World Enough and Time (26 page)

But if they displease me, I will have all their Lands …

I wholly will abandon State affaires,

And pass my Time with Parrasites and Players,

And Visit Nell when I shold be att Prayers.

Whether Marvell's growing disillusion with the King had reached the pitch where he would want to compose such a crude ballad is not clear. That such a view of the King as a rake and an unscrupulous manipulator of the constitution was circulating is not at all surprising.

Although Parliament was not sitting through the summer, Marvell was still saddled with the continuing business of the Spurn Head lighthouse and the egregious Philip Frowde, who evidently had not been successfully bribed. Marvell wrote to the Brethren of Trinity House about Frowde's endless manoeuvrings in some exasperation: ‘as farre as I can observe the Gentleman a litle matter makes him much businesse and he seems to me one of those who thinke it the greatest point of wisdome to make the most scruples'.
7
In the middle of June Marvell described him angrily as ‘so various & fickle in handling this businesse all along'
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that he longed for them to find a way of bringing the business to an end. Perhaps out of gratitude for his heroic efforts with the insufferable Frowde, the Wardens of Trinity House now sent him a present of a Yorkshire salmon.

19

Our Mottly Parliament

Thus whilst the King of France with powerfull Armes

Frightens all Christendome with fresh Alarms,

Wee in our Glorious Bacchanals dispose

The humble fate of a Plebeian nose.
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On 24 October 1670 Parliament resumed after its long adjournment. It began, unsurprisingly, with a demand from the King for money. He told a House oblivious of the secret clauses of the Treaty of Dover that it was vital for British defences to be kept up to the mark, given the military build-up both of the King of France and of the United Provinces. The recent duties on wine had not generated the expected amount of revenue and, since 1660, the navy had been costing £500,000 a year. On top of this the King had many debts, and had to strengthen the navy, in part to be able to offer protection to the Mediterranean trade. His demand, in short, was for £800,000 and the paying off of all his debts before Christmas. Into Marvell's scrupulously neutral tone when reporting all this to Hull there enters just a shadow of irony.

The necessity of raising all this money compelled Parliament to propose various duties on drink and other commodities and they were not especially welcome to the Hull merchants. Duties on foreign imports such as tobacco were also proposed, a shilling per hundred was put on figs and prunes, five shillings on a barrel of foreign soap, and similar impositions on a host of goods such as nutmeg, cinnamon, mace and cloves. A little later in the session duties would be imposed on foreign imports, and an inventory made ‘of all the French curiositys & trinkets of which our people are so new fangled'
2
so that punitive duties could be imposed on them. Marvell seems to have been surprised at the readiness of the House to agree to what would be seen in the country as fairly onerous taxes, simply in order to ‘gratify his Majestyes utmost expectation'.
3
Nor, in reporting all this, had he lost his odd caution and secretiveness, warning the Corporation yet again to treat his letters as confidential: ‘For I reckon your bench to be all but as one person: whereas others might chance either not to understand or to put an ill construction upon this openness of my writing & simplicity of my expression.' On reflection, he added: ‘This perhaps is needlesse.' Given the prevailing caution surrounding accounts of the doings of Parliament – Arlington, for example, had ordered that the King's recent speeches requesting supply be not printed – the anonymous satires circulating in London may be better understood as a safety valve, letting off dissent and criticism.

As well as caution downright suppression featured in Marvell's Hull letters. On Monday 21 November he spoke in the House in defence of the dissenter Hayes, who had recently been arrested, but there is no mention of it – as was the case with all his previous speeches – in his correspondence.
4
He would not speak again in the House until 1677. With his nephew, however, he was always eloquent and Marvell's letter to Will Popple of 28 November is the nearest we have anywhere in his writing to an endearment, a personal tenderness. ‘I need not tell you I am always thinking of you,'
5
wrote the fond bachelor uncle. His news was that the nonconformists had not been cowed by the Conventicle Act: ‘To say Truth, they met in numerous open Assemblys, without any Dread of Government.' The trained bands in London or the local militia nonetheless ‘harassed and abused' the dissenters, killing several Quakers. Marvell mentioned the two dissenters Hayes and Jekill who, during one of these clashes, had been picked out of the crowd at random and made an example of, but did not refer to his Parliamentary intervention on their behalf a week earlier. He reported, too, the recent case of the Old Bailey jury who had refused to be intimidated by a capricious and reactionary judge in the trial of the two Quakers William Penn and William Mead and who were committed to Newgate Prison for acquitting the two men. Their defiance has become legendary and today a memorial tablet in the Old Bailey records their courage. In Marvell's account there is little doubt of what he thought of the episode:

