World Enough and Time (5 page)

Marvell probably began his European trip in the spring or summer of 1642 with a visit to Holland, a country he was later to satirise as ‘This indigested vomit of the Sea' in the poem ‘The Character of Holland'. He was possibly in France in 1643, when the poet Antoine Girard Saint-Amant, author of a poem called
‘La Solitude',
which has been seen as an important influence on Marvell's treatment of the theme, was at the height of his fame. According to Marvell's detractors like Samuel Parker, who were keen to portray him as a vexatious Calvinist, he visited Geneva; Parker referred to him crossing the Alps and visiting Berne and Lyons. The nearest we come to a reliable sighting of Marvell, however, is in 1645 or 1646, when he visited the English poet Richard Flecknoe in Rome. Italy was an important stop on the English grand tour and Parker paints a vivid portrait of Marvell as one who has ‘seen all the
Tredesian
rarities and old stones of Italy, that has sat in the Porphyrie Chair at
Rome,
that can describe the method of the Election of Popes, and tell stories of the tricks of Cardinals…'
12
There is a traditional, though once again unsubstantiated, story of Marvell meeting Milton in Rome and the two discoursing on the iniquities of popery in the vicinity of St Peter's itself. In his Latin verses on the Louvre,
‘Inscribenda Luparae',
there is an allusion to a Latin inscription in the church of St John Lateran at Rome which he may have seen
13
and in ‘The Garden' his reference to a floral clock has led some scholars to surmise that he may have seen the famous example by Famianus Strada in the garden of Aldobrandini's villa in Rome.
14
As well as the reference to his Spanish fencing-master he seems to have attended at least one bull-fight while in Spain, if we take as a literal report on experience his comparison, in ‘Upon Appleton House' of the newly mown meadows to the ‘
Toril
/Ere the Bulls enter at Madril'.

Despite his views on Catholicism, and the seminary's reputation among hostile witnesses from the previous century as a place where treason was spoken (see, for example, Anthony Munday's
The English Roman Life
of 1582), Marvell may in 1645 have visited the English College at Rome, as Milton certainly did before him in October 1638. The College was on the itinerary of English visitors to Rome, regardless of their religious affiliation, the feast of St Thomas of Canterbury being a particularly popular day for the English to call.

Marvell's putative visit depends on a theory that he was a tutor to Edward Skinner. The College's ‘Pilgrims' Book' contains an entry for 18 December 1645, mentioning a ‘N. Skinner' having dined there with the seventeen-year-old Henry Howard (later the sixth Duke of Norfolk) and another young man, the son of the author and naval commander Sir Kenelm Digby. Skinner is said to have been there
‘cum suo tutore'
(with his tutor), which could be a reference to Marvell. Reserved and unobtrusive as ever, Marvell may not have pressed forward any other identity than
‘tutore'.
The difficulty with this theory lies in that initial ‘N'. It could be an abbreviation of the familiar ‘Ned', or it could simply be the customary initial used to indicate the place where a name was to be inserted. The College Rector, who would have made the entry, did not record young Digby's first name either. Skinner's two companions, however, were recorded seven weeks earlier in a register of British visitors kept at the University of Padua. On 31 October 1645 a Stephen Skinner – no relation to the family whose mother was not drowned in the Humber – was entered in the Padua record, making him a more likely candidate for attendance at the Roman lunch.
15
Another name which appears several times in the Pilgrims' Book of the English College in 1645 and 1646 is the much more interesting one of Richard Fleckno or Flecknoe, whose connection with Marvell is quite beyond doubt.

Posterity has dealt harshly with Richard Flecknoe, the protagonist of Marvell's poem ‘Fleckno, an English Priest at Rome'. John Dryden – prompted in part by Flecknoe's fierce attacks on the obscenity of the London stage – would in 1682 make him the eponymous subject of his poem ‘Macflecknoe or a Satyr upon the True-Blew-Protestant Poet, TS.', an attack on the poet Thomas Shadwell. In Dryden's poem, Flecknoe is presented as the epitome of dullness and one who ‘In Prose and Verse was own'd, without dispute/Through all the realms of Non-sense, absolute'. Although Marvell's poem is scarcely more respectful, there is evidence in Flecknoe's writing that he may have enjoyed occasional remissions from tediousness. His statement that ‘I write chiefly to avoid idleness, and print to avoid the imputation (of idleness), and as others do it to live after they are dead, I do it only not to be thought dead whilst I am alive'
16
is not wholly devoid of wit.

Richard Flecknoe, described in Gillow's
Dictionary of the English Catholics
as ‘priest, poet and dramatist', was born in Oxford (date unknown) and was the nephew of the Jesuit, Father William Flecknoe
SJ
. He was sent abroad to be educated at one of the Jesuit colleges where he was said to have entered the Society of Jesus and been ordained priest. According to Gillow: ‘Naturally of an easy-going disposition, with a strong objection to the trammels of discipline, it was no wonder that he soon left the Society. His weakness was vanity and conceit, and fondness for society in which he was ambitious to shine as a polite English scholar.'
17
It is not difficult to see why satirists were attracted to the pompous, social-climbing author of
A Treatise of the Sports of Wit
(1675) as an easy target, though his poems would earn passing praise from Robert Southey and Charles Lamb in the nineteenth century.

In 1640 Flecknoe left an England drifting towards a civil war in which Catholics might not prosper (though he would later write a worthless eulogy of Oliver Cromwell in 1659 which praised the Lord Protector, opining that ‘a Greater and more Excellent personage has no where been produc'd by this latter Age').
18
His travels began in the Low Countries and would later take him to Constantinople, Portugal and Brazil, as described in his
A Relation of Ten Years Travells in Europe, Asia, Affrique, and America
(1656). In the opening pages of this work he announces breezily his reasons for leaving a conflict-ridden country: ‘I'm too weak and slight-built a Vessel for Tempestuous Seas … England is no place for me and for Poets … I, like one who flies an
Incendium,
wholly indifferent whither I went, so I sav'd myself.' We laugh, and Marvell laughed, but might his own motives have been similar?

Flecknoe enjoyed his exile amongst English titled expatriates, until, that is, their complaints about their losses at home began to bother him, at which point he moved on: ‘I, by relating all to the narrow compass of one
Portmanteau,
travel lightly up and down, injoying that Liberty,
Fortune
has bestow'd on me,' he declares. In Brussels, he flattered various titled ladies: ‘amongst Men (such is the corruption of the Times) one learns nothing but
Libertinage,
Vice and
Deboisherie
'. He passed through France, then to Monaco, where he was lodged in the Palace of the Prince, and then into Italy, always on the run from political conflict. No sooner had he arrived in Genoa than the Marquis Philippo Palavicino despatched a carriage to fetch him from his inn to the Palace. By 1645 he had arrived in Rome where something clearly went wrong. ‘I swear I like it not,' he writes. ‘Give me good Company, good Natures, & good Mirth, & the Devil of any such thing they have here.' He was impressed by the ruins and the antiquities, but did not care for the living inhabitants of the city. He wrote to his noble friends in Flanders: ‘I converse more with the dead than the living here (their antient
Statua's
and
Pictures,
I mean) … how melancolly a Creature I am.' This was the condition in which Marvell found him, explaining in the poem's opening lines that he called at the poet-priest's lodgings because he was ‘Oblig'd by frequent visits' from Flecknoe to do so, which suggests that Marvell had for some time been well-integrated into English expatriate life in Rome.

