World Enough and Time (23 page)

The poem illustrates Marvell's view of public affairs in the second half of the 1660s, when the excitement of a new dawn felt at the Restoration had begun to evaporate and be replaced by a perspective of political sleaze and national self-doubt. It benefits from his closeness to affairs and is unsparing in the lash of its satire. It recalls the baneful events of 1666 and early 1667, such as the Dutch fleet's sailing up the Medway and the fall of Clarendon (though written just too early to record his flight). According to Aubrey, Marvell admired the satires of the rakish poet Rochester: ‘I remember I have heard him say that the Earle of Rochester was the only man in England that had the true veine of Satyre.'
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Rochester reciprocated the admiration in his poem ‘Tunbridge-Wells' in 1675, where he saluted Marvell's treatment (in prose) of Samuel Parker (‘Tho'
Marvel
has enough expos'd his Folly'). The ‘true veine' in a poem such as Rochester's ‘A Satyr against Mankind', where the satire deals not merely with the petty events of the day that clutter the genre of the painter poems but the general human condition, was never quite reached by Marvell in his satires of the reign of Charles II. The gift for generalised observation that marks his finest lyrics seemed to desert him in these late satires, which seldom transcend their specific context. Perhaps Marvell, as a practical politician, was too close to the events he described to stand back and take a more reflective view.

‘The last Instructions to a Painter', however, is vastly superior to a poem like ‘Clarindon's House-Warming' and has many fine satiric touches, such as the portrait of Henry Jermyn, Earl of St Albans, a gambler and
bon viveur
rumoured to have had an affair with the Queen Mother, Henrietta Maria. John Evelyn observed, many years later, of St Albans that: ‘He ate and drank with extraordinary appetite. He is a prudent old courtier, and much enriched since his majesty's return.'
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Marvell painted the old rake with relish:

Paint then St
Albans
full of soup and gold,

The new
Courts
pattern, Stallion of the old.

Him neither Wit nor Courage did exalt,

But Fortune chose him for her pleasure salt.

Paint him with
Drayman's
Shoulders, butchers
Mien,

Member'd like Mules, with Elephantine chine.

Well he the Title of St
Albans
bore,

For never
Bacon
study'd Nature more.

The physicality of the description (and the recurrence of Marvell's preoccupation with the human posterior which at least one critic has suggested merits psychoanalytic investigation)
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is even more evident in the lines on Clarendon's daughter, Anne Hyde, who in a private marriage ceremony at his residence in the Strand, Worcester House, on 3 September 1660 had become Duchess of York. Clarendon, who did not really approve of this match with the King's brother, James, later attributed to it in part his downfall. Rather like a cartoon strip, or a panning camera, the advice-to-a-painter genre allows the poet to present a series of otherwise unconnected caricatures. Anne Hyde is followed by the King's mistress, Barbara Villiers, Countess of Castlemaine whose taste for sex with her servants is satirised:

She through her Lacquies Drawers as he ran,

Discern'd Love's Cause, and a new Flame began.

Her wonted joys thenceforth and
Court
she shuns,

And still within her mind the Footman runs:

His brazen Calves, his brawny Thighs, (the Face

She slights) his Feet shapt for a smoother race.

This is all a far cry from the tender verses enfolding Mary Fairfax and the delicate pastoral dialogues of the 1650s.

After these pen portraits, the painter is invited to imagine the House of Commons in the form of a gaming parlour with the court and country parties no better than a pair of backgammon players in a tavern game in which ‘The Dice betwixt them must the Fate divide.' Here the ruling party is motivated by avarice using the Excise as its means. The latter is a many-handed, many-eyed devouring monster prowling the streets by day: ‘And flies like Batts with leathern Wings by Night'. In his letters to Hull, Marvell would always reveal himself to be a sworn enemy of the Excise, an essential posture for a member of the country party, opposed to the extravagance and profligacy of the metropolitan court. The poem reels off the names of a catalogue of long-forgotten politicians and makes much of the incompetence of the government in its handling of the Dutch War and its bungled attempts at a peace, which culminated in the shame of the Dutch raid: ‘
Ruyter
the while, that had our Ocean curb'd,/Sail'd now among our rivers undisturb'd.' At the heart of the poem is a picture of Archibald Douglas, captain of a Scottish regiment, who refused to desert his ship
The Royal Oak
when it was burnt in the Dutch attack and who thus died aboard it. The lines that describe him were later excerpted and framed by lines from another hand to appear as a new poem, ‘The Loyall Scot', in 1697. The panegyric is a shift in tone from the satirical temper of the poem up to this point. Douglas is shown as a paragon of male beauty ‘on whose lovely chin/The early Down but newly did begin;/And modest Beauty yet his Sex did Veil,/While envious Virgins hope he is a Male'. Once again, Marvell's notion of sexual allure is bound up with innocence and sexlessness.
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After the account of the Dutch raid the poem turns to the assigning of blame and by a witty play with rhyme mocks the making of a scapegoat out of Peter Pett, Commander of the Naval Dockyard at Chatham. The real culprit, however, turns out to be Clarendon. The poem – by far Marvell's longest – draws to a close with a dream-sequence in which the King is visited by the shade of his grandfather and then by his father, ‘ghastly
Charles
', the latter, ‘turning his Collar low,/The purple thread about his neck does show'. Waking from his dream: ‘The wondrous Night the pensive
King
revolves,/And rising, straight on
Hyde's
Disgrace resolves.' With a closing reminder that ‘scratching
Courtiers
undermine a
Realm
' the poet appears to advocate, as an alternative to the King's current cabal, an aristocratic elite of courtiers rich enough to be above venal bribery and genuinely noble (‘large Souls').

Whatever part the poem played in the national debate about the events of 1666–7, its desired end came on 29 November when Clarendon, after dark, left London by coach for Erith in Kent. From there, he took a boat to France, landing in Calais after a journey that took three days because the wind was ‘indifferently good'.
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The search for new scapegoats would now begin.

17

The Faults and the Person

The Raising and Destroying of Favourits and Creatures is the sport of Kings not to be medled with by us.
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Marvell's involvement in the impeachment of Clarendon was not confined to the composition of nearly 1,000 lines in rhyming couplets. He entered fully into the Commons debate on the matter, and his interventions were marked by a characteristic independence of judgement. He was never wholly predictable as a politician, although he generally came down on the side of the Opposition forming around the figure of Clarendon's opponent, the Duke of Buckingham, who had married his former pupil Mary Fairfax.

Some time before Parliament met to consider these matters on 10 October 1667, Marvell wrote to Sir John Trott, MP for Andover.
2
Trott's son Edmund had died of smallpox on 11 August, not long after his older brother John, also a young Oxford graduate, had died from the same disease. Since Marvell's correspondence is mostly about political and business affairs, this letter of condolence is of interest in showing a more human side of the poet. Although placing his sympathy in a stern Christian context of acceptance of ‘your Sons happiness' (in going to meet his Maker) the letter is one of feeling. ‘I know the contagion of grief,' Marvell wrote, ‘and infection of Tears, and especially when it runs in a blood. And I my self could sooner imitate then blame those innocent relentings of Nature, so that they spring from tenderness only and humanity, not from an implacable sorrow.'
3
In Marvell's grief, however, there is leisure for fiction, and the letter is a very rhetorical one. It also contains an allusion, masked in a Biblical analogy, to the political situation, and expresses the fear that, in the wake of the Dutch raid, greater calamities were in store for English Protestants from a court that may have done secret deals with the papists. Marvell concludes by enumerating the things that should console a Christian father grieving for his son: ‘The word of God: The society of good men: and the books of the Ancients. There is one way more, which is by diversion, business, and activity; which are also necessary to be used in their season.' Marvell is aware that in writing to a father about the loss of his son he is writing of a condition he has not experienced and never will experience. With that nuance, but ostensibly writing about their respective public roles, he writes: ‘But I my self, who live to so little purpose, can have little authority or ability to advise you.' Marvell composed two Latin epitaphs – one for each son, the one to Edmund described in this letter as ‘this sorry Elogie of your Son' – that are set in tablets in the north wall of the chancel of the old church at Laverstocke in Hampshire, now a mortuary chapel of the Portal family.

On 10 October 1667 Parliament resumed with a determination to seek redress for the miscarriages of the war and to punish the culprits. As the most powerful man in the government, Clarendon was in everyone's sights. Burnet wrote: ‘The Parliament were, upon their first opening, set on to destroy Lord Clarendon. And all persons who had heard him say anything that could bear an ill construction, were examined.'
4
Marvell, who spoke rarely in the House (by the standards of the time that was normal enough), made four speeches during October and November. The first was on 14 October, four days after Clarendon was impeached. ‘There neuer appeared a fairer season for men to obtain what their own hearts could wish either as to redresse of any former grievances or the constituting of good order and justice for the future,'
5
Marvell had told Mayor Franke just before Parliament was due to open. Three weeks later he was confessing to him that ‘really we are tired out with publick businesse'.
6
On 14 October he rose to intervene in the Clarendon debate in what is in some ways a puzzling speech. Marvell seemed not to have had the gift for plain, forceful speaking when on his feet in the Commons, and his speeches often appeared crabbed and difficult to follow. It was as if he hated having to come down on one side directly, preferring to offer qualifications and hesitations. In this intervention he seemed almost to be speaking up for Clarendon, as a result, perhaps, of some fear on his part that the faction clamouring for the Chancellor's impeachment might not actually be holding out a better alternative. The clear lines of Parliamentary opposition that came to be called the court and country parties were only emerging at this time, and Parliament did not have the sharply defined and whipped divisions and allegiances that have come to be the norm in the late twentieth century. Marvell's speech is missing from the official journals but two accounts survive, in the diary of the Derbyshire MP, John Milward, and in some manuscript notes collected by the Tewkesbury MP, Sir Henry Capel, and now preserved in the British Museum. Marvell rose after the Totnes MP, Sir John Maynard, had finished speaking:

Mr Marvell.
The Raising and Destroying of Favourits and Creatures is the sport of Kings, not to be medled with by us. Kings in the Choice of their Ministers move in a Sphear distinct from us. It is said because the people rejoiced at his fall wee must thank the King. The people allso rejoiced at ye Restoration of the Duke of Buckingham the other day obnoxtious. Shall wee not thank ye King for that too? Its said wee hate him not, Would any man in this House be willing to have such a vote pass upon him? Wee are to thank the King for ye matter of his speech. This is not in perticuler any part of it and comes irregularly before us.
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In his diary, John Milward reported that the whole morning was given over to speeches on this question of the right way to dispose of Clarendon ‘and whether the King's laying him aside should be joined to the other acts of grace for which we were to give him the thanks of the House'.
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The King had told both Houses of Parliament: ‘I do assure you I will never again trust the late Lord Chancellor in any place of public employment.' That assurance seems to have been good enough for Marvell. In a parallel with his response to Cromwell, he seems to have fallen in naturally with the idea of the legitimacy of existing power, particularly when it was exercising its strength. A famous defender of the rights of dissenters, he was not himself a natural dissident. Perhaps as a result of this speech he was singled out three days later and placed on the committee inquiring into the miscarriages of the recent war.

On 26 October, Marvell spoke again, once more seeming to aim at a more just and particular indictment rather than have the House simply accede to a generalised clamour for Clarendon's scalp. In reply to a speech by Sir Richard Temple, the Warwickshire MP, who had bellowed: ‘Let not this son of Zeruiah be too strong for king and parliament,'
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Marvell called for fairness in the treatment of Clarendon: