World Enough and Time (28 page)

Such affairs of state were much more interesting than Marvell's other duty, dealing yet again with the tiresome Philip Frowde and his lighthouse project. Throughout the year letters on the subject shuttled back and forth between the MP and the Trinity House Brethren. Marvell met Frowde by accident on 20 June and told him bluntly: ‘I had been so unhappy in former discourses with him as to meet with such delays uncertaintys and repugnances that I was tired out of the businesse.'
5
It nonetheless dragged on and in late November Marvell dined at the other Trinity House in Deptford, to whom he was well known ‘hauing obliged them much in our last Session of Parlt by opposing a new Act for Dover Peere',
6
in order to see if a common front between the two Houses could be effected.

At the end of September 1672 Marvell returned to London after a summer break to witness the reaction to his anonymous pamphlet
The Rehearsal Transpros'd: or Animadversions upon a late Book, Intituled A Preface Shewing What Grounds there are of Fears and Jealousies of Popery.
It did not bear his name and carried a cod-printer's declaration that it was published ‘at the sign of the King's Indulgence, on the South-side of the
Lake Leman
'. This was to be Marvell's most famous prose work, particularly in the century after his death. In spite of the praise of Swift who wrote: ‘we still read
Marvel
's Answer to
Parker
with Pleasure, tho' the Book it answers be sunk long ago'
7
it is highly unlikely that ‘we still read' it. In spite of the multiplicity of editions of Marvell's poems currently in print,
The Rehearsal,
together with its second part, published the following year, are the only prose works to have been published in modern scholarly editions; none of the prose, apart from a few excerpts, has found its way into a popular edition. Even for scholars, the rest of the prose writing still has to be read in the original editions or in nineteenth-century reprints. Marvell's prose satire is learned, witty, occasionally enlivened by flashes of vigorous language and vivid metaphor, but it lacks the immediacy, pace, rapid clarity and narrative invention of Swift. It is unlikely that it will ever achieve an appeal outside the ranks of dedicated Marvellians.

The book was written, as its title indicates, in response to a preface written by Samuel Parker, an up-and-coming thirty-two-year-old Anglican polemicist about whom few of his contemporaries could find a good word to say and who later became the Bishop of Oxford. The preface was attached to a theological work called
A Vindication of himself from the Presbyterian Charge of Popery
(1672) by Bishop John Bramhall, Archbishop of Armagh. Bramhall, a Yorkshireman born in Pontefract, had, according to his biographer, married a clergyman's widow who ‘gave him a fortune and a library'.
8
He went to Ireland in 1633 as chaplain to Strafford, Charles I's trusted adviser, Sir Thomas Wentworth, and became Bishop of Derry in 1634 where he earned the nickname ‘Bishop Bramble'. Although Marvell's quarrel was with the obnoxious Parker, the late Bishop Bramhall was an equal foe of toleration and suppleness of mind. As Bishop of Derry he opposed the use of the Irish Bible and Prayer Book because the native tongue of the Irish was ‘a symbol of barbarism'. His virulence towards Catholicism was such that: ‘It is said that he was so obnoxious to the papal powers that on crossing into Spain he found his portrait in the hands of innkeepers, with a view to his being seized by the Inquisition.'
9
When Marvell wrote his riposte, Bramhall was dead, but Samuel Parker was very much alive.

The apostate is often the fiercest opponent of his former co-religionists, a phenomenon paralleled in the sphere of political ideology; in the twentieth century one thinks of the virulence of many ex-communist Cold War ideologues. Samuel Parker, born in Northampton in 1640, though destined to become the scourge of nonconformity, was in his youth a very puritanical adolescent. At Wadham College, Oxford, encouraged by a Presbyterian tutor, he adopted a strict and self-denying religious discipline. With his companions he fasted and dined grimly on a thin broth made of oatmeal and water which earned them the nickname of the ‘Grewellers'. The broth-eaters frequently went to a house of fervent religiosity in the Oxford parish of Holywell, kept by ‘an old an crooked maid'
10
called Bess Hampton. The economic base on which her superstructure of piety rested was the taking in of washing. At the Restoration, Parker threw off this disguise and emerged as a career Anglican. Marvell accused him of subsequently attacking John Calvin and of having ‘made a constant Pissing-place of his grave'
11
in his anxiety to distance himself from that brand of theology. After changing colleges to Trinity, Parker was ordained in 1664 and went to London to be the chaplain of a nobleman. From this vantage point he began to ingratiate himself, in Marvell's judgement spending ‘a considerable time in creeping into all Corners and Companies, Horoscoping up and down concerning the duration of the Government'.
12
Having decided that ‘the Episcopal Government would indure as long as this King lived', Parker decided to back the right horse and ‘cast about how to be admitted into the Church of
England
'. Once this had been accomplished, Parker became chaplain to Archbishop Shelden at Lambeth Palace and in June 1670 was appointed Archdeacon of Canterbury. He then threw himself into religious controversy, defending royal absolutism and religious authority. In 1686 he would be appointed Bishop of Oxford by James II. Burnet described him as ‘a covetous and ambitious man' who ‘seemed to have no other sense of religion but as a political interest and a subject of party and faction. He seldom came to prayers or to any exercises of devotion, and was so lifted up with pride that he was become insufferable to all that came near him.'
13
An apocryphal story is told of his being asked what was the best body of divinity and replying: ‘That which would help a man to keep a coach and six horses was certainly the best'.
14
Anthony Wood, in his
Athenae Oxoniensis,
was another, if slightly more sympathetic, contemporary, who thought that Parker laid himself open to Marvell's attack ‘thro' a too loose and unwary handling of the debate'
15
but was chastened by the experience.

Parker's first book was
Tentamina de Deo
in 1665 but, after joining the Royal Society that year, he published his first noteworthy work in 1666,
A Free and Impartial Censure of the Platonick Philosophie,
which gave vent to his hatred of religious enthusiasm and his dislike of the ‘common and mechanical sort of men'. He returned to this hatred of the lower orders the same year in
An Account of the Nature and Extent of the Divine Dominion and Goodnesse
where he expressed the concern that if the common people be ‘suffered to run without restraint, they will break down all the banks of Law and Government'.
16
The earliest work that Marvell engaged with was the
Discourse of Ecclesiastical Politie,
whose subtitle more than adequately indicates its scope and the intellectual temper of its author:
wherein the authority of the Civil Magistrate over the Consciences of Subjects in matters of Religion is asserted; the Mischiefs and Inconveniences of Toleration are represented, and all Pretenses pleaded in behalf of Liberty of Conscience are fully answered.
The book was published in 1669 and its answers were replied to in 1671 by
A Defence and Continuation of the Ecclesiatical Politie.
It was the preface, however, issuing from Parker's period as rector of Ickham in Kent in 1672, that finally sent Marvell into action.

The drift of Parker's thinking in questions of ecclesiastical government was that, given the ungovernable variety of human beliefs, the ‘Civil Magistrate' or head of government should be given total power in religious matters to prevent anarchy. There is an obvious analogy with the great seventeenth-century thinker Hobbes, who in
Leviathan
(1651), written in the immediate aftermath of civil war, advocated acceptance of the prevailing power as the only means to peace. Parker found the concept of freedom of conscience odious and believed instead in the virtue of absolute obedience. To him toleration was an evil and a threat to civil order. In the
Discourse
he claimed that the Church of England was being ‘savagely worried by a Wild and Fanatique Rabble'
17
and attacked ‘the wild and hair-brain'd Youths of the Town' who make atheism acceptable under the guise of liberty of conscience: ‘'Tis these Apes of Wit and Pedants of Gentility that would make Atheism the fashion forsooth.' He was contemptuous of the high moral ground claimed by the defenders of liberty of conscience, arguing that ‘of all Villains the well-meaning Zealot is the most dangerous'. In spite of the aggressive spirit of Parker's polemic and its lurid terms, he tried to articulate in the
Discourse
either a disingenuous or a genuinely naive belief that he was a voice of moderation, reluctantly drawn into arguments of church discipline. ‘The Author is a Person of such a tame and softly humour,' he wrote sweetly in the preface, ‘and so cold a Complexion, that he thinks himself scarce capable of hot and passionate Impressions: and therefore if he has sometimes twisted Invectives with his Arguments, it proceeded not from Temper but from Choice; and if there be any Tart and Upbraiding expressions, they were not the Dictates of Anger or Passion, but of the Just and Pious Resentments of his Mind.'

With all his resources of elegant mockery, Marvell tore away this veil of pious cant, and both men clambered into the pit together in a tussle that the poet was foreordained to win.

21

Animadversions

For it is not impossible that a man by evil arts may have crept into the Church, thorow the Belfry or at the Windows. 'Tis not improbable that having so got in he should foul the Pulpit, and afterwards the Press with opinions destructive to Humane Society and the Christian Religion. That he should illustrate so corrupt Doctrines with as ill a conversation, and adorn the lasciviousness of his life with an equal petulancy of stile and language. In such a concurrence of misdemeanours what is to be done?
1

In 1671, George Villiers, Duke of Buckingham, wrote a play called
The Rehearsal.
Buckingham, leader of the country party's opposition to Charles at a time when Marvell's sympathies were running in that direction, saw his play receive its first performance in London on 7 December 1671. The aim of this burlesque was to ridicule the current fashion for ‘heroic' plays, a genre founded by the former Poet Laureate, William Davenant, nicknamed ‘Bayes' because he wore the laureate's crown of bay leaves. When Davenant died in 1668 the mock title passed to his successor as Poet Laureate, John Dryden. As the Victorian critic, Henry Morley, introducing a selection of these plays which included
The Rehearsal,
put it: ‘Bold rhodomontade was, on the stage, preferred to “good sense” upon poets, as a reaction against the strained ingenuities that had come in under Italian influence.'
2
When Marvell came to write his pamphlet, the recent success on the stage of Buckingham's play, which was printed in 1672, would still be reverberating; although popular in the eighteenth century,
The Rehearsal
is neither in print nor performed today. It is made up of a string of parodic passages mocking the heroic style, featuring a central character called Mr Bayes who takes two friends to see a rehearsal of his absurd new play. At one point Bayes, a self-confessed plagiarist, explains to his friends, Mr Smith and Mr Johnson, his method of composition:

Bayes:…
I take a book in my hand, either at home or elsewhere, for that's all one, if there be any Wit in't, as there is no Book but has some, I Transverse it; that is, if it be Prose put it into Verse, (but that takes up some time), if it be Verse, put it into Prose.

Johns:
Methinks, Mr.
Bayes,
that putting Verse into Prose should be call'd Transprosing.
3

By equating Samuel Parker with the bombastic fool Bayes, whose embodiment on the stage would be fresh in many of his readers' minds, Marvell was being both witty and highly topical, and enjoying a further tilt at Dryden into the bargain. The implication is that Parker's attempts at wit, like those of Mr Bayes, are derivative and farcical. Marvell's earthy humour made what purported to be a contribution to theological controversy into an instant best-seller.

But he had a serious purpose in writing it. He wanted to defend the King's policy of indulgence towards nonconformists, which was coming under fire from many leading figures in the Church of England and even from some dissenters who saw it as a step towards popery. Samuel Parker was only the noisiest and most aggressive of the defenders of the Establishment. The MP Sir John Reresby later wrote in his
Memoirs
that the Declaration of Indulgence was ‘the greatest blowe that ever was given, since the Kings restoration, to the Church of England'.
4
Leading figures in the Church of England, alarmed at the threat to their hegemony, began to campaign against the King's policy. The Bishop of London instructed his clergy to preach against popery such that, according to Burnet: ‘The king complained to Sheldon [Gilbert Sheldon, Archbishop of Canterbury] of this preaching on controversy, as done on purpose to inflame the people, and to alienate them from him and his government.'
5
With opposition to his policy of toleration coming both from the Church and from Parliament, Charles took steps to make sure that the nonconformists, whose hatred of Catholicism was as potent as either, were on his side, and offered some of the leading nonconformists a yearly pension of £50 in order to secure their support, though the famous nonconformist minister Richard Baxter refused to take the King's money. A friend of Marvell, Baxter shared his retrospective scepticism about the value of the Civil War, writing in his autobiography,
Reliquiae Baxterianae:
‘I make no doubt that both parties were to blame, as it commonly falleth out in most wars and contentions, and I will not be he that will justify either of them.'
6
According to Wood, the physician and author Henry Stubbe, who wrote a response to Marvell's pamphlet, was well rewarded by the King for two pamphlets he wrote in 1672 and 1673 defending that other unpopular plank of royal policy, the Dutch War. Wood alleged that Stubbe received £200 from the royal purse. Although there is no suggestion that Marvell was rewarded financially for his polemic it would have been no less welcome to the King for the way in which it defended his policy, silenced its leading opponent, and presented Charles himself in a highly favourable light. Charles was not a lover of serious discourse but, if Burnet is to be believed, he took
The Rehearsal
to his bosom: ‘the last King, that was not a great reader of books, read them [the two parts of
The Rehearsal
] over and over again'.
7