20

A Gracious Declaration

And accordingly he issued, on March the 15th 1672, His Gracious Declaration of Indulgence, of which I wish His Majesty and the Kingdom much joy, and, as far as my slender judgement can divine, dare augurate and presage mutual Felicity …1

After the proroguing of Parliament in April 1671, Marvell, who had now reached the age of fifty, wrote no more letters to his constituents (at any rate none that have survived) until nearly three years later, at the start of 1674. The gaps in Marvell’s correspondence have sometimes been attributed to nervousness on the part of recipients about their contents, though there is little evidence of even an approach to politically compromising frankness in those official letters that do survive. The loss of letters also resulted from more mundane treatment by posterity. William Skinner of Hull, who held a number of Marvell letters at the beginning of the eighteenth century, is said to have had so little interest in this trove that he ‘gave them to the pastry-maid to put under pie-bottoms’.2

In the autumn of 1672 Marvell would publish his prose broadside against Samuel Parker, The Rehearsal Transpros’d, a defence of the King’s policy of indulgence towards dissenters and Catholics, but there is no independent insight, through correspondence, into this important controversy. In the early part of 1672, however, before the King had issued the Declaration, Marvell’s letters show that he was staying at a house at Winchendon, near Aylesbury, owned by Lord Wharton, the Opposition peer who shared Marvell’s distaste for the Conventicle Act. It was to this address that several letters were sent by a Dr Benjamin Worsley to Marvell, who forwarded them to Lord Wharton, adding notes and sealing them with his personal seal, representing a stag. Marvell and Worsley were acting as matchmakers for Wharton’s eldest son, who planned to marry a Mrs Cable from Honiton in Devon. Marvell had requested Worsley, who had friends in Devonshire, to conduct a few discreet inquiries about Mrs Cable, which he then passed on to the anxious father. In the end it was Mrs Cable who was unimpressed by young Wharton when he paid her a visit in Honiton and the match went no further. Marvell’s presence in the house, and his role in this intimate matter, shows his close involvement with the leading Opposition figures.

It was possibly early in 1672 that Marvell – if he was the author, and the evidence both external and internal is slight – wrote the satirical poem, ‘Nostradamus’s Prophecy’. A manuscript version of the poem bearing the date 6 January 1672 has survived and, even if Marvell was not the author, it is interesting, if not poetically then politically, as a commentary on the immediate situation. It pretends to be a prophecy by the sixteenth-century Frenchman Michel de Notredame, better known as Nostradamus, some of whose prophecies were thought to have predicted the execution of Charles I and the Great Fire. The poem alludes not only to this but also to more immediate events and personalities, adverting to the sexual licence and corruption of the court and the alleged homosexuality of the King’s first minister George Villiers, Duke of Buckingham:

When Sodomy is the Premier Ministers sport

And whoreing shall be the least sin att Court,

A Boy shall take his Sister for his Mate

And practise Incest between Seven and Eight.

It goes on to refer disparagingly to Lauderdale as ‘an old Scotch Covenanter’ now become ‘The Champion of the English Hierarchye’ and contains a very Marvellian tilt at the Bishops: ‘When Bishops shall lay all Religion by/And strive by Law to ’stablish Tyrany’. Its closing couplet, which casts ‘envious Eyes’ on the Venetian republic as a better alternative to this corrupt English monarchy, may point to a shift taking place in Marvell’s thinking – again, if the poem is his – away from constitutional monarchism towards republicanism.

The decision of Charles to issue the Declaration of Indulgence heightened public fears about his covert motives. The Declaration claimed that he was entitled by his ecclesiastical prerogatives to suspend the laws against dissenters and to grant licences to them to open meetinghouses. Catholics would also be allowed freedom of worship in their own homes. These concessions worried those who disliked religious freedom and others also feared that the King might extend his claim to be able to suspend religious statutes to the suspension of other laws. And there was the question of the Duke of York. The King’s brother was no longer seeking to conceal his Catholicism, his failure to take communion at Easter having been noticed. In spite of his numerous bastard offspring, the King had no legitimate heir. As John Dryden put it some years later in his satire Absalom and Achitophel (1681), referring to this period, Charles had ‘Scatter’d his Maker’s Image through the Land’ by copulating prodigiously with various women, ‘But since like slaves his bed they did ascend,/No True Succession could their seed attend’. The Duke of York was therefore the King’s heir presumptive. The prospect of a Catholic king, bent on destroying Protestantism and establishing Romish power on English soil, alarmed many, who asked whether there was something more to the Declaration of Indulgence than met the eye. The alliance with Louis XIV had just resulted in an attack on Holland, a solid Protestant state. What was the King now planning with the Catholic ruler across the water? These fears and anxieties ensured that the twelfth session of the Cavalier Parliament that met in March 1673 would be a noisy and disputatious one, but for now Marvell would welcome the easing of the pressure on the dissenters, however little he relished the same spirit being shown towards the Catholics. The emergence in these years of the country and the court parties can suggest a neat modern division of party interest but the King was essentially a law unto himself. He was fond of intrigue and parleying with people of all sorts of political backgrounds. The flavour of this is caught by the memoirs of the Marquess of Halifax:

He lived with his ministers as he did with his mistresses; he used them, but he was not in love with them. He showed his judgement in this, that he cannot properly be said ever to have had a favourite, though some might look so at a distance … He had back stairs to convey informations to him, as well as for other uses; and though such informations are sometimes dangerous … yet in the main that humour of hearing everybody against anybody kept those about him more in awe than they would have been without it. I do not believe that ever he trusted any man or set of men so entirely as not to have some secrets in which they had no share; as this might make him less well served, so in some degree it might make him the less imposed upon.3

Such a secretive, crafty sensibility might well have been intrigued by – and made use of ‘back stairs’ for intrigue – the discreet and private figure of Andrew Marvell, who was about to emerge in print as the King’s defender, at least in the matter of indulgence towards nonconformists.

Three months after the Declaration, in June, Marvell wrote to Will Popple offering an analysis of recent political events. To his customary circumspectness was added some consciousness of real risk, as he explained to Will: ‘There was the other Day … a severe Proclamation issued out against all who shall vent false News, or discourse ill concerning Affairs of State. So that in writing to you I run the Risque of making a Breach in the Commandment.’4 The political situation was deteriorating and suspicion was rife. ‘Affairs begin to alter, and Men talk of a Peace with Holland,’ Marvell wrote. He thought that this shift away from the alliance with France would happen ‘before Michaelmass’ (29 September), an opinion whose grounds could not be disclosed even to Will: ‘for some Reasons not fit to write’. Marvell’s sympathies were clearly with the Protestant Dutch: ‘No Man can conceive the Condition of the State of Holland, in this Juncture, unless he can at the same Time conceive an Earthquake, an Hurricane, and the Deluge.’ By contrast: ‘France is potent and subtle.’ As if to underline the sense of impending crisis, a number of fires had broken out, at St Catherine’s Dock, Bishopsgate and Southwark, recalling the Great Fire and the Catholic plotters whom many blamed for it. ‘You may be sure all the old Talk is hereupon revived,’ Marvell told Will.

Such affairs of state were much more interesting than Marvell’s other duty, dealing yet again with the tiresome Philip Frowde and his lighthouse project. Throughout the year letters on the subject shuttled back and forth between the MP and the Trinity House Brethren. Marvell met Frowde by accident on 20 June and told him bluntly: ‘I had been so unhappy in former discourses with him as to meet with such delays uncertaintys and repugnances that I was tired out of the businesse.’5 It nonetheless dragged on and in late November Marvell dined at the other Trinity House in Deptford, to whom he was well known ‘hauing obliged them much in our last Session of Parlt by opposing a new Act for Dover Peere’,6 in order to see if a common front between the two Houses could be effected.

