World Enough and Time (38 page)

Marvell contrasts this ‘gross superstition'. with the English way. In contrast to the states of Catholic Europe, skewed towards absolutism and insensitive to individual civil liberties, he argues, ‘here the subjects retain their proportion in the Legislature; the very meanest commoner of England is represented in Parliament, and is a party to those laws by which the Prince is sworn to govern himself and his people'. Marvell then claims in regard to the King (he must have been aware of the ironic cast of these words as he framed them, for the whole tenor of the pamphlet is to contradict this comforting assertion in reality): ‘His very Prerogative is no more than what the Law has determined.' The English King is ‘the onely intelligent ruler over a rational People'. These fine words on the constitutional position of the King as dutiful and answerable servant of his people bear little relation to the reality Marvell's pamphlet sets out to describe. He adds that there is absolutely no question of England going back to the unfortunate ‘Romish perswasion' of its past, because for Anglicans their doctrine is ‘true to the principles of the first institution' of Christianity. One look at the state of things in Europe will teach England how fortunate she is in avoiding the enslavements of the Continent and will bolster her Euroscepticism.

Although Marvell was a member of the Parliamentary committee that examined the evidence of the causes of the Great Fire, and which reached a sceptical conclusion, he now asserts baldly that it was a deliberate act of foreign papists ‘acted by Hubert, hired by Pieddelou, two Frenchmen'. With an interesting dash of pragmatism, Marvell concludes that there is little prospect of the English returning to their original religion, ‘the Protestant Religion being so interwoven as it is with their secular interest'. Reclaiming the Church lands confiscated after the Reformation now would ‘make a general earthquake over the nation'. In spite of all these points, there are still those in England, Marvell contends in terms that would make his old friend, Milton, turn in his grave, who would wish to ‘introduce a French slavery' by converting England back to Catholicism:

For, as to matter of government, if to murther the King be, as certainly it is, a fact so horrid, how much more hainous is it to assassinate the Kingdom? and as none will deny, that to alter our Monarchy into a Commonwealth were treason, so by the same fundamental rule, the crime is no less to make that Monarchy absolute.
20

After these preliminaries, Marvell proceeds to the real matter of his pamphlet, which is not just to inveigh against Catholicism but to offer ‘a naked narrative' of recent events, quoting documents, many of which would not be in the public domain, in order to expose the conspiracy working against the government of the land. Vitiated like all conspiracy theories by its lack of specific evidence and its shadowy gesturing at possible culprits, the remainder of the pamphlet is nonetheless characterised by a more level and coherent tone than his earlier ribaldries and satires such as
Mr Smirke.
The urgency of his self-appointed task seems to have sobered and controlled his prose. The thesis had already been stated plainly in the opening pages:

There has now for divers years a design been carried on to change the lawful Government of England into an absolute Tyranny, and to convert the established Protestant Religion into downright Popery: than both which, nothing can be more destructive or contrary to the interest and happiness, to the constitution and being of the king and kingdom.
21

In fact Marvell goes a little further back in history to the beginning of the decade in search of evidence of the conspiracy. The proroguings of Parliament in the 1670s (which did actually tend to happen when the King was being supplied with covert funds from France) are seen as opportunities for the conspirators ‘to give demonstrations of their fidelity to the French King'. He attacks, surprisingly in view of the effort he put into defending it in
The Rehearsal,
the Declaration of Indulgence in 1672 as a bid by the ‘hellish conspiracy' to ‘defraud the nation of all that religion which they has so dearly purchased … it was the masterpiece therefore of boldness and contrivance in those conspirators to issue the declaration'. Not for the first time in his political career, Marvell thus radically revised his stance. In spite of a backhanded tribute to the crypto-Catholics like Clifford who ‘honourably forsook their places rather than their consciences' in 1673, when the Test Act was introduced in the wake of the repeal of the Declaration, Marvell is contemptuous of the Duke of York, who married a Catholic, Mary of Modena. ‘Such marriages,' he declared, ‘have always increased Popery, and incouraged priests and jesuits to pervert His Majesty's subjects.' Claiming that the conspirators made overtures to ‘the old Cavalier party' to boost their strength, Marvell accused them of an intent ‘to have raised a Civil War'.

Coming closer to the present – the long prorogation of 22 November 1675 to 15 February 1677 which he called ‘this vast space' in which the conspirators flourished – Marvell, in default of harder evidence, notes that it is ‘very remarkable' that five judges were replaced during this period: ‘What French counsel, what standing forces, what parliamentary bribes, what national oaths, and all the other machinations of wicked men have not yet been able to effect, may be more compendiously acted by twelve judges in scarlet.' He then turned his attention to his fellow MPs, observing that it was ‘too notorious to be concealed, that near a third part of the House have beneficial offices under his Majesty'. A further third were ‘hungry and out of office' and therefore angling for the same sort of favour. In spite of having been elected to oppose the court party, these country MPs ‘when they come up, if they can speak in the House, they make a faint attack or two upon some great minister of State'. Fortunately, there remain among the final third some who are ‘constant, invariable, indeed Englishmen' who can be counted upon to behave decently. But, in truth, Parliament presents a sorry picture: ‘It is less difficult to conceive how fire was first brought to light in the world than how any good thing could ever be produced out of an House of Commons so constituted.' There is a fatally complacent conviviality among these Parliamentary time-servers, in Marvell's picture: ‘They live together not like Parliament men, but like so many goodfellows met together in a publick house to make merry. And which is yet worse, by being so thoroughly acquainted, they understand their number and party, so that the use of so publick a counsel is frustrated, there is no place for deliberation, no perswading by reason, but they can see one another's votes through both throats and cravats before they hear them.' Only the four lords, including Shaftesbury, who challenged the prorogation and were sent to the Tower for doing so earn Marvell's unqualified praise in this Parliament. As he reviews in detail the events of 1677, Marvell sees the hand of the conspirators in everything: ‘For all things betwixt France and England moved with that punctual regularity, that it was like the harmony of the spheres, so consonant with themselves, although we cannot hear the musick.'

Marvell ends by claiming to have ‘laid open' the conspiracy if the country will care to examine the evidence: ‘yet men sit by, like idle spectators, and still give money towards their own tragedy'. The pamphlet, he claims, was written ‘with no other intent than of meer fidelity and service to his Majesty', when he knew full well that if there was any conspiracy the King was at the heart of it. Far from welcoming its publication, however, the government set on foot immediately a hunt for the author. The
London Gazette
for 21–25 March 1678 carried an advertisement offering a reward of £50 for anyone who could find ‘the Printer, Publisher, Author, or Hander to the Press' of this and other ‘Seditious, and Scandalous Libels against the Proceedings of Both Houses of Parliament'.
22
The person who found the actual ‘Hander of it to the Press' could expect a reward of £100.

It was not until after Marvell's death in the summer of 1678 that Sir Roger L'Estrange confidently identified the poet as the author in a letter to Secretary of State Williamson.

29

A Death in Bloomsbury

Some suspect that he was poysoned by the Jesuites, but I cannot be positive.
1

John Aubrey

Was Andrew Marvell gay? That he was unmarried and lived the life of a frequently solitary bachelor in modest lodgings where he kept a supply of wine to ‘refresh his spirits, and exalt his muse', in Aubrey's phrase, can hardly be brought forward in evidence. Being in or out of the state of marriage is not decisive in settling questions of sexual orientation. Marvell's secretiveness, the complex ambiguity that surrounds so many of his thoughts and actions, and that lies at the root of his poetics, makes it difficult to produce confident assertions about that most private of areas in a life, a person's sexuality. What we have can best be described as a certain body of insinuation, some of which has already been hinted at above: the faint trace of incipient paedophilia in ‘Young Love', the rough allusions of his enemies in the pamphlet wars of the 1670s both to his putative sexual impotence and to a similarly attributed habit of sodomy with the author of
Paradise Lost.
The distinguished critic Sir William Empson – with a possible irony given that he was one of the few Marvell scholars to have been convinced of the evidence that Marvell had a wife – thought he detected the whiff of unnatural sex in Marvell's descriptions of the brawny and perspiring mower in ‘Damon the Mower'. ‘I think he fell in love with the Mower,'
2
Empson opined, and again: ‘I do not know that any other poet has praised the smell of a farm hand.' One particular passage in the poem ‘The Loyall Scot' has disturbed a number of critics, including both Empson and Elsie Duncan-Jones, the latter pointing out that the youthfulness of the naval hero Captain Archibald Douglas, who refused to desert his ship as it was consumed with flames, is ‘rather uncomfortably'
3
stressed. Empson, in another essay, thinks that: ‘The case is so bad as to excite grave suspicion against the subconsciousness of the poet.'
4
Traces of homoeroticism in the portrayal of Douglas might be detected in the two lines in ‘The Loyall Scot' that originally appeared as part of ‘Last instructions to a Painter': ‘Not so brave Douglass, on whose Lovely Chin/The Early down but newly did begin,/And modest beauty yet his sex did vail,/Whilst Envious virgins hope hee is a Male.' The poem goes on to note that ‘His shady locks Curl back themselves to seek/Nor other Courtship knew but to his Cheek' – a dash of narcissicism now entering the picture of adolescent loveliness. In the later lines, the youthful sexual innocence of Douglas modulates into a picture of his death by fire, in which the description is unnaturally prolonged and mixed in with what could be sexual feeling: ‘Like a glad lover the fierce Flames hee meets/And tries his first Imbraces in their sheets … His burning Locks Adorn his face divine.' Empson recoils: ‘I find this disgusting, and all too likely to well up from the worst perversion, that of Gilles de Rais, the craving to gloat over the torturing of a tender innocent.'
5

Marvell's is not a poetry of personality. He does not follow a confessional aesthetic. His characteristic poetic motion is to proceed by examining alternatives and holding them in balance, dramatising conflicts in search of an equipoise, using a deliberate ambiguity. In poems like ‘Young Love' or ‘The Loyall Scot' he may be doing no more than playing with hints and shades of feeling for poetic effect. Or he may not. What is certain is that no reliable evidence for his actual conduct in life can be derived from these sources. If he was a closet homosexual (and it is difficult to imagine any other kind at that historical epoch, particularly among Members of Parliament already coping with an array of vigorous enemies keen to pounce on any imagined misdemeanours), leaving his lodgings at night to seek illicit pleasure with young men in the smoky taverns and alleyways of Covent Garden and the City, there is no evidence for it.

Marvell's last surviving letter was written on 6 July 1678, to the Corporation that had employed him as its Parliamentary representative for nearly twenty years. It was a typical combination of Parliamentary bulletin and selective concentration on the matters that would interest the Hull merchants most: an ‘Additional Impost upon Wines'.
6
The House was thinning out, as the meagre number of votes on either side of the divison on this issue attested. ‘Things tend toward an end of the Session,' Marvell explained. Nine days later the House was prorogued and by the end of the month the MP was in Hull, attending a formal meeting of the Court of the Corporation. According to the minutes for 29 July: ‘the Court and Mr Marvell held severall discourses about the Towns affaires'.
7
An audit book notes that the local worthies spent £3 8s 4d on a municipal lunch or ‘collation' ‘to give Coll Gilbe & Squier Marvell Burgesses of Plement for this towne a treatment for meate & wines'.
8
Two days later, France and Holland signed a peace treaty at Nijmegen. The Cavalier Parliament in which Marvell had sat since 1661 had only six months to go before being finally dissolved.

After completing his round of municipal duties, and no doubt having visited his family and friends in Hull, Marvell returned to London. Somewhere between leaving Hull on 9 August and arriving in the capital, he contracted a fever, traditionally described as a tertian ague but possibly malarial, which brought him down very low. Although his lodgings were in Maiden Lane, Covent Garden, his sickbed was on the north side of Great Russell Street in Bloomsbury (the site now occupied in part by the forecourt of the British Museum). A doctor was summoned and his intervention seems to have made matters worse. He later recounted his treatment to another doctor, Richard Morton, who published in 1692 a Latin treatise describing it as an example of what can happen when the wrong drugs, particularly opiates, are administered at the wrong time. Morton's account, written by a man who shared Marvell's religious and political opinions, affords posterity an unusually detailed account of the poet's medical treatment.
9
On arrival at Great Russell Street, the ‘conceited doctor', as Morton calls him, instead of prescribing an ounce of quinine as a cure for the intermittent fits produced by the ague, bled and sweated the patient in a way that Morton strongly disapproved. He had Marvell almost buried in stiflingly thick blankets under the impression that the heavy sweat would counteract the cold shivers which generally accompany the onset of the ague fit. As to the bleeding, Morton considered that it was extremely unwise to bleed a man aged fifty-seven. On Friday 16 August, Marvell died in a coma brought on by these medical attentions. Immediately, in that overheated atmosphere which preceded the discovery of the Titus Oates plot, speculation grew that he had been poisoned – ‘by the Jesuites', according to Aubrey, who later crossed out in his manuscript the qualifying ‘but I cannot be positive'. The popular name for the quinine that might have saved him had it been applied was ‘Jesuit's powder', so called because it was introduced to Europe by Jesuit missionaries.