In fact Marvell goes a little further back in history to the beginning of the decade in search of evidence of the conspiracy. The proroguings of Parliament in the 1670s (which did actually tend to happen when the King was being supplied with covert funds from France) are seen as opportunities for the conspirators ‘to give demonstrations of their fidelity to the French King’. He attacks, surprisingly in view of the effort he put into defending it in The Rehearsal, the Declaration of Indulgence in 1672 as a bid by the ‘hellish conspiracy’ to ‘defraud the nation of all that religion which they has so dearly purchased … it was the masterpiece therefore of boldness and contrivance in those conspirators to issue the declaration’. Not for the first time in his political career, Marvell thus radically revised his stance. In spite of a backhanded tribute to the crypto-Catholics like Clifford who ‘honourably forsook their places rather than their consciences’ in 1673, when the Test Act was introduced in the wake of the repeal of the Declaration, Marvell is contemptuous of the Duke of York, who married a Catholic, Mary of Modena. ‘Such marriages,’ he declared, ‘have always increased Popery, and incouraged priests and jesuits to pervert His Majesty’s subjects.’ Claiming that the conspirators made overtures to ‘the old Cavalier party’ to boost their strength, Marvell accused them of an intent ‘to have raised a Civil War’.
Coming closer to the present – the long prorogation of 22 November 1675 to 15 February 1677 which he called ‘this vast space’ in which the conspirators flourished – Marvell, in default of harder evidence, notes that it is ‘very remarkable’ that five judges were replaced during this period: ‘What French counsel, what standing forces, what parliamentary bribes, what national oaths, and all the other machinations of wicked men have not yet been able to effect, may be more compendiously acted by twelve judges in scarlet.’ He then turned his attention to his fellow MPs, observing that it was ‘too notorious to be concealed, that near a third part of the House have beneficial offices under his Majesty’. A further third were ‘hungry and out of office’ and therefore angling for the same sort of favour. In spite of having been elected to oppose the court party, these country MPs ‘when they come up, if they can speak in the House, they make a faint attack or two upon some great minister of State’. Fortunately, there remain among the final third some who are ‘constant, invariable, indeed Englishmen’ who can be counted upon to behave decently. But, in truth, Parliament presents a sorry picture: ‘It is less difficult to conceive how fire was first brought to light in the world than how any good thing could ever be produced out of an House of Commons so constituted.’ There is a fatally complacent conviviality among these Parliamentary time-servers, in Marvell’s picture: ‘They live together not like Parliament men, but like so many goodfellows met together in a publick house to make merry. And which is yet worse, by being so thoroughly acquainted, they understand their number and party, so that the use of so publick a counsel is frustrated, there is no place for deliberation, no perswading by reason, but they can see one another’s votes through both throats and cravats before they hear them.’ Only the four lords, including Shaftesbury, who challenged the prorogation and were sent to the Tower for doing so earn Marvell’s unqualified praise in this Parliament. As he reviews in detail the events of 1677, Marvell sees the hand of the conspirators in everything: ‘For all things betwixt France and England moved with that punctual regularity, that it was like the harmony of the spheres, so consonant with themselves, although we cannot hear the musick.’
Marvell ends by claiming to have ‘laid open’ the conspiracy if the country will care to examine the evidence: ‘yet men sit by, like idle spectators, and still give money towards their own tragedy’. The pamphlet, he claims, was written ‘with no other intent than of meer fidelity and service to his Majesty’, when he knew full well that if there was any conspiracy the King was at the heart of it. Far from welcoming its publication, however, the government set on foot immediately a hunt for the author. The London Gazette for 21–25 March 1678 carried an advertisement offering a reward of £50 for anyone who could find ‘the Printer, Publisher, Author, or Hander to the Press’ of this and other ‘Seditious, and Scandalous Libels against the Proceedings of Both Houses of Parliament’.22 The person who found the actual ‘Hander of it to the Press’ could expect a reward of £100.
It was not until after Marvell’s death in the summer of 1678 that Sir Roger L’Estrange confidently identified the poet as the author in a letter to Secretary of State Williamson.