At the end of September 1672 Marvell returned to London after a summer break to witness the reaction to his anonymous pamphlet The Rehearsal Transpros’d: or Animadversions upon a late Book, Intituled A Preface Shewing What Grounds there are of Fears and Jealousies of Popery. It did not bear his name and carried a cod-printer’s declaration that it was published ‘at the sign of the King’s Indulgence, on the South-side of the Lake Leman’. This was to be Marvell’s most famous prose work, particularly in the century after his death. In spite of the praise of Swift who wrote: ‘we still read Marvel’s Answer to Parker with Pleasure, tho’ the Book it answers be sunk long ago’7 it is highly unlikely that ‘we still read’ it. In spite of the multiplicity of editions of Marvell’s poems currently in print, The Rehearsal, together with its second part, published the following year, are the only prose works to have been published in modern scholarly editions; none of the prose, apart from a few excerpts, has found its way into a popular edition. Even for scholars, the rest of the prose writing still has to be read in the original editions or in nineteenth-century reprints. Marvell’s prose satire is learned, witty, occasionally enlivened by flashes of vigorous language and vivid metaphor, but it lacks the immediacy, pace, rapid clarity and narrative invention of Swift. It is unlikely that it will ever achieve an appeal outside the ranks of dedicated Marvellians.

The book was written, as its title indicates, in response to a preface written by Samuel Parker, an up-and-coming thirty-two-year-old Anglican polemicist about whom few of his contemporaries could find a good word to say and who later became the Bishop of Oxford. The preface was attached to a theological work called A Vindication of himself from the Presbyterian Charge of Popery (1672) by Bishop John Bramhall, Archbishop of Armagh. Bramhall, a Yorkshireman born in Pontefract, had, according to his biographer, married a clergyman’s widow who ‘gave him a fortune and a library’.8 He went to Ireland in 1633 as chaplain to Strafford, Charles I’s trusted adviser, Sir Thomas Wentworth, and became Bishop of Derry in 1634 where he earned the nickname ‘Bishop Bramble’. Although Marvell’s quarrel was with the obnoxious Parker, the late Bishop Bramhall was an equal foe of toleration and suppleness of mind. As Bishop of Derry he opposed the use of the Irish Bible and Prayer Book because the native tongue of the Irish was ‘a symbol of barbarism’. His virulence towards Catholicism was such that: ‘It is said that he was so obnoxious to the papal powers that on crossing into Spain he found his portrait in the hands of innkeepers, with a view to his being seized by the Inquisition.’9 When Marvell wrote his riposte, Bramhall was dead, but Samuel Parker was very much alive.

The apostate is often the fiercest opponent of his former co-religionists, a phenomenon paralleled in the sphere of political ideology; in the twentieth century one thinks of the virulence of many ex-communist Cold War ideologues. Samuel Parker, born in Northampton in 1640, though destined to become the scourge of nonconformity, was in his youth a very puritanical adolescent. At Wadham College, Oxford, encouraged by a Presbyterian tutor, he adopted a strict and self-denying religious discipline. With his companions he fasted and dined grimly on a thin broth made of oatmeal and water which earned them the nickname of the ‘Grewellers’. The broth-eaters frequently went to a house of fervent religiosity in the Oxford parish of Holywell, kept by ‘an old an crooked maid’10 called Bess Hampton. The economic base on which her superstructure of piety rested was the taking in of washing. At the Restoration, Parker threw off this disguise and emerged as a career Anglican. Marvell accused him of subsequently attacking John Calvin and of having ‘made a constant Pissing-place of his grave’11 in his anxiety to distance himself from that brand of theology. After changing colleges to Trinity, Parker was ordained in 1664 and went to London to be the chaplain of a nobleman. From this vantage point he began to ingratiate himself, in Marvell’s judgement spending ‘a considerable time in creeping into all Corners and Companies, Horoscoping up and down concerning the duration of the Government’.12 Having decided that ‘the Episcopal Government would indure as long as this King lived’, Parker decided to back the right horse and ‘cast about how to be admitted into the Church of England’. Once this had been accomplished, Parker became chaplain to Archbishop Shelden at Lambeth Palace and in June 1670 was appointed Archdeacon of Canterbury. He then threw himself into religious controversy, defending royal absolutism and religious authority. In 1686 he would be appointed Bishop of Oxford by James II. Burnet described him as ‘a covetous and ambitious man’ who ‘seemed to have no other sense of religion but as a political interest and a subject of party and faction. He seldom came to prayers or to any exercises of devotion, and was so lifted up with pride that he was become insufferable to all that came near him.’13 An apocryphal story is told of his being asked what was the best body of divinity and replying: ‘That which would help a man to keep a coach and six horses was certainly the best’.14 Anthony Wood, in his Athenae Oxoniensis, was another, if slightly more sympathetic, contemporary, who thought that Parker laid himself open to Marvell’s attack ‘thro’ a too loose and unwary handling of the debate’15 but was chastened by the experience.

Parker’s first book was Tentamina de Deo in 1665 but, after joining the Royal Society that year, he published his first noteworthy work in 1666, A Free and Impartial Censure of the Platonick Philosophie, which gave vent to his hatred of religious enthusiasm and his dislike of the ‘common and mechanical sort of men’. He returned to this hatred of the lower orders the same year in An Account of the Nature and Extent of the Divine Dominion and Goodnesse where he expressed the concern that if the common people be ‘suffered to run without restraint, they will break down all the banks of Law and Government’.16 The earliest work that Marvell engaged with was the Discourse of Ecclesiastical Politie, whose subtitle more than adequately indicates its scope and the intellectual temper of its author: wherein the authority of the Civil Magistrate over the Consciences of Subjects in matters of Religion is asserted; the Mischiefs and Inconveniences of Toleration are represented, and all Pretenses pleaded in behalf of Liberty of Conscience are fully answered. The book was published in 1669 and its answers were replied to in 1671 by A Defence and Continuation of the Ecclesiatical Politie. It was the preface, however, issuing from Parker’s period as rector of Ickham in Kent in 1672, that finally sent Marvell into action.

The drift of Parker’s thinking in questions of ecclesiastical government was that, given the ungovernable variety of human beliefs, the ‘Civil Magistrate’ or head of government should be given total power in religious matters to prevent anarchy. There is an obvious analogy with the great seventeenth-century thinker Hobbes, who in Leviathan (1651), written in the immediate aftermath of civil war, advocated acceptance of the prevailing power as the only means to peace. Parker found the concept of freedom of conscience odious and believed instead in the virtue of absolute obedience. To him toleration was an evil and a threat to civil order. In the Discourse he claimed that the Church of England was being ‘savagely worried by a Wild and Fanatique Rabble’17 and attacked ‘the wild and hair-brain’d Youths of the Town’ who make atheism acceptable under the guise of liberty of conscience: ‘’Tis these Apes of Wit and Pedants of Gentility that would make Atheism the fashion forsooth.’ He was contemptuous of the high moral ground claimed by the defenders of liberty of conscience, arguing that ‘of all Villains the well-meaning Zealot is the most dangerous’. In spite of the aggressive spirit of Parker’s polemic and its lurid terms, he tried to articulate in the Discourse either a disingenuous or a genuinely naive belief that he was a voice of moderation, reluctantly drawn into arguments of church discipline. ‘The Author is a Person of such a tame and softly humour,’ he wrote sweetly in the preface, ‘and so cold a Complexion, that he thinks himself scarce capable of hot and passionate Impressions: and therefore if he has sometimes twisted Invectives with his Arguments, it proceeded not from Temper but from Choice; and if there be any Tart and Upbraiding expressions, they were not the Dictates of Anger or Passion, but of the Just and Pious Resentments of his Mind.’

With all his resources of elegant mockery, Marvell tore away this veil of pious cant, and both men clambered into the pit together in a tussle that the poet was foreordained to win.