World Enough and Time (39 page)

Marvell's presence in Great Russell Street, rather than in Maiden Lane, can be explained by the fact that in June 1677 he had taken out a lease on a property in this rapidly developing part of London, in order to be of service to the two young Hull-born bankers, Richard Thompson and Edward Nelthorpe, whose merchant bank, Nelthorpe & Co, had collapsed in 1676 after a run on the bank by creditors starting in the autumn of 1675. Two other partners were John Farrington and Edmund Page. Fleeing from their creditors, Thompson and Nelthorpe took refuge in the house in Great Russell Street that Marvell had leased in the name of his housekeeper, Mary Palmer, from a John Morris. Nelthorpe was known to his neighbours only as ‘Mr White'. The Bloomsbury household contained at various times the two bankrupts, Mary Palmer, Thompson's wife, Dorothy, and a servant. Marvell himself remained in Maiden Lane, where he kept his papers and valuables, but he was presumably a regular visitor to Great Russell Street. In sheltering from the law two bankrupts who owed people money, Marvell might be considered to have been in an ethically dubious position. It is unlikely, however, that he would have seen it in this light. Doing favours to the Hull business community and to people related to him by birth was quite proper as far as Marvell was concerned. The fact that his relatives had clashed with Sir Robert Viner and were ardent anti-Royalists would have increased his sense of their being a deserving case. As well as upsetting the City establishment, the bankrupts had also clashed with the East India Company. Although they had suffered heavy shipping losses in the period leading up to their business collapse in March 1676, they may also have been the victims of a vendetta in the City when their offer to pay compensation, or a ‘composition', to their creditors was rejected by a minority of those creditors after lobbying by the Lord Mayor.
10
Marvell may have considered that the balance needed tilting a little in their direction. He may also have invested what few savings he had in the bank, again for patriotic reasons as a man of Hull, and therefore could have been an interested party as a creditor himself. In what would now be considered a highly dubious conflict of interest, he actually sat on the Commons committee appointed to consider a bill introduced on 4 February 1678 ‘for the better Discovery of the Estates of Richard Thompson, Edward Nelthrop, and others, Bankrupts'. In their own published account of what happened,
The Case of Richard Thompson and Company: With Relation to their Creditors
(1678), the two claimed that they had become ‘in the compass of one Year the sad Objects of common Obloquy, or Pity'.

Marvell had first become directly involved with the affairs of the bankrupts when his name appeared on a bond for repayment of £500 on 9 June 1677.
11
Edward Nelthorpe had taken the money to Charles Wallis, a London goldsmith, presumably hoping to keep the cash out of the hands of any creditors and trusting Marvell to take good care of the bond. Three days later the two principal bankrupts disappeared into the obscurity of a Great Russell Street lodging leased in someone else's name (though Thompson spent some time in hiding at the home of his brother-in-law Major Braman in Chichester in the early part of 1678). The
London Gazette
published in January 1678 an advertisement offering a reward for any information about the whereabouts of the four partners. John Farrington gave himself up and was imprisoned in the King's Bench prison but was apparently allowed to come and go into the City as he pleased. Edward Nelthorpe died a month later than the poet, on 18 September, and Thompson assumed management of the house, paying Mary Palmer her housekeeper's salary of £10 a year. The survivors then began a lawsuit that dragged on until 1684. Records of it have survived, in which Mary Palmer asserted that, far from being Marvell's housekeeper, she was in fact his wife and had been secretly married to him since 1667. When the first edition of Marvell's poems was published in 1681 the title page was followed by a short note ‘To The Reader':

These are to Certifie every Ingenious Reader, that all these Poems, as also the other things in this Book contained, are Printed according to the exact Copies of my late dear Husband, under his own Hand-Writing, being found since his Death among his other Papers, Witness my Hand this 15th day of
October,
1680.

