World Enough and Time (33 page)

Written in the early summer of 1674, ‘On Mr Milton's Paradise Lost' opens with a confession by Marvell that ‘When I beheld the Poet blind, yet bold,/In slender Book his vast Design unfold,' he had misgivings that Milton would ‘ruine' the sacred scriptural truths ‘to Fable and old Song'. Marvell's residual Puritanism made him uneasy at the turning of sacred matter into material for poetry. As he read on, however, he became ‘less severe', although a new anxiety arose that Milton would prove the victim of his own success in making the whole thing seem too easy. Some lesser talent might even be given the idea of putting the story of creation on to the Restoration stage as an entertainment. Dryden – tilted at here as ‘the
Town-Bays'
– actually did write an opera, inspired by
Paradise Lost,
called
The Fall of Angels and Man in Innocence,
but it was never performed in spite of having been licensed on 17 April 1674. Marvell's final judgement, however, was that Milton had got it exactly right:

At once delight and horrour on us seize,

Thou singst with so much gravity and ease;

And above humane flight dost soar aloft,

With Plume so strong, so equal, and so soft.

Milton's astonishing achievement, Marvell suggests, constitutes a gift from heaven, a compensation for his loss of sight in the form of an inner vision. The closing lines of the poem allude briefly to Milton's refusal of rhyme in favour of blank verse. A note by Milton on the verse of his epic – attached, like Marvell's poem, to this second edition only – says categorically that rhyme is ‘no necessary adjunct or true ornament of poem or good verse … but the invention of a barbarous age, to set off wretched matter and lame metre'.
7
Milton believes that rhyme is ‘to all judicious ears, trivial and of no musical delight' compared with the real marks of poetic craftsmanship which do not depend on ‘the jingling sound of like endings'. Marvell, who wrote all his poetry in rhyme, generally in rhyming couplets, alludes – with a gentle, self-mocking irony – to his fashionable fondness for that ‘tinkling Rhime' which the severe Milton abhors: ‘I too transported by the
Mode
offend.'

Towards the end of April, Marvell wrote to Edmund Popple in Hull to say that he was coming to the city, though not until Will had returned from Paris to accompany him. The erection of a lighthouse at the mouth of the Humber was a more local issue than the intrigues of foreign powers, but one that demanded his attention. In a letter to the Trinity Brethren in October, Marvell displays once again his subtlety in public affairs by pointing out that the wardens could no longer oppose the weight of opinion in favour of a lighthouse, advising them to avoid loss of face by using new evidence of a sandbank having formed at the mouth of the Humber to justify their U-turn. This would enable them to be seen to be ‘retracting or rectifying with more honour' their former objections and ‘serve for a just pretense to the variance of our judgements'.
8
Marvell's other correspondence in the autumn of 1674, especially several letters to Henry and Edward Thompson, reveals his anxiety about the political situation and impatience with ‘the hurry and foolery of the Town'.
9
Aware of the intrigues conducted on all sides, he told Henry Thompson on 5 November, the anniversary of the gunpowder plot: ‘Things stand as I feare but ticklish and insincere betwixt us and Holland.'
10
To Henry's brother, Edward Thompson, he reported the following month the case of the ‘Popish Priest', Father Alexander Burnet, who had been condemned to be hanged, drawn and quartered. ‘'Tis the most criticall thing since this Kings reigne whether he shall be executed or not. Few days will tell us.'
11
In the event, Burnet was merely banished, but the incident was the latest evidence of official paranoia about clandestine Catholic influence on the state. In the same letter Marvell reveals in passing his estimate of the legal profession, which he held in much the same estimation as the clergy: ‘As to what you say of dealing with his sollicitors [those of Sir John Hewley, who disputed Henry Thompson's electoral victory over him at York] that race of men you know are not easy to discourage a cause wch brings them grist, and they will claw any mans humour as long as he feeds them with mony.' Nothing in the public climate could have contributed to a softening of Marvell's satirical temper and around this time he wrote several satires that can probably be attributed to him with reason.

On 29 October 1674, the King attended a City of London banquet at which the new Lord Mayor, Sir Robert Viner, a prominent goldsmith, was installed. On 18 December the aldermen presented him with the Freedom of the City in a golden box valued at £1,000. The poem ‘Upon his Majesties being made free of the Citty' satirises the event by representing the King as a feckless and idle apprentice who should not have been honoured by a company of hardworking citizens and merchants. The sheer awfulness of the verse is explained in part by its probable intended use as one of the rough songs sung at the Lord Mayor's table during the annual festivities in the City:

He spends all his Days

In runing to Plays,

When in his Shop he shou'd be poreing;

And wastes all his Nights

In his constant Delights

Of Revelling, Drinking and Whoreing.

More particularly, the poem makes the direct accusation that Charles ‘still doth advance/The Government of France/With a Wife of Religion Italian'. If this poem is by Marvell it gives a truer picture of his view of the monarchy and its trustworthiness at the end of 1674 than the pious declarations of loyalty in works like
The Rehearsal.
Sir Robert Viner, before being made Lord Mayor, had presented to the King on his birthday on 29 May 1672 a white marble equestrian statue of his monarch, which he had erected in Stocks Market, the site of the present-day Mansion House, though the statue was later removed to Newby Hall, Ripon, in 1734. The statue was in fact a recycled figure of the King of Poland, John Sobieski, altered to represent Charles. The poem is thought to have been written in the autumn of 1674, after the statue had been covered up for a period of alterations. The poet represents the statue ironically as the tribute of a conquered people to their new master: the City of London wholly defeated by the profligacy of the King. The statue is considered ridiculous and its location in a marketplace appropriate for a King ‘Who the Parliament buys and revenues does sell.' In an allusion to the retouching, the poet suggests: ‘'tis such a king as no chisel can mend'. Nevertheless ‘though the whole world cannot shew such another,/Yet we'd better by far have him than his brother.'

Another possible Marvell poem of late 1674 or early 1675 is ‘Britannia and Rawleigh', a poem cast in the form of a dialogue between Britannia and Sir Walter Raleigh. Britannia recounts to Raleigh her abhorrence of the contemporary English court: ‘A Colony of French Possess the Court;/Pimps, Priests, Buffoones i'th privy chamber sport.' She tells how she has reminded the King of past precedent when England stood up to foreign powers like Spain in Elizabethan times, but the dangerous advisers are leading the King astray: ‘I'th sacred ear Tyrranick Arts they Croak,/Pervert his mind, his good Intencions Choak.' In spite of Raleigh's urging to try to bring the King to his senses and dismiss his corrupt courtiers, Britannia protests: ‘Rawleigh, noe more; too long in vain I've try'd/The Stuart from the Tyrant to devide.' Instead she will reject monarchy in favour of republicanism on the Venetian model – a motion that those who accept the attribution of this poem to Marvell believe he also made in the four years of life that remained to him: ‘To the serene Venetian state I'le goe/From her sage mouth fam'd Principles to know.'

That Marvell's disillusion was affecting his private disposition as well as his public interventions as a politician and anonymous satirist is clear from a letter he wrote to Sir Henry Thompson at the start of 1675. It hints, not for the first time, at his sense of isolation, of solitary uselessness. Thompson's reluctance to trouble the poet, Marvell says, is ‘the cruellest piece of your Ciuility: to me especially who haue no imployment but idlenesse and who am so oblivious that I should forget mine own name did I not see it sometimes in a friends superscription'.
12
Marvell was now fifty-three, with no wife or family or settled property. He had published little except some occasional verses and anonymous satires. His best-known work was
The Rehearsal.
He was a career politician, mocked by his more patrician colleagues in the House for being dependent on a salary from his provincial electors. His future was to sit in the House and serve Hull – he was just about to take up his pen and thank the burgesses for their annual gift of a barrel of ale – in spite of a deep and growing disillusionment with contemporary politics. Resignation in disgust was not an option, for what alternative career did he have? The most effective role for a writer in politics is to diagnose and to warn. Marvell's growing sense that the country was being at best lied to, at worst betrayed, would culminate, three years later, in the publication of his pamphlet
An Account of the Growth of Popery.
Surrounded by these public men with their estates and fine houses and their large families, Marvell had only his meagre lodgings in central London and the fierce integrity that would become the stuff of his legend in later centuries to sustain him. As the news came of the calling of another Parliament in April 1675, after a long proroguing, he would be girding himself up for the thirteenth session of the Cavalier Parliament. He did not expect much from it, but he would not abandon his commitment. ‘I shall not faile to obeye your commands,'
13
he promised the Hull Corporation stoically.

25

The Late Embezzlements

Then, England, Rejoyce, thy Redemption draws nigh;

Thy oppression togeather with Kingship shall dye.
1

When Parliament resumed on 13 April 1675, members filing into their seats found in their places a mock speech from the throne written by an anonymous hand. It is now considered to be by Marvell, the irony more mordant, the regard for the King more scant than ever before.
His Majesty's Most Gracious Speech to Both Houses of Parliament
begins with the King explaining that, though he had always assumed winter to be the best time for Parliamentary business, he has been assured by the Lord Treasurer ‘the spring was the best season for sallads and subsidies'.
2
The thirteenth session of the Pensionary Parliament was plainly to be no different from the others: the King would seek money from Parliament and the latter would seek from the King something in return in the shape of constitutional guarantees about civil liberty and religious freedom. ‘I hope therefore,' the mock speech continued, ‘that April will not prove so unnatural a month, as not to afford some kind showers on my parched exchequer.' There is a plain, Swiftian directness in this short satire of a kind that the long-winded pamphlets often lost sight of in the thicket of their elaborate invectives. Asking the Parliament for more supply, the King declares: ‘The nation hates you already for giving so much, and I'll hate you too, if you do not give me more. So that if you stick not to me, you must not have a friend in England.' The essential irresponsibility and triviality of mind that Marvell sees in Charles, as well as his gullibility in relation to his scheming ministers, are the main constituents of this satire. ‘I have made a considerable retrenchment upon my expenses in candles and charcoal,' the King is made to say, ‘and do not intend to stop there, but will, with your help, look into the late embezzlements of my dripping-pans and kitchen stuff … for, I would have the world to know, I am not a man to be cheated.'

Marvell's official view of the first day's proceedings was contained in a more sober letter to the Hull Corporation that night, which reports that the King actually said that he had summoned Parliament ‘that he might know what further he could do towards the securing of their Religion and Property and to establish a durable Correspondence betwixt him and his People'.
3
He also pledged that he would ‘always maintaine the Religion and the Church of England as now established'. The fact that he felt it necessary to make this assurance indicates how widespread were the fears that he was inclined towards Catholicism. In the first week of the new Parliament measures were discussed, and reported by Marvell with evident approval, for the more effective harrying of ‘Romish Priests' and for their ‘speedyer conviction'.
4
In particular there was a clause proposed ‘to distinguish between Papists and Protestant Dissenters' so that certain obvious inconveniences of a policy of toleration could be removed. A week later Marvell was appointed as teller for the bill disqualifying officials from sitting in the House.

On 24 April an unusually vehement tone enters into Marvell's routine letter to Mayor Hoare at Hull. He reports the case of Sir Robert Viner (whom he had several months earlier satirised in
The Statue in Stocks-Market
), who was now in deep financial trouble. As a way out of his difficulties, Viner was trying to get his stepdaughter married to Peregrine, the son of Lord Treasurer Danby, a move described by Marvell as ‘a detestable and most ignominious story',
5
not least because she appeared already to be married. But the explanation for Marvell's anger is a little more complicated. Two of Marvell's distant relatives, Richard Thompson and Edward Nelthorpe, ran a merchant bank together in the City and were also engaged in the wine and silk trade, lead mines and Irish manufacturing, ‘omitting nothing within the compass of our ingenuity'
6
as their later bankruptcy statement put it. For a mixture of political and commercial reasons Thompson, Nelthorpe & Co – who may also have been the holders of Marvell's modest savings – were enemies of the Establishment figure of Sir Robert Viner. A month before Parliament opened a heated dispute had arisen between the Lord Mayor Viner and the Common Council of the City over the appointment of a judge to the Sheriff's Court. Two leading members of the Common Council opposing Viner were Nelthorpe and Thompson, which may explain why Marvell thundered against Viner's alleged ‘late enterprising to subvert in all manners the Libertyes of the City'. For his part, Viner saw the actions of Nelthorpe and Thompson as a crude attempt to undermine his political position by having him arrested for debt, though in fact it was soon to be the two merchant bankers who were in difficulty. Within a year they went bankrupt and into hiding from their creditors. Marvell helped by taking lodgings for them in his own name in Great Russell Street. He was always ready to perform a good turn to Yorkshire businessmen and relatives, especially when, as in this case, they had been of assistance to his favourite nephew Will in his activities as a wine importer. Marvell's act in sheltering these bankrupts in Bloomsbury would later have far more interesting reverberations, though.