29
A Death in Bloomsbury
Some suspect that he was poysoned by the Jesuites, but I cannot be positive.1
John Aubrey
Was Andrew Marvell gay? That he was unmarried and lived the life of a frequently solitary bachelor in modest lodgings where he kept a supply of wine to ‘refresh his spirits, and exalt his muse’, in Aubrey’s phrase, can hardly be brought forward in evidence. Being in or out of the state of marriage is not decisive in settling questions of sexual orientation. Marvell’s secretiveness, the complex ambiguity that surrounds so many of his thoughts and actions, and that lies at the root of his poetics, makes it difficult to produce confident assertions about that most private of areas in a life, a person’s sexuality. What we have can best be described as a certain body of insinuation, some of which has already been hinted at above: the faint trace of incipient paedophilia in ‘Young Love’, the rough allusions of his enemies in the pamphlet wars of the 1670s both to his putative sexual impotence and to a similarly attributed habit of sodomy with the author of Paradise Lost. The distinguished critic Sir William Empson – with a possible irony given that he was one of the few Marvell scholars to have been convinced of the evidence that Marvell had a wife – thought he detected the whiff of unnatural sex in Marvell’s descriptions of the brawny and perspiring mower in ‘Damon the Mower’. ‘I think he fell in love with the Mower,’2 Empson opined, and again: ‘I do not know that any other poet has praised the smell of a farm hand.’ One particular passage in the poem ‘The Loyall Scot’ has disturbed a number of critics, including both Empson and Elsie Duncan-Jones, the latter pointing out that the youthfulness of the naval hero Captain Archibald Douglas, who refused to desert his ship as it was consumed with flames, is ‘rather uncomfortably’3 stressed. Empson, in another essay, thinks that: ‘The case is so bad as to excite grave suspicion against the subconsciousness of the poet.’4 Traces of homoeroticism in the portrayal of Douglas might be detected in the two lines in ‘The Loyall Scot’ that originally appeared as part of ‘Last instructions to a Painter’: ‘Not so brave Douglass, on whose Lovely Chin/The Early down but newly did begin,/And modest beauty yet his sex did vail,/Whilst Envious virgins hope hee is a Male.’ The poem goes on to note that ‘His shady locks Curl back themselves to seek/Nor other Courtship knew but to his Cheek’ – a dash of narcissicism now entering the picture of adolescent loveliness. In the later lines, the youthful sexual innocence of Douglas modulates into a picture of his death by fire, in which the description is unnaturally prolonged and mixed in with what could be sexual feeling: ‘Like a glad lover the fierce Flames hee meets/And tries his first Imbraces in their sheets … His burning Locks Adorn his face divine.’ Empson recoils: ‘I find this disgusting, and all too likely to well up from the worst perversion, that of Gilles de Rais, the craving to gloat over the torturing of a tender innocent.’5
Marvell’s is not a poetry of personality. He does not follow a confessional aesthetic. His characteristic poetic motion is to proceed by examining alternatives and holding them in balance, dramatising conflicts in search of an equipoise, using a deliberate ambiguity. In poems like ‘Young Love’ or ‘The Loyall Scot’ he may be doing no more than playing with hints and shades of feeling for poetic effect. Or he may not. What is certain is that no reliable evidence for his actual conduct in life can be derived from these sources. If he was a closet homosexual (and it is difficult to imagine any other kind at that historical epoch, particularly among Members of Parliament
already coping with an array of vigorous enemies keen to pounce on any imagined misdemeanours), leaving his lodgings at night to seek illicit pleasure with young men in the smoky taverns and alleyways of Covent Garden and the City, there is no evidence for it.
Marvell’s last surviving letter was written on 6 July 1678, to the Corporation that had employed him as its Parliamentary representative for nearly twenty years. It was a typical combination of Parliamentary bulletin and selective concentration on the matters that would interest the Hull merchants most: an ‘Additional Impost upon Wines’.6 The House was thinning out, as the meagre number of votes on either side of the divison on this issue attested. ‘Things tend toward an end of the Session,’ Marvell explained. Nine days later the House was prorogued and by the end of the month the MP was in Hull, attending a formal meeting of the Court of the Corporation. According to the minutes for 29 July: ‘the Court and Mr Marvell held severall discourses about the Towns affaires’.7 An audit book notes that the local worthies spent £3 8s 4d on a municipal lunch or ‘collation’ ‘to give Coll Gilbe & Squier Marvell Burgesses of Plement for this towne a treatment for meate & wines’.8 Two days later, France and Holland signed a peace treaty at Nijmegen. The Cavalier Parliament in which Marvell had sat since 1661 had only six months to go before being finally dissolved.
