World Enough and Time (37 page)

Less than three weeks later Parliament was adjourned for an Easter recess from 17 April until 21 May, on which day there was an eclipse of the sun. On 10 May Marvell received the sum of £40 14s in Parliamentary wages but the frequent adjournments throughout the summer left him plenty of time for his own pursuits. ‘I am much out of Towne,' he wrote to Sir Edward Harley on 7 August. He was making use of his leisure to write, probably in seclusion at Highgate, his most serious work,
An Account of the Growth of Popery,
which would appear, anonymously, at Christmas. In parallel with this mounting concern at the perceived Catholic threat, Marvell was anxious about the revival of attempts to suppress dissent. In Scotland, he reported to Sir Edward, the field conventicles were rife: ‘And the proceedings against them as violent. Even poor herd-boys are fined shillings and sixpences.'
15
His reports of the popular hostility to the decision of the Bishop of Argyle (‘who is also Parson of Glasgow') to limit the way in which the burial of a nonconformist minister's child was conducted in Glasgow leave little doubt about what he thought of these attempts to suppress dissent. In addition to these serious matters his letters to Hull were often padded out with gossipy detail, such as his report in July about what had transpired at the London sessions. A Frenchman had been indicted for the rape of a ten-year-old girl and another man ‘for buggery of a Mare'.
16
Another case involved an indictment of a woman ‘for beastliness with a Dog for wch she is condemned & will be executed'. Marvell added: ‘I wish I had something better left to take of the ill relish of such horrid wickedness at the end of my Letter.'

Just before Christmas, Marvell was instructed by the Hull Corporation to pay a visit to James, Duke of Monmouth, the illegitimate son of the King. They asked him to procure six pieces of gold ‘with a little silke purse'
17
and to present them to the Duke, who was the High Steward of Hull, ‘as his annuall honorary from the town'. Monmouth had been involved in the incident of the slitting of Sir John Coventry's nose in 1670 and the murder of a beadle the following year, and therefore would be unlikely to prove an attractive figure to Marvell – but he was later put forward by Shaftesbury as a substitute for the Duke of York to succeed the King to the throne. Marvell's correspondence shows him making several visits to the Duke at the end of 1677, ostensibly on the Hull business, but it is possible that he may have discussed other things.
18

On 27 December 1677, Marvell acknowledged a present of ale from Trinity House. This time it was a full measure. ‘I acknowledge all your favors and thanke you particularly for your Ale which came up in very good condition and is excellent Liquor,' he wrote. A similar gift was expected from the Corporation but had not yet arrived at his lodgings in Maiden Lane, Covent Garden. From that address he wrote to the Mayor to express his fear ‘that there is a probability of a warre with France'.
19
Such an eventuality, he suggested, would have at least one desirable consequence: ‘that by prohibiting their wines we were obliged to drinke so good Liquour'.
20

28

No Popery

And as we are thus happy in the constitution of our State, so are we yet more blessed in that of our Church; being free from that Romish yoak, which so great a part of Christendom do yet draw and labour under.
1

Early in 1678, Shaftesbury was released from the Tower, where he had languished for a year after his ill-judged attempt to challenge the legitimacy of the resumed Parliament the previous February. This was not an easy time for the opposition. The King and his minister, Danby, while not always pursuing the same policies, had nonetheless gradually fortified the position of the government by a combination of secret dealings with the French King and bribery of potential opponents. The notorious Titus Oates conspiracy, alleging a popish plot, would not be announced until the autumn. The opposition, whatever intimations it might have of the King's secret deals with Louis XIV, lacked clear evidence. Public opinion, however, was anti-French and vigorously anti-Catholic. The marriage of the Duke of York's daughter Mary to William of Orange was a popular move seen as strengthening Protestantism. By the end of the year a treaty with the Dutch would be signed, ostensibly placing England against France, but Charles continued his covert links with Louis, trying to secure more money from him in exchange for maintaining English neutrality. Opposition members like Marvell, who feared an international Catholic conspiracy, looked on in alarm at these machinations.

His new-year letter to Hull, referring to ‘the probability of a warre with France', reflected the general mood of the opposition MPs. Not that the high-minded like Marvell were, in their personal dealings, averse to proposing a little inducement. In a letter written from his Covent Garden lodgings to the Trinity House Brethren on 8 January 1678, Marvell suggested to them, in regard to a Mr Fisher who had been of service to Trinity House in the matter of the timber importer Clipsham who was trying to avoid his dues: ‘I thinke if you incouraged him sometime or other with a little vessell of your Ale it would be very well placed.'
2
The accounts of Trinity House for the year show that money was spent on ‘two barrells of ale sent to Coll Gilby & Mr Marvell', a further ‘tenne gynneys' that was ‘Given to Mr Marvell for a gratuity for all his labour & paines & writeing letters in the business' and a further £2 11s 4d ‘Spent now at Mr Marvell's comeing downe with Coll Gilby & him upon a treate'.
3
The Trinity House Warden, Thomas Coates, wrote from London to his fellows on 5 February to report on Marvell's shyness in accepting these gifts:

Accordinge to your order I waited on Mr Marvell att Westminster yesterday to whome I presented your reall respects with the testimony thereof your kinde token, which att the first he very modestly refused untill I did assure him if he did not accept itt the House would demonstrate their gratitude some way equivolent to itt. Then hee received itt desireinge me returne you his hearty thankes protestinge (and I doe beleive him) hee never expected such recompence for any service or kindnes hee had donne or could doe the House and would be ready to serve and assist them.
4

So grateful was Marvell for this significant addition to his Parliamentary income that he wrote soon afterwards, with just a hint of sanctimoniousness, to the Wardens saying: ‘I find my self very much surprised lately by a Token which you were pleased to send me by Mr Coates. And truly I was very unwilling to have accepted having always desired rather to doe those offices of friendship where I could have no prospect of other gratification then the goodness of the Action.'
5
When this eloquent asseveration was over, Marvell pocketed the money.

Having just been elected a younger Warden of the Trinity House in London at Deptford, Marvell found himself, in the spring of 1678, caught in a conflict of interest. He was obliged to tell the Hull House: ‘I am under some constraint, not hauing liberty being a member of this Trinity House to impart their resolutions to you upon this affaire and yet being desirous to doe you all reasonable service.'
6
This new appointment is testimony to Marvell's lifelong interest in mercantile and maritime business.

On the wider international stage, Marvell was apprehensive about the behaviour of the French, whose army was in Flanders. Reporting to the Hull Corporation on a range of trade sanctions against the French, and describing the French troop movements, he again predicted: ‘So that all things compared it lookes like warre.'
7
If that were to be the case, he was confident that any extra expenses demanded by the King for the conduct of the war would be ‘chearfully supplyed by all his good Subjects'.
8
Three days later, however, the House voted to confine such supply ‘to the use of the French war in the strictest termes'
9
– knowing the propensities of the King in the matter of supply. One consequence of these war preparations was that more urgent business was laid aside, in particular measures to tackle ‘the danger from the Growth of Popery'.
10
Nonetheless, a committee was established ‘to consider of the dangers by the Growth of Popery and the Remedyes for the same'.
11
The House also received ‘seuerall particulars in Monmouth and Herefordshire about Masses Priests &c: and other things too open and visible in those Countyes'.
12
Nothwithstanding the strength of Marvell's animus towards the Catholics he could still manage to maintain an equilibrium of sorts. In a letter to Hull on 30 April, after recounting some lurid details of the activities of the ‘Popishly affected' in the Welsh Marches, he nonetheless entered the caveat that they could just be rumour: ‘I write these things unwillingly as being of ill Report & whch therefore although fit to be communicated to persons of your prudence yet it may be prudent to keep within a narrow compasse.'
13
Throughout the early spring war seemed imminent but then the possibility of a peace between Holland and France began to emerge. In one of his last letters to his constituents, Marvell reported on the apparent moves towards peace and its likely acceptance by the Spanish Emperor ‘so that all the late Alarum vanishes'.
14

