World Enough and Time (17 page)

If Marvell can sometimes seem a little too anxious to please in these letters to his constituents, he was at the same time ready to take risks for an old friendship. At this precise historical moment, any declaration of friendship for Milton, the unabashed defender of regicide, was most certainly a risk. Tradition has it that Marvell was a constant, though at certain times rather a discreet, visitor to Milton at his London home. In the latter part of 1660, however, Milton was in jail. The Act of Indemnity did not include him and he had been imprisoned in October. On 15 December Milton was released by order of Parliament and immediately protested that the House of Commons Serjeant-at-Arms had imposed excessive jail fees on him. Marvell bravely took up his case, complaining that the £150 demanded was extortionate. In the
Parliamentary History of England
published in 1808 by Thomas Hansard, the following account is given:

The celebrated Mr John Milton having now laid long in custody of the serjeant at arms was released by order of the House … Soon after, Mr Andrew Marvel
[sic]
complained that the serjeant had exacted 1501. fees of Mr Milton; which was seconded by col. King and col. Shapcot. On the contrary, sir Heneage Finch observed, That Milton was Latin secretary to Cromwell, and deserved hanging. However, this matter was referred to the committee of privileges to examine and decide the difference.
14

Having been told by the solicitor-general, Finch, that the man he was defending ‘deserved hanging', Marvell would have had cause to reflect seriously on the safety of his own position. According to Milton's nephew, Edward Phillips, in his
Life of Mr John Milton
(1694): ‘
Mr Andrew Marvel,
a member for Hull, acted vigorously in his behalf, and made a considerable party for him.'
15

Marvell's pay as an MP – apart from the barrels of ale sent down from Hull – was 6s 8d for every day's attendance and it came from the Hull Corporation. This was presumably the ‘honourable pension' referred to by Aubrey. It has been estimated, however, that his total remuneration from 1659–78 amounted to no more than around £525.
16
Largely as a result of the disparaging comments of Samuel Parker, who seemed to think that the taking of a wage was a mean act of money-grubbing, a legend grew up that Marvell was the last MP to receive wages from his constituents in this way.
17
In fact the practice, though not widespread, continued until the end of the century, when two Bristol MPs, Sir Richard Hart and Sir John Knight, are recorded as receiving a regular allowance in the Parliament of 1690–95. Marvell's successor as MP after his death, William Ramsden, also received a wage. Corporations like Hull saw it as a good investment and the money was raised by a local tax known as ‘knight's pence'.

The early letters of Marvell as MP demonstrate a vigilant attention to the growing presence of the Excise and the likely costs of various measures being considered. He saw his role very clearly as being to advance the interests of Hull businessmen before anything else. His satirical poem ‘The Last Instructions to a Painter' draws a picture of a ‘portly Burgess' who ‘through the weather hot,/Does for his Corporation sweat and trot'. An earlier Hull MP, Peregrine Pelham, had written to the Corporation in 1645 making the point plainly enough: ‘I am confident you neede not feare any committee to doe you any prejudice. I doe not spend 500 li p'ann' here for nothing.'
18
MPs would be expected to write letters, report back on legislation touching local business interests, interview people, negotiate on the Corporation's behalf, and even arrange bribes. At the Restoration the return of the country gentry to Parliament in greater numbers – with their lordly indifference to stipend – resulted in a decline in a practice chiefly seen in the urban constituencies and the ports. Parker's objection to Marvell's taking of wages had, therefore, an element of snobbery.

Marvell's reputation continued to be one of honest poverty. A description of him as an MP, which first surfaced in an article in the
Gentleman's Magazine
in 1738, although its source is not given, is a memorable one and a telling example of the eighteenth-century construction of a Marvell legend of patriotic sanctity:

Andrew Marvel, one of the most disinterested patriots in the reign of Charles II, by managing a very narrow patrimony, kept himself above corruption: and there is a story of him which though it may seem but ordinary, deserves to be everlastingly remembered: he dined usually at a great ordinary in the Strand, where having eat heartily of boiled beef, and some roast pigeons and asparagus, he drank his pint of port; and on the coming in of the reckoning, taking a piece out of his pocket, and holding it between his thumb and finger: ‘Gentlemen, said he, who would let himself for hire while he can have such a dinner for half a crown?'
19

