World Enough and Time (16 page)

The Club was formally organised with a ballot box in which votes or tentamens (experiments) were cast. Although Aubrey said that at this time ‘as to human foresight, there was no possibility of the King's returne' the Club seems to have been hated by the Parliamentarians, particularly for its advocacy of gradual rotation of membership of Parliament by regular balloting, which would result in complete replacement of the House every nine years. Sometimes, when the party at the Turk's Head broke up, Harrington would declare: ‘Well, the King will come in.' Unfortunately, Harrington went mad, imagining that ‘his Perspiration turned to Flies, and sometimes to Bees'.

Richard Cromwell fell in part because he failed to secure the support of the army, the final blow being the defection of his generals, Lambert, Fleetwood and Desborough. In October 1659 a Committee of Safety, effectively a military dictatorship, was imposed. In December this Committee again gave way to the Rump Parliament, which admitted seventy-three of the members of the former Long Parliament who had been expelled or ‘secluded' in 1648. This enlarged Rump called what was known as the Convention Parliament, which met for the first time on 25 April 1660. Although the balance of power between Parliament and the King would never again revert to what it was in the 1640s, the restoration of the King – promising to submit to Parliamentary terms once restored – had become inevitable. The country was no doubt tired of war, dissension and the failure to secure a viable alternative form of government. On 29 May 1660, Charles II returned to London in triumph.

Marvell was in that Parliament elected on 2 April. Once again John Ramsden was his fellow MP, with a massive majority over his nearest rival, Marvell, who in turn saw off the challenge of Edward Barnard of Gray's Inn, William Lister (a former Hull MP during the first and second Protectorate), Matthew Alured (to whom he was of course related but whose uncompromising republicanism told against him) and Francis Thorpe (a judge under the Commonwealth).
9
Marvell would remain an MP for Hull until his death in 1678.

Marvell continued to write poetry, with his immersion in the political world producing, inevitably, a number of satires. He also turned for the first time to prose and pamphlet warfare. But it would be wrong to assume that his political career signalled the death of the lyric poet. Uncertainty about dating the poems should counsel caution about such generalisations. The conventional assumption that the lyric, pastoral and garden verse belongs to the early 1650s is persuasive, but it is an assumption nonetheless. There is no reason in principle why he could not have written some of this poetry during the 1660s. Some writers on Marvell, scenting a conspiracy of conservative academics keen to distance their hero from the contaminations of politics by privileging the lyric over the political verse, have accused the latter of a process of ‘hypercanonisation', an ugly piece of jargon denoting the selective winnowing of the canon to exclude unwelcome political verses.
10
There is something in this, but, important as both the Cromwell poems and the later satires are, and remembering that Marvell was always an intensely political poet, nothing can boldly be assigned to the period of his Parliamentary career that can equal those poems where his wit and formal elegance are most forcefully on display. To minimise the skill and insight and judgement of his best political poems is grossly to misrepresent his art, but fewer of these later poems captivate the reader in the same way as ‘To his Coy Mistress' or the ‘Horatian Ode'.

11

His Majesties Happy Return

If Marvell's picture does not look so lively and witty as you might expect, it is from the chagrin and awe he had of the Restoration then just effected.

Thomas Hollis
1

On 29 May 1660 Charles II entered London to scenes of popular rejoicing. Old-fashioned historians have always relished this particular episode in the national narrative. Writing in 1936 (the year of the Jarrow March), the author of the relevant volume of the
Oxford History of England,
G.N. Clark, painted a picture of Merrie England stirring its sleepy limbs to raise maypoles, propose drunkenly extravagant loyal toasts, and mock the defeated Puritans. Clark wrote warmly of the King's procession making its way from the harbour at Dover through south-east England to Whitehall, deploying an antique diction to realise the feudal scene: ‘Noblemen and gentlemen attended on horseback, mayors and aldermen in their gowns, country-folk were morris-dancing on the greens; maidens strewed flowers and sweet herbs before the cavalcade.'
2
Although the truth may have been a little more undifferentiated, there is little doubt that the Restoration was welcomed. The country had had enough and was at the very least eager to come out and see the spectacle. Perhaps the young King, whose thirtieth birthday this was, could offer, if not a return to the old days, a period of stability. In London bonfires lit up the night sky, some of them immolating effigies of Cromwell. The diarist John Evelyn wrote that night: ‘I stood in the Strand and beheld it and blessed God.'
3

Marvell, in spite of his later retouching of the record, had been closely associated with the anti-Royalist cause for almost the whole of the 1650s. His superior, Thurloe, was under arrest on a charge of high treason. His close friend and associate in Thurloe's office, Milton, for whom he spoke up bravely in his first months in Parliament, spent a brief period in jail in the autumn of 1659 and saw his books burnt by the public hangman. Marvell, had he not had better luck, might have followed him, if not to jail, then into the political wilderness. Although he began the decade in the company of a moderate Parliamentarian, Lord Fairfax, he had increasingly moved towards the core of the Cromwellian administration and had made many enemies who would be watching him for the future. His life was often in danger on the rough streets of Restoration London as he made his way back from Westminster to his lodgings in Maiden Lane, Covent Garden. Marvell has been criticised for the rapidity with which he embraced loyalty to the King, but he justified it with a more elevated argument than mere opportunism. And if he accepted as a fait accompli the restoration of constitutional monarchy he remained a member of the opposition to the court party. His anonymous verse satires were not designed to flatter the leading figures in the regime, and his controversial pamphlets were unsparing in their attacks on the established clergy. Skilled in the arts of self-preservation, he was not a toady.

One of Marvell's first tasks in the Convention Parliament, which had met for the first time on 25 April, was to compose a Latin reply to the Prince Elector Palatine of the Rhine, the King's first cousin, who had written with his congratulations on the Restoration. It has been suggested that the decision of the House on 23 July to ask ‘Mr
Marvell,
a member of this House … together with the members that serve for the Universities'
4
to prepare a reply on behalf of the King was a deliberate act of mockery directed at Cromwell's scribe by a triumphantly Royalist Commons. In fact it may have been no more than a practical recognition of a skilled Latinist's well-advertised suitability for the task.

Marvell sat on various select committees in the Convention Parliament and was, from the outset, a diligent MP. Even in his brief stint in Richard Cromwell's Parliament the previous year he had been placed on five committees: to examine a petition from Elizabeth Lilborne (5 February 1659); to consider how the five northern counties could be supplied with ‘a learned, pious, sufficient and able ministry' (5 February); to examine whether the county palatine of Durham should be represented in Parliament (31 March); to examine a petition of the disbanded forces in Lancashire (13 April); and to consider how to remove and where to place records then at Worcester House, which was to be returned to its owner (13 April). In the Convention Parliament he was put on to no fewer than ten committees between June and November considering, variously, reparations to landowners, spending money to redeem captives at Algiers and Tunis, draining of the Fens, settling the militia, and examining ‘a bill for preventing the voluntary separation and living apart of married persons'.
5
Marvell was both industrious and attentive to the detail of what must have been on occasion tedious business for someone of his lively wit. His letters to his constituents show a passion for the intricacies of Parliamentary business. This diligence may have helped his reputation in the House, though he would always have enemies ready to exploit any perceived failings.

On 15 November, and again on the 27th, he reported to the House the work done by his select committee on a bill to erect and endow vicarages out of rectories that had been impropriated. This was a measure of redistribution of Church revenues that failed to win approval from the Lords, where it was blocked by the bishops. The measure was proposed again, without success, several times during the next two decades. Marvell would never take the side of the Church Establishment and was vigorous in his praise of the King for his Declaration of Indulgence, issued on 14 April 1660 at Breda where he held his court when still in exile. This promised ‘that no man shall be disquieted or called in question for differences of opinion in matters of religion'. On his return the King promoted this Declaration, in Marvell's view, ‘as far as the Passions and Influences of the contrary Party would give leave for'. He also praised the King for his Act of Indemnity, passed on 29 August, which drew a line under what had happened in ‘the late Combustions'. Always vigorously anti-clerical, the clergyman's son had little doubt about who was to blame for attempts to block the King's measures of religious toleration:

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.
6

Although diligent as an MP in reporting back to his electors, the Hull Corporation, Marvell rarely indicated the way he had voted or gave an account of the speeches he had made. His tone was an interesting and paradoxical mixture of the servile and the exacting; he would indicate his willingness to write to them at any cost (on one occasion forgoing his supper to do so), but he would also instruct them sternly not to speak of certain matters or give them uncompromising instructions about how they should handle a particular issue. The earliest letter we have to the Corporation from its new MP was written on 17 November 1660, although it refers to an earlier letter, which has not survived, written to the Mayor on the first day of the sitting. It was addressed to Mayor Christopher Richardson and ‘the Aldermen his Brethren'. The piece of business that Marvell thought concerned them most was the question of the settling of the militia. Eight regiments needed to be disbanded now that the wars were over and Marvell was on a select committeee dealing with the issue. He was not in favour of a standing army, telling the Corporation: ‘'Tis better to trust his Mtyes moderation.'
7
He predicted: ‘I doubt not but ere we rise to see the whole army disbanded &, according to the Act, hope to see your Town once more ungarrisond.'
8
This prompted a memory that he shared with the Corporation: ‘For I can not but remember, though then a child, those blessed days when the youth of your own town were trained for your militia, and did methought become their arms much better then any soldiers that I haue seen there since.' He went on to point out his lack of importance as a ‘private member', notwithstanding which ‘though I can promise litle yet I intend all things for your service'. He was thus going to be an independent back-bencher, who would give a good account of himself to his constituency. The letters helped to make him feel that he was not wasting his time in Parliament: ‘'Tis much refreshment to me after our long sittings daily to give you account of what we do,' he wrote at the end of November.
9
In December the Corporation showed its appreciation of the two MPs by sending them a present of Yorkshire ale. Marvell quipped: ‘the quantity is so great that it might make sober men forgetfull'.
10

His letters tell of the important issues of state but also matters of more parochial interest to Hull, such as the attempt by local worthy Henry Hildyard to regain the Manor House, a large mansion inside the Hull walls that had been rented from him by Charles I, turned into a fort and granted to the town by the Parliament in 1648. A letter on this matter, signed by Marvell and Ramsden but in the latter's hand, refers to the Civil War, prompted by Hildyard's predicament: ‘the iniquitie of those tymes was to be lamented but it had been as in great earthquakes, or ovrfloweings where bounds had been generally removed, & possessions washt away one from anothr'.
11
The image of natural disturbance here is reminiscent of the famous observation on the Civil War by Edward Hyde, the Earl of Clarendon, in his
History of the Rebellion:

a small, scarce discernible cloud arose in the north, which was shortly after attended with such a storm, that never gave over raging till it had shaken, and even rooted up, the greatest and tallest cedars of the three nations; blasted all its beauty and fruitfulness; brought its strength to decay and its glory to reproach, and almost to desolation …
12

The recent employee of Cromwell was happy to lend his signature to Ramsden's account of ‘the late Combustions'. Increasingly loyalist in temper towards the King, Marvell was not sycophantic, refusing just before Christmas to approve a bill asking for the ‘voluntary benevolence' of the country in meeting the expenses of the King's coronation. ‘For though nothing be too much for so gracious a Prince as his Majesty has been all along to us,' he suggested, ‘yet 'tis good to leave something to give hereafter & not to indanger the peoples good will by taking their benevolence.'
13
In case this was a little too free, he quickly added: ‘God hath laid a soare affliction upon his Mtyes family & therein upon the whole nation.'