If the prospect of war had receded, the forward march of popery was certainly not, in Marvell's estimation, being halted. On 10 June he wrote to Will Popple a cleverly ironic letter that made it pretty clear that he was the author of an anonymous pamphlet that had been circulating for at least six months:

There came out, about Christmass last, here a large Book concerning
the Growth of Popery and Arbitrary Government.
There have been great Rewards offered in private, and considerable in the Gazette, to any who could inform of the Author or Printer, but not yet discovered. Three or four printed Books since have described, as near as it was proper to go, the Man being a Member of Parliament, Mr
Marvell
to have been the Author; but if he had, surely he should not have escaped being questioned in Parliament, or some other Place.
15

Marvell's early biographers were in little doubt that this work was the triumph of their English patriot. ‘He sets, in a true light, the miseries of a nation under a papal, and the blessings of a protestant administration,'
16
wrote Cooke. In the view of Thompson it was ‘the means of discovering the Popish Plot, and other diabolical intrigues of the Jesuits'.
17
Marvell's conspiracy theory may now strike us as excessive but the historical evidence, much of which would have been unavailable to him, bears out at least some of his contention that Parliament was being hoodwinked by the King, who was engaged in covert dialogue with a foreign power of a kind that was profoundly undemocratic and unconstitutional. The full title of the work indicates its scope and its historical specificity:
An Account of the Growth of Popery, and Arbitrary Government in England: More Particularly from the Long Prorogation of November, 1675, Ending the 15 February 1676 [1677 n.s.], till the Last Meeting of Parliament the 16th of July 1677.
The 1678 edition, published after his death and naming him as the author, adds that it was ‘Recommended to the Reading of all
English
Protestants'.

The perceived threat from the Catholic European powers rather than the nature of the Catholic religion itself was the primary motor of Marvell's animosity. He was capable of admitting the sincerity of individual Catholics and even of acknowledging their disabilities in the state, but this anonymous work begins badly with a highly prejudicial attack on Catholicism that does Marvell little credit. It is in fact one of the canonical texts in the long history of English anti-Catholicism. With the overemphatic rhetoric of a fundamentalist preacher thumping the lectern in a corrugated iron mission hut, he inveighs against Catholicism in the usual terms. Catholicism, he argues, combines the worst abominations of Judaism, Islam (‘Plain Turkery') and paganism, with some ‘peculiar absurdities of its own in which those were deficient'.
18
The whole package, which has no claim to be considered a religion at all, is ‘carried on, by the bold imposture of priests under the name of Christianity' and constitutes a ‘last and insolent attempt upon the credulity of mankind'. In particular, by confining its use of scripture to the language of Latin it deprives ‘the poor people' of direct access to the word of God. It practises ‘idolatry' in its worship of saints and angels, and it builds its foundation on ‘incredible Miracles and palpable fables'. Its central enormity is the Mass, conducted:

in an unknown tongue, and intangled with such Vestments, Consecrations, Exorcisms, Whisperings, Sprinklings, Censing and phantasticall Rites, Gesticulations, and Removals, so unbecoming a Christian Office, that it represents rather the pranks and ceremonies of Juglers and Conjurers.
19

But the ultimate provocation to the good sense of an English Protestant is the doctrine of transubstantiation: ‘that Transubstantial solacism … a new and antiscriptural Belief, compiled of Terrours to the Phancy, Contradictions to Sense, and Impositions on the Understanding'. In exchange for blind loyalty to this ceremonial nonsense, the Catholic powers have ‘discharged the people from all other services and dependence', in sharp contrast to the English constitutional position where the citizen is not dictated to by a theocracy. The scandal of indulgences makes the Pope ‘clerk of the spiritual market' in which ‘the worse Christians men are, the better customers'. Absolute power and infallibility is granted to the Pope, who ‘does persecute those to death who dare worship the Author of their Religion instead of his pretended Viceregent'. Finally, the celibate Catholic priests – and this is an interesting observation from the unmarried Marvell – ‘by remaining unmarried, either frustrate human nature if they live chastly, or, if otherwise adulterate it'.