World Enough and Time (35 page)

For Marvell the controversy was to some degree a reprise of the engagement with Samuel Parker. The aim was to advance the cause of religious toleration, to administer some satirical sideswipes to the stuffier and more conservative parts of the Anglican establishment and to have some sport with an ill-matched opponent. As with
The Rehearsal,
Marvell went to the contemporary theatre for a title. Sir George Etherege's
The Man of Mode
had just received its first performance at court. In the play, Sir Fopling Flutter, ‘the prince of fops', is the eponymous man of mode, though it is a minor character, Mr Smirke, chaplain to Lady Biggot, whose name provides Marvell's title. His subtitle advertises the work as being ‘certain annotations' on the
Animadversions.
He calls Bishop Croft ‘judicious, learned, a sincere Protestant' and his book ‘of that kind that no Christian scarce can peruse it without wishing himself had been the author'.
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Marvell sums up the initial reaction of the clergy to Croft's pamphlet:

Not only the churches but the coffee-houses rung against it. They itinerated like excise-spyes from one house to another, and some of the morning and evening chaplains burnt their lips with perpetual discoursing it out of reputation, and loading the Author, whoever he were, with all contempt, malice and obloquy.
5

Marvell sensed that Turner, like Samuel Parker before him, was a bully in clerical garb, and leapt to the defence of Croft. Because of the rancour of the punitive tendency in the Church of England, Croft had been shown no mercy over his pleas for toleration. In Marvell's view, Turner's reply to Croft – ‘a lasting pillar of infamy' – had been executed ‘not according to the ordinary rules of civility, or in the sober way of arguing controversie, but with the utmost extremity of jeere disdain, and indignation'. Worst of all for Turner, he ‘took up an unfortunate resolution that he would be witty'. In truth he was a pompous fool like Parker, ‘huff'd up in all his ecclesiastical fluster'. His style was crushingly pedantic, ‘so wretchedly does he hunt over hedge and ditch for an university quibble'. This put Marvell in mind of his own schooling at Hull Grammar School – another of those fugitive autobiographical touches – where the pupils were taught to scan Latin verses prior to any understanding of what the words might mean: ‘For as I remember this “scanning” was a liberal art that we learn'd at grammar-school: and to scan verses as he does the Author's prose, before we did, or were obliged to understand them.'
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Marvell also criticised the Act against printing without a licence because it allows clergy to attack ‘men's private reputations', having easier access to publication. He adds: ‘It is something strange that to publish a good book is a sin and an ill one a vertue; and that while one comes out with Authority, the other may not have a dispensation.' He accuses the Church of England writers of wanting to exercise a monopoly (‘these single representers') on Church questions and of using that privilege not to attack wickedness but to entrench their own position: ‘to render those peccadilloes against God as few and inconsiderable as may be, but to make the sins against themselves as many as possible, and these to be all hainous and unpardonable'. The Act works ‘by ingaging men's minds under spiritual bondage, to lead them canonically into temporal slavery'. This introductory passage is charged both with Marvell's liberal attachment to freedom of speech and with his fervent anticlericalism. It is also done with his usual vigour of expression and vividly apt similes: he observes that ‘calumny is like London dirt, with which though a man may be spattered in an instant, yet it requires much time pains and fuller's-earth to scoure it out again'. And again, when he finally begins to get down to the matter of Turner's book, he censures him for imputing all sorts of things to Croft which are not there in his argument: ‘So men with vicious eyes see spiders weave from the brim of their own beavers.'

As with Marvell's previous polemics, the lively engagement with the opponent is of more interest than the sequential argument, which is as difficult to summarise as ever. He epitomises Croft's original argument thus: ‘That nothing hath caused more mischiefe in the Church, then the establishing new and many Articles of faith, and requiring men to assent to them with divine faith.' Forcing impositions on dissenters, in Croft's own words, ‘hath caused furious wars and lamentable bloodshed among Christians'. This is the essence of Marvell's ecclesiastical politics: that the state should not impose too much in matters of faith. Its secular counterpart is his view that the constitutional monarch should not exact too much from the citizen. In both contexts the freedom of individual conscience is paramount, it being argued that nothing is gained by the religious or secular authorities seeking more control than is strictly necessary. This current of thought places Marvell firmly in the mainstream of the English liberal tradition, marred only by the occasional excesses of his xenophobic anti-popery, the English tradition often losing its way when travelling on a passport. It justifies his posthumous reputation as a defender of civil and religious liberty at home. All such arguments, however, are lost on individuals like Turner, whom Marvell mockingly describes as ‘the Animadverter' in allusion to the title of his attack on Croft: ‘But like some cattle, the Animadverter may browze upon the leaves, or peel the barke, but he has not teeth for the solid, nor can hurt the tree but by accident.' For Marvell, simple Christian faith is enough ‘without the chicanrey and conveyancing of humane extentions'. Scripture, rather than Church discipline, is his guide for Christians and should be the guide for men like Turner:

