a period of alterations. The poet represents the statue ironically as the tribute of a conquered people to their new master: the City of London wholly defeated by the profligacy of the King. The statue is considered ridiculous and its location in a marketplace appropriate for a King ‘Who the Parliament buys and revenues does sell.’ In an allusion to the retouching, the poet suggests: ‘’tis such a king as no chisel can mend’. Nevertheless ‘though the whole world cannot shew such another,/Yet we’d better by far have him than his brother.’
Another possible Marvell poem of late 1674 or early 1675 is ‘Britannia and Rawleigh’, a poem cast in the form of a dialogue between Britannia and Sir Walter Raleigh. Britannia recounts to Raleigh her abhorrence of the contemporary English court: ‘A Colony of French Possess the Court;/Pimps, Priests, Buffoones i’th privy chamber sport.’ She tells how she has reminded the King of past precedent when England stood up to foreign powers like Spain in Elizabethan times, but the dangerous advisers are leading the King astray: ‘I’th sacred ear Tyrranick Arts they Croak,/Pervert his mind, his good Intencions Choak.’ In spite of Raleigh’s urging to try to bring the King to his senses and dismiss his corrupt courtiers, Britannia protests: ‘Rawleigh, noe more; too long in vain I’ve try’d/The Stuart from the Tyrant to devide.’ Instead she will reject monarchy in favour of republicanism on the Venetian model – a motion that those who accept the attribution of this poem to Marvell believe he also made in the four years of life that remained to him: ‘To the serene Venetian state I’le goe/From her sage mouth fam’d Principles to know.’
That Marvell’s disillusion was affecting his private disposition as well as his public interventions as a politician and anonymous satirist is clear from a letter he wrote to Sir Henry Thompson at the start of 1675. It hints, not for the first time, at his sense of isolation, of solitary uselessness. Thompson’s reluctance to trouble the poet, Marvell says, is ‘the cruellest piece of your Ciuility: to me especially who haue no imployment but idlenesse and who am so oblivious that I should forget mine own name did I not see it sometimes in a friends superscription’.12 Marvell was now fifty-three, with no wife or family or settled property. He had published little except some occasional verses and anonymous satires. His best-known work was The Rehearsal. He was a career politician, mocked by his more patrician colleagues in the House for being dependent on a salary from his provincial electors. His future was to sit in the House and serve Hull – he was just about to take up his pen and thank the burgesses for their annual gift of a barrel of ale – in spite of a deep and growing disillusionment with contemporary politics. Resignation in disgust was not an option, for what alternative career did he have? The most effective role for a writer in politics is to diagnose and to warn. Marvell’s growing sense that the country was being at best lied to, at worst betrayed, would culminate, three years later, in the publication of his pamphlet An Account of the Growth of Popery. Surrounded by these public men with their estates and fine houses and their large families, Marvell had only his meagre lodgings in central London and the fierce integrity that would become the stuff of his legend in later centuries to sustain him. As the news came of the calling of another Parliament in April 1675, after a long proroguing, he would be girding himself up for the thirteenth session of the Cavalier Parliament. He did not expect much from it, but he would not abandon his commitment. ‘I shall not faile to obeye your commands,’13 he promised the Hull Corporation stoically.
25
The Late Embezzlements
Then, England, Rejoyce, thy Redemption draws nigh;
Thy oppression togeather with Kingship shall dye.1
When Parliament resumed on 13 April 1675, members filing into their seats found in their places a mock speech from the throne written by an anonymous hand. It is now considered to be by Marvell, the irony more mordant, the regard for the King more scant than ever before. His Majesty’s Most Gracious Speech to Both Houses of Parliament begins with the King explaining that, though he had always assumed winter to be the best time for Parliamentary business, he has been assured by the Lord Treasurer ‘the spring was the best season for sallads and subsidies’.2 The thirteenth session of the Pensionary Parliament was plainly to be no different from the others: the King would seek money from Parliament and the latter would seek from the King something in return in the shape of constitutional guarantees about civil liberty and religious freedom. ‘I hope therefore,’ the mock speech continued, ‘that April will not prove so unnatural a month, as not to afford some kind showers on my parched exchequer.’ There is a plain, Swiftian directness in this short satire of a kind that the long-winded pamphlets often lost sight of in the thicket of their elaborate invectives. Asking the Parliament for more supply, the King declares: ‘The nation hates you already for giving so much, and I’ll hate you too, if you do not give me more. So that if you stick not to me, you must not have a friend in England.’ The essential irresponsibility and triviality of mind that Marvell sees in Charles, as well as his gullibility in relation to his scheming ministers, are the main constituents of this satire. ‘I have made a considerable retrenchment upon my expenses in candles and charcoal,’ the King is made to say, ‘and do not intend to stop there, but will, with your help, look into the late embezzlements of my dripping-pans and kitchen stuff … for, I would have the world to know, I am not a man to be cheated.’
Marvell’s official view of the first day’s proceedings was contained in a more sober letter to the Hull Corporation that night, which reports that the King actually said that he had summoned Parliament ‘that he might know what further he could do towards the securing of their Religion and Property and to establish a durable Correspondence betwixt him and his People’.3 He also pledged that he would ‘always maintaine the Religion and the Church of England as now established’. The fact that he felt it necessary to make this assurance indicates how widespread were the fears that he was inclined towards Catholicism. In the first week of the new Parliament measures were discussed, and reported by Marvell with evident approval, for the more effective harrying of ‘Romish Priests’ and for their ‘speedyer conviction’.4 In particular there was a clause proposed ‘to distinguish between Papists and Protestant Dissenters’ so that certain obvious inconveniences of a policy of toleration could be removed. A week later Marvell was appointed as teller for the bill disqualifying of
ficials from sitting in the House.
On 24 April an unusually vehement tone enters into Marvell’s routine letter to Mayor Hoare at Hull. He reports the case of Sir Robert Viner (whom he had several months earlier satirised in The Statue in Stocks-Market), who was now in deep financial trouble. As a way out of his difficulties, Viner was trying to get his stepdaughter married to Peregrine, the son of Lord Treasurer Danby, a move described by Marvell as ‘a detestable and most ignominious story’,5 not least because she appeared already to be married. But the explanation for Marvell’s anger is a little more complicated. Two of Marvell’s distant relatives, Richard Thompson and Edward Nelthorpe, ran a merchant bank together in the City and were also engaged in the wine and silk trade, lead mines and Irish manufacturing, ‘omitting nothing within the compass of our ingenuity’6 as their later bankruptcy statement put it. For a mixture of political and commercial reasons Thompson, Nelthorpe & Co – who may also have been the holders of Marvell’s modest savings – were enemies of the Establishment figure of Sir Robert Viner. A month before Parliament opened a heated dispute had arisen between the Lord Mayor Viner and the Common Council of the City over the appointment of a judge to the Sheriff’s Court. Two leading members of the Common Council opposing Viner were Nelthorpe and Thompson, which may explain why Marvell thundered against Viner’s alleged ‘late enterprising to subvert in all manners the Libertyes of the City’. For his part, Viner saw the actions of Nelthorpe and Thompson as a crude attempt to undermine his political position by having him arrested for debt, though in fact it was soon to be the two merchant bankers who were in difficulty. Within a year they went bankrupt and into hiding from their creditors. Marvell helped by taking lodgings for them in his own name in Great Russell Street. He was always ready to perform a good turn to Yorkshire businessmen and relatives, especially when, as in this case, they had been of assistance to his favourite nephew Will in his activities as a wine importer. Marvell’s act in sheltering these bankrupts in Bloomsbury would later have far more interesting reverberations, though.
Marvell’s routine dispatches to Hull during this session refer repeatedly to the progress of the anti-Catholic legislation and the new Test aimed at exposing covert Catholic tendencies and confining office-holding to Anglicans. He signs off one letter in June by noting: ‘The Pope hath given a Cardinalls Hat to Father Howard, the Queen’s Almoner.’7 Clearly there could be no let-up in the vigilance against Popery. During this early summer, Marvell may have been approached to write a life of his old friend, John Milton, who had died in November. On 18 May, John Aubrey wrote to Anthony Wood, claiming: ‘Mr Marvell has pmised me to write minutes for you of Mr Jo: Milton who lyes buryed in St Giles Cripplegate ch: – I shall tell you where.’8 Nothing seems to have come of this, though at one time there was speculation that Marvell may have been the author of an anonymous early life of Milton now attributed either to Cyriack Skinner or to Milton’s nephew John Phillips.
During the summer, Danby, at his own expense, arranged for the erection of a bronze equestrian statue at Charing Cross, cast by a sculptor called Le Sueur in 1633. The Civil War broke out before it could be erected and Parliament sold it contemptuously to a brazier called Rivet who, after the King’s execution, made a profitable sideline in bronze-handled knives and forks that he persuaded ardent Royalists to buy, under the impression that they were purchasing implements made from the very material used to portray the Royal Martyr. In fact, Rivet had kept the statue intact, producing it after the Restoration and eventually selling it to Danby. The poem ‘The Statue at Charing Cross’, attributed to Marvell, mocks the statue as a thing put up ‘to comfort the hearts of the poor Cavaleer’ and asks: ‘Does the Treasurer think men so Loyally tame/When their Pensions are stopt to be fool’d with a sight?’ It advises that the face of Charles I should be arranged to face away from Whitehall lest: ‘Tho of Brass, yet with grief it would melt him away,/To behold every day such a Court, such a son.’ Underlying the poem is the conviction that Danby was principally employed in buying votes and bribing support, which it is hard to deny. Abortive moves were made to impeach Danby in April – an allusion is made to this in a poem of doubtful attribution, ‘A Ballad call’d the Chequer Inn’ – but Danby survived to go on bribing.
The poem ‘A Dialogue between the Two Horses’, written probably in the autumn of this year, has, like most of these late satires, been attributed only with difficulty to Marvell. The possibility must be faced that none of these later satires could have been written by Marvell and certainly none adorn his poetic reputation, though that cannot in itself stand as an argument against his authorship. Critics have been uneasy with the attribution of the ‘Dialogue’ because of its marked republicanism and its lack of Marvell’s customary tenderness towards Charles, but it is clear that in the last three or four years of his life Marvell had begun to shed the last vestiges of instinctive loyalism towards the ruling power and to view the consequences of ‘His Majesty’s happy restoration’ in a more jaundiced way.
The two horses in question are the ones in Stocks Market and Charing Cross, supporting Charles I in bronze and Charles II in white marble. After an introduction that muses on precedents in classical literature for animals and inanimate oracles giving speech (though deriding parallel examples from Catholic shrines), the poem fancies a dialogue between the two steeds. They share a mutual dismay at the state of affairs where ‘Church and state bow down to a whore’ and where the King’s brother, the Duke of York, becomes a Catholic in order to ‘that Church defy/For which his own Father a Martyr did dye’. In spite of the King’s greed for revenue the country is impoverished and ‘Our worm-eaten Navy be laid up at Chatham’. Invited to comment on the bronze horse’s ‘Royall Rider’ – Charles I – the white horse offers a rather more stringent view of Charles I than Marvell once offered in the ‘Horatian Ode’. The indictment suggests once again that the Civil War (‘too good to have been fought for’) could have been avoided if it were indeed no more than a dispute about Church ceremonial (‘He that dyes for Ceremonies dyes like a fool’) aggravated by Laud:
Thy Priest-ridden King turn’d desperate Fighter
For the Surplice, Lawn-Sleeves, the Cross and the mitre,
Till at last on a Scaffold he was left in the lurch
By Knaves who cry’d themselves up for the Church,
Arch-Bishops and Bishops, Arch-Deacons and Deans.
Charles II’s mount declares that he prefers Cromwell to either of these kings, notwithstanding his despotic tendencies, because at least the country was not a laughing-stock: ‘Tho’ his Government did a Tyrants resemble,/Hee made England great and it’s enemies tremble.’ Marvell – if the poem is truly his – is thus revising his earlier poetic estimates of Cromwell as much as those of Charles I, for in the poems of the 1650s he came closer to glorifying rather than expressing doubts about Cromwell’s autocracy. Faced with the prospect of the Duke of York, the white horse cries out: ‘A Tudor a Tudor! wee’ve had Stuarts enough;/None ever Reign’d like old Besse in the Ruffe.’ His last word is: ‘A Commonwealth a Common-wealth wee proclaim to the Nacion;/The Gods have repented the King’s Restoration.’ Although this poem cannot be mentioned in the same breath as the great ‘Ode’, its politics are quite without ambiguity and would fit the outlook of a fundamentally democratic, anticlerical politician, looking out with dismay at the contemporary political scene of duplicity, jobbery, bribery and corruption.
Marvell mentioned the Charing Cross statue in a letter to Will Popple on 24 July. In addition to its jaundiced view of the political world, the letter betrays Marvell’s desire to find some calm, reflective time to address his nephew away from the increasingly unsympathetic atmosphere of Westminster:
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