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’.10 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,’11 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:
the book said to be Marvels makes what shift it can in the world but the Author walks negligently up & down as unconcerned. The Divines of our Church say it is not in the merry part so good as the Rehearsall Transpros’d, that it runns dreggs: the Essay they confesse is writ well enough to the purpose he intended it but that was a very ill purpose. The Bp of London’s Chaplain said it had not answerd expectation.12
Christopher, later Viscount Hatton, was one of many who knew that Marvell was the author. Writing to his brother on 23 May, Hatton expressed the hope that: ‘Andrew Marvel will likewise be made an example for his insolence in calling Dr Turner, Chaplain to His Royal Highness, Chaplaine to Sir Fobling Busy, as he terms him in his scurrilous satyrical answer to his Animadversions on Naked Truth.’13 To Harley, Marvell reported that the leading Presbyterian, William Bates, objected to his interpretation of the Council of Nice, making him speculate as to whether there was some ulterior motive for Dr Bates’s animosity: ‘But some years agoe I heard that he said Marvell was an Intelligencer to the King of France. ’Twas about the same time that the Doctor was in pension to another Monarch.’ In sardonic conclusion about all this sniping at his work Marvell asks Harley rhetorically: ‘Who would write?’ But if this indicated some weariness with polemic, events would force him back into print the following year. Besides, it is possible to detect more than a little relish in his account of the reactions to his work. Mr Smirke was not written by someone who did not take pleasure in the art of satirical flyting.
27
This Sickly Time
I desire, that, during this king’s reign, we may apply ourselves to preserve the people in the Protestant Religion, not only in the profession of it, but that men may live up to it, in morality and virtue of religion, and then you establish men against the temptation of Popery and a prince that may be popishly affected.1
The continued suspension of Parliament throughout 1676 meant that Marvell wrote no letters to the Hull Corporation containing reports of Parliamentary business. After the stir of the Mr Smirke publication in the early summer, we hear nothing from him again until the autumn. On 28 November he wrote from London – mentioning that he had been ‘out of Town till this night’ – to George Acklam, one of the Trinity House Brethren. Though he could be of little benefit to the town as an MP during the prorogation, there was plenty of business to conduct on behalf of Trinity House, in this instance the pursuit of a timber importer called Clipsham who was refusing to pay the duty of primage on a cargo of fir deals rightly due to Trinity House. Marvell advised them on this matter, although he wished they could have avoided getting themselves into a position of having to contemplate litigation. He had little respect for lawyers, particularly provincial practitioners, and observed to his brother-in-law on the Clipsham case: ‘Country Counsell like ill Tinkers make work for those at London.’2 Throughout the following year Marvell would pursue this case with an impressive doggedness and attention to detail.
In an extravagant signing off to his letter to Trinity House, Marvell stressed the ‘great obligation’ the Brethren laid upon him by allowing him to serve them in their affairs, ‘which I shall preferre to my own upon all occasions’.3 He also thanked them for their ‘kind present of Ale lately sent me’. It had apparently been tampered with or carelessly handled, as Marvell explained to another correspondent, Edward Thompson the York merchant. The barrel was in short measure by about six inches as a result of the ale porters being either ‘carelesse or thirsty’.4 A little less conventionally and with more real feeling, Marvell added to the Corporation that: ‘I am heartily glad to read in this sickly time the hands of so many my old & good friends’. Disillusioned with public life, Marvell was taking increased consolation from his personal friendships. A letter to his brother-in-law Edmund Popple a few weeks later signed off with an unu
sual personal touch: ‘Remember to all friends & Katy beside’.5 Katy may well have been Catherine Alured, whose daughter Mary married Edmund and Mary’s son, Will Popple. Marvell’s other friends at this time included Sir Thomas Allin, the naval commander and comptroller of the navy in the 1670s, with whom Marvell dined in December.6
At the start of 1677 the signs were that Parliament would be recalled soon. Marvell decided to write to William Foxley, Mayor of Hull, in anticipation of the event, pointing out his situation of ‘not having in the intervalls of Parliament any frequent or proper occasion of writing to you’ and his wish, in the absence of serious Parliamentary business, not ‘to interrupt you with unnecessary letters’.7 He made the point that the infrequent sessions of Parliament had not been helpful to anyone, least of all a provincial corporation seeking to promote private bills, but he was ready to do what he could by ‘giving you account that I am here in Town in good health, God be praised, and vigour, ready to take that Station in the House of Commons which I obtain by your favour and hath so many years continued’. Rather self-righteously he added that he would strive to do his duty ‘and in the more generall concerns of the nation shall God willing maintaine the same incorrupt mind and cleare Conscience, free from Faction or any self-ends, which I haue by his Grace hitherto preserved’.
On 15 February he was at last able to report that the fifteen-month prorogation had come to an end. Marvell’s summary of the King’s opening remarks to the session showed that it was to be business as usual:
He was pleas’d in a most weighty and gracious manner to profer on his part all things that might tend to the securing of the true Protestant Religion, the Libertyes and Propriety of the Subject and the Safety of the Nation: mentioning also his Debts & the necessity of building shipps.8
Parliament immediately plunged into a procedural quagmire to determine ‘whether we act under a Prorogation or an Adjournment’,9 which affected whether resumed Bills could be judged now to be receiving their first or second readings. There was also the need to issue by-election writs, thirty-two seats having become vacant.
Behind this fussy concern with procedure the old enmities and conflicts were being revived. Shaftesbury and Buckingham were sent to the Tower ‘for their High Contempt of the House’ because they had the temerity to challenge the legitimacy of the proroguing. Marvell reported: ‘To day I heare they are made close Prisoners.’10 The session was, unsurprisingly after such a long intermission, a busy and hard-working one, which took its toll on MPs. ‘I am in much weariness,’ Marvell protested on 8 March, and on 17 March he pleaded to Mayor Foxley: ‘I must beg your excuse for paper penn writing & euery thing. For really I haue by ill chance neither eat nor drunke from yesterday at noone till six a clock to night that the house rose.’11 He was taking a keen interest in what was happening in Parliament and was particularly concerned at the Bill ‘for securing the Protestant Religion, by educating the Children of the Royal Family therein’ which was first introduced on 20 March. The old fears that the Royal Family was far too close to Catholicism – the King’s brother was a declared Catholic and there were suspicions about the King himself – were sharpened by an anxiety that a Catholic could succeed to the throne if Protestants did not take action to ensure the King’s heirs were brought up free from the taint of popery. It was an issue on which Marvell could not remain silent. In the debate on 27 March he rose to make his longest ever speech in Parliament, though once again his report to Hull made absolutely no mention of his intervention.
In the debate of the first reading Secretary of State Williamson, attempting to disarm objections that such a Bill was offensive to the King by in effect treating him with suspicion, had argued that it was necessary only ‘should the misfortune befall the kingdom of a prince of the Romish religion’.12 When the Bill came in for a second reading on 27 March it was greeted at first with a silence in the House, which Secretary Williamson said was a token of its seriousness. Speakers immediately rose, however, to argue that it was a threat to royal prerogative and was handing power to the bishops. ‘It is now a thesis amongst some churchmen, that the king is not king but by their magical unction,’ said one MP, Mr Mallet. Marvell was the fourth speaker in the debate but, notwithstanding his abhorrence of Catholicism, he opposed the second reading. ‘It is an ill thing, and let us be rid of it as soon as we can,’ he told the House, adding: ‘I am sorry the matter has occasioned so much mirth. I think there was never so solemn and sad an occasion as this bill before you.’ He then proceeded to explain why he thought its introduction ‘unseasonable’. He objected to its shockingly unadorned reference to the contingency of the ‘death’ of the King: ‘It might have had a more modest word to have disguised it from the imagination (demise?).’ Again attacking the injudicious drafting, he highlighted the reference to the eventuality ‘that possibly the crown may devolve on a Popish government’. Marvell urged that this was something ‘which ought not to be supposed easily and readily’. For one thing it was outrageous to suggest that the King was in any danger of meeting his death, and indeed the law made it treasonable ‘to imagine the death of the king that is’. In an outburst of ferventloyalism, the putative author of ‘The Statue in Stocks-Market’ and ‘A Dialogue between the Two Horses’ declared: ‘God be thanked for the king’s age and constitution of body! The king is not in a declining age; and if we intermeddle in things of this consequence we are not to look into it so early, as if it was the king’s last will and testament.’ As for the raising of the spectre of a ‘Popish successor’, Marvell ‘would not precipitate that evil, no, not in a supposition’. The king has world enough and time: ‘Whilst there is time there is life, and whilst life, time for information, and the nearer the prospect is to the crown, information of judgement will be much easier.’ Don’t talk about it loosely now, he seems to be saying, for, when the true seriousness of the succession stares people in the face the fact will steady people’s minds.
Marvell then went on to call the bill ‘a great invasion on prerogative: to whom ever God shall dispose the kingdom, it is entire to the king’. He objected to the bishops being given power by the bill and suggested it would be just as appropriate or inappropriate for the power to be given to a delegation from the College of Physicians (a frivolous comparison that earned him a rebuke in committee the following day from the Speaker who ‘cast a severe reflection’13 on it). The fact is that ‘this power is not fit to be lodged in any sort of persons whatsoever. Whatever prince God gives us, we must trust him. Let us not, in prevention of things remote, take that immoderate care in this bill.’ Marvell said that instead: ‘We may apply ourselves to preserve the people in the Protestant Religion.’ If people lived good and virtuous lives as Protestants, he argued, that would be the best safeguard for the future of the religion. ‘If we do not practise upon ourselves, all these Oaths and Tests are of no use; they are but phantoms.’ He concluded: ‘Whether this bill will prevent Popery, or not, this will secure the promotion of the bishops; it will make them certain.’ In the contest between his anticlericalism, combined with a dislike for tests of allegiance on the individual, and his detestation of popery, the former triumphed. In a speech whose erudition – a learned reference to the Patriarch of Antioch – and elaborate metaphors obstructed its clarity and flow, Marvell had discharged himself rather uncomfortably. Before sitting down he confessed to the House: ‘I am not used to speak here, and therefore I speak with abruptness.’ The experience had not been an easy one for him. Although the bill was committed by 127 votes to 88 – and Marvell was appointed to the committee – it seems to have died of neglect and was not taken further. Two days later, however, Marvell was again on his feet, this time defending himself against the charge that he had been acting in a disorderly manner towards another Member of the House.
The incident was seized upon by Marvell’s enemies in the House who tried to get him committed to the Tower for it. What seems to have happened is that, on approaching his place in the chamber, Marvell tripped
over the feet of another MP, his old friend Sir Philip Harcourt. In putting out his hands to steady himself he appeared – to the hostile witnesses of the court party – to have landed ‘a box on the ear’ to Sir Philip. Evidently they complained to the Speaker, who had just reprimanded Marvell for his conduct in the earlier debate and now instigated, on 29 March, a debate about the incident because: ‘I saw a box on the ear given, and it was my duty to inform the house of it.’14
With consummate lack of tact, Marvell rose to defend himself:
What passed was through great acquaintance and familiarity betwixt us. I neither gave him an affront, nor intended him any. But the Speaker cast a severe reflection on me yesterday, when I was out of the house, and I hope that, as the Speaker keeps us in order, he will keep himself in order for the future.
Sir Job Charlton, MP for Ludlow, goaded by this impertinence, spluttered his indignation on behalf of the Speaker: ‘You in the Chair, and a stroke struck! Marvell deserves for his reflection on you, Mr Speaker, to be called in question. You cannot do right to the house, unless you question it; I move to have Marvell sent to the Tower.’ The Speaker then claimed to have seen a blow struck and a retaliation but Sir Philip Harcourt insisted: ‘Marvell had some kind of a stumble, and mine was only a thrust; and the thing was accidental.’ Secretary Williamson said that he could not excuse Marvell, ‘who made a very severe reflection on the Speaker’, and asked that Marvell withdraw so that the house could consider what should be done. Colonel Sandys was outraged that, instead of apologising, Marvell had made some disrespectful remarks to the Speaker: ‘A strange confidence, if not an impudence!’ Marvell then tried again to defuse the situation by saying that he was ‘content to be a sacrifice’ by withdrawing because he had such respect for the House. He added that he had simply seen an empty seat ‘and going to sit in it, my friend put me by, in a jocular manner, and what I did was of the same nature. So much familiarity has ever been between us that there was no heat in the thing. I am sorry I gave offence to the house.’ No doubt reflecting inwardly that his Commons interventions seemed to be rather incompetent and his habitual silence and reserve were well worth returning to, he added: ‘I seldom speak to the house, and if I commit an error, in the manner of my speech, being not so well-tuned, I hope it is not an offence.’ But the Speaker seemed reluctant to let the matter drop, insisting that he had seen a blow struck. With MPs becoming impatient at the issue being strung out, Sir Thomas Meres, the MP for Lincoln, rose to pronounce the last word: ‘By our long sitting together we lose, by our familiarity and acquaintance, the decencies of the house. I have seen 500 in the house, and people very orderly; not so much as to read a letter, or set up a foot. Once could scarce know any body in the house, but him that spoke. I would have the Speaker declare that order ought to be kept; but as to that gentlemen [Marvell] to rest satisfied.’ With that the matter does indeed seem to have rested.
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