but these are the Divines in Mode, who, being by their dignities and preferments plump'd up beyond humane proportion, do, whether for their pride or ignorance, neither understand themselves or others (men of nonsense) much less do they speak of God, which ought to be their study, with any tolerable decorum. These are the great Animadverters of the times, the church-respondents in the pew, men that seem to be members only of Chelsy Colledge, – nothing but broken windows, bare walls and rotten timber.
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After declaring that ‘I do not reckon much upon a Church historical, devilish beliefe. Unless a thing be in the express words of Scripture, there are some of the laity to whom a Council cannot demonstrate, sneezing powder cannot demonstrate, no earthly power can do it,' Marvell lays down his pen. Abandoning his original intention of examining each of Turner's arguments one by one he declares (somewhat to the relief of the reader): ‘I am weary of such stuffe…'

Appended to the work, however, is
A Short Historical Essay Touching General Councils, Creeds and Imposition in Religion,
which develops the original argument of Croft – that the essential truths of primitive Christianity have been obscured by the machinations of the later ecclesiastical politicians – by offering an historical account of the development of religious ‘creed-making' at councils of theologians summoned to deliberate on what they regarded as vital questions of faith. It demonstrates the extraordinary depth of Marvell's knowledge both of scripture and of Church history and is unusual in its logical arrangement and flow. His understanding convinces him that it is undesirable for the civil power to involve itself in policing questions of religious belief. His jaundiced account of the councils of the early Church makes him reflect: ‘a man would scarse think he were reading an history of bishops, but a legend of divels'.
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In a discussion of the Arian heresies, Marvell observes pointedly on the fact that: ‘Whereas truth for the most part lyes in the middle, but men ordinarily look for it in the extremities.' He mocks the emergence of bishops in early Christianity, falling over themselves in their profusion and their self-importance, obsessed with detecting heresy at every turn, ‘when every hare that crossed their way homeward was a schismatic or an heretick, and if their horse stumbled with one of them, he incurred an anathema'. As well as preferring the
via media,
Marvell confesses to an instinctive sympathy for the underdog: ‘Only I will confess that as in reading a particular history at adventure a man finds himself inclinable to favour the weaker party, especially if the conqueror appear insolent'. As a child, Marvell had witnessed his father's clashes with the ‘insolent' church hierarchy and remained a lifelong opponent of their arbitrary exercise of power. In censuring the manufacture of creeds and the accompanying invention of heresies, he argues, in a way that would have endeared him to the nonconformists, for the primacy of individual conscience over episcopal jurisdiction: ‘It is not as in secular matters where the States of a kingdom are deputed by their fellow subjects to transact for them, so in spiritual.' And again: ‘The soul is too precious to be let out at interest upon any humane security, that does or may fail; but it is only safe when under God's custody in its own cabinet.'

Marvell accuses the bishops of having their own material reasons for wanting to impose creeds and of being worldly and ambitious. The orthodox bishops in the reign of Constantius were ‘obstinate for power, but flexible in faith', losing sight of the essential truth of Christianity in the heat of ecclesiastical power politics: ‘And all this mischief sprung from the making of Creeds, with which the bishops, as it were at Tilting, aim'd to hit one another in the eye, and throw the opposite Party out of the saddle.' In Marvell's reading of early Christianity, the bishops were overeager in the matter of persecution, exhibiting a ‘wolfishness' towards their flocks. They then progressed from ‘a spiritual kind of dominion' to a desire to wield civil power: ‘A bishop now grew terrible.' In a sharp reminder to his readers of the applicability of these arguments to the 1676 context, Marvell connects the earthquakes in the reign of Valens, which were seen as full of portent, to recent natural phenomena in England:

All which put together, could not but make me reflect upon the late earthquakes, great by how much more unusual, here in England, thorow so many counties since Christmas, at the same time when the Clergy, some of them, were so busy in their cabals, to promote this (I would give it a modester name then) persecution, which is now on foot against the Dissenters …
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Marvell quickly notes, however, that he is ‘not neither one of the most credulous nickers or applyers of natural events to humain transactions'. In the 1650s he had made use of the pathetic fallacy in his Cromwell poems, but the growing scientific spirit of the age was making its impression on him and rendering him sceptical about seeing natural phenomena as judgements of God. Continuing to underline the parallels with present events, he accuses the bishops of making Christians more ‘distressed' under their rule than they were during the early era of persecutions, and of fomenting political discord by ecclesiastical means: ‘turning makebates between prince and people, instilling dangers of which themselves were the authors'. The result of this activity was that ‘most princes began to look on their subjects as enemies'. The political mischief created by the bishops has forced recent English monarchs into more repressive behaviour than they would otherwise have adopted. Charles II they have thus ‘induced to more severities, then all the reigns since the Conquest will contain if summ'd up together'. There is a very real danger of a revival of ‘the former persecutions'. Marvell's remedy for these maladies is that the Church hierarchy should ‘inspect the morals of the Clergy' and recommend more use of the Bible: ‘'Tis a very good book, and if a man read it carefully, it will make him wiser.' In addition the bishops ‘ought to disintangle from the world'; they should not ‘take up the ministry as a trade' but lead good, exemplary lives and leave off theological niceties and the imposition of rules. In short the desideratum was: ‘That they do not come into the pulpit too full of fustian or logick. A good life is a clergyman's best syllogism, and the quaintest oratory.'

Unsurprisingly, the Church of England hierarchy took great offence at this. The Bishop of London demanded that the Privy Council take action and the Earl of Anglesey, the Lord Privy Seal, unsuccessfully petitioned the Lord Chancellor to throw Marvell's bookseller, Nathaniel Ponder, into jail for having printed the book without a licence. Even the Presbyterians were unhappy at Marvell's strictures on the Council of Nice. But Bishop Croft was delighted and wrote to tell Marvell of his satisfaction at his having ‘set forth Mr Smirk in soe trim & proper a dresse'.
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Croft offered his thanks for the ‘humane civility & christian charity shewed to ye author of naked truth soe bespattrd wth ye dirty language of foule mouthed beasts whoe though he feared much his own weaknesse yet by gods undeserved grace is soe strengthned as not at all to be dejected or much concerned wth such snarling currs though sett on by many spightefull hands & hearts of a high stamp but as base alloy'. Faintly amused at Croft's strong language, Marvell wrote back to say rather extravagantly that he had in fact ‘given you ye highest provocation' by the inadequacy of his work on Croft's behalf. In a reference to Croft's ‘christian magnanimity' (which in fact seems rather lacking from the quoted remarks), it is possible to detect some irony on Marvell's part. In a letter to Will Popple enclosing copies of the correspondence with Croft, Marvell refers to Croft as ‘ye foole', which suggests that he saw him as a rather pathetic figure. His role for Marvell was as a pretext for an attack on his favourite targets.

While the controversy was breaking out in the wake of publication of
Mr Smirke,
Marvell was spending June in the country – possibly in Highgate or perhaps farther afield. ‘To make the Town new to me I haue been airing my selfe for near three weeks in the Country,'
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he wrote to Sir Edward Harley, Croft's fellow Herefordshire man, who had probably apprised the Bishop of the identity of his friendly pamphleteer, on 1 July. The letter also refers in passing to a ‘debauch' at Epsom involving the poet Rochester, who was an admirer of Marvell's satirical poetry but who lived rather more loosely. Marvell tells Harley of a number of pamphlets that have come out in response to the
Naked Truth
controversy. One is called
The Catholic Naked Truth
(‘by a Papist') and another is by Bishop Burnet. By referring to Croft's work as ‘the poore mans book' Marvell continues to regard him as someone in some sense to be pitied, perhaps for his naivety in thinking that such a book would not provoke a furious reaction. Again in ironic mood, Marvell pretends in the letter that he is not the author and writes of himself in the third person: