World Enough and Time (30 page)

‘Have you not, my lord Bishop, such a book which he hath lately written?'

‘Yes.'

‘Please to produce it. There, my lord, look over that page of the preface!'

‘Well, what of this?'

‘Why, my lord, does he not say he is “a true son of his mother the church of England”?'

‘Well, and what of that?'

‘Read further on, my lord: “The church of England has spawned two bastards, the Presbyterians and the Congregationals”. Ergo, my lord, he expressly declares
that he is the son of a whore.'

‘You are very witty, indeed, Mr Marvell but let me intreat you in future time to show more reverence to the cloth.'

That Marvell declined to obey the Bishop's injunction is evident from his subsequent writings. Six printed replies to
The Rehearsal
appeared rapidly to provoke him further. The first of these was
Rosemary & Bayes: or Animadversions Upon a Treatise Called, The Rehearsal Transprosed. In a Letter to a Friend in the Country.
This short, twenty-two-page pamphlet was the first reply and must have been published within weeks of Marvell's work appearing, because it is dated 1672. The anonymous author was Henry Stubbe, described by Wood as ‘the most noted Latinist and Grecian of his age … a singular mathematician, and thoroughly read in all poetical matters, councils, ecclesiastical and profane histories'.
4
Yet in spite of these accomplishments, Wood went on, Stubbe ‘became a ridicule, and undervalued by sober and knowing scholars'. He was an intimate friend of the political philosopher Thomas Hobbes. His reply, ‘written in haste' in the form of a letter to a friend in the country, reassures that person on its first page: ‘Honoured Sir, Do not wonder that you so little understand the
Rehearsal Transpros'd;
I believe the
Author
himself never did.'
5
Stubbe's attempt at a riposte is, for the most part, footling and pedantic although he does not set out automatically to defend Parker and concedes: ‘There are in it several Periods, which shew the Author to have had some Intervals of SENSE and WIT', though these are such as ‘you may find in the Harrangues of Enthusiasts, and Madmen'. Stubbe claimed that Parker was not generally approved of: ‘As to the Church of England few of them approved the Style of Mr Bayes, and fewer his Doctrines: He was in the Pulpit declaimed against as the young Leviathan.' But he feared that if the clergy were held up to ridicule and were
‘inodiated'
civil peace would be threatened. Stubbe concluded by rejecting Marvell's analysis of the origins of the Civil War, arguing that no single cause could be adduced unless it were that ‘the Lawyers (finding themselves too numerous, odious, burthensome and disrespected by the people) would indear themselves to the Nation, and make work for their profession, by seeming Assertions of the Laws, Rights and freedom of the Subject'.

Meanwhile, the government was considering its reaction to Marvell's talked-about work. On 23 January 1673, the Secretary of State, Henry Coventry, called in the Surveyor of the Press, Sir Roger L'Estrange, to find out how this unlicensed work had managed to escape the censor. L'Estrange, under examination, told Coventry that he ‘neither knew, nor heard of'
6
The Rehearsal
until the first impression had been distributed by the printer, whom he assumed to be Nathaniel Ponder. L'Estrange advised that ‘if the Book were Questioned, there were those would Justify it' and a prosecution of the printer would very probably fail. Nonetheless, the Stationers' Company officials seized the sheets of a second impression at the printer, behaving with their customary selective zeal. Only about half of the pamphlet literature published between 1662 and 1679 was licensed, because L'Estrange was easily bribed and the Stationers' Company acted in a wholly arbitrary fashion. Strictly, all ‘seditious' books (which included anything critical of Church or State) should have been licensed but the printer – probably, from the initials ‘A.B.', Anne Brewster, widow of the printer for Cromwell's Council of State and later printer of Marvell's
Account of the Growth of Popery
– was one of a number who took advantage of the ineptness of the censors to evolve an efficient system of printing and distribution. Coventry's examination revealed that L'Estrange had been summoned by the Earl of Anglesey to his house in Drury Lane. On arrival, the Earl made clear that the book had met with approval in the very highest quarters. He told the censor:

Look you, Mr L'Estrange, there is a Book come out … [
The Rehearsal
] I presume you have seen it. I have spoken to his Majesty about it and the King says
he will not have it supprest, for Parker has done him wrong, and this man has done him Right.
7

Thus informed by the Earl that ‘the King will have the Book to passe', L'Estrange accepted instructions to license it, preserving his
amour-propre
by making some quibbles about one or two passages ‘not fit to be Licensed'. No sooner had Anglesey agreed to this than L'Estrange primly asserted ‘that he did not love to tamper with other mens Copyes, without the Privity and Allowance of the Author'. Anglesey replied with evident impatience that ‘he could not say anything of the Author, but that such alterations might be made without him' and L'Estrange was sent away to license the book. The Clerk of the Stationers' Company now announced that he would not enter it. L'Estrange wrote and asked why, ‘saying that he disliked the thing as much as anybody, but being over-ruled he expected the Company's officer should likewise conform'.
8
The clerk was adamant and the book was never entered on the Stationers' Register.

Events, however, were proceeding quickly and by the time Parker came to register his
Reproof to the Rehearsal Transprosed
in March 1673 with the Stationers' Company – it appeared in May – the political situation had changed significantly. The King had been forced to cancel his Declaration of Indulgence after the Commons had voted it down. Marvell had thus failed in his political aim and Parker was able to turn the tables on him, accusing the poet of being opposed to the will of Parliament. Parker, taking his cue from Marvell, plunges directly
ad hominem,
rather than addressing the argument, into a tirade of personal abuse, in an attempt to demonstrate to the world, he says, that Marvell's literary accomplishments, foreign travels, linguistic skills and his ‘being a cunning Gamester' fail to qualify him ‘to discourse of Conscience and Ecclesiastical Policy'.
9
Marvell in fact is ‘a Clown', ‘a Buffoon' a ‘Trifler', and ‘as despicable a Scribbler as ever blotted paper'. Parker claims, however, to have a more serious purpose. What he calls ‘my old War against Faction and Non-conformity' has been designed to expose ‘that certain and inviolable confederacy that there has always been between Non-conformity and the Good old Cause'.

The history of polemic is generally written by the victors. Although the conventional assumption that Marvell won the argument is justified – for who is Parker to posterity compared with a major poet like Marvell? – it should not be overlooked that here and there, amid the ineffable splutter and bluster, Parker hits home. But, for the most part, Parker conducts himself like a pompous ass, rearing himself up in the opening pages to rebuke Marvell for ‘acosting me in such a clownish and licentious way of writing, as you know to be unsuitable both to the Civility of my Education, and the Gravity of my Profession'. Trying to match his opponent for wit, he claims to have a further aim: ‘to convince the world how little Wit is requisite to prove that you have none at all'. He claims, with some measure of justification, that Marvell makes no serious attempt in
The Rehearsal
to refute his thesis about the nature of ecclesiastical authority and the proper field of the individual conscience. He accuses his opponent of masking a lack of knowledge and a shortage of theological rigour under a cover of sportive mockery: ‘it is in the nature of some Vermine to be nibbling though they have no Teeth'. Parker also correctly identifies Marvell's fervent anticlericalism: ‘And if you can but get scent of anything that smells of a Priest, away you run with full Cry and open Mouth.'
10

Parker follows Marvell's polemical method of The Tendentious Curriculum Vitae, mocking him, in passages already quoted, as ‘an Hunger-starved Whelp of a Country Vicar' whose inherited distaste for church hierarchies makes him go for any clergyman ‘with all the rage of a Phanatick Blood-Hound'. He refers to him as ‘an Urchin', a ‘boy' and a ‘young man' as if he were dealing with a raw provincial youth, not a fifty-year-old MP. He blames Marvell's coarse language and scurrility on his ‘first unhappy Education among Boat-Swains and Cabin-Boys, whose phrases you learn'd in your Childhood', that rough education being topped up by consorting with ‘the Boys and Lackeys at Charing-Cross or in Lincoln's Inn Fields'. Parker hammers away in this fashion for over 500 pages before concluding:

So that if you must be scribling, betake your self to your own proper trade of Lampoons and Ballads, and be not so unadvised as to talk in publique of such matters as are above the reach of your understanding, you cannot touch
Sacred things
without
prophaning
them.
11

Parker may have stung Marvell when he refers to his ‘juvenile Essays of Ballads, Poesies, Anagrams and Acrostics' (either Parker is misinformed or some interesting lost items of the Marvell canon are being alluded to here). Endorsing the view that Marvell's true poetic output belonged to the earlier part of his life, the passage goes on to refer to the poet's apparent desertion by his Muse: ‘your Papers lying useless by you at this time when your Muse began to tire and set'.

Parker, though he would be silenced by the second part of Marvell's
Rehearsal
later in the year, made one more return to his opponent in a posthumously published work (he died, it is said, after a convulsive fit at being instructed by James II to admit nine more Catholic Fellows to Magdalen College, Oxford, where he was President in the 1680s). This was his
De Rebus sui Temporis Commentarium
(1726), published in an English translation the following year by Thomas Newlin as
Bishop Parker's History of His Own Time.
It contains the same blend of personal abuse and slander and alleges that Marvell was close to the Cabal, who met ‘at a tavern at the sign of King Henry the Eighth, against the Temple … when they went abroad, they distinguish'd themselves by a green ribbon round their hats, as a badge of their society'.
12
Still nursing his resentment, he went on:

Amongst these lewd Revilers, the lewdest was one whose name was
Marvel.
As he had liv'd in all manner of wickedness from his youth, so being of a singular impudence and petulancy of nature, he exercised the province of a Satyrist, for the use of the faction, being not so much a Satyrist thro' quickness of wit, as sowerness of temper: of but indifferent parts, except it were in the talents of railing and malignity.

Against the evidence that Marvell, at least until the mid-1670s, was not, in spite of his mounting disillusion, a serious opponent of the King (who had, after all, eased publication of
The Rehearsal
), Parker makes quite a specific allegation that has no other independent corroboration:

In all Parliaments he was an enemy to the King's affairs, being one of those Conspirators, who being sixty in number, of the remains of the Rebellion, had bound themselves by oath, from the beginning, to give all the trouble they could to the King, and especially never to vote for granting any taxes.
13

Parker alleges that Marvell, known to be one of this club of sixty, was treated by his fellow MPs ‘with shame and disgrace', making it difficult for him to participate in debates ‘for they were hardly ever suffer'd to speak without being hiss'd at; and our Poet could not speak without a sound basting'. Parker concluded that Marvell continuously represented the interests of this secret group of ‘Sectaries' and that his defence of toleration and dissent was no more than a desire to advance the fortunes of his group. ‘Whether the Conspirators aim'd at tyranny,
Marvel
himself was certainly a proper person to give testimony, who if he was not their Secretary, was yet admitted into their inmost counsels, for the sake of his ancient friendship with them.' In his earlier writings Parker had perfected this mode of slanderous insinuation, grounded perhaps in something more than gossip (he clearly knew something about Marvell and his background), but vitiated by the lurid tones of the conspiracy theorist. There is just sufficient mystery in some of Marvell's political dealings to allow for the possibility that his politics may have been more subtle and dark than they appear in his correspondence, but Parker is the most prejudiced witness of all, and one with obvious motives for wanting to allege the worst about his opponent.

Throughout 1673 replies appeared to
The Rehearsal.
Few of these were of great value in advancing an argument that even the two chief antagonists had allowed to dissolve into personal abuse. The poet Richard Leigh, a young Oxford graduate, published
The Transproser Rehears'd: or the Fifth Act of Mr Bayes's Play.
It picks up the abusive tone of the controversy, rehashing many of Parker's gibes, and it may be no more than this pamphlet convention that is behind its insinuations of sexual oddity in Marvell. In a passage on ‘his Personal Character' Leigh seems to be implying some anatomical sexual deficiency: ‘Neither would I trumpet the Truth too loudly in your ears, because ('tis said) you are of a delicate Hearing, and a great enemy to noise; insomuch that you are disturb'd with the tooting of a sow-gelder's Horn.' A little later, Leigh adds: ‘you may allow him to be an Allegorical Lover at least'.
14
And he concludes with a piece of doggerel that implies some unnatural acts between Marvell and Milton: