Being resolved now to sequester myself one whole Day at Highgate, I shall write four whole Sides (if my Spirit will hold out) in Answer to your kind Letter, and to attone for my so long unaffected Silence.9
The letter mirrors the attitude to the King found in the contemporary satires. Marvell does not dress up the reasons for this Parliament being called: ‘It seemed necessary for the King’s Affairs, who always, but now more, wants Mony, the Parliament should meet.’ He describes to Will the emergence in this session of an ‘Episcopal Cavalier Party’ as the dominant influence on the King and reports the erection of the statue at Charing Cross ‘for more Pageantry’. Further ideas were being discussed to cement public loyalty to the monarch, including digging up the body of Charles I ‘to make a perfect resurrection of Loyalty, and to be reinterred with great Magnificence’. He reports both the attempts to impeach the King’s favourite minister Lauderdale and the general disorder of the House. One day it erupted into chaos on the floor of the Commons with ‘every Man’s Hand on his Hilt’. In a concluding remark to Will, Marvell seems to be trying to express some wish for his nephew to be emancipated from the press of business and to find something more worthwhile as a focus of his energies, projecting on to him, perhaps, some of his own anxieties about the futility of his life as a politician in this ‘odiously ridiculous’ Parliament: ‘O when will you have arrived at what is necessary? Make other serviceable Instruments that you may not be a Drudge, but govern all your Understanding.’
‘The times are something critical,’10 Marvell wrote to Hull on 21 October, explaining why he was once again counselling the Corporation to be cautious about circulating too much of what he told them in confidence, ‘beside that I am naturally and now more by my Age inclined to keep my thoughts private’. Marvell’s reserve, his caution, his lack, in Aubrey’s words, of ‘a generall acquaintance’, may have conspired to bring about a certain increase in withdrawal, perhaps even a renewed anxiety about his personal safety in an unscrupulous political culture, where means could be found for most of the ends politicians sought. There would be plenty of reasons to want this lethal satirist silenced, but withdrawal would hardly be conducive to effectiveness as a practical politician in the House of Commons. If he felt, at fifty-four, he was getting old, the spectacle of his friend Jeremy Smith’s approach to death that autumn would have been chastening. On 13 October, Marvell witnessed Smith’s will, having already been appointed a trustee on 12 June with three others, all of whom received forty shillings. This would result in his having to take some responsibility for the funeral and settling the estate.
At the end of the month, during a brief adjournment of the House, Marvell went over to Sir Jeremy’s house at Clapham and spent the night at his deathbed. On the night of 3 November his ‘very cordiall friend’ died. In a letter to Mayor Shires of Hull the next day Marvell wrote: ‘I was yesternight againe with Sr Jer: and saw him expire at eleuen a clock at night dying very peacably and with perfect understanding memory and speeche to the last gaspe.’11 The death of a good man at such a moment was peculiarly affecting, ‘such breaches being in these times very difficult to be repaired’. Marvell was worried at this time that there might be some sort of surveillance of his letters – a possibility hinted at in some of his correspondence with Hull. He warned the Mayor: ‘it seemes therefore that there is some sentinell set both upon you and me. And to know it therefore is a sufficient caution.’ In this fraught, threatening atmosphere the King himself was not free from a sense of menace. Marvell reported to Sir Henry Thompson in York: ‘I heare that two ugly distichs haue been pasted up at the Kings Bedchamber doore. I am sorry that they should haue so much effect as to make the King distrust his Safety and walk with guards.’12 This was a reference to some rather ungrammatical doggerel found pinned to the King’s bedchamber door on 27 November: ‘in vaine for help to your old friends you call, when you like pittied them they must fall[sic]’.13 The growing political tension had evidently generated a sense of danger among all those in public life. Marvell’s early biographers frequently alluded to the threats he faced during this time. ‘He was often in such danger,’ wrote Thomas Cooke, ‘that he was forced to have his letters directed to him in another name, to prevent any discovery that way.’14 Thompson likewise claimed: ‘He was frequently threatened with murder, and way-laid in his passing to and from Highgate, where he was fond of lodging.’15 Marvell would have been an attractive target – he was an irritant to the court and the suspected author of offensive satires – as well as being an easy one. Living in isolation, frequently alone, he could easily have been picked off by some hired assassin. Both Cooke and Thompson, keen to portray Marvell as a martyr in the cause of religious freedom and conscience, no doubt exaggerated his ‘life of perpetual danger’ and his ‘fear of losing his life by treachery’ but the likelihood is that he would have had to exercise caution at this period in his political life.
On 22 November the King prorogued Parliament for fifteen months until 15 February 1677. The Member for Hull, however, was not idle, for early in the new year he would once again enter the field of religious controversy. He had not yet done with the Church of England hierarchy and its more disputatious members.
26
Divines in Mode
As the arts of glass coaches and perriwigs illustrate this Age, so by their trade of Creed-making, then first invented, we may esteem the wisdom of Constantine’s and Constantius his empire.1
Parliament had been prorogued as a result of a secret agreement between the King and Louis XIV which meant that Charles received £100,000 a year from the King of France. He had his money and therefore had no need of Parliament. Danby was not party to this agreement and continued to wage war against Catholics and dissenters by strengthening the power of the Anglican establishment. In so doing he was accused of reopening the wounds of the Civil War and at the very least provoking conflict between the liberals and the hardliners within the Church of England. Marvell’s interpretation of these events – or those of which he would have been aware – was that the power of Parliament to resist popery and absolutism was being weakened by Lord Treasurer Danby’s regime of bribery and corruption.
The publication, in 1676, of a book called Animadversions Upon a Late Pamphlet Entitled The Naked Truth, written by the Reverend Francis Turner, Master of St John’s College, Cambridge, gave Marvell his opening for a new polemic in defence of toleration. The object of Turner’s ‘animadversions’ was a work published by the Bishop of Hereford, Herbert Croft, in the spring of 1675. The Naked Truth. Or, the true state of the Primitive Church was Croft’s attempt to argue that the enforcement of conformity in the Church of England by penalties and persecution was not the way forward. Croft was a vigorous opponent of Catholicism and, according to Burnet (who was one of several who responded in print to The Naked Truth), he was not a diplomat: ‘Croft was a warm, devout man, but of no discretion in his conduct: so he lost ground quickly. He used much freedom with the King: but it was in the wrong place, not in private, but in the pulpit.’2 Anthony Wood observed that ‘the appearance of this book’ – which came out first as a privately printed appeal to Parliament and which was then taken up by a bookseller – ‘at such a time was like a comet’.3 Croft, like Marvell, had an early, but in his case rather more substantial, flirtation with Catholicism. The son of Sir Herbert Croft, of Croft Castle in Herefordshire, Croft had been educated by Jesuits and had attended the English College in Rome in 1626 under the assumed name of James Harley. Converted to Anglicanism in the 1630s and later a chaplain to Charles I, his fortunes naturally dipped during the Civil War. After the taking of Hereford, the Parliamentary commander, Colonel Birch, had to restrain a guard of musketeers from seizing him. Famously, he preached at the Roundheads as they entered his cathedral when he was still only Dean, the pulpit from which he did so still on display at Hereford in the south-east transept. After the Restoration, however, he was made Bishop of Hereford where, in one of the most touching of English chur
ch monuments, in Hereford Cathedral, he can be seen holding hands with his lifelong friend Dean George Benson, who is buried beside him. A Latin inscription reads: ‘In Vita conjuncti In Morte non divisi’ (Together in life, undivided in death).
For Marvell the controversy was to some degree a reprise of the engagement with Samuel Parker. The aim was to advance the cause of religious toleration, to administer some satirical sideswipes to the stuffier and more conservative parts of the Anglican establishment and to have some sport with an ill-matched opponent. As with The Rehearsal, Marvell went to the contemporary theatre for a title. Sir George Etherege’s The Man of Mode had just received its first performance at court. In the play, Sir Fopling Flutter, ‘the prince of fops’, is the eponymous man of mode, though it is a minor character, Mr Smirke, chaplain to Lady Biggot, whose name provides Marvell’s title. His subtitle advertises the work as being ‘certain annotations’ on the Animadversions. He calls Bishop Croft ‘judicious, learned, a sincere Protestant’ and his book ‘of that kind that no Christian scarce can peruse it without wishing himself had been the author’.4 Marvell sums up the initial reaction of the clergy to Croft’s pamphlet:
Not only the churches but the coffee-houses rung against it. They itinerated like excise-spyes from one house to another, and some of the morning and evening chaplains burnt their lips with perpetual discoursing it out of reputation, and loading the Author, whoever he were, with all contempt, malice and obloquy.5
Marvell sensed that Turner, like Samuel Parker before him, was a bully in clerical garb, and leapt to the defence of Croft. Because of the rancour of the punitive tendency in the Church of England, Croft had been shown no mercy over his pleas for toleration. In Marvell’s view, Turner’s reply to Croft – ‘a lasting pillar of infamy’ – had been executed ‘not according to the ordinary rules of civility, or in the sober way of arguing controversie, but with the utmost extremity of jeere disdain, and indignation’. Worst of all for Turner, he ‘took up an unfortunate resolution that he would be witty’. In truth he was a pompous fool like Parker, ‘huff’d up in all his ecclesiastical fluster’. His style was crushingly pedantic, ‘so wretchedly does he hunt over hedge and ditch for an university quibble’. This put Marvell in mind of his own schooling at Hull Grammar School – another of those fugitive autobiographical touches – where the pupils were taught to scan Latin verses prior to any understanding of what the words might mean: ‘For as I remember this “scanning” was a liberal art that we learn’d at grammar-school: and to scan verses as he does the Author’s prose, before we did, or were obliged to understand them.’6 Marvell also criticised the Act against printing without a licence because it allows clergy to attack ‘men’s private reputations’, having easier access to publication. He adds: ‘It is something strange that to publish a good book is a sin and an ill one a vertue; and that while one comes out with Authority, the other may not have a dispensation.’ He accuses the Church of England writers of wanting to exercise a monopoly (‘these single representers’) on Church questions and of using that privilege not to attack wickedness but to entrench their own position: ‘to render those peccadilloes against God as few and inconsiderable as may be, but to make the sins against themselves as many as possible, and these to be all hainous and unpardonable’. The Act works ‘by ingaging men’s minds under spiritual bondage, to lead them canonically into temporal slavery’. This introductory passage is charged both with Marvell’s liberal attachment to freedom of speech and with his fervent anticlericalism. It is also done with his usual vigour of expression and vividly apt similes: he observes that ‘calumny is like London dirt, with which though a man may be spattered in an instant, yet it requires much time pains and fuller’s-earth to scoure it out again’. And again, when he finally begins to get down to the matter of Turner’s book, he censures him for imputing all sorts of things to Croft which are not there in his argument: ‘So men with vicious eyes see spiders weave from the brim of their own beavers.’
As with Marvell’s previous polemics, the lively engagement with the opponent is of more interest than the sequential argument, which is as difficult to summarise as ever. He epitomises Croft’s original argument thus: ‘That nothing hath caused more mischiefe in the Church, then the establishing new and many Articles of faith, and requiring men to assent to them with divine faith.’ Forcing impositions on dissenters, in Croft’s own words, ‘hath caused furious wars and lamentable bloodshed among Christians’. This is the essence of Marvell’s ecclesiastical politics: that the state should not impose too much in matters of faith. Its secular counterpart is his view that the constitutional monarch should not exact too much from the citizen. In both contexts the freedom of individual conscience is paramount, it being argued that nothing is gained by the religious or secular authorities seeking more control than is strictly necessary. This current of thought places Marvell firmly in the mainstream of the English liberal tradition, marred only by the occasional excesses of his xenophobic anti-popery, the English tradition often losing its way when travelling on a passport. It justifies his posthumous reputation as a defender of civil and religious liberty at home. All such arguments, however, are lost on individuals like Turner, whom Marvell mockingly describes as ‘the Animadverter’ in allusion to the title of his attack on Croft: ‘But like some cattle, the Animadverter may browze upon the leaves, or peel the barke, but he has not teeth for the solid, nor can hurt the tree but by accident.’ For Marvell, simple Christian faith is enough ‘without the chicanrey and conveyancing of humane extentions’. Scripture, rather than Church discipline, is his guide for Christians and should be the guide for men like Turner:
but these are the Divines in Mode, who, being by their dignities and preferments plump’d up beyond humane proportion, do, whether for their pride or ignorance, neither understand themselves or others (men of nonsense) much less do they speak of God, which ought to be their study, with any tolerable decorum. These are the great Animadverters of the times, the church-respondents in the pew, men that seem to be members only of Chelsy Colledge, – nothing but broken windows, bare walls and rotten timber.7
After declaring that ‘I do not reckon much upon a Church historical, devilish beliefe. Unless a thing be in the express words of Scripture, there are some of the laity to whom a Council cannot demonstrate, sneezing powder cannot demonstrate, no earthly power can do it,’ Marvell lays down his pen. Abandoning his original intention of examining each of Turner’s arguments one by one he declares (somewhat to the relief of the reader): ‘I am weary of such stuffe…’
Appended to the work, however, is A Short Historical Essay Touching General Councils, Creeds and Imposition in Religion, which develops the original argument of Croft – that the essential truths of primitive Christianity have been obscured by the machinations of the later ecclesiastical politicians – by offering an historical account of the development of religious ‘creed-making’ at councils of theologians summoned to deliberate on what they regarded as vital questions of faith. It demonstrates the extraordinary depth of Marvell’s knowledge both of scripture and of Church history and is unusual in its logical arrangement and flow. His understanding convinces him that it is undesirable for the civil power to involve itself in policing questions of religious belief. His jaundiced account of the councils of the early Church makes him reflect: ‘a man would scarse think he were reading an history of bishops, but a legend of divels’.8 In a discussion of the Arian heresies, Marvell observes pointedly on the fact that: ‘Whereas truth for the most part lyes in the middle, but men ordinarily look for it in the extremities.’ He mocks the emergence of bishops in early Christianity, falling over themselves in their profusion and their self-importance, obsessed with detecting heresy at every turn, ‘when every hare that crossed their way homeward was a schismatic or an heretick, and if their horse stumbled with one of them, he incurred an anathema’. As well as preferring the via media, Marvell confesses to an instinctive sympathy for the underdog: ‘Only I will confess t
hat as in reading a particular history at adventure a man finds himself inclinable to favour the weaker party, especially if the conqueror appear insolent’. As a child, Marvell had witnessed his father’s clashes with the ‘insolent’ church hierarchy and remained a lifelong opponent of their arbitrary exercise of power. In censuring the manufacture of creeds and the accompanying invention of heresies, he argues, in a way that would have endeared him to the nonconformists, for the primacy of individual conscience over episcopal jurisdiction: ‘It is not as in secular matters where the States of a kingdom are deputed by their fellow subjects to transact for them, so in spiritual.’ And again: ‘The soul is too precious to be let out at interest upon any humane security, that does or may fail; but it is only safe when under God’s custody in its own cabinet.’
Marvell accuses the bishops of having their own material reasons for wanting to impose creeds and of being worldly and ambitious. The orthodox bishops in the reign of Constantius were ‘obstinate for power, but flexible in faith’, losing sight of the essential truth of Christianity in the heat of ecclesiastical power politics: ‘And all this mischief sprung from the making of Creeds, with which the bishops, as it were at Tilting, aim’d to hit one another in the eye, and throw the opposite Party out of the saddle.’ In Marvell’s reading of early Christianity, the bishops were overeager in the matter of persecution, exhibiting a ‘wolfishness’ towards their flocks. They then progressed from ‘a spiritual kind of dominion’ to a desire to wield civil power: ‘A bishop now grew terrible.’ In a sharp reminder to his readers of the applicability of these arguments to the 1676 context, Marvell connects the earthquakes in the reign of Valens, which were seen as full of portent, to recent natural phenomena in England:
All which put together, could not but make me reflect upon the late earthquakes, great by how much more unusual, here in England, thorow so many counties since Christmas, at the same time when the Clergy, some of them, were so busy in their cabals, to promote this (I would give it a modester name then) persecution, which is now on foot against the Dissenters …9
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