Marvell would have received far less as an MP than the £200 he had been receiving as a civil servant before entering Parliament. Some have speculated that his in-laws in Hull – rich merchants and traders who could make good use of a reliable man in London and Westminster – may have offered Marvell an additional stipend even though, as members of the Corporation, they were doing this already. Often in his letters he reports himself as being very busy, sometimes on business ‘out of towne', yet his Parliamentary activity cannot have been as demanding as it would be for a Hull MP today, with long daily sessions and extensive constituency duties. He spoke rarely in Parliament and, as a member of the Opposition, was not at the centre of the administration, or a holder of posts. It is not clear what this business was (unless it was a reference to his writing) but it could well have been ancillary, and perhaps necessarily discreet, activity carried out on behalf of his friends in Hull. The legend of his poverty may have been no more than a legend.

12

A Breach of the Peace

And if you can but get scent of anything that smells of a Priest, away you run with full Cry and open Mouth.
1

Marvell celebrated his fortieth birthday on 31 March 1661. The following day he was re-elected to what became known as the Cavalier Parliament, where he would achieve a moderately active public profile. Over his seventeen-year career in this Parliament he would be appointed to 120 committees, act as teller in 8 divisions, and make 14 speeches, a diligent enough record for the day.
2

Even before his re-election, Marvell was settling in to a good relationship with the Hull burgesses. His letters continued to be shrewd, attentive and compliant. ‘I have no greater delight than to be serviceable to you,'
3
he wrote in one letter, concluding: ‘It is hard for me to write short to you. It seems to me when I haue once begun that I am making a step to Hull & can not easily part from so good company.' His references to the King are unimpeachable. After ‘an ugly false report' of an attempt on the life of the King he told the Corporation: ‘I doubt not but the same extraordinary hand that hath hitherto guided him will still be his Protection against all attempts of discontented persons or partyes.'
4
The most prominent of those ‘discontented partyes' was that of the Fifth Monarchy Men. This millenarian sect was at its most powerful in the 1640s and 1650s, when its belief in the revelation of the Book of Daniel that the return of Christ would occur at the overthrow of the last four earthly monarchies (Babylon, Egypt, Rome, and the Pope) captured the imagination of many zealots. They saw the Civil War as enacting the violent end of the fourth monarchy and heralding the arrival of the Fifth Monarch, Jesus. Although their moment had passed, a final attempt at insurrection, led by Thomas Venner, a Fifth Monarchist preacher, took place on 7 January. Ten days later, Marvell reported briefly: ‘The Prisoners of the fift Monarchy men in this late insurrection haue been found guilty today upon their triall … The next week 'tis expected they should all be executed.'
5

After the King's initial attempts at reconciliation, something like a Royalist backlash against the Presbyterians as well as the sectarians was growing and it would be reflected in the imminent elections, but Marvell continued to work away at the parochial concerns of Hull. In February he requested that he be kept discreetly informed about the interests of the Corporation in terms that suggest he had felt underconsulted by them: ‘Pray let me in all things that are not of too nice a nature be informd somthing particularly & with the first that I may serve you the better.'
6
His close relationship with his twenty-seven-year-old nephew, William Popple, is revealed by a request made the next month that the Corporation address Marvell's correspondence to him, marking the envelope
‘to be left with William Popple Merchant London
& not one word more of street signe or lodging'.
7
If he was receiving his mail at his nephew's hands on a regular basis Marvell may thus have been engaged in business with Popple and was in such close contact that doing this meant ‘I can haue them out the first minute the maile comes. Otherwise the seuerall Porters carry them about in their walks & so much time is losst.'

Marvell's diligence paid off at the general election in April 1661. His fellow MP John Ramsden, who had triumphed so clearly at the election a year previously, sank to the bottom of the poll – his poor attendance record telling against him – and his seat was taken by Anthony Gilby, the Royalist colonel and captain of the Hull garrison. It was an interesting combination, the former Cromwellian and the Royalist representing the town together for the next seventeen years. Both MPs, however, shared a strong anti-Catholicism. Gilby later advocated strong measures against Catholics and supported the bill to exclude them from Parliament ‘that now our laws will be made by those of our own religion'.
8
To any Catholic constituents who protested he said bluntly: ‘they may thank themselves for it'. Gilby waived his wages for the first session of the Cavalier Parliament, although the Corporation presented his wife with a piece of plate, but he subsequently agreed, like Marvell, to be paid in cash and ale for his Parliamentary duties.

Marvell seems to have been very confident of his position as an MP, for his reaction to the news of his re-election bordered on the complacent. ‘I perceive by a letter from Mr Mayor,' he told the Corporation a few days after the election, almost as an afterthought before signing off, ‘that you have again (as if it were grown a thing of course) made choice of me now the third time, to serve for you in Parlament.'
9
Parochial as these letters generally were, Marvell occasionally gestured towards the wider world. On this same occasion he thus reported: ‘'Tis two days news upon the Exchange that some French in the Bay of Canada haue discoverd the long lookd for Northwest passage to the East Indyes.' Was it Popple who reported the news from the Exchange or was he there himself engaged on business?

The Cavalier Parliament met for the first time on 8 May 1661. A week later tensions between Marvell and Colonel Gilby began to surface. Marvell's regular despatches to Hull had always been a joint effort with John Ramsden but, given the latter's poor attendance record, they were probably the work of Marvell. On 16 May, however, Marvell wrote to Mayor Richardson delicately pointing out that his new partner preferred to make his own line of communication with Hull: ‘I would not haue you suspect any misintelligence between my partner & me because we write not to you joyntly as Mr Ramsden & I used. For there is all civility betwixt us. But it was his sense that we should each be left to his own discretion for writing except upon some answer unto your Letters & that to be joyntly.'
10
How far the Corporation believed in that ‘civility' may be guessed at. They would be fully aware of the sharply contrasting political backgrounds of the two Members. In fact, relations steadily worsened during the first weeks of the new Parliament until, on 1 June, Marvell was forced to write again:

Gentlemen my worthy friends,

The bonds of civility betwixt Colonell Gilby and my selfe being unhappily snappd in pieces, and in such manner that I can not see how it is possible euer to knit them again, the onely trouble that I haue, is least by our misintelligence your businesse should receive any disadvantage.
11

Marvell explained that the cause of the rupture was ‘some crudityes and undigested matter remaining upon the stomach euer since our Election' and described it as ‘this unlucky falling out'. He regretted that the Corporation's interests might be adversely affected by this rumpus and pledged: ‘if I wanted my right hand yet I would scribble to you with my left rather then neglect your businesse'. Two days before this, he had already reported to them his profound concern for their affairs when finding himself too busy to give his normal full account: ‘I am something bound up that I can not write about your publick affairs but I assure you they break my sleepe.'
12
The major political events of the day, such as the order for the burning of the Covenant by the public hangman on 17 May – the Covenant was the oath to defend the Parliamentary cause and reform the Church of England on anti-episcopalian lines – usually merit a brief reference in Marvell's letters.

Around this time Marvell wrote his first recorded letter to the Trinity House Corporation in Hull. Trinity House had developed out of an amalgamation of the mediaeval guild of the Holy Trinity and the Shipman's Guild and consisted of twelve Elder Brethren, six Assistants, and an unlimited number of Younger Brethren. The Elder Brethren chose two Wardens and one of these was Edmund Popple, Marvell's brother-in-law, to whom he also wrote from time to time in a personal capacity. Marvell himself was never chosen as an Elder Brother. Trinity House was the chief authority for the port of Hull and maintained charities for ‘decayed' seamen. Its income came from endowments and from the levying of primage on vessels using the port, a right abolished in the nineteenth century.
13
Marvell would be as assiduous in his pursuit of the interests of Trinity House – particularly in relation to a long drawn-out wrangle over the erection of a lighthouse at Spurn Head in the 1670s – as he was of the interests of the city Corporation. Sixty-nine letters to the Brethren have survived. In 1674 Marvell also became a member of a similar body on the Thames, Trinity House at Deptford, which had jurisdiction over pilotage for the Port of London. As the chief authority for lighthouses in England and Wales, it caused some degree of conflict of interest to Marvell over the Spurn Head project. On 18 May, Marvell – this time securing the joint signature of his reluctant partner Gilby – wrote his first letter to Trinity House, indicating his willingness to be of assistance and flattering the House as ‘so considerable a body in your selues and so honourable a limbe of the Towne'.
14