The Jury not finding them guilty, as the Recorder and Mayor would have had them, they were kept without Meat or Drink some three Days, till almost starved, but would not alter their Verdict; so fined and imprisoned. There is a Book out which relates all the Passages, which were very pertinent, of the Prisoners, but prodigiously barbarous by the Mayor and Recorder. The Recorder, among the rest, commended the
Spanish
Inquisition, saying it would never be well till we had something like it.

Marvell's frank letter contains no trace of his former conventional loyalty to the monarch, who had been pressing the House hard for his money. ‘The House was thin and obsequious,' he wrote, adding that when the supply was approved it was with little enthusiasm, ‘few Affirmatives, rather a Silence as of men ashamed and unwilling'. With judges openly advocating the desirability of a Spanish Inquisition to root out dissent, and a Parliament in the King's pocket, these would indeed seem, to Marvell, dark days for English liberty. ‘There is like to be a terrible Act of Conventicles,' he concluded.

Not merely did Marvell decline all general political opinions in his Hull letters, but he never sought any from his correspondents, so his letter to the Corporation on 17 December is unique in suddenly posing the question: ‘What is your opinion at Hull of the bill from the Lords for general naturalization of all forainers that shall take the oaths of allegeance & Supremacy?'
6
In the surviving letters this was the first and last time he made such an inquiry. The session that came to an end at Christmas had been a long and gruelling one, as Marvell admitted to the York merchant Edward Thompson, to whom he wrote on the same day, saying he was ‘tired out with sitting daily till nine a clock'.
7

When the House returned in January 1671 there was nothing in the political situation to raise Marvell's spirits. ‘The Court is at the highest Pitch of Want and Luxury, and the People full of Discontent,'
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he reported to Will Popple. Ten years on from the high hopes of the Restoration, all he could see was corruption, extravagance and the erosion of civil liberty. Possibly around this time he wrote the satirical poem ‘Further Advice to a Painter', which begins:

Painter once more thy Pencell reassume,

And draw me in one Scene London and Rome,

There holy Charles, here good Aurelius Sate,

Weeping to see their Sonns degenerate.

The present King's father, Charles I, is imagined looking down in dismay on his son's degenerate reign. The zoom lens then moves in on Parliament itself and its obnoxious (to Marvell) Speaker, Sir Edward Turner ‘Whose life does scarce one Generous Action own'. Sir Thomas Clifford, Sir John Duncombe, and Ashley Cooper, the Treasury commissioners, are represented as ‘This great triumvirate that can devide/The spoyls of England' and Secretary of State Arlington is painted as holding a drunken meeting of the Council of State: ‘Our mighty Masters in a warme debate;/Capacious Bowles with Lusty wine repleat'. The poet mocks – and in general this poem does little more than mock, a weakness of the ‘painter' genre, which often uses the instruction conceit to mask a lack of structural dynamic – ‘the five recanters of the Hous/That aime at mountains and bring forth a Mous'. This was a reference to the five defectors from the country party whom Marvell had mentioned in a recent letter to Will: Sir Robert Howard, Sir Edward Seymour, Sir Richard Temple, Sir Robert Carr and Gervase Hollis (or possibly his son, Sir Frescheville).

The poem also contains an allusion (‘The humble fate of a Plebeian nose') to an incident that took place just after the House was adjourned at the end of 1670 and figured largely in the debates of January 1671. Marvell describes, in a letter to Will Popple, an incident in the House in which Sir John Coventry, the Weymouth MP, moved that there be a tax on theatres. Sir John Birkenhead, MP for Wilton and a Royalist, had responded by observing that the theatres had been of great service to the King. Coventry replied with the sarcastic query – the allusion to the King's mistresses being unmistakable – as to whether he meant the male or female players, an inquiry which indicated the respect with which the King was held in some parts of the House. Marvell takes up the story of what happened next to Coventry:

On the very Tuesday night of the Adjournment twenty five of the
Duke of Monmouth's
Troop, and some few Foot, layed in Wait from ten at Night till two in the Morning, by
Suffolk-Street,
and as he returned from the
Cock,
where he supped, to his own House, they threw him down, and with a Knife cut off almost all the End of his Nose; but Company coming made them fearful to finish it, so they marched off.
9

An anonymous poem on this incident, ‘Upon the Cutting of Sir John Coventry's Nose', was at one time attributed to Marvell.
10
When the issue was first raised in the House the court party tried to brazen it out by deflecting blame on to Coventry for his original words, but the House resolved on introducing a bill banning the perpetrators for life and making the slitting of noses a felony without benefit of clergy. The incident illustrated the fact that the King and his courtiers could no longer take liberties with Parliament and was thus something of a benchmark, but it would have done little to lift Marvell's despondent mood in relation to public affairs. Nor did the firm action of the House dissuade courtiers from similar disorderly acts. The Duke of Monmouth and his friends were again in trouble a few weeks later in a scrap with the Watch during which a beadle was murdered. Marvell was appalled at the way the courtiers got away with this criminal behaviour. ‘They have all got their Pardons, for
Monmouth's
Sake,' he told Will, ‘but it is an Act of great Scandal.'
11

Another scandal was the insidious growth of popery, with fresh and disturbing evidence from the Welsh Marches. It was alleged in the House that, ‘notwithstanding his Mtys sincerity in the Protestant religion',
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certain ‘Eminent persons' were markedly off message. Reporting the debate to Hull, Marvell observed: ‘One Gentleman particularly affirm'd that in Monmouth & Herefordshire there were more Popish Priests then Orthodox Ministers & that in six Hundreds of that Country, three were grown in a manner all Papists & whereas of late years there were not aboue 400 they were now grown to betwixt 4 & 5000.'
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Accordingly: ‘A Committee was orderd to inquire into the growth of Popery & to bring an Act in to prevent it.' There was also concern that in suppressing dissenters and papists there was a danger of forgetting another important group. As a prudent afterthought, therefore: ‘The Jews were also added into the Question.'

Towards the end of February, a member of the House of Lords, Lord Lucas, made what Marvell called ‘a fervent bold Speech against our Prodigality in giving and the weak Looseness of the Government'.
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He was undeterred by the King's presence when he spoke. When copies of the speech were circulated some members of the Lords succeeded in having it declared a libel and it was burnt by the public hangman. In reporting this affair to Will Popple, Marvell was drawing attention yet again to the profligacy of the court and its lack of grip on affairs. He was disturbed that the King of France was then at Dunkirk, ostensibly for peaceful purposes, yet the navy was nowhere to be seen in spite of the fact that the King had recently been voted £800,000 for strengthening the navy. Marvell observed bitterly that there was no point in being worried. Louis would not lift a finger against England ‘but leave us to dy a natural Death. For indeed never had poor Nation so many complicated, mortal, incurable, Diseases.' For his part, Marvell appeared to be about to go on another government mission to Ireland in connection with treasonable Catholic activity there. Though there is no concrete evidence that he actually went, it is significant that he was still considered trustworthy for such commissions. The opportunity to escape the corrupt odour of the English court would be no small part of the attraction of going to Ireland, he told Will: ‘I think it will be my Lot to go on an honest fair Employment into
Ireland.
Some have smelt the Court of
Rome
at that Distance. There I hope I shall be out of the Smell of our.'
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