World Enough and Time (25 page)

On 14 February 1670 Parliament sat for the first time since its prorogation on 1 December with plenty of business to conduct. ‘We haue kept to our selves these three dayes to so hard duty that you will excuse me if I be shorter then ordinary,'
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wrote Marvell in one of his first letters of the new session to Hull. Since he entered the House a decade earlier the life of an MP had become more and more filled with activity. His letters increasingly reflect this fact, while at the same time suggesting, tantalisingly, that his workload might have had other undisclosed elements: discreet government activity, personal business affairs, intrigue, or, simply, the natural private preoccupations of a scholar-poet.

The Parliamentary session of 1670 was busy with the issue of suppressing the perceived threat of illicit nonconformist meetings, the conventicles; not only the Catholics posed a threat to the supremacy of Anglicanism. Suspicion of the King's foreign policy coloured the response of the House to many other issues. In May 1668 the peace of Aix-la-Chapelle had resulted in a ‘Triple Alliance' between England, Holland and Sweden against France, but the following year the King's younger brother, James, Duke of York, acknowledged his conversion to Catholicism. Secretly, the King began negotiations with Louis XIV of France for an alliance based on a promise by Charles to declare himself a Catholic at an agreed time (which, in the end, he never did). The deal was secretly agreed in May 1670 by the Treaty of Dover, offering money and military aid to Charles in return for his declaration, which could be the opening for the establishment of Catholicism in England. Had this been publicly known, the anti-Catholics would have felt fully vindicated in their prejudice. The result of all these manoeuvrings was a continuing tension between the public and private policies of the King.

On 21 March, Marvell wrote to his nephew, William Popple, who was at his business address in Bordeaux. One of the longer surviving letters of Marvell, it is unusual in the extent and candour of its personal political opinion. The letters to Hull generally contained almost no personal judgements on politics, though the gaps in the archive could mean that some letters were destroyed precisely because of their possibly incriminating political content. Addressing his fond nephew as ‘Dear Cousin',
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Marvell began by explaining that he had ‘writ twice to you at
Bourdeaux
', where Popple had another arm of his international trading business. The unfolding political chronicle began with a report of the mission to Scotland of Lord Lauderdale, the King's Commissioner for the Scottish Parliament. Lauderdale had done good work there for Charles, but Marvell clearly disapproved of his successes in not only ‘giving the King absolute Power to dispose of all Things in religious Matters' in Scotland, but also in settling a militia in the country of 20,000 foot and horse ‘to march into
England, Ireland,
or any Part of the King's Dominions, whenever his Person, Power, Authority, or Greatness was concerned'. These were precisely the sorts of powers that Marvell and the country opposition were determined the King should not be able to exercise in England. Lauderdale's third triumph was to empower Charles to start the machinery to bring about the union of England and Scotland, ‘for which Service he was received, with extraordinary favour, by the King'. The opposition, Marvell reports, muttered that Lauderdale ‘deserved an Halter rather than a Garter' for this work and asked itself if he could be impeached.

The habitual deference towards the King that marks Marvell's constituency correspondence (and that may, for all its formal eloquence, have been no more than politic) is noticeably absent from his letter to Will Popple. On the contrary, he was clearly annoyed by the attitude of the King who, before Christmas, had been voted £400,000 but now demanded even more. From the end of the session on 1 December to 14 February, when the House resumed, there had been ‘great and numerous Caballing among the Courtiers', the upshot of which was that the King, ‘being exceedingly necessitous for Money', addressed the House
‘Stylo minaci & imperatorio'
(in an imperious and threatening manner) to warn that failure to agree to his supply would have all sorts of dread consequences. Because of a failure on the part of ‘the Country Gentlemen' to get themselves to Westminster in sufficient numbers for the first session, the King won the votes that he needed. One of these ensured that ‘The terrible Bill against Conventicles is sent up to the Lords', a measure for suppressing nonconformist meetings that Marvell described to Will as ‘the Quintessence of arbitrary Malice'. With the sort of gossipy candour that is wholly absent from his official correspondence, Marvell confided to Will:

It is my opinion that
Lauderdale
at one Ear talks to the King of
Monmouth
[the Duke of Monmouth, James Scott, illegitimate son of Charles by Lucy Walters, and captain-general of the King's forces at this time] and
Buckingham
at the other of a new Queen. It is also my Opinion that the King was never since his coming in, nay, all Things considered, no King since the Conquest, so absolutely powerful at Home, as he is at present. Nor any Parliament, or Places, so certainly and constantly supplyed with men of the same Temper.

Marvell was describing a Stuart despotism that made a mockery of Parliament and the role of an individual MP like himself. In a heartfelt cry to his nephew that marks something of a turning point in Marvell's politics he asked: ‘In such a Conjuncture, dear
Will,
what Probability is there of my doing any Thing to the Purpose?' Marvell wanted to believe in constitutional monarchy and be a loyal servant of the state, but the abuse of power by the court was making it impossible for him to practise that loyalty with any conscience. His disillusion with power would reinforce his belief in the need for religious toleration, for the individual conscience to have some space to flourish and not to be ordered by the state in a polity where dissent was increasingly being outlawed. He concluded his letter with a Latin quotation, from the sombre words addressed by Aeneas to his son Ascanius just before Aeneas goes out to battle in the closing book of Virgil's
Aeneid: ‘Disce, puer, Virtutem ex me verumque Laborem,/Fortunam ex aliis'
(Learn from me, child, the meaning of true labour, and from others the meaning of fortune). Marvell had devoted his life to politics and had no other avocation apart from his writing, in an age when professional writers did not exist. Had it been worth it? Will was fortunate in having established a successful business career. He was not dependent on the vagaries of men of power. His uncle, however, must stick with it, increasingly conscious that this might be a labour in vain.

Marvell's parallel letters to Hull during this first session of 1670 deal with the matters that would naturally concern them – customs duties and taxes on wine – but when he comes to recount, in detail, the progress of the conventicles bill his account is descriptive rather than opinionative. The strong feelings on the issue expressed to Will are absent from the Hull chronicle. On the contrary, Marvell sounds like a supporter of the measure when he reports the activities of ‘one Fox a teacher of some fanaticall people in Wiltshire'
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who was said to have organised a conventicle at which some of these ‘fanaticall' people ‘had said they owned no King but that the King & the Duke his brother (they are words so odious as scarse to be written) were both bastards…' It was clear that it was the political as much as the religious freedom of the conventicles that affronted the government ‘because seditious Sectaryes, under pretense of tender consciences do contrive insurrections at their meetings'. Soon, in his clash with the ultra-orthodox cleric Samuel Parker, Marvell would find himself arguing passionately in defence of that ‘tender conscience' that the ruling party despised. The House, meanwhile, with the bit between its teeth, decided to extend the repressive measures to ‘Popish recusants' as well as nonconformists. Marvell itemised in detail how the new act against conventicles, passed by 138 votes to 78, would work. Anyone over the age of sixteen attending a meeting ‘under pretense of religion in other manner then allowd by the liturgy & practise of the Church of England' of more than five people, ‘in an house field or place where no family inhabits', and who could be proved by the magistrates ‘either by confession of the party or oath of witnesses or by notorious euidence or circumstance' to have done so, or simply being unable to deny the charge by calling witnesses, would be fined five shillings, doubled if they failed to pay the first time. There would be much sterner penalties for anyone preaching at such a meeting or hosting it. It was a witch-hunter's charter, but Marvell passed no comment to his electors, observing merely that he had gone into such detail ‘that inconveniences might better and in time be prevented'. His inability to enter into frank political dialogue with his constituents is eloquent of the expectations they would have of their MP. He was in the House to perform services for the merchant aristocracy of Hull, not to exercise personal political judgement and discretion. He concluded his long newsletter with the words: ‘I am now tired.' The letter that followed gave further proof of the growing pressure of Parliamentary business: ‘We are this night upon the report of the City Bill; the crowd of business now toward our rising obliging us to sit both forenoon and afternoon, usually till nine a clock, which indeed is the occasion that I have the less vigor left at night, and cannot write so frequently to you'.
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The work proved too much for some honourable members as the end of the session drew near, and by 7 April Marvell was reporting: ‘Our house is now grown very thinne scarse more then an hundred for the most part.' On 11 April the House was finally adjourned until 24 October.

Once the recess had begun Marvell was free to write again to Will at Bordeaux. He had been using as postman Edward Nelthorpe, a banker who operated in partnership with his cousin Richard Thompson, both Yorkshiremen connected to Marvell and important players in the tortuous story of his final days. Nelthorpe's son, Robert, was Popple's clerk at Bordeaux. Once again, Marvell has more gossip for Will, in particular ‘an extraordinary Thing done':

The King, about ten a Clock, took Boat, with
Lauderdale
only, and two ordinary Attendants, and rowed awhile as towards the Bridge, but soon turned back to the Parliament Stairs, and so went up into the House of Lords, and took his Seat. Almost all of them were amazed, but all seemed so; and the
Duke of York
especially was very much surprized. Being sat, he told them it was a Privilege he claimed from his Ancestors to be present at their Deliberations.
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The King's tactic was to surprise and undermine the Duke of York's influence in the Lords. Marvell interpreted it as another sign of the times being out of joint: ‘It is true that this has been done long ago,' he told Will, ‘but it is now so old, that it is new, and so disused that at any other, but so bewitched a Time, as this, it would have been looked on as a high Usurpation, and Breach of Privilege.' By these high-handed acts and gestures, Charles was signalling to Parliament that he was not their creature and could do as he pleased. He was reported to have said that what quickly became established as his regular visits to the Lords were ‘better than going to a Play'. On the London stage this year the plays of Dryden and Aphra Behn were being performed, the theatres – closed by the Puritans in 1642 – having now been fully restored. The King's next move was to persuade the Lords to send down a ‘proviso' to the Commons ‘that would have restored Him to all civil or eclesiastical Prerogatives which his Ancestors had enjoyed at any Time since the Conquest'. Marvell was horrified at this despotic impudence, telling Will: ‘There was never so compendious a Piece of absolute universal Tyranny.' The Commons ‘made them ashamed of it' however and the Lords withdrew the proviso. For Marvell this was a serious blow to the reputation of Parliament. ‘We are all venal Cowards,' he wrote in despair. ‘What Plots of State will go on in this Interval I know not.' The court intriguers would take advantage of Parliament not sitting from April until October to pursue their plotting and caballing. The King's favourite sister, Henriette, Duchess of Orleans, a Catholic like his brother, was reported to be in Canterbury during the French King's progress through Flanders. ‘There will doubtless be Family Counsels then,' observed Marvell, who suspected, like many of his fellow countrymen, that the King was thinking of divorce because he had been given no heir. ‘Some talk of a
French
Queen to be then invented for our King … The King disavows it; yet he has sayed in Publick, he knew not why a Woman might not be divorced for Barrenness, as a Man for Impotency.' Alarm at the slide towards royal arrogance if not despotism was inseparable from fears about secret treatying with Catholic powers.

Around this time, a poem called ‘The Kinges Vowes' was circulating, anonymously, though it has been attributed tentatively to Marvell. Later additions have made dating and attribution still more complicated. As with so many of the doubtful poems in the Marvell canon there is a strong incentive to discard poems that are palpably not up to the standard of his best, but poor quality alone cannot justify exclusion. Some flavour of both content and poetic quality can be taken from the following excerpt:

I will have a fine Parliament allwayes to Friend,

That shall furnish me Treasure as fast as I spend;

But when they will not, they shall be att an end.

I will have as fine Bishops as were ere made with hands,

With consciences flexible to my Commands;