World Enough and Time (32 page)

So that not to Write at all is much the safer course of life: but if a mans Fate or
Genius
prompt him otherwise, 'tis necessary that he be copious in matter, solid in reason, methodical in the order of his work; and that the subject be well chosen, the season well fix'd, and, to be short, that his whole production be matur'd to see the light by a just course of time and judicious deliberation … For indeed whoseover he be that comes in Print whereas he might have sate at home in quiet, does either make a Treat, or send a Chalenge to all Readers; in which cases, the first, it concerns him to have no scarcity of Provisions, and in the other to be compleatly Arm'd: for if any thing be amiss on either part, men are subject to scorn the weakness of the Attaque, or laugh at the meanness of the Entertainment.
10

Parker, Marvell strongly implies, has ignored this sensible and workmanlike aesthetic and by writing ‘an Invective' has taken the greatest risk. Rather disingenuously for the author of several biting satires, the poet argues that the importance of preserving a person's reputation is so great a civic good that satire, however lofty its professed aims, may be undesirable: ‘For 'tis better that evil men should be left in an undisputed possession of their repute, how unjustly soever they may have acquired it, then that the Exchange and Credit of mankind should be universally shaken, wherein the best too will suffer and be involved.' The target of ‘Clarindon's House-Warming', had these words reached him in his French exile (he had only another year to live), would no doubt have permitted himself a bitter laugh at this doubtful argument. Parker, Marvell says, has chosen personal invective in preference to the celebration of virtue. Writing these words, did he reflect on the way he himself had abandoned his lyric delicacy in favour of coarser satire and prose polemic? There may have been a suppressed personal charge in his observation that ‘whereas those that treat of innocent and benign argument are represented by the
Muses,
they that make it their business to set out others ill-favouredly do pass for
Satyres,
and themselves are sure to be personated with prick-ears, wrinkled horns, and cloven feet'. In this second engagement with Parker, Marvell is expressing genuine doubts about whether it is a valid proceeding to protract personal invective, but he is goaded to it by the injustice of Parker's attack which makes what he does ‘not only excusable but necessary'. Higher moral standards are rightly demanded of clergymen, which would not matter in any other trade or profession: ‘No Mans Shooe wrings him the more because of the Heterodoxy, or the tipling of his Shooe-maker.' Marvell concedes that he too has ‘imperfections' and ‘though I carry always some ill Nature about me, yet it is I hope no more than is in this world necessary for a Preservative'. In what could be no more than a rhetorical strategy but which nonetheless seems to carry a note of personal feeling and is consistent with what we know about his love of privacy and apartness, Marvell says that he was reluctantly tempted to this encounter ‘from that modest retiredness to which I had all my life time hitherto been addicted'.

Marvell then proceeds to unpick Parker's arguments, to mock his personal history as the son of ‘whining Phanaticks' and his sanctimonious period with the Grewellers and to declare that ‘it hath been this for the odiousest task that ever I undertook'. Taking care to stress that his support for the cause of toleration does not mean that he himself is a nonconformist (‘I am come not long since from swearing religiously to own that Supremacy'), Marvell at last addresses the substantive argument: ‘I do most certainly believe that the Supream Magistrate hath some Power, but not all Power in matters of Religion … I do not believe that Princes have Power to bind their subjects to that Religion that they apprehend most advantageous.' He denies that he is an enemy of the Church of England or resentful of its ecclesiastical wealth, which is ‘all but too little', but he is angered by the vulgar displays of wealth of certain prelates such as Parker, whom he accuses of sauntering ‘about City and Countrey whither your gilt Coach and extravagance will carry you … This is the great bane and scandal of the Church.' Marvell is fundamentally opposed to law-abiding people being turned into enemies of the state simply by virtue of their religious beliefs. He concedes that ‘The Power of the Magistrate does most certainly issue from the Divine Authority' and that kings ‘as they derive the Right of Succession from their Ancestors, so they inherit from that ancient an illustrious extraction, a Generosity that runs in the Blood above the allay of the rest of mankind'. Their special eminence relieves them from ‘the Gripes of Avarice and Twinges of Ambition', disposing them in consequence ‘to an universal Benignity'. No apologist for hereditary monarchy could wish for more than this and Charles's delight with
The Rehearsal
is not hard to comprehend. Nonetheless, Marvell counsels kings to practise magnanimity and, in one of those characteristic concrete and vivid images he deploys frequently in both parts of
The Rehearsal,
he compares the ruler to a shepherd who has an obvious interest in keeping good care of his flock: rulers cannot prosper ‘if by continual terrour they amaze, shatter, and hare their People, driving them into Woods, & running them upon Precipices'. In short, while defending the divine right of hereditary kingship, Marvell was arguing that the monarchy had duties towards its subjects, one of which was to practise toleration. Advocating a moderate reformism, Marvell extends the virtue of toleration to the sensible allowance of the need for constructive and gradualist change, but avoiding the ‘Schisms, Heresies, and Rebellions, which are indeed crimes of the highest nature'. Societies do change and are in need of modernisation: ‘And therefore the true wisdom of all Ages hath been to review at fit periods those errours, defects or excesses, that have insensibly crept on into the Publick Administration; to brush the dust off the Wheels, and oyl them again, or if it be found advisable to chuse a set of new ones.' Against Parker's virulent contempt for the herd, Marvell defends ‘the Common People' as possessing innate good sense, observing shrewdly: ‘Yet neither do they want the use of Reason, and perhaps their aggregated Judgment discerns most truly the errours of Government, forasmuch as they are first to be sure that smart under them.'