‘Flecknoe, an English Priest at Rome', which is formally reminiscent of the satires of Donne and Horace, is hardly a charitable poem, making fun of Flecknoe's poverty and pinched surroundings, from which, on this occasion, no aristocratic patron had been able to rescue him. The poet mockingly recounts a visit to Flecknoe's lodgings ‘at the Sign/Of the sad
Pelican
'. Once there, he is required to climb three flights of stairs, at the top of which he finds a garret which was so small, three feet by seven, it ‘seem'd a Coffin set on the Stairs head'. The act of opening the door blocked half the room, making it a ‘Wainscot'. In contrast to its tight dimensions, however, the room contains poetic stanzas in abundance and no sooner does Marvell squeeze himself in than the awful poet begins in ‘a dismal tone' to read his ‘hideous verse'. He resigns himself to this ‘Martyrdom', which is rapidly followed by a performance on the lute, over whose frets the poetaster's ‘gouty Fingers' move, the rumblings of his empty stomach making a sympathetic music with the strings. Marvell's language in the poem is wittily blasphemous about the Catholicism of Flecknoe, who is pitiably thin from starvation ‘as if he only fed had been/With consecrated Wafers', and who is fattened only by wads of his terrible rhymes. He watches the scarecrow dress and, after a farcical encounter with another caller while trying to get down the narrow stairs, all three go out for a meal where, replenished, the poems start again, read this time by the third party, probably an Italian because he is said to appreciate the poems ‘because he understood/Not one Word'. This local youth may also be hiring the poet to write hack verses addressed to his
inamorata.
Hearing his poems inadequately rendered, the ‘disdainful Poet' stamps off in high dudgeon. Marvell, finding himself free at last, pretends mockingly that he will go off to St Peter's to hang a votive offering there in gratitude for his release.

Such a bald summary, of course, does scant justice to the allusive wit and word play of the poem, which cleverly satirises such theological concepts as transubstantiation as well as Catholic practices such as the Lenten fast. Moreover, like every poem of Marvell's, it is instinct with classical allusion and lightly worn learning. Such a wit implies an appreciative audience so perhaps the author, who on internal evidence had a long acquaintance with the city prior to the visit, had some learned friends among the English in Rome who would enjoy both the manuscript verse – it was not published until after his death in the 1681 edition of his poems – and the mockery of Flecknoe, who might have been a standing joke among them. Pauline Burdon speculates that the readership could have included the second Duke of Buckingham, who had been in Rome since late 1645 and would stay until May 1646. Flecknoe later addressed some verses to him and one reason for cultivating Marvell might have been the hope that the latter's contacts might bring him together with a much needed potential patron.
19

It is probable that the encounter between the two poets took place in March 1646 during Lent. Flecknoe seems to have arrived in Rome at least as early as January 1645, according to the English College records, to perform a mission for one of his patronesses, the Duchess of Lorraine. Once that mission was completed he seems to have slid gently, during late 1645 and 1646, into the poverty in which Marvell found him, having no other means of support.
20
His visits to the English College may have occurred during this period of hardship when he would appreciate the opportunity to dine.

Another of Marvell's poems can possibly be dated to this time. ‘A Dialogue between Thyrsis and Dorinda' was set to music by the English composer William Lawes, the setting having survived in Lawes's own hand in a manuscript now in the British Library. Since Lawes was killed fighting for the Royalist side at the siege of Chester in September 1645 the poem must have been written in the first years of the decade, though the version that appears in the 1681 edition of Marvell's poems appears to have been revised later. It shows that the delicate pastoral verses, such as those that appear in the early pages of the
Miscellaneous Poems,
began early.

The final stage of Marvell's tour was Spain. He would have set off from Italy no sooner than the spring of 1646, it being the habit of travellers to winter in cities. The next certain sighting we have of him is in Cambridgeshire, in the autumn of 1647. He would travel again, on official missions, some more clandestine than others, but this period of four to five years was the most extended and probably most relaxed of his periods abroad. His mockery of Flecknoe's poverty suggests that this was not his own condition. To have sustained himself for such a long period implies some form of financial support, either from a patron at home or from the income derived from working as a tutor to a young man of wealthy family.

He would, however, return – with skills newly acquired from a Spanish fencing-master – to an England engaged in an altogether less frivolous and foppish presentation of arms.

4

The World's Disjointed Axle

Then is the Poets time, 'tis then he drawes,

And single fights forsaken Vertues cause.
1

Arriving back in England, perhaps in the summer or early autumn of 1647 at the port of Hull, after four or five years of relaxed foreign travel, the twenty-six-year-old poet, who would not find a permanent job until at least the middle of 1650 or the beginning of 1651, found himself in the middle of a still raging conflict. In November 1647, the King, who had been taken into Army custody earlier in the year, escaped from Hampton Court and fled to Carisbrooke Castle on the Isle of Wight. The Second Civil War was just about to start.