After completing his round of municipal duties, and no doubt having visited his family and friends in Hull, Marvell returned to London. Somewhere between leaving Hull on 9 August and arriving in the capital, he contracted a fever, traditionally described as a tertian ague but possibly malarial, which brought him down very low. Although his lodgings were in Maiden Lane, Covent Garden, his sickbed was on the north side of Great Russell Street in Bloomsbury (the site now occupied in part by the forecourt of the British Museum). A doctor was summoned and his intervention seems to have made matters worse. He later recounted his treatment to another doctor, Richard Morton, who published in 1692 a Latin treatise describing it as an example of what can happen when the wrong drugs, particularly opiates, are administered at the wrong time. Morton’s account, written by a man who shared Marvell’s religious and political opinions, affords posterity an unusually detailed account of the poet’s medical treatment.9 On arrival at Great Russell Street, the ‘conceited doctor’, as Morton calls him, instead of prescribing an ounce of quinine as a cure for the intermittent fits produced by the ague, bled and sweated the patient in a way that Morton strongly disapproved. He had Marvell almost buried in stiflingly thick blankets under the impression that the heavy sweat would counteract the cold shivers which generally accompany the onset of the ague fit. As to the bleeding, Morton considered that it was extremely unwise to bleed a man aged fifty-seven. On Friday 16 August, Marvell died in a coma brought on by these medical attentions. Immediately, in that overheated atmosphere which preceded the discovery of the Titus Oates plot, speculation grew that he had been poisoned – ‘by the Jesuites’, according to Aubrey, who later crossed out in his manuscript the qualifying ‘but I cannot be positive’. The popular name for the quinine that might have saved him had it been applied was ‘Jesuit’s powder’, so called because it was introduced to Europe by Jesuit missionaries.
Marvell’s presence in Great Russell Street, rather than in Maiden Lane, can be explained by the fact that in June 1677 he had taken out a lease on a property in this rapidly developing part of London, in order to be of service to the two young Hull-born bankers, Richard Thompson and Edward Nelthorpe, whose merchant bank, Nelthorpe & Co, had collapsed in 1676 after a run on the bank by creditors starting in the autumn of 1675. Two other partners were John Farrington and Edmund Page. Fleeing from their creditors, Thompson and Nelthorpe took refuge in the house in Great Russell Street that Marvell had leased in the name of his housekeeper, Mary Palmer, from a John Morris. Nelthorpe was known to his neighbours only as ‘Mr White’. The Bloomsbury household contained at various times the two bankrupts, Mary Palmer, Thompson’s wife, Dorothy, and a servant. Marvell himself remained in Maiden Lane, where he kept his papers and valuables, but he was presumably a regular visitor to Great Russell Street. In sheltering from the law two bankrupts who owed people money, Marvell might be considered to have been in an ethically dubious position. It is unlikely, however, that he would have seen it in this light. Doing favours to the Hull business community and to people related to him by birth was quite proper as far as Marvell was concerned. The fact that his relatives had clashed with Sir Robert Viner and were ardent anti-Royalists would have increased his sense of their being a deserving case. As well as upsetting the City establishment, the bankrupts had also clashed with the East India Company. Although they had suffered heavy shipping losses in the period leading up to their business collapse in March 1676, they may also have been the victims of a vendetta in the City when their offer to pay compensation, or a ‘composition’, to their creditors was rejected by a minority of those creditors after lobbying by the Lord Mayor.10 Marvell may have considered that the balance needed tilting a little in their direction. He may also have invested what few savings he had in the bank, again for patriotic reasons as a man of Hull, and therefore could have been an interested party as a creditor himself. In what would now be considered a highly dubious conflict of interest, he actually sat on the Commons committee appointed to consider a bill introduced on 4 February 1678 ‘for the better Discovery of the Estates of Richard Thompson, Edward Nelthrop, and others, Bankrupts’. In their own published account of what happened, The Case of Richard Thompson and Company: With Relation to their Creditors (1678), the two claimed that they had become ‘in the compass of one Year the sad Objects of common Obloquy, or Pity’.
Marvell had first become directly involved with the affairs of the bankrupts when his name appeared on a bond for repayment of £500 on 9 June 1677.11 Edward Nelthorpe had taken the money to Charles Wallis, a London goldsmith, presumably hoping to keep the cash out of the hands of any creditors and trusting Marvell to take good care of the bond. Three days later the two principal bankrupts disappeared into the obscurity of a Great Russell Street lodging leased in someone else’s name (though Thompson spent some time in hiding at the home of his brother-in-law Major Braman in Chichester in the early part of 1678). The London Gazette published in January 1678 an advertisement offering a reward for any information about the whereabouts of the four partners. John Farrington gave himself up and was imprisoned in the King’s Bench prison but was apparently allowed to come and go into the City as he pleased. Edward Nelthorpe died a month later than the poet, on 18 September, and Thompson assumed management of the house, paying Mary Palmer her housekeeper’s salary of £10 a year. The survivors then began a lawsuit that dragged on until 1684. Records of it have survived, in which Mary Palmer asserted that, far from being Marvell’s housekeeper, she was in fact his wife and had been secretly married to him since 1667. When the first edition of Marvell’s poems was published in 1681 the title page was followed by a short note ‘To The Reader’:
These are to Certifie every Ingenious Reader, that all these Poems, as also the other things in this Book contained, are Printed according to the exact Copies of my late dear Husband, under his own Hand-Writing, being found since his Death among his other Papers, Witness my Hand this 15th day of October, 1680.
Mary Marvell
According to Mary Palmer/Marvell’s deposition, now in the Public Record Office, Farrington approached her a day or two after Marvell’s death and asked her for the keys of the Maiden Lane lodgings. Without her having the chance to inspect what was there, Farrington carried off various hampers, trunks and financial bonds and bills, including – Mary Palmer was convinced – the bill for £500 referred to above which she was anxious to acquire. In the usual interpretation of her motives, she was ready to pretend she was the poet’s widow in order to secure it. A little later than Farrington, she herself called at Maiden Lane and found nothing more than ‘a few Books & papers of small value’.12 That negligible heap of things would have included the man
uscript of ‘To his Coy Mistress’. Farrington rejected entirely this version of events, claiming that he had never had the keys, but the records show that he began to take an interest in Marvell’s estate, filing a legal request, a caveat, in the name of Marvell’s sister in Hull, Mrs Blaydes, to prevent anyone taking out administration of the estate without his knowledge. He accused Mary Palmer, in one deposition, of pretending to have been Marvell’s wife immediately after his death and of putting on a tearful act in order to inveigle money for the funeral out of his relatives in Hull. She also offered, ‘by insinuating & crafty speeches’, to be of service to Farrington, who thought her ‘an ill woman’ whose aim was to defraud Farrington of Nelthorpe’s estate as well as getting her hands on Marvell’s money.
In the end she was granted administration of Marvell’s estate, jointly with John Greene, in September 1679, a year after the poet’s death. The £500 was now pursued by Mary Palmer for herself and Farrington for the Nelthorpe estate. Inevitably, litigation ensued, in the course of which the other litigants began to question, apparently for the first time, Mary Palmer’s claim to be Marvell’s wife. Farrington argued that Mary Palmer was a housekeeper who never even shared a table with Marvell and who was his social and intellectual inferior: ‘Nor is it prbable that the said Andrew Marvell who was a Member of the house of Comons for many years together & a very learned man would undervalue himselfe to intermarry with so mean a pson as shee the said Mary then was being the widdow of a Tennis Court Keeper in or near the City of Westm who died in a mean condicon.’ Mary Palmer ingeniously replied that it was precisely this difference of condition that led Marvell as ‘a Parliamt man and a Learned man’ to disguise the marriage and that she played along with the concealment by eating separately in the servant’s quarters. She went further by asserting that the marriage took place on 13 May 1667 at the Church of the Holy Trinity in the Little Minories and defied anyone to consult the marriage register – a document that no longer exists. The case finally came to court on 15 November 1682 – well after the publication of the volume of poems – but more than a year would elapse before the second hearing at which the Court of Chancery finally decided, in June 1684, that the bond was part of the estate of Nelthorpe. When she died in November 1687 her entry in the burial register of St Giles-in-the-Fields read Mary Palmer, not Mary Marvell.
World Enough and Time Page 29