Marvell argues again that the Civil War was provoked by the people being forced into religious conformity, which led to ‘those dismal effects, which, if they cannot be forgotten, ought to be alwayes deplored, alwayes avoided'. Marvell had no nostalgia for the Civil War. He defended toleration and the individual conscience and pragmatism in government and deplored the oppressive temper of men like Parker who could openly declare that vice was preferable to disobedience. By the time Marvell laid down his pen, Parker was finished. The experience, Wood would later write, ‘took down somewhat of his high spirit' and he ‘judged it more prudent to lay down the cudgels, than to enter the lists again with an untowardly combatant so hugely well-vers'd and experienc'd in the then, but newly, refin'd art (tho' much in mode and fashion almost ever since) of sportive and jeering buffoonry'.
11

Marvell, too, though the acknowledged victor, must have felt some relief also in putting this controversy to rest. The hints thrown out in the second part of
The Rehearsal
about the toll taken on a poetic sensibility by these engagements with satire and angry polemic point to Marvell's sense that certain costs were being incurred by his mode of life and the activities into which it inevitably drew him.

24

Tinkling Rhyme

Thou singst with so much gravity and ease;

And above humane flight dost soar aloft.

‘On Mr Milton's Paradise Lost'

Though he may have been the victor over the enemies of toleration in a pamphlet war, Marvell could draw little comfort from the political situation at the start of 1674. Early in 1673 the King had been forced to withdraw the Declaration of Indulgence as the price of getting the supply he needed from Parliament. Parker claimed that Marvell voted with fellow MPs for the withdrawal but in fact there is no record. He could have done so as a Parliamentary tactic designed to achieve legislative action to guarantee toleration rather than continuing to rely on royal prerogative. Meanwhile, a Test Act had been passed, forcing all holders of public office to swear that they rejected the Catholic doctrine of transubstantiation and to furnish a certificate proving that they had recently taken Anglican communion. This attempt to flush out Catholics from public positions resulted in Clifford, a member of the now disintegrating Cabal, deciding to resign rather than renounce his Catholicism publicly. James, Duke of York, also resigned, and announced his intention to marry a Catholic, Mary of Modena, raising the prospect of a Catholic successor to Charles. In a mounting atmosphere of mistrust and fear, opinion in Parliament began to shift towards the reliably Protestant Dutch, with whom the country was still officially at war. Dutch propaganda was active and there existed at this time a fifth column, described by its historian as ‘a strange story of spies and secret agents, smugglers, and conspirators, which at times reads more like historical fiction than sober fact'.
1
Marvell, a man ‘of singular desert for the State to make use of', was once again involved in this clandestine work, operating under the alias of ‘Mr George'.