Mary Marvell

According to Mary Palmer/Marvell's deposition, now in the Public Record Office, Farrington approached her a day or two after Marvell's death and asked her for the keys of the Maiden Lane lodgings. Without her having the chance to inspect what was there, Farrington carried off various hampers, trunks and financial bonds and bills, including – Mary Palmer was convinced – the bill for £500 referred to above which she was anxious to acquire. In the usual interpretation of her motives, she was ready to pretend she was the poet's widow in order to secure it. A little later than Farrington, she herself called at Maiden Lane and found nothing more than ‘a few Books & papers of small value'.
12
That negligible heap of things would have included the manuscript of ‘To his Coy Mistress'. Farrington rejected entirely this version of events, claiming that he had never had the keys, but the records show that he began to take an interest in Marvell's estate, filing a legal request, a caveat, in the name of Marvell's sister in Hull, Mrs Blaydes, to prevent anyone taking out administration of the estate without his knowledge. He accused Mary Palmer, in one deposition, of pretending to have been Marvell's wife immediately after his death and of putting on a tearful act in order to inveigle money for the funeral out of his relatives in Hull. She also offered, ‘by insinuating & crafty speeches', to be of service to Farrington, who thought her ‘an ill woman' whose aim was to defraud Farrington of Nelthorpe's estate as well as getting her hands on Marvell's money.

In the end she was granted administration of Marvell's estate, jointly with John Greene, in September 1679, a year after the poet's death. The £500 was now pursued by Mary Palmer for herself and Farrington for the Nelthorpe estate. Inevitably, litigation ensued, in the course of which the other litigants began to question, apparently for the first time, Mary Palmer's claim to be Marvell's wife. Farrington argued that Mary Palmer was a housekeeper who never even shared a table with Marvell and who was his social and intellectual inferior: ‘Nor is it prbable that the said Andrew Marvell who was a Member of the house of Comons for many years together & a very learned man would undervalue himselfe to intermarry with so mean a pson as shee the said Mary then was being the widdow of a Tennis Court Keeper in or near the City of Westm who died in a mean condicon.' Mary Palmer ingeniously replied that it was precisely this difference of condition that led Marvell as ‘a Parliamt man and a Learned man' to disguise the marriage and that she played along with the concealment by eating separately in the servant's quarters. She went further by asserting that the marriage took place on 13 May 1667 at the Church of the Holy Trinity in the Little Minories and defied anyone to consult the marriage register – a document that no longer exists. The case finally came to court on 15 November 1682 – well after the publication of the volume of poems – but more than a year would elapse before the second hearing at which the Court of Chancery finally decided, in June 1684, that the bond was part of the estate of Nelthorpe. When she died in November 1687 her entry in the burial register of St Giles-in-the-Fields read Mary Palmer, not Mary Marvell.

If Marvell's marriage is not categorically disproved by this evidence, it is certainly extremely difficult to sustain belief in it after a reading of his substantial correspondence and an examination of the records of his life. Nowhere does he reveal himself as anything other than a single man, enjoying the company of friends but living alone in a solitary, reserved existence. If Mary Palmer was his wife it would need to have been an arrangement of the kind she describes, being kept like a Victorian mistress, unacknowledged, unknown to any of his family, business associates, or acquaintances in the political world. Given Marvell's ability to hold various worlds in suspension, his secretiveness, his reserve, it cannot be said to be utterly implausible, but the truth will never be known.

Two days after he died, Marvell was buried in St Giles-in-the-Fields. Anthony Wood said that he was told by the sexton that Marvell was interred under the pews ‘in the south isle by the pulpit'.
13
Two days later, two of the Hull Trinity House Brethren, Thomas Coates and Edward Hodgson, wrote to Marvell's friend Dr Robert Witty to say that their messenger, unable to find Marvell at his Covent Garden lodgings, made inquiries and discovered that he was dead ‘for which we are all very sorry and as unhappy in our loss of so faithful a friend to our society'.
14
The Corporation voted £50 towards the funeral expenses and for a monument at St Giles that no longer exists (if it ever did), the church having been rebuilt in the eighteenth century. Legend has it either that the monument was destroyed in 1682 during the reaction against the Whigs or that the rector refused to allow the erection of a monument to such a man as Marvell. In St Giles Church today there is only the epitaph of 1764, the words thought to have been composed by his nephew Will Popple, with their echo of Eliot's famous ‘tough reasonableness beneath the slight lyric grace' in the reference to his ‘joining the most peculiar graces of wit & learning with a singular penetration, & strength of judgement'. It stresses his Parliamentary service as ‘a true patriot' and judges him finally to be: ‘a strenuous asserter of the constitution, laws & liberties of England', the character his reputation would now assume until the recovery of his full poetic reputation in the early twentieth century.

30

The Island's Watchful Sentinel

But whether Fate or Art untwin'd his thread,

Remains in doubt. Fames lasting Register

Shall leave his Name enroll'd as great as theirs,

Who in
Philippi for their Country fell.
1

Shortly after Marvell's death the above anonymous lines were written, although they were not published until 1697 in the collection
Poems on Affairs of State.
As well as hinting darkly at the possibility that Marvell did not die a natural death, they are the first foundation stone of the Marvell legend. For the next two centuries or more, Marvell would be regarded as his admiring contemporaries largely saw him: an incorruptible English patriot on the Roman model, a defender of English liberties against the threat from Europe, an island hero rather than a poet. Like all such legends a grain of truth was combined with rather more exaggeration. Marvell was indeed a courageous advocate of religious toleration, notwithstanding his deep prejudice against European Catholicism. A certain kind of English liberal outlook, about which it is no doubt easy to be complacent, finds its best expression in some of Marvell's writings and official correspondence: the belief that the citizen has rights and freedoms that should not be surrendered lightly; that the balance of power between the metropolitan elites and provincial society always needs a little rectification in favour of the latter; that the power wielded by monarchical, civil, and ecclesiastical authorities must always be monitored with vigilance by the active citizen and required to justify any encroachment on the liberties of the individual. Although his Parliamentary interventions were few and not always entirely happy, Marvell seems to have been consistent in his principles. The same anonymous poet calls him ‘this Islands watchful Centinel'. The purity of the legend, however, has to be considered a little diluted when one examines the various instances recorded above of slightly questionable behaviour or partiality to questionable friends and associates, or the rewriting of history and the revision of his personal place within it. Even if one does not go so far as the distinguished Marvell critic Sir Frank Kermode, who judged passages in his political poetry ‘odious',
2
one might hesitate to elevate Marvell to sainthood. In one of many internal contradictions in this complex man – that between principle and a principle of pragmatism – there was sometimes too much of a readiness to adopt a new position on practical grounds, forgetting former objections and beliefs. Sitting generally on the fence, Marvell could sometimes leap off it with surprising agility. Equally, the peculiarly English stamp of his Yorkshire-rooted patriotism did indeed occasionally carry a xenophobic undertow, but he was a poet steeped in European literary culture, and in particular that of the Latin language. An accomplished linguist, an eager reader, a keen and knowledgeable traveller, Marvell cannot in any sense be compressed into the mould of a late twentieth-century ‘Euro sceptic' or Little Englander.

The Marvell legend continued to be burnished after his death.
An Account of the Growth of Popery
and the verse satires attributed to him were frequently reprinted throughout the eighteenth century. In the year of his death a posthumous work,
Remarks upon a Late Disingenuous Discourse,
written by ‘A Protestant' but from Marvell's hand, appeared. A defence of John Howe, former chaplain to Cromwell, who had written a tract on predestination, it was probably the last thing on which Marvell had been working when he died. It is a characteristic attack on otiose theological debate, on ‘those peevish questions which have overgrown Christianity' with ‘endless disputes concerning the unsearchable things of God'.
3
In it he confesses that he ‘cannot boast of any extraordinary faculty for disputation' but nonetheless comes to the defence of Howe as he came to the defence of Herbert Croft, condemning the pamphlet written by Howe's antagonist Thomas Danson for ‘its street adages, Its odd ends of Latine, Its broken shreds of poets, and Its musty lumber of schoolmen'. The new critical prose of the late seventeenth century, influenced by the scientists, was making this old-fashioned, fussy discourse increasingly irrelevant. Had Marvell survived to write more prose he may well have developed a leaner, more tightly argued style. The signs of its beginning are present in his very late works. Summing up his task in this minor pamphlet, Marvell explained his own sense of his mission, in terms that would apply to his previous engagements in
The Rehearsal
and
Mr Smirke: