17

The Faults and the Person

The Raising and Destroying of Favourits and Creatures is the sport of Kings not to be medled with by us.1

Marvell’s involvement in the impeachment of Clarendon was not confined to the composition of nearly 1,000 lines in rhyming couplets. He entered fully into the Commons debate on the matter, and his interventions were marked by a characteristic independence of judgement. He was never wholly predictable as a politician, although he generally came down on the side of the Opposition forming around the figure of Clarendon’s opponent, the Duke of Buckingham, who had married his former pupil Mary Fairfax.

Some time before Parliament met to consider these matters on 10 October 1667, Marvell wrote to Sir John Trott, MP for Andover.2 Trott’s son Edmund had died of smallpox on 11 August, not long after his older brother John, also a young Oxford graduate, had died from the same disease. Since Marvell’s correspondence is mostly about political and business affairs, this letter of condolence is of interest in showing a more human side of the poet. Although placing his sympathy in a stern Christian context of acceptance of ‘your Sons happiness’ (in going to meet his Maker) the letter is one of feeling. ‘I know the contagion of grief,’ Marvell wrote, ‘and infection of Tears, and especially when it runs in a blood. And I my self could sooner imitate then blame those innocent relentings of Nature, so that they spring from tenderness only and humanity, not from an implacable sorrow.’3 In Marvell’s grief, however, there is leisure for fiction, and the letter is a very rhetorical one. It also contains an allusion, masked in a Biblical analogy, to the political situation, and expresses the fear that, in the wake of the Dutch raid, greater calamities were in store for English Protestants from a court that may have done secret deals with the papists. Marvell concludes by enumerating the things that should console a Christian father grieving for his son: ‘The word of God: The society of good men: and the books of the Ancients. There is one way more, which is by diversion, business, and activity; which are also necessary to be used in their season.’ Marvell is aware that in writing to a father about the loss of his son he is writing of a condition he has not experienced and never will experience. With that nuance, but ostensibly writing about their respective public roles, he writes: ‘But I my self, who live to so little purpose, can have little authority or ability to advise you.’ Marvell composed two Latin epitaphs – one for each son, the one to Edmund described in this letter as ‘this sorry Elogie of your Son’ – that are set in tablets in the north wall of the chancel of the old church at Laverstocke in Hampshire, now a mortuary chapel of the Portal family.

On 10 October 1667 Parliament resumed with a determination to seek redress for the miscarriages of the war and to punish the culprits. As the most powerful man in the government, Clarendon was in everyone’s sights. Burnet wrote: ‘The Parliament were, upon their first opening, set on to destroy Lord Clarendon. And all persons who had heard him say anything that could bear an ill construction, were examined.’4 Marvell, who spoke rarely in the House (by the standards of the time that was normal enough), made four speeches during October and November. The first was on 14 October, four days after Clarendon was impeached. ‘There neuer appeared a fairer season for men to obtain what their own hearts could wish either as to redresse of any former grievances or the constituting of good order and justice for the future,’5 Marvell had told Mayor Franke just before Parliament was due to open. Three weeks later he was confessing to him that ‘really we are tired out with publick businesse’.6 On 14 October he rose to intervene in the Clarendon debate in what is in some ways a puzzling speech. Marvell seemed not to have had the gift for plain, forceful speaking when on his feet in the Commons, and his speeches often appeared crabbed and difficult to follow. It was as if he hated having to come down on one side directly, preferring to offer qualifications and hesitations. In this intervention he seemed almost to be speaking up for Clarendon, as a result, perhaps, of some fear on his part that the faction clamouring for the Chancellor’s impeachment might not actually be holding out a better alternative. The clear lines of Parliamentary opposition that came to be called the court and country parties were only emerging at this time, and Parliament did not have the sharply defined and whipped divisions and allegiances that have come to be the norm in the late twentieth century. Marvell’s speech is missing from the official journals but two accounts survive, in the diary of the Derbyshire MP, John Milward, and in some manuscript notes collected by the Tewkesbury MP, Sir Henry Capel, and now preserved in the British Museum. Marvell rose after the Totnes MP, Sir John Maynard, had finished speaking:

Mr Marvell. The Raising and Destroying of Favourits and Creatures is the sport of Kings, not to be medled with by us. Kings in the Choice of their Ministers move in a Sphear distinct from us. It is said because the people rejoiced at his fall wee must thank the King. The people allso rejoiced at ye Restoration of the Duke of Buckingham the other day obnoxtious. Shall wee not thank ye King for that too? Its said wee hate him not, Would any man in this House be willing to have such a vote pass upon him? Wee are to thank the King for ye matter of his speech. This is not in perticuler any part of it and comes irregularly before us.7

In his diary, John Milward reported that the whole morning was given over to speeches on this question of the right way to dispose of Clarendon ‘and whether the King’s laying him aside should be joined to the other acts of grace for which we were to give him the thanks of the House’.8 The King had told both Houses of Parliament: ‘I do assure you I will never again trust the late Lord Chancellor in any place of public employment.’ That assurance seems to have been good enough for Marvell. In a parallel with his response to Cromwell, he seems to have fallen in naturally with the idea of the legitimacy of existing power, particularly when it was exercising its strength. A famous defender of the rights of dissenters, he was not himself a natural dissident. Perhaps as a result of this speech he was singled out three days later and placed on the committee inquiring into the miscarriages of the recent war.

On 26 October, Marvell spoke again, once more seeming to aim at a more just and particular indictment rather than have the House simply accede to a generalised clamour for Clarendon’s scalp. In reply to a speech by Sir Richard Temple, the Warwickshire MP, who had bellowed: ‘Let not this son of Zeruiah be too strong for king and parliament,’9 Marvell called for fairness in the treatment of Clarendon:

Mr Marvell would have the faults hunt the persons: would not have a sudden impeachment by reason of the greatness of the person or danger of escape, lord Clarendon not being likely to ride away post.10

That night Marvell reported to Hull’s latest Mayor, Anthony Lambert: ‘This morning seuerall members of our House did in their places moue the House to proceed to an impeachment against the earle of Clarinden, and layd very high crimes to his charge. The House proceeded in it with very much temper and the result at last was no further then to make a Committee to look out presidents against Tuesday morning (till when we adjournd) to report to the House what way formerly they had proceeded in capitall cases.’11 On 31 October, Pett, the Superintendent of the Chatham Dockyard and another national scapegoat, was put in the Tower, and Marvell was one of those speaking up for him in Parliament. Once again, one assumes this came from a sense that proper justice ought to be done rather than for the House simply to indulge in revenge exacted on an easy target. The Clarendon business dragged on into November, with sessions so long and full that Marvell was forced to confess to Hull on 14 November: ‘I lose my dinner to make sure of this Letter.’12 He had just spoken again on 7 November in response to a claim by the Hindon MP, Sir Edward Seymour, who had brought in the impeachment, that Clarendon had allegedly said the King was unfit to govern. Marvell challenged Seymour to say where this information came from.13 Difficulties arose between the Commons and Lords over the impeachment, the latter being unhappy with the Commons’ call for Clarendon’s impeachment, in Marvell’s words, ‘upon a generall charge of Treason’.14 Like Marvell, the Lords wanted more specific charges to be brought. The Commons replied angrily that the Lords’ refusal was ‘an obstruction of the public justice in the proceedings of both houses of Parliament and in the president of evill and dangerous consequence’.15 But by the end of the month it was too late. Clarendon had fled. On 3 December Marvell reported to the Mayor that an order had been issued for the securing of all seaports to prevent Clarendon’s escape, which, by that time, had actually happened. With what was presumably a dry Yorkshire irony, Marvell observed: ‘I suppose he will not trouble you at Hull.’16 The year ended with a gift, this time from the Brethren of Trinity House, of ‘your towne liquor’.17

After the Christmas recess, Parliament met again on 6 February 1668, but so few MPs had bothered to turn up that the House was adjourned until the beginning of the following week when it resolved to fine future absentees £40. If they refused to pay they would be sent to the Tower until they agreed to pay the fine. One of Marvell’s first acts in this session was to make another of those hot-headed speeches that contrast so oddly with his generally judicious and highly qualified approach to public business. He was clearly angered at the failure of grafting officials to secure proper intelligence during the Dutch War, believing that they lined their own pockets instead, and he contrasted intelligence operations with those of earlier English administrations. The object of his invective was Henry Bennett, Lord Arlington (one ‘A’ of the Cabal), Secretary of State:

Mr Marvell, reflecting on Lord Arlington, somewhat transportedly said: We have had Bristols and Cecils Secretaries, and by them knew the King of Spain’s Junto, and letters of the Pope’s cabinet; and now such a strange account of things! the money allowed for intelligence so small, the intelligence was accordingly – A libidinous desire in men, for places, makes them think themselves fit for them – The place of Secretary ill gotten, when bought with 10,000l. and a Barony – He was called to explain himself but said, The thing was so plain, it needed not.18

The speech attracted some comment. Milward said it was ‘a most sharp speech’19 and said that it was directed at several members of the Council of State. Pepys referred to ‘Great high words in the House’ saying that reports of bad intelligence made many MPs ‘bitter against my Lord Arlington’ and that it was generally considered that ‘the King paid too dear’ for his intelligence in Arlington’s case ‘in giving him £10,000 and a barony for it’.20 Arlington himself, in a letter to Sir William Temple, acknowledged that ‘Mr Marvell hath struck hard at me.’21 The evidence suggests that Marvell’s anger was widely shared, but his manner of speaking (‘somewhat transportedly’) was sufficiently noteworthy to be recorded in Grey’s Parliamentary reports. Curiously, on this and all the other occasions on which Marvell spoke in the House, he made no reference to the intervention in the course of his detailed letters to his constituents. He did, however, refer to the findings of the inquiry into the miscarriages of the war. The failure to guard the Medway with sufficient ships and the policy of paying the seamen with promissory notes or ‘tickets’ rather than hard cash were two mistakes identified by Marvell’s committee. Referring to the latter issue in a speech on 22 February, Marvell said that the navy board might well be able to clear themselves from responsibility for the fiasco of the war ‘yet it was requisite that they should be desired to inform the House where the fault was, for there is no question but that they are able to do it’.22 Two days after his ‘somewhat transported’ speech, Marvell had been the first MP on his feet to propose consideration of the King’s speech from the throne, almost certainly because it proposed measures of religious toleration. He returned to the theme on 13 March, when he spoke against a motion to renew the act against conventicles (unauthorised nonconformist meetings). He did so again on 30 March, but he was on the losing side and the act was renewed.

At this time Marvell was living ‘att the Crowne over against the Greyhound Taverne neere Charing Crosse’.23 He was working long hours in the House, sitting until five in the evening on 15 February and eight o’clock on 27 February. ‘’Tis nine at night and we are but just now risen,’24 he complained two months later. At that period of the history of Parliament, this would be considered late. It is frustrating not to know more of the private life of the bachelor poet-politician at this time of his life. His letter to Sir John Trott about ‘living to so little purpose’ suggests that he may have had doubts about his aim in life. He may even have been lonely in his central London lodgings, although he had high-ranking friends such as Sir Jeremy Smith, a former Cromwellian and an admiral in the Dutch War. There is a glimpse in one of Marvell’s letters of Smith, himself, and William Legge, Lieutenant-General of the Ordnance, relaxing after some piece of complicated business conducted by Marvell on behalf of Hull Corporation, the three of them sitting ‘drinking a cup of sack’25 and allegedly singing the praises of the burgesses of Hull. Smith was examined by the House at this time as part of the investigation into the conduct of the war, but Marvell was confident of his being cleared of any responsibility for the naval debacle: ‘I doubt not but Sr Jeremy will come of with full reputation.’26 Sir Jeremy later (13 October 1675) asked Marvell to witness his will and made him a trustee with three others, and Marvell would be at his bedside when he died. All four trustees were asked ‘to take the Care and Tuition of my children’27 and were each left 40 shillings. Those children would be added to Marvell’s nephew, William Popple, to make up a group of young people for whom this childless man would have a special care.

For all his circle of distinguished acquaintances and his public profile – this was the period of his maximum exposure as a politician – Marvell was always reserved and prone to keep his own company. He was also very secretive, even in his chronicles to Hull. At the end of February he ended an account of recent Parliamentary proceedings with the tantalising declaration: ‘Other things are of a privater nature.’28 He would make a similar comment a year later: ‘Let not my willingness to acquaint you with affairs be made too common or prejudiciall.’29 Even some of what was enacted on the floor of the House of Commons or discussed in the lobbies was being turned into a mystery.

Marvell, it must be said, enjoyed the art of politicking and what would now be called lobbying. Early in 1669, he was working hard for the Trinity House Brethren, trying once more to frustrate the plans of Philip Frowde to build his lighthouse at Spurn Head, whose tolls would be a burden on Hull merchants, putting fees into Frowde’s pocket rather than their own. From his Covent Garden lodgings Marvell elaborated the best tactics to use with this man: ‘But I looke upon Frowd as the spring of that engine & haue been sometimes thinking whether, considering the block that you being so considerable a body may always put in his way, it were not fit to try whether he as an hungry and needy man might not be induced for some slight recompense to let fall his pretension…’30 No Parliamentary Committee on Public Standards then existed to outlaw such financial inducements to favour constituency business in the House, and the lighthouse issue would consume a great deal of Marvell’s attention during 1669. He wrote nothing and appears to have done little on the record during that year, though hinting darkly to Hull in September at ‘some occasions of mine own & absence out of Towne’,31 which may have been no more than a sequestration at Highgate to read and write away from the press of business. Whether or not a bribe was actually paid to Frowde he was still pursuing a private bill to erect his lights and apparently getting the better of Marvell’s attempts to deflect him. ‘It is not necessary to make you a Cart of the flats & sands that we meet with at Court but in short Col: Frowd barrs us and he is always at the top and we at the botome,’32 Marvell confessed to Trinity House on 18 September. The same month his name appears on a list of those who might be favourably inclined towards the Duke of York drawn up by Sir Thomas Osborne, later Lord Danby. Osborne’s scheme was to construct a temporary alliance between the court and country parties, offering the latter some concessions on religious dissent in exchange for their agreeing to vote supplies to the King. The Duke of York’s sympathisers were one of the factions he believed he could line up (though one might have expected Marvell to have been considered as part of Buckingham’s camp). In the event, this coalition of interests did not come together and Osborne had to seek other means.33

Parliament had been prorogued for most of the year, from March until October. When it sat again on 19 October, the House, Marvell as a diligent attender pointing out, ‘being but thin’,34 one of the first pieces of new business was the King’s wish that Commissioners be appointed ‘for making an Union of the two Kingdomes’, England and Scotland. The House was also to be preoccupied this session with rumours of renewed religious and political dissent. The conventicles were alleged to be meeting again and ‘other dangerous meetings’ were taking place. The House agreed to investigate a rumour ‘that Ludlow [the regicide who had escaped to Switzerland in 1660 after having been impeached] was in England’ and ‘that Commonwealths men flock about the town’.35 Marvell, the former Cromwellian, reported in horror-struck tones that at these ‘they talkt of New Modells of Government’. Five days later he reported new rumours ‘that there was some great & euill designe on foot, & many old Army Common welths & Councill of States men & Outlaws & forainers about town’.36 Those ‘forainers’ would undoubtedly be suspected of being papists.

Marvell’s natural tendency was always to endorse the status quo, to respect the legitimacy of the prevailing power. He shrank from anything that smacked of revolutionary change. But as the next decade drew on he would become more and more disillusioned with King and court and more ready to countenance other political arrangements.