The fifth column was based in The Hague where William of Orange plotted to turn English opinion against France with the aid of his confidential secretary, the Huguenot refugee du Moulin. The latter dealt with all the intelligence coming from England from around the autumn of 1672. At the London end of this spy network were men operating understandably under false names. One key figure, William Medley, was a former Fifth Monarchy Man who had signed the manifesto of the plotters against Cromwell in 1657,
A Standard Set Up,
and had been thrown into the Tower for two years. A former colleague of Medley's turned informer and identified him as ‘Mr Freeman'. Another plotter was William Carr, more mercenary than ideologue, who was engaged in sending Dutch propaganda pamphlets to Arlington. In May 1674, Carr had an interview with Sir Joseph Williamson, Secretary of State, in Rotterdam, where he spilt some of the beans, including the following from Williamson's unpublished journal in the state papers:

There were certain young gentlemen relations to Parliament men, that had managed all this matter here [in Holland], during the last session of Parliament [i.e. January–February 1674]. They have come over twice or thrice. Once came over a Parliament man under the name of Mr George by du Moulin's order, was but one night at The Hague, and having spoken with the Prince returned. Carr saw him, was a thick, short man, as Carr judged much like Marvell, but he could not say it was he, though he knows, as he says, Marvell very well.
2

At the start of 1674, increasingly disillusioned with the political scene, Marvell had decided to act. In some later papers of du Moulin, dated 22 June 1674, Marvell's name appears, this time assigned the alias ‘Mr Thomas', and in a letter to du Moulin from London of 30 June ‘Mr Thomas' is said to have been ‘in the country, and will not return for some time'. Marvell was also said to have been involved in causing an argument among the spies. In 1673 a man called Abraham van den Bempde was arrested on suspicion of being involved in espionage. He was a friend of Marvell's as is clear from the dedication by Cooke of his edition of Marvell's works to van den Bempde's son John, who lived at Scarborough, referring to ‘that inviolable Friendship betwixt your Father and Mr Marvell'.
3
The evidence that Marvell was engaged in espionage at the start of 1674 is thus compelling. His involvement in this sort of activity would be consistent with his growing association with the country party, now headed by the Earl of Shaftesbury. As a lifelong anti-Catholic, during 1673 and 1674 Marvell would have had an interest in supporting a policy designed to break the Anglo–French alliance. Given that his country was officially at war with the Dutch and in alliance with the French, his activity was both dangerous and treasonable. The fact, however, that on 3 February 1674 he was appointed for the only time in his Parliamentary career to draw up reasons for a conference with the Lords about an address for peace
4
indicates that there may have been some permeability between the legitimate and illegitimate streams of knowledge on foreign affairs at this critical moment.

By 1674 the King's secret Catholic policy was in tatters. Denied money by Parliament unless he did so, he made peace with the Dutch by signing the Treaty of Westminster in February. The Cabal was now dissolved and the King's new chief adviser was Danby, whose putative visit to Marvell's garret has already been described. The bribes and inducements used from now on by Danby to build up the court party in the Commons deepened Marvell's disillusion with the court and heightened his fears about popery and arbitrary government. On 26 April, he wrote to Edmund Popple claiming that Arlington, architect of the secret Treaty of Dover, had been appointed Lord Chamberlain after a bribe of £10,000 had been paid on his behalf.
5

In July a second edition of Milton's
Paradise Lost
appeared. First published in 1667, the new edition was prefaced by two poems, one in Latin by Samuel Barrow and one by Marvell, signed merely ‘A.M.'. Milton was now free from the odium attached to his name at the Restoration and had been the recipient of recent praise from Marvell in the second part of
The Rehearsal,
where Marvell was keen to rebut Parker's charge that Milton somehow had a hand in its first part. ‘For by chance,' Marvell wrote, ‘I had not seen him of two years before; but after I undertook writing, I did more carefully avoid either visiting or sending to him, least I should anyway involve him in my consequences.'
6
He then continued – somewhat outrageously – boldly to rewrite Milton's republican and regicidal past: ‘J.M. was, and is, a man of great Learning and Sharpness of wit as any man. It was his misfortune, living in a tumultuous time, to be toss'd on the wrong side, and he writ
Flagrante bello
certain dangerous Treatises.' Safely sanitised, Milton is now living a quiet life: ‘At His Majesties happy Return, J.M. did partake, even as you yourself did for all your huffing,' Marvell reminds Parker, ‘of his Regal Clemency and has ever since expiated himself in a retired silence.' Marvell reveals that it was at Milton's London home after the Restoration that he first accidentally met Parker who at that time ‘frequented
J.M.
incessantly and haunted his house day by day', although Milton is ‘too generous to remember' what the two men talked about on these occasions. Marvell himself, though meeting Parker four or five times, ‘never contracted any friendship or